Cougar Tracks, page 7
‘Two shots?’ Cougar said. ‘Carlina was only shot once.’
‘I don’t know. I guess someone fired back. Maybe D’Arcy.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Well, hell, I don’t know then, Cougar,’ Dallas said, adjusting his eyepatch. ‘Maybe Solon shot twice and missed once. Hard to see how he could have at that range, but maybe he was shook up. I don’t see that one shot or two matters that much. Solon Reineke killed Carlina. We all saw it.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Cougar said with dark bitterness.
‘Is that why you’re heading out there, Cougar? Is it Solon Reineke that you’re after?’
‘Yes, it’s Reineke.’
‘I see.’ Dallas was thoughtful again as they rode side by side. ‘You asked me a kind-of funny question, Cougar. About do I read German.…’
‘So?’
‘I don’t know. It was just an awful funny question. There has to be something you’re not telling me. That’s all right – maybe you don’t think I need to know. But I was thinking … Reineke, ain’t that a German name?’ And then Dallas slowed his horse to leave Cougar to ride on alone with his sullen and confused thoughts.
It was already turning toward dusk and Cougar had begun to look for a likely campsite when Dallas approached him again, his horse lifted into a canter before he reined in alongside.
‘Did you see ’em, Cougar? We’ve got trouble.’
Cougar, whose eyes had been looking westward for a sign of water and grass indicating a decent camp ground, now looked back in the direction Dallas was indicating. ‘Damn,’ Cougar muttered. A long line of riders was visible against the skyline to the southeast. ‘Mexicans,’ he said, stating the obvious. Their outsized sombreros were clearly visible and the excessive silver on their saddles, glinting in the late sunlight, marked them for men from across the border.
‘Would they be looking for us, do you think?’ Dallas asked.
‘You know they must be,’ Cougar answered. A wagon, probably full of supplies, was theirs for the taking, along with six horses. And if they spotted Ellen.… It’s us they’re after. They are probably just talking it over still, wondering if it’s worth the risk.’
He said nothing to Dallas about the other reason these men might be trailing along. That the vaqueros could possibly be going West to join the army that was supposed to be gathering there to do battle with General Crook’s forces.
‘They’re holding their distance,’ Dallas commented.
‘For the time being.’ But it wasn’t dark yet. And that was when any would-be raiders would probably prefer to descend upon them.
Then Dallas said something with a touch of uncharacteristic nervousness: ‘Directly back of us there’s another party of men. You can just make out their dust.’
‘I know they’re there,’ Cougar said calmly.
‘Damn all, Cougar!’ Dallas McGee suddenly exploded. ‘If you don’t trust me, fine. I’ll cut out on my own, but something sure as hell is going on around here, and I don’t feel like risking my life over something I don’t even understand. You’re holding out on me, old friend, and I don’t know why.’
So Cougar told him. There was nothing else to do. Dallas was right. He was risking his life by being with their small party. When he had finished his explanation, Dallas sat his saddle in deep silence.
‘So that’s how it is,’ he said at last.
‘That’s how it is. If you want to ride out now, I couldn’t blame you.’
‘Hell no, I’m not going to cut and run.’ Dallas grinned. ‘I just needed to know what sort of ball I was attending.’
The Mexicans continued to follow them as they moved onward, but eventually they were lost in the deep twilight. When they could travel on no farther safely, Cougar rode back to the wagon and told Dr White, ‘We’d better stake out a dry camp. Atop that rocky knoll, I think.’
Dr White shouted back from the wagon bench. The horses can’t pull that slope! We’ll have to carry up what we need. Why not camp on flat ground?’
‘Because we can carry up what we need – food, water, blankets, and ammunition – easier than we can keep mounted men from riding through our camp,’ Cougar answered. ‘Have a look behind you.’
At his pointing finger, White looked back and saw the horsemen moving like ghosts through the twilight purple. ‘What are they? Indians?’ he asked.
‘Mexicans, we think, but it doesn’t matter who they might be. We have no idea what their intentions might be and the high ground is much safer.’
