Crow’s ears were tuned in to danger, and he heard the faint hiss of the first arrow through the air. The thunk as it struck home in flesh and bone. Then the stifled groan of shock as the soldier found himself falling from the high McClellan saddle.
Before the second shaft hit Harris, Crow was already turning, drawing his pistol from the back of his belt. Seeing a half dozen Apaches standing behind boulders, most with bows. Two … three with rifles.
The hawk had been a warning.
Harris was dead.
Down and dead. Maybe his fingers still clawed at the freezing pebbles and his lips moved in a reflex action. His eyes were still open and they conveyed some picture to his closing brain. But nobody would ever know what images the soldier carried with him into the far blackness of eternity.
Dale was slower. Despite all his experience as a soldier in the South-West he still couldn’t believe the speed and efficiency of the ambush. A bullet kicked his horse out from under him, sending him down with it. His head turned desperately, looking whether he could take cover behind the wounded animal, but there seemed to be Indians all around him. Blocking off the trail they’d just used, walking in towards him, firing steadily as they did so. More on both sides.
“Jesus, Crow!” he screamed. “Help me, for Christ’s sake!!”
The shootist was busy looking for his own way out.
Digging his spurs into the flanks of the stallion, so that it reared and flailed out with its fore-feet. Making it a harder target for the attacking Chiricahua. He didn’t bother trying to return the fire. From horseback there was no point. But his mind was racing.
About a dozen or so in all. Behind and around. And, unless the man leading the Apaches was a total fool, there’d be a few more round the next bend in the trail, waiting for the attempt to run for it.
“Help me!” yelled Dale. Trying to hold on the reins of his horse, while the mare struggled to rise, blood pumping from a severed artery in its neck. Steaming in the cold.
It had to be a side trail.
Those to the left were the widest, tempting and inviting. Up to the right they looked close to impassable, winding out of sight towards the blank cliffs and sheer precipices.
“Left,” he said to himself, wincing as a bullet scored across his forearm, tearing a furrow through the cloth of his black coat.
“Crow! Christ, help. Help!”
Despite what he’d said the tall shootist hesitated for a moment. Looking back at the helpless soldier, his dark blue uniform stained with dirt across the hip and shoulder where he’d fallen. Dale’s face slack with terror, seeing his death closing on him. The Apaches were holding their fire for a moment, hoping to do what Crow had guessed they might. Take the pony-soldier alive so that their women could work on him and loosen his tongue.
For a moment the tall man in black considered gunning Dale down, to save him from what was to come. And to try and save the rest of the patrol.
“Come on!” he called, holding the stallion still for a few seconds.
“Now?”
“Sure. Come on or you’re …”
At his words the trooper dropped the reins of his own dying horse, glancing once at the approaching Chiricahua, then powering himself across the few yards of open ground.
Fists pumping, his short legs thrusting at the earth beneath him. Head back.
Too slow.
“… dead,” finished Crow.
It was a bullet from a captured Springfield carbine. Crow actually saw the Indian level it and fire. From less than ten paces range.
The forty-five hit the running man in the small of the back, punching him forwards. It must have hit him in the spine, as he went down like a brain-struck rabbit. Falling all at once, hands reaching for the wound, like a woman easing a muscular strain after a day spent leaning over the washing-tub. He didn’t even cry out, the shocking force of the blow taking away all his senses. His eyes were squeezed shut, mouth clamped tight.
With a wound like that Dale might have lived on for some hours. There wasn’t a shred of hope that Crow could save him now. All he could do was …
Level the pistol and fire twice, thumbing back on the hammer of the Colt. Seeing both bullets splinter into the wounded soldier’s skull. One just above the ear on the right side, the other slightly higher and further back. Dale’s head bounced at the double impact, but he didn’t feel any pain.
The numbness in the middle of his back was puzzling him. There was no feeling in his legs, and he didn’t want to open his eyes to see the Apaches grinning in at him. Didn’t want that. If he kept his eyes shut. . . .
That hope died with him.
The moment he’d squeezed the trigger a second time, Crow was moving.
“Come on, you bastard!” he bawled, clubbing the horse between the ears with the barrel of the pistol. Not hard enough to stun it, but hard enough to convince the surprised animal that this was for real. It took the warning, setting off away from the two dead men and the advancing Apaches.
He snapped off two more shots at the approaching Chiricahua, with the satisfaction of seeing one of the warriors clutch at his shoulder and spin sideways, blood flowering against the pale blue of his cotton shirt.
His suspicions that the Indians were under orders to try and take one of them prisoner were reinforced when he heard an older man call out a harsh, guttural warning not to kill him.
No arrows came winging after him. No more bullets were fired.
For fifty yards or so he let the stallion run on free, gathering speed, then he wrenched at the reins, bringing it sharply round to the right, towards the higher ground and the steeper trail.
There was more shouting and this time shots were fired at him. That meant he’d slipped their trap by taking the least likely path. The leader of the Chiricahua—he wondered whether it might be Small Pony himself—obviously didn’t have sufficient men to cover every trail out from the scene of the attack. But he must have figured that ninety-nine men from a hundred would simply have looked for the fast and easy way away from the ambush.
Crow was that one in a hundred.
The Apaches would have left their own ponies some distance away from the scene of the killings, so that they didn’t warn the three men. Now they would be paying the price for that decision. Crow on the big black had several minutes start on them. And he made the best possible use of that start. Heeling the stallion on with a ruthless determination.
The trail was just as steep and narrow as it’d looked from below, which was another factor in his favor. He could go at his best speed without any fear of being ambushed from around the next corner. The following Apaches would constantly have to bear in mind the possibility that he might have stopped. That he might be sitting waiting for them around the next doubled curve, ready to wipe the leading man off his pony.
