Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawk slung the brave’s Winchester over his own right shoulder, and pulled the Schofield out of the sash. He tripped the latch and broke open the top-break pistol. All six chambers showed brass. Hawk snapped the revolver closed and snugged it into one of his two empty holsters—the one he wore in the cross-draw position on his left hip.

  Saradee moved up behind him. He saw her shadow slide along the red, rocky ground. She was looking around cautiously. Softly, she said, “Any more?”

  “Hell if I know.” Hawk held out the carbine he’d borrowed. “Here.”

  Saradee looked at her rifle and then at the one hanging from Hawk’s shoulder as well as the Schofield in his holster. Her cheeks dimpled and she shook her blonde hair back from her face. “You’re racking up.”

  “Now, I just need a horse.”

  They’d left the ancient shack Hawk had been healing in two days ago. They’d had to ride double on Saradee’s palomino as Hawk continued his hunt for Pima Miller. The palomino was strong, but the heat and extra weight were taking its toll, slowing them down.

  Hawk needed a horse. Even if it wasn’t his own grulla. Any horse would do. Even a half-broken Chiricahua mustang that likely didn’t care for the smell of white men.

  Or anything else about white men . . .

  Hawk and Saradee had spied the Indians milling along a ridge about an hour ago, around three in the hot afternoon. Sensing an ambush, Hawk had decided to bring the ambush to the Chiricahuas. True, he and Saradee were the interlopers here. The Apaches were only protecting what they believed to be theirs, a mountain of religious significance—their Thunder God’s abode. But Hawk doubted they’d mind if he didn’t sell his life cheaply.

  A true Chiricahua would not flinch at a mortal challenge.

  The next challenge for Hawk was to secure one of the warriors’ horses.

  He made sure his new carbine was fully loaded and then he looked around. He sensed that the Indians had come from the north, so he stepped out into the ravine and stared in that direction.

  Spying no more imminent threats, he glanced at Saradee. “Fetch your horse.”

  “Whatever you say, lover.”

  “Stop callin’ me that,” Hawk said, angrily squeezing his new carbine’s neck as he looked around at the weird pinnacles and glyphs of rock rising in all directions.

  “Don’t give me orders . . . lover.” Saradee looked around warily. “Are you sure Miller is worth all this? Maybe you should find another killer to kill. One who hasn’t embedded himself so deep in Apacheria.”

  The sun was hammering down on Hawk, who had lost his hat sometime before Miller and the Zimmerman girl had thrown him over his horse. Now he went back to the Apache, removed the strip of calico banding the young warrior’s head, and wrapped it around his own.

  As he tied the cloth in back, he said, “You can leave whenever you want. You never had to ride out here in the first place.”

  Hawk meant it. He didn’t like having her around. Or was it that he liked having her around too much?

  She smiled at him, reached up to adjust the calico bandanna on his forehead. She’d dimpled her pretty, suntanned cheeks again. A few strands of her hair, sun-bleached nearly white, blew against his cheek. He felt the raw pull of her deep in his loins.

  Her infernal pull.

  “Leave and miss out on all this fun?” Saradee shook her head. “Not a chance, lover. I’ll fetch my horse.”

  She turned and strode away. Hawk couldn’t help watching her go, admiring the sway of her full, firm hips and round ass strained against her light-blue denims. Her chaps slapped against her long, slender legs as she walked, silver spurs ringing lightly.

  Her hair slid back and forth along her slender back, blowing out from her face in the hot, dry breeze.

  Hawk turned away from her and continued walking along the ravine. He saw the light indentations that the Apaches’ moccasins had made in the caliche. He followed them into an off-shooting canyon and then into an open, sandy area. He stopped in a wedge of shade, and snapped up the Winchester.

  Three horses milled in the chaparral to Hawk’s left. Paint Indian ponies with simple hemp hackamores and colorful Apache blankets for saddles. He was glad to see the horses but what had him riveted was the white man staked back-down to a slight rise ahead and on Hawk’s right.

  Hawk looked around the man, making sure he wasn’t walking into a trap. When he deemed himself alone, with only the staked man for company, Hawk moved forward. He stopped at the base of the slope to which the man had been staked.

