by Ralph Cotton
When they rode their horses at a walk past the hooves, hide and innards of Chase’s butchered horse, three greasy black vultures looked toward them and stretched out their wings and scowled them away from their gory feast.
“It all yours, boys,” Stevens called out to the bold scavengers, glancing back over his shoulder at them. “We’ve et.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Pusser. “Those horse steaks looked pretty good while they was parting out Chase’s cayouse.”
“If you’re that hungry, I’ll wait for you,” Stevens said, giving a taunting grin, nodding back at the bloody mess of horse entrails.
“You know what I meant,” Pusser said crossly.
They rode quietly on, following the Ranger’s and Ramon’s footprints to the top of the low rise. When they stopped they looked down at a lone young vulture picking through the former contents of Chase’s cranium. A few feet from the vulture a mound of fresh-turned sand supported a stack of rocks.
“Think they buried ol’ Malcolm?” Pusser asked.
“Yeah, that’s what I figure,” Stevens said quietly, his hand on his holstered gun as he looked all around.
“Meaning he wasn’t dead after we shot him,” Pusser offered.
“One would only think so,” said Stevens, still looking all around the small sandy basin. “It’s doubtful anybody would waste a bullet on a dead man, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Pusser agreed. He paused, then said, “So . . . you figure the Ranger finished him off?” trying to work it out in his mind.
“I would not find that hard to believe,” said Stevens, getting a little testy from all the questions. “If I ever see him I’m going to ask him, first thing.”
“Are you crowding me?” Pusser asked, getting a little testy himself from Stevens’ snide answers.
Without answering, Stevens turned his horse and nudged it toward the charred remnants of the village in the flat, shapeless distance.
Pusser clenched his jaws and rode alongside him.
When they got closer to the burned-out village, they saw the people stretching a large canvas from the top of a blackened stone and adobe wall slantwise to the ground. Rocks were laid to hold the canvas in place both atop the wall and along the ground, forming a lean-to-shaped shelter. Seeing the two scalpers riding in, Ramon and another man stepped out of sight, Ramon with his muzzleloader reloaded, the other villager with Malcolm Chase’s rifle. In addition to carrying his muzzleloader, Ramon wore Chase’s gun belt around his thin waist.
“Hola the village,” Stevens said as the two reined up a few feet from the ongoing work.
A large elderly widow named Natilizar stepped back from the work on the shelter and gave the two scalpers a nod.
“Hola,” she said. “You can see that our village has burned, and we are preparing a place of refuge from the wind and the sand.”
“Yeah, yeah, we see all that,” Stevens said impatiently, looking around for any sign of the Ranger. “We just need to get our horses watered . . . ourselves too. We’ll be on our way.”
“We never hang around where work’s going on,” said Pusser with a slight grin.
“Over there is our well,” the widow said. She gestured toward the donkey at the waterwheel. “You are welcome to fill your canteens before you leave.”
Stevens stared at her coldly.
“Are you rushing us off?” he said. “What if we’re hungry?”
“Yeah,” said Pusser, “what if we wanted ourselves a good fresh horse steak?”
“We have no horse meat,” said the widow. But upon seeing by the look in their eyes that they knew better, she said, “None to spare, that is.”
“Fix us a steak,” Pusser said, getting demanding. “You best not spit on it either.”
Stevens gave him a surprised and annoyed look and said to the woman before she could respond, “Where’s the Ranger? We know he’s here.”
The widow looked back and forth between the two, getting nervous.
“Are you going to fix us a gawl-damn steak, or am I going to have to thrash the living hell out of you?” He started to rise and swing down from his saddle.
“Forget your gawl-damn steak for a minute!” said Stevens. He looked back at the woman. “We just want to know if we’re going to get waylaid unsuspecting.” He looked all around again.
The widow looked panic-stricken.
“She told you the truth.” said Ramon. “The Ranger is not here. He left.” He stepped around the corner of the charred wall, the flintlock in hand, cocked and ready. Chase’s black-handled Colt stood in the holster at his waist.
