the Rider Of Ruby Hills (1986) (20 page)

Even as his eyes touched them, the nearest Indian broke into a wild, shrill whoop! Then the whole charging line broke into yells.

Rock Bannon, leaning against the Crockett wagon, lifted his Henry rifle and fired. A horse stumbled and went down. He fired again, and an Indian threw up his arms and vanished in the turmoil of oncoming horses and men, and then the other men of the wagon train opened up.

Firing steadily, Bannon emptied his rifle before the Indians reached the edge of the circle. One brave, his wild-eyed horse at a dead run, leaned low and shot a blazing arrow into the canvas of the Crockett wagon. Rock fired his right-hand pistol and the Indian hit the dirt in a tumbling heap, just as a second arrow knocked off Rock's hat. Reaching up with his left hand, Rock jerked the burning arrow from the canvas. The fire had not yet caught. Then he opened up, firing his pistol, shifting guns, and firing again. The attack broke as suddenly as it had begun.

Tom Crockett was kneeling behind a water barrel, his face gray. A good shot, he was not accustomed to killing. He glanced up at Rock, a sickened expression on his face.

"I never killed nothing human before!" he said weakly.

"You'll get used to it out here!" Rock said coldly. His eyes lifted to Sharon.

"You saved our wagon!" she said.

"It might have been anybody's wagon," he said brutally, and turned away. He counted seven dead Indians on the prairie. There were probably one or two more hidden in the tall grass. He could see several dead ponies. The Indian who had shot the flaming arrow lay not more than a dozen feet away. The bullet had gone through his stomach and broken his spine.

Rock walked around. He had eyes only for the men. Cap looked frightened, but determined. Pagones had fired steadily and with skill. Bannon nodded at the short man.

"You'll do," he said grimly.

Pagones started to speak, started after him, and scowled a little. He was ashamed of himself when he realized he was pleased at the compliment.

They were good men, Rock decided. Purcell was reloading his rifle, and he looked up as Bannon passed, but said nothing. Rock walked back to the Crockett wagon. Cap was standing there, his rifle in the hollow of his arm.

"Will they come again?" he asked.

Bannon nodded. "Probably several times. This is Buffalo Hide. Those were his warriors."

"But Morton said-" Crockett started to protest.

Bannon looked around, and then he pointed at the dead Indian. "You goin' to believe Morton Harper or that?" he demanded. "That Indian's a Blackfoot. I know by the moccasins."

This time they came in a circle, going around and around the wagon train. A volley of flaming arrows set two wagon tops afire. Rock stood at the end of the wagon and fired steadily, carefully, making every shot count.

Dawn came with a red, weird light flashing in the east and turned the wagon colors to flame. Guns crashed, and the air was filled with wild Indian yells, and the acrid smell of gunpowder and burned canvas. Three times more they attacked, and Bannon was everywhere. Firing, firing, firing. Crockett went down with a bullet through his thigh. Bjornsen was shot through the head, and a warrior leaped from a horse into Greaves's wagon and the two men fought there until the Indian thrust a knife into Greaves's side. Bannon shot the brave with a snapped pistol shot, almost from the hip.

The last attack broke, and the sun lifted into the sky. As if by magic the Indians were gone. Rock Bannon wiped the sweat from his forehead and stared out over the plain. Buffalo Hide had lost men in this fight. At least twenty of his braves were dead, and there would be wailing and the death chant in the Blackfoot villages tonight.

Two horses and an ox had been killed. They gathered around, buried the two dead men and butchered the ox. Rock sat on a wagon tongue alone. Cap walked over to him. The man's face was round and uncomfortable.

"Reckon you saved us, Rock," he said. "Don't rightly know how to thank you!"

Bannon got up. He had been cleaning his rifle and reloading it while the men were buried. "Don't try," he said.

Bob Sprague walked over and held out his hand. "Guess we haven't been very friendly," he said, "but you were right about the Indians."