  The man was groaning and turning his head from side to side, squeezing his eyes shut against the sun. He stopped moving and his eyelids flickered as he tried to see through them.

  “Someone there?” To Hawk, his Old World accent sounded German. His dark-brown beard, lightly threaded with gray, hung to the middle of his chest clad in a sweat-matted, salt-stained buckskin shirt. A hide tobacco pouch hung down his chest, half-concealed by his beard.

  Hawk looked around carefully and then moved up the slope to stare down at the gent. The man squinted up at Hawk. He must have seen only Hawk’s dark hair and the red bandanna, for he spat out, “Miserable savages! Kill me and get it over with!” Then he grunted out several angry words in the Chiricahua tongue.

  Hawk said, “Easy. I’m not gonna kill you.”

  When he was relatively sure no more Indians were near, Hawk let his carbine hang down his back by the lanyard. He pulled his dagger from his right boot and cut the man’s wrists free of the ironwood stakes they’d been lashed to with strips of muslin that had no doubt been looted from some white settler’s ranch house or wagon.

  When Hawk had freed both the man’s wrists, he reached down to cut loose his ankles. “How many were there?” he asked, still looking around. The only sign of the Indians were the three contentedly grazing mustangs.

  The man had sat up. He was eyeing Hawk suspiciously. He had dark-brown eyes set deep in dark sockets, and a lean, weathered face. “Five jumped me,” he said in a deep voice, rubbing each wrist in turn. “Somehow the devils snuck up on me. Strange. I’ve done good, skinnin’ clear of ’em.”

  He seemed deeply baffled by the attack, as though he were fairly confident in his ability to avoid the Apaches.

  Hawk said, “That means there’s two more around here somewhere.”

  The man shook his head as his second ankle came free of the stake. He wore high-topped, lace-up boots, his buckskin trousers stuffed into them. Both trouser knees were patched, the patches nearly worn through to his longhandles.

  “They come runnin’ through here a few minutes ago,” the man, who Hawk assumed was a prospector, said, glancing off toward a relatively flat stretch of rocky, brush-speckled desert to the north. “Apaches don’t like a fight unless it’s a sure thing.”

  Hawk stared to the north. He used a hand to shade his eyes. He thought he could make out two figures bobbing in the hazy, brassy distance, heading toward a distant, copper-colored, shelving ridge.

  Hawk looked at the prospector. The man was studying Hawk closely, his brown eyes still skeptical. Hawk extended his hand and tried a reassuring smile.

  “Hawk,” he said.

  The prospector had an addled air. Hawk wasn’t sure if it was from the attack or if he was just naturally edgy, suspicious of strangers. Something told him it was the latter.

  The man slowly closed his own hand around Hawk’s. He was not wearing a glove, but it felt like he was. His palm was so thoroughly calloused that if felt like a glove liberally crusted with dried mud.

  He did not give his name, merely nodded slightly, one eye twitching, and then looked away. He gained his feet heavily. He was tall and broad-shouldered, potbellied, bandy-legged. He brushed dust from his trousers, picked up a canvas hat lying nearby, set it on his head, and began tramping off to the north.

  “Fetch my burros,” he muttered just loudly enough for Hawk to hear. He hacked up phlegm, spat to one side, and kept walking.

  H
awk stared after him. Saradee put her palomino up beside the rogue lawman and stared off toward the north, lifting a gloved hand to her hat brim, shading her eyes.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Hell if I know,” Hawk said.

  CHAPTER 18

  GOLD!

  “I can’t believe this,” Miller heard himself mutter. “I can’t . . . I can’t believe this. I must be feverish . . . dreamin’!”

  On his knees, he used a hammer to chip at the scale-like lumps of gold in the mine’s low ceiling. He closed his eyes and lowered his head as the gold and bits of quartz and dirt rained down on him. One chunk bounced off his hat. It smarted as it raked his forehead, but he didn’t mind. In fact, he barely felt it.

  Miller coughed against the dust wafting in the close, shadowy confines and looked down at the gold nugget about half the size of his fist glistening up at him in the wedge of daylight angling down from a ceiling crack farther down the hole.

