The Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  Perro Loco aimed the pistol in his outstretched hand over Marina’s right shoulder, screaming an Apache death song.

  It had all happened in little more than a second. Cameron was still reacting to Bachelard’s draw as the Indian bounded toward him. Now he turned his Winchester in the Indian’s direction, but there was no way he could take a shot and not risk hitting the woman. His horse, startled by the Indian’s shriek, was doing a stiff-legged dance that made an accurate shot even less likely.

  Cameron saw the swiftly approaching pistol aimed at his head. When the screaming horse was only ten yards away, Marina yelled, “No!” and flung her right arm at the Indian’s hand. The gun barked and the bullet sailed wide.

  Perro Loco yelled savagely, striking at Marina as his horse plowed broadside into Cameron’s. Cameron tried to roll wide as the horse fell, but his boot caught in the stirrup, and the horse went down on his leg. The Indian’s horse fell on Cameron’s, throwing Marina on top of the white man. The Indian lost his rifle as he slid out of the saddle, then quickly regained his seat as the horse struggled to its feet and plunged away.

  As Cameron’s horse rose noisily, Cameron scrambled to a sitting position, and brought the Winchester to his shoulder, trying to plant a bead on the bouncing, quickly diminishing figure of the Indian. He shot once, saw the bullet kick dust. He cocked again, steadied the rifle, and fired.

  Perro Loco’s head snapped forward. The horse bucked and the Indian fell out of the saddle. He rolled once, bringing a hand to his head, then crouched, looking back at Cameron as the horse bucked across the desert, angrily kicking its back legs and arching its neck.

  Perro Loco gave an angry shriek as Cameron fired again. The bullet spanged off a rock at the Indian’s knees. Perro Loco rolled to his side, then regained his feet smoothly, like a cat, and ran behind a brushy rise. He appeared a second later beyond the rise, darting between saguaros and creosote shrubs, heading east.

  Cameron stood and fired four more angry shots, hitting nothing but mesquite and rocks. The Indian disappeared down a grade.

  Cameron cursed. Becoming aware of guns going off around him, he crouched behind a creosote shrub and looked around. Hotchkiss knelt in a gully about twenty yards away, aiming south, where Bachelard’s men apparently were. A few shots sounded in that direction, and Cameron saw a single puff of smoke from a hundred yards away. But it looked as though Bachelard and his men, having gotten what they had come for, were retreating into the desert.

  Cameron couldn’t see Clark and Jimmy Bronco, but the sound of pistol fire beyond Hotchkiss told him they were still kicking. They probably had Perro Loco to thank for that, Cameron speculated wryly. If it hadn’t been for the Indian’s sudden attack, Bachelard no doubt would have killed Marina, and his men, following suit, would have opened up on Cameron and the others before they’d had time to react.

  “Thanks, my Injun friend,” Cameron muttered dryly, turning to look for Marina.

  Ten yards behind Cameron, she lay behind the skeleton of a fallen, decaying saguaro. Only her eyes and the top of her head were visible.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  The others were still shooting—Cameron thought he recognized the eager, rapid bursts of Jimmy Bronco’s Coltsbut there hadn’t been any return fire for several minutes.

  He stood, and then she did as well, favoring her left foot. Her eyes were frightened, haunted, but there was a fire there too.

  No, she was definitely no hothouse flower, Cameron thought.

  “I think I—how do you say?—sprained my ankle,” she said.

  “Sit down there, let me take a look.”

  She sat on the dead saguaro, on which the thorns had long since decayed, and started unlacing her shoe. Cameron took over, loosening the laces and pulling out the tongue, then gently eased the shoe’s heel away from her foot.

  She gave a pained sigh.

  “Hurt?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He gave one more gentle tug and the shoe came off in his hand. He dropped it, removed her sock, and took her long, slender foot in his hand. He moved it, very gently, from left to right.

  He raised his eyes to hers. “Hurt?”

  She shook her head. “Not much.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” he said.

  Her eyes held his. “I am sorry, Mr. Cameron … for everything … for all this.”

  Cameron couldn’t help smiling at her. Something about her touched him very deeply. “What are you talking about?” he said with a laughing grunt. “You saved my life today.”

