Silver

by Graham Masterton

  He found the camp site he had been seeking, a mile or so, down the trail. There was a stand of cottonwoods which indicated water and an outcropping of rocks alongside it which made an ideal miniature fort. Leaving the horse picketed nearby to disturb him if anybody approached, he made a dry camp without a fire, rolled himself in his blankets and, after thoroughly stamping around the little basin in the rocks to make sure there were no rattlesnakes in it, laid his head on his saddle with his Winchester alongside his blankets, and fell into the light sleep of the experienced Indian fighter.

  He was awakened by the horse, which was moving nervously around the little basin. He lay for a long moment, listening, and was about to roll over and go back to sleep when he heard the sound which had roused the animal.

  It was about a half an hour before dawn, he reckoned. The sky was very dark away towards the west, but there was already a suggestion of dove grey to the east, so the sun would be up shortly.

  In the soft light, he tapped out his boots in case a tarantula or a scorpion had sought shelter in them in the dark, and pulled them on, before cautiously peering around the cottonwood grove over his natural battlements.

  All seemed to be peaceful and he was turning away to saddle the horse when he heard the slightest suggestion of movement over towards the base of one of the trees.

  The ground was wet there and it looked as though there might be water under the earth for the digging of a hole. Maybe an underground tributary of the springs which had given Chico its reason for being there.

  In case he had to move fast, he got the saddle on the dun and pulled the cinches up twice. The horse made a dummy snap at him and he punched its belly to make sure it had not inflated itself to keep the cinch loose. The dun breathed out and he pulled the cinch up to the usual notch, and fondled the horse’s nose.

  All the time, he was listening carefully, but he got the horse saddled and ready before he investigated further. Holding its lead rein, he led out of the little hollow and down towards the cottonwood grove.

  He found the wounded man at once, as he had left a drag mark from the road to the grove. He was lying face down just within the cottonwoods, unconscious. His clothes were unremarkable range equipment: jeans and a flannel shirt, riding boots, with large roweled spurs, a gun-belt which held only a few cartridges, and a leather and canvas vest. He was hatless and the bandana had been taken from his neck and wrapped tightly round his thigh. It had done nothing to stem the blood which was oozing through it.

  Cassidy leaned down and turned the man over. The eyes stayed closed, but Cassidy knew the type. A hard face with high cheekbones, a hawk nose and slit of a mouth. A harsh face, and now, a dying one. Cassidy had seen that cheesy pallor before and it indicated a dramatic loss of blood.

  He checked both hands and the holster on the worn gun belt, and found no sign of a weapon. The man must have dropped it on his desperate drag from the road, if not before. The bullet which had hit him had entered from behind, and was still in the wound, high on the inside of his thigh There was no exit wound at the front.

  It would need a clever surgeon and a hospital to get it out and, so far as Cassidy knew, there was neither doctor nor hospital within a hundred miles.

  Effectively the man was dead, though his fluttering breathing denied it.

  Cassidy made him as comfortable as he could. He was reaching for his saddle bags when he heard hoofs on the road, and straightened up, sliding the Winchester out of its case on the saddle.

  He stood behind the horse and watched the road and could see a group of men coming along in the growing light. They were riding slowly and checking the road and the roadside for tracks. A posse, Cassidy guessed, seeking the wounded man.

  And the wounded man was here, with Cassidy. Being treated for his wounds, and tended in a camp in the cottonwoods.

  A situation which might easily be misunderstood.

  The posse, to a man, misunderstood it. They followed the wounded man’s tracks and the tracks led them to Cassidy. For most of them, that was enough.

  They pulled up in a bunch and looked over Cassidy and the wounded man, who was lying on his side, and had been bandaged. One man started to move his horse to the side, and Cassidy said:

  “Stay right where you are, fella! We got things to discuss, here, and I ain’t got time to pussy-foot around!”

  The rider stopped. Cassidy sounded like he meant what he said, and in any case, the posse, bunching, could only see his head above his saddle and his legs below it. It would be a lucky shooter who managed to get his gun out, take the difficult shot at head or legs, and survive the pointed Winchester.

  “Now,” said Cassidy. “Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you guys just the once, and that’s all. You listenin’?”

  Not a man spoke, but the barrel of the Winchester held all their eyes. One man, who was able to tear his eyes away from it, said in a surprised whisper: “Hell, that’s the guy who braced the McGibbons in the bar last night!”.

  There was a ripple of surprised interest and recognition. Cassidy swore to himself.

  “Yeah,” said Cassidy. “And not one of you moved a hand to help out! I ain’t in love with your town, neither! So listen close!”

  The posse remained like rocks in the saddle. Not a man of them did not remember the speed of the draw with which he had disarmed the town roughs, or the accuracy of his shooting when ambushed outside the saloon.

  “Keep your hand off that gun, Zeke!” said one of them in a stage whisper. “He hit Al McGibbon plumb centre in the dark across the street – and they shot first!”

  The posse remained still.

  “Yeah, and I had to come out here to camp overnight. Thanks a bunch, fellas!” he snarled.

