The Bounty Hunters Page 4

  Smoke from the suffocated fire hung like hot steam over the rubble of partly burned equipment—cooking gear, cases of provisions, clothing and bedding—heaped and draped about the wagons. The smoke was thinning to nothing above the wreckage, but its stench carried higher, even to the two men.

  A bolt of red material, like a saber slash across the flesh-colored sand, trailed from a scorched end at one of the wagons to the base of a heavy-boled pine a few yards up the glade. And through the lower branches they saw the arm extended to clutch the end of the cloth. The arm of a woman.

  A stillness clung to the narrow draw. Bowers heard a whispered slow-drawl of obscenity, but when he glanced at Flynn the scout’s lean face was expressionless. He lay on his stomach looking down the short barrel of his carbine. Bowers nudged him and when Flynn glanced up the two men rose without a sound and started down the loose sand.

  They came to the woman beneath the pine and Flynn parted the branches with the barrel of his carbine, then stooped quickly. Bowers saw the figure of a young girl, but Flynn was over her then and he could not see her face, though he glimpsed the sand dark with blood at her head.

  Flynn came up slowly and said, “Anita Esteban’s cousin,” but he was thinking something else. It was in his eyes that looked past Bowers to the burned wagons. “Somebody took her hair,” he said.

  They separated, Flynn following the sand clearing, and came out on the trail a dozen yards apart. He looked uptrail toward Bowers, then felt his nerves jump as he saw the bodies off to the side of the road.

  Two men and a young boy. Worn, white cotton twisted unnaturally. He could see the rope soles of their sandals. They lay facedown with the backs of their heads showing the blood-matted, scorched smear where they had been shot from a distance of no more than a yard. He moved toward Bowers and watched the lieutenant kneel beside another sprawled figure. As he drew closer, he saw that it was Anastacio Esteban.

  Bowers looked up at him. “He’s dead.”

  “They’re all dead,” Flynn said quietly. He looked past Bowers and saw other forms straggled along the side of the trail. Even from a distance he was certain they were dead. Then he knelt down next to Anastacio whom he had known a long time and he made the sign of the cross and said the Hail Mary slowly, for Anastacio and for the others.

  Bowers looked at him curiously because he had not expected to see him pray, then motioned up the draw. “There are more up there.” The other two wagons were roughly a hundred yards beyond and partly hidden by the brush where they stood off the trail.

  He said to Flynn, “They had mules, didn’t they?”

  “They must have.”

  Flynn looked up-trail toward the two wagons. The animals that had pulled them were not in sight, but these wagons had not been burned. He heard Bowers say, “I hear ’Paches would rather eat a mule than even a horse.”

  In the shallow bed of the first wagon they found a woman with a child in her arms and next to her were two children clinging tightly to each other. No one was in the second wagon, but in the brush close by they found others. Most of them had been shot from close range.

  Up beyond the second wagon they saw a woman lying in the middle of the trail. Her arms were spread with her fingers clawed into the loose sand. Flynn went to her quickly. Bowers watched him stoop over her then come up, shaking his head. Nita Esteban was not among the dead.

  Flynn came back carrying the girl in his arms and placed her gently in the wagon. Bowers saw that she had been scapled; and his head turned to look at other things.

  “They’re changing their ways,” Flynn said.

  Bowers looked at him questioningly.

  “Have you ever seen an Apache ambush?”

  Bowers hesitated. “No.”

  “Well don’t put this down as typical.”

  Bowers said, with embarrassment, “I’m sorry…about this.”

  “I knew Anastacio. The others I met only once.”

  Bowers looked up. “I thought you knew the girl well.”

  Flynn shook his head. “It only seems that way.”

  “They must have taken her.”

  “And perhaps others.” Flynn was silent as his eyes went over the ambush—the burned wagons, the dead. “Mister, I’ll tell you something. This isn’t Apache.”

  “What other tribes are down here?”

  “No other, to speak of.”

