Apache Shadow Read online

  Apache Shadow

  Jason Manning

  Copyright © 2005, 2016 Jason Manning

  APACHE SHADOW

  Barlow was startled by the appearance of a second Apache, who was sliding down the embankment not twenty feet to his left. Barlow fired; the broncho kept sliding, and when he hit the bottom of the ravine, he fell. But Barlow's elation was short-lived; the Apache rolled over and began shooting. A bullet kicked dirt into Barlow's face as he desperately rolled away from the rim of the embankment. He felt the searing burn of a bullet on the inside of his left arm, just above the elbow. Lying on his back, he tested the arm, flexed the fingers of his left arm. Everything was still working. The bullet had just grazed the skin.

  He didn't hear the third Apache's attack, or even see it. He just felt it coming, some primeval instinct kicking in to warn him of danger, and he rolled again, onto his belly, and once more blazed away with both pistols. The broncho stumbled, got off one wild shot before dropping his rifle, and then fell sprawling, almost on top of Barlow. Barlow swung a leg around and prodded the broncho with a bootheel. There was no response. The Apache was dead.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 1

  His name was Coughlin. Born in Texas, he'd spent four years fighting Yankees during the recent War for Southern Independence. But before that, he'd lived on the Texas frontier and had been fighting bandits and Comanche raiders from the age of ten. In fact, fighting and killing was all that Coughlin knew, which was why he excelled at his present occupation: scalphunter.

  Coughlin had no idea how many men he had killed in his lifetime. He'd never been one to count his victims. The tally didn't matter to him. He'd killed on the Texas frontier and on the battlefields back east to stay alive. Now he killed to make a profit. He derived no particular pleasure from it. He was not consumed by a hatred for the Apache, as it seemed so many others were, especially the Mexicans. It was a hatred fed by fear, he'd decided. The feud between Mexican and Apache stretched back for generations, and it seemed to Coughlin that no Mexican would rest easy unless and until every last Apache was dead. That applied even to the ones who were trying to live in peace north of the border, the ones who resided on the reservations set aside for them by the United States government. The four Apaches in the canyon below were Coyoteros—and they were of the peaceful variety. But since the Mexicans were the ones offering the bounty on Apache scalps, and they made no distinction between peaceful Apaches or renegades, Coughlin didn't either.

  He was a big, bearded man, grim and weathered as he sat cross-legged on the rim, in the scant shade offered by a stand of ocotillo. He wore a tunic of butternut gray—more than just a memento from the war, it was his lucky shirt; he'd survived Shiloh and Chickamauga and Franklin in the shirt without a scratch. Buckskin trousers and a battered, wide-brimmed hat completed his attire. A .50 caliber Sharps buffalo gun lay across his lap. He needed such a weapon, because he preferred to do his killing from a distance. It was safer that way—especially when you were dealing with Apaches, peaceful or not.

  Faded blue eyes, narrowed into slits against the glare of the desert sun, scanned the opposite slope of the canyon. Somewhere over there were his two associates, Skaggs and the Mexican. They had orders not to shoot until he did. He was pretty sure they wouldn't, even though they'd been hunkered down for more than two hours and Skaggs wasn't long on patience. But Skaggs had been around Coughlin long enough to know you didn't cross the Texan if you cared at all about your health and well-being.

  Coughlin wanted to wait until the four Apaches reached the water hole, which he could see from his vantage point. He'd found the water hole just today, and careful scouting of the canyon provided evidence that Apaches often visited. Of the four, one was a woman, one a child. One of the two men was young, probably not yet twenty years of age; the other was twice as old. They would be wary approaching the water hole. But once they reached it, they'd let their guard down a bit. At least Coughlin could hope that would be the case. He'd learned to wait until the moment he had the advantage. He didn't fight fair. Only people who had something to prove fought fair.