  She smiled wryly, gave a slow blink of her smoky-black eyes. Cameron couldn’t help staring at her, transfixed for what must have been at least a quarter-minute. Then he looked down and saw that her bare foot was still in his hand.

  “Marina?” Clark called from somewhere nearby.

  Startled, suddenly self-conscious, Cameron lowered her foot and stood, awkwardly looking around. “Well … we’ll get you on a horse and you can rest that ankle in Contention City. Maybe get a doc to take a look at it.”

  Clark appeared out of the creosote, pushing a branch aside, a pistol in his hand. He was sweaty and dirty.

  “Marina … ?” he said. His eyes dropped to her bare foot. “What happened?”

  “I sprained my ankle,” Marina said. “It’s okay.”

  Clark dropped to take a look at the ankle, and Cameron moved away to find Hotchkiss and Bronco. Hotchkiss holstered his pistol as Cameron approached.

  “You all right, Jack?” Hotchkiss asked, smiling with relief. “I figured for sure Perro Loco was going to take you to the dance there for a minute.”

  Cameron shook his head. “I did too. You boys catch any lead?”

  “Nah,” Hotchkiss replied.

  “I think I clipped one of ’em,” Jimmy Bronco said proudly.

  Hotchkiss looked at the kid, scowling. “You did not, son. That was my shot, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Okay, okay,” Cameron said, interceding. “Let’s just worry about getting the horses back so you two can get Clark and his wife to Contention City.”

  Hotchkiss looked at him, blue eyes flashing incredulity. “What do you mean so you two can? Where are you goin’?”

  Cameron was glancing around for the horses. “After Loco. Where the hell do you think?”

  “Alone?”

  “He’s unarmed,” Cameron said with a shrug. “It’s best to ride him down now, before he can get back to his band. I want you two to stay with the Clarks.”

  Hotchkiss looked down, troubled. “I don’t know, Jack. Armed or unarmed, that’s one hotheaded Injun.”

  Cameron started walking in the direction where his horse had disappeared, then stopped suddenly and turned toward Clark and Marina.

  Clark was sitting in the sand, heels planted in the ground before him, resting his weary head. Marina was putting her shoe back on. She glanced up and saw Cameron. She stopped what she was doing and looked at him with a vague question in her narrowing gaze.

  Cameron turned, giving a wry chuff, and continued walking. All he needed now was to get a goddamn woman stuck in his craw …

  CHAPTER 9

  WHEN CAMERON CAUGHT up to his horse, about a hundred and fifty yards from the scene of the shoot-out, he watered the animal, mounted up, and headed after Perro Loco. The man’s trail wasn’t hard to follow, marked as it was by bright red splotches of blood on rocks and shrubs—so much of it that Cameron kept thinking he’d soon come across the man himself. There was nothing like a head wound to drain you dry.

  But he’d ridden two miles along an arroyo twisting up a shallow canyon lined with boulders, and there was still no sign of the Indian, save for his blood and intermittent moccasin prints.

  Suddenly, after another mile, the blood disappeared. Cameron dismounted and looked around, tipping the flat brim of his hat off his forehead and mopping his brow with the sleeve of his buckskin tunic.

  He walked
several yards up the trail, leading his horse in his hands, peering at the ground. Nothing. Finally he stopped, sighed, and looked up the northern wall of the canyon, which was turning coppery as the sun angled westward, the nooks and crannies between boulders turning a deep ocean-green.

  Spying him, a well-fed coyote turned and leapt from a boulder, where it had perched to scan the valley for prey. The beast took stiff-legged strides up the grade and over the peak. Its presence told Cameron the Indian had not gone that way; which left only forward—or up the opposite wall.

  Cameron tethered his horse to a piñon, unsheathed his Winchester, and started up the wall, jumping from rock to rock, stopping now and then to crouch and look around. During one such breather he saw a small drop of blood on a boulder to his left. It was about the size of a raindrop, which told Cameron the Indian had stopped long enough to stifle some of the blood flow.

