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Authors: William W. Johnstone

Flintlock (25 page)

BOOK: Flintlock
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CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
A bullet
spaaang
ed off the inside wall of the cave and then bounced around like an angry hornet in a box.
“What the hell!” Sam Flintlock said. “Charlie, you stay right where you're at.”
“I'm not going anyplace, Sam,” Charlie Fong said to Flintlock's retreating back.
Flintlock ran to the cave mouth, his Colt hammer-back and ready in his hand. He hit the ground, rolled to his right and then came up on one knee, his eyes on the slope.
“Halloo,” Abe Roper yelled. “Can you hear me, Sammy?”
“Damn you, Abe!” Flintlock called. “You could've killed us.”
“I had to get your attention, Sammy,” Roper said. “I can't walk up the rise, me feeling as bad as I do.”
He was leaning on his rifle, using it like a cane, and his head was bent as though breathing came hard to him.
“I'm bringing Charlie down,” Flintlock said.
“Is he still alive?”
“Yeah, he is. Lucky for you, Abe. You must be saying your prayers at night.”
Flintlock stepped into the cave. There was no sign of the old man.
“I'm taking you out of here, Charlie,” he said.
“Hell, Sam, I can't walk.”
“I know. I'll carry you.”
“I'm too heavy for you,” Fong said. “You could fall real easy.”
“You're a little Chinaman. How heavy can you be?” Flintlock said.
He lifted Fong effortlessly and carried him like a man would carry a child, toward the entrance of the cave.
“Grab my Hawken from the wall there, Charlie,” he said. “Can you hold it?”
Fong nodded, reached out and picked up the rifle. He laid it across his belly and said, “Got it, Sam. Let us proceed.”
“Abe!” Flintlock yelled when he walked out of the cave. “Shoot at us again and I swear I'll gun you right where you stand.”
Roper said nothing, but he waved and stepped away, leaning heavily on the Winchester. He looked like a man carrying a burden on his shoulders.
 
 
“What do you mean they just lit out?” Flintlock said.
“Sammy, I don't know rightly what happened,” Abe Roper said. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, I do know. After you left to get Charlie I must've passed out. When I woke, they were gone and so were their horses.”
Flintlock said to Ayasha, “You didn't try to stop them?”
“They're afraid of the thing in the cave,” the girl said. “They wanted me to go with them, but I wouldn't. No, I couldn't stop them, Sam.”
Flintlock again turned his attention to Roper. “So we got two little Chinese girls wandering out there in the wilderness somewhere?”
Roper nodded, his face a mask of misery. “I reckon that's how it stacks up, Sam'l.”
“Damn you, Abe,” Flintlock said. “I should've shot you years ago.”
Charlie Fong was lying beside the fire, fat raindrops filtering through the pines splashing on his blanket. Now he got up on an elbow and said, “Sam, I'll help you find them.”
“Not a chance, Charlie,” Flintlock said. “You're still too sick. I'll go after them.”
“The ground's soft, Sammy,” Roper said. “They'll be easy to track.”
“I figured that out for my ownself, Abe,” Flintlock said. He was still angry at Roper and it showed.
 
