Revenge of Eagles

CHAPTER 13

Ponci Elliot’s leg hurt him. There was no denying the pain that had by now infested his whole leg. But he wasn’t nearly as crippled or as out of it as he had been pretending to be. Although it was painful to do so, he could still walk, and ride, and stay alert.

Ponci had exaggerated his condition around the others for one reason. He had done it to put them, and especially Fargo Ford, off guard. He hadn’t even been hitting the laudanum as hard as everyone thought, but was saving it for later, when he would need it.

This entire ruse was all a part of his plan to steal the money during the first opening he had. His only problem was finding the right chance. Then, last night, the opportunity was handed to him on a silver platter. He was very pleasantly surprised when the others went upstairs with their whores and Fargo figured that, somehow, the money would be safer with him. It was all he could do to keep his face expressionless over the gift that was dropped in his lap.

“What do you think about that, horse?” Ponci asked his mount. “They were going to leave me in Oro Blanco without the money. Did you know that? Well, let’s see how they like it now.” He chuckled. “Damn me, if I wouldn’t enjoy bein’ a fly on the wall when ole Fargo discovered his money’s all gone, though.”

Ponci had ridden out of town right after midnight, and rode hard through the long, dark hours, putting as much distance between himself and Sassabi Flat as he could. Now, as the sun rose over the Quigotoa Mountains, he slowed his horse to a more leisurely pace. After all, there was no sense in killing his animal, and he doubted that Fargo was even awake yet.

Back in Sassabi Flat, Fargo Ford was awake. So were Dagen, Casey, and Monroe. They were not only awake, they were already aware that Ponci had taken the money. The four of them hurried down to the livery to claim their horses. That was when they saw that Ponci’s horse was gone.

“Son of a bitch!” Fargo swore loudly. “I didn’t think the bastard could even get mounted without help. Son of a bitch!” he said again in his anger.

“Hey!” Monroe shouted to the stableman. “You! Come here!”

The stableman was an older man with white hair and a white beard.

“Sí, Señor?” the man asked when he answered the summons.

“The roan,” Monroe said, pointing to the stable. “Where did the roan go?”

“I do not know, Señor. I did not see him leave.”

“What do you mean, you didn’t see him leave, you ignorant bastard? It’s your job to see people leave when they take a horse,” Fargo said angrily. “Otherwise, why do we pay you to watch after our horses.”

“I do not know, Señor,” he said again.

“Ahh! You don’t know shit!” Fargo said, shoving the old man roughly. Then to the others: “Let’s get saddled and get after him.”

“Get after him? Get after him how? We don’t even know which way he went,” Dagen said.

Fargo smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “We know which way he went.”

“We do?”

“He went north,” Fargo said resolutely.

“How do you know that?”

“I know that he did ’cause he’s got hisself a whore up in Mesquite,” Fargo said. He chuckled. “Oh, yeah, he figures he can get up there, lay low with his whore while he’s gettin’ his leg fixed, and we won’t know nothing about it.”

“Yeah, he’s talked about that whore from time to time, but who knows if she is real?” Casey asked. “I mean, when you think about it, I can’t picture Ponci with no woman, be she whore or not.”

“Most of the time that is true,” Fargo agreed, “but I know that this one is real.”

“How do you know this one is real? How do you know he ain’t makin’ this one up like he does all the others?” Casey asked.

“I know this here one is real ’cause she’s my sister,” Fargo said.

“Your sister?” Casey said in shock.

“Yeah, you got anything to say about that?” Fargo challenged.

“No,” Casey said quickly. “No, I don’t reckon that I do.

“Come on,” he said. “Get your asses in the saddle and let’s go.”

Within minutes after saddling and mounting, Fargo Ford and the others were riding north out of Sassabi Flat. By now it was incredibly hot and even the breeze, what little there was of it, emphasized the terrible heat. When the wind did blow, which was seldom, it did little by way of amelioration. Quite the opposite, in fact, for it was like a breath of air from a blast furnace, rattling the tinder-dry grass and shifting the sand about in abrasive clouds.

