Cry of Eagles (9 page)

Major Wilson Tarver was badly shaken, uncertain what to do next. The thunder of rifle fire from all sides was still ringing in his ears, and the screams of his wounded and dying troopers in the canyon left him chilled to the bone in spite of the unusual warmness of the day.

“Sergeant Boyd is dead, sir,” Private Newman stammered, nursing a minor flesh wound in his right shoulder. “I saw him go down with this huge hole in his head. Blood came pouring out the back of his skull like it was a wooden bucket that sprung a leak.”

“Spare me the details,” Tarver replied, staring up the arroyo where the deadly ambush had taken place. “I can see he's among the missing.”

Corporal Collins rode his limping bay gelding up beside the major. “Looks like we lost almost twenty men, sir. No telling how many are lying in that ravine badly wounded, needing medical attention. I can hear some of them moaning, crying out for water.”

“If we ride back in there to render aid, they'll slaughter the rest of us,” Tarver snapped. “What we need is a flanking maneuver. We must find a way to get up on that rim behind them, somehow.”

“Sure will be hard to do on a horse, sir, and my horse has gone lame in a forefoot. I don't see any way a horse can make that climb.”

“Then we'll proceed on foot. Dismount!” Tarver shouted the order as though he felt sure of his decision.

Tarver shouted the even though he had serious reservations about it. He hated this dry desert country, and above all else, he hated Indians. The Apaches at Fort Thomas were a filthy lot, beneath contempt, and not a single one could be trusted, in his experience.

Private Newman seemed nervous. “If you'll pardon me for saying it, sir, we need to leave plenty of men to guard our horses or those Apaches are liable to steal 'em and leave us out here on foot.”

Tarver gave Newman an angry glare. “I don't need anyone to remind me of proper military tactics, Private. Now dismount and prepare a picket line for the horses.”

“Yes sir,” Newman replied meekly, swinging down from his McClellan saddle with his ammunition pouch and rifle. “Sorry I said anything, sir.”

Men climbed down from their saddles. A young private from New Jersey began driving stakes for picket ropes in the sandy desert soil.

“I want a six man squad around our mounts,” Tarver said as he stepped to the ground. “Corporal Collins, pick five good marksmen and form a circle around our animals. The rest of us will climb that west ridge from the rear. Spread out in a line and stay behind cover whenever you can find it. Surprise will be our advantage.”

“You don't figure they'll see us coming?” Private Newman asked. “I figure they're watching us right now, just waiting to see what we'll do. They'll know what we're up to.”

“Not if we employ every precaution and proceed slowly. I assure you these red savages are mere mortal men who die just as easily as anyone, when taken by surprise.”

Tarver motioned to a private named Hiram Walker. “Lead the way up the side of that ridge, Private, and stay down as low as possible.”

Private Walker lost most of the color in his face. “Yes, sir, Major,” he answered, leading off toward the craggy slope west of the ravine.

* * *

Nervous sweat poured down Wilson Tarver's face from the band of his cavalry hat. Climbing long stretches of impossibly steep slabs of limestone, he had his rifle at the ready and the flap on his pistol holster unfastened. Yucca fans and all manner of desert plants offered the Apaches hundreds of places to hide as the soldiers ascended the west slope leading to the ravine. Extreme caution was called for by the terrain.

“Maybe they pulled out,” Private Newman whispered off to Tarver's right.

“We'll know soon enough, so please refrain from doing any more whispering. This wind will carry the sound of your voice straight toward them ... if they're waiting for us to try to ambush us again.”

One of Tarver's boots made a crunching noise when he stepped on a pile of loose rock. He cursed his carelessness silently and kept on climbing.

Private Walker knelt down suddenly behind a clump of yucca and signaled the others to halt.

“What is it?” Tarver asked softly.

“Can't say for sure, Major, but I think I heard a noise right up yonder.”

“Where? Point to it.”

Walker pointed to a spot slightly south of their present position.

