Doomsday Rider

Eleven

“No, not Jesus, but God’s Chosen One,” the man said. “Yes, chosen by Him to convert the Apache to the way of the Lord and prepare them for the doomsday to come.”

More people had come out from the ruined pueblo, and now around thirty men, women, and children surrounded the Chosen One, hanging on his every word.

“I am a voice of one, crying in this wilderness; prepare ye the way of the Lord,” the Chosen One said in a high, singsong voice. “March twenty-three of the year nineteen hundred is the appointed time of the doomsday. Prepare ye now for the terrible judgment to come. Amen and amen.”

The people around him cheered and the Chosen One looked up at Fletcher and Charlie. “Now, brothers, will you join us?”

“Where is Estelle?” Fletcher asked, ignoring the man’s question.

The Chosen One’s eyes were bright with a strange, glowing fire, and Fletcher realized this man was far from sane.

“Why do you wish to see my wife? She is with child and she rests.”

“Mister,” Fletcher said, his patience rapidly wearing thin, “I believe Estelle is in terrible danger. There is a man in the basin right now who plans to kill her, and he will if we don’t get her out of here fast.”

The Chosen One shook his head, a faint smile playing around his lips. “Never fear; no harm can come to Estelle here. We are protected by the shield of the Lord.”

Charlie kneed his horse forward. “Lookee here, Mr. Chosen,” he said, “we came across the tracks of maybe thirty Apaches earlier today, all of them young warriors. You’ve got to get your people out of here before it’s too late.”

“The Apaches are our friends, our children. They leave us in peace.”

“That’s because they think you’re nuts,” Charlie said. “But I got a feeling them young bucks who made those tracks won’t give a damn. They’ll want your womenfolk and whatever else you have. Mister, you ever see what thirty Apaches can do to a woman?”

“If that time comes, I will talk to them and direct them to the path of righteousness,” the Chosen One said, his strange blue eyes shining. “I have been appointed by God to show them the way, for the Apaches are as little children.”

Realizing it was hopeless, Fletcher nonetheless tried. “The Apaches who will come here, maybe today, certainly tomorrow, are not children. They’re warriors and they won’t talk nice and they won’t consider you their friend. They believe anyone who is not an Apache is an enemy, and that includes you, Estelle, and the rest of the people here.”

“My disciples are with me,” the Chosen One said. “And, like me, they do not fear the Apache. We are not their enemies and we will make them understand that.”

Fletcher shook his head. “Mister, you can’t make an Apache do anything he doesn’t want to do. If you don’t leave now, you’ll all be dead by this time tomorrow, and then it won’t make any difference.”

One of the younger men, small and thin with quick black eyes, stepped in front of the Chosen One. “You two ride on out of here,” he said, his accent strongly Boston Yankee and accusing. “It’s you who will get the Apaches all riled up and bring them down on us.”

An angry murmur of agreement went through the rest of the disciples, and a dirty-cheeked youngster peeked out from behind her mother’s skirt and stuck her tongue out at Fletcher.

“No! That is not our way,” the Chosen One said, holding up his staff for quiet. “We will invite these men to break bread with us, and then they must leave us in peace.”

Fletcher swung out of the saddle and walked to the Chosen One. “Know this: I’m not leaving here until I know Estelle is safe, even if I have to take her with me.”

The man smiled. “I think that will be for my wife to decide.”

Charlie and Fletcher led their mounts to the lower pueblo, but at a word from the Chosen One a pair of teenage boys took the horses. “We will stable them while you eat and we have grain,” the man said.

The Chosen One waved a hand, taking in the surrounding hills. “The Lord has provided us with everything we need here. There are plenty of edible plants in the mountains and we grow corn and beans and squash. Next year we plan to plant cotton and weave it into our clothing.”

“I don’t suppose,” Charlie said as they stopped at one of the doors to a room in the pueblo, “you have coffee?”

“That we cannot grow, though it is said it grows wild in the mountains.”

“Just askin’,” Charlie said, disappointment writ large on his face.

The Chosen One ushered them inside, and Fletcher and Charlie found themselves in a largish room warmed by a crude brazier in a corner that burned fragrant cedar logs. Woven mats covered the dirt floor, and a single shelf tacked to one of the walls held shards of brightly colored pottery.

“That was made by the old ones who lived here hundreds of years ago,” the Chosen One said by way of explanation. “They were famous for their graceful water jars and cooking pots of red, black, and white, all decorated in scrolls and squares and triangles. These broken shards are all that is left. We collect them in the upper pueblos.”

“What happened to them?” Charlie asked. “Seems to me they could hole up here forever if need be.”

“No one knows,” the Chosen one said. “Around four hundred years ago they just vanished.”

Charlie nodded. “Apaches, probably.”

“Perhaps,” the Chosen One said. He waved a hand, directing Fletcher and Charlie to a mat. “We live very simply here. We use only mats for sitting and for sleeping.”

