Stryker's Revenge Page 2

  “Then we can catch them?”

  “We can. Them bucks don’t even know we’re here. Looks like all of them headed north.”

  Stryker took time to roll a cigarette, aware that Hogg’s eyes were still on his face.

  He was the only man who looked at him straight. Stryker had grown used to people staring at the tunic buttons on his chest when they spoke to him, unwilling to raise their eyes and confront the horror of his disfigured features. But the scout looked and never flinched.

  He’d recently asked Hogg why this was so, and the man had answered only, “Lieutenant, I seen the wounded at Gettysburg, Chickamauga and a dozen other places.”

  Stryker lit his smoke, then turned again to Sergeant Hooper, telling him he needed a smart soldier to carry a message to Fort Bowie.

  “Beggin’ the lieutenant’s pardon, but I don’t have one o’ them,” Hooper said.

  A smile tugged at the corners of Stryker’s mouth, doing nothing to soften the stiff, grotesque mask of his shattered and deeply scarred face.

  “Then send me a stupid one,” he said.

  “Plenty of those, sir,” the sergeant said. He turned to his left in the saddle and yelled, “Trooper Sullivan. Come ’ere an’ speak to the officer.”

  Sullivan, a small man with the look of a belligerent rodent, rode out of line and drew rein in front of Stryker.

  “Now mind your manners, Sullivan, or I’ll be ’avin you,” Hooper warned. He wore a ferocious scowl on a countenance as round and red as a penny. The sergeant had been a desert soldier for nearly fifteen years, but, unlike most men, his skin still burned scarlet in the sun and never tanned.

  Stryker returned Sullivan’s salute and said, “Ride to Fort Bowie and tell them the Norton and Stewart stage has been attacked. Six dead. No survivors. Ask them to detail a burial party, then lead them here to the saddleback yonder. Tell them I am headed north toward the Cabezas in close pursuit of the hostiles.”

  The lieutenant studied the trooper’s face. “Can you remember that?”

  Sullivan repeated the message word for word, and Stryker decided the man was not as dumb as Hooper alleged.

  “Then get going,” he said. “And good luck.”

  After the trooper rode away, cantering to the west in a cloud of yellow dust, Stryker spoke to Hooper again. “Sergeant, Mr. Hogg and I will ride ahead. Follow on with the rest of the patrol and the pack mules.”

  Lieutenant Stryker sat his horse and studied the scene before him, his mouth working. He’d prepared himself for the worst during his ride to the saddleback, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination.

  His eyes met those of Hogg, and the scout grimaced. “Damned Apaches never clean up after themselves, Lieutenant.”

  Perhaps it was an attempt at humor. More likely Hogg was reaching out to him in clumsy reassurance, telling him that any normal man would be appalled by what he saw.

  One thing Stryker did not need was sympathy. He’d read too much of that in the faces of others over the course of the past few months, not only for his broken face, but for losing his beautiful wife-to-be and promising Army career.

  Without a word he swung out of the saddle and stood with the reins in his hands, looking around, forcing himself to swallow every bitter drop of this vile medicine.

  The woman, a girl really, was the most noticeable, her body being the only one that had been stripped naked. She was lying spread-eagled on her back, her open blue eyes fixed on the indifferent sky, as though horrified that it thought nothing of how she’d been outraged.

  Hogg had said the girl had been used hard, and she had, probably by all twenty of the Apaches. They had not been gentle.

  And she’d been pregnant.

  Her belly had been cut open, and her unborn son, a small, white, curled thing about six inches long, had been placed at her left breast as though suckling.

  An Apache joke.

  The scout was at Stryker’s side. His eyes went to the girl, then back to the officer. “Lieutenant, you ever been in Kansas?” he asked.

  Stryker shook his head, saying nothing, his eyes still on the woman’s ravaged, bloodstained body.

  “Some flat, long-riding country up there. A man on a tall horse can stand in the stirrups an’ pretty much see forever. Into tomorrow, if a feller’s farsighted enough.”

  “You say.”

  “Uh-huh, I do say. I was only there oncet, back in ’seventy-eight when ol’ Dull Knife an’ his Cheyenne was playing hob from one end o’ the state to t’other. Right pretty country though, Kansas, even in winter.”