Suddenly, boyishly, Bannon grinned. "Forget it, Bob! You did a right good job with that rifle of yours!"

They were the only two who mentioned it. Rock helped lift Crockett into the back of the wagon and then harnessed the oxen. He was gone, riding out on the flank on the steel dust when Sharon came to thank him. She looked after him, and her heart felt suddenly lost and alone.

It was late that day when they reached the dry country. The settlers did not realize the change until the dust began to rise, for in the distance it had looked much the same, only the grass was darker and there was less of it. Within a mile they were suffused in a cloud of powdery, sifting dust, stifling and irritating in the heat.

This was no desert. Merely long miles of plain where the hills receded and there was no subirrigation to keep the grass green and rich. All the following day the dust cloud hung over the wagon train, and from Mulholland's place in the van the last wagons could not even be distinguished.

Mulholland looked up at Bannon, who was riding beside him. "Harper said there was one bad stretch," he said, almost apologetically.

Bannon did not reply. He alone of all the party knew what lay ahead. He alone knew how brutal the passage would be. Let them find out.

Days later, when Cap asked him to go for game, they all knew. They were still in that desert of dust and dirty brown brush. They had camped in it five days now. Their water barrels were empty, the wagons so hard to pull in the thick dust that they made only a few miles each day. It was the worst kind of tough going.

When he had killed two antelope in the hills. Rock rode back to join the party. Pagones, hunting on the other side had killed one. Rock turned toward Sharon's wagon and swung down from the saddle. She looked up at him from over a fire of greasewood.

"Hello," she said. "We haven't seen much of you?"

He took off his black, flat-brimmed hat. His dark, curly hair was plastered to his brow with sweat.

"There are some here who don't want me talking to you," he said dryly. "Figure I'm a bad influence, I guess."

"I haven't said that!" she protested. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. "I like to have you riding close. It-it makes me feel safer."

He looked at her an instant and then looked away. "How's your dad?"

"Better, I think. But this heat! It's so awful! How long before we get out of this dust?"

"Tomorrow night, at this rate. This bad stretch is over."

"Then we're free of that. Morton said there was only one."

He noticed that she had called Harper, "Morton." "He was wrong. You'll strike another near Salt Lake that's much worse than this. You'll never get across unless you swing back and take the old trail for Pilot Peak."

"But he said-" Sharon protested.

Rock Bannon looked up at her from where he squatted on his haunches. "I know he did. I heard everything he said, and I'm still wondering what he has to gain by it. Nobody takes this route. Crossing the Salt Desert by this route is suicide-with wagons at least. You've all placed a lot of faith in a stranger!"

"He was right, Rock. Those first six days were heaven, and from now on it should be good."

"From now on it will be good until you hit the desert," he admitted, "unless you stop."

"Unless we stop?" Sharon dished up a plate and handed it to him, and then poured the coffee. "Why?"

"Tomorrow we get into Hardy Bishop's country." Rock Bannon's face was somber.

"You always refer to him as if he were an outlaw or something awful!"

"No," he said. "Bishop isn't any of those things. If you are his friend or a guest, he's one of the finest men alive. If you are an enemy or try to take something that's his, he is absolutely ruthless."

When she returned from feeding her father, she sat down beside him on the wagon tongue. The sun was down, and the dust had settled. Near a fire on the far side of the circle, Dud Kitchen was singing softly over his mandolin.

The air was cool now, and the soft music mingled in the air with the scent of wood smoke, the low champing of the horses, and the mumbling of the oxen. In the distance they could see the hills, purple with the last shadows before darkness, and shadowed with a promise of coolness after the long days of heat and dust and bitterness.

He stared away at the hills, remembering so much, worried, uncertain, wondering again about Morton Harper. What did the man have in mind? Who was he? Purcell said Harper had lent him money. Perhaps he had lent others in the wagon train money. It was not like a man to loan money and not follow it up to get back what was his. Behind all of this was a reason, and in the back of his mind Rock was afraid he knew that reason.

