Ralph Compton Doomsday Rider Page 9

  The road rose to meet them, then took a sudden dip down the other slope of the hill, leveling out about half a mile ahead. To the left of the track rose another hill, crested by a jumbled pile of huge boulders, here and there a stunted spruce growing among them. Angry gray puffs of smoke rising up from the rocks showed where men were holed up and shooting.

  But at what?

  The answer to that question became clear to Fletcher a moment later when he saw an Apache crawl forward on the snow in front of the rock, taking advantage of every scrap of cover he could find. The Indian put his rifle to his shoulder, fired, cranked the rifle, and fired again.

  Another shot, this time from the rocks. The Apache threw up his hands, his rifle spinning away from him, and rolled down the slope, and landed spread-eagled at the base of a spiky mescal.

  But that warrior was only one of a dozen who were converging on the rocks from all sides.

  “Is it sodjers up there?” Charlie asked, his far-seeing eyes trying to penetrate the distance.

  “Maybe,” Fletcher replied. “Or Scarlet Hays.”

  “Hah, then let him die.”

  “Can’t, Charlie. He’s no good and I’d surely like to leave him to the Apaches, but I need him.”

  Fletcher turned to the old man, a fierce, laughing recklessness in his eyes that Charlie saw and noted, seeing it as an echo of other, wilder, times. “You ready?”

  “Hell, boy, as ever was.”

  “Then let’s go save Scar Hays’s mangy hide.”

  Fletcher let out with a wild war whoop and spurred his horse. He threw his rifle to his shoulder, cranking and firing so rapidly the movement of his hand was a blur.

  An Apache, startled, turned and ran toward Fletcher, his rifle coming up fast. Fletcher fired and the man screamed and went down. Another Apache appeared from a stand of mescal, and Charlie’s shot took him in the middle of the chest.

  Up on the rocks, two men appeared, both of them firing. An Apache went down, then another.

  Now Fletcher and Charlie were among them. Holding his rifle like a pistol, Fletcher fired at an onrushing Indian and the man fell, blood staining the snow around him.

  One of the men atop the boulders threw up his arms and toppled backward. But the other man, a towheaded youngster, was still shooting, handling his rifle well.

  It was too much for the Apaches. They broke for their horses, leaving at least six of their number dead on the ground.

  Charlie fired a parting shot at the Indians before they disappeared over the crest of a hill. He brandished his rifle above his head and yelled a wild, ululating war whoop, his old eyes shining with excitement.

  “Damn it, Buck,” he said, “we done it.”

  “Looks like,” Fletcher allowed. “Now let’s go see if Scarlet Hays is among the living.”

  There had been three men holed up in the rocks, and when Fletcher and Charlie dismounted and climbed among the boulders two of them were already dead. The top of Asa Clevinger’s head had been just about blown off by a bullet, and Milt Gittings, who had been one of the men who climbed on top of the boulders to fire at the Apaches, lay on his back, his staring eyes unseeing, the blue shadow of death already on his face.

  Only the Topeka Kid was still alive and unhurt, and right now his lips were curled into an insolent grin. “I guess I’ve got to thank you for coming to our rescue, Fletcher,” he said.

  “You don’t owe me a thing, boy,” Fletcher replied, his eyes as cold and level as his voice.

  “Wasn’t aiming to anyhow,” the Kid said, his grin growing wider.

  “Where’s Scar?” Fletcher asked.

  The Kid shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “You were guarding Hays’s back trail and seen us coming,” Charlie said. “Were you and them other two laying fer us when the Apaches attacked, Kid?”

  “Go to hell,” the Kid said. “I don’t have to answer questions from you.”

  “Boy, I ought to whup your ass,” Charlie said, his face flushing red above his beard.

  “Anytime you want to try it, old man, have at it,” the Kid said, his hands moving to his holstered Colts.

  Charlie moved toward the youngster, but Fletcher stepped between them. He looked at the Kid, fighting to keep his own rising anger in check. “Now, I don’t much care for your manners, boy, especially toward your elders,” Fletcher said. “But right now that’s neither here nor there. What I want to know is where I can find Scar.”

  “You go to hell,” the Kid said. “Anyhow, Scar ain’t skeered of you, and come to that, neither am I.”