  “Well?”

  “It isn’t Indian.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “It was made to look Apache. And they did a poor job.”

  “I’ve heard that Apaches are known to kill.”

  “With bullets?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they can’t walk down to the corner and buy a box whenever they feel like it. Almost all the people were killed after they’d given up—with bullets—and that isn’t Apache. On top of being hard to get, a bullet’s too quick.”

  “I’ve been told not to try to figure them,” Bowers said.

  “That might apply to why they do something, but you can make sense out of how they do it.” To Flynn the signs were plain. Many were plain because they were not there. A branch had been used to drag the footprints out of the sand. That wasn’t Apache. The wasting of bullets. The scalping. Generally Apaches did not scalp. But they learned quickly. They have learned many things from the white man. They take the children of certain ages, to bring them up in the tribe because there was always a shortage of men. And there were many children here, dead, that an Apache would have taken.

  They took Nita, and perhaps others, he thought. The taking of women is Apache—but it is hardly exclusively so.

  And there were other things that he felt that told him this wasn’t the work of Apaches. But it would take time to tell Bowers.

  “Lieutenant,” he said then. “You’ve got your work cut out for you. Get your tactical mind turning while I go up-trail.”

  Bowers began gathering the bodies, dragging them to a level sandy opening off the trail. His body was tense as he worked. He was aware of this, but he could not relax. He thought: They looked deader because their clothes are white—and because they were shot in the back of the head.

  He looked up-trail, up the slight rise over which Flynn had disappeared, then to the high steep banks of the draw. A faint breeze moved through the narrowness; it brushed the pine branches lazily and carried the burned-wood smell of the wagons to the young lieutenant. The redheaded, sunburned, slim-hipped lieutenant who had graduated fifteenth in his class from the Point and was granted his request for cavalry duty because of his high grades and because his father had been a brigadier general. His father was dead five months now. The smooth-faced, clean-featured, unsmiling lieutenant who now felt nervously alone with the dead and looked at the slopes, squinting up into the dark green, his eyes following the furrows of cream yellow that zigzagged up the crest; then, above the crest, the pale blue of the sky and the small specks that were circling lazily, gliding lower, waiting for the things that were alive to leave the things that were dead.

  This was not cavalry. This was not duty his father, the brigadier, had described. A year at Whipple Barracks and he had not once worn his saber beyond the parade quadrangle. Four-day patrols hunting something that was seldom more than a flick of shadow against towering creviced walls of andesite. Patrols led by grizzled men in greasy buckskin who chewed tobacco and squinted into the sun and pointed and would seldom commit themselves. Cautious, light-sleeping men who moved slowly and looked part Indian. Every one of them did.

  No, Flynn did not. That was one thing you could say for him. He was different from most of the guides; but that was because he had been an officer. One extreme, while the old one with the beard, Madora, was another. That was too bad about Madora, but perhaps he would recover. Flynn did not seem to view things in their proper perspective. He had probably been a slovenly officer. Deneen had said he would have to be watched, but he knows the country and that’s what qualified him for this mission.
Mission! Dragging home a filthy, runaway Indian who didn’t know when he was well off. An unreasoning savage, an animal who would do a thing like this. Flynn is out of his mind thinking it was someone else. Get it over with. That’s all; just get it over with.

  When Flynn returned he was leading two mules.

  “Those must have gotten away,” Bowers said.

  “Or else they didn’t want them.”

  “Not if they were Apaches,” Bowers said.

  Flynn nodded. “That’s right. Not if they were Apaches.”

  They hitched the mules to one of the wagons, binding the cut traces, and loaded the dead into the flat bed; they moved off slowly, following the draw that twisted narrowly before beginning a curving gradual climb that once more brought them to high open country. By noon of the next day they would be in Soyopa. They would bring the people home to be buried.

  Later, as the trail descended, following the shoulder of the slope, Flynn studied the ribbon of trail far below. It would be dark before they reached the bottom, he knew. They both rode on the wagon box, their horses tied to the tailgate.

