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