  The crack was just beyond where Jodi was working, filling her second set of saddlebags. She chuckled as she set down her hammer and buckled the pouch she’d just filled.

  “Told ya, didn’t I?” she jeered. “And you thought I was lyin’.”

  “I did,” Miller admitted, chipping away at another nugget protruding from the ceiling above his head. “I did at that.” He stopped hammering at the gold and grinned at the girl, winking. He felt so light that he thought it fully possible he might float like a feather on the wind.

  Float over the earth, grinning.

  “May I apologize, Miss Jodi?” the killer said. “May I do that? Sincerely?”

  “No need to apologize,” Jodi said, gaining her feet and trying to heft the saddlebags onto her shoulder. No doing. The bag was way too heavy. She’d have to drag it along the ground. “Just fill them pouches and meet me outside. We’d best head on out of here before the Dutchman pays his mine another visit.”

  “Pshaw!” Miller said. “Chances of him makin’ another visit when we’re here are slim to none.”

  “Just the same . . .” Jodi grunted as, crouching—the ceiling was too low for her to stand up straight—she started dragging her filled saddlebags up the slant of this secondary mine shaft. “We only have these three saddlebags . . . and three horses. No point in tarryin’.”

  “What a shame,” Miller said. “What a damn shame we don’t have one more horse. Or two horses. Two big mules. Think of that!”

  “We already got enough gold here to see us through two or three lifetimes, killer. Keep your mind on that. I been all through this, dreamin’ at night about drivin’ a whole herd of mules up here, drive ’em out loaded with gold. But, then, shit—the Apaches would probably find me, run me down.”

  Jodi was grunting, breathless, as she dragged the bags up the secondary shaft to the main one, her silhouetted figure growing smaller and smaller against the light of the shaft’s front entrance. “No point in gettin’ greedy. We just gotta take what we can carry and get out before the Apaches or the Dutchman finds us here!”

  “I ain’t afraid of no Dutchman,” Miller said, knocking another nugget free from the ceiling. “Ain’t afraid of no Apaches, neither!”

  The gold and quartz thumped onto the mineshaft floor. The floor, walls, and ceiling still showed the chips and gouges from Miguel Peralta’s many peon miners who’d toiled in the mine about forty years ago. They’d exploited the main vein into the mountain, and then they must have started on the secondary shaft, near the main shaft’s mouth, just before they’d heard the war drums and hightailed it.

  Miller and Jodi didn’t have torches so they’d penetrated the mine no farther than the light. There was plenty of gold right here for the taking, and not even hard taking at that!

  So, the legend was real!

  Peralta had really been here, mining the gold that Coronado had heard about. It had been Apaches who’d killed Peralta and his men when they’d fled down the mountains toward Mexico with a string of gold-laden burros.

  As the burros had bolted from the gunfire and flying arrows, the gold had been scattered to the four winds.

  “Plenty more where that came from,” Miller said, chuckling as he worked.

  “What’s that?” Jodi called, crouching at the entrance about fifty yards up the shaft.

  “Nothin’!” Miller said. “Just talkin’ to myself! We rich men tend to that, don’t ya know!”

  He laughed hard at that, giddy.

  Giddy.

  Liable to sail off on the next low cloud . . .

  “Meet ya outside!” Jodi yelled. “Don’t linger. Just fill them bags and pull your picket pin!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Miller said, stuffing several small chunks into a pouch of the saddlebags open near his knees on the shaft floor. “Now she’s gettin’ all bossy. Ain’t that just the way, though?”

  He chuckled some more. Jodi’s bossiness didn’t bother Pima Miller. Nothing bothered Miller and he doubted that anything ever would bother him again.

  He chuckled at that, too, and tried to stuff another couple of small nuggets into the saddlebag pouch. He pushed and tucked and tried to break the nuggets into smaller pieces.

  They just wouldn’t fit.

  He looked down at the nuggets in his right, gloved hand. What a shame. What a damned shame. Leaving good gold behind.

  He tossed the gold chunks into the darkness farther down the shaft, heard them thump and clink as they struck the floor and rolled. That made him laugh, too. Tossing gold around as though they were mere rocks. Like he was a kid skipping stones on a quiet lake.

  Hah!

