Coroner Creek

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Coroner Creek

Luke Short

CHAPTER I

Some of the post lamps were out even before taps ended. As the last note of the bugle died, the dogs took it up, and their bedlam spread from the post to the agency dogs and was echoed far off by the curs around the clusters of wickiups on the reservation to the south.

It was a chorus of ferocity with an exquisite idiocy about it, and Chris Danning, knowing now he had been listening too intently, put his back against the wall of the trading post and settled into patience again. An Indian woman came out the door beside him, a sack of groceries slung over each shoulder, and tossed them into the bed of a spring wagon drawn up paralleling the trader's porch. She stepped in and drove off, and afterward the Apache buck came out. He stood in the rectangle of lamplight cast by the doorway, his shadow huge and almost formless in the dust of the road beyond, and scratched himself through a rent in his shirt, which was worn tails out. Afterward, he approached his pony at the tie rail, first regarding Danning's sorrel beside his own horse with a born horse stealer's admiration. He mounted and rode off after the wagon whose slack jolting was merging slowly into the distant racket of the dogs.

But even so, Danning heard the Indian's grunt of greeting to the approaching rider, and now Danning sat erect on the split-log bench against the store wall and waited. The rider barely touched the lamplight from the store before he was swallowed up in the darkness again, yet Danning recognized the scout. McCune had hunted Indians so long he rode like one, feet turned out and gently flailing.

Danning waited a precautionary moment, and then, when he was certain nobody was following McCune, he rose and stepped quietly through the doorway of the store. Even in the soft light cast by the lamp over the side counter there was something hard and angular about his high shoulders under the patched and weather-bleached calico shirt. Just inside the door was his saddle; he lifted it by the horn, looked briefly about the room and, seeing the trader, raised his hands in thanks and parting. His narrow face, sober to taciturnity, was blank with indifference; his gray eyes behind high and heavy cheekbones did not even wait to register the answering wave. He went out and saddled his horse swiftly, and rode west into the night after McCune.

The old scout was waiting well beyond the clutter of the agency buildings and the mission, and as Danning came up, McCune put his horse alongside at a walk.

“You bring your money?” McCune asked presently.

“You said to. Does that mean you've found one?”

“You're lucky,” McCune murmured. “The buck wants to buy him a new wife. He's a Cherry-cow 'Pache, not one of these, or he wouldn't take your money.”

“But he was in on the massacre?”

“He was in on it,” McCune answered. “A trooper must of got to him because he's got a saber cut across his chest. Withered his arm.”

They were silent now, and Danning checked his desire to question. The dimly seen wagon road still held the heat of the blazing Arizona day, and back at the agency some dog, surely stubborn, held to his senseless barking.

Presently, McCune put his horse off the wagon road and threaded his way carefully down a steep rock-strewn slope that presently leveled off in the sandy bed of a wash. McCune was waiting here, and when Danning came up, he said, “I better take your gun.”

Danning handed it to him and McCune slipped it into his coat pocket and grunted. “It's hard to keep your temper if you ain't used to them. They brag, you know.”

“I'll keep my temper.”

“You better,” McCune said gently. “I give my word.”

They rode abreast down the wash for a couple of miles, climbed out of it and cut south across some sage flats and then came abruptly into a canyon in which a couple of small fires were burning some distance below. A dog picked them up and hounded them down the trail until McCune cursed it into silence. Afterward, on the level canyon floor, Danning saw the two brush wickiups, the tiny brush corral, and the garden plot contemptuously scratched in the poor earth beyond, which signified as permanent a home as the Apaches ever built. The smell of the camp, rising in the still warm night, was that of burning mesquite. They passed three women at the first fire, and McCune did not even look at them. Beyond, Danning saw the bucks. Their mesquite fire was not big and cast little light, so that the two Apaches hunkered between it and the other wickiup were shapes a man had to look for.

Before McCune dismounted he murmured a greeting which was returned almost inaudibly by one buck, and then he stepped out of the saddle and went across deliberately to squat beside the fire. He was a spare, bent man in a baggy, dusty black suit whose right pocket sagged with Danning's gun. Danning ground-haltered his horse and came up beside McCune and sat down, cross-legged.

