Longarm and the War Clouds (5 page)

Four days later, in the hot desert dusk, Magpie glanced over to where Longarm and War Cloud lay back against their saddles, hats tipped over their eyes. Apparently believing both men were asleep, the young Apache princess let her calico blouse slip down off her shoulders.

However, Longarm was not asleep.

He'd awakened when the girl had risen from her bedroll, just after the sun had gone down. In the summer in the desert Southwest, travelers rode by night, especially when there was a moon, as there was now. That way said travelers spared themselves as well as their mounts from the merciless sun.

Longarm had been sleeping with the intention of rising with the moon, but Magpie had risen first.

The girl's stirring had awakened Longarm. Apparently, she had decided to refresh herself at the
tinaja,
the small stone tank tucked away in this narrow, rocky arroyo in which they'd set up camp earlier that morning.

The tank was fed by a trickle of spring water. Narrowing one eye as he stared out from beneath his down-canted hat, Longarm saw the girl drop to her knees on the small pool's opposite side, facing him. She glanced up once more, looking toward him.

He closed his eye.

He felt properly chagrined, and more than a little childish, but he didn't want to interrupt the girl's ministrations. Also, the boy inside him and in all men couldn't help wanting to sneak a proscribed peek at her wares.

She was awfully set up, after all. High-busted and long-legged, and though her father had claimed she'd never been with a man, she was one of the most erotically charged young women Longarm had ever known. Aside from Cynthia Larimer, of course . . .

His eyes closed beneath his hat brim, Longarm heard the faint tinkle of dripping water. He opened his eye and peered out from beneath his hat at the girl kneeling on the other side of the pool. She'd slid her doeskin dress and her calico blouse down to her waist and was slowly, quietly cupping water to her chest.

Longarm's conscience forced him to close his eyes. The little boy in him, however, castigated his more mature self for his discretion. “Ah, go ahead and peek,” the voice said. “What can it hurt?”

The urgings of his grown-up loins were even more convincing.

Shamefully, he opened his right eye again. Magpie had removed her hair from its customary twin braids, and her long, stygian tresses hung forward over her shoulders as she cupped water in her right hand and raised that hand to her left breast.

Longarm could catch only a glimpse of the precious orb in the dim light and through the thin, jostling screen of her hair, but what he saw prodded his loins with a sharp, invisible knife. As she dipped her other hand in the water and brought it up to rub the cool, refreshing liquid across her other breast, she straightened her back and lifted her chin.

Her hair slid back slightly to hang straight down her sides, nearly to her belly, completely exposing her breasts that stood up proudly against her chest. They were slightly oblong and firm, with large, alluringly dark areolas and red-brown nipples that appeared slightly distended and pointed a little to each side.

Magpie lifted her chin higher, crossing her arms on her chest and cupping her breasts in each hand. She rolled the nipples between her thumbs and index fingers, and gave a barely audible groan.

Longarm heard a grunt rise up from around the hard knot in his throat. The girl dropped her chin quickly to stare across the water at him, flattening her hands out on her breasts, covering them. Longarm squeezed his eyes closed and tensed.

He pricked his ears, listening.

Had she heard him grunt?

He lay there, his senses attuned, keeping both eyes squeezed shut. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. From across the spring pool he heard a faint rustling sound, as though the girl was covering herself. He heard the faint crackling of her moccasins on the sand around the pool.

The crackling grew louder.

Then it stopped.

Longarm sensed the girl standing over him. Feigning sleep, he kept his face muscles relaxed beneath the hat and tried very hard to keep his breaths long and even.

“You damn fool,” his more mature self silently scolded the devilish child inside him.

He steeled himself to receive a kick. None came. He felt the skin above the bridge of his nose furrow, and he was about to open his eyes, but then he kept them closed when he felt a cool drop of water land on his closed lips. Another cool drop landed on the tip of his nose.

Water from the girl's hair, no doubt.

The notion caused his trouser snake to stir in its lair, but he kept his eyes closed despite his nearly overwhelming desire to open them and see just what in the hell she was doing up there.

At the same time he remembered War Cloud's admonition to stay away from her unless he wanted his dick to turn black and fall off. Longarm hadn't taken the warning literally, but part of him couldn't help wondering about it just enough to make Magpie all the more alluring.

All the more alluring for being forbidding.

