Apache Squaw Read online

  And at the same moment, Jed heard a crackle of shots, spitting and bouncing around the Canyon. He ducked down, imagining that he’d been seen, realizing immediately that it wasn’t that. There was none of the noise of bullets striking and screeching away off rocks anywhere near him.

  So that meant...

  ‘Quarter after five. Right on the nail, Lieutenant. Better’n you can guess,’ he said to nobody in particular.

  Now that the feint had begun, the Apaches would be running to defend their front door, and would think that the shot Herne had just fired had come from the Cavalry patrol. There wouldn’t be any reason for them to suspect their escape route had been infiltrated.

  Carefully, keeping as flat and as low as possible, he began to creep down the path, watching as the Apaches scattered out across the wide head of the Canyon, making their way towards the narrow neck, where they would be occupied for a while holding off the Cavalry. The camp was quietening, with the women going on with their business. Carrying washing to the small stream that flowed from the bottom of the cliff where he climbed. A clump of trees surrounded the pool, close to the nearest of the wickiups.

  Four or five squaws, stout and shapeless in their long fringed dresses, driving another woman in front of them. Even from his high-up position, Herne couldn’t have failed to recognize the naked figure of the white woman. It was Emmie-Lou Parsons, carrying a pile of clothes towards the pool, goaded on by the Indian women, who each had a sharp stick with which they prodded her. Her pale skin was blotched with dirt, and bruised across the breasts and hips, with spots of blood here and there from the points of the sticks.

  Twice while he watched, still making his careful and secretive way nearer, Herne saw the white woman stumble and nearly fall. The squaws laughed and jeered her, quite oblivious to the gun-battle that raged a quarter-mile away down the Canyon. They seemed to know that their retreat was invulnerable, and they ignored the shooting.

  There was a charred tree close by the pool, with a bundle of burned sticks lashed to it. A small fire still glowed at the base of the tree, a curl of smoke twisting silently up from the embers. As they passed the bundle of sticks, each of the squaws poked at it with their makeshift speaks. One of them stopping and lashing at the charred bundle with all of her strength, calling out to the others.

  Herne felt the skin crawl on his back. The black sticks had moved! Cried out in a voice that was so feeble and thin it hardly seemed human.

  Not only had Herne found the missing Emmie-Lou Parsons. He’d also just found what remained of the ramrod, Tanner.

  If One Eye was any good as a leader, it wouldn’t take him all that long to realize that the attacking force didn’t really have it in mind to do any actual attacking. Then he’d start wondering about what sort of a diversion it was. And why.

  So Herne had to keep on moving. He got a bonus when three of the five squaws left to go back to their own wickiups, leaving Emmie-Lou guarded by the remaining couple, one of whom, Jed noticed as he crept closer, was carrying a Winchester under her arm.

  The trees gave him good cover, and the rushing stream shrouded any noise he might have made as he stalked towards his prey. There was a gap of fifteen or twenty yards between the nearest rock and the first of the trees. He waited as long as he dared for the camp to become empty. But there were always several squaws, and a dozen brats playing in the dust.

  If he ran he would draw attention to himself, so he simply pulled out his shirt, and walked slowly across, keeping his face turned away, hoping that a casual glance would mistake him for one of the Apaches. He was nearly in the trees when he heard, and saw out of the corner of one eye, an Apache child point in his direction and call something out.

  Like a ball from a musket, he leaped the last two or three steps, standing panting in the cooler shade of the glade, peering out through the green curtain of leaves, Colt ready drawn. The little naked boy who had seen him was pointing and the women were staring where he showed them. Jed stood very still, not even thumbing back the hammer on the gun in case its triple click should give him away.

  One of the squaws, who Herne guessed was the mother of the little boy, obviously decided that her son was trying to trick them and wagged an angry finger at him. The rest of the women laughed and the little boy scampered away from them. Herne watched him, in case he tried to prove he’d really seen what he claimed, but the child seemed to have forgotten all about it and wandered off alone among the wickiups on the far side of the camp.

