Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  He was out of sight for few seconds before the girl heard the dull crack of the outlaw’s pistol.

  Jodi stared toward the station yard. She blinked slowly. Her mouth corners rose.

  CHAPTER 7

  DUST AND BONE

  Hawk was up at dawn, lashing two four-foot-long oak branches together with rawhide he’d found in the barn behind Nan-tee’s now-vacant shack. He’d soaked the rawhide in a water trough, and now he knelt atop the two branches, where they formed a cross, and tightly wound the wet rawhide around the joint.

  He tied the hide and used the back of a shovel blade to hammer the cross into the ground, at the head of Nan-tee’s grave, on the far side of a shallow wash flanking the barn. He lowered the shovel, caught his breath, and looked at the mound of rocks.

  Odd how he no longer felt anything but a slight, lingering guilt. He was well aware he’d orphaned the little boy, but it had been a mistake he’d declared to himself as honest. The woman’s killing had been inadvertent, and he’d done as much as he could to repay Nan-tee for having killed her and orphaning her boy.

  Having her buried and marking her grave was as much as he could do. Vivienne had taken the boy to an Apache woman who lived with her father and two children in a hogan-type lodge in the desert west of Spotted Horse.

  Hawk said no words over the dead woman. He knew a few, but they refused to be remembered. He’d said them before, and ever since his family had been taken from him, they’d sounded laughably hollow.

  He’d tried it again just a few months ago, when he and his blonde sometimes-partner Saradee Jones had visited the two graves outside the town of Crossroads in southern Dakota Territory. Hawk had been wounded in an especially violent shootout, and his nearness to his own death had fueled the urge to be near his dead family again. But to Hawk the two graves in that stark cemetery had merely been two depressions in the ground capped with wood fashioned into crosses—home to nothing more substantial than a few shovelfuls of dust and bits of bone.

  Those two holes in the ground did not house his family. His family—the love and the laughter and the times he and Jubal had fished a nearby creek together—were gone. They’d been taken from Hawk and this world by Three-Fingers Ned Meade.

  All they were, all they would have been . . . gone.

  It was a bone that Hawk could not get out of his craw. Killing Pima Miller wouldn’t do it, either. He had no illusions.

  But Miller needed killing if for no other reason than a young mother had taken a bullet meant for him. But of course there were many more reasons. Miller was a killer. He’d even killed the sawbones who’d dug Hawk’s bullet out of his hide. By hunting him down and killing him, Hawk would feel better.

  He would feel, for an hour, maybe an hour and a half—no more than that—better.

  And then, when the feeling passed, he’d clean and reload his weapons and look for the next man who needed killing.

  Or the next woman. Women were not immune to evildoing.

  Saradee Jones, for instance. There was likely no worse woman anywhere. And she needed killing. But so far, Hawk hadn’t been able to drop the hammer on her. He’d only been able to feast himself on her splendid body while she taunted him for doing so.

  One day, however, he would kill her. Maybe the next time he saw her, in fact.

  Footsteps sounded behind Hawk. One hand went to the grips of the silver-plated Russian as he turned. He removed his hand from the gun. Vivienne walked toward him. As she made her way across the wash, she carried a burlap sack in one hand, a steaming stone mug in the other.

  She wore her black hair pulled back in an enticingly sloppy French braid. A cream-colored, Mexican-style dress with red embroidering hugged her fine body, buffeting around her brown legs. The dress left her shoulders bare.

  The long, pale scar running down the side of her face stood out in the weak morning light.

  The grulla, saddled and ready for the trail, Hawk’s Henry rifle snugged down in the saddle boot, whickered and turned to the girl, as well, switching its tail.

  “Easy, fella,” Hawk said, patting the horse’s neck. “She’s a friend.”

  “A friend, eh?” Vivienne smiled ironically as she climbed the shallow bank, likely remembering the passion of their previous night’s coupling. She held out the coffee and the tied neck of the bag to Hawk. “Food for the trail. Parched corn for your horse. I thought you might like a cup of coffee before you go.”

