Lake of the long sun, p.12
Slow Dying (An Apache / Cuchillo Oro Western #18), page 12
Contents
About William M. James
Dedication
Wilfred Owen Quote
The Apache Series
More on Piccadilly Publishing
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
This is for Liz—who has helped me find the road
I’d never found. I loved her when I first saw her,
and I’ll love her until I die.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918
The Apache Series
#1. THE FIRST DEATH
#2. KNIFE IN THE NIGHT
#3. DUEL TO THE DEATH
#4. THE DEATH TRAIN
#5. FORT TREACHERY
#6. SONORA SLAUGHTER
#7. BLOOD LINE
#8. BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
#9. THE NAKED AND THE SAVAGE
#10. ALL BLOOD IS RED
#11. THE CRUEL TRAIL
#12: FOOL’S GOLD
#13: THE BEST MAN
#14: BORN TO DIE
#15: BLOOD RISING
#16: TEXAS KILLING
#17: BLOOD BROTHER
#18: SLOW DYING
#19: DEATH DRAGON
#20: BLOOD WEDDING
#21: FAST LIVING
#22: BORDER KILLING
#23: DEATH VALLEY
#24: DEATH RIDE
#25: TIMES PAST
#26: THE HANGING
#27: DEBT OF BLOOD
Chapter One
“BRING UP THE twelve-pounders!”
“All the mules are dead here, Sir!”
The mist blew about him, making the uniforms of the soldiers blur and shimmer like ghosts. There was clinging mud beneath his feet, forcing each step to be slow and painful. All around him there was a bedlam of screaming men and bursting shells, black powder smoke adding to the sense of unreality. He could hardly make out whether the troops to his right and left were wearing uniforms of blue or gray.
“They’re breakin’ through on the ridge, Captain!” came a voice from his side, and he turned, but there was nobody there, the speaker having vanished in the murk.
His fingers gripped the slippery brass hilt of the saber, while his left hand held an empty pistol. His hat was gone, and he blinked, wiping away a thread of blood from his eyes with the torn sleeve of his jacket.
“Look at Jackson, Captain Mann!”
The piping voice was a young drummer boy, hefting a musket longer than he was, blood streaking his hands and arms, a cut across his shoulder. His eyes were wide with shock and fear.
“What?”
“There. See!”
Captain Thaddeus Mann stared through the fog that swirled around them and saw a group of men locked together in a desperate battle a half mile away across a steep-sided valley. The hill was dotted with corpses tangled together in death, but on the top stood a solitary figure surrounded with what looked like a rampart of rotting bodies, many of them little more than skeletons.
“I make him out,” he replied.
“He holds the line!” screamed the boy, his voice trembling with emotion.
“Then hurrah for Jackson. See how he stands, like a wall of bones. Bones—” the officer replied, shaking his head at a sudden faintness.
There was the sound of silk rustling, and he looked behind him. A woman was walking past, oblivious to the bloody carnage about her, dressed in a long, flowing silk gown of the palest lilac. Her eyes were blue as the summer sky in Montana, and she smiled at Thaddeus Mann and then disappeared behind a small clump of trees.
“Rachel,” he said, trying to take a step toward her, but his boots were clogged in the crimson mud, and he nearly fell. There was the whistling of an artillery shell, growing louder and louder, and he flinched away from it. The earth shook with the concussion of the explosion. He heard the screeching of metal fragments as they burst all around him, leaving him unscathed.
“Captain?” said the drummer boy at his side, in a questioning, conversational tone.
“Yes,” Captain Mann replied as he turned to the boy. “Sweet blessed Jesus,” he muttered.
The cannonball had taken the lad’s right arm clean off at the shoulder as though he had been struck a blow by some giant cleaver. The severed limb lay at his feet, and as Mann looked down, he was horrified to see that the fingers were still curling and straightening with a hideous life of their own.
Blood jetted from the wound, dappling the ground around them like a fall shower. But to Captain Mann’s dismay, the boy showed no sign that he was even aware of his injury. Though his face grew pale and he swayed a little on his feet, he still smiled gently at the officer.
“You know something, Captain?”
“In God’s name, what, boy?”
“My father was an officer. He seduced my Ma, and she hanged herself when I was one year old.”
“Then I am …” but he could think of nothing more to say.
“Hanged herself in her garters, Captain. One fine Sunday morn.”
With that it was as though someone had slashed through the strings that hold body and spirit together, and the boy slumped to the earth without another word, lying still and dead.
Thaddeus Mann turned and tried to run from the field of battle, dropping his gun and allowing the saber to slip from his fingers. His only wish was to flee this nightmare. He knew the fighting so well that it was almost as though the same scenes were being played over and over for him.
The fog cleared, and he was able to run once more, feeling dry earth beneath his boots. There was an avenue of tall and stately trees that helped to cut off the sounds of the battle behind him. Gradually, he slowed to a walk, holding his side where the running had pained him, feeling his breath grow less ragged.