A few moments later a young blond woman stepped into the room carrying a wooden platter of food and a jug. She was obviously pregnant, and she smiled at Fletcher as she laid the platter and the jug on the floor beside him.

“I will bring cups,” she said, then turned and left.

“Is that Estelle Stark?” Fletcher asked when the girl had gone.

The Chosen One nodded. “She is my wife. Estelle is my right hand, my rod, and my staff.”

Fletcher said nothing. The girl was in danger both from Scarlet Hays and the Apaches, and if he were to save her life he had to get her away from this madman.

Estelle returned with wooden cups, and into these she poured Fletcher and Charlie a clear liquid from the jar.

Fletcher tasted the drink hesitantly, while Charlie sat with the cup in his hand, waiting expectantly for his reaction. The drink had the strong, smoky taste of Irish whiskey and would probably get a man drunk just as fast, Fletcher decided.

“It’s whiskey, Charlie,” he said.

The old man’s face lit up and he gulped from his cup. “Whiskey, hell, this is mescal.”

The Chosen One shrugged. “It is a little luxury we allow ourselves, mescal and sometimes Apache tizwin, but only in the strictest moderation.”

“I got to say, Buck,” Charlie said, draining his cup, “things is sure starting to look up around here.”

Estelle served them beans and roasted flat cakes made from the nutritious head of the mescal plant. The food was good, and Fletcher, being hungry, ate heartily.

Charlie wolfed down his food and then extended his cup to Estelle.

“It seems, wife, that our giant friend is in need of more drink,” the Chosen One said, his voice tinged with faint disapproval.

If Charlie noticed, he ignored the man’s comment, saying only that this was without doubt the best mescal he’d ever tasted, except maybe one time down Mexico way, but that was so long ago he could scarcely remember, so maybe he was wrong about that.

After Charlie had finished speaking, the Chosen One patted the mat beside him, indicating that Estelle should sit beside him.

When the girl did, he said, “Wife, Mr. Fletcher has something to say to you.”

The girl was not particularly pretty, but she had a full, well-shaped mouth, and her eyes were very blue and full of vitality. It was hard to guess at her figure because of her pregnancy, but Fletcher decided she’d been slender and shapely and would be so again.

“What do you wish to say to me?” she asked.

Fletcher thought that through, forming in his mind how best to express it, but the girl stopped him cold.

“Is it about my father?”

“How did you know that?” Fletcher asked, surprised.

“A man travels this dangerous wilderness just to talk to me, so I can only assume he was sent here by my father.”

Fletcher hesitated, deciding to take this one step at a time. “He wants me to bring you home.”

The girl shook her head, a slight smile touching her lips. “My father hates me, and now”—she touched the back of the Chosen One’s hand with her fingers—“more so than ever.”

“Why would he hate you? Because you defied him and ran away from home with a man and got pregnant?” Fletcher shrugged, realization dawning on him. “I guess, now I’ve heard myself say it, for some men that’s reason enough.”

“It’s more than that,” Estelle said, her face suddenly pained. “When I was almost thirteen I caught scarlet fever. I almost died, but my mother nursed me through it and she made me well again. Maybe it was because she loved me so much and stayed so close to me that she caught the disease herself, and she wasn’t so lucky. Despite the attentions of the best doctors my father’s money could buy, she died. She was just thirty-three years old, and my father adored her.”

Estelle leaned her head on the Chosen One’s shoulder, an easy, intimate familiarity that surprised Fletcher.

“My father blamed me for my mother’s death. He got so that he couldn’t even bear to look at me any longer, and he packed me off to a boarding school in New York, as far away from him as possible. Then, when I was seventeen, he sent for me, intending to marry me off to the son of one of his political friends. But in Washington I met this one here, the one who has been chosen by God, and agreed to become his wife and share his ministry.”

The girl smiled at Fletcher. “Doomsday will arrive in just twenty-seven short years. By that time my husband will be an old man, but I will be standing beside him when the trumpets of the Lord sound. And, Mr. Fletcher, we will be surrounded by Apache men, women, and children, all those we have guided onto the path to righteousness. Our work has just begun, and the journey will be long and difficult, but, oh, the harvest will be bountiful.”

“Praise the Lord!” cried the Chosen One.

Charlie, caught up in the moment and more than a little drunk, yelled, “Hallelujah!”

Fletcher gave the old mountain man a hard look, then said, “Estelle, I believe your father has hired a gunman to kill you and plans to blame me for your murder. Senator Stark harbors dreams of the presidency, and right now you and your unborn child stand in his way. He can’t let a breath of scandal affect his campaign, so he figures it’s better if he can say you were murdered in the Arizona Territory as an act of mindless vengeance by the notorious gunfighter Buck Fletcher.”

Estelle looked puzzled. “But why you?”