“Oh, did he, then?” said Stevens, his hand still clamped around his gun butt. “I know who that black Colt belonged to.” He nodded at Ramon’s waist.
“Sí, I know you do,” Ramon said solemnly. “But now it belongs to me . . . me and all of us.”
On the other end of the fifteen-foot-long wall, the other Mexican villager stepped into sight with Chase’s rifle against his shoulder, cocked, aimed, ready to fire.
“Well, well . . . ,” Pusser said in a low, even tone. “Look what we’ve got here.” He sat ready to draw his pistol and start firing.
“You must ride on,” Ramon said in a steady voice, “or we will kill you both.” He stared at them. “The Ranger is gone, your compañeros are dead and buried. There is nothing here for the two of you—nothing but trouble,” he warned.
“The only thing worse than a Mexican getting a bath is a Mexican getting a gun,” Pusser said. He glared again at the widow and added, “But I’m having me a gawl-damm steak before I leave this burned-out hull—”
“Shut the hell up about your damn steak!” Stevens shouted at him. “The Ranger’s gone, Malcolm is dead.” As he spoke he lifted his hand slowly from his gun butt and stepped his horse back. “This is loco.”
“Sí,” said Ramon, nodding, “it is loco.” He looked at the widow. “Wrap some meat and give it to them.”
“By God, that’s more like it,” Pusser said. He eased the grip on his gun butt and gave Stevens a look.
“Gracias . . . ,” Stevens said, looking around at the workers who had stopped and stood watching. The widow walked away behind the wall and returned right away with meat wrapped in a bloody canvas cloth.
As she handed the meat up to Pusser, Ramon said to Stevens, “If you follow the Ranger, you will run into a band of six young Apache. We saw them only moments after he left.”
“Good try,” said Stevens. “Knowing the Apache is our game.” He rattled the finger bones and bits of scalp and memorabilia on the bib of his shirt. “We know they’ve all cut out to the deep hill country.”
Ramon started to say more, but he stopped himself.
“Go with God,” he said, raising a hand as Stevens turned his horse and nudged it back toward the trail.
“Watch your language, old beaner,” Pusser said. “God wants to go with us, he better bring his own skinning knife.” He followed Stevens with a smug look, hefting the wrapped horse meat in the palm on his hand.
* * *
Knowing the scalpers were playing cat and mouse with him, the Ranger didn’t stop until well after dark when the many shod hoofprints he’d followed from the village became lost in the darkness. He’d traveled all day in silence, keeping the horses quiet and out of sight, avoiding any open stretches or turns on the hill trail. When the sun dropped he’d continued on, adjusting his eyes to the grainy dark until he knew he could safely go no farther. Then he eased off the trail onto the rocky hillside and made a dark camp, keeping the horses a few yards away from his bedroll against the back side of a large boulder. The prints he followed would be there in the morning. One of the horses wore shoes that had an extra-thick ridge at its center. Another horse wore shoes with two missing nails. Easy tracking, Sam told himself.
In the moments before slee
p overtook him, he recounted the events of the day. With Malcolm Chase dead, he told himself, one down, two to go. . . . If he could avoid killing the other two, he would. If not, he wasn’t going to let them stop him from getting the man he was after.
He had made the right move escorting the village elders out to butcher the horse. Had he gone alone, he realized, there was a good chance Malcolm Chase would have killed him. It was not something he wanted to dwell on, but he had to acknowledge it was a close call. These mercenaries had spent enough time hunting down Apache that they had learned a lot of their ways. Hiding under the sand was a trick he knew himself, yet Chase had managed to pull it on him—almost gotten away with it. He had to watch his step, he told himself, turning onto his side, closing his eyes for the night.
