Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) (44 page)

Little Fox turned in his saddle to watch Quanah’s people starting up the narrow, twisting path out of the canyon as the wet wind blew cold.
The
Comanchero,
Pedro, is due here any time. He will bring more guns, more powder to renew our fight. Stay only a few more days. . . .”

“No,” Quanah said with determination. “Even if we get more guns, we haven’t enough warriors to carry them against the thousands of Bluecoats coming toward us from all directions.”

“But the soldiers will never find us in this canyon.” Little Fox fingered the collar of the Turkey-red buffalo hunter’s shirt he wore. “We can hide out here forever and keep raiding with the soldiers always wondering where we are going. This canyon is a haven to our people.”

“The haven can easily become a trap.” Quanah pulled the buffalo robe closer around his shoulders. “Sooner or later, the soldiers will track the braves here. . . .”

“Never!” Little Fox said.

Quanah shook his head. “My white blood tells me to leave this place, take my people out of this canyon.”

“And what will you do then?”

“We will enjoy whatever time we have left out on the
Llano Estacado.”
The great leader pulled his buffalo robe closer. “If our time of freedom is running out, we will enjoy whatever time we have left in our own land of the wild, bare plains. Those few days will be more precious to us because we know that soon it will end and we will be crowded onto reservations to be treated like beggars.”

Little Fox looked to the north. “It is an early winter,” he admitted. “You are riding out with a cold rain blowing in. If you must leave, better you should wait until the weather clears, and by then the
Comanchero
—”

“No.” Quanah reined the gray around. “My white blood tells me this is just the kind of weather the great white soldier ’Bad Hand’ Mackenzie would choose for an attack, knowing Indians love to stay close to their camps in wet weather. Do not underestimate that soldier chief. I have fought him before and I know how clever, how relentless he is. Sooner or later, he will find this canyon.”

And with that, he nudged the big gray with his moccasins and joined his people riding out of the Palo Duro in the cold, wet rain.

Colonel Ranald Mackenzie sat his mount in the cold mist and watched his men hold onto the struggling
Comanchero
. “Try again, boys; we need that information.”

“No,
Senor
”
the
Comanchero
gasped, “I—I know nothing.”

“Pedro, you bastard,” Mackenzie swore, looking down at the one-eyed bowlegged Mexican and the group by the wagon, “you damned
Comancheros
have supplied these Indians for a hundred years but you’ll supply no more! I don’t know how you sleep nights with all those tortured, scalped ghosts haunting you.”

The red-faced sergeant looked up at Mackenzie. “Again, sir?”

The slight, spare officer fidgeted nervously, then nodded. He hated this part of it, but he had to know where those war parties were going when they so mysteriously disappeared after their bloody raids and he knew this man could tell them. “Again, Sergeant Murphy.”

Pedro struggled and tried to protest as the soldiers looped a rope around his neck, tied the other end to a propped-up wagon tongue, and lifted him barely off the ground while he struggled and choked. Mackenzie knew that, like many mixed-blooded Comanches, Pedro was terrified of being hanged or choked to death so his soul might be trapped forever in his dead body.

Mackenzie watched a long moment before gesturing with his crippled hand. “That’s enough, boys. Let him down and see if he’s ready to talk yet.”

Pedro was ready to talk now. As Mackenzie leaned on his saddle horn and listened, the
Comanchero
gasped out details of a great canyon lying a little to the north of the cavalry camp. That was all the officer needed. He had the information now to strike a mortal blow against the war parties.

It was still rainy and unseasonably cold as Mackenzie gave his orders. The troopers mounted up, ready to head north into the darkness.

“Sir, what’ll we do with the
Comanchero?”
The sergeant gestured toward the man slumped despondently by the small campfire.

Mackenzie shrugged. “Let him go, Murphy. Sooner or later, the Comanche themselves will get him for giving away their location and it won’t be a pretty death. He knows he’s signed his own death sentence by telling us what we wanted to know.” His lean body ached from the old wounds as he wheeled his horse north. “I hate it that I had to do that to get the information we needed, but there’s lives at stake and we have a duty, Sergeant.”

The sergeant nodded, falling in next to him as the horses rode out. “You did what you had to do, sir; all the men know that and respect you for it. None of us would ride under any other officer, you know that, sir.”

Mackenzie nodded his thanks. He had seven war wounds from both the Civil War and the Indian campaigns, and sometimes they bothered him in bad weather. “I worry about those that ride with Custer. Sooner or later, he’ll get them all killed.”

“He find any gold on that trip into the Black Hills these past few months?”

Mackenzie shrugged, his slight body slumped in the saddle as they rode north. “I don’t know,” he grumbled, “but those Hills are sacred and protected by treaty. He’ll have the Sioux and the northern Cheyenne coming into this Indian war if he doesn’t watch out!”

“I suppose he was under orders,” the red-faced old Irish sergeant said, “just like the rest of us; just doing his duty.”

Duty.
Doing his duty had cost Ranald’s father, Commodore Mackenzie, his career. But that would not stop Ranald from doing his. “We’ll try to take the Indians in that canyon by surprise,” he said, straightening his aching shoulders. “And I’ll send scouts on ahead, find out if it really exists, what the lay of the land is.”

The sergeant looked back at him with frank admiration. “May I say, sir, I wouldn’t trade havin’ served with you for a general’s stars.”

