Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

Michler found them a battered coffeepot, salt pork, and flour and salt for pan bread and they rode out as the sun changed from yellow to bronze and the light of day began to die around them.

But as they were leaving Sergeant Wilson stepped out from behind a rock and laid a hand on the bridle of Fletcher’s horse.

“I ain’t forgetting what happened here,” he said, his voice low and ominous. “Just so you remember.”

Fletcher nodded. “Apparently there’s something you don’t know about me, Wilson.”

“What’s that?” the soldier asked, his hard, gray eyes belligerent.

“I don’t scare worth a damn.”

Sieber laughed and anger flared red in Wilson’s face, but he dropped his hand from the bridle and stepped back. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said, no friendliness in his voice, only an unspoken menace.

“You’re going to have to kill that man, Buck,” Sieber said as he and Fletcher rode out, swinging their horses to the northeast.

“Or beat him to within an inch of his life,” Fletcher said. “Seems to be the only language he understands.”

Five

They camped that night near the dry wash of Deer Creek and staked their horses close to camp on a patch of black grama grass that grew as tall as a man’s waist.

Around them the air crackled with frost, and cold nipped at their fingers and noses, and small creatures scuttled in the fallen needles among the surrounding pines.

Sieber made coffee and fried salt pork and pan bread on a hatful of fire, trusting to the bare branches of the sycamore spreading above their heads to scatter the thin ribbon of smoke.

A cold, waxing moon rode high in the sky, hiding its face now and then as dark clouds moved across its shining arc, their edges for a while rimmed with silver. The night smelled of sage and mesquite and of the piñon, cedar, and juniper that grew on the hillsides. A hunting mountain lion roared in the distance, perhaps angry at the twenty-dollar bounty the Territory had just placed on the heads of his kind, then fell silent.

On either side of Fletcher’s camp stretched miles of rough, broken country. Gigantic boulders, hurled skyward from the sizzling mouths of ancient volcanoes, obstructed the streambeds that fed water to both grass and timber, and hemming in the basin on all sides were the towering, upflung peaks of the far mountains, vast arrowheads of snow on their red slopes pointing the way skyward.

After they ate, Sieber pulled his rifle close and lit his pipe, watching with careful, speculative eyes as Fletcher rolled a cigarette.

Fletcher lit his smoke and eased his back against the trunk of the sycamore. Without looking at the scout, he smiled and said, “Speak your mind, Al. Just sitting there studying me the way you are is spooking the hell out of me.”

Sieber grinned around the pipe stem between his teeth. “Damn it, Buck, you don’t miss much, do you?”

Fletcher let the question go and Sieber said, “I heard tell a while back, maybe it was when I was up Cheyenne way, that you took on a whole war party of Indians when you was just a younker. Them as told me called it Fletcher’s Vengeance Ride, and they said after it was all over you’d taken twenty scalps.” The scout took his pipe from his mouth and looked into the glowing bowl. “Did I hear the right of it?”

“Stories grow with the telling, Al,” Fletcher said. He drew deep on his cigarette, thinking back, then said, “They were Sioux and there was four of them. My folks had a cabin up on Two-Bit Creek in the Dakota Territory, and the Sioux came down on them and killed them both. I was fifteen that year and near enough man-grown. I went after the Indians and killed them all, and I cut off the hands of the one that had scalped Ma.”

“It was a reckoning,” Sieber said, nodding his approval, a fighting man’s recognition of another’s courage and ability with weapons.

“That it was,” Fletcher agreed. Then, lower and almost to himself: “It was a reckoning.”

He threw the stub of his cigarette into the fire. “After that, with Ma and Pa gone, there was nothing for me any longer on the Two-Bit, so I headed east and joined the war. I’d four long years of that and it made me grow up fast.”

Sieber nodded. “No matter how tall a man’s daddy was, he has to do his own growing, and that’s a natural fact.”

Fletcher picked up his Winchester. “Better get some sleep, Al. I’ll take the first watch and wake you in four hours.”

Sieber nodded and put his cold pipe in his shirt pocket. He lay back, his head on his saddle, and, with the frontiersman’s ability to drop off instantly, was soon sleeping soundly.

* * *

The two men rode out at first light, heading north across a timeless land untouched but for the passage of the Apache, and before them the ancient Salado people who had lived in cliff dwellings farther south but had probed this far and farther in search of game. The hawk and the eagle had crossed this land times without number, but had touched it only with their shadows.

Cattlemen had not yet moved into the Tonto Basin in numbers, and Fletcher and Sieber rode across flatlands between the hills and gorges, fertile, untilled land where Blackfoot and Crowfoot grama grass grew so high the seedy tips touched their stirrups.

Saguaro, cholla, prickly pear, agave, and jojoba grew low on the hillsides and atop the mesas, and piñon and the checker-barked juniper clung to the higher slopes.

To the north lay the colossal red and yellow rampart of the Mogollon Rim, a mountain cliff with slopes that fell away steeply to meet the dark green line of the timber.

Both men rode easily but alert, rifles ready to hand across the horns of their saddles.

Of Apaches they saw no sign, though once they made out talking smoke rising from a craggy spire of rock near the southern bend of the Salt River. It was as yet too far away to be a signal of danger, but it was a thing to be aware of, and both men rode with their eyes restlessly scanning the hushed land around them.

Fort Apache lay among the foothills buttressing the escarpment of the Rim and was for Fletcher an opportunity to talk to General Crook and perhaps get a lead on Estelle Stark.

Even if it was a cold trail, it could be a starting point, and a sight better than wandering aimlessly around wild and broken country made dangerous by hostile Apaches.

The afternoon had not yet shaded into evening when Fletcher and Sieber crossed the Salt at the clear, pebblebottomed shallows near the scorched ruin of Sean Costello’s store and an hour later rode into Fort Apache. They saw a shabby collection of log huts and tents that was a fort only in name, occupied, at least temporarily, by three troops of the First Cavalry and their Paiute scouts.

A rising wind was blowing long and cold off the Mogollon Rim, smelling of mountain ice and pine, bringing with it flurries of snow, and the sky was heavy with gray clouds. Although it was not yet night, oil lamps cast yellow and orange shadows on the windows of the huts along officer’s row, and the sentries on duty, muffled in greatcoats, fur hats, and scarves, stamped their feet against the cold, their breath smoking.

The few women who were in sight walked quickly, heads bent against the wind, shawls drawn tight around their shoulders.

Fletcher rode bundled in his sheepskin mackinaw, the collar up around his ears, as he followed Sieber to General Crook’s headquarters, a log cabin with a shingle roof, twice as big as the rest, but just as badly built and equally shabby and unwelcoming.

Fletcher and Sieber dismounted, looped the reins of their horses to the hitching rail, and walked inside, Fletcher’s spurs chiming on the rough plank floor with every step.

A young corporal orderly sat at a desk, and in the far corner of the room a potbellied stove glowed cherry red, burning wood that smelled of mesquite. A coffeepot stood on top of the stove, and a few tin cups littered a small table close by.