Blood and Gold

Chapter 16

The Apaches boiled out of the flat, featureless land like wraiths, two dozen of them, well-mounted, firing and yelling as they came.

All hell was breaking loose fast—too fast. I slid my Winchester out of the boot, turned in the saddle and cranked off a few quick shots. Beside me, Wingo was doing the same. It’s no easy task to sight on a target through a scope off the back of a rearing horse, but Wingo made it look easy.

One Apache suddenly threw up his arms and toppled off his paint pony and another pulled up and slumped over his horse’s neck, hit hard.

Ned Tryon yelled something I couldn’t hear and whipped up the oxen. The huge animals lumbered into a shambling trot, but no matter how they strained against the yoke, hooves kicking up clouds of dust, their pace was painfully slow.

Wingo wheeled his mount and rode to the back of the wagon. He reached out his hand and yelled to Lila: “Get up here!”

Ezra was firing steadily, his smoking Colt bellowing, and the Apache charge broke, the warriors splitting up, streaming to the right and left of us.

“What about him?” Lila asked.

“Leave him,” Wingo hollered. “He’s already a dead man.”

“Lafe!” Hank screamed. “For God’s sake take me with you!”

The big gunman glanced down at the stricken outlaw, his blue eyes pitiless. “Not a chance, Hank. You’re our ticket out of here. They’ll be so busy with you, they might forget about the rest of us.”

“No!” Lila cried. “You can’t leave him here.”

“Damn right I can,” Wingo yelled. He leaned from the saddle, scooped Lila into his arms and held her close in front of him. The gunman savagely raked the paint with his spurs, drawing long streaks of blood, and was gone in a cloud of dust, the pony’s steel shoes winking in the sunlight.

Ezra emptied his gun at the Apaches, then swung his horse around and followed Wingo.

There was no time to be lost. I fired at a big warrior on a bay horse, missed, fired again. My second bullet hit the target because this time the Indian’s rifle spun away from him and he crashed heavily to the ground.

I rode toward Ned and kicked my right foot free of the stirrup. “Ned,” I yelled, “take a stirrup.”

Ned waved me away. “Go,” he shouted. “Save yourself and Lila.”

I galloped beside the man and reined up hard. The black reared and his hindquarters slammed into the ground, his churning hooves throwing up clods of earth.

“Ned, damn you, take the stirrup,” I yelled, fighting the horse as he tried his best to bolt on me.

A bullet plowed into the wagon, a shower of splinters exploding into the air, and another kicked up a startled exclamation point of danger between Ned’s feet.

The Apaches were closing on us now from two sides, yelling in triumph, wishful of taking us alive.

I slid the Winchester back into the boot and drew my Colt. As the black reared again and angrily fought the bit, I slammed a couple of fast shots at the Indians nearest us and saw them waver and break.

“Now damn you!” I yelled at Ned.

The man finally realized how desperate things were and his left foot smacked into the stirrup. I spurred the black and, Ned grimly hanging on to the saddle horn, took off after the others. Behind me I heard Hank scream in terror and scream again, shrieking, shattering screeches that scraped my strung-out nerves raw.

After about a hundred yards I turned, looking for pursuers. But the Apaches were milling around the wagon, yipping war cries, intent only on Hank.

I had no regard for killers like Hank Owens, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was about to die a hideous, agonizing death. Even though gut-shot, his dying would not come quickly or easily. The Apaches knew well how to keep a man alive, the better to prolong the torments they inflicted on him. Hank would last many long, suffering hours, and in the end, he’d curse Lafe Wingo, curse God and curse the day he was born and the father who sired him and the mother who bore him.

His only hope was that he’d die out of his mind, no longer capable of understanding his appalling reality, and so travel beyond the reach of the Apaches.

Wingo had been right though, heartless as it was. His sacrifice of Hank had bought us time. The question was: Had he bought us enough?

As I rode in the dust of Wingo and Ezra Owens, I had no answer to that question.