  Hawk stared at her, vaguely puzzled.

  “I had a feeling I’d find you here,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  Hawk took the cup and the grub sack, and sipped the coffee. It was hot and black.

  Vivienne folded her arms on her breasts as she looked down at Nan-tee’s grave. Then she glanced at him. “Where’s your wife?”

  “How do you know there was a wife?”

  “You look like a killer. Kill like a killer. But last night . . .” Vivienne shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know. You were nice.

  Gentle. Figure there must be a woman behind that.”

  “There was.”

  “And a child?”

  Hawk stared over the mug as he sipped the coffee.

  “I found a carving—a wooden horse, a black stallion—on the floor in my room. It must have fallen out of your coat pocket. ‘Jubal’ is written on the bottom.” Vivienne paused. “I wrapped it up and put it in the grub sack.”

  “Obliged. It’s my boy’s. Was my boy’s.”

  “I’m sorry, Gideon. Whatever happened, I’m sorry. I hope you find peace sometime, somewhere . . . despite it all.”

  “Ain’t likely. But I appreciate your sayin’ the words, Vivienne. Just the same.”

  She reached out and slid a finger across the moon-and-star badge pinned upside down to his vest.

  “Farewell, Upside-down Lawman. Watch your back. Pima Miller is a sneaky devil. Some say Nan-tee gave him secret Apache powers that make him extra strong, extra hard to kill.”

  Hawk finished the coffee and handed the cup back to Vivienne. “We’ll see.”

  Hawk tied the grub sack to his saddle horn then stepped into the leather. He did not look back at the woman from the Laughing Lady Saloon as he put the horse into a trot through the chaparral, heading south, the same direction in which Pima Miller had headed.

  As Hawk had expected, the storm had washed away most of Miller’s sign. But Hawk’s own Ute war chief father had taught him how to track long ago, and he’d put those skills to good use, gaining experience during the years he’d worked as a bona fide federal lawman.

  He’d honed said skills to a razor’s edge after he’d begun tracking men for his own satisfaction, with a hard heart and the unflappable determination of a religious fanatic. There was probably presently no better tracker on the frontier than Gideon Hawk, excepting possibly one or two Apache trackers now working for the US Army under the supervision of General Crook, or some of the Pima and Maricopa Indians whom John Walker had trained to fight Geronimo’s Chiricahuas.

  To complement those skills, Hawk was as patient as he was determined, and patience was key when tracking on the lee side of a desert gully washer.

  Hawk had last seen Miller heading south, toward the Superstition Mountains that were now in the early morning a gray-green lump on the southern horizon. As Hawk rode through the chaparral, weaving around saguaros, barrel cactus, mesquites, and palo verdes, he saw the remnants of the previous day’s rain—the desert caliche and soft clays whipped into small swirls and still-damp, miniature deltas that had eroded any markings left by the killer.

  But, still, Hawk found parts of prints on the lee sides of trees and occasional boulders, where the rain had had less direct access to them. He also found several relatively fresh horse apples and even a bit of cloth clinging to a cholla branch—a few threads of blue chambray that had been torn from the same color shirt as the one Miller had been wearing when Hawk had last seen the killer.

 
By noon, Hawk had progressed only a mile from Spotted Horse, but as Miller’s trail was leading almost directly south, he was relatively certain it would continue in that direction, toward the Superstitions whose steep, gray crags continued changing both shape and color along the southern horizon as the sun kited across the sky.

  As Hawk rode and continued picking up small signs of his quarry’s passing, he put himself in the mind of Miller. The killer had ridden through here during a downpour. He’d also been wounded. Those two things had likely made him a desperate man. One who had likely not been sure that Hawk hadn’t been following him.

  Doubtless, the man wouldn’t have cared much about which direction he was riding. He’d likely given his horse its head and just hung on, hoping to find some place in which he could cower from the lightning, thunder, and hammering rain.

  Since he’d been heading south, he’d probably continued heading south.

