L'Amour Louis - Novel 016 Read online

  "Did you see it again? That flash, I mean?"

  "No."

  "But you think it was somebody? You think someone was over there?"

  "Maybe ... it was sudden, then gone. Might have been the sunlight on a sliding rock, or something."

  "You don't believe that?"

  "No," he replied honestly, "I don't."

  "I am not afraid," Consuelo said, and seated herself at the table. "I can shoot."

  Swante Taggart was still alive. Under a copper sky he rode his horse through a rust and copper land. Through time corroded hills flecked with the green of juniper or the dusty gray of sage he walked the gaunt steeldust, knowing the ache of hunger and the heaviness of nights without sleep.

  At thirty-two, Swante was thankful for the years behind and hopeful for those yet to come, but now he lived, not from day to day, or even from hour to hour, but from minute to minute. That he rode through such a land at such a time was a matter of selection but not of choice. The choice had been made for him by the sudden arrival of Pete Shoyer at Crown King.

  The selection of route was Swante's own, for he knew it well enough to doubt anyone would follow him ... but Shoyer was doing it. Eleven of the posse had turned back when Swante Taggart had ridden into Apache country, but Shoyer was behind him, and there were still men with him, although but few.

  Taggart was out of water, out of food. Somewhere south of him was Globe, but he did not want to go to Globe. And he was at least three hard days' ride from the mining town of Morenci. Three days or even more at the rate of travel he must use, for Geronimo's dust-brown warriors were riding a grudge against the white man, and under cover of Geronimo's activities a dozen small bands had come out to raid and kill.

  No ridge could be crossed without a careful study of the country around, and he must take time to hide his own trail when that was at all possible. A dozen times already he had doubled the changed direction, but so far he had been less than lucky, for Pete Shoyer was still behind him.

  Pete Shoyer was a man-hunter by choice and profession. He had been a scout for the Army, as had Taggart himself, and they had known each other slightly, but without liking. Shoyer had also ridden as a paid gunhand for the big cattle outfits, and lately he had been a Wells Fargo agent and a deputy United States marshal.

  Taggart did not mean to be taken, and Shoyer was notorious for bringing in dead men, but until now Swante Taggart had never fired a shot at a man wearing a badge, and he did not want to begin ... even with Pete Shoyer.

  The Verde River and twenty miles of blistering land lay behind him, but by the route Taggart had taken he had covered more than thirty miles. Leaving the Verde he had taken what he believed was Canyon Creek trail, but it had proved a cul-de-sac north of Lion Mountain.

  When he found a way out of there and reached the bed of Alder Creek, the sand was dry and there was no hint of water, anywhere. When he got down now from the horse he staggered, and for a moment he leaned against the horse before straightening to look around.

  He had drawn up in the partial shade of a thick clump of juniper, and squinting his eyes against the glare, he searched the country before him. Five miles away and three thousand feet lower was Tonto Creek, a faint green line indicating its course. Beyond the valley of the Tonto, the Sierra Anchas were a wall across the sky.

  Taking his time, fighting the weakness brought on by thirst, hunger, and exhaustion, Swante Taggart worked out a course that would take him to the old Apache trail that lay alongside Greenback Mountain and toward the peak of Lookout, which lay beyond.

  To the south, at least twenty miles away, the Four Peaks of the Mazatals bulked dark against the sky. If there was no water in Tonto Creek, he must try for Turkey Spring, and once in the canyons of the Cherry Creek country Shoyer would never find him. He knew that country.

  But he was fooling himself if he believed he would get farther than the Tonto without water. If there was no water there, he would do as well to make a stand there, for he would die anyhow. His horse would go no further than the Tonto .. . if he made it that far. And a man without a horse in this country was a dead man.

  Nothing moved but the wind. His hand carelessly brushed a rock exposed to the sun, and it burned like a red-hot iron. His eyes searched the desert again. He should be moving on, yet he was reluctant to stir, and when at last he started to mount, he stopped, frozen in place.

