Scalpers (15 page)

“I've never seen a heathen Apache sleep till daylight,” Pusser said, staring as if in disbelief.

“You likely never will again,” Stevens said. As he spoke he checked his rifle, raised its long-distance sights and placed the butt to his shoulder. He looked down the barrel.

Pusser clamped a hand around the rifle chamber, blocking Stevens' aim.

“Wait!” he said. “The hell are you doing?”

“What any natural man would do when a half dozen scalps fall into his lap—I'm skinning them.” He gave Pusser a shove. “Don't ever grab my rifle.”

“What about the Ranger?” said Pusser. “We're supposed to be tracking him.”

“What about him?” said Stevens. “If he shows up I'll skin him too.” He looked Pusser up and down. “Are you getting weak on me? If you want any of this, you best be shooting while I'm shooting. Otherwise I'm keeping the whole bounty to myself.”

“They're too far away,” Pusser said. “Listen to me.” As he spoke he reached around to his side and picked up his rifle. “This far off if any of them gets away, we'll be all morning tracking them down.”

“I'm not letting a chance like this get away from me. I don't expect they'll walk up here and scalp themselves,” said Stevens.

“I say we need to get closer, make sure when we strike, we leave none standing,” Pusser said, getting his fill of Stevens. “I was only trying to prepare us for what could happen.”

Stevens considered it.

“Maybe you're right, we need to get closer,” he said.

“Now you're talking. Let's get down on the trail and hit them head-on. With surprise on our side, they won't stand a chance in hell,” Pusser said. He reached back and drew a big bowie-style knife from its sheath behind his back and gripped it in his hand. “Any luck we'll go back to Bigfoot with six scalps on our saddle horns.”

“Yeah, and the Ranger hung over his saddle,” Stevens said. He gave a sharp grin and scooted back away from the edge of the boulder. “He'll see who knows how to kill these heathen Injuns.”

From the cover of a scrub pine on the high path where he and his horses had spent the night, Sam watched the two scalpers through his outstretched telescope. Farther below them he saw the Lipans rise from their drunken sleep and stagger over to where their horses stood hitched to a rope line. These were the Indians who had passed him in the night. He was sure of it. Looking away from them back to the two mercenaries, he saw the rifles in their hands. He'd watched one of them draw his big scalping knife from its sheath behind his back. When he saw them stand and step toward their horses a few yards away, it was plain to him what they were up to.

All right, it's between them and the Lipans,
he told himself. He collapsed the telescope between his palms and walked to where his two horses stood warming in the early-morning sunlight.

“Good news,” he said, unhitching them, gathering the dun's rein and the barb's lead rope. “Looks like we've got a clear trail toward Ozzie Cord . . . for a while anyway.”

He swung up into the saddle and rode off along the trail in the opposite direction of the Lipans and the scalpers. An hour passed before he heard the gunshots resound high up on the hill line behind him. He didn't bother looking around. Instead he followed
the tracks of the many shod horses he'd followed off the hill trail and down along the edge of the sand flats.

At noon when the sun had turned the sky white and waves of heat danced languid across the desert floor, Sam put the horses in the shade of rock and cactus along the belly of a dry creek bed. Using his upturned sombrero, he watered the animals from a canteen, poured a trickle of water on his neck and wiped a small palm full around on his face. An hour later he was back in the saddle, following the hooves of the same group of riders he'd followed since leaving the burned-out village. Now the hoofprints turned out across the sand flats.

“Hate to do it to you,” he said to the dun and the barb. Then he pulled his bandanna up over the bridge of his nose, tugged his sombrero down and rode on.

Nearing dark he'd left the hot desert wind behind him and moved the animals off the sand flats. Picking up the hoofprints he had lost for only a few minutes in the stir of sand, he followed a calm meandering path at the base of a rocky foothill until the horses grew restless at the scent of water. Seeing that the hoofprints he followed also turned up onto the sloping hillside, he let the horses lead him upward among cactus and brush to the edge of a stone-lined water hole.

“Good work,” he said quietly to the horses as he stepped down from his saddle and let them walk forward and drink their fill.

While the two animals drank, he picked up a
pointed wooden trail sign from the dirt, shook it off and read it in the failing evening light.

Casa Robos. . . .

He looked all around in the grainy darkness and twisted the pointing sign back and forth as if to discern its intent. Then he dropped it back to the dirt and let his eyes follow the hoofprints of the Perros Locos away from the water hole where they too had slaked their thirst.

