Commanche Vengeance Page 6

  Without hesitating, he moved forward, pulled the black around and spotted the roan. His heart leaped. Somehow they had overlooked Sarah’s carbine, which was still rammed into her saddle holster.

  He led the two animals back down the line of tipis, keeping well away from the tents and in the darkness. At the tipi where Sarah lay unconscious, he stopped the ponies, stroked their necks and moved toward the tent.

  Sarah was just beginning to stir when Duke scooped her up in his arms. She opened her eyes and started to protest.

  “Shush!” he whispered. But in her semihysterical state she could not understand him.

  Standing her on the ground and holding her up with one arm, he chopped her on the neck with his fist, hard. She slumped in his arms and he swept her up and half ran toward the horses.

  He had to tie her into the saddle, looping a line around her body and cinching it tightly around the animal’s belly. He pulled her carbine out of the saddle boot and slipped it into his own.

  Mounted, he urged the animals to move, the two horses stepped off into the darkness.

  They rode all night and half the next day, and still Sarah did not regain consciousness. Late the following afternoon Duke found a small box draw that had a stream running through it and a concealed exit for getting out of the other end. He pulled her down from the roan gently and bathed her head with the clear stream water, and made her as comfortable as he could. Just before dark he managed to kill a jack rabbit with a makeshift slingshot to avoid using his gun. He made a gamy-tasting gruel for Sarah.

  On the second and third day Duke watched the scouts and searchers of One Nest’s village out looking for them, but they did not see the box draw and the little stream—or thought it wasn’t likely the man and woman would settle in such an obvious trap.

  On the fourth day the Indians did not come and on the fifth, Duke scouted the area for nearly ten miles looking both for meat and signs of the Comanche. He found a small bear cub and shot it through the head, but he saw no sign of the Indians.

  When he got back to the stream, Sarah was bathing her face in the running cold water. She looked up at Gibson Duke and nodded. “There doesn’t seem to be very much left of Sarah Phelps you don’t know about, Mr. Duke.” she said. She indicated the front of her trousers where she had managed to sew them together somehow. “But I’m not asking any questions about things that—”

  Duke straightened up. “Nobody touched you, Sarah.” he said. “There was an Indian that stripped you down like that, but I got to him before he did anything.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “As for me,” Duke said and set about skinning the cub. “If I have you, you’re going to be alive and kicking.”

  Sarah wiped her bruised face on the sleeve of her shirt. “What I meant, Mr. Duke,” she said evenly, “was that I’m not asking any questions.” She turned her head away. “If any man had a right—” she stopped.

  “I might as well tell you right now, Miss Sarah,” Duke said, continuing with his work on the bear cub. “That was One Nest’s bunch we run into—”

  Sarah whirled around, clutching her hands to her breasts, her fingers clenching slowly, tightly into a fist “One Nest!”

  “Yes, and they cleared out”

  Sarah headed for the roan. Duke jumped up after her. “Where you think you’re going!” he demanded.

  “After him.

  “With what?” Duke demanded, trying to restrain her. “We got one carbine between us and only a few shells —and you can’t even stand up without getting dizzy.”

  Sarah tried to wrench free of his grasp. “I’m going.”

  Duke pulled her back. “You ain’t going no place, woman. Now you listen to me. We’re going to sit right here on this stream and eat and sleep and rest until you’re full well again. Then we’ll go after your Indian. If we have to sit here a week, well find them and you can have your man—but we ain’t going until I say so. And I ain’t going to say so until you’re rested and fed and able.”

  Sarah relaxed.

  “They’ll leave a trail a mile wide now that we’re fresh on them,” Duke said confidently.

  Sarah nodded. “All right, Mr. Duke,” she said tonelessly. She wandered back to the makeshift bed of grass and brush and sank down, her strength gone. “But we’ll get him, Mr. Duke.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s damn sure. We’ll get that Indian.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One Nest did not leave a trail a mile wide. Three days of rain at the end of a week, while Sarah regained her strength, wiped the traces of the Indian village from the face of the Texas Panhandle.

