Ruxton lay barely conscious and groaning in a stand of prickly pear and a trooper was dragging him out of the thorns by his boots.
“Where’s Hooper?” Stryker snapped.
“He ran for it, Lieutenant,” the man said. “Ruxton made a break with him, but then the sarge turned and dropped him with a punch.”
That made sense. Hooper knew one of his guards would stay behind to secure Ruxton, leaving him with only one rifle to deal with.
“If Ruxton tries to run, kill him,” Stryker told the trooper, who had succeeded in pulling the man free of the cactus. “Got that?”
Without waiting to hear a reply, the lieutenant made his way to the mouth of the arroyo and his eyes searched into darkness.
He turned south, stepping warily, his gun up and ready, letting his vision adjust to the gloom.
There was no sound but the soft sigh of the wind and the rustle of junipers and mesquite. The moon had slid lower in the sky and the stars had reappeared, scattering a pale, opalescent light. Shadows hunched among the foothills and the mountains soared in stark outline, like black, impossibly ancient pyramids.
Stryker found the trooper’s body in a narrow dry wash. The young soldier had a round, pleasant face, now composed in death. His neck had been broken and his carbine and gun belt were missing.
Hooper, who knew the ways of the desert as well as any Apache, had crouched in the wash and waited. In comparison to the small, slight troopers, cavalry sergeants and officers tended to be taller and stronger. Hooper was a big, heavy-muscled man and the soldier had not stood a chance.
Stryker rose to his feet, his eyes probing the darkness. The shadows were still, unmoving. The night was so quiet he heard the beat of his heart.
“Hey, Stryker!” Hooper’s voice called out from somewhere among the foothills to his left.
“I know you can hear me, Stryker, lad. Or have you gone deaf since you ain’t humping the colonel’s daughter no more?” A pause, then, “How was she, Stryker? Did she buck like an unbroke pony or just bend over, bare her ass and think of daddy?”
The lieutenant moved to his left. A mistake. Hooper saw the flicker of movement and fired. Stryker felt the bullet burn across the meat of his right shoulder and he dived for the cover of the sandy wash bank. Here a huge boulder cast its shadow over Stryker and he could not be seen unless he moved again.
“Hey, Stryker?” Hooper assumed a Southwestern accent. “Dang it all, boy, did I get ye?”
The lieutenant raised his head over the bank and pushed his cocked revolver out in front of him.
Move, Hooper, just move. . . .
“Hey, Stryker, know what the two-dollar whores say at the hog ranch back at the fort? No, you haven’t heard? They say they won’t even let you pay to screw ’m because you’re too damned ugly.”
Stryker’s mouth was dry, his eyes burning. He wiped a sweaty right palm on his breeches and took up his Colt again.
Move, you bastard, move. . . .
A chuckle from the shadows, then, “Know what sweet little Millie is doing right now up in Washington, Stryker? She’s got some general’s head between her thighs and she’s saying”—now he affected a high, girlish voice—“ ‘Oh, General Beauregard, dear, that horrible Lieutenant Stryker, he was so damned ugly he couldn’t have paid me to open my legs for him.’ ”
Hooper laughed again, a harsh bellow devoid of humor.
Seeing the dead at the stage and the ranch had stressed Stryker, and the battle with the Apaches that had turned into a turkey shoot with no honor on either side had made matters worse.
Something inside him snapped and his muscles bunched as he prepared to jump to his feet.
He never made it. A strong hand pushed him back down and Hogg’s voice whispered in his ear, “He’s trying to draw you out, Lieutenant. Once you’re in the open he’ll set his sights right between them yellow shoulder straps and you’ll be a dead man.”
Stryker opened his mouth to protest, but Hogg’s shout stopped him. “Hooper, this here is Joe Hogg. You stay right where you’re at. I’m a-comin’ for you.”
A startled rustle of juniper branches in the distance . . . then silence.
The scout looked at Stryker and smiled. “I guess ol’ Hooper didn’t like his choice of partner to open the ball.” He rose to his feet. “I came across a dead trooper back there.”
