Apache summer
by
Author unknown
Chapter One.
Western Texas, 1870 ~ ~ Look, Lieutenant! Fire, rising high to our
left!' Jamie Slater reined in his roan stallion. With penetrating
silver-gray eyes he stared east, where Sergeant Monahah was pointing.
Across the sand and the sagebrush and the dry dunes, smoke could indeed
be seen, billowing up in black and gray bursts. Tendrils of flame, like
undulating red ribbons, waved through the growing wall of smoke.
'Injuns!' Monahan breathed.
To Jamie's fight, Jon Red Feather stiffened. Jamie turned toward him.
The half-breed Blackfoot was a long way from home, but he was still one
of the best Indian scouts around. He was a tall, striking man with
green-gold eyes and strong, arresting features. Thanks to a wealthy
white grandfather, Jon Red Feather had received a remarkable education,
going as far as Oxford in England.
Jamie knew that Jon resented the ready assumption that trouble meant
Indians, even though he admitted readily to Jamie that trouble was
coming, big trouble. The Apache hated the white man, the Comanche
despised him, and Jamie was convinced that the great Sioux Nation was
destined to fight in a big way for all the land that had been grabbed by
the hungry settlers.
Through Jon, Jamie had come to know the Comanche well. He didn't make
the mistake of considering the Comanche to be docile, but, on the other
hand, he'd never known a Comanche to lie or to give him any double-talk.
'Let's see what's going on,' Jamie said quietly. He rose high in his
saddle and looked over the line of forty-two men presently under his
command.
'Forward, Sergeant. We ride east. And by the look of things, we'd best
hurry.'
Sergeant Monahah repeated his order, calling out harshly and demanding
haste.
Jamie flicked his reins against the roan's shoulders, and the animal
took flight with grace and ease. His name was Lucifer, and it fitted the
animal well. He was wild--and remarkable.
That was one thing about the U. S. Cavalry, Jamie reckoned as they raced
toward the slope of the dune that led to the rise of smoke. They offered
a man good horses. He hadn't had that pleasure in the Confederate
cavalry.
When the Confederacy had been slowly beaten into her grave, there hadn't
been many mounts left. But the war had been over for almost five years
now.
Jamie was wearing a blue uniform, the same type he'd spent years of his
life shooting at. No one, least of all his brothers, had believed he
would last a day in the U. S. Cavalry, not after the war.
But they had been wrong. Many of the men he was serving with hadn't even
been in the war, and frankly, he understood soldiers a whole lot better
than he did politicians and carpetbaggers.