 
The girls' tracks headed due east into the high desert country.
The only settlement of any size was at least fifty miles away and the chances of two young girls getting there alive were slim.
It consoled Flintlock to recall that the army was scouting the area, rounding up bronco Apaches. Maybe the girls would bump into a cavalry patrol.
But this was a country of vast, lonely distances, of scarred, somber peaks, shadowed canyons and long winds. The land was harsh and unforgiving and could kill a grown man a hundred different ways.
The odds were not in the girls' favor, and Flintlock knew it.
One thing he had going for him was that they were not far ahead of him, and, despite the downpour, their tracks were fresh.
Buttoned up into his slicker, rainwater running off the brim of his hat, Flintlock stuck doggedly to the trail east, even though the devil of impatience rode him.
And a slow-burning anger.
Roper and Charlie Fong had ignored his warning about the cave and both were now sick and would probably take at least a couple of days to recover. Right then they were in no shape to defend themselves . . . and the Apaches were still out. Ayasha clung to him, mentally fragile and vulnerable, and he needed to be with her, now more than ever.
What he didn't need was to chase two hysterical young girls across a rain-lashed, broken land where humans, white or Indian, rarely ventured.
Sam Flintlock clenched his teeth. Damnit, it seemed problems had piled up on him.
But what he didn't know then was that were more to come....
Flintlock was ten miles east of the Red Valley when it dawned on him that he wasn't closing the distance between himself and the fleeing Chinese girls.
Their horses bore a lighter burden than his and they were putting a heap of distance between him and the sisters.
He was reluctant to tire out his mount and kept the sorrel reined to a distance-eating walk. But his progress was slow and he reckoned there were only about four hours of daylight left. It was little enough time.
When Flintlock reached Shiprock Wash he saw a cabin on the east bank, its pine log structure almost invisible behind the relentless march of the rain.
It was an obvious place for the girls to hole up for the night.
Habits of a lifetime die hard, and Flintlock unbuttoned his slicker to clear the way to his Colt. He kneed his horse forward.
No smoke came from the cabin's chimney and the door was hanging aslant on one hinge. The glass in the only window was bullet pocked and a dead hog lay in the mud outside. A screeching windmill still turned at the back and nearby a dead cottonwood raised skeletal fingers to the sky.
Wary now, Flintlock swung out of the saddle and advanced the remaining fifty yards to the cabin on foot, taking advantage of the little cover available.
The smell hit him when he was still a dozen yards away.
Flintlock drew his gun. Was it the hog? Or dead men?
He stepped to the door, jerked it wide and looked inside.
The two dead men lay sprawled on the floor, one gray, the other a young towhead. Their faces were distorted in death, but the men looked remarkably alike. Father and son miners, Flintlock told himself, and they'd both been shot multiple times.
Flintlock's immediate reaction was to pin the killings on the Apaches.
He'd thought Geronimo would be in the Sierra Madres by now, content to raid into Mexico, until the U.S. Army gave up the chase and returned to barracks.
But had he in fact swung north?
Apaches were the most notional people on God's earth, and there was no guessing what a man like Geronimo would do.
Then Flintlock studied the cabin more closely.
The place had been ransacked; something young Apache bucks would do as they searched for guns, ammunition and trinkets.
But the floorboards had been pulled up and the sod roof had been probed with a broom handle. No Apache would've done that. But white men on the hunt for gold certainly would.
The dead men were tinpans and they'd been murdered because their killers suspected they'd a stash of dust hidden somewhere in the cabin.
The rank, sweet stench of decay sickened Flintlock and he backed out of the door . . . into the hard, impersonal muzzle of a rifle.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
“Sam Flintlock, my friend,” Carlos Hernandez said. “How good it is to see you again.” He held up his right hand, the fingers curled into a claw. “See, my wrist is getting better, but—this is very sad—my hand, he is withering.”
The Mexican had eight men with him—and two girls.
The Chinese sisters sat miserable and soaking wet on their horses, guarded by a huge bandit with a scarred face and a bad attitude. When the man turned his nail keg of a head and stared at Flintlock his black eyes glowed with murder.
Flintlock had no cards to play. He knew he was already a dead man.
“Carlos, let the girls go,” he said. “Your business is with me.”
Hernandez smiled, the diamonds in his teeth catching the thin light of the gloomy day. “You are so right, my friend, my business is with you . . . and it is a business that will take a long, long time.”
The Mexican shrugged. “As for the girls, I want them for myself.” He tapped himself on the chest. “They will amuse Carlos Hernandez the great bandit chief for a while and they will consider it a great honor. Then, when I am finished with them, I will give the señoritas to my men. Because”—Hernandez opened his arms wide, threw back his head, and yelled—“I am a flowing river to my people!”
This last drew cheers from the bandits and one of them fired his rifle into the air in celebration.
After the commotion died down, Hernandez said, “Flintlock, my friend, an eye for an eye, so what do I take for a hand that has withered to a twisted hook?”
Flintlock answered that question with one of his own. “Why did you kill the miners, you damned savage?”
“Gold,” Hernandez said. “But they had none and that was unlucky for them.”
Flintlock tried again. “Let the girls go and we'll talk.”
Suddenly Hernandez was angry. “I don't wish to talk about the women. They are nothing. We will talk about what you will give me for my good right hand.”
The Mexican stood, grim-faced, waiting for Flintlock's answer.
Rain ticked on the shoulders of his oilskin army cloak as thunder roared and lightning clashed. To the north, above the distant mountains, a streak of light gray showed among the black clouds, a promise that the storm had reached its climax and would not last much longer.
“When I get back to Texas, I'll send you a couple of bucks,” Flintlock said. “How does that set with you?”
Hernandez made no reply, but his unspoken answer was obviously “not well,” because he used his left hand, heavy with rings, to deliver a smashing backhand to Flintlock's face.
The blow came out of nowhere, caught Flintlock flatfooted and he staggered and fell. His gun jerked out of his waistband and the Mexican kicked it away.
Hernandez didn't give him a chance to rise. His boots thudded again and again into Flintlock's ribs, vicious kicks that hurt and robbed him of breath.
Finally the bandit stepped back and said, “Get him to his feet.”
A couple of men dragged Flintlock erect. Hernandez smiled at him and said, “A hand for a hand, my friend. How does that set with you?”
The taste of blood in his mouth, Flintlock said, “You go to hell.”
“Ah, then you agree with my judgment,” Hernandez said. “But you will be the one in hell, my friend.”
He turned to his men and said, “Juan, bring your ax. And a block.”
The man called Juan had the eyes of a lizard. He pulled a tomahawk from his belt and stepped in front of Flintlock who swayed on his feet, weak from the kicking he'd taken.
Juan pointed out an upright, blade-scarred log near the cabin. “Bring me that,” he said. When a couple of men laid the cutting block at his feet, he looked to Hernandez for guidance.
“I will cut off his hand, his gun hand,” the bandit chief said. “Prepare him for my justice, Juan.”
Several grinning Mexicans manhandled Flintlock onto his back. After a rope was looped around his right wrist, a man sat on the wet mud and pulled, forcing the hand onto the block.
Hernandez took the tomahawk from Juan and said, “Flintlock, my very good friend, this may take more than one . . . how do you say? . . . chop. But I will do my best.”
“Hernandez, you're a damned, filthy animal,” Flintlock said, between gritted teeth.
“Perhaps.” The Mexican grinned. “But I am the one with the ax, I think.”
Hernandez stooped a little, stared at Flintlock's hand for a few moments . . . and then raised the tomahawk.
The blow never fell.
A .45-70 bullet drilled through the crown of Carlos Hernandez's sombrero, smashed into the top of his bowed head and exited at the base of his skull in a gory eruption of blood, bone and brain.
 
