And it was immediately answered by a flurry of rifle fire that crashed bullets all around the area where Birchwood and Trimble lay hidden.
Stryker heard the old prospector’s laugh, a high-pitched, “Hee-hee-hee!” that chased itself around the meadow. “Damn me, boy,” he yelled, “but that was good shootin’.”
A pause, then, “Are you white men?” A woman’s voice.
“Hell, do we sound like Apaches to you?” Stryker yelled.
“Identify yourself!”
Irritation flared in Stryker. He had no desire to bandy words with a bushwhacker, female or not.
An impatient bullet spurted aV of dirt in front of his face.
“Identify yourselves.”
Stryker shook his head. This was developing into a Mexican standoff. He justified his surrender by telling himself he was only being polite to a lady.
“First Lieutenant Steve Stryker, United States Cavalry. Those two in the bushes are Second Lieutenant Dale Birchwood and Clem Trimble, the crazy old coot with the Spencer.”
“An’ I’m right pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” Trimble called out, apparently unfazed by Stryker’s comment.
“Step into the open where I can see you,” the woman said.
“That won’t work, lady,” Stryker said. “You show yourself first.”
“You’re a white man all right,” the woman yelled.
“Always wanting me to show myself.” There was a moment’s pause; then the woman stepped out into the meadow. “This enough show for you?”
Chapter 28
Stryker rose to his feet and the others did the same.
The woman, dressed in canvas pants and a man’s collarless shirt that hung loose on her thin frame, carried a Winchester in her hands. She was young, with a thick mane of beautiful blond hair, but her face was overlaid with a veneer of hard years that had browned and wrinkled her skin and put flint into her eyes. She had a rash all over her face and neck that looked angry and red as though she’d been stung by hornets.
Stryker made to step toward her, but the rifle came up fast, the muzzle unwavering on his belly.
“Stay right there, soldier boy,” she warned.
“I can offer you food,” Stryker said, stopping right where he was.
“Coffee,” Trimble said, smiling. “I can bile you up some, ma’am.” His smile grew wider. “You’re a right pretty gal, an’ that’s a natural fact.”
“Horseshit, pops. Save it for somebody who cares.” The woman motioned to Stryker with the rifle. “You, soldier boy, what the hell did you do? Walk face first into a band saw?”
Stryker smiled. “Something like that.”
“You in charge?”
“Yes.” He waved a hand in the direction of his companions. “This is my command.”
“Well, we’re camping here and I want you and your men to move out.”
“We?” Stryker asked.
By way of reply, the woman looked over her shoulder and yelled, “It’s all right, Maxine. Bring the wagon.”
Two mules hauled a small wagon with a canvas top into the meadow. A woman was handling the reins and two others walked beside front wheels. They all seemed young, but unlike the first were wearing dresses, stained, ragged and dirty, but store bought and once expensive.
Trimble’s eyes twinkled and he smiled and smoothed his ragged beard. “Welcome, ladies,” he said, stepping toward the wagon. “A thousand warm welcomes.”
“Clem, stay back!” Stryker yelled, panic edging his voice.
The old prospector halted in midstride and turned to Stryker. “What the hell, Cap’n?”
“Look at their faces!”
Trimble did, and the aborning haze of desire fled quickly from his eyes.
The woman with the rifle spoke to him. “The soldier boy is right, old timer. We’re poxed.”
Looking aghast, Trimble took a step back, his hand on his chest. “What kind of pox?”
“Smallpox, you idiot. Now just stay away from us. I have one dying in the back of the wagon if she isn’t dead of fever already and time’s running short for the rest of us.” She looked around the meadow, at the trees and then to the creek that ran clear over lilac-colored pebbles. “I figure this is as good a place as any to die, and better than most.”
As though to put an exclamation mark on the woman’s statement, Maxine suddenly groaned and slumped over the reins. The two other women helped her down from the seat and laid her on the grass.
Stryker shook his head in disbelief and spoke to the woman with the rifle. “What in God’s name are you women doing here in the middle of an Apache uprising?”
“And that’s exactly why we’re here, soldier boy. We came up from Sonora in Old Mexico. Had a house in a settlement just across the border. But business dried up.” She turned. “How is Maxine?”