‘All right,’ White said, finally understanding. He glanced at his daughter. Ellen sat beside him on the seat, young, small and quite pretty. White seemed to be beginning to comprehend the sort of situation he had brought her into.
They set up camp as quickly and as quietly as possible. Cougar and Dallas never put their rifles down. They watched, unspeaking, as sunset dimmed to crimson, blinked bright briefly, and then faded across the dark land.
Ellen sat quietly on a flat volcanic rock atop the small knoll. Dr White moved about aimlessly in nervous agitation. D’Arcy, who had borne the discomfort of being carried up the hill in grim silence, groaned now and then with pain. He had been seated on a blanket beside a large, pocked boulder.
To Cougar, Calvin D’Arcy seemed to be getting no better. His fever remained high. Dr White had told Cougar, but not D’Arcy of course, that he still believed the arm was going to have to be taken off if the man were to survive. They were an unhappy and nearly defenseless little group. Cougar, studying White, found himself wondering why a man of his caliber would ever volunteer for the rugged wilderness life of an army surgeon. Cougar had known a few such surgeons in his time, and they had, almost without exception, been men of deep courage, knowing they might find themselves unarmed in the field trying to perform surgery under septic conditions and even under fire.
Was there more behind Dr White’s decision to come West than Cougar had been told?
He turned his attention to Ellen as he sat, rifle propped up between his knees in the near-darkness. He could ask her to tell him more about White, but he thought he would get no new answers. She was an intensely loyal woman, and, he thought now, stronger than she had seemed at first. Was she, perhaps, the glue that held their little family together and not Dr White himself?
‘There’s someone creeping around down in that gully,’ Dallas whispered, and behind them he could hear D’Arcy gently cock his Winchester.
‘Are you sure?’ Cougar asked, seeing nothing himself.
‘I’ve still got one good eye, Carroll. He’s over there, near that clump of sage. Just beyond those twin boulders.’
‘How many do you make out?’ Cougar strained his eyes against the darkness. Damn! He should have been keeping better watch himself instead of sitting there worrying about Ellen.
‘One’s all I saw,’ Dallas whispered. ‘Do you want me to go down and take a look?’
‘I guess I will, Dallas,’ Cougar said softly. He handed his friend his Spencer repeater and took his razor-edged bowie from its sheath. ‘I guess it’s my place to have a look.’
EIGHT
Cougar slipped into the darkness beyond the camp with the long-bladed knife in his hand, his feet as silent as a big cat’s as he moved across rocks and sand using only the last light of purple dusk to guide him. There would not be a moon until close to morning and the stars seemed thin and worn behind the haze of the desert sky.
Whoever was below had a terrible surprise in store for him. The big man was coming; the cougar was tracking. There would be blood spilled when Cougar embraced his enemy.
To Ellen, who had watched him as he stole out of camp, it was like watching a shadow pass through shadows, his footfalls whispers, his bulk fading against the darkness surrounding him. She bit at her lower lip and started when her father placed an arm around her shoulders.
She spoke not at all to Cougar as he passed; she knew there were hunting men out there and instinct sealed her lips.
There was a ground fog as light as babies’ breath against Cougar’s cheek. He felt his way carefully down the slope, not wanting to dislodge a single pebble. He moved in increments, pausing every few steps to crouch and study what lay around him in the night.
The dim stars cast muted shadows against the earth. The canyon bottom itself was like a dark river. When he reached it he still had heard nothing at all except his own tight breathing and the faint sounds of his boots against the sand.
But there was a hunter out there; Cougar could nearly feel his presence like the slight warmth of a body nearby … but where? He crouched now in a stand of laurel-leaf sumac and sage, scenting the familiar, pungent odor of the chaparral. Still nothing moved or made a muted sound against the hovering night. Cougar held his bowie knife beside his thigh so that there was no chance of the feeble starlight glinting off of it.
Something rustled down the canyon, a shuttling sound like a rattlesnake over leaves and Cougar felt his muscles tighten in response. His heart began to beat a little faster. It seemed that it rose and swelled in his chest. He still did not move at all, but only waited, and after a few minutes he was again rewarded with the slight echo of a tiny rustling sound. A man moving through brush? A prowling bobcat?