  They rode back to the village site and scouted for miles in an ever widening circle, but after two days’ searching they found nothing. Sarah dropped to the ground and sat in the shade of her roan while the animal nuzzled at the dry plains grass. Duke remained in his saddle, back to the sun, squinting into the distance.

  “What do you think, Mr. Duke?” Sarah asked.

  “Many things,” he replied. “They coulda gone west, toward New Mexico—or on up north after buffalo.” He paused. “But I don’t think they would have gone much further north, ma’am. It’s getting on into summer and they wouldn’t go too far after bluffer for fear of running into some Cheyenne, who don’t exactly cotton to Comanches.”

  “One thing is sure,” Sarah said. “We can’t go on with one gun between us.”

  “That’s right, ma’am, and we need other things too.”

  “Where you reckon we are, Mr. Duke?”

  Duke squinted into the distance again. “In the middle of nowhere, Miss Sarah. You could follow your nose and get to one place about as soon as you could get to another.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, ma’am, it looks to me as if we’re going to have a long hunt before us. And running around the way we are is just going to wear us out There’s a way of doing things like this.”

  “I don’t have too much money, Mr. Duke.” Sarah said.

  “I got a little, ma’am, that’s yours without asking, but even so we need lots of things. Guns are going to cost a lot, and bullets for ’em, and another carbine gun, and clothes for the winter—”

  “I’ll have him before the snow comes—” Sarah said quickly.

  “That may be so, but you got to look at these things in their right light.”

  Sarah climbed wearily into her saddle. “All right, Mr. Duke, I know what you’re saying. And I realize we’ve got to get some weapons and supplies. We might as well get on with that first.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Duke nodded. “I figure the best thing we could do is trail on north—we ought to hit some bluffer some time. We could invest a few dollars in a few guns and maybe do a little hide-hunting for some extra money.”

  “I got about three hundred and fifty dollars in gold,” Sarah said.

  Duke nodded. “I only got about a hundred dollars, ma’am.”

  “Won’t that be enough to get what we need,” Sarah said quickly, “without having to sidetrack and earn money?”

  “Handguns are a flat hundred dollars in Dodge City, ma’am. Out here things cost a little more. And a carbine rifle will cost a little more than that. Then there’s shells—and the winter gear—”

  “I told you I’d have him by the snow,” Sarah said shortly.

  Duke nodded. “Yes, ma’am, but we better prepare just in case, don’t you think, Miss Sarah?”

  She did not reply. She looked back at the site where the village of the Comanches had been, and gazed on to the west. “I’ll bet if we trail on toward the Apache country, we’ll find him.” she said, half to herself.

  “With one gun, ma’am?” Duke said softly.

  Sarah sighed and shook her head wearily. “All right, Mr. Duke. Yours is a cooler head than mine for the situation, I guess. How far is it to Dodge City?”

  “Better’n two hundred miles.”

  With a last look toward the west, beyond the rise where the village of One Nest had r
ested, Sarah Phelps turned her eyes to the northeast. She tried to console herself that abiding by Gibson Duke’s suggestions was the best thing to do for the moment. But there was still the lingering feeling of the hunter to press on—just over that next rise—and see if the hunted is not there.

  They rode into the sun without talking, defeated for the moment, allowing their horses to pick their own trails as long as the general direction was toward Dodge City.

  They were just over the Kansas line when they saw the riders coming toward them in a flurry of high dust on a late afternoon in July. They pulled their horses back to a rest, shielded behind outcropping of sandy hillock and watched the men pound their leather hard and fast.

  “Won’t last long if they keep going like that in this weather,” Duke said thoughtfully. “Unless they have to run.”

  “I reckon they do,” Sarah said. “See yonder?” She nodded toward the east, where a second group of riders, larger than the first by more than half, pounded down after them.