Stryker nodded. “Hooper killed him.” He glanced at the sky. “Come first light we’ll go after him.”
“Lieutenant, Hooper has been in the territory a long time,” Hogg said. “He’ll be like an Apache in those hills. Sure, I can track him but it will take days, maybe weeks, and you’ll lose a bunch more men. With Nana out, you should return to the fort.”
“Just let Hooper go?”
“No, Lieutenant. We’ll catch up with him again, that is if the Apaches don’t get him first.” Hogg’s eyes gleamed in the starlight. “Something you should know: When they were both sergeants, Hooper and Rake Pierce were drinking and whoring buddies. If Hooper survives, he could lead us right to Pierce.”
“That’s damned thin, Joe.”
“I reckon it is. But it’s a chance. Maybe the only chance we got.”
Stryker bent his head and lost himself in thought. After a couple of minutes he looked at Hogg and said, “All right, we’ll take our dead back to Fort Merit. I’ll show Colonel Devore the new Winchesters and tell him that there’s one sure way to slow Nana and Geronimo—stop Rake Pierce selling them rifles. And I’ll tell him I want the job.”
“Sounds like an excellent plan, Lieutenant,” Hogg said. “But don’t think of going after Pierce with anything less than a full cavalry troop.”
“There are two troops of the Second at Fort Merit. I’m sure the colonel will be willing to spare one of them.”
The soft, desert starlight did nothing to improve the appearance of the horrifically mutilated face Stryker turned to his scout. “Of course, I could be calling this all wrong. I’m bringing back dead, a crazy woman and now I’ve lost a murdering deserter. Maybe Colonel Devore will throw me in the guardhouse.”
Hogg’s teeth glinted as he smiled. “Lieutenant, the whole time General Crook was here, he never killed twenty-one bronco Apaches in a single battle. Hell, you could be a hero an’ get a gold medal.”
Aware that he was treading along the slippery edge of self-pity, Stryker said, “Look at me, Joe. Do feathered generals pin medals on officers who look like me?”
Hogg was a man born and raised to the habit of honesty. “No, Lieutenant Stryker, quite frankly they don’t.” Then, an unlikely gesture for him, he placed a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
Chapter 8
Fort Merit was one of seventy military posts scattered throughout the Arizona Territory, though most were destined to last only a few years before their adobe buildings crumbled away and were reclaimed by the desert.
Like Fort Bowie to the south, built to protect Apache Pass and its springs, a small settlement had grown up around Fort Merit, a sprawling maze of adobes, jacals and ramshackle outbuildings.
The parade square was enclosed on three sides by barracks, the hospital, the quartermaster’s warehouse, a bakery, a blacksmith’s shop, stables and the headquarters building. To the west of these, wandering into the desert, was a creek lined by willows and cottonwoods. Near the creek a hog ranch had sprung up and a couple of other dives, optimistically called saloons, offered forty-rod whiskey, gambling and whores.
There was no sutler, but a general store owned by a gloomy Scotsman named Cameron offered the soldiers everything from bone-handled penknives to caviar and champagne. He also offered his wife, a bony, hard-faced Swede, but, by Cameron’s own account, got few takers.
Stryker led his detail through the usual noisy throng of children and dogs around the jacals, then rode into the parade ground. In the noon heat, the Stars and Stripes hung from the flagpole like a damp rag, and the brass barrels of the post’s
two sixpounder cannons—they had never fired a shot in anger at Apaches—were being polished to a marvelous sheen by a wretched trooper who had managed to irritate somebody in authority.
Fort Merit was no spit-and-polish post to gladden the eye of a fuss-and-feathers general. It was mean, shabby, dirty and run-down, but to Stryker it was home, a haven of safety and rest in a hard and dangerous land.
He turned the redheaded woman over to the enlisted men’s wives of suds row, who bustled and fluttered around her and led her into one of their tiny quarters.
“She was captured by Apaches and she won’t talk,” Stryker told a large, busty woman with a fierce mustache that must have rivaled her husband’s. “I think her mind is gone.”
“We’ll take care of her, poor little thing,” the woman said. “Did the Apaches . . . ?”