Nothing moved as Cougar bunched himself into a tighter ball of muscle and honed steel, his legs tensed so that they were nearly cramped under him, his hand knotted like an iron band around the stag-horn handle of his bowie knife.
Then the thing sprang from the brush, making only an angry hissing sound before its body collided with Cougar’s. Cougar’s knife slashed out and a scream ripped the night.
The attacker tried to hammer at Cougar with his hand, which was fisted around the handle of a pistol, but Cougar caught his wrist as he fell on to his back, tugging his assailant after him.
Simultaneously, the big scout drove a knee into his attacker’s groin and slashed out again with the deadly blade of the big bowie. Steel met the flesh of the other man’s throat with deadly savagery and there was a trapped, gurgling sound as warm fluid flooded Cougar’s face and hand.
Then the attacker lay still, blood soaking into the arroyo sand, and Cougar rolled his body aside, retreating quickly to the shelter of the brush where he panted, watching and waiting. There may have been more of them out there and Cougar was taking no chances.
The cicadas began to sing and a rising breeze to stir the brush around him. Still no one came following the dead man. Cougar rose and moved carefully to the body of the man he had killed and crouched low, examining him.
They had never met before, nor was he a Mexican.
Who, then, was he? Who? The question was frustrating. He must have been another of the men who had been tracking them since Twin Creek. Maybe had grown impatient with the long trail and decided to strike here and now and have done with it. A desperate attempt to stop Cougar and D’Arcy. But then, where were his partners? Simple impatience could not explain the man’s motives, whoever he was. Whoever he had been.
Cougar patted the man down, finding nothing that seemed of significance. He wore a silver and copper bracelet, an unusual piece of jewelry, with the strands of both metals woven together. Cougar removed it, tugged his gunbelt from under him, slinging it over his shoulder. Then, after a few more silent, watching moments, he started back toward the camp on the rocky knoll.
He whistled very softly – two tones – before he re-entered the camp and D’Arcy answered with his own whistle. Then Cougar was in the camp and to his astonishment Ellen was in his arms, shuddering.
She drew back suddenly and Cougar knew that it was the blood on him that had driven her away.
‘Down there …?’ she began to ask, but she had no need to finish the question, nor was there any need for Cougar to answer. She looked at his bloody face and shirt and the captured gunbelt across his shoulder and knew that he had killed.
‘How many?’ was D’Arcy’s whispered question.
‘One,’ Cougar said and a puzzled silence followed. Cougar knew what D’Arcy was thinking – why one man alone unless he was simply scouting out their camp? But if that was so, why then would he choose to attack Cougar?
‘I suppose now we can—’ Dr White said very loudly and Cougar hissed back at him.
‘I suppose now we can just keep quiet the rest of the night! I’ll stand guard. You’ve got second watch, Dallas,’ Cougar said, and then he ambled toward the highest of the dark, jumbled rocks towering above the camp, and, with his Spencer rifle in hand, he sat down to endure three long hours of night watch.
The enemy was out there, but what did he want? And when would he come in force? Perhaps they were waiting for their small party to get farther out on to the approaching desert where accidents were many and discovery rare. Cougar could not outguess them just now; he had no answers. He could only sit and glare out at the sullen night, his big .56 repeater across his lap.
Now and then he thought of Ellen in the large emptiness of the long night. Could that woman possibly be falling for him? How could such a thing be – she a well-raised lady and he a big, uncouth grizzly of a man? He thought of her slender body against his as he returned to camp. It had probably been only relief that had pushed her into his arms. Yet, for just a moment there he had felt … well, thought he had felt, something beyond that. Something inexplicable, probably imagined. And something, if real, he definitely was not prepared for. Not now, not now. He was still trying to complete his love for Carlina.
He tried to push Ellen from his mind and with difficulty managed it. He returned to his troubled brooding and troubled puzzling, to staring against the dark, threatening curtain of the desert night.
