Stryker's Revenge (2 page)

Time would tell . . . when the bandages were removed.

“I haven’t changed my mind, Colonel,” Stryker said. His voice was a harsh croak, far removed from the usual fine baritone that he had so often used to entertain his fellow officers with selections from Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan’s latest operettas.

He had not lied to Lawson. He hated, with a passion, the silent, brooding desert, its infinite distances, the land and sky scorched to the color of chalk. And there was no honor to be gained fighting Apaches, no medals awarded for killing Stone Age savages.

Without the colonel, he could end up as so many others had done in the frontier army, an aging captain, if he was lucky, with nothing to look forward to but a retirement of genteel poverty eked out in some dusty western town, with stories to tell but no one to listen to them.

As though he’d read the lieutenant’s thoughts, Lawson slapped his hands together and said heartily, “Come now, Major Decker, shall we proceed with the”—he smiled—“unveiling?”

“The Man in the Iron Mask,” Millie whispered. She put a hand to her mouth. “Why did I say that?”

“Understandable, my dear,” Lawson said smoothly. “After all, the only person who has seen Lieutenant Stryker’s handsome features this past two months is Major Decker. A mask indeed, but of cotton, not iron.”

The doctor, a stricken look on his face, leaned over Stryker and whispered into his ear, low enough that only he could hear. “Steve, God help me, I tried my best.”

Stryker swallowed hard, a growing apprehension in him that was but a step away from fear. As Decker began to unroll the bandages, the lieutenant listened into the wind-lashed night, a man afraid of what was to come.

He winced as the cotton gauze ripped away from dried blood, and Decker whispered, “Sorry.”

Stryker stared at the dusty ceiling, which was cob-webbed in the dark corners where the spiders lived. He again felt the spike of panic.

Two months, and in all that time Decker had not let him look into a mirror!

For God’s sake, why not?

Millie’s hands were hot in his own and he felt sweat on her palms. She was breathing unevenly, quiet little gasps that were now coming quicker as the layers of bandages were peeled away.

Outside, in the darkness, the coyotes were talking, and Stryker heard sentries call out to one another. The wind pounded around the eaves of the hospital, as though eager to be let inside and witness what was happening.

Made uneasy by the hunting coyotes and bored with the human activity, the little calico jumped down from the sill and found a sheltered spot behind the wheel of a parked freight wagon. She curled into a ball, nose to tail, but did not sleep.

When she heard the woman’s scream, she jumped to her feet, head lifted, eyes aglow with emerald fire.

“I’m sorry, Steve!” Millie Lawson jumped to her feet. She didn’t look at him again. “I’m so sorry! I can’t. . . . I just can’t—”

She turned and ran to the door, ignoring her father’s call to stop. The girl threw the door open wide, then dashed blindly into the darkness, her sobs drifting behind her like leaves in a wind.

Shocked, his face drained of color, Colonel Abel Lawson pointed an accusing finger at Decker. “Damn you, Major!” he yelled. “Damn you to hell!”

The doctor looked like a man who had just been punched in the gut. “I did my best to piece him together,” he said. There was no defiance in his voice, only weary resignation.

“Then your best wasn’t good enough, was it?” Lawson snapped. “The damned mule doctor could have done better.”

Stryker looked at the two men, then traced his fingertips over his face from forehead to chin. Battling to keep his voice steady, he said quietly, “Major Decker, please bring me a mirror.”

He didn’t look at his reflection or scream until he was alone.

By then, Surgeon Major Decker was already stinking drunk.

Lieutenant Steve Stryker watched Joe Hogg ride toward him at a slow canter. The scout’s head was on a swivel, his eyes constantly scanning the chaparral-covered hills around him.

Hogg was by nature a careful-riding man, but his vigilance put Stryker on edge.

He turned to the soldier at his side, like himself stripped down to long johns, hat and boots against the merciless heat of the day. “Draw carbines and form a skirmish line, Sergeant Hooper.”

Hooper swung his horse away and yelled at the eighteen troopers behind him. “You heard the officer. Draw carbines an’ form a bloody skirmish line.”

The cavalry troopers, tough, hard-bitten runts riding grade horses, drew their Springfields and shook out into a ragged line, leaving one man with the pack mules. Then, like Stryker, they sat their mounts silently and watched Hogg come.