  It was a shame, he mused, that the Apaches were traveling on foot—he and his associates augmented the scalp bounties they earned by selling any weapons or mounts appropriated from their victims. Coughlin had no idea why the Apaches were traveling through the canyon—where they had come from or where they were going was no concern of his. It was likely that they lived in a cowah somewhere nearby, apart, for whatever reason, from the several Coyotero che-wa-kis, or villages, located in these hills.

  When they reached the water hole, the woman and child knelt to drink. The young man took a quick look around and followed suit. The older man slowly and carefully surveyed the canyon walls. He looked right at Coughlin's hiding place, but the distance was too great, and the scalphunter too skilled at blending into the environment. The older Apache finally knelt at the edge of the water, laying down the rifle he'd been carrying.

  Coughlin raised his own rifle, drew a bead, and fired without hesitation.

  The bullet struck right between the Apache's shoulder blades, and the impact hurled him facedown into the water hole. Across the way, Skaggs and the Mexican began shooting. The young man died next. The woman grabbed the older man's rifle and got off a few shots in Coughlin's direction; she knew, in a general sense, where the first shot had come from, and since she was Apache, she was going to die fighting. Coughlin admired her for that. He reloaded the Sharps, oblivious to the bullets burning the air in his vicinity. He was drawing a bead on the child when the woman went down, shot dead by either Skaggs or the Mexican, and she fell sideways just as Coughlin squeezed the trigger. His bullet, meant for the child, struck her instead. The child—Coughlin couldn't tell if it was boy or girl, and didn't care—had been standing, frozen in shock and fear, ankle-deep in the water hole. Now, suddenly, the young one bolted and, before Coughlin could reload, disappeared around a bend in the canyon beyond the water hole.

  Muttering a curse, Coughlin finished loading the Sharps and then quartered down the slope, moving with a lithe grace that was surprising for someone so big. He was sure the older Apache was dead, having fired the shot himself, but he wasn't going to count on Skaggs and the Mexican being crack shots, so when he got down to the canyon bottom, he approached the bodies with caution. His cohorts were making a headlong descent of the other slope, and as they came closer, Skaggs let out a whoop that echoed down the still-as-death canyon. Coughlin grimaced. As far as he was concerned, scalphunting was serious business, but Skaggs thought of it as sport. An attitude like that tended to make a man careless, and in this country a careless man was a dead man, sooner or later.

  "Hot damn!" exclaimed Skaggs, delighted. "That was too damn easy!"

  Coughlin looked at the Mexican. The Mexican never said much, and
neither did his expression. He gazed at the dead Apaches without a glimmer of emotion.

  "Don't just stand there," said Coughlin. "Go get the kid."

  The Mexican gave him a blank look, then, with a curt nod, started off up-canyon at a lope.

  "I swear," muttered Coughlin, once the Mexican was out of earshot, "I think that one has Apache blood in his veins."

  "Mebbe we should take his scalp someday," Skaggs said and giggled.

  "Yeah, why don't you try someday?" said Coughlin dryly. "I'd like to see you try."

  Skaggs was picking up the Apaches' rifles. "We'll get fifty pesos apiece for these repeaters down on the border," he said gleefully.

  "Almost as much as we'll get for these scalps," said Coughlin, in disgust. The Mexican government was paying twenty-five pesos for every male scalp, ten pesos for every female and child.

  "It's enough," said Skaggs. "Enough to buy some mescal and a Mex woman."

  Coughlin looked askance at his partner. That was all Skaggs cared about—getting drunk and having a woman. For his part, Coughlin wanted more. He wanted enough money to set himself up for life in some Mexican town. But the money they got for killing these Apaches wouldn't go far. A night or two in a border town and they'd be stone broke again. Still, Coughlin was philosophical about it—there were limited opportunities for an ex-Confederate with only one bankable skill.

