Blood of Eagles (6 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone

BOOK: Blood of Eagles
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“I think I know where they're going,” Falcon said. “Place called Wolf Creek. Something's going on there that's drawing hard cases. We'll find this whole bunch there, I imagine.”
He peered into the twilight ahead, puzzled. The fire they saw was at least two miles away, but in the momentary shift of winds he caught just a hint of woodsmoke.
 
Billy Challis and Tuck Kelly rode into Outpost late that evening. Billy was itchy, like a hungry cat scentingfresh blood, and Tuck was looking for a little fun. They were both disappointed. There were no whores at Outpost just then. The usual little flock of soiled doves that sometimes hung around there had migrated up to Taos some months ago, and no new ones had come in yet.
There was a crowd, though, and it wasn't a crowd that any man—even Billy—wanted to fool with. There were some hard men in the bunch passing through on their way into the strip called No Man's Land, and the few hardscrabble river miners they saw were hard-eyed and close-knit. Even Billy Challis, mean and spoiling for trouble as he usually was, saw no percentage in bucking that kind of odds.
They held their tongues, had a meal, and spread their rolls in a cold smelly loft above a mule stable, apart from the other travelers staying over.
They did learn something, though. There had been another stranger at Outpost, just hours before them, who might have been that Colorado gunslick, Falcon MacCallister. He had been there and gone, but there was speculation about him. From his questions,it was clear he was looking for somebody.
“Whoever it is, I'd hate to be him,” a man named Dawson allowed. “What I've heard of that MacCallister,he's pure-dee hell in a handbasket when he's riled.”
Tuck had a notion—from the questions the man had asked—who he was looking for.
He was looking for
them.
The two gunnies were both stone sober when they rolled in for the night. They decided to double back in the morning—follow the north rim of the valley and maybe catch up with the wagon at the bend crossing. If they missed the trace, they would head straight for Wolf Creek, maybe be there when Asa Parker arrived. Asa Parker could decide what to do about MacCallister.
“And don't call him Asa Parker any more,” Tuck reminded Billy. “Remember, from now on we call him colonel! He's Colonel Amos DeWitt.”
SEVEN
Tad Sands was madder than Pete had ever seen him, and for three miles or more he took it out on everything in sight. The redhead rode like a madman,ignoring cuts and washes along the upper bank, pushing through thickets that he could as easilyhave gone around, not giving a damn what it cost the horse beneath him.
The sorrel was bleeding from flank and mouth. Its eyes were wild and its ears laid back, and Tad raked it savagely with his spurs as it shied away from a washout.
Pete Monte winced, despite himself. “You're gonna kill that horse if you don't ease up,” he called from behind. “How about—” He went silent as Tad swivelled half around in his saddle, glaring at him. The redhead's eyes were pale blue rage, and Pete's hand dropped instinctively to hover at his waist, his fingers touching the butt of his cross-draw Colt.
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 ...

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