West of Tombstone (2 page)

‘There's no one around to smell it,' Cameron said.

‘No?' Stony's eye narrowed. ‘My friend, an Apache could be lying behind a sandhill not twenty feet from us right now and you wouldn't see him, nor would you have heard him approach in his moccasins. Some fools will sit around smoking tobacco as well – do you know how far away that can be smelled! Ask somebody who doesn't smoke. The 'Paches know when something isn't right. This is their country after all.'

‘You seem to know the Apaches well,' Cameron commented. He had caught himself unconsciously searching the perimeter of the camp for shadows that should not be there.

‘Not really. As well as most white men do, I guess,' Stony replied, ‘and that's not well at all when you come to think of it. No,' he said more definitely, ‘I don't know 'em. But I know how they hunt, how they track and how they fight. I know just enough to have kept me alive this long out here.'

Stony rose silently. Cameron saw him look toward the east and then he began kicking sand over the faintly glowing embers, putting the fire out. ‘I can see a ribbon of gray above the horizon. It's time we were traveling.'

They rode for a few miles across hard-baked playa with an infinity of cracks separating the brittle salt flats into plate-sized segments as the sun slowly rose and stretched long crooked shadows of man and horse out before them. Nothing grew here, not even scrub chaparral or impervious cactus. Within an hour the sun had grown to an angry crimson hue and the white salt flats absorbed the color and turned it back on them like seeming red mirrors. To Cameron it seemed that they were veering toward the west, away from Tombstone and he asked Stony about it.

‘We need to reach Maricopa Creek,' Stony said, lifting his chin toward the north-west. ‘It elbows back toward Tombstone. We can't ride far on the playa. The horses would die under us and we'd be next.'

Cameron nodded, thanking his stars that he had run into a man who knew this desert and its secrets. He glanced at Stony Harte as the glare of the sun blurred his vision. Harte wore his gun on his left hip for a cross-handed draw. His hat was broad, doeskin-colored. A fancy band of silver decorated with bits of red and green turquoise, obviously of Navajo Indian craftsmanship, circled the low crown.

His gray horse stepped lightly and, despite Stony's complaint that the gray mare with its white mane and tail was obstinate, Dolly seemed to obey even the slightest pressure of the reins intelligently, without protest. The two were as one and Cameron knew they had ridden many a trail together.

The sun was a burning brand against Cameron's back. By early morning, true to Stony's prediction, the temperature had soared, approaching three figures. The flats, now colorless, stretched out to the border of infinity. Cam's own paint pony seemed to be faltering in the heat.

‘Water?' Cameron Black asked, as he and Stony rode side by side in companionable misery.

‘We'll hit easier going soon,' Stony answered. He pointed ahead with a gloved hand to where the broken flats began to be encroached upon by wind-scoured sand dunes. It didn't seem to Cameron to be easier going, but anything beat these damned salt flats.

Stony told him, ‘Another few miles and we'll find the Maricopa. It's a dry creek this time of year, but there are brackish pools here and there – enough for our purpose.' Which, Cameron decided, was to remain alive beneath the white sun.

They began to see dry, sand-smothered creosote bushes and alkali-coated mesquite. An unpromising vista, but Cam knew it indicated that somewhere near there was at least occasional water. They rode up the flank of a low, overheated dune and Stony Harte lifted a finger without speaking, indicating a line of low dead willows lining a dry river-bed stretching out like a dark thread toward the far horizon.

As they reached flat land again Stony became more talkative.

‘Where you from, Cameron?' he asked, thumbing his broad-brimmed hat back off his forehead. ‘I hear some Georgia in your voice.'

Cam grinned through chapped lips. ‘You have a good ear. Waycross, Georgia, originally.'

‘I thought so,' Stony said with a nod. ‘Myself I'm from Macon. Funny – two Georgia boys meeting away out here in this damnable country. Far away from the magnolia trees and the oaks hung with those lush skirts of Spanish moss.' His eyes were briefly reminiscent, lost in the memory of the Old South.

‘It is. But it's my luck I met you, Stony.'

