‘Guess it is. Case like this, might be hard to prove. Hurryin’ out with the Mayor and his woman. How about my word on it, Verity?’
‘Your word?’ exclaimed the banker, as if Crow had suggested offering a bucket of dog crap as surety.
‘That or nothing.’
Verity fought a battle with himself, finally allowing his desire to get the rescue moving to outweigh his banker’s caution. Nodding.
‘Fine. That’s, all. If you hear a word from them, then ignore it.’
‘How long will you be, Mister Crow'?’ asked the old man as the bounty-hunter made for the door, trailing the Sheriff a few paces behind him.
‘Long as it takes, Mister Verity,’ replied Crow. ‘Just as long as it takes.’
Before noon Crow was away. Heading north towards the Verity spread. Ready to pick- up on the trail of the kidnappers. Watched silently by half of the town of Dead Hawk. All wondering whether the lean stranger would be able to bring back the head of the community. Most of them knowing that if the shootist failed, then their settlement would probably die along with Abraham Verity. Glancing back, Crow heard the noise of a shovel ringing on stony soil. They were burying Bart Wells along with Judd and Reagan. Laying them all to rest together in a single grave.
It was a ringing, hollow noise and it seemed to follow him out into the freshness of the Arizona spring. The purse with the hundred dollars in it jingled in his vest pocket. It was good to have it there. Maybe it was a token that the bad days were over and the good days were beginning.
He’d washed and shaved. Wrung out the yellow bandana that was all remaining from the Cavalry uniform. Spreading it out on the rail in front of the jailhouse while he shared a breakfast with the lawman. Eggs, steak and grits, just like he’d promised. But refusing the bottle of whisky. By the time he’d finished, mopping up the grease with a hunk of corn bread, the bright golden kerchief was dry enough to knot around his neck once more.
Before he’d left he’d checked through all of his weapons. Making sure they were all loaded. A round ready in each chamber of the pistol. One in the breech of the oiled Winchester. Both barrels of the Purdey loaded. Borrowing some grease from the lawman to polish the honed-down saber on his left hip. Finally checking the time with the gold hunter.
The stallion had been fed and watered, frisking, snapping viciously at the livery stable boy who held him. Responding reluctantly to Crow as he swung up into the saddle. The man giving it a clout between the eyes to remind it who was the master, the force of the punch making it stagger slightly. Shaking its head groggily. Then he’d left.
Scouting around the ravaged house. The fire was finally out, just a few glowing sparks blowing around the blackened wood. The ends of rope dangling in the light breeze where the two men had been cut down and laid in the wagon. Some lengths of material from the front of the house draped over them where the killers had dragged it, in their attempts to make the whole thing look like an Indian raid.
They had had enough sense to use unshod horses. But from the tracks Crow was certain that they had been horses and not ponies. The trail led off to the west. Where they had seen the Chiricahua appear. Perhaps brought by the signal of the pillar of black smoke. There had been about eight or nine of the men attacking the spread. To an experienced reader of spoor like Crow, the story lay there in the dirt for anyone to make out.
Eight, he decided. Tracing the marks from each different animal. Looking for boot tracks as well. Few Apaches would wear high-heeled western boots. Most favoring the long, soft leather boots. But several of the tracks in the sand were of the boots of white men.
They had ridden in together. Straight up to the main gate. There was yet more proof, if it were needed. No Apache raiders would do that. They would have come sneaking silently in out of the night.
These were whites. It looked like they’d come riding in and maybe even called out a warning to the house. Letting them know they weren’t hostile Indians. Waiting until the two hands had come out to greet them and then taking them. Probably firing the outbuildings immediately. Killing the two men while they set the house alight and secured the Mayor and his blonde wife.
It had been a clumsy and muddled operation; one of them must have circled into Dead Hawk from the north and left the note demanding money. It was more money than Crow could easily imagine. But the one thing that Verity hadn’t done was complain he couldn’t afford it. At least the kidnappers had done that part efficiently enough. That planted a seed in Crow’s mind. One that gave him a nagging concern, but he couldn’t quite figure why. As though he should have taken another step in his thinking, but hadn’t.
