Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

Charlie had walked into Estelle’s room, and now he stepped to Fletcher’s side.

“Damn it, Buck, you shot ol’ Scar all to rag dolls,” he said, grinning.

Fletcher ignored Charlie and said to Wilson: “You can catch up one of those Apache ponies wandering loose out there and leave here at first light. I reckon the army will catch up to you eventually and hang you.”

Wilson’s eyes slid to the wagon and Fletcher said, “That stays right here.”

The sergeant bent to pick up his rifle but Fletcher’s voice stopped him. “So does that.”

Wilson straightened, swallowed hard, and nodded. “Anything you say, Mr. Fletcher. I’m not hunting trouble.”

The man turned on his heel and walked away into the darkness.

Charlie put a hand on Fletcher’s shoulder. “Buck, why don’t you get some sleep. Me, I’m gonna stand guard on that wagon until daybreak so Wilson doesn’t get any ideas.”

Fletcher’s eyes went to Estelle’s room, where Hays lay, and Charlie said, “Don’t worry; I’ll take care of that.” The mountain man smiled. “It will be a doggone pleasure to plant ol’ Scar at last.”

Suddenly weary, Fletcher nodded. “Thanks, Charlie. Wake me before first light so I can bid our friend Wilson a fond farewell.”

Fletcher went to his room in the pueblo, stretched out on his mat, and within moments was asleep.

When he woke it was still dark, though when he looked out the window there was a suggestion of gray in the sky to the east.

Fletcher built a smoke from his dwindling supply of tobacco, a fact that gave him a twinge of concern, lit the cigarette, and stepped outside.

It was cold and he pulled the sheepskin collar of his mackinaw around his ears and walked toward the wagon, calling out softly for Charlie.

There was no answer.

“Some guard,” Fletcher muttered to himself, smiling. “Probably sound asleep.”

Charlie Moore was asleep. But it was a sleep from which he’d never waken.

The old mountain man lay flat on his face by the wagon, an 1860 model cavalry saber, useless against Apaches but an efficient murder weapon, sticking out of his back. The tracks of Andy Wilson’s regulation boots lay around Charlie’s body and led to the back of the pay wagon.

Fletcher pulled the saber free and turned Charlie over onto his back. The old man’s eyes were closed and a slight smile showed on his mouth under his beard.

Fletcher knelt and placed the palm of his hand on Charlie’s chest. There was no heartbeat, and death had already changed the tone of his skin and deepened the wrinkles around his eyes.

Charlie Moore was seven feet tall and wide in the shoulders, but now, somehow, he looked small and shrunken.

Rising, a terrible rage in him, Fletcher opened the back of the wagon and looked inside. The soldiers were paid mostly in paper money, and most of the sacks had been taken.

He left Charlie where he was and checked on the horses. The old man’s mustang still grazed on a patch of thin winter grass, but Fletcher’s big American stud was gone.

When he returned to Charlie’s body there were a few people gathered around and a couple of the men helped him carry the old man into a room in the pueblo.

“Let him lie there,” Fletcher said. “I’ll be back for him.”

“We can bury him,” a man with tired, red-rimmed eyes said. “God knows we’ve put enough to rest around here.”

Fletcher’s face was hard and unyielding; he refused, at least for now, to give in to his grief. “I’ll kill any man who tries to bury him,” he said. “I told you I’d be back for him.”

The men around him drew back a step or two, reading his face, and the man with tired eyes said, “He’ll be here, waiting for you.”

“Make sure that he is,” Fletcher said.

He walked outside, went to his room, and caught up his rifle. Then he saddled Charlie’s horse, swung wide of the pueblo cliff and followed a trail of fresh horse tracks in the snow.

He was going to kill Andy Wilson.

With his bare hands.

Seventeen

Wilson’s tracks led due south, toward the Gila River.

Fletcher calculated the man had maybe a four-hour start on him, but he was riding a stud with a distance-eating stride and that was no small thing.

Fletcher rode alert and ready in the saddle, his rifle across the horn, wary of an ambush.

This was mostly rolling hill country coming off the southern reaches of the Mazatzals, but beyond the Gila lay the Pinaleno, Santa Catarina, Santa Rita, Huachuca, and Chiricahua ranges, their rugged slopes thickly covered in pine, cedar, and juniper, and once among those peaks a man could lose himself forever if need be.

Fletcher put himself in Wilson’s position, trying to guess the moves he’d make. He came to the conclusion the man would not veer from his set trail and continue to head due south, hoping to make Nogales and beyond that Mexico.

He rode on, the rage inside him replaced by a grim determination to stick to Wilson’s trail no matter what happened.

For several miles there was no sound but the footfalls of Fletcher’s mustang and the creak of saddle leather. Around him were the pine-covered hills, here and there vast outcroppings of ancient volcanic rock showing red or gray against the green.

Within view of Iron Mountain, Fletcher splashed into a shallow creek and let his horse drink, then urged the little mustang forward again.

Toward noon, as he topped a steep rise, the sun felt warm on his back, melting the frost from his bones. Above his head a buzzard turned lazy circles in the air, its wings hardly beating, and once a brown bear, wakened from hibernation, glared at him, sending him on his way with a surly growl as he rode by.

The mustang was tough and enduring and showed no sign of slacking his pace as the day wore on and the sun dropped lower in the sky.

Wilson’s tracks in the snow were easy to follow, since nothing else was moving across that vast land. The coyotes, wolves, and deer and elk that were their prey had moved higher into the mountains with the coming of the first snows and would not be seen again until spring.

But once as the day was fading, Fletcher glanced at his back trail and thought he saw a flicker of gray vanish among the pines at the base of a saddleback rise.

Had an elk come down to graze lower on the slopes? Or was it a hunting wolf?

Fletcher rode on, dismissing the incident from his mind.

It had been an elk, nothing more.

The day shaded into night and Wilson’s tracks became harder to follow. But Fletcher rode south, reading the man’s mind.

Wilson would keep on riding through the night, not daring to stop, and Fletcher would follow.

The sky was clear but for a band of black cloud, and around it the night birds were pecking at the first stars. It had grown colder and Fletcher huddled in his mackinaw, thinking of hot coffee and blankets by the fire, both of them as out of reach as the stars above him.

A long wind, blowing chill from the north, teased the surrounding pines, bringing with it a few scattered flakes of snow.

Reluctantly, knowing it was his last, Fletcher stopped in the shelter of some trailside spruce and built a thin cigarette with the remaining few shreds of his tobacco.

He smoked gratefully until the cigarette burned to his fingers, then, with a pang of regret, dropped the butt into the snow.

Fletcher swung the mustang again to the south, his breath steaming around his mouth in the cold air, and rode deeper into the night.

At one point he lost his way and had to backtrack for an hour after he found that he’d ridden into a wide box canyon. He rode out of the canyon, then swung south again, and after a couple of miles he caught a glimpse of Wilson’s tracks. They led down a shallow rise and onto a wide, tree-rimmed, and snow-covered valley that was probably carpeted thick with sage and black grama grass in the spring.