Ambush (9 page)

Major Brierly was almost abreast the figure, which he could not identify, when he was heard; the man whirled, and at the same time Brierly heard the clatter of wood against the wall.

“Who's that?” Brierly asked sharply.

There was no reply, and now Brierly stepped up onto the veranda. Suddenly, it came to him with the impact of a physical jolt. “Riordan?”

No reply. Brierly turned and called, “Sergeant of the guard! On the double!” He turned back just in time to see the figure lurch away from the wall toward him. He was reaching for his pistol before he remembered his belt and pistol were looped over the back of the chair on his porch.

He said sharply, “Steady now, soldier,” and then he saw the arms raised, as if to deliver a blow.

With swift decision, Brierly moved toward him, hearing behind though, the pounding of feet crossing the parade ground.

And then, too late, he saw what he was facing. Even as he saw, he felt a searing pain in his side and groin, and knew he was falling backwards. He fell heavily, just as two shots came in rapid succession from the veranda. He heard Lieutenant Storrow shout, “All right he's down, he's down,” and wondered why a man would call that, and to whom.

He reached down to his side where the pain was deepest and his fingers touched steel, and then Captain Wolverton was beside him, kneeling, a pistol in his hand. There were other people there, too, but Brierly's attention was not on them. He felt the steel, the shape of it, and then he knew why there was pain in his groin also.

Wolverton said, “Easy sir, easy.” He bawled out. “Lantern here!”

Brierly said calmly, then, “Pull it out, Wolverton. You can't carry me with a pitchfork sticking out of me.”

Just before dawn, where the Craig road crossed a dry wash floored with splintered red boulders, Captain Loring ordered a halt for rest and food. The far bank held enough scattered mesquite for fires, and from this point on, the tangled mesas to the east would press closer, demanding an increased alertness.

Loring, even so, put out guards here, and the men started small fires to cook their bacon. There was the promise in the hazy dawn that the day would be blazingly hot, and Loring passed needless word to Sergeant Mack that he wanted to start with half-canteens after breakfast.

It was a subdued bunch of troopers, the whiskey worked out of them, that sprawled on the ground; talk was sparse, and apt to be sharp, and Harcourt's corporal driver, a downy-cheeked tee-totaler, talked with Frank Holly and smugly watched their silent suffering.

Returning from picketing his own and Linus' horse, Ward rounded the rear of the Daugherty wagon in time to hear Loring say to Sergeant Mack, “—if there's a lame one report it to me. It's apt to be a slack time, right after pay, Sergeant.”

“That I know, Captain,” Sergeant Mack replied gravely. There was no faint hint of mockery in Mack's tone; but in his eyes was a sardonic gleam, an able man's protest at being told his job. Loring wheeled away and came over to the wagon, his shirt already blotting perspiration. Captain Harcourt had a precarious seat on the Daugherty wagon's step, watching Linus pour coffee in a thick cascade into a grimed pot.

“Easy, Linus,” Loring said. “You'll have the stuff thick as gravy.”

Linus eased off, poured water from his canteen into the pot, and set it in the fire. As Ward slacked down against the rear wheel, Linus glanced over at him. His young face was somber; then a faint smile touched it and he said, “You're a hell of a looking guide. In that suit, you look like you're going to a dance.”

Ward drawled, “I'm here for the ride, and you don't pay me, so damn your opinion.”

Linus smiled briefly, and then his face was somber again, and Ward thought,
It's last night and Riordan. He doesn't know how to say it
. And then he thought irritably,
I don't believe
, yet he wondered.

Loring sank to the ground with a sigh and said, “I ate too much last night. This heat'll be murder.” He looked at Ward, a kind of impersonality creeping into his dark eyes, his face. Loring was not, Ward knew, either forgetting or forgiving his refusal to help Ann Dunnifon. “Kinsman, what are the prospects of turning up 'Pache sign?”

Frank Holly had strolled up to the group by how, and at Loring's question, he too eyed Ward.

After a moment's thought, Ward answered. “Pretty good, maybe on the way back.”

“How so?”

Ward shrugged. “Diablito will figure that when Brierly pulled me off the Peak, he wanted me to work. He'll send word to the reservation and across the border that something is about to start. That will pull in all the malcontents, and the lads who want a good fight.” He paused. “All this is maybe.”

