THE CONCORDE SHIFTED like a virgin bride.
Breed was having trouble staying in the seat, the way the thing bucked under him, and to make matters worse he had the feeling of being watched. It wasn’t anything he could put a finger to, just an eerie stiffening of the hairs on his back. He recalled something old Sees-Both-Ways had told him, a time the Chiricahua shaman had taken him off into the high meadows before his manhood ceremony.
Every man gets born with two eyes, the shaman had said, and for most men two are enough. Used properly. Some need more, because they attract more trouble. Don’t ever ignore what your body tells you. Don’t ever think you can ignore the other signs.
When the young man—Azul, he was called then—had asked about those other signs, the shaman had chuckled and told him he would know when the time came.
It had been sound advice.
The run into Tucson should have been smooth enough. The attacks on the H & T line had so far been mounted on the Endurance to Yuma trail. The road into Tucson was a whole lot smoother, with fewer places for a pistoleer to make his play and more roving cowboys in the vicinity than was healthy. But the uneasy feeling still persisted.
Link Bawdry, his driver, laughed it off. Until the men showed.
Two rode out of the scrub ahead of the stage. They carried rifles and they made sure they were too far out for the sawed-off Meteor to hurt them.
Link hit the brake and yelled the team to a dust-swirling stop.
Two more men showed from behind the coach. Like the pair in front, they carried Winchesters cocked and aimed. Breed glanced back and tossed the shotgun off into the brush: there was no point to dying needlessly. He lifted his arms up to where the gunmen could see his hands were empty and kicked Link into doing the same.
Like Chicago magicians, a man appeared on either side of the stage. Breed grinned inwardly as he realized they must have used the old Apache trick of scooping out a hollow in the ground and lying under a blanket, waiting for the time to come when they should appear. They both carried scatterguns.
The passengers stepped out of the coach like debutantes at their first ball. There were five this trip. Two women were riding east to the Southern Pacific station at Tucson, en route to families in Louisiana and Mississippi; one rancher was bound for Texas to buy breed stock; and two drummers were just moving on. Within minutes, none of them had the wherewithal to travel any farther. The ladies lost their money along with their rings, the men were stripped of dollars, weapons, watches, and anything else of value.
The road agents faded away as fast as they showed, leaving the passengers cursing the H & T line, and Link Bawdry venting his spleen on his useless shotgun rider.
‘What did you expect?’ Breed asked patiently. They could have shot me out of the seat before that bird gun touched them.’
The driver started to say something else, but then he saw the look in Breed’s eyes and closed his mouth in a hurry. They ushered the travelers back inside the coach and Breed retrieved the shotgun from the side of the trail. He checked the load and lifted a handful of shells from the pouch under the drive seat, tucking the stubby tubes into the pockets of his vest.
‘Drive on.’ Link obeyed. ‘When you hit that bend up ahead, slow down. I’ll see you back in Endurance.’
Link shrugged. He never had trusted half-breeds, and this one was proving crazier than most.
They reached the bend and the Concorde slowed. Breed came up and out of the seat in a clean dive. The stage rolled on as he turned head over heels through the mesquite, ignoring the thorny spikes tearing at his flesh. He wished he had brought his Winchester with him, but the shotgun would have to suffice; along with his Colt and the two knives. He had chosen the spot carefully. The outlaws had ridden northwest, so the bend in the trail and the heavy scrub would hide his move. Now he had only to trail them. And kill them.
In the time he took to belly through the undergrowth and lift to his feet, he left behind the veneer of his white upbringing. His Stetson was tucked beneath the bench of the Concorde’s drive seat, leaving his hair falling free. He tugged at the drawstring of a rawhide strip wound around his gunbelt, yanking the cured leather clear of the cartridge-filled belt. Crouched behind the shelter of a tall saguaro, he wound the rawhide about his head, drawing his hair back off his face, knotting the thong so that the ends hung down along his bronzed neck. The rawhide cord was the warband of the Apache, an inheritance of his Chiricahua upbringing. To don the band was to accept the duty of killing.
