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  The braves came on full-tilt, a furious intimidating spectacle. Their fighting blood was up. The end of the chase was at hand. Prestige for the brave who made the kill, greater prestige still for he who took the white man alive, a captive for the torture. War whoops sounded and resounded. Hoofbeats pounded, drumming hard-packed ground. They were so close that individual details could be made out—a shrieking brave in a red shirt, a lance hung with feathers, a wild-eyed charging horse.

  Paradoxically, a great stillness came over Sam, a deep calm. He had done this many times before. It was what he did.

  Shouldering the Winchester, he sighted on the brave in the lead. Kill the leader and sometimes it would take the heart out of a Comanche attack. Sam squeezed the trigger.

  The brave went down, falling off his horse. The horse kept coming for a while before breaking off to the side.

  Sam didn’t pause to watch his target go down. In tight spots, it was vital not to freeze on one target but to keep in continuous motion, constantly moving to the next target. Besides, he knew that when he pointed his rifle at a target and pulled the trigger, he hit the mark in all but the most extraordinary situations.

  He went for the braves at the spearhead of the charge. They were bunched up tighter and the ones farther back on the flanks could see the others going down, a demoralizing experience.

  Five shots in rapid succession, five downed braves. The others knew they had a wildcat by the tail.

  Their forward motion arrested, they fanned out at the wings, the right flank swinging farther right, the left flank farther left. The straight-on charge was broken for now.

  Sam freed Dusty’s reins, gathering them up in one fist, rifle in the other. He urged the horse up, Dusty quickly scrambling upright on all fours.

  Grabbing the top of the saddle horn with his left hand, Sam boosted himself up into the saddle and rode diagonally northeast deeper into the Breaks. He slammed the still-smoking rifle home into the scabbard.

  The rock wall was at his back for protection, shielding him from Comanche bullets as he rode bent low, leaning far forward. Dusty hit the gallop.

  A lull developed as the surviving Comanches regrouped.

  Not all the downed braves were dead, but those who weren’t were mortally wounded and would not ride again, not alive. They had taken their last ride in this world. The next would be in the Invisible World of the Spirits.

  Glowering and dark looks, muttering and shaking of heads occurred between the survivors. Their prey had proved a most formidable marksman, cutting their numbers almost in half in one quick exchange. Could he be El Solitario, The Man with the Devil Gun?

  A great prize, if he could be taken. But the braves’ ambition for glory was countered by the superstitious half-mystical aura that had come to envelop the shooter. A man of power, he was not to be reckoned lightly.

  Meanwhile, stray riderless horses must be rounded up. Pride won out over awe and the chase resumed.

  The quarry had vanished behind a curtain of brittle rock outthrusting from the earth at an angle. The broken land provided welcome cover for Sam.

  The elements of the chase had changed dramatically for the hunters. Possible death lurked around every blind corner, every scrim and scrum of rock. The Comanches advanced cautiously, sending scouts ahead in places of potential ambush—and they were many. It was a landscape of heights and depths, for the broken land counterpointed needle pinnacles and rocky ridges with washes, arroyos, and man-deep cuts. The pursuers began to lose sight of Sam for long stretches at a time.

  Sam was unable to shake them. His horse left tracks the trail-wise Comanches were able to follow even in the gathering gloom of oncoming night. To his right, the central range of the Breaks rose up, climbing higher into the darkling sky.

  He smelled fresh water from a long way off and soon came to a trickling creek. Pausing at the thin stream, he stepped down from the saddle. The water smelled good and tasted better. He tasted first rather than the horse for fear of alkali or foulness.

  Dusty’s head dipped to the rivulet and he began to drink. Sam allowed only a taste. All too soon he hauled the horse’s head up and away from the water. He couldn’t risk having Dusty slowed by drinking too much.

  Sam took advantage of the break to reload the rifle, then mounted up and rode on.

  Just like the Comanches lost sight of him, he lost sight of the Comanches—a double-edged sword, for he was unable to see if they had split their force and were stalking him from more than one direction.

