Thomas Eidson - St. Agnes’ Stand

A sound from behind told Swanson the dog had worked its way up through the brush of the mountain. He looked over his shoulder at it sitting on its thin haunches, its eyes and ears fixed on the trail ahead; at least they weren’t coming at his back. He let the dog take a blow. It stood some six hands at the shoulders, deep-chested, maybe ninety pounds, narrow at the hips. Nature had left its tail long for balance, and somebody else had spiked its ears so they couldn’t be torn off in a fight. Great patches of bare skin showed on its haunches and shoulders where its thin hair had been worn off in sleep against the hard desert. It was as formidable a beast as it was ugly; a fierce and violent mongrel, able to take a man down and able to kill.

Five years before, the dog had thrown in with him in Arizona, swinging silently in behind his mule one sundown in a high mountain meadow a hundred miles from anywhere or anyone. That’s all he knew about it, excepting it was clean, didn’t beg, wasn’t friendly and didn’t make noise; those were things he understood and respected. It had bitten him once, and he had thought of shooting it more times than that.

When the dog was rested, he waved it ahead. It trotted past the mule and began to zigzag in the brush on both sides of the trail. Five yards from the hilltop, it froze. Swanson watched it for a few seconds and then swung painfully down, keeping his right hand free. When he reached the ground he pulled a leather pouch from behind the cantle of his saddle and slung it under his arm; then he loosened the straps holding a crossbow in place, listening hard as he worked, and slipped the weapon across his back. He checked the cylinder on his pistol and started up the trail.

Even hurt, he was deceptively light on his feet. He wore soft, mule-eared boots and moved with a grace and power that told of years not spent in a saddle but on foot in mountains like these. His buckskin leggings and his four-button blue flannel shirt were soft and noiseless as he walked. He knew the dog had a scent but the wind kept it confused, and he watched it now turning and sticking its nose up, then turning again. He continued climbing.

The dog was nowhere in sight as Swanson eased over the crest of the trail. The pain was bad in his leg. He lay still for a long time in a patch of dried hopsage and listened to the hills. No sound. The morning sun burned into him. He squinted his eyes and searched for movement. The wind had died. Just heat and dust and gravel. The flies and gnats hadn’t started in yet. The air felt pure and clean and hot. He crawled forward until he was overlooking a wide canyon that fell sharply away from where he lay concealed. At the bottom he could see a rocky flat and a dry river bed; a line of stunted tamarisk trees, parched and almost leafless, bordered the waterless course of the river. Nothing looked alive.

He had not spotted them before he heard the popping of a musket. Seconds later, there was a louder, sharper bark from what sounded like a Hawken. He squinted and searched the canyon until he located the white smoke drifting in the air, and after a few minutes more of searching he saw the Indian who had fired the musket. Ten minutes later, he had marked the positions of thirty Apaches, and seen their prey.

Two freight wagons lay overturned in a V against a cliff at the edge of a narrow road. Swanson pulled a telescope from the leather pouch and scanned them. The remains of a water barrel indicated the standoff would be short, Hawken or not. The wood looked dry. But maybe whoever was behind the wagons still had water. For their sake, he hoped so.

He glassed the road again. It was going to be a game with only one end: the freighters were eventually going to go crazy from the heat, the thirst, the fear … and one night they were going to try and escape. They wouldn’t make it.

He gave them three days, maybe. They were probably Mexicans; two to a wagon and armed with muzzle loaders and single-ball pistols. The Hawken might mean their cargo was valuable. It didn’t matter. No one would come to help them. They knew that. They knew the Apache. Their people had brutalized one another from time out of mind. They were muerto . The best they could hope was not to be taken alive. He couldn’t help them.

He held the telescope on some rocks near one of the wagons. The Indians had started a landslide in an attempt to knock the closest dray off the road, but it had missed. The stones lay in a mass higher than the wagons. The Apaches had seen this and two stood behind the rocks motioning for a third to climb up and take a shot.

Swanson focused the scope on this Indian. He was wearing a red shirt strapped at the waist with a leather belt, a white breechcloth, bare legged with deerskin boots. He looked no more than sixteen, but from the easy way he carried the musket in the crook of his arm, the way he strode confidently up the rocky slope, it was obvious this was their marksman.

Swanson studied him closely: the respect he was being shown by the others, his arrogance, and the comfortable manner in which he handled the weapon said he knew how to shoot. With just yards separating the mound of rocks from the wagons, he was going to give the people behind the wagons jessy; it would be like plunking thirsty horses at a water hole.

Swanson didn’t love Mexicans, but he liked them somewhat better than a stacked deck. Even so, he figured it wasn’t his funeral. He was calculating on pulling back and staying out of the fight, when he saw the Indian in the red shirt, a cock-of-the-walk grin on his poxed face, standing on the road in clear view of the wagons, urinating; daring the trapped Mexicans to do something. He wasn’t twenty feet from the closest wagon. It seemed incredible. Swanson waited for the Hawken to bark; waited for the pissing Apache to fly backwards, his chest blown open. Nothing happened.

He couldn’t figure it; why don’t they just shoot the sonofabitch, he wondered. Like jack rabbits cornered by the dog, they must be frozen with fear. That, or they’d already killed themselves. He had heard of that happening, though he didn’t know whether to believe it or not; it seemed impossible an armed man would shoot himself rather than die fighting. But long ago he had learned there was no figuring fear in man or beast.

Still, this act of pissing at men who were going to die, men cornered and outnumbered and who didn’t have much of a fighting chance left, men who had maybe just a little bit of dignity left inside their pinched up guts, didn’t set well with him. Fact of the matter, while Nat Swanson was slow to anger, this made it for him.

He limped half-crouched down a ridge top to some boulders and squatted behind them, tightening the bloody bandana on his thigh, groaning quietly from the pain. Then he pulled the crossbow off his back, his hands moving over the coffee-coloured wood with familiarity bred over a lifetime. It had been his grandfather’s. Swanson knew the hearth stories – the old man had used it to poach deer and boar off the great English estates around Kent in the late 1700s. It must have been a wonderfully efficient weapon for that purpose: powerful, accurate, silent as soft wind through spring leaves.

He placed the butt on his stomach and, grasping the slack string in both hands, yanked back hard, grunting at the hurt in his leg, bending the short metal wings until the string caught in the trigger lock; then he notched a bolt snugly in place and rose slowly over a waist-high boulder, resting the weapon on the stone. He guessed the range, sighted a fraction high, and pulled his breath in. No wind. The Indian was atop the boulders now, making a show of sighting his musket on the two wagons. Swanson let his breath out, then held it and pulled softly. There was no recoil, no sound to speak of, only a soft twang as the string slammed forward.