He responded with a question of his own. "What else? Tobadzistsini is the God of War. Soon, every acre of what you call Arizona Territory will be drenched in blood. And this time, we will win!"
Chapter 7
J.D. and Kate went on to finish breakfast as they'd planned, though Kate seemed to feel rushed throughout the serving and consumption of their meal. J.D., by contrast, took his time, enjoying it as much as he was able when he reckoned a fool's errand lay in front of them.
Kate was determined to pursue the disappearances and made it clear that she would go alone if he refused to tag along. That wasn't happening, but J.D. doggedly refused to ride the army's dust like vultures seeking carrion, perhaps to be arrested if the young lieutenant and his soldiers couldn't find a better set of suspects for the crime.
Some kind of heathen lingo painted on the barn in blood, as Marshal Dill described it, sight unseen. That could mean anything, he thought. J.D. had never heard of an Apache written language, but that proved nothing, in itself. He'd have to wait and see, but he was not about to put Kate or himself in harm's way with the edgy soldiers, when their blood was up.
"What's taking you so long?" Kate asked.
"Two things. First, I don't swallow breakfast like a snake chokes down a mouse. And second, we're not rushing out to have some kind of confrontation with the cavalry while they're doing the job they're paid for. That's a good way to get shot, or at the very least wind up in irons."
"You just don't want to go," she said, accusingly.
"You're right. But I've agreed because it means so much to you, although it's bound to cost us time. And that means money, just in case it slipped your mind while you were worried over total strangers."
"Christ, J.D.! A woman and her kids!"
"I know," he said, mouth nearly full. "And I've agreed, but not to any hasty move that buys a load of trouble with the law. So just calm down and wait."
Another thirty minutes passed before they claimed their horses from the livery and started west. The hostler had provided rough directions to the Hoskins spread, although he didn't know the victims personally. They had never been his customers, and likely never would, but everybody in Inferno seemed to have at least vague knowledge of the district's other residents, whether they lived in town or not.
Six miles northwest, the hostler told them, give or take. Childs Hoskins had been famous for his white barn, when most farmers in the neighborhood preferred bright red. J.D. supposed white lasted longer in the desert sun, but saw no reason for discussion of the subject as they saddled up and rode away.
"With any luck, the soldiers will be done and gone before we get there," he told Kate, as they passed by Inferno's posted limit and the end of Marshal Dill's authority.
"What do you think they found?" she asked, cracking the ice between them.
"Won't know that until we see it," he replied. "But if you're smart, you won't count on some kind of magic revelation, just from writing on a wall."
* * *
"Sergeant," Lieutenant Ellwood Brannon called out from his saddle. "Make sure someone copies down those painted characters."
"Yessir," replied the sergeant, Furman Sholes, a grizzled veteran who'd passed his twenty years in uniform and then some. "It's all crap, o' course. There ain't a filthy redskin in a thousand ever learnt to write."
"I want that record, nonetheless," Lieutenant Brannon ordered. "Is that understood?"
"Yessir. Sure thing, sir. As you like, sir."
"And be quick about it now."
The sergeant went off grumbling and left Brannon dwelling on the irony of his complaint. Every man at Fort Royster knew Sholes was an illiterate himself, had signed an "X" on his enlistment papers when he'd signed up for the war with Mexico in 1846 and earned his first commendation for valor in the Battle of Chapultepec. Others had followed—in Mexico, during the Civil War, and for his service on the Indian frontier. Sholes knew more about combat than any other soldier Lieutenant Brannon had met, but the sergeant's obvious, outspoken bigotry against the darker races brought him down in Brannon's estimation.
What Lieutenant Brannon needed at the moment was the sergeant's expertise, without his sneering editorials on race, religion, and the rest of it.
They'd found Childs Hoskins in the farmyard, lying on his back, axed through the breastbone to his heart, the dust around him turned into a grim rust-colored mud by spouting gore. As for the dead man's wife and children, they were simply gone, along with several horses taken from the barn. And on the barn's wall, daubed in blood, a message Brannon could not translate, pictographs of animals with some misshapen English letters scattered in between.
The sergeant was correct about it being gibberish, but Brannon meant to have a record of it come what may. Whether they found the missing woman and her kids or not, whether they finally turned up dead or alive, Brannon would leave no stone unturned.
His other men had fanned out, poking through the house, the barn, the outbuildings, none finding anything that might advance the search. Besides the now-dried bloody scribbling on the barn, Brannon had nothing but some tracks of horses, leading off northward, toward the Casa Grande Mountains. "Big House," that would be, in Spanish, if it mattered now.
His orders from the colonel, handed down by Captain Mackey, were to follow any leads he found and make a "credible attempt" to bring the captives home. Well, back, that was, not necessarily delivering them to the homestead where their husband/father had been slain. Most likely, they would wind up at the fort until arrangements could be made for shipping them somewhere back East.
Another fresh start trampled in the West, left to dry up and blow away.
He would pursue the hoof print trail as far as possible, but Brannon doubted anything would come of it. Between the arid, hard-packed desert soil and constant wind, he'd be surprised if they could track the raiders for a mile, much less into the mountains, where the dry ground turned to stone.
