Hooper, who knew the ways of the desert as well as any Apache, had crouched in the wash and waited. In comparison to the small, slight troopers, cavalry sergeants and officers tended to be taller and stronger. Hooper was a big, heavy-muscled man and the soldier had not stood a chance.
Stryker rose to his feet, his eyes probing the darkness. The shadows were still, unmoving. The night was so quiet he heard the beat of his heart.
“Hey, Stryker!” Hooper’s voice called out from somewhere among the foothills to his left.
“I know you can hear me, Stryker, lad. Or have you gone deaf since you ain’t humping the colonel’s daughter no more?” A pause, then, “How was she, Stryker? Did she buck like an unbroke pony or just bend over, bare her ass and think of daddy?”
The lieutenant moved to his left. A mistake. Hooper saw the flicker of movement and fired. Stryker felt the bullet burn across the meat of his right shoulder and he dived for the cover of the sandy wash bank. Here a huge boulder cast its shadow over Stryker and he could not be seen unless he moved again.
“Hey, Stryker?” Hooper assumed a Southwestern accent. “Dang it all, boy, did I get ye?”
The lieutenant raised his head over the bank and pushed his cocked revolver out in front of him.
Move, Hooper, just move. . . .
“Hey, Stryker, know what the two-dollar whores say at the hog ranch back at the fort? No, you haven’t heard? They say they won’t even let you pay to screw ’m because you’re too damned ugly.”
Stryker’s mouth was dry, his eyes burning. He wiped a sweaty right palm on his breeches and took up his Colt again.
Move, you bastard, move. . . .
A chuckle from the shadows, then, “Know what sweet little Millie is doing right now up in Washington, Stryker? She’s got some general’s head between her thighs and she’s saying”—now he affected a high, girlish voice—“ ‘Oh, General Beauregard, dear, that horrible Lieutenant Stryker, he was so damned ugly he couldn’t have paid me to open my legs for him.’ ”
Hooper laughed again, a harsh bellow devoid of humor.
Seeing the dead at the stage and the ranch had stressed Stryker, and the battle with the Apaches that had turned into a turkey shoot with no honor on either side had made matters worse.
Something inside him snapped and his muscles bunched as he prepared to jump to his feet.
He never made it. A strong hand pushed him back down and Hogg’s voice whispered in his ear, “He’s trying to draw you out, Lieutenant. Once you’re in the open he’ll set his sights right between them yellow shoulder straps and you’ll be a dead man.”
Stryker opened his mouth to protest, but Hogg’s shout stopped him. “Hooper, this here is Joe Hogg. You stay right where you’re at. I’m a-comin’ for you.”
A startled rustle of juniper branches in the distance . . . then silence.
The scout looked at Stryker and smiled. “I guess ol’ Hooper didn’t like his choice of partner to open the ball.” He rose to his feet. “I came across a dead trooper back there.”
Stryker nodded. “Hooper killed him.” He glanced at the sky. “Come first light we’ll go after him.”
“Lieutenant, Hooper has been in the territory a long time,” Hogg said. “He’ll be like an Apache in those hills. Sure, I can track him but it will take days, maybe weeks, and you’ll lose a bunch more men. With Nana out, you should return to the fort.”
“Just let Hooper go?”
“No, Lieutenant. We’ll catch up with him again, that is if the Apaches don’t get him first.” Hogg’s eyes gleamed in the starlight. “Something you should know: When they were both sergeants, Hooper and Rake Pierce were drinking and whoring buddies. If Hooper survives, he could lead us right to Pierce.”
“That’s damned thin, Joe.”
“I reckon it is. But it’s a chance. Maybe the only chance we got.”
Stryker bent his head and lost himself in thought. After a couple of minutes he looked at Hogg and said, “All right, we’ll take our dead back to Fort Merit. I’ll show Colonel Devore the new Winchesters and tell him that there’s one sure way to slow Nana and Geronimo—stop Rake Pierce selling them rifles. And I’ll tell him I want the job.”
“Sounds like an excellent plan, Lieutenant,” Hogg said. “But don’t think of going after Pierce with anything less than a full cavalry troop.”
“There are two troops of the Second at Fort Merit. I’m sure the colonel will be willing to spare one of them.”
The soft, desert starlight did nothing to improve the appearance of the horrifically mutilated face Stryker turned to his scout. “Of course, I could be calling this all wrong. I’m bringing back dead, a crazy woman and now I’ve lost a murdering deserter. Maybe Colonel Devore will throw me in the guardhouse.”
Hogg’s teeth glinted as he smiled. “Lieutenant, the whole time General Crook was here, he never killed twenty-one bronco Apaches in a single battle. Hell, you could be a hero an’ get a gold medal.”
Aware that he was treading along the slippery edge of self-pity, Stryker said, “Look at me, Joe. Do feathered generals pin medals on officers who look like me?”
Hogg was a man born and raised to the habit of honesty. “No, Lieutenant Stryker, quite frankly they don’t.” Then, an unlikely gesture for him, he placed a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
Chapter 8
Fort Merit was one of seventy military posts scattered throughout the Arizona Territory, though most were destined to last only a few years before their adobe buildings crumbled away and were reclaimed by the desert.
Like Fort Bowie to the south, built to protect Apache Pass and its springs, a small settlement had grown up around Fort Merit, a sprawling maze of adobes, jacals and ramshackle outbuildings.
The parade square was enclosed on three sides by barracks, the hospital, the quartermaster’s warehouse, a bakery, a blacksmith’s shop, stables and the headquarters building. To the west of these, wandering into the desert, was a creek lined by willows and cottonwoods. Near the creek a hog ranch had sprung up and a couple of other dives, optimistically called saloons, offered forty-rod whiskey, gambling and whores.
There was no sutler, but a general store owned by a gloomy Scotsman named Cameron offered the soldiers everything from bone-handled penknives to caviar and champagne. He also offered his wife, a bony, hard-faced Swede, but, by Cameron’s own account, got few takers.
Stryker led his detail through the usual noisy throng of children and dogs around the jacals, then rode into the parade ground. In the noon heat, the Stars and Stripes hung from the flagpole like a damp rag, and the brass barrels of the post’s two sixpounder cannons—they had never fired a shot in anger at Apaches—were being polished to a marvelous sheen by a wretched trooper who had managed to irritate somebody in authority.
Fort Merit was no spit-and-polish post to gladden the eye of a fuss-and-feathers general. It was mean, shabby, dirty and run-down, but to Stryker it was home, a haven of safety and rest in a hard and dangerous land.
He turned the redheaded woman over to the enlisted men’s wives of suds row, who bustled and fluttered around her and led her into one of their tiny quarters.
“She was captured by Apaches and she won’t talk,” Stryker told a large, busty woman with a fierce mustache that must have rivaled her husband’s. “I think her mind is gone.”
“We’ll take care of her, poor little thing,” the woman said. “Did the Apaches . . . ?”
“Yes, they did, ma’am,” Stryker said quickly.