“Who in the hell are you, mister?” Cunningham managed to say. “We ain’t done you no harm.”
“It’s the Apache you’re hurting, Cunningham. I gave you a choice. Go or die. You chose the wrong one.”
“How—How many of you are there?” Cunningham said. “You got men outside?”
“There’s a nation outside, Lester. A whole nation of Apaches.”
“I don’t get it,” Cunningham said, his voice fading as his eyes began to glaze over with the frost of death.
He shuddered and there was a crackle in his throat. He let out a long sigh and couldn’t get any breath back in his lungs. He closed his eyes and went limp.
Zak looked at the two men. Both were dead and there was a silence in the room that was both blessed and cursed.
Zak walked to the cage. He took the cage outside, set it on the ground. He lifted the door, and Bertie hopped out. Zak made a sound to scare the rabbit off, then returned to the shack.
“And you won’t kill any more coyotes, either,” Zak said as he picked up the oil lamp and hurled it against the wall, hitting it just above the bundle of hides. Tongues of flames leaped in all directions and began licking at the dried fur, anything that would burn.
Zak stepped outside into the clean dry air. He opened the gate to the Colt and started ejecting spent hulls. He stuffed new cartridges into the pistol as he walked slowly toward the place where he had left Nox. Before he mounted up, he could smell the sickly aroma of burning human flesh.
Chapter 18
Ben Trask cursed the rising sun. He jerked the cinch strap tight, drove a fist into his horse’s belly. The horse flinched and drew up its sagging belly, giving Trask another notch on the cinch. He buckled it and turned to the others in the stable.
“Jesse Bob, you and Willy about finished yonder?”
“Just about, Ben,” Cavins said, but he was still trying to load his saddle over the blanket. His horse was sidestepping every attempt.
“I got to finish curryin’ mine,” Rawlins said. “He wallowed in shit durin’ the night.”
The eastern horizon was a blaze of red, as if billions of sumacs had exploded and dripped crimson leaves in the sky. There was a majesty and an ominous hush across the desert as the sun spread molten copper over the rocks and plants.
“It’s goin’ to be hotter’n a two-dollar pistol out there today,” Trask grumbled. “We should have been gone long before sunrise.”
“Nobody woke us up,” Cavins complained. “Hell, we even hit the kip with our clothes on last night.”
“It’s that damned Ferguson,” Rawlins said. “He said he’d have somebody wake us up before dawn.”
“Where in hell is Ferguson?” Trask said, a nasty snarl in his voice. “It looks like we got a bunch of barn rats in here and no sign of Hiram.”
“He said he had business to take care of,” Cavins said. “He’ll be along directly.”
“There’s only one business this day. Damn his stage line anyway.”
The Mexicans were almost finished saddling their horses and were leading them out of the stables. Ferguson waded through them into the barn and started yelling at Lou Grissom.
“You got my horse saddled yet, Lou?”
“Yes, sir. He’s still in his stall, though.”
“Shit, you could have brought him out. Ben, this is a hell of a day for whatever you got planned,” Ferguson said as he approached Trask.
“Climb down off your high horse, Hiram,” Trask said. “You know the stakes.”
“No, I don’t know the damned stakes. I got one plan, you got another.”
“O’Hara’s map’s gonna lead us right to the head honcho Apache hisself. We can wipe ’em out in one blow. With my men and yours, them what’s in those line shacks, we’ll have a small army. Just make sure everybody’s got plenty of cartridges, and it wouldn’t hurt to take along a few sticks of dynamite.”
“Christ, Ben, what makes you think you can trust that soldier boy?”
“Did you hear that horse come in early this morning, runnin’ like a bat out of hell?”
“Nope. I slept like a dadgummed log all night.”
“That was a rider from Fort Bowie. Wore out saddle leather and his horse to bring me a message from Willoughby.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. O’Hara’s baby sister left the fort night before last, headin’ straight for your place. I told O’Hara if this didn’t pan out, she’d be the first to die, and he could watch her bleed.”
“He swallered that?”
“Shivered like a dog shittin’ peach seeds,” Trask said.
Hiram found that hard to believe. O’Hara hadn’t impressed him as a man who was much afraid of anything. But, of course, he would have strong feelings for his sister and might fear that harm would come to her if he didn’t