“Yes, they did, ma’am,” Stryker said quickly.
The woman nodded. “Then she’ll need all the attention and love we can give her.”
The lieutenant felt awkward and clumsy. “Well, please carry on, ma’am.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, glad to be gone from there and the concerns of womenfolk.
After he’d seen his wounded and dead carried into the hospital, Stryker had Trooper Ruxton taken to the guardhouse and then dismissed the detail. Before entering the headquarters building, he untied a new Winchester from the saddle horn, then gave his horse over to the care of Trooper Kramer. He heard the young soldier tell Hogg that the frog in his pocket was still alive, though it was exhibiting definite signs of being down in the mouth and he confidently expected the creature would bite the dust before nightfall.
“Keep checking on it until dark, boy,” the scout said. “As any doctor will tell you, the frog cure is the sovereign remedy for asthma and it has never been known to fail.”
Stryker watched Trooper Kramer leave. Was it only his imagination or had the boy’s breathing sounded easier? Then another thought hit him hard: Why the hell did he care?
But he did. And that gave him pause. It was something to think about . . . later.
A couple of loungers propped up the timber poles that supported the headquarters’ porch. The younger man was a drover in from one of the surrounding ranches with a supply of beef. The other was a scout Stryker had seen hanging around the fort. Long John Wills was nearly seven feet tall in his moccasins and sported a magnificent red beard that hung all the way to the crotch of his greasy buckskins. He had a vague reputation as an Indian fighter and a more definite one as a ladies’ man.
“Seen you ride in, Lieutenant,” he said, “bringing in dead and wounded, an’ all. Run into Apaches?”
Stryker nodded. “West of here.”
“Ol’ Nana’s out.”
“Yes, so I heard.”
Wills inclined his head. “See the tents over yonder?”
“I saw them as I rode in.”
“Two companies of the Twenty-third Infantry. Them boys are green as can be and their major is a little feller who looks like he’s about twelve years old. All the cavalry, including the Second, is being sent to Fort Bowie.”
“Then the Twenty-third has been ordered here to guard the fort?”
Wills smiled. “Never was a truer word spoke, Lieutenant.” He looked over at the tents, then threw up his hands. “God help us all.”
“Colonel Devore inside?”
“He is, with that major I told you about. I think his name is Hayes . . . Haynes . . . something like that.”
Stryker put his hand on the door, but Wills’ voice stopped him. “Lieutenant, Colonel Devore is right testy today. He’s sore about losing his cavalry.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
After the oppressive, dusty heat of the day, the inside of the adobe felt cool, its windows shuttered against the blaze of the sun. An elderly corporal sat at a desk to one side of the door to the colonel’s office.
The man rose to his feet and saluted when Stryker entered, his eyes darting everywhere, unwilling to settle on the contorted mask of the lieutenant’s face.
“First Lieutenant Stryker’s compliments to the colonel, and ask him if now is convenient to make my report.”
The corporal seemed relieved that he no longer had to meet the lieutenant’s eyes. He knocked on the colonel’s door, stuck his head inside and repeated Stryker’s words.
“Send him in,” Devore said.
Stryker stepped inside, the Winchester hanging loose at his side.
Colonel Michael Devore sat behind his desk, a grizzled, medium-sized man of forty-five who had begun his career as a cavalry private at the outbreak of the War Between the States and had risen through the ranks to brevet brigadier general.
Devore was no spit-and-polish soldier, but a fighting man who understood the limitations of light cavalry in Indian warfare but used its flexibility and speed of movement to full advantage. He knew his men, loved the desert and admired the Apache as a skilled guerilla fighter.
He also looked another man directly in the eye, as he did now to Stryker.
“You’ve been through it, Lieutenant.”
Stryker nodded. “Yes sir, some.”
Devore waved a hand. “Meet Major Hanson; he commands the infantry you must have noticed when you rode in.”
Hanson was blond, boyish and small, wearing a neat tunic that somehow had not gathered a coating of gray desert dust. Stryker suspected the major had carefully brushed his uniform before meeting with his formidable superior officer.
