Jory Sherman - Blood Sky at Morning

“No,” Ferguson said. “I’ve seen your work, Ben. We’ll get what we need out of him.”

“When?”

“By tomorrow. His sis was on that stage Jenkins took out of here to Fort Bowie. He sets store by her. I’m going to tell him we’ll grab her and put the boots to her if he doesn’t tell us what we want to know.”

“Just what are you doing to make O’Hara tell us where those Apaches are holed up?”

“The lieutenant’s bobbing for apples,” Ferguson said.

“Huh?”

“You wanta see? Finish up and we’ll walk over to the office.”

“Damned right I want to see,” Trask said.

He finished his whiskey, stood up.

Ferguson swallowed the last of his drink.

“See you later, boys,” Trask said to the Mexicans still drinking at the tables, their heads and shoulders bathed in lamplight and blue smoke. He laid some bills on the table, picked up the bottle, held it against the light to see how much whiskey was left. He grunted in satisfaction.

The two men walked out of the cantina and toward the freight office. Its windows sprayed orange light on the porch. A man with a scattergun stood in the shadows beneath the eaves, while another, with a rifle, paced back and forth between the corrals and the office building, his boots crunching on sand and gravel. The shotgun man worked for Ferguson. His name was Lou Grissom. The man with the rifle was one of his own, Al Deets, as hard as they came, not a soft bone in him.

“Al,” Trask said. “In the dark you got to shoot low.”

“Yeah, Ben,” Deets said. “Low and off to one side.”

Trask laughed as they clumped up the steps onto the porch. Grissom just stood there, like a mute statue. He wasn’t at all friendly, Trask thought, and that was the kind of man you needed to stand guard with a Greener chocked up with buckshot.

Ted O’Hara sat in a chair in a back room, stripped of his shirt, his arms and legs bound with manila rope. He looked haggard in the sallow light from a single lantern dangling from an overhead rafter. Two men stood on either side of him, bracing him against the chair back so he wouldn’t fall forward. In front of O’Hara sat a wooden tub filled with water. O’Hara’s face and hair were wet, his eyes closed, his head drooping downward so that his chin almost rested on his chest.

“He asleep?” Ferguson said.

“Tryin’,” one of the men, Jesse Bob Cavins, said.

“He say anything ’bout them Apache hideouts?” Ferguson asked the other man, a gaunt stringy hardcase named Willy Rawlins.

“Nope. He’s just swallered a lot of water, Hiram.” Rawlins had a West Texas drawl you could cut with a butcher knife if you laid it on a chunk of wood.

“Nothing?” Trask said, a scowl forming on his face.

“Nary,” Rawlins said.

“Says he don’t know nothin’,” Cavins said, “and we near drowneded him ten minutes ago.”

“He have any papers on him?” Trask asked. “Maps, stuff like that?”

“On that table over yonder,” Cavins said, nodding in the direction of a table next to a rolltop desk against one wall.

Trask walked over to the table and picked up an army pouch. He opened it, spread the contents out on the tabletop. Ferguson strode up to stand beside him.

“None of that made any sense to us,” Hiram said. “Army stuff.”

“You ever in the army, Hiram?”

“Nope. Not as a regular. I hauled freight out of Santa Fe and Taos up to Pueblo and Denver. Warn’t no war up yonder.”

Trask opened a folded paper and laid it out flat.

“This here’s a field map,” he said. “If you know how to read ’em, you can find out where you are. Or, in this case, where our young Lieutenant O’Hara has been.”

“Lot of gibberish to me,” Ferguson said.

“There’s numbers on it, in different places.”

“Don’t make no sense.”

“No, not to you and me. But I’ll bet O’Hara there knows what they mean. Did you show him the map? Ask him about it?”

Ferguson looked at the two men flanking O’Hara. They both shook their heads.

“Why not?” Trask asked.

“Yeah, why not?” Ferguson asked.

“We just asked him what you told us to ask him, Hiram.”

“And what was that?” Trask wanted to know, a warning tic beginning to quiver along his jawline.

“Where in hell them Apaches’ camps was,” Rawlins said.

“We asked him about Cochise, too,” Cavins said, a defensive tone to his voice.

“What did he say to those questions?” The tic in Trask’s facial muscles subsided as his jaw hardened. In the silence, the men could almost hear Trask’s teeth grind together.

“He said he didn’t know,” Rawlins said.

“He said he was on the scout, follerin’ orders is all.” Cavins was on the verge of becoming belligerent, and Ferguson shot him a warning glance.

Trask huffed in a breath as if he was building up steam inside him. But he remained calm. He knew men. These would be no trouble. Not Cavins nor Rawlins, not even Ferguson. Trask had observed men like these all his life, and men like O’Hara, as well. He knew the realms of darkness they all harbored. He knew their fears. Torturing men had given him insights that few other men ever even thought about. But he also knew when torture would fail, result only in silence or death.

O’Hara had been Ferguson’s idea, but then he had inside information, a conduit of some kind that led straight into Fort Bowie. An inside man. A man who hated Apaches as much as he did. Hiram knew someone high up in the military, at the post, who knew what O’Hara was scouting. But Hiram didn’t know how to dig that information out of a man like O’Hara, a soldier who held to higher standards than he did.

“Mind if I take a crack at soldier boy?” Trask said. “You got any coffee you can make in here?”

“Long as you don’t mark him up none, Trask,” Ferguson said. “Willy, you put on some Arbuckle’s. Bob, get some kindlin’ started in that potbelly.”

Rawlins walked over to a sideboard built into the wall. Nearby was a potbellied stove with a flat round lid on top. Cavins knelt down and opened the door, picked up a stick of kindling wood and poked around in the ashes.

“Deader’n hell,” he said. “Nary a coal.” Then he set about making a fire.

Rawlins rattled a pot against another, set out the one that made coffee, lifted the lid. He opened an airtight of Arbuckle’s coffee, releasing the aroma of cinnamon. He dipped grinds into the pot, replaced the lid.

“What do you aim to do, Ben?” Ferguson asked.

“Perk this guy up some, first off.”

Trask walked over to O’Hara, the map in his hands. He knelt down in front of the lieutenant, put his hand on O’Hara’s chin, tilted his head back up. O’Hara’s eyelids fluttered open. His blue eyes were watery, unfocused.

“You awake, Lieutenant O’Hara? We’re not going to put your face in the water no more, son. We just want to talk.”

O’Hara opened his eyes wider, stared at Trask.

“Not going to tell you anything.”

“That’s all right. You’ve been through hell, and it don’t make no difference no more. We found your map. It tells us what we want to know.”

“Map?”

Trask held up the map. O’Hara looked down at it.

“This field map we found on you. You recognize it?”

“No,” O’Hara said.

“That’s fine. It’s got numbers on it. Know what they mean?”

“No.”

Trask smiled. “Well, take a good look, Lieutenant. Maybe you do.”

O’Hara turned his head away. He struggled with his bonds, then gave up fighting it. They didn’t loosen.

“Sir, you’ll pay for this,” he said. “Holding me prisoner. The army will probably hang you.”