The thing that had once been human lay in a small clearing between a pair of mesquite juniper-covered hills that were bright with summer wildflowers. The man was spread-eagled beside the ashes of a fire, his wrists and ankles bound to stakes with strips of rawhide.
His eyelids had been cut off and fires had burned in his hands and on his groin. There was little left of either. His naked body was covered in small cuts and the desert fire ants had been busy on him.
The man raised his head, trying to see with black, burned-out eyes. There was a terrible fear in his quavering voice. “Who’s there?”
“Lieutenant Steve Stryker.”
A grimace that could have been a smile stretched the man’s cracked lips. “Oh, thank God it’s you! I’m saved.”
Wearily, Stryker took a knee beside Sergeant Miles Hooper. He lifted the canteen from his shoulder and pressed it to the man’s lips. Hooper drank deeply, then laid his head back on the ground.
“You’ve saved me, Lieutenant. Oh, please, I need a doctor bad. Get me to the post.”
“What happened, Hooper?” Stryker asked.
“Rake . . . Rake Pierce. I . . . I asked him for ’elp and he threw me to the Apaches, like I was a piece of meat.” Hooper raised his head again. “I can’t see you, Lieutenant.”
“Sun blindness. It will pass.”
“He—Rake—laughed, Lieutenant. The Apaches were working on me, making me scream and he laughed. He’s . . . he’s not a man; he’s a fiend.”
Hooper tried to raise his head again. “My pisser,” he croaked, “did they take my pisser?”
Stryker glanced at the blackened lump of burned flesh between the man’s legs.
“No,” he said, “it’s fine.”
“Thank ’eavens. I’ll need that for the whores when I get well again.”
“Where is Pierce headed?” Stryker asked. Silently he undid his holster flap and slid out the Colt.
“North, Lieutenant. That’s all I know, following the Apaches.” He moved his head. “Get the lads to cut me free and put me on a horse. I need a doctor real bad. I’m glad you saved—”
Stryker’s shot slammed into Hooper’s temple. He holstered his revolver and got to his feet, looking down at the dead man. Hooper had been a murderer, a deserter and a disgrace to his uniform, but nobody deserved to die as he’d done.
A sick emptiness in him, Stryker headed back toward the game trail between the hills. His steps were slow and halting, a dragging, agonized shuffle across the hot sand. Blood was seeping through his shirt, weakening him.
He gave up after twenty yards and collapsed into the thin shade of a juniper that struggled for survival in the narrow crevice of a fractured boulder. The sun rose higher in the sky, pounding the land into submission, and only the insects moved, making their small sounds in the bunch grass.
Stryker closed eyes that felt as though they were heavy with sand. He leaned his head against the rock and breathed through his mouth, grabbing at the thin air. Gradually he let not sleep, but a deep unconsciousness take him.
As the day shadowed into the lilac tint of evening and the stars set sentinels in the sky, an antelope trotted past the split rock, only to bound away when it caught sight of the sprawled human. A pair of hunting coyotes winded Stryker but quickly lost interest when they scented richer, closer and deader meat. . . .
His uneasy, restless slumber dragged on.
“Lieutenant! Lieutenant Stryker!”
Stryker’s eyes flew open. Mrs. McCabe was calling into the darkness for him. He struggled to his feet just as the woman emerged from the gloom—leading a horse.
“When it got dark I grew worried,” she said. “I thought . . . I thought maybe you were—”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Where is Kelly?”
“Asleep.”
Stryker felt like he was a hundred years old. He stepped wearily toward Mary McCabe and studied the horse. “He’s a criollo,” he said. “I once saw a regiment of Mexican lancers mounted on them. How did you come by him?”
“One of the dead Apaches was riding him. I found him wandering under the cottonwood beside the cabin. I bridled him,” the woman said. “He’s not a tall horse. Can you get on his back?”
Stryker managed a smile. “Seems like I’ll have to. I can’t make it back to the cabin on foot.”
It took him several attempts, but finally he managed to climb onto the little horse’s back. The criollo was well-trained and had stood quietly while Stryker mounted him. Now Mary gathered up the reins and led the horse back toward the game trail.
On the way, Stryker told her about finding Sergeant Hooper. He did not tell her the man had still been alive and that he’d fired a mercy shot into his brain.
“The Apaches are heading north to join Geronimo,” he said. “So is Rake Pierce, the man who beat me with a shackle chain.”
When she turned, Mary’s face was a pale blur in the gathering darkness. “You want to kill him, this man?”
“Yes, I do, Mrs. McCabe. I want to kill him real bad.”
“I understand.”
“You do?”
“I wanted to kill the man who abused me and cut me with a knife. I’m a coward who just never found the courage.”
“You have courage, Mrs. McCabe. It’s a quiet, womanly sort of courage that doesn’t shout its name, but it’s courage nevertheless. If you’re a coward, I haven’t seen it in you yet.”
“No one has ever said anything like that to me, Lieutenant.”
“A woman needs a man to say things to her, Mrs. McCabe. He should tell her about the way her hair catches the sunlight, the blue sky that lives in her eyes. True things.”
“West Point taught you well, Lieutenant Stryker.”
“No, life taught me well, or it’s trying to.”
“Hold on tight,” Mary said. “We’ve reached the hogback.”
Chapter 15
The McClellan saddle was designed to favor the horse, not the rider, and Stryker felt stiff and uncomfortable as he headed the criollo south across an endless brush desert cut through by dry creeks and wide, dusty washes.
He felt uncomfortable for another reason.
Mrs. McCabe and Kelly walked beside the horse, their only protection from the blazing sun a tiny white parasol that the woman had preserved from the time before her marriage. Stryker knew they were suffering, but neither uttered a word of complaint, a fact that did nothing to ease his conscience.
Mary knew that the lieutenant wasn’t fit to walk a long distance and she’d accepted it. But again, that didn’t make it any easier.
They’d left the cabin at first light that morning, planning to meet up with Birchwood and his infantry on the trail south. Stryker would then abandon Yanisin and his people to their own devices and use a series of forced marches to reach Fort Merit, hopefully before the Apaches attacked.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, not even a good one, but it was all Stryker had, and at least he felt he was taking the initiative again.
He looked down at the woman. “How are you holding up, Mrs. McCabe?”
“It’s hot.”
Kelly’s head was bent and her feet were dragging. She had earlier refused to sit on the horse in front of
