dying hard.”
“Try to lie still,” I said. “It will help.”
The day slowly faded into night and a cold moon rose in the bright, star-scattered sky. The flickering firelight played on the bodies of the dead that lay around me, touching their pale faces with red. In the distance a coyote howled his hunger, a long, drawn-out wail that was carried far by the wind.
Mercifully, Charlie Hunt was now beyond pain and the blue death shadows were gathering under his eyes and in the gaunt hollows of his cheeks. He was no longer with me, but had traveled back to another time and place. He spoke to his ma and sister like they were right there by the fire and once he whispered the name of a girl he had known.
I guessed it was about midnight when his eyes flew open and he looked right at me. “I’m obliged to you for staying by me,” he said. Then death rattled in his throat and he was gone.
As Reeves and me had done for the others, I now did for the man who was once Charlie Hunt. I closed the boy’s eyes and straightened his legs and crossed his arms over his chest.
Then I saddled the black and rode away from that place of death, the glow of the moonlight painting the trail ahead, the grass, the hills and the pines the color of tarnished silver.
I rode through the night, the big black, well used to dark trails, moving out sure-footed and confident.
At first light I stopped in a grove of post oak and elm and made a fire. A narrow creek ran close by but only a trickle of water ran over its sandy bottom and it took me near five minutes to fill my coffeepot and the water was bitter at that.
Reeves and me had split what supplies we had, including those we found at the outlaw camp, and I made a meager breakfast of venison jerky washed down with weak coffee.
I eased the girth on the black and let him graze; then I spread my blankets and slept for a couple of hours.
The sun was climbing higher in the sky when I woke, drank the last of the coffee and swung into the saddle.
Doan’s Crossing was a ways to the south of me, but I planned to reach it before nightfall.
By early afternoon I’d crossed two forks of the Red, the Salt and the North, both of them little more than sandy, shallow creeks lined with stunted cottonwoods. When I turned in the saddle, behind me the peaks of the Wichita Mountains were lost in haze and ahead lay a lush, grassy valley about four or five miles wide, brushy ravines on either side cutting deep into the surrounding hills.
I rode into the valley, the black walking knee-deep in grass and wildflowers. After an hour, the sky above me clouded over, and rain began to fall. I shrugged into my slicker and spread as much of it as I could over Sally’s straw bonnet, which I gloomily realized was beginning to look the worse for wear.
The valley gradually widened until the surrounding hills were maybe six miles apart and mesquite began to appear. Here and there a few scrubby elms grew close to the bottoms of the slopes, their branches drooping as the rain fell heavier.
I studied the land around me. Had Lafe Wingo and the Owens brothers passed this way? And if they had, how long ago?
I had no answer to those questions and the valley seemed as empty of life as the canyons of the moon.
There was no trail where I rode, but once I saw where the grass had been trodden down by a small antelope herd that had passed this way.
The rain continued to fall and I was considering trying to find some shelter in one of the ravines when I heard a sudden rattle of gunfire. Then silence. A moment later another shot racketed through the valley, followed by another.
I reined in the black, trying to puzzle this out. This was a remote valley and as far as I could tell, there was no sign of habitation.
Hunters maybe?
Or could it be Lafe Wingo and the Owens boys shooting at something or somebody?
This I doubted very much, but nonetheless I slid my Winchester from the boot, cranked a round into the chamber and rode forward again, the rifle ready across the saddle horn.
The gunfire seemed to have come from about a mile ahead and a ways to the north of where I rode, and I fretted that I might be riding into more trouble than I wanted or needed.
Catching my unease, the black’s head was up, his ears pricked forward, his eyes on the valley ahead of us. Another shot split the quiet of the afternoon, echoing away into silence.
I rode on, wary now. Despite the slanting mesh of the falling rain, the air was clear and I could see for a good distance. The valley began to narrow again, then, to the north of me. I rode up on a wide saddleback between two high hills. The saddleback rose gradually for about a mile, rising to a height of three hundred feet, its crest studded by a ragged parapet of bare sandstone rock.
I reined in the black and stood there for a few minutes, studying the saddleback, wondering what lay beyond the crest.
A shot rang out, followed by another, and this time there could be no mistaking where they originated. Beyond the bench somebody was firing. But who? And at what?
My first instinct was to swing away from there and keep on riding. But I was always a curious young feller and now my prying nature got the better of me and like a dang fool I kneed the black forward and began to climb the rise.
I dismounted before I reached the crest and led the black into the rocks. Now I was there, I discovered that the summit of the saddleback was flat, about thirty yards wide, and the red sandstone rocks, each as tall as a man, were scattered everywhere around its entire length and width.
Leaving the horse, I crouched and sprinted to the edge of the rise, well hidden by the surrounding boulders, and looked down.
Below me, the saddleback sloped away to end in a wide, flat-bottomed box canyon surrounded on all sides by tall hills. A sod cabin, shaded by a huge oak, lay close to the base of the hill furthest away from me. On one side of the cabin was a small timber barn, on the other a corral and, near that, a pigpen.
Corn shoots were greening a plowed-up piece of land to the front of the cabin and nearby ran a shallow creek, coming off one of the surrounding hills.
All this I saw in an instant, but what made my blood run cold were the Apaches hidden among rocks that must have tumbled down the rise in ancient times when the ground around here trembled.
From where I crouched I saw the backs of three of the Indians, but with Apaches, if you saw three there could be twice that number hidden.
And there were more of them. When I changed position to get a better angle on the cabin, I counted seven ponies tethered in a break in the hill to the right of the Apache position and there may have been others hidden from view.
Wooden shutters with narrow firing slits were drawn across the two small windows to the front of the cabin and from one I saw a puff of smoke followed by the bang of a rifle. A moment later a shot was fired from the other window and I heard the bullet whine off a rock near where an Apache crouched.
A warrior I hadn’t noticed before suddenly rose and fired his Winchester at the cabin. Soon three more stood and began firing, their bullets thudding into the cabin’s sod walls, a couple of shots splintering through the wood shutters.
The reason for all this firing became obvious when I noticed three Apaches run past the pigpen, then disappear from sight near the corral.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were planning. They could reach the cabin from its blind side and then get up on the flimsy pole and sod roof, smash it apart and fire at the defenders inside.
I figured the sodbusters in the cabin had chosen to live in this canyon because it was well sheltered from the heat of summer and the snows of winter. But they had chosen unwisely, because now they were trapped like rats and it was only a matter of time before the Apaches wore them down.
On my first trip up the trail I’d seen what Coman ches did to an Irish army scout and his Ute wife they’d captured. There was very little of the two left by the time we came across them, but it was obvious they’d taken a long, terrible time a-dying. Their last screams were still frozen on their gaping mouths and Simon Prather had to