  Miller buckled the flap on the bulging pouch, gained his feet, and began dragging the bags on up the shaft. He groaned against the hitch in his side, where the rogue lawman had shot him. The stitches were pulling free. Miller had been feeling blood welling from the wound for the past several days.

  As soon as he made it down to Tucson, he’d have to have a real sawbones stitch him up again. Now that he was rich, he couldn’t take any chances on not living a good, long, full life! One hell of a rich life indeed!

  Hell, he was richer than Horace Tabor! He was richer than Jay Gould and all them railroad barons back east!

  Hah!

  Miller dragged his saddlebags up the shaft. He had to crawl to make it easier on his side, since he couldn’t stand up all the way.

  By the time he’d gained the entrance, where the light momentarily blinded him and the heat blasted against him like the breath of an angry dragon, he gained his feet, slung the bags over his shoulder and made his way over to where Jodi was tightening her Morgan’s saddle cinches.

  One pair of bulging saddlebags hung behind her cantle. The other was on the rogue lawman’s grulla.

  Miller headed for Hawk’s horse. It was eyeing him skeptically. The girl had fed each of the horses a pile of peeled barrel cactus, as up here at the entrance to the mine nothing grew but rocks and prickly pear.

  Miller grinned at her. Even with the hundred pounds of gold on his back, he felt as light as a cottonwood leaf. “Girl, I might just let you please me extra fine tonight!”

  Jodi looked at him askance. “I’d rather fuck Cochise, dead as that old Injun is.”

  Miller eased the saddlebags across Hawk’s empty saddle and turned to her, sure he’d misunderstood or that she was just back to teasing him again. “Huh?”

  “You heard me.”

  Jodi had tightened her cinches and now she turned toward the outlaw, leaned against the side of the black, and crossed her arms on her breasts. She looked Miller up and down, and curled a nostril. “First the old man tellin’ me what to do and when to do it, and don’t do that, girl, do this . . . and oh, no, you done it all wrong, girl! Makin’ light of me and runnin’ me ragged. Treatin’ me like he treated his boots, only worse. At least I didn’t have to fuck the son of a bitch. But you—you think you can have it just any old time you want it. You think you deserve it because I led you to this here mine—the Dutchman’s mine—and now you�
��re just feelin’ like the cock o’ the walk!”

  The girl spat to one side, looked at Miller again, and wrinkled her other nostril.

  Miller studied her, squinting against the bright sunlight up here at the top of a small, shelving mesa straight north of El Sombrero. “Hey, now . . . I was just funnin’ you, girl. I was just feelin’ good, and, you know . . . funnin’. No need to get a bur in your bonnet.”

  “I ain’t wearin’ a bonnet, you jackass.”

  “Hey, now, you listen here!” Miller said, feeling anger burn up through all the goodness and lightness he’d been feeling.

  The girl reached behind her, filled her right hand with her pocket pistol. Miller had been moving toward her but now he stopped. His anger burned hotter, brighter.

  “I was gonna wait till we got to Mexico, Pima,” Jodi said, aiming the pistol at his belly. “I was gonna wait till we had the gold stashed somewhere secret, where we could fish it out whenever we needed more of it. It’d have been a whole lot easier to have help gettin’ the gold across the border. But you won’t make it. That wound done opened up on you. Opened up bad.”

  Miller glanced down at his side. She’d been right. He felt as though a sharp-toothed animal were gnawing away at the bullet hole. Blood stained his shirt. The stain was at least as large around as his open hand.

  “You’re losin’ blood fast,” Jodi said. “You’ll just keep losin’ it faster an’ faster. And your slow dyin’ would just slow me down. So I’m gonna end it right here, Pima.”

  The girl raised the pistol and clicked the hammer back. She smiled with one half of her mouth. “I’m gonna end our delightful partnership right here.”

  There was the boing! of a bowstring being released.

  A soft whistling growing louder.

  The thump of the arrow tearing into flesh and bone.

  “Ughh!” the girl cried, lurching forward and triggering her pistol into the ground near her boots.

  Dropping the gun, she twisted around and hooked an arm behind her back, which was suddenly bristling with a red-and-blue-fletched Chiricahua arrow sticking straight out from between her shoulder blades.