Blood of Eagles (7 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone

BOOK: Blood of Eagles
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Hesitantly, he scanned the brush again, then crept to the picket rope. Bypassing the little dun, he approachedMacCallister's big black horse and reached for its halter.
The horse laid its ears back and showed its teeth.
“So'qui-li,
” the boy crooned softly. “Horse, I want to ride you.” With a lunge, he grabbed the halter and reached high for an ear. Woha'li wasn't sure what happened next, but he found himself tumbling backward, with a powerful hoof whooshing past his head. He came up against the limestone bluff and lay there, stunned.
MacCallister had told him to leave Diablo alone. Now Woha'li knew why.
The boy sat slumped and silent beside glowing embers when Falcon MacCallister slipped soundlesslyinto the sheltered camp. Exhausted and confused,Woha'li the warrior had gone to sleep with his worn old .32-20 cradled in his arms.
EIGHT
After the lightning came the pouring rain—waves and walls of it, driven by wild gusts of wind. It was a downpour, a real frog strangler, and the slopes below the cut bank flowed torrents. But it ended as abruptly as it had begun, and before dawn there were stars in the western sky and the high-up hills stood crisp against a freshly washed horizon.
By first light, Falcon climbed the caprock to look down across a different river. Normally the upper Cimarron was a gentle sleepy stream meandering along a wide sandy bed between high valley walls. Only now and then, sometimes many years apart, did it reveal its true character. It was doing so now.
From the caprock, Falcon looked out on a wide surging stream a quarter-mile from bank to bank. The flash flood had come down from the high foothillsand filled the ancient waterway almost to the rim. Here and there up and down the south side, among the inundated scrub brush of the new banks, were scatterings of debris—broken planks, a demolishedtent, a dead mule tangled in harness.
Far upstream, something bobbed and swayed on the floodcrest, coming down. Seen through the telescope,it became a raft of sorts—a jumble of wood planking, like the remains of a footbridge attached to a placer-mine chute. There were people on it, busy with poles and bits of board, fighting the currentas they fought to keep the contrivance upright.
They brought the horses up from the cut bank, and then Falcon made his way down to the floodway. He waved his arms until those aboard the raft had seen him, then set about splicing ropes to make a lifeline. A mile or so downstream, the river made a hard bend to the left. Even without using his scope, Falcon could see the torrent pounding at the banks there.
The makeshift raft coming down from the Black Mesa “mines” might hold together on a straight current,but it would never survive that bend. It and all those aboard would be dashed to pieces if they went that far.
Woha'li appeared from the brush and swung out on a salt-cedar branch to look upstream. “Crazy
yonegs,
”he stated flatly, then swung back to firm footing.“Horses ready,” he said.
“He-ga.
We go.”
Falcon ignored him. Splicing three coils of saddle rope and a length of reata, he had a line nearly fifty feet long. To one end of it he tied a chunk of driftwood,and then he coiled the rest.
Aboard the makeshift raft men were struggling furiouslyto alter course, edging to the right as they approached. There were seven or eight of them clinging to the debris, all working frantically with plank oars and bits of pole while they struggled to keep their vessel intact. With each shift of current, the mess threatened to split apart, to separate into disconnected flotsam.
As the unlikely thing neared, Falcon waved and shouted. When he was sure they saw him, he stepped as far out as he could, freed the chunk end of his coil, and began swinging it in a widening circle.
Woha'li watched in disbelief for a moment, then picked up his rifle.
“He'ga-ha!”
he demanded. “We go now!”
Falcon was busy. He ignored the kid. He completedhis swing, gauged his distance and trajectory, and let the chunk fly. It arced out over the muddy waters, trailing its rope, and fell directly ahead of the raft. Men aboard scrambled to grab it, and securedit somewhere. Falcon wound the free end around a squat cedar bole, looped it, and tied it off. Gripping the line then, he set it across his shoulders, held it as a sling, and braced himself.
With men heaving at both ends of the line, the ungainly raft veered sharply, veered again, and beganto disintegrate in the current.
Eighty yards from water's edge, up the tangled brushy slope where the canyon wall met the wide limestone shelf called caprock, erosion had formed a narrow trail angling up to the prairie above. For long moments, as the people below worked to swing the motley raft ashore, a horse and rider were skylined,watching.
Woha'li the Eagle, last survivor of what had once been one of the proudest families of
Ani-wa'ya,
the wolf clan of the eastern Cherokee, had run out of patience. He watched for a moment as
ani-unegas
below him struggled against a rampaging river. He was only twelve years old, but there was work now for a man, and no other man remained in his family.
He raised a hand in quick salute.
“Donada‘gohui, Towo'di,
” he murmured. “Man named Falcon, good-bye.”
 
