Shadow Man Page 6

  They’d decided their plan earlier, such plan as it was. Head up the canyon. As soon as one of them came in sight of an Apache (or thought he did) he’d open fire and the others would back him up. They’d raise as much hell and kill as many Indians as they could before the end came. And hope they weren’t taken alive….

  As Taylor studied these men’s faces for what he knew was the last time his throat was dry. He nodded and they moved off. Then he was alone. He supposed just about as alone as he’d ever been.

  He followed the others into the black gut of the canyon. He tried to ignore the fear that hummed through him and smelled faintly on his skin like sulphur.

  He tried to move almost silently but every small noise he made seemed to crash violently, to fill the night, rattling like a coin in a tin cup.

  He paused once more, stretching out on his belly.

  He strained to see and identified blotches of paler darkness in the gloom. A scatter of small boulders. Boulders or blankets with Apaches huddled under them? He listened to the thick, throbbing silence around him. He could see or hear nothing yet his nerves quivered with the feeling of enemies all around him, closing in….

  There was sudden movement in the darkness; a man broke from it, running towards him.

  Taylor lifted his rifle, glimpsing the pale hair and beard of Davy Harrison.

  Harrison got halfway to him, grunted and stumbled. He went down on all fours. He groped around on the earth, an arrow angling up from the back of his neck. Another shape broke from the dark behind him: a man running forward, swinging the club in his hand.

  Taylor fired.

  The charging man kept running, on legs that suddenly had no strength. He plunged headlong, struck the earth on one shoulder and rolled.

  Taylor started to rise. Suddenly there was a pungent odour in his nose – bear grease!

  He turned his head. The black silhouette of a man loomed above him, thrusting down with the lance in his hands. He cried the Apache word ‘Zas-tee!’ – ‘Kill!’

  Taylor dodged the lance, driving his head into the Apache’s stomach. The man grunted, doubled forward and pitched headlong over his enemy. Taylor stood and something like a strong wire caught him across the throat, jerking him backwards. He fell; other figures reared out of the dark about him. Taylor lifted his rifle and took a blow on his right arm, which numbed it. He let the rifle fall. He felt terror then and tried to squirm off the earth. He could tell someone had hooked a bow over his head, the bowstring was burning into the flesh of his throat. He heard gunfire and yelling, and he heard, too, the gagging sounds he made.

  Taylor struggled to his knees. An Apache stood over him, swinging the rifle in his hands across his body. Taylor tried to dodge the rifle butt as it arced towards him. He was too slow. Pain exploded against his right temple and bright colours flashed. Then he was lying on his back on the earth and the night sky above him reeled and toppled, a black wall falling towards him. The bone-white moon fell too, shot out of the sky, and in falling turned black.

  The moon wasn’t dead but rode the starless sky above. Taylor watched it out of one eye, because his right eye was closed, glued down by the dried blood on the right-hand side of his face. Pain roared and throbbed in his head. He registered pain in his wrists also. He discovered his wrists and ankles were tied tightly by some kind of hair rope. He lay on a slight slope, head pointing uphill. He was stretched out like an X on the cold, hard ground, the ropes tied to posts hammered into the earth.

  If he wasn’t cold enough from the night what he saw was enough to freeze his blood. Apaches stood around him. Perhaps half a dozen men. The chevrons of white bottom-clay that split their faces made them seem like a gathering of fierce, dark hawks. They all had weapons in their hands.

  This was the worst nightmare of any white man on the frontier: to be taken for torture by hostile Indians. He ought to be shaking with fear. When he came out of his present dazed state he’d be plenty afraid, he supposed. Right now all he felt was a dizzy sense of unreality, and the pain in his head.

  Taylor wasn’t sure where he was, perhaps on the flats east of Devil’s Pass. The night sky looked to be at its darkest, dawn one or two hours off. His nose caught the acrid stink of recent burning, maybe a small fire just gone out, a faint smell of roasting meat…. In nearby shadows, a man whimpered in pain. He lifted his voice and cried: ‘God help me!’

  Taylor tried to clear his head of its hurting and confusion long enough to identify the voice. Before he could an Apache stepped forward and stared down at him.