  “We’ll find something to cover her, Joe,” Stryker said. “Then lay her out alongside the others.”

  Hogg looked over at the stagecoach. “The driver and guard are still up on the box—must have been killed in the first volley. The two passengers tried to protect the gal though. See that tall feller lying by the door?”

  “I see him.”

  “That there is ‘Five-Ace’ Poke Fisher, a gambler out of El Paso, Texas. Ol’ Poke was a fair gunhand, and in his day he killed more’n his share. If you look at him, he was shot maybe four, five times, an’ all his wounds are in the front.”

  Hogg shook his head admiringly. “He died hard, did Poke, while a-trying to save the little lady. Who would have figgered ol’ Five-Ace for a hero?”

  Stryker turned to Hogg. His eyes in their crushed sockets were as hard as blue steel and his voice was as level as Hogg’s Kansas plains. “Joe, when we catch up with the savages, I want them all dead. I don’t want prisoners that the Army will only slap on the ass and send to San Carlos. If there are women and children with them, I want them dead too, every damned one of them. If I should fall, will you make sure my orders are carried out?”

  Suddenly the scout’s eyes were distant, as though he’d mentally put space between himself and his young officer. “Lieutenant, the Apache is a benighted heathen who only knows one way of making war—the way he was taught. He kills his enemies any how he can, then amuses himself by using their wives and daughters. He wasn’t always like that—I mean, way back. The Spanish taught him their way of war, and then the Mexicans and now the white man. Every cruel, senseless thing he does, he’s seen done to his own people many times over, and ten times worse.”

  Hogg shook his head. “Lieutenant, hating the Apache is like hating the cougar because of the way he kills a deer.” He waited, then said, “Or you fer your face. Neither way of thinking makes much sense.”

  Stryker stood stiff and silent for what seemed an eternity, then said, “I asked you a question, Mr. Hogg. If I fall in the engagement, will you see that my orders concerning the treatment of the Apache hostiles are carried out?”

  The scout touched the brim of his hat. “I’ll see that Sergeant Hooper follows your orders, Lieutenant.”

  “And you?”

  “I hired on as a scout. Nobody said nothing about killing women and children.”

  Without another word, Hogg turned on his heel and greeted Hooper, who was leading the troop over the crest of the saddleback. “The lieutenant wants the bodies laid out and covered, Sergeant,” he said. “See what you can find in the luggage to use as shrouds.”

  The cavalrymen were all young; one of them, Trooper Muldoon, was just sixteen. They had never been this close to dead people before and it showed in their strained faces as they laid out the already-smelling dead.

  After the bodies were arranged in a row, covered by whatever items of clothing the soldiers had found in the luggage, Stryker stood in silence, looking down at the now-faceless dead. He lifted his head and yelled. “Sergeant Hooper, form the troop in line behind me.”

  Hooper did as he was ordered, and then the lieutenant said, “Now remove the coverings from the bodies.”

  When that was done, Stryker moved to the side of the line and addressed the men in a loud, harsh voice. “Look well, all of you, and know your enemy. The Apache is not a warrior, not a soldier, but a killing animal. The only way to deal with
such a savage beast is to kill him before he kills you.”

  Stryker walked down the line, looking into the young faces of undersized boys recruited from city slums. To favor its horses, the United States Cavalry preferred troopers to be small and light, and their rations of hardtack and greasy salt pork—and not much of it—were designed to keep them that way.

  “Men,” Stryker said, “we will meet up with the Apache later today. When we find them, what do we do?” He glanced down the line. “You, Trooper Muldoon, what do we do?”

  The young man’s face was flushed from being singled out for attention. He swallowed hard. “Kill them, sir.”

  “And their women?”

  “Kill them, sir.”

  “And their children?”

  “Kill them, sir.”

  “God curse the savages to hell! That’s the spirit, Trooper Muldoon,” Stryker yelled.

  Another voice, from the end of the line, said, “I wish we had our sabers, sir.”

  Stryker strode in the direction of the voice. “Damn his eyes, who said that?”

  “I did, sir. Trooper Murphy.”