  First he saw the dust. It hung in the distance, filtered red by the last of the sun. Whatever had raised it was out of sight now.

  Then, below—small shapes moving out of shadow into strips of faded sunlight—two riders, moving slowly, bringing up the rear of whatever was up ahead. The riders seemed close, but they were not within rifle range.

  “Lieutenant, let me have your glasses.”

  There was something familiar about the rider on the left, even at this distance. Flynn put the glasses to his eyes and brought the riders close and there it was, as if looking into the future, seeing Frank Rellis riding along with the Winchester across his lap.

  5

  Standing in the doorway, Lieutenant Lamas Duro scratched his bare stomach and smacked his lips disgustedly. The taste of mescal was stale in his mouth. A feeling of faintness came on him, then passed just as suddenly and left him wide awake. He swallowed again as his tongue searched the inside of his mouth. And finally Lieutenant Duro decided that he did not feel too badly considering the mescal and the few hours sleep. Perhaps the mescal had not worn off completely. That was it.

  He looked at the corporal, who smiled at him showing bad teeth, and he thought: If he is as frightened as I know he is, why should he smile? Why should he curl his diseased mouth which makes me despise him all the more? He shrugged to himself as his hands felt the flatness of his pockets. Then he moved the few steps from the sleeping-room doorway into the front room, and drew a cigar from a packet on the cluttered desk.

  The corporal, who was a small man, watched him with wide-open eyes and nervously fingered into his pocket for a match; but when he scratched it against the adobe wall it broke in his hand, unlighted.

  Lieutenant Lamas Duro, chief of rurales, took a match from the desk, shaking his head faintly, and scratched it across the scarred surface of the desk. Holding it to the cigar, he looked at the corporal and the corporal’s eyes shifted quickly from his own.

  He moved his hand idly over the hair of his stomach and chest and the hint of an amused smile played about the corners of his sensitive mouth. The corporal, a cartridge bandoleer crossing his faded gray jacket, stood at a rigid but stoop-shouldered attention, his eyes focussed now somewhere beyond the lieutenant, seeing nothing.

  “You have a good reason for hammering my door at this hour?” The lieutenant spoke calmly, yet his words seemed edged with a threat.

  “Teniente, the execution,” the corporal said with his eyes still on the wall beyond.

  “What execution?”

  “The Indian who was taken yesterday, Teniente. The one who accompanies the American.”

  “Oh…” There was disappointment in his voice.

  The day before, an American had wandered into Soyopa with a glittering display of goods—kitchen utensils, cutlery, leather goods, hats, even suits of clothes. The boxes filled his Conestoga to such capacity that many of the pots and pans hung from racks along the sides. And with him was the Aravaipa Apache boy.

  The boy was perhaps thirteen, certainly not older, but still an Apache. Lieutenant Duro’s duty was to rid this territory of banditry, and this included Apaches. They were simple instructions with few qualifications. No exceptions. If the Apache was foolish enough to enter Soyopa, so be it. Let him make his grace with God. His scalp was worth one hundred pesos.

  The trader was escorted far out of sight of the pueblo and sent on his way, after protests. The Territorial Commission would hear about this. But Lieutenant Duro could make no exceptions. It pained him that the villagers would have no opportunity to make purchases, but he must think of their protection and welfare first. He had told this to Hilario, the alcalde. Often the upholding of the law is unpleasant. One must often act against his heart.

  “Why there are even things I wanted to buy,” he told the alcalde, “but I could not.” And while he said it, he thought of the law of compensation. The good are rewarded. He still had the Apache boy.

  “Also, Teniente…”

  “Yes!” He bellowed the word and glared, and now smiled only within himself, watching the frightened corporal. What excuses for men I have, he thought. What a magnificently stupid son of the great whore this one is.

  “It is the alcalde. He desires to speak with you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  The corporal stammered, “I told him I would present his request.”

