High Wild Desert (7 page)

“I'm Corporal Malory,” the soldier said, facing Sam again. We saw dust rise off the canyon wall.” He gave a guarded smile. “I doubted you were pronghorn out this time of day. We came to take a look.” He nodded off toward the end of the canyon wall. “I recognized you straightaway. We were told you was up here somewhere. You know what we're doing here, I expect?”

Sam eased up a little when he saw the Apache appear from behind a stand of rock and come walking back, leading an army horse and a shorter desert barb.

“We fed them a horse,” Sam said. “We made it up the canyon wall while they decided what to do with it—eat it raw would be my best speculation, until they get somewhere safe enough to build a fire and dry it.”

“Wise move avoiding them, Ranger,” the corporal said as the Apache scout stopped beside him with their horses. “They've armed themselves, waylaid a stagecoach out of Farm Town Settlement. Got themselves a shotgun, two rifles, three or four handguns. But they're in poor want for bullets.”

Sam only nodded, not wanting to mention that he'd already figured as much.

The corporal walked closer to Adele and Cisco Lang, noting the handcuffs holding Lang to his saddle horn.

“Prisoner, huh?” he said, looking Lang up and down. “What did he do?”

“Yes, a prisoner,” Sam replied. But he left the other question unanswered.

“What did he do?” the corporal asked again.

“I heard you the first time,” Sam said coolly.

The corporal saw the Ranger's refusal to reply was deliberate. Catching on, he cleared his throat and looked back and forth, embarrassed.

“More of this badlands desert trash, I take it,” he said, attempting to save face. “If you want my opinion, Ranger, you'd do well to walk him out and put a bullet in his head.”

Lang glared at him; the Ranger just stared blankly. Adele looked away as if not hearing any of it.

“Thank you for your
opinion
,
Corporal,” Sam said in a stiff tone.

Lang noted the Apache scout's dark eyes showing a sharp flash of humor move across them.

“Well, then . . . ,” the corporal said, collecting himself after an icy silence. “Is there anything else we can do for you, Ranger?”

“No,” Sam said flatly. He continued his cold stare.

“In that case,” said the corporal, “my scout and I will ride down and sweep this valley floor to its end and meet the rest of our detail while they surround these bad actors.” He smiled haughtily and added, “I can assure you this trail will be safe by dark.”

Sam said flatly, “I'm hoping we'll be in New Delmar before nightfall.”

“I hope you will mention to the citizenry there that we are out here doing a striking job, protecting this frontier from these murdering red heathens.”

Sam didn't reply, but he slid a look at the Apache scout and saw that his blank eyes had gone back to some dark, guarded place.

As the two men took their horses by their reins and stepped over the edge of the canyon wall, leading the animals beside them, Sam shoved his rifle down into its boot, picked up his telescope and raised it to his eye again.

“Don't feel like you had to protect my personal business from him,” Lang said as Sam scanned a cloud of dust at the far end of the canyon floor.

“I didn't do it to protect your personal business,” Sam said as he spotted the band of renegades riding along, each of them with his shirt off, the sleeves tied around his neck, all supporting bloody bundles of horse meat resting on their laps. “You're
my business
as long as you're my prisoner.”

He scanned a thousand yards ahead of the renegades and saw the cavalry detail riding straight toward them. Without mentioning what was about to happen out there on the dusty desert floor, he shut the telescope between his gloved hands and turned to his stallion.

Within moments, the three had mounted and ridden on along the rim of the canyon in the direction of New Delmar. Ten minutes later they heard the cacophony of gunfire rumble up the canyon walls ahead of them and echo out across the high desert hills.

“There went Mexico,” Lang said, and they rode on.

Chapter 7

When the trail along the canyon spilled onto the stretch of rock and flatlands, the Ranger noted the gunfire ahead of them had stopped. In its place, a thousand yards beyond the Ranger, Lang and Adele, lay a low cloud of red trail dust and gray-black gun smoke. Out of the looming smoke a thin rising stream of red dust swirled toward them through a wall of towering buttes and chimney rock. A short distance behind the stream of trail dust, another wider, thicker stream began to rise. Shots began to ring out again.

“Good heavens,” said Adele Simpson, “what now?” She gave the Ranger a worried look.

“My guess is that one of the braves managed to get away,” Sam replied. He nodded out toward the distant trail. “I'd say right now the army is in hot pursuit.” He looked out for a moment toward the shooting, then said, “Come on, let's not get caught in their fire.” He gestured to Adele and Lang ahead of him, motioning toward a stand of rock twenty yards to their right.

Sam slid Black Pot to a halt at the foot of a jagged steep rock and handed Adele his reins and his Winchester. Telescope in hand, he stepped out of his saddle onto the rock and climbed five feet up onto a narrow ledge. Standing tall against the high rock, he stretched his telescope out and leveled it in the direction of the oncoming gunfire.

In the circle of the lens, he spotted a young Apache boy racing along the trail, riding the spindly-legged roan they had sacrificed, of all things.