  A single gunshot rang out from up-canyon. It was the Mexican, taking care of the kid. Coughlin drew a knife from its belt sheath and went to work, starting with the older man. Grabbing a handful of the dead Apache's hair, he made a circular incision around the top of the skull, starting at the hairline. The scalp came off the dead man's head with a wet popping sound. Coughlin put the scalp in a pouch slung over one shoulder—a pouch stained black with the blood of previous victims. He took the young man's topknot and was working on the woman when the Mexican returned, the limp body of the child under one arm. Coughlin nodded at the Mexican. He didn't know much about the man, and was suspicious of his lineage, but it couldn't be denied that the Mexican was almost as efficient at killing as he was. He just wasn't sure that the Mexican could be trusted—and he never turned his back on the man. The profit turned on scalphunting was usually pretty slim, especially when cut three ways. Coughlin had occasionally contemplated getting rid of his associates, and he had to assume that the thought had crossed the Mexican's mind too. Skaggs, on the other hand, was too stupid to consider it, and too scared of Coughlin to try something like that. The Mexican didn't appear to be afraid of anything.

  "Skaggs," said Coughlin, as he finished scalping the woman, "go fetch the horses."

  Looking skyward, Coughlin squinted at the buzzards already circling in the hot updrafts rising out of the canyon. It didn't take them long to find death, and they served as a signpost for anyone who might be in the vicinity. Coughlin wanted to put as much distance between himself and the water hole as quickly as possible. Other Apaches weren't the only potential danger. There was the United States Army to worry about. He and his colleagues had just killed four Coyotero Apaches—and for all Coughlin knew, they'd done the deed on land that was part of the Coyotero reservation. This was something the blue bellies would frown upon, since they were trying to avoid another war with the Apaches. What the Mexican government would happily pay him for, the Yankees would hang him for.

  Which was why he was more than a little annoyed when Skaggs showed up with only two horses and their pack mule in tow.

  "What the hell is wrong with you?" he snapped. "My horse, too, damn it."

  Skaggs looked worried. "Your horse is dead, Coughlin."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Bullet in the skull."

  Coughlin recalled how the Apache woman had grabbed up a rifle and fired several rounds at the canyon rim where he'd been laying in wait. His horse had been well-hidden and on the back side of the rimrock. That she'd killed it had to be a fluke. Ricochet, possibly. Coughlin cut loose with a long string of epithets. Just his luck that something like this would happen. But he'd learned to adapt quickly—a skill learned the hard way on a half dozen battlefields, where almost nothing went the way the goddamned officers planned it.

  "I'm taking your horse, Skaggs," he said, in a tone of voice that made it plain he would brook no objections. "You ride the pack mule."

  "I don't wanna ride no mule, Coughlin," whined Skaggs.

  Coughlin scowled. "I don't care what you want. You weigh in at half of what I do. The mule can carry you and the provisions too. Besides, it won't be for long. We'll pick up the first horse we see, and then we'll make tracks for the border."

  "There is a rancho," muttered the Mexican. He was pointing due east.

  "Hey, that's right," said Skaggs. "Spread run by a feller named Barton. No, Barlow. Yeah, that's it." Skaggs was pleased with himself for remembering. "Barlow, that's his name."

  "I don't care what his name is," rasped Coughlin, exasperated. He went to Skaggs' horse and climbed into the saddle. "Long as he doesn't mind parting with a horse."

  "What if he does mind?" asked Skaggs.

  Coughlin glowered at him. "What do you think?"

  They rode away from the water hole with Coughlin in the lead, and Skaggs, cursing as he kicked the mule into motion, bringing up the rear.

  Chapter 2

  It had been the same every morning for more than a year—Joshua Barlow would step out of the small adobe house that he called home to stand in the slanting morning sunlight on the porch and gaze across the sagebrush flats to the Mogollon Mountains, blue and jagged in the distance, and feel a great contentment sweep over him. The smell of the sage mixed with the wood smoke that rose from the chimney of the house and of the larger adobe structure across a stretch of hardpack that served as a bunkhouse for the ten men who worked for him. The horses in the corrals were stirring, galvanized by the rising of the sun. Farther out, he could see a handful of the hundreds of cattle that grazed on land belonging to him. To him and Oulay, the Chiricahua Apache woman who had become his wife. Part of that contentment was pride of ownership. But more than that was the fact that he'd been blessed, this past year, with Oulay's love. That was what made everything worthwhile. Compared to that, nothing else much mattered. And as long as he had her at his side, it really didn't matter if he owned a thousand cattle or none at all.

