After several days travel southwest along the trail, the wagon train stopped at Buckdun Station, a stagecoach way station and flyspeck town grown up at a crossroads where a spring bubbled forth out of the rocks.
The wagon train halted to water the horses and take on fresh water supplies for the next leg of the trip.
Al Jensen took Henry McGee off to one side. Jensen’s manner was excited seeming, confidential. He spoke in a hushed voice. “Know who’s eating lunch in the station dining room, Henry? Sime Simmons!”
“Don’t believe I know the name, Al. . . .”
“What! Never heard of Sime Simmons, the famous Indian fighter and scout? Why, he’s one of the best-known and most-respected hombres this side of the Rocky Mountains!”
“Is that a fact?”
“I hope to hell it is. He’s led wagon trains without number westward through the Sierras to California without losing a man or a horse. Knows every pass and water hole along the trail. We’d be sitting pretty if we could hire him on as guide.”
McGee looked doubtful. “We don’t have much money, Al.”
“Me, neither. Who does? But that works both ways. Simmons may not have much money. Maybe we can get him on the cheap. Guiding a wagon train’s a whole lot safer and easier than hunting Apaches.”
Some of the other men on the wagon train broached the same idea to McGee. Seemed Sonny Boy had sung the praises of Simmons in their ears. Several of them came together to persuade McGee.
“It won’t cost anything to ask,” Karl Haber said.
“You’re a good man, McGee, but you ain’t no wagon master and you never been west on the trail before. I’d rest easier if we could depend on a professional who knows his business,” Jack Collins said.
Sime Simmons was in his late forties, gray at the temples, with a gray-speckled, sharp-pointed spade beard.
“He’s no youngster. He must be good to have lived so long, with the life he’s led, the places he’s been,” wagoneer Burt Rowley said, low voiced and intense, urging McGee to approach the scout.
Simmons had gray eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide face. He wore a flannel shirt, and a brown, fringed rawhide vest, red bandana, black denims, and cowboy boots. He wore a gun on his right hip; a gun belt was worn over his shoulder, hanging a second gun butt out under his left arm. Two men were with him, hard-bitten frontier types.
McGee cautiously sounded out Simmons about a job as scout, Simmons expressing guarded interest without committing himself. He pointed out that he was traveling with two sidemen, partners, whose interests must be taken care of.
Porgy Best had oily black hair combed in a rooster-tail haircut with long sideburns. Mort Donegan had close-cropped blond hair and beard. His hair was so pale and yellow it was almost colorless. Long-slitted yellow eyes were set in a long, seamed face.
McGee stressed that neither he nor his fellows had much money.
“I can see that,” Simmons said dourly. “Tell you what I’ll do: What you ain’t got in money I’ll take in horses. Once we reach Sacramento, you folks won’t need all your horses. Make up the difference in pay with horseflesh. I’ll take care of my pards.
“Fact is, I been eating red dirt and chasing Apaches—and being chased by them—for too many years now. I been thinking of starting me a horse farm and California looks like a good place to set down in.”
A price was set and mutually agreed on, and the deal was made. The wagon train left Buckdun Station with Simmons riding point, sided by Best and Donegan.
“I feel better knowing those three are with us in case we run into trouble along the way,” Burt Rowley confided to his wife, Colleen.
“Me, too,” she said in heartfelt sincerity.
The convoy made its way south by southwest through New Mexico into Arizona.
Brown-and-black mountains and yellow sands gave way to gray-black mountains and red dirt.
The wagon train made camp for the night in Yellow Snake Canyon, a half-mile north of the trail. A twisty, narrow cut, it was bordered by sharp-edged, razor-backed rock ridges. Its red-brown-yellow floor was boulder studded and thick with cactus. A sweet scent of wild-growing aloe permeated the site.
“We’re in Apache country,” Sime Simmons said, “Victorio’s land. Victorio and most of his bucks are down in Mexico, but that don’t mean some of the war parties ain’t gone north on their own to do some raiding. This is a box canyon, so we can only be approached from one direction. The canyon mouth is easily held.
