Hondo (1953) (8 page)

The Mescalero with the officers coat had something else. Hondo stooped and pulled it from the pocket. The guidon of Company C, trampled, dusty, and bloody.

He stepped into the leather and moved off, riding with caution. There was a faint stirring in the grass now, and there was a smell of dampness in the air. Sam moved far out on the flank, trotting with his head up, knowing the danger.

Then he saw the buzzards. They were low down over a distant hill. He put the lineback into a trot, and then, turning in the saddle, he looked back. Only the long grass moved, only the distant hills lined the horizon.

He inhaled deeply, liking the cool, fresh air. He rode down into the long valley down which the Apaches had come.

At least eighty warriors, likely more. Davis had been outnumbered two to one. He puckered his brow. The Indians had been moving right along, not like men going into battle.

The first thing he saw was a dead pony. He drew up, scanning the ground. He counted nine more, moved ahead, and saw too many to count. There was blood on the grass where men had fallen. He saw a spot of white. It was a dead trooper, stripped and mutilated.

Swinging right into the hills, he saw several brass cartridge cases. Two, three men here. He saw it then. Ambush. Not by the Indians, but by Lieutenant Davis and Company C. And they had hit hard at the moving Apaches.

On the opposite hill, toward which the Apaches had fled for shelter, he saw more horses and several spots of white.

Atop the hill he drew up, looking around. He saw all that remained of Company C, the naked bodies of the dead, fallen in their blood and their glory as fighting men should. Some were scalped, many were not.

Lieutenant Davis had been shot three times, twice through the body, then a finishing shot through the head. His body was not mutilated. Neither was that of big Clanahan, lying close by. They had died together, the lieutenant and the malcontent.

Nearby lay a broken whisky bottle. Hondo Lane rolled a smoke and lit it, knowing what had happened here. That bottle had belonged to Davis, and at the end he must have given it to Clanahan. Hondo could picture the scene ... the Lieutenant giving the bottle to the man he had several times sent to the guardhouse for drunken brawling, but a man who died well beside an officer he understood.

He drew deep on the cigarette. This was no place to stop. Yet he hesitated, looking for the one man who should be here. He saw him then, some thirty yards away.

Old Pete Britton had outlasted them all. That was evident from the scattered shells around his body. Despite the Apache's need for weapons, the two rifles he had used were not taken. His body was unmutilated. These were signs of respect paid by the Apaches to a fighting man.

Judging by the signs, the old man must have held out at least an hour longer than the others. On his hard old face there was a taunting, wolfish grin. He had defeated his ancient fears of loneliness, sickness, and poverty.

Only when he was once more in the saddle did he see the fleck of white on the blade of bear grass. It was a thick letter, addressed to Mrs. Martha Davis.

Turning down the valley, he saw the rest of the story. The ambush had worked, a decisive blow if not a conclusive victory. And then the Mimbrenos had come up from behind. The unknown factor...

Briefly he scouted around, reading the last grim details of the story, written plainly here. Then he started the lineback down the long valley at a steady trot. So it had started, then, and with a crashing victory for the Apaches. Yet a victory that had cost them much. The Apaches carried off their dead and wounded, but there were bloodstains on the grass and many of them marked where men had died.

He rubbed the scrabble of beard on his jaws, staring bleakly into the west. He felt the stir of wind upon his neck, the grass bent around him, and the lineback's mane streamed away, and with the wind came a few large, scattered drops of rain.

Turning, the slap of rain against his hard cheeks, he dug into the bedroll for his slicker. When he had it on, he kept to low ground, off the hills where lightning would strike. And then came the rain and the wind. It struck with a solid blow. There was an instant of pause, then the downpour. Thunder roared in the distance, then lightning snapped at the ridge to his right and there was a smell of brimstone and charred grass.

The lineback moved out, wanting to run, and he let it go. The rain roared down and the wind swept it along the grass. In a matter of minutes there was a trickle of brown water down the valley, then a widening rush. He moved the horse to ground a few feet higher and pushed on.

Suddenly an arroyo cut the ground across before him. Already the sand was damp and there was a trickle of water. He hesitated, hearing the roar of the water coming downstream, knowing that wall of rolling water would be upon him in seconds. Then he gambled.

He put the lineback down the bank and slapped him hard on the hip. The startled animal leaped from under him, and, snorting in terror, was running, belly down, across the arroyo. Almost in the middle he saw the wall of water upstream, bearing great logs on its crest. Bank to bank the rolling wall of brown water rushed at him, and he slapped spurs to the lineback and the horse gave a pain-maddened lunge and reached the bank. Its hoofs slipped in the clay, then caught, and with two great bounds the horse was up and away from the water.

"Good boy." Hondo patted the horse's shoulder. "You'll do to take along."

The horse tossed his head impatiently and they pushed on. Rain pelted them, the sod turned soggy underfoot, waves of wind washed over them, and great whips of lightning lashed the darkened hills. Stones glistened like gems, and the gray veil of the rain strained out the distance and left nothing but the wet and roaring world through which they moved, man and horse, joined now before the common terror of the storm.

A dozen times he turned aside, working away from torrents of white water roaring down arroyos. Once he saw a great cottonwood uprooted and lying upon its side. He saw tall grass flattened to the ground, and hail beat upon them, men passed.

There was no stopping, for there was no place to stop. He rode on, half stunned by the driving fury of the storm, remembering the house in the basin and wondering how Angie fared. She should have a man. It was not good for a woman to live alone. Nor a man.

And that boy ... The lad needed a father.

From a low place in the hills his eye caught a glistening something, and he reined over and rode nearer. It was a low roof, a stone-faced dugout in the side of a hill. He rode the horse down and, swinging down, opened the door. It was roomy and dry within.

