Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

GIDEON Hawk was riding high above the desert floor, traversing a broad jog of saguaro-studded hills, when he halted the grulla suddenly and turned to peer back the way he’d come.

In the pink, sunbaked basin below—several miles out from where the hills began rising from the desert floor—a shot had sounded.

Cicadas whined. To his right, a roadrunner or a rabbit rustled the sunbaked brush.

Another shot sounded, so faint it might have been a twig snapping just beyond the last rise he’d crossed. But the sound was too sharp, with a spanging, lingering echo.

Several more shots rose from the plain—angrily, hastily fired rounds. Too many to be those of a hunter. Indians, possibly, but Hawk hadn’t crossed any Apache sign, had seen no smoke talk.

The shots had come from a long ways away. It would take him an hour to ride back to the base of the hills, and probably another hour, traversing cuts and low rimrocks, to reach the site of the shooting.

By the time he got to the scene, the shooting would long be over, the shooters gone. Whoever they’d been shooting at would be gone as well. One way or the other . . .

Hawk stared out over the plain, sweat funneling through the blond dust on his sunburnt cheeks, soaking the thick mustache drooping down both sides of his mouth. His eyes were hooded, haunted, brooding.

Hawk lifted his canteen from his saddle horn, took a few sips, draped the lanyard back over the horn. He adjusted his seat on the sweat-damp saddle, nudged the grulla’s flanks, and continued along the trail, weaving through the heavy shrubs and cracked, clay-colored boulders.

After fifty yards, he pulled back on the reins, sat staring over the horse’s ears.

He neck-reined the grulla around and trotted back the way he’d come, retracing the old Indian trail switchbacking across the knobs. Nearly an hour later, the flat, burning desert stretched before him. It took him another hour to cut the soldiers’ sign.

The sun was nearing the two o’clock position when, weaving through the creosote and crossing dry arroyos, he came upon a horse standing hang-headed, reins drooping, at the bottom of a shallow wash. The horse stood sideways to Hawk, its eyes half-closed, as if sleeping. Something hung down from its saddle on the far side.

Hawk dismounted, dropped the grulla’s reins, and walked over to the horse—dirty, scratched, and sweat-lathered, its breath raspy. It had run itself to exhaustion. Walking around the horse’s rear, Hawk stopped beside its left hip. His breath caught in his throat.

Before him, a soldier lay facedown in the bloody rocks. His left boot was caught in the stirrup, the ankle broken and twisted. The kid’s tunic was tattered and bloody, barely hanging from his skinny frame. The dragging wasn’t what had killed him, however. The bullet that had been drilled between his shoulder blades, no doubt blowing out his heart, had done the deed.

Hawk kicked the private’s foot free of the stirrup, then hurried back to his horse. He mounted up and followed the dead private’s tracks through the catclaw, over the skeletons of fallen saguaros, across a dry wash, and up the side of a low, cedar-stippled knoll.

Hawk halted the grulla atop the knoll, a pipestem cactus angling a long shadow to his right. Below, in the brush between two vast boulder snags, buzzards fought and quarreled over and between the half-dozen or so bloody, blue-clad bodies and over the large brown humps of two fallen horses. The fallen soldiers were laid out side by side in a relatively rock-free patch of caliche.

One of the shaggy, black buzzards, perched on the head of a dead soldier, squawked and turned its grizzled bald head toward Hawk, a bloody eyeball dangling from its hooked beak. The bird leapt from the soldier’s head and ran, bounding awkwardly and spreading its massive wings, into the dense chaparral beyond the dead men.

Hawk lifted his gaze as something moved in the brush down the grade ahead and left. A soldier backed toward him, crouching and stumbling as he dragged a body toward the six already laid out. He turned his head to one side, to see where he was going.

Suddenly, he stopped with a grunt, dropped the dead man’s ankles, and whipped around. He stumbled right and forward, and dropped to one knee, clutching his right side.

As the man looked up from under the brim of his battered kepi, the sweaty, blood-streaked face of Lieutenant Primrose shone in the harsh light. He reached for the pistol on his right hip. Apparently realizing Hawk was out of the six-shooter’s range, he pushed off his knee and ran toward the carbine leaning against one of the fallen horses.

“Hold on, Lieutenant,” Hawk called, gigging his horse down the knoll and touching his Colt’s butt. “It’s Hollis.”

Frowning up the knoll at Hawk, his lower jaw hanging, the lieutenant slowed to a shambling, heavy-footed walk. Primrose grabbed the carbine by the barrel, then sat heavily down on a rock, laying the Spencer across his thighs. He watched Hawk with a wary, puzzled expression, as if he wasn’t sure he could trust his vision.

As Hawk reined up before the man, the fear in the lieutenant’s eyes abated. He removed his yellow kerchief, doffed his hat, and mopped his brow and sweat-soaked goatee. Blood dribbled down from a gash on the side of his head. More of it stained the right side of his tunic.

Something behind Hawk caught the lieutenant’s attention. Suddenly, he dropped the kerchief, grabbed his carbine, ran past Hawk toward a buzzard pecking the back of a dead private, and fired.

The bird screamed as the slug blew it off the dead soldier. It flapped in a broad circle, wings beating the ground insanely, chortling and squawking as it ran down like a child’s top, and died. Around it, several other buzzards barked and ran for cover.

“Bloody scavengers!” the lieutenant shouted, tears welling in his eyes as he ejected the smoking shell. He rammed a fresh slug into the Spencer’s chamber, but held the gun low by his side, staring at the soldiers lined out before him.