  Not two hundred yards away an Apache warrior sat on a spotted pony. Swante spoke softly to his horse and waited, holding very still, for to move was to be seen. The Apache started his pony and walked it slowly forward, crossing the very trail Taggart would have taken had he gone forward at once. And had he gone on without stopping, the Apache would now be on his trail, for his tracks would have been seen.

  He heard the movement before he saw them, and when they came up out of the juniper and ocotillo along the slope there were at least forty of them, including children and squaws. No less than seventeen were fighting men.

  Holding his breath, he waited, careful not to look directly at them for fear he might draw their attention. They moved slowly, for with them was a travois with a sick or wounded man upon it. When they had gone by he sat down on a rock in the shade and waited there for what might have been twenty minutes.

  When he did start moving he walked beside the steeldust to lower the silhouette they would make against the sky. No sound disturbed the blazing afternoon. He was sodden with weariness and weaving as he walked. Behind him the led gelding stumbled, and he knew that even the tough mountain horse was nearing the end of its strength. If there was no water in Tonto Creek that would be the end of it ... they could go no further.

  When they had walked what he believed to be a mile, he paused. There was no air stirring below the rim of the hills, and it was stifling. It was, he guessed, more than a hundred and twenty in the shade, if a man could find shade. The green line marking the creek was nearer now, but he could see no gleam of water among the trees.

  His shirt was stiff with caked sweat and dust. He started on, and the horse, after one complaining tug on the reins, followed after. Taggart was hard put to keep his feet. Heat waves shimmered before him, and at times he had difficulty in bringing his eyes to a focus. He was a big man, unusually quick on his feet, and when he started to stumble he knew he was in trouble.

  And then he fell. For a long minute he lay sprawled on the ground. Then he got his palms under him and pushed up, getting to his knees, and then to his feet, where he stood swaying. The green line of the creek was weaving weirdly before him. He had been in trouble before.

  Swante Taggart could remember few times when he had not been in some kind of trouble. Born in a Conestoga wagon on the Sweetwater in Wyoming, during a wagon-train fight with Cheyennes in 1848, he had lived the following twelve years drifting with his parents from one boom mining camp in California to another.

  When his father died his mother took him back to the Middle West, and they arrived in Minnesota to live with relatives, just in time for his mother to be massacred by Little Crow's warriors, along with several hundred others. Young Swante had escaped by hiding under some roots at the edge of a river, and had been found there by Lieutenant Ambrose Freeman when he led his company of Rangers to the relief of Fort Abercrombie.

  A good hand with a rifle and already a man grown, young Swante rode along. After the massacre Swante Taggart rode west hunting the Sioux who had killed his mother, for he had seen them all and knew he would remember them. There had been four in that

  particular group, although there were more outside and around, but it was those four he wanted.

  He killed one of them near the edge of a slough not far from Birch Coulee, and two weeks later he found two of the others together near a bend of the Missouri. He killed one and the other got a bullet into Swante and hung around two days while Swante waited in a buffalo wallow.

  When a troop of cavalry appeared, the Sioux tried to leave, but Swante's first bullet dropped his horse and the second
nailed the Indian as he got up from where he had been thrown when his horse fell.

  A doctor with the Sibley command fixed Swante up, and he returned to Fort Lincoln in an army ambulance. In the years that followed he herded cattle, hunted buffalo, scouted for the Army, and rode shotgun on a stage.

  While he was holding down this last job, a party of Sioux approached the stage north of Hat Creek Station in Wyoming, and one of them was the last of the four who had killed his mother.

  They knew each other, and Swante told the others what he wanted. While the stage waited, Swante fought the warrior with a knife and killed him, and then got back up on the box and the stage rolled on to Deadwood.

  In New Mexico he found a spring with a good flow and two meadows that lay below it. He filed on the land and settled down to fight Apaches and live happily ever after. The Apaches gave him no trouble, but after almost a year of peaceful living the Bennett brothers drove six thousand head of cattle into the area and found the range they wanted ... only Swante Taggart sat right in the middle of it by the biggest spring, and with several hundred acres of sub-irrigated land.

