Blood Sky at Morning

Chapter 8

Ben Trask poured two fingers of whiskey into Hiram Ferguson’s glass.

“Maybe this will calm your nerves, Hiram,” Trask said. “You’re as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Ferguson’s hands shook as he lifted the glass to his lips. He was almost as big a man as Trask, but he was soft, flabby, with pudgy lips, jowls like a basset hound’s, and at least three chins under a round moon face. Trask was all hard muscle, half a foot taller than Ferguson, with a lean, angular face, and a hooked nose that looked as if it had been carved out of hickory with a hatchet. Wind and sun had burnished his features to a rich brown tan. His pale blue eyes were almost gray, portraying no emotion, like the eyes of a dead fish.

“That’s what you wanted, Hiram, wasn’t it? Get the army to chase out the Chiricahua?”

“Yeah, but we wanted to make ’em mad that the Apaches were killin’ civilians, burnin’ down their homes, rapin’ their women. I never called on you to go after soldiers. Shit almighty, Ben. You done took one giant step. In the wrong direction, to my way of thinkin’.”

“Hiram, you got nowhere with them tactics. Now you got that damned Jeffords smokin’ the peace pipe with Cochise and his whole gang. Then you go to the army mollycoddlin’ every red nigger from the Rio Grande to Santa Fe.”

“They’re even talkin’ about namin’ a fort after them bastards,” Ferguson said.

They were sitting in the Cantina Escobar, not far from Ferguson’s Stage & Freight Company. Most of the men inside were as anti-Apache as Ferguson, including the six Mexicans who had dressed up like Chiricahua and killed the two soldiers.

The others were local ranchers and their hands. Most of these were standing at the long bar, quaffing beer and eating pickled sausages prepared by Antonio Escobar’s wife, Lucinda, who also cooked bistec, frijoles refritos, juevos, papas, puerco, and anything else a hungry man might ask for. The smells from the kitchen were not overpowered by the scent of smoke and whiskey and mescal, tequila and fresh sawdust on the dirt floor hauled in from the nearby lumberyard and sawmill. The tables were small, except for one, which was used by card players and sat in the front corner to make room for all the tables. There was no music on most nights, but sometimes Lucinda’s brother would bring his guitar and sing sad Mexican folksongs on holidays when the cantina was occupied largely by Mexican vaqueros. This was not one of those nights, and the crowd was equally divided between Mexicans and norteamericanos.

“Look, Hiram, you wanted me to bring the army down on the Apaches. That’s why I staged that attack on one of your stages to make it look like the Apaches were on the warpath. By now, that gal has told every woman in that fort about that savage Indian attack.”

“Speakin’ of that, where in hell is Jenkins?” Ferguson asked. “He should have been back from Bowie this afternoon.”

“Who knows?” Trask said. “I’m wondering how you’re doing with O’Hara. You still got him over at the freight yard?”

“So far, he won’t talk.”

“He knows where every Apache camp is from here to the San Simon. Maybe you ought to let me work him over. And while we’re at it, what’s the difference between you kidnapping a cavalry officer and my bunch putting out the lamps on a couple of soldier boys? I’d like a crack at O’Hara. I could make him talk like a damned magpie.”

“No,” Ferguson said. “I’ve seen your work, Ben. We’ll get what we need out of him.”

“When?”

“By tomorrow. His sis was on that stage Jenkins took out of here to Fort Bowie. He sets store by her. I’m going to tell him we’ll grab her and put the boots to her if he doesn’t tell us what we want to know.”

“Just what are you doing to make O’Hara tell us where those Apaches are holed up?”

“The lieutenant’s bobbing for apples,” Ferguson said.

“Huh?”

“You wanta see? Finish up and we’ll walk over to the office.”

“Damned right I want to see,” Trask said.

He finished his whiskey, stood up.

Ferguson swallowed the last of his drink.

“See you later, boys,” Trask said to the Mexicans still drinking at the tables, their heads and shoulders bathed in lamplight and blue smoke. He laid some bills on the table, picked up the bottle, held it against the light to see how much whiskey was left. He grunted in satisfaction.

