The Quantro Story (8 page)

He squeezed the Winchester's trigger again, aiming at the shadow that moved near the fallen white man. He side-stepped immediately to the right and felt the wind of a bullet as it whipped through the airspace he had just occupied.

He levered another shell into the breech, then the night went quiet as each man tried to gauge where the other was.

Quantro's last shot had burned Cole's left arm as he backed away from Jones's body. He touched his sleeve and felt the stickiness of blood beneath the ripped cloth. Whoever was shooting out there would pay for that. He retreated into the trees, his boots crunching on dead wood, then stopped to listen.

He heard nothing.

Then he caught the sound of Quantro reloading the Winchester. He aimed into the darkness and thumbed the hammer of his Colt. The sound of the shot was deafening to the ears of both men as they strained to catch the slightest movement in the undergrowth. Cole listened again, but the bullet had ploughed harmlessly into the thick bark of a tree.

Quantro caught a glimpse of the muzzle flash and squeezed off a quick shot. But the night was still again.

It seemed that Cole was trying to circle round in back of him, to place him so the firelight could give him a chance of getting a profile shot. Quantro smiled. Well, if that was what he wanted, then that's what he would get. His moccasins silent on the soft earth, he moved in towards the flickering of the fire. He circled a little to take himself out of Cole's line of fire, just in case the half-breed was too close, and edged to the fringe of trees that surrounded the clearing where the camp was placed.

Just inside the clearing lay Cole's sweat-stained and well used
Vaquero
saddle, placed by the half-breed to serve as a pillow. Quantro reached out quickly from the undergrowth and scooped up the lariat hanging from the saddle horn. Within five seconds he was back in the shelter of the timber.

The lariat would serve him well.

He wanted to take Zeb Cole alive so the breed would know who it was who had taken him, and why he was going to die.

He knew that Cole would circle the fire, and keep on circling until he found his attacker. Or his attacker found him, so Quantro picked himself a strong tree, whose large forked branches were just visible in the gloom above him. His wiry arms reached up and placed the Winchester in the protective crook of a branch, then with his arm through the coil of rope, he leapt like a wildcat and caught hold of the bough above him. He swung for a moment, then hoisted himself up onto the perch.

He squatted on the broadest branch and fashioned a loop with a slipknot in the lariat, testing the rope with a practiced hand.

The Winchester within arm's reach provided a little insurance.

Five minutes he waited. Then ten. He swung the coil slowly.

To kill Cole he had all the time in the world.

A muffled crack of a breaking twig reached his ears and he froze. Then he heard the swish of a branch.

Cole was coming closer.

Quantro's night vision was strained to the utmost as he squinted among the trees. A shadow moved. Quantro's lips peeled back from his teeth in a death's head grin. He began to feed the rope through his fingers, almost caressing the rough fiber, and the loop slowly grew bigger.

Zeb Cole stepped as carefully as he could, but cowboy boots with big Californian spurs weren't exactly the best footwear for stalking in the woods. With the Colt held out in front of him he crept through the undergrowth. Where the hell was Ramone ? He must have heard the shots. Unless… the snake-eyed bastard who had killed Jones had already killed him out at the horses? Yes, that must be the reason. What was he after? The cattle? A rustler rustling from rustlers? It couldn't be ranchers out looking for their cattle because if it was, then there'd be a whole bunch of them together. Who then?

He had heard no movement other than his own for the last ten minutes, so where was the man with the Winchester? Maybe he had only wanted to kill Jones? No, that couldn't be it. He had already killed Ramone or he would have been here by now, so it couldn't just be Jones he was after.

Cole swore under his breath.

This was crazy. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. The ambushing bastard was ruining his big haul. The BIG one. Enough money to go to California. All lost. If only he could get his hands on the sniveling, interfering…

…Then the loop of rope fell out of the sky. It slipped over Cole's head and past his shoulders with the ease of an experienced cowhand roping a yearling calf. As he realized, the man in the tree pulled back hard on the rope and the lariat snapped tight around him, pinning his gun arm to his body. As he was jerked backwards off his feet his mouth opened to cry out involuntarily, and the look of astonishment on his face turned to one of fear. For some reason he could not fathom, his mind screamed
Indian!