  Rocky ridges flanking the central range grew in height and width, forming a sort of maze fronting the high hills. The skyline of the Breaks was gilded by the setting sun. The foothills were dark with thickening shadows. Sam rode a winding course through the rocky ridges. More and more often he came to a choice between paths.

  If he chose wrong, the route might lead him to a blind alley, a dead end penning and trapping him. In such a case, the Comanches could play a waiting game, sealing him in the passage with no escape and staging the assault of their time and choosing.

  But it was North Central Texas, not the Rocky Mountains; the pathways remained open as he followed his course.

  Sunlight narrowed at the hilltops as the sun went down. Sam came to a long, low, stony shelf that spread out for some distance from the foothills. It was slightly rounded at the top, an expanse of rock.

  It could be the break he’d been hoping and waiting for. A godsend, for the hard rock surface would help mask his trail. Not erase it. The Comanches would be on the lookout for signs—the telltale white scuff mark a horseshoe made on stone, an overturned rock with its dark underside exposed, a trampled thatch of weeds and broken twigs.

  But such sign would be hard if not impossible to find in the gathering dark.

  Sam followed the stone ground in close to the foothills, then way out to the edge. Horseshoes clip-clopping on stone as Dusty picked out his steps sounded uncomfortably loud, like a pounding drumbeat.

  The shelf played out all too soon and he was off the rocks with a pang of regret. Had the shelf ended too soon for him to hide his trail and shake his pursuers?

  Once more, turf lay beneath the horse’s hooves, muffling sound. No sign nor sound of the hunters, but Sam was uncomfortably aware of their looming presence. It was like not seeing the wind, but knowing it was there.

  He rode up a long lane between two rocky ridges, a slot pooled with gloomy shadow. Bad place to be caught. A cleft opened on the left, a gap slanting northwest toward the flat. He followed it, breaking out into a wider expanse. Water came down from the hills and greenery speckled the landscape. Ahead lay a shallow creek, its banks lined with a fringe of brush.

  Sam rode Dusty into the center of the creek, following it upstream for a distance in hopes of hiding his trail. The last traces of light were gone from the peaks. A thin hazy mist rose from the ground.

  In the west, the evening star twinkled in a purple-blue sky.

  Nightfall.

  Sam rode on, the horse moving at a quick walk. Darkness deepened the sky to star-dusted black.

  Comanches preferred to fight in daylight, but they would do what they had to during the hours of darkness. They’d stay on the trail as long as they could.

  Sam unknotted the bandanna from his neck, wetting it with water from his canteen. He leaned far forward to rub the moist cloth against Dusty’s snout, the horse grateful for the coolness of welcome moisture. Now and then, Sam fortified himself with a bite of jerky.

  The hours wound toward midnight, the stars slowly wheeling their courses through the heavens.

  Sam halted atop a sugarloaf-shaped hill topped by a stand of trees. He stopped to rest the horse; he could have kept going and would have preferred it, but the horse’s needs came first. He wanted Dusty to rest and refresh to have some reserves of strength and endurance for what the coming hours might bring.

  Man and horse were positioned on the north slope below the crest to avoid skylining.

  Sam emptie
d the better part of a canteen into his upturned hat, holding it under Dusty’s mouth. The horse lapped it up, slurping greedily, while Sam stroked the animal’s long head, murmuring soft words of encouragement.

  Sweet fresh grass on the hillside furnished Dusty with grazing fodder. The horse had the mustang’s ability to live off and thrive on grass and hay versus the thoroughbred’s limiting need for oats and grain.

  Sam stretched, pacing around, trying to work out the kinks of stiffness. Jerky, parched corn, and canteen water provided cold comfort but were most welcome.

  He went to the hilltop to watch the moonrise. Bats flew out of the trees at his approach, cutting their wild skittering capers against the starry sky. He lay prone, peering over the crest at the flat, screened by brush and weeds.

  A waning moon rose above the eastern hills into the heights, flooding cold pale golden light down on the nightscape. The glow etched the edges of rocky ridges, moonbeams slanting through banks of mist on the ground.

  No sign of the Comanches. That didn’t mean they weren’t there. He probably wouldn’t see them if they were there. The first warning of a Comanche attack would be a bullet or arrow coming his way, providing it didn’t kill him. Satisfied, he returned to Dusty.