The two men walked out of the cantina and toward the freight office. Its windows sprayed orange light on the porch. A man with a scattergun stood in the shadows beneath the eaves, while another, with a rifle, paced back and forth between the corrals and the office building, his boots crunching on sand and gravel. The shotgun man worked for Ferguson. His name was Lou Grissom. The man with the rifle was one of his own, Al Deets, as hard as they came, not a soft bone in him.

“Al,” Trask said. “In the dark you got to shoot low.”

“Yeah, Ben,” Deets said. “Low and off to one side.”

Trask laughed as they clumped up the steps onto the porch. Grissom just stood there, like a mute statue. He wasn’t at all friendly, Trask thought, and that was the kind of man you needed to stand guard with a Greener chocked up with buckshot.

Ted O’Hara sat in a chair in a back room, stripped of his shirt, his arms and legs bound with manila rope. He looked haggard in the sallow light from a single lantern dangling from an overhead rafter. Two men stood on either side of him, bracing him against the chair back so he wouldn’t fall forward. In front of O’Hara sat a wooden tub filled with water. O’Hara’s face and hair were wet, his eyes closed, his head drooping downward so that his chin almost rested on his chest.

“He asleep?” Ferguson said.

“Tryin’,” one of the men, Jesse Bob Cavins, said.

“He say anything ’bout them Apache hideouts?” Ferguson asked the other man, a gaunt stringy hardcase named Willy Rawlins.

“Nope. He’s just swallered a lot of water, Hiram.” Rawlins had a West Texas drawl you could cut with a butcher knife if you laid it on a chunk of wood.

“Nothing?” Trask said, a scowl forming on his face.

“Nary,” Rawlins said.

“Says he don’t know nothin’,” Cavins said, “and we near drowneded him ten minutes ago.”

“He have any papers on him?” Trask asked. “Maps, stuff like that?”

“On that table over yonder,” Cavins said, nodding in the direction of a table next to a rolltop desk against one wall.

Trask walked over to the table and picked up an army pouch. He opened it, spread the contents out on the tabletop. Ferguson strode up to stand beside him.

“None of that made any sense to us,” Hiram said. “Army stuff.”

“You ever in the army, Hiram?”

“Nope. Not as a regular. I hauled freight out of Santa Fe and Taos up to Pueblo and Denver. Warn’t no war up yonder.”

Trask opened a folded paper and laid it out flat.

“This here’s a field map,” he said. “If you know how to read ’em, you can find out where you are. Or, in this case, where our young Lieutenant O’Hara has been.”

“Lot of gibberish to me,” Ferguson said.

“There’s numbers on it, in different places.”

“Don’t make no sense.”

“No, not to you and me. But I’ll bet O’Hara there knows what they mean. Did you show him the map? Ask him about it?”

Ferguson looked at the two men flanking O’Hara. They both shook their heads.

“Why not?” Trask asked.

“Yeah, why not?” Ferguson asked.

“We just asked him what you told us to ask him, Hiram.”

“And what was that?” Trask wanted to know, a warning tic beginning to quiver along his jawline.

“Where in hell them Apaches’ camps was,” Rawlins said.

“We asked him about Cochise, too,” Cavins said, a defensive tone to his voice.

“What did he say to those questions?” The tic in Trask’s facial muscles subsided as his jaw hardened. In the silence, the men could almost hear Trask’s teeth grind together.

“He said he didn’t know,” Rawlins said.

“He said he was on the scout, follerin’ orders is all.” Cavins was on the verge of becoming belligerent, and Ferguson shot him a warning glance.

Trask huffed in a breath as if he was building up steam inside him. But he remained calm. He knew men. These would be no trouble. Not Cavins nor Rawlins, not even Ferguson. Trask had observed men like these all his life, and men like O’Hara, as well. He knew the realms of darkness they all harbored. He knew their fears. Torturing men had given him insights that few other men ever even thought about. But he also knew when torture would fail, result only in silence or death.

O’Hara had been Ferguson’s idea, but then he had inside information, a conduit of some kind that led straight into Fort Bowie. An inside man. A man who hated Apaches as much as he did. Hiram knew someone high up in the military, at the post, who knew what O’Hara was scouting. But Hiram didn’t know how to dig that information out of a man like O’Hara, a soldier who held to higher standards than he did.