  It was Loco.

  Taylor wondered if Nachay was with this bunch. Loco’s son might have died of his wound in the desert, after Taylor found him there, but the white man doubted it. As a rule Apaches were hard to kill.

  Loco was taller than the men with him, though stocky and barrel-chested as most of them were. He was wearing his trademark red shirt. Loco was in his fifties, Taylor supposed, his chest-length hair almost purely grey. Taylor expected him to glare at the prisoner in hatred and anger. Instead his face showed something like sadness. He looked a tired man, full of his years. Strangely Taylor was reminded, for a moment, of Major Cameron.

  Loco turned away abruptly. Someone was approaching. Taylor heard a new sound, one that didn’t belong in an Apache camp. The Apaches’ deerskin moccasins made little sound on the earth, but this newcomer’s footfall made a noisy crunching over loose stones and gravel. Whoever it was wore boots.

  Taylor lifted his head and strained to see, but the newcomer was above and behind him.

  Loco and the other Apaches turned their backs on Taylor. They walked upslope towards the newcomer, out of Taylor’s view. Voices came. Taylor strained to hear. After a moment he determined the talk was in Spanish, the universal language of the South-west. He heard Loco say: ‘You’re only just in time. Have you got the rifles?’

  A man replied: ‘Have you got the money, jefe?’

  There was some more talk, which Taylor missed, then voices faded out.

  All sound faded out, leaving pristine silence. Taylor waited for the Apaches to return. They didn’t.

  He decided that, inexplicably, he’d been left alone here. He started to pull at his ropes. Then there was a small rushing sound, boots churning loose stones, and a little music after that.

  Taylor held still, listening. Slowly he turned his head. All he saw was the darkness of the slope above him and to his right. Gradually he made out a column of thicker darkness on the night: a man standing there. He was entirely in shadow and then he moved forward a few steps. Taylor heard his boots again and a small, bell-like ringing.

  He knew what that was: the man had jingle-bobs, tiny pear-shaped pendants hanging from the ends of the spur rowels on his boots. They made a slight, pretty music.

  Taylor felt the man’s eyes on him and waited for him to move closer. Instead he heard the faint sounds of boots and spurs retreating upslope. They lost themselves in distance. After a time Taylor decided he was alone again.

  He thought about the man with jingle-bobs on his spurs. Taylor hadn’t been able to place an accent, but the gunrunner was undoubtedly an American.

  Taylor remembered something he’d said to somebody – Cameron perhaps – something like: If they’d been well-armed, none of us would have made it into this canyon.

  The Apaches might be just about to get themselves well-armed. And if they caught the Cameron party scaling the bluff, in no position to fight…. A scene played in Taylor’s mind’s eye, he heard people screaming as they died, he heard Fiona Cameron’s scream….

  He strained at his tethering ropes, bringing blood at his wrists, to no avail. Then he lay, defeated, and watched the sky turn grey-black as false dawn came.

  He’d forgotten the man nearby, who started moaning again, asking God in Heaven to help him. Taylor could now identify this man from what remained of his voice. It seemed Ethan Evans had found religion at last.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Taylor tried again at
his ropes but only succeeded in bringing more blood to his wrists. And more pain to his head.

  Ethan Evans made small, pitiful sounds that showed he was still – just – alive.

  Pain was like an axe blade that someone had used to split Taylor’s skull and then left in there. After some indeterminate time it eased a little – though not much – and he could think. And remember. The fight in the canyon. Putting the pieces of his memories together, Taylor at last realized what had happened. They’d been ambushed. Loco had been waiting for them.

  Taylor had told Nachay: ‘Your daddy’s pretty smart.’ He hadn’t known the half of it. Loco had out-thought and out-guessed his enemies at every turn, from the first ambush through to the fiasco in the canyon. Taylor wondered if he was maybe the smartest Apache leader since Cochise. If he’d had a thousand warriors in his band, instead of a hundred or less, he might have been able to hold off the white eyes for years. But it was too late for that now, and maybe Loco knew it. All he could do was slow down the final advance of the invaders, wound and harass them, until he was, himself, hunted down.

