Cry of Eagles (25 page)

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After a while, when there was no sound of gunfire, Naiche rode to the top of a small hillock and peered into the distance. He could barely make out the war party returning in the semidarkness, leading the three horses and their riders back toward the tribe.

As they got closer his mouth became dry, and he felt a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He turned to Nana and said, “Keep the others here. Do not let them see what Chokole has found.”

He kicked his horse into a gallop and rode out to meet the returning war party. As he got nearer, the images on the horses became clearer.

It was the three warriors he'd left to guard their backtrail at the juncture of the Dragoons and the desert. They were all dead, tied to their horses with sticks and rope, butchered as all the others had been by the tall one and his friends.

He held up his hand. “Stop here. I do not want the others to see this, for it will cause them to lose faith.”

Chokole's face was twisted, as if she tasted something bitter. “What shall we do with them? They deserve a ceremonial burial, for they died honorably in battle with our enemies.”

“Cut their ropes and leave the bodies here in this arroyo. Bring the ponies. We must be on our way before the bluecoats find our trail and follow us here. We cannot afford to be caught on the open desert.”

“But—” Chokole started to say.

“Enough!” Naiche growled. “We will honor our fallen by singing songs of their bravery around our campfires once we are safe in the Pedregosas. Until then, we must keep on the move until we find cover.”

Chokole nodded, her lips a thin, white line. She knew she must not say anything else. She glanced at the three dead warriors, whose mothers and sisters would be singing a death song tonight. She made a silent vow to kill the white-eyes who did this or lose her own life trying.

After the ponies were emptied of their burdens, Naiche led the war party back to the main body of his tribe. He reined his horse to a halt in front of his people, who were waiting for him to tell them what to do.

“Stay here and wait for the three white-eyes who follow us,” Naiche said, pointing to the five men who had been watching their backtrail. “Hide yourselves well, and be brave in battle. You must kill them, and then you may rejoin our tribe.”

He rode off, leading his people toward the Pedregosas that could barely been seen against the evening sky in the distance. Once there, they could make their way toward Mexico and join up with Geronimo and his warriors to form an unstoppable force that would drive the white man from their land forever.

As Falcon rode through moonlight across the desert, he talked to Diablo in a low, soothing tone. It was something he'd done for years. He found expressing his thoughts out loud served several purposes. The tone of his voice reassured Diablo that all was well, and made the horse less skittish and less likely to buck or bolt if he came upon something unexpected in the semidarkness. In addition, speaking his innermost thoughts out loud allowed his more critical and logical conscious mind to pick them apart and find any obvious weaknesses or inconsistencies that might otherwise go unnoticed. The process had served him so well over the years that he now did it without thinking, automatically.

“Naiche must have found those three dead guards I sent on ahead by now,” he murmured, sitting back against the cantle of his saddle in a relaxed manner as the big stud moved steadily through the night.

“So, he now knows even better that someone dangerous is on his trail. Hopefully, that will spur him to push his people hard, to make them travel around the clock without getting any rest. Tired warriors don't make good fighters, so the more he pushes them the better for me—and for the army if Hawk and Jasper ever manage to meet up with them. And if they recognize the fires I set as a signal,” he added after a moment of thought.

As he remembered killing the three guards he found himself almost regretting his crusade against the renegades. After all, he reasoned, there was no way this particular bunch of Indians could have had anything to do with Marie's death. Perhaps he was becoming as bad as a lot of people who had settled the West, letting his thinking degenerate into the old adage, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Searching his heart, trying to look deep inside himself, he came to the conclusion that he was being too hard on himself. He really had no particular animosity against Indians or any other minorities, in general. It was only the ones who took it upon themselves to break the law—to raid and kill and go to war against innocent people—that he hated and wanted to kill.

The murder of his wife Marie was only a symptom of the disease of disrespect for the rule of law. Understandable, maybe, in such a young, wild frontier, but a sickness he would do everything in his power to eradicate. It wasn't so much the letter of the law or the sometimes flawed men who tried to enforce it that Falcon believed in, but the general premise that if a collection of people were to live in close proximity there must be rules of behavior based on mutual respect and dignity which had to be followed. Those who took it upon themselves to ignore such common sense rules had to be punished or there was no safety for anyone in the land.