The man who stood up, scanning the scrubland around him, was no longer Matthew Gunn, or even Breed. Now he was Azul, a warrior of the Chiricahua, dedicated to vengeance.
He took the shotgun in his left hand, settling his thumb behind the twin hammers to prevent their accidental discharge. He untied the thong of the Colt’s holster and shifted the revolver over to his left hip, lashing the thong around the gunbelt. That way, should the pistol discharge accidentally, it would fire behind him, into the ground, not his leg.
Satisfied, he trotted back along the trail. When he reached the place where the road agents had stopped the coach he halted, studying the ground. He walked back to where the first two had shown, then examined the ground behind the stopping place. He found the hollows where the other men had waited. When he was finished, he knew the horses were metal shod and one was missing a nail. A second favored its left hind leg, as though the shoe was worn or poorly fitted. All were grain fed.
The tracks went off to the north. The man who was now Azul paced after them.
They were not difficult to follow at first, hard-ridden animals leave a clear trail, and he ran easily towards the distant hills. After a while they faded out over shale and he was forced to cast round in circles, waiting to find them again. When he did, they were going west. Even then, they were not hard to follow, and an Apache warrior is trained to run down a horse.
Azul smiled and moved on at an easy lope, conserving his strength.
The six men made camp in a buffalo wallow. It was shaded round with mesquite and withered wild oak stumps. It sheltered them from the night wind and the ridge served to fade out the glow of their camp-fire. They divided up the takings from the stage, agreed a roster of night guards, and settled down to sleep.
The wallow seemed like a pretty safe place. After all, there was no posse about to trail them so far into the badlands at night. And no one off the stage was going to do anything more than run for Tucson and a warm bed.
They felt safe and satisfied and were looking forward to the praise the Colonel was bound to give them come morning, when they reached the hide-out.
Azul slowed down as the moon came up. It made the tracks harder to find, though it didn’t hide them. He settled into a fast-paced walk—a white man might have called it a trot—and kept on going. Around midnight he halted, squatting down to sip water from his canteen and ease his legs a bit. Then he stood up and went on: the sooner he found his quarry, the sooner he could eat.
The moon faded over the horizon and the sun made a bronze impression on the dawn mist. Azul kept on running. He ran with the easy grace of a wild animal, covering ground fast without burning up his reserves of energy. He had known Apache braves who could move like this for three days, with no more than brief halts at noon and midnight, then go into fighting as fresh as a man new-risen from a night’s sleep. The trick lay in conserving strength—and in the raw power of the will—to move onwards at a steady pace, not racing but maintaining the gait until sheer determination closed the gap.
Sweat ran down his face, plastered his shirt against his chest. The scattergun doubled its weight, and he swapped it from left to right hand as the weight of the thing began to numb his muscles.
Around noon he found the buffalo wallow churned by hoofprints. The dead ash of the fire was still warm enough to tell him the raiders were not long gone, and the tracks leading out pointed west. He followed them.
After a while he noticed that the lame horse was slowing down. Farther on he found a thrown shoe and after that the tracks split in two directions. Five raiders held close together, but the sixth dragged back, lagging after the others.
Azul smiled and increased his pace.
By mid-afternoon the trail was divided distinctly: five men were riding hard for the low hills to the west, the other was limping well behind.
At dusk Azul found the lone horseman.
The pony was stumbling, favoring its damaged hoof. The man riding the hurt animal was fighting to keep it running, ignoring the beast’s pain as he lashed a quirt viciously about its flanks.
Azul smiled, shifting the scattergun over to his right hand as he closed on the horseman. He moved off the trail, weaving through the chaparral lithe as the fox that seeks to outflank its prey. He increased his pace, drawing level with the horseman, pulling ahead. The man was too busy fighting his mount to pay much attention to his back trail and Azul went past him unseen.
Up ahead, a huge cactus spread spiky arms across the sky. Azul stood behind its sheltering bulk. He waited until the horse came level with his position, then came out from cover fast.
