Ralph Compton Doomsday Rider Page 3

  “Why is she in Arizona?” Fletcher asked, interested despite the alarm bells ringing in his head.

  Stark exchanged a quick glance with Slaughter, then replied, “About a year ago, Estelle met a man in Washington. I never knew real his name, but he called himself the Chosen One.”

  “Looks like Jesus in one of them pictures you see in the Bible.” Slaughter grinned.

  “That will do, Mr. Slaughter,” Stark chided. He turned to Fletcher. “Estelle is a child, an impressionable child. She’s had a sheltered life and maybe that’s why she fell for this man’s story hook, line, and sinker. She up and ran away with him and, from what I was told by the Pinkertons, is now with him in the Tonto Basin.” He sighed. “She’s said to be helping that lunatic and his followers convert the Apaches. Estelle calls it fulfilling her mission from God or some such nonsense.”

  Fletcher tried something then.

  He moved in his chair, just a quick turn of the shoulders. But Slaughter caught it instantly and his Colt, which he’d held seemingly carelessly across his knees, came up fast, the muzzle pointing directly at Fletcher’s head.

  Fletcher eased back in the chair, smiling slightly. There could be no escape from this house, at least not at the moment, with Slaughter watching him like a hungry hawk. If he tried to rise, the gunman would put three or four bullets into him before he could even get to his feet.

  “What is the Chosen One’s story?” Fletcher asked Stark, accepting that he was pinned to his chair like a butterfly pinned to a card.

  The senator had seen Fletcher’s movement, recognized it for what it was, but seemed to dismiss it as a thing of no consequence, at least for the moment.

  “The Chosen One, as only he calls himself, is the leader of a doomsday cult,” Stark replied, his voice even. “He believes the world will end in a fiery holocaust nineteen hundred years after the death of the Savior, on March twenty-three, 1900, to be exact.”

  Stark leaned forward in his chair. “The Chosen One believes, or says he believes, that he was appointed by God to convert the Apache savages to Christianity before the world ends.”

  Fletcher smiled, his fingers straying from force of habit to the pocket of his rough canvas shirt. Disappointed, he dropped his hand and said, “I’d say he’s got his work cut out for him. The Apaches don’t take kindly to preachers, at least the ones I’ve known.”

  Slaughter, a perceptive man, had seen Fletcher’s hand move to his shirt pocket. Like many Texans, Slaughter had picked up the cigarette smoking habit from Mexican vaqueros and, despite his intense dislike of Fletcher, he had the smoker’s natural empathy for another in dire need of tobacco.

  “Here,” he said, tossing paper and tobacco sack to Fletcher.

  Fletcher built a smoke and Slaughter threw him matches. The gunfighter drew deeply and gratefully, and said, “First one in many a week.”

  “Man shouldn’t be without tobacco,” Slaughter said. “Might put him on edge and maybe make him try something he could regret.”

  “A man might at that,” Fletcher agreed. He turned to Stark. “If I find your daughter and get her out of Arizona, and that’s a big if, what’s in it for me?”

  “For you?” Stark asked, his right eyebrow rising in surprise. “Why, nothing except a few more weeks of freedom before you continue your sentence.”

  Fletcher smoked in silence for a while, studying Stark, trying to determine whether the man really meant what he’d just said. He apparently did, because his face was set and determined and there was no give in his expression.

  “That’s way too thin,” Fletcher said finally, stubbing out his cigarette butt in Stark’s ashtray, immediately beginning to build another. “I might just head for Arizona and keep on riding, maybe all the way to Mexico.”

  “Try that, Fletcher, and I will do everything in my power to hunt you down wherever you are and see you hanged,” Stark said, his voice level. “A man with your reputation and penchant for violence doesn’t disappear easily, even in Mexico.”

  The senator thought for a few moments, then said, “Still, you make a valid point, and perhaps I should up the ante. I will concede this much: Bring my daughter home and then prove to my satisfaction that you’ve forsaken the gun to take up the plow and I’ll see what I can do to have your sentence reduced.” He hesitated. “Perhaps five years in the territorial prison. No more than that.”

  “The alternative?” Fletcher asked, lighting his cigarette.

  “The alternative is that I send for the keen young Lieutenant Simpson right now and have you returned to Wyoming and your cell.”

  “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.

  The Apaches demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and while there was still breath in their lean, sinewy bodies they’d fight on, defiant even as they saw their way of life and all that they held sacred being relentlessly and systematically destroyed.

  And they were out there now, among the rocks, knowing they had three white men trapped. The Apaches were eager to finish this thing, but, patient and knowing as the stalking wolf, they were biding their time.

  How many of them?

  Fletcher studied the rocks behind the wagon. Had he seen one of them move? Just a moment ago he’d caught a sudden flash of red in the narrow vee between two gray boulders. And now he saw it again.

