Cherish (2 page)

Southeastern Colorado, 1868

There was nothing quite as distinctive as the scent of
human blood, Race Spencer thought grimly. Warm and slightly sweet with a coppery tang, it put him in mind of his childhood and the stolen pennies he’d often clutched in one grubby fist.

All his life, he’d heard men tell of seeing things so terrible it curled their hair. Race, whose wiry, jet-black locks were as straight as a bullet on a windless day, had always believed those tales to be flapdoodle. Until now. Judging by the prickly feeling under his collar, the short hairs at the nape of his neck were curling as tight as the topknot on a bald-faced calf.

Even his horse Dusty was all het up, withers twitching, ears cocked, freshly shod hooves nervously striking partially buried slabs of rock on the sandy rise. Race leaned forward in the saddle to stroke the buckskin’s muscular neck. Not that he figured on it doing much good. Dusty knew the smell of death, and like any living thing with a lick of sense, the horse had a hankering to make fast tracks.

“Easy, old son,” he murmured to the mount who was also the best trail partner around. “Give me a minute to eyeball this here mess before we decide to hightail it.”

In the arroyo below, a half dozen wagons sat in a loose circle around a lone candelabra cactus. The stretch of sun
baked, yellow clay between the wagons was littered with all manner of possessions and so many dead people Race had trouble counting them in a sweeping glance. All were dressed in black clothing, with large, crimson patches staining the yellow earth under their spread-eagle bodies.

Though a few rays of fading sunlight were still visible over the distant peaks of the Rocky Mountains, Race felt chilled to his marrow. A shudder did a do-si-do up his spine, and his skin went as knurly as a plucked goose.

Over a mile back, he had started catching whiffs of the blood. Knowing it was fresh and most probably human, he should have been braced for the sight that greeted him now. But to say these people had died violently was like saying Methuselah was sort of old. This was a massacre, nothing less, the type of thing Apache warriors might do, only as far as Race could see, there hadn’t been a single scalp taken.

All totaled, Race counted eleven bodies in the rubble, six middling-aged men and five women. Citified folks, he reckoned, lured west by the promise of free land and wide-open spaces. It was disheartening to think that high hopes for a better life had led them to such a sorry pass.

From the looks of things, they’d traveled a far piece, probably clear from St. Louis, a hell of a journey for both man and beast. A fellow lying in the foreground wore boots with patched soles, indicating that he’d walked many a mile, and the canvas on the rattletrap wagons was tattered and sported so many holes, it reminded Race of the punctured Arbuckle can that his biscuit roller, Cookie Grigsley, used as a strainer.

The poor damned fools. What craziness had led them to leave the main wagon train? And after doing that, why in the hell had they ventured off the Santa Fe Trail? He supposed they might have taken a wrong turn. The Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail meandered in a north-westerly direction for quite a spell before it dove south toward New Mexico, and sometimes inexperienced travelers got to thinking they were headed the wrong way. When they tried to correct their course, they often got lost.

He heaved a weary sigh, knowing even as the questions
circled darkly in his mind that he’d come up with no answers. None that made sense, anyhow. After hiring out his gun to Santa Fe Trail wagon masters for ten long years, Race knew that all westward-bound travelers were warned repeatedly that it was dangerous to light out on their own. Unfortunately, in almost every caravan, there were those men whose high opinions of themselves outflanked their common sense. For whatever reason, these folks had broken off from the main group.

It would be their last mistake.

In his thirty years of living, Race had seen more things to turn his stomach than he cared to recollect, but this beat all. Even most of the oxen had been slaughtered, only two of the creatures still standing. Whoever had done this was plumb loco.

The ticklish sensation at the back of Race’s neck suddenly became more pronounced. He scanned the surrounding terrain. He wasn’t alone in this place.

Another man might have pooh-poohed the notion, but Race had learned when he was knee high to a tall grasshopper never to question his hunches. Maybe it was the dash of Apache flowing in his veins, but he had always possessed keen senses. Like his being able to smell blood from well over a mile off. No how, no way could he explain that, yet to him the ability was second nature.