Tarver couldn't see anything amiss. “It's probably nothing. Continue forward, Private.”

Private Walker came up in a crouch, still wary, taking small steps around the yucca fans with his Winchester held tightly to his shoulder.

Tarver waited until Walker had moved on a few paces before he continued his own climb up the rocks.

Then he saw a sight that froze him in his tracks. The men on either side of him stopped to stare.

A blue-uniformed trooper from Company C came staggering toward them ... Tarver seemed to remember the boy's name as being Longworth. Blood covered the front of his blue tunic and the legs of his pants. His arms were folded in front of him as though he was cradling an infant, but what he held in his hands was no child.

Longworth was doing his best to hold his intestines in place, to keep them from dragging across the sand and rocks. A huge gash in his abdomen allowed his innards to spill from his body like bloody coils of slippery purple rope, squirming with each step he took.

“Dear God,” Private Newman croaked, sinking to his knees when he saw Longworth. Then he began gagging on the contents of his stomach.

“His throat's been cut, too,” Walker said over his shoulder, “and it looks like they cut out his tongue. I can see the stump of it waggin' inside his mouth, only he ain't making any words, just noises.”

Major Tarver felt his legs tremble.
How could another race of human beings do such an animalistic thing?
he wondered. It was clear these Apaches were not a part of the human race, more like wild animals than men.

Longworth continued to stumble toward them, loops of his intestines dragging in the sand, his mouth opening and closing as if he meant to talk, but only a fountain of blood came forth and strange, muffled sounds.

“The bastards,” Tarver hissed.

“You want me to fetch him and help him to some shade?” Private Walker asked.

“Yes. Please. One of you men go with him,” Tarver replied, finding he was unable to move or take his eyes from the ghastly sight.

As Private Walker started toward Longworth, a gunshot rang out from a clump of cactus higher on the ridge. The back of Walker's shirt exploded in a shower of crimson.

“Everybody down!” Tarver screamed, throwing himself flat on a slab of limestone.

Another gunshot lifted Private Collins off his knees, sending him tumbling backward. A bullet had entered his skull through his right eye socket, blowing the rear of his skull away, killing him instantly.

More gunfire erupted from the top of the slope, and more of Major Tarver's troopers began to fall. The rattle of rifle fire grew so heavy it became a single sound.

Private Walker, blood pumping from his back, came crawling toward Tarver.

“Help me, Major! I'm shot!”

Tarver had no idea how he could help. He found he was too frightened to even raise his rifle and return the hail of heavy gunfire.

“Please help me, Major!” Walker pleaded, still crawling, leaving a trail of blood in his wake.

At that precise moment, Wilson Tarver did the unthinkable for a trained military commander. When duty required that he make a decision in hopes of saving the lives of his remaining soldiers, he simply urinated in his pants and began to weep uncontrollably.

“You gotta help me, Major! I'm dyin'!”

Tarver heard the dying man's plea and did nothing, feeling the wetness creep down his pants leg as a stream of tears flooded his cheeks.

Another soldier's voice sounded from his left.

“Pull back, boys! They're gonna kill every one of us if we keep lying here!”

It was an order Tarver knew he should have given, yet at the moment he was unable to speak.

All around him, soldiers began creeping backward, and Tarver knew he must do the same. He raised his head just long enough to catch a glimpse of Longworth falling headfirst into a bed of prickly pear cactus. He lay there among the cactus needles, his feet still kicking.

“Withdraw!” Tarver cried weakly, pushing himself backward with all his might.

A trooper to Tarver's left let out a yelp and tumbled down the slope, a puddle of red shining in the sun where he had been hiding behind a fan of yucca spines.

Then another sound reached Tarver's ears—gunshots coming from behind.

He glanced over his shoulder as he was inching backward, and saw a band of Apache warriors armed with repeating rifles attacking the men guarding their horses.

Corporal Collins was the first soldier to go down, clutching his belly after he dropped his rifle. Spooked horses broke free of the picket ropes when the explosions started, and most of their mounts took off in a gallop in every direction.