 
The Apaches struck with incredible swiftness and violence.
Smarting from their defeat at Fort Defiance, they fell on the Mexicans like ravening wolves.
Within a couple of minutes, the ground was littered with dead bandits. Those were the lucky ones.
The man called Juan was taken alive . . . and so was Sam Flintlock.
The ten Apache women who emerged from Shiprock Wash in the wake of the warriors were wild with grief for the sons, husbands and lovers killed at Fort Defiance.
Knives drawn, they sprang on the bodies of the dead Mexicans and soon their hands and arms to the elbows were scarlet with blood, as they cut, stabbed and mutilated.
The bandits were not soldiers, but they were still the hated enemy of a people without friends.
Juan, shrieking in pain and terror, was hacked to death and his decapitated head was kicked along the rain-soaked ground like a football.
Throughout this terrifying, crimson-splashed nightmare, Flintlock was left alone. No one came near him, even when he brushed past a warrior and stepped beside the Chinese girls who were still mounted and like him, unharmed.
Numbed by the horror around him, the human intestines curled on the ground like pink snakes, Flintlock tried to say something to the girls, but the words stuck in his throat as though he'd swallowed a dry chicken bone.
Why was he being ignored?
Flintlock felt a twinge of fear. As the only white man among the bandits, was he being singled out for special treatment by the Apache women?
Their anger finally slaked, the women stood in a bloodstained group, consoling each other amid tears and wails.
Flintlock counted only eight warriors, all of them young bucks, who now stood in silence, rifles in their arms, and stared at him, their black eyes revealing nothing.
Then he saw Geronimo.
Mounted on a small mustang pony, the Apache seemed heedless of the rain as he rode toward Flintlock. He looked old and tired and the lines on his face had deepened. Geronimo was a man who'd ridden one trail too many and knew it.
His shoulders stooped, he stopped a few yards from Flintlock and said, “There is a mountain to the east of here the white men call Shiprock. The peak was once the nesting place of a giant bird of prey, like the one you bear on your throat. It is a sacred place.”
Flintlock nodded as though he understood the Apache's drift. He didn't.
Geronimo said, “I had a vision at the mountain. I saw the great bird of prey swoop down and gather up all the Apaches, men, women and children, in its talons. Then it flew away with my people into the setting sun. This caused me great sadness.”
“What does it mean, Geronimo?” Flintlock said. He figured his life was hanging by a thread and he was determined to be affable.
“It means that soon the Apache will be no more. Their day is done.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Flintlock said. “The Apache are a brave people.”
Geronimo nodded. “It is good to be brave, but the white men are more in number than the stars in the night sky, and they have guns and cannon.”
He shook his head, his face drawn. “I will lay down the heavy load I have carried since boyhood. I will follow the white man's trail and make him my friend, but I will not bend my back to his burdens.”
“You will surrender, Geronimo?”
“When the great bird took my people, I saw a few fall from its claws. Those that are left I will save. Yes, I will surrender.”
The Apache said something to his warriors and they gathered the Mexican horses and their guns and ammunition.
“Sam Flintlock, you are under my protection,” Geronimo said. “I give you your life.” He looked at the Chinese girls. “Yours?”
Flintlock said, “Yes, they are mine.”
“Then you may have them.”
“You saved me, Geronimo,” Flintlock said. “I would have no hands if you hadn't showed up when you did. I would've bled to death.”
“Let me see the tomahawk,” Geronimo said. “I may keep it to remind me of this day.”
Flintlock picked up the weapon and handed it to the Apache. Geronimo stared at the tomahawk for a while, then threw it away. “
Faugh
, it is Pima and a filthy thing.”
He swung his horse away and his warriors and the women followed.
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BOOK: Flintlock
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