“Muy bueno,” he said when he looked at Newt again.
Newt didn’t know what to think, but nothing Gok did should have surprised him. The hint of a wry smile formed on Gok’s mouth and then was gone. He obviously enjoyed showing him how weak a white man was that couldn’t drink blinky milk when they hadn’t had a real meal since leaving the village upriver.
“You know what to do,” Newt said in English.
It didn’t matter that Gok couldn’t understand him, for the old warrior knew what to do without being told. They had discussed it all in detail with Horn playing the translator, and kept discussing until they found the kind of spot along the road that Newt was looking for.
Newt took a stand in the timber and brush along the river not fifty yards from the road. Gok went on down the road with their horses and tied them in a thicket past the point where the road was pinched between that hat-shaped mesa and the river. He rode his own horse back toward their ambush site, and when he was at the place they had chosen he stopped and waited.
Newt watched Gok from behind a cottonwood trunk on the riverbank and wondered if he could pull it off. Horn had said that the Apache were crafty fighters and admired nothing more than a smartly laid trap. Well Gok was about to get his chance to show how crafty he was.
It was a cool fall day, but Gok had stripped to nothing but his breechcloth, his moccasins, and that silver-mounted gunbelt. A wide cloth headband held back his hair from his forehead. He had left his sightless Springfield rifle back with the other horses. Instead of the rifle, he held only an empty glass tequila bottle in his hand—a bottle he had found in the Hatchet’s camp.
When Gok saw the Hatchet’s dust cloud coming from the north he took up the blanket lying across his horse’s withers and draped it over his head and shoulders. Sometime later, when the lead riders from the Hatchet’s gang were in sight, he slumped on his horse’s back and bowed his head enough that his face was hidden from view. The empty tequila bottle hung at the end of one arm as if he were about to drop it. To all intents and purposes he looked like he was drunk and had fallen asleep in the middle of the road.
And that’s how he was supposed to look.
The Hatchet had four of his men riding point as a vanguard. They drew up when they saw Gok. They were at first cautious, but soon they yelled out to him. Gok did not answer but remained slumped on his horse.
The lead riders came on, with the rest of their party lagging a little behind out of caution. The Hatchet’s procession was now close enough that Newt could make them all out, from the riders to either side, to the ones riding rear guard, and the line of children sandwiched in the middle and walking in single-file. Those children were yoked neck to neck with rope and some kind of collars around their necks, exactly as Gok had predicted from the tracks he read days earlier. There were eighteen children, and from the size of them, their ages ranged from maybe six to twelve or so, both boys and girls. Most of them had literally walked right out of their moccasins, and their raw feet shuffled through the road dust while their filthy faces stared ahead of them blankly and hopelessly.
The point riders stopped once more, this time a little more than a hundred yards from Gok. Again, he did not answer their calls.
Two more riders left their positions riding to either side of the children and joined the point riders. The rest of the renegades remained behind. Newt looked for the one called the Hatchet, but either the outlaw did not come forward, or Newt was unable to recognize him from the stories Horn had told.
The Hatchet’s gang was a mixed lot of gringos, Mexicans, and Indians and half-breeds. Several of them wore bandoliers of cartridges across their chests, and all manner of weapons were draped upon their persons and saddles. A Mexican in a big felt sombrero called out for Gok to clear the road.
When the Apache didn’t respond, a white man with a red beard and a potbelly bulging out from between his suspenders rode a little forward of the others. He had a falling block, single-shot Remington-Hepburn sporting rifle propped upright on one thigh.
He shouldered the weapon and took a long time aiming, making a show of it for his friends, but his bullet only struck the road well beyond Gok when he finally fired. He was either an exceptionally poor shot or had been merely trying to scare Gok off. Knowing the kind of men they were, Newt guessed that he was a poor shot, long-range fancy gun or not.
Gok kept his nerve and did not run away, but he took advantage of his horse shying from the ricocheting bullet. He let the animal spin around and made like he almost fell off its back and had a hard time getting things under control. Once the horse was still, he took a mock slug from the empty bottle and looked up at the outlaws as if seeing them for the first time.
“You missed,” one of the outlaws said, and the other men laughed.
“Just trying to scare him,” the man with the red beard growled.
“Drunk-ass Indian doesn’t have sense enough to get gone. Bet you can’t shoot that whiskey bottle out of his hand.”
The one with the red beard ejected his empty shell case and was thumbing in another cartridge and getting his Hepburn ready. Gok wasn’t about to risk sitting there and letting them shoot at him again, no matter how badly that one shot. He took another fake slug from his empty bottle and let out a drunken, crazy war cry that sounded somewhere between a squalling tomcat and sick rooster. He kicked his horse up to a trot and aimed directly for the renegades at the front of the line. He made sure to totter from one side of the horse to the other with his head wobbling as if his neck were made of red India rubber.
The renegades’ concern had shifted to hilarity, and instead of shooting Gok they let him come closer, offering bets as to whether the drunk Indian would fall off his horse or not before he got to them.