  Taylor heard, distantly, gunfire.

  There was a lot of it, and it came fast: rapid-firing weapons.

  Taylor listened in fear and horror. If the Apaches had caught the Cameron party scaling the bluffs, what chance would they have? What chance would Fiona have?

  There was a small sound in the darkness by his right ear, the rasp of a moccasin against the earth. A shape loomed over him. Taylor couldn’t see the face clearly but glimpsed a stripe of white-bottom-clay banding the cheeks. He felt a sudden fear, but that became bewilderment as he saw the Apache crouch down and pull at the stake-pin by Taylor’s right wrist. When the Indian got the pin fairly loose he reached towards the prisoner. He placed something in Taylor’s right hand: it was a knife with a bone haft.

  Nachay said, ‘Better go quick, Shadow Man.’

  Then he was gone.

  Taylor lay still a moment, trying to sort out the confusion in his thoughts. Then he started yanking at the loosened stake pin. He worked it free and used the knife to cut his remaining bonds.

  Whilst he did he heard a change in the distant firing. It eased considerably, slackening to short sporadic bursts. Which meant either the wagon people had got away, or they were all dead.

  Taylor attacked his bonds with renewed urgency. The loosening of the ropes brought exquisite pain to his wrists and ankles, and sitting up drove an iron spike through his skull. But he couldn’t think about that, with what might be happening in Devil’s Pass. He staggered to his feet.

  Dawn was pushing up over the eastern mountains and turning the land and sky pink. It showed him Ethan Evans. Evans was thirty yards away. He was naked and sitting up, tied to a stubby barrel-head cactus so the long spines drove into his back. A piece of dampened rawhide had been tied around his temples, to crush his skull as it contracted. His legs were splayed and a small fire had been built on his belly and his crotch, though it was dead now, a pile of white ash.

  Taylor had seen things and had a strong stomach but he might have vomited at this ghastly sight, except he had nothing in his stomach to bring up. Ethan had still been alive only a short while ago, which seemed incredible, but now he was a nodding corpse.

  Taylor supposed he’d been lucky on a couple of counts. Normally novice warriors, boys about fourteen, would have been left behind to guard prisoners but maybe Loco had taken only seasoned warriors with him on this raid; and Taylor had been taken unconscious, so spared Ethan’s fate, at least to begin with.

  Taylor turned away from the dead man. He moved towards the sound of gunfire. And then it came to him: there was no gunfire….

  He entered the eastern end of Devil’s Pass, where the MacShane wagon lay, and the Williams’s Conestoga. He found no bodies. He guessed the Apaches had dragged off the dead white eyes, rather than leave corpses to bloat and stink in the canyon mouth. Taylor kept to the cover of rocks along the canyon wall. He heard the drumming of hoofs and hid inside a circle of small boulders, but the sound receded, the horsemen moving away from him.

  Taylor’s head was full of gnawing pain and some of the heat haze of the desert seemed to have found its way on to his head, so he seemed to be moving through a blinding sun-yellow dream, in which nothing seemed real, and he was too numb to feel anything. He’d seen what the Apaches had done to Ethan Evans and felt nothing. Now he stood over Davy Harrison: the man lay dead at his feet and that didn’t seem real either. Harrison had his hands to the back of his neck, to the arrow embedded there, his mouth was wide open and screaming, the face frozen in its final pain. Matt Williams lay nearby. Both men had been stripped naked, but showed only a few random mutilations, presumably inflicted after they were dead. Neither was scalped. Harrison had been right about that.

  Taylor came to the mouth of the canyon. The earth near him was churned by many hoofs and to the west a haze of fine dust was slowly settling. There was an eerie quiet as he went into the canyon, then he heard a strange snapping and crackling. And smelled smoke.

  In the basin the wagons were still burning. A lifting wind drove a screen of grey smoke across. It brought tears to his eyes and he coughed over it. All the livestock had been driven off, including his grey horse. He skirted the blackened hulks of wood and canvas being licked by small flames and walked towards distant bluffs. He’d lost track of time because it had been dawn and now the sun was high towards noon. It burned his flesh and laid a fiery hand on the pounding in his head. It scoured his eyeballs and turned the world to white light, a dazzling mist that he found he was staggering into.

