Here by the Bloods (17 page)

“Sniper!” The cigarette flies from Delmer's lips as he yells out the warning. I dive for safety behind the sandstone obelisk, the sniper's bullets pinging off the rocks above me. I roll onto my belly and peer out around the edge. Far up the hill, a hundred yards at least, two granite slabs lean against each other, forming a natural stone shelter that serves the sniper as an elevated fortress from which to rain down his lethal fire. I take aim at the sliver of dead space between the two stones and squeeze off a round. The wind takes it right, judging by the wisp of dust that puffs off the granite.

Delmer spits a volley from the Gatling but quickly cuts it short. “He's out of range,” he says, shaking his head.

Two of the Snowman's men appear out of nowhere, sprung from their hiding places by the ray of hope shining off the barrel of their sharpshooting kinsman. The captain's Winchester rifle, with its stubby barrel meant for close-up work, chokes empty, confirming its uselessness.

The first man rushes Ahiga, who finds himself out in the open, a juicy target for the sniper. The unseen rifle pops again, narrowly missing Ahiga as he crouches to accept the impact of the charging desperado. The Navajo locks the man's arm behind his back and, spinning him around, presents him toward the slope as the rifleman unleashes a round meant for Ahiga himself. The bullet catches the bandit square in the chest. Ahiga tosses the dead outlaw aside and reaches out to grab the second man as he passes. The bandit slips through his arms and runs straight for Delmer.

Swiveling the gun hurriedly, Delmer sprays a hail of bullets into the air, but the man drops low, beneath the lip of the boulder, and then springs up and over the barrier. Delmer lifts the gun, wielding it like a shotgun—a last and desperate measure for any crank man. The attacker flies feetfirst at him, kicking the growling crank gun from Delmer's grasp. It skitters across the ground, abruptly silenced. The kick sends Delmer onto his back. He fumbles for his knife, but the outlaw is quicker to draw his own. Delmer throws both his arms onto the man's wrist, straining to slow a blade that works gainfully toward his heart. His muscles will give out before his grit. He does not have long.

“I need a rifle,” I say, calling behind me. Bix squats behind a scrubby thatch of bramble that would not stop a sunbeam, much less a pulverizing slug from a bolt-action thirty.

“I'll come to you,” Bix says, racing toward me. He holds two rifles, one his own, the other newly acquired from his kill. He closes the distance, the relief visible on his face as he nears to within ten yards. Another pop rings out and his elation shatters. He collapses into me, clutching his side. The blood puddles through his fingers. I pull him behind the sandstone and his eyes start to glaze. “Shit, Harlan,” he says, the vigor fading from his voice. “I thought we had this one.”

“Stay with me, Lieutenant.” But then his eyes take on the death stare and he slackens.

“Harlan!
Harlan
!” Delmer lies on his back, the attacker straddling his chest. The man plunges the knife down, hacking his way through Delmer's flailing, blood-streaked arms. I draw the Colt and aim at the man's head. Delmer finds a fistful of sand and hurls it into his eyes. The bandit rolls off him, blinded. I fire into the rocks, nearly killing Delmer as he bolts upright. Delmer flips over and tries to stand. His assailant wipes the sand from his eyes and turns, with vengeful urgency, toward Delmer, the red-stained bowie knife jutting from his cocked arm.
Pop!
The bullet zings past my ear and I duck back behind the sandstone.

“Shoot him. Shoot him!” cries Delmer, scampering on all fours away from the attack. The man lunges for him, bringing the knife down just as Delmer takes an evasive dive. But the blade connects, awkwardly—an unclean blow. Delmer howls. “Please, God. No!” He kicks at his killer, slowing the man for a brief moment. Then the outlaw raises the knife for the decisive thrust. I take aim, but once again Delmer springs into my line of fire.

“Move, Delmer!” I shout. In his confusion, my words go unheeded, as if, in that moment, Delmer has chosen to stop fighting. But then, in a blur of motion, salvation comes to him from a most unlikely source. Ahiga. The great warrior hurdles the barrier, ax held high. With a single, devastating blow, the Navajo swings the heavy, steel blade into the neck of Delmer's tormentor with such force that the head separates from the torso and careens into the rocks with a squishy thud. I can only watch, awestruck.

“Thank you,” Delmer mutters, clutching the lower part of his rib cage. “Oh, God. Thank you.” Ahiga looks toward him, then to the crank gun smoldering in the dirt, then back to the dying Pinkerton. A fresh rage overtakes him. He brings up the ax and takes a menacing step in Delmer's direction.

