Golden Hawk 2 Read online

  Walking Crow rushed at him. Until the last moment, Hawk waited, then ducked aside. As Walking Crow charged past him, Hawk slashed out with his bowie, opening a long slice in Walking Crow’s right side. Ignoring the wound, the Comanche spun about and flung himself at Hawk, his blade thrusting eagerly for Hawk. Hawk ducked back, stopped, weaved to one side—quickly slashed left, then right. Walking Crow ducked hastily back. Hawk rushed him. Walking Crow ducked, just eluding Hawk’s blade. Sticking out his foot, he tripped Hawk.

  Hawk came down hard, or so he let it appear. He lay facedown for a few seconds, counting, then rolled over. Walking Crow had already launched himself through the air at Hawk’s prone body. Hawk planted his bowie blade up in the ground, then shifted aside. The Comanche slammed to the ground, impaling himself on the bowie’s blade. Gasping, Walking Crow jumped to his feet. With one quick yank, he pulled the bowie from the wound in his side and flung it away.

  Hawk scrambled to his feet in time to catch the gleam in Walking Crow’s eyes as he focused on something—or someone—behind Hawk. Hawk whirled. In the nearest of the fresh graves one of the dead Comanches was sitting up, his mud-streaked face cold with triumph as he drew his arrow back across his bow. The bow twanged. Too late, Hawk flung himself to one side. There was a numbing impact in his thigh. He hit the ground and rolled over swiftly to see the Comanche step out of the grave and fit a second arrow to his bowstring. Reaching back, Hawk flung his throwing knife. It slipped past the bowstring and buried itself in the Comanche’s chest.

  This time the Comanche was really dead when he toppled back into his grave.

  Walking Crow was charging at him now, his knife held high. An arrow in his thigh, his knife lost to him, Hawk braced himself. A rifle shot rang out from the timbered hillside above them. The round caught Walking Crow high in the shoulder and sent him sprawling forward to the ground, his knife falling from his hand. Hawk snatched up the knife. Up almost instantly, the Comanche turned away from Hawk and raced for his pony.

  Hawk tried to overtake him, but the arrow lodged in his left thigh was too much. Each movement caused an excruciating explosion of pain that shot clear down to his toes. Walking Crow swung into the saddle and galloped past Hawk, blood pouring from his wounds. As he passed Hawk, he slashed down with his war club and caught Hawk on the side of the head. Hawk slumped dazedly back to the ground as Walking Crow bent over the pony’s neck and vanished into the timber.

  Hawk leaned back, his head pounding, his senses reeling. There was no one to blame but himself. Hawk had let that son of a bitch lure him down here so a dead Comanche could finish him with an arrow in the back. Hawk’s desire to throttle Walking Crow had been turned against him.

  Hawk swore softly and closed his eyes.

  Chapter Two

  THE SOUND OF hoofbeats pounding closer prevented Hawk from losing consciousness. He opened his eyes and looked up to see a buckskin clad rider hurriedly dismounting beside him. The rider had a familiar smell—that of Bill Williams. Squinting up at Bill in the growing darkness, Hawk managed a halfhearted wave.

  “You all right, Hawk?”

  “I’m hurtin’ some—but go see to that son of a bitch in the grave over there. He may still be trouble.”

  Bill walked over to the dead Comanche, studied him for a moment, then reached down and pulled Hawk’s knife out of his chest. With a negligent kick, he sent the dead Indian rolling into the grave.

  Bill walked back, squatted beside Hawk, and handed him his knife. “This here’s a right mean little stickpin you got, Hawk.”

  “It comes in handy.”

  “Who was that Comanche left here in such a hurry?”

  “Walking Crow.”

  “He’s a tough one. I thought for sure old fetchum had plugged him in the back.”

  “You got him in the shoulder. It was a fine shot anyway. Much obliged.”

  Bill nodded, his eyes dropping quickly to the Comanche arrow protruding from Hawk’s thigh. “Best get this out of you before you bleed to death.” He glanced up at Hawk. “You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  With a quick jab, Bill slapped the arrow all the way through Hawk’s thigh, snapped off the feathered portion of the shaft, and pulled the arrow out. Hawk gasped. Bill had been incredibly fast, but the pain had still been intense enough to make his head spin.

