Ambush (17 page)

“The only precaution you need is to move at night, so your dust won't be visible, and make a cold camp so your smoke won't be. If the band comes this way, its scouts will pick you up an hour ahead of the main band. After that, if they choose to fight, you'll have an engagement. If they don't, you'll never see them.”

Loring smiled so faintly that only one corner of his mustaches lifted. “You have a lot of respect for our red brethren, haven't you?”

“You've fought them, I hear,” Ward countered. “Haven't you respect for them?”

“Very little, for the northern tribes,” Loring answered mildly. “Their best commander I wouldn't trust with a platoon. They fight on whim, without a plan; match their numbers and they won't even fight.” He looked musingly at the fire. “I doubt if these are any different.”

“You won't be in doubt long, Captain,” Ward murmured, and lay back.

At the end of two hours, the camp was broken and the column formed again, and Ward now took the lead. Behind him, he could hear the sergeants calling, “Close up the file! close up the file!” as they moved in the thick darkness.

Ward had traveled this country two winters ago, and once they had crossed the eastern ridge, they moved out of the canyon snarl into a country he knew better, a land of stubby peaks and deep valleys that must be alternately skirted and threaded.

It was a long march, the rests few, for they had planned to make almost all their easterly distance under cover of darkness. Loring and Ward rode side by side much of the time, and their talk was sparse, limited to necessary communication.

To Ward, it was a strange feeling, riding beside this man whose innermost secret he shared. Was he thinking of Ann Dunnifon, hoping, like some hero out of a medieval tale, that his prowess in battle would be the deciding factor that would win her favor and her hand? It was easy to smile at the thought, though it was probably a wrong one, and not for the first time today he remembered his parting with Ann.

It had been a rough one, purposely so, for he had wanted to shock her into the realization that manner and rank and courtliness were not enough in the man she would marry. “You'll remember,” he had told her.
Trouble is, I will too
, he thought, now. Why had he done it, and having done it, why did it stay with him, so that he could remember the fragrance of her hair, the fullness of her lips, the wild first protest and then the submission, and finally the sadness of her voice in reproof? He had been driven to do it out of sudden anger and perhaps malice, and the notion that he had felt either puzzled him now. But above all, the irony of the fact that in trying to drive Ben Loring from her mind he had succeeded in fastening her irrevocably in his own was inescapable. And oddly welcome, too.

After midnight, the country opened more, rock giving way to a footing of coarse gravel and sometimes sand that made slower going. But it lacked an hour of dawn when Ward halted on the talus slope of a mesa and waited for the column.

Loring halted the troop and pulled in beside him, and Ward said, “There's no shade close, Captain, but the sun will hit here last. You can signal from this butte. Water is a bare quarter-mile on.”

By dawn, the horses had been watered, guards put out, picket line established, and the troop sleeping, Ward with them.

He wakened when the sun had been up three hours, and found Tana squatting in the shade of a near-by rock. The camp was beginning to stir, as if in premonition of the miserable day ahead. The potholes which were called Cardinal Springs because of the bright red color of the mesa rock from whose base the water seeped, lay several hundred yards to the east. There was a wide stretch of sage-stippled valley reaching to another low mesa close by to the south. Beyond, in the corridor between the mesas, was the long slope of the tawny land to the distant blue Rincons and to Mexico. Already a dust devil was dragging at a snail's pace across that long desert reach that was beginning to blot up the sun's early heat.

Loring cut through the groups of stirring troopers from the picket line, a canteen swinging from his hand. Linus rounded the big rock which, split from the mesa's rim, had come to rest on the valley floor, and beside which Ward knelt, folding his blanket. Linus stood there a moment, his hair tousled, sleep still in his eyes, looking over the distant country.

“Why in hell do we fight over this?” he asked, and added, “Good morning. Where're my boots?”

Loring approached briskly, said good morning to a pair of troopers, and then halted. Shading his eyes, he looked up the slope, where Lieutenant Storrow, with his signalman, had been stationed from sunup to catch Tremaine's relay.

Then he came on, finding Ward and Linus munching sandwiches of cold meat.

