The Lonely Men s-14 Read online

  "How is it? Are we all here?" I asked.

  "I was the last one," Battles said. "We all made it."

  "Anybody hurt?"

  "They burned my shoulder," Rocca said. "It is nothing."

  So I led them away at a fast trot for a little way, then I ran the horses again for a good half-mile, slowed to a trot and then a walk, then ran them again.

  At noon we drew up at a small seep that came from the base of a grass-covered dune. We watered our horses, exchanged saddles to fresh horses, and pushed on.

  We kept a good pace, riding wide of any places of ambush, and watching for dust clouds. There were bandits as well as Indians to be feared, and there were soldiers, too, who might resent our being here. All this while the children did not cry, they did not once call out. The Apaches had taught them that, if nothing more.

  At midafternoon we rode into a deserted village. The ruins of a large adobe still stood, and a half-completed church. There was water running in an irrigation ditch.

  In a corner of one of the houses was a skeleton, still half-clothed, of a Mexican who had died fighting. The left arm of the skeleton showed a break that had mended badly, leaving the arm shorter and crooked.

  Tampico looked at it then at the dried leather of the holster on which an initial had been carved. It was a large B.

  "So this is where it happened, Benito," he said, and then glancing around at me, he said, "I knew him. He was a bad one, but brave."

  We made coffee there, and a hot soup from the jerked beef, and some corn, potatoes, and onions found in the deserted fields, now gone to weeds. We ate quickly, but we ate well.

  Spanish wiped his hands on his chaps and looked at me. "Let's be gettin' on," he said. "There's a smell of death about this place."

  John J. Battles was already in his saddle, waiting. We mounted up and moved out, riding fresh horses again, so as to use none of them too hard.

  It was hot and still in those late hours of the day, and the dust did not rise.

  Suddenly Murphy indicated a place on the horizon where a blue-gray finger of smoke made a question mark against the mountains. It was ahead of us off to the east. We knew what it meant, and we pressed on, picking up the north star for guiding, following it as best we could, with what the terrain offered. After midnight we stopped among some willows and made dry camp in an arroyo.

  Short of daybreak we were in the saddle again, and pushing on. We passed a village off to our right.

  "Tres Alamos," Rocca said. Three Cottonwoods ... it was the name of many villages. Later we passed near another village, but avoided it, for there was no time for answering questions, and they would not like us bringing the Apaches on them. This was Senokipe -- hollow tree. I loved the names the country gave, the sound of them made music to the ear. Santa Rosalia ... Soledad ... Remedies ...

  Soyopa ... Nacori ... Chimala ... Kiburi. Okitoa, a sparrow hawk's nest, Batuco, a waterhole, Cumuripa, a rathole ... Matape, the red cliff, and Bacadeguatzi, meaning "at the white mountain." The men who came first to this land used the names descriptive of it, the names that grew as naturally from the land as the cottonwood, the willow, or the ocotillo. Dawn came up in crimson light over the eastern mountains, it flushed the mountainsides with a kind of dull flame.

  "I don't like it," Rocca muttered gloomily. "It looks like blood."

  In the next hour we counted three smokes ... three and an answering smoke.

  We stopped at a small creek, watered the horses, and shifted saddles.

  "If anything goes wrong," I said to Dorset, "you take the children and ride for the border. Harry can handle his own horse and one of the youngsters."

  Rocca turned in his saddle. "I can smell Apaches. They have been by this way, and not long since."

  Murphy chuckled. "You're dreamin', boy. Nobody can smell that good."

  "They have been here," Rocca insisted. "And they will come again."

  Now that we were further north, the grass was sparser, there were bare sandhills, and the bare brown-red rock of the mountains was streaked with the white of quartz. The sun was hot two hours before noon. The air was still, nothing stirred anywhere. Dancing heat waves emphasized the dead quiet.

  My skin crawled. Again and again I shifted my rifle to wipe the sweat from my hands. Sweat streaked the dust on the faces of my companions, and the sweat trickling down my spine was cold and clammy under the slight stir of wind. I tried to assay our chances and came up empty.

