the Lonely Men (1969) (16 page)

Dorset knew it, too. She turned her horse, lifted a hand, and they rode off into the coming morning. I taken one look and then I hit the slope a-sliding. Far below I could see the Indians.

Battles was on the rim, bellied down behind rock slabs. Far off, near the stream, I could see the Apache ponies, but nothing was moving on the slope.

Behind Battles I could see Spanish, and he was rolling some rocks into place, lifting others, making a sort of rough wall from where John J. was firing to where Rocca was lying. He was getting set for a last-ditch fight, and the lay of the land sort of favored our position by being a mite lower than the rest of the hollow.

Of a sudden an Apache came up from behind a rock and started to move forward, and my Winchester came up as if it moved of its own will, and I taken a quick sight and let go.

High on the slope the way I was, right under the rim, I had a good view of what lay below. That Apache was a good three hundred yards off and lower down, but I held low a-purpose and that bullet caught him full in the chest.

He stopped in his tracks and Battles shot into him, getting off two fast shots before he could drop, but when he did drop he just rolled over and lay sprawled out, face up to the sun.

A number of shots were fired at me, but all of them hit the slope a good fifty feet below me, and I decided right then I was going to stay where I was.

It stayed quiet then, and slowly the afternoon drew on. Our horses had been bunched by Spanish so that they were close to Rocca, and the position seemed pretty good unless the Apaches decided to attack by night. But I kept on thinking about what we might do. There had to be a way out.

Now, my pappy was always one for figuring things. He told me time and again that when in a difficulty a body should always take time to contemplate. "The only way folks got to where they are," he'd say, "was by thinkin' things out. No man ever had the claws of a grizzly nor the speed of a deer -- what he had was a brain."

Right now we had here a stalemate, but it worked in favor of the Apache. It worked for him because he had access to plenty of water and grass, which we did not have.

And I knew the Apache would no longer wait. He'd be scaling that rimrock himself, and without horses he could get up there all right, although it would take some doing. We could figure on having them above us by the next daybreak, and then that hollow would be nothing but a place to die in.

We had to make it out of there, and right now. Nobody expects to live forever, but nobody wishes to shorten his time. Of course, a body never knows which turn will shorten it. Like when a bunch of us boys went off to the war we left a friend behind who paid a substitute. We all came back, safe and sound, but the one who stayed home was dead -- thrown from a horse he'd ridden for three years ... scared by a rabbit, it jumped, and he lit on his head. So a man never knows.

Only if we didn't get out of this place we weren't going to be laying many plans.

Up there where I was, I began to give study to the country around.

I knew that getting the rest of those horses up to the top was an unlikely chance. In the first place, most of them were larger and heavier, and altogether harder to handle than the two we had got out. We might just possibly get one horse up, or even two. We would never make three or four.

So I cut that out of my thinking. Somehow we had to get out by going downhill, and that meant riding right through that bunch of Apaches ...

Now, wait a minute, I told myself. There to the right ... that's a slide of sand, but there's a mixed lot of growth in it There don't seem to be so many large rocks. I studied it as carefully as the light would allow.

If we could just ... I began to see how we, or some of us, might make it. If we stayed here none of us would make it through tomorrow.

I was going down there right now and face them with it. Only first there was that Apache off to the left. He had been coming up the hill for the last half-hour, creeping, crawling, out of sight more than two-thirds of the time, but always getting closer. Now when he moved again ...

Settling myself into the sand, I braced my elbow and taken a careful sight. Then I waited. His foot moved ... I waited.... Then he lunged into view and I squeezed off my shot. He never even twitched.

Chapter
14

When I came sliding into the hollow Spanish looked at me. "Was I you, I'd still be travelin' " he said. "It don't look like we're goin' no place down here."

"I've got an idea," I said.

He searched my face. "Well, you Sacketts have come up with some good ones. I hear tell whenever one of you boys are in trouble, the rest come a-runnin'. I'd like to see that now. I surely would."

"They don't know where I'm at."

John J. was stuffing a pipe. He looked haggard and honed down. I hadn't the heart to look at Rocca yet.

"What's this idea?" John J. asked. "Right about now I'll buy anything."

"Yonder," I said, "there's a corner of slope that's mostly free of big rocks.

There's some grass and some brush, but it's low stuff, and the sand looks as if ifs packed."

"So?"

"Come nightfall we mount up. We stampede the horses down that slope into the Apache camp and we go with them. Only we keep on riding."

Battles gave study to it Spanish, he just looked at me. "How many do you think would make it?" he asked.

"Maybe none ... maybe one."

Battles shrugged. "Well, it's no worse than here. At least we'd be trying."

"What about Tamp?" Spanish asked.

"He isn't getting any better, is he? How much chance has he got here?"

"None at all."

"All right. So we get him into a saddle. You put that Mex on a horse and he'll ride it to hell and gone. I know him. If we get him up in a saddle he'll stay there as long as any of us, dead or alive."

"All right," Battles said, "I'll buy it. What do we do?"

"Pick your best horse. We'll load the pack horse. Maybe he can stay with us, maybe he can't. Maybe hell follow and catch up. You know how horses like to stay together."

We sat about there, chewing on jerked beef and trying to see all the angles, but there wasn't much we could do but trust to luck. We could hold to the far side of the bunch away from the Apache camp, although that might be the worst thing, for there'd likely be Apaches sleeping around, or watching from everywhere.

Time was a-passing, but we daren't do anything to let those Indians know what we were planning. Saddling up had to be done after dark, and all we could do would be to pray none of them got up on the rimrock before night came on.

Tampico Rocca was lying there with his eyes open when I sat down beside him.