“There ain’t been no Apache sign in these parts all summer and I don’t expect to run across any of them red devils now, but it pays to take all due precautions. Me and the boys’ll be keeping watch all night, so don’t you folks stay up fretting and worrying. Get a good night’s sleep—we got a big day ahead tomorrow.”
“Don’t nobody go a-wandering, not with all them snakes around in the rocks,” Porgy Best added. “They don’t call this Yellow Snake Canyon for nothing—them snakes is rattlers.”
“Stay together, sleep in your wagons and you’ll be fine,” Simmons said.
Linda Gordon didn’t stay in her wagon, not all night. She woke up an hour or two before dawn. She had to answer a call of nature. She didn’t want to leave the wagon, but there was no help for it.
She wore a nightdress. She pulled on a pair of boots and slipped out of the back of the wagon without waking up her folks, Mal and Fran.
The moon was low and there was plenty of moonlight to see by. She stepped carefully, afraid of stepping on a rattlesnake. Her ears were pitched for the telltale sign of a reptilian rattle. She didn’t want to go far from the wagon.
A few men were standing and talking around the campfire, which had burned low: Sonny Boy, Sime Simmons, and his two sidemen. Linda was embarrassed to have them see her going to do her business, so she kept the wagon between herself and them.
A man-high rocky outcropping was a stone’s throw away. She went to it. She didn’t want to climb over it for fear of stumbling over a rattlesnake den in the rocks, so she went around it, behind the back of it. The scent of aloe tasted sweet in her nostrils.
She did what she had to do and started to head back. Hoofbeats sounded—riders were approaching the mouth of the canyon.
Apaches!
Linda opened her mouth to scream a warning, but before she could do so, the men in the camp started shouting and shooting off guns.
Sonny Boy had a gun in each hand. He was holding them pointed up in the air and firing them off one by one, whooping and hollering as he did so.
Karl Haber stuck his head out the back of the wagon. “What is it? Indians—?”
Sonny Boy shot him. Karl Haber fell back into the wagon.
A horrible mistake, thought Linda, frozen in place, peeking around a jagged rock edge. Sonny Boy must have lost his head and shot Mr. Haber by accident—
Shrieks sounded inside the tentlike covering of the Conestoga, the screams of the Haber females, Karl’s wife, Lilli, and his two daughters, Gretchen and Eva.
Lilli Haber popped up in the back of the wagon, clutching the top of the closed tailgate, screaming Karl’s name. Seeing Sonny Boy standing nearby with a smoking gun, she cried, “You killed my husband!”
“I killed you, too,” Sonny Boy said, coolly and deliberately shooting her.
Linda was so close she could hear the thwack of the bullet impacting flesh.
Lilli Haber’s body bowed backwards. Her tight grip on the tailgate kept her from toppling over. She opened her mouth. Dark liquid—blood!—spilled from her mouth, staining the front of her nightdress.
Sonny Boy shot her again. She collapsed, falling across the tailgate, upper body draped across the top, head and arms hanging down toward the ground. Inside the wagon the Haber girls were screaming and crying.
A half-dozen riders came tearing into camp, reining in hard just short of the wagons grouped in a circle. They whooped and shouted, firing their guns, venting fierce bloodcurdling howls and yips. They weren’t Apaches, tho
ugh, not even Indians. They were white men.
Henry McGee jumped down from his wagon, six-gun in hand. He wore a pair of pants and was bare from the waist up and barefoot. A big belly hung over the top of his pants. He darted into the circle of firelight, eyes wild, looking this way and that, trying to make sense of things.
“Henry! Over here!”
McGee looked around to see who’d called his name. It came from Al Jensen, seated on the driver’s seat of his wagon fully dressed and with his hat on.
McGee darted toward him. “It’s an attack, Al—!”
Jensen pointed a gun at McGee and fired. McGee was hit, and he lurched. He wavered like a flame in a breeze. The gun fell from his hands. He clutched his middle with both hands where he’d been hit.
He dropped to his knees, shocked, disbelieving. Jensen fired two more shots into him.
“Al,” McGee whispered, dying. He fell face forward into the dirt.