They'd be returning empty-handed, he imagined, waiting for the next attack and hoping it would lead them somewhere. Failing that, it all boiled down to war against a band of renegades the army couldn't find, while more and more settlers were slain.
And who, when all was said and done, would take the blame?
* * *
"They're heading out," Kate said.
"I see that," J.D. answered. "Hold your horses 'til they're out of sight."
"But if we lose them—"
"Never mind. Their tracks are going to be clearer than the ones they're following."
She grumbled something J.D. didn't catch, which he suspected might be just as well. The troop of bluecoats dwindled, riding northward, first obscured by their own dust cloud, then lost to sight entirely.
"All right, J.D. Can we go in now?"
"I don't see why not," he said, already mounting up.
She led him at a gallop, anxious to get on with it, while J.D. held his stallion to an easy trot. Whatever the soldiers had found to send them on their way, J.D. knew he would see it soon enough, and he meant what he'd said to Kate: chasing full-speed after the troops would only raise the stakes, increase their odds of landing in hot water for what he believed was no good reason in the world.
Of course, his heart bled as a civilized man's should for the settlers slaughtered on their own home ground. Ideally, it would be a better world if no one ever died by violence, but that was not reality. As long as there were weapons in the world and men who loved to use them for whatever reason—greed or bigotry, insanity or spite, even a twisted sort of "love"—there would be killers, lawmen, soldiers, and the twilight figures like himself and Kate, who earned their living hauling in the badmen who evaded capture by authorities.
But as for hostile Indians...
No laws in the United States still offered bounties for dispatching renegades, and J.D. never would have been a scalper, even if the trade were still officially encouraged. Those he'd heard of, back before the war and since then, on the Tex-Mex border, were no more than mu
rderers themselves, lifting whatever bit of hair might pass for hostile, be it Indian or Mexican, without regard to sex or age.
Pure scum, and lucky if they never crossed his path.
Ahead of him, already reined in near the barn, Kate called back to him in her most excited voice, "J.D.! I found it!"
Picking up his pace a bit, he went to join her, feeling something like a lead weight settling in his gut.
* * *
"Don't tell me you can read that," J.D. cautioned, trying not to snort in pure derision.
"No, of course not," Kate replied. "But you'd agree it's Indian?"
He scanned the barn's south wall again, where something had been scrawled in blood across white-painted boards, roughly as high as a medium-sized man could reach. J.D. saw nothing that resembled words, but could pick out crude sketches that resembled some familiar desert animals, along with what he took for mountain peaks, a mesa, and perhaps a river or a wriggling snake. The last one wasn't clear, some of the dried blood flaking off already, where the artist had run short.
"Could be some kind of Indian," he granted. "Or it could be something cribbed from Egypt, where they've found those tombs and mummies. Hell if I know."
Kate heaved a pretty sigh. "Well, I would guess it's safe to say we've got no mummies here, J.D. And no Egyptians either, if you haven't seen a pyramid that you forgot to mention."
"No," he conceded. "None of that."
"So, call it Indian. And given where we are right now, likely Apache. Yes?"
"I reckon so. Unless a white man tried to fake it."
She stopped and thought a moment about that. It wouldn't be the first time they had run across white killers trying to blame native tribesmen for their crimes.
"Agreeing to that possibility," she said, "why would a white gang massacre two families without taking any prisoners, then snatch a woman and two children from the third?"
To that, J.D. could only shrug. "I doubt the bluecoats left us any evidence that they could carry, but we may as well look closer, anyhow."
With that in mind, they trespassed in the empty house, noting the signs of struggle, although little in the way of blood. Whoever had been taken there, the victims had not bled enough to indicate a mortal wound. In fact, the only blood they found in any quantity was in the dooryard, where it seemed that someone had been gravely wounded and bled out.
"Must be the husband," J.D. said. "The soldiers wouldn't take him with them, while he's going ripe."
"More likely neighbors," Kate surmised. "Whoever found this in the first place and went on to raise the cry."
"Hard way to start a morning. I suppose the other families will all be moving to the fort, now, if they don't pack up and look for someplace else to live entirely."
"Someone has to stop this," Kate declared.
"Someone, as in the U.S. Army," he replied.
"You trust them, J.D.?"
"Any reason not to?"
"Other than the troops we saw looked green? And even if they fielded every soldier from that little fort, there wouldn't be enough to cover half this district. More likely a fifth, if that."
"Which doesn't make it our job."
"Bringing back that mother and her children? Not even if we've got an edge?"
"What edge?"
"We've done this kind of thing before."
"And when was that?"
"Not just like this, but saving people. Bringing captives home. J.D., we saved the U.S. President!"
"I wish we hadn't, if you plan to bring it up each time we have an argument."
"What can it hurt, just trying for a little while?"
"Aside from getting killed and scalped, you mean?"
"We run that risk, each job we take," she said. "Well, not the scalping, but—"
"There is no job," he told her yet again. "Nobody hired us, no one's paying us, and even if we pull it off somehow, there's no reward in it."
"J.D."