“It looks like their stolen horses were in such poor shape,” Sam said, “they kept the roan and slaughtered one of their others.”

“No kidding?” Lang said from his saddle below.

Sam noted a detached sound to the outlaw's voice. He had already started to look down when he heard Adele cry out for his help. He saw Lang grab the rifle and try to wrench it free from her hands. She held on long enough for Sam to draw his big Colt and point it down toward Lang's head.

“Turn it loose, Cisco,” he said with finality, his finger on the trigger, ready to pull it.

With his hands cuffed to the saddle horn, Lang had little leverage to get the rifle free from the woman and aim it up at the Ranger.

Lang froze, but held on to the Winchester, weighing his chances.

“I'll kill her, Ranger,” Lang said, giving his best bluff.

“No, you won't,” Sam said. “It's a fool's play. I didn't leave a bullet in the chamber. Think how many bullets I'll put in the top of your head before you lever a round up and get a shot off.”

In the distance, gunshots still rang out along the trail. Lang gave it another second of thought.

“Damn it,” he growled, letting go of the Winchester. He stared with disgust at Adele. “You'd see me killed before you'd give me a gun and let me have a fighting chance?”

Adele jerked the rifle farther away from him as he slumped in his saddle.

“Anything you think I ever owed you, Cisco, you more than used up long ago,” she said. “I wish I had thought quick enough to put a bullet in you myself.” She heatedly swung the rifle around in her hands and and aimed it at Lang's chest.

Lang gave her a cool look.

“Go on, pull the trigger, Adele,” he said. “You heard the Ranger. There's no bullet in the chamber.”

Her hand tightened around the rifle. Sam saw where her anger was taking her.

“Adele, stop. Don't pull that trigger,” he called down in a grave tone. “There
is
a bullet in the chamber. You don't want his death on your hands.”

There is a bullet in the chamber?
Lang stared up at the Ranger with a puzzled, outraged expression.

“You—you bluffed me, Ranger?” he said with an air of shocked disbelief.

“Maybe,” Sam said, behind the pointed Colt.

“You did, you bluffed me,” said Lang, as if stunned by the impossibility of it.

“Imagine that,” Sam said. As he spoke, he stepped down the side of the rock, over into his saddle. Reaching over, he took the cocked rifle from Adele's hands, let the hammer down and laid it over his lap. He knew Lang was watching, wondering now whether or not he had been bluffing. Yet Sam did nothing to reveal himself. Lang was good at playing games, he decided. Let him figure it out for himself.

“Stick close to the rocks,” he said, offering no more on the matter. “This chase won't last long.”

As they advanced, the sound of gunfire in the near distance grew more intense, but only for less than two minutes. They rounded a turn in the trail, sticking close to the rocks flanking their right, and the shooting stopped all at once. A silent moment passed, followed by a single rifle shot as they moved into sight and saw two soldiers standing over the downed Apache youth lying lifeless on the ground.

“Look at this,” said Lang, seeing the roan still racing along toward them.

As the frightened horse drew closer and swung around them off the trail, the Ranger raced in beside it, grabbed its bridle and slowed it to a halt.

“Whoa, boy,” he said, sensing the roan give in, circle to a halt alongside him and the stallion. Feeling the firm hand checking it down and the safety of another of its kind beside it, the roan blew and snorted and shook itself out. “You come out of this better than I ever expected,” Sam said. He turned with the roan and led it over to Lang and the woman.

“Well, look at you,” Adele said to the winded roan. She reached over and patted its sweat-streaked head. Lang just sat watching, knowing that each mile they drew nearer to New Delmar, the lower his chances were of getting away.

Now the army,
Sam thought.

A hundred yards ahead through a drift of trail dust, Sam saw the two soldiers standing over the downed Apache watch closely as he followed Lang and the woman forward at an easy gait, leading the roan beside him. As the three approached, Sam watched a buckboard roll forward from among the rest of the detail, who sat back twenty yards watching from their saddles. The buckboard slid to a stop a few feet from the Apache lying dead on the ground. The driver jumped down wearing a long tan riding duster and a black bowler hat.

By the time the Ranger and his companions halted a few feet from the two soldiers, the driver had set up a tripod and attached a large camera atop it, pointed toward the two soldiers and the dead Indian.

“Hold your people back there for a moment, Ranger,” one of the soldiers called out to Sam in an air of importance. “We need to let this dust die down.”

Sam, Adele and Lang looked at each other.

“A photo grafter,” said Lang, “making tinplates of the Western Frontier—something they're doing for posterity.”

“So I've heard,” Sam said, watching intently.

“Posterity, my ass,” said Lang. He spit with contempt. “Who the hell cares about any of this?”

They sat watching the man in the duster and bowler hat run back and forth, fussing over the way the soldiers stood, adjusting their positions with a discriminating eye. At length the man ran, picked up a rock and placed it under the dead Apache's head to elevate it a little. A moment later, after returning behind his camera, a flash of powder rose from a flash pan in his hand and the soldiers relaxed.