He gave them good morning and knelt in the sandy soil and said, “Well, my Apache came back, Kinsman.”

“So I notice,” Ward said, around a mouthful of food.

“Ask him if he's slept,” Loring said.

Ward swallowed his mouthful and called his question to Tana, whose answer Ward relayed. “Enough, he says. He lost our trail on the rocks, and when he couldn't pick it up again, he slept till daylight.”

“Good, I propose putting him to work.” Loring was talking to Ward. “It's perfectly possible to be surprised here by any stray Apache, since this is a known water-hole, isn't it?”

Ward nodded.

“And it's also possible that this same stray could carry word to Diablito of our presence, isn't it?”

Again Ward nodded and added quietly, “A stray by the name of Tana.”

Loring looked searchingly at him. “You still believe him disloyal?”

“You could find out.”

“How?”

Ward said dryly, “Send him out and see if he comes back.”

Loring flushed and said, “That's just what I propose to do. There are several trails leading to this waterhole, according to our information. I think it wise to see if they're being traveled, or if any Apaches are approaching, so we can be ready to hold them.”

Ward only nodded.

Loring said politely. “Tell him then, will you?”

Linus said, “What if he doesn't come back from his scout?”

“He'll come back,” Loring said flatly.

Linus glanced at Ward, who rose, sandwich still in hand. He picked up a couple of pieces of meat, walked over to Tana, and gave them to him, afterwards relaying Loring's orders. Tana accepted the meat with thanks, put it in the buckskin bag hanging from his empty bandoleer, listened to the orders, rose, and started off toward the spring at an easy trot. Loring moved on, and Ward returned to Linus.

“What about it?” Linus asked, looking at him searchingly.

“We'll see.”

“Hell, that'll be too late,” Linus protested.

“I meant,
I'll
see.”

He watched Tana drink at the springs, then vanish around a point of rock to the east. Linus saw it too, and he glanced at Ward. “He's got a head start on you already.”

“No, in a few minutes, he'll be in those rocks above the springs. He'll watch there for a while to see if he's being followed before he moves on.” He picked up the canteen and unscrewed the lid. “You go do your soldiering. I'll sleep for a while where he can see me.”

Ward drank and afterward lay down in the shade of the rock, facing the springs. He mentally segmented the top of the mesa above the waterhole, and watched each segment for any sign of movement. When a trooper passed, he closed his eyes, as if sleeping, but at the end of twenty minutes he had seen no movement.

He waited five minutes longer, then rose, and walked back through the lounging troopers past the picket line and the lounging but alert guard at the far end of the mesa. Once clear, he turned north and set out at an easy jog, and at clearing the mesa, he cut east again, holding to the same steady trot. He crossed one trail, took to the rocks at the base of Cardinal Mesa's steep slope a half-mile north of the Springs, and climbed steadily. Here, as he remembered, the mesa was a little more than a hogs-back. Keeping to the rocks, and bent low, he crossed the ridge, and when he could see the country to the east and south, he halted, bellied down, and searched the far country intently.

Presently, on the flats below, Tana came into sight. He was traveling at a trot on the faintly defined trail toward the east. Now and then, he would pause like a coursing dog halted by a vagrant scent, and kneel beside the trail. Then, at last, he wheeled away from it and headed up the canyon north to cut the north trail. He was, Ward saw, obeying Loring's orders, for if he intended flight, he would not have bothered with this elaborate pretense. And yet the uneasiness, residue of suspicion, still lingered within Ward.

He pulled off the hogback, returning to camp by the same route, and now the heat of midday was bright and cruel. The troopers lay clustered in any shade they could find or manufacture; mounts were being led down to water in fours, and the camp was beaten into silence by the heat.

Someone rigged up an awning by propping up blankets; Loring was sleeping under it and Ward could see Linus down at the potholes. He slacked under an edge of the blanket's shade, and presently Tana hove in sight, had his drink at the spring, and returned to the partial shade of the boulder. He and Ward eyed each other blandly for a quiet moment, and then Tana reported. A bland of five headed east had left the potholes yesterday; all other tracks were over three days old. There was dust of a party traveling far to the south, too far to see, but they were coming this way. Later he could tell.