‘Maybe,' Stony Harte said with a suggestion of something Cameron couldn't grasp. The thought slid away, drifting on the dry desert breeze. ‘Funny,' he went on, as they neared the dry creek, ‘I feel like we've met before.'

Cameron laughed. ‘I was thinking at first that we might be related somehow,' he said.

‘Who knows? I did notice right off that we bear a resemblance. Hell, maybe we had a great grandaddy who was a rambling Georgia man!'

They rode now along the bank of the Maricopa. There was not a sign of water. But the polished stones spread from bank to sandy bank indicated that indeed water did flow there at times, probably in torrents as flash floods off the high western hills funneled through its bed. Other signs of water appeared, like fragments of a jigsaw puzzle. A dragonfly lazed past and desert quail emerged from the willow brush, glanced at them and rushed away at their approach, not frightened enough to fly, but cautious enough to seek shelter. Now there were a few green leaves on the twisted branches of the tangled willows and once a cottontail rabbit in their path sat looking at them uncertainly before it too fled.

‘Not far now,' Stony Harte said. ‘This is called the Contreras spur. There's a pool not far along where there's always enough water for a couple of men and their horses.'

Cameron could only hope that Harte was correct. His tongue clove to his palate and his lower lip had split with the heat and dryness. The paint horse was not moving well at all, not like the nimble and feisty Dolly who continued to obey eagerly the lightest touch of Stony's heel or slightest pressure of his knees.

But then, Cameron thought, Dolly was a desert horse and she trusted her rider. The paint horse that Cameron had purchased in Tucson seemed bewildered by this sere landscape and the long white skies, considering this usage brutal.

At mid-afternoon they came upon the promised water.

‘Let Dolly sample it first,' Stony advised. ‘She knows the smell of alkali and the scent of arsenic. If she doesn't back from it, we've got sweet water.'

They swung down from their weary horses and Cameron held his eager paint pony back until Dolly sampled the pond first. She nosed the pond scum away from the brackish surface of the steel gray pool, tasted gingerly and then dropped her muzzle fully to begin drinking deeply. Stony Harte laughed and nodded to Cam to let his own horse drink. After the two men had drunk their fill and replenished their canteens they sagged tiredly to the sandy earth. A bower of tightly woven thorny mesquite and willow brush towered over them, filtering the sunlight. There was a single, ancient sycamore tree, its mottled bough arching low above the pond.

There were red ants streaming in a furious erratic line to the mesquite brush and back to wherever they had their nest, and pond skimmers – those strange long-legged insects which seemed to have the ability to walk on water – a multitude of quail tracks and, as Stony pointed out in the wetter sand near the pool, the hoof prints of a small doe.

‘Wish she was here now,' Stony said, removing his hat to wipe his brow. ‘I've had all the pemmican I can take. Leave that for the Indians.'

Cameron laughed, agreeing, and asked Stony about making a fire for coffee, but the older man shook his head decisively. ‘We're farther into Jicarilla country, Cam. That's a very bad idea.'

Cameron noticed that Stony had chosen to sit on his saddle-bags and not his blanket, but he didn't make a remark. The day remained unwaveringly hot, without a stirring of breeze, but they had the roughly woven shade overhead and the cooling influence of nearby water, and the afternoon was not all that unpleasant. Quail still spoke in the underbrush; perhaps disturbed by this man-presence near their watering place. A ball of gnats hung menacingly in the air but did not move in their direction.

Cameron, the heat and deprivation weighing on him, let his eyes close as he sat on his horse blanket placed over the burning sand. If it were twenty degrees cooler, he thought, he wouldn't mind stretching out for a nap.

‘You know, Stony …' he began, opening his eyes.

His words were cut off sharply before he could continue, for through the white glitter of the sunlight he saw that Stony Harte had drawn his pistol and had it aimed toward him.

‘Stony!' Cameron shouted. Before he could move, Harte pulled the trigger of his .44, the roar echoing thunderously in the small copse. And then Stony Harte laughed out loud as the shot echoed up the canyon and black powdersmoke roiled upward through the tangle of branches into the white desert sky.

