the Lonely Men (1969) (2 page)

We set out then. After a while I rode Tampico Rocca's horse and he walked. By daybreak both horses were tired out and so were we, but we had sixteen miles behind us and a stage station down on the flat before us. We were still several hundred yards off when a man walked from the door with a rifle in his hands, and we were almighty sure there was another one behind a window from the way he kept out of line with it.

When we came up to the yard he looked at Murphy, then at the rest of us, and back at Murphy. "Hello, Spanish. What was it? Apaches?"

"Have you got a couple of horses?" I asked him. "I'll buy or borrow."

"Come on inside."

It was cool and still. Me, I dropped into the first chair I saw and put my Winchester on the table.

A second man left the window where he had been keeping watch and, carrying his rifle, he went back toward the kitchen, where he began rattling pots and pans.

The first man went over to a table and carried the wooden bucket and the gourd dipper to us. "I'd go easy, there at first," he suggested. And that we did. The station tender leaned on the bar. "Haven't seen you in years, Spanish. Figured they'd have stretched your neck before now."

"Give 'em time," John J. Battles said. Setting there in the chair, taking occasional swallows of cool water from the bucket, I began to feel myself getting back to normal.

Spanish, he leaned back in his chair and looked over his cup at the station tender. "Case, how long you been with the Company?"

"Two ... maybe two and a half years. My wife left me. Said this western country was no place for a woman. She went back to her folks in Boston. I send her money, time to time. Afraid if I don't she'll come back on me."

"Ain't never married, myself," Spanish said. He looked over at me. "How about you, Tell?"

For a moment there I hadn't anything to say. I kept thinking of Ange, the last times I saw her, and of the first times, high in those Colorado mountains.

"My wife is dead," I told him. "She was a rarely fine girl ... rarely fine."

"Tough," Spanish said. "You, Rocca?"

"No, senor. I am not a married man. There was a girl ... but that is far away and long ago, amigos. Her father had many cows, many horses ... me, I had nothing. And I was an Indio ... my mother was an Apache," he added.

My eyes were on the floor, tracing the cracks in the rough boards, often scrubbed. My hungry flesh was soaking up the lost moisture and I felt sleepy and quiet, liking the square of sunlight that lay inside the door, even the drone of the flies ... I was alive.

The blood of Apaches was still on my hands. There had been no water in which to wash until now, but soon I would ... soon.

The room was like many of its kind, differing only in the plank floor. Most floors were of stamped earth. There were several rough board tables, some chairs and benches. The room was low-raftered, the walls were of adobe, the roof of poles and earth. I could smell bacon frying in the kitchen, and coffee.

Spanish Murphy hitched around in his chair. "Tell, we make a team, the four of us, why don't we stick together?"

The man came in from the kitchen with tin plates and a frying pan filled with bacon. He dumped the plates on the table, then forked bacon onto them. He went out and returned with the coffeepot and a plate of tortillas. Still another trip and he brought a big bowl of frijoles -- those big Mexican brown beans -- and a dried-apple pie cut into four pieces.

"We'll need a couple of horses," I said, looking around at Case.

"You'll get 'em," Case replied. "I think the Comp'ny would like to get them to a safer place. We've been expectin' an attack almost any time."

He gestured toward the bacon. "You got to thank Pete Kitchen for the bacon. He raises hogs down to his place, calls 'em his 'Pache pincushions, they're so shot full of arrows."

John J. Battles, a solid chunk of a man, glanced across the table at me.

"Sackett ... that's a familiar name."

"I'm familiar," I agreed, "once you know me." It wasn't in me to get him comparing notes, figuring out who I was. Once he did, he'd bring up the fight in the Mogollon country, and how Ange was murdered. It was something I was wishful of forgetting.

"I still figure," Spanish said, "that we'd make a team."

"If you want to risk hanging." John J. Battles grinned at us. "You all heard what Case said."

"Me," Rocca said, "I wasn't going nowhere, anyhow."

"Later," I said, "it will have to be later. I've got a trip to take."

They looked at me, all of them. "My brother's kid. I hear tell he's been taken by the Apaches. I've got to go into the Sierra Madres after him."

They thought I was crazy, and I was thinking so myself. Rocca was the first: one to speak. "Alone? Senor, an army could not do it. That is the Apache hideout where no white man goes."

"It's got to be done," I said.

Case, he just looked at me. "You're crazy. You're scrambled in the head."

"He's just a little boy," I said, "and he's alone down yonder. I think he will be expectin' somebody to come for him."

Chapter
2

Laura Sackett was a strikingly pretty young woman, blonde and fragile. Among the dark, sultry beauties of Spanish descent she seemed a pale, delicate flower, aloof, serene, untouchable.

To the young Army officers in the Tucson vicinity, Laura Sackett was utterly fascinating, and this feeling was not dulled by the knowledge that she was a married woman. Her husband, it was known, was Congressman Orrin Sackett, who was in Washington, D. C. Apparently they had separated.

But nobody seemed to know just what the status of the marriage was, and Laura offered no comment, nor did she respond to hints.

Her conduct was irreproachable, her manner ladylike, her voice was soft and pleasant. The more discerning did notice that her mouth was a little too tight, her eyes shadowed with hardness, but these characteristics were usually lost in the quiet smiles that hovered about her lips.

Nobody in Tucson had ever known Jonathan Pritts, Laura's father, and none of them had been present in the vicinity of Mora during the land-grant fighting.

Jonathan Pritts was now dead. A narrow, bigoted man, tight-fisted and arrogant, he had been idolized by his daughter and only child, and with his death her hatred for the Sacketts had become a fierce, burning urge to destroy.