The four men were riding in single file, even though there was plenty of room for them to ride abreast. Fargo was at the head of the file, pushing them hard to catch up with Ponci.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said. Then, shouting into the desert: “Do you hear me, Ponci, you son of a bitch? I’m going to kill you!”

The echo rolled back from the Quigotoa Mountains.

“Kill you ... kill you ... kill you!”

Keytano’s wife awakened him. He sat up in the blankets and reached for the wooden shingle she offered him. On it was his breakfast of boiled beef and bread.

“He is gone,” he wife said.

“Who is gone?” Keytano asked as he bit into the meat.

“Chetopa. He is gone, and he has taken five warriors with him.”

Keytano sighed, then put down his meal. “This is not good,” he said.

“Will he make war?” she asked.

“He cannot make war, he can only make trouble,” Keytano said.

“But he can make much trouble,” Keytano’s wife suggested.

“Yes,” Keytano agreed. “He can make much trouble.” Keytano sat there for a long moment, just staring ahead. His wife picked up the food he had put down and held it out to him.

“Eat, my husband,” she said. “You cannot be strong here, and here”—she put her hand to her heart, then to her head—“if you do not eat.”

“Yes,” Keytano agreed. “I must eat. Then I must consider what to do.”

Arnold Johnson drove the rented team and buckboard toward Arivica. He had two accounts in Arivica, which he normally serviced by stagecoach, but after his run-in with Gentry, he would not be using the stagecoach again. They could just get their revenue somewhere else. They would not get one more cent from Arnold Johnson, or from Thurman Leather Goods.

His samples were in the back of the buckboard, plus he was even carrying the fulfillment of one order. When he traveled by stage, all he could carry was his samples. He could never fulfill an order because there was rarely room for the extra baggage on the stage.

The more he thought about it, the more he believed that he should have been traveling this way all the time anyway. It was certainly more comfortable than being inside a hot, airless coach box. And if he had to share another coach with someone like Falcon MacCallister ... well, he just didn’t know what he would do.

He didn’t know which was worse, having to share the coach with MacCallister, or with the Indian woman. There should be a law prohibiting Indians from traveling with white people, just as there was a law prohibiting the Colored from traveling with white people.

Indians and Coloreds should know their place, and their place was definitely below a white man.

“Below a white man,” he said aloud, and he laughed. “Yeah, I would like to have one of them below me right now.”

He rubbed himself as he thought of Cynthia. Cynthia was a black woman who had set herself up with her own crib back in Calabasas. Johnson was one of her best customers.

And, up in Harshaw, he was a frequent visitor to an Indian woman named Sasha.

The Indian girl who had been riding in the coach with him was prettier than either one of them. He thought of her lying naked in the ditch, and he wished he had gone up with MacCallister to see her. He wondered if the men who took her did have their way with her.

What would it be like, he wondered, to be an outlaw, to be completely free of all convention? Why, anytime you wanted a woman, you would just take her. And you wouldn’t have to pay her either. He imagined himself as one of the more storied outlaws of the West.

“Johnson the Terrible,” he said out loud.

No, that didn’t sound good.

“Kid Johnson.”

He shook his head. That didn’t sound right either. Maybe his first name.

“Arnold the Outlaw.”

“Arnold the Evil One.”

“Evil.”

“Evil Arnold! Yes!” he said aloud.

For the next several minutes, as Arnold drove the buckboard, he fantasized himself as Evil Arnold, robbing banks, holding up stagecoaches, and raping women. He felt himself getting an erection.

While one of his warriors held the reins to his horse, Chetopa slithered on his belly up to the crest of the ridge. Looking down onto the road that ran through the valley floor below, he saw a single buckboard, occupied by only the driver. There appeared to be some things in the back of the wagon, though from his distance, he had no idea what they were.

He went back to the others and looked at the war party he had gathered. There were five of them, ranging in age from sixteen to thirty. Each warrior was in paint, having chosen his own particular design.

Chetopa’s war paint consisted of yellow around one eye, black around the other, and three red slashes on each cheek.

It had not been hard to gather his band. Some he had known since they were boys growing up together. Others had come to the village during the breakup of the Chiricahua. All had a thirst for adventure, and most had their own reasons to hate the white man.

