Cry of Eagles (3 page)

Falcon finally managed to find a small table against the wall that was unoccupied and settled in, sitting facing the crowd out of habit even though he, along with everyone else in the room, was unarmed.

After a while, Doc and Wyatt joined him at his table. Falcon leaned forward and put his face near theirs, so no one else could hear him. “Wyatt, I just heard something you need to know.”

He told them of the conversation he'd overheard between Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury.

Wyatt sat there a moment, his face set and grim. Finally, he smiled slightly. “Well, I guess I knew this was coming. It's time to put a stop to this feud, once and for all.”

He stood up and shook Falcon's hand. “Thanks for the information, Falcon. I'm much obliged to you.”

“What are you going to do, Wyatt?”

Wyatt took a deep breath. “Stick around until tomorrow afternoon and you'll see ... the entire town will see.”

October 21 was a clear, chilly day without a cloud in the sky over Tombstone. Falcon was finishing lunch at Campbell and Hatch's Saloon when, through the window onto Main Street, he saw Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Doc Holliday come out of the marshal's office. As the four men walked down the street, all dressed in long dusters over their suits, he noticed Doc put a shotgun under his coat, keeping it out of sight.

Falcon threw a couple of banknotes on the table, grabbed his hat, and strolled outside, staying well behind the Earps and Doc Holliday on the boardwalk. He was curious to see how they would handle the threat he'd overheard the night before.

They turned left on Fourth Street, toward the OK Corral, walking abreast in the middle of the street. Falcon stepped around the corner, and he could see Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury out in front of the corral at the corner of Third and Fremont Streets, standing next to their horses.

When Wyatt noticed the men were all wearing sidearms, he called out, “You boys surrender your weapons, or you're under arrest.”

Sheriff Behan hurried up to the Earps, saying, “It's all right. They promised me they weren't gonna stay armed.”

Virgil elbowed the sheriff aside and continued walking toward the four cowboys wearing red sashes. “We don't want any trouble,” he said. “Throw down your guns.”

Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury drew their guns, and Doc shot Billy through the chest, the sharp report of a scattergun echoing up and down Fremont. Then he turned his shotgun on Tom and put a double load of buckshot into his chest, killing him instantly, dropping him in his tracks.

Ike screamed, “Don't shoot, don't shoot!” and began to run down the street. Wyatt allowed him to pass, but Doc fired twice at him, missing both times.

As Ike ran, his brother Billy tried to fire a last few shots before he died. Camillus Fry, the proprietor of a photo studio nearby, raced over and took his pistol away from him.

Frank shot at Doc, but the bullet hit Doc's holster and ricochetted into his hip, producing a minor wound. Doc whirled and fired his Colt, hitting Frank in the forehead as the Earps all opened fire.

In less than thirty seconds, Billy, Frank, and Tom lay dead. Virgil had a bullet through his leg, and Morgan was wounded in both shoulders. Wyatt was the only one unscathed by the fusillade of bullets flying up and down the street.

As Falcon watched the melee, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye from the alley before him. Johnny Ringo was in the shadows, aiming a rifle at the Earps.

Falcon pulled his derringer from his boot and stepped up behind Ringo, placing the double-barrel against the back of his head. “I don't think I'd do that, if I were you,” he said in a low voice.

Ringo dropped the gun and raised his hands.

Falcon hesitated, then said, “Get on your horse and get out of town. There's been enough killing here today.”

Ringo glanced back, hatred in his eyes, then sprinted down the alley toward his horse and jumped into the saddle, spurring his mount into a gallop without looking back.

Falcon put his derringer back in his boot and went to help get the wounded Earps to a doctor.

Doc pulled out a silver flask, calmly took a deep swig, and announced that what medical care he needed Kate Elder could provide. He walked off toward his room over the photography shop, whistling a tune Falcon thought he recognized as “Dixie.”

Naiche, Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, watched the tiny settler's cabin from mottled shade beneath a gnarled pinyon pine, resting his rifle atop the high withers of his starving sorrel pony. Behind him, below the rim of the ridge, ten warriors sat on their ponies, awaiting his signal.

Naiche was worried. He counted four white-eyes moving about the cabin and barns near the spring, and if they had repeating rifles an attack would be costly. Since leading their escape from Fort Thomas and the Indian agency he'd been careful to avoid army patrols and all other white men traveling in large numbers. Now the Dragoon Mountains, in what the white-eyes called Arizona Territory, was crawling with soldiers looking for Naiche's half-brother, sworn enemy of the white Star Chief. In the tongue of the People he was called Gokaleh. Now most Apaches called him by his white man's name ... Geronimo ... after the attack on a Mexican village on the day of the Feast of Saint Jerome—Santo Geronimo in Spanish—when Geronimo began his bloody war on all who settled traditional Apache lands in Mexico or the southwestern United States.