The rest of it had been bungled.
His train of thought was derailed by a rumbling of thunder. Off west. The sky there had been darkening for the past hour, promising a spring storm. It wasn’t anything to worry Crow, apart from the fact that it would wash out the trail he was seeking.
A flicker of silver lightning on the horizon, among the low hills, made him walk quickly to his horse. Thinking still about the sort of men he was going to be chasing. Men who had a vicious streak in them. The butchering and torture of the two cowboys showed that. Brutal killers. Killers with very little brain. Maybe it wasn’t going to be that hard.
Once in the saddle of the stallion he pressed on at a fast trot, wanting to get in among the hills before the rains came. Knowing with a certainty that gnawed at his mind that if he once lost that trail, then he might never find it again.
The lightning came once more, spreading in a sheet of luminous light. Breaking out of the black belt of low cloud that was winging towards him over the western hills. Already he could actually see grain falling. Several miles ahead. Like a veil of mist weeping from the underside of the cloud.
‘Come on,’ he muttered, kicking the stallion in the ribs to speed him on to something close to a full gallop. The horse, scenting the coming storm, whinnied a protest, but it never slackened its pace. Bitter and painful memories reminded it of what happened if it tried to have its own will over the rider.
Crow wasn’t the most gentle of men.
The trail of the eight horsemen wasn’t that hard to follow. He could make out the tracks of the cowboys who’d first reported the burning spread in Dead Hawk, but they didn’t cover the killers’ hoof-marks. The eight horses had become ten. That meant they’d come intending just to take Verity and the woman. Tethering the spare mounts out in the desert land towards the hills.
He was getting close. Already in among the low piles of boulders. The trail narrowing. With side canyons. It was becoming darker. Like night closing in and the thunder was roaring around him, bouncing from rock to rock.
Then two things happened at once.
It began to rain, sheeting down. But just before visibility shut down, Crow saw three men on horses, a couple of hundred paces ahead on the main trail.
Unmistakably Chiricahua!
Chapter Eight
Arizona spring rain doesn’t often last very long. Maybe an hour or so. This time it didn’t even last that long. From the moment the first spots came powering down, surrounding Crow and the stallion in a small circle of total wetness, with everything else wiped out of sight, to when it cleared on eastwards, couldn’t have been more than ten minutes.
The man had heeled his horse to the side, trying to find some kind of shelter from the downpour. But by the time he’d spotted a massive overhang of dripping rock, it was already easing.
Crow took off the floppy black hat, banging it against the .horse’s flanks to beat some of the wetness out of it. Sticking it back on top of his straggling hair, pasted to his lean cheeks by the storm. Squeezing water from the yellow bandana and reknotting it. Sitting still and silent, wondering just where the Indians had gone. Maybe they’d high- tailed it out of the place.
‘Maybe not,’ he whispered to himself, straining his ears for the noise of movement. Difficult to detect over the disappearing rumbling of the thunder.
Man on a horse against three
mounted Chiricahua needs to do something to even up the odds a little. Crow did the simplest and the best thing. He dismounted and tethered the black stallion, its gleaming coat streaming rain, to a large reddish boulder at the side of the trail.
Climbing up the rocks until he found himself a narrow ledge. He’d slung the Winchester from his belt, knotting it on with the long leather thong that was tied to its stock.
Then he waited.
After the better part of an hour the storm had completely passed over, leaving a sky that was the delicate blue of a bird’s egg. Speckled with tiny clouds that sailed serenely overhead, oblivious of the deadly game that was being played in the maze of rocks beneath.
Crow watched the last of the rain drying from the boulders. Running gently over the rough surfaces, carrying small amounts of red sand. Trickling down like tears of blood.
Patient as the stones themselves. Blanking his mind to the passing minutes. Keeping his eyes and ears alert to any changes. A rustle of sand. The faintest click of a rifle butt snagging against a boulder. A snatched breath from a man g who thought nobody would hear him.
