The Shadow Man (24 page)

Jacob touched High Walking and pointed. The Comanche nodded.

High Walking drew one of the jasper-tipped arrows from his quiver. He nocked the shaft on the gut string of his powerful war bow. He pulled the cord to his cheek.

The bowstring twanged. The arrow leapt toward the man.

Jacob caught the barest fleeting glimpse of the hurtling bolt. Then the shaft vanished into the chest of the guard.

The man crumpled to his knees and pitched forward in the tall grass. He uttered not a sound.

“One dead,” High Walking said.

The men waited, their eyes wrestling with the darkness. The grass bent and bowed in the wind. The moon walked along its ancient, endless path. With low, tearing sounds the horses cropped the rich, ripe seed heads of the wild plains grass.

Jacob spoke. “The man you killed must have been the only guard. Let's take the horses and hide them.”

Quietly they pulled the tethering stakes from the earth and led the cayuses a quarter of a mile west. There the horses were again tied on the ends of lariats.

“Now we will return quickly to the camp of our enemies,” said High Walking. “I want to have my revenge. First we will find and kill any rider watching the sheep and cattle.”

The two men made a wary turn around the scattered herd. The weary animals took no notice of the skulking figures. Not one guard was located, and Jacob and High Walking stole back over the plain.

Drawing near the camp, they dropped to their knees and crawled close. The light in the camp had weakened, the fire throwing only a red luminescence from a bed of glowing coals.

The low mumble of voices came from the edge of the darkness beyond the fire. Jacob caught the words. The Texans were assigning the hours of the night guards.

Jacob strained his sight to pierce the murk and pick out the targets. The Texans figured themselves to be safe in the night. They were wrong. Jacob made out the indistinct forms of four men sitting on the ground. Their arms moved as they ate. That is your last meal, he thought.

He leaned toward High Walking and spoke. “You take the men on the left. I'll take those on the right. Don't stop shooting till every man is dead.”

He loosened his pistol in its holster, and then gripped his rifle. He couldn't see the sights of the gun in the dark. But he wasn't worried about that. At this short range he could simply point the long-barreled weapon and hit the center of a man.

High Walking rose to his knees. The bow bent in his hands. The taut string hummed. He released the arrow. The speeding shaft jumped across the bed of coals into the darkness.

A man screamed. Once.

“Bastard!” exclaimed Jacob. The Indian should have made his assault on the raiders at the same instant as Jacob. The man was unpredictable and therefore dangerous. Jacob jerked his rifle up and fired at a dim form just beginning to rise from the ground.

The blackness of the night seemed to ripple from the concussion of the gunshot. The man fell backward with a harsh expulsion of air.

The two remaining Texans were scrambling to their feet. Their hands clawed at holstered pistols.

Jacob grabbed his revolver and shot at one of the raiders. The man sank to his knees and pitched forward, his face plowing into the hard ground.

High Walking had again bent his bow. He released the string, flinging an arrow at the shadow of the last man spinning to run away. The shaft struck the middle of the shadow, driving it backward. A guttural moan came out of the gloom. Then all was silent.

High Walking looked through the night at Jacob. Neither man spoke. Jacob knew their presence together was only a matter of convenience, of joining strengths and weapons to better kill other men. When the battles had ended, the Comanche might decide to fight him.

High Walking pulled his knife and, holding it poised to strike, went from body to body. He checked the last one and called out to Jacob. “All are dead.”

“Then let's see what the Texans have that we can use.” Jacob collected a handful of brambles from under the hackberry trees and tossed them on the hot coals. Short flames burst into life.

In the night Jacob gathered a rifle, pistol, and ammunition from one of the dead men. He took a section of canvas, a two-gallon canteen of water, and a quantity of food from the pile of supplies. All of the items were stowed in one of the packs. A saddle was selected from the ones the Texans had used.

Satisfied he could leave at a moment's notice and be well provisioned, Jacob took a tin plate he'd found in the packs and filled it from the pot near the fire. He began to eat.