Cole slammed into the ground on his back. The hand that was clamped tight around the six-gun was jarred as he fell, sending a bullet crashing out into the night sky, then his fingers relaxed their hold and the pistol fell to the ground beside him.

Then the shadow leapt from the tree.

***

When Cole awoke, something was wrong. It was daylight and the world was upside down. His body was stiff. When he tried to move he found his wrists and ankles were lashed to a rough wooden cross leaning against a twisted oak. The ropes were so tight they burned into his flesh and his hands and feet were numb, his circulation cut off. His face too, hurt, and he remembered the pummeling fists after the man had leapt from the tree. He supposed his face was a good mess by now.

By twisting his head painfully he could see his bare scalp was about two feet from the ground, and he was hanging almost vertically, his boots pointing to the sky that was visible above the top of the oak.

If he looked straight ahead, he could see his gaoler squatting by a fire shaking a skillet of spitting fat over the flames. The smell of bacon was tantalizing on the morning air. That and the aroma of coffee. Battered as he was, Cole was still hungry.

As best he could, upside-down, he looked his assailant over. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with long blonde hair and dressed in trail clothes. Except for the knee-high moccasins. They would account for his stealthy attack. As he watched, the blonde man forked bacon straight from the skillet into his mouth, then cupped his hands round a steaming coffee mug. Finished, he stood up, a hand brushing the remains of his breakfast from his beard stubble. He padded across the clearing to a big buckskin horse that stood waiting patiently. He returned with a tobacco pouch and some papers.

Then Cole saw the slight limp.

He examined the cowboy's face. Yes, it was him. The hair was longer, and the face was older, but he was the boy from the ranch back in Colorado. What was that rancher's name? Quinton? Quarter? Quantro?

“Awake now, greaser?” Quantro said without looking up from his fingers as they manipulated the tobacco.

Cole grunted.

“Know who I am?”

“I know,” Cole growled.

“Good.” Quantro smiled and stuck the cigarette into the corner of his mouth. He leaned forward and lifted an ember from the fire. As the smoke curled upwards from his nostrils he eyed his captive.

“Ain't your lucky day, is it?”

***

The torture began as the sun climbed into the morning sky, a blazing ball of painful fire. If you were staring at it of course. But then, Cole couldn't do much else, because by then he didn't have any eyelids. The sharp blade of the Bowie knife had sliced them clean off.

He couldn't swallow either. The strip of wet rawhide laced around his Adam's apple saw to that. As the sun's heat mounted, the rawhide dried out little by little, shrinking until it cut easily into his throat. He could not even cry out in pain. His voice had been reduced to an animal croak, guttural and weakening by the hour.

He wished the
gringo
would kill him. At this point he would have thanked him for death. The sun searing into his brain through unclosable eyes and the noose eating into his throat was indescribable. His lips had cracked and his swollen tongue poked uselessly out into the hot, dry air. Quantro spoke only once as he sat and watched over his captive.

“I've waited a long time for this, Cole. You're going to die by inches. Each time my leg hurts in the years to come, I'll think of this day and that pain will become a pleasure.” He paused and drew his Colt. He aimed the pistol at Cole then slowly cocked the hammer. After a few moments he released it then lowered it back down harmlessly. “It would give me the greatest pleasure to just blow you away, but that would be too easy on you. And besides, you just ain't worth the cost of a bullet.” He holstered the pistol and occupied his hands rolling another cigarette. When the operation was complete, Quantro struck himself a match, then churned the smoke around his mouth slowly before ejecting it to the burning sky.

It would soon be noon, and where Cole was suspended, under the bare branches of the twisted old oak tree, there would be no shelter, no reprieve. The sun would beat mercilessly on him. Quantro smiled over at the half-breed.

“I'm going to sit here and wait for as long as it takes you to die. A day, two days, maybe even three if you're half as tough as you think you are. But I don't think so. I'll be surprised if you make it through ‘till tomorrow morning.”

Cole could do nothing but glare half-heartedly at his gaoler through eyes that would never shut, even in death. Of the three
pistoleros
that Quantro had tracked down and brought to account, Zeb Cole took the longest to die. It was the penance he paid for breaking a boy's leg with a cruel sideswipe of a Winchester barrel. Throughout the day the rawhide noose gradually bit deeper and deeper into his throat until the skin broke and his windpipe ruptured.

