Doomsday Rider

Three

The boy beside him was dying. But he was dying too slowly, an arrowhead of strap iron embedded deep in his belly, shot from an elegant Apache bow of Osage orange wood.

The young trooper, who looked to be no more than seventeen, wore the blue of the Fifth Cavalry, and he was a boy making a man’s attempt to bear a pain that would soon become too much to bear.

“How is he?”

Al Sieber, Brig. Gen. George Crook’s chief of scouts, looked from the young soldier to Buck Fletcher, his eyes bleak.

Fletcher shook his head and Sieber nodded, saying nothing, knowing no words were needed.

Fletcher eased his position behind the rock, where he knelt and gazed out on a land held fast by January’s cold, a wilderness of craggy mountains and mysterious valleys and infinite silences. It was a land pine-covered, the abode of the black-tailed deer, the cougar, the cinnamon and black bears, the fox, and the bobcat.

And the Apache.

But of the Apaches there was no trace, always a sure sign that they were there.

From down near the wagon the sergeant cursed again, a long, outraged string of profanity laced with the expressive Gaelic of the old country. Then he screamed. He’d been alternately cursing and screaming for a long time now, at least an hour, but gradually the curses were growing less frequent as the screams grew longer and more shrill.

“Help him,” the trooper said. “For God’s sake, help Sergeant McDermott.”

Sieber bit off a chew and wedged it into his left cheek. “You lie quiet, boy. There’s no helping of McDermott now. He took his chances like the rest of us and he knew how it would be if he was caught.” The scout chewed and spat a stream of brown tobacco juice over the rock where he crouched. “They got squaws with them down there. Apache squaws know how to cut a man.”

The sergeant screamed and this time there were no more curses.

“And they’re remembering Skull Cave,” Sieber said, throwing the statement away as an afterthought.

Fletcher had learned from soldiers and settlers he’d met that just two weeks before, on December 28, 1872, seventy-six Indians, a few Apache and the rest Yavapai, were massacred at Skull Cave by three companies of the Fifth Cavalry. The victims were mostly women, children, and old men, and the Apache, eager for revenge, had set the whole Tonto Basin country aflame.

War bands roamed the basin and its bordering mountains, the Mazatzals, the Sierra Ancha, and the Superstitions, and raiders struck as far north as the Mogollon Rim.

Crook was out after the Apache with nine troopstrength detachments of the First and Fifth cavalries and their Pima and Maricopa scouts. The general’s plan was to surround the Apache and Yavapai bands and drive them into the Tonto Basin, concentrating them there for the kill.

“The trail must be stuck to and never lost,” Crook had ordered his officers. “No excuse will be accepted for leaving a trail. If your horses play out, the Apache must be followed on foot, and no sacrifice should be left untried to make the campaign short, sharp and decisive.”

So far, the Apache had not obliged, fighting back with a ferocity born of desperation, fueled by an undying hate of the white man and all he represented. Army patrols had been ambushed and the cabins of isolated settlers south of the Mogollon Rim escarpment attacked, resulting in burned cabins and the scattered, violated bodies of men, women, and children.

The Apaches demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and while there was still breath in their lean, sinewy bodies they’d fight on, defiant even as they saw their way of life and all that they held sacred being relentlessly and systematically destroyed.

And they were out there now, among the rocks, knowing they had three white men trapped. The Apaches were eager to finish this thing, but, patient and knowing as the stalking wolf, they were biding their time.

How many of them?

Fletcher studied the rocks behind the wagon. Had he seen one of them move? Just a moment ago he’d caught a sudden flash of red in the narrow vee between two gray boulders. And now he saw it again.

Fletcher sighted his rifle on the notch between the rocks and waited.

Above him the sun had climbed to its highest point and a vulture glided across the hazy green sky, slanting toward the towering, rugged bulk of Mazatzal Peak to the west.

There was little heat in the winter sun and it was cool here among the rocks. A stunted juniper spread twisted limbs over the small clearing amid the boulders where Fletcher, Sieber, and the dying trooper had taken refuge, casting crooked shadows on the sand.