But there was nothing.
The three Chiricahua had disappeared into the rain squall as if they’d never been there.
An hour slipped away. Most other men might have given it up. Shuffled or eased themselves to rest cramped muscles. Allowed their concentration to waver; Crow never moved.
The time he’d spent with different tribes of Indians earlier in his life had taught him many things. One of the most important being the great virtue of patience. An Apache boy might be sent out into the wilderness of the Southwest with nothing but a knife and a spear to fend for himself for a week or more. If he failed then he would starve. It was no good returning to his tribe expecting them to be sorry for him. They might pity him but he would be an outcast. The Indian tribe was such a tightly-knit social unit that it could not afford to carry that kind of straggler. So he would wait. Perhaps keeping quite still for several hours. Until he was able to strike with one of his weapons. That kind of patience stayed with a man all his life as a warrior.
Crow had once been with a party of soldiers. Scouts had checked out a camping site four hours before the rest of the party came. Then the officer had insisted they checked again. It wasn’t until five or six hours after that the Apaches snaked out from under the sand where they’d lain still and silent to ambush the pony-soldiers. It had been a bloody battle.
The clock in his head told him he’d been waiting for nearly two hours before Crow’s ears caught the sound he’d been listening for. A noise so faint that most men would have missed it. And most men would have died for missing it.
It was a whisper of noise. A foot being set down on a pebble that shifted at the last moment. Crow heard it and knew what it meant. But he still didn’t move. His stallion also heard it. Or maybe smelled something on the wind and snickered softly. Shifting its hooves.
One moment the small area where the trail branched had been empty. Next moment there were three Indians there. All holding carbines at the ready. Eyes scouring the rocks around for a sight of the man whose horse still stood tethered in front of them.
Crow could have been certain of killing two with the Winchester. Maybe three. But maybe wasn’t enough. He leaned back into the shadows on the ledge and waited. Listening to the Apaches as they whispered to each other. Directly beneath him.
It was interesting.
They hissed warnings to each other in the guttural speech of the Chiricahua. Crow wasn’t that fluent in the Apache tongue, but he knew enough to get by. And he heard them talk of this white man with the black horse with a wicked eye. Wondering whether he had run for it in the rain. Wondering whether he was a guard for the party of two hands of white-eyes that had passed by earlier in the day. A group that sounded to Crow very much like the party that had kidnapped the Veritys.
And they talked of an illness that had struck at their village. One that gripped the belly and brought sickness. One that killed at random. Picking the little child and the mighty warrior. The old woman and the strong son of their chief.
Something that sounded very much to Crow like cholera. Perhaps the most dreadful disease on the frontier. It wasn’t totally unknown for an unscrupulous Indian Agent to deliberately give a tribe blankets that were infected with the illness. Something that was sometimes done with a wink from the military or from the politicians.
Three was a difficult number. One too many to take safely. Crow waited on. Listening to their whispered conversation. Hearing them refer to the white men being camped up on a small river away in the direction of the sleeping sun. The west. By the stone that looked like a flying bird. That must be Buzzard Peak. A spur of reddish rock jutting out of a cliff, at the entrance to a canyon. Not that far off. Reachable by evening if he was allowed to go on.
The three warriors complained bitterly about the illness that had hit them. Moaning about how they had been weakened by it. Unable to go and kill the whites who had ridden so carelessly into their mountain fastness. Times gone by and they would have run upon them and staked out their bones to whiten in the sun. But not now.
One of them sounded unwell and suddenly broke off the talk to walk quickly. Almost a stumbling run, out of sight around the rocks where Crow hid, into a small cave. There was the noise of someone with a griping bowel complaint, voiding himself.
The other two sniggered to each other at their brother’s distress.
Crow shot them both.
Standing quickly and silently up and pulling the broad trigger on the rifle. Tugging down on the lever, the ejected cartridge tinkling among the rocks behind him. Slamming it shut and ramming another bullet into the breech. Firing a second time. Levering again. Holding the Winchester still in his hands, waiting for the third man to appear from the cover of the tiny cave.