  Bill bent his head to peer into the wound. “It’s a clean wound,” he informed Hawk. “But I’ll have to cauterize it soon’s we get ourselves to a new camp.” He looked around distastefully. “This one smells too much like Indian.”

  “That Comanche took my horse.”

  “We’ll ride double on mine. We ain’t going far. I got me a camp on that slope up there.”

  Hawk leaned his head back. He was too weary to argue. Gathering up Hawk’s rifle and revolver, Bill found Hawk’s bowie in the brush where Walking Crow had thrown it. He tucked the knife and revolver into his saddlebags and jammed the Hawken into the boot beside his own rifle. Then he returned to Hawk and reached down.

  Bill was a tall, gaunt man with long reddish hair. When Hawk first met him at Bent’s Fort the previous year, the mountain man had appeared somewhat frail; but now, as Hawk felt the mountain man’s muscles and sinews flexing powerfully under him, he realized Old Bill Williams was still in his prime. As casually as he might carry a pet skunk, Bill walked over to his horse and deposited Hawk down onto his saddle. Grabbing hold of the saddle horn, Hawk tried not to think of the pain in his thigh while Bill mounted up behind him, urging his horse up the slope. Neither one of them glanced back at the dead Indian sprawled in his open grave.

  The wolves, then the coyotes, and after them the buzzards would clean his bones and those of the others under their light covering of dirt.

  Hawk almost passed out on the jolting ride up the slope to Bill’s camp. When they reached it, Hawk saw the place was more than a camp. Bill had constructed a solid-enough lean-to extending out from the side of the mountain’s flank, with layers of pine boughs for roofing, a makeshift fireplace in one corner with a hole over it to let out the smoke. Along the inside wall Bill had placed his cot. Set low on the dirt floor, it was constructed Indian-fashion with pine boughs for bedding. Carrying Hawk easily, Bill placed him down on it.

  Bill then got a fire going in the fireplace. Once the flames were high enough, he held the blade of Hawk’s bowie in the flames. When it was white-hot, Bill poured half a bottle of whiskey down Hawk’s throat and splashed the remainder into the arrow wound.

  The whiskey had Hawk’s head spinning until he felt Bill plunge the searing blade into his wound. Hawk sobered instantly and clung to Bill’s filthy buckskin shirt. It didn’t feel like a knife at all. It felt as if Bill were pushing a mile-long poker through his thigh —one that came straight from hell.

  Bill peered into the wound and shook his head. “Don’t like the look of it,” he told Hawk. “Looks a mite angry in there.”

  Old Bill disappeared then, came back much later, and built up the fire. He had brought back a wicker basket full of a lot of moldy-looking dirt and pine needles. By this time Hawk felt so feverish, he didn’t care what Bill did, and he offered no protest as the mountain man wrapped the moldy pine needles about his thigh.

  Not long after Bill finished tying the bandage, Hawk passed out.

  The thigh was too swollen for them to travel the next day, but Bill kept piling on the mold, and before nightfall the swelling went down and the throbbing calmed appreciably. Late the next day, when Bill unpeeled the messy poultice, the wound looked a lot cleaner and was already beginning to itch.

  “What in hell is that stuff, Bill?”

  “Just some mold an old Indian witch doctor showed me. Works fine, don’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll show you how to find it when I get the chance.”

  The next day, riding double, Hawk and Bill headed for Fort Union. They rested three or four times during the day, and Hawk’s leg seemed to get stronger with each passin
g hour. At nightfall, they made camp high in the timber.

  During all this time the two men had said little. Hawk had been too uncomfortable for chatter, with the pain in his thigh and the raw smell emanating from Old Bill’s filthy buckskins. But that wasn’t the only reason. Bill was not a man for idle chatter. Indeed, his silences were almost as legendary as his stink—according to what Hawk had learned from Tom Fitz. During one stretch Bill’s spirits had sunk so low he had disappeared into the wilderness with only his Bible and his Collected Works of Shakespeare for solace. If any fellow mountain man stumbled on Bill during this period, he was greeted with a baleful silence more terrible than any howling anger.