The horse saw him first, shying away so that the rider swore and dragged the reins hard over, gouging spurs deep into the animal’s ribs. He felt Azul before he saw him: a hand that closed suddenly around his right foot, lifted, tilted him over in the saddle. For an instant he saw a bronzed face, unsmiling blue eyes, then he pitched over, tumbling off the horse. He fell heavily on the farther side of the animal, jerking his left foot clear of the stirrup to avoid being dragged. He landed on his back, instinct jumping his right hand towards the Colt’s revolver holstered on his hip.
His fingers touched the grained wood of the butt, then a terrific blow smashed wind from his lungs and he doubled over, clutching at the burning bail of pain filling his stomach.
Azul let the horse run free as he rammed the scattergun into the man’s belly. Using his left hand, he drew the Colt and tossed it far off into the scrub. Then he stood back, watching the man fight the nausea caused by the blow.
The man was in his late thirties, his face seamed by long exposure to the elements. His brown hair was thinning, grown long to cover the shiny patch of naked scalp decorating the crown of his head. His hands, Azul noticed, were calloused, as though accustomed to handling reins or ropes, though the palms and fingernails were oddly blackened, as if ingrained with coal dust or gunpowder. His jacket, too, seemed odd. It was cut short at the waist, and the faded grey material showed lighter patches on the shoulders and around the uncomfortable-looking stand-up collar, as though some overlying stuff had been recently cut loose.
He waited until the man was finished vomiting and tapped him gently with the scattergun.
The man looked up, blinking tears from his cloudy green eyes.
‘You got my horse injun, what more you want?’
His accent was soft and southern and it was obvious he didn’t remember Azul from the hold-up.
‘Talk,’ said the half-breed. ‘And quickly. Your friends might come back.’
‘You’re dead if they do.’ A note of defiance crept into the voice. ‘They find you here, you’re crowbait.’
‘I’ll have company,’ Azul grinned, lifting the shotgun to rest the muzzles against the man’s stomach. ‘So the sooner you decide to talk, the better chance you got of staying alive.’
He smiled, dragging back one hammer of the Meteor, watching the way the man’s face paled under its tan as he looked down at the big, empty black hole of the shotgun’s barrel.
‘Talk?’ It was a question now. ‘What kinda talk?’
‘Why you stopped the stage.’ Azul’s face remained impassive. ‘It couldn’t have been worth much.’
‘A few hundred dollars.’ It sounded almost apologetic.
‘Try again,’ murmured Azul. ‘At best you took seven hundred. Split between six of you that’s not so much to risk getting shot for. And you planned it too well.’ He let the double muzzles of the Meteor slide down the man’s body until they were leveled on his feet. ‘Tell me about the Windy Ridge hold-up.’
‘I wasn’t there!’ The words came out fast and frightened. ‘I had nothin’ to do with that.’
‘But you know who did.’
‘For God’s sake don’t ask.’ Fear of immediate pain was abruptly replaced by terror of something else. ‘Let me die. Only don’t ask me. Please God, don’t.’
The raw fear in the man’s voice stopped Azul for a moment. From the beginning he had guessed that the hold-up was some segment of a larger plan—had hoped to uncover the details from his prisoner. Now he felt sure that the man was prepared to die before revealing what that plan was. Which meant he feared something even more than death. Given time, the information might have been obtained: the Chiricahua were long-versed in that art. But time was short. The other riders might be coming back; if not, Azul must pick up their trail before it got washed out in a fresh squall.
He looked into the man’s eyes and spoke carefully, so that each word should sink in through the terror.
‘Three men tried to stop the stage on Windy Ridge. I killed them all. The next day two men tried to kill me. I killed one, leaving the other alive to answer questions. But someone shot him. Whoever it was escaped; he rode in the direction you were going. Today you helped stop the Tucson stage. Six men are too many for that. Someone wants to finish the H & T line. I want to know who, and why.’
He paused, pressing the muzzle of the scattergun hard against the man’s foot, keeping his voice low and clear.
‘I think you can tell me. If you refuse I shall kill you. It will hurt a great deal as I do it. Think about it.’
‘No! Sweet Jesus, don’t ask me.’
Spittle flecked tight-drawn lips as the man’s head pulled back, wide-spread eyes staring up at the sky as though he hoped some kind of miraculous answer would resolve his problem.