“Wherever you're headed, I'm right with you,” he said quietly. He took off his sombrero, pitched it to the ground and walked to the water's edge. He took two canteens down from the dun's saddle horn and sank to his knees by the dun's hooves.

As the canteens lay filling, he lowered himself onto his palms and sucked in a mouthful of water, swished it and spat it on the ground beside him. He took another mouthful and swallowed it, feeling the cool wetness surge in his chest. As he started to take another mouthful, he heard a sound in the rocks behind him and swung around, bringing his Colt up from its holster cocked and ready in his wet hand.

“Please,
señor
, don't shoot,” said a gruff, wheezing voice. “I will tell no one what you and your
compañeros
did, I swear to you on the Blessed Virgin!”

Sam saw an old man and woman step out of the
brush where they had been hiding. They held their hands chest high.

With his free hand Sam wiped his lips.

“What is it you saw me do?” he asked.

“Nothing! Nothing,
señor
, like I told you,” the old man replied nervously.

“Take it easy,” Sam said. “I'm not who you think I am. I'm an Arizona Ranger tracking a killer this side of the border.”

“A Ranger?” the old man said with relief. “Then thank God it is you instead of another of the Perros Locos chasing us.”

“Come in closer. Let me see you,” Sam said, looking all around in the darkness. “Why are the Perros Locos chasing you? Where are they?”

“We are from Casa Robos,” said the old man, stepping closer, the old woman right beside him. “I am Miguel Bovier. She is my
esposa
, Josefina—she does not talk so much. We have escaped with our lives, when so many of our people did not.” He lowered a hand enough to cross himself; the old woman did the same.

“One of the Perros Locos pursues us. God forbid what he will do if he catches us.”

Seeing how excited the old man was, Sam gestured toward the water. “Both of you have some water, sit down and rest. Nobody's going to bother you here.”

“
Gracias
, Señor Ranger,” Miguel said. “He is a devil, this one. He chases us so hard we have to leave our cart, our poor donkey behind. He would
already have caught us, except . . . he keeps falling from his horse.”

“Falling from his horse?” Sam said.

“
Sí
, from his
horse
!” the man said as if having a hard time believing it himself. “They come to Casa Robos and drink everything in the cantina. They kill our goats and eat them. They rob all of our stores—chase the women. Then they set fires and leave.”

“How far back is he?” Sam asked, looking out along the dark trail.

“He is not far,” said Miguel. “The last place we see him, he was chasing his horse and cursing it—”

“Shhh . . . hold it,” Sam said, silencing him. They listened toward the faint sound of a horse's hooves clopping on the hard path leading to the water hole. “Get back in the brush,” Sam whispered. He backed away to the dun as the old couple took cover. Not wanting to fire a gun unless he had to, he slipped the Winchester from his dun's saddle boot and moved to the edge of a large rock standing alongside the path the hooves were walking in on.

As the sound of the hooves grew nearer, Sam stepped higher onto the rock and drew back the rifle for a hard jab when the rider came into sight. Yet, when the horse appeared and walked past him toward the beckoning water hole, Sam lowered the rifle, stepped out and looked back along the trail. In the grainy moonlight he saw a huge Mexican staggering forward on foot carrying something in
his hand. Sam could hear him cursing to himself in Spanish.

At the sight of the big Mexican, the mute woman, Josefina, grew terrified and let out a high, tortured shriek before her aged husband could grab her and stop her.

“Ah, so there you are, you little piglets, you,” the Mexican said, staggering in past the rocks where Sam stood ready to deliver a blow with his rifle butt. “You have caused me so much trouble that now I have to kill you!” He drew a big pistol from his holster, and pitched the object he carried onto the ground. Sam recognized it as a broken saddle stirrup.

“Por favor! Por favor, señor!”
Miguel said, holding his wife pressed tight against his side. As he pleaded, the Mexican thought the old man was pleading to him for his life. In reality the old Mexican was asking the Ranger to make his move. Which he did.

“It will do you no good to beg,” the big Mexican said, spreading his feet, getting ready to raise the pistol toward the old couple.

“Hey, over here!” Sam said, moving quickly from the side, getting the Mexican's attention. As the big lumbering man turned to face him, Sam unleashed a hard, stabbing blow with his rifle butt to the man's forehead. The big Mexican dropped back a step; the gun flew from his hand. But then he caught his balance just as the Ranger stepped in and
delivered another blow that sent him sprawling on the ground.