  “Now, you bring trouble to me! I found this here guy tryin’ for the spring an hour ago. He’s been shot from behind and I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  There was a ripple of interest.

  “Now, I got business in that bank of yours, back in town, and when I’m through with that, I aim to make tracks. You got business with this guy, you better hurry because he ain’t goin’ to be around for long, from the sound of his breathin’.”

  He raised one foot and put his boot in the stirrup. “In the meantime, I’m going back to town to that there bank. Don’t be stupid enough to follow me.”

  There was a murmur from among the group. One of them started to say something and the man next to him hushed him. But the men were too keyed up to keep quiet.

  “Won’t do you no good holding up the bank!” said the tail-ender who had tried to move his horse. “It’s plumb empty!”

  “What?”

  “Bunch of guys broke in last night while we was in the saloon watching yore play actin’ with the McGibbons and broke open the safe,” said the talkative one. “Cleaned it out and escaped, came right this way! We got him on the run and looks like he made it this far all by himself.”

  “Or maybe not!” shouted one of the others. “Maybe he was met by the lookout! Maybe you brung him this way to lie up, and didn’t expect us to catch up so soon!”

  There was a rumble of agreement. The posse had started out late and seemed to have lost track of the safe-breaking gang, and they were loath to let this chance to make someone pay slip through their hands. They had a rope and at least one victim.

  “Come on, he can only get one or two! Let’s rush him!” shouted a voice from the back of the group. Men who thought up bright ideas like rushing an armed marksman usually were at the back of the group, Cassidy had noticed.

  “Sure, rush me!” he said. “You lead ’em, loud mouth! Come on! Right to the front, where I can see you!”

  The men at the front of the posse seemed in favour of that idea. Most of them started looking over their shoulders and none made any attempt to move forward.

  Cassidy swung his leg over the saddle while they were arguing among themselves. One of the posse saw him doing it and shouted a warning, while grabbing for his pistol. It wen
t off as he pulled it from the holster and his horse, startled, started to buck madly, throwing the whole tightly packed group of horsemen into disarray.

  Cassidy looked down at the bank robber. The man had made an attempt to turn onto his back and apparently died in the act of doing it. At any rate, he was now lying in a blood-stained heap. His eyes were open and glazing and blood had run from his wound to drench his jeans.

  All this Cassidy took in as he clapped his heels to the bay’s flanks and hung on, while the horse, already made skittish by the turmoil, went off like a race-winner.

  Cassidy steered him through the cottonwood and over the slight rise behind them, onto a low valley leading to the south and east, and let him run. The big horse, rested and watered, settled into a distance eating stride and allowed himself, after the initial burst of speed, to be brought down to an easy gait.

  Cassidy was broke again; he was on the run and he was heading for Apache territory at a time when even General Crook needed a regiment to go into it.

  The luck of the Irish, he told himself. But the idea did not raise the grin it usually managed to do.

  He was mad through and through, and if his luck demanded a war party of Tonto Apaches, bring ’em on.

  3.

  They followed, of course. Cassidy had been expecting it, because he expected that the money in the pip-squeak bank was all the town and the surrounding land possessed.

  He reckoned that the bank had been robbed in the few hours since he left town and before dawn. Probably when the McGibbon brothers had braced him in the saloon. He could think of no other reason for them to pick on him and a gunfight with a stranger passing through would be just the kind of thing to focus the population’s attention on the saloon, while there was mayhem going on elsewhere in the town.

  Which meant that the McGibbons were involved in the bank robbery, which in turn mean that they would know where the robbers had gone, eventually. From his own knowledge of the northern part of Arizona Territory, he reckoned they would head for the Mogollon Rim which was a little to the south and away to the east. It would have several attractions for the robbers.

  For one thing, the Mogollon Rim was a natural shelf of rock which slashed across the Territory from southeast to northwest. It was backed on the northern side by the Mogollon Plateau which was over a thousand feet higher than the Tonto Basin - nestled to the south of the Rim. Because of the sharp contrast between the lower, hotter basin to the south of the Rim, and the cooler land to the north, the long, precipitous scarp face made a natural barrier.

  There were several ways through it, of course, and they were used enthusiastically by the Tonto Apache to raid north and flee south when the army came after them in the basin.

  General Crook, for whom Cassidy had regularly scouted and for whom he had a considerable respect, was based at what was now called Fort Verde, where the Verde river ran past some old cliff dwellings in a deep cut, and went off towards the west.

  Crook had also established a base at Fort Apache in the White Mountains to south and east, among the less troublesome White Mountain Apache, who sullenly accepted his presence.

  The Apache had a reluctant respect for Crook because he was clever enough to use their own tactics against them. Where other commanders toiled along hampered by their equipment and wagons full of the impedimenta of modern military hardware, Crook used mules. Just mules. He even rode one himself in preference to a horse.

  If he could not carry any article of his equipment on a mule train, then he left it behind. He reduced his men’s equipment to a manageable minimum, laid a heavy emphasis on knowledge of the local district and its demands and drawbacks.