Putting all else from his mind, he pricked his ears to listen, his body motionless, his breathing slowed almost to a stop. What he saw and heard—or in this case, what he didn’t see and hear—was mighty worrisome. On a prairie grassland at this time of evening, the horned larks and prairie chickens usually twittered to beat the band, and small creatures always darted to and fro through the foxtail barley and blue grama grass. Not so in this place. An eerie quiet lay over everything. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath. Not so much as a twig moved in the tall stands of saltbush that dotted the sand hill at the opposite side of the arroyo.

Shifting in the saddle, Race slowly reached back to loosen the strap that secured his Henry in the rifle boot. At close range, his pearl-handled Colts were his weapons
of choice, but they were as useless as teats on a boar hog for long-distance shooting. The two-legged animals responsible for this piece of work wouldn’t be the kind to face him. They’d stay under cover and try to pick him off with their rifles.

Race wanted to kick himself for not bringing a few of his hired hands along. But he really hadn’t anticipated trouble. A half hour or so back, when he’d heard all the gunfire, the shots had been so close together and similar in pitch that he figured it was someone target practicing. He had decided to circle out from his cattle herd to have a look-see only because rapid, evenly spaced gunshots could be a distress signal. Granted, the usual way to signal for help was to fire only three shots, then pause for a spell before shooting again. But who was to say a greenhorn would know that?

Still scouring the opposite hillside, Race could almost feel eyeballs staring back at him. He had a good mind to get the Sam Hill out of there. The poor souls in the camp below were beyond his help, and if he hung around to bury them, he’d be as easy to pick off as a bottle on a post. A smart man would go back to the herd, recruit some men for a burial detail, and return here tomorrow.

But since when had he ever claimed to be smart? The smell of blood would draw predators, and by morning, there wouldn’t be much left of the bodies. There were womenfolk down there amongst the dead, and by the looks of them, they’d suffered shame enough already. He couldn’t just ride off and leave them to become carrion for the coyotes or vultures. There were also the two surviving oxen to consider. Still trapped in the traces, the beasts would wander off before morning in search of water, pulling what was left of a sorry-looking wagon behind them. Sooner or later, a wheel would get hung up, stopping the wagon as surely as if it were hitched to a Mormon brake, and they’d die a slow death. If he turned them loose, at least they’d have a fighting chance.

Race saw a black-tailed prairie dog frozen stock still in front of its burrow, tiny hands held to its mouth like a nervous woman biting her fingernails. Prairie dogs had a
knack for sensing danger. This one’s paralytic terror wasn’t an encouraging sign.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, Race touched his boot heels to Dusty’s flanks. The horse sidestepped and chuffed nervously, reluctant to descend the slope.

“It’s okay, pardner,” Race said in a voice gone oddly thick.

As Race nudged Dusty down the embankment, the muscles across his shoulders snapped taut. If the no-account skunks were out there somewhere, they were taking their own sweet time to say how-de-do.

Even as he scoured the brush, Race kept jerking his gaze back to the ruined wagons. His strongest feeling of a presence seemed to be coming at him from that direction. Could it be that someone was still alive down there? Not likely. Leastwise not anyone in his range of vision. He knew dead when he saw it.

Still, there were six men in the clearing and only five women. That left an odd man out. Maybe the sixth man’s wife had hidden and was now afraid to show herself.

As he drew closer, Race saw that all but one wagon had been nearly dismantled, the tops ripped off the driver seats, attached tool chests and storage bins pried loose from the beds and torn completely apart. Shifting his gaze to the one wagon still intact, he wondered why it hadn’t received the same treatment. Not enough time, maybe? Judging by the way his hair was standing up, Race decided his arrival might have surprised the killers. They could have spotted him in the distance and skedaddled only a few minutes before Race got there.

He scanned the opposite slope for any sign of stirred up dust. At one point along the ridge, the air looked a mite murky, the way it would if a group of men had fled over on horseback. Whirlwinds were common out here, though.