‘Why?’ Azul asked again.
‘I can’t tell you! It ain’t worth it.’
‘Is dying worth it?’ Azul spoke softly, nudging the shotgun against the sole of the man’s boot. ‘Dying can take a longtime.’
The man’s eyes rolled upwards, most of the pupil disappearing into the folds of suddenly-whitened lids. His teeth showed black behind lips stretched thin and unnaturally wide in fear.
‘No! Christ, no!’
Azul thought about the time he might have. The other riders could be coming back; the man was not about to be persuaded with words. He squeezed the trigger of the Meteor.
The scattergun was loaded with ten-gauge shot. At a hundred feet it could cut a man in half. Fired point blank it was like blowing a cannon into the target. He was careful to discharge the muzzle away from the man’s foot: fired direct, it would tear off his lower leg and kill him from nervous shock and loss of blood. The way Azul used the gun it merely ripped away his boot, the sole of his foot, and his toes.
The man screamed, his shattered limb stiffening in automatic spasm as it pumped bright fountains of blood over the sand. Instinctively he reached down to clutch at the pain.
Azul rammed the stock of the scattergun hard against his arm. The man jerked back, still screaming.
‘Why?’ Azul asked again.
‘Jesus! I’m dyin’. I’m gonna bleed to death.’
‘Yes,’ said Azul. ‘Unless you tell me why.’
‘Cain’t. Don’t know why.’
There was too much pain in the tone of the man’s voice to disbelieve him.
‘So who told you to do it?’
‘Oh God! I seen him cut a man’s tongue fer tellin’ less.’
‘You’ll see your own out if you don’t use it fast.’
The man gulped, weighing his chances. Death balanced both sides of the scales, though the one scoop was weighted more immediately than the other.
‘Colonel Sibley.’ It was a confession torn from fear and pain. ‘He’s a Cherokee. Served under Stand Watie. Half injun, he was. Passed fer pure white. Colonel Jonathan Sibley, he was called. When ole Jo Shelby took his men down into Mexico after the war, it was Cal Sibley opted to stay on an’ fight guerrilla style around the border.’
‘Jonathan Sibley, you called him,’ said Azul. ‘Why the change to Cal?’
‘Oh sweet Jesus.’ The man looked down at his bleeding foot. ‘We got to callin’ him Cal on account of his nature. He acted up the hardest bastard anyone served under. “Callous” Sibley we named him. It kinda stuck.’
‘So why’s he here?’ Azul asked. ‘What’s a rebel colonel doing hangin’ around here?’
‘Ask him,’ moaned the man. ‘I just done what he told me.’
He reached down, clutching at his shattered foot. Azul cocked the second hammer of the shotgun, lifting his head as he caught the distant pounding of hooves. They were coming from the west, the way the road agents had been headed. And they were getting too close for comfort. He shoved the Meteor up tight against the man’s good leg.
And squeezed the second trigger.
The discharge of heavy gauge shot blew the entire foot away, leaving a ragged stump of blood-spattered bone sticking out from under the torn-off shredding of the boot.
The man screamed and kicked both legs up high in the air, curling over backwards as he clutched at the stump of his leg. Blood sprayed in a high arc, splattering over his face as he twisted around the pain, trying to cut it off with the pressure of his groping hands.
Azul stood up, backing away from the spray of blood, thumbing fresh cartridges into the scattergun. The riders were coming closer, so he moved off into the scrub, finding cover where he could watch without being seen. He bellied down into a mesquite thicket, waiting for the horsemen to arrive; watched as they examined the corpse, and waited for them to leave.
When they had checked over the dead man and mounted up again, he moved out of his cover, walking cautiously back to the trail.
The only signs of their passing were the bloodstains and the prints of several horses, heading west.
He began to run again, loping after the horses.
In time they would lead him to the mysterious Colonel Sibley and the reason for the attacks on the H& T stage line.
If he lived that long.
He thought he would; after all, he had come up against the colonel’s men three times now, and so far had kept his feet firmly on the ground.