  Hawk continued his slow ride, scanning the ground as well as the flora around him, throughout most of the afternoon, wanting to make sure he was still on Miller’s trail. He didn’t care if it took him a week to ride five miles. As long as he was still on Miller’s trail, he’d eventually catch up to the man and kill him.

  He hoped Miller wouldn’t die from his bullet wound before the rogue lawman could run him down. He wanted the satisfaction of being the last person the killer saw before he was sent to hell on the burning, gunpowder wings of a .44 slug.

  Hawk thought the man who’d left his dead woman—killed with a bullet meant for him—and his small child behind while he’d fled into the night, thinking only of himself, deserved nothing less.

  He reached a broad, deep arroyo in the early afternoon, when the distant mountains were relieved by dense shadow, the northwestern rock faces tinged yellow and salmon. Hawk stared down at the cut before him. The water, which was the color of creamed coffee, had receded halfway down the steep banks. Last night, however, it had to have been a veritable millrace.

  Hawk looked around, wondering if Miller had made it across or had headed either east or west along the bank. He considered following the arroyo in both directions, but if he remembered right, the Butterfield Company had a stage route running nearby. Miller might have known about the trail and at least tried to head for it. Hawk would check the trail out first, and the first relay station he came to.

  Someone might have spotted the wounded killer.

  Hawk’s grulla mustang crossed the arroyo easily, though it had some trouble climbing the steep opposite bank that was slick with still-wet clay. The horse’s hooves slipped, and as it fought for traction, the mustang’s lungs wheezed like a blacksmith’s bellows.

  At the top of the bank, Hawk stopped the horse, resting him, and looked around.

  To his right, a saguaro leaned out over the wash. The night before, the lip of the wash had eroded enough to uproot the cactus. Now, among the bone-colored roots that had been partially torn out of the ground, something glistened in the afternoon sunshine.

  Something Miller had left behind? Possibly a canteen?

  Hawk swung down from the saddle, dropped to a knee beside the saguaro, reached through the roots, and took hold of the object.

  He saw right away that whatever it was couldn’t have belonged to Miller, for it was too deeply entangled in the saguaro’s roots. However, curiosity urged him to disentangle the roots until he was holding before him a badly dented and rusted Spanish-style helmet from which the rain had washed away some of the mud. Despite the weathering, Hawk recognized the headgear by its flat, narrow brim and the high crest, like a rooster’s comb, running from front to back.

  Only one cheek guard clung to it. The other was likely entangled deeper in the root ball, or maybe it had long ago been blown or washed away in rains similar to that which had ravaged this desert the night before.

  Hawk ran his hands along the helmet’s flaking metal brim. Finding these ancient artifacts always gave him a chill. They reminded him how small and insignificant he was. Even how small and insignificant his misery was—merely one clipped scream among the barrage of screams and long, keening wails that comprised all of human life on earth from the first mortal forward.

  He peered through the bristling chaparral toward the castle-like Superstitions rising in the south. He’d heard that a rich Mexican whose family had owned a sprawling rancho had come north on a gold-scouting expedition about forty years ago. Don Miguel Peralta had been chasing a legend that the Apaches had told Coronado about a vein of almost pure gold in the high, rugged range two hundred miles north of what is now the US−Mexico border.

  Discovering that the vein was more than mere legend—that the nearly pure gold did, in fact, exist—Peralta recruited several hundred peons to work his “Sombrero Mine” deep inside the Superstitions, and over the next three years he shipped home by pack train millions of pesos’ worth of nearly pure gold concentrate.

  Hawk looked down at the helmet in his hands.

  Could he be holding the headgear of one of Coronado’s men who, exploring this country three hundred years ago, first became privy to the Apache story of almost-pure gold? The gold that Don Peralta mined later, before the Civil War, and ended up selling his life to the Apaches for?

  Dust and bone . . .

  Hawk heard a scream. Loud and shrill, it came from inside his own head. It was the scream of his wife when Linda learned that their boy, Jubal, had been taken off the school playground and hanged by Three-Fingers Ned Meade.

