Ambush (10 page)

Loring wrenched off his black hat and mopped forehead and hair with his handkerchief, and Ward's puzzled glance lingered on the man a moment before he turned away. There was something here that he did not understand. Second lieutenants like Linus were notoriously eager for action, and were most often denied the opportunity in favor of the senior officers. Loring, in command, had quizzed his guide until he had a judgment from him of action; and then, instead of relegating his junior officer to the drudging job of escort and accepting the chance for action himself, he had declined. Declined? Ward wasn't sure. Either it was an act of generosity or a touch of cowardice, and Ward doubted the latter.

Sergeant Mack pulled out seven men from the detail, saw they had full canteens, and Loring got the column under way immediately, again driving for the shade of Credit Canyon, where they would rest, and leaving a cloud of bitter dust hanging in his rear.

Linus motioned Sergeant Mack to him now, and then said to Ward, “I don't propose anything except to overtake that band. What's the best way to do it?”

Ward told him of the three main ridges of Bailey's Peak on the eastern side that reached out like the tentacles of a starfish; obviously, the band was headed up the middle valley—Calendar Canyon—and unless alarmed would keep to the known trail.

“Then we try to overtake them?” Linus asked, gloomily. “Our horses have been on the trail around fifteen hours already.”

“There's another choice,” Ward said. “There's a seep at the head of Calendar Canyon. It's not good water, but it's drinkable. It's possible they'll camp there. You could take a chance on it and aim for that.”

“When'll we reach it?”

“After dark.”

Linus was silent a long moment, weighing these considerations, and Sergeant Mack regarded him with a deep attention. The choice was plain; either Lieutenant Delaney could drive his men and their mounts with the promise that, dead spent, they would find a fight before dark, or he could take the saving, cautious other way which promised nothing and might be fruitless. It was a hard choice for a young lieutenant spoiling for a fight, but there was an iron judgment in Mack's expression.

Linus said then, “We'll play it safe. We'll aim for the seep.”

Ward saw Mack nod imperceptibly and a ghost of a smile touch his lips before he turned away to the waiting troopers.

The afternoon was pure hell. Ward moved the detail two ridges to the east, and after that it was a slogging, steaming climb whose speed was gauged by the weariness of their mounts and the roughness of the crosscut canyons, whose walls caromed off the stifling heat.

They rested once and pushed on, with Linus' promise that at sundown they would take a longer rest. They were still in rough country, but the canyons were shallower and occasional stunted cedars were struggling for footholds in the pockets of stony soil. In the close canyons the rank smell of horse and man sweat was almost a stain in the air, and the troopers, faces gray with dust and eyes puffed, were beat into silence by the heat.

With lowering darkness came a relief from the heat, and Ward, while he could still see, climbed a ridge and took his bearings, afterward returning to swing the column on a more westerly course. The bulk of Bailey's Peak, even in the growing darkness, filled a black and ominous half of the northern sky.

Another hour of darkness passed, broken only by the sullen curses of the men or the stumbling racket of a tired horse, before Ward halted. Linus, pulling abreast him, quietly halted the troop.

“In the valley behind that next ridge,” Ward said. He would have known without landmarks, for his horse, smelling water, lifted its head restively.

He swung stiffly from the saddle and said, “Take a rest. I'll have a look,” and disappeared swiftly into the darkness.

The lift of the rocky slope brought an aching strain to his legs. He climbed swiftly, silently, once feeling his moccasin sole graze the thorns of prickly pear. At the top of the ridge he bellied down to crawl more slowly, feeling his senses sharpen, and then he halted.

Below him in a shallow valley far less deep than the one he had left was a dying fire. He studied the ground surrounding it, and presently made out several scattered forms sleeping. Counting them and allowing for a doubtful, there were seven. The seep welled from the base of the ridge he was on, and was therefore invisible.

While he watched, one of the figures stirred and rose. It was an old man, and he moved off up canyon. Ward listened and heard him change the positions of the horses picketed on the sparse grass up canyon. When he returned and lay down again, Ward pulled back off the ridge and returned to the detail.

