Shadow Shooters Read online

  Shadow Shooters

  Released from Yuma Prison in the fall of 1878, after serving three years for bank robbery, Anson Hawkstone returns to the Apache village where he lived, determined to find Rachel, his former love, and give up the outlaw trail. However, things do not go as planned when he is forced to take part in a stagecoach hold-up after Hattie, an Apache princess, is taken hostage. Hawkstone is pushed to the limit in trying to avenge the wrongs committed by other men before he can finally be reunited with Rachel.

  By the same author writing as George Snyder

  The Gunman and the Angel

  Dry Gulch Outlaws

  Shadow Shooters

  George Arthur

  ROBERT HALE

  © George Arthur 2018

  First published in Great Britain 2018

  ISBN 978-0-7198-2661-0

  The Crowood Press

  The Stable Block

  Crowood Lane

  Ramsbury

  Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.bhwesterns.com

  Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press

  The right of George Arthur to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Chapter One

  They released him the second week of August, 1878. He stepped out of Yuma Territorial Prison into the harsh, gritty Arizona wind carrying a bundle under his arm, his tousled, curly blond hair whipping round his face in the breeze; he wore plain blue denim pants, a white shirt buttoned at the wrists and neck, and high-topped shoes. His hazel eyes squinted at the waiting buckboard.

  The old Apache woman stood next to the wheel, crouched against the wind, her craggy face weathered as river driftwood. She held the grey plains Stetson hat in both hands while she watched him approach.

  ‘You need haircut, Anson Hawkstone,’ the old woman said, handing him the Stetson.

  They stood close, facing each other, he towering above her at his six feet four. The old woman looked ancient and creased from the 200-mile trip out.

  Hawkstone pulled the Stetson on to his head. ‘Where is the woman, Big Ears Kate?’

  ‘She is with the man.’

  ‘The same man?’

  ‘Pine Oliver he calls himself, the man in your house, on your bed, inside Big Ears Kate.’

  ‘Didn’t visit once in three years,’ Hawkstone said. ‘You came every month, 400 miles round about.’

  The old woman shook against a gust of hot wind, looking weary, her frail frame light enough to blow away. ‘Some brand woman can’t wait three years – too long to pine – gets restless with yearning and want – finds substitutes.’

  Hawkstone helped her up to the buckboard seat. She took the reins.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ he said. ‘Slide over.’

  The old Apache woman in her loose buckskin did not move. ‘Free from prison you take command?’

  ‘I command nothing, but I’ll drive the wagon. Slide over.’

  She slid away, but held the reins. He climbed to the seat beside her and tossed the bundle in the back. He smiled at her, content to see her without bars between them, and pulled the reins from her hands. ‘You raised me from a pup, and mebbe even past forty don’t make me no good.’

  ‘You still pup in some ways.’ Her eyes looked ahead, her face sharp, durable as stone without expression, without softness. She placed her creased hand on his leg.

  Hawkstone waved the reins against the back of the mule.

  With darkness they camped along the Rio Gila, to split the trip into four days. They ate smoked antelope she had brought. She slept inside the wagon without movement, while Hawkstone tossed restless on the ground under the wagon, listening to the gurgle of the Rio Gila and coyotes on the prowl.

  The village of twenty tepees and four wickiups looked the same to him, clustered close along a flat between hills approaching the Pinon Llano mountains. Juniper and mesquite clung to the craggy hillsides, with cottonwood along the creeks and the big Rio Gila river. The village was forty miles north of Fort Grant and Wharton City, Arizona Territory, a day’s ride south of Tucson. A mile from the village was the house that he had built – the house where Big Ears Kate shared his bed with a man called Pine Oliver.

  Inside the old woman’s wickiup where as a child he had grown up, he dropped the bundle and pawed through his gear from a life before prison – his buckskin pants, three cotton shirts, boots and his gunbelt.

  The old woman watched the bundle unroll. ‘You still carry book.’

  Hawkstone picked up the thin volume. ‘Ben Franklin.’

  ‘He come to village?’

  ‘He’s long dead. He wrote words I read and say sometimes, as I remember.’

  She nodded. ‘You go to house now?’

  ‘It ain’t moving. I’ll be getting to it.’ He picked up the 1876 Winchester rifle. He held the Colt Peacemaker .45 in his hand. ‘Where’s my Mexican saddle?’

  ‘On Black Feather’s pinto – a good saddle should not be idle.’

  ‘It won’t be idle now I’m back.’

  ‘He will bring it.’

  The old woman sat cross-legged Apache fashion and watched Hawkstone.

  He said, ‘I’m headed to Disappointment Creek – wash this prison stench off me.’

  ‘I will cook venison before dark.’ She stared at him. ‘Big Ears Kate will push her parts against you so you smile on her.’

  ‘Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools without wit enough to be honest.’

  The old woman nodded. ‘Is that from the book?’

  ‘It is, sort of.’

