Rebel Spurs by Andre Norton (best ereader for comics .TXT) 📕

Drew lunged and then reeled back as Shannon laid the barrel of his Colt alongside the Kentuckian's head. He was half dazed from the blow but he managed to get out his protest.

"You murderin' butcher!"

"Kirby ain't dead, he'll just have a sore head tomorrow," Kitchell returned, as the man he called Sergeant Wayne straightened up from the Texan's crumpled form. "And you—you keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing a superior officer. Shannon, no more of that!" The order stayed a second blow.

"Oughta shot him for real, suh."

"No. Not a man who rode with General Forrest." Kitchell hesitated and then added, "We'll be long gone before he wakes. Tie this one in the saddle if he can't hang on by himself. You may be right, Shannon, about him having his uses in the future."

"Say, Colonel, this here gray hoss, he's got hisself all hurted bad. Can't nohow go 'long with us. Want I should shoot 'im?" That whine came from the meadow where they had left the horses.[pg 212]

"No, leave him. Won't do Kirby any good and that's a fine horse—might just see him again some day. Sergeant, you fill all the canteens; take any supplies you find here. Then we'll move out."

Drew, his wrists corded to the saddle horn, both ankles lashed to the stirrups, swayed in the saddle as Shannon took the reins of his horse and led it along. The pain in his head and the agony in his side resulting from even the most shallow breaths, brought on a kind of red mist which shut off most of the surrounding night. He had no idea how the outlaws had managed to jump the camp. And who was the extra man with them now? Only three had escaped during the horse fight, but four rode in the present party. He could not think straight; it was all he could do to will himself to hold on and ride.

Drew was thirsty, so thirsty his tongue was a cottony mass in his mouth. The day was light and sunny now, and they were single-filing through a region of bright, colored rock wind-worn into pinnacles, spires, and mesas. There was no water, no green of living things—just rock and sun and the terrible need for a drink.

Maybe he moaned; Drew could not be sure. He saw the man riding ahead turn in the saddle. Blue eyes, the man had, with no honest life in them. Once before the Kentuckian had seen eyes such as those. It had been in a cabin—a cabin back in Tennessee in the dead of winter. A young bushwhacker wearing Union blue, with a murderer's eyes in his boyish face, had watched Drew with the same incurious glance which held nothing of humankind. Shannon; the bushwhacker—two of the same killer breed. But to recognize that no longer mattered. Nothing mattered save water....[pg 213]

His mount stopped. Drew looked dully at the ground. Then his attention shifted to the man standing beside his horse.

"Down with you, fella."

Gray jacket, torn and threadbare—yet gray. Drew frowned.

"Sergeant Rennie, Buford's Scouts...." He tried to identify himself to this strange Confederate, but the words that got out were a thick mumble. Then, somehow he was on the ground and the man was holding a canteen to his mouth, dribbling blessed liquid over that choking cotton. Drew drank.

"Sergeant Rennie ... must report ... General Buford...." He was able to talk better now.

"Wot's that he's sayin'?"

"Somethin' 'bout some General Buford. Don't know who he is."

"Buford? Buford rode with Forrest." Those words were spoken by a different voice, sharper, better educated.

Drew opened his eyes, and for the first time actually saw the men he had been traveling with. The officer, who was maybe in his mid-thirties, had a beard trimmed to a point and eyes half sunk in his head. And Shannon—he had a half-grin on his lips as he stared down, enjoying what he saw when he surveyed Drew. The one Kitchell called Sergeant Wayne was a big fellow, even though he was thinned down. He had a square sort of face—jaw too heavy for the rest of it. Then, Drew's eyes came to the last man and stopped.

To the first three there was a uniformity; the remnants of military training still clung to them. But this shrunken figure with a wild gray beard, watery, bloodshot eyes, a matted[pg 214] thatch of hair on which a broken-rimmed hat perched, ragged and filthy clothing ...

"Not gonna haul th' Mex much farther, you ain't!" observed this scarecrow with a touch of relish in the relaying of bad news. "He's outta his head now, gonna be clean outta his skin come sundown."

"All right!" said Kitchell. "We'll camp here ... in that shade." His gesture indicated some point beyond Drew's range of vision.

"They're gonna be sniffin' 'long right behind us," the sergeant said dubiously.

"You're forgettin' we've got us sonny boy here!" Shannon loomed over Drew. "He'll buy us out."

"Maybe from Rennie—not from them Yankee troopers."

"I told you"—Shannon lost his grin—"th' Yanks ain't gonna come all th' way down here! There's too much pointin' in th' other direction. That is, if you was as good as you said you was, Lutterfield!"

The old man grinned in turn, widely set yellow tooth stubs showing ragged. "Ain't never failed you yet, boy. Old Amos Lutterfield, he's got him those wot believe wot he says like it was Holy Writ—he sure has! Them troopers'll go poundin' down th' Sonora road huntin' wot never was, till they drop men an' hosses all along. Then Nahata an' his bucks'll tickle 'em up a bit—an' they'll forgit there was anyone else t' hunt."

Drew lay in the position where they had dumped him, his hands still tied, the ropes on his ankles now knotted together. Had the season been high summer they would have baked in this rock slit, but it was still uncomfortably warm. He heard a low moaning and saw Kitchell and Lutterfield[pg 215] bending over the Mexican. It was plain that the wounded man had suffered from his enforced ride.

Some time later the Kentuckian was pulled into a sitting position. His hands loosened, he was allowed to feed himself, but the carne tasted like wood splinters when he chewed it.

"Not much like th' Range?" Shannon asked him. "Don't worry none—it won't last long, Rennie, no, it won't!"

"You did take my papers."

"I sure did! You thought I was clean outta m' senses back there in th' Jacks when that fool Texan called out your name—didn't you now? Well, I wasn't an' what he said sure made me want to know a little more—seein' as how Hunt Rennie might well be m' pa. He owed me a Pa, you know. M' real pa was killed gittin' him outta prison. I didn't want no drifters cuttin' in on what was rightly mine, in a manner of speakin'. So I just waited m' chance to get at that belt of yours. Found what I wanted—an' that sorta made up m' mind.

"Colonel Kitchell here, he wanted me to go south with him. They have them a war goin' on down there; a man can always git ahead in wartime does he like soldierin'. But I weren't sure 'bout goin', till I found out as how I might jus' be pushed out, anyway."

"Why did you think that? Hunt Rennie's always treated you as a real son, hasn't he?"

"Like a real son? Like his idea of a son, you mean. Work hard—an' havin' books pushed at me. Always jawin' about education an' bein' a gentleman! Do this, don't do that—this's right, that's wrong. Bein' soft with Injuns—Lord, I was sick of bein' his kind of son when I went off with Howard. Rennie wasn't even ready to fight th' war proper—big [pg 216] man here, 'fraid to try it where he wasn't! Rightly he was sick of me, too, only his precious duty wouldn't let him say so.

"But as long as he didn't know 'bout you, he'd try, an' keep on tryin'. I had me a good place to hole up on th' Range. With you there he might'n't hold on to his patience. First off I thought I might settle you permanent, then you got took up by Bayliss." Shannon laughed. "That sure was a switch! Captain thought you was Kitchell's man, when he shoulda looked a little closer in a coupla other places."

"But you were shot—by Kitchell's men."

"I was creased by th' shotgun rider on th' stage we tried to stop. Boys brought me in close to town an' dumped me on th' road—gave us a chance to make up another tale to fool Bayliss. Me, I've been ridin' with Colonel Kitchell since '64. We come west from Kansas 'long th' end of that year. Th' Colonel, he saw what might be