Sonora slaughter an apac.., p.1
Sonora Slaughter (An Apache Western #6), page 1
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Cuchillo Oro was riding alone through the desolate terrain of Sonora, Mexico, when a rifle shot blasted his horse out from under him. He took cover and worked his way to the place in the rocks where the shot came from. There he found Simeon Schuster, a badly injured American bounty hunter.
Schuster was working for the Mexican Government and was shot by the bandits he was hunting. He had mistaken Cuchillo for a renegade Apache who rode with the bandits. Cuchillo hated all bounty hunters and didn’t care one way or the other. But a group of bandits, attracted by the shot, galloped toward them across the baking sands. It looked like certain death for both of them. As a ruse, to save his own life and impress the bandits of his good intentions, Cuchillo killed Schuster.
But then a beautiful girl named Rosita complicated matters ... and Cuchillo soon found himself sentenced to death by a military firing squad.
Cuchillo was in big trouble. But would his fabled golden knife be enough to get him out of it?
APACHE 6: SONORA SLAUGHTER
By William M. James
Copyright © 1976, 2023 by William M. James
First Digital Edition: September 2023
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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Published by arrangement with the author’s estate.
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For Mark, who found the grass grows greener on the other side.
Chapter One
SIMEON SCHUSTER WAS ready to admit that he had made his last dollar of blood money, even though the pain of the two bullets imbedded deep in his body had now subsided to a dull ache. For he had seen enough men die—plenty of them he had killed himself—to be aware that a lessening of pain did not always mean that a wounded man was on the mend.
It never meant that when a man had a thirty caliber slug impacted against the base of his spine—at the end of a blood-dripping tunnel that let in the daylight through his belly button. All it indicated was that a numbness had set in, as a prelude to sudden death or maybe a coma.
The other wound had, initially, seemed superficial. But, had Schuster been the worrying kind, this would be causing him the most anxiety now. It had been inflicted by the same Spencer repeating rifle, the Mexican snapping off a lucky shot out of the sun-bleached hills to crash a ricochet into the American’s upper arm. It had chipped the humerus bone without cracking it, but it was a bad wound: getting worse with each grueling minute it was not treated. Schuster smelled the rancid odor of gangrene emanating from his upper arm and knew the poison of putrefaction would kill him before he hemorrhaged to death in his stomach. But he did not allow this once-inevitable option to concern him. For his pain-punished mind was fastened on the slim possibility of survival. Against a good chance of dying, the odds on living were long indeed. But he had always been a gambler—never more so than when he elected to become a bounty hunter, free-lancing for the Federales in southern Chihuahua and Sonora.
So he licked the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, tasting sweat and dirt, and moistened the front sight of his Henry rifle. Then he drew a bead on the big Indian astride the black horse and waited.
If waiting was a hardship to a bounty hunter, it was also part of the job. So was the risk of getting blasted. He had waited seventeen days in a ravine above the San Miguel River for a chance to take Calvera: the bandit chief known as Red Shirt who was top on the Federales’ wanted list in the area at the southern end of the Sierra Madre range. There were five thousand dollars in the pot and the rules of the game were flexible. Dead or alive. Flexible and immaterial, for nobody would ever take Red Shirt alive.
As the big Indian rode closer—but not close enough yet—Schuster smiled at a happy memory. He recalled having the ugly bandit chief lined up in the Henry’s sights, as much a sitting duck as the Indian.
There had been an Indian with Calvera. And a young Mexican not yet old enough to shave.
“The bastard!” Schuster growled, flicking his gaze away from his target for an instant to glare at the crumpled form, stiff after many hours of death, lying on the rocks ten feet away. Fifteen, maybe. Certainly no older. But old enough and lucky enough to push Simeon Schuster to the brink of death.
“But it sure cost you high, kid,” the bounty hunter snarled as he resumed his concentration on the advancing Indian.
There had been just the three of them, riding down from the gang’s hideout in the Sierra Madre foothills. Confident and at ease, experiencing no sense of danger as they laughed and joked: Calvera telling the stories and the other two responding.
Schuster had pressed against the Henry’s trigger. Then the sun had shown, to spill brilliant yellow across the dull grayness of the dawn light. While keeping his prime target in the rifle sights, Schuster had seen, on the periphery of his vision, the Indian and the kid throw back their heads to vent bursts of laughter. And he could only assume that the kid had spotted the rifle barrel glinting in a shaft of sunlight.
But such assumptions were purely academic now. Whatever had caused him to act, he had done so swiftly and effectively. As Schuster squeezed the trigger, the kid lunged sideways in his saddle. His outstretched arms thudded against Calvera’s meaty upper arm and the older, much uglier Mexican was hurled off his horse. Schuster heard the bandit chief’s bellow of anger above the crack of the rifle shot. The bounty hunter’s vocal response was less loud, but equally as enraged, as he saw his bullet blast chippings from unfeeling rock.