Chokole rode her pony quietly to a spot near the rump of Naiche's sorrel. She was a woman warrior, rare among the Apache bands, chosen for her bravery and marksmanship with a rifle. She had taken many white and Mexican scalps. “Why do we wait, Naiche?” she whispered, the sound of her voice lost on a breath of hot desert wind.

“There are four white-eyes men. If they have Winchester rifles, the price for taking their food and livestock will come high.”

“Will we wait for the night?” Chokole asked, as her pinto stamped a hoof to rid its leg of a stinging horsefly.

“I will watch them a longer time, until the shadows come to hide our approach.” Naiche often doubted his wisdom in the ways of war, for he was not like his brother, a master of illusion and disguise who always caught an enemy by surprise. Naiche's thirst for blood often made him reckless. He longed to hear the screams of the wounded and dying enemy, see the sight of blood, hear the sound of a scalp being torn from an enemy's skull. Waiting to enter a fight was hard.

“As you wish, Naiche,” the hard-twisted Apache woman said, cradling her rusted Spencer carbine in the crook of a thin brown arm. Two Colt pistols were belted to her bony waist, and she bore battle scars all over her flesh from knife and bullet wounds. “I will tell the others.”

She turned her pony with a plaited rawhide jaw rein and rode silently off the rocky ridge.

Naiche glanced at the sky. There would be no moon tonight, a sign from the Four Spirits that they approved of his attack on the cabin in darkness, hiding his warriors' approach. Thus he decided to wait, for it was unwise to ignore a sign from the Spirits, bad medicine that could cause their attack to fail, or cost them many lives.

* * *

With their ponies tethered in a rocky ravine, Chokole led them toward the cabin on foot, then later on her hands and knees through tangles of creosote brush, until finally she went down on her belly to crawl, slithering like a snake around clumps of cactus and creosote stalks, making no sound. Naiche crawled in her wake while the others were scattered, forming a deadly circle around a crude pinyon log cabin with windows alight. The scent of smoke came from its chimney. In pole corrals behind the cabin a half dozen horses nibbled at mounds of hay. Two mules were in a separate corral. In another pen several small calves settled down for the night beneath the shadow cast by a thatched roof of pine limbs and mud. He could almost taste the roasted mule meat on his tongue now at the feast they would have to celebrate the success of their raid.

Naiche heard Taza and two more warriors off to his left, a sound only a trained Apache ear could hear. The circle was almost complete around the settlers cabin. Very soon, the time for killing and scalping would begin.

A door into the cabin opened when a dog barked. Golden lamplight spilled out onto the hard-packed ground, framing the outline of a man with a rifle. It was too much for Naiche to resist, a perfect shot at an enemy even though the others were still inside.

Very softly, covering the cocking mechanism with his palm, he thumbed back the hammer on his Spencer and took careful aim. Chokole heard the faint sound and glanced over her shoulder, then she shook her head, asking him to wait until they were closer to the cabin under the cover of the creosote bushes.

Naiche ignored her, his blood coursing through him in rapid bursts, thinking about the scream of a dying man when his bullet passed through the white man's heart. Sighting carefully along the barrel until he was certain he could not miss, he feathered the trigger gently.

The bang of his Spencer crackled through the night silence blanketing barren mountains around the cabin. The man in the door frame let out a yelp and dropped his rifle, bending over to clutch his belly as his wail grew louder. He staggered forward a half-step when another rifle exploded from the brush, ripping open one side of his skull in a shower of blood, bone, and plugs of his hair.

Another figure dashed to the doorway with a rifle. Chokole was ready. Her gun roared while Naiche sent another cartridge rattling into the firing chamber of his rifle. In the same instant three more guns erupted from scattered positions near the front of the cabin.

The second white man screamed the cry of a young man as he sank to his knees without firing a shot. He let his rifle fall and reached for his throat, making strangling noises before he fell over on his face.

Two more white-eyes foolishly rushed outside, directly into the line of fire from Naiche's warriors. Guns banged at them from the creosote bushes.

One slender man went spinning around, slammed into the wall of the cabin by force of impact from a lead slug. The other fell back into the cabin. When he landed, a thundering roar from his shotgun sent bits of dried mud and sticks flying from the roof.

“Ayiiii!” Chokole cried, rising up in a crouch to rush the door. Others let out the Apache war cry as Naiche began running behind Chokole toward the cabin.

He could hear the white women's screams, and the sound was like sweet music to his ears. He would enjoy torturing the survivors, even the women, for their shrill cries satisfied some inner need he'd learned during his training as a warrior under the greatest of all Apache war chiefs, Cochise.

* * *

A boy of less than sixteen years lay on the blood-soaked dirt floor of the cabin, whimpering, holding a mortal wound in his side, blood spilling between his tightly clasped fingers. Naiche stood over him, his knife poised about the white-eye's skull.

In the few words of the white man's tongue he'd learned at Fort Thomas while he was a prisoner there, he spat, “This Apache land!”