  The lieutenant stopped in front of the man, a slight, stooped towhead with eyes the color of rain. “True blue, Murphy. And so do I wish I had my saber. But if we can’t give them the steel, we’ll give them good old American lead.”

  A ragged cheer went up from the soldiers, and even the normally staid Hooper joined in the clamor.

  Hogg stepped to Stryker. “You fight Apaches afore, Lieutenant?”

  “No, this will be my first action.”

  “You’re learning fast.”

  Stryker smiled his crooked smile. “Look at my face, Mr. Hogg. It’s because I’ve got hell on my side.”

  Chapter 3

  Lieutenant Stryker rode beside the guidon, Hogg taking the point somewhere ahead of the patrol. The sun was now full in the sky, and the brush-covered hills around them were free of shadow. Scattered stands of mesquite and juniper grew in the valleys, and once Stryker saw an isolated cottonwood standing as a lonely sentinel near a dusty dry wash, close to the burned-out skeleton of an old freight wagon.

  Four miles due east lay Apache Pass. To the west arced the worn track of the old Butterfield Stage route. Ahead of Stryker the rocky southern peaks of the Dos Cabezas Mountains shimmered in the heat haze.

  Stryker dismounted the patrol to rest the horses, and led his men forward at a slow, shuffling walk. The only sounds were the creak of leather and the rattle of horse harnesses, the click of hooves and boots on rock.

  The lieutenant’s long johns stuck to his upper body and legs, and sweat trickled through the gray alkali dust on his cheeks. Behind him, covered in that same dust, the soldiers plodded forward like a column of ghosts. Trooper Kramer, who had a weak chest, wheezed with every step, and his mouth was wide-open, battling for each tortured breath of bone-dry hot air.

  Nothing moved in the vast land, but somewhere up ahead were the Apaches, unseen, yet a palpable presence all the same.

  Ahead of Stryker the figure of a mounted man undulated in the heat waves, his horse’s legs impossibly long as it picked its way forward like a distorted giraffe.

  Gradually the image settled and re-formed into its usual shape, the buckskin-clad figure of Joe Hogg astride his mustang.

  Stryker halted the column and waited for the scout to come.

  “Water ahead, Lieutenant,” Hogg said, drawing rein. “And dead people.”

  The lieutenant said nothing, waiting.

  “Ashes of the ranch house are still warm,” the scout continued. “I’d say it happened no more’n two hours ago.”

  “The dead?”

  “Man, woman, three children.”

  “Where are the Apaches?”

  “I don’t know. But they’re around, lay to that.” Stryker turned. “Mount up,” he yelled.

  But before he could swing into the saddle himself, Hogg stopped him. He dug into the pocket of his coat, leaned from the saddle, then dropped a handful of spent shells into the officer’s palm.

  “I found some of these at the stage and more at the ranch. Shiny brass, .44-40 caliber. This was brand-new ammunition fired from repeating rifles.”

  “What do you think, Joe?” Stryker asked, looking into Hogg’s eyes.

  “I think at least half of them bucks have repeaters, Henrys or Winchesters. Judging by the firing pin strikes, I’d say, like the ammunition, the rifles are new.”

  Stryker’s voice was tense, tight. “Somebody running guns to them?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Tell me it’s Rake Pierce, Joe. Damn you, tell me it’s him.”

  Hogg was quiet for a while. A horse shook its head, the bit chiming. Trooper Kramer was agonizingly coughing up phlegm and dust, and somebody laughed and slapped the man’s back.

  Finally Hogg sat back in the leather and said, “Well, before we left Fort Merit, Colonel Devore told me that Pierce was running guns to the Apaches. But he said he was in the Madres.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Joe? Why didn’t Colonel Devore tell me?”

  “We didn’t want to get you worked up over nothing, Lieutenant. The Madres are a far piece away and it’s a heap of country to cover, even if the Mexicans would allow it, which they wouldn’t.”

  “But Pierce could be here, in the Arizona Territory.”

  “Anything is possible, Lieutenant. For sure, Sergeant Pierce was always a man who didn’t cotton to being penned up in one place for too long.”

