Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

Grant nodded. “I will clear your name, Major. That you may depend on.”

Fletcher smiled. “Mr. President, I’m no longer a major. I’m just plain old Buck Fletcher.”

Grant swung into the saddle and touched his hat brim. “Till we meet again . . . Major.”

He followed the wagons and didn’t look back.

Fletcher turned to Estelle, who was standing at her horse’s head, the reins in her hands.

“Better get going,” he said. “The snow’s getting thicker and you could lose the wagons.”

“Come with me, Buck,” Estelle said, her eyes urgent and pleading. “Once I’ve talked to my father’s lawyers and settled the estate, you can return with me to Arizona. I want you riding at my side when I continue the Chosen One’s work among the Apaches. Buck, you’ll help me spread the word. You’ll be my Doomsday Rider.”

Fletcher grinned and shook his head. “Estelle, I’m not cut out to be a preacher. I’ve got places to go, a lot of places I’ve never seen before, and I’ve got things to do.”

“Change your mind, Buck. Please come with me.” Estelle took Fletcher’s big, callused hand and raised it to her lips. “I think, given time, I could love you, Buck. I know I could.”

Gently, Fletcher removed his hand from the girl’s grasp. He walked to the stirrup of Estelle’s horse and held it for her. “Time to go, Estelle. You can’t let those wagons get too far ahead of you.”

The girl put her foot in the stirrup then swung into the saddle. She looked down at Fletcher. “If you change your mind, will you come after me?”

“Maybe. Just don’t count on it too much.”

“I’ll be looking for you, Buck. I’ll be watching my back trail every hour of every day. I owe you so much, I want to spend my lifetime repaying it.” She smiled. “One day I’ll turn my head and you’ll be there.”

“ Hasta luego, Estelle,” Fletcher said. He slapped the rump of the girl’s horse and stood there as she rode away.

He kept his eyes on Estelle until she was swallowed up by distance and the falling curtain of the silent snow . . . and even after that, he continued to watch a long time longer.

Twenty-eight

Two weeks later, a long wind blowing at his back, Buck Fletcher crossed into the Colorado Territory and rode into the foothills of the Rockies.

He crossed Chico Creek, and directly ahead of him soared the snow-covered bulk of Pike’s Peak. Fletcher stopped in the shelter of a stand of mixed aspen and Douglas fir and built himself a smoke.

He had no clear idea where he was headed, but the supplies he’d gotten from President Grant were fast running out, and he’d soon have to make a decision.

To the north was Denver, and as he smoked he figured that was as good a choice as any, though he did not much care for cities and their crowds and less for sleeping under a hotel roof.

But Denver it would be.

Fletcher tossed the butt of his cigarette into the snow, then left the trees and swung north, keeping Cherry Creek to his right. The peaks of the mountains to the west were covered in snow, and a few flakes drifted in the wind. It was bitter cold and he huddled in his mackinaw, his breath smoking in the frigid air.

That night he camped in a stand of cottonwood on a bend of the creek, ate a hasty supper washed down with twice-boiled coffee, and was glad to seek the warmth of his blankets.

Around him the land lay empty and silent, but for the calling of the coyotes and the wind whispering through the branches of the cottonwoods. There was no moon because the sky was covered in cloud and the air smelled of pine and of dark-shadowed ravines and of loneliness.

Fletcher rose before daybreak, drank the last of his coffee, and saddled up. He figured he was fifty miles from Denver, and behind the rocky escarpment to his west must lie the South Platte, and beyond the river, Bison Peak and the majestic, pine covered Tarryall Mountains.

The night was being washed out by a gray dawn as he rode through a valley between two shallow hills and emerged once again onto the flat, the creek shining in the distance under a watery sun.

Fletcher swung his horse to the west, closer to the mountains and the tree line. The snow was deeper there, and drifting some, but the slopes would provide more shelter from the wind.

He rode across a patch of sandy, barren ground, studded here and there by shrubs of mountain mahogany, the place shielded from the worst of the snow by a rocky overhang, and headed once again into open country.

The snow here was deeper, up to his horse’s knees, and the going was slower.

Fletcher glanced to his left and saw a jutting outcropping of gray rock, surrounded by a jumble of massive boulders that must have tumbled down the slope in some cataclysm in ancient times. A few stunted spruce grew in the spaces between the rocks and here and there a tangle of blackberry bushes that would fruit in the early summer.

He had chosen this route unwisely. The going was too heavy and it was tiring his horse. He swung the stud to the east, planning to ride back toward the creek where the wind would blow harder but the snow would be less deep. Above him, the clouds were building into towering ramparts, broken down in places like the colossal walls of a besieged city, and the snow was falling thicker.

The wind tugged at Fletcher’s mackinaw, blowing the mane of his horse, and the only sound was the jangle of the bit and the soft footfalls of his mount in the snow.

Ahead lay the creek, cottonwoods growing at intervals along its bank, their companion willows shivering in the cold and rising wind. . . .

Fletcher never heard the shot that blasted him from the saddle.

He slammed into the ground, knowing at once that he’d been hit hard. The alarmed stud galloped away from him, stirrups flying, then stopped a couple of hundred yards away to graze on a patch of grass thrusting up from the snow.

For a few moments he lay there, stunned. Another bullet kicked up an angry vee of snow at his side; then a second burned across the top of his right thigh.

Rising to his feet, Fletcher turned and ran back toward the rock overhang he’d seen earlier. He angled in the direction of a vast snowdrift that would screen him, at least temporarily, from the view of the hidden rifleman.

Fletcher had seen a puff of smoke rise from the outcropping among the boulders where the man was hidden, but there was no way to get at him from here. Besides, his rifle was with his horse, and right now he was badly outgunned.

He reached the drift, a sheer parapet of snow rising twenty feet above his head, and stepped warily along its base, fearing that a bullet could send the whole thing crashing down on him.

Once past the drift, Fletcher ran toward the overhang, limping on his wounded leg, and at last reached the shelter of the rock.

But there was no cover here.

Fletcher explored the side of the overhang farthest from the hidden rifleman. The shelf of rock ran almost straight for about thirty yards, then curved back into the mountainside. It jutted out a good twenty-five feet, and, as far as Fletcher could tell, its top was flat, covered in scrub and maybe stunted pine.

Wounded or no, bad leg or no, he had to get up there. If he stayed out here in the open much longer he’d be a dead man.

A wide, scarlet fan rose above his belt on Fletcher’s left side, and his shirt was drenched in blood. Was the bullet still in there—or had it gone right through him?

He reached inside his mackinaw to the small of his back and his hand came out wet and red. He had his answer.

Fletcher stepped to the slope where the rock shelf merged back into the mountainside and began to climb.

He was losing blood and weakening fast, and the slope was steep and covered with a tumulus of loose rocks, ice, and shingle. The higher he climbed, the more his boots slipped on the tumulus and he’d slide back down again, a shattering shower of shingle clattering over him.