He further reasoned he would be acting no differently if a band of marauding white men were on a killing rampage. He would still feel the need to do all he could to wipe them out. The fact the killers were Indians was secondary to the need for their complete destruction.

After he came to this conclusion, he felt better about his mission, less afraid he was becoming hardened and callous to the killing he was being forced to do. His mind was cleared of all self-doubt, and he was able to concentrate on the job at hand, which was making life, and death, as miserable as possible for Naiche and his followers.

Without slowing Diablo, he reached back into his saddlebag and pulled out the tin of bootblack and applied some more to his face. Earlier, he taken the precaution of wrapping burlap around Diablo's hooves, to muffle any sound the stud might make as they traversed the desert. He knew Naiche was sure to have posted more guards after finding his last three hadn't survived their assignment.

Falcon was both hampered and helped by the desert terrain. On the one hand there were precious few places any ambushers could hide, but on the other hand it was going to be almost impossible for him to arrive unnoticed across the miles of flat land. He was lucky the moon was only half full and there were plenty of scudding clouds to give at least intermittent cover of darkness.

The padding on Diablo's feet was so effective and his ride was so quiet that he could hear the occasional rattle of a snake disturbed in its slumber by his passage, or the swish and clatter as a lizard or kangaroo rat scurried out of his path.

From up ahead a faint cry came carried on the evening breeze. At first it was so low Falcon thought it merely the moaning of the wind, or the cry of a distant night bird. Soon it became louder, reminding him of the screech of a big female mountain lion in heat, screaming for her mate.

Suddenly, the cry changed and became screams for help, in a voice Falcon thought he could recognize through the agony.

“Damn, Diablo,” he muttered as he pulled back on the reins and cocked his head, listening. “That sounds like Cal Franklin up ahead. If the Indians got to him and staked him out, that means they've got someone waiting to see if I take the bait.”

He slipped out of the saddle, leaving Diablo ground-reined next to a mesquite bush. He took his shotgun rather than his Winchester with him, for he knew there would be no aiming in the darkness and he wanted something with a wide spread to it.

Crouching to keep from outlining himself against the horizon in case the moon came back out, he shuffled his feet to minimize sound and moved as silently as a wraith toward the terrible sounds ahead. As he walked, he loosened the rawhide hammer thong on his pistols and rearranged the scabbard of his Arkansas Toothpick so it was within easy reach.

The closer he got to the source of the sounds, the surer he was it was Cal Franklin making them.
The damn fool must have gotten careless and let some of Naiche's scouts take him prisoner,
Falcon thought. The one thing practically everyone in the area of marauding renegades agreed on was not to be taken alive, for the Indians left ample evidence it was a most horrible way to die. Knowing Cal, he had probably been riding along daydreaming about all his gold dust and what he was going to spend it on in Tombstone.

Every few feet, Falcon stopped dead still and held his breath, searching the darkness ahead for any sign of human presence. He realized that no man, not even an experienced Apache warrior, could sit for hours in dark waiting in ambush and the not make some noise, no matter how slight.

As he waited, Falcon heard the sound of a low, muffled cough from off to his right, then a sniff, as if the brave waiting there for him was coming down with a cold.

He shifted his direction slightly and crept forward, his Arkansas Toothpick in his right hand and his shotgun in his left.

Glancing upward, Falcon saw a large cloud moving slowly across the sky with all the majesty of a clipper ship sailing calm seas. The trailing edge of the cloud was almost to the moon, and in another few moments would pass it, leaving a brief period of moonlight shining down.

Falcon froze, staring ahead, waiting for light. When it came, he could clearly see the outline of a man sitting fifteen feet ahead of him on the ground with his legs crossed in front of him and a rifle resting on his thighs. The man's head was nodding, leaning forward only to be jerked back upright as he caught himself dozing and tried to force himself to stay awake.
Naiche has been pushing his people too hard,
Falcon thought. Warriors falling asleep while waiting in ambush was a sure sign they hadn't had much rest lately.

When the next cloud covered the moon, bringing almost total darkness, Falcon laid his shotgun on the ground and eased forward, an inch at a time. As soon as he was in position, he clasped his left hand over the warrior's mouth and quickly slid the blade of his knife across his throat.

The man jerked once, then sighed heavily, almost as if he were relieved to give up his life and finally get some sleep. Falcon lowered him to the ground gently so as not to make any noise.