When he heard the soft crackling of sand again, he opened his eye. She was walking away from him. She sat down by her gear about ten feet to his right, and crossed her legs Indian-fashion, and began plaiting her hair. Her blouse was buttoned, and she'd drawn her dress up to her shoulders.

She looked at him, and he thought he saw a smug little smile quirk her lips that were normally a knife slash across her beautiful face. Longarm reached up and shoved his hat back off his forehead. He sat up with a grunt, as though just waking.

“Oh, you up, Magpie?” he said, stretching.

The girl said nothing. She merely continued to braid her hair while watching him blandly though with what he detected as a knowing light in her molasses-dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“Shoulda woke me,” Longarm told the girl, seeing the half-moon angling up over the toothy ridges silhouetted against the soft, spruce-green, southeastern sky. He reached over to his left and nudged War Cloud, still snoring beneath his black, felt, bullet-crowned hat.

“Come on, amigo. Rise an' shine—we're burnin' moonlight.”

Several hours later, not long before dawn, they were following an old freight road through the broad, greasewood stippled valley between the Chiricahua Mountains on the left and the Dragoons on the right. War Cloud drew back on the reins of the grulla he'd requisitioned at Fort Dryer in New Mexico, and sat his saddle tensely.

Longarm, riding to the scout's left, also drew rein. Magpie stopped her own buckskin behind the two men.

Longarm glanced at War Cloud and said quietly, “What is it, amigo?”

“Do you feel it?”

“Them long fingernails been raking the back of my neck for the last ten minutes—that what you're talkin' about?”

War Cloud stared straight ahead toward a low, boulder-strewn ridgeline sitting perpendicular to the trail, about fifty yards ahead. The trail had been blasted through the middle of the outcropping, forming a gray notch straight ahead in the moon-washed, purple ridge.

Longarm looked around, as did War Cloud.

The night was eerily quiet. The moon was quartering low in the northwest, casting an eerie, pearl light from behind Longarm's right shoulder and over the scattered boulders, mesquites, saguaros, and greasewood clumps. Stars flickered like distant campfires.

There was not a breath of breeze stirring the refreshingly cool desert air.

A lone coyote had been baying for the past fifteen minutes.

Nearly straight ahead, a pinprick of light flashed.

“Ambush!”
Longarm shouted, reaching forward to yank his Winchester '73 from the scabbard strapped over the right stirrup of his McClellan saddle.

As the bullet screeched off a rock about two feet ahead on his left, the rifle's distant crackle reached his ears. He leaped out of his saddle, as his two trail mates did likewise, and slammed his rifle's butt against the coyote dun's left hip, sending the horse galloping off to the right with the others, out of the line of fire.

Another rifle flashed just right of the first bushwhacker's gun. As the bullet plumed dust in front of him, Longarm dropped to a knee in the trail, raised his rifle, and squeezed off four quick rounds at the ridge.

War Cloud, crouched to Longarm's right, did the same, and when his reports stopped echoing, Longarm ran off the left side of the trail, yelling, “I'm goin' in!”

Behind him, he heard War Cloud shout in his Coyotero tongue at Magpie. Longarm knew enough of the language to know he'd told the girl to stay with the horses, so they wouldn't run far. Then he glimpsed War Cloud dashing through the desert and paralleling Longarm off the trail's right side, heading for the ridge.

The bushwhackers opened up with their rifles but they obviously couldn't see the two men charging toward them, weaving separate courses around the wiry brown brush clumps, cholla cactus patches, and boulders. Their slugs struck wild, spanging wickedly off rocks or snapping branches.

Running hard, Longarm gained the base of the ridge and didn't slow his pace much as he lunged up the side, loosing sand and gravel in his wake. One of the rifles flashed ahead and on his right, three bullets kicking up gravel well behind him. The shooter could now hear him, maybe see his shadow, but he couldn't track him.

Longarm skipped off several boulders, leaped a low barrel cactus, and skipped off another boulder as he reached the razorback ridge between a one-armed saguaro on his left and a horse-sized and -shaped chunk of rock on his right. He pressed his shoulder to the side of the boulder, thumbing back his rifle hammer.

Breath raked in and out of his lungs from the hard climb. He steadied his hands on his rifle. An eerie silence had fallen in the wake of the shooting. Longarm could sense the tension in the bushwhackers. They knew they'd been run up on; they just didn't know where the runners were.