  She said, ‘Will you know when false words of honey come from her?’

  ‘Monkeys full of spite will always come round to bite.’ He winked at the old woman as he carried his clothes from the wickiup down towards the creek.

  Village dogs not knowing him yapped out a barking chorus, tails wagging friendly while he talked low to them as he walked and told them they were good puppies. He carried the bundle fifty yards from the village to the creek and dropped it on the bank. Two young girls hauled their clean laundry away with giggles. When they were out of sight, he tore the prison-issued clothes off his body until he was naked – ripped the buttons off the shirt, yanked the pants down his legs, and threw it all in the creek, so the clothes and the memory of where they came from washed down to the big Rio Gila river and drowned.

  He sat in the stream flow and splashed water over his chest and waist and head. The creek was cold, but felt good in the heat of the setting sun. He stretched his back out on smooth rocks until the water flowed over his head. He moved his head from side to side while he scrubbed himself all over with his bare hands. With his head propped on a slick pile of pebbles, he watched scarlet clouds move slowly above him.

  He brought into his mind an image of Big Ears Kate. When he thought of her it was only her soft body he remembered – much softness – excess softness. Her face was smooth and quick to smile, with fleshy lips that she opened easily – apparently for anyone.

  By contrast there had been the woman in prison, Pearl Harp – the only woman ever inside, a stagecoach robber whom Hawkstone knew intimately for almost a year. Pearl was a
tiny thing, no more than five feet two and slight. Her interesting face could be attractive when she worked at it, otherwise she looked downright masculine. Past thirty yet firm as a young tree trunk, she wasn’t eager about anything except making her way through prison time as easy as she could. Hawkstone had met her his second year in, and their intimacy didn’t go quite a year: the warden had taken a liking to her, and he was able to make her life much easier than Hawkstone could. He snatched her right away. Her company kept the warden smiling, until she became in the family way.

  The child was picked up by her well-off parents from Illinois, and joined the other two they raised by her divorced husband, Brett Harp. After the divorce, Pearl had worked a few tents while travelling the country, and had then hooked up with an outlaw, Boot Hobson, and taken to stagecoach holdups. They never made much money at it, mostly what the passengers carried. Boot had cut a trail to parts unknown, and Pearl went to prison for stealing $436. The warden had made promises for early release, and had actually been working on it while he worked on her.

  The sun had almost hidden behind the Pinons. Hawkstone felt the bubble of the creek water wash over him. Parts of prison needed time to fade. Ben Franklin wrote that time was a herb that cured all diseases, or something like that. Prison life would fade because he intended to replace it with better parts of living.

  Thinking of Big Ears Kate and Pearl Harp just naturally had him calling to mind Rachel Cleary, who later became Rachel Good Squaw. She had crowded his thoughts in prison, as she had at sea. Sometimes she pushed out the sounds of imprisoned men with their shouts, their cries and tears, vomiting and fighting each other. So many years ago, before the events of his life swept him along. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and they had been in love.

  Chapter Two

  The splash of the creek made Anson Hawkstone doze and remember. When he was ten, his parents had been killed and he had been taken by Cherokee; but he had run off, and these Chiricahua Apache had found him starving in the desert, and the old woman – younger then, with a son and his new woman – had taken him to raise until grandchildren came along. When Hawkstone reached seventeen, the son’s squaw had given the old woman a baby granddaughter – but Hawkstone then left for the goldfields of California.

  A year later he had met the orphan Irish girl with flaming red hair and an easy laugh named Rachel Cleary – except, at eighteen, a chance had come to Hawkstone that he couldn’t let go: he hired on as a deck hand for the clipper ship Roberta Cloud, bound round the world hauling cargo of all kinds. Hawkstone’s thinking was that he might find his Norwegian roots and where his people came from – or if he still had people. He wrestled with the decision to go – but he couldn’t afford to take her with him.

  He didn’t know he had left Rachel in the family way.

  Over the next seven years, Anson Hawkstone rose to captain his own clipper, the Rose Wave, which sailed him to meet relatives in Norway and to other ports of the world. Though many women passed through his bunk and life, his fondness remained for the Irish girl, Rachel Cleary. He wrote to her when he could, but his letters came back. In 1858, at twenty-five, he left the sea, having found the history of his roots, and after experiencing many other worldly adventures. After a year of failed searching to find Rachel, he settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, where he met and married a pretty, sweet girl named Susan who gave him his baby boy, Michael. He began to scout for the army.

  A year later he was dispatched to Fort McDowell, east of Wickenburg in Arizona Territory. He joined a cavalry expedition of forty soldiers riding southwest, where a tribe of Mescalero Apache had been reported running kill raids against the locals outside the town of Globe. Hawkstone took no part in the killing, having been raised by Apache and with no animosity towards them. He showed the army the way, then avoided the massacre – and suppressed his urge to open fire on the blue bellies by riding