“Oh, Señor Ranger,
gracias, gracias
!” the old Mexican said, still holding his sobbing, frightened wife. “This man would kill us for no reason except that we fled Casa Robos to
keep from
being killed. What is wrong with people like this? Do their souls belong to the devil?”

“Maybe that's it,” the Ranger said, realizing that he himself had no better answer. He stepped over, picked up the big French revolver and stuck it down behind his belt. He reached into the man's boot well and pulled out a long sheathed dagger. He pitched the dagger to the old man.

“Gracias,”
Miguel said, turning his wife loose. He slid the knife from its sheath and examined it. “What—what about his gun,
señor
?” he asked haltingly. “May I have it?”

“In a minute,” Sam said, hearing the Mexican already starting to groan on the ground. Looking down, Sam saw the man shake his large head and try to focus his eyes—eyes that appeared too large and shiny in the moonlight. He started to try to raise himself, but the Ranger clamped a boot down on his chest.

“Lie still, big fellow,” he said, holding his rifle ready in both hands. “I'll give it to you again.”

“Who . . . the hell . . . are you?” the big Mexican said in a thick, deep voice, staring up through eyes that the Ranger could now tell were lit and fueled by cocaine.

“Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack,” Sam said. “Where are the Crazy Dogs headed?”

“Perros Locos . . . ?” the man said as if having to let his mind catch up to him. “I don't know . . . we—we are robbing villages?”

“Yes, that would be my guess too,” Sam said, helping the man's memory a little. “But where are you headed next?”

“Arena Grande?” the Mexican said, still unsure of himself.

“He says they head to
Big Sand
, Señor Ranger,” the elderly Mexican said.

“I heard him,” Sam said. He turned to the elderly couple. “How far back is your mule cart?”

“Three . . . four miles,” the old man estimated.

“You've got a horse, a knife and a gun.” He lifted the French revolver from his waist and held it out to the old man. “Ride back and get your cart. Take your
esposa
and lie low somewhere.”

“You don't take
my
horse!” the big Mexican shouted, making a grab for Sam's leg, pulling himself quickly onto his knees. Sam drew back the big revolver, but before he could swing it he saw the aged man drop down onto the big Mexican's back like a dark spirit. He saw a glint of steel in the moonlight as the big knife moved around quickly and sliced the big Mexican's throat ear to ear.

Sam took a step back as blood spewed. The old man stepped back too, the knife hanging in his hand. The Mexican clasped both hands to his throat; blood gushed between his fingers. He gagged. He fell to
the ground and wallowed and thrashed. Then he appeared to relax. He fell silent and still.

Sam gave the old man a look.

“Is it wrong what I do?” old Miguel asked.

Sam didn't answer. He stood with his rifle in one hand, the French revolver in the other. The dead Mexican's horse had clopped over and stood at the water's edge, drinking side by side with the dun and the speckled barb.

*   *   *

In moments, the Ranger and the old man had dragged the dead Mexican into the brush and stacked a few rocks over his body. They'd finished watering the three horses and mounted and ridden away in the moonlight toward Casa Robos. Josefina sat behind her husband with her hands clasped together around him. The big French revolver stuck up from behind the old man's waist. Two miles down the trail they heard the squeaking of a wooden cart wheel and stopped short for a moment, listening.

“Ah yes, it is my cart,” Miguel said, relieved. He looked at Sam in the moonlight. “A man who is truly a man knows the sound of his own cart,
sí
?”

Sam only nodded. He nudged the dun and led the barb forward until the donkey stopped the cart in the trail facing them. Beside him, the old man and woman stepped down from the dead Mexican's paint horse and hurried to the donkey.

“See? I told you it's my cart,” the old man said.

Sam stepped down from the dun and helped Miguel and Josefina turn the donkey around on the trail and point it in the direction of Casa Robos. As
soon as the cart was righted, the old woman scrambled over its side and took up the donkey's reins. She smiled at her husband and nodded vigorously.

“And now she is happy again,” the old man said, his hand resting on the French revolver in his waist.

Back atop the horses, Sam and the old Mexican rode alongside the woman and the donkey cart. In the distance several thin glowing firelights seemed to rise from the earth and dot the darkness of the domed purple sky.