Lon Brumm and Chris Hooper, two young bachelor farmers who’d come out from Nebraska to Bear Paw and shared a wagon on the trip west, climbed down from their wagon and started shooting at Jensen, banging away at him. They were no good with guns, all their shots going wild.
Someone stepped into view from behind a nearby wagon and opened up on them.
Muzzle flares underlit the shooter’s face, revealing Sime Simmons, his eyes and mouth slits. He looked infinitely cruel, vicious.
Chris Hooper was hit, spinning sideways, falling. Lon Brumm shouted, blasting away at Simmons. Simmons put a bullet in him. Lon Brumm staggered. Simmons fired again, felling him.
Chris Hooper was on his hands and knees, feeling around for the gun he’d dropped. Finding it, he straightened up, only to be slapped down by a bullet from Al Jensen’s gun.
The riders who’d stormed into the canyon jumped down from their horses, running around the wagons, circling them. They thrust gun hands inside the overarching canvas tents, shooting every male Bear Paw emigrant they found, man and boy.
One of the newcomers stuck his head in the back of the Gordons’ wagon. Fran Gordon screamed. The raider fired, silencing the scream.
A tremendous boom followed, the shooter’s head exploding. Mal Gordon jumped down from the wagon, double-barreled shotgun in hand.
Mort Donegan shot him. Mal Gordon dropped. Mort moved off in search of other prey.
Mal Gordon wasn’t dead. He rose shakily, clutching the shotgun in one hand. He spread his feet wide apart, bracing himself to keep from falling. He gripped the shotgun in both hands, swinging it toward Mort Donegan’s back.
Donegan prowled around, too intent on finding fresh prey to realize that imminent doom loomed behind him.
A rifle cracked, once, twice, three times. Each time it fired, Mal Gordon shuddered, hit. The reports sounded quickly, one after the other, one, two, three.
Mal Gordon dropped.
Linda stuffed a fist in her mouth to keep from screaming.
Carol Jensen stood there, holding a leveled Winchester hip high, a tendril of smoke wriggling from the barrel.
Mort Donegan saw her, and waved, shouting, “Thanks!”
“When you shoot a man, kill him!” Carol said.
“Next time I will!”
“Be more careful or there won’t be a next time.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Donegan said, laughing. He went off, looking for more emigrants to slay.
This was no battle; it was a massacre punctuated by sporadic, largely ineffectual gunfire from those attacked.
The enemy within were Al Jensen, Carol Jensen, Sonny Boy, Sime Simmons, Porgy Best, and Mort Donegan.
The enemy without were the six riders who’d come storming into camp, minus the one whose head had been blown off by Mal Gordon.
Who were they, what did they want? They acted like a pack of crazy killers, Linda thought.
They went from wagon to wagon, killing the males where they found them and dragging out the females. Women and girls were herded shrieking and sobbing around the campfire.
The gunmen took orders from Al Jensen, who was not shy about giving them. Al and Carol went among the females, selecting out all the wives, mothers, and older women, leaving behind the teenagers and young girls.
Al Jensen stood in a posture of dominance over the youngsters, hat tilted back, hands on hips, booted legs spread wide.
“You belong to Black Angus now,” he sneered.
Linda Gordon knew what she had to do. Her parents were dead. There was nothing she could do to help the other girls. It would only be a matter of time before Al Jensen or one of the insiders who’d traveled with the wagon train noticed her absence and set the others searching for her. She couldn’t stay where she was. The night sky was lightening and the sun would come up soon.
While the gunmen led the women away, she sneaked out from behind the rock outcropping where she’d been hiding. One of the riders had hitched his horse to a rear wheel of the Gordons’ wagon. Bent low, almost double, she snuck over to it.
Linda was trembling so hard she almost couldn’t stand. She panted, unable to catch her breath. The horse was a big black. It snorted as she neared it, going around behind it. The bulk of the wagon mostly screened her from view of those inside the circle.
She picked at the reins, knotted around a spoke of the rear wagon wheel. The knot fought her and she broke a nail trying to pick it loose. Biting her lip, she plucked at the reins. Suddenly, the knot came undone.
Linda fisted the reins, turning the horse, walking it away from the wagon. She expected an outcry any second, but no one had yet noticed her.
