The Third Western Megapack

by Barker, S. Omar

  The raiders were sweeping, back and forth through the corral, the pound of their hoofs deafening, the blue-red flame of their gunfire blinding.

  Brooke chose a gap in that swirling madness of flying manes and tossing heads, stumbling over the bodies of four soldiers where they had tried to form under a corporal. A Yankee trader was on his hands and knees, cursing bitterly, sinking a little lower with each oath.

  A line of horses clattered by. Brooke threw Julie to the ground, falling deliberately on top of her, his body a shield. Slugs thudded into the ground about them.

  Then he was up again, hunting in that smoky hell for Hernic, because the boy had the key to his manacles.

  Hernic was backed against a wagon, blond head thrown up. There was awful deliberateness in the way he kept cocking and firing, cocking and firing, spilling saddle after saddle with deadly effect.

  All the arrogance and pride had left him. For that moment he was just a man who desired only to stand there and pump out his lead till he died.

  As he stopped to reload, Brooke lurched up to him, bellying the smoking Walker down between them, shaking his manacles in Hernic’s face.

  “I’ve had these on long enough, Hernic, long enough.”

  Blinded by his battle lust, the lieutenant tried to shove Brooke aside. But the hunter twisted his arm, forcing him to where his saddle bags lay. Still struggling, the boy fumbled for the keys.

  As he unlocked the manacles, Donahue and three troopers backed into the little open space of death Hernic had cleared with his dragoon. Walters staggered in, too, face twisted with fear. Behind him roared a pair of iron Missourians, brass-mounted Hawkins rifles bellowing. The rest of the corral was a carnage of dead and dying. Brooke and the others stood alone, the only ones left. And the raiders were reforming, wheeling, gathering for that last charge.

  Hernic elbowed his way to the fore and would have stood there, jacking out empties and reloading and cocking and firing to the end. But Brooke had been taught in a different school.

  He who fights and runs away.…

  The hunter grabbed Hernic, one arm crooked around his neck, the other twisting his gun arm. He yanked him off balance and pulled him back through the teamsters and troopers, back through the outspanned wagons. Donahue didn’t have to be told when to retreat. He formed a masterly rearguard, waiting there in the breech with his three troopers until everyone was safe outside.

  As that dark mass of riders broke into their sweeping charge, half-hidden by a front of blazing gunfire, the sergeant pulled his men out. One of them dropped across a wagon tongue, coughing his life’s blood into the shortgrass.

  * * * *

  Brooke half-carried the lieutenant through the swamp-grass of the river bottoms, talking to him in a low voice, almost as one would soothe a child.

  “It’s all over now, Hemic. You did what you could and they’d be proud of you back at the Academy, but it’s all over now. There’s no shame in running. Even Donahue understands that.…

  “The wagons!” choked Hernic, fighting. “Damn you, I was sent to guard them. Let me go back, let me go back!”

  Brooke pushed him into the mucky shallows. “I don’t think we’ll lose the wagons.”

  He ordered the others down, and they submerged themselves until only their heads remained above water, hidden by the willows. Walters was making a racket, shaking and sobbing and cursing. Brooke finally took Hernic’s dragoon and crept over to the florid man, hitting him on the back of the head, neatly, coldly.

  He collapsed into the water. Julie gasped at such brutality. Then she put her hand over her mouth, realizing why Brooke had done it. Riders had followed them into the bottoms.

  For a long time those men cantered back and forth through the cottonwoods, calling softly to one another. Sometimes it was in Spanish, sometimes in English—never in Cheyenne.

  But Brooke had hidden his party well, and finally the horsemen spurred back over the hump that separated the wagons from the river. Lying there in the cold water, Brooke heard muted sounds from over that hillock—the bawl of cattle, the faint calling of men. And finally the peculiar squeaking rumble of wagons beginning to roll.

  Donahue took a heavy breath. “Lor’, Lor’, but that was a helluva business. I went out to change the guard on the cavvy, an’ find all the sentries lyin’ in their own blood. When I come back soundin’ the ’larm, there was the guards on the corral in the same fix, knifed through the gullet.”