Death arrived with the dawn of the second day.

When Quantro was ready to travel, he crossed the clearing and inspected the bug-eyed, blistered face that had been a man. He spoke aloud.

“What's the matter Cole? Can't you take it when you're on the receiving end?”

CHAPTER 5

Pete Wiltshire's shirt clung uncomfortably to his back. He wiped a hand across his face which only smeared the clinging coat of white dust kicked up by the mules in Wild-Horse's string. Between his legs, the shaggy coat of the paint pony steamed. Each step the pony took jarred him in the saddle. Goddamn desert. He squinted ahead to where Wild-Horse's string of heavily-laden mules walked into the distance. The line was a little longer now, for the Apache had roped the dead cowboy's black mare to the end of the string.

Pete turned in his saddle and looked back at his own mules. The sturdy little animals were jerking their heads and snorting under the weight of their loads. Right at the back, the big buckskin stallion with the fine saddle plodded along, head hanging, listless in the blistering heat.

Pete fanned his face ineffectively with his battered hat, but soon returned it to his head, for the strength of the sun was too great to bear through his thinning hair.

They must be close now.

He squinted into the sky, and sure enough, there it was.

The buzzard hung in the endless sky like a marker over the man that must be on the desert floor below. They would soon reach him. Only a few hundred yards.

As he watched, the buzzard banked in a steep turn and began to lose altitude. Rapidly, it glided in towards the earth.

Pete opened his mouth to shout, but Wild-Horse had already let the lead rope of the mule train fall, and was kicking his pony into a loping canter.

***

Quantro's eyes were barely slits as he faced the ordeal of the noon sun. It blazed down on to his face with the concentration of an air-fanned kiln. It mattered little which way he turned his head, the heat still found access to each pore of his raw skin. Yesterday he had been able to sweat, even though it had dried as soon as it emerged on to the surface of his skin, but today there was not even that. Even the burning sands reflected the heat back up on to his body.

Now he was beginning to understand what Zeb Cole had gone through, lashed upside-down on the crude wooden cross. He had seen it happen to Cole and now it was happening to him. The sun had twisted his brain into a tortured, hysterical thing, his cracked lips only uttering coarse cackles instead of the full-throated manic laughter he heard echoing through the caverns of his mind. His right hand still persevered in his grip on the Colt, but he was so weak he wondered if he would be able to summon the strength to pull the trigger if the need arose.

His whole body was one huge nerve-searing pain. The ache from the gunshot wound seemed to have crawled outwards from his busted shoulder until it encompassed his whole torso, joining up with the dull throbbing from his badly-healed leg.

Now he could only move his head a little. In the corner of his eye he caught a movement. A tiny lizard wriggled under the shelter of a fist-sized rock. Quantro's eyes fluttered uselessly closed, his burnt eyelids no protection at all against the glare. His eyeballs felt as though they were bedded in a pit of gravel. He found himself dreaming and wishing for the cold, crisp snow that had covered the mountains that winter. How good he had felt, returning to the cabin, a haunch of Antelope meat over his shoulder. Fresh. Alive.

Now, he was no longer the same man. Even his lungs were slowly losing their fight to drag oxygen out of the hot, dry air that was sucked painfully into them. Pathetic, dying in a hole in the ground in the God-awful desert that was called the Devil's Plateau, with only a hungry buzzard for company.

The buzzard!

His eyes flickered open, and with horror surging in his stomach, he saw the black silhouette of the bird's wingspan wheel away to the west, then swing back. He blinked. Were his eyes playing tricks on him?

It was falling out of the sky.

No.

It was banking to glide into him.

Death suddenly loomed close, and he forced his weary eyes to track the coming buzzard. The tendons in his strained throat stood out like whipcord as he fumbled back the hammer on the six-gun.

Closer and closer.

Click. The hammer held on its spring.

Silence.

Closer.

With teeth gritted against the pain, Quantro raised the Colt in a shaking hand, silently swearing as each minute movement sent spasms through his shattered nervous system. He tried his best to hold the gun steady. If he could have smiled then, he would have done so. The one last thing he would do in this Godforsaken place.