  Cameron couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d only grazed Perro Loco, the man’s feat was amazing. He’d run three miles practically without stopping, bleeding, and now he was climbing a canyon wall. Cameron might have caught old Perro Loco in a bad moment back in Summerville, but the man really was the Mad Dog of the Desert—a true-blue Apache with sand in his blood if ever there was one.

  Cameron made a mental note to watch himself. The Apache might not have a gun, but Cameron didn’t doubt that the man knew how to fashion weapons from natural objects, and he didn’t want to fall into a false sense of security. Hell, he’d seen Apaches kill soldiers with stones thrown from thirty yards away!

  Wagging his head, Cameron descended the grade to his horse and unsaddled the animal, then removed the bridle. He hid the tack in a clump of brush under a couple low-growing piñons. He’d leave the animal here while he went after Perro Loco on foot, which was the only way to track him up that steep, rocky grade. In his years scouting for the Army, Cameron had discovered that often a foot was the only way you could effectively track an Apache—Mad Dog of the Desert or otherwise.

  He clapped the horse on the rump. The animal trotted a few yards ahead, then stopped and craned its head around to peer curiously at Cameron, who sat on a rock and was replacing his boots with the moccasins he always carried in his saddlebags. “Go on up the trail and find water,” he told the horse. “There’s bound to be a spring around here somewhere.”

  The horse just stared at him.

  Cameron tucked his boots into his saddlebags, then grabbed his field glasses, and his canteen and rifle, and slung both over his shoulder. “I’ll be back tomorrow … I hope,” he told the horse. “Don’t go off with any strangers, now, and stay out of trouble.”

  He headed back up the wall.

  It was hard going for a man who’d gotten used to a saddle. When he was scouting, Cameron had exercised nearly every day in the rocky hills around Fort Hauchuca. That was seven years ago, however, and while Cameron kept in shape working around his ranch, he was not the young, fleet-footed Indian-stalker he once had been.

  After several hundred yards, he finally had to stop and catch his breath. He put his head down and sucked air into his lungs. Dark spots formed before his eyes and his vision swam.

  “Christ Almighty,” he wheezed. “I’m getting old.”

  When his heartbeat finally started to slow, he lifted his head to glance up the slope, sweat stinging his eyes. Near the sandstone ridge pocked with swallow nests, something moved.

  Cameron brought up his field glasses and adjusted the focus, bringing the shaded ridge clearly into view. There against the wall was the shadowy figure of a man; the buckskin breeches told Cameron it was Perro Loco. He was climbing the spur that crested the ridge—a twenty-foot wall of sandstone rock pitted with clefts and small crevices. The Indian’s hands and moccasined feet were finding those crevices and using them to pull him up toward the ridge.

  Cameron’s heart quickened again. He lowered the field glasses and brought up the rifle, levering a shell. He wasn’t sure how far away the Indian was—it was hard to judge distances uphill and in this light—but he thought a shot was worth a try. He had no doubt that Perro Loco already knew he was here.

  Sighting down the barrel, he didn’t like the position he was in, so he slid back on his butt and planted the barrel on his upraised knee. Unable to get the elevation he needed from that angle, he climbed off the rock and used it as a rest for the rifle, crouching low. He took up the slack from the trigger and felt the rifle jump as it barked, spewing smoke and fire, instantly filling the air with the smell of rotten eggs. He lifted his head—the Apache was still there, moving methodically from one hand-and foothold to another.

  Cameron dropped his head back down to the rifle and fired. Dust puffed about two feet left of the Indian. The Indian paused for a moment, taking a quick glance over his shoulder, then resumed climbing.

  One cool cucumber, Cameron thought, squeezing off another round.

  A gout of sandstone blew off the spur six inches above Cameron’s last slug. The goddamn rifle was firing to the left. Cameron lowered his head and adjusted his aim. Perro Loco was pulling himself up the last few feet to the top of the spur.

  Cameron fired. The bullet spanged below the Indian’s right foot as the man was bringing the foot onto the ridgetop.

  Angrily Cameron fired three more shots in quick succession, then lifted his head to see the Indian standing on the ridgetop, outlined against the sky. The man turned, dropped his breeches and bent over, so that for two seconds all Cameron could see was the tan circle of his naked ass.