The women were dragged away kicking and screaming out of the circle of wagons into the restless dark beyond the firelight.
“You know what to do,” Al Jensen called to the men taking the women away.
“Sure—like always!” one shouted back.
Linda gripped the pommel, climbing into the saddle.
The women and the men herding them were swallowed up in darkness. After a pause, wails and cries of horror sounded, drowned out by a fusillade of gunfire.
Linda kicked her heels into the horse’s flanks, urging it forward. This animal was used to running. It dug dirt and lunged forward, coursing ahead.
When the guns fell silent, the women weren’t screaming anymore. The men returned, alone. The horse’s hoofbeats were loud in the sudden silence.
“One’s getting away—stop her!” somebody shouted.
Men ran after Linda, but she had a good head start. She hunkered down low in the saddle, leaning far forward over the horse’s muscular crupper, bent legs hugging its surging flanks.
Shots sounded, bullets streaming past her on all sides. Darkness hid her and the shooters couldn’t see to hit her.
“Get her! Don’t let her get away!”
She got away, galloping out of the canyon south across the flat. She crossed the dirt road of the east-west trail, continuing south. She knew from conversations she’d overheard the night before that Tombstone lay some miles to the south. She rode on.
When it was light, Linda looked back and saw two black specks in the distance, pursuing her. All the long day she played cat-and-mouse with the hunters, trying to lose them. Her evasive course often detoured her miles alternately east, then west and back again in a zigzag course down what she would later learn was the Sulphur Spring Valley.
More than once she thought she’d lost her pursuers, only to find the duo once more inexorably on her trail. Sun beat down on her, squeezing the moisture out of her trembling form.
Sometime in late afternoon, she seemed to have lost her pursuers. Sundown came, bringing welcome relief from the naked sun’s burning rays. Night fell, and she became lost, riding around in the dark without a clue for some hours.
Moonrise brought the key to her salvation. She knew the moon, like the sun, rose in the east and set in the west. She pointed the horse’s head toward where she thought south lay and continued onward.
Later that night, she was unsure whe
n, a patch of light appeared on a hillside to the east. The lights of a town. It was not Tombstone as she’d hoped, but, as she would eventually learn, Cactus Patch.
She rode to it. The horse was on its last legs, panting, unsteady. It had gone without water all day into the night.
Linda reached the outskirts of town. She dismounted, hitching the reins to a bush. She staggered on foot into town.
She almost stumbled into Dorado and Quirt Fane, lurking, waiting for her. She didn’t know who they were, but she knew what they were: hunters, bloodhunters dogging her trail.
Having lost her earlier, they must have headed toward the nearest town, knowing that if she saw its lights, she’d make for it. Cactus Patch was that town.
She fled, evading their clutches. A desperate burst of speed propelled her as she darted up and down side streets and alleys at the edge of town. Giving them the slip, she made her way to the main street.
Only she hadn’t escaped. Quirt Fane loomed up out of the night, grabbing her. She was lashed and then clubbed into semi-consciousness.
Bob Farr stepped in, trying to help. Shooting broke out. Linda Gordon took her chance. She jumped up and ran for her life.
Return fire from Shorty Kirk’s saloon drove off Quirt and Dorado. Bob Farr was dead, another man was badly wounded.
Linda emerged from hiding, falling into the arms of her rescuers.
TEN
Linda Gordon was emotionally and physically exhausted from her ordeal.
Telling her story to those gathered in the marshal’s office had left her weak, drained.
“She needs rest and lots of it,” Nugget editor-publisher Harry Woods said.
“She needs justice,” Matt Bodine said, glowering, “and she’ll by God have it, as long as I’ve got a breath in me.” His fighting blood was hot, and he was burning to hit the vengeance trail.
Linda looked up at him from where she was sitting, a look of mingled gratitude and appeal in her eyes.
“Colonel Davenport is taking a personal interest in the girl,” Arnholt Stebbins said. “He’s arranged for a room for her at the hotel. A doctor is there waiting to look after her. We’ll need a carriage to take her to the hotel.”
Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die Page 11