One touch on the trigger and the ugly bird would just disintegrate into a tumbling ball of screaming, bloodied feathers. He would blow the damn bird right out of the sky.

Closer.

Blow it all away.

Come on you bitch. Come and get me.

See what you'll get for your trouble.

He concentrated on the growing apparition in the sky, his finger crooked around the trigger. His hand shook. Any second now, any seco…

Then the sun went out.

No! His mind screamed and his mouth silently uttered curse after curse as he twisted on the baked ground, futilely trying to find a way through the darkness to aim at the buzzard. He blinked, time after time, in the sudden shadow. His eyelids painfully fluttered as he tried to understand. It was noon! The sun was high! What happened? His eyes dilated rapidly as he tried to focus.

Then he understood.

It was a man's shadow.

Thank God! Then he frowned. Second thought flashed a warning. Was it the boy?

Then his vision cleared and he saw the rippling, naked brown skin, the breech clout, knee high moccasins and leggings. He saw the shoulder-length thick black hair held back by a headband around the forehead. He saw the whites of the man's curious eyes as he looked down at him.

Realization burned up inside of him. He would have screamed his hate out loud if his throat had allowed him. This was a whole lot worse than a hungry buzzard.

Apache!

He forced his gun arm up in an arc, but it took an eternity for his muscles to react. It was an easy matter for the Indian to pluck the Colt from his feeble grasp.

“Easy boy,” said a voice that did not come from the Indian. Or if it did, his mouth hadn't moved, for Quantro's eyes were riveted to the dark face. He painfully swiveled his tortured eyeballs in the hot gravel of their sockets and saw the white man. A battered Stetson above a grizzled jaw, flecks of white in the dark beard.

“Nothing to worry 'bout, boy. You're safe now.”

The water that trickled slowly onto Quantro's lips was warm, but to him it was as cold as the snow of his dreams. His swollen tongue soaked up the precious liquid.

Pete Wiltshire looked down in horror at the man on the ground. He had seen healthier looking men who had been dead for two days. He knew it would only make matters worse to quench the wounded man's thirst. The ragged, dirty wound in the blonde man's shoulder had cost him a lot of blood. It was infected too. The sun had blistered and charred his skin so that he looked almost inhuman, sores on his cheeks, running and scabrous. His pain must be incredible.

Pete rigged up a shade over Quantro's head and soaked his bandana with water, gently dabbing the battered face and cracked lips. Wild-Horse produced herbs from his saddlebags and tended to the shoulder wound. When the Indian had done what he could to ease the infection he began to scout around.

The last thing Quantro noticed was that the sky was empty. His companion, the buzzard, had been cheated and had departed for fresh skies. He slipped away into the darkness, unconscious.

“Come,” Wild-Horse said with a jerk of his head that tossed the long dark hair around his shoulders. Pete looked up at the Apache's face, then came up off the ground. He gazed down at the closed eyes of the cowboy, then folded the tattered wanted flyers and pushed them into a pocket.

The Apache led him down the slope, skirting a patch of ground that bore sign, and up a gentle rise where a low ridge overlooked the hole where they'd found the wounded man. Wild-Horse knelt and touched some shale that carried dried blood. Half a dozen brass casings from a Winchester littered the ground.

“See,” he said. “The boy who carried this rifle.” He motioned with the Winchester. “He hid here. Bushwhacked the blonde-haired
Americano
while he was down in the dip. The horse ran, and the blonde one crawled up the shale to the hole. Later, he got a shot at the boy. He rode out.”

Pete looked at the blood on the rocks. It was apparent the boy had waited a while before riding out. He must have realized he was in a bad way, and his only chance was to get away and find help. He would have known he had hit the blonde man anyway, and figured he was a dead man.

It all made sense.

So that meant the blonde one back up there in the hole had been ambushed. Why? And what had the wanted flyers to do with it? He shrugged and walked back to the hole.

“We'll have to get him back to the settlement. Even then he might not make it.” He turned his head and examined the face of his Apache friend. Wild-Horse had the inbred Apache hatred for the whites, and who could blame him? But they had accepted Pete into their camp. Would they accept the blonde boy?