It was the massacre of his troopers that held Tarver's attention. Half a dozen Apaches fired endless rounds of ammunition into the five remaining troopers, cutting them down one or two at a time.

“We're doomed,” he said aloud, for now they were afoot in the desert foothills of the Dragoons, surrounded by Apache warriors armed with Winchesters.

Tarver managed to struggle to his feet, not to race downhill to aid his fellow soldiers, but to run west toward a jumble of rocks where he hoped to hide until the killing was over. He knew he was abandoning his command, and that was certainly grounds for a court-martial, but right at the moment all he cared about was getting out alive.

He ran toward the rocks in a low crouch, the stains of his urine darkening his pants, ignoring cries for help coming from the men he was leaving behind.

Tarver had almost reached the safety of the boulders when a blow struck him in the back. At first he thought someone had hurled a stone at him due to his show of cowardice.

And then a flash of white-hot pain shot through his body, running down his spine, and he understood he'd been hit by a bullet.

He tripped over a rock and fell on his face, whimpering, wishing this was only a bad dream.

Moments later someone seized him by the hair and turned him over on his back. He stared into the hate-crazed eyes of a huge Apache warrior holding a knife.

The last thing he felt before he lost consciousness was a searing pain across the top of his skull as his scalp was sliced off his head. Blood rained down on his face ... his own blood, and then he felt nothing.

* * *

Darkness hid them from all but the most watchful eyes and Isa knew this, guiding his warriors up an ancient trail to the highest mountaintops in the Dragoons. He had ridden the trail hundreds of times when he was a boy, before the white men came to take them prisoner at Fort Thomas. It still bothered him that the iron horseshoes made so much noise, yet it was all but impossible to pull the shoes off without crippling an animal. Thus he listened helplessly to the grinding of metal against rock.

“We are close now,” Nana said, riding his horse up beside Isa's.

“Yes,” Isa agreed.

“By the time the sun rises, we will see the valley and the stream.”

Isa halted his horse long enough to give their starlit back trail a careful examination. “The bluecoats have not found our tracks, and that is good. Without the old Shoshone, they are as helpless as children.”

“Perhaps they will bring the Pawnees,” Nana suggested when they heeled their horses forward again.

“Let them come,” Isa whispered, his jaw clamped in an angry line. “We will kill their Pawnee scouts at the high pass above the stream and hang their scalps from the limbs of the pinyon pines on the slopes.”

“They will surely come with many more soldiers,” Nana warned.

Isa grunted, guiding his horse around a pile of rocks. “It will give us many more enemy scalps,” he said. “We have their magic rifles.”

“But we have only a handful of warriors to shoot them at the enemy.”

“Word will reach the others at Fort Thomas and San Carlos. All the older warriors know of the hidden spring in these mountains and the meeting place.”

“Too many of them are dead in spirit, Isa,” Nana said in a grave voice. “They are ready to die on the white man's reservation.”

“They need a leader who has courage. Naiche is as brave as any Apache upon the face of Earth Mother.”

“But will the others have the courage to slip away to join us?”

Isa glanced down at his bundles of rifles. “When they know we have the white man's magic guns, they will come. Naiche has seen this in a peyote vision.”

Nana still seemed doubtful. “We have been prisoners at Fort Thomas for many winters. The old ones who fought so bravely are now nothing more than broken-spirited men. I do not think they will have the heart for battle.”

“It is the bluecoats' whiskey that makes them weak. When they hear about the rifles they will come, and we will drive the white men from our land.”

“You are sure of this?”

“Naiche has seen it in a dream.”

Nana reined his horse to a piece of high ground with a view of what lay behind them. “It will be good,” he said softly, “to have our homeland again.”

Isa frowned as he rode his horse over the ridge. “The price will be high. Some of us must die in battle . . . but in the end we will drive them from our ancestral lands, and the buffalo will return. We will live in peace again. Naiche told me this as it came to him in his vision.”