  This evening, however, Bill appeared a bit more sociable. After Hawk had washed down Bill’s jerky and sourdough biscuits with coffee strong enough to cure warts on a toad, Bill lit up his pipe and indicated that some conversation might be in order.

  “Hawk, you mind tellin’ me how you got yerself into sech a scrape?”

  Hawk smiled sheepishly. “Like any dumb beaver, I went for the bait.”

  “Maybe you better explain that.”

  “Walking Crow was the bait. The brave with my knife in his chest planted himself in that grave and waited for Walking Crow to lure me into hand-to-hand combat with him. When Walking Crow got me close enough, the Comanche in the grave popped up and sent that arrow into me.”

  Bill grinned. “Looks like them Comanches’ve decided to resort to trickery. It don’t do them no good to come at you straight on, judging from what I been hearin.’ “

  “I’m just sorry Walking Crow got away.”

  “I wouldn’t worry none about that, Hawk,” Bill said, puffing reflectively on his pipe. “He’ll be back.”

  A long silence followed. Then Bill took the pipe stem out of his mouth. “I see some Indian tacks driven into your Hawken’s stock. You done that?”

  “Nope. That was done by the Comanche chief I took it from.”

  “Which one’d that be?”

  “Two Horns. He took it from my pa when he killed my folks and captured me and my sister.”

  Bill puffed on his pipe for a while to digest this information. Then he said, “Yep. I heered tell you was raised by the Comanche. How come you didn’t go whole-hog Indian, Hawk? I never did hear of a white kid brought up among them red devils who didn’t turn out more Indian than the Indians.”

  “I looked a lot younger, but I was fourteen when they took me and my sister. I didn’t have any trouble keepin’ in mind what them savages done to my folks. And neither did my sister.”

  “You was fourteen, eh? Yeah, I reckon you was too old by that time to be broken to their yoke. So what’d they do to you?”

  ‘They set me to watchin’ their horse herds.”

  “You was a slave then?”

  Hawk nodded.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t cut off your balls.”

  “I came close to it. But I stayed out of trouble—until they sold my sister to a Comanchero. Then I pretended to be one of them, went on a raid into Mexico, and broke loose. I had to kill a few of their warriors along with that chief. Since then there’s been a steady stream of Comanches tryin’ to avenge them deaths.”

  Puffing on his pipe, Bill nodded. “One thing about the Comanche. They never turn on a friend—and they never forgive an enemy. Ask the Apaches. They’ll be comin’ after you, Hawk—long as the grass grows and the rivers run.” He paused, furrowing his brow. “Didn’t I hear tell you took your sister back from the Blackfeet last fall?”

  “I did. But the Blackfeet came after her again this winter,” Hawk admitted bitterly. “Now Tall Buffalo has her.”

  Bill shook his head slowly in wonder. “Hawk, they got you in a son-of-a-bitch stew, and that’s a fact. It ain’t only the Blackfeet you got to contend with—it’s these here Comanches, too.”

  “What about you, Bill? What’re you doin’ in these parts?”

  Bill told Hawk his own sad story. A week before, an impudent band of Arikaras had stolen Bill’s winter catch of plews along with his two pack horses, which had been carrying most of his gear. Bill had been traveling to Fort Union, where he hoped to gather together a small force of mountain men to help him retrieve the plews from the Arikaras. That was when he caught sight of Hawk battling Walking Crow. Earlier, Bill had heard the gunfire when Hawk swept down upon the Indian encampment.

  “Count me in, Bill,” Hawk said.

  “Thought you’d be on your way into Blackfeet country to take back your sister.”

  “I owe you, Bill. And later, maybe I can count on this force of yours to help me find Annabelle.”

  Bill puffed on that for a while, then nodded. “It’s a deal.”

  Two days later, a good week yet from Fort Union, Hawk and Bill heard gunfire over the next ridge. Both men dismounted. Hawk was limping, but he was able to put weight on his left foot and keep up with Bill.

  A moment later, peering down at a rough trail that wound toward them from the prairie beyond, they saw two shaggy-looking riders firing on a small covered wagon. Rifle fire from the wagon was keeping the two riders back. On the ground beside the stalled wagon, Hawk made out an older man’s sprawled figure. He lay very still, his head face down in the ground.