  “Someone stole our guns, too,” offered a shivering trooper. “It wasn’t nice, facin’ them devils with our bare hands.”

  A steady drizzle had started when Brooke finally led Hernic out of the bottoms. He left the others behind, but he wanted the officer to see a few things.

  The rain had put out the fire and there was enough of the smoldering wreckage to show that only three wagons had been left behind. Bodies were scattered in pitiful, grisly heaps. Hernic turned his head away from the sight—that singular, viscous look to the top of every head. It even made Brooke a little sick. But he forced the boy to help him, searching carefully through all the corpses. Mohan wasn’t among them. Nor Georges Tremaine, nor Haller. And they couldn’t find any bodies of the raiders.

  “That proves they were Indians,” said Hernic stubbornly. “They always carry away their dead.”

  Brooke kept his voice even with effort. “Indians don’t attack at night, Hernic. They think a man who dies in darkness goes to hell. The only point in leaving burned wagons and scalped bodies is to throw the blame on the Indians. Do you think whoever did the raiding, would leave their dead here to give the whole thing away?”

  Hernic bit his lip, unable to meet Brooke’s gaze. That stubborn pride blinded him, made it impossible to admit he was wrong and the man he despised was right.

  Ignoring him, Brooke hunted over the wreckage for any sort of weapon, but the camp had been stripped bare. Only a few buffalo guns lay amid the ashes, bent and broken and burned beyond use. He had to be satisfied with a hickory ox-bow, only partly ruined. As he turned back toward the river a great gaunt figure in a red shirt stepped from the fringe of cotton-woods, covered head to foot by leaves and mud. Hernic had his gun out and cocked before he recognized the man.

  “It was all over afore I was rightly awake,” said Tahrr. “An’ I didn’t hev no gun. So I buried muhse’f in the woods. Ain’t no point in dyin’, ’less yuh hev to.”

  “Tahrr,” said Brooke grimly. “You are a man after my own heart.”

  * * * *

  They marched all next day up the river, not very many of them in all that vast country, covered now by the dead gray blanket of rain that pelted down endlessly. Sometimes they sank to their knees in the sand and mud. A smoky mist swam through the mottes of soggy cottonwoods, lending an unreality to their pain and exhaustion.

  The sergeant and two of the teamsters had guns, but they had used their last ball in the fight. The two cavalrymen who had escaped with Donahue were unarmed. That left Hernic’s dragoon with three precious loads and Brooke’s hunting knife as the only real weapons in the whole party.

  They made a forlorn camp under some elms; Brooke formed a bed of boughs for the girl, and set guards for the night. When he gave Donahue and Walters the two hours before dawn, the wagon-master bridled.

  “I’m still leader here, Brooke, and I’m not taking any orders from a half-naked savage.”

  Brooke’s dark face became, impassive—his voice took on that almost inaudible softness. “I’m going to try and keep you all alive out here, Walters. But if you get in the way, I won’t have to be mad to kill you.”

  The infinite deadliness in those low tones made Walters take a fumbling step backward, surprise and fear blanching his face. And two hours before dawn he rose from his soggy bed of grass and mud to stand watch with Donahue.

  The rai
n had stopped next morning. Brooke showed them where to find the tipsin root, and they chewed it during the weary march, gaining some nourishment. At noon they came across blackberries and a few plum thickets. And mile by mile they marched westward, warmed illy by a feeble sun, bitten by buffalo gnats that rose in swarms from the swampy bogs formed by the rain.

  At the evening camp, Brooke began to carve on the hickory ox yoke, watching Hernic. The boy sat with his blond head in his hands, utterly defeated. He had failed in his command, had lost most of his men—and apparently didn’t care whether he lived or died.

  But Brooke remembered how Hernic had stood with his back against the wagon, facing that pounding, blazing death. Nothing could defeat a man like that, permanently. And when the Trail had polished off his arrogance and stiff-necked pride, the stuff beneath would be a thing to see.