He returned his gaze to the encampment. Going by the havoc wreaked on those wagons, the killers had been searching for something. Only what in blazes might it have been? Folks like these wouldn’t have been carrying cash or valuables. Mixed in with the stuff thrown from
their wagons were farming implements, telling Race that the dead men had probably been clod busters. He had yet to meet a rich clod buster.

Keeping one eye on the hillside, Race guided Dusty to the center of camp. As he swung from the saddle, one of the oxen began to bawl, the forlorn sound slicing through the silence. Glancing down, he saw that the heel of his riding boot was planted on the spine of a small black book with gold lettering. Several other books exactly like it lay scattered around, the covers of a few closed, some open, their ribbon markers and pages fluttering forlornly in a sudden gust of wind. Race couldn’t be sure because he’d never learned to read, but it looked to him as if the sky had clouded up and rained Bibles.

Had these folks been religious zealots? That would explain all the black clothing and why none of the dead men had a weapon on or near his body.
Cheek turners
. Race had run across a few in his day—men who allowed others to spit on them, praising the Lord while they were at it. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never get his lasso tossed over that kind of thinking.

What in tarnation had happened here? Armed with nothing but courage and those little black books, had these poor fools walked out to meet their killers, never lifting a finger to defend themselves? Race had a feeling that was exactly what had happened. No wonder it had sounded as if someone were target practicing. These people hadn’t even tried to hide.

Letting Dusty’s reins dangle free, Race slipped his Henry from the rifle boot, then turned and nearly tripped over a dead woman. Since entering the camp, he’d been trying not to look closely at the bodies, but that became difficult when he was damned near nose-to-nose with one.

Middling-aged and plump, the woman had light blue eyes and gray hair, worn in a braided coronet at the crown of her head. She looked like somebody’s granny. Not exactly the type to drive a man wild with lust. But the torn state of her clothing along with the nasty red marks on her wrists and exposed thighs told a different story. She also had caked blood under her fingernails, a telltale sign
that this particular cheek-turner had fought for her life toward the last.

A trickle of crimson, only now beginning to congeal, ran in a jagged line from the corner of the woman’s lax mouth down the crease of her chin. She hadn’t been dead too long. Thirty minutes, maybe forty. If only he had heard the gunfire sooner, he might have gotten here in time to save her. He switched his rifle to his left hand and tightened his grip over the stock, his fingertips pressing hard against cool gunmetal. A choking sensation grabbed hold of his throat as he bent to close her sightless eyes and straighten her torn clothing.
Too little, too late
. But it made him feel better to restore what little he could of her dignity.

What kind of animals did things like this? Race guessed he was fixing to find out. If he didn’t get shot in the back while digging these graves, he would have to go after them. He couldn’t let crimes like this go unpunished. Not if he hoped to sleep at night.

A fatalistic calm settled over him. The long and short of it was, a man had to do what he had to do. Race’s conscience wouldn’t let him leave, and if he ended up dead for his trouble—well, maybe it was meant to be. Besides, he could just as easily get shot in the back trying to ride away.

That being the case, he set his uneasiness aside, determined to take things as they came. Before disturbing the ground, he searched the area for any clues that might help him track the killers later.

Assuming, of course, that he lived to see another sunrise.

The hoofprints he found near the wagons indicated that the group was sixteen strong and riding shod horses. That ruled out Indians and comancheros. Indians rode only barefoot ponies, and a band of comancheros would have left a mishmash of tracks, some of their mounts shod and some not.

Walking slowly, Race circled the area. Then he retraced his path and bent to examine the footprints of the men themselves. They had been wearing low-heeled riding
boots like his own, and the spur cuts were shallow. The ornate Californio spurs preferred by Mexican vaqueros left deeper cuts than these, the shank marks curved and blurred by the drag of instep chains. Plainer, more practical spurs—the kind usually worn by Anglos—had left these marks.

White men had done this. Race had been hoping to find evidence to the contrary, not because the atrocities committed here would have been any less horrible, but because it seemed particularly obscene when men did things like this to members of their own race, not out of hatred or to avenge, but for the sheer joy of killing.