the Burning Hills (1956) (12 page)

A man on a lunging horse swung the horse around and lifted his gun to chop a shot. Jordan and Maria Cristina fired at the same instant and the man threw up his hands.

The horse broke into a plunging run and the rider stayed with him for six or seven jumps, then spilled off, arms and legs thrown wide to hit with a splash of water like a doll thrown carelessly. The man lay sprawled and wet and dead.

So quickly it happened, so quickly it was over. A moment of madness laced by gunfire, a moment of thundering guns and spitting lead, and then only the quiet and the rain falling.

Slowly he straightened up. He held both guns, never conscious that he had drawn the second. Shoving one into his holster, he began to reload. One gun was empty, the other held but two shells. And he had no memory of firing more than three, perhaps four times.

Maria Cristina got up from the rock where she had knelt, half-concealed by boulders and brush.

"You are hurt?" she asked.

"A scratch."

He stood there a minute or two, looking out into the rain. Jacob Lantz was still around and, although the tracker had left before the shooting started, he might declare himself in at long range. And he had the reputation of being good with a rifle.

Trace Jordan walked out into the rain. Lantz was nowhere in sight

Mort Bayless stared up into the sodden clouds, his eyes wide to the sky, unheeding the pounding rain. Blood stained the pool in which he lay. His shirt was plastered to his thin body, all the evil in him a thing gone now, emptied out of him with his life.

Ben Hindeman was lying there too but he was not dead.

He had been hit three times, once by the rifle. He made a feeble futile grasp toward his fallen gun and then lay quiet, looking up at Jordan.

"Is it bad?"

Trace looked at him. One bullet through his left side but low down. Another through his chest but high enough to have missed the lung. The third through his thigh.

"You're hit," Jordan said. "Can be bad."

"I got a wife," Hindeman said. "A good woman. A man should think of those things."

He dosed his eyes momentarily, then opened them. "They never should have stolen those horses," he said. "The damn fools."

Another man lay beyond Hindeman, sprawled out, one knee buckled under him. The fourth man, the one knocked down by Bayless' horse, still lay where he had dropped. There was no blood on him.

Trace Jordan bolstered his gun and stooped to pick up Ben Hindeman. As he stooped he heard the click of a drawn-back hammer and turned quickly.

Jacob Lantz stood there with empty hands held wide from his body. Maria Cristina had covered him with a Winchester.

"Help you with that?" Lantz asked. "He's a heavy man."

Together they carried him under the overhang and after one careful searching look at Lantz, Maria Cristina put her rifle down. "Make a fire," she told him.

Then she turned to Jordan. "You first," she said.

"He's hard hit," Trace said. "I can wait."

Maria Cristina shrugged. "Suppose he dies? He would have killed you."

"Him first," Jordan told her flatly. "Get busy."

She looked at him, their eyes holding on each other. Then she knelt beside Hindeman. "You think you strong," she said, glancing up. " Ithink you big fool."

Hindeman chuckled, then gasped at the pain. But he looked up at Jordan. "I think you've got you a woman, Friend."

He looked past Trace Jordan at Lantz. "What happened to you?" he asked hoarsely.

Lantz bared his broken teeth in a grin. "I told you ... I'd trail him. I wouldn't fight him. When I seen what Mort was fixin' to do, I taken out."

Jordan glanced out to where the other men lay. The man who had been knocked down by Bayless was gone. He had evidently lain quiet until the shooting was over and at the first chance, ducked out. Some were like that. Sometimes the ones who swaggered die first. Like Ike Clanton at the O.K. Corral fight

Maria Cristina bathed the wounds in a decoction made of a desert plant, than bandaged them as best she could. From the plant named sangre de Cristo she had taken the sap, which coagulates quickly, to stop the blood from the wounds.

By the time the wounds were cared for and Lantz had buried the dead men, it was midday. He came back inside. "Rain's breakin'" he said. "Better get set for trouble."

"Trouble?"

"Yeah," Lantz took his time. "There's one got away, an' more comin'. If that one's lucky, he'll fetch up with those who been comin' behind us. You can just bet they'll come huntin' you."

Ben Hindeman spoke from his pallet. "The fight's over, Jake. You tell 'em I said so. We're through."

"Buck might listen. Wes Parker won't. Some of the others might not, either."

"Then you light out an' stop 'em," Hindeman said harshly. He lifted himself to an elbow. "Stop 'em an' get a buckboard down here for me. If you can't stop 'em, ride like hell for John Slaughter's outfit."

The clouds broke and the rain drifted away. The sun returned and the pools began to disappear. Only the greener vegetation and the dampness around the rocks remained to remind them of the storm.

Trace Jordan took his rifle and led the horses to a patch of grass where they could be picketed in plain sight of the shelter. He was far less worried by the Sutton-Bayless riders than by the Apaches. For several days now both the pursuers and the pursued had been leaving tracks all over this corner of Sonora, an area that was Apache country.

Any hunter from one of the rancherias might have come upon those tracks, or any squaw out gathering herbs or firewood could have seen them. In a country where a white man could scarcely turn over in bed without an Apache knowing it, it was absurd to believe they would not be aware of all that had happened.

Moreover, the Apaches who escaped from the kidnapping of Maria Cristina must by now be seeking them out. Yet wherever he looked, the desert was empty.

Returning to the overhang, he found Maria Cristina sitting by the rocks with a rifle at hand. Their eyes met and no words were needed. Both had grown up in Indian country; they understood the gravity of their situation.

They were two people with a wounded man on their hands and no telling when help would reach them. The rain had wiped out their trail, yet the Apaches well knew where they would be going. It was only a matter of time until they were discovered.

