Blood of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

  Tad’s glare held him for an instant. Then the redheadturned away and spurred the sorrel again—forcing it to jump, letting it find its own footing on the uneven ground across the washout.

  Pete shook his head grimly, hauled aside, and went around. “You’re crazy as a loon, you wormy bastard,” he muttered.

  They had followed the river since leaving Outpost. Mostly staying to the upper bank, they had been clear of the heaviest brush and the nasty little thicketsof soapweed, yucca, and prickly pear that grew among the broken slopes. The forbidding portals of Black Mesa were still visible behind them, but Outpostwas far back and hidden by the rises.

  Pete gave up on trying to calm the enraged Tad Sands. The redhead would just have to ride it out, and if it cost him a horse, that was his lookout. By the time the sun lost itself in rising cloudbanks beyondthe mesa, the redhead was out of sight, and Pete didn’t particularly care where he had gone.

  He found him a mile or so on, though. It was getting dark, and a cold wind was pushing in ahead of the clouds over the breaks. Tad had crossed the river and camped in a cove on the south slopes. Pete followed his firelight in, and the sound of hammering.

  The redhead had removed the ejector from his Colt and was hammering on it with a rock, trying to straighten it. “ ’Bout time you showed up,” he growled. “Give me that nail puller you got.”

  Pete climbed down, dug the tool out of his saddlebag,and handed it over. Using it as a vise, Tad went back to hammering. Pete brought water, put on a pot, and set some coffee to boil. Then he stripped his saddle and gear, rubbed down his horse, and dug out a tin of liniment. Tad didn’t even look up as his partner tended the scrapes and cuts on his sorrel.

  When the ejector rod was eyeball straight, Tad reassembledhis revolver and jacked the rod through every port of its cylinder. “There,” he husked, finally.“Don’t look just right, but it works. Thought that son of a bitch had ruined it.”

  “I thought he’d broke your neck,” Pete said casually.“God, that big jasper must be strong as an ox. The way your head was bobbin’ around—”

  “You just shut your damn mouth, Pete!” Tad croaked. His voice was hoarse and raspy, as if his windpipe had rusted. He glared at his partner. “Son of a bitch is gonna pay for that. An’ if I hear one more word about it, you will, too.”

  Pete shut up. He had ridden with Tad Sands for nearly a year now, and he was about sick of the redhead.They had been drovers together, working a herd. But Tad had changed after a run-in with herd-cuttersover in the Outlet. When the powder smoke cleared, Tad had decided he was a gunhand.

  He took to strutting and drinking, and seemed to be always spoiling for trouble. He practiced his draw for hours at a time, and when he could afford bullets he put holes in every fence post, bean can, and cactusleaf in sight. The more he drank, the meaner he got. He had a short fuse by nature, and nowadays his anger was frightening.

  Getting along with Tad Sands was like petting a badger. Pete just never knew what was going to set him off.

  Pete shared out the coffee when it was boiled stiff, and stretched out on his soogans. The cove broke the wind, but there was lightning now in the western sky. “Funny spring,” he said. “Started too soon. Prob’ly gonna be a storm season.”

  Tad didn’t answer, and Pete glanced over at him. The redhead had cleaned and reloaded his Colt, and now he was working on his saddle gun, occasionallypeering out into the darkness, toward the river. He had an open jug of Mose Polan’s rotgut beside him.

  Pete felt a chill that wasn’t just from the wind. “What are you thinkin’ about, Tad? We’re headin’ for Wolf Creek in the morning, ain’t we?”

  “When I’m ready,” Tad rasped, coughing to clear his voice. “You notice the flats down there when you rode over, Pete? Notice how there’s no cover out there?”

  “I noticed,” Pete admitted. “What are you aimin’ to do, Tad?”

  “I got a notion that moon-haired jasper will be comin’ this way,” the redhead said. “Sometime tomorrow,he’ll come ridin’ along with that Injun kid. I aim to be waitin.’ ”

  “Have you looked at the sky?” Pete suggested. “If it rains, ain’t anybody gonna be ridin’ them bottoms.”