  John J. Battles suddenly spoke. "I'd like to see the leaves turning red and gold again, and hear the wild geese honk."

  "You're thinking of a northern land," Spanish Murphy said. "I remember a time like that in Wyomin'. I drove a herd east from Oregon."

  Dorset edged close to me. "Tell," she said softly, "do you think we'll make it?"

  I did not want to talk, it was a time for listening. "We've had luck so far," I answered.

  We switched horses again and pushed on through the nooning time -- four bold but lonely men, a girl scarcely become a woman, and the youngsters, four of them.

  With the spare horses, three per rider, and our pack horse, we made a solid bunch. Our other pack horse had long since been lost.

  Somewhere, still far off to north of us, lay the border, a thin line drawn on maps, and a thin line in our consciousness, but a strong one across our lives.

  North of it there might be help. And further north still there was sanctuary.

  We slowed the horses to a walk. It was very hot. The sun was lost in a brassy sky.

  I think we all knew that the Apaches would come. We could elude a few, but we could not elude them all. The Apache had no regard for horse flesh. He would ride a horse to death and then eat him, so he rode often at a killing pace. And there were the talking smokes, speaking across the distance.

  I did not hate the Apache. He was my enemy as I was his because of the time and the circumstances, but he was a fighting man, and a strong man who endured much to live in this country. If they captured us they would kill us. There would be torture for the men, worse perhaps for the girl, but it was their way of life, and you judge each man by his time and his way of life.

  We walked our horses while the saddles creaked, and we blinked our eyes to see past the sting of the salty sweat trickling into them. Dark stains showed on our shirts. We drank water from our canteens, and kept on.

  We knew there was a waterhole ahead. Rocca knew where it lay, Spanish knew, and I knew. We thinned out as we rode nearer, and we cut for sign, but found none.

  We could see a cottonwood up ahead, and a small clump of willows. Off to the east, fifty yards or more from the waterhole, rose a bare upthrust of rocks perhaps half a mile long, and not more than a hundred yards wide for most of its length.

  Pulling up, I studied those rocks. "That waterhole now," I said. "If somebody was up in those rocks anybody at the waterhole would be a sitting duck."

  "We got to have water," Murphy said.

  Glancing around, I saw a separate small island of rocks rising perhaps from a buried spur of the ridge. "You folks hole up over younder," I said, "and I'll take three horses and the canteens and ride over there for water. You cover me.

  If any shooting starts, you open up on the ridge over there. I'll water the horses, and fill the canteens."

  Leading the horses, I rode to the waterhole. There was a desert wren singing in the willows, and the cotton-wood leaves were rustling, as they do in the slightest breeze. Some quail sifted away through the low brush as I approached, the horses quickening their pace as they neared the water.

  If there were Apaches near they would surely have seen my friends take their rifles and get down among the rocks, and they would be almighty sure to know that meant trouble if they opened fire. But it was a shaky business, a-setting out there on a horse, letting the other ones take the time to drink, and just a-waiting for a bullet.

  After a bit I got down, went around the waterhole, and began filling canteens.

  First off, o
n coming up to the waterhole I'd taken notice of the ground, and saw coyote, bighorn, and wild horse tracks, and the track of a desert fox, too, but no tracks of anything human. That didn't mean a whole lot. An Apache, if he figured there were white men around, would never go near a waterhole unless he was dying of thirst. He would just hole up some place close by and wait.

  One by one I filled the canteens, getting a drink myself in the meantime, and then I mounted up and rode back and took the rest of the horses.

  It was an eerie sort of thing, watching the horses dip their muzzles into the water and drink, and listening to that wren in the brush. I could see a place where some javelinas, the wild pig of the desert, had been bedded down.

  When the last horse had drunk his fill, I gathered the reins on the black and put a boot into the stirrup. I started to swing up, but something glanced sharp across my eyes and I let go the pommel and dropped.