They now had four horses picketed and Jordan considered rigging a litter between two of them, yet these horses were unused to any such contrivance and would be frightened by it. They were, at best, just broken to the saddle.

Slowly the hours dragged by and there was nothing. The danger grew greater by the minute and Jordan was restless and irritable.

Ben Hindeman began to mutter and complain. His fever mounted and he became delirious. Maria Cristina sat with him, keeping damp cloths on his head. Several times she mixed concoctions used by the Indians for fever and they helped; but Hindeman had lost blood from his wounds and his condition was far from good.

Raiding parties from the Sierra Madre used this route and the Chiricahuas had their stronghold in the mountains just north of the border.

By noon of the second day Jordan knew something must be done. He had been leaning on the rocks staring into the desert's heat waves when he made his decision. With some poles and two ponchos he rigged a litter between two horses. With Maria Cristina's help, Hindeman was loaded into the litter and, holding the horses to a walk, they made their start.

It was slow going ... yet by dusk they had covered fifteen miles and camped in a cluster of rocks near an intermittent stream.

Ben Hindeman's face was flushed and he looked bad. Jordan stared down at the wounded man, considering the irony of the situation. Only hours ago this man had been hunting him to kill and now he, Jordan, was trying to save the man from death by bullets he had himself fired! And risking his own life to do it.

Rifle in hand, Trace Jordan walked out from camp. The illness from his own wounds had cut down his weight. He was lean and raw-boned, even tougher-looking than usual and his clothing was battered and worn from days and nights of travel.

Yet the years of wilderness living had conditioned him to a hard life and ... he had gone only a few yards when he saw the tracks. The tracks of a man walking.

A wounded man ... a white man.

The man had staggered as he walked. Once he had gone to his knees. Absorbed in the trail, Trace Jordan followed it along for a half-mile. Twice the man had fallen in that distance. At the second place there was blood on the desert.

Jordan went up to some rocks and from the slight vantage point they gave him, began a minute examination of the terrain. Suddenly, some distance north, he saw a dark object on the desert.

It might be a rock. But there was a subtle difference that told him it was not. He started north, walking fast.

Even before he reached the body he knew who it was. Old Jacob Lantz had led many a foray against the Apache but he had led his last one. He lay sprawled in the desert and he was dead. But his body was neither cold nor stiff.

He had been shot three times but one of. the wounds was at least a day old. Evidently on the first day out from the overhang, Lantz had been wounded and his horse killed. By some artifice he had evaded the Apache and started on... on foot.

Today, probably within the last few hours, they had come up with him again. And if they had killed him no longer ago than that, they must be close by. They might have found the tracks of the four horses coming north.

Hurriedly he turned and made his way back to the rocks. As he walked, he made plans. Despite their weariness and Ben Hindeman's condition they must move on tonight. Rarely would Apaches attack at night and they preferred not even to travel at night. The border could not be more than fifteen to twenty miles away and the border was where lay the ranch at San Bemardino Springs.

Maria Cristina came swiftly to her feet when she saw his face and Jordan explained, holding back nothing at all.

Hindeman was conscious. "You two take out," he said. "Small chance I'll make it, anyway."

"You'll make it," Jordan told him dryly. "You're too mean to die."

As soon as it was dark they loaded up and just before they rode off, Jordan built a fire and stacked fuel so it would fall into the flames. Due north then, holding a course on the polestar, they rode. The desert was broken and rough but they made good time.

"Keep goin'," Hindeman told them. "Don't pay me no mind. If them Apaches get me it won't matter, anyway."

So they pushed on through the night and in the first gray of dawn, with the horses wearily plodding, they glimpsed far off a cluster of buildings.

At the same instant Maria Cristina called out, "Trace!"

He turned in the saddle. Behind them and to the east, not six hundred yards away, a dozen Indians sat their horses. They had come out of an arroyo and were apparently as surprised as Jordan himself.

"Keep moving," he told her. "Keep moving no matter what."

They rode on, holding their pace. Suddenly the Indians began to move out. Their ponies began to trot.

Trace Jordan stepped up the pace. The buildings were not more than five miles away now. The Indians were very close and coming up rapidly.

Turning, Trace Jordan, lifting his Winchester, took careful aim. He took up the slack on his trigger, took a deep breath, let part of it out, then took up more slack, then a little -- the rifle leaped in his hands and a horse jumped and fell back, throwing his rider.

Twice more he fired; then, waiting to see the effectiveness of his shots, he raced after Maria Cristina and the litter.

With shrill yells the Indians came after him. Suddenly, at the buildings, a rider appeared around the corner of a barn and started for them. Behind him came other riders until seven were strung out, racing their horses.

Trace heard shooting and, turning his horse, he emptied his rifle at some two hundred yards distance. An Indian on a paint pony fell from his horse and rolled over, got up, then fell again. Then a horse shied violently at another shot and the Indians slowed up and spread out.

Jordan ran his horse after the litter, feeding the shells into his rifle. When he looked back again the Indians had broken off their pursuit and turned away.

The riders from the ranch came up and swung their horses alongside. Their leader was a small square-shouldered man with cold gray eyes.

"Hindeman!" he said sharply. "Apaches get you?"

"No." Ben Hindeman indicated Jordan. "He did."

On the second morning following their arrival at Rancho San Bernardino, Trace Jordan came out into the morning sunlight and pulled on his hat. It was very early and John Slaughter was still at breakfast. Ben Hindeman was sleeping and apparently much improved.

There had been no sign of the other riders from the Sutton-Bayless outfit.

Buck Bayless and Wes Parker had not been among those in the fight at the rocks and Hindeman would say nothing about them. Yet something in his manner made Jordan increasingly restless.