  “Ain’t gonna do more than blow a little,” Tad said huskily. “They’ll come. They’ll be right out there where the riverbed’s widest. When they get to where I want ’em, I’m gonna teach them both some manners.”

  “Hell you are!”

  Tad turned to face him, a feral glare in his eyes. “If you get in my way, Pete, I’ll kill you, too.”

  Pete Monte finished his coffee, then got to his feet. Without a word he rolled and strapped his bedroll,picked up his saddle, and went to get his horse. He was tightening the cinches when Tad Sands came up behind him, carrying his rifle.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” the redhead demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Pete turned, sighing. “I’ve said it before, Tad. You’re crazy as a loon. And you’re a mean drunk. If you aim to bushwhack a man just because he didn’t kill you when he prob’ly should have, then you’ve got it to do, but I don’t hold with ambush. I believe I can find my own way from here.”

  Stepping past the redhead, Pete collected his gear and stowed it aboard his horse. The wind was kickingup some sand now, and whipping the little fire. It was cold, and there was a wetness to the air. The little cove would have been a snug place to spend the night, but he would find another place.

  “You ain’t goin’ anywhere!” Tad spat, his voice a harsh croak. “You unpack that gear!”

  “I’m leavin’,” Pete said. He snugged the straps on his pack and tossed a rein over the saddle horn.

  “You ain’t runnin’ out on me!” Tad croaked.

  “What are you goin’ to do, shoot me in the back?”

  “You’ll face me, Pete. By God, I won’t allow this!”

  “Gonna shoot the only friend you’ve got, an’ with a bent gun?” Pete’s voice was harsh with disbelief. “I’m through, Tad. It’s you that’s bent out of shape, not your damn gun.”

  “Face me, you ... you polecat!”

  Pete looked around at him, not turning. “Tad, you know I won’t back down from any man. Not even you. But I’m no murderer, either. I’m damned if I’ll help you ambush a stranger, and I don’t intend to draw down on a crazy drunk.” Leading his mount, he walked out of the light, picking his way up the slope toward the flatlands above.

  Tad looked after him for time, peering into the darkness long after Pete was out of sight. Then he shook his head and kicked at the sandy ground. “Jesus!”he complained, his voice a harsh whisper. “What’s ailin’ him, anyway?”

  When Tad Sands left the cove fifteen minutes later, leading his saddled sorrel, he passed within a dozen feet of Falcon MacCallister. Crouched in the brush just out of the fire’s light, camouflaged by darkness and long instinct, Falcon watched the redheadleave. Then he faded back into the shelter of the bluff and began the walk back to his own snug camp, where Woha’li waited with Diablo and the dun.

  Few would have seen him pass, even anybody who had been there watching, but to Falcon MacCallister the stars of half a sky—and the staccato flare of lightningin the clouds to the west—gave light enough to see. As he walked, a slight smile teased the cornersof his mouth.

  Falcon MacCallister was recalling something he had heard a long time ago—something his own father,the legendary Jamie Ian MacCallister, had said: “The rarest quality in the human critter is ordinariness.Mankind’s plain peculiarities never cease to amaze me.”

  As though God seconded the motion, the low sky flared and a mighty clap of thunder echoed through the hills like cannon fire.

  Under the sound of the thunder and wind was another, more ominous sound. Even from high on the south slope, Falcon could see what caused it. The rain that was just commencing had already washed the foothills to the west. The river was rising.

  It was one of those springtime
storms that struck the high plains in a hundred guises—sometimes as blizzard, sometimes as hail, sometimes as dust, sometimesas torrential rain, and sometimes with tornado ferocity that swept the lands clean and devoured anything standing.

  This time it was lightning and a thunderstorm that strode down from the high slopes and swept across the Cimarron breaks. Two hours after sundown the western sky was alive with searing tendrils of lightning. An hour later fitful rain rode the winds, and the whole sky was ablaze with sound and fury.

  The little dun was skittish at the first few cascades of thunder. Woha’li had his hands full just keeping the horse attached to his tether. But when he snugged the animal’s lead closer to MacCallister’s big black, on a picket rope close under a limestone shelf, Diablo’s solid presence seemed to calm him. When the first rains hit, both horses crowded the line and edged around, closer to the snug little fire where Woha’li waited.