  Fletcher sighted his rifle on the notch between the rocks and waited.

  Above him the sun had climbed to its highest point and a vulture glided across the hazy green sky, slanting toward the towering, rugged bulk of Mazatzal Peak to the west.

  There was little heat in the winter sun and it was cool here among the rocks. A stunted juniper spread twisted limbs over the small clearing amid the boulders where Fletcher, Sieber, and the dying trooper had taken refuge, casting crooked shadows on the sand.

  Slowly, taking his time, Fletcher rested his rifle on the rock in front of him and built a smoke. He gestured with the tobacco sack toward Sieber, but the scout produced a chewing plug from his vest pocket, signaling his preference.

  Fletcher lit his cigarette and studied the notch between the boulders again.

  There it was!

  The flash of red slowly grew into a headband around the brow of an Apache. The Indian raised his head higher, scanning Fletcher’s position, his rifle coming up to his shoulder.

  Fletcher fired, and the Apache disappeared. But a fan of bright blood spattered the rock close to where the man’s head had been.

  “Get him?” Sieber asked, crawling beside Fletcher.

  “Burned him, I think,” Fletcher said.

  Sieber nodded. “That will make them more careful. I guess by now they figure we ain’t a bunch of pilgrims up here.”

  Another Apache, killed by Sieber, lay beside the wagon, and Fletcher had shot a second during the Indians’ first wild charge at the wagon. But that warrior had been pulled out of sight and Fletcher did not know if he was alive or dead.

  Fletcher had been in the Tonto Basin country for a week now, chasing vague leads on Estelle Stark and the Chosen One that had come to nothing. Mostly he’d heard confused rumors of a white woman seen with Apaches, and in every case the trail left by the girl had petered out.

  Earlier that morning Fletcher had ridden south from the Mogollon Rim, a long wind at his back, and had met up with Sieber on the upper reaches of Cherry Creek.

  Sieber was leading a supply wagon packed with hardtack and bacon to a detachment of the First Cavalry and their Paiute scouts camped near the base of Mazatzal Peak. Sieber, with only Sergeant McDermott driving the wagon and the young trooper riding escort, had asked Fletcher to ride with them. Like many Western men of that time, Sieber had heard of Fletcher, and he was grateful for his gun skills and extra rifle.

  Since he’d been following cold trails that led nowhere, Fletcher, at a loose end, had agreed.

  An hour later the Apaches struck.

  A dozen warriors had come scattering out of the rocks as the wagon neared Shake Ridge, and McDermott had gone down, wounded in their first volley. The young trooper—his name was McKinnon—had taken an arrow in the belly.

  Fletcher and Sieber had each downed an Apache. Fletcher had grabbed the reins of the trooper’s horse and galloped into an arroyo, then swung down when he reached a jumbled pile of boulders that marked the end of the canyon
. He’d helped the trooper into the shade of the juniper, then, while Sieber fired at the oncoming Apaches, Fletcher had led the horses into the shelter of a rock overhang.

  A few minutes later they’d heard the first agonized screams erupt from the sergeant’s mouth.

  “How long can they keep that up?” Fletcher asked Sieber.

  The scout ran the back of his gun hand across his mustache, wiping away sweat. “If he’s lucky, the rest of the day and maybe into the night. If he’s unlucky, until tomorrow. And if he’s real unlucky, the day after that. Like I said, I saw women with them, and they’ll drag it out as long as they can.”

  Al Sieber was a handsome, wide-shouldered man of thirty. The hard life of an army scout had burned every ounce of fat from his lean frame, and his blue eyes were cool and unafraid. He was a fighting man to the core, and during the War Between the States had served valiantly at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, and had been wounded in action three times.

  Now he spat a stream of tobacco juice, neatly nailing a basking lizard, and studied the arroyo before him.

  “What you doing in the Arizona Territory, Buck?” Sieber asked without taking his eyes off the rocks where the Apaches lurked. “I seem to recall hearing you was up Wyoming way, selling your gun to a rancher in one of them grass and water wars everybody talks about.”

  “You heard right,” Fletcher said. “But now I’m here.”

  He offered nothing more, and Sieber was quite willing to let it go, but then Fletcher said, “I’m searching for somebody. A girl. Her name’s Estelle Stark.” He turned and looked at the scout. “Ever hear of her?”

  Sieber shook his head. “Name means nothing to me.” He spat tobacco juice again. “Best you go talk to General Crook. He knows everything that’s going on in this country.”

  “Where can I find him?” Fletcher asked.

  “Last I heard he was at Fort Apache. That’s about fifty miles due east of here, close to the big bend of the Salt River. It ain’t much as forts go, just a collection of ramshackle log huts and tents, but then ol’ George was never much of a one for fuss and feathers.”