In spite of the bone-tiring day he’d spent in the desert heat, he slept a light and shallow sleep, the way he’d trained himself to do. The sleep of a tracker, he called it, or the sleep of an owl. Even so, in the middle of the night, his light veil of sleep was pierced by the quiet sound of horses walking past his camp on the trail beneath the boulder. Having also trained himself not to awaken with a start but rather open his eyes slowly and search out whatever sound had awakened him, he did so without moving an inch.
And there it was, the slightest rustle of horses’ hooves, of men speaking under their breath in the darkness. But it wasn’t English, he realized after a moment of listening, nor was it Spanish. As the riders drifted past him like ghosts in the night, he recognized the short, low, choppy words of Apache. The fact that he heard them and their horses at all made him doubt his findings. Apache traveled as silent as a wisp of desert breeze.
Yet there it was again. He listened closely. Lipan, he decided. Even as he reaffirmed his conclusion, he realized by the thickness and the slur of their voices that the warriors were drunk. That explained a lot, he thought, rolling silently up from his blanket into a crouch. Colt in one hand, Winchester in the other, he eased over to the back side of the boulder, leaned his rifle against it and stood between the horses, keeping their attention away from the passing horses.
“Good boys,” he whispered near their pricked ears as the last faint click of hoof moved away on the trail to his left. He slipped his Colt back into its holster. “What say we take a different path? It’s getting a little crowded up here.”
The horses stood silent as he rubbed each of them on its muzzle. After a moment he unhitched them both, saddled the dun and tied his supply pack atop the barb. In the pale moonlight he led the animals around from behind the boulder, to a thinner trail leading farther up on the steep hillside. By the time he’d found a stop to his liking, the sun had drawn a fine silver thread along the distant horizon. “A long day followed by a long night,” he told himself, slumping down against a boulder and closing his eyes, the horses’ reins in his hands.
But he knew his climb would be worth his efforts. Come daylight he would have a full view of the trails below and anyone traveling on them. With Apache traveling the trails—drunk or sober—he needed every advantage he could take for himself.
* * *
At dawn, Ian Pusser and Bernard Stevens lay atop a flat rock looking down on a switchback trail below them. At some time during the night they had heard the faintest sound of horses moving along the hard, stony trail. But with their bellies full of warm horse steak, neither had dragged himself from sleep long enough to investigate.
“Do you see what I see?” Pusser whispered, barely keeping his excitement from showing.
“I’d be blind if I didn’t,” said Stevens. The two of them stared down at five sleeping warriors stretched out on the rocky ground over two hundred yards away. Three warriors were loosely wrapped in blankets. Two were spread-eagle on the ground, shirtless, like two men staked to the earth to keep from falling off. A sixth warrior, sitting guard, had fallen over onto his side atop a tall boulder. His rifle lay ten feet away.
“I’ve never seen a heathen Apache sleep till daylight,” Pusser said, staring as if in disbelief.
“You likely never will again,” Stevens said. As he spoke he checked his rifle, raised its long-distance sights and placed the butt to his shoulder. He looked down the barrel.
Pusser clamped a hand around the rifle chamber, blocking Stevens’ aim.
“Wait!” he said. “The hell are you doing?”
“What any natural man would do when a half dozen scalps fall into his lap—I’m skinning them.” He gave Pusser a shove. “Don’t ever grab my rifle.”
“What about the Ranger?” said Pusser. “We’re supposed to be tracking him.”
“What about him?” said Stevens. “If he shows up I’ll skin him too.” He looked Pusser up and down. “Are you getting weak on me? If you want any of this, you best be shooting while I’m shooting. Otherwise I’m keeping the whole bounty to myself.”
“They’re too far away,” Pusser said. “Listen to me.” As he spoke he reached around to his side and picked up his rifle. “This far off if any of them gets away, we’ll be all morning tracking them down.”
“I’m not letting a chance like this get away from me. I don’t expect they’ll walk up here and scalp themselves,” said Stevens.
“I say we need to get closer, make sure when we strike, we leave none standing,” Pusser said, getting his fill of Stevens. “I was only trying to prepare us for what could happen.”
