Lord Apache (3 page)

Teetering, Meech walked toward his bedroll and fell soggily into a reed-bordered pool. Eggleston helped him to his feet and wiped him off. A moment later the detective was snoring an obbligato to the melodies of frogs half buried in the mud of the river.

"Thank you, Eggie." Drumm smiled. "Very good of you."

The valet finished washing the last of the dishes and pans and dried his hands.

"I've laid out your nightshirt and slippers, sir. Will there be anything else?"

Drumm yawned. "Nothing, Eggie. Turn in yourself, get a good night's sleep. It's a long way to Prescott."

In spite of his growing annoyance with the Arizona Territory, Jack Drumm drowsed easily off, sleeping the sleep of the righteous Englishman. Sometime near dawn, to judge from the pallor of the eastern sky, he awoke. For a time he lay on his cot, listening to night sounds; the canvas of the tent rustling in a breeze, far-off clamor of coyotes on the hunt, an occasional
ker-chonk
from a frog in the ooze of the almost-vanished Agua Fria. To judge from their snores, Eggleston and the detective slept well in their blanket rolls on open ground. The mules, however, seemed restless. They snuffled, broke wind, moved about against the restraint of the ropes holding them to the picket line.

Yawning and scratching, Drumm padded to the door in slippers and nightshirt. A setting moon swam low in scattered clouds. The coolness of the air was laced with a faint perfume, probably from some desert plant. He was pondering this, trying to remember what the
Traveler's Guide
said about aromatic desert flora, when one of the mules, ghostly in the dawn, gave a strange whickering sound and pulled hard to the end of its rope. The rest quickly took up the odd behavior. Suddenly one burst into a chilling bray.

At first he felt, rather than saw, the intruders. Then, as his gaze sharpened, he saw the Indians slipping about the camp. One cut the picket line with a knife that flashed like quicksilver in the waning moonlight. Another rummaged through the piled packs. A third crouched over Alonzo Meech's recumbent form. Meech rose on an elbow, reaching for the Colt's revolver that lay beside him, but the Indian stepped on his wrist and brandished a hatchet.

"Stop!" Drumm called. "Halt! Eggie, where are you? Halloo the camp!"

He snatched up the fowling piece, providentially just inside the tent door, and fired as the hatchet started to descend. Howling, the savage sprang into the air, clutching an arm. Meech quickly rolled from his blankets, catching his assailant about the ankles, and caromed with him into the embers of the fire.

Though the light was not good, Drumm could see at least a dozen of the bowlegged little men dashing purposefully about the camp. Two had attacked Eggleston; one pinioned the valet from behind while the other raised a ribboned lance. Drumm fired a quick shot from the other barrel. The man with the lance dropped to his knees, holding his stomach. Just as Drumm squeezed off the shot, arms clasped him from behind; a blow on his wrist knocked the fowling piece to the ground.

Wresting free from his remaining captor, Eggleston managed to draw a pistol and discharge it into the man's face, pulling the trigger so rapidly that the several shots sounded almost as one.

"I'm coming, Mr. Jack!" he shouted. "Hold on!"

Drumm had a few wrestling tricks, learned on his passage through Persia; the Persians were great wrestlers. Dropping to his knees, he reached back to catch his assailant's ankles, and pulled hard. The Indian went over backward, breath whooshing out of him in a gasp as he landed on his back. Alonzo Meech, clothes laced with sparks from the fire he had rolled into, struck Drumm's captor over the head with the butt of his revolver. The blow glanced off; the Indian ran away toward the mules.

"They're after our animals!" Meech shouted, pulling the trigger on an empty chamber.

Horses and the mules alike were in panic. Milling and rearing, they screamed in terror. A flying hoof became entangled in the tent, dragging it down in a welter of canvas. Drumm, Meech, and the valet knelt behind an overturned table among a rubble of pots, pans, and kitchen utensils, firing at targets of opportunity. The dawn was pierced with stabs of flame, report of weapons, hoarse shouts as the bandy-legged little men rushed the defenders while others attempted to round up the animals.

Drumm clubbed his fowling piece and swung wildly as a man wearing an ornamented leather hat discharged a pistol almost in his face. Stunned by the explosion, he fell over, blinded by the flame. The Indian leaped over the table and landed astride him, searching for the throat with powerful hands. Meech, too, rolled on the ground under the weight of two wiry attackers, while Eggleston snatched up a broken table leg to rain blows on their backs.