  The Topeka Kid was not much above medium height, but muscular and wiry. His eyes were an icy blue, and a fine, incipient mustache smeared his top lip, a vanity that every Western man with even the slightest claim to manhood sported in those days.

  He wore dust-colored range clothes and a canvas mackinaw, but the guns in his belts were expensive and flashy, nickel-plated with grips of yellow ivory.

  The Topeka Kid was said to have killed more than his share of men, and looking at him now, that arrogant, insolent grin on his face, Fletcher was willing to believe it.

  He’d seen youngsters like this one before, back along a thousand half-forgotten trails. Young as he was, the Kid would be as dangerous as a striking rattler, and he’d be almighty sudden, deadly, and certain.

  “Buck,” Charlie said, the anger in him subsiding, “seems to me ol’ Scar can’t be too far ahead if’n he left these boys to finish us and then catch up with him.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Let’s mount up and ride.”

  He turned to clamber back down the boulder-strewn slope, but the Kid’s voice, icy cold and slightly mocking, stopped him.

  “Hey, Fletcher,” he said, “Scar told me he seen you draw one time and he says I’m beaucoup faster than you.”

  Fletcher turned, his eyes shading from blue to gunmetal gray. “He lied to you, Kid.”

  The Topeka Kid shook his head. “Nah, it don’t work that way. See, ol’ Scar, he never lied to me before.”

  “Well, he lied to you this time.”

  “I surely don’t think so. I reckon maybe you’re the damn liar.”

  At that moment, Fletcher knew the Kid was going to try it. The youngster wanted to go back to Scarlet Hays and tell him he’d outdrawn and killed the great Buck Fletcher. And after that he’d recount the same thing to every two-bit gunman he met, increasing his reputation so that armed and belted men would step wide around him, and talk soft and low in his presence.

  Charlie, a perceptive man, knew it too. Now he tried to step in and make the whole thing go away.

  “Kid,” he said, “maybe you best mount up and ride on out of this territory. We saved your hide today; be content with that.”

  “You shut your trap, you old goat,” the Kid said, never taking his cold snake eyes off Fletcher. “Well, Fletcher,” he said, “I called you a damn liar. Are you going to take it and back down?”

  Smiling slightly, Fletcher shook his head. “Boy, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for longer than you. Your gun won’t even clear the leather. Now do as Charlie says and ride on out of here and no hard feelings.”

  The Kid thought that through, and Fletcher saw a slight doubt creep into his eyes. But there was no turning back from this and the Kid knew it, and so did Fletcher.

  “Fletcher,” the youngster said, “do I have to slap you into drawing?”

  And the Topeka Kid drew.

  He was fast, very fast.

  But his fancy Colt was still clearing leather when Fletcher’s bullet took him in the middle of the chest.

  The Kid staggered back a step, his Colt coming up fast, and Fletcher fired again and again. Three bullet holes appeared in the center of the Kid’s mackinaw, so close together they could have been covered by the palm of a woman’s hand.

  Slowly the Topeka Kid sank to his knees, his gun falling from his suddenly unfeeling fingers.

  Fletcher stepped up to the boy, looking down at him.


  “Hell, you ain’t that fast,” the Kid said, blood staining his lips. “I just seen you, and you ain’t near as fast as Scar.”

  There was a well of kindliness in Buck Fletcher, buried deep but nonetheless there, that sometimes manifested itself at times like these. But this wasn’t one of them.

  “Kid,” he said, “you weren’t much.”

  The Topeka Kid, who would have been nineteen years old that spring, died with that realization, Fletcher’s harsh words branding themselves into his brain before his eyes closed and he looked only into infinite darkness.

  Charlie Moore stepped beside Fletcher, glanced down at the dead youth, and shook his head. “You didn’t kill him, Buck. Scarlet Hays did.”

  “Maybe so, Charlie,” Fletcher said, a cold emptiness in him, “but it sure don’t make it any easier.”

  Ten

  Fletcher and Charlie searched the trail ahead, but of the wagon and Scarlet Hays there was no sign. It was as though they’d vanished off the face of the earth.

