Heather Graham - Slater Brothers 04 - Apache Summer.pdf

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Apache summer
by
Author unknown
Chapter One.
Western Texas, 1870 ~ ~ Look, Lieutenant! Fire, rising high to our
left!" Jamie Slater reined in his roan stallion. With penetrating
silver-gray eyes he stared east, where Sergeant Monahah was pointing.
Across the sand and the sagebrush and the dry dunes, smoke could indeed
be seen, billowing up in black and gray bursts. Tendrils of flame, like
undulating red ribbons, waved through the growing wall of smoke.
"Injuns!" Monahan breathed.
To Jamie's fight, Jon Red Feather stiffened. Jamie turned toward him.
The half-breed Blackfoot was a long way from home, but he was still one
of the best Indian scouts around. He was a tall, striking man with
green-gold eyes and strong, arresting features. Thanks to a wealthy
white grandfather, Jon Red Feather had received a remarkable education,
going as far as Oxford in England.
Jamie knew that Jon resented the ready assumption that trouble meant
Indians, even though he admitted readily to Jamie that trouble was
coming, big trouble. The Apache hated the white man, the Comanche
despised him, and Jamie was convinced that the great Sioux Nation was
destined to fight in a big way for all the land that had been grabbed by
the hungry settlers.
Through Jon, Jamie had come to know the Comanche well. He didn't make
the mistake of considering the Comanche to be docile, but, on the other
hand, he'd never known a Comanche to lie or to give him any double-talk.
"Let's see what's going on," Jamie said quietly. He rose high in his
saddle and looked over the line of forty-two men presently under his
command.
"Forward, Sergeant. We ride east. And by the look of things, we'd best
hurry."
Sergeant Monahah repeated his order, calling out harshly and demanding
haste.
Jamie flicked his reins against the roan's shoulders, and the animal
took flight with grace and ease. His name was Lucifer, and it fitted the
animal well. He was wild--and remarkable.
That was one thing about the U. S. Cavalry, Jamie reckoned as they raced
toward the slope of the dune that led to the rise of smoke. They offered
a man good horses. He hadn't had that pleasure in the Confederate
 
cavalry.
When the Confederacy had been slowly beaten into her grave, there hadn't
been many mounts left. But the war had been over for almost five years
now.
Jamie was wearing a blue uniform, the same type he'd spent years of his
life shooting at. No one, least of all his brothers, had believed he
would last a day in the U. S. Cavalry, not after the war.
But they had been wrong. Many of the men he was serving with hadn't even
been in the war, and frankly, he understood soldiers a whole lot better
than he did politicians and carpetbaggers.
And he had liked the life in the saddle on the plains, dealing with the
Indians, far better than he had liked to see what had become of the
South.
This was western Texas, and the reprisals from the war weren't what they
were in the eastern Deep South. Everywhere in the cities and towns were
the men in tattered gray, many missing limbs, hobbling along on
crutches. Homeless and beaten, they had been forced to surrender on the
fields, then they had been forced to surrender to things that they
hadn't even understood.
Taxes forced upon them. Yankee puppets in place where local sheriffs had
ruled. The war was horrible--even after it was over.
There were good Yanks, and Jamie had always known it. He didn't blame
good men for the things that were happening in the South--he blamed the
riffraff, the carpetbag- gets. He liked his job because he honestly
liked a number of the Comanche and the other Indians he dealt with--they
still behaved with some sense of honor. He couldn't say that for the
carpetbaggers.
Still, he never deceived himself. The Indians were savage fighters; in
their attacks, they were often merc'fless.
But as Jamie felt the power of the handsome roan surge beneath him as he
raced the animal toward the rise of fire and smoke, he knew that his
days with the cavalry were nearing an end. For a while, he had needed
the time to get over the war. Maybe he'd needed to keep fighting for a
while just to learn how not to fight. But he'd been a rancher before the
war had begun.
And he was beginning to feel the need for land again. Good land, rich
land.
A place where a man could raise cattle in wide open spaces, where he
could ride his own property for acres and acres and not see any fences.
He imagined a house, a two-story house, with a great big parlor and a
 