Slowly, taking his time, Fletcher rested his rifle on the rock in front of him and built a smoke. He gestured with the tobacco sack toward Sieber, but the scout produced a chewing plug from his vest pocket, signaling his preference.

Fletcher lit his cigarette and studied the notch between the boulders again.

There it was!

The flash of red slowly grew into a headband around the brow of an Apache. The Indian raised his head higher, scanning Fletcher’s position, his rifle coming up to his shoulder.

Fletcher fired, and the Apache disappeared. But a fan of bright blood spattered the rock close to where the man’s head had been.

“Get him?” Sieber asked, crawling beside Fletcher.

“Burned him, I think,” Fletcher said.

Sieber nodded. “That will make them more careful. I guess by now they figure we ain’t a bunch of pilgrims up here.”

Another Apache, killed by Sieber, lay beside the wagon, and Fletcher had shot a second during the Indians’ first wild charge at the wagon. But that warrior had been pulled out of sight and Fletcher did not know if he was alive or dead.

Fletcher had been in the Tonto Basin country for a week now, chasing vague leads on Estelle Stark and the Chosen One that had come to nothing. Mostly he’d heard confused rumors of a white woman seen with Apaches, and in every case the trail left by the girl had petered out.

Earlier that morning Fletcher had ridden south from the Mogollon Rim, a long wind at his back, and had met up with Sieber on the upper reaches of Cherry Creek.

Sieber was leading a supply wagon packed with hardtack and bacon to a detachment of the First Cavalry and their Paiute scouts camped near the base of Mazatzal Peak. Sieber, with only Sergeant McDermott driving the wagon and the young trooper riding escort, had asked Fletcher to ride with them. Like many Western men of that time, Sieber had heard of Fletcher, and he was grateful for his gun skills and extra rifle.

Since he’d been following cold trails that led nowhere, Fletcher, at a loose end, had agreed.

An hour later the Apaches struck.

A dozen warriors had come scattering out of the rocks as the wagon neared Shake Ridge, and McDermott had gone down, wounded in their first volley. The young trooper—his name was McKinnon—had taken an arrow in the belly.

Fletcher and Sieber had each downed an Apache. Fletcher had grabbed the reins of the trooper’s horse and galloped into an arroyo, then swung down when he reached a jumbled pile of boulders that marked the end of the canyon. He’d helped the trooper into the shade of the juniper, then, while Sieber fired at the oncoming Apaches, Fletcher had led the horses into the shelter of a rock overhang.

A few minutes later they’d heard the first agonized screams erupt from the sergeant’s mouth.

“How long can they keep that up?” Fletcher asked Sieber.

The scout ran the back of his gun hand across his mustache, wiping away sweat. “If he’s lucky, the rest of the day and maybe into the night. If he’s unlucky, until tomorrow. And if he’s real unlucky, the day after that. Like I said, I saw women with them, and they’ll drag it out as long as they can.”

Al Sieber was a handsome, wide-shouldered man of thirty. The hard life of an army scout had burned every ounce of fat from his lean frame, and his blue eyes were cool and unafraid. He was a fighting man to the core, and during the War Between the States had served valiantly at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, and had been wounded in action three times.

Now he spat a stream of tobacco juice, neatly nailing a basking lizard, and studied the arroyo before him.

“What you doing in the Arizona Territory, Buck?” Sieber asked without taking his eyes off the rocks where the Apaches lurked. “I seem to recall hearing you was up Wyoming way, selling your gun to a rancher in one of them grass and water wars everybody talks about.”

“You heard right,” Fletcher said. “But now I’m here.”

He offered nothing more, and Sieber was quite willing to let it go, but then Fletcher said, “I’m searching for somebody. A girl. Her name’s Estelle Stark.” He turned and looked at the scout. “Ever hear of her?”

Sieber shook his head. “Name means nothing to me.” He spat tobacco juice again. “Best you go talk to General Crook. He knows everything that’s going on in this country.”

“Where can I find him?” Fletcher asked.

“Last I heard he was at Fort Apache. That’s about fifty miles due east of here, close to the big bend of the Salt River. It ain’t much as forts go, just a collection of ramshackle log huts and tents, but then ol’ George was never much of a one for fuss and feathers.”