  Among the trees he could hear the two women talking and sniggering. He walked like a ghost between the trunks, setting his foot down as carefully as if he was walking across eggs, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Please. Please leave me alone! I’m trying! Oh, Blessed Jesus, I’m trying!!’ Followed by tears, and renewed laughter from the Indian women.

  There they were. Emmie-Lou, naked and very beautiful, kneeling down and trying to wash a cotton shirt between two large stones on the edge of a clear pool, made by damming the stream. The Mescalero women, one of whom was barely a teenager, stood and watched her. The white woman’s long hair dangled across her shoulder, and she paused to push it up out of her eyes. The younger squaw screeched out at her, and reinforced her words with two cracking blows across the back, raising red weals on the tender skin.

  The other Apache woman — the one with the rifle — stepped forward and took the shirt from Emmie-Lou’s fingers. She looked at it contemptuously, then dropped it on the earth at the pool’s edge and trampled on it until it was filthy and muddy, then handed it back to her accompanied by a slap across the face.

  ‘Time to move in on the laundry,’ said Herne quietly to himself, taking the step beyond the trees that put him into clear view of the pool.

  Both Indian women had their backs to him, but Emmie-Lou glanced up, attracted by the movement. The face was much like the face in the picture, but it seemed to have aged and grown hard. There was a livid bruise under the left eye, and a brown thread of dried blood at the corner of the mouth.

  Holding the gun steady, Herne raised his left hand to his lips in a gesture of warning. He hoped that he could get closer to the other women and maybe take them out without noise.

  It was a futile hope.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ exclaimed Mrs. Parsons, half-standing, eyes wide open as if she couldn’t believe what she saw.

  An expression that was mirrored on the faces of the two Mescalero squaws as they spun round to see the tall figure of the white man, like some avenging spirit sprung from the soul of the trees, gun in hand and cold death in his eyes.

  ‘Come to me, Mrs. Parsons. Slow and easy.’

  Seeing the angel of salvation, Emmie-Lou suddenly became conscious that she was stark naked, and one hand flew to cover her breasts, while the other dropped to cover the dark triangle of matted hair at the junction of her thighs.

  ‘No time for modesty, Mrs. Parsons. Just keep on walking towards…Bitch!!’

  The older of the two women, carrying the rifle, suddenly screamed at the top of her voice, and came running at him, holding the Winchester like a lance. He saw her finger whiten on the trigger and shot her through the center of the forehead, the bullet lifting her off her feet, throwing her backwards in a tangle of arms and legs. The rifle went up in the air in a lazy arc, lodging in the branches of one of the shady trees.

  The second squaw also started towards him, changing her mind as she saw what happened to her companion. She hurled her stick at Herne, missing by only a hand’s span, then dived into the water, vanishing in a cloud of white spray.

  Herne steadied himself, holding his right wrist with his left hand for extra support, and waited until the girl’s head and shoulders rose above the surface. As it did so he put a bullet carefully through the back of the skull, taking away most of her face as it exited. The body jerked and kicked for a few seconds, then floated serenely on the clear water, blood clouding out from the fatal wound.

  ‘Get the dress off that first one,
’ snapped Herne to Emmie-Lou. ‘And get a damned move on before the whole damned tribe gets on our asses.’

  For a moment he thought that his prize was going to give out on him with a fit of the vapors. He took a half-step towards her, but she shook her head, and turned her back to him, bending down over the corpse of the Mescalero squaw, quickly ripping the dress off her.

  ‘Just put it on anyhow. Don’t stop to take mind of how it looks!’

  Behind, from the direction of the camp, he could hear the voices of women, growing nearer. Excited and shouting. Even against the background of the shooting at the mouth of West Wind Canyon, the scream had been heard. His best hope was that none of the braves were there.

  While Emmie-Lou dressed, tugging the damp skins over her nakedness, Herne quickly reloaded the Colt. Three bullets. Three kills. Economical shooting.

  ‘I’m ready. Where do...?’

  ‘No questions. Just stick closer to me than paint to a door and we’ll make it.’

  ‘What about Pete?’

  ‘Who the…?’