good-sized kitchen with huge fireplaces in each to warm away the
winter's chill. Maybe it was just time for his wandering days to be
over.
"Sweet Jesus!" Sergeant Monahah gasped, reining in beside Jamie as they
came to the top of the rise of land.
Jamie silently echoed the thought as he looked down upon the carnage.
The remnants of a wagon train remained below them. Men had attempted to
pull the wagons into a defensive circle, but apparently the attack had
come too swiftly. Bodies lay strewn around on the ground. The canvas and
wood of the wagons still smoldered and smoked, and where the canvas
covers had not burned, several leathered arrows still mmained.
Comanche, Jamie thought. He'd heard that things were heating up.
Seemed like little disputes would eventually cause a whole-scale war.
Monahah had told him he'd heard a rumor about some whites tearing up a
small Indian village.
Maybe this was done in revenge. "Damnation!" Sergeant Monahah breathed.
"Let's go," Jamie said.
He started down the cliff and rocks toward the plain on which the wagon
train had been attacked. It was dry as tinder, sagebrush blowing around,
an occasional cactus protruding from the dirt. He hoped there was no
powder or ammunition in the wagons to explode, then he wondered what it
would matter once he and his men looked for survivors.
The Indians had struck sure and fast, then disappeared somewhere into
the plain, up the cliffs and rock. L'like the fog wisping away, they had
disappeared, and they had left the death and bloodshed behind them.
"Cimle carefully!" he advised his men.
"A half-dead Comanche is a mean one, remember?"
Riding behind him, Jon Red Feather was silent. Their horses snorted and
heaved as they slowly came down the last of the slope, trying to dig in
for solid footing. Then they hit the plain, and Jamie spurred his horse
to race around and encircle the wagons. There were only five of them.
Poor bastards never had a chance, he thought. He reckoned that someone
had been bringing some cattle north, since there was at least a score of
dead calves lying glass-eyed and bloody along with the human corpses.
There was definitely no one around. And there was not a single Indian
left behind, not a dead one, or a half-dead one, or any other kind of a
one.
 
He dismounted before the corpse of an old man. There was an arrow shaft
protruding from his back.
Jamie touched the man's shoulder, turning him over. He swallowed hard.
The man had been scalped, and a sloppy job had been done of it. Blood
poured down his forehead, still sticky, still warm.
It hadn't happened more than a half hour ago. If they had headed back
just a lousy thirty minutes earlier, they might have stopped this
carnage.
His men had dismounted too, he realized. At a command from Sergeant
Monahan, they were doing the same as he, searching through the downed
men for any survivors. Jamie shook his head, standing. Hell. He had just
been to see the local Comanche chief. Running River was the peace chief,
not the war chief, of the village, but the white men and Running River's
people had been doing just fine together for years now.
Jamie liked Running River. And though he had never kidded himself that
any Comanche couldn't be warlike when provoked, he couldn't begin to
imagine what in hell would have provoked an attack like this one. If the
Indians were hungry, they would have stolen the calves, not slaughtered
them.
Jon Red Feather was next to him, investigating the body. "No Comanche
did this," he said.
Jamie frowned at him.
"Then what do you think? A band of Cheyenne?
Maybe a wandering tribe of Minutes. We're too far south for it to be the
Sioux"--" I promise you, Lieutenant, no self-respecting Sioux would ever
do such a careless job. And the Comanche are warriors, too. They learn
from an early age how to lift the hair."
"Then what?" Jamie demanded impatiently. His blood run cold as he
realized that Jon was insinuating that it hadn't been Indians who had
made this heinous attack. It wasn't possible, he told himself. No white
man could have killed and mutilated his own kind so savagely.
"Hey, Lieutenant!" Charlie Forbes called to him. Jamie swung around.
Forbes was on the ground beside one of the dead men, an old-timer with
silver-gray whiskers. "What is it, Charlie?"
"Looks like this one was hit by an arrow, tried to rise and got shot
with a bullet, right in the heart."
He could feel Jon standing behind him. Jamie adjusted his plumed hat and
 
twisted his jaw.
"Don't try to tell me the Comanche don't have rifles."
"Hell, I'm not going to tell you that. They get them from the
Comancberos--the Comancheros will sell rifles to anyone.
Of course, you've got to bear in mind that the Comancheros do buy them
from your people."
Jamie didn't say anything. He stepped past Jon and stared at the one
wagon that seemed to have had little damage done to it. He thought he
heard something.
He had to be imagining things. The job here had been very thorough.
Still, he watched the wagon as he straightened his back, trying to get
out all the little cricks and pains. He felt queasy about this thing.
And he hadn't felt queasy about anything in quite some time.
He'd grown up on bloodshed. Before he had been twenty, his sister-in-law
had been slain by Kansas jay hawkers Then war had been declared, and
though he had fought in a decent regiment under the command of John Hunt
Morgan, he had never been able to escape the horror of the border war.
From his brother Cole he had learned that the Missouri bushwhackers
could behave every bit as monstrously as the jay hawkers
And a Southern boy called Little Archie Clements had gone around doing a
fair bit of scalping in his day. He and his men had stripped down men in
blue and shot them without thought, and when they'd finished with the
killing they'd gone on to scalping.
He had no right to think that the Indians were any more vicious than the
white men. No right at all.
He exhaled slowly. Knowing that the Southern bushwhackers had been every
bit as bad as the Northern jay hawkers was one of the reasons he was
able to wear this uniform now. A blue cavalry uniform, decorated in blue
trim, with a cavalry officer's sword at his side. He didn't carry a
military-issue rifle, though. Through four years of civil conflict he
had worn his Colts, and he wore them to this day.
His eyes narrowed suddenly. He could have sworn that something in the
wagon had moved.
He glanced over his shoulder. Jon was behind him. Jon nodded, aware
instantly of Jamie's suspicions. He circled around while Jamie headed
straight for the opening at the rear.
He looked in. For a second he could see only shadows in the dim light.
Then things took form. There were two bunks in the wagon. Ironically,
 

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