Buzzard Bait

by Brett Cogburn

  “My name’s Clagg.” The Hatchet tapped his finger on the bar again.

  “Begging your pardon.”

  “I chop other things.”

  “I bet you do,” Newt said in a voice so quiet it barely made it across the length of the bar.

  “What’s that?”

  Newt heard something rubbing against the front of the cantina and turned and saw the Circle Dot horse with its head sticking inside the doorway and staring at Newt with its usual lazy eyes and bored expression. The horse was rubbing his saddle and side against the doorjamb to scratch itself, and that’s what Newt had heard.

  “Is that your horse?”

  “No, he thinks I’m his.”

  “Does he always do that?”

  “What?”

  “Walk into saloons?”

  “Only when he’s thirsty.” Newt took a look to make sure the bartender wasn’t seeing the horse mangling his plastered wall and dropping a pile of manure under his porch roof.

  “You ought to do a better job of tying him.”

  “He won’t stay tied,” Newt said. “He’s got a rebellious nature.”

  Newt looked out the window and saw more men tying their horses up to a corral fence down the street and closer to the plaza. There were four of them, three Mexicans and an Indian, and the Indian had a bandage above his knee. Newt recognized them as what was left of the Hatchet’s gang.

  Newt downed the last of his beer and went to his horse and picked up the trailing rein. The gelding was halfway into the doorway by then.

  Newt pointed again at the hatchet in the outlaw’s belt. “You be careful with that wood chopping. You might cut on the wrong tree and it fall on you.”

  “I’m always careful,” the Hatchet said, realizing like he had all along that there was some byplay going on that he couldn’t quite get a handle on. “And I’m always good.”

  Newt tried to back the Circle Dot horse up, but it refused to budge.

  “Got to make this difficult, don’t you?” Newt said.

  He led the horse the rest of the way through the doorway, and his saddle fender scraped so hard against the doorjamb that Newt feared it was going to tear apart. He was turning the horse around in the tight confines of the room when the bartender came back from wherever he had gone. He stopped and looked at the horse as if he wasn’t quite sure he was seeing what he was seeing.

  Newt bent the brim of his hat to the bartender. “Begging your pardon. This here is a peculiar beast.”

  Newt led the horse back outside before the bartender could manage an answer. The rest of the Hatchet’s gang was still at the corral messing around with their horses. Seeing that he had a little more time, he turned around and stood in the doorway.

  “Hey there, Mr. Sag,” he said.

  “Clagg.”

  “Oh, ain’t that what I said? Anyways, I just wanted to tell that, speaking of horses, you might ought to get rid of that gray horse you’re riding. Mind you, I’m no expert on horseflesh”—Newt jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the Circle Dot horse behind him—“but he looks like he might be a little too high strung. Nervous, you know. Never can tell when a horse like that might throw him a fit.”

  Newt left before that had time to soak in. He readjusted his supplies on his saddle and swung up on his horse. He was well down the street and almost at the edge of town when he looked back one last time at the cantina.

  The Hatchet was standing outside the door watching Newt, and Colonel Herrera was standing beside the Hatchet talking to him.

  Newt faced forward in the saddle again and looked down at the Circle Dot horse’s head. “Now, we’ve got to get this straight. Just because I go in a saloon doesn’t mean you get to. You could get a bad reputation hanging around such places.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was no one in sight when Newt rode his lathered horse into camp. Before he had a chance to become too worried, the children began slipping out of the timber and coming back to the campfire. Horn followed them, carrying his rifle nonchalantly in the crook of his elbow.

  Gok came up from behind Newt, and Charlie McComas was with him. He was mimicking Gok’s walk and trying to match strides with him. Newt thought then how much the boy already acted like a little Apache.

  “Put that fire out,” Newt said.

  Horn took in Newt’s hard-used horse and heard his tense tone for what it was. He quickly scattered the fire and began to kick dirt on it, and the children helped him. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you got into, but how far is it behind you?”