Flies buzzed around the glistening blood pools. Cicadas whined. High up in the brassy sky, a hawk screeched.

The lieutenant sighed, set the rifle down against the rock, and walked back to the body he’d been dragging when Hawk had first spotted him.

“Ambushed,” Primrose said thickly, staring down at the dead private. “They were waiting in the rocks.” He turned to look at Hawk, his rheumy eyes slitted with fury. “Sergeant Schmidt was in with them.”

Primrose shrugged. “I had no time to count them, Mr. Hollis. They took me by surprise. Before I knew what was happening, my horse had unseated me. I crawled away and began returning fire with my revolver.”

The lieutenant leaned down, grabbed the body by both ankles, and straightened. “A bullet ricocheted off my shoulder holster, burned my side. I went down, hit my head on a rock. They left me for dead.”

He paused, head hanging. His shoulders jerked. He turned to Hawk, laughing coldly. “One was a woman. A beautiful, deadly woman. I froze when I saw her, thought surely she must have been a mirage!”

He laughed again, stepped back, and began dragging the body toward the others he’d positioned side by side for burial.

Hawk turned his horse around, rode slowly back the way he’d come, scouring the ground for tracks. “Did you see which way they went?”

Hawk turned. The lieutenant had fallen to his knees again, head bowed, holding his right arm taut to his bloody tunic.

Hawk cursed and rode back to where Primrose crouched beside a cholla. Dismounting, he looped his reins over the grulla’s saddle horn, then squatted before the lieutenant. “Let me take a look.”

“I have to bury my men,” the lieutenant said weakly. “It’s the least I can do. Should have sent a scout ahead.” He shook his head. Again, tears filled his eyes. “Just didn’t think we’d be hit out here . . . small group . . . traveling cross-country . . .”

Hawk pushed him back, quickly unbuttoned his tunic, and peeled the right side away from the shoulder holster decorated with a Union medallion showing an eagle with spread wings. The disc was dented and creased where the bullet had hit. Behind the holster, the ricocheting slug had torn a deep, bloody path about six inches long.

Hawk cursed again and looked around. He had to get on the trail of those bushwackers before dark, but the lieutenant looked too dazed and weak to tend to himself.

“Come on, Lieutenant,” Hawk said, standing and grabbing the man’s left arm. “Let’s get you into some shade and wrap those wounds.”

“You don’t have the strength to bury them. The commander at Bowie will send a detail.”

Hawk pulled the lieutenant to his feet, drew the man’s left arm over his shoulders, and led him away from the growing stench of death. The soldier was too weak to resist. Hawk clucked to the grulla, which followed, rolling its eyes uneasily at the carnage and the persistent buzzards returning from the brush jerking cautious, hungry looks around the gap between the boulder piles.

“Goddamn Schmidt,” the lieutenant said as Hawk eased him down in the shade of a paloverde. “Murdering son of a bitch. I’m going to dog his murdering ass . . . ahhh! That hurts.”

As he’d leaned back against the tree, he’d pulled the wound open. He clapped his arm and head over his side, breathing sharply through his teeth.

“You think that hurt,” Hawk said, returning from his horse with a roll of bandages he’d fashioned from an old sheet, and a bottle of whiskey. “Try this on for size.”

He popped the cork, nudged the lieutenant onto his left shoulder, and tipped the bottle over the eight-inch gash. When the whiskey hit the burn, the lieutenant arched his spine, threw back his head, and bunched his face with misery.

While the lieutenant still had his head back, Hawk poured more whiskey over the gash in his head.

When Hawk had cleaned both wounds and wrapped bandages around the lieutenant’s lower chest and his forehead, he mounted the grulla and ran down one of the soldiers’ saddled horses. A canteen hung from the saddle horn. Hawk led the horse back to the lieutenant and, without dismounting the grulla, tied the reins to a branch of the paloverde.

“You have a horse, weapons, and water,” Hawk said. “You best rest here overnight and head back to Fort Bowie in the morning.”

Hawk turned. The lieutenant was pushing himself to his feet. “Stay put, Lieutenant. You’re addlepated.”

When the lieutenant, lips stretched with pain, sagged back down against the tree, Hawk gigged the grulla into a trot, began scouring the ground around the carnage for the killers’ sign. Twenty minutes later, he’d found where the bushwackers had tied their horses. It wasn’t hard to see which direction they’d headed after they’d gathered the payroll-bearing mules and the girl.

Hawk turned toward the paloverde. Again, the lieutenant was trying to stand, holding his arm against his side, his gritted teeth white against the dark hollows of his blood-smeared face. He was a tough, young bastard, but Hawk doubted he’d be able to climb onto his horse before his concussion convinced him it was a bad idea.

Hawk turned the grulla south and gigged it into a trot, following the tracks of the ten shod horses down a rocky shelf and onto a low table surrounded by distant blue, red-tipped mountains.

He’d ridden an hour through a shallow, jagged-edged basin when, pausing to drink, he spotted a small purple figure moving behind him. Frowning, he lowered the canteen, reined the grulla up a low table of sandstone, and raised his binoculars.

As he adjusted the focus, a bay horse bearing a blue-clad, slump-shouldered rider took shape. The rider wore a white bandage under the brim of his tan kepi. The horse plodded along slowly, the rider’s head dipping toward the bay’s jostling mane. The brass buttons of his tunic winked in the west-angling sunlight.

Hawk was about to snarl a curse when more movement appeared behind the lieutenant. His frown deepening, Hawk again raised the binoculars.