She had seen her father driven from Mora, his dream of empire shattered, his hired gunmen killed or imprisoned. A vain, petty, and self-important man, he had impressed upon his daughter that he was all the things he assumed he was, and to her all other men were but shadows before the reality of her father.

Until he had come west, they had lived together in genteel poverty. His schemes for riches had failed one by one, and with each failure his rancor and bitterness grew. Each failure, he was positive, had come not from any mistake on his part, but always from the envy or hatred of others.

Laura Pritts had married Orrin Sackett with one thought in mind -- to further her father's schemes. Orrin, big, handsome, and genial, and fresh from the Tennessee hills, had never seen a girl like Laura. She seemed everything he had ever dreamed of. Tyrel had seen through her at once, and through her father as well, but Orrin would not listen. He was seeing what he wished to see -- a great lady, a princess almost -- graceful, alluring, a girl of character and refinement. But in the end he saw her, and her father, for what they were, and he had left her.

And now Laura Pritts Sackett was returning, without a plan, without anything but the desire to destroy those who had destroyed her father.

As if by magic, on the stage to Tucson, the pieces began to fall into place. At the first stage stop east of Yuma she overheard the driver talking to the station tender.

"Saw him in Yuma," the driver was saying. "I'd have known him anywhere. Those Sackett boys all look alike."

"Sackett? The gunfighter?"

"They're all good with their guns. This one is Tell Sackett. He's been out California way."

The idea came to her that night. She had been trying to think of some way to hurt the Sacketts, to get even with them. Now here was Tell Sackett, the older brother, the one she had never met. It was unlikely that he knew of her difficulties with Orrin. The Sacketts wrote few letters, and from what she remembered Orrin had not seen his brother in years. Of course, he might have seen him since she left, but there was a chance, and she resolved to take it.

The means was supplied to her also by way of a conversation overheard. She had heard many such conversations without thinking of how they might be used. The men were talking of the Apaches, of some children stolen by them, perhaps killed. "Two of them were Dan Creed's boys. I don't know who the other one was."

The young Army lieutenant on the stage had made tentative efforts at a conversation with Laura, all of which she had studiously avoided. At his next attempt she surprised him by turning with a faint, somewhat remote smile.

"Is it true, Lieutenant, that there are Apaches about? Tell me about them."

Lieutenant Jack Davis leaned forward eagerly. He was a very young man, and Laura Sackett was a beautiful young woman. It was true he had himself been on only two scouts into Apache country, but he had served with older, more experienced men who had talked freely, and he had listened well.

"Yes, there are Apaches," he said, "and it is true we might encounter them at any time, but the men on this coach are all armed, and are experienced fighting men. You will not need to worry."

"I was not worried about them, Lieutenant, merely curious. Is it true that when attacked they retreat into Mexico? Into the Sierra Madre?"

"Unfortunately, yes. And the Mexicans are not helpful. They refuse to allow any of our armed forces to cross the border in pursuit, although I believe there are some indications the two governments may work together against the Apaches."

"So it seems likely that if a prisoner were taken over the border into Mexico you would not have much chance of recovering him, would you?"

"Almost none. A few times exchanges have been arranged. In a few cases individuals have traded goods or horses for a prisoner, but if the Apaches are pursued, they usually kill their prisoners."

Laura Pritts Sackett was thoughtful, and at the next stage stop she wrote her note to William Tell Sackett. Unless she was completely mistaken, he would come to Tucson at once, and unless she was equally mistaken, he would start at once for the Sierra Madres. The rest would be up to the Apaches.

What the Apaches failed to do, if they failed, might be done by other means ... for which the Apaches would receive due credit.

Skillfully, she drew out the young lieutenant, and his comments were added to from time to time by one or another of the coach passengers. By the time the stage arrived in Tucson, Laura was well posted on the activities of the Apaches in Arizona Territory, as well as on the many times they had killed or kidnapped children, from the Oatman Massacre to the moment of her stage trip.

"Supposing one man or several men -- not soldiers -- were to try to go into the Sierra Madres?" she asked Lieutenant Davis.

"They would never return alive." The lieutenant was positive. "They wouldn't have a chance."

One of the passengers, a bleak, hard-faced man in rough frontier garb, looked around at him briefly. "Depend on the man," he said after a moment, but if he was heard his comment was not acknowledged.

That night, seated before her mirror, Laura Sackett knew she had found what she wanted. To trap his beloved brother would be just as satisfying as to trap Orrin himself, or Tyrel, whom she blamed even more.

She wished only for one thing: to see their faces when they realized how their brother had been duped.

When that man at the stage station in Yuma told me there was a letter for me I thought he was surely mistaken. Why, I couldn't recall getting more than three or four letters in my whole life, and nobody knew I was in Yuma -- nobody at all.

None of us folks had been much hand to write. Orrin and Tyrel had learned to write, but with me writing was an almighty slow affair, and not one to be undertaken lightly. And we were never much on just exchanging letters unless there was something all-fired important. But sure enough, this letter was for me, William Tell Sackett. It read:

Dear Tell:

Our son, Orrin's and mine, has been taken by the Apaches. Orrin is in Washington, D. C. Tyrel is laid up.

Can you help me?

Laura Sackett So old Orrin had him a boy! Now, nobody had seen fit to tell me, but drifting place to place the way I'd been, it was no wonder. And no need for me to know, when it came to that.

None of the family knew where I was, but that need cut no ice now. When I'd needed help the whole lot of them had come a-running, and if the Apaches had Orrin's boy I'd have to move fast before they killed him ... if they hadn't already.

A body never knew what the Apaches would do. They might kill a child right off, or they might cotton to the youngster and raise him like one of their own sons, and with just as much affection and care. A lot depended on how old the boy was, on how he reacted, and on how fast the Apaches had to move.