Remembering a Marseilles stratagem, Drumm drove a knee into the groin of the man in the leather hat. The grip on his throat loosened; the man grunted and rolled away. Quickly Drumm was on him with his fists. But the Indian drew a knife from a sheath at his belt. A savage slash caught Drumm across the cheek and mouth; he felt blood, tasted blood. Catching the wrist, he twisted it savagely, wanting to hear bones break. But the man heaved suddenly under him to roll free.

Meech, freed from his attackers, found time to reload. He stood behind the overturned table, Colt's revolver in one hand and Winchester rifle in the other, firing into the melee like a Gatling gun and cursing with the same copiousness.

"Oh, you bastards! You damned lousy bastards! You low-life stinking bastards!"

Shouting, "They're taking our mules!" Eggleston ran toward the milling animals. As he clung to a man's leg, trying to drag him from a mule, the Indian hit him across the face with a war club. Staggering back, the valet clutched at his nose. The man in the leather hat, sounding a wild whoop, mounted Jack Drumm's own fine gelding and snatched up the Union Jack on its staff. With a bone whistle clamped between his teeth he blew a shrill summons. The other raiders broke off the combat, vaulting onto various mounts and following their chief. In a moment, yelling and whooping like banshees, they splashed through the shallows and were gone. The last Jack Drumm saw was the despairing flutter of his Union Jack, caught by the first rays of the sun. The man in the leather hat held it high and triumphant above the reeds as he galloped away.

Alonzo Meech had run out of ammunition but not of obscenities. Cursing, he ran after the departing intruders, splashing muddily through the reeds and brandishing his useless weapons. Finally he gave up the chase and came back, wheezing a few weakened epithets.

"Well, we gave 'em as good as we got, anyway!"

"Is anyone hurt?" Drumm asked anxiously.

Eggleston, awakened in his underclothes, was nearly naked. He limped toward them, one hand holding his battered nose, blood leaking between his fingers. Alonzo Meech's black coat, which he had slept in, was torn down the back, and one sleeve dangled by a thread.

"I think one of my fingers is busted," the detective said. "And I burned my butt when I rolled into the fire with that ugly-face varmint that tried to bury his hatchet in my brains."

During the melee Drumm himself had stepped on a cactus with his bare feet; his ribs ached also where someone had hit him with a rifle butt or a war club.

Eggleston sat shakily on a rock, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his nose with a handkerchief. "But you, Mr. Jack," he said to Drumm. "We must take care of that dreadful cut on your cheek!"

Among the wreckage Drumm found a shattered mirror and inspected himself. The wound, already crusted with coagulating blood, stitched downward from his eyebrow, skirting the nose, to lose itself in the wreckage of his mustache.

"Speaking of casualties," Meech said, "
he
ain't in too good of a condition!"

In the slanting sunlight of early morning, they watched the Indian the valet had shot in the face try to prop himself on his elbows. Painfully he pushed his body up inch by inch, turning a bloody face toward them. Then he collapsed, life running from him as grain spills from a torn sack.

"Those were not Pimas, Mr. Jack!" Eggleston murmured.

They were indeed not peaceful Pimas, or Papagos; they were bloodthirsty Apaches, certainly one of Agustín's roving bands. Though the light had not been good, Drumm had seen stocky, quick-moving little men, thigh-length leggings held to waists by a leather thong. Muslin loincloths dangled to the calves behind. One wore around his neck a string of ivory-white beads—probably a rosary torn from some slaughtered Mexican. The rest had colored cloths tied around square-cut shoulder-length locks, and carried what looked like modern breech-loading rifles. The man in the leather hat, too—the one that had seemed the leader. Drumm felt gingerly at the wound on his cheek, seeing again the ferocity in the face, the conical hat ornamented with feathers and bits of glass, the animal-like glitter in black eyes. They were scarcely human, the Apaches.

"I ain't been in a scuffle like that for a long time," Meech said. "Not since the Cooney gang of smugglers on the Fourteenth Street docks in Manhattan in '69!" He took down his pants and inspected his scorched backside. "My butt feels like it's been barbecued!"

In the wreckage of the tent Drumm found his medical kit and roll of court-plaster to bandage Eggleston's bashed nose. But the valet objected.