Figuring the other bushwhackers were arranged in a circle around the dying, moaning man, Falcon picked up his shotgun and began to move laterally around the area the sounds were coming from. He was in no hurry and moved slowly, knowing time was on his side. As tired as these warriors were, the closer to dawn it became, the harder it would be for them to keep their attention at peak levels.

The next two kills went without a hitch, the men dying silently as they had sat while waiting to kill Falcon. The fourth warrior must have been more alert than the others, or perhaps he heard the click of a pebble moving when Falcon attacked. He turned just as Falcon grabbed his throat, trying to bring his Winchester up to fire.

They wrestled in the dark for a few seconds until finally Falcon managed to slip the point of the Toothpick under his rib cage and angle it up to pierce his heart.

A dying spasm caused the brave's trigger finger to contract on the Winchester and it fired, exploding in the desert silence like a cannon shot, belching a foot-long flame out into the night, temporarily blinding Falcon.

The last of the sentries jumped to his feet, and in his excitement began to fire repeatedly at the place where he saw and heard the rifle shot. Bullets were pocking the desert sand all around Falcon as he rolled over toward his shotgun.

He grabbed the Greener and eared back the hammers, pointing the twin barrels toward the sound of rifle fire and firing blindly.

Just as the shotgun exploded, a whining bullet tore into Falcon's chest, hitting a rib bone and skipping along under the skin to exit out his back. Luckily the rib deflected the slug enough that it didn't pierce the chest but stayed just under the skin, causing intense pain but no lasting damage.

The buckshot from Falcon's shot spread out into a pattern ten feet wide at twenty yards, peppering the Indian and tearing him almost in two. He was blown backward in the air, arms flung wide, dead before he hit the ground.

When Falcon's vision came back took his shirt off and explored his wound with his hands. He figured he was all right when he took a deep breath and found only pain, no restriction of his breath and none of the dreaded bloody froth that meant a lung wound and certain death.

He rolled the shirt into a long cylinder and wrapped around his chest, tying it tight to minimize blood loss.

After making sure there were no more sentries, he made his way toward the sounds of crying and begging and moaning coming from the nearby depression in the ground.

No matter how many men a man has killed, or how many men he's seen left by Indians to die, when it's someone he knows personally and they're still alive and in agony, it rends the heart to see what cruelty one human being can impose on another.

There were tears in Falcon's eyes as he squatted next to Cal Franklin. He slipped the Toothpick under the rawhide thongs holding Franklin's wrists outstretched and cut them one by one, releasing the terrible tension on his arms.

Cal turned his head toward Falcon, exposing staring, sightless eyes covered with ants. “Who's there? Who is it?” he whined, his voice hoarse from his screaming and yelling.

“It's Falcon, Cal.”

“Oh, thank God!” He reached with one of his newly arms and grabbed Falcon's shoulder. “Kill me, Falcon. If you've got any mercy in your soul at all, kill me quickly!”

Falcon glanced down and saw that Cal's intestines were spread all around him. The man had no chance at all of survival, but he might live for days in total agony.

Falcon drew his Colt and laid the barrel against Cal's temple. With his free hand, he stroked Cal's cheek. “Cal, you rest easy now, you hear?” Falcon said and pulled the trigger, putting an end to Cal Franklin's misery.

He sat back on his haunches, breathing slowly, waiting to regain enough energy to go out into the darkness and fetch Diablo.

He thought maybe he'd rest there the rest of the night and wait for the dawn to see if perhaps the army was on its way. He'd had no stomach to travel any further tonight. He'd had enough killing to last him a while, and he really needed rest. He didn't want to make the same mistake Naiche was making and push himself so hard he became ineffective.

After a while he got to his feet and went to find Diablo. On the way, reined to an ocotillo cactus, he found the five ponies belonging to the warriors left behind to kill him.

Once back at the area where the dead Indians lay, he took out his Arkansas Toothpick and walked to each body, slicing off the scalp locks one by one.

Taking the scalplocks to where the horses were tied, he affixed a scalp lock in each of the ponies' manes, leaving the bloody trophies hanging along their necks. After he was done with the grisly task, he cut their reins and fired his pistol behind them, sending them galloping off toward the distant mountains where Naiche was headed.

Falcon hoped they would send yet another message to Naiche that his days were numbered.