“You kill my brothers with your fire-gun! You die!”

“No!” Delmer says, raising a futile arm in defense. Ahiga hefts the blade high. I spring from my perch, ignoring the sniper.

“Stop!” I shout. I think I hear the rifle pop, I cannot say for certain, but I land on my knees at the feet of Ahiga. For the third time Ahiga holds my fate in his hands. “It was an accident. I swear to it.” He considers me for a long moment and then lets his arms drop. The ax bounces harmlessly to the ground. “Get your head down!”

Pop! Ahiga snaps into a crouch, startled. The sniper shoots again. Pop! The bullet dings off the rocks behind us and ricochets into the dirt next to Delmer, close enough to hear the whiz of lead.

“Shit,” Delmer cries, slithering tighter against the rock, “he's homing in.” Ahiga closes tight against the boulder and then rises up, firing the Spencer four times. I listen for the impact on the other end and when it does not come I know he is wasting precious bullets while the sniper rapidly solves the puzzle of our stony fortress.
Pop—ching!

A gasp escapes from the ground below me, followed by a sizzling inhalation of air through teeth. I look down and see Delmer pawing at his neck. Blood squirts from beneath his hand, steaming in the cold air. A pool of scarlet liquid turns black against the dusty ground.

I spin toward Ahiga, brimming with anger. “Give me my goddamn Spencer!”

The Dineh hesitates but tosses me the rifle. I flop straight to my belly and slide silently around the far end of the boulder, the Spencer cocked and poised for a quick release. Half a breath finds its way out of my lungs as the sights come into focus. Beyond the little metal tabs, the stone shelter is a muddled blur, but in the center of it, I come to rest on a dark streak of dead space. The trigger folds at my touch, followed by a familiar, explosive
snap!
Something flutters behind the stone slabs, then falls from view. “I got him.”

 

 

I turn back to the others and see Delmer flat on his back, sucking in slow, shallow breaths that puff, gray and steaming, against the first flakes of a gentle snow. His left hand stays pressed up to his neck, coated with sticky redness, but in his right—tucked between his trembling, bloodstained fingers—is a folded bit of yellow paper. “Get this . . . to my wife.” Kneeling down to him, I take the letter and put it in my pocket. There is nothing else I can do for him.

“I will.”

“Bet you never thought old Delmer'd be the last white man standing,” he says, allowing a smile to come to his lips.

“You are right about that,” I say.

Delmer blinks a few times, staring straight through me, and then he stops fighting. The life goes out of him quick. Ahiga falls in next to me, eyeing Delmer with some curiosity. “Little man. Big gun.”

“Yeah.”

 

 

We pause a moment, Ahiga and I, and then, without another word, walk around the boulder and survey the carnage. Bodies lie strewn about the canyon in every imaginable state of contortion and dismemberment. A handful of Dineh pick through the remains, jabbing the occasional spear into the heart of a trouser-wearer for good measure. But all the white men—Pinkerton and outlaw—are dead.

Ahiga moves out ahead of me, pacing himself, as if the business of collecting scalps is more chore than trophy. I methodically check the faces, my mind pulling from memory those eyes that stared down at me over a peacock-blue mascada in that orbiting pageant outside the jail.

Before long I am halfway up the slope. I see the chief, atop his pony, cresting the lip of the ridge. The young scout is with him. Something about that boy's presence eases the weight of what has happened today. The chief held him back and I am glad for it. The chief gazes skyward, his thin reedy voice choked with grief, his arms outstretched in supplication, and offers a lilting prayer to the Spirits. A good dozen of his men lie dead in the canyon.

I feel Ahiga beside me. “He is not here,” I say. “The Snowman.”

“Bandit chief, no.” Ahiga says.

Flipping the Spencer around, butt first, I extend the weapon toward Ahiga. I cannot say the Dineh have much need for the White Man's laws of ownership. Ahiga is no different. What he steals is his. But he dismisses the offering with a wave of his hands.

“Gun, part of you,” he says. Then he holds up his weathered ax. “This, part of me.”

I nod in gratitude and find my thoughts settling back onto the chief and the Snowman. Both men sent their soldiers forth to fight for them by proxy. It is not cowardice. It is survival of the species.