Sam nudged Black Pot forward when one of the soldiers waved him in.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” said a young captain with dust-mantled shoulders and a dust-streaked beard. Beside him, a stout sergeant who had posed with his boot on the dead Apache's shoulder stepped over and reached out for the roan's bridle. But Sam pulled the roan away.

“The roan is ours,” Sam said. “We gave it up to the renegades earlier.”

“Then I suppose it wasn't yours after all, eh, Ranger?” said the sergeant.

Sam just looked at him, holding the roan back closer beside him.

“As you were, Sergeant Durbin,” said the captain, reading the Ranger's face differently than his sergeant. “The Ranger says it's his, he's welcome to it.” He looked up at Sam. “It's certainly not one of our army horses from San Carlos.”

The sergeant stepped back with a nod to higher authority.

The photographer backed away from his camera and looked the roan up and down.

“It would be good to have a photo of the horse this warrior was riding,” he said.

“What say you, Ranger?” the captain asked, being diplomatic.

“Certainly, Captain,” said Sam. “It is the horse he was riding when you caught him.” As he spoke and gave the roan over to the photographer, he looked down at the face of the dead Apache, a bullet hole through his forehead from close range. “I wouldn't call this young fellow a warrior, though,” he offered.

“Indeed?” said the captain. “What, then, would you call him, Ranger? He and his bloody band have massacred four white settlers in as many days.”

Sam looked down from his saddle into the back of the buckboard at the blank faces of the other dead Apaches piled in side by side. A shirt stuffed with bloody horse meat still hung around one man's neck, tied by its sleeves.

“I understand, Captain,” he said, realizing there was no use commenting any further on the issue.

“Good, then,” said the captain. “As you can see, our job is nearly finished here, Ranger. As soon as my scouts report in, we'll be riding back to San Carlos. You and your party are welcome to ride with us as far as New Delmar.”

“I had planned on being in New Delmar tonight,” Sam said, pausing to consider the captain's offer.

“And so we will, Ranger,” the captain said. “We'll have our evening meal first, then ride on tonight by the light of the moon. We'll arrive there in the morning, rested and fed.”

Sam noticed the look of disappointment in Lang's eyes. Riding with the army gave him little hope to make a getaway.

“Obliged, Captain,” Sam said. “I'd like to take you up on your offer. First, I need to ride back into the canyon and collect the lady's belongings we had to leave beside the trail.”

“Nonsense, Ranger,” said the captain. “I'll send some men to fetch the lady's belongings.”

“We're most grateful, Captain,” Sam said. “It would be good to relax some, have more than one set of eyes on my prisoner here.”

“I'll post two guards around him, Ranger,” the captain said. “You may doze in your saddle all the way to New Delmar—travel by compliments of the U.S. Army.”

The Ranger gave Lang a thin smile, then turned back to the captain.

“Much obliged, Captain,” he said.

“All ready here, Captain,” the photographer called out, having the roan stand over the dead Apache, the sergeant holding its reins.

“If you'll excuse me, Ranger,” the captain said with a smile. “History calls on us to declare ourselves.”

Sam only nodded and backed his stallion out of their way.

•   •   •

Inside the Number Five Saloon, a gambler named Ace Myers shoved his chair back from the table and stood up into an angle of morning sunlight breaking through a dusty window. He looked down at Oldham Coyle, who was lying facedown on the battered tabletop, a few chips scattered around him. A half-empty bottle of rye stood at Coyle's elbow.

“None of my business, mister,” the gambler said to Dave Coyle, who stood beside his sleeping brother, “but you ought to get him out of here while he's still wearing a shirt and britches. He hasn't won a hand since yesterday.”

“You're right,” Dave said. “It's none of your
damned
business.” He took Oldham by his shoulder and shook him roughly. “Wake up, Oldham,” he said in a loud voice close to his brother's ear. “It's all over.”

Oldham stirred and lifted his head. A poker chip stuck to his cheek and followed him up. It fell as he swung his head back and forth and tried to focus his eyes, though an indentation of the chip showed on his face.

“What's over?” he asked in a groggy voice.

Myers stifled a laugh, already seeing that the least remark could set off trouble. He shrugged and folded a stack of dollars the dealer had given him for cashing in his chips. Handing the dealer a gold coin large enough to bring a smile to his tired face, he turned to leave.

“Wait!” said Oldham, seeing him go. “I'm still in.” He raked his hands around desperately on the tabletop gathering his few remaining chips.

Ace Myers slowed a little and looked back over his shoulder, but noting the expression on Dave Coyle's face, he decided it best to keep walking. The dealer rose and stood back a step, watching.

“You're not in, Oldham, you're out,” Dave said to his brother, shaking him harder. “Look at you. You've burned yourself up, all this rye, this damned Mexican powder.” He swung a hand and slapped a small leather bag of cocaine off the table onto the floor. Powder billowed. “You've lost all your money.”

“No! No, I haven't,” Oldham said. “You're wrong! I've got more money upstairs.” He rose and walked unsteadily across the floor.