five joined him, while the others, especially the older men, merely stared at them from the openings of their wickiups.
“Will we attack this white man?” one of the Indians asked.
“Yes,” Chetopa answered.
“Eeeyaah!” the others shouted, and Chetopa motioned for them to be quiet.
“We will wait until he passes,” he said. “Then we will strike from behind.”
So deep was Johnson into his fantasies that he didn’t even see the Indians as they came over the ridge and started after him. In fact, his very first indication of danger was when one rode up right beside him on the left and another on the right.
For a second, Johnson was shocked by their sudden and unexpected appearance. Then he became frightened, and he slapped the reins against the back of his team, urging them to run.
The team broke into a gallop, and the buckboard flew down the road, leaving behind it a billowing rooster tail of dust. The Indians easily kept pace with him, and as he looked left and right, he saw that they were laughing, actually enjoying his panic.
He was not armed, and had no way to fight back. As soon as the Indians realized he wasn’t armed, they rode ahead of him, still one to either side, and reached down to grab the harness of his team. The Indians slowed the team, finally bringing them to a halt.
For a second the buckboard just sat there, surrounded by the swirl of dust the wheels had stirred up, as the whole war party gathered around.
“What do you want?” Johnson asked. He pointed to the harness and tack he was carrying. “Do you want my samples? You can have them! Take them.”
“You should not have come here,” Chetopa said.
“What do you mean I shouldn’t have come here? This is a public road. I’m on my way to Arivica.”
Chetopa spoke in Apache to the others, and Johnson saw them all raise their rifles and point at them.
“What? No!” he shouted.
The report of six rifle shots rolled back from the nearby mountains, and Johnson’s body jerked under the impact of the bullets. He slumped forward, prevented from falling only by the footrest of the buckboard.
Chetopa dismounted, drew his knife, and advanced toward the body. Grabbing the dead white man by his hair, he made the scalping cut; then he jerked the scalp off and held it up while it was still bleeding.
“Eeeyahh!” he shouted, and the others, denied the scalp, took out their anger and left their mark by further disfiguring of the body. They hacked and cut at the dead man while, overhead, buzzards circled, waiting patiently for their unexpected feast.
By now the pain Ponci was feeling was so severe that it was almost unbearable. Every step his horse made transferred a shooting pain up his leg and into the rest of his body. He had half a bottle of laudanum left ... but he didn’t want to use it. Not yet anyway.
Up ahead, he saw what he had been looking for, and he guided his horse toward an unusual rock formation: an obelisk, with two round stones at the bottom. To Ponci, it looked like a pecker and a pair of balls. It looked like that to the Indians as well, which is why they called it Dzil Ndeen, or “Mountain Man.”
What made the rock formation particularly significant now was the fact that Ponci knew it shielded a cave from view. And right now, Ponci needed the cave as a means of getting out of the sun, staying out of sight, and providing a place to recuperate after he did what had to be done.
Ponci rode his horse toward the rock formation. When he passed a patch of vegetation, he stopped and let his horse graze.
“Eat what you can,” he said. “It’s going to be slim pickin’s for a while.”
Once in the cave, Ponci climbed down from his horse, removed the horse’s saddle, then secured him. After that he started a small fire, then took his knife out and cut his pants leg off, just above his right knee. He took off his boot, and slid the cut sleeve of the pants leg down and off.
“Oh, damn,” he said quietly as he examined his leg. From the knee down, the leg was blue. The wound was puffy, with abscesses and dead flesh all around it. “This son of a bitch is bad.”
Ponci built a small fire, then put the knife blade in the fire.
“How damn hard can it be?” he asked aloud. “Hell, when I was butcherin’, I would sometimes cut off a dozen legs a day.”
Ponci fortified himself with a few swigs of laudanum, making sure to hold some back for later. Then he took the knife from the fire and looked at his leg, just below the knee.
“Of course, them legs was on cows or pigs. This here will be the first time I ever cut my own leg off.”
Almost hysterically, he giggled. Then, holding his breath, he started to cut.
CHAPTER 14
There was a comforting familiarity to the interior of a general store. It was redolent with the scent of coffee beans, ground flour, smoked meat, and various spices. The shelves behind the clerk’s counter were colorful displays of can labels—yellows, reds, blues—advertising beans, peaches, peas, and tomatoes. A calendar on the back wall had the smiling picture of a young girl holding a bar of soap.
BUY PEARL’S SOAP, the legend said.
A long string of peppers hung from a nail, adding their own aroma to the other smells.
Falcon was here, buying the supplies he would need to sustain him during the time he would be on the trail of Fargo Ford and the others. As he called for each item, the store clerk, a tall, thin man with snow-white hair and a beard, would find it, then bring it back to the front, adding the item to an increasing pile. As he added each item, he