A woman shook her head, her fevered eyes telling what her mouth did not.
“I don’t know what happened to them boys down there,” the woman with the rifle said, speaking again to Stryker. “Maybe they got religion or the Apaches scared them, but they stopped coming round. Then we were told by a Texas drover that General Crook was gathering an army in the Pedregosas and that he was camped on Big Bend Creek with three regiments. He told us how to get there, so we packed up the next day and headed north, following the soldiers.”
“Ma’am, the general established his headquarters at Fort Bowie to the north,” Birchwood said.
“Don’t you think we know that by now, sonny?” the woman said. “We were told wrong was all.”
Birchwood flushed and said nothing.
Again the woman glanced behind her. “Fetch me a canteen, Selina.”
She filled the canteen at the creek and walked back to Maxine. She lifted the dying woman’s head and tried to make her drink, but Maxine refused, coughing weakly.
Stryker had never seen smallpox before, but somewhere he’d read that you had to stay at least ten feet from a victim or risk being infected.
“Mount up, Mr. Birchwood,” he said. “We’re moving on.”
“Yes, sir,” the young lieutenant said, glad to get away from that place of death.
But Trimble, inquisitive, or revealing an old man’s concern about his health, said, “Ma’am, beggin’ your pardon, but did you get the pox around these parts?”
The woman laid her rifle against the wagon and stood facing him, keeping her distance. “I know where we got it, pops. South of here. We were camped about two miles north of the Big Bend, right close to a mountain.”
“Sounds like the Packsaddle to me, ma’am,” Trimble said. He nodded. “We’ll ride around them parts, I reckon.”
“It wasn’t the mountain that gave us smallpox, Mister. Two men came riding into our camp. Big men and well armed. They’d brought whiskey with them and stayed for the night and we girls showed them a real good time. Then, at first light, they came to me and said they’d no money. But the bigger of the two, a man wearing buckskins who called himself Silas—”
Stryker was suddenly alert. “Ma’am, was his last name Dugan?”
The woman shook her head. “Since when does a man give a whore his last name? He called himself Silas and the man who was with him Rake.”
“When was this?” Stryker asked.
“Nine days ago. The smallpox took us real fast.” Stryker and Birchwood exchanged glances, and Trimble stepped into the silence. “Ma’am,” he said, his voice hollow, “he didn’t give you blankets, did he?”
“He said he was camped nearby and he’d stashed away food and blankets to hide them from the Apaches. He said blankets were better than money, because we’d need them if we planned on heading for Fort Bowie. He said the nights get cold in the Chiricahuas. He brought us the blankets and some food and right after that, we all got sick.”
Suddenly Clem Trimble looked old. “Ma’am, the Mexicans pay Silas Dugan in gold to spread disease among the Indians. I reckon he aimed on doing it to the Apaches, but they went on the warpath, broke down their rancherias and spoiled his plans. He spreads smallpox with infected blankets because he had the pox once hisself and it can’t trouble him a second time.”
For the first time the woman acted like the girl she was. Tears started in her hot eyes and she said, “We drank his whiskey and done everything for him a man could daydream about. Why would he do that to us?”
His voice clicking in his throat, Trimble said, “Because he’s Silas Dugan and he thought it was a funny joke to play on you, ma’am.”
“Can a man be that evil?”
“If you’ll forgive me for sounding like a preacher, ma’am, evil is at war with the entire creation. That’s how ol’ Silas thinks of hisself, a man at war with God hisself and the rest of humanity.”
A silence followed that grew, then stretched taut, and Stryker decided to break it. “Mount up,” he said.
He swung into the saddle of the criollo and then kneed the horse toward the woman, keeping his distance. “Is there anything I can do for you, ma’am? If I meet up with General Crook’s command, I could send a doctor back here.”
The woman shook her head. “Thank you, but we’ll be dead by then.” She lifted her eyes to Stryker. “Have you whiskey?”
“Sorry. I don’t have any.”
“No matter; we’ll just die sober.” Her fevered gaze softened and Stryker was no longer looking into the hard eyes of a whore but of a woman in pain. “Lieutenant, my name is Stella Parker. Will you remember that?”
“Do you have kinfolk I can contact, ma’am?”
