BREED REACHED ENDURANCE without spotting any more of Sibley’s patrols.
He found Ma Harvey waiting at the H & T depot, fussing irritably about an equally ill-tempered Mose Curran. Both oldsters broke off their bickering when he walked in, anxious to know what was going on.
‘Where’s Nate?’ Ma barked. ‘That ride-prove too much for him? He soakin’ his backside in a hot tub?’
She shut up fast when Breed told her what had happened, worry damping her temper so that suddenly she seemed her age. And very lonely.
‘So what now?’
Breed shrugged. ‘If the marshal survived the fall, then he’ll talk.’
‘You don’t know Nate Whitman,’ remarked Ma. ‘He’s obstinate as all hell when he wants to be.’
‘I know how to make men talk,’ replied Breed simply. ‘He will.’
The way he said it persuaded Ma that he was right.
She sat down, looking tired. ‘So what d’you think will happen.’
‘Hard to say,’ murmured Breed. ‘It depends on why Sibley’s gang is hiding out in the canyon. Could be they’re plannin’ to raid the town.’
‘Why?’ Mose asked. ‘What’s here fer it to be worth their while? We ain’t got a bank worth speakin’ of, nor enuff saloons to draw big money. You don’t need an army to stick-up stages. If he was fixin’ to raid anywhere it’d be Tucson or Yuma. Maybe Gila Bend.’
‘Might be he’s just holin’ up a bit,’ suggested Ma. ‘Layin’ low fer a whiles.’
‘No.’ Breed shook his head. ‘If he wanted to hide somewhere, he’d stay south of the border. They got less law down there and the country’s wild enough to get lost in.’
He grinned, remembering how many times he had hidden down there.
‘No. It has to be somethin’ else. He’s got an army hidden up there, and you don’t hide an army without plannin’ to use it.’ He paused, thinking. ‘How far to the nearest big town?’
‘Three days o’ hard ridin’ on a good pony,’ answered Mose.
‘So if he made for Tucson or Yuma,’ said Breed, thoughtfully, ‘he’d most like be spotted. That wagon would slow him down. Could be more like five, six days.’
The oldsters waited, baffled as the tanned forehead wrinkled in thought, unable to suggest any alternative reason.
Breed’s own thinking was a curious, very individual mixture of white and Indian logic. In white man’s terms, there was no reason for Sibley’s presence. But Sibley wasn’t pure white, so—like Breed himself—his thinking might well be transformed by Indian logic. And why would an Indian—any Indian, Apache or Cherokee—hide a large raiding party near a settlement?
The answer was unbelievable. But he had to believe it: it was the only one possible.
‘He’s planning to take the whole town.’
He said it quietly, his voice almost matter-of-fact, so that Ma Harvey and Mose could scarcely credit their ears.
‘Why?’ Ma was the first to recover. ‘Fer what?’
‘Money. Revenge.’ Breed shrugged. ‘Sibley is part Indian, so he’ll think like an Indian. There’s no other reason for him to be here. Maybe he thinks to settle a score for the Trail of Tears. Maybe he’s still fighting the Civil War. I don’t know: but I’ll lay odds I’m right.’
They didn’t believe him, but he hadn’t really expected them to.
It took the wreck of the morning stage from Fort Yuma to persuade them. Breed was waiting to take it on to Tucson when it failed to show. An hour later, Ma was beginning to wonder if the wild-minded youngster wasn’t right. An hour after that she knew. The stage came in at last, but there was no one living on board. The near-side lead horse was badly lamed where a bullet had clipped a fetlock, and pure instinct slowed the others down beside the H & T corral. The reins were flapping loose and the drive seat was covered with blood. The driver and his shotgun rider were gone, the bodywork of the coach was riddled with holes and the two passengers were rolling around inside. Shot to pieces.
Breed’s face stayed impassive as he watched the bodies dragged out. One was a woman, and it was her blood-stained corpse that persuaded Ma.
‘What do we do now?’
She turned to Breed, electing him as leader without pausing to wonder why.
He whistled softly. ‘I’m not sure. Try to put the Tucson run through and the same thing’ll happen. Way I see it, Sibley plans to isolate Endurance. He’s not about to let anythin in or out.’