  They were back on the trail hours before sunrise. It was a lonesome trek; Sam hoped like hell it would stay lonesome, because the only company he was likely to encounter was Comanches.

  Moonset brought a predawn lightening of the sky showing above the hilltops. Purple-black night sky faded to purple, then purple-blue, stars paling.

  Daybreak and till no sign of the Comanches. The pressure at the back of Sam’s neck like the onset of heavy weather was gone, a kind of instinct hinting that he’d lost his pursuers. He seemed to be in the clear as far as he could tell.

  Somehow during the night he had shaken the Comanches.

  He continued to proceed as though they were hot on his trail. The sky turned a soft blue and a tad hazy. The early morning air was cool and fresh in the long shadows of the Breaks. Shadows that would be there for a long time until the sun crested the skyline.

  Mist lay over the flat, leaving dew on the grass. Small birds fluttered under thin-leafed tree boughs. The few trees were stunted and dwarfed.

  The day grew warm long before the sun topped the ridgeline. The heat was welcome, soaking into Sam’s taut muscles and sore limbs.

  On he trekked, finally entering familiar territory. To the right, the line of hills began to dip, sloping downward, opening up more of the eastern sky. A forerunner of the Notch.

  The Breaks ended temporarily. Ahead lay the distinctive outline of Buffalo Hump, a butte-like landform rising several hundred feet high with curved sloping sides and rounded summit. A significant landmark.

  Here was the Notch, a gap several miles wide in the Breaks, opening into Hangtree County. It divided the range into the North Breaks and South Breaks.

  Through the gap running east-west lay the Hangtree Trail; east it ran to Hangtree town and beyond. West it took three branchings—south toward San Antonio and the Pecos Trail to New Mexico; north to Fort Pardee, the Canadian River, and Comancheria; and far west into the heart of the Llano.

  The south fork was well traveled, the north lightly traveled, and the west hardly traveled at all. West of the Notch lay Anvil Flats, gateway to the Llano, the landscape dominated by Buffalo Hump. The landform was once a Comanche campsite on the Long Trail connecting Comancheria through Texas to Mexico.

  The North Fork ran west of the Breaks, clear of all but a few sparsely scattered rocky outcroppings. Sam followed it, pointing Dusty north. The hulking bulk of Buffalo Hump lay behind him. His destination was Fort Pardee, some long miles away. He wanted a parley with Captain Ted Harrison, commanding officer of the post. Sam had some important information he wanted to pass along and some questions he wanted answered.

  He was unaware that during his three-week absence from Hangtree dogging the Comancheros and Hog Ranch gunrunners, Harrison had led most of his cavalry company far northeast into the Uplands in search of Jimbo Turlock and the Free Company.

  By mid-morning Sam was sufficiently confident of his escape from the Comanches to allow himself the luxury of a pipe. And luxury it was. He tamped down a rough-cut tobacco blend into the bowl of his corncob pipe, its bowl yellow-brown from age and use, broken in the way he liked it. Pipe stem clenched between strong white teeth, he fired up the bowl, drawing deep and sighing with contentment.

  His destination was Fort Pardee.

  But not before making an important detour to the Hog Ranch.

  FIFTEEN

  Sam reached the Hog Ranch at twilight. The lowdown dive was a phenomenon of the frontier. Just as dogs have fleas, army bases have places like the Hog Ranch.

  Soldiers have needs to fill off-duty hours—women, whiskey, and gambling, in no particular order. They require a place to blow off steam lest they blow their stacks or blow their brains out.

  Garrison life is hard, never more so than out on the wasteland. Long hours of hard work and boring stretches of inactivity were periodically punctuated by explosive outbursts of action and violence.

  The military brass often tolerated such deadfall dives as the Hog Ranch so long as they didn’t transgress certain rules of behavior or detrimentally affect the performance of the unit.

  Fort Pardee’s Captain Harrison would have taken swift and decisive action against the site had he known that its crowd was running guns to the Comanches, a fact of which he was unaware but of which Sam Heller intended to apprise him.