I’ve been told that small worries cast big shadows, but what was facing me now was no small worry and uppermost in my mind wasn’t Simon Prather’s money or Lafe Wingo. It was all Lila, and that surprised me.

I slowed the black to a walk and Ned stepped down. Ahead of us, Wingo and Ezra had done the same, and I saw their heads swivel this way and that as they hunted for any kind of cover.

They found it a few minutes later, an abandoned wagon lying tipped on its side about fifty yards off the trail. Beyond the wagon ran a creek, maybe twenty feet wide with steep banks, a single cottonwood spreading leafy branches over twelve inches or so of sluggish water. Some curly mesquite grew quite close to the creek and here and there catclaw peeped from the buffalo grass.

Wingo and Ezra dismounted and took positions with their rifles at either end of the wagon. As Ned and I got closer, Lila came out from behind the wagon and stepped toward us.

She looked at Ned, the afternoon light harshly revealing the sunken planes of his unshaven cheeks and the dark circles under his sagging eyes.

“Pa,” she asked, “are you all right?”

The man nodded. “I just need to rest for a while.”

I swung down from the saddle and followed Lila and her pa to the wagon. Then I ground tied the black and slid the rifle from the boot.

“Boy, you keep watch behind us,” Wingo yelled. “I don’t want them Apaches coming at us across the damned creek.”

“They got Hank,” I said. I was telling Wingo something he already knew, but I was determined to leave the outlaw at least that three-word epitaph.

“The hell with him,” Wingo said, leaving him quite another.

The big gunman seemed to have forgotten about killing me, at least for now. Judging by the tenseness in his jaw and the way his knuckles showed white on the stock of his rifle, I figured the Apaches were his more urgent concern.

I took up a position near the creekbank, keeping the cottonwood to my left, and glanced around. The ashes of a fire lay in a circle near the bank and a battered coffeepot and a man’s flat-crowned hat were half-hidden in the grass.

It looked like the teamster who had driven this wagon had been attacked by Apaches only a couple of days before. I had no doubt they’d killed the man, but a scattering of shiny brass cartridge cases around the wagon showed where he’d made a good fight of it.

Just the previous spring, having all the confidence of the young, I figured that life was forever. But now, as the hours ticked slowly toward late afternoon, I had the uneasy feeling that maybe I wasn’t as immortal as I’d thought.

Unbidden, the thought came into my mind: Dusty, if Wingo doesn’t get you, the Apaches will.

I realized that I was in one hell of a fix and that realization brought me no comfort.

Over by the wagon, Wingo yelled at Lila: “Girl, see if you can find some wood or maybe some dry cow chips. We’re going to need coffee.”

“Lafe, you think that’s wise?” Ezra asked, his face strained, thin mouth pinched. “I mean the smoke.”

Wingo slowly shook his head, acting like he was feeling more sorrow than anger. “Ezra,” he said, real slow, “don’t you think the Apaches already know exactly where we are?”

A dawning realization crossed the man’s face and he gulped. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess they do.” Ezra’s eyes scanned the empty land around him. “I’m jumpy, is all. It’s this damned waiting that’s getting to me.”

“Me too,” Wingo said, his tongue running over his cracked lips. “It’s like I keep hearing footsteps.”

Although Lafe Wingo and Ezra Owens were experienced fighting men and possessed courage of a sort, theirs was the kind of bravery suited to short, explosive moments of action, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t daring of the typical frontier gunman.

This kind of taut waiting, while a man chewed on his heart and his belly was all balled up in a knot, required a quieter, more enduring courage that neither Ezra nor Wingo seemed to possess.

Did I?

I couldn’t even guess. I knew I was scared, so only time and events would provide the answer.

A long-handled shovel lay near the wagon and I used it to dig myself a shallow rifle pit. Then Wingo and Owens took their cue from me and did the same.

The three of us were as prepared as we were ever going to be, and the next move was up to the Apaches.