  Charlie had been kneeling, studying the tracks, and now he rose to his feet and stepped beside Fletcher. “They swung the wagon off the road here,” he said. “By this time they could be anywhere among these hills. It would take a dozen Apache scouts a week to find them.”

  “Them? Who’s with him?” Fletcher asked, not really expecting an answer.

  But he got an answer of a sort.

  “Don’t know,” Charlie said, shrugging. “But the man with Hays wears cavalry boots and rides an army hoss.”

  “How do you know? About the horse, I mean.”

  “Big, heavy animal with a long stride. I’d say he goes maybe seventeen hands and weighs almost twelve hundred pounds. Not too many of those around here except for army horses and that American stud you’re forking.”

  “Maybe Hays stole the animal and he’s got a new boy riding it.”

  “Maybe. But maybe there’s a sodjer riding that horse and he tipped Scar off about the paymaster’s wagon. Could be he was one of the escort.”

  Fletcher thought this through for a while, then said, “That would make more sense than Crook allowing a lowlife like Hays to drive a pay wagon. The general didn’t strike me as being stupid, and, believe me, that’s a rare commodity among generals.”

  With a groan, Charlie climbed stiffly into the saddle, and Fletcher realized the old man was growing bone-tired.

  “What do we do now, Buck?” Charlie asked.

  Fletcher jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I saw some deer tracks back there. I think maybe it’s time we did some hunting now we can’t depend on getting grub from the army.”

  “Deer hunting.” Charlie smiled. “Now, that’s something I can teach you young ‘uns.”

  “Teach away, Charlie.” Fletcher grinned. “I sure am hungry.”

  An hour later a fat whitetail buck went down to their guns.

  But it was Fletcher who made the killing shot.

  * * *

  They camped for the night in a stand of manzanitas beside a shallow creek with water running clear under a paper-thin sheet of pane ice.

  The horses were staked nearby, and Fletcher and Charlie cleared away snow and gathered as much grass as they could, tearing it from the frozen earth by the roots.

  It was hard, exhausting work, but Charlie, insisting that he make himself useful after having failed in the hunt, afterward skinned out the buck and cut some thick steaks. These they broiled over a small fire, both men wishful for coffee and salt, but having neither.

  The old mountain man ate his steaks Indian style, holding the meat between his teeth, cutting a chunk off with a knife. It was a good way—if a man was careful of his nose, and Fletcher, the owner of a large, predatory beak, decided against trying it.

  Some things were simply not worth the risk.

  Earlier Fletcher had scouted a wide area around their camp, but the Apaches had gone. Crook’s flying columns of cavalry had taught them the dangers of sticking around any one place for too long. It had been a bitter lesson and the Apache had begun to heed it well.

  After they’d eaten and the day shaded into night, Fletcher lay in his blankets beside the fire, his rifle close to hand, and built a smoke. “Tomorrow at first light we’ll head out for the old Indian ruins,” he said, lighting his cigarette. “If I can get to Estelle Stark then I reckon the first half of my task is done.”

  “You think if Scar has been paid to kill the girl, he’ll come after her?” Charlie asked.

  Fletcher nodded. “I do, and that will make the rest so much easier.”

  “Not so easy, Buck,” Charlie said, frowning. “Getting Hays to talk in front of witnesses will be no Sunday-school picnic. He’ll come at you shooting.”

  “That,” Fletcher said, “is a bridge I’ll have to cross when I reach it.”

  Later Fletcher and Charlie talked of other things as men do while the long night swells around them, of guns and horses and of men and manners and places they’d seen and places they had not and of mountains and valleys they’d touched and of tall, white ships and the wild green seas that began where the land ended.

  Slowly, as the campfire guttered and a coyote howled in the far distance, their talk slowed, then ended, sleep at last taking them.

  Beyond the manzanitas, hidden by a stand of pine, a man sat his horse and studied the camp. After half an hour he swung his gray horse south, moving carefully among the pines, keeping to the base of the hills, silent and stealthy as a ghost.

  * * *

  Fletcher and Charlie ate a quick breakfast of venison steak, then saddled up and rode south, taking almost the same route as the man on the gray horse.

  To the west, the towering spire of Mazatzal Peak touched low clouds heavy with snow, and the air was crisp and cold, like cracked ice on the tongue.