Calvera and the Indian, while lacking the youth of the kid, were a match for his speed of reflex action to the unexpected. Even as Schuster jacked a fresh shell into the Henry’s breech, the Indian unbooted his rifle and blasted a shot into the ravine mouth. Cursing louder, Schuster was forced to duck into cover from the ricocheting bullet. Calvera had landed badly, but recovered quickly. The kid drew his rifle and exploded a shot. It was another ricochet, but more damaging. The spinning, end-over-end bullet plunged into the meaty flesh of Schuster’s upper right arm with enough velocity to tear through the tissue and touch the bone.
The bandit chief was on his feet by then, dragging out his rifle and firing simultaneously with the Indian. And, as the fusillade of fire continued to pour into the mouth of the ravine, spraying rock chippings and forcing Schuster to keep low, the bounty hunter knew he had lost. There was no alternative but to retreat. Three men had been the optimum number in the time available. A first hit, then two more while the survivors tried to recover from their shock. A fast gallop down the smooth slope to get identification from the trio of bodies; then escape to the Federale post at Navojoa before the rest of Calvera’s bunch came running in response to the shots.
No chance of that now, he knew, as he scuttled back into the ravine and swung up into his saddle. As the hoof-beats of his mare resounded between the ravine walls, and his wounded arm dripped telltale spots of blood through the rising dust, the rifle fire was curtailed. He heard shouts, then other hoof-beats—made by more than three horses and coming from farther away than the arroyo below the ravine where he had made his try for Red Shirt.
His arm had started to hurt. Then he began to sweat, the moisture made to ooze by the pain and drawn by the heat of the rising sun. Before long, his horse was lathered. But he galloped it until the mare began to stagger and waver off course. He slowed the pace then. The pain had eased and he was able to think logically.
A prime reason for the high price on Calvera’s head was that he did not treat bounty hunters or any kind of government agents lightly. If there was no other choice, he killed them at a distance. But he preferred to capture them: and what happened to such prisoners was talked about only in hoarse whispers. Calvera himself was an expert in the art of inflicting slow death. And, since the Apache scout had joined his gang, more than a few refinements had been added to the bandit chief’s repertoire of torture.
Cool discretion had caused Simeon Schuster to ride out of the ravine. Then pain had blurred his thought processes and he had galloped his mount to near exhaustion: driven by voices from the past which spoke in fine detail of the parodies of former human beings which had been discovered long after the Calvera group took a prisoner.
Then, when pain became bearable, reason prevailed again. If he was going to escape the vengeance of Calvera, he had to have a fit horse. He was better than two miles northwest of the point where he had staged the abortive ambush, at the top of a sheer bluff. He stayed there for a full three minutes, scouring the barren country of the mountains with his narrowed eyes and struggling to hear the beat of hooves above the ragged panting of himself and his horse. He neither saw nor heard anything moving on the empty land. But he did notice the splashes of blood on the ground, dry almost the instant the moisture touched dust or rock.
He used his kerchief to form a tight tourniquet
He could not feel his right arm, which hung stiff and lifeless at his side. Later, he realized that the infection of the wound had spread to his bloodstream and he had become light-headed. At the time, he experienced only a swelling confidence. Calvera had been shot at, but he had survived. He had important business to attend to and had decided to ignore his attacker’s escape.
“You should have knowed better, you crazy lunkhead,” he muttered to himself, and almost squeezed off a shot at the big Indian riding the black horse. But a bead of sweat dripped off his high forehead and splashed into his green eye.
He fisted the eye clear and was glad he had not fired. The Indian was still a hundred and fifty yards away. Calvera had been twice that distance downrange—and the bullet had cracked through the air precisely where the Mexican’s heart had been before the kid pushed the ugly bastard off his horse. But Simeon Schuster had been fresh and uninjured then. In that condition he was prepared to match his marksmanship against anybody’s.
Calvera had not ignored his failed assassin.
At mid-afternoon, with the Mexican sun as bright and hot as it had been at noon, the wounded bounty hunter had crested a rise.
“Buenos tardes, señor,” the kid had greeted, his dark eyes smiling with genuine pleasure as he looked along the length of the Spencer rifle pressed against his shoulder. “Como esta usted?”
Over the rise there was a shale-covered slope, neither long nor steep. The kid had swung wide to get ahead of his quarry and now he stood midway down the slope. His sweat-covered pony stood in the arroyo at the foot of the slope. The kid did not even look breathless. He knew he had it made, and this encouraged overconfidence. And, what Schuster gave away to youth, he compensated for in experience.
The kid made a gesture with the rifle which instructed the bounty hunter to dismount. Schuster was left-handed and his holstered Remington was tied down to his left thigh. He drew while the kid was still using the rifle as a pointer. The six-gun was cocked as it came out of the holster. It exploded the instant the barrel was canted at the right angle down the slope. The kid had time to trade his smile for a frown. Then the forty-four caliber slug plunged into his left eye and smashed into the open air again at the back of his head. Blood flew in a fine spray.