One slashing sweep of his knife blade passed across the scalp of the boy while Naiche held an iron grip on his yellow hair. The sound of tearing flesh, of a razor-sharp blade passing across bone, was quickly drowned out by a scream so loud it filled the cabin walls. Blood sprayed from the torn scalp lock as Naiche held it high, showing it to Chokole and the others before he shook the blood from it.

Across the room, Taza sliced off the scalp of a whimpering girl with one swift motion. She shrieked as Taza shook blood off her torn scalp so that she was covered with crimson droplets from head to toe, as though she'd been outside in a red rain.

Then Taza drove his knife into her belly, and the girl passed out. The blade opened her stomach with ease. With his free hand he pulled the white girl's intestines and organs through the wound, making a grisly popping sound, scattering coils of purple intestine across the floor. Taza held the liver in one fist, squeezing blood and bile from it. Then he let out a war whoop and threw it against the cabin wall.

Chokole knelt over an older man whose chest still rose and fell slowly. With practiced skill she cut off his eyelids so it appeared he was staring at her, even though pain had rendered him unconscious.

Otoe, a seasoned warrior of many battles with the bluecoat soldiers, pulled another dying white man by his hair over to the fireplace, where an iron pot held boiling beans. He swung the pot hook out of the way quickly, so as not to burn his hands, for like Naiche and the others he was hungry, and the beans would be eaten as soon as the killing was finished.

Otoe dropped the unconscious white man's head into the hot coals and flames. He looked over at Naiche and grinned as the man's hair and face burst into flame, evoking a moan from what was left of the dying man. In Apache he said, “We will eat the brain of our enemy along with his pot of beans.”

“It is good,” Naiche muttered, searching the cabin floor for a final victim.

A soft groan from outside reminded him of the boy who fell at the base of the cabin wall. He strolled through the doorway, his knife tip dripping blood, to slice the scalp from the last of the enemy.

The white boy was conscious, watching him as he seized a fistful of his curly blond hair.

“No, please no!” the boy yelled.

Naiche's wicked grin was his only reply as he swept his blade across the wounded boy's forehead. Blood squirted all over Naiche's arms and hands, and the scent of it, even the feel of it, was good. The warm liquid steamed in the chilly night air as he held his hands up to the sky and gave a harsh cry of joy.

Chokole came outside. “All are dead,” she said in the softest of voices, with no hint of the ferocity revealed by her actions only minutes before. “These white-eyes are like all the others. They die like cowards, screaming, trying to hide under their wooden beds. Geronimo speaks truth when he tells us the white-eyes have no stomach for fighting. We will drive them from our lands when Geronimo gathers more warriors and guns.”

It was true, Naiche thought as he shook the bloody scalp dry and hooked it through his belt. He spoke to Chokole in the darkness while the others began carrying flour and sugar and other foodstuffs outside to be loaded on the settler's horses and mules. “The repeating guns are what make the white soldiers strong,” he began. “When we raid the fort and take these guns for our own, the bluecoats will stand no chance against us. They are not brave men. Their repeating rifles give them the strength of ten men. We must have Winchesters and many bullets, and more brave warriors who are not afraid to slip away from the reservation to follow us in a fight to defeat the enemy. As we speak, Isa is moving from one lodge to another at the fort, talking to warriors who want freedom, to live in the old ways. Isa promises many will follow him, and they will bring repeating rifles and bullets into the Dragoons to our secret place.”

“It will be good,” Chokole agreed. “With many-shoot guns, we will defeat these white-skinned cowards easily.”

Naiche watched Taza bring haltered mules and horses from the corrals behind the cabin. “Do not forget Geronimo will return with warriors hiding in the Sierra Madres in Mexico, and he will steal many strong ponies from the Yaquis so our movements will be swift.”

Otoe came to the cabin door to speak to Naiche. His arms and chest were drenched in blood. “Let us eat the white man's beans, for I am very hungry.”

Naiche pointed to the animals being taken from the sheds and corrals. “As soon as everything is lashed to the horses. We must be ready to escape quickly if the soldiers come. When all is finished, we eat. Chokole and I will gather the white mens' guns and ammunition. One is a Winchester, a gift from the Great Spirit. With even one repeating rifle, we will kill many more of the enemy until Isa comes to the mountains with more warriors and Winchesters.”

Otoe gave what might pass for a smile. “It is good, Naiche, to kill our enemies again. For too long we have been like dogs, kept in cages at the fort. My heart is happy to be free, killing the whites who have driven us from our lands.”

Naiche turned toward the dark outlines of the Dragoons high above the settlement. “Very soon, the land will be ours again. We will take it back and cover Apacheria with the blood of those who took it from us.”

“The Spirits have answered Geronimo's prayers,” Chokole said with a glance toward the sky.

“It is not only his prayers the Spirits hear. When Geronimo kills, the cries of his dying white enemies reach the Moon, the Winds, Mother Earth, and the Sun. It is his courage the Spirits reward.”

“As well as our own,” Chokole said.

Naiche stared into her black eyes. “As well as our own, my warrior woman. We have only begun to fight.”