He and Linus and Mack discussed the camp; it was agreed that an attack from up canyon would alarm the horses and wake the camp, while an attack from down canyon would drive the band to their horses. Linus chose the ridge for the attack, and, after counting off horse-holders and ordering the removal of spurs, Linus called the detail around him.

“There'll be women and children down there. Don't shoot them. Bucks are fair game if they fight, but remember, we want prisoners. We'll form a skirmish line this side of the ridge and go over quietly. You'll wait for my spoken command to fire. Ward and Sergeant Mack will be farthest right to cut off any retreat to the horses. No talk. Signal to deploy will be given by the man ahead of you touching you: you'll touch the man behind. No talking.”

They presently reached the ridge and started up it single file, Ward in the lead. There was whispered cursing occasionally, but the climb was reasonably silent. Just below the ridge, the troopers deployed in a skirmish line, and the signal was given to advance.

They achieved the ride and were a third of the way down it when a horse up canyon nickered. It brought the old man to his feet yelling, and the whole camp seemed to boil up.

“Charge!” Linus called, and it was inevitable that some trooper should mistake the command and fire. The whole skirmish line was in a pell-mell run down the slope, and Linus saw the old man call out and streak for the horses. Ward was almost on the canyon floor now, and alone, for Mack had stopped for a bead on the old man. The shot was wild and now Ward hit the canyon floor. The old man, seeing him, was a swerving shadow now, coming at him, and Ward raised his pistol and fired. The old man fell and rolled and was up again with the false fall of a tumbler, his knife glinting dully in the faint light as it raised.

Ward's second shot knocked him flat and he heard Mack's brass voice yelling, “The far slope, the far slope!”

Three crouching figures were zigzagging up the opposite ridge, pausing to snap shots from their carbines at the detail. Now Ward saw Linus lift his pistol and fire. One of the figures slowed, moved, and silently folded against a rock. The others vanished completely. An Apache woman running blindly in front of the troopers who were firing up the slope crashed into Linus and sent him to his knees, but he had presence of mind enough to call, “Mack, head him off for the horses!”

A trooper tackled the fleeing woman and brought her down. A second woman was keening shrilly, and a baby she was holding started to cry. Mack pounded past Ward, picking up another trooper and heading for the horses, and Trooper Ennis started to climb the far slope, thought better of it, sighted on the downed Apache, and fired. The body stirred and was motionless.

It was all over. Linus kicked the fire alight and saw a recumbent figure on the ground beside it. He toed it gently and the figure came out of its blanket into a sitting position. It was an Apache buck past middle age, and he looked proudly at Linus.

Linus, his eyes shining with excitement, said, “You don't like to fight and you don't like to run. Good 'Pache.” He heard Ward approach and turned and said, “Is he sick?” and did not wait for an answer as he wheeled away to look at the other prisoners. Troopers were pushing a woman and her baby toward the fire. An old woman followed her. A pair of troopers were arguing whether there were two or three men who got away, and decided it was two, while Linus was counting his men.

“Grady and Bord!” Linus called. “Get the horse-holders!”

Sergeant Mack and Baltizar came back now each leading only two Apache ponies and Mack said dolefully, “We was too late, Lieutenant. Two are gone.”

Linus ordered the horses picketed closely, put out guards, and then turned to the captives, while the remaining troopers threw themselves on the ground to talk over the fight.

Back up the canyon came the call of an owl, and it was answered immediately from the ridge to the west. Ward saw the Apache buck turn his head and listen, his face inscrutable.

Linus heard it too, and he said, “Well, they'll get word to Diablito. How much time have we got?”

“We can rest an hour here,” Ward said.

Linus nodded to the buck. “Open up on him. Ask him why he wouldn't fight.”

Ward did and got the reply that he was sick, had nothing against the white man, and that he had been brought here against his will. As the Apache talked, Ward looked at fie Apache woman, no more than a girl, sitting off by herself with her baby. He thought,
She's the one
, and presently left the buck and went over and kicked the fire into brightness.