The scout was a narrow wisp of a man who seemed to be formed only of height and width, like a figure on a playing card. He had the thin, hard-boned face of a desert rider and his shabby, trail-worn coat and pants had faded to the color of the desert itself. In a close-up fight, he was good with the heavy revolver that rode his hip, better with the Henry .44-40 booted under his left knee.

Stryker had been told that Hogg had killed eight white men in gunfights, and he believed it. The scout was sudden, dangerous beyond measure, and if there was any softness in him, Stryker hadn’t found it yet.

The lieutenant waited, knowing that Hogg, a taciturn man who didn’t like to be pushed, would speak in his own due time.

“Apaches—a mixed band by the sign,” Hogg said finally. “I found Chiricahua and Mescalero arrows up there.”

“Where are they?”

“Not where they are, Lieutenant, but where they was.” Hogg turned in the saddle and pointed. “Beyond the ridge of the saddleback yonder. Norton and Stewart stage out of Globe. Five men dead and one woman.” The scout’s black eyes sought Stryker’s, deciding not to rein in his tongue. “The woman was young and she was used, rode hard fore an’ aft, afore they cut her throat.”

“An officer’s wife headed for the fort?”

“Could be. But now it don’t matter a hill o’ beans who she was, do it?”

“Damn it, Joe, I thought the Chiricahua were still holed up in the Madres, licking their wounds after the beating they took from the Mexicans in the Tres Castillas last year,” said Stryker.

“I’d say the twenty young bucks who attacked the stage didn’t learn that lesson.” The scout shrugged. “They must have just broke out recent, lookin’ to raise hob in general and avenge the deaths of ol’ Victorio an’ sixty warriors in partic’lar.”

“They’re succeeding.”

The sun was very hot and gulping the still, dry air was like breathing inside a blast furnace. Buzzards were gliding lazily over the saddleback, patiently anticipating the feast spread out below them.

“Where are they headed, Joe?” Stryker asked.

“North, toward the Cabezas. They cut out the stage mules. I’m guessing they’ll camp in the foothills tonight and fill their bellies with mule meat.”

“Then we can catch them?”

“We can. Them bucks don’t even know we’re here. Looks like all of them headed north.”

Stryker took time to roll a cigarette, aware that Hogg’s eyes were still on his face.

He was the only man who looked at him straight. Stryker had grown used to people staring at the tunic buttons on his chest when they spoke to him, unwilling to raise their eyes and confront the horror of his disfigured features. But the scout looked and never flinched.

He’d recently asked Hogg why this was so, and the man had answered only, “Lieutenant, I seen the wounded at Gettysburg, Chickamauga and a dozen other places.”

Stryker lit his smoke, then turned again to Sergeant Hooper, telling him he needed a smart soldier to carry a message to Fort Bowie.

“Beggin’ the lieutenant’s pardon, but I don’t have one o’ them,” Hooper said.

A smile tugged at the corners of Stryker’s mouth, doing nothing to soften the stiff, grotesque mask of his shattered and deeply scarred face.

“Then send me a stupid one,” he said.

“Plenty of those, sir,” the sergeant said. He turned to his left in the saddle and yelled, “Trooper Sullivan. Come ’ere an’ speak to the officer.”

Sullivan, a small man with the look of a belligerent rodent, rode out of line and drew rein in front of Stryker.

“Now mind your manners, Sullivan, or I’ll be ’avin you,” Hooper warned. He wore a ferocious scowl on a countenance as round and red as a penny. The sergeant had been a desert soldier for nearly fifteen years, but, unlike most men, his skin still burned scarlet in the sun and never tanned.

Stryker returned Sullivan’s salute and said, “Ride to Fort Bowie and tell them the Norton and Stewart stage has been attacked. Six dead. No survivors. Ask them to detail a burial party, then lead them here to the saddleback yonder. Tell them I am headed north toward the Cabezas in close pursuit of the hostiles.”

The lieutenant studied the trooper’s face. “Can you remember that?”

Sullivan repeated the message word for word, and Stryker decided the man was not as dumb as Hooper alleged.

“Then get going,” he said. “And good luck.”

After the trooper rode away, cantering to the west in a cloud of yellow dust, Stryker spoke to Hooper again. “Sergeant, Mr. Hogg and I will ride ahead. Follow on with the rest of the patrol and the pack mules.”