Early that morning he had walked though the village calling for all who were brave of heart to join him. These five joined him, while the others, especially the older men, merely stared at them from the openings of their wickiups.

“Will we attack this white man?” one of the Indians asked.

“Yes,” Chetopa answered.

“Eeeyaah!” the others shouted, and Chetopa motioned for them to be quiet.

“We will wait until he passes,” he said. “Then we will strike from behind.”

So deep was Johnson into his fantasies that he didn’t even see the Indians as they came over the ridge and started after him. In fact, his very first indication of danger was when one rode up right beside him on the left and another on the right.

For a second, Johnson was shocked by their sudden and unexpected appearance. Then he became frightened, and he slapped the reins against the back of his team, urging them to run.

The team broke into a gallop, and the buckboard flew down the road, leaving behind it a billowing rooster tail of dust. The Indians easily kept pace with him, and as he looked left and right, he saw that they were laughing, actually enjoying his panic.

He was not armed, and had no way to fight back. As soon as the Indians realized he wasn’t armed, they rode ahead of him, still one to either side, and reached down to grab the harness of his team. The Indians slowed the team, finally bringing them to a halt.

For a second the buckboard just sat there, surrounded by the swirl of dust the wheels had stirred up, as the whole war party gathered around.

“What do you want?” Johnson asked. He pointed to the harness and tack he was carrying. “Do you want my samples? You can have them! Take them.”

“You should not have come here,” Chetopa said.

“What do you mean I shouldn’t have come here? This is a public road. I’m on my way to Arivica.”

Chetopa spoke in Apache to the others, and Johnson saw them all raise their rifles and point at them.

“What? No!” he shouted.

The report of six rifle shots rolled back from the nearby mountains, and Johnson’s body jerked under the impact of the bullets. He slumped forward, prevented from falling only by the footrest of the buckboard.

Chetopa dismounted, drew his knife, and advanced toward the body. Grabbing the dead white man by his hair, he made the scalping cut; then he jerked the scalp off and held it up while it was still bleeding.

“Eeeyahh!” he shouted, and the others, denied the scalp, took out their anger and left their mark by further disfiguring of the body. They hacked and cut at the dead man while, overhead, buzzards circled, waiting patiently for their unexpected feast.

By now the pain Ponci was feeling was so severe that it was almost unbearable. Every step his horse made transferred a shooting pain up his leg and into the rest of his body. He had half a bottle of laudanum left ... but he didn’t want to use it. Not yet anyway.

Up ahead, he saw what he had been looking for, and he guided his horse toward an unusual rock formation: an obelisk, with two round stones at the bottom. To Ponci, it looked like a pecker and a pair of balls. It looked like that to the Indians as well, which is why they called it Dzil Ndeen, or “Mountain Man.”

What made the rock formation particularly significant now was the fact that Ponci knew it shielded a cave from view. And right now, Ponci needed the cave as a means of getting out of the sun, staying out of sight, and providing a place to recuperate after he did what had to be done.

Ponci rode his horse toward the rock formation. When he passed a patch of vegetation, he stopped and let his horse graze.

“Eat what you can,” he said. “It’s going to be slim pickin’s for a while.”

Once in the cave, Ponci climbed down from his horse, removed the horse’s saddle, then secured him. After that he started a small fire, then took his knife out and cut his pants leg off, just above his right knee. He took off his boot, and slid the cut sleeve of the pants leg down and off.

“Oh, damn,” he said quietly as he examined his leg. From the knee down, the leg was blue. The wound was puffy, with abscesses and dead flesh all around it. “This son of a bitch is bad.”

Ponci built a small fire, then put the knife blade in the fire.

“How damn hard can it be?” he asked aloud. “Hell, when I was butcherin’, I would sometimes cut off a dozen legs a day.”

Ponci fortified himself with a few swigs of laudanum, making sure to hold some back for later. Then he took the knife from the fire and looked at his leg, just below the knee.

“Of course, them legs was on cows or pigs. This here will be the first time I ever cut my own leg off.”

Almost hysterically, he giggled. Then, holding his breath, he started to cut.