“No, no folks. Just say my name sometimes. I mean years in the future, will you say, ‘Stella Parker,’ now and then?”
Too overcome to speak, Stryker nodded.
“Thank you,” the woman called Stella said. “Thank you most kindly.”
Chapter 29
Stryker and the others rode due south, in the direction of Packsaddle Mountain. Riding through rugged, difficult terrain, they crossed Box Canyon and were within two miles of High Lonesome, yet another forbidding chasm, when thunderheads began to build above the Swisshelm Mountains to the west.
Within minutes the clouds had turned black and the air smelled of ozone and of the pines that were already tossing their heads, worried by a rising wind.
“Big blow comin’ up, Cap’n,” Trimble told Stryker. He winked. “We don’t want to be caught in no canyon when the rains come; a man can drown quicker’n scat that way.”
Stryker was irritated, not at the old man but at the volatile temperament of the desert summer. He was praying that Pierce was still camped close to the Saddleback and had not already slipped south into Mexico.
“Look for a likely place to hole up,” he said. He looked around himself, but saw nothing that promised shelter. Trimble was right; there was always a danger of flash floods in the canyons and arroyos. They would have to reach higher ground.
Now the scowling clouds above them were black. Thunder banged and lightning flashed skeletal fingers that clawed the face of the sky. Rain hammered down, falling like a cascade of stinging steel needles.
Stryker turned in the saddle. “Up ahead!” He had to yell over the noise of the storm. He waved the others forward.
He pushed the little criollo up a steep, pine-covered rise and headed toward a limestone overhang, jutting out from the lower slope of a shallow peak. The overhang was low, no more than six feet, holding up a detritus of fallen rocks, whitened tree limbs and rubble. But it covered a deep gash in the slope that went back fifteen feet, gradually sinking lower until it petered out at a rock face. It would shelter both men and horses until the storm passed.
The wind ravaged through the trees like a shark, shredding pine needles, cartwheeling them into the air. Lightning blazed and thunder roared in the voice of an angry god.
“Hell,” Trimble said, throwing himself off the back of Birchwood’s horse, “it’s like the end of the world.”
Stryker and Birchwood led their mounts into the shelter of the overhang. The horses were frightened, their eyes showing arcs of white, but they stood where they were, preferring even that meager shelter to what lay outside.
Stryker stepped deeper into the cleft, found a place to sit and built a cigarette. He wondered how the women were faring back at their camp. Huddled in the wagon probably, waiting for death to take them.
“Stella Parker,” he said aloud.
Birchwood looked at him strangely, but said nothing.
“The woman with the rifle,” Stryker said. “Her name was Stella Parker.”
“Oh,” Birchwood said.
Stryker glanced up at him. “Yes, that was her name all right.”
After the storm passed, they mounted again and rode south and that night camped in the looming shadow of the Packsaddle.
As though ashamed of its temper tantrum, the desert compensated by putting on a show. The violet sky was clear, glittering with far-flung stars, and a bright moon rose, braiding the pines with mother-of-pearl light. A soft breeze rustled, heavy with the scent of damp moss, and out in the darkness the waking coyotes shook themselves and sprayed from their coats water that haloed around them like beads of silver.
Stryker sat by the fire, drinking coffee and smoking. Opposite him, Birchwood was deep in thought, his young face crimsoned by the flames.
“Something troubling you, Mr. Birchwood?” Stryker asked. “You still tearing yourself apart over your whiskey bender?”
The young man shook his head. “No, sir. My betrothed can’t hear me, I know, but I’ve made another vow that I will not enter houses of ill repute and that my lips will ne’er again touch whiskey.”
“Very commendable, Mr. Birchwood. I’m sure your lady would be pleased to know that her cavalier has sworn off whores and strong drink.”
Birchwood looked sharply at Stryker, but the lieutenant’s face was empty.
After the time it took him to light another cigarette and sample his coffee, Stryker said, “So what’s sticking in your craw?”
Birchwood poked a stick deeper into the fire, throwing up a shower of sparks. “I think we should head back to Fort Bowie, sir. We’ve followed our orders and ascertained that there are no Apaches within miles of the post. Now it’s time to go back.”