There were more people on the raft than it had appeared. As the thing came closer, Falcon could see glimpses of people everywhere in the wreckage. He could not tell how many, or even how many of them were alive, but all of them were in pitiful condition.Considering the wall of water that must have swept down on that mining camp in the river bottom upstream, it was a wonder anyone had survived.
The raft bumped and scraped against other floatingdebris, and bit by bit it continued to come apart. One entire section of the thing—something that looked like a wrecked buckboard wagon and some lashings—veered off into the current and floated away. There were two or three people aboard it, none of them moving. As it rolled and turned, beginningto submerge, Falcon saw two faces and a disconnected arm. Two men and a woman, he guessed ... all dead.
By the time the raft grounded, just a few yards out into the stream, there wasn't much left except a section of what might have been a footbridge, a broken rocker-box still holding bits of gravel from a mine, and a few kegs and barrels lashed into the mess with rope.
It was full morning by the time Falcon got them all to shore and counted them. Fourteen men, three women, and the bodies of two more dead men. Falconmuttered his amazement. Twenty-two people had ridden that torrent on a frail lash-up of floating debris that they had somehow assembled when the first rush of flood hit them.
Five had not survived, but somehow seventeen had!
He revised his count when one of the men waded out to the wreckage and brought back a wriggling, unhappy bundle in a wet quilt. A young woman screamed when she saw it, and ran to take it.
“Make that eighteen,” Falcon said.
It was only then, when he herded them all up the slope to caprock—some of them being supported or outright carried—that he realized the Indian boy was gone. Diablo stood alone up there, still tethered, but the dun was missing along with its saddle and Woha'li's belongings. Woha'li had gone on alone, and left no sign where he was going.
The flood survivors were a dismal lot, battered and drenched. Several had injuries, but none appearedto be dying just yet.
“We tried to get out of the water at Outpost,” one of the men—a dark-bearded beanpole named Iverson—toldhim. “They came out with lanterns, and threw ropes to us, but we were ... just going too fast. All we could do was hang on.”
“You were crazy to be in that riverbed when you could see it was storming in the foothills,” Falcon said. He dipped his head for a moment, rememberingsomething Woha'li had said to him the day before.
“Hade'ne-a equone unegadihi,
” he muttered.
Iverson blinked. “What?”
“It's Cherokee.” Falcon shrugged. “It means something like, ‘that's how the river kills crazy white people.' ”
 