Stevens considered it.
“Maybe you’re right, we need to get closer,” he said.
“Now you’re talking. Let’s get down on the trail and hit them head-on. With surprise on our side, they won’t stand a chance in hell,” Pusser said. He reached back and drew a big bowie-style knife from its sheath behind his back and gripped it in his hand. “Any luck we’ll go back to Bigfoot with six scalps on our saddle horns.”
“Yeah, and the Ranger hung over his saddle,” Stevens said. He gave a sharp grin and scooted back away from the edge of the boulder. “He’ll see who knows how to kill these heathen Injuns.”
Chapter 15
From the cover of a scrub pine on the high path where he and his horses had spent the night, Sam watched the two scalpers through his outstretched telescope. Farther below them he saw the Lipans rise from their drunken sleep and stagger over to where their horses stood hitched to a rope line. These were the Indians who had passed him in the night. He was sure of it. Looking away from them back to the two mercenaries, he saw the rifles in their hands. He’d watched one of them draw his big scalping knife from its sheath behind his back. When he saw them stand and step toward their horses a few yards away, it was plain to him what they were up to.
All right, it’s between them and the Lipans, he told himself. He collapsed the telescope between his palms and walked to where his two horses stood warming in the early-morning sunlight.
“Good news,” he said, unhitching them, gathering the dun’s rein and the barb’s lead rope. “Looks like we’ve got a clear trail toward Ozzie Cord . . . for a while anyway.”
He swung up into the saddle and rode off along the trail in the opposite direction of the Lipans and the scalpers. An hour passed before he heard the gunshots resound high up on the hill line behind him. He didn’t bother looking around. Instead he followed the tracks of the many shod horses he’d followed off the hill trail and down along the edge of the sand flats.
At noon when the sun had turned the sky white and waves of heat danced languid across the desert floor, Sam put the horses in the shade of rock and cactus along the belly of a dry creek bed. Using his upturned sombrero, he watered the animals from a canteen, poured a trickle of water on his neck and wiped a small palm full around on his face. An hour later he was back in the saddle, following the hooves of the same group of riders he’d followed since leaving the burned-out village. Now the hoofprints turned out across the sand flats.
“Hate to do it to you,” he said to the dun and the barb. Th
en he pulled his bandanna up over the bridge of his nose, tugged his sombrero down and rode on.
Nearing dark he’d left the hot desert wind behind him and moved the animals off the sand flats. Picking up the hoofprints he had lost for only a few minutes in the stir of sand, he followed a calm meandering path at the base of a rocky foothill until the horses grew restless at the scent of water. Seeing that the hoofprints he followed also turned up onto the sloping hillside, he let the horses lead him upward among cactus and brush to the edge of a stone-lined water hole.
“Good work,” he said quietly to the horses as he stepped down from his saddle and let them walk forward and drink their fill.
While the two animals drank, he picked up a pointed wooden trail sign from the dirt, shook it off and read it in the failing evening light.
Casa Robos. . . .
He looked all around in the grainy darkness and twisted the pointing sign back and forth as if to discern its intent. Then he dropped it back to the dirt and let his eyes follow the hoofprints of the Perros Locos away from the water hole where they too had slaked their thirst.
“Wherever you’re headed, I’m right with you,” he said quietly. He took off his sombrero, pitched it to the ground and walked to the water’s edge. He took two canteens down from the dun’s saddle horn and sank to his knees by the dun’s hooves.
As the canteens lay filling, he lowered himself onto his palms and sucked in a mouthful of water, swished it and spat it on the ground beside him. He took another mouthful and swallowed it, feeling the cool wetness surge in his chest. As he started to take another mouthful, he heard a sound in the rocks behind him and swung around, bringing his Colt up from its holster cocked and ready in his wet hand.
“Please, señor, don’t shoot,” said a gruff, wheezing voice. “I will tell no one what you and your compañeros did, I swear to you on the Blessed Virgin!”