  So Brooke sat, patiently carving on the ox yoke that would eventually be a short-bow as deadly as the one he had had before.

  The next day he cut half a dozen willow withes from the river bank and dried them in the sun. It was another day before they passed a rocky formation from which he could form arrowheads, and yet another before he flushed a wild turkey. He used one of Hernic’s precious balls on the bird, and that evening while the others were still eating its meat, he set about to finish his arrows. He cut fringe from his buckskin leggins and moistened it in his mouth, then slit the turkey feathers and bound them to the nocked end of the willow shoots with wet thongs.

  Some of his arrows had broad short heads with barbs to hold in the wound, and these were meant for hunting. Some had long slender heads without barbs, and these were meant for war.…

  Because he knew now that he wouldn’t be satisfied with just leading these people to safety. A desire was growing within him to get those wagons back. It was almost something personal, between him and Mohan.

  That was why he began teaching Hernic and Donahue and the soldiers and the teamsters how to live in this country and how to fight.

  Donahue was short and stocky. He had a catlike compactness that the towering Missourians and even the lieutenant lacked. So Brooke chose the brick-faced sergeant to teach the ways of the knife. At the end of each weary day, he showed Donahue how to block and how to stab, and how to kill. He taught the non-com all he had learned from Little Elk and the other Cheyennes, and he had learned a lot. Donahue was Irish, and pugnacious by nature, and he had a talent for any fighting. He learned fast.

  * * * *

  The hunter taught the others, too. He showed them how to crawl through willows without disturbing a single shoot. He made them lie in bogs and swamps for hours on end without moving a muscle. Julie learned with the men. She had become one of them.

  This was Indian country, of course, and one of the hardest lessons was learning to cover their trail. Sometimes they used rocks, leaping from one to the next, or walked across fallen timber to leave no footprints. And for days at a time, they used one of the oldest methods, walking in the shallows of the great brown sluggish Arkansas. So Brooke taught them.

  Often they would grow so weary that he had to beat and fight and abuse them forward. He grew leaner, and his body came to look like a blade of fine Damascus. His tensile strength went deeper than his body, though, and it became more apparent every day.

  Wind wrinkles were beginning to appear around Julie’s blue eyes; her hands were no longer soft. She cried at night, sometimes, when the day had been hard. Yet, she never complained. It was Walters who showed most strain. He had lost weight, his hands twitched a lot. He had been almost two weeks without liquor.

  Brooke shot a black-tail deer, and made the girl a short Crow skirt from its hide, split up the center. She exchanged it willingly for her crinoline, torn and dirty and not meant for rivers or briars.

  On the fifteenth day they were slogging through hip-high blue-root near the Cimarron Crossing of the Arkansas. Orioles were singing from a grove of aspens that covered rising ground to the north. Suddenly the birds ceased their talk. Their wings made a soft whirring against the muted roil of the river.

  Brooke stopped, moving his hand slightly. Those behind sank into the grass without sound as he had taught them. Then he squatted down, nocking an arrow with a long slender head into his hickory bow’s string. He had known that sooner or later he would use those arrows for war.

  In a moment, the first Indian appeared, riding from the trees. He forked a stallion, gray with small black Arab spots, the gaudy paint horse so dear to a red man’s heart. Following were others, single file, cantering out of the trees like a line of gaily-mounted ghosts, eagle feathers nodding from black hair, red, blue and yellow blankets wrapped around lean torsos.

  Brooke let his bowstring slacken and stood up. These were Cheyenne.

  The riders suddenly became a swirling pool of wheeling mixing color, blankets flapping as they reared their ponies back on one another. But the brave in the lead had marked those Sun Dance scars on Brooke’s chest. He threw himself from his mount, dropping his yellow blanket to reveal similar scars on his own body.

  “You are a brother,” he cried joyfully. “You are a brother.”