Wild-Horse gazed impassively down at the wounded man. When he looked back at his friend, Pete knew it would be okay.

“Can you rig up a sling between the two horses? The black mare and the buckskin. There's no wood to build a travois.”

The Apache nodded and turned away.

Pete remained, looking down at Quantro for a while. There was something about his face that bothered him. It reminded him of someone else, a long time ago. No, he couldn't place it.

He lit a small brushwood fire with the little fuel he could find and boiled the coffee pot. The noonday sun was too hot to bother with cooking, so both Wild-Horse and he chewed strips of jerky. As far as their wounded guest was concerned, it was all Pete could do to make him swallow a mouthful of warm coffee.

When the food was gone they watered the two strings of mules, waiting patiently as each animal drank a small ration of the precious fluid. The last in line was the buckskin stallion, and when he had taken his share there was barely enough to fill the canteens. Pete didn't worry too much about it. If anyone knew where water was in this Godforsaken place, then Wild-Horse did. Pete had implicit trust in the Apache's skill.

They lifted Quantro into the blanket sling and Pete took charge of the string of mules while the Indian handled the buckskin and the mare.

They rode for three hours in the blistering heat. They sat their ponies and the heat slowly sapped their energy until exhaustion gnawed at their bones. The rocky, barren desert went on for ever, smoldering under the heat haze. Pete called a halt twice to check on their wounded passenger and make him drink. South. Always south, at a slow monotonous pace. The desert began to close in, escarpment and rock spurs thrusting up through the ground to point jagged accusing fingers at the sun. Still there was no vegetation, and that meant no water. But there is water in the desert if you know where to look for it.

And Wild-Horse did.

The Apache knows the desert like his own hands. For all time, since the Great Spirit had willed it, the Apache had inhabited the southlands. Some of the tribes roamed just north of what was later to become the Mexican border, but most below. The legends and the history, unwritten but related around the campfires, passed from generation to generation. But, in the 1450s, the
Espanoles
had arrived in their galleons from across the big sea, and those men that became known through history as the
Conquistadors
were hungry for the yellow and white iron that coursed in thick veins in the earth of Mexico. To the Apache himself, gold and silver were worthless. The metals did not fill the hungry bellies of the children. Who can eat iron? When the
Espanoles
began to hunt for the metals, the Apache smiled and would have allowed the dirt-scratchers to take all they wanted as long as they did not drive out the game. But the
Conquistadors
seemed to hold some strange belief that they could not rape the ground of its riches unless nobody but them lived on it. Duped and helpless against the cannons of the Spanish, the Apache were driven north into the Texas and Arizona territories.

But then the white people had come. They were different to the dark-skinned Spanish, but as their numbers increased the Apache found himself fighting for his very existence on the face of the earth that he believed the Great Spirit had given to him. He began to find himself imprisoned on reservations, restriction a harsh infringement on the Apache way of life. Some, like the Chiricahua fled back to the high peaks of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Sierra Madre, that the Apache called the Blue, or Mother Mountains.

Not content to deprive the Apache of both his land and food, the
Americano
Long-Knives, the U.S. Cavalry, held campaigns, long columns of the horse soldiers under the leadership of General Crook penetrating deep into the mountains and gorges to capture the Indians. They searched along the old Apache trails that criss-crossed and hair-pinned along the sheer canyon walls of the mighty Bavispe River and its tributaries in an effort to scourge the land. In the years of running and hiding the Apache had learnt to live on little and to find food and water where there appeared to be none.

Today was such a day.

As the day began to cool, the shadows growing long, Wild-Horse halted the column. He caught up two of the empty water bags from a pack mule and signaled Pete to make camp, then wheeled his pony to scout the desert. He rode for a mile to the north and skirted a wide escarpment. It was as he expected. He found the little-used trail that wound up to the top of the ridge. The stony track twisted in and out between huge boulders, twice as tall as a man in the saddle.

But he found what he wanted.

The trail opened out onto a ledge where the
tinajas
were. There were three of the huge natural rock cisterns that held sweet rainwater long after the infrequent rains had been soaked up by the thirsty desert. Shadow was adequately provided by a convenient rock overhang. The Apache slaked his thirst and filled the water bags, then retraced his own trail back down to the desert floor.