Rebel Yell (18 page)

“But not much sense,” Barton shot back.

“Would you do any different?”

“Hell, no!”

Within a short time Cal Lane and the Burgesses were mounted up on three fast horses.

Wagon master Brooks organized a group of men at one of the wagons on the west side of the wagon train circle. Gathering around the extended wooden wagon tongue to which the team was hitched while traveling, they lifted it, using it as a handle to swing the wagon outward like a hinged door, breaking the circle to make an exit for the trio.

Cal Lane, Pete Burgess, and Stan Burgess rode outside the ring to the accompaniment of much waving and cries of “Good luck!” and “Good hunting!”

The trio angled northwest to the Hangtree Trail, following it west out of town, the direction taken by the fugitive “Randy.”

When they were out of sight, the work gang hefted the ox-tongue handle, levering the wagon back into place, closing the circle.

In the Hughes camp, a spy came running to Denton Dick to tell him of the three men riding in pursuit of Randy. Denton Dick scared up a couple capable henchmen, since Leo Plattner continued to be of no use to him, still unconscious from Barton's titanic front kick.

Denton Dick started barking orders. “Slim! Brown! Get a couple of the boys and go after those three. See that they don't come back! No, wait!” he said, immediately countermanding his first orders. “It won't do to be seen chasing them. Let them get out of sight, then leave. Go north till you're out of sight, then cut west after them. Get them. You know what to do.”

“We sure do,” someone said, chuckling evilly.

“Don't bring back their horses. They might be recognized!”

“Okay, Dick!” a enthusiastic henchman cried as he and a few others moved to obey.

“Make sure you dump the bodies where they won't be found,” Denton Dick called after them.

“Right!”

Denton Dick rounded up another stooge. “Go to the Cattleman Hotel and tell Kale Dancer what happened here, about the killing and Barton and all. No,” he reversed instantly. “No, wait. Never mind. This is important. I'll do it myself.”

The Hog Ranch was merely a prelude to the horror of Fort Pardee.

“Not so many buzzards this time,” Sam Heller said to himself as he reached the fort at sunset. That helped, somehow.

It sat on a flat, a stone rectangle with walls ten feet high and three feet wide. Cube-shaped turrets rose at the four corners of the oblong. The hollow rectangle enclosed lines of buildings bordering an open parade ground and barracks square.

Set in the middle of nowhere, the man-made geometric structure lay a quarter mile west of the northbound Comancheria Trail, beyond the shadow of the Breaks. The walls were made of stones quarried and gathered from the west face of the Breaks. It was grueling, backbreaking work, but that's what peacetime garrison troops were for. Not that peace was so peaceful in Hangtree County, or Greater Texas, either, for that matter.

A dirt road ran west from the trail to the front gates of the fort. A stream ran a hundred yards north of the structure, behind the back of the north wall. A working artesian well lay inside the walls, supplying an independent water source.

Fort Pardee had been built a few years after the successful (for the United States, that is) conclusion of the Mexican War. It was part of a string of such forts the federal government had built along the frontier line of the hundredth meridian to check and suppress the Comanche and lesser hostile tribes. Its high thick stone walls had been proof against the tribes, who had never been able to overcome it. Many a blistering Comanche charge had broken under withering rifle fire from those ramparts. When the War Between the States broke out, the government in Washington, D.C., closed the forts, pulling the troops out in preparation to fight the big battles east of the Mississippi.

Fort Pardee had been reopened after the war's end in the summer of 1865. It was undermanned and had never been at full strength since commencing operations.

As Sam approached, it was obvious the fort had fallen, the manner of its undoing as yet a mystery to him. But that it had fallen, of that there could be no doubt.

A handful of buzzards circled high overhead. A few stray horses roamed aimlessly in the middle ground outside the walls. They looked up with curiosity from their grazing to take note of his arrival. A few thin gray lines of smoke rose from within the walls.

New tracks crisscrossed the land, the ground churned up by many hoofprints. A hundred and fifty horses or more, like a cavalry column. Nothing unusual there. It was a cavalry fort. But the direction of the line of march was surprising.

It came out of the Breaks via the nearest path north of the fort, cutting diagonally southwest, then circling around to the southern front gate. The assembly massed, some entering and then leaving the fort, the entire column moving south beyond the horizon.

Damnedest sequence of troop maneuvers at Fort Pardee Sam Heller had ever seen! The question was, Whose troops?