As he was talking, Ward saw Linus start toward the camp at half walk, half trot. A shower of pebbles cascaded down the talus and Trooper Corteen, Storrow's signalman, slid into sight from the mesa top, braking himself and then coming up to Loring, who wakened.

Loring read the note Corteen handed him, and then extended it to Linus, who had joined them. Linus shared with Ward the note which read, “Engaged band mid-morning. Action broken off after skirmish. Big band sixty-eight pulled off Peak. Holly says for Cardinal Springs, Have lost contact but am pursuing with also one troop Craig. Wolverton.”

“So they're headed here,” Loring said, in quiet triumph. “When'll they reach us, Kinsman?”

“Noon tomorrow, maybe.”

Loring turned to Corteen, “Get Sergeant Mack,” he ordered, and then he saw Tana, and smiled at him. He turned to Ward, and asked for Tana's report. Ward told him of the dust sighted, and Loring said, “Ask him how far away?”

Ward did, and Tana answered; and now, listening to him, Ward felt the solid shock of excitement.

He said to Loring, “Three hours, maybe. In a couple of hours, he'd like to look again.”

“Tell him to,” Loring said.

Ward did, and looking at Tana now he thought.
That's the first mistake you made, my friend. And that one is enough
. For Tana had lied. There had been no dust, and yet in two hours he wanted to look for it.

Chapter VI

The troop was beat into utter stillness by the savage heat of the afternoon. Lieutenant Storrow came down off the mesa top, his two canteens clanking emptily as he slid to the valley floor in a scuff of dust. His wiry body was erect, but his long face was mottled a dangerous red.

Seeing him, Sergeant Mack came off the ground and called, “I'll fill those, sir.”

“Stay down, Mack,” Storrow said, “I'm warmed up already.” He moved off toward the spring.

It was then that Tana rose from behind the rock where he had been resting, looked off to the south, and then followed Storrow toward the spring, not looking back.

Watching him, Sergeant Mack observed to Ward lying side him, “It's a funny thing, lad, but I wonder does that 'Pache know how lucky he is? Now if it was him and his people that had us prisoner, they'd put out our eyes, drive cactus spikes under our nails, strip us naked, and turn us over to their women and kids to club to a bloody pulp.” He shook his head wonderingly. “And him here walkin' as free as my cousin Anson on the streets of Philadelphia.”

“So far,” Ward murmured, and rose. Mack looked at him sharply, but Ward was moving off toward the picket line. Here he leisurely saddled up. He was not afraid that Tana would watch his back trail this time, but he did not want to alarm Loring, who was dozing fitfully under his make-shift shelter. He mounted and rounded the end of the mesa and walked his horse its length, but now he diverged from his earlier trail and kept north, paralleling the trail to Bailey's Peak, but keeping a height of land between him and the trail.

The country presently began to climb, but Ward urged his horse now. On his right was the flat-topped cone of a peak, and he remembered the trail took its east side, climbing sharply to level off on a high short plateau that soon entered a country of wide canyons beginning the slow lift to the Bailey's Peak country.

There was a tangle of tumbled rock on the west side of the cone's slope, and here he abandoned his horse. There was an urgency upon him, and he threaded his way at a jog through this huge rubble, aiming for the north slope. He was panting now, and he felt the sweat streaming down his sides and his pulse hammering in his temples. Skirting a tangle of catclaw, he plunged angling up the slope, coursing the north face now through scattered manzanita until he came out onto the plateau at its junction with the peak.

The mouth of the shallow valley before him was filled with the slip of huge rocks from the peak, and Ward entered these and presently he saw the faint trail below him snaking through its canyon within a canyon. Moving down to the trail, he spent ten seconds reading its story, and afterward drew off and moved parallel to and down it to the nearest high boulder. Now he drew his pistol and laid it on the ground, and fought for a deep breath of the furnace-hot air; his shirt and trousers were drenched with sweat, and he could feel it pooling in his moccasins.