 

Lieutenant Stryker sat his horse and studied the scene before him, his mouth working. He’d prepared himself for the worst during his ride to the saddleback, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination.

His eyes met those of Hogg, and the scout grimaced. “Damned Apaches never clean up after themselves, Lieutenant.”

Perhaps it was an attempt at humor. More likely Hogg was reaching out to him in clumsy reassurance, telling him that any normal man would be appalled by what he saw.

One thing Stryker did not need was sympathy. He’d read too much of that in the faces of others over the course of the past few months, not only for his broken face, but for losing his beautiful wife-to-be and promising Army career.

Without a word he swung out of the saddle and stood with the reins in his hands, looking around, forcing himself to swallow every bitter drop of this vile medicine.

The woman, a girl really, was the most noticeable, her body being the only one that had been stripped naked. She was lying spread-eagled on her back, her open blue eyes fixed on the indifferent sky, as though horrified that it thought nothing of how she’d been outraged.

Hogg had said the girl had been used hard, and she had, probably by all twenty of the Apaches. They had not been gentle.

And she’d been pregnant.

Her belly had been cut open, and her unborn son, a small, white, curled thing about six inches long, had been placed at her left breast as though suckling.

An Apache joke.

The scout was at Stryker’s side. His eyes went to the girl, then back to the officer. “Lieutenant, you ever been in Kansas?” he asked.

Stryker shook his head, saying nothing, his eyes still on the woman’s ravaged, bloodstained body.

“Some flat, long-riding country up there. A man on a tall horse can stand in the stirrups an’ pretty much see forever. Into tomorrow, if a feller’s farsighted enough.”

“You say.”

“Uh-huh, I do say. I was only there oncet, back in ’seventy-eight when ol’ Dull Knife an’ his Cheyenne was playing hob from one end o’ the state to t’other. Right pretty country though, Kansas, even in winter.”

“We’ll find something to cover her, Joe,” Stryker said. “Then lay her out alongside the others.”

Hogg looked over at the stagecoach. “The driver and guard are still up on the box—must have been killed in the first volley. The two passengers tried to protect the gal though. See that tall feller lying by the door?”

“I see him.”

“That there is ‘Five-Ace’ Poke Fisher, a gambler out of El Paso, Texas. Ol’ Poke was a fair gunhand, and in his day he killed more’n his share. If you look at him, he was shot maybe four, five times, an’ all his wounds are in the front.”

Hogg shook his head admiringly. “He died hard, did Poke, while a-trying to save the little lady. Who would have figgered ol’ Five-Ace for a hero?”

Stryker turned to Hogg. His eyes in their crushed sockets were as hard as blue steel and his voice was as level as Hogg’s Kansas plains. “Joe, when we catch up with the savages, I want them all dead. I don’t want prisoners that the Army will only slap on the ass and send to San Carlos. If there are women and children with them, I want them dead too, every damned one of them. If I should fall, will you make sure my orders are carried out?”

Suddenly the scout’s eyes were distant, as though he’d mentally put space between himself and his young officer. “Lieutenant, the Apache is a benighted heathen who only knows one way of making war—the way he was taught. He kills his enemies any how he can, then amuses himself by using their wives and daughters. He wasn’t always like that—I mean, way back. The Spanish taught him their way of war, and then the Mexicans and now the white man. Every cruel, senseless thing he does, he’s seen done to his own people many times over, and ten times worse.”

Hogg shook his head. “Lieutenant, hating the Apache is like hating the cougar because of the way he kills a deer.” He waited, then said, “Or you fer your face. Neither way of thinking makes much sense.”

Stryker stood stiff and silent for what seemed an eternity, then said, “I asked you a question, Mr. Hogg. If I fall in the engagement, will you see that my orders concerning the treatment of the Apache hostiles are carried out?”

The scout touched the brim of his hat. “I’ll see that Sergeant Hooper follows your orders, Lieutenant.”

“And you?”

“I hired on as a scout. Nobody said nothing about killing women and children.”

Without another word, Hogg turned on his heel and greeted Hooper, who was leading the troop over the crest of the saddleback. “The lieutenant wants the bodies laid out and covered, Sergeant,” he said. “See what you can find in the luggage to use as shrouds.”