War Party (Ss) (1982) (13 page)

"You like him?"

"Like him? He's splendid! All my life I've wanted to own just such a horse. Of course," he added quickly, "I could never afford it."

"With your mare it might be very profitable," she assured him quietly. Then she lifted her chin. "Mr. Miles, what would you do for another mule?"

He laughed grimly. "Anything short of murder," he said, "if I got him before tomorrow."

"Even to sharing your wagon with a widow?"

He chuckled. "Even that!"

"Then prepare to have a passenger. I've got a mule!"

He shook his head. "That's impossible. There isn't a mule within miles and miles of here. I've looked."

"I have a mule," she said, "as big as yours. He was sold to me by Simon Gilbride."

Scott Miles sat down, and she explained very quietly. Determined to go to Santa Fe, she had decided the only thing to do was to personally see the old man.

Gilbride, it turned out, had been in her father's command in Mexico. That, a little pleading and a little flattery had done the trick. "So," she said, "I have a mule.

I have the only mule. So if you go you take me. What do we do?"

Scott Miles got to his feet and bowed politely. "Mrs. Hance, will you do me the honor of allowing me escort you to Santa Fe?"

She curtsied gravely, then her eyes filled with mischief. "Mr. Miles," she replied formally, "I was hoping you'd ask!"

Pembroke was in the hotel, seated with Bidwell and several others, shaping last details of the trip.

"Count me in." Scott could scarcely keep the triumph from his tone. "I've got my mule!"

As he explained he saw Bidwell's face stiffen. Pembroke frowned slightly, then shook his head. "It won't do, Miles," he said. "The women would never stand for it. We can't have an unmarried couple sharing a wagon. It just won't do."

"Look," he protested, "I-" Argument was fruitless. The answer was a flat no. Disgusted, angry and desperate, he started back toward the wagon. He was nearing it when he heard a shot, then another. Running, he whipped his pistol from his waistband and broke through the trees to the wagon.

Mrs. Hance stood behind the wagon with a smoking rifle. Her face was white. "They got away," she said bitterly, "they've stolen our mules!" She continued icily, "Have you decided to just stand there or are you going to take Admiral and go after them?"

"Admiral?" He was astonished. "They didn't get him? You mean he was tied here?"

"Behind the wagon," she said shortly. "Now take him and get started!"

"He might be killed," he warned Her lips tightened. "Take him! We're in this together!"

It was morning when he realized he was closing in. Admiral was not merely a beautiful horse, but one with speed and bottom. And one of the men was wounded. He had come upon the place where they bathed and dressed his wound at daylight. He had found fragments of a bloody shirt and fresh boot-tracks.

Two hours later he stopped on the edge of a grove and saw them disappearing into a cluster of piiions a half mile away. They had the mules roped together and they were moving more slowly. The wounded man was riding his mare.

He had no illusions about fair play. They would kill on sight. If he survived he must do the same. Studying the terrain, he saw a long draw off on the right that cut into the plain to the south. If he could get into that draw and beat them to the plain . . .

Admiral went down the bank as if mountainbred and on the bottom he stepped out into a run. Despite the long night of riding, the big horse had plenty left. He ran and ran powerfully, ran with eagerness.

At the draw's opening, Scott Miles swung down. Grimly, he checked the heavy pistol he carried. Thrusting it into his waistband, he walked along through the scattered greasewood and pifion until he was near the entrance of the larger draw down which they were coming.

The mules came out of the draw with the men behind them. Scott Miles drew his pistol and stepped from the pinons, but as his foot came down a rock rolled and he lost balance. He fell backwards, seeing the riders grabbing for their guns. He caught himself on his left hand and fired even as a bullet whisked by his face.

He rolled to one knee and fired again. The second shot did not miss. One man lurched in his saddle and there was blood down the back of his head, and then he fell into the dust, his horse stampeding.

The wounded man had disappeared, but the third man leaped his horse at Scott. There was an instant when Scott saw the flaring nostrils of the horse, saw the man lean wide and point the gun straight at his face. And then Scott fired.

The man's body jolted, seeming to lift from the saddle, and was slammed back as the horse leaped over Miles, one hoof missing him by a hair. The rider hit the sand and rolled over. Taking no chances, Miles fired again.

One man left. Sitting on the sand, half-concealed by brush, Miles reloaded the empty chambers. Then he started through the brush, moving carefully.

The wounded man sat on the ground, holding his one good arm aloft. "Don't shoot!" he begged. "I tossed my gun away."

Scott gathered the guns, then the mules and the horses. He left one horse for the wounded man. "You do what you like, but don't cross my trail again. Not ever."

The mules made a nice picture ahead of the big Conestoga wagon, and on the seat Scott Miles sat beside his wife. She was not only a very pretty woman, this Laura Hance Miles, but, as he had discovered, a useful one.

He was, he admitted, very much in love, a richer and more exciting love than he had ever experienced. There would always be a place in his heart for Mary, but this woman was one to walk beside a man, not behind him.

She had shown it since the first day they were two together, a team, working toward a common end. It was what he had wanted.

There had been a time, he remembered, when he had believed a man could never get close to a woman like this. But that had been a long time ago.

And Bill had been right. It was necessary to like somebody, too.

Alkali
Basin.

The stage rocked and rolled over the desert road, vainly pursued by a thick cloud of fine white dust. It plunged down a declivity into a dry wash, then swept up the other side and around a hairpin curve at the top, to straighten out on the long dash across the valley.

Price Macomber, vice-president of the Overland Stage Company, was heading west on an inspection tour accompanied by his niece and Pete Judson, the district superintendent.

Price, a round man with a round pink face and round rimless spectacles, was holding forth on his pet theme,-useless expenditures.

