Red Sleeves swore volubly in both Spanish and English, the Apache tongue having no profanity in its vocabulary He ordered out the warriors, recently returned from the springs, to hold off the settlers while the rest of the encampment tried to get away In his perplexity, however, he ordered one half of the fighting men to go with the tribe. He felt certain that the soldiers were hidden in ambush.
The men under Doom and Leclerc were brought to a sliding halt when they charged around a bend in the trail and came face to face with a furiously charging body of hostile horsemen. Shouts, curses, and gun-fire welled up among the tall, stately trees as men, red and white, flung themselves off their horses and sought shelter. Jock Leclerc’s roaring voice rumbled over the fight. He spurred his horse into the thickest of the fight and shot into the mass until his gun was empty, then he used a rifle for a club. The warriors were fighting defensively now, and the whiskey was turning to acid in their entrails.
Doom, caught up in the zest of the moment, found a spring of inner energy somewhere and rode in be-hind Leclerc. A brave, resigned and doomed as the settlers swept in and past his tree stump defenses, jumped at Doom, grabbed his wounded leg, and tried to pull him from the horse. A wild, sickening jolt of agony ran through the frontiersman and his pain-filled eyes were sharpened with a murderous lust as he reached down, his big pistol almost against the hostile’s head, and pulled the trigger. Doom straightened up as the settlers surged over the hostiles en masse and swept on up the trail into the Indian camp area.
The Apaches, who hadn’t gotten away with their fellows, fought and died where they stood. The settlers, flushed and maddened with their sufferings and brief triumph, matched the hostiles in savagery and abandon. Wounded warriors, spitting defiance from the ground, were dispatched with knives and rifle butts; the hectic skirmish was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Doom told Leclerc to keep the settlers from following the main camp of Indians through the treacherous forest, and, with a few exceptions, the attackers stayed back and hunted fugitives among the débris that littered the former ranchería.
Doom was getting painfully down from the Indian horse, before the abandoned brush hut of Red Sleeves, when a single rifle shot echoed through the noisy camp. Instantly everyone was hunting cover. Caleb dropped flat as the bullet threw a violent gust of gravel and dirt up beside him. He rolled toward the abandoned shelter, drawing his pistol as he went. Again the hidden gunman fired. This time the bullet struck sideways on Caleb’s pistol and ricocheted off into the air with a whine. Doom dropped the smashed gun and flexed his fingers, half numb from the shock. He made it safely to the edge of a small, fallen tree, floundered over it, and lay flat be-hind the punky, rotten trunk as the third shot flung a gorge of splinters out of the wood.
The ranchería was deathly still as probing, narrowed eyes and cocked guns sought the hidden gunman among the brush and trees. Caleb had surmised where his enemy was and began an oblique crawl, knife in hand, through the foliage toward a flanking spot. The silence was oppressive, and Doom listened with acutely sharpened instincts for a telltale sound that would guide him. None came.
Somewhere, a long way off, a bugle call came distantly to the hidden settlers. Caleb heard with a tight smile and continued his crawl. He stopped his advance in a clump of chokecherry and sage. A movement off to his left and a little ahead had caught his eye. Cautiously he parted the brush and looked inquiringly among the shadows of the trees and his face froze into a thwarted grimace. Not 200 feet from where he was lying, Sam Ginn was turning a high-headed bay horse around, preparatory to mounting. Without a gun and with a leg that he knew would no longer support him, Caleb was forced to lie still and watch the renegade getting ready to escape.
Suddenly he cried out, involuntarily. Another figure, ghost-like and massive, shot up out of the brush almost at Ginn’s feet and struck the startled half-breed with stunning force. Ginn, still wearing his Apache clothing, went down as the dark, powerful body of Jock Leclerc smothered him in a cursing, raging mesh of huge, flailing, slashing fists. Ginn half rose to one knee as Leclerc’s knife went in under his upthrust arms and sank to the hilt in his chest. Ginn jumped up and ran like a rabbit for about twenty feet, then collapsed in a sodden heap. Leclerc walked over to him, pulled out his knife, looked apprehensively around, knelt self-consciously.
Caleb coughed and Leclerc jumped up and whirled, his face red and angry. “Ought to be ashamed o’ yourself, scalpin’ a poor dead renegade.”
Leclerc’s dark face lightened up, but the embarrassment remained. He poked the inert body with a blunt-toed boot. “I allow I oughta be, all right, but, dammit, I just couldn’t resist it. Sort o’ forgot I’m a civilized man fer a second there.”
He forced a guilty smile, then frowned as he helped Caleb to his one good leg. “Wait a minute, hombre. Wa’n’t that a hostile hair lock I seen, nice an’ fresh, on your horse’s bridle when we rode up here?”
Doom’s eyes were twinkling in spite of the bone weariness that was sapping his strength. “Well, that’s different. I’m an outcast, an’ folks sort o’ expect that from me. But you…. ”
Leclerc’s powerful shoulders and arms half carried, half led Caleb back to the desolation of the Apache ranchería, where a group of perspiring soldiers were displaying trophies taken from those they had chased southward. “Ain’t a man livin’ that’ll ever say any-thin’ about Caleb Doom bein’ a outcast in my pres-ence.” The soldiers looked up quickly from where they stood beside their horses, amid the settlers. Several officers looked a little embarrassed at Leclerc’s words, and avoided Doom’s eyes.
Leclerc bristled as he helped Caleb astride his horse and clambered up on his own mount. His words were repeated in a truculent, loud voice. “Ain’t a man livin’ that’ll speak evil o’ Caleb Doom in my presence!” Leclerc’s black eyes were wide and challenging and his massive shoulders were hunched as he stared at the silent officers.
An enlisted trooper, sweat-streaked and grinning slightly lopsidedly, nodded slowly. “No, I don’t reckon they will. In your presence or out of it.”
Jock tossed a sardonic look at the officers. “Now that you hombres finally got outen your little block-house, chase them hostiles y’selves. We’re a-goin’ back to Dentón.” He shook out his reins and moved off beside Caleb, whose thoughtful, brooding face wore a white, drawn, half smile.
As the settlers moved down the trail, one of the officers, a tall graying man standing stiffly among his subordinates, snapped a quick salute at the retreating back of the buckskin-clad ex-soldier riding beside Jock Leclerc, turned quickly, antagonistically, and frowned at the younger men. “There goes one of the men who’ll make this land a safe place to live in.”