“It's too damn true,” Frank Holly said.

Linus looked at him. “You sorry about it?”

“Sorry I get paid?” Holly asked sourly. “No, it ain't that. I'd get paid the same amount of money to fight half as many. It's just that a few of them are too many.”

Harcourt, in the paymaster's department, said smugly, “I'll read all about it in the Santa Fe paper. ‘Army chases Apaches. Diablito is headed for security of Hellangone Mountains. Captain Loring, scion of wealthy New York family, says; “I intend to send Diablito's hide to my boot-maker for my next pair of boots.”'”

Loring smiled perfunctorily and said, “I'd like to, at that.”

Ward had been watching Loring, a faint curiosity stirring in him as to why he had asked his question, and as to what sort of a man he really was. This was the man Ann Dunnifon favored, and Ward tried to remember what he had heard of him, since he arrived at Gamble in the spring and Ward had never served with him. Loring, so the talk went, was a good enough officer. He was rich in his own right, from a well-known York state family, and the envy of the garrison's younger officers. He had, in the romantic fashion of the cavaliers, adopted arms as his profession. He was the gentleman soldier, a throwback to distant times, and therefore a curiosity to his fellow officers who were hardworking, capable, and ordinarily poor men. He was, Ward guessed, humorless, earnest, and privately aloof, but possessed of a calm self-assurance that would attract a fatherless girl like Ann Dunnifon. Above all else, Ward mused, he would be correct in all things.

The brief breakfast of cold meat sandwiches and scalding coffee finished, the detail started off again, and now Loring put out flankers as they entered the canyon country. Off to the north, Bailey's Peak, in the new day, towered over all this country, dominating it. Corporal Baltizar, with half the detail, drew the rear position in the dust of the Daugherty wagon; they rode with neckerchiefs across their mouths, slacked in the saddle, and only half awake and bitterly patient. Loring and Holly were in the lead, and Ward, beside Linus, saw the dark stain of perspiration begin to spread on Loring's back at the first touch of the blasting sun.

They rested in midmorning and changed flankers and the positions of the detail, and went on again, and Ward sat slack and somnolent in the saddle, feeling the hourly increase in heat. It was dry, savage, merciless, and he liked it. The land, of a sameness that was soporific, was a dun-colored waste of rock and sage clumps and mesquite tangles, and it was never wholly level, so that the twisting road accommodated itself to an endless upthrust of eroded mesa and slope of canyon floor. And always Bailey's Peak was seldom out of sight, wheeling slowly on their left and scarcely diminishing in size or changing in aspect.

Loring was driving for the noon halt, angling across a sandy arroyo that brought labor to the horses. The far bank achieved, Ward saw the tracks, and pulled out of the column. Holly, on Loring's right, saw them the same instant and said, “Hold on,” and Loring brought the column out of the wash and then halted it.

Loring called now from the front of the column, “How new?” and Ward dismounted. His glance raised briefly, irritably, to the flanker on the right who, riding forward, should have noticed the sign. He had lagged, however, and had reined up on the bank of the wash and was looking at the ground. Ward pointed with his chin to Holly and said indifferently, “Ask your guide.”

Loring gave the order to dismount, then pulled his horse over to Holly. Ward followed the tracks a way in the direction in which they were headed, up the wash toward Bailey's Peak. He heard a rider behind him, and glanced up to see Linus, hands folded on pommel, watching him. Linus said nothing, however.

Now Ward mounted and rode up the arroyo, which began to pinch between narrowing banks as it cleft a rubble ridge. Then he saw where the bank caved for the crossing to the other side, and the gouged earth where the Apache ponies had heaved up the far slope to the ridge. He studied this a moment, of a mind to return, and, changing his mind, he put his horse into the deep sand of the wash and forced him up the steep ridge slope. Here he pulled his horse abruptly to the left, and then, still sitting his horse, he studied the ground a long minute, letting his horse blow. Carefully, then, he dismounted and began to circle this shelf, and when he saw Linus' horse heave up over the lip, he motioned him over to his own horse.