Ranald smiled in spite of himself. “How long we been together, Murphy?”

The Irishman smiled. “You know that as well as I do, sir. The Civil War. I been with you longer than anyone. Remember last year when we went off down to Mexico looking for those renegade Kickapoos, Lipans, and Mescalero Apaches that was raiding back up into Texas?”

Mackenzie grinned in spite of himself, wiping the rain from his face. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget that pair we ran into when we tangled with the Indians.”

Murphy laughed. “Ain’t it the truth, now? She was such a rich, elegant beauty and he was just a tough Texas gunslinger. . . .”

“But handsome,” Mackenzie reminded him, thinking about that unlikely pair. “They sure got themselves in a mess, didn’t they?” He didn’t expect an answer as he shifted his weight in the saddle, remembering how the Indians had carried off that fine Spanish lady. “Bandit from Bandera,” he remembered, “what a lady’s man he was!”

The column rode awhile through the wet darkness in silence. Then a scout galloped up. “Sir, we’ve found that canyon, all right. That
Comanchero
wasn’t lying about it.”

Mackenzie straightened his tired shoulders. “What’s it like?”

The scout scratched his grizzled beard. “Like nothin’ you ever saw, sir. Must be at least a hundred miles long, I reckon, and deep, like a raw wound through those red and pink canyons. You’d never know it was there if you was just lookin’ for it.”

Mackenzie felt the old excitement mount. “No wonder we’ve had such a time winning this Indian war! We’d chase those war parties and they’d just disappear into thin air. Guess they were riding to that canyon. Are there many?”

The scout took off his battered hat and scratched his head. “Only God knows and he ain’t tellin’! Judgin’ from the tepees, I’d say hundreds of every tribe and lots of horses, too. Maybe you’ll want to wait ’til you can get reinforcements, sir. . . .”

“Reinforcements, hell!” Mackenzie said sharply. “That might be the safe thing to do, but in the meantime, we lose precious time! And if a war party spots this column, we’ll lose the advantage of surprise!” He motioned for his officers to ride up.

The bluecoated men reined in, waiting.

Mackenzie considered all the possibilities as he wiped the cold rain from his face with his crippled hand. Command was an awesome duty, but like his father, he would not shirk his responsibility. “We’ll ride all night,” he decided, “try to get into that canyon before dawn; before the Indians discover we’re here.”

He saw the troubled looks his officers exchanged in the darkness. Only the old sergeant seemed to have any confidence in Mackenzie’s decision. The others would rather do the safe thing, wait for reinforcements.

“We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” he snapped. “This is our big chance to finish this war that those damned buffalo hunters started!” He shifted his weight in the saddle, wishing he rode as well as the reckless Custer. “Move the men out!” he ordered. “We’re going to reach that canyon before morning and give those Indians a surprise for breakfast.” He looked at the grizzled scout. “What’s the name of this place we’re riding to?”

“The Palo Duro,” the scout said, “Palo Duro Canyon.”

Mackenzie’s old war wounds were bothering him again in this cold, wet rain. But he would not spare himself any more than he would his men.
Thirty-three years old, he thought, but in this biting cold he felt twice that
. “Make a note for history, men,” he said to his officers. “Palo Duro will go down as the last great Indian battle in Texas!”

But later, as he rode near the canyon’s rim, he wasn’t so sure. In less than a hour, it would be dawn. There were hundred of tepees and grazing horses at the bottom, and it was a long way down. Were John German’s four little daughters in this canyon? If so, did Mackenzie dare attack? All of the army was enraged over the slaughter of that luckless family found scalped by their wagon up in Kansas. The family Bible had let the troopers know there were four younger children who had been carried off.

The officer’s horse stamped its feet and he took a breath of wet September grass, of steaming horsehide.
Horses
. He wondered for a moment if Quanah Parker and his own prized gray horse were down there? Then he shook his head. He had a grudging admiration for the big half-breed chief and he had a feeling Quanah was too smart to get trapped in that canyon.

The cold rain blew in his face as he turned back to his scout. “How do we get in?”

The scout looked troubled. “There may be other trails at the other end we don’t know about. But what we’ve found at this end is a steep trail only wide enough for one horse at a time down the side of the canyon to the bottom.”

Mackenzie rubbed his muttonchop sideburn nervously. “We’ll take it.”

“But, sir,” a young captain protested, “it’ll take an hour to reach the bottom and it’ll be daylight by then! What happens if the Indians spot us? We’ll be helpless strung out along that trail with them picking us off! A fall off that path is enough to kill a man or horse, even if the bullets and arrows don’t get him!”

“I’m in command here, Captain!” he reminded the young man coldly. “Sometimes what they teach you at West Point doesn’t apply out here fighting Indians. If this mission fails, if it’s a disaster, like my father before me, I’ll take the responsibility. Now let’s move!”

But he had severe doubts as he rode down the crooked trail single file, a man riding ahead of him and behind him in the darkness. If they were discovered, the column would be trapped on the narrow ledge, and it must be six or eight hundred feet to the floor of the canyon that the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River had cut through the high plains of the Texas Panhandle.

He shivered in the brisk wind of the early norther. If only the darkness would hold a little longer until he could get his column to the bottom. But even as he thought that, he saw the pale pink glow over the rocky canyon walls to the east, realized sunrise was going to catch the troopers still strung out along the steep canyon wall.