McCune passed his sack of tobacco to the nearest Indian, who wore only a breechclout and shirt and was squatted comfortably on his heels, elbows on knees and arms straight out. He, Danning guessed, was not his man, and this was confirmed when the second Apache refused the tobacco. Danning knew that by taking it, the Indian would reveal the fact that under his filthy shirt his right arm was useless. Danning studied this man now, and was studied in return.

The buck did not bother to hide either his hatred or his contempt for the two white men, and Danning wondered at his own calmness. This Indian had been there, had seen it, had helped, had maybe done it, and yet Danning felt only a vast and imperturbable patience, no anger.

Presently McCune said, “Smoke up. This'll take time,” and then began to talk to the Apaches in their language. The younger man, the stranger, kept watching Danning, his broad face, with its small, curved nose, stolid and sleepy and fierce even in repose.

The older Indian answered McCune now, and McCune waited until he had finished, and then said to Danning, “He wants to see the color of your money.”

Danning took the buckskin bag containing two hundred dollars in eagles from his pocket and handed it to McCune, who tossed it to the young buck. He made no move to catch it, and let it lie at his feet.

Then McCune spoke again, and the younger buck answered at some length. McCune interrupted him only once before he finished.

McCune now said, turning to Danning: “He was with Tana the time Tana's bunch broke out of the reservation. Tana's scouts had picked up the paymaster's detail of Captain Jordan that was on its way from Grant to Pima Tanks, but they let it go through. They were after horses, but Jordan's horses weren't much and besides the detail was well armed. He says Tana never did know about the Quartermaster's train that was already at Pima Tanks with the load of rifles. His bunch was watching the paymaster's detail.”

“Ask him the question,” Danning said.

McCune spoke to the young Indian again, and was answered at great length. Danning found himself leaning forward, trying to recognize a single word of the Apache's gibberish.

When the Indian finished, McCune said wryly to Danning, “He wants to brag first. Want to hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Tana and his bunch were up in those dry hills to the west of Pima Tanks—Deaf Jensen's country—when that bad storm hit. It scattered their small
remuda
to hell-and-gone, and had most of 'em afoot. Tana figured it would be easier to raid for horses around Pima Tanks than to round up his own. He sent an old man—Sal Juan they called him—down into Pima Tanks, figuring Captain Jordan didn't know yet that Tana had broken out. Sal Juan was to hang around until Jordan's detail pulled out, and then Tana would raid the town. Sure enough, Jordan hadn't got the word about Tana.”

McCune turned now, and the Indian, without invitation, took up his story. Danning noticed McCune was listening with a still intentness, and he grunted as the Apache finished.

“In Pima Tanks,” McCune continued then, “Sal Juan was braced by a white man he knew, a freighter. Said he had in formation Tana might want. Said he—”

“Ask his name,” Danning interrupted.

McCune did. The Apache answered briefly, irritably. McCune said in a low voice, “He don't know it. Take it easy. Let him tell it.”

The Apache spoke again, and while he was speaking, Danning heard a soft “Ah” from McCune, and then the old scout translated.

“Sal Juan brought this white man out to the old sawmill and left him there, and went back and got Tana and another buck who could speak American and this son.” McCune nodded his head toward the young buck who had been speaking. “The white man was in luck; he didn't know Tana'd broken out, but he knew Sal Juan was a friend of Tana's. When he met Tana, he made him this proposition. He said there was a Quartermaster train loaded with rifles in Pima Tanks. That train and a stage full of people and Captain Jordan's detail had all decided to throw in together and take the old road to Lincoln. That was through some bad Indian country, but they figured it wouldn't be dangerous now the 'Paches was quiet. Besides, they'd been held up by the storm too, and they was all in a hurry. The white man made this deal. In return for this information, Tana would raid the party when they was in Karnes Canyon. Tana could keep the horses and the rifles and ammunition. All the white man wanted was the pay chest in the back of Jordan's Daugherty wagon.”

“Did he get it?” Danning asked.

McCune nodded. “He got it. Tana's bunch cleaned out the picket line the first night. It took them three days to finish the job after that.”

Danning's face did not alter as he heard this; his big hand lifted a little from his leg and then settled back again. He said in a dull, quiet voice, “Go back to the white man. Have him describe him. Everything he can remember about him.”