  The three Bennetts and their gunfighting segundo rode over to suggest that Swante move, but Swante was not accepting suggestions. Threats followed and Swante sat tight. He owned two hundred head of cattle and a few horses, and he was contented. He asked only to be left alone. Then there had been a "difficulty."

  Young Jim Bennett decided the time to act was now, and with Rusty Bob Blazer, who had killed three men in Texas, he rode over to move Taggart. The shooting was sudden, offhand, and Jim Bennett and Rusty Bob lay dying on the grass, and the only witnesses were Bennett riders.

  It was a bad time for gun trouble. New Mexico was in a ferment over the activities of young Billy Bonney, who was rousting around in the middle of a shooting war up in Lincoln County. The Bennett brothers had money, cattle, and strong political influence, while Swante Taggart had only a fast horse. A man must use what he has.

  Outlawed by the state for what had been a justifiable killing, Swante Taggart and his fast horse headed west. A pack horse carried what supplies were at hand when the dream ended.

  The stop at Knight's Ranch had been his mistake. Until that time he had avoided trails, but by the time he rode within sight of Knight's he was out of coffee, out of food, and he desperately needed sleep. Until then nobody had any idea what had become of Taggart.

  Two days later when Pete Shoyer came in, returning from delivering a body to the sheriff in Silver City, he heard Taggart was wanted and discovered a man of the description had been at Knight's.

  Crown King had seemed the obvious solution for Taggart. It was a mine, a scattering of other prospect holes, and a few buildings. Scarcely a town, it was off the main trail and offered a job for a man who could use a single-jack and drill. Taggart had learned how to do that in California when he was ten, and he was doing all right until Pete Shoyer rode into town.

  Within minutes, while Shoyer was cutting the dust from his throat in the Crown King saloon, Swante Taggart rode out. He went up Poland Canyon, switched back down Horsethief Canyon, rode through the Bradshaw Mountains, and watered his horse in the cold waters of Agua Fria opposite Squaw Creek Mesa.

  Half a dozen canyons open in the raw side of Squaw Creek Mesa, each seeming to offer a means of escape, but actually the only trail led up the wall and not through the inviting canyons. He believed he had an hour's lead and he might have more, and what hoof-prints the horse might leave in the clear stream bottom would be gone by that time, so Swante Taggart had ridden upstream for two miles and left the water on a ledge of rock. He camped that night close to Shirt-Tail Springs, with Turret Peak looming to the northwest.

  It was here only a few years earlier that Major Randall's soldiers had scaled the fortress-like peak in the night to surprise a band of Apaches in their seemingly invulnerable hiding place.

  That had been several days ago, and now he was here, weaving heavily down the long slope toward Tonto Creek with the heat waves dancing weirdly before him, with cracked lips, a parched throat, and a prayer for water in the Creek. His head ached, throbbing heavily, and the sun blazed in the brassy vault of the sky. The ground was hot beneath his boots.

  The Apache came out of the ground as if born from it, and he came shooting, but even an Apache can be wrong. The mistake killed him. The dust-brown figure leaped, the sunlight caught on his rifle barrel, and Swante Taggart, who had used a fast draw before this, felt the gun buck in his hard palm.

  The mountains tossed the sound like a bouncing ball. Then the sound faded and died, and Swante Taggart stood staring at a dead Indian and knew he had been lucky. There had been no time for thought ... his reaction had been instantaneous, the result of years of practice and awareness of danger. The Apache pony hated the white man's smell and drew back from him.

  There was no water skin on the pony, and Taggart took time only to secure the rifle and ammunition. There were thirty-odd rounds of .44 ammunition, and before this was over he might need it.

  Staggering a little as he straightened up, Swante Taggart glanced around him. How long since the others had gone by? He had come three miles ... nearly four, and they must have gone as far or farther. He gathered the gelding's reins and started on once more, plodding along, his eyes staring into the heat-blurred mystery into which he walked. And then green leaves were brushing his face and with a grunt of longing he burst through the brush into the bed of the Tonto.

  It was dry. Three times before, some years earlier, Swante Taggart had camped beside Tonto Creek or watered his horse there, but now, when he needed it so much there was no water in it. It was twenty miles to Turkey Spring, and through a mind fogged by exhaustion he knew he was not going to make it. Nor was his horse.