He hated when she used that tone, with just enough self-righteousness to make him cringe. Through clenched teeth, he replied, "What have we got to go on, then, besides these nonsense scribblings on the wall?"
"It shows a range of mountains," she reminded him, pointing. "The raiders' tracks lead off that way, as do the soldiers'."
J.D. shook his head. Said, "Christ, I wish we'd packed a lunch."
Chapter 8
For all their talk of sacrifice, the warriors who had kidnapped Rosalind Hoskins and her two children made no move to harm them while they shared their captors' cave. If anything, they seemed to treat the three whites with a measure of consideration that surprised the recent widow, still in shock from witnessing the murder of her husband.
All right, she hadn't actually seen it happen, but Childs had been lying there, a tomahawk protruding from his lifeless chest, as she, Orville and Daphne were abducted from their home. That counted, in her estimation, as a crime observed first-hand.
And now, what?
So far, they'd been handled rudely, but without any particular abuse beyond the obvious of being kidnapped in the first place. Since arriving at the cave, they had been given water and some kind of meat she hadn't dared examine closely, guessing that it came from something in the nature of a reptile species. It was difficult to chew and swallow, but she'd told her children they must keep their strength up for the future and whatever it might hold in store.
Another thing Rosalind didn't like to think about, as if she could avoid it.
How long since they had been taken from the farm? Since Childs had died?
It was approaching suppertime when the attack occurred, and now she knew it must be sometime during afternoon of the following day. Not dusk, yet, but fatigue was weighing down her eyelids, telling Rosalind that she'd gone too long without sleep. Pressed up against her sides, Orville and Daphne had already given in, Rosalind's son snoring softly, while her daughter fidgeted and twitched through frightened dreams.
What could she do to get them safely out of there, away from their abductors?
Absolutely nothing came to mind.
Her only hope lay with the Schumer family, their nearest neighbors to the north. Derek, the patriarch, a year or so younger than Childs, was scheduled to stop by yesterday morning and borrow Childs's plow. When he witnessed what had happened, surely Derek would ride into town for help, alerting the authorities.
But would they act?
Rosalind knew about the other recent killings—bad news always traveled with the speed of prairie wind or wildfire—but there'd been no sign of troops or posses scouring the desert. Were the marshal of Inferno and the soldiers of Fort Royster willing to sit back while renegades ran rampant over helpless settlers?
Rosalind could not allow herself to think that way, as it would lead her to despair and soon communicate itself to her two offspring. For their sakes, if nothing else, she must appear strong and resolved to deal effectively with any situation that arose. That was a mother's job, and she had managed until now, though always with her husband's help.
But now, without him...
Stop that! she told herself. Buck up and do the job that you were born for.
Or die trying. Right.
How many more strange lizard meals, how many cycles of the sun and stars, before her time ran out?
Clenching her teeth, Rosalind sat in silence, waiting for the answer to present itself.
* * *
As best J.D. could tell, the Casa Grande Mountains sprawled across the skyline roughly ten miles north of what had been the Hoskins family spread. He wasn't sure exactly what to call the farm now, with the family's patriarch cut down, his wife and children carried off to God knew where. Presumably, title would still reside with any member of the clan who managed to survive, but whether they would care to come back home again was anybody's guess.
The first job, obviously, was to find them and determine if they were alive. Beyond that, J.D. didn't like to think about what must be done to set them free, assumin
g it was not too late.
They held a steady pace, riding the soldiers' dust without pursuing them too energetically. He sympathized with Kate, who likely would have overtaken them if she was able, and she didn't have him holding back, to slow her down. From time to time, she shot a peevish glance over her shoulder, blond hair streaming out behind her in the desert breeze, and grimaced at J.D.'s failure to keep his stallion in a lather.
"No point punishing the animals," he called out to her once. "They have to get us back again, you know."
She hadn't answered him, but slowed her mare a little, grudgingly. He knew Kate loved that horse, but when she had her mind made up that someone needed help, she often cast discretion to the winds. Courage she had, and plenty of it, but he wished that she would stop and think things through more often, when the outcome of a poor decision could be fatal.
They had roughly halved their distance from the Casa Grandes, still without a sign of renegades or soldiers in the flesh, but following the latest trail of seven army horses posed no problem for J.D. and Kate. Their skills at tracking were approximately equal, J.D.'s honed a little sharper by his hunting as a child, but he could trust Kate not to miss a deviation from the army's trail. No soldiers had departed from the squad to follow other tracks, all riding steadily northward.
And what did they expect to find among the mountains waiting there?
When they had slowed to rest the horses for a spell, Kate asked, "You think they're still alive, J.D.?"
"The soldiers, I'd say yes, because we would have heard some shooting otherwise. The woman and her kids, who knows? I'd have to understand why they were snatched, instead of being butchered outright, like the first two families. Somebody wanted them alive right then, but for how long? You might as well ask one of them," he said, and pointed toward a pair of buzzards riding thermals high above.
Kate caught her breath. "You don't think—"
"Nope. You'd have more than a couple birds for three dead people, Kate."
"Of course. You're right."
"Which doesn't mean we'll get them back, you know."
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