Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

“Stark,” Fletcher said, ignoring the man’s sudden flush of anger, “I was railroaded into that murder charge. I never shot a man in the back in my life.”

The senator shrugged. “A hick sheriff orders you out of his tumbledown Wyoming cow town. Later he’s found dead in the livery stable, a bullet in his back, and you’re standing over him, holding his own still-smoking gun in your hand.” Stark’s smile was cold. “I’d say it was an open-and-shut case, and so apparently did the jury.”

“The sheriff was dead when I got there. Someone else killed him, knowing I was on my way to the livery stable and was sure to investigate the shot. That’s why I picked up the gun.”

Fletcher saw Slaughter’s eyes flicker to Stark. The look was gone in an instant, but it spoke volumes. Did Slaughter know who the real killer was? And did Stark himself know?

At that moment Fletcher had no answers to those questions, and the very notion seemed wildly far-fetched, but it was something for a man to think about.

Stark was speaking again. “Whether you’re guilty or not isn’t my concern at the moment. Right now I need an answer, Fletcher. Will you bring back my daughter and give me your word that you’ll return here to Lexington with her?”

Fletcher smiled. “You’d take the word of a hired gun and plunderer?”

“I’m told that, despite your profession, you’re said to be a man of your word. Come now,” Stark insisted, the man’s patience obviously wearing thin, “what’s your answer?”

This time Fletcher did not hesitate. “I’ll bring her back,” he said. “After that, well, we’ll have to see how the cards fall. I reckon even five years in prison can feel like a lifetime.”

Fletcher had expected Stark to raise some kind of objection, but to his surprise the senator nodded his acceptance. “Just get Estelle back here and then we’ll talk. The clothes you wore when you were arrested are here, and so are your guns. I had them sent from the prison a few weeks ago.”

“A few weeks ago? You’ve been planning this meeting for that long?”

“I’m a methodical man, Fletcher,” the senator said. “And the cost was not much.”

* * *

Later, standing in Stark’s bedroom, dressed in his own hat, blue shirt, black pants and run-down boots, a red bandanna tied loosely around his neck, Fletcher began to feel human again. Stark had provided him with a sheepskin mackinaw and had replaced his Henry rifle with a new Model of 1873 .44.40 Winchester.

Fletcher strapped on his gun belts, a short-barreled Colt in a cross-draw holster, a second revolver with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel at his hip. He opened the loading gate of this revolver and spun the cylinder. It was empty.

Stark smiled. “There will be plenty of time to load that when you and your horse are on the Katy heading south.”

“We ain’t so stupid, Fletcher,” Slaughter added, his gun leveled and unwavering.

“You have my horse?” Fletcher asked, surprised, ignoring the sneering gunman.

The senator shook his head. “No, not your horse, but one just as good. I have a big American stud in the stable out back. He’ll serve you well.”

The senator stepped to a dresser near his four-poster bed and reached into a drawer. He came up with a small canvas sack, pulled shut with a drawstring. “There’s two hundred dollars in traveling expenses in this bag,” he said, hefting the sack, letting the gold coins clink. “Use it wisely.”

Stark laid the sack in Fletcher’s palm and added, his cold, flat eyes suddenly animated, “Go to Arizona and bring back my daughter to me, Fletcher. She’s all I’ve got in this world and I love her very much.”

Fletcher stood and curled the brim of his hat, as was his habit when he had the Stetson in his hands and not on his head. “You sure believe in taking chances, Stark. I could take your money and your horse and just skedaddle.”

“You could,” the senator conceded. “But I don’t believe you will. I was told by a very highly placed person that despite the wild, lawless life you’ve led since the end of the War Between the States, he still considers you as he did when you were an officer of horse artillery under his command. He calls you a man of great personal courage, integrity, and honor.”

“Who told you that?” Fletcher asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Gen. Ulysses S. Grant,” Stark replied.

Three

The boy beside him was dying. But he was dying too slowly, an arrowhead of strap iron embedded deep in his belly, shot from an elegant Apache bow of Osage orange wood.

The young trooper, who looked to be no more than seventeen, wore the blue of the Fifth Cavalry, and he was a boy making a man’s attempt to bear a pain that would soon become too much to bear.

“How is he?”

Al Sieber, Brig. Gen. George Crook’s chief of scouts, looked from the young soldier to Buck Fletcher, his eyes bleak.

Fletcher shook his head and Sieber nodded, saying nothing, knowing no words were needed.

Fletcher eased his position behind the rock, where he knelt and gazed out on a land held fast by January’s cold, a wilderness of craggy mountains and mysterious valleys and infinite silences. It was a land pine-covered, the abode of the black-tailed deer, the cougar, the cinnamon and black bears, the fox, and the bobcat.

And the Apache.

But of the Apaches there was no trace, always a sure sign that they were there.

From down near the wagon the sergeant cursed again, a long, outraged string of profanity laced with the expressive Gaelic of the old country. Then he screamed. He’d been alternately cursing and screaming for a long time now, at least an hour, but gradually the curses were growing less frequent as the screams grew longer and more shrill.

“Help him,” the trooper said. “For God’s sake, help Sergeant McDermott.”

Sieber bit off a chew and wedged it into his left cheek. “You lie quiet, boy. There’s no helping of McDermott now. He took his chances like the rest of us and he knew how it would be if he was caught.” The scout chewed and spat a stream of brown tobacco juice over the rock where he crouched. “They got squaws with them down there. Apache squaws know how to cut a man.”

The sergeant screamed and this time there were no more curses.

“And they’re remembering Skull Cave,” Sieber said, throwing the statement away as an afterthought.

Fletcher had learned from soldiers and settlers he’d met that just two weeks before, on December 28, 1872, seventy-six Indians, a few Apache and the rest Yavapai, were massacred at Skull Cave by three companies of the Fifth Cavalry. The victims were mostly women, children, and old men, and the Apache, eager for revenge, had set the whole Tonto Basin country aflame.

War bands roamed the basin and its bordering mountains, the Mazatzals, the Sierra Ancha, and the Superstitions, and raiders struck as far north as the Mogollon Rim.

Crook was out after the Apache with nine troopstrength detachments of the First and Fifth cavalries and their Pima and Maricopa scouts. The general’s plan was to surround the Apache and Yavapai bands and drive them into the Tonto Basin, concentrating them there for the kill.

“The trail must be stuck to and never lost,” Crook had ordered his officers. “No excuse will be accepted for leaving a trail. If your horses play out, the Apache must be followed on foot, and no sacrifice should be left untried to make the campaign short, sharp and decisive.”

So far, the Apache had not obliged, fighting back with a ferocity born of desperation, fueled by an undying hate of the white man and all he represented. Army patrols had been ambushed and the cabins of isolated settlers south of the Mogollon Rim escarpment attacked, resulting in burned cabins and the scattered, violated bodies of men, women, and children.