  Something tripped him. He groped around on his hands and knees, almost blind, then he blinked the sun-dazzle out of his eyes. He stared at Ma Kruger, who stared back, her eyes wide in terror. Her mouth was open to scream. The wind made a veil that rippled across her face and sand was being driven into her mouth.

  It was her body he’d tripped over. She lay on her left side. One hand was still pressed to her right side where her dress was dark with blood.

  In a dream once more, Taylor stood and looked around. Mrs Kruger was the first of a trail of dead. They made a pitiful litter at the base of the bluff. The Cameron party. He went numbly from corpse to corpse. He was fearful that the next dead face he looked into would be Fiona Cameron’s, but he looked anyway.

  A rifle lay at his feet. He lifted it, testing the trigger and found the weapon was jammed. It was a Winchester 73, the latest model, like the rifle Taylor had owned, although some Apache owned that now. Many rifle shells were scattered around, glittering in the noon sun.

  It was clear from how most of the bodies lay that they’d been killed climbing the bluff and had fallen to earth. A long rope hung almost from the top of the bluff, so one of the fleeing people had got that high at least. One man’s body hung, upside down, snagged around an outcrop of rock, near to where the tail end of the rope dangled. In his mind’s eye Taylor saw the migrants climbing the almost sheer cliff face, whilst Apaches swarmed below, pumping bullets out of their rapid-firing rifles. It must have been a cruel, easy slaughter, people screaming and falling like slaughtered quail.

  He found ten dead, six men and four women. Numb and dizzy as he was, it took him a time to work out who wasn’t there. All the men were accounted for except Buck Evans and Major Cameron. Four women were missing, including Señora Sanchez. And Fiona Cameron.

  There was no sign of any Apache casualties. At any rate, Apaches always carried off their dead.

  He did some scavenging, finding a dead man’s hat, a bandanna and, most important of all, a canteen that was nearly full. He took a long drink, his first water in twelve hours.

  Taylor studied the dim trail zigzagging up the west side of the bluff. He decided he could climb the steep trail unaided three quarters of the way up. After that he’d have to haul himself up the dangling rope, and then it would be a matter of climbing the last twenty yards or so of sheer rock barehanded. He’d have to do that with his head sp
litting with pain in the eye of the coruscating sun. But he was going to do it anyway, because the six missing people might be lying dead up there, Fiona amongst them.

  Some indeterminate time later he was sitting atop the bluff, pouring sweat and feeling the thin air of this altitude sear his chest.

  No bodies here, no dead Fiona Cameron. But there were spent cartridges scattered on the earth.

  So where were the missing migrants?

  The men might have been carried off for torture, the women taken into captivity as spoils of war. It was even possible – although unlikely – that all six missing people had got away.

  Off north lay the desert, glaring white in the afternoon haze. Fifty miles in that direction was the Morrison ranch.

  Taylor decided he would sleep out the afternoon heat in nearby cover then set out for the Morrison spread at dusk, walking all night if need be.

  Far below were the burning wagons and broken bodies of the Cameron party. Taylor stared down at them, the black taste of failure in his mouth. He’d been hired to protect these travellers on their trail of hope. Instead he’d led them to their graves. Already wolves and coyotes were gathering to the feast, and buzzards spiralled down from the sky.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Taylor made his way to a bosky, or grove, of mesquite trees. He found a place to sleep and slept without dreaming.

  When he woke it was late afternoon. The aching in his head had eased. He scouted around for food, finding some squaw cabbage to chew, and sucked sweet juice from the pads of a prickly pear. He begrudged the time this took but he had to eat and drink something. Otherwise he wouldn’t have the strength to do what he had to do next. He paused from time to time to look for enemies in the surrounding country.

  A few columns of pale smoke still climbed out of the box canyon. Taylor watched the smoke and frowned. He filled his pockets with beans from the mesquite trees. As sundown came he moved.