It was a struggle to get the horse through the door, but he made it. At the back of the dugout there was a dirt-floored cave where there was a hitch rail and a trough. He shucked out of his slicker and took wood from a pile of mesquite roots and built a fire in the crude fireplace. There was a little grain left in the bag brought from Angie's, and he hung a feed bag on the horse, then wiped him as dry as possible.

The fire blazed up, the room grew warm. Hondo barred the door and fixed a meal, then lay down on the boards of the bunk and dozed. The firelight played on his face, the rain roared and pounded on the roof overhead.

What kind of man could leave a woman like that in Apache country? His eyes were suddenly wide open and he was angry, thinking about it. She was all woman, that one. And a person ... a real person.

Somewhere along the tangled trail of his thoughts he dropped off and slept, and while he slept the rain roared on, tracks were washed out, and the bodies of the silent men of Company C lay wide-eyed to the rain and bare-chested to the wind, but the blood and the dust washed away, and the stark features of Lieutenant Davis stared at the sky, where the lightning played and the fury of the storm worried its way out. Lieutenant Greyton C. Davis, graduate of West Point, veteran of the Civil War and the Indian wars, darling of Richmond dance floors, hero of a Washington romance, dead now in the long grass on a lonely hill, west of everything.

The fire smoldered and blinked its light away, finding no fuel, and in the cold sundown Hondo Lane opened his eyes and looked up at the roof, and then swung his feet down.

The rain was gone. There was no wind. Out there all was silent. He opened the door and stepped out. Broken clouds floated above, and in the far-off west the storm rolled and grumbled like a drunken sergeant in his sleep.

Lane led out his horse and tightened the cinch, then stepped into the saddle again and followed westward, after the storm. And the storm clouds were topped with fire, spears of crimson shot out, piercing the tall sky, and a star appeared. It was cool now, and still.

The miles fell behind. In the distance there was faint smoke, then came the rain-washed walls of the village and the rain-darkened parade ground, the sutler's store and the home of the Army west of the Rio Grande.

Hondo Lane pulled his hat brim lower and started the lineback down the slope. At least, he thought, this is still here.

But behind this thought there was the memory of a quiet-faced woman and a child, of a house beside a stream, and of a woman moving in the house while he slept. He shifted restlessly in the saddle and swore at the horse to cover his feeling and his wonder at it.

Chapter
Six

The storm, sweeping westward across the vast reach of desert and mountain, had crossed the little ranch in the basin before it reached Hondo Lane and the bodies of Company C's fallen veterans. It had come roaring out of the sky, driving before it a barrage of rain that pelted the dry soil, lifting dust as it struck, and bringing to the air that peculiar odor that comes when rain first strikes dry ground.

Not even the cliff protected the cabin from the force of the storm, or from the roar of thunder but it was filled with warmth, comfort, and the smell of coffee. But it was a house empty, for the man was gone.

The sound of rushing water in the usually dry wash frightened her a little, for she had seen those torrents move all before them, and had seen them come when the sky was clear above, and rain only over the distant mountains. Yet now the rain was general, and the parched earth of her garden drank it eagerly.

Some water would remain in the hollow behind the washed-out dam, too. It would last a few weeks, enough so she could irrigate several times, and so it might be the difference between a good crop and none at all.

Johnny was unnaturally quiet, watching her, his face serious. "Will the man come back, Mommy?"

"I don't know, Johnny. He's very busy."

The same question was haunting her own thoughts. Would he return? And why should he? But if he did, what would she do? The thought disturbed her. Why should she think of doing anything? What was there to do?

Worried by her own feelings, she sorted clothes for washing, then dusted and mopped, doing work she had not planned to do, merely to keep her thoughts occupied. Yet she kept wondering about him. Had he found shelter?

Remembering the incidents of his visit, she tried to tell herself that he was hard, cruel. His attitude toward the dog, toward Johnny ... all of it. Yet in her heart she knew he was not cruel. Hard, yes. But how else could he be? And how deep did the hardness go?

What lessons he had learned had come to him in a bitter school. It was the way he knew of learning, a hard way but a fast way that taught its lessons well. She remembered the way he had come off the pallet, gun in hand. What life had a man lived who could be so alert, even in sleep?

It was nearly sundown when the rain ended at the basin, and she went outside. The air was miraculously cool and washed clean and clear. To breathe it was like drinking cold water. The sky was still a broken mass of cloud, and thunder rumbled off in the canyon of the faraway western hills. Lowering masses of cloud filled the hollows of the hills and nestled in the saddles where the ridge dipped low. Occasionally the bulging domes of cloud flared incandescent with distant lightning.

Leaves dripped, water whispered against the banks of the wash, brown and swirling. She fed the horses and stood silent in the yard, looking around at the hills. He was gone. Even his tracks were gone. What kind of woman was she, a married woman and a mother, to be thinking like this of any man?

A man who had gone as if he had never been. But that was not true. His footprints were gone from the yard, yet something remained, something intangible, yet present. A something that set her heart yearning toward the way his horse had gone, that made her remember the way he walked, the strange, somber, almost lonely expression of his eyes. The hunger in them when she had looked up suddenly and met his gaze ... She flushed, remembering it. And the way he had kissed her, and what he had said.

"A woman walks with her head up ought to kiss a man before she dies."

She repeated the words, feeling the heavy beat of her heart. What a strange thing to say to a woman! And the way he had kissed her ... not fierce, not possessive, not demanding, and yet so much much more.

Slow drops from the eaves fell into the barrel placed to catch the runoff. In the late dusk the hills were unnaturally green and lovely after the rain. She would take the horses out to the hills in the morning and picket them on the grass where she could keep watch on them from the garden. She walked to the corral and put her hand on the wet top rail and looked again at the hills. The hills etched themselves against the sky darkening and gray. It would be lonely now, lonely as never before.