  Newt told him what had happened, and Horn interrupted him often to translate what was said for Gok.

  “You should have killed him while you had the chance,” Horn said. “You could have saved us a lot of trouble and done the world a favor.”

  “You weren’t the one standing there in the saloon with him. That Clagg is a rough one. I don’t think anybody is gonna put lead in him without taking some back,” Newt said. “It could have gone either way.”

  “True, but the thought of what he’s done, and him still breathing and maybe doing it again, is a hard one to take. Old Sieber always says to stomp your snakes when you get the chance.”

  “It galls me as much as you, but I promised I would get Billy Redding back to his family, and I can’t do that if I’m lying back yonder dead,” Newt said. “Clagg’ll get his one of these days. His kind always does. If I never see him again, then I can live with that.”

  “You think he’ll come after us?”

  “I do. You can bet he knows by now about me bringing those children back, and that’s gonna be a hard rock for him to get past his craw.”

  “You say that all calm-like, but you come running your horse into camp like the hounds were nipping at your heels.”

  “You let me do the worrying.”

  Horn gave a nervous chuckle. “You being worried, well, that worries me. What about you seeing the Hatchet and Colonel Herrera? Something stinks to high heaven there. You’d think the colonel would arrest him on the spot. The Hatchet’s a wanted man, and putting him down would be a fine feather in the colonel’s hat.”

  “I’ve got ideas about that.”

  “You mean you think the Hatchet might be in cahoots with the colonel?”

  “Wasn’t it you that told me about Colonel Herrera once selling those Apache women?”

  “You think he’s gone full slaver and partnered up with the Hatchet?”

  “If you were a strutting, mean little peacock like Colonel Herrera, what would you do with the Indian children you wound up with while you’re playing politics trying to wipe out every last Apache in Mexico? Maybe Clagg’s paying the colonel off, or maybe he’s handling shipments for him.”

  Horn grimaced. “If that’s true, we’re likely to have the Hatchet and his boys, and the Mexican cavalry after us,” Horn said.

  “I’d say that’s likely if the colonel is slaving.”

  “Gonna be hard to hide from them, and harder to outfight them. Herrera’s regulars have been fighting Apaches for years with him. They know this country, and they’re tough and they’re seasoned. And he can get militia and Rurale help from here to the border.”

  “I don’t intend to hide from him or fight him,” Newt said.

  “What do you intend?”

  “I’m counting on out-running his sorry ass,” Newt said. “And when I get back to the States I’m going to get drunk and then sleep for a week.”

  “I’m glad you set reasonable goals.” Horn began to count off the things on his fingers: “Run like hell. Home. Get drunk. Sleep.”

  “You got it.”

  “Sounds easy enough. When do we start?”

  Newt looked back down the mountain the way he had come and toward Bacerac. “I thought I saw dust on my back trail, and I’m also pretty sure I heard that bugle again. I’m guessing right now would be a good time.”

  * * *

  They stuck to the mountains as they worked northward toward
a stronghold of the Apache where Gok believed that others of his people would be camped. Twice they came across the tracks of Mexican soldiers, and once they hid up high and, through Horn’s binoculars, watched a troop of cavalry in the river valley below.

  They traveled slowly due to the terrain and the children, and the constant need to be on the lookout. The wind shifted out of the north, and it turned cold in a matter of hours. They wrapped themselves in whatever they could, and all of them suffered.

  Two days out of Bacerac they reached the Apache camp Gok had been guiding them toward. The first thing they saw were three dead horses, and then beyond that were several burned wickiups and scattered personal items.

  And bodies.

  Gok read the tracks and the signs of the battle, and pointed them out to Newt and Horn. The Mexican soldiers, thirty or more of them, had caught the camp unaware and driven the Apaches up the canyon. Two scalped and mutilated Apache women and an old man lay not far past the edge of the camp. Surprised or not, it appeared that the Apaches had put up a good fight, despite their losses. There were also three fresh graves, and Gok surmised that they contained the bodies of soldiers killed in the fight.