By the law of gravity, Simeon Schuster should have become a survivor at that moment. The kid, hit at the top of his axis by a bullet, should have fallen backward—to slope the Spencer into the sky as his dying nerves moved his finger on the trigger. But he was unevenly balanced on the slope—and it was the shale that moved before his dead weight. His feet were thrust backward and he fell forward. Schuster was still turned in the saddle toward the kid and had started to grin his triumph.
“Bien gracias,” he said. And he wanted to add: “Y usted?”
Instead, he cursed as the bullet punctured his final link with the womb and bored an unnatural tunnel through his entrails to compact against his spine.
He rocked in the saddle, away from the brink of the slope. He dropped the Remington and grabbed for a steadying support. His hand fisted around the stock of the Henry, just behind the frame. He pulled himself erect—too strongly.
“Bastard as lucky as you ... he don’t deserve to friggin’ live!” the bounty hunter rasped.
The boot tilted and the Henry slid out. The body of the kid slid all the way down to the arroyo. The noise of the moving shale, the smell of fresh blood and the sight of the lifeless body spurred the pony into a bolt.
Schuster toppled from his saddle and vented a scream of agony as he thudded to the ground. He still held the rifle, and the muzzle jabbed hard into the belly of the mare. The horse reared, snorted, and plunged into a bolt that took her in the opposite direction to the pony. Her former rider, spilling new blood with each vicious turn, went down the shale slope in a fast, sideways-on roll. But he held on to tenuous consciousness until he came to a jolting halt against the dead Mexican. In turn, he held on to the Henry.
His grip on it was just as firm when he surfaced to awareness. Not much later, for the sun was still midway down the western dome of the sky—continuing to beat down on every living and dead thing with a mercilessly intense heat.
He had not moved far since he regained consciousness—just a few feet away from the corpse, to where the arroyo finished at the top of a series of shallow, natural steps. During infrequent rainstorms, the water would rush along in a torrent at the foot of the shale slope and then cataract down over the steps. The vast emptiness of the high country desert spread north from the bottom of the steps gave mute testament to the fact that such heavy falls never lasted for long. There was just sand, cactus plants, and rocks out there, until the Indian showed—far to the north—and Simeon Schuster stacked the slim opportunity for survival against the good chance of death.
The sun was a lot lower now, and the rocky bluff facing the shale slope had been giving him shade for a long time. An hour, at least. Welcome at first, the shade’s benefit had soon diminished in comparison with the bounty hunter’s unfulfilled needs: treatment for his wounds and water to replace the moisture he had lost through the sweat of fear, pain, and heat.
When he tried to moisten the Henry’s front sight again, he discovered there was no more saliva in his mouth. But it didn’t matter. Wetting the sight was just a stupid habit.
The Indian—a dirty Apache like the one who rode with the Calvera bunch—was less than a hundred yards away now. He looked in pretty bad shape after crossing the desert, but Schuster didn’t give a damn about the man. It was the piebald pony that interested him, with its California saddle, rope bridle and reins, and two heavy-looking canteens.
They wouldn’t be as heavy as they looked to a parched man. Schuster could still think logically to an extent. The Apache had taken a long ride across a burning desert, but he would not have used up all his water. They were many things, but they were not dumb, those bastard Apache braves. There never was a lake at the edge of any desert and this Indian would certainly have conserved some of his precious water.
He was tall by Apache standards: maybe two inches above the bounty hunter’s own height of six feet. And strongly built, with broad shoulders and a wide chest. Tapered at the waist, too. Unlike Schuster, who had the belly of a man who has spent too much time and money in saloons and cantinas. A lot more handsome, with narrow black eyes, flared nostrils, high cheekbones, wide mouth and resolute jaw: features that combined to broadcast an easy kind of pride. The whole framed by thick black hair that brushed his shoulders and was held off his forehead by a wide black headband. But he wasn’t perfect—by any standards and certainly not those of the Apache nation. The index and middle fingers of his right hand were missing and the other two fingers seemed to have a rigid paralysis.
He was dressed in a cotton shirt, open to the waist, buckskin leggings, moccasins, and a Stetson with a drooping brim which was tipped onto the back of his head. He didn’t carry any weapons on view.
“But who cares?” Simeon Schuster growled to himself, moving his posture slightly.
Covered by the deep shade from the rock face, he lay in an awkward posture—knees pulled up to his chest to ease the stomach wound. On his side, with his injured, unfeeling arm stretched out toward the Indian. The barrel of the Henry rested on the lifeless right hand. His cheek was pressed against the top of the rifle stock.
He knew that talking to himself was a symptom of a new attack of light-headedness. But he willed his mind to keep a solid grip on reality. The Indian had reined in his horse, twenty-five yards out from the base of the dry fall. His dark, watchful eyes swept to the left and right, then directed their gaze up the natural steps. He was considering whether to climb up to the arroyo or to stay on the desert edge.
“But it don’t matter, Apache!” the bounty hunter said—or perhaps only thought. He could not be sure. Nothing about the Indian mattered—except his presence there with the horse and water canteens.