“Because I was accused of a murder I didn’t commit, and I believe your father—don’t ask me how—set up the whole thing, and all to get me down here to the Tonto Basin.”

The girl shook her head vigorously to signal her lack of understanding, and it dawned on Fletcher that she was not too intelligent. His life hung by a thread and he’d hoped this dim girl could help clear his name. Now that hope looked more and more unlikely to happen, and Fletcher felt his spirits sink.

Charlie may have been half-drunk after liberally helping himself from the mescal jug, but he was shrewd and perceptive, and now he stepped into the conversation. “Tell her the whole story, Buck,” he said. “From the beginning, and take it real slow and easy, just like you tole it to me.”

Fletcher took a deep breath and told Estelle the story as he’d recounted it to Charlie back in the cave, beginning with his arrest for murder in Wyoming and ending with his run-in with Scarlet Hays and his disastrous interview with General Crook.

When Fletcher stopped talking, a slow dawning of comprehension lit Estelle’s face. “Yes, all that sounds like my father,” she said. “He’s not the kind of man who would leave anything to chance.”

Fletcher nodded. “If your father’s hired killer is Scarlet Hays, as I suspect, I’d thought to draw him here and get him to confess in front of you and other witnesses. But now there’s an Apache war party out there and everything’s changed.”

“We have nothing to fear from the Apache,” Estelle said, parroting the Chosen One’s words.

“Right at this moment we have everything to fear from the Apaches,” Fletcher said. He leaned toward the girl. “Estelle, come with me. We can leave here now and you’ll be safe.”

“But I am safe. I’m here with my husband.”

The time for talking was over, and Fletcher knew it.

“Then me and Charlie are going to stick around here,” he said. “You’re the bait in my trap, Estelle, and I don’t aim to lose you.”

* * *

Fletcher and Charlie stood guard at the base of the hill as the day died around them. A light snow was falling again, and behind them the pueblo ruins in the higher reaches of the cliff stood stark and silent, their square windows blank eyes looking out on nothing.

Charlie was nursing a mescal hangover, surely the worst of all of them, and he was surly and uncommunicative, and Fletcher let him be.

Finally the old man said, “You know, Buck, there’s maybe a dozen grown men back there and they don’t have a single gun between them. They got hoes and spades and rakes, but not even a damn shotgun.”

“Do you think the Apaches will come?” Fletcher asked.

Charlie nodded, an action he appeared to instantly regret. “They’ll come, all right,” he said, wincing. “I think they’ll hit us at daybreak tomorrow.”

“You’re pretty sure, Charlie?”

“Sure as I’m standing here. Those tracks were made by a war party, and the only whites to make war on for maybe fifty miles around are right here.”

Charlie rubbed the back of his neck. “Damn itch is still bothering me.”

Fletcher saw that same strange look in the old mountain man’s eyes and it troubled him enough that he had to say what he was thinking straight out. “Charlie, are you scared?”

The old man drew himself up to his full seven feet, his face stiff. “Buck, I ain’t scared of anything I can see and I ain’t scared of any living man. But when this itch starts on me, it’s the not knowing that scares me.”

“Is it the Apaches, maybe?” Fletcher asked, relieved that his worst suspicions were unfounded.

“Could be,” Charlie said, “but I don’t think so. Something or somebody is watching us, Buck, and I have no idea who or what it is.”

“Keep your eyes skinned, Charlie,” Fletcher said. “I reckon I got my own itch, and it’s telling me we could soon be in a world of trouble.”

By full dark, the Chosen One’s disciples sought their mats in the pueblo as though they did not have a care in the world.

Fletcher and Charlie decided to stand watch in turns, and he let the older man sleep first, since his hangover took top priority.

A gentle snow was falling as Fletcher stepped out of the room assigned to him and Charlie in the pueblo, his Winchester cradled in his arm.

He walked toward the slope, his eyes scanning the rise of the hill ahead of him. The breeze had dropped and the broad snowflakes fluttered slowly to earth, coating the branches of the pines with white. An owl glided past him on silent wings, a ghostly gray phantom that quickly faded from sight to become one with the darkness.

If the Apaches came this could be one avenue of attack, unless they skirted the hill and approached the pueblos from the narrow valley beyond.

The night had turned cold and frost hung in the air, and Fletcher’s breath smoked as he walked along the base of the hill toward the valley.

On the western slope grew scattered spruce and cedar, and at its base rose an upthrust pinnacle of red, flat-topped rock about twice the height of a man, smaller boulders of the same color surrounding it on all sides.

Fletcher walked to the rock, stood in its meager shelter, and built a smoke. He thumbed a match into flame, trusting to the rock to shield him from the view of any sleepless Apaches who might be wandering around in the night.

In this, Fletcher’s trust was badly misplaced.

Using cupped hands he raised the light to his cigarette—and the sky fell on him.