  Farther up toward the head of the little valley, they came upon low parapets of stacked rock that the Apaches had hastily erected to fight behind while they bought time for their women and children to escape. Spent brass cartridge cases littered the ground behind those little rock piles.

  Gok left the others behind and went up a trail that climbed out of the valley. When he returned, he told them that most of his people had gotten away and managed somehow to keep many of their horses. He thought they were one day ahead of them and that they would move as fast as they could toward the border and see if they could turn themselves over to the army or sneak back onto the reservation.

  Horn helped Gok carry the Apache dead to a crevice in some rocks to bury them there. Newt saw the look on Billy Redding’s face as he looked upon those bodies and the rest of the destruction of the camp. The other children sat their horses beside him, watching the same thing. Newt cursed himself for not taking them away from the camp and out of sight of such horror.

  He motioned the children back down to the far end of the mountain glade and led them out of sight of the destroyed camp. He dismounted and walked over to stand beside the horse Billy and Charlie rode.

  He reached up a hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Steady, boy.”

  Billy didn’t answer, but he did manage to nod at Newt, which was an improvement and a positive sign that he might be getting better. But Newt worried that the boy was too traumatized by what had happened to him and might not ever totally be himself again.

  Charlie leaned around Billy and said, “Don’t lie to him. Bad stuff happens, and if it’s bad enough nobody can help you.”

  Newt was as concerned with Charlie’s attitude as he was with Billy’s inability to snap out of whatever place he had retreated to. Charlie was a strong little boy, but maybe too strong. “We came and got you boys, didn’t we?”

  Charlie didn’t sound like a child when he asked, “You think you saved me, Mr. Jones?”

  “When we get back . . .”

  “Back to where?”

  “Back to the States. Back home with your family.”

  “Father is gone, and so is Mother.” Charlie looked straight at Newt with no tears in his eyes and with his expression and tone so matter-of-fact.

  Newt heard the emptiness and the hurt in the little boy that he was trying to hide inside a tough shell. “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with it, and nobody can fix it.”

  “How old are you, Charlie?”

  “Seven.”

  “It’s all right to be scared, you know.”

  “I cried some at first,” Charlie said. “Didn’t do any good, and they whipped me for it. You got to be quiet. Don’t make any noise and don’t fuss. They told us that, but Billy cried anyway.”

  “Billy’s not the same as you.”

  “He still cries and he pees himself sometimes.”

  “That’s because he’s got wounds.”

  “Wounds? You’re hurt and you don’t cry.”

  “Not hurts on the outside, Charlie, but hurts on the inside. That’s what I’m telling you. You’ve got hurts, too, always will have them. You know how you get a cut finger and sometimes the best thing to do is to take off the bandage and let that cut get a little air so it can heal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well maybe Billy’s letting his hurts air out so they’ll heal. Maybe if he has time enough those hurts won’t have to show so much.”

  “That’s not what the Apache say. They say that a warrior ought to be tough.”

  “They told you that? You speak Apache?”

  “No, but I’ve watched them,” Charlie said. “Someday I’m going to be tougher than them or anybody.”

  “Oh, you are?”

  Newt wanted to say more to Charlie, but he couldn’t think of what that should be. And Gok was coming his way. The old warrior let out a long, shrill whistle, then did it a second time. It wasn’t long before his horse came trotting to him.

  “How do you teach them to do that?” Newt asked, impressed, although he had seen Gok do that many times.

  Gok didn’t understand the words, but he saw that Newt was impressed. He patted his horse on the neck and then swung onto its back.

  Newt looked at Gok and then at the Circle Dot horse. He puckered his lips and did his best imitation of the whistle sound Gok had used. The Circle Dot horse’s expression never changed, and it didn’t so much as perk its ears at the sound. Instead, the animal yawned, stuck out its tongue, and shook its head so that those ears flopped.