They held a war council inside the depot. It made the situation look even worse. Endurance had a standing population of two hundred and three citizens. Fifty were children. Eighty-four were women. Of the remaining sixty-nine men, twenty were only a year or so from a long visit to Nate Whitman’s funeral parlor.
By tacit agreement, they accepted Breed as their leader.
He left them forting-up Endurance with empty wagons and piled crates, anything they could utilize to block off both ends of main-street and the few side alleys leading out to the empty prairie. They collected their weapons and distributed ammunition. Then settled down to wait.
Breed didn’t give much for their chances. All Sibley needed to do was surround the place and fire the outer buildings; use the fire to carry the defenders back to the center of town, and hold them there, unless he preferred to kill them. There was no help likely to come in from Tucson or Fort Yuma or Gila Bend. And if it did, it was likely to arrive too late.
The only other alternative was to carry the fight to Sibley.
He rode out alone. He felt safer that way.
Nolan looked down at Nate Whitman’s body, stooping to wipe his knife on the Marshal’s stained vest. What had once been a face was now a ragged mess, though the lower part of Whitman’s abdomen looked even worse.
‘So it is ole Kieron’s boy,’ grunted the dark man thoughtfully. ‘Chance sure is a funny thing.’
He stood up, wiping his hands on a bandanna.
‘So what we gonna do about him?’ Jude Christie sounded worried.
‘Ride easy, Jude.’ Nolan chuckled. It was a malignant sound. ‘We got him exactly where we want him: bottled up in a town that’s just about to get itself blowed apart.’
He turned, watching the column of Sibley’s men riding out from the canyon. They went two-by-two, cavalry style, out-riders up ahead and the main body flanking the wagon. It was an amusing thought. Nolan had seen Gatling guns in action before: he wondered if anyone inside Endurance had had the same experience.
‘Hey, Jude!’ He climbed into the saddle. ‘Let’s go finish Gunn fer good.’
Christie mounted his own horse, wishing hard that he shared Nolan’s confidence. Trouble with the goddam ‘breed was that he proved hard to kill. Though thirty-seven wild outlaws and a Gatling gun should give them an edge. Christie liked to hedge his bets.
He followed the man in the black suit out of Forgotten Well, catching up with the tail of the column and cantering past the disciplined riders. They drew level with Sibley’s wagon and Nolan called over to the renegade.
‘Colonel!’ Sibley turned. ‘How you figger to play this, if they do know we’re comin’?’
‘Simple.’ Sibley smiled like a death’s head. ‘We fight our way in. All survivors will be held hostage until we send to Fort Yuma. If the Yankee army attempts to interfere, the hostages will die.
‘When they meet our demands we simply leave for Mexico. We shall take hostages with us an4 kill them on the border. After that, we lose ourselves in Chihuahua. The Yankees will be unable to follow us until they secure official government permission. By then, we shall be gone.’
He smiled, a madman confident of his insane superiority. Nolan fell back, almost smiling: it was the kind of crazy plan that really was mad enough to work.
Breed saw the column coming nine miles out from Endurance.
He heeled his mount over to a dry wash, urging the beast up to the crest. Below the sight line, he sprang from the saddle and dragged the horse down, forcing it to stretch out on the drying ground. He lay across its neck, holding it down, one hand clamped tight about its nostrils, and watched the men ride by.
He counted them, totaling thirty-seven. But the two siding the metal wagon were the only ones he studied in detail. He reached out, prompted by instinct, to finger the scars decorating his left forearm. He had put them there when he took the Apache blood-oath to avenge his parents. The blood welling from the cuts had touched the faces of his mother and of his father and the memory was as clear in his mind as the words he had spoken over their ravaged skulls …
… ‘I give you my word that the men who did this will die. Before they die, they shall know me. They shall know who kills them, and why.’
He remembered the salt taste of the blood, the ruined faces, the burning rancheria ...
… ‘By the sky and the grass, your blood and my birth tree, I swear I shall kill them ... My blood is your blood, who takes yours, takes mine. And blood repays blood.’
He watched Nolan and Christie ride past him and knew that he was going back to Endurance.
Back to kill.