A tall man on a pale gray horse rode forward to join the men in the front. Or maybe he wasn’t so tall as he seemed. It could have been how rail thin and long limbed he was that made him seem that way. He wore a white felt sombrero on his head, and a belted red wool poncho or serape covered his torso. But his likeness to the Mexicans in his gang ended there. He was a different creature by far, as if you had slung bits and pieces of three or four different kinds of men together. He wore his hair in two long braids, one hanging over either shoulder Indian-style. The tallest pair of boots that Newt had ever seen was on his feet, and the tops came well past his knees. Such boots were usually only seen in antique oil paintings of dashing cavalry officers from the Continent.
The newcomer tilted his head back to get the brim of his sombrero out of the way, and the sun flashed on his face. It took Newt a moment to realize the man was wearing some kind of spectacles with strange orange lenses. The tall man coughed and then said something to those gathered beside him that made them laugh.
Gok pulled his horse up barely twenty yards from them. He hurled the bottle at them and managed to strike the tall man’s gray horse on the end of the nose. The horse crabbed backward on its haunches and slung its head and reared up.
While the tall one in the funny glasses was trying to stay on his frightened horse, Gok let out another war cry and reined his pony around and lit out of there in a run.
For a wonder, none of them fired on him in that instant. They were cursing him and shouting all kinds of vile threats, but nobody shot until he was already well away and leaning low over his pony’s neck. The frantic horse belonging to the man in the orange glasses was creating such a storm that they crashed into each other’s horses and jostled each other in an attempt to get a shot at Gok.
Seeing that he was rapidly putting distance on them and in a fury, all six of them chased after him, with only the tall man in the orange glasses and three others left behind with the captive children. The Mexican who had first called out to Gok had the fastest horse among them, and he rapidly took the lead. He had drawn a machete from a saddle scabbard and was pointing it forward like he was leading some cavalry charge and not simply a bad man full of bloodlust to hack one poor drunk Indian to piec
es.
Gok let his pony run, but he held back on his reins enough to keep them feeling like they had a chance to catch him. They were only a long stone’s throw behind him when he passed through the narrowest point between the hat-shaped mesa and the river. A couple of the pursuers lost patience in ever running Gok down and laying hands on him, and fired at him. But shooting a pistol from the back of a running horse was no easy thing, and they missed. Bullets whipped the air all around the Apache.
Gok let the blanket fly from his shoulders, and it spread out like a kite and sailed directly into the Mexican, tangling his machete in it and covering his horse’s head. The horse immediately propped on its front legs and came to a jarring halt and began bucking. The Mexican bandito was no bronc rider, and he was thrown to the ground.
Horn’s rifle bellowed from up on the mesa in that very same instant, and another of the Hatchet’s men reeled in the saddle and his horse went wild off the road. Newt leaned out around the cottonwood tree and shot another of the renegades, knocking him from the saddle.
It took that second shot for the Hatchet’s men to realize they had ridden into a trap, but it took them moments that they didn’t have to get their horses stopped and headed back the other way. Again Horn’s rifle boomed, and Newt worked the lever on his Winchester as rapidly as he could, shooting into the milling men in the road. Loose horses were running everywhere.
Two of the renegades rode into the brush between the road and the foot of the mesa. They had spotted Newt and fired at him from cover. A bullet slapped the tree trunk at belly button level not six inches from Newt. He flinched and ducked behind the tree as other bullets cut through the thicket around him. But the renegades in the brush on the far side had not spotted Horn up on the mesa, and they were easy pickings for him from that high vantage point. He shot the first one, and the impact of his bullet striking the man between the shoulder blades slammed him over the front of his saddle.
Horn fired a second time and missed, but he did manage to flush the other renegade back out into the road. Newt leaned out around the cottonwood trunk again and shot at him. The outlaw screamed and clutched at his leg, and his horse broke into a run. Though hit hard, he stayed in the saddle and whipped his horse toward those of his gang who had remained behind. Both Horn and Newt missed shots at him.
And then Gok was coming back at a dead run, and he slowed little before he bailed off his horse on the fly. The momentum of that dismount gave him foot speed, and he charged toward the Mexican with the machete who was then getting to his feet. Gok had his knife in one hand and his pistol in the other. The Mexican saw him too late. He raised that machete over his head intending to chop down on Gok and split him in two, but the Apache had already closed with him and was inside the reach of that long blade. Gok plunged his knife into the Mexican bandit’s right armpit and stuck his pistol in his belly and pulled the trigger at the same time. Gok had withdrawn the knife and was leaping off the road and into the brush before the Mexican bandit’s body hit the ground.
The first of the Hatchet’s men that Horn had shot had his horse parked on the edge of the road and was so wounded that he couldn’t sit upright in the saddle. Gok sped out of the brush at his side as if he had never once quit running and leaped at him. He landed astride the horse behind the renegade’s saddle and pressed his pistol into the renegade’s side and pulled the trigger two times. Then he shoved the renegade’s limp body to the ground and took his place in the saddle and rode back into the brush.