  Newt whistled again, but he had even less success. The horse turned and walked a few steps farther away and lowered its head and picked at a clump of dead grass. Newt looked at Gok again, and the old warrior said nothing.

  Newt walked over and caught his horse, and as he was picking up his reins he said, “Why can’t you be a good horse? I should have given you back to that Mexican Don that time. He tried to tell me that you were nothing but trouble and bad luck.”

  When Newt was back in the saddle, Gok pointed with his rifle at the trail the Apaches from the camp had fled along.

  “Vámonos,” he said.

  And go they went, down the mountain toward the lower country, and always working toward the border.

  By the tracks Horn and Gok found, the Apaches had split into smaller bunches in an attempt to confuse their pursuers and to lose them. Gok said the Apaches would rejoin each other at some point they had agreed upon before parting. Sure enough, the Mexican soldiers soon gave up tracking the refugees or feared to follow them into a possible ambush. What’s more, Gok seemed certain he knew where the next place where his people were headed. And he increased their pace because of that.

  The temperature dropped even further as the day neared sundown, and Newt noticed Billy and Charlie shivering in the saddle beneath their crude and inadequate blanket ponchos. Newt took off his coat and slung it over Charlie’s shoulders. The garment was big enough that it wrapped around them both, and Billy clutched it closed in front of him.

  Newt shivered as a cold gust blew through his thin shirt, and he took his rubber slicker from behind his saddle and put it on. The slicker wasn’t much for keeping a man warm, but it would do a fine job of blocking the wind.

  Gok became anxious before they had gone another mile. Newt guessed that Gok believed they were getting close to his people. Maybe that’s why he let his guard down, and maybe that’s why the three protectors weren’t more cautious about riding into the canyon ahead instead of looking for a way around it or scouting it more closely before they entered.

  The canyon was a knife-edged cut through the middle of a flat-topped tableland with a dry creek running down its course. It was more like a giant crack in the earth or gully with almost vertical sides, and it sloped gradually dow
nhill for several miles and was cut with many other side canyons and eroded draws that ran into it. At the bottom of that maze of cracks Newt could see where the ground leveled off into a gentle hump of scattered oaks and grassland.

  They were only a little ways into the canyon and Newt was thinking about how pretty those oak trees were when a bullet thumped into one of his saddlebags and gunshots rang out and echoed off the canyon walls.

  Chapter Twenty

  Another bullet whipped through a fold in Newt’s slicker, and another one spanged off a slab of stone so close to him that he was struck in the side of the face by chunks of rock and grit. The Circle Dot horse bolted ahead, and Newt fell from the saddle.

  Half-stunned and hatless, he fought to his feet. Gok was charging on down the canyon, and the children and Newt’s horse raced behind him. Newt caught hold of Horn’s horse’s tail as it passed him and hung on. He was drug along behind it in a stumbling, lunging run until he could keep up no longer and finally lost his balance and hit the ground again.

  When he got to his feet for a second time, Horn was coming back to him in a run. Newt shook free of the tangle of his slicker, dropping it as he reached up and caught the arm that Horn held out to him. There was more gunfire from the canyon walls above them. Newt heard the sickening thump of a bullet striking Horn’s horse and felt the animal shudder from the impact and the pain in the moment he swung up behind Horn.

  Horn turned the horse and started after Gok and the children. His Colt was in his hand and he thumbed shots at the puffs of powder smoke that appeared on the left-hand side of the canyon walls as they fled down it. Newt could do nothing but hang on.

  The canyon was long, and to continue along its course was to be wide-open to whoever was firing at them from above. Gok and the children turned into a side canyon to the left, and Newt and Horn followed them.

  The side canyon was really no more than a large eroded gully coming down off the high edge of the tableland above them, and it ended in a steep slide of powdery earth and loose scree. No horse was going to climb that, and to turn back meant coming under their attackers’ guns again. One of the children’s horses had also been hit, and it was down on its side struggling and thrashing. Horn’s horse faltered and stumbled on weak knees, and they bailed from it.