  Until now he hadn't fully understood why his father, a Northerner and a high-ranking officer in the federal army, had chosen to live in Georgia, where, in the years leading up to the Civil War, so many of his neighbors had despised him and everything he represented. Timothy Barlow had fallen in love with a Southern belle—Joshua's mother—and had gladly endured the contempt and hatred of Southern natives to spend his life with her on the plantation she'd inherited from her father. In doing so, Timothy Barlow had become a reluctant slaveholder, a situation that alienated many Northerners. But no sacrifice had been too great for him. As Timothy Barlow's son, Joshua had sacrificed too, growing up an outcast, spurned by most of the other Southern-born children he knew; and sometimes, as young and self-centered people are prone to do, he'd even resented his parents for putting him in such an untenable position.

  It had been for love, of course—and these days Joshua knew a love just as strong. Like his father, he was willing to risk anything, endure any situation, for that love. His one regret was that he hadn't been afforded an opportunity to tell them that he comprehended—and respected—the depth of love they'd shared and forgave them for any discomfort it had caused him in his childhood. But not too many months ago he'd received word from an attorney in Georgia that his father had died of natural causes, and that his mother had passed away only a few weeks later—of a broken heart, said some. It was a heavy blow—one Joshua wasn't sure he could have endured without Oulay's abiding love providing him with solace. And that was why his mother and father had been willing to face all the scorn heaped upon them—because when a man and a woman shared a love such as theirs, and like the one J
oshua shared with Oulay, they didn't need anyone or anything else. Joshua didn't need the land or the cattle that now belonged to him, at least not for himself. He stayed and worked and toiled and sweated to build something for Oulay and for the children he hoped they would have one day.

  This land—and many of those cattle—had once belonged to someone else, a rancher named John Ward. Ward was dead now, killed by Apaches. So were Ward's children, a son and a daughter. In those days Barlow had been a lieutenant in the United States cavalry, trying desperately to prevent an Apache war that Ward, and many others, had desired. That war had come, and many had died. But now peace—albeit an uneasy peace—reigned. Many of the Chiricahuas, including Oulay's father, the great chief Cochise, were renegades hiding in mountain strongholds in Mexico. Most of the other Apache bands had made their peace with the Pinda Lickoyi—the white man—and lived now on reserves set aside by the United States government for their use in perpetuity. Barlow was no longer in the army; he'd given up his commission under circumstances that had put him at risk of court-martial. He'd served, reluctantly, as chief of Apache scouts during the failed campaign to capture Cochise and his people before they could cross the border. During that campaign he had seen lives squandered, friends lost. Oulay had almost been lost to him, as well, kidnapped by a Netdahe, an Apache renegade named Kiannatah. But she had been restored to Barlow—thanks in no small part to an old half-breed scout known as Short Britches.

  That was all behind Barlow now, though. Most folks expected the uneasy peace between white man and red to come to a bloody end, and soon. Barlow tried not to think about it. When he did think about it, he vowed to himself that he would not get involved.

  Across the way, several of the cowboys who lived in the bunkhouse were coming out onto their porch to smoke the first cigarette of the day or to wash up at the water basin on a trestle table near the door. Most of the men who worked for him were vaqueros. Barlow thought they were a good, reliable bunch. They worked hard, were loyal to him, and he, in turn, trusted them. But the man he trusted most of all—Short Britches—did not live in the bunkhouse. He spent his days and nights roaming the desert, patrolling the perimeter of the ranch, looking for trouble. There was something comforting about the idea of the old scout riding the line. No one knew the country, and the people who roamed across it, better than Short Britches.