TWO

‘Learn to watch where you sit,' Stony Harte said with a smile. He had risen to walk toward Cameron Black's blanket. Using his boot toe he nudged the four-foot long sidewinder from the sand. The rattler was dead and, Cameron noticed, it had been killed by the single .44 bullet that had taken its head off neatly. Stony buried the head of the snake with his boot and picked up the sidewinder's rubbery, near-white body which he tossed far away for some other predator to feed on.

Cameron found he was still trembling. It wasn't the snake so much that caused his fear, it was the sudden murderous glint he had glimpsed in the eyes of Stony Harte, as he drew his revolver and fired in one deft movement.
That could have been me
, he thought irrationally as he watched the viper being flung away.

‘I never saw him.…' Cameron said shakily. ‘How did you know?'

‘I saw his eyes protruding from the sand. He was watching you. Doubt he would have struck unless you molested him – they usually don't. But,' Stony went on, ‘you might have stuck a hand on him while you were rising or shifting position.' He shook his head and smiled again. ‘Rattlers don't like that.'

‘That shot …?' Cameron Black asked.

‘Yeah, we should be moving. If there are Jicarillas around they'll have heard it.' Stony rose, put on his fancy hat and hefted his saddlebags.

It was cooler now and they continued to follow the course of the Maricopa. There was still no running water to be seen in the riverbed, but now and then Cameron could smell moisture in the still hot air. To him it seemed they were continuing to veer north-west, away from Tombstone, but Stony had assured him that the creek bent eventually toward the town. And here they always had the chance of coming across water. Out on the desert flats there was none.

The land began to change again with the passing of the evening hours. Low hills began to appear along their way, studded with agave, their flanks littered with red volcanic stones. Cameron heard an owl hoot somewhere and a rush of motion in the willow brush lining the river as some larger animal took to its heels at their approach.

Purple dusk was beginning to settle and there was a pale, rose-colored narrow pennant of cloud adhering to the sky. Stony asked from out of the near darkness: ‘How do you come to find yourself in this country, Cameron?'

‘I lost my mother and father at the same time,' Cameron shrugged. ‘I was sent to live with an uncle in Arkansas. He didn't like me and I didn't like him. A cousin in Tucson invited me to come West and work on his dry ranch. By the time I got here we were in full drought and there was no water at all for his stock tanks. He had to sell off his cattle to the army and he moved on to New Mexico where a friend had offered him a clerking job in a dry goods store. Me … I hung around Tucson for a while but there was no work there. I hear they're hiring mule skinners in Tombstone,' he shrugged, ‘so that's where I'm headed. If it doesn't work out, I'll travel on again. I got no roots left, no people.

‘How about you, Stony?'

Stony Harte's voice was low, controlled, but bitter as he answered out of the near darkness. ‘I lost my folks in Georgia too. Mine were killed by Union soldiers. I lost an uncle, two brothers and my aunt lost her mind when the Yankees burned the house down and took over her land.

‘I swore I'd never live in the States again. That's how I come to be in Arizona Territory. If it ever becomes a state, I'll move on again – even if it's to Australia.'

The anger was unmistakable, the hatred of the Yankees. Cameron was sorry he had asked the question at all.

Venus, the evening star, had begun to glow dimly above the western horizon. Cameron felt his pony misstep, stumbling on a round creek bottom rock. ‘Think maybe we ought to pick a campsite, Stony?' he asked.

‘No. We're pushing on a little farther.'

Cameron shrugged and followed along doggedly. It was Stony's country; he must have had some goal in mind. Near the creek now Cameron could tell, by scent, the willows were greener, water more plentiful, and he caught sight of three or four closely growing cottonwood trees not far ahead. Stony beckoned in the darkness and Cameron followed him through the brush and up onto open country without question.

They found themselves on a low bluff where the scent of sagebrush was heavy and clumps of nopal cactus grew here and there. They followed a narrow path no wider than a rabbit run until Stony finally drew Dolly up at the edge of a rise and halted, looking down into the small valley that had appeared. Cameron could make out a tiny cabin, a small grove of live oak trees standing near it. A light burned in the cabin's window.

‘You knew this was here,' Cameron said in surprise.

‘Sure, Cam! I told you to trust me. Let's go on down.'

‘Is it safe? Maybe we should hail the house first.'