  The bullet, timed for my swing into the saddle, clipped a twig where my head would have been, had I not been warned by that flash of sunlight on a rifle barrel.

  On one knee I aimed and fired, my shot echoing those fired by my bends among the rocks, and they all hit within inches of where the Apache had been. Then I was in the saddle and racing the horses back to the rocks. In an instant we were all riding, and another shot hit the sand behind us.

  "Only one," Rocca said, "but he'll send up a smoke."

  "Maybe we got him," Spanish said.

  "We'd have to have luck. We worried him, but I don't think we got him."

  We glanced back, and in another minute saw a thin column of smoke rising. We looked at it, but nobody made any comment. The horses were slowed to a walk -- they might need to run later. We traveled down an arroyo that left no tracks to speak of, the deep sand obliterating all but indefinite hollows.

  We went down across a desert flat and into several parallel ranges of bare ridges, their slopes partly covered with the drift sand. The ridges gave us a little cover, and we stepped up the pace.

  The children were very tired now. The endless motion of the horses had lulled them into a state where nothing mattered but a longed-for end of it. As for the rest of us, we lived by the moment, counting on nothing more, knowing that the worst might still lay before us.

  Dorset came close to me, and for some time we rode side by side without speaking. Suddenly, about half a mile off to our right, we saw a rider. It was an Apache, but he made no effort to close the distance, simply holding a course parallel to our own. A few minutes later another appeared, to our left.

  "They're closing in." Battles lit a cigar, squinting his eyes through the smoke.

  "I think they've got some place in mind, somewhere up ahead."

  Tampico stood in his stirrups, scanning the country around. "We'll turn west," he said.

  We wheeled quickly and charged in that direction, spurring our horses for speed, and drove right at the man on that flank.

  For a startled instant I think the Apache had no idea what to do, and then he fled off to the northwest as fast as his pony could carry him.

  We kept on west at top speed, wanting to cover ground before they could adjust to our change of direction and pace. We dipped into a hollow dotted with clumps of ocotillo and prickly pear, and charged down it, out of sight of the Apaches for at least a mile. Then we rode up a shallow wash and out on the flat above.

  There were at least a dozen Apaches off to the east, riding on a course that would join with ours somewhere ahead. Others were coming up behind, and to the west we could see another party coming along fast to head us off.

  Me, my eyes were taking in the country around. We were being boxed. "All right,"

  I said, "we'll run!"

  And we ran.

  I figure we all knew we were up against it then. They knew we had been swapping saddles, but now they weren't going to give us a chance to do that. They were going to run us the way they'd run wild horses, in relays. If we stopped they'd move in and surround us, so we had to run. And they knew where we were running to.

  Oh, they were sly, all right, cunning as wolves. Ahead of us a canyon mouth suddenly opened, a wide, shallow canyon like some of those in western Texas, with sides sloping steeply up to a sheer rock wall about thirty or forty feet high. The Apaches closed in on the sides, driving us into that canyon like into a trap. And we knew it would be a box canyon, with a dead end somewhere up ahead.

  "Slow down," I said. "Rocca, we got to find us a place up on the slope, somewhere open to the top."

  A shot rang out and one of our horses stumbled and fell. I swore. Nobody ever likes to see a good horse die, but this one would be eaten by the Apaches.

  They had fallen behind now, but they were in the canyon top, which was over four hundred yards wide at this point. There was a thin trickle of water in the bottom, at the east side.

  We were almost abreast of what looked like a means of escape before we saw it -- hollow up near the rim, a sort of half-basin scooped out by some fall of rock, followed by erosion. Pulling up, I pointed. "We're going up there."

  "It's a trap," Rocca said. "We'll never get out of it."

  "It's a place to stand and fight from," Battles answered, looking up. He wheeled his horse and started up the slope.

  He rode left for about fifty paces, leading the pack horse, then back right, riding a switchback trail he was making himself.

  Tampico Rocca was already down behind some rocks, and I dropped beside him. "Go on up," I told Dorset. "At the top you'll have to lead your horse, but keep going."