  Brooke greeted him, then turned slightly, Donahue and the others rose from the grass. Surprise flickered across the Cheyenne’s painted face, and Brooke smiled a little. That the Indians hadn’t spotted those lying in the blue-root was the greatest of compliments, the final test, really. The hunter had taught his people well.…

  They were great lean greyhounds of men, these braves, and they had been north on a war party against the Blackfeet of the Big Horns. They had captured many horses and were in good spirits. When, as a brother, Brooke asked them for enough ponies to mount his party, they gladly gave him a dozen skittish little mustangs. The Indians had just killed a buffalo, and they shared hump-rib with the whites. Brooke sat cross-legged by the fire, talking to them in their own language, and he had never looked more like an Indian. Finally he asked one careful question of the brave leading the party.

  “Yes,” answered the painted warrior, “A big wagon train passed us going north toward the mountains, but we let it alone. That is our treaty, you know, with the white man.”

  Brooke watched the Cheyenne narrowly. “Why should a wagon train be going north so far from the Trail?”

  The Indian avoided Brooke’s eyes not speaking. But finally he spat it out, half in anger, half in fear.

  “Los Diablos!”

  He rose stiffly, jerking his head at his warriors. They mounted without another word, rounding up all but the ponies they had promised Brooke, and galloped off in a rising cloud of dust toward the river. Brooke stood watching them go, a small triumph in his smile. Then he turned to the others.

  “Now that we have horses, it wouldn’t be hard to reach Santa Fe. You’d be safe there. Or we could ride after the wagons. And some of you would die.”

  Hernic rose, a strange set look to his face. Perhaps he still disbelieved the existence of Los Diablos, yet Brooke knew he would give his life cheerfully for even the smallest chance of vindicating himself.

  Tahrr spoke for the muleskinners. “I got a mule in that train named Peaches. I’d like to git muh hands on the critter whut stole her.”

  “And you, Julie?” asked the hunter. “They’re my wagons,” flamed the girl, almost defiantly.

  There was a sudden scuffle. Hemic slapped at his holster in a startled way. But Walters had the gun in his hand, eyes glittering insanely. Brooke had seen the look before. The Trail did that to some men.

  “You didn’t ask me, Brooke,” babbled Walters in a high-pitched voice. “They’re my wagons too, you know. And I say they can go to hell. You’re taking us to Santa Fe, or I’ll kill you!”

  He cocked the gun with its two precious loads. The hollow click was the only sound. The others stood like graven images, knowing it would mean Brooke’s de
ath to make so much as a move. There was nothing the hunter could do. And if Hernic had his spread-legged, god-like way of meeting the end, so did Brooke have his way. He drew himself up a little, face impassive, and there was something infinitely proud in the thrust of his chin.

  Perhaps Walters had expected fear. There was a puzzled hesitance to the way he thrust the Walker out before him, steadying it.

  Julie took that moment to step in front of Brooke.

  “You’ll have to use that first ball on me, Louis.”

  Then Donahue stuck his foot out and shoved Walters over it, and Hernic leaped for the big man’s gun arm, and all the others jumped him like a pack of wolves.

  The gun exploded. Tahrr rolled from the mass of struggling bodies, cursing hoarsely and holding his side. The fight lasted only a moment, arms flailing, feet kicking. Then someone, groaned sharply from the bottom. The men untangled themselves. Donahue got up, panting. Hernic rose, holding his gun by its barrel. There was a film over his eyes, and he stood looking from the bloody gun-butt to Walters’ crushed skull.

  Suddenly he dropped the dragoon in the sand, and turned to walk away into the night.

  Donahue started to follow, but Brooke caught his arm, muttering, “Let him go, Sergeant. He’s young.…”

  “Yeah,” said Donahue. “Yeah, I guess y’r right.”

  They did what they could for Tahrr’s wound, and buried Walters in a shallow grave, piling rocks over it. Brooke stayed beside Julie when the others had left. She was dry-eyed, looking at the cairn dully.

  “I guess I couldn’t really have loved him,” she said. “Because I can’t feel much sorrow. He was handsome and he had a swagger. Those things go to a woman’s head. But he was weak, wasn’t he? He could never belong to this wild, raw, new country as you do, David. I don’t understand you very well, yet. I’m just beginning to realize how strong you are.”