The front gate was open, its massive portals flung wide. The walls were stone but the gate door was wrought of fire-hardened timber reinforced with iron bands. Fire-resistant and unbroken it remained.

A couple of bodies lay on the ground in front of the open gate. Unlike at the Hog Ranch, the dead men were decently clothed, for all the comfort they could take from that. They were soldiers, cavalry troopers.

Dusty sidled uneasily just outside the gate. The warhorse was used to battlefields, blood, smoke, and mass death, but something about the scene got to him, working on his nerves.

Sam knew the feeling. He felt it, too.

From where he sat on Dusty, he could see the central area. The courtyard was littered with corpses of men and animals, even corpses of buzzards. There had been massive violence.

Sam unknotted the bandanna around his neck, retying it so it covered the lower half of his face. That helped against the smell, a little.

He rode through the gate into the fort. The foot of the walls was flooded with purple-blue pools of dusky shadow gloom. The rifle was in his hand before he knew it, unaware of having drawn it from the saddle scabbard. Its heft and solidity was a comforting thing. Even more so was its death-dealing potential. He slowly rode the perimeter.

Fort Pardee had been built according to the usual army plan.

A quadrangular courtyard, a large open center space, served as a parade-drilling ground and assembly area. Buildings stood with their backs to the stone walls, their fronts edging the four sides of the quad.

Opposite the front gate on the far side of the quad, against the inside of the north wall, stood the administrative building, a two-story structure. Staff offices lay on the ground floor and the officers' quarters on the second floor.

Along the inner east stone wall were the stables, storehouses, and the guardhouse. The stables had been looted, the horses were gone. The quad bore the tracks of their hoofprints, where they had been cleared out of the stables and herded off the barracks square, out the gate and on the road in a mass exodus.

The west wall was lined by barracks for the enlisted men, and a mess hall shared by officers and enlistees.

The administrative building had been trashed, ransacked, vandalized. Windows were all broken, with barely a shard of glass remaining in the frames.

Files lay strewn about in haphazard disorder. Papers—documents, heaping double armfuls of them—had been tossed out the windows, littering the barracks square. They'd been torn, shredded, and trampled under many hooves.

An attempt had been made to burn the building but it had been a flop. Ground-floor offices were burned out, gaping windows outlined by smeary soot and scorch marks. But the flames had failed to take hold and the structure remained relatively undamaged.

On a low mound bordered by a circle of paving stones was a flag stand. The flagpole was broken off near the base. The flag was torn, trampled, and partly burned, all but a tattered scrap of white stars on a blue field and red and white stripes.

Sam dismounted and picked it up, folding it and stashing it inside his shirt for safekeeping. He continued his observation on foot.

To one side stood a wellhead, a surface-level vent for the artesian well. The circular stone wellhead was topped by a peaked roof supported by four upright pillars. The rope attached to turn handles at one end and a bucket at the other had been cut. Sam peered into the well. The upper part of a dead man stood floating vertically upright in the water.

Shocking as the number of dead was, it could have been far worse. Sam judged that the complement of soldiers was way understrength, one-third or even a fourth of its usual complement of between 150 and 175 troops.

All the troopers showed signs of having died hard. Death was rarely pretty, violent death less so.

The bodies showed a strange divide. Some had died by conventional means—shot, mostly, with a few stabbings and bludgeonings. Most had died without a mark on them, yet paradoxically died hard. Those bodies lay twisted and contorted, their hands like claws, their faces agonized masks. Some showed streaks of dried blood that had run from mouth and nose or discolored foam covering nostrils and mouths. Heaps of vomit pooled everywhere.

Those corpses, which were in the vast majority, showed no marks of violence—no bullet holes or stab wounds. Nothing.
Nada
.

A mystery, a sinister mystery. Sam's nerves were rock steady, but the macabre scene of mass death was starting to get to him.

The buzzards—ah yes, the buzzards. Their presence, such as it was, added to the mystery.

Sam sensed they made up a significant piece of the puzzle. He looked up and noticed more had joined the party. It appeared there were scavenger birds airborne, circling their wheels without number, ever-alert for carrion. Predators they were not. They took no live prey. They never killed. They fed on table scraps of carcasses killed by others. They were specialists, eating only dead things, a needful part of the wasteland's self-cleansing cycle.