Sieber was silent for a few moments, then said, “Course, all that depends on us getting out of here alive, and right now I’d say that ain’t looking too likely.”

Down by the wagon, where one mule lay dead in its traces, the other stood patiently, waiting for whatever was to come. The Apache valued mule meat above all others, and, hungry as they were, would hope to fill their empty bellies after this fight was over.

Sergeant McDermott screamed, screamed a second time, and then fell silent, but his cries still echoed for long moments within the narrow canyon walls.

When McDermott shrieked again, Sieber, stone-faced, sang a ballad under his breath that was then highly popular in the barracks of the enlisted men.

I’d like to be a packer,

And pack with George F. Crook,

And dressed up in my canvas suit,

To be for him mistook.

I’d braid my beard in two forked tails,

And idle all the day

In whittling sticks and wondering

What the New York papers say.

Behind him, Fletcher heard the young trooper stifle a groan. Crouching, he stepped to the soldier’s side. “Is it bad?” he asked.

The boy nodded, and said through clenched teeth, “It’s real bad. I don’t think I can bear it much longer. I want to go now.” Trooper McKinnon, small and wiry like most of Crook’s cavalrymen, looked down at the arrow, bright with colored turkey feathers, sticking out of his belly.

“Can you pull it free?” he asked. “I don’t want to die with this inside me.”

Fletcher shook his head. “All I’d do is cause you more pain. Best you lie real still and make your peace with God.”

“I done that already,” McKinnon said. “I figure I’m right with my creator.” A slight smile touched the boy’s white lips. “Know something? I ain’t never sparked a girl. Not even once. Now that it’s all up with me, I guess I never will.”

“Aw, sparking a girl isn’t what it’s cracked up to be,” Fletcher said, unable to relieve one kind of pain, trying to relieve another. “Why, I recall one time down El Paso way when I . . .”

His voice trailed off into silence. He was talking to a dead man.

Fletcher closed the boy’s eyes, pulled the arrow from his body, and stepped back to his position behind the rock.

“Is he dead?” Sieber asked.

Fletcher nodded, suddenly feeling empty and old.

“He was a good soldier,” Sieber said. “Done his duty.” The scout nodded. “He’ll make his ma proud.”

“Well, he’s no kind of soldier now,” Fletcher said. “And I reckon I’ve already seen proud ma’s enough that I don’t ever care to see another.”

Sieber opened his mouth to speak, but what he said was drowned out by another shrieking cry of pain from the sergeant.

“McDermott is a big, strong man and he’s dying mighty hard,” Sieber said. “He’ll last a long time.”

“Why do they do that?” Fletcher asked. “You know Apaches; why torture a man that way?”

The scout shrugged. “An Apache measures his own bravery against that of his enemy. The Apache believe a captive who lasts a long time under torture must be very brave, and that reflects much credit on the man who captured him. Better to conquer a mountain lion than a jackrabbit.”

Fletcher glanced up at the sky and the yellow ball of the sun. “Pretty soon we’re going to get mighty thirsty,” he said. “Then we’ll face our own torture.”

Sieber nodded. “There’s a canteen in the wagon. Maybe after dark I’ll mosey on down there and see if I can grab it.” He shook his head, his face grim. “That is, if we’re still around.”

“You won’t make it,” Fletcher said. “They’ll be expecting us to try something like that.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Maybe I have. At least, I’ve been studying on it some, though it’s mighty thin.”

“Well, thin or not, let’s hear it, man,” Sieber urged. “Seems to me the way our time is running out, beggars can’t be choosers.”

Quickly Fletcher outlined his plan, and Sieber’s grin grew wider with each word. When Fletcher finished the scout slapped his thigh and said, “Hot damn, Buck, it might just work.”

“It better work,” the gunfighter said. “If the Apaches wait until almost dark and all rush us at once, we’re dead.”

Doubt clouded Sieber’s eyes. “I ain’t much good with a Colt’s gun.” He slapped the brass receiver of his Henry. “But I can use this here rifle pretty well.”

Fletcher smiled. “You’ll do, Al.”

The two men waited. They needed Sergeant McDermott to scream again.