The day was shading into a cool, blue-shadowed twilight under a burnished sky the color of Black Hills gold when the warriors attacked. They came at us from two directions, one party of eight men charging directly toward me, intent on crossing the creek, the others concentrating on Wingo and Ezra.

Ignoring what was going on behind me, I fixed my attention on the task at hand. I fired at the Apache in the lead. Too fast. A clean miss. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to slow down and fired at the man again. Another miss. The Apaches were closer now, riding hell-for-leather.

I got up on one knee, levered a round into the chamber, fired, and a man went down. I fired again. Another hit, though this warrior just swung out of the charge, blood staining the front of his shirt, and loped back in the direction he’d come.

Behind me I heard the constant crash of rifles as Wingo and Ezra fired. I jumped out of the trench and gave ground, bullets kicking up dust at my feet. The Apaches reached the creek and began to mill around, bunching together as they slowed their ponies to make the steep descent into the sandy streambed. I threw down the Winchester, shucked my Colt and hammered three fast shots into the clustered horsemen.

Two men went down, one of them screaming, and I emptied the Colt into the rest, as far as I could tell, scoring no other hits.

But it was enough.

No Indians, not even Apaches, will take casualties like that without pulling back to lick their wounds and talk things over. The warriors swung their horses around and loped away. I grabbed the Winchester, sighted on a trailing Apache and pulled the trigger. Click! I had hosed the rifle dry.

A bullet fired from somewhere well beyond the creek slammed into the dirt inches from my right bootheel as I fed shells into the Winchester. I looked around for a target, saw nothing and stepped over to the wagon.

The Apaches were gone, but three of them lay stretched out on the ground, short, wiry men in faded Spanish shirts and wide blue and red headbands.

I’d often spoken to old soldiers who’d fought in the War Between the States and as I stood and surveyed the carnage around me, I recollected one of them saying that the generals on both sides never did learn the folly of attacking entrenched infantry with light cavalry.

The Apaches had made that same mistake, and judging by the number of their dead, I’d say they’d paid dearly for it.

Wingo and Ezra had killed three, and I had downed three and wounded at least one other. The Apaches, always few in number, could ill afford a butcher’s bill of that magnitude.

I stepped past Wingo and Ezra, their faces streaked black with powder smoke, and went to Lila who was huddled behind the wagon, her pa’s head in her arms.

“Was he hit?” I asked, kneeling beside her.

Ned looked at me and managed a weak smile. “A bullet burned across the back of my head,” he said. He reached behind him, probing for the wound and when his hand appeared again it was bloody.

Lila rose to her feet. “Pa, I’ll get some water from the creek and bathe your head.”

“Better let me do that, Lila,” I said. “There are dead men over there.”

The girl nodded gratefully, but as I turned to leave, she stopped me and threw herself into my arms. “Dusty,” she whispered, “thank God you’re all right.”

I tilted up her chin with a forefinger and her lips parted, her eyes suddenly hungry. I kissed her then, hard and long, and when my lips finally left hers I said: “And I’m glad you’re all right too.” Then with a husky voice, and battling to understand my feelings for her, I added: “I better get that water.”

As I walked past Wingo, the man’s eyes followed me, a burning, barely subdued rage flushing his face.

The gunman wanted Lila, and he’d kill to get her. But I was prepared to fight to keep her, so as I filled my canteen from the creek, I figured that at least for right now, things were pretty much balanced out on that score.

I handed Lila the canteen and stepped beside Wingo and Owens.

“Shouldn’t we ride on out of here, Lafe?” Ezra was asking. “Seems to me we whipped them real good.”

Wingo nodded. “We whipped them all right, but they might be back. We stay right where we are until sunup. If we leave now and they catch us out in the open, we’re dead men.”

Wingo turned to me. “You, boy, rustle us up some grub and see to more coffee. It’s going to be a long night.”

Wingo was right on that score—because an hour later, just as dark was falling and the first sentinel stars appeared, Hank Owens began to scream.