  “Could be some kind of law business,” Duke said. “Best thing we can do is set still and watch the parade go past.”

  They remained hidden until the dust had settled on the trails of the two groups of riders before moving down into the open. “We ought to make Dodge City soon,” Duke said. “I’ve a mind that what we just saw was law business.”

  It suddenly occurred to Sarah that she knew very little about the man she had ridden and fought with for weeks. And Duke’s flint-hard expression when he spoke of the law—the second time she had noticed it, the first being the run-in with Barb—caused her to look at him with curious interest. “You ever have any trouble with the law, Mr. Duke?’ she asked.

  Duke snapped his head around. “How come you ask, ma’am?”

  “You were the one that pressed yourself on me, Mr. Duke,” Sarah said. “And I told you what there is to know about me, but very little has been said about you.”

  Duke’s face hardened. “Ask your questions, then.”

  They rode along half a mile, fighting the sun, before Sarah spoke. “That fellow Barb—he mentioned Jasper—”

  “His brother. Barb and Jasper Owens, a couple of noaccounts that was running cattle. I didn’t care one way or the other until they started messing around my friend’s place. My friend wasn’t much of a shooter. So I picked a fight with Jasper and gunned him down.” Duke’s voice was harsh. “They left my friend alone after that.”

  “Are you wanted by the law?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, ma’am. I had to get out of Santa Fe in a hell of a hurry.”

  They rode on in silence. Sarah didn’t ask any more questions. She knew enough about Gibson Duke already to convince her that he was a forthright man. If he said any more, she would listen, but she would not ask any more questions.

  They made camp about twenty miles outside of Dodge City late in the evening, so they could arrive in the town on to noon the next day instead of late afternoon. It was while they were drinking coffee that Duke brought the subject up again.

  “I been rolling around the country since the war, ma’am,” he said. “One way or another I’ve found myself just about to lose something or arriving too late to have a chance.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “There was cattle in Santa Fe—I had a few head, but the fever got to them and I couldn’t hold out. Then I drifted back into Texas and tried hide-hunting, but the Comanche killed my partner and took my stake. Then up north to the mining camps—” He stopped.

  “Where were you raised?”

  “Texas. My paw was in Houston’s army when they downed old Santa Anna.” He poured more coffee, I never give much for nothing no way—that is, until—” He stopped cold.

  Sarah looked him in the eye. “Until what, Mr. Duke?”

  “I met you, Miss Sarah.”

  “That’s a kind thing to say, seeing I’m a widow that’s had children.”

  Duke began cleaning the carbine. He slipped his boots off and dug his toes into the loamy Kansas soil. “You better get some sleep, Miss Sarah. I’ll just sit here a while and get this iron in shape. Dodge City is a tough place.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dog City, some of the buffalo hunters called it. The summers were like the south side of hell, and the winters colder than the nose of a nuzzling buffalo calf. The small Kansas town of Dodge lay barking in the late July heat. It was a raw, ragged and mean town when Sarah and Duke rode in. Ordinarily the heat would have emptied the streets. The heat was there, and the flies and the swishing tails of the horses tied to the hitch-rails, but the streets were anything but deserted.

  Twenty-five or more men milled around the general area before the Wells Fargo office, their tempers mean and their voices edged with violent protest. More than half of them carried rifles, and to the man they were armed with hand guns.

  Sarah and Duke rode away from the mob, their eyes watching, trying to overhear some of the talk to learn what the trouble was.

  As their ponies drifted past the milling men, a few of them turned to look at the two dirty, dust-laden riders.

  “Here, let’s ask them!” one of the men yelled, and pointed toward Sarah and Duke. “Hold on there, you two!” the man yelled and made a grab for Sarah’s reins. Sarah pulled back and wheeled the roan up and around. The men backed off.

  “Hold that horse down, damn it!” the man yelled. Others were drawn to Sarah and Duke and worked around them. Duke sat still, the carbine across his saddle. He watched Sarah pull the roan in tight.