“Mind if I take a crack at soldier boy?” Trask said. “You got any coffee you can make in here?”

“Long as you don’t mark him up none, Trask,” Ferguson said. “Willy, you put on some Arbuckle’s. Bob, get some kindlin’ started in that potbelly.”

Rawlins walked over to a sideboard built into the wall. Nearby was a potbellied stove with a flat round lid on top. Cavins knelt down and opened the door, picked up a stick of kindling wood and poked around in the ashes.

“Deader’n hell,” he said. “Nary a coal.” Then he set about making a fire.

Rawlins rattled a pot against another, set out the one that made coffee, lifted the lid. He opened an airtight of Arbuckle’s coffee, releasing the aroma of cinnamon. He dipped grinds into the pot, replaced the lid.

“What do you aim to do, Ben?” Ferguson asked.

“Perk this guy up some, first off.”

Trask walked over to O’Hara, the map in his hands. He knelt down in front of the lieutenant, put his hand on O’Hara’s chin, tilted his head back up. O’Hara’s eyelids fluttered open. His blue eyes were watery, unfocused.

“You awake, Lieutenant O’Hara? We’re not going to put your face in the water no more, son. We just want to talk.”

O’Hara opened his eyes wider, stared at Trask.

“Not going to tell you anything.”

“That’s all right. You’ve been through hell, and it don’t make no difference no more. We found your map. It tells us what we want to know.”

“Map?”

Trask held up the map. O’Hara looked down at it.

“This field map we found on you. You recognize it?”

“No,” O’Hara said.

“That’s fine. It’s got numbers on it. Know what they mean?”

“No.”

Trask smiled. “Well, take a good look, Lieutenant. Maybe you do.”

O’Hara turned his head away. He struggled with his bonds, then gave up fighting it. They didn’t loosen.

“Sir, you’ll pay for this,” he said. “Holding me prisoner. The army will probably hang you.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. You’re not hurt, are you? You maybe swallered some water, got your hair wet, is all.”

“I was kidnapped. At gunpoint.”

“Not by me.”

“Who are you?” O’Hara asked.

“That’s not important. I came to help you. You want to go back to Fort Bowie all in one piece. Your sis is there, waiting for you.”

“Colleen?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s her name.”

O’Hara breathed a sigh, gulped in air. His eyes began to clear. “How do you know this?”

“Why, she rode this man’s stage to Fort Bowie. There were two soldiers with her. Some damned Apaches attacked the stage. Killed and scalped the two soldiers, but the driver got her away and set her down safe in Fort Bowie. Ain’t that right, Hiram?”

“Sure is.”

“So, you can go back there, too. I just thought you might want to help me with this map here.”

“No. I can’t help you. Those numbers don’t mean anything to me.”

Trask stood up. O’Hara followed him with his gaze, looked up at him.

Trask’s manner had changed. The smile was gone, the face hard again.

“Listen to me, you sonofabitch,” Trask said, his voice a husky rasp, “if you don’t want to see me cut your sister’s throat, right here, right in front of you, you’d better tell me what these numbers on the map mean. Are they Apache camps?”

Before O’Hara could answer, there was a commotion outside. Hoofbeats and the rumble of a wagon or coach. A moment later Lou Grissom blasted through the door as if he were on fire.

“Mr. Ferguson, Jenkins’s coach just rolled in.”

“Jenkins all right?”

“I don’t know. He ain’t drivin’ it.”

“Well, who the hell is?” Ferguson snapped.

“Somebody wearing a United States Army uniform, and they’s an army escort pullin’ up right with him.”

“Shit,” Ferguson said.

O’Hara opened his mouth as if to yell. Trask clamped a hand over his mouth, drew his pistol, held it like a hammer and brought it down hard on top of O’Hara’s head. There was a sharp crack and O’Hara’s head dropped like a sash weight as he fell unconscious.

“Just don’t let the bastards in here, Hiram,” Trask said. “Get out there and find out what’s going on.”

Ferguson needed no urging. He was out the door a second or two later, Grissom on his heels.

Trask stared after them. Cavins and Rawlins stood frozen by the stove. The coffeepot burbled, spewed steam into the air.

Trask put a finger to his lips and holstered his pistol.

There was a silence in the room as if no one was there.