  Hawk tossed the helmet aside, swung up onto the grulla’s back, and continued south toward the stage road and, he hoped, more sign that he was on the trail of Pima Miller.

  The wind wasn’t blowing, but the rogue lawman could smell blood on the breeze . . .

  CHAPTER 8

  THE STAGE FROM FLAGSTAFF

  The old man sat back in his rocking chair, both open eyes rolled up and slightly off-center as though he were staring at the bullet hole in his forehead.

  Blood trickled from the hole past the corner of his left eye and along his nose to pool in the mustache of his blue-white Vandyke beard. His arms had been tied behind him to the spools at the back of the chair, and his ankles were bound. His lower jaw sagged, upper lips stretched back from his crooked, yellow teeth in the same snarl he’d likely given his killer.

  Extending the cocked Russian in his right hand, Hawk looked around the shack. He didn’t have to inspect it to know that no one else was there. A deathly silence filled the place, and dirty dishes were mounded in the dry sink to the right of the range on which were several greasy pots and pans. Flour had been spilled on the table, near a mess of freshly oiled tack and the hide-wrapped handle of a pickax. The flour told Hawk that someone had hastily packed for the trail, and that that person had likely gone with Miller.

  That Miller had shot the trussed-up, defenseless old man, there was no doubt in Hawk’s mind. A woman had lived here with the old man, for the kitchen, however messy, bespoke a woman’s touch. The slight fragrance of lilac water mixed with the smell of man sweat and tobacco in the cabin’s hot, pent-up air still humid from the previous night’s storm.

  Hawk turned and walked out through the cabin’s open door. He held the Russian down along his leg as he moved off the porch and walked around the yard, closely inspecting the ground. He stopped near the windmill and stared south.

  Then he holstered the hog leg, stepped up onto the grulla’s back, and trotted on out of the yard, following an oft-used wagon trail that appeared to meander over the low benches in the direction of the Superstitions standing tall now on the horizon, orange and pink in the light of the falling sun.

  Fifteen minutes later, content that he had Miller’s trail—two shod horses heading south toward the mountains—Hawk returned to the yard and unsaddled his mount in the barn. He took great care with the grulla, watering and graining the mount and then slowly, thoroughly wiping him down with an old feed sack and then currying him and cleaning out his hooves. The horse had picked up a few
pebbles and cactus thorns, and they had to be tended to prevent trouble as he trailed Miller.

  Hawk was well aware that without his horse, the hunt would be over. And once he left the stage station and headed up into the Superstitions, his horse would be even more essential. If the mustang went down, Hawk’s own life would be over.

  And Pima Miller would ride free with his hostage.

  If the girl or woman was, indeed, a hostage. Hawk had seen no signs of a struggle, so he couldn’t be sure. He’d heard that Miller held a devilish attraction for women, and any girl living alone out here with the now-deceased old man would probably be susceptible to the killer’s charms.

  Miller might be using her as a guide rather than a hostage. The cabin was filled with mining implements, as was the barn and tack room, which meant that the old man and possibly the girl were at least part-time prospectors, and likely knew the mountains well.

  By the time Hawk had finished tending his own horse and feeding and watering the stage horses and three burros and headed back to the cabin, the sun had slid down behind the far western ridges that were silhouetted black against it. He saw no reason to continue after Miller that day.

  Tomorrow would be soon enough. It would likely rain tonight, as already more monsoon clouds were building in the southwest, but Miller would no doubt continue to follow the well-worn trail leading south of the station yard.

  Obviously, he was intending on either hiding in the mountains until his trail grew cold, or on leading his hunter into the high crags, isolating him and bushwhacking him from the ample cover of that wild country. Or maybe he intended to work through them to the south. Hawk knew that the outlaw’s home territory was the desert around Tucson. He’d acquired his nickname, Pima, from having been married to a Pima girl for a time, when he’d been hauling freight to Arizona cavalry outposts in the years following the war.