  “Have you presented it now?”

  “Yes, Teniente.”

  “Then what keeps you here?” The corporal turned with an eagerness to be out, but Duro brought him up sharply. “Corporal!”

  “Yes, Teniente.”

  “Corporal…” He spoke softly moving back toward the sleeping room, still idly rubbing his stomach, and nodded into the room. “…when you go, take that cow of a woman with you…”

  The west wall of the courtyard was bullet-riddled from one end to the other, though the pockmarks were scattered at the extreme ends. Toward the center they were more clustered and in some few places the bullet holes formed gouges—scarred patches from which the adobe had crumbled, leaving hollows.

  And it appeared that the wearing away of the wall was a concern of Sergeant Santana’s. He varied the position of his riflemen with a calculated deliberateness which argued reason, moving them along the wall with each execution.

  At one time, perhaps the appearance of the wall had been his concern, but it had become lost in routine; so that now he moved his riflemen back and forth simply because he was able to do so. He knew that bullets would never probe completely through the thick adobe—not in his lifetime; nor did he care if they ever would.

  This morning, Sergeant Santana measured the paces from the line of six riflemen to the wall. He counted twelve in time with his strides, then raised the quirt which was attached to his wrist and waved it in an indolent, sweeping motion toward the rear door of the adobe building. He lighted a cigar, leisurely, and when he looked at the door again they were bringing out the Apache boy.

  Walking into the yard now, two men in front of him, two behind and one on each side, he seemed very small. Pathetically small. Santana shrugged and blew smoke out slowly. An Apache was an Apache. He had heard even the teniente say that.

  They placed him close to the wall where Santana indicated with his quirt, and a rurale remained on either side of him holding his arms, though his hands were tied behind his back. The others moved away to join the line of men along the back of the house.

  Santana’s eyes followed them then shifted to the back door, expecting it to open, but it remained closed and again he turned to the Apache who was looking about with little show of concern.

  His trousers were too large, bunched at the waist and tucked into moccasins rolled beneath his knees. His shirt was dirty, faded blue, and only his moccasins and headband indicated that he was Apache. The two rurales, in their dove-gray uniforms and crossed bandoleers,
were a half-head taller than the boy who would move his chin from one shoulder to the other to look at them, studying the leather cartridge belts and the silver buttons on the soft gray jackets. And all about the courtyard were these men with their guns and so many bullets that they must have special belts to hang them over their shoulders. The boy was aware that he was going to die, but there were so many things of interest to see. He hoped they might delay it for a little while longer.

  Two Americans came in through the gateway in the east wall. They strolled leisurely, smoking cigarettes, and as they approached Santana one of them called, “You better get closer, that boy’s kinda small.”

  Both of them laughed, but Santana ignored them and looked toward the house’s rear door.

  They were gaunt-faced men, both needed a shave, and they wore their hats low on their foreheads against the morning sun. They stood with their thumbs in low-slung gun belts watching Santana and the rifleman. Now the one who had spoken before said, “Hey, Santy! We’ll lay you even, three of the six don’t hit the boy!”

  They grinned, waiting for the sergeant to answer. Santana said with contempt, “Listen to the great killers of Indians.”

  One of the Americans said, “Well?” but Santana had turned his back to them.

  Through the gateway now came a group of men dressed in white peon clothes and straw sombreros. There were six in all, but five of them walked close together, a few strides behind the older man with the bronzed face and white mustache. Hilario Esteban, the alcalde of Soyopa, walked with more dignity than the others who seemed purposely holding back, as if reluctant to enter the courtyard.

  And at that moment, Lieutenant Duro came out of the back door of the adobe building. He was hatless, his jacket open, and a white scarf draped loosely about his neck. A cigar was in the corner of his mouth. Drawing on it, he glanced at Hilario Esteban who was only a few paces away. But when he saw the old man about to speak, he turned his head quickly toward Santana who was coming over from the rifle squad.