Ralph Compton - Down on Gila River

“An’ I’m right sorry about that,” Sam said. “I mean, me coming so cheap an’ all.”

Santos grunted, then said, “Now the question: Is it worth my trouble to keep you alive for twenty dollars?”

The breed lost himself in thought for a few moments. Finally he said, “Maybe I should just kill you, then be on my way.”

Sam opened his mouth to speak, but Santos held up a silencing hand.

“No,” the breed said, “I’ve thought about it and have decided that I can’t kill you. I promised I’d bring you in alive and a contract is a contract. I have a reputation to uphold.”

Santos’s eyes whipped the older man from head to toe and Sam felt as if he’d just lost a layer of skin. “You are a trouble to me, old cowboy. I’m starting to think that I regret ever laying eyes on you.”

“I’m right sorry to hear you say that,” Sam said. “If it’s all the same to you, maybe I should just skedaddle and we’ll forget this ever happened.” He blinked. “I’ll send you fifty dollars for your wasted time, just as soon as I get set.”

The breed shook his head. “No, it can’t be done. I gave my word.” He kneed his horse into motion. “Come. We should reach Dan Wells’s place before nightfall.”

* * *

Sam rode knee to knee with Santos and realized where he’d made his big mistake—leaving the Spur Lake Basin country in the first place.

He’d harbored the notion that he might prosper in the restaurant business, and then he’d met Hannah and was smitten by another, better notion—that he might settle down with her and little Lori.

Now both prospects were gone and all that remained were the burned-out cinders of his dreams.

One thing he did know: he’d never let Jake Wells torture him to death. Better a bullet than a branding iron.

Chapter 34

“Look at us,” Lorelei said. She’d insisted that everyone link hands in a circle, including the giggling Lori. “Ain’t we a posse to be reckoned with?”

Like her daughter, Hannah saw the funny side to the situation.

“I bet about now Santos is shaking in his boots,” she said.

“Moccasins,” Lorelei said.

And both women laughed.

But the Kiowa’s face was set in stone.

“Santos is a great lord and not to be laughed at,” he said. “He has killed many men, and he’ll kill us.”

“The schoolma’am wants her man back,” Lorelei said. “There’s no stopping a woman when her mind’s set on a thing.”

“Sam is already a dead man,” the Indian said. “Santos told me so.”

“James,” Hannah said, “we must try to save him. Won’t you help us?”

The Kiowa nodded. “I will help. We will die together. It is not for us to know the ways of the Great Spirit, but perhaps that is what he has planned for us.”

Lorelei shook her head. “Ain’t you just a joy to be around?” she said.

The cabin had burned down to a pile of charred logs, and only a few thin tendrils of smoke rose from the ashes.

As Hannah climbed into the saddle behind Lori, she glanced at the ruin but saw no sign of bodies, and she was relieved about that. Such a sight would have been horror piled on horror.

She felt the weight of the derringer in the pocket of her dress and for the first time realized just how little Santos had given her.

There had been other guns in the cabin, but he had burned them with the bodies, as though he did not want her to be better armed.

Obviously he didn’t fear her, so giving her the belly gun had amused him, nothing more, some weird kind of half-Apache humor.

Well, that was your mistake, Santos, Hannah thought. But she realized at once it was false bravado, an empty boast, like a rooster crowing atop a dung heap.

Lorelei had mounted and now she kneed her horse closer to Hannah.

“You’re deep in thought, schoolma’am,” she said.

Hannah smiled. “I was trying to figure why Santos gave me the derringer.”

“Because he’s a no-good buzzard,” Lorelei said. “He knows if you ever try to use it on an armed man, you’ll get killed fer sure.”

“Apache humor,” Hannah said, giving voice to her earlier thought.

“Yeah, something like that,” Lorelei said.

* * *

The Kiowa had been unable to round up more of the horses he’d released from the Cappses’ barn, so he jogged ahead of Hannah and Lorelei and constantly scouted the trail.

To the north lay the Pinos Altos, and the tracks of Sam and Santos headed in that direction.

Around them the high country stretched motionless and empty, the aspens and pines on the surrounding hillsides standing as still as paper cutouts in the thin morning air.

The Kiowa stopped and when the women rode up on them, he pointed to an area of trampled grass.

“Santos stopped to palaver here,” he said.

“Was it with Moseley and the Wells brothers?” Hannah asked.

James shook his head. “Six, seven riders, on unshod ponies. Probably an Apache war band.”

His eyes scanned the distances to the west.

“Apaches ride in that direction,” he said. “They’ll raid into Arizona, maybe so.”

The Kiowa’s eyes lifted to Hannah and he pointed. “Santos and Sammy head that way, toward Dan Wells’s place on the Gila.”

A heavy depression settled on Hannah like a sodden cloak.

“Of course that’s where we’ll find them,” she said, in a flat voice. “At the Wells place.”

“You having second thoughts about this, schoolma’am?” Lorelei said, her lips pale, paler even than her face.

Hannah needed reassurance, but she found none in Lorelei’s fevered eyes or in the blunt, roughed-out features of the Indian.

“We don’t have a hope, do we?” Hannah said.

Lorelei ignored that question and asked one of her own. “So, what’s changed since we left the cabin?” she said. “Back then you were all for rescuing Sammy boy and putting a bullet into Vic Moseley.”

“Maybe now that we’re closer, it doesn’t seem quite that easy anymore.”

“Honey, it never was easy,” Lorelei said.

Hannah said nothing and Lorelei laid it on the line.

“We got a kid with us, an Injun who’s scared out of his breechclout, a sneaky gun with two bullets in it, and we’re up against four of the West’s most dangerous gunmen, to say nothing about Apaches.”

Lorelei smiled. “So tell me, what was easy about that to begin with?”

Hannah hugged Lori close and laid her chin on top of the child’s head. “None of it,” she said.

“We go back,” the Kiowa said. “Head for Silver City and tell the law.”

“And let Sam die,” Hannah said. It was not any kind of an accusation, just a statement of fact.

“That about sums it up, sister,” Lorelei said.

Hannah was quiet for a long time, her eyes distant.

Finally she said, “Back to Haystack Mountain way, the ghost of an Apache warrior sits his horse among the trees near my cabin. I see him most nights, just sitting there, staring ahead of him into nothing. He doesn’t move.”

The Kiowa had been listening intently. His face empty, wedged with shadow, he drew off a few yards from the others, stumbling as he walked.

James broke into a low, soft chant and his feet shuffled on the sun-crisp grass.

“Sam thought the Apache was waiting for the return of someone dear to him, and for a while I thought that was the case,” Hannah said. “Now I’m not so sure.”

Lori watched the Kiowa and smiled around her thumb as the Indian’s chant rose and fell amid the hushed morning like a birdsong.

Lorelei waited for Hannah to speak again, her eyes on the Kiowa, saying nothing.

“I believe the Apache failed in some terrible way,” Hannah said, “and he was killed before he could make amends. Now he waits forever, hoping to undo the wrong he did.”