  She was not one to ask unnecessary questions. She knew what Rocca and I were set to do, and she wasted no time. John J. Battles was already halfway up, and he was on his feet, leading his struggling horses. Harry Brook, with one of the Creed boys, was right behind him, but being lighter they could stay on the horses.

  Spanish Murphy was waiting. Winchester in his hand, and when Dorset passed him he followed, leading the other horses. They strung out on the trail, making quite a cavalcade.

  "Tamp," I said, "there's a steep fall of rock, a sort of watercourse, to the left of where they are going up. It will be steeper but faster."

  "Bueno," he said, and looked around at me. "It has been a good race. A very good one, I think."

  The Apaches were coming closer -- there must have been at least thirty of them.

  Again I glanced at the slope, checking out the route, the possible cover, the quickest way to the hollow up under the rim. It was farther up there than it looked, and already the others were looking a lot smaller, but they still had a way to go.

  One of the Apaches was trying to climb the slope behind us. Rocca tucked the butt of his Winchester against his shoulder, held his aim for an instant, and fired. We saw the Apache slip, half fall, then catch himself and turn his horse away from us.

  We waited. The other Indians were scattering out now. We fired, choosing our targets, but we could not see whether we scored or not. But all the Apaches in sight went to the ground.

  Rocca ducked back, running swiftly from rock to rock. He was an Apache again himself, swift and daring, yet sure. He paused once, shot quickly, then ran on.

  I balanced my Winchester in my hands, took a quick glance toward a bunch of brush and rocks about thirty feet away, and ran for it. A bullet kicked dust just ahead of me ... another ricocheted off a rock with an angry snarl, a nasty sound, the flattened bullet could have made an ugly wound.

  Crawling a dozen feet, and scrambling through the brush, I got up again, rounded a boulder, and was in plain sight of them. I brought my rifle up swiftly. An Apache was running straight toward me when I stepped out, but before he could stop or hunt cover, I squeezed off my shot.

  He was not seventy yards away and was facing full toward me, and there was no way I could miss. The bullet caught him running, and he took two steps before he pitched on his face in the gravel of the slope.

  Up the watercourse I could hear scrambling feet, and I ran that way. I was taking long strides,
leaping from rock to rock like a mountain goat, with lead spattering around me. Once I lost my footing, my heel skidded off a water-worn boulder, and I was pitched into the sand. I came up fast and felt a bullet snatch at my hat as I fired ... and missed.

  The Apache I'd seen was gone. The one I had killed was still lying back there on the gravel.

  My breath was tearing at my lungs but I scrambled on up, crawling over boulders, pulling myself from rock to rock. From time to time I was out of their sight.

  Suddenly Rocca was right ahead of me. He turned to speak and I saw the bullet catch him. It dusted him on both sides, and he squatted suddenly on his haunches with blood coming from his side, staining his shirt.

  He let go of his rifle and started to fall forward, but I caught him.

  Ahead of us was about sixty yards of talus slope, and then the hollow toward which we'd headed.

  When I caught Rocca I just naturally let him fall across my shoulders, catching hold of his collar with my right hand. My Winchester was in my left, and I reached down and got a finger through the lever on his rifle and lunged up straight. Then I started up the slope.

  That struggle up, with Rocca across my shoulders, my breath most gone, and those bullets coming toward us from behind ... I never want to do that again.

  Somehow I made it, and then stumbled and sort of fell into the hollow. Somebody lifted Rocca off my back, and I saw he'd been hit at least one more time.

  Gasping for breath, I stared around me. They were all there, Dorset, the children, Murphy, and Battles, and the horses. And now there was us two.

  "The trouble is," John J. Battles said, "we're trapped. There's no way out."

  Chapter 13

  The hollow was nowhere more than seventy or eighty feet across, and the side up which we had come spilled over in a slope of broken rock and gravel. Elsewhere the sides sloped up steeply in banks of blown sand and gravel, littered with broken rock from the escarpment above, and dotted with sparse brush. The sheer wall above varied from eight feet in height to twice that.