  Great flares of lightning lit the rainy sky, and thunderdrummed. The air smelled sweet, and seemed to hum and crackle like a den of vipers—a sky full of brilliant rattlesnakes striking downward.

  “Utsonati,” the Indian boy sang quietly, looking skyward and speaking to the lightning in the ancient way of his people, “Anagalisgi, osiyo! Hiwo‘ni-a aga-sga’.”Hello, lightning. When you speak, the rains come down.

  Woha’li was impatient and nervous. Though he spoke some English—far more than the man MacCallisterspoke atsalagi—still he didn’t know much about the tall yoneg who had befriended him. The man was soft-spoken and polite, yet he was very strong, and he moved with the grace and purpose of a warrior. One had only to glance at those pale eyes to know that he could be deadly. He had hair the color of moon-corn, yet he adapted himself so well to the land and the moment that sometimes Woha’li would have sworn he was Indian.

  And he rarely said or revealed more than he had to. Right now, Woha’li had not the vaguest idea where he had gone, or why. MacCallister had simply told him to make camp and wait with the horses, then had disappeared into the shadows.

  Woha’li was thinking seriously about breaking away from the white man, going on alone. He was grudgingly grateful for the things MacCallister had done for him, but he didn’t see that he needed to follow any yoneg around. He had a loaded rifle now, and he knew what he wanted to do.

  The frontal rains came in a rush of wind and spray, and Woha’li pulled back into the shelter of the cut bank. Out in the gully beyond, the slope was screened by scrub cedar.

  The thickets were alive with windsong and with scurrying small things moving up the slope from the riverbed below. A wilderness in motion, seen from above.

  And just overhead, above the rock rim of the ledge, were the rolling flatlands where lightning danced like spider legs walking.

  “Anagalisgi, ” his father had told him. “Anagalisgi ale Utsonati ... Tsalagiyahi unali’i gesa. ” The lightning, like Utsonati the rattlesnake, is the Cherokee’s friend.

  In Woha’li beat the heart of a warrior, and vengeanceflowed hot in his veins ... the single-minded resolve to exact retribution upon those who had killed his father and mother. MacCallister was ani-unega—a yoneg. Only a white man. He might return, and he might not. Either way, Woha’li would go on, and he would have his revenge.

  The lightning flared, the thunder rolled, and eyes dark as hawks’ eyes looked out at the flashing wilderness.In his heart, Woha’li was very much a Cherokee warrior. Still, for the rest of him, he was only twelve years old, and he felt lost, cold, and lonely. All the family he had was gone, and the white stranger he rode with had disappeared into the night.

  And down the slope, brush crackled and splintered as the floodwaters from upstream rose steadily in the Cimarron gorge.

  Woha’li’s loneliness only added fuel to the seethingrage that burned within him. Somewhere out there, not far away, were the men who had killed his father and mother. Maybe only a few miles away. Even at night, he could find them. And if he had a very good horse ...

  Hesitantly, he scanned the brush again, then crept to the picket rope. Bypassing the little dun, he approachedMacCallister’s big black horse and reached for its halter.

  The horse laid its ears back and showed its teeth. “So’qui-li, ” the boy crooned softly. “Horse, I want to ride you.” With a lunge, he grabbed the halter and reached high for an ear. Woha’li wasn’t sure what happened next, but he found himself tumbling backward, with a powerful hoof whooshing past his head. He came up against the limestone bluff and lay there, stunned.

  MacCallister had told him to leave Diablo alone. Now Woha’li knew why.

  The boy sat slumped and silent beside glowing embers when Falcon MacCallister slipped soundlesslyinto the sheltered camp. Exhausted and confused,Woha’li the warrior had gone to sleep with his worn old .32-20 cradled in his arms.

  EIGHT

  After the lightning came the pouring rain—waves and walls of it, driven by wild gusts of wind. It was a downpour, a real frog strangler, and the slopes below the cut bank flowed torrents. But it ended as abruptly as it had begun, and before dawn there were stars in the western sky and the high-up hills stood crisp against a freshly washed horizon.