Cougar, using the slow swing of the Dipper’s handle for his clock as the constellation rotated around Polaris, awakened Dallas about three hours later to stand his watch. He, himself, turned into his bed immediately, dropping off to a deep, dreamless sleep. Many men had wondered at his ability to do that, about the wisdom of it, but Cougar had the time-tested capacity to sleep deeply and still have the ability to come alert at once. No, his body needed sleep badly and it did come rapidly, but his senses were never totally unconscious. And so it was that when Dallas came past him in the early morning to wake D’Arcy to the darkness for his shift, Cougar heard the footsteps, Dallas’s murmuring, and watched as D’Arcy rose with Dallas’s help.
And it seemed to Cougar that the two men whispered together for just a little time too long. Dallas turned slightly toward Cougar’s bed, studying it. Cougar saw the one-eyed man shake his head and say something else in a throttled whisper. Then the two men separated in the night, D’Arcy hobbling toward his lookout position.
Cougar went back to sleep again. This time he did dream: the bad old dream of Carlina lying dead on her blankets, her clothes half torn off, the blood smearing her beautiful body with a sickly maroon stain.
The first glint of sunlight hadn’t yet darted through the flimsy clouds in the eastern sky when Cougar first heard movement that brought him awake in the silent, dour camp. In the cold gray of morning D’Arcy sat shivering with a blanket around his shoulders, eyes deep set and red. Dallas fidgeted nervously with his revolver, wiping it with a cloth, but not actually cleaning it. Dr White, appearing several years older than he had just days ago, had tried to slick back his hair and dust off his dark suit, but ineffectively. Only Ellen looked up to the challenge of the new morning, but even her face was drawn, her lips drawn down unhappily.
Cougar rolled out of his bed and got to his feet in one swift movement. The others watched him silently, almost without expression.
‘Any sign of them?’ Cougar asked D’Arcy as he rolled up his blankets.
‘None. It seems to me, Cougar, that they might have just ridden on past us in the night. Hoofs on sand wouldn’t have made enough sound to draw our attention.’
‘That could be. Maybe we weren’t of as much interest to the Mexicans as we thought. They might have just been giving us the eye.’ Cougar stood, hands on hips, looking out at the world around them as the sky paled with the coming dawn.
‘You mean they didn’t know who we were?’ D’Arcy asked.
‘Exactly. How would they? If they were soldiers recruited for another mission and not simply bandits, they might have taken notice of us and investigated, seeing nothing that interested them enough to start a fuss; they would have continued on to another place where they had more urgent business.’
‘Like the White Mountains,’ D’Arcy said grimly.
‘Like the White Mountains where General Crook is holed up, still not even knowing that he is being gradually surrounded.’
Morning rolled on and still they saw no one as the sky brightened with the colors of new dawn and they made their way back down the rocky knoll to the wagon and their picketed horses. Cougar was already in the saddle of his sorrel when he noticed that the doctor still hadn’t come down from the night camp. Ellen White was sitting alone on the wagon bench.
‘Where’s your father?’ he asked the girl, who sat, hands clasped between her knees, looking out at the gray desert ahead of them.
‘He’s still up there.’ She nodded. ‘It is a spiritual moment.’
‘It’s what? Do you mean he’s up there praying?’
‘It is time for him to meditate and contact his spiritual connection,’ she replied with a weak smile.
‘Ellen, I don’t understand what you’re telling me,’ Cougar said frankly. ‘It’s time that we were going – there isn’t time to stop and commune with whatever spirits you are talking about.’
‘Nevertheless,’ the girl said, ‘Father feels that he must. That is what he is doing.’ Ellen kept her gaze from Cougar’s face.
‘That’s a part of the rituals in this church he had, is it?’ Cougar asked, looking up toward the crest of the knoll. White still had not appeared.
‘Yes …’ Ellen murmured, ‘a part of it.’
Dallas McGee had ridden up to the wagon, his horse sidestepping with morning friskiness. ‘What’s up?’ he asked Cougar. ‘Are we going to roll this morning?’