The Apache girl stared at him sullenly, her eyes bright and bitter and secret. She was not afraid, Ward knew; the reservation life had taught them what to expect of the Army in the way of treatment. There was a way to go about this, though, and he said in the slush-mouthed Apache tongue, “The sick man looks part Mexican.”

“His mother was,” the girl answered. “He is my father.” Linus, listening, regarded Ward expectantly, but Ward spoke to the girl again, not approaching her, trying to make the conversation casual and offhand. “Were all these men sick, your father, the two who got away, and the two dead?”

“Our horses were no good.”

Ward was silent a moment, wondering if this was the time to take the chance on the question that had been haunting him since noon. He decided it was, and he asked, “Were they angry that a woman went ahead with the warriors, while they had to watch the women and babies?”

“Yes. They could do nothing, because the woman was part of Sal Juan's band, and they were not.”

A cautious elation touched Ward; his guess that he had mentioned to none, not even to Linus, was verified. He said now, “How is the white woman looking? It is different than what she knew before.”

“They told me at first she was proud,” the girl said. “Now she works hard.”

Ward looked down at the fire, his face immobile. “Has she been taken as a wife?”

“No. She is too strange, they say.”

Linus' patience broke and he asked, “What's she saying, man?”

“She said Mary Carylyle was in the band that went on ahead, that she's well and not married.

Linus whistled in exclamation and looked thoughtfully at Ward. “You knew that, didn't you? That's why you offered to come!”

Ward nodded, and Linus grinned, rising. “Next time, maybe we'll make it.”

The horse-holders came in now and Linus gave orders for an hour's rest, the sentries to be relieved in half an hour. The Apaches moved together around the fire, and the troopers, dog tired, scraped hollows in the ground for their hips and shoulders and slept blanketless.

The soft talk of the Apaches came to Ward as he sprawled tiredly on the ground and pulled his blanket around him, letting the ache of weariness diffuse through him. Linus rolled up close by and Ward, thinking of the day and its fortunes, knew that Linus had done well. He would make a good officer, Ward knew—an officer whose men would unashamedly love him.

Linus' voice, soft and hesitant, broke in on his thoughts. “You awake?”

“Yes.”

Linus didn't speak for a moment, and then he said, “About what Riordan said before you hit him.” He paused. “I love his wife. I think he must have guessed it.”

Ward said nothing, waiting, wondering.

“She's been true to him, though, because she's that kind. I'd steal her if I could, God help me, but she won't have it.” He added then, “Thanks for pulling Loring off my neck.”

Ward said, “Sure. But what are you going to do about it, Linus?”

“I'm going to pretend I can forget it. She is too.”

There was, Ward knew, nothing more to say. He understood in one swift instant the bitter hopelessness of the man beside him. The rigid code of the conduct that the Army had fashioned for its own had ordered the cleavage between enlisted man and officer and between their women. There was no chance even for a man's passion and recklessness to bridge that chasm. It was there, implacable and absolute.

The departure from the spring an hour later was swift and wordless. The troopers were drugged with their small taste of sleep, but they knew the urgency of leaving here soon. Under cover of darkness, they were safe from attack, but by dawn if they remained they would be trapped, out-numbered and annihilated by reinforcements from Diablito's band. The captives rode in the middle of the detail, a trooper on each flank, but they showed no disposition to bolt.

Ward cut immediately for the next ridge to the east, crossed it, picked up their old trail, left it, returned to it, and left it again, always moving eastward. There was, he knew, no faint hope that he could cover his trail even at night, since an Apache tracker could both feel the trail in the dark and smell the dust of the detail, but he could confuse them as to his intent so that they could not circle him in the darkness and ambush him on the trail at dawn.

At first daylight, they were in more open country, and Linus put out flankers, and presently they picked up the Craig road far to the east of where they had left it. In full daylight, behind a screening ridge on which a lookout was posted, they ate a cold breakfast and went on, each mile diminishing the chance of Diablito's retaliation.