  ‘Pete Tanner. They’ve been doing… dreadful…’

  ‘Yeah. I heard a mite of that while I was coming down the path this morning, ‘fore sun-up. What they’ve done to Pete Tanner is done. Can’t do nothing for him.’

  ‘Lookout!!’

  Herne spun and fired in the same action, catching the movement from the edge of his vision. Someone with a drawn bow. One of the Mescaleros. The bullet made it four in a row. It smashed the bow in half, and carried on to tear clean through the chest of the Apache holding it, knocking him into one of the trees, and leaving him a bleeding corpse.

  ‘Hell!’ said Herne, angry at his own speed.

  He had just shot the little boy who had pointed him out earlier. A little boy who would have been all of six.

  He tried to back away from the oncoming women, keeping Emmie-Lou at his side, waving the gun at them in the vain hope that he wouldn’t have to slaughter any more of the squaws or their brats.

  ‘Shoot them down!’ hissed Emmie-Lou at his elbow. ‘Make them pay for what they did to me and Pete.’

  ‘Guess they done a little of that already, Mrs. Parsons,’ he replied.

  But the women took the matters to themselves, coming after him with sticks. Butchering a mob of Apache women wasn’t Jed’s idea of gun fighting, but he knew well enough that a woman with a knife could kill a man as efficiently as a marksman with a Sharps rifle. He’d seen the bitch-queen of Memphis, Fat Alice Birch, prove that when she cut the throat of Linus May all over the floor of the Golden Flower saloon. Linus had always been squeamish about women, and couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger of his big forty-four.

  Finest hanging Memphis had in years, with Fat Alice blowing kisses to the crowd all the way to the gallows, and only the hangman spoiling things by figuring that Alice was a mite lighter than she really was. Might have been trying to be a gentleman, but all it did was pull her blonde head clean off her shoulders when the trap opened. Front eight rows got soaked in the blood.

  If the squaws had been white women, Jed would have taken a chance on trying to talk them out of it. But they weren’t, and he wouldn’t

  ‘Get back!’ he shouted, waving the Colt at them, while Mrs. Parsons cowered behind him, still muttering for him to kill them all for what they’d done to her and Tanner.

  He took no notice of her, and the women took no notice of him, surging forwards in a screaming bunch, with a few of the children scurrying around their skirts, throwing stones at him.

  ‘God Damn,’ Herne said quietly, firing four quick shots at the leading four women, aiming to stop them rather than slaughter them. Two went down holding smashed knees, and one clutching her stomach. The fourth snap shot missed the front rank, taking out one of the squaws at the rear, opening up a wide flesh wound under her ribs.

  It stopped them. They all stood in a huddle, around the fallen women, their screaming and cursing muted, within twenty paces of Herne. He stood at the edge of the bloodied pool, watching them carefully, and slowly reloaded his Colt.

  ‘Trail out goes up the path behind us. Through the trees and round the side of the nearest wickiup. Go on. Get a start and I’ll join you. Shout if you see any bucks coming back to find out what all the shootin’ is round here. Move it!’

  Emmie-Lou Parsons started away from him, but he was aware that she was walking slowly. Jed risked a glance back, seeing her still on his side of the water, watching the action with frightened eyes.

  ‘Get your ass out of here, or we’re both dead. And keep low on the path!’ he bellowed at her.

  Another stone splashed in the water behind him, and Jed reckoned that it was also time for him to be moving. It wouldn’t be long before some of the squaws remembered that there were guns in the wickiups, and came after him and the escaping captive.

  Two more shots broke them. This time he fired to kill, picking them off like shooting fish in a barrel, knocking them over in the sand, which was being trampled up and soaked in blood until it resembled crimson mud. Leaving the two corpses behind and the one gut-shot rolling about and screaming, the others fled, helping away the three injured women who could be moved.

  Herne followed them up, firing a couple more shots over their heads to keep them on the move. Sending them scurrying and moaning away across the open space by the cooking fires, into the wickiups. Dragging their children behind them, feet trailing in the dust. In seconds, Herne stood alone in the middle of the Mescalero camp.