Longarm consciously slowed his breathing, pricking his ears.

Gravel crackled somewhere ahead and right, along the crest of the ridge he was on. One of the shooters was moving toward him.

He crouched low, took one step forward, and looked around behind the boulder. A shadow moved down the slope and right. Starlight glistened off a rifle barrel. Longarm saw a sombrero silhouetted against the sky. The bushwhacker saw him at the same time and jerked his rifle up.

Longarm aimed and fired.

The man screamed. His own rifle crashed, lapping flames at a slant toward the ground. The ricochet plowed into the end of the boulder near Longarm as the man in the sombrero screamed
“Mierda!”
and staggered backward down the slope, spurs chinging.

A rifle barked farther right along the ridge, and Longarm pumped a fresh cartridge into his own Winchester but held fire when an answering flash and belch evoked a grunt and sent more spurs to ringing raucously.

Longarm called, “War Cloud?”

“Here, Custis,” came the Indian's deep voice.

A half second later, another rifle flashed out of the darkness on the downslope ahead of Longarm and on his left—about forty yards away. The bullet burned a line across the lawman's left cheek. He wheeled and, crouching, gritting his teeth, emptied his Winchester, the spent cartridges clinging off the boulder behind him.

He lowered the gun and ran down the slope, following a path that the moon- and starlight revealed between brush clumps and rocks. Ahead, he saw the jostling shadow of the man he'd opened up on moving away. The closer Longarm got to the gent, the clearer the man's grunts and groans became as he ran in the opposite direction. His gait grew more and more shambling.

Finally, he stopped and half fell against a rock.

“Hold it!” Longarm shouted, palming his Colt.

He wanted the man alive. He wanted to know who the shooters were and what had prompted the ambush.

“Fuck you, you son of a bitch!” the man screamed.

Light flashed off the barrel of the rifle that the hombre was swinging toward Longarm. The lawman extended his Colt Frontier and hurled two chunks of .44-caliber lead at the dead center of the man. The bullets punched him straight back. He dropped his rifle and flailed at the rock to no avail.

He piled up on the ground beyond it with a shrill cry. There were wild snapping sounds. The man groaned, gasped frantically. When Longarm reached the wounded bushwhacker, he saw what the commotion had been. The man had fallen into a sprawling cholla and been impaled by a thousand of the jumping cactus's porcupine-like quills.

He lay quivering as he died, blood glistening darkly in the moonlight.

War Cloud said in a low, even, unalarmed voice that rang clear in the quiet night, “You all right over there, brother?”

“Better than this poor son of a bitch.”

“You better come over and look at this, brother,” said War Cloud.

“What's that?”

“We're rich men, Custis.”

Longarm saw a faint glow in the rocks off to his right, in the direction from which War Cloud's voice had come. Leaving the dead man where he lay on the cholla, he made his way across the shoulder of the slope until he was looking down into a hollow cut in the rock-strewn hillside.

In the hollow, by the low fire burning there with a coffeepot sitting inside the stone ring and on a flat rock to stay warm, War Cloud stood, looking up at Longarm. The Indian's lined face was creased with one of his devilish grins.

He held his Spencer repeater out and down, indicating the pair of saddlebags near the fire. Longarm knew what he'd find inside the bags even before he skipped rocks down into the hollow and flipped one of the flaps back. He stared down into the pouch stuffed with packets of banded greenbacks and cream-colored burlap sacks. Longarm plucked one of the small sacks up out of the pouch. Coins clinked inside. He hefted it in his hand.

“Gold, I'd say.”

“We could head for Frisco, brother,” War Cloud said. “I hear the women are pretty there.” He grinned again, betraying the fact he was joshing. Longarm had never known a more honest or honorable man than War Cloud.

“Must be several thousand dollars in these bags,” Longarm said, glancing into the other pouch. “That'd buy a lot of whiskey and women, all right.”

“A holdup,” War Cloud said. “We almost run up on a pack of curly wolves, Custis. Probably thought we were part of some posse after them.”

Longarm nodded. “We'll take the money along to . . .”

He let his voice trail off as the clacking of hooves rose just south of his and War Cloud's position, and lower. He and the Apache scout walked over to stand on the lip of the cut through which the trail threaded.