  Shadows still lay dark in the ravines and canyons, and the game trail the two men followed wandered among low hills and thick stands of pine, always hiding what lay beyond.

  At noon a light snow began to fall, dusting Fletcher’s and Charlie’s shoulders with white, and a rising wind stirred in the trees and set the pine needles to whispering.

  They topped a rise and reined up in the shelter of some silver spruce. Charlie nodded to the south. “We should reach the ruins in an hour, maybe less.” He looked at Fletcher. “Reckon she’ll still be there?”

  Fletcher rose in the stirrups, easing himself in the saddle as his stud tossed its head, the bit jangling. “I don’t know, Charlie. I sure hope so. It will make what I have to do so much easier.”

  “Well, Indian Jake told me she’s there,” Charlie said, repeating what Fletcher already knew but seeking some reassurance.

  Fletcher nodded, knowing how the old mountain man felt. “I reckon he did, Charlie.”

  “Jake, now, he ain’t a man to make up stories,” Charlie said, his eyes searching Fletcher’s face, trying to read the other man’s expression.

  Again Fletcher nodded. “I don’t suppose he is, but there’s one way to find out. Let’s ride on down there and see for ourselves.”

  As Fletcher and Charlie grew closer to the ruins, the land around them became wilder and more rugged. Brown hills, many of them sheared off into grooved, vertical cliffs, were covered in sagebrush, greasewood, and cholla. Cedar, pine, and spruce grew on their upper slopes, dark arrowheads of green against thick patches of snow.

  The two men rode through a narrow valley hemmed in tight by the surrounding hills, then onto a flat open area, cut across by a creek with water that still ran fast and clear over a sandy bottom.

  Fletcher and Charlie let their horses drink, then moved across the snow-covered flat. “Looks like another creek up ahead,” Fletcher said.

  Charlie rose in the stirrups, stretching to his great height, his eyes following Fletcher’s nod. He shook his head. “Buck, that’s no creek. It’s tracks. A lot of tracks.”

  Charlie in the lead, Fletcher followed, and when he got closer he saw that what he’d thought was a depre
ssion in the snow made by the runoff from a creek was horse tracks. And Charlie had been right—there were a lot of them.

  “Unshod ponies,” Charlie said, leaning from the saddle as he studied the deep trail. “I’d say thirty riders, maybe more.”

  “Apaches?” Fletcher asked, already knowing the answer.

  Charlie nodded. “Uh-huh, and only warriors. Apache women and children walk, and there are no footprints down there.”

  The pony tracks angled across the open ground and ended at the hills. Fletcher looked around him but saw no Indian sign.

  “What you reckon they’re doing this far south?” he asked Charlie.

  “Dunno. But I think we’d better get to your Estelle Stark gal right quick. This many warriors could sure play hell with her and the rest of them pilgrims at the ruins.”

  Fletcher felt fear spike at him, not for himself but for Estelle and the others. “Charlie, do you think they’ll attack?”

  “Apaches are mighty notional,” the old man answered. “But this is a war party, probably all young bucks, and if that Chosen One feller has women with him . . . well, sure, they’ll attack.”

  Charlie rubbed the back of his neck. “Got me an itch back there, Buck,” he said. “Know what that means?”

  Fletcher shook his head and grinned. “Way too late for mosquitoes.”

  The old mountain man’s face was grim and unsmiling. “It ain’t a critter bite. I only get that itch when somebody’s watching me.” He looked around at the hills. “And right now somebody’s watching me.”

  Fletcher saw only the silent hills and the wind stirring the trees. But he trusted Charlie’s instincts and he too felt something, something that made him feel exposed and extremely vulnerable.

  “Let’s ride,” he said. “I don’t want to get caught out in the open by those Indians.”

  “Amen to that, brother,” Charlie said, and Fletcher caught an odd glint in the old man’s eyes. It was just a flash that quickly came and went. But could it have been fear?

  The two men crossed the flat and rode through a stand of pine just as the snow stopped and the parting clouds revealed a bright, cold sun. When they cleared the trees a wide basin hemmed in by hills opened up in front of them, sloping downward to end at an almost vertical cliff face.