  Not quite alone.

  He was at the edge of the clump of trees, nearly within touching distance of the burned tree where the remains of Tanner hung, the small fire at his feet still smoldering gently. The air was heavy at that spot with the sickly-sweet scent of burning flesh.

  The thing tied there made a noise. A low, regular sound. Herne doubted if there was anything left that could be called life, and that Tanner was no longer aware of anything going on around him. Not even aware that he was making a slow, hissing, rasping noise with every other breath. His world would have been filled with pain. Topped up and up until it overflowed and there was nothing but pain. That was when the brain would have given up.

  There was hardly an inch of the naked body that wasn’t scorched black, the skin hanging in swollen blisters and tatters. Against the darkness, Herne could see speckles of fresh blood, shockingly clean and red, coming from where the squaws had beaten him as they passed by with Mrs. Parsons.

  Suddenly Herne was glad that he’d killed the women. His only regret that he hadn’t shot them all down. Wiped them out with the same disregard that they’d shown their helpless white prisoner.

  For a moment he even thought of going on into their wickiups and gunning them all down. But time was running out. He had noticed that the crackle of firing from the neck of West Wind Canyon was slackening. That meant the Apaches were realizing that the attack wasn’t going to be pressed home. Soon some of them would be back to check that all was well in their camp.

  Major Corwin had told him to burn them out. Told him. Not even asked. And Herne the Hunter had never been the sort of man to do what he was told. Nobody ever threw him his guns and ordered him to run. So there would be no fire. He’d been hired to bring out the woman, and that was what he’d do. In any case, the earth huts of the Apaches wouldn’t burn that easily, as Corwin ought to have known.

  Tanner shifted in his bonds, and cried out. An unintelligible jumble of garbled sounds. Elisha Parsons had said that the ramrod had known about the threat from the Mescalero raiding party before he set out with Emmie-Lou, but that he’d been ready to take the chance.

  Now he was near death. Herne knew enough of the ways of Apache squaws to guess without looking too closely what horrors lay beneath the roasted exterior. The tongue and the ear-drums would have gone early. And the ears themselves, and the eye lids. The lips, and all of the teeth. The nose sliced away. The genitals removed. If he had been lucky, they would have been cut quickly away with
one slash of a skinning knife. Probably though, Tanner hadn’t been lucky.

  Fingernails, and then the fingers themselves. Each one bent slowly back, until it cracked while the women would all have laughed and applauded. Only then would they have taken up their needles and their thongs, vying with each other to see who could best decorate the living flesh with patterns of beads.

  It would have taken a long time. Tanner would have felt it for an eternity. The eyes would have remained, for the squaws would have lost something of their pleasure if their victim had not been able to see what was being done to him. So much of the enjoyment lay in the anticipation.

  The fire would have come last. Probably during the night that Herne and the Cavalry were riding towards the Canyon. Dozens and dozens of thin needles of wood inserted in the skin, and then one of the squaws would have waved a blazing torch over the body, igniting them all.

  Herne swallowed hard. Turned to the thing hanging at his side, and carefully fired a single shot between where the eyes had once been. The charred object jerked once and then was still. There was surprisingly little blood.

  Time to be moving. To follow Emmie-Lou up the steep path, and hope to stay ahead of the Mescalero warriors who would certainly try and regain their captive. And catch the white man who had invaded their camp and butchered their women and children. If they caught Herne, Tanner’s sufferings would be nothing compared with what they would do to him.

  Jed turned and stepped back into the trees, away from the charred corpse. ‘If’n you play with fire, I guess you got to expect to get your fingers burned,’ he muttered darkly.

  Chapter Seven

  The woman was only a little way up the path, sliding back a yard for every two she climbed, her feet slipping in the soft sand. She had lifted up the long dress around her knees to try and make it easier, but the effort was nearly beyond her, Herne caught up with her, pausing only to fully load his Colt again, wishing that he had his Sharps with him. With the accuracy of the long rifle, he could have kept any pursuit safely away from them. But it was a futile thought, and he went back to concentrating on the reality of his situation.