Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

There were loose ends to be tied up for sure, like taking care of the soldiers who had escorted Fletcher to Lexington. But those men were only pawns to be moved across Stark’s chessboard and sacrificed when the time came.

Such a man should never become president of the United States, and Fletcher, though he realized he was just another pawn, vowed he would do everything he could to stop Stark—even at the cost of his own life.

A man was talking to him, and Fletcher swung his mind back to the here and now.

“. . . so what do you want to do? Do you want us to help you bury the old man?”

Fletcher looked down at the man from the saddle. “No,” he said, “I’ll lay him to rest.” He nodded toward the highest pueblo. “Up there.”

“What? Are you crazy?” the man asked, his face shocked. “Man, that’s six hundred and fifty feet, and it’s almost straight up.”

“Charlie didn’t want to be buried in the ground,” Fletcher said, his voice even. “He wanted to lie where he could see the stars. Well, he can see the stars from up there.”

The man shook his head. “Mister, we’re all pulling out of here in an hour. There’s nothing to hold us here now except memories of death and lies.” He shrugged. “You’re on your own.”

Fletcher smiled, bringing a fleeting softness to his hard, tough, and unhandsome features. “Charlie would have it no other way.”

Fletcher unsaddled the horses and staked them out on the grass. He was kicking aside as much of the snow as he could when the man he’d spoken to earlier brought a bucket of grain, saying that was the last of it, and Fletcher divided it between the horses.

He had to go after Estelle, no matter what the risk. But that would have to wait. He would take care of Charlie first.

The old mountain man lay wrapped in a blanket in one of the empty rooms in the pueblo.

Fletcher lifted the blanket from Charlie’s face. The aging of death was on him, and its quiet. A strand of gray hair had fallen over Charlie’s forehead, and Fletcher gently pushed it back into place.

“Old-timer,” he whispered, “you and me have a journey to take.”

Fletcher was a big man, and strong, but even so Charlie Moore was a heavy burden.

The path to the uppermost pueblo, once climbed by the Salado Indians who had lived here hundreds of years in the past, wound up the steep canyon hillside through a thick forest of saguaro, cholla, palo verde, and ocotillo cactus.

Charlie lay across Fletcher’s shoulder, but the climb was long and hard, and Fletcher’s legs were soon scraped by hundreds of thorns. Despite the cold of the morning, sweat trickled down his back and stung his eyes.

Fletcher stopped and gently laid Charlie on a patch of brush clear of cactus and shrugged out of his mackinaw. He laid the coat on the path where he would find it on the way down and wiped sweat from his forehead.

“Old-timer,” he said, breathing heavily, “you really set me a task.”

He picked up Charlie again and climbed higher.

Three hundred and fifty feet above the canyon floor, Fletcher reached ruins set into an alcove in the cliff. He counted sixteen ground-floor rooms and three on a second story.

Fletcher carried Charlie into one of the rooms and set him on hard mud floor. He stepped to the doorway and saw the canyon spread out below him, the hill opposite covered in pine, snow whitening their branches.

He rolled a smoke and stood in the doorway, enjoying the stillness and rugged beauty of the morning. Out there somewhere was Estelle Stark, and the girl was in deadly danger. He would have to go after her and face the two men who had taken her.

It would not be easy, and before it was over he might be as dead as old Charlie lying cold and quiet behind him.

Fletcher finished his cigarette and ground out the butt under his heel.

“Hell,” he said aloud, “it’s just another hill to climb.”

He went back into the room and picked up Charlie again.

Now the slope rose steeper and the way harder.

Fletcher slipped and fell heavily, and Charlie’s body rolled away from him, tumbled among the cholla cactus, and came to rest at the base of a giant saguaro.

He walked back down the slope and sat beside Charlie, his breath coming in great, gulping gasps as the air around him thinned.

But there could be no stopping. Not yet.

Wearily, Fletcher again hoisted his burden onto his shoulder. He glanced up at the ruins two hundred feet above him, set into a shallow cavelike depression in the cliff.

The distance seemed impossible, but he set his chin and climbed, placing one foot in front of the other like a mechanical man, climbing . . . climbing higher . . . and higher . . .

His legs shaking from the ascent and the strain of Charlie’s great weight, Fletcher reached the upper ruins, a complex of thirty-two rectangular rooms, eight of them with a second story.

It was there Charlie would rest.

An ancient ladder still stood against the front wall of the pueblo, leading to one of the higher rooms. Fletcher put his foot on the first rung, testing its strength with his weight.

Old and dried-out though it was, the ladder held.

Fletcher shifted Charlie on his shoulder, holding the old man’s body with his left arm, and climbed, taking it slowly, one rung at a time.

When he reached the roof he laid Charlie down as gently as he could and covered the old man with the blanket. The rocky overhang above the pueblo cut off the view of the sky, but Fletcher moved the blanket away from Charlie’s face and turned the old man’s head to the north.

“The stars are that way, Charlie,” he said.

Fletcher was not a praying man, nor did he know any words to say. But he took off his hat and stood in silence with his head bowed.

After a while he replaced his hat, took one last look at Charlie, and said, “ Hasta luego, old-timer.”

Then he went down the ladder and down the slope and back to the flat.

Eighteen

When Fletcher descended to the canyon floor, the pueblo was deserted. The Chosen One’s disciples were gone, their footprints tracking to the northeast, a tribe of nomads who had come to the pueblos in search of doomsday and their Lord’s return but found only death, despair, and disillusionment.

One of them was riding—the one who had taken Charlie’s horse—but Fletcher felt no inclination to go after him.

That would take too much time and he had none to spare.

He searched the pueblo and found a dozen roasted mescal cakes, and these he stuffed in the pockets of his mackinaw. The Apaches carried the flat, dry cakes as their principal means of sustenance on their periodic raids into Mexico. Tasting somewhat like boiled beets, the cakes were both filling and nutritious and they kept fresh for a long time.

Fletcher saddled the stud and swung out of the valley and headed toward the Mazatzal Peak, fifty hard, broken miles to the northwest.

The shadowed canyon country around him gradually gave way to the rolling, pine-covered foothills of the Mazatzals. Fletcher saw no open ground and everything around him was built on a vast scale, the boulders, the trunks of the spruce, and the pine-choked ravines between the hills.

He had earlier picked up the tracks of two horses. One left a deeper imprint, suggesting that the mount was carrying two riders, one of them presumably Estelle, surely a jolting, uncomfortable ride for a pregnant woman.

Around noon Fletcher rode into a narrow divide between the hills where the trees stretched a canopy of leaves on each side, almost blotting out the sky. A stream ran through the length of the valley, one of the hundreds of runoffs from the Salt River. Although sheets of pane ice extended from each bank, the water bubbled free in the middle over a mossy, pebbled bottom.