Magpie was coming along the trail on her buckskin, trailing War Cloud's grulla and Longarm's dun by the horses' reins. She held one of her revolvers in the same hand in which she held her own reins and brought the buckskin to a sudden halt when her wary gaze found her father and Longarm standing over her.

War Cloud told the girl in Apache that all was well and for her to bring the horses over to where the outlaws' three mounts were picketed in some mesquites farther down the slope. Then Longarm and War Cloud started to turn back to the campfire. They both stopped and turned back to the cut at the same time, neither saying anything as they stood quietly, pricking their ears.

From farther off along the trail, on the other side of the cut through the razorback ridge, the clamor of many hooves rose. A good-sized band of riders was heading toward the cut.

Longarm and War Cloud shared a look.

The Indian said, “More curly wolves, maybe, eh?”

“Maybe. Or the posse after them.” Longarm started leaping boulders as he dropped down into the cut. “Only one way to find out.”

He leaped from the last boulder to the trail. War Cloud followed him down. The two men jogged back along the cut through the ridge, the high walls rising around them to block out the moon and the stars. Ahead, the rataplan of the oncoming riders grew quickly.

War Cloud and Longarm did not have to speak to know the other's intentions. They'd worked together enough in the past and, while belonging to separate races, were cut enough from the same cloth to know instinctively how to work together without a lot of chinning about it.

As they left the cut and walked out onto the flat, Longarm moved off the trail's left side while War Cloud slipped off to the right. Longarm dropped down behind a twisted mesquite, and doffed his hat to make his shadow smaller. The pearl light of dawn was beginning to leech into the sky, making both him and War Cloud easier to see. On the other side of the trail, War Cloud crouched behind a boulder, holding his Spencer repeater up high across his chest.

The drumming of the riders' hooves continued. Staring along his back trail, Longarm saw the shifting shadows as the group drew closer. Even with the gradually intensifying dawn light, it was impossible to see how many riders were along the trail. They were a shifting, gray-purple mass as they approached Longarm and War Cloud, and the cut just beyond.

Longarm didn't so much as see or hear as he sensed movement behind him. He glanced over his left shoulder to see Magpie move stealthily off the trail, to pass behind him and drop down behind another mesquite to his left. The girl hadn't made a sound. She had not looked at Longarm as she slipped away from the trail, and she did not look at him now.

An odd one, that girl. But while she rarely made eye contact with Longarm, he sensed that she was keeping an eye on him, just the same . . .

Puzzling.

Longarm gave his attention to the trail. He frowned. The clomping of the hooves had stopped about sixty yards away. He could see the clumped riders as a vague, purple mass. The group had probably heard the gunfire. Whoever they were, they were wisely wary.

As the sun continued to rise toward the horizon and more light bled into the eastern sky, he could make out what he thought was gold trim on the blue hat of the lead rider. Also, farther back in the group what appeared to be a guidon buffeted gently.

A company flag?

Longarm glanced at War Cloud. The scout glanced back at him. Silently, they agreed to hold their positions.

Voices sounded in conferring tones. Then one of the group separated from the others and came on ahead on what appeared an army bay. The lone rider came on slowly, hooves thudding softly in the well-churned dust of the trail. When Longarm made out the sergeant's chevrons on the sleeves of the soldier's blue tunic, the lawman rose to stand beside the mesquite while War Cloud and Magpie held their positions.

“That's far enough, Sergeant,” Longarm said.

The soldier reined his bay up sharply about twenty yards back along the trail. The man's startled horse sidestepped and blew, rippling its withers and shaking its head.

The man in the saddle was burly. He wore a leather-billed forage hat and suspenders over his blue cavalry tunic.

The lawman could see the man's eyes flash wildly beneath the brim of his cap. Just as the sergeant began to lower the carbine he'd been holding barrel up on a stout thigh, Longarm said, “Easy, soldier. I'm a deputy United States marshal. The men you're after are dead and the loot is secure.”

Longarm set his rifle on his shoulder, making no quick movements in case the sergeant was trigger-happy, and stepped out onto the trail. “If it's them you're after, I mean,” he added.

The sergeant looked at him askance and flexed his yellow-gloved hand around the neck of his army-issue Spencer repeater. “We're after three yellow-bellied scalawags, true enough,” the man said in a deep, slightly raspy voice. “But how do I know you ain't . . . ?”