 

 

Ahiga taps my arm and grunts—his preferred way of addressing me. Down below us, a figure crawls, belly-down, across the canyon floor. Making slow, labored progress, he leaves in his wake a blood-streaked trail from the stone shelter to the rocky berm where he now finds himself. The sniper. He wears a dark brown suit that I recognize. Not two days ago, I sat across from it at the Jewel. As we approach, he gives up on his escape and rolls over, sizing up both of us with a glazy stare.

“Which one of you shot me?” he asks.

“I did.”

“Hell of a shot.”

I step up to him and push his hat back off his face with the tip of the Spencer.

“Your name is Jessup,” I say. “The Kansan.”

He tries to laugh, but in his weakened state there is no sand to his breath. “I've gone by a lot of names in my day. I guess that would be one of them.” He is dying quick and I do not have much time.

“Where is LaForge?”

“Wish I knew. Can't help you.”

I drive the rifle's muzzle into the lower part of his abdomen where the bullet caught him. A scream bleats from him—he sounds like a castrated lamb. “Listen to me,” I say, gesturing to Ahiga, who lowers the ax from his shoulder. “This fella here is going to cut your tongue out and feed it to you.” The Kansan's face, already ashen from loss of blood, goes ghostly white, even against the ground where the snow has started to take hold.

“Don't let him do that. Please, we're not savages, are we?”

“Tell me where the meet-up is and he will kill you quick.”

The Kansan's eyes flip from me to Ahiga and back to me again. A lone tear leaks down his cheek and into the thin blanket of fresh powder. “The salt flats. Hour after sundown. If he finds out I told you, he'll hunt down my wife and young 'uns. Don't tell him it was me . . . tell him . . . tell him it was one of the old-timers.”

“All right,” I say. I turn to Ahiga and nod him forward. “Keep his suit clean.”

The Snowmen had hidden their horses, nearly twenty in all, far down in the adjoining ravine, guarded by a single, broad-shouldered bandit with a ten-gauge shotgun and a Union carbine rifle. The Dineh chief shot him from the top of the ridge as the battle raged in the canyon. He was the silver-hair's lone kill today.

The horses, save for a pair of sturdy pack mules, became the prize of the Dineh. But the saddlebags that hung on them, brimming with the coin and bullion of the legendary three-town spree—all the loot itself, every penny of it—rides with me. All in all, it is a fair divvy, as the Navajo, even at their most mercantile, would rather barter in livestock than the White Man's silly trading-paper and precious metals.

As an added bonus, I granted the chief and his men the bulk of
our
horses, which had weathered the thundering skirmish from a concealed bluff just below the canyon's uppermost ridge. The chief, in return, left me with enough sackcloth to wrap up what bodies and body parts could be salvaged from the killing grounds. He even had his men fashion me a travois to transport them back to town. I am glad that Delmer and Bix and the brothers will get proper burials. The kin of the others will have to be content with closed caskets and memorials.

 

 

The sled drags heavily down the mountains—twice I have to dismount and lift it over some hindrance or another. Storm, still reeling from the echoes of war, squawks more mightily than the mules that carry the load. I rub his neck and remind him of the warm blanket and fresh hay that await him when this is over, but the stallion still makes sure his displeasure is noted.

We reach the salt flats some time after four, although the hour proves tough to discern. The sky and earth meld seamlessly in a wash of sunless gray that obscures the horizon behind a squall of thickening snow. It will cover our tracks, and that is good.

The Kansan's woolly brown suit scratches at my skin, showing its cards—it is a costume unsuitable for everyday riding. But at least it is warm and fights off the biting cold that sneaks through my topcoat.

Stretching for miles, the barren sweep of basalt and sand offers little in the way of cover. Many bighorn, disoriented or wounded from imperfect rifle shots, have stumbled their way down the mountains and into this nothingness. With nowhere to go, those summer hunts ended quick.

For all its featureless expanse, I knew precisely where the Kansan meant when he confessed the name of the place. At the north end of the salt flats, a strange circle of sandstone formations juts improbably from the ground. The effect, when standing inside the structure, is like being in a sort of amphitheater, the desert zephyrs' whistling through the stone towers serving as applause. It is a perfect meeting spot, obfuscated from passing horse or rail rider and remote enough to engender the curiosity of only the most determined tracker.

Daylight drips hurriedly through winter's bony fingers. If I work fast, I have just enough time to settle the animals and scrounge up fuel for a fire, but the labor is a blessing—anything to take my mind off the day's carnage and the searing, leaden pull of a shattered heart.