  Stryker swung into the saddle and gathered up the reins. “I want him, Joe. I want that bastard at the end of my gun.”

  “If he’s in the territory, I’ll do my best to find him for you, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, find him. And when you do, let me be the first to know,” Stryker said. “I’d sell my soul to kill that man.”

  Hogg was silent, obviously thinking about what he had to say. Then he said it, a plainspoken man with harsh words wrenching out of him like whetted iron.

  “Lieutenant Stryker, from what I’ve seen an’ heard on this patrol, you no longer have a soul to sell.”

  It was difficult to read Stryker’s face, a stiff, misshapen mask that could no longer reveal emotion. Only the eyes were alive, now clouded like a sky before rain.

  “Then I’ll drag Rake Pierce down into hell with me, and consider my eternal damnation well worth the price.”

  Under his gray beard, a smile found its way to Hogg’s lips. “Lieutenant, if I was a preaching man, about now I’d say, God forgive you.”

  Stryker nodded. “Mr. Hogg, I assure you, if you were a preaching man you would not be with this column.”

  Once again Stryker took his place beside the guidon. “Ride ahead,” he told Hogg. “Find me those savages.”

  “There’s water at the ranch, Lieutenant.”

  “The men and horses have water enough. We can always swing by there and replenish our canteens on our way back to Fort Merit.”

  “There’s also six Christian people who need buryin’.”

  Suddenly Stryker was irritated. “Mr. Hogg, we’re not a damned burial detail. The dead are beyond hurt. They can fend for themselves.”

  Hogg shook his head. “It just don’t seem right, Lieutenant.”

  “Mr. Hogg, as long as I’m in command, I’ll decide what’s right. If you have any reservations on that point, you may return immediately to Fort Merit.”

  The scout was silent for a few moments, as though he was turning over that option in his mind. Finally he said, “I reckon I’ll stick, Lieutenant. We can all go to hell together.”

  He swung his horse away and once again cantered into the shimmering heat of the afternoon.

  Stryker waved the detail forward, and they headed due north for the next hour.

  Directly ahead of the lieutenant, beyond the foothills, soared the domed peak of Government Mountain, where in ancient times mysterious peoples from farther south had once mined obsidian. Juniper and mesquite gre
w at the base of its slopes, giving way to brush as the mountain climbed to its full height of almost eight thousand feet. The peak’s shadowed foothills spread away in all directions, like the knotted roots of a gigantic oak.

  Somewhere in that tangle of arroyos, trees and hills were the Apaches.

  Stryker took off his battered campaign hat and wiped sweat from the leather band. Were the savages watching them even now, waiting until they came into rifle range? And where the hell was Joe Hogg?

  It was very hot. Dust drifted in thick veils around the column, and the men riding at the rear were suffering. The stale smell of horse and man sweat hung in the air and the red and white guidon drooped listlessly in the stillness. From somewhere close by a rattlesnake made its presence known, an angry buzzing that almost immediately lapsed into silence as the snake sought protection under a mesquite bush. The sun was the color of white-hot iron, branding the suffering sky, and in all the vast, naked land nothing moved and there was no sound.

  Now the foothills of the Cabezas were drawing close and Stryker halted the column. He called Sergeant Hooper forward.

  “Rest the men, Sergeant. No fires. We’ll wait here for Mr. Hogg’s report.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hooper said. He snapped off a smart salute as though he were still on parade at Aldershot with the Queen’s Own Rifles.

  Stryker watched the man leave. Hooper was a good soldier, steady, but he had a fatal weakness for women. According to his record, it had been the rape of a fellow sergeant’s sixteen-year-old daughter that had forced him to desert and flee England ahead of a rope.

  Desperate for experienced soldiers, the United States Army had weighed Hooper in the balance, decided that he had value as an Apache killer, and had posted him to the Southwest. As far as Stryker knew, the Army had never regretted that decision.

  As for himself, he had never liked the man. Hooper was a good soldier, but he was an overbearing bully and Stryker read something in his eyes that he did not like, something that crawled. . . .

  Grateful to get out of the saddle, the troopers sprawled in whatever thin shade they could find. They could not boil coffee, but pipes were lit and a few of them chewed on evil-smelling jerky.