He checked his escape after about a quarter of an hour, sitting quite motionless in the saddle, calming his breathing and listening for sounds of pursuit. But the Arizona mountains were silent and still. The clouds had come rolling in once more, bringing sharp flakes of snow in their teeth, cutting visibility from the steep slopes all around.
Evening was still several hours off, but the light was poor and Crow guessed that there wouldn’t be a lot of enthusiasm among the Apaches for any extended pursuit among the unforgiving mountains. Though a group of warriors as large as the one that had ambushed the two soldiers and himself would eventually overwhelm him, if they could catch him, they would know what a heavy toll of blood he could charge.
The rough trail that he’d been riding was becoming treacherous. Closing in on the one side, with a drop falling away to the left of him. Sheer into circling darkness, the flakes of snow spinning around like lost souls in the infinity of Purgatory.
Crow had swung down and was leading the horse for a while, still stopping every five minutes or so and listening. Twice his boots slipped on patches of fresh ice that coated some of the larger boulders.
“Best try and stop somewheres,” he said to himself, sniffing at the cold.
In a locked room at the back of Crow’s mind there was a whispering voice. A fear that the reason that the Chiricahua weren’t bothering to pursue him too closely was a simple one. There’d been no side trails leading off the track. Not one. No opportunity to turn and lose them. And the cliffs seemed to be overwhelming the trail, squeezing it tighter and tighter.
Suppose it was simply going to stop? Peter out and utterly vanish.
If that happened then he was cold meat. As dead as if he was dangling in a slaughterhouse with a steel hook through his throat.
The blood price could still be high.
But the whispering voice was stilled.
The trail widened once more, so that he was able to mount up on the stallion. From some old tracks he saw, he guessed that somewhere the far side of the mountain this trail came out lower down. In good weather it was probably an occasional hunting path, used as a short-cut to avoid a long and tedious ride around the bottom of the hills.
But with the snow deepening and the temperature dropping by the minute, it was a perilous way to go.
What was it Jed Herne used to say? “If you’ve got death behind you and death in front of you, then you might just as well keep on going the way you’re heading.”
Right at that particular moment it seemed as good advice as any.
But within the hour things had changed. The snow had begun to fall with a serious intent and venom, blotting out everything but the cliffs to his right and the trail a few paces ahead. Though he knew the yawning abyss still lurked to his left, it was impossible to see anything there but a wall of swirling whiteness.
Once again he’d been forced to walk alongside the black horse, leading it cautiously forwards. Not bothering to stop and listen for pursuers. In weather as bad as this had become Crow knew that nobody else would be moving out in the hills.
And, if he didn’t find somewhere soon to rest up under cover he wouldn’t be moving out for much longer.
The path had ceased its snaking ascent, seeming to have leveled off. Even dipping two or three times, as if it was planning to return to the valley floor. Then changing its mind like a shy maiden flinching back from wading in at the edge of the sea.
The snow was blinding. Lying so deep that it was blurring the side of the trail. Twice Crow came within a single stride of stepping clean over into the blank silence.
“Got to stop this,” he said quietly.
The wind was rising, producing the effects of a blizzard. The stallion was becoming more restless, tugging at the reins and whinnying. Skittering sideways, banging its flank on the cliff.
In the flurries he occasionally saw further ahead. It was during one of those brief clearances that he saw the narrow opening to a side trail; the first one that he’d seen since starting his wild flight away from his two dead comrades.
The rocks seemed to offer slightly more protection from the worsening weather so he took it, pulling at the bridle and leading the horse after him. It was like walking into a room. The rocks domed above his head, shutting out most of the snow and all of the wind. The horse’s hooves rang on bare stone again.
The narrow passage lasted for about a hundred yards, bending and winding among the orange walls of rough stone.
It was nearly dark and bitterly cold. Though the wind was gone, the air itself seemed to be composed of crystals of fragmented ice. Packed so that breathing became painful to Crow. But he pushed on. The trail was clear and well-trodden, so it must lead somewhere.
Ahead of him the shootist suddenly saw a dark, rough circle, black against the lighter rocks. It had to be a cave. Maybe what he was looking for. Maybe too shallow for him and the horse. Maybe the haunt of some ravening mountain lion.
“No,” said Crow. There was the faintest hint of an orange-red glow from within. If there was a fire there then it had to be man.
Apaches?
There couldn’t be anyone else in this isolated fastness, but where were the guards? And the place was totally silent. As he walked the stallion forward the animal resisted. Snickering softly and trying to pull away from him. It was obvious that the cave frightened the horse and Crow stopped for a moment. Rubbing his hand across its neck with a surprising, soft touch, gentling its fears and blowing up its nostrils. Calming it. Finally leading it on once more.
Hesitating in the mouth of the cave. There was a great overhang of sullen rock that shut out the sky and left the area of stone in front quite dry. Crow tied the black to a spur of jagged boulder, patting it again on the side of the neck.
“Wait on there,” he said. “Wait on.”
Reaching down to flick the retaining thong off the twin hammers of the sawn-down scattergun. The Purdey was made for just this kind of situation. Going into a dark cave when you didn’t know who or what you’d meet. There wasn’t a creature living that could stand up to the double charge of ten-gauge shot.
A small fire was flickering near the opening to the cave. But it was impossible to see how far the opening went. It might have been barely six feet. It could have been ten miles. The shootist hesitated, peering into the midnight blackness.
“The only enemy is fear, Crow,” said a voice. “Enter and you will defeat even that.”