"It has been my experience," he was saying, "that given the slightest excuse each driver and each station operator will come up with a number of items of utterly useless expense, and such items must be eliminated."

He braced himself against the roll of the stage and stared out the window for an instant as if collecting his thoughts. Then his eyes pinned Judson to his seat as a collector pins a butterfly. Judson squirmed, but there was no escape.

"You understand," Macomber continued, I'm not accusing these men of including items for their own advantage. No doubt at the moment they believe the item essential, yet when viewed logically it usually proves such claims were arrived at without due consideration.

"Take, for example, the ridiculous request of this man Wells, at Alkali Basin. Four times now he has written us demanding we send him blasting powder!

"Now think of that! Blasting powder, of all things! What earthly use would a station agent have for blasting powder? In our reply to his first request, we suggested he submit his reason for wanting it, and he replied that he wished to blast some rocks.

"Were the rocks on the road? No, they were not. They were some seventy yards off the road in the desert. The request was, without doubt, the whimsical notion of an uneducated man at a moment when he was not thinking. By now he no doubt realizes the absurdity of his notion.

"It is such items as this that can be eliminated. And I observed," Macomber added severely, "that you recommended his request be granted. I was surprised, Judson.

Needless to say, I was very surprised. We expect better judgment of our district superintendents."

Judson mopped his brow and said nothing. In the past one-hundred-and-ten miles he had learned it was wiser to listen and endure. Price Macomber's voice droned on into the hot, dusty afternoon with no hint of a letup.

The best arguments Judson had offered had been riddled with logic, devastating and inescapable. He would have liked to say that sometimes logic fell short of truth, but lacked the words, and no argument of his could hope to dam the flow of words that poured over the spillway of Price Macomber's lips.

Molly Macomber stared wearily at the desert. Her uncle, so polished, immaculate, and sure of himself, had failed to materialize into the superman he had seemed in Kansas City and St. Louis.

Against the background of the rolling grasslands, she had noticed that his stiff white collar and neat black suit seemed somehow incongruous.

Also, among the ragged, stark ridges of the desert, his mouth seemed too prim and precise, his eyes seemed flat and rather foolish. They were like the eyes of a goldfish staring from a bowl at a world it neither understood nor saw clearly.

"Keep the expense down," Macomber was saying, "and the profits will take care of themselves."

Judson stared at the desert and shifted his feet. He felt sorry for Molly, who evidently expected glamour and beauty on this westward trek. He also felt sorry for himself.

He took a drink with his stage drivers, and played poker with them. Somehow he had always got results.

He had visited Alkali Basin just once before, and heartily wished he would never have to again. If Wells, keeper of the station there, wanted blasting powder, Judson was for letting him have it. Or anything else, for that matter, including a necklace of silver bells, a Cardinal's hat or even a steamboat-anything to keep him contented.

In the three months before Wells took over the station at Alkai Basin, no fewer than six station agents had attempted the job.

The first man stuck it ten days. It was a lonely post where he had only to change horses for two stages each day, one going east, and one west. After ten days that agent had come to town on the stage and shook his head decisively. "No!" he said violently. "Not for any price! Not even Price Macomber!"

Four days after the next agent took over, the stage rolled into Alkali Basin and found no horses awaiting it. The horses were gone from the corral, and the agent lay across his adobe doorstep shot three times through the body, mutilated and scalped.

Two more men had tried it, one after the other. The Apaches got the first one of these on his second day, and the other man fought them off for a couple of hours, then went to Mexico with two teams of six horses each, and had not been heard from since.

Blasting powder might be somewhat extreme, but in Judson's private, and oft expressed opinion-to everyone but Macomber-any man who would stick it out for as much as ten days in the white dust and furnace heat of Alkali Basin, was entitled to anything he wanted.

The man called Wells had been on the job for two solid months, and so far, except for the powder, his only request had been for large quantities of ammunition. He sent in a request for more by every stage.

Macomber leaned with the sway of the stage as it swung around a corner of red rock.

The movement awakened Molly who had dozed, made sleepy by the motion of the stage and the heat. A thin film of dust had settled on her face, her neck and her hair.

Perspiration, extremely unladylike perspiration, had left streaks on her face.

Her eyes strayed out over the white, dancing heat waves of the basin's awful expanse.

The hot sun reflected from it and the earth seemed to shimmer, unreal and somehow ghastly. In the far distance, a column of dust arose and skipped along over the white desolation like some weird and evil spirit. It was the only movement.

The stage reached bottom and paused briefly in the partial shade while the horses gathered breath for the long, bitter run across the desert bottom, inches deep in alkali.

The pursuing dust cloud caught up with and settled over the stage and the clothing of the occupants. Even Price Macomber's dauntless volubility seemed to hesitate and lose itself in space. He was silent, staring out the window as though totaling a column of figures. Money saved, no doubt.

As the stage stumbled into movement once more, he glanced at Judson. "How much further to our stop?"

"Forty miles to a decent place. It's no more than ten miles to Alkali Basin. We change horses there, but we'd better get food and water at Green's Creek."

The horses, as though aware of the coming rest, lunged into the harness and charged at the heat waves.

Six hours earlier, morning had come to Alkali Basin. The sun, as though worn from its efforts of the previous day, pushed itself wearily over the jagged ridge in the distance and stabbed with white hot lances at the lonely stone building and the corrals.

Wells, his stubble of beard whitened with alkali, stared through one of the small windows with red-rimmed, sleepless eyes. The Apaches were still there. He couldn't see them, but he knew without seeing. They had been there, devilish in their patience, for eighteen hours now. They were out there in front of him, behind that low parapet of rocks.