Sullivan, a small man with the look of a belligerent rodent, rode out of line and drew rein in front of Stryker.
“Now mind your manners, Sullivan, or I’ll be ’avin you,” Hooper warned. He wore a ferocious scowl on a countenance as round and red as a penny. The sergeant had been a desert soldier for nearly fifteen years, but, unlike most men, his skin still burned scarlet in the sun and never tanned.
Stryker returned Sullivan’s salute and said, “Ride to Fort Bowie and tell them the Norton and Stewart stage has been attacked. Six dead. No survivors. Ask them to detail a burial party, then lead them here to the saddleback yonder. Tell them I am headed north toward the Cabezas in close pursuit of the hostiles.”
The lieutenant studied the trooper’s face. “Can you remember that?”
Sullivan repeated the message word for word, and Stryker decided the man was not as dumb as Hooper alleged.
“Then get going,” he said. “And good luck.”
After the trooper rode away, cantering to the west in a cloud of yellow dust, Stryker spoke to Hooper again. “Sergeant, Mr. Hogg and I will ride ahead. Follow on with the rest of the patrol and the pack mules.”
Lieutenant Stryker sat his horse and studied the scene before him, his mouth working. He’d prepared himself for the worst during his ride to the saddleback, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination.
His eyes met those of Hogg, and the scout grimaced. “Damned Apaches never clean up after themselves, Lieutenant.”
Perhaps it was an attempt at humor. More likely Hogg was reaching out to him in clumsy reassurance, telling him that any normal man would be appalled by what he saw.
One thing Stryker did not need was sympathy. He’d read too much of that in the faces of others over the course of the past few months, not only for his broken face, but for losing his beautiful wife-to-be and promising Army career.
Without a word he swung out of the saddle and stood with the reins in his hands, looking around, forcing himself to swallow every bitter drop of this vile medicine.
The woman, a girl really, was the most noticeable, her body being the only one that had been stripped naked. She was lying spread-eagled on her back, her open blue eyes fixed on the indifferent sky, as though horrified that it thought nothing of how she’d been outraged.
Hogg had said the girl had been used hard, and she had, probably by all twenty of the Apaches. They had not been gentle.
And she’d been pregnant.
Her belly had been cut open, and her unborn son, a small, white, curled thing about six inches long, had been placed at her left breast as though suckling.
An Apache joke.
The scout was at Stryker’s side. His eyes went to the girl, then back to the officer. “Lieutenant, you ever been in Kansas?” he asked.
Stryker shook his head, saying nothing, his eyes still on the woman’s ravaged, bloodstained body.
“Some flat, long-riding country up there. A man on a tall horse can stand in the stirrups an’ pretty much see forever. Into tomorrow, if a feller’s farsighted enough.”
“You say.”
“Uh-huh, I do say. I was only there oncet, back in ’seventy-eight when ol’ Dull Knife an’ his Cheyenne was playing hob from one end o’ the state to t’other. Right pretty country though, Kansas, even in winter.”
“We’ll find something to cover her, Joe,” Stryker said. “Then lay her out alongside the others.”
Hogg looked over at the stagecoach. “The driver and guard are still up on the box—must have been killed in the first volley. The two passengers tried to protect the gal though. See that tall feller lying by the door?”
“I see him.”
“That there is ‘Five-Ace’ Poke Fisher, a gambler out of El Paso, Texas. Ol’ Poke was a fair gunhand, and in his day he killed more’n his share. If you look at him, he was shot maybe four, five times, an’ all his wounds are in the front.”
Hogg shook his head admiringly. “He died hard, did Poke, while a-trying to save the little lady. Who would have figgered ol’ Five-Ace for a hero?”
Stryker turned to Hogg. His eyes in their crushed sockets were as hard as blue steel and his voice was as level as Hogg’s Kansas plains. “Joe, when we catch up with the savages, I want them all dead. I don’t want prisoners that the Army will only slap on the ass and send to San Carlos. If there are women and children with them, I want them dead too, every damned one of them. If I should fall, will you make sure my orders are carried out?”
Suddenly the scout’s eyes were distant, as though he’d mentally put space between himself and his young officer. “Lieutenant, the Apache is a benighted heathen who only knows one way of making war—the way he was taught. He kills his enemies any how he can, then amuses himself by using their wives and daughters. He wasn’t always like that—I mean, way back. The Spanish taught him their way of war, and then the Mexicans and now the white man. Every cruel, senseless thing he does, he’s seen done to his own people many times over, and ten times worse.”
Hogg shook his head. “Lieutenant, hating the Apache is like hating the cougar because of the way he kills a deer.” He waited, then said, “Or you fer your face. Neither way of thinking makes much sense.”
Stryker stood stiff and silent for what seemed an eternity, then said, “I asked you a question, Mr. Hogg. If I fall in the engagement, will you see that my orders concerning the treatment of the Apache hostiles are carried out?”
The scout touched the brim of his hat. “I’ll see that Sergeant Hooper follows your orders, Lieutenant.”
“And you?”
“I hired on as a scout. Nobody said nothing about killing women and children.”
Without another word, Hogg turned on his heel and greeted Hooper, who was leading the troop over the crest of the saddleback. “The lieutenant wants the bodies laid out and covered, Sergeant,” he said. “See what you can find in the luggage to use as shrouds.”
The cavalrymen were all young; one of them, Trooper Muldoon, was just sixteen. They had never been this close to dead people before and it showed in their strained faces as they laid out the already-smelling dead.
After the bodies were arranged in a row, covered by whatever items of clothing the soldiers had found in the luggage, Stryker stood in silence, looking down at the now-faceless dead. He lifted his head and yelled. “Sergeant Hooper, form the troop in line behind me.”
Hooper did as he was ordered, and then the lieutenant said, “Now remove the coverings from the bodies.”
When that was done, Stryker moved to the side of the line and addressed the men in a loud, harsh voice. “Look well, all of you, and know your enemy. The Apache is not a warrior, not a soldier, but a killing animal. The only way to deal with such a savage beast is to kill him before he kills you.”
Stryker walked down the line, looking into the young faces of undersized boys recruited from city slums. To favor its horses, the United States Cavalry preferred troopers to be small and light, and their rations of hardtack and greasy salt pork—and not much of it—were designed to keep them that way.
“Men,” Stryker said, “we will meet up with the Apache later today. When we find them, what do we do?” He glanced down the line. “You, Trooper Muldoon, what do we do?”
The young man’s face was flushed from being singled out for attention. He swallowed hard. “Kill them, sir.”
“And their women?”
“Kill them, sir.”
“And their children?”
“Kill them, sir.”
“God curse the savages to hell! That’s the spirit, Trooper Muldoon,” Stryker yelled.
Another voice, from the end of the line, said, “I wish we had our sabers, sir.”