  “Highwaymen,” Bill muttered. “They been plaguing the pilgrims since last year on this trail.”

  “Whoever’s inside that wagon is doing a pretty good job of holding them off.”

  “Won’t last long,” Bill said. “There’s two of them and only one of the other.”

  “Let’s get closer.”

  “Jest what I was thinkin’.”

  That was easier said than done. The mountain slope was pocked with boulders and slippery shale. Small patches of scrub pine and juniper provided the only cover. By the time they got to within a hundred yards of the two highwaymen, the two robbers had decided to split up. One darted off to the right, evidently intent on encircling the wagon, while the other moved closer, pouring a steady fire into the wagon.

  “I’ll go after the other one,” said Bill.

  Hawk nodded and waited until Bill was out of sight before he continued down the slope after the highwayman below him. He did not want to alert the other highwayman that he and Bill were on the scene, so he moved as close to his prey as possible before making a move on him.

  The highwayman was crouched down behind a rock, reloading his rifle when Hawk got to within twenty yards of him. He had a filthy, ragged beard and his stink was strong enough to cross the twenty yards to Hawk.

  “Hey, mister,” Hawk called softly.

  The fellow spun quickly, hauling up a huge revolver.

  “Over here,” Hawk called just as softly. “Near the boulder.”

  The highwayman craned his neck, then stood up. Smiling, Hawk stepped into full view. Startled by Hawk’s sudden appearance, the highwayman did not know whether to shoot Hawk or say hello. Hawk reached back, caught the tip of his throwing knife, and threw it—all in one easy, fluid motion.

  The knife caught the man in the gullet. He dropped his six-gun and fell back to the ground, the only sound the heavy thump of his revolver when it hit a patch of bunch grass.

  Hawk moved swiftly over to the dead highwayman, withdrew his knife, and wiped it on the man’s filthy shirt. Then he kicked away his revolver and kept on toward the wagon. A rifle shot blazed at him. He flung himself to the ground, landing on the wounded portion of his thigh. He almost cried out.

  Damn! He should have known better. To the fellow in the wagon, Hawk was just another highwayman moving in to finish him off. Keeping low, he inched forward, his Hawken in his right hand, his bowie in the other. Then he heard a cry from the other side of the wagon, followed by a shot. He jumped to his feet, raced around to the rear of the wagon, and saw Big Bill on the ground, the other highwayman standing over him.

  Hawk flung up his rifle and fired. The half-ounce ball of lead smashed into the highwayman’s spine, nearly cutting him in half. He toppled to
the ground beside Old Bill. Bill sat up, blinking, dazed.

  “Looks like you evened the score between us, Hawk,” he muttered.

  “Hold it right there!”

  Both men turned to see a fiery-eyed woman stepping out of the wagon, an ancient flintlock revolver in her small hand.

  Hawk dropped his rifle to the ground. Bill turned his head and glared up at the young woman.

  “Dammit! You the one skulled me?”

  “I did!”

  “You made a mistake,” Hawk told her. “We came to help.”

  “You ain’t a member of that gang?”

  “Did I just act like it?”

  At once the woman lowered her weapon and slumped wearily back against the wagon. Then she remembered the man lying on the other side of the wagon.

  “Oh, my God,” she cried. “Father!”

  She rushed around the front of the wagon and vanished. A moment later they heard her scream, followed by her sobbing. Neither man needed to be told how badly the girl’s father had been hurt.

  Rubbing his head where the woman had clubbed him, Bill got to his feet and picked up his rifle. Then he peered at the downed highwayman and kicked him over onto his back.

  “Thought I recognized him,” he said. “This here was Dan Fitzhugh. He ran out of luck a couple of years back—and then he ran out of brains.” He looked up at Hawk. “I gather you took care of the other one.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Just wondered. I didn’t hear nothing.”

  They walked around the wagon and approached the woman. She was on her knees beside her father, his head in her lap, rocking. The two men stood beside her for a long while, saying nothing, waiting for her storm of grief to subside. Bill kept a respectful distance, knowing how fulsome he smelled. But after a while Hawk stepped closer and rested his hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  Her face streaked with tears, she looked boldly up at Hawk, and he saw at once how pretty she was.