Louis L'Amour - The Lonely Men

"What you think?" Rocca said suddenly. "One rider?"

"Uh-huh," I said, "a small man or a boy."

"What are you talking about?" Battles asked.

"We've been picking up tracks," I told them. "A shod horse. A small horse, but a good one. Moves well ... desert bred."

"Injun, on a stolen horse," Spanish said promptly. "No white man would be ridin' alone in this neck of the woods."

Rocca shrugged doubtfully. "Maybe so ... I don't know."

Those tracks had been worrying my mind for quite a few minutes, for whoever rode that horse was riding with caution, which meant it was no Apache. An Apache would know he was in country where his people were supreme, and although he would keep alert, he would not be pausing to scout the country as this rider was.

In my mind I was sure, and I knew Rocca was sure, that the rider was no Indian.

Unless, maybe, an Indian child.

When the desert sun was gone the heat went with it, and a coolness came over the land. The horses, quickened by the cool air, moved forward as eagerly as if they could already smell the pines of the Sierra Madre. From time to time we drew up to listen into the night.

About an hour before daylight we gave our horses a breather. Rocca, squatting on his heels behind a mesquite bush, lit a cigarette cupped in the palm of his hand and glanced at me. "You know the Bavispe?"

"Yes ... we'll hit at the big bend ... where she turns south again."

Tampico Rocca knew this country better than I did. After all, he was half Apache, and he had lived in the Sierra Madre. Battles was sleeping, and Spanish he went over to listen to the night sounds, away from our voices. I was hot and tired, and was wishing for a bath in that river up ahead, but it wasn't likely I'd get one.

Rocca was quiet for a spell, and I settled back on the sand and stared up at the stars. They looked lonely up there in the nighttime sky, lonely as we were down here. I was a solitary man, a drifter across the country, with no more home than a tumbleweed, but so were we all. We were men without women, and if all the nights we'd spent under a roof were put together they would scarcely cover four or five weeks.

Men have a way of drifting together without much rhyme or reason, just the circumstances of their living brings them together, just as we had been brought together in Yuma. Now the three of them were chancing their lives to lend me a hand, but that was the way with western men, and chances were I'd have done the same for them.

We started on again when the first streaks of dawn were coloring the eastern sky. The cactus began to be separate from the other shadows, and the rocks stood out, dark and somber. We rode single file, nobody talking until the gray sky was yellowing overhead, and then in a quiet corner we stopped, found a place to hide a fire, and made a small breakfast We were careful to build our fire in a hollow and under a mesquite bush, where the rising smoke would be dissipated by the branches overhead ... though using dry wood there was little smoke. Our time for hot meals was about over. Barring some sort of accident, we should soon come up to the Bavispe. Once we crossed that we would be in the heart of Apache country, with them on every side of us.

The Apache, in a sparse, harsh land where raising any crops was mighty nigh impossible, turned to raiding and robbing.

Generally, the men I'd heard talk of the Indian thought it was taking his land that ruined him. As a matter of fact, it had much to do with it, for an Indian couldn't live on a fixed ten acres or a hundred acres and live as he liked. He needed lots of hunting ground, and country that would support fifty Indians would support ten thousand planting white men.

But the Indian was whipped the first time one of them had a rifle for his own.

It was the trader who whipped the Indian by giving or selling him things he couldn't make himself. From that time on, the Indian was dependent on the white man for ammunition, for more guns, for more of the things he was getting a taste for. It was good sitting there in the cool of early morning, with the faint smell of woodsmoke in the air, the smell of frying bacon, the smell of good coffee. We were taking a chance, but we had scouted the country with care.

"How old's the boy?" Spanish asked suddenly.

"Five ... I think. About that."

"You think he's still alive, Tamp?" Battles asked.

Rocca shrugged. "Depends on whether he's a nervy kid, maybe. We'll pick up some tracks soon."

"Seen any more of that strange rider?" Battles asked. "I been watching for tracks all morning."

"No," I said, "I haven't seen any."

"What's it like up yonder?" Spanish asked.

"Oaks ... then pines. Running streams, rocks. All anybody could want but grub.

They have to bring it in. They get it from the Mexicans, or they kill them." He gestured. "The Apaches have almost cleared this part of Sonora of the Mexicans.

At least the rich ones. And the poor ones can only stay if they'll provide food for the Apaches."

My thoughts went back over the desert to Laura. She was a pretty woman, and she was brave ... holding herself up, like she did, with her little boy lost, and all. But somehow she left me uneasy. But I was never very comfortable around women ... except Ange. And the Trelawney girls I'd known back home in the hills.

We sat there quiet a little longer, listening to the horses cropping at the shrubs. Rocca was smoking and squinting at the hills around.

None of us knew what might be waiting for us up yonder. Even if we found the boy alive, we still had to get him from the Apaches and get him back across the border. Our chances were none too good. I looked over at Rocca and said, "Shall we move out?"

He rubbed his cigarette into the sand, and got up.

Me, I just stood there a moment or two thinking. All of a sudden I wished I was somewhere else. We were facing up to a lot of hell, and I looked forward to none of it. Besides, there was something about this whole affair that made me mighty uneasy.

We crossed the Bavispe and took a thin trail that led up through scattered oaks, along steep switchbacks toward the pines. The only sound was the chirping of birds, the grunting of one of the horses over a steep part of the trail, or the clatter of a falling rock.

For an hour we climbed, pausing several tunes to let the horses catch their breath. Finally we rode out on a bench under the pines where stood the ruins of stone houses built of rough lava blocks with no mortar. There were at least a dozen of them in sight, and maybe more back under the trees. The walls were of a sort of gray felsite, and here and there one appeared to be better built than the others, as though built by different hands, by different thinking.

Rocca indicated a slight depression in the grass near one of the walls. "We're still on the trail."

A crushed pine cone looked as if it had been scarred by a sharp-shod hoof. There were other signs too.

The country here was wild and rugged, and we saw no water. We were now over six thousand feet up, judging by the growth around us, and still we climbed. The trail occasionally wound along a rim with an almost sheer drop falling off on one side or the other. We rode with our rifles in our hands, our boots light in the stirrups, ready to kick free and hit the ground if there was time. Riding that kind of country with Apaches around will put gray in your hair.

We came out presently on a shoulder of the mountain with pines all around us.

There was sparse grass, and a thin trickle of snow water ran down the mountain slope. Found the tracks of the rider there ... plain. The small horse had stood under a tree, tied to a low branch while she scouted ahead. She?

The word came to me unbidden, without thinking. It came like a voice speaking to me, and I spoke aloud what I had heard in my mind's ear. "It's a woman, Tamp.