The sun came out, diamond-bright and broken by the leaves of the trees. From among them Mann saw a beautiful white stallion that was moving slowly and picking at the lush grass at the edge of the forest. He smiled at it until it half turned, and he saw that it had been dreadfully wounded. A fragment of metal had ripped its flank and belly apart, and its intestines looped greasily about its rear hooves, trailing in the dust as it walked steadily toward him.
The officer began to run again, away from the double row of trees, toward a lake he could see glinting a half mile off. A raven swooped down from the warm air, its midnight wings brushing against his gray hair. Once more the Confederate officer eased his pace and gathered his breath. The long meadows had given way without his noticing it to cropped lawns, and there was a large white house visible behind a rambling bower of red roses. It was a colonnaded mansion like his own home in Georgia, but there was nobody to be seen anywhere. It was odd that there were no slaves working in the fields beyond the lake. They couldn’t all have run North to the comparative safety of the Union lines.
There was a polished table laid out with a spotless damask cloth covering it diagonally, set with silver cutlery and glittering crystal glasses. A decanter of red wine and a long vase with a single white rose were in the center. The wind had dropped, and Captain Mann stood still in a dome of total silence.
He was conscious that he was no longer alone, and he swung around to see a woman walking around the corner of the house, her arms held out toward him, almost pleadingly. She wore a white bonnet, which totally concealed her face from him, but he felt that he knew her.
“Rachel?” he whispered, unbelievingly. It couldn’t be his wife, Rachel. He knew that she was dead, buried in the blazing ruins of Atlanta.
The silence was gone, and he could hear the noises of fighting coming closer. But he couldn’t remember what battle it was. Antietam? Shiloh? Spotsylvania? Vicksburg? Or was it Chancellorsville? That was when Jackson had fallen; Mann remembered that.
The woman was coming nearer, almost running, her arms still outstretched to him. The sun was sinking lower behind her so that she was a black silhouette against a dazzling bowl of golden light. The Captain squinted, trying to make out the face under the brim of the white hat. A white hat decorated with red roses around the brim. His wife had worn a hat like that.
“Rachel?”
There was a crash behind him, and he saw that the table had fallen over, the glass and porcelain had shattered. But there was no wind, and nobody was near it.
“Rachel?”
She was right by him, and he held his arms out to hold her. The hat fell back, held around her neck by ribbons, and he saw …
“No …!”
It was a sigh, not a cry, that strangled in his throat at the charnel vision of horror. A blasphemous entity was in his arms. There was rank breath on his cheek from the yellowed stumps of teeth; shreds of withered skin decorated the bones of the skull; a few hanks of corn-yellow hair dangled from the scalp; red-rimmed sockets of wind-washed bone were where the eyes would have been.
Thaddeus Mann pushed away this gibbering specter of his wife and ran away from the great white house and the formal gardens, away from the lake and the trees and toward the fighting.
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He hardly saw the soldier who was standing and waiting for him in the shadows, holding a .577 Enfield rifle musket with a bayonet fitted. The man wore dusty blue and had a half-smile on his lips as he saw the Reb officer running blindly toward him. He lowered the muzzle of the gun and braced himself for the impact.
Thaddeus Mann never saw the bayonet. He felt only a dull blow and the pain of something that grated between his ribs, bringing him toppling to the earth. His fingers scrabbled among the fallen leaves, and he felt his sight slipping away. But he could hear steps coming closer. The last he saw was a woman in a long dress, wearing a white hat trimmed with red roses.
This time he screamed so loudly that he finally woke himself up.
Chapter Two
SHERIFF THADDEUS MANN, late captain in the Army of the Confederate States of America, had been the law in Pine’s Peak since he had been demobilized from the infantry at the end of the fighting. He was a man at the far end of middle-age, with most of his past behind him and not a whole lot of future to look forward to.
Pine’s Peak, in Colorado Territory, was a lot like its sheriff.
There’d been silver in what had looked like commercially viable quantities, and the mine had begun to thrive. The township had sprung up, and there’d been saloons and whorehouses, the beginnings of a church, a school and a half-dozen stores. But the great hope of Pine’s Peak was the railroad.
The Kansas Pacific was opening up the center of the country, running across from St. Louis, through Kansas City, Fort Hays and Denver and up to Cheyenne, where it linked up with the Central Pacific to drive a path clear through to the Pacific at San Francisco. A committee of influential citizens had been set up in Pine’s Peak to arrange a contract for a spur line to join up with a new branch of the main railroad that they had heard was proposed to run in their direction. That had been back just after the War, around the time that Thaddeus Mann came to town.
Since then, a whole lot of things had gone wrong in the area. The information had been wrong. Simple as that. The Kansas Pacific had never intended to push out in the direction of Pine’s Peak at all. So the settlement had built its spur for nothing. Seven miles of track started behind the optimistically named International Saloon and then stopped. Not anywhere in particular. Just stopped.
There were three trestle bridges and a high embankment as well as a short tunnel of about 60 feet hewn through living rock. The total cost was around 18,000 dollars more than the committee had anticipated, and the construction had resulted in 11 deaths from accidents and four from Indian attacks.