  The Hog Ranch lay in a valley a half mile west of the north fork of the Hangtree Trail and several miles south of Fort Pardee, which lay out of sight beyond the far side of the valley’s north ridge. A forlorn locale, made squalid by the Hog Ranch.

  Sam left the trail, angling northwest. He approached the Hog Ranch at a tangent, using the valley’s south ridge as a screen.

  Black V shapes—buzzards—circled not-so-high above the valley. This in itself was not necessarily unusual. The birds were scavengers, carrion feeders thriving on dead things. Dead things were liable to be found around the Hog Ranch.

  But what kind of dead things and how many?

  A fair number of buzzards circled the site, more than the usual handful of opportunistic scouts. Sam was already on his guard, so this detail merely ratcheted up the tension a turn higher.

  He dismounted at the foot of the south ridge, tied Dusty’s reins to a low scrub bush, and drew his rifle from the saddle sheath. He surveyed the scene from a distance through a pair of field glasses, sighting no sign of lookouts posted on the south ridge. That meant little if they were hunkered down on the far side below the crest, hidden from view.

  Still they’d have to stick their heads above the ridgeline to see what was on the other side. Sam watched for a long time as the dusky gloom deepened, but no lookouts showed themselves.

  He knew from past experience that Hog Ranch folk generally weren’t in the habit of posting sentries. They were too shiftless, lazy, and uncaring. But survivors of the Boneyard massacre might have put their fellows on guard.

  More direct action was required. Sam climbed the low south slope. Lying prone just below the crest, he looked over the ridge. Beyond lay a dismal valley, a brown creek snaking across the bottom of the valley floor. Squatting on the far side of the creek was the Hog Ranch itself, a broken-down ranch house surrounded by a handful of rickety outbuildings, sheds, and shacks. No grass grew around the site. The ground was bare and muddy.

  Well, not entirely bare. A couple of bodies lay in the yard. Two bodies almost obscured by the flock of vultures feeding on them. The vultures were the only signs of life.

  The Hog Ranch seemed deserted, abandoned. The corral was empty. No horses were tied to the hitching post in front of the main building, no smoke rose from the chimney.

  A quarter-hour’s watch detected no lurking skulkers, no movement save for the hordes of big black birds hot at their grisly work on t
he corpses.

  The scene required a closer look.

  Sam returned to Dusty, stowing the binoculars safely away in a reinforced leather carrying case which he put in a saddlebag. He mounted up, rifle in one hand, reins gathered in the other.

  He rode over the ridge, down the other side into the valley toward the ranch house. The site stank and not only of death. Its inhabitants set no high priority . . . or any priority at all . . . on hygiene and sanitation.

  “Hog Ranch? No self-respecting hog would be caught dead in this filth,” Sam muttered.

  Dusty was untouched by the smell of death. He was a warhorse familiar with battlefield carnage.

  The muddy ground bore heavy sign of much recent traffic, a maze of footprints and hoofprints.

  Hardly a straight line was to be seen in the ranch house, a low one-story building whose long façade fronted the yard. It was aproned by a hazardous plank board veranda, many boards loose, sagging, or broken. The flat roof sank in the middle, its four corners leaning inward. A ramshackle stone chimney seemed in imminent danger of collapsing, leaning at a perilous angle.

  It was hard to make out any details of the two bodies sprawled in the muddy yard, the dead all but hidden by the vultures feeding on them. The buzzards were unimpressed by Sam’s advent, few bothering to do more than glance up from their grisly repast.

  Buzzards are nasty-looking creatures, Sam thought. Fowl indeed!

  Their beaky heads were bare of feathers, a caricature of hateful old men—bald, wizened, beady-eyed, and bad-tempered. How those eyes glittered! Sharp-eyed and watchful that none of their fellows snatched a morsel they regarded as rightfully theirs.

  “A lot like people,” Sam told himself.

  They worked close! Like nothing so much as human chowhounds crowding the free lunch table at a saloon.

  They were a noisy bunch. Ill-tempered, too, constantly nudging and shoving each other with massive folded wings. Sharp-pointed predatory beaks stabbed, dug, and tore at the cadavers and each other.