  By the time Cameron had levered another shell and sighted down the barrel again, the ridgetop was deserted.

  The Indian was gone.

  “Why, you son of a bitch!” Cameron hissed.

  He replaced the spent lead in the Winchester with shells from his belt, cursed again, and started up the boulder-strewn wall.

  He moved as fast as he could over the rocks and boulders and occasional talus slides, pushing through brush to avoid the troublesome cholla, working hard as the grade rose and the sun fell, making it hard to see all the obstacles in his path. His feet grew heavy and his heart pounded like a Comanche war drum.

  No, he wasn’t as young as he used to be. Thirty-five was old for a man like himself.

  Despite the cooling air, sweat dribbled off his brows to sting his eyes. Rivulets streaked the dust on his face and dripped onto his wet shirt. He turned once and saw the valley behind him filling with shadows and the kind of salmoncolored light painters loved. Cameron would have thought it lovely if he were anywhere but here.

  When he reached the base of the spur that capped the ridge, he gave himself a two-minute breather, then slung the rifle over his back, made sure the six-shooter was secure in its holster, and resumed the climb, thrusting the toes of his moccasins into narrow crevices in the sandstone rock.

  Cameron was halfway to the top when his arms simply played out. His quivering legs felt at once heavy and as insubstantial as air. His bleeding hands were wet and slippery, making it even harder to grab hold of the rock.

  He looked down. The base of the spur was a good twenty feet below. If he fell, he’d land on hard, basaltic rock and probably roll a halfmile through cholla cactus and prickly pear and who-knew-what-else? He’d seen men die from infected cholla wounds. At the very least he’d probably end up with a broken leg.

  He sucked an angry breath of air through his teeth and cursed. Perro Loco was not going to do him in. He’d worked too hard to die like this—alone on a goddamn sandstone spur in Apache country, his bones stripped and scattered by mountain lions and brush wolves.

  No, goddamn it … No!

  From somewhere his anger summoned strength. Suppressing the pain, focusing only on the hand- and footholds he needed to find, he moved, slowly but steadily, until he’d wrapped a hand around the rocky shelf at the top.

  There was a fist of rock pushing out of the sandstone to his right. Cameron got his right foot on it and, pushing and pulling, grunting and cursing, hauled himself
onto the shelf and over. He rolled onto his back, the breath coming like gusts of sand up and down his windpipe, his heart drumming until he thought it would open his chest.

  He stared at the near-dark sky, in which the first stars shone like lanterns, and smiled with relief. Suddenly he grunted in terror and pushed himself onto his knees, bringing the rifle around—the Indian could be waiting for him. The perfect time to attack would have been right after he’d made that energy-sapping climb. A minute ago, Cameron would have been hard put to lift his fist, much less the Winchester.

  But there was nothing around but rock and twisted mesquite and some Mormon tea rustling in the night breeze gentling out of the west. Seeing something at his feet, Cameron looked down closely, squinting: a heavy splotch of blood. He’d seen traces of it on the sandstone as he’d climbed, but here was nearly a puddle.

  Apparently the climb had been as hard on the wounded Perro Loco as it had been on Cameron. No doubt that’s why the Indian had elected to keep moving rather than stay and fight.

  “Good,” Cameron told himself, nodding. “Damn good.” Then he realized, looking into the blackening valleys on both sides, that it was too dark to keep going. There was not enough light to make out the Apache’s blood trail or moccasin prints. The new moon wouldn’t rise until the end of the week. What’s more, high clouds were moving in from the west, and in an hour or two they’d rub out the light from the stars.

  He’d stay put until morning, Cameron decided, searching for a place to camp. He found one about twenty feet down the ridge, a hollowed-out place in an escarpment of jagged basalt that lifted out of the hill like lumps of coal glued together by gods amusing themselves.

  The hollow was about five and a half feet tall and nearly as wide, with rocks on both flanks, making it easily defensible. To make it even harder for anyone to sneak up on him during the night, Cameron placed rocks and mesquite twigs in a halfcircle around the hollow. An attacker would be betrayed by snapping twigs or the rattle of one of the loose stones.