The mutton stew was delicious. He chewed hard, feeling a strange sense of pleasure at the thought of eating the food of his foes.

“Try some,” Jacob said, pointing at the pot with his spoon. “It's very good.”

The Comanche looked at Jacob with a bitter stare. “The man I had hoped to slay was not one of those,” he said, gesturing at the dead bodies. “I have seen him up close enough to know. He is tall with red hair.”

“The chief could be a hundred miles east of here. But now we have horses and can ride them down. Eat, for we need to be strong.”

In the flickering light of the fire Jacob saw the haunted, sorrowful expression on the Indian's face. Did his own countenance also show his terrible anguish?

The Comanche spat at the pot of food. He extracted a piece of peyote from his pouch and began to chew it. He stalked into the night. “I will bring up the horses,” he called back.

Jacob had lost his appetite. High Walking and he had killed some of their enemies but not their leaders. Those men had planned the murders and had a higher priority to die. And they had escaped.

He went to meet High Walking and helped stake out the horses. As he worked, he saw a nimbus of hazy mist forming around the moon. A ring of light was visible through the mist close around the yellow sphere. By the density of the high, cold moisture and the swiftness with which it had come hurrying in, he judged that the weather was changing, and that rain would fall within a day.

The last horse was fastened to the end of a lariat. The Comanche, without a sign, turned and walked off, becoming lost in the darkness.

Jacob picked up a blanket and, selecting a spot near a tall horse, lay down. As he watched the haze thicken around the moon, he sensed that his days remaining upon the earth had a small number, and were of little value. Except for his revenge.

During the night he dreamed of fighting a gun battle with a swarm of Texans on a windy plain. He could see Petra far off, beckoning to him to come to her aid. But the Texans were always barring his way, shooting at him and laughing uproariously, as if it were all some great joke.

* * *

The storm wind came running from the east like some giant night animal charging upon Jacob. He awoke with a jerk and sat up to stare into the wind. He could see nothing, for all around him the night lay congealed in utter blackness, so thick that a man could hold a handful. The grass stems whipped and broke with a brittle sound. Darts of their reedy bodies stung Jacob's face like biting insects.

He rolled himself back into his blanket. He hoped the stakes would hold the tethered horses so they wouldn't drift away with the winds. He lay listening to the storm wind punishing the prairie with its anger.

At last Jacob dozed. At times the wind pushing against the blanket brought pleasant dreams of Petra's body moving against him when they slept. He would awaken and realize with sadness that he was not with Petra in the big hacienda on the Rio Pecos.

With the dawn the fury of the storm increased and drove Jacob from his bed. The air was full of dust and flying bits of grass. Overhead, dense, threatening clouds streamed past in the teeth of the wind.

The thousands of sheep and the few hundred cows had vanished. Three of the horses were missing. The animals had gone off to the west, and Jacob thought that their situation wasn't too bad. They could easily end their wind-propelled journey back on the Pecos. Permanent water could be found there.

High Walking came out of the grass. He paid no attention to Jacob, as if the white man did not exist. He saddled one of the horses but touched not one item of the provisions.

You are a damn fool Comanche, thought Jacob. He hastily shoved his blanket into the pack he had assembled the evening before. One of the horses that had marks on its back from having previously carried packs was again loaded. The long-legged horse was saddled. The others were turned loose and immediately began to wander off with the wind.

Jacob dipped out a plate of the cold stew. As he wolfed the food he looked at the Indian, a gaunt, brown statue sitting motionlessly on his horse and staring east into the storm. Jacob wondered what the Indian ate. Or if he ate anything except the peyote.

Jacob swung astride his new mount. The horse immediately grabbed the bit in its big teeth and went stiff-legged. Jacob saw the cruelty at the mouth, and he had no time to fool with the brute. He jerked its head roughly to the side and slapped the horse hard across the ears with his hand. The brute stomped the ground with both front feet and acted as if it wanted to rear. Jacob cuffed it again. The horse relaxed and accepted the domination of its rider. It went off smartly beside High Walking's mount.