“Is that ole Tom Fitzpatrick I hear bellyachin' up there on that army bay, Custis?” War Cloud stepped out onto the trail, his own Spencer repeater resting on his shoulder.

Longarm glanced at the scout, who looked up at the sergeant, white teeth showing between his parted, upswept lips.

“Well, jumpin' Jehoshaphat,” sputtered the sergeant, who appeared to be in his late thirties, early forties. “If it ain't that old dog eater, War Cloud his own mangy self!”

The sergeant hipped around in his saddle and bellowed at the group behind him, “Come on in, Captain! It's all clear—got us a federal lawman and an old friend here!”

The sergeant reached forward to shove his carbine into its saddle boot and then crawled heavily out of the saddle. He walked up to War Cloud, grinning broadly, and pumping the Indian's outstretched hand. “Good to see you, kid. What in the hell brings you back to this next of the woods, and how in the hell did you run down them curly wolves for us? Two days ago they robbed the stage out of Tombstone, an' we finally cut their trail yesterday afternoon.”

Fitzpatrick's eyes widened. He shifted his gaze between Longarm and War Cloud, and then pointed at both men, saying, “Oh, wait a minute. By thunder, I bet you're both here to . . .” He let his voice trail off, and then, as the rest of his patrol rode on up behind him, he shielded his mouth with his left hand as he whispered, “Not to speak of it in front of the enlisted men. Just the captain.”

The sergeant shook his head darkly, emphasizing that the subject shouldn't be blabbered out.

“What do we have here, Sergeant?” asked the lead rider, a rangy, mustached young man with captain's bars on the shoulders of his dark blue uniform blouse.

He frowned beneath the brim of his blue kepi whose left side brim was pinned up against the crown. There were seven other soldiers, including the guidon bearer, riding behind him. All the bays were sweat-silvered and dusty and weary-looking. They'd obviously been pushed hard for many miles.

Fitzpatrick said, “Captain Gavin Kilroy, this here rock worshiper is my old friend, War Cloud. Apache scout. You and the rest of these men wouldn't remember him, as you wasn't stationed at Fort McHenry when he was, but he served about as heroically as any soldier I've ever known.”

The sergeant turned to Longarm, and his gaze became uncertain. “And this here man is a federal deputy marshal.”

“Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis P. Long, at your service, Captain,” Longarm said, reaching up to shake the hand of the young officer. “I, too, am a friend of War Cloud's. Friend and colleague. We worked together several times back when he was tracking for the U.S. marshals. We were heading for McHenry on official business when we were bushwhacked . . . by the very three stage robbers you boys are after, I understand.”

Most folks would have given War Cloud two or three skeptical looks. Not the young captain. There was probably a whole stable of Apache scouts at Fort McHenry, there being no more valuable tool for tracking Apaches than other Apaches.

“Pleased to meet both you gentlemen,” he said. “Are you sure you got the men we're aft . . . ?”

The captain let his voice trail off when Magpie stepped soundlessly onto the trail behind Longarm and her father. The girl stood with her moccasins spread, thumbs hooked behind her shell belt, staring with that typically skeptical glower.

The sergeant and the captain had both jerked slightly with starts and touched their guns. But now the captain, scrutinizing the girl though he probably couldn't see much of her in the misty near-dawn light, said, “And who is this?”

War Cloud introduced his daughter.

Fitzpatrick said in shock, “That . . . that there full-growed miss is your little Magpie?”

“She sure is,” War Cloud crowed.

“Why, last time I seen her—and it wasn't all that long ago—she was only hock-high to a deer tick! Look at her now!”

Fitzpatrick stepped forward, eyes bright with an older man's joy at seeing a child again he hadn't seen in years. Magpie's face remained hard as sand-scoured granite, long, dark eyes reflecting the growing light.

“Hey there, you little tadpole—you remember me? Why, sure you do. You were probably six, seven years old last time I . . .”

Fitzpatrick stopped, frowned, as the girl said something in Coyotero to her father, almost barking the guttural words, before swinging around and taking long strides along the cut toward where they'd left the stolen money and the horses.

“Don't mind her, Sergeant,” Longarm said. “That's practically a bear hug compared to the greeting I got from the girl!”