It was a good time to take cover, for the remaining men in the Hatchet’s gang were firing upon them from up the road. They had spotted both Newt and Horn, and they sent a hailstorm of bullets their way. All Newt could do was to hunker down behind the cottonwood, but Horn had the high ground and was farther away from the gang. He shifted positions often on the mesa, taking advantage of the rough terrain and taking potshots at the gang. Gok fired from somewhere in the brush between the road and Horn’s position, and the combined firepower of he and Horn drove the remaining outlaws farther up the road. Soon the gunfire slackened until it was nothing at all.
Chapter Fifteen
The outlaw bunch was caught in a bad position. They were on low ground and out in the open, and they had no idea how many men they faced. They most likely thought it was an Apache war party that had ambushed them, exactly as Newt had intended. They could take to the brush on one side of the road or find cover along the riverbank on the other and fight it out, but the last thing any man but a fool wanted was to have an Apache war party able to use that same cover to close on them.
Newt watched it all and knew this was the gamble he had taken. There was no way they were going to get all of the gang, and his plan had been to separate the Hatchet’s forces and weaken him to the point that he would leave the children behind. Sounded good when you said it, but he wasn’t sure if the whole damned thing wasn’t about to backfire on him.
The Hatchet’s men had disappeared to the sides of the road, whether intending to fight from there or simply getting out of sight of Horn’s rifle while they talked things over, Newt didn’t know. The children remained in the road. Maybe they were too scared to move, or their captors wouldn’t let them leave it. And that was one more problem. It was going to be hard to smoke that gang out for fear of hitting the kids.
Newt began to work his way along the riverbank toward the children. It was slow going, and despite the dense cover provided by the vegetation along the river, he expected any second for one of the outlaws to spot him and take a shot at him.
It took him the better part of half an hour to work his way upriver, moving low and sometimes on hands and knees. All the while, the children remained in the road. Some of them were even sitting on the ground. Horn fired a shot from the mesa, purposely aiming high at the riverbank side of the road opposite the children. His shot wasn’t returned.
Newt was barely ten yards from the children. He saw something move on the far side of the road, closer to the children, and immediately assumed it was some of the slave-trading trash who had stolen them. He raised his rifle and waited.
Gok appeared from the brush and knelt beside one of the children, a girl. The Apache was tense and constantly scanning around him while he spoke to the little girl. She was obviously Chiricahua or some other kind of Apache, for Newt could hear enough of their murmuring to tell the sounds of the dialect.
Gok whispered orders to the rest of the children while he tried to pull the girl to her feet. Frightened and confused, the children were slow to respond. Some of them smiled at the sight of Gok, but most of the others only gave him blank expressions or cringed from him. The rope linking them together made it hard to get them on their feet and coordinated.
Newt scanned the road beyond them and to either side of it. He expected Gok to be gunned down at any minute, but no shot came. Either the Hatchet’s men had retreated, or they were waiting to draw out more of the Apache they thought were with Gok. Not a saddle horse was in sight, nor was the handful of pack mules that the slave traders had used to carry their gear.
Taking a chance, Newt stepped out onto the road. He kept his back to the children when he reached them, still looking for signs of the enemy. He kept shifting his attention from one face to another, looking for the Redding boy.
There were both Mexican and Indian children among the captives, but it was hard to tell one from the other. They all looked the same in both condition and misery.
Many of them were half naked, but so filthy with grime and road dust and burned by the sun and weather that they were almost identical in skin color. They carried blankets and scraps of blankets to cover them, or bits of buckskin and filthy cotton rags that were the last remains of what they had been wearing when they were captured. Some wore nothing but outsized adult shirts hanging nearly to their knees and the sleeves flopping past their hands like scarecrows.
A flash of a bit of grimy, pale face caught Newt’s attention near the end of the line. He went closer and took
hold of the boy and rubbed away the filth with his thumb and saw that it was indeed a white boy. Tears were streaming out of the boy’s eyes and leaving streaks down his grubby cheeks while his mouth trembled.
“Billy? Are you Billy Redding?” Newt asked.
The boy didn’t answer him and tried to look down at the ground. Newt grabbed his chin and forced his head back.
“Billy Redding,” Newt said again.
The boy blinked and another flood of tears poured forth.
It was the boy he sought, Newt was sure of it. In the photograph the boy was sitting in an upholstered chair in some parlor, wearing a suit and with his dark hair oiled and combed—clean and unafraid, with a sack of hard rock candy on his lap that his mother and father had probably bribed him with to sit still for the camera. Now his hair was tangled and matted, and he was wearing one of those men’s shirts five times too big for him. He immediately looked down at his bare toes sticking out from under the tail of the shirt when Newt released his chin. A tiny boy for his age, and too scared to talk, but Newt was sure it was the Redding boy.
Gok hissed something at Newt to get his attention and then motioned him off the road. Together, they hustled the children into the brush. Gok led them on a winding course until they found a relatively bare spot in the midst of a dense thicket.
Gok signaled for the children to sit down while Newt knelt and watched their back trail. He could see only glimpses of the road through the brush.
“Se fueron,” Gok said.
Newt did not understand Gok’s Spanish.
Gok pointed in the direction of the road and gave a wave of one hand to the north. Then he made a walking motion with two fingers and pointed again in the same direction. “Se fueron.”
Buzzard Bait Page 12