In things that Crow had read, the white-hatted hero would not have behaved like that. He’d have-leaped to his feet, calling on the hostile natives to surrender. Giving them every opportunity to give in. And when they both began to shoot at him, the hero would have tugged out his six-guns and blasted the pistols or rifles from the hands of the Indians.
Crow was delighted that he had the chance to gun them down from cover, without any chance of them shooting back at him. His first bullet drove in through the top of the skull of the further Chiricahua, pushing him to his knees, the shot smashing downwards through his brain, exiting through his open mouth as a tiny lump of pulped and bloody lead.
The other Indian had enough time to begin to turn and look upwards. The forty-five hitting him through the side of the face, just beneath the left eye. Angling upwards so that it came out above the right ear. Blasting out a chunk of skull as large as a saucer, splattering it into the dirt in a welter of crimson and a spray of pink brain tissue.
Through the cloud of powder smoke Crow could see that he wasn’t going to need a third bullet. Both warriors were undoubtedly dead, though their corpses still twitched and writhed as the nerves ignored the messages of death.
There was a yelp of shock from the third man, but no immediate sign of him running out to be gunned down by the hidden marksman. Crow had no wish to leave him alive, and the cave might provide him with enough shelter for him to threaten Crow’s withdrawal on the stallion.
So, he had to be killed.
It was nearly twenty feet to the floor of the trail, but Crow leaped it without any hesitation. Waiting would only have made it harder. He landed perfectly balanced, immediately diving to his right and rolling, close to the bodies. There was the boom of a rifle and a gout of bloodied sand splattered near his feet. Then he was up, squeezing and levering four times, hearing the bullets whining and bouncing off the rocky interior of the cave. But at least two of the shots found their targets.
He heard a scream of agony, and the last of the Apache braves appeared.
His breeches were still around his ankles and he shuffled forwards, thighs and feet streaked with the mut
e evidence of his own illness. He was barely twenty, but the cholera had bitten deep. Making him painfully thin, the ribs standing out like wicket fencing, eyes sunken in his skull.
Crow dropped the warm rifle, seeing that it wasn’t going to be necessary. Not wanting to waste another round on a dying man.
One of the bullets from the Winchester appeared to have inflicted a minor flesh wound on the shoulder of the Chiricahua. But the other had hit home at the bottom of the neck, where it joined the scrawny chest. As the warrior lurched and stumbled towards him, both hands pressed to the bleeding hole in his throat, blood bubbled from the exit wound between the shoulders, sure sign of a hit in the lungs. And an equally sure passport to the wrong side of living.
He was trying to talk, words choking back in his pain. Eyes wide open as he saw Crow standing waiting for him. Falling to his knees, then sliding on his face in the sand, only a half dozen paces from the avenging figure of the tall white man.
Crow drew his cut-down saber in a hiss of steel, holding the familiar hilt with its golden tassels. Whetted to a sharp edge and point, the eighteen-sixty sword had a good feel and balance to it, even though it was now a bare two and a half feet long. It lacked the weight of the Bowie knife, but it was better, in Crow’s opinion, for the cut and thrust of close fighting.
The Chiricahua was probably dying. With that kind of blood loss it was unlikely he’d live until evening. But Crow had seen enough of badly wounded men who had seemed past all hoping who’d risen from their coffins and lived to see other men dead. He didn’t want anyone else coming across the Apache and finding out that there was another white man, alone, loose in the region.
He stepped over to the young man, lying on his face, bare rump white to the sun. Placing the point of the saber against the third vertebrae in the neck. Suddenly leaning all his weight on it. Driving it through the flesh with a clean snap as it jammed between the bones of the spine, killing the Indian immediately.
In dying there was a great rush of foul water from his bowels as the bloody flux was released. Crow grimaced his disgust and stepped back, tugging the sword loose with an effort. Wiping it in the clean sand near the waiting stallion and re-sheathing it at his left hip.
Tears of Blood Page 5