Sharon spoke suddenly. "What are you thinking of, Rock? You are always so silent. You seem so bitter sometimes, and I can never understand what you have in your mind."

"It isn't anything." He had no desire to mention Harper again. "I was just thinking about this country."

"You like it, don't you?"

"Like it?" He looked up suddenly, and his eyes changed. He smiled suddenly and with warmth. "Like it? I love it! This is a man's country! And that ahead? Wait until you see Bishop's Valley! Miles upon miles of tumbling streams, waving green grass dotted with cattle!

"You should see Bishop's Valley! You go down through a deep gorge along a roaring mountain stream, and you can look up at cliffs that rise for three thousand feet, and then suddenly the gorge widens and you look down a long valley that is six or seven miles wide and all of fifty miles long.

"On each side, high mountain ridges shut it in, and here and there deep gorges and ravines cut back into those ridges and there are green meadows and tumbling waterfalls. And all the hills around are timbered to their crests. It's a beautiful country!"

Sharon stared at him, enchanted. Rock had never talked like this before, and as she listened to him tell of the hills and the wild game, of deer, elk, bear, and mountain goats, of the catbirds calling in the willows and the hillsides white with groves of silver-columned birch, she suddenly forgot where she was and who was talking.

"You seem to love it so much!" she said. "Why did you ever leave?"

"It belongs to one man, to Hardy Bishop," Rock said. "He's carving a little empire there. He went there long before any other white man dreamed of anything but going on to California, before they thought of anything but getting rich from gold mines. They came through the country like a pack of vultures or wolves, taking everything, building nothing. They want only to get rich and get out.

"He was different. Once, when only a boy, he went into that valley on a trapping venture, and he was never content until he came back. He drove a herd of cattle west when there were no cattle in this country, and he got them into that valley and turned them loose. He fought Indians and outlaws, he built a dam, built a home, built irrigation ditches where he wanted them, and planted trees.

"He made the valley, and you can't blame him if he wants to keep it his way now."

Long after Sharon lay in her blankets, she thought of that and of Rock Bannon. How tall he was! And how strange! He had risen suddenly and with scarcely a word had walked into the night, and then she heard him mount his horse and ride away. Yet even as she heard the dwindling hoof beats, she heard something else, the sound of other horses drawing near. Still wondering who the riders could be, she fell asleep.

Scarcely were they moving in the morning before a black mare wheeled alongside her wagon. Flushing suddenly, she saw Morton Harper, hat in hand, bowing to her.

"Good morning!" he said. "I hoped to catch up with you before this, but by tomorrow you'll be in green country again!"

"Yes, I know."

He looked at her quickly. "You know? Who told you?"

"Rock Bannon."

His face sharpened, and she could sense the irritation in the man. "Oh? Then he's still with you? I was hoping he had left you alone. I'm afraid he's not a good man."

"Why do you say that? He's been very helpful."

Harper shrugged. "I'd rather not say. You know of that killing in Laramie, and if that were the only one, it would not matter. There are others. He has killed five or six men. He's a troublemaker wherever he goes. I'm glad Purcell and your men understand that, for it will save a lot of trouble."

He smiled at her. "You look so lovely this morning that it is unbelievable that you have come so far across the prairies. It is a pity you have so far to go. I've been thinking some of settling in this country here." He waved ahead. "It is such a beautiful land, and there is nothing in California so desirable."

Rock Bannon had heard the horses the night before, and he had reined in long enough to see them come up to the fire. Harper he recognized at once. There were two men with him, one a lean, sharp-faced man with a long nose. The other man was short, chuckleheaded, and blunt featured. Bannon's lips tightened when he recognized Pete Zapata. The half-breed killer was notorious, a gunfighter and desperado of the worst stripe, but none of the wagon train would know that.