After registering the initial shock that Stryker’s appearance always caused, Hanson stood and gave the lieutenant a surprisingly firm handshake and a friendly grin. Like Devore, he sought eye contact.
Stryker and Hanson made the usual polite exchanges expected of officers, “Welcome to Fort Merit, sir,” and “Delighted to be here, Lieutenant,” but Devore cut it short. “Since he’s going to be directly involved in the defense of this post, Major Hanson should listen to your report, Lieutenant.”
Using as few words as possible, Stryker told of the attack on the Norton and Stewart stage and the massacre at the ranch. He then described the action in the arroyo and the murder committed by the mutinous deserter Sergeant Miles Hooper.
“And this man, Trooper Louis Ruxton?”
“In the guardhouse, sir. He’s charged with inciting a mutiny.”
“I have a short way with mutineers, Lieutenant, especially in wartime.” Devore’s face hardened. “I’ll convene a court-martial for later this afternoon, to be followed immediately by the firing squad.”
He rose and took the Winchester from Stryker’s hand. “You’ve done well, Lieutenant. This is from the arroyo battle?”
“Yes, sir, one of six we took off the Apache dead.”
“And you suspect Sergeant Rake Pierce supplied these?”
“Yes, sir, I do. New guns and new ammunition.”
“Well, it’s possible. But last I heard he was in the Madres.”
“I think he may be closer,” Stryker said. “With Nana out and joined up with Geronimo, this is where the market is for his guns.”
“The consensus of opinion is that Nana will leave the territory and raid deep into Mexico, Lieutenant. That’s why the cavalry, myself included, is being recalled to Fort Bowie. We will pursue Nana and Geronimo and make sure they remain south of the Rio Grande.”
“Nevertheless, sir, I believe that Pierce is somewhere in the Cabezas Mountains. If he is out of the picture and the Apaches can’t get guns and ammunition, Nana will be forced to return to the San Carlos.”
Devore’s smile was barely a twitch of his lips under his mustache. “There’s nothing personal in your request, of course?”
“You know it’s personal, sir. I make no secret of it.”
Seeing the confused look on Major Hanson’s face, the colonel said, “Mr. Stryker and Rake Pierce have a history. The lieutenant’s last detail before he was to be transferred to Washington was to bring Sergeant Pierce from Fort Bowie to here to be
court-martialed for desertion.”
“Sir, with all due respect, do you feel this is necessary?” Stryker asked. He suddenly felt vulnerable, like a man, naked from the bathtub, who walks into a surprise party.
“Lieutenant, your face speaks volumes, and I think Major Hanson should be aware of the reason,” Devore said. “He’s too much of a gentleman to ask, but he will soon be in command of this post and he has a right to know what kind of man Pierce is, and indeed, what kind of man you are.”
Then, damn you, let me tell it, Colonel.
“Major, it was drawing on to dark when I left Fort Bowie, so we camped for the night close to Silver Strike Spring. Somehow Pierce got out of his shackles—maybe one of his friends at Bowie had passed him a duplicate key—I don’t know. Anyway, he grabbed the gun of the other escort and shot him dead. He also wounded me. Then he took the shackle chain and swung it back and forth across my face, screaming that I’d never put those irons on him again.
“Pierce left me for dead, but I was picked up by a passing stage and returned here.” Stryker managed a smile. “The post surgeon did his best, but Pierce is a big man and strong, and the damage was too great. The handsome specimen you see before you is the result.”
Hanson, obviously embarrassed, tried to say the right words, but finally gave up, his mouth working.
“Major, I’ve grown used to children running from me in fear and women shrinking away when I turn and they see my face. The Mexicans call me la Fea Una, the Ugly One. I don’t know what my own men or the Apaches call me.”
“Let me just add that Lieutenant Stryker is a fine officer, and I’m glad he’s here and not playing drawing room soldier in Washington,” Devore said quickly. He looked at Stryker. “I plan to recommend you for promotion to captain for your successful action against the Apaches, Lieutenant. I think I still have enough influence among the old Civil War generals to see that it’s done.”
Stryker nodded. “Thank you, sir, but I’d rather have your permission to go after Pierce.”
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