  By first light, Falcon climbed the caprock to look down across a different river. Normally the upper Cimarron was a gentle sleepy stream meandering along a wide sandy bed between high valley walls. Only now and then, sometimes many years apart, did it reveal its true character. It was doing so now.

  From the caprock, Falcon looked out on a wide surging stream a quarter-mile from bank to bank. The flash flood had come down from the high foothillsand filled the ancient waterway almost to the rim. Here and there up and down the south side, among the inundated scrub brush of the new banks, were scatterings of debris—broken planks, a demolishedtent, a dead mule tangled in harness.

  Far upstream, something bobbed and swayed on the floodcrest, coming down. Seen through the telescope,it became a raft of sorts—a jumble of wood planking, like the remains of a footbridge attached to a placer-mine chute. There were people on it, busy with poles and bits of board, fighting the currentas they fought to keep the contrivance upright.

  They brought the horses up from the cut bank, and then Falcon made his way down to the floodway. He waved his arms until those aboard the raft had seen him, then set about splicing ropes to make a lifeline. A mile or so downstream, the river made a hard bend to the left. Even without using his scope, Falcon could see the torrent pounding at the banks there.

  The makeshift raft coming down from the Black Mesa “mines” might hold together on a straight current,but it would never survive that bend. It and all those aboard would be dashed to pieces if they went that far.

  Woha’li appeared from the brush and swung out on a salt-cedar branch to look upstream. “Crazy yonegs, ”he stated flatly, then swung back to firm footing.“Horses ready,” he said. “He-ga. We go.”

  Falcon ignored him. Splicing three coils of saddle rope and a length of reata, he had a line nearly fifty feet long. To one end of it he tied a chunk of driftwood,and then he coiled the rest.

  Aboard the makeshift raft men were struggling furiouslyto alter course, edging to the right as they approached. There were seven or eight of them clinging to the debris, all working frantically with plank oars and bits of pole while they struggled to keep their vessel intact. With each shift of current, the mess threatened to split apart, to separate into disconnected flotsam.

  As the unlikely thing neared, Falcon waved and shouted. When he was sure they saw him, he stepped as far out as he could, freed the chunk end of his coil, and began swinging it in a widening circle.

  Woha’li watched in disbelief for a moment, then picked up his rifle. “He’ga-ha!” he demanded. “We go now!”

  Falcon was busy. He ignored the kid. He completedhis swing, gauged his distance and trajectory, and let the chunk fly. It arced out over the muddy waters, trailing its rope, and fell directly ahead of the raft. Men aboard scrambled to grab it, and securedit somewhere.
Falcon wound the free end around a squat cedar bole, looped it, and tied it off. Gripping the line then, he set it across his shoulders, held it as a sling, and braced himself.

  With men heaving at both ends of the line, the ungainly raft veered sharply, veered again, and beganto disintegrate in the current.

  Eighty yards from water’s edge, up the tangled brushy slope where the canyon wall met the wide limestone shelf called caprock, erosion had formed a narrow trail angling up to the prairie above. For long moments, as the people below worked to swing the motley raft ashore, a horse and rider were skylined,watching.

  Woha’li the Eagle, last survivor of what had once been one of the proudest families of Ani-wa’ya, the wolf clan of the eastern Cherokee, had run out of patience. He watched for a moment as ani-unegas below him struggled against a rampaging river. He was only twelve years old, but there was work now for a man, and no other man remained in his family.

  He raised a hand in quick salute. “Donada‘gohui, Towo’di,” he murmured. “Man named Falcon, good-bye.”

  There were more people on the raft than it had appeared. As the thing came closer, Falcon could see glimpses of people everywhere in the wreckage. He could not tell how many, or even how many of them were alive, but all of them were in pitiful condition.Considering the wall of water that must have swept down on that mining camp in the river bottom upstream, it was a wonder anyone had survived.

  The raft bumped and scraped against other floatingdebris, and bit by bit it continued to come apart. One entire section of the thing—something that looked like a wrecked buckboard wagon and some lashings—veered off into the current and floated away. There were two or three people aboard it, none of them moving. As it rolled and turned, beginningto submerge, Falcon saw two faces and a disconnected arm. Two men and a woman, he guessed ... all dead.