Morning had passed into evening by the time FalconMacCallister had the refugees tended and secure.Some of the injured rested in the shelter of the cut bank where Falcon and Woha'li had camped the night before, all the rest on the caprock shelf above.
They were a pitiful lot, cold, hungry, and exhausted.One of the men had cracked ribs, and he coughed up blood each time he awoke.
Falcon helped them as much as he could. He bound some of their wounds, set a broken arm, shared his little stock of foods, and saw to the setting of signals—a bright-colored blanket to wave and a ready bonfire for the night. He helped them bury the dead from the raft. Then he saddled Diablo and rode out, southward into the breaks.
He was gone for an hour and came back with a dressed-out mule deer and two antelope. He rode up to the refugees' fire and dropped the meat, then unsaddled Diablo and turned him out to graze. It was too late to travel, and they still needed help. He would stay for the night.
“The water should begin dropping by morning,” he told them. “There'll be people coming down from Outpost when they can, I guess.”
“They won't come,” one of the miners said glumly. “Why would they? They probably think we're all dead by now.”
“They'll come,” Falcon said.
By first light of dawn he rode west, upstream along the high south ridge. It was three hours' ride to the breaks across from Black Mesa, and it took another hour of signaling across the flooded river before they understood what he wanted. When he saw ridersheading east from Outpost he fired two shots into the air, mounted, and headed east again.
It was past noon when he returned to the survivors'camp. “They're coming from Outpost,” he told them. “They'll be on that ridge over there in an hour, and they'll cross when they can. One of them's a gent named Dawson. Tell him MacCallister said to help you. Tell him I'll make it worth his while, if he wants to look me up.”
Seeing nothing more that he could do there, FalconMacCallister rode away, not looking back. He set his course east along the south rim of the Cimarron canyon, with the quartering sun and the crisp wind at his back. He paused only briefly at the cove where the two ex-cowboys—Tad and Pete—had stopped, then went on. Once he saw faint impressionsthat might have been the prints of Woha'li's dun, but only briefly. The Indian boy had chosen to go his own way, and Falcon couldn't fault him for that. The kid was hardly more than a lanky child, but who was to say when a boy became a man?
The thought brought back memories of his father. Jamie Ian MacCallister had been a man at Woha'li's age. Raised by Shawnee Indians, he had learned the warrior's way and learned it early.
Jamie Ian MacCallister had become practically a legend—aman feared by many, loved by some, and respectedby all who ever knew him. But to Falcon, the living legend had been, simply, Pa. Pa might have said that a boy becomes a man when he chose to.
And Pa had said some things about the Cherokee. To the Shawnee, they were “the ones who came before”or “those who were always here.” In Kentucky, the two peoples had fought for centuries, and they knew each other very well. “Spirit people,” the Shawnee called the Cherokee. The Shawnee were masters of camouflage, yet a Cherokee warrior, they said, could disappear—even from Shawnee eyes. Disappear... then strike with deadly force.
Woha'li was hardly a Cherokee warrior. The kid was only a cub. But then, a boy became a man when he chose to.
“Donada‘go-hui,
Woha'li,” Falcon said. “Good-bye. Take care of yourself.”
 
He found where the wagon party had camped, up on the crest above the river's bend, but the trail was cold now and he lost it a few miles east, above the breaks where stony gray-red clay defied tracks, and drift sand shifted with each breeze as it dried from the last night's rain.
There were still only four men in the bunch. He knew that two had broken off, but had no idea where they had gone. He could only speculate that they were off on some errand, and might rejoin their buddies later.
He hoped they would. The images of that desolate gully up in the foothill slopes, and what he had found there, haunted him. Like an old scar, the memories of his beloved wife lived in him. Now these newer images were a torment, reopening the old wound, renewing the pain of it.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. Those six men ... those brutal men! Somebody had something they wanted, so they took it.
The forlorn silence of that gully haunted Falcon. Five people had been murdered there—two men killed outright, three women raped and brutalized, then finally killed. And two of those had been young girls!
Six men had murdered those people, and six men should answer for that. Falcon didn't intend to settle for four. The constant ache of Marie's memory, he knew, was partly because he'd never had a chance to avenge her. Her killers were dead now, but Falcon had had no part in their deaths.
He felt a need to somehow atone—to set things right—and that need drove him as he rode the lawlessland, heading east.
A dozen miles east of the Cimarron's bend, he made night camp beside a little stream and shook out his soogans under a deepening sky where stars were coming out.
He had lost the trail of the overland wagon somewhereback, and had not found it again. But he knew the direction they were going, and he knew what was there. Somewhere ahead, in the prairies of the neutral strip called No Man's Land, was a tallgrass region known as the Haymeadows. And somewhere in that region was a place called Wolf Creek.
A lot of people seemed to be heading for Wolf Creek. If there was a spread being built there, as Dawson said, there'd be a settlement. And a settlementwould be a good place to look for the killers he was hunting.

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