  The Apache warriors, the magnificent guerrilla fighters, had become used to escaping their Army pursuers by travelling light and fast, and taking to broken high ground with narrow rocky defiles, where the Army’s artillery and heavy equipment wagons could not follow. Crook developed an army band which was lightly equipped and heavily armed and as agile as the Apache.

  He even managed to get mountain guns which were carried on mules and disconcerted the Apache who had grown used to rifles and six shooting pistols - had in fact grown expert in their use - but had not until now come up against artillery.

  “We were doing fine until you started shooting wagons at us!” one Apache chieftain complained in disgust.

  Crook’s troopers were guided by scouts recruited among the Apache themselves and they learned from them.

  The Apache were startled to find themselves pushed further and harder than they had ever been before, and they reacted first with astonishment and then with renewed venom.

  All that was by the way at the moment, for Cassidy. Finding the bank robbers and recovering his money was his first priority. But there were others.

  First was avoiding the posse. He thought he had thrown it off more than once, only to find it emerging from a stand of trees back along his trail or see its cooking fire in the darkness.

  Now, he topped out on the edge of the Rim and looked back. Sure enough, there was a faint mist of dust back there, which meant that the dogged pursuit was continuing. He swore bitterly. So far he had avoided killing anybody, which meant that when he finally managed to get back to his original purpose, he could at least protest to the authorities. Since the main authority round here was General Crook, he knew he would have a sympathetic hearing.

  He leaned down from the saddle and examined the trail he had been following. The tracks were by now familiar to him. There were six in the gang, one of them riding a horse with a deformed hoof which needed a slightly oddly shaped shoe, and one riding a horse which must be huge. Its tracks were driven deep where there was soft ground, and it had feet like soup plates.

  They were the last horses to pass down this trail and since he had picked them up just outside Chico and found them time and time again on his flight from the posse, he was pretty certain these were the tracks of the bank raiders. And now, from the posse’s point of view, his tracks were with the bank raiders’, and that was in itself doubly incriminating.

  The view over the Tonto Basin showed him trees and the light yellow of the cottonwoods which followed the river’s course, but little else. There was no smoke to indicate cooking fires or settlements, nothing to show it was anything but a sleeping forest. But it was not and Cassidy knew it better than anybody.

  And of course the Indians. In the White Mountains to the east, there were Apaches. The White Mountain Apaches were reputed not to be as aggressive as the Chiricahua to the south, the Mascaleros in New Mexico, or the Mimbres. The Tonto basin had its own breed, the Tonto Apache.

  He clicked his tongue and the horse continued on its downward trail, picking its way as delicately as a dancer, and Cassidy let it get on with its business undisrupted and concentrated instead on watching for Indian sign.

  Somewhere down there, under the canopy of trees, there were several people Cassidy was desperate to find, and far more than several of the people he was desperate not to find. The latter of course were all Indians and Cassidy was not silly enough to believe that the Indian had not detected him. He rode loose in the saddle with his carbine across his knees.

  The horse was already entering the trees when he heard the crackle of distant gunfire.

  Under normal circumstances, he would have turned his horse’s head away from it, but where there was gunfire there was likely to be white men and Indians, and the white men he was seeking were the most likely ones in this setting.

  Cautiously, he tuned the horse’s head towards it and even more cautiously, he picked his way along the faint trail which wound among the trees. There were fresh hoof-prints, where the ground was soft enough, and they were of shod horses, which meant they were ridden by white men.

  Where the shooting was, there would be his money too, and Cassidy was determined to have it.

  He pushed the horse along as fast as he dared, but before he could come up on the scene of the firing, it had stopped.

 
; Cassidy slowed immediately and let the horse pick its own wary pace. Somewhere up ahead were the men who had stolen his money and a group of unknown size which was most probably Apaches. There was also the posse to account for and Cassidy honestly did not know where they were, but suspected the Indians would settle that worry for him.

  The thought reminded him that they might also settle Cassidy and he slowed his pace even further, riding a little forward on the saddle, and then stopping to listen.

  He heard another shot, which puzzled him. If the Apache had been victorious, he ought to be hearing their yells of satisfaction by now. If not, surely the firing would be resumed.

  Under the trees, he came across the first dead man. Her was lying face down, half hidden from sight by the brown grass under the trees, one arm stretched out in front of him and a tuft of the brown, sere grass clutched in his extended hand. His horse had run on a few paces before it had stopped to crop the grass. It looked tired and dejected and had plainly been ridden hard.

  Cassidy examined the surrounding trees without finding anything sinister. The pursuing Indians, presumably, had simply left the horse for attention later and carried on after the fleeing white men.

  Cassidy took the dead man’s pistol and brand new Winchester to prevent the Indians from snatching them up, made sure they were loaded and pushed the pistol into his belt and the rifle into his saddle scabbard. With his own rifle and pistol in reserve, it gave him formidable firepower, and deprived the Indians of extra weapons. The dead man’s weapons were fully loaded and he had a few rounds in the loops on his belt, but not many. The rifle needed cleaning, too.

  Re-mounting his horse, he was about to push on, when it occurred to him to try and establish the dead man’s identity.