  The slight breeze from the south brought no reaction from the steeldust, and had there been water in a pool of the stream bed to the south, Swante knew the horse would have smelled it. If water there was, anywhere near, it must lie to the north. Turning, he plodded along the sandy bed, each step a special effort of will.

  And then he fell again. He did not stumble this time. He seemed to be wading in sand, and each step seemed to take him deeper and deeper, until he fell face down in the sand. For several minutes he lay prone until the nudging of the gelding stirred him to action.

  Slowly, he got to his feet. A faint sound came to him, and he turned his head like a man in sleep, struggling to place the sound. A cottonwood ... leaves rustling. The whispering leaves spoke of water. And then that sound again, a scratching and rustling. Carefully, he worked his way into the brush on the stream's bank, but exhaustion had robbed him of guile and he made the brush rustle.

  Instantly, the sound he had been moving toward stopped. After a moment of silence it began once more. Pushing his way through the brush, he emerged a dozen feet from the base of a giant cottonwood. Nearby two porcupines were digging for water.

  The hole they had dug was only as large as a good-sized water bucket but the last of the sand was damp. He picked up a rock and shied it at them, but they stood their ground, quills bristling. Swante Taggart moved toward them and reluctantly they backed off, giving ground slowly. The gelding had followed him and it went to the hole, sniffing eagerly at the damp sand, and scratching at it with one hoof.

  Pulling the horse away, Swante knelt and began to scoop sand from the hole with both hands. The sand became damper, and he was down less than two feet. He dug on, working feverishly, and soon the hole began to fill with muddy water.

  Swante sank back on his heels, and let the steeldust have the first of the water. Then pushing the horse away, he dug the hole deeper, widened it out. The porcupines had not left him. They waited on the edge of the brush making angry sounds at him, their need for water overcoming their fear of him.

  He would make it then ... he would drink and the horse would drink and he would fill the canteen. Then he would leave the water to the porcupines, and they deserved it. He dipped his cupped hands into
the water and gulped a mouthful which he held in his mouth, letting the parched tissues soak it up ever so gradually, then allowing a cool trickle to find its way down his raw throat.

  The gelding whinnied pleadingly and he allowed the horse to drink again, although there was scarcely more than a swallow or two in the bottom of the hole. He scooped out more sand and the hole began to fill up.

  He managed another swallow, and a delicious coolness began to spread through him. There was shade under the cottonwood, and concealment, so he stretched out on the sand and lay still, relaxing little by little as exhaustion took over. From time to time the horse drank, then he began cropping on some brown grass nearby. Swante lay still and listened to the sounds, and he heard the porcupines sucking at the water. Turning his head he saw them there, watching him warily, but drinking, too, not six feet from where he lay.

  When they were gone he cleaned out the pool and dug into his pack for what remained of his coffee. He built a small fire of dry sticks under the cottonwood and made the coffee. Desperately as he wanted food, he would not kill one of the porcupines, for they had brought him to water. Actually they had saved his life.

  No desert man will camp near a water-hole, for water in the desert is too precious to others beside himself, and wild creatures will not approach a water-hole when a man is near. The porcupines had been a rare exception, their need perhaps as great as his own.

  When he left the water-hole, it was only to move back a short distance, for he needed time to recover from the effects of his long thirst. He spread his blanket and slept, too soundly for safety, but with the sleep of utter exhaustion.

  He awakened before daylight and led the gelding to the hole, where they both drank again, and when fresh water, now clear and cold, had collected again, he filled his canteen. The porcupines had been there during the night, for the marks of their tiny hands were all about.

  The sun was just showing itself over the mountains when he finally left. The place where he had found water was in the mouth of a wash running into Tonto Creek from the Sierra Anchas; and emerging from the brush, he found a faint Indian trail that led back into the mountains, running alongside the wash. There were no signs of recent travel. It was not the trail he had been planning to take, but it was one even less likely to be discovered. Without doubt it led to the top of the plateau.