Most folks thought the birds found their carrion by sense of smell, but that was a misconception. Their famously keen eyesight was the secret of their success. They could spot a dead desert mouse from a quarter mile or more straight up.

Seeing dead bodies in the fort, the buzzard flock had no doubt eagerly swooped down for the feast. The forerunners, the first in line, set about their grisly task of scavenging. Taloned claws ripped and tore, wickedly sharp beaks pierced and shredded. Something went wrong then.

The seemingly bountiful banquet had proved fatal to them.

A number of buzzards lay strewn about the dirt of the sandy courtyard of the quad. Their forms were weirdly contorted, stiff-legged. Dead.

Other still-more opportunistic buzzards had attempted to feed on their fallen fellows. They, too, had succumbed.

Somewhere along the way, the buzzards had gotten the idea that the dead of Fort Pardee were bad medicine—tainted—their flesh lethal to taste. So the remainder left them alone, shunning them. That patrol wheeling ceaselessly overhead in the sky kept vigil, but they had ruled Fort Pardee off-limits.

Sam tried to put the pieces together. What could have done it? Plague? But no epidemic was that virulent, acting with such speed as to take out so many all at once.

Also to consider was the evidence of violent death, looting, vandalism, and pillaging. A number of dead soldiers lay barefoot, their boots having been stolen. Men sick or dying of plague don't do that.

Poison?

That seemed the most likely solution. It fit the facts, the evidence of twisted unmarked bodies, and the greenish froth surrounding noses and mouths of so many dead.

Yes, poison would explain much. Who had administered the fatal dose?

Not the Comanches. Mass poisoning wasn't their style. Under exceptional circumstances such as relentless hot pursuit, they might poison a waterhole to halt a cavalry patrol, but never at this level.

While Sam was deep in thought, the sky began bleaching, losing its blue hue. Shadows grew, darkening. He went into the enlisted men's barracks. Only a few dead there and all by violence—shot.

Any familiar faces among them? Friends, comrades? He tried not to look. He didn't want to know. Later, yes, but not now. It was a sore trial for him to keep going, but did he owe the dead any less?

The quarters had been hastily looted, plundered. Soldiers' wooden chests were shattered into scraps and splinters to get at their contents. Blankets were stripped and stolen from beds, mattresses overturned and slashed, stuffing ripped out like spilled entrails.

Anyone who knew the army must know that the enlisted barracks would provide mighty slim pickings and the officer's quarters little better. Army pay was little enough to start with, barely a pittance. Most troopers drank up, whored, or gambled away their pay almost as soon as they had it.

Sam went out, glad to be quitting the barracks. He caught sight of the mess hall standing beside it, a long low single-story shed-like building with a long wall at the front. The kitchen was in an annex on the right-hand side to minimize heat of cooking in the eating hall during hot weather.

Here lay the height of horror, the black heart of the whole deadly business.

A handful of bodies lay in a fan-shaped display outside the mess hall's front entrance. They all lay with their heads farthermost from the entryway as though they had been fleeing the building when the poison took them.

A hazy miasma hung floating about the open door and windows. Sam stood in the doorway looking in, a sign of how unsettled he was. Trail craft had long schooled him in the folly of standing outlined in a doorway where a man made a particularly inviting target.

But he was rooted to the spot.

About three dozen dead men were heaped on the mess hall floor. Tables and benches lay overturned amid piles of corpses. Plates, tableware, and spilled food were strewn about everywhere.

“An unholy mess,” he mumbled.

The stench was a physical thing, a yellowish haze that stung Sam's eyes, making them burn. The bandanna covering his nose and mouth might as well not have been there for all the good it did.

Unholy mess
.

Luckily he was holding his breath; in the shock of revelation he had forgotten for a moment to breathe. Bile rose in the back of his throat, his gorge rising.

Unholy
.

Sam had seen enough, too much. He had seen all he needed to see, all he needed to know:

He stepped back, stumbling, coughing, and choking. By accident, he stepped on a dead man's limb, nearly losing his footing. He staggered a dozen paces away, gasping for breath. Tearing away the bandanna, he sucked great heaving breaths of air.

Blessed relief. Bad as the air was in the fort, it was far better than that of the miasmic mess hall.

Sam swore aloud, cursing the race of poisoners, damning them to eternity—

A voice came then, a weak shout. Had he imagined it?

No, there it was again!

“Help! . . . Help!”

A voice crying for help in the fortress of the dead.