Then the silver lode began to fail. The quality of the ore deteriorated, and the quantity started to fall each month. Gradually, the town of Pine’s Peak began to die, and Thaddeus Mann sat in his office and quietly watched it happen. It didn’t worry him that much. His salary was paid, and it covered his expenses. On his arrival he’d been given a cabin on the edge of the town, and his needs were few and simple—basic food and three bottles of whiskey a week plus a visit to one of the two remaining brothels once every two weeks. He divided his favors equally between Jane’s and Theresa’s. The Harknett sisters had been in Pine’s Peak since way back when, and they now kept their houses going with a fading supply of whores. Lately, they’d taken to using Indian girls and even a nigra bitch. But the town had drawn the line at that, and the black girl had been sent packing.
The only things that worried Mann were his dreams.
During the War he’d been an elderly captain, ready to retire from the Southern forces, but he’d stayed on throughout the hostilities. He’d seen action in most of the major battles and campaigns. Where younger men had given up and quietly put a ball through their heads, Thaddeus Mann had kept fighting. Despite his age and gray hair, he was one of the most experienced and toughest soldiers in the Army. He’d fought Indians for years, and then he’d taken part in bounty-hunting in Mexico. There wasn’t a trick of killing or tracking or trapping that Mann didn’t know.
If it hadn’t been for his character, there was no doubt that he would have risen further and faster than a middle-aged captain. But Thaddeus Mann didn’t much care. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. Most times he didn’t suffer them at all. And since, in his opinion, most of his superiors were fools, it’s easy to see why he retired still a captain. And some said it was only his great skill that had saved him from demotion or even from a court-martial and a firing squad.
That insubordination had lasted with him in Pine’s Peak, but the folks there recognized the steel that lay beneath the quiet exterior. Mann didn’t hate anybody, but he kept the law. Didn’t matter a flying damn to him about justice or injustice. All that mattered was the law.
Thaddeus Mann had never been a light-hearted man. As a boy he’d studied hard with a view toward a military career, until family tragedies had sent him out into the world at the age of 13 to start earning a living with his fighting talents.
Only late in life did he glimpse the distant prospect of happiness when he met and loved and won Rachel Ashley, the wealthy daughter of a local cotton magnate. But the bitterness between the North and South had meant a short and wonderful marriage—a marriage that ended when his young bride was trapped in a blazing building and killed.
After that he didn’t smile a whole lot.
In between the recurrent nightmares that haunted his sleeping hours, Thaddeus Mann was an excellent sheriff. But that was coming to an end. As the town died, the need for a top lawman slipped away, and he knew that the time couldn’t be that far off when they would ask him to quit. Then he’d live for a while in peace in the little house, and after that … After that he’d maybe move away west and see the Pacific one last time.
Things weren’t so good. He could no longer pick and choose his deputies, and he was left with a mixture of passing drifters and local sweepings. Most were young boys in their early 20s or late teens who were eager for trouble when drunk, and just ordinary mean when they were sober. Boys that he would never have looked at in the old days, but now it was them or nothing. And with occasional outbursts of fighting with the local Indians, they were just a mite better than nothing.
“What the hell happens if bigger trouble comes along?” he asked nobody in particular as he looked out of the window at the early morning.
Four miles away, in a shelter beneath an overhanging rock, something better in the way of trouble was also awake, standing and stretching the night’s chill out of his bones, feeling the muscles crack as he extended them to the limit.
He was big even by the standards of white men. But he was an Apache, a member of the Mimbreños tribe. Six feet tall and broadly built, his only physical imperfection was a mutilated right hand where a Cavalry officer named Cyrus Pinner had tortured him. It had taken him years, but the Apache had finally tracked Pinner down and killed him.
He drew a knife from its buckskin sheath at his right hip. The dawn sun flashed off the polished blade and the uncut stones in the rough, golden hilt. It was the knife that had given the Apache a name that made him notorious throughout the southern and western regions of America.
Golden Knife. Cuchillo Oro!
Chapter Three
FOR A LONG time after the end of the Civil War, there wasn’t a whole lot of trouble with the Indians in that part of the Colorado Territory. The local Utes were mostly peaceable, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho to the north and east of Pine’s Peak had also been quiet; though occasionally there’d be a few young bucks who’d break out and go raiding, trying to rekindle the dying ashes of their people’s pride.
It was that same racial shame that also brought the old men to the settlement—warriors who remembered the great days of fighting the white settlers and the pony soldiers of the Cavalry. They would sit cross-legged by the smoldering campfires and tell of the herds of buffalo and of the vast rivers of living creatures that a man might stand and watch for a day and never see the beginning or the end.
But that was over.
Wounded Bear and Crooked Eye were two of the oldest men in the local Ute tribe. Wounded Bear was in his 50th summer. He had a beer gut that toppled him forward if he tried to run and a necklace that he told the whites was made from the bones of animals he had killed when a young warrior. But the other men of his tribe knew that they were, in truth, the knuckle bones of six of the yellow-stripe soldiers that he had personally killed. Crooked Eye was a little taller than his old friend and a year or so younger. But he had suffered grievously in a fight against the whites nearly 20 years back, and an empty eye socket told its own tale, as did the scars that seamed his body and the turned ankle that forced him to walk at a slow, limping pace.