Linus saw him make his circle then, and once Ward knelt and carefully studied the ground and once he picked up something and examined it before he threw it away. Then he disappeared along the ridge behind a tangle of mesquite, and when he came back, he was mopping his face with his handkerchief.

Linus said dryly, “Is it any hotter back there than here?”

“It's hot, all right,” Ward said, and he halted by his horse. He was thinking,
That's not much to go on
, and then walked directly across the shelf to the spot he had examined before. His search now, on hands and knees, was thorough, and Linus watched him with a vast impatience. When Ward rose, there was a scowl on his face. He said nothing as he swung into the saddle, and put his horse down the slope to join the command.

The detail was dismounted, most of the troopers sitting listlessly in whatever shade they could find. Holly, Loring, and Harcourt, with Sergeant Mack, stood conversing at the head of the column.

As Linus and Ward dismounted, Loring glanced at Ward and said, “Holly says about eight. The tracks are about an hour old. Do you agree?”

Ward nodded. “Some are older by a couple of hours.”

Holly, gently, and with one thumb, scratched his cheekbone, above his beard, and contemplated Ward. “Some women,” he said finally.

Again Ward nodded. “With babies. That's why they lagged.”

Harcourt snorted in skepticism. “You found a diaper, I suppose,” he said in good-humored mockery.

“Same thing,” Ward murmured. “A shred of moss.”

Loring was observing him intently, and now, ignoring Holly, he said, “What do you make of that?”

“The bucks are in a hurry to join Diablito, and they'll make his camp tonight. If they didn't figure on that, they wouldn't have let the women lag. Also, they're not alarmed. They've come a hell of a ways, because their horses are tired and not in good shape. The bucks are just impatient; they've probably been summoned.”

Loring considered this in silence, and Linus watched him with a mounting impatience. Finally, Linus said, “Ben, I'd like to request permission to follow and overtake them.”

Loring's answer, after a moment, was dry, freighted with a heavy humor, “Also permission to escort your nursery back to the post?”

Linus grinned. “Yes, sir. Maybe they won't all be women and children.”

Loring turned slowly, and looked up the arroyo. Beyond it, in the middle distance, lay Bailey's Peak. He said quietly then, “With an hour start, and our horses tired, we'd never hope to catch them before they reach Diablito. Chances are, they wouldn't stand anyway. We don't want the women.” He looked at Linus. “I guess not.”

“Hell,” Linus said quietly.

Loring said stiffly, “My orders were to keep any band from joining Diablito. It was left to my discretion.”

“That's too discreet, Ben,” Linus protested.

Loring's face altered slowly into hardness, and Ward was waiting for Linus' rashness to be flattened. But Loring's dark glance lifted to Ward. “However, I have never neglected the advice of a guide. Is it worth it, Kinsman?”

“I'd go,” Ward said. “But you can ask Holly; he's your guide.”

“And your reasons?” Loring said, ignoring Holly.

Ward nodded toward the ridge. “There's no clear story there. If you want to, you can noon here and send Holly out for an hour. He'd know more when he gets back.”

“An hour's too long, isn't it?”

Ward nodded assent.

Loring said insistently, “But your reasons?”

“They wouldn't be yours, Captain,” Ward murmured. “Whoever you catch, fight or not fight, could tell us more of Diablito's plans and what he knows than we're aware of now. Still, that's not within orders, is it?”

Loring said stolidly, “I have your word that we're apt to cross Apache sign on the way back. Am I to split my command, and spend my guide on a chase for women and children, or am I to preserve it for a more likely prospect that will harm Diablito?”

“You won't lose your guide,” Ward said quietly. “I'll go.”

Surprised washed over Loring's face, and he and Ward studied each other in silence, Loring straining to read what lay behind the offer, Ward blandly withholding any indication of his reason. Again Loring looked at Bailey's Peak and when his glance returned, it was to Linus.

“Very well. Linus, you will take Sergeant Mack and seven men, with Kinsman as guide. You will try to overtake this band before darkness. You are forbidden to go further than the camp you establish tonight. You will return tomorrow and proceed to Craig. Doubtless, we'll meet you on our back trip.”

Linus saluted generously, and turned and called, “Sergeant!” But Sergeant Mack, who had heard the conversation, was already heading for the column at a trot.