  “What’s the matter with you!” the man demanded. “Ain’t you got no better sense—” He made another grab for Sarah’s reins and Duke leaned over, cracking the man’s wrist with the barrel of the carbine. The man jerked back.

  “That ain’t your horse, they ain’t your reins, I don’t see you wearing a star, so you ain’t the law. So keep your goddam hands off,” Duke said in measured tones.

  “Don’t let him get away with that, Stu!” someone yelled to the man.

  Duke looked around, threw a shell into the carbine and pulled it up. “I got away with it.” he said, eyes alert, and hands steady.

  “We got a right to know—”

  “You ain’t got no goddam right at all as long as I got the carbine and you ain’t,” Duke said. Sarah had moved to his side.

  “One of ’em’s a woman!” someone gasped.

  “No wonder he lit into Stu!” another replied.

  “Take your hat off, Miss Sarah,” Duke said softly.

  Sarah removed her hat and did not react to the mild ripple of amazement that ran through the group of men.

  Duke looked down at the man called Stu. “If you’ll tell me what this is all about and ask me politely, I might be able to help you.”

  “Two days ago the bank was held up by three men—but they had three more scattered through town that helped them out,” Stu said. “The sheriff went after ’em with a posse, and then three hours ago about a dozen riders came into town and hit the Wells Fargo office for every ounce of dust and every eagle they had in the safe.”

  Duke nodded. “And you think we had something to do with it?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Stu said. “All I wanted to do was ask you if you had seen anyone—”

  “Seen lots of things.”

  “I tell you he’s being smart and sassy—” Stu turned to yell at the others.

  “He sure as hell is!” cried a cowhand gleefully. “And you’re gettin’ it, Stu!”

  The crowd laughed and slapped their legs.

  When they had quieted down, Duke nodded to the others. “As it happens, me and this lady did see riders—but this was yesterday afternoon, close on to sundown. Two groups—one seemed to be running and the other chasing after them. But we didn’t see anything else.”

  “How do we know that’s all you saw?” Stu demanded.

  Duke slipped out of the saddle and stepped toward the man. “You don’t know,” he said. “And I’m getting tired of your b
ig mouth. I heard Dodge City was a tough town, but I never thought it was full of windbags too.”

  ‘You call me a windbag?” Stu dropped his hand toward his side. Duke did not hesitate, he rammed the barrel of the carbine into the other man’s stomach and brought his knee up into the man’s face when he bent over. The blood spurted out of his nose and he dropped into the dust at Duke’s feet. Duke looked at the others. “Me and this lady just came off the trail. I told you what we saw and that’s all there is. We don’t know anything about a bank robbery—or Wells Fargo or anything else. Only reason this had to happen was for the reasons you saw. I ain’t apologizing, to him, or to any of his friends that might be in the crowd. Where I come from, we got more respect for women.”

  He faced the men and then deliberately put his back to them and climbed back into the saddle.

  “What happened to your hand guns?” demanded an edgy voice from the crowd.

  “Ran into some Comanche back a ways and lost ’em.”

  “That’s easy to say,” the voice said, and Duke saw a youngish-looking man, whip-thin and red-haired, hat pushed back to reveal a curly forelock.

  Stu, with the help of several others, was pulled out of the dust and hair carried through the crowd. “What you said about apologizing to Stu—or any of his friends in the crowd—I’m a friend of Stu’s.”

  “Funny,” Duke said with a grin and a glance at the others, “that you waited until he was knocked cold before you said anything. Could be that he don’t know anything about it.”

  The young man turned red. The crowd of men began to chuckle and then laughed outright. Duke ignored the red-haired youth and nodded to Sarah. They wheeled their ponies around and moved down the street, the laughter of the crowd trailing after them, Duke had ridden twenty-five yards when he heard the shrill demand come from behind. “You got a gun!” he heard the red-haired boy scream. “Turn around and face me!”