"You don't have to tell me," he said. "I heard you talking."

"You reckon you can set up there like I said?"

"You get me into the saddle, that's all I ask. That and a couple of shotguns."

"You'll have them."

We sat quiet then for a quite a spell. It was almighty hot, and even sitting still the sweat trickled down my body. We drank and drank again, and we all ate a little more ... no telling when we'd get to eat or drink again, if ever.

Finally I taken my rifle and climbed up on the rim. We had to make those Apaches think they had us, and after my helping in two kills from up there, they'd be sure I'd stay there.

Up on the rim I could see no cover for an Apache up there, no way one could come on a man except by night, and if anybody rode from their camp, I could see him.

The camp was too far for a rifle shot, but I could see their cook fires, and see them moving around. Our horses, if we could start them slow, might get within easy distance of their camp before we had to stampede them. And we might be lucky enough to stampede their pony herd, but I wasn't betting on anything.

When it was fairly dark I came down off the rim and we lighted a small fire to make coffee. They knew where we were, and we wanted them to think of us as staying put, although the idea of us trying to break out probably never came to their minds. They knew we were boxed in.

Over coffee we just sat around, keeping an ear tuned for movement. Rocca was propped up by his saddle atop a couple of rocks.

John J. Battles was quiet, saying nothing much until suddenly he started to talk of home. It seemed he'd come from New England, of a good, solid family. He had made a place for himself in the town and was a respected young businessman, and then he got involved with a girl, and another young man from a respected but high-riding family had come for him with a gun. This fellow had been drinking, and threatened to kill Battles on sight. When they met again Battles was armed, and in the exchange of shots, he killed the man.

There had been a trial, and Battles was cleared of the shooting, but he found himself no longer welcome at the girl's house, or anywhere else in town. So he sold his business, went west, and had drifted. He had driven stage, ridden shotgun for Wells Fargo, during which time he killed a holdup man and wounded his partner. He had been a deputy marshal for a time, had driven north with a cattle drive, and scouted against the Cheyenne.

"What happened to the girl?" Spanish wanted to know.

Battles glanced up. "What you'd expect. She married somebody else, not as well off as I'd been, and he got to hitting the bottle. A couple of years later his horse ran away with his rig and he was killed.

"She wrote, wanted me to come back. Offered to come west to me, and you know something? Try as I might, I couldn't even remember exactly what she looked like."

"You didn't have a picture?"

"Had one. Lost it when the Cheyennes ambushed a stage I was traveling on." He paused for a moment. "I'd like to have seen the leaves change color back in the Vermont hills again. I'd like to have seen my family again."

"I thought you had no family," I said.

"I've got a sister and two brothers." He sipped some coffee. "One brother is a banker in Boston. The other one is a teacher. I'd gone into business, but a teacher was what I really wanted to be, only when the moment came I was steadier with a gun that I should have been." Nobody talked there for a time, and then Battles looked around at me. "Any of your family ever in New England? There was a man named Sackett made quite a name for himself up in Maine during the Revolution. Seems he was wounded or hurt or something, and he spent the winter on the farm with my great-grandparents, helped them through a bad time."

"Uh-huh. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution. He was with Dearborn at Saratoga, and he was in Dearborn's command when they marched with General Sullivan to destroy the towns of the Iroquois."

"Likely it's the same man." Battles put down his coffee cup and began to stoke his pipe.

Spanish walked in from the lookout "All quiet," he said. "There's still one fire goin' "

Quiet as could be, we saddled our horses, and loaded what grub was left on our pack horse. Overhead the stars were very bright, and the night was still. Whilst the others got Rocca ready for traveling, binding his wounds tighter. I crept over to the place where we were going to try to ride down.

The ground was packed pretty good, and there was no slide sand.

The place was narrow, just a strip that might ordinarily have gone unnoticed, except that in our desperation we had looked for any possibility at all. Of course the Apaches might have seen it, too, and might be waiting for us down there, for it was the only place where we could come off the mountain with any speed. But we had not seen it from below, only from the view on the rimrock.

We gathered near the edge, the loose horses before us, held by me and Spanish.

Tampico Rocca was in the saddle, John J. Battles beside him, holding our two horses.

It was near the middle of the night when we released our hold on the horses and went back to step into our saddles. "All right," I said, "let's go."

We started the horses forward. We made almost no sound in the night, there was a whisper of hoofs in the sand, a slight creak of saddle leather. I could feel a tightness in my chest, and I gripped hard on the pistol butt in my hand. This would be close, fast work -- no chance for a rifle here.

The lead horses disappeared over the edge before us and started down, and as they reached a point about a third of the way down we let out a whoop and each of us fired a shot.

Startled, the half-broken horses lunged into a run. They went down the slope in a scattered band and hit the flat below running all out. A rifle flashed, somebody shouted, and a fire flared up. The Apaches had prepared fires for light, and they lit the wild scene with a dancing glare.

Low down on the black horse, I charged into the night, gun held low and ready.

The wind whipped my face, and the horses thundered into the Apache camp.

Off to my left Rocca's gun was blazing. I saw a wild Apache face spring at him out of the dark, saw the flash of the pistol, and the face vanished into the darkness. Somewhere a horse screamed, and I heard a shout from Battles as his horse spilled head over heels, and John J. hit the sand running. I saw him slide to a stop and slam two fast shots at the running Apaches. Then he wheeled and, bolstering his pistol as he moved, he made a wild grab at the streaming mane of one of our horses, somehow turned aside from the first rush. He was almost swept from his feet, but he went astride the horse, clinging to his hold on its mane.