"Mr. Jack, let us not waste time. Let us pack up what gear is undamaged and hurry to Prescott! There we will be safe!"

Looking about the camp, Drumm felt shaken and disoriented; in the aftermath of the quick and brutal attack, the scene was unreal. Random shots had shattered the bowl of the portable commode, which leaked its contents in a lugubrious gurgle. Looted boxes, chests, and packs lay strewn about. Scattered coals from the fire had ignited the rubber bathtub, which burned with a smoky glow. Anger began to grow in him.

"There's one mule left," Meech observed, "and my buckskin mare. They stole all the rest of the animals."

It was true; their transportation, so necessary in this desert, was badly crippled. Drumm slapped at a fly buzzing near the caked blood on his cheek. Now that the nightmare of the raid had passed, the slashed cheek began to hurt, a throb that surged with each beat of his pulse.

"Look up there," he said, pointing toward Prescott. "There—on the slopes of the mountain!"

They looked. Between them and Prescott, on the barren flanks of the mountain, winked a small bright light. It flashed steadily, repeatedly, in what could only be a manmade message of some sort.

"I remember now," Drumm said in a tight voice. "The Apaches are known to signal to each other, when they are on the warpath, with bits of mirror! Wherever the devils who attacked us have gone, carrying my Union Jack, there are even more of them on that ridge there, waiting for new prey."

Eggleston roamed sadly among the scattered utensils, the broken bottles, the wreckage of his former kitchen establishment. Listlessly he picked up a jam jar; as he held it between his fingers a crack widened. The contents slid out to plop on the ground.

"That flag," Drumm said bitterly, "belonged to my brother Andrew! It flew over his company of sepoys when he was serving in India!"

He picked up the fowling piece from the ground where it lay. The stock had broken off clean when he clubbed someone.

"I object," he cried. "I object strongly to being chivied about so! British subjects have been wantonly attacked and humiliated by foreign nationals! Good God, is there no law or order in these United States? When we reach the East Coast I intend to file such a protest that heads will roll!" Angrily he flung the broken weapon down. It had been a fine piece, costing over a hundred pounds in Brussels. For a moment he chewed angrily at a corner of his bloody mustache; his fingers worked convulsively. Then, taking a deep breath, he turned toward the valet, trying to regain his composure.

"First, Eggie," he said, "we must do the decent thing and bury this dead person. However grave has been the provocation, an Englishman has certain obligations."

Meech snarled. "Drag the bastard out in the desert and let the buzzards have him!"

Drumm shook his head. "However depraved, the fellow was a human being. He must be put into the earth in a civilized way." Finding a shovel among the litter, he started to dig. Eggleston arose with a sigh to assist his master. A cloud passed over the sun, and a chill wind sprang out of nowhere. Drumm paused for a moment in his digging, looking toward the distant mountains over which hovered a ragged scud of cloud.

"It may rain up there," he muttered. "At this season sudden and violent storms are not unusual at the higher elevations, according to the
Traveler's Guide
."

Sullenly Meech watched as they dug.

"There!" Drumm said finally, wiping his brow. "Not so deep as it should be, perhaps, but we can pile stones on top to keep away the coyotes." In a satchel he found his Anglican Book of Prayer. While the valet stood with head appropriately bowed, he read the Service for the Dead.

"I don't believe this!" Meech grumbled, shaking his head.

Drumm took from the dead man's neck a small leather sack depending from a rawhide thong. The sack was ornamented with beads and small bits of glass, stitched in a complex pattern. Curious, he opened the sack and shook the contents into his palm: a handful of bluish grains, nothing more. Perhaps some kind of talisman, but it had not done the warrior any good. He poured the grains back into the sack. Sticking a broken Apache lance into the ground at the head of the grave, he hung the sack on it, watching it dangle in the wind while Eggleston filled the grave and piled stones atop it.

"That will do," Drumm decided. "Thank you, Eggie."

Meech regarded them both with disbelief. "I've heard of crazy Englishmen, but this beats all." He shrugged, washing his hands of the foolishness. "Well, we better get out of here!
Tempus fugits
! No telling when them varmints are likely to come back. There's three of us, and only two animals, but by riding double and changing around from time to time, we can make it to Prescott." He buckled the Colt's revolver about his waist and picked up the Winchester rifle.