Beyond the trampled zone of the prairie where the sheep had grazed and bedded, Jacob and High Walking found the tracks of four horses. They stepped down from their saddles and squatted in the whipping grass to examine the imprints in the dirt.

“The riders are ahead of us, maybe two days,” High Walking said, and touched one of the horse tracks.

“The gunmen who escaped from us at the river warned the men with the herd. Now the leader and three others ride on ahead. They'll be alert and watching for us.”

“That makes no difference to me,” growled the Comanche.

The men mounted and guided their cayuses to the east. The storm wind pounded them as it rushed past in a roaring, invisible river. The mighty current often staggered the horses, and they would slow and try to turn from its bite. Each time the horses faltered, the men whipped them onward with cutting blows.

The tuneful sound of fife and drum and the voices of hundreds of marching soldiers singing “The Blue-tailed Fly” reached Captain Paul Spradling, army surgeon. For the first time in many weeks the captain had a short, free hour to ride away from the noise and confusion of the soldiers and wagons, and the needs of ill men.

He sat his mount just below the timber line on the south slope of El Barro Mountain and just above the head of El Canon de Pena. Las Vegas was fifteen miles off to the northeast, and Santa Fe fifty miles to the west beyond the steep, high backbone of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

General Kearny's Army of the West was strung out below the captain, traveling in detachments of two or three companies each along the Santa Fe Trail. The First Regiment of Missouri Cavalry, under Colonel Alexander Doniphan, was nearly out of sight to the west and approaching the Rio Pecos Valley. The colonel's mounted riders were the scouts and advance guard for the army.

Two batteries of artillery, with twelve six-pound cannon and four twelve-pound howitzers, under Major Meriwether Clark, followed second in line. E. V. Sumner's three squadrons of First Dragoons came next. One of the squads was always riding in a protective position along both flanks of the marching army.

Two companies of infantry under Captain William Angney were just below Captain Spradling. It was their singing that he heard.

Close behind the marching foot soldiers, three hundred wagons rumbled and rattled on the rough road. Within their capacious bodies were transported the sick and injured soldiers, as well as ammunition, food, medicine, harnesses, a blacksmith shop, and a thousand other items needed to keep the army moving and ready for battle. A large herd of livestock came last, walking in a perpetual storm of dust kicked up by their own pounding hooves.

Kearny's soldiers had grown tough over the six weeks of the march. His total army at the beginning when it had left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had consisted of one thousand four hundred and fifty-eight men, four thousand horses and draft mules, and fourteen thousand nine hundred cattle and oxen.

Most of the men had been unaccustomed to long marches, especially in the heat and dust of the arid plains. But the general had pushed them hard, up to thirty-two miles a day. Regulars and recruits alike had cursed and moaned, but they made it, outpacing the horses at times. In twenty-nine days they had covered five hundred and fifty miles and reached Bent's Fort on the Missouri River.

On August 2, the soldiers left Bent's Fort and started southward toward Raton Pass. For four days they marched almost without water, the temperature climbing to one hundred and twenty degrees, the wagons falling back, the horses collapsing, and the men burying their weaker comrades who could not survive. Packs of wolves followed the columns, feeding on the dead livestock.

Water was the most difficult thing to find. When a water hole was found, the lead men usually rushed to use it, spoiling it for those behind. Often when the wind was right, the livestock would smell the water, bolt ahead, and plunge into it, fouling it for all.

Captain Spradling had been moving constantly from one infirmary wagon to the next, tending the ill and injured. Then the days had grown cooler as the army climbed into the higher elevations of the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Fresh mountain streams were found. Men began to crawl out of the sick wagons and fall into formation.

The hardships and deaths had been more than the young captain had bargained for. Still, now that the goal of Santa Fe was within striking distance, he felt a wonderful exhilaration.

As the marching soldiers below him began to sing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” Spradling turned his mount and rode parallel to the column. He passed through a mile of pinon pine and juniper, and came out on the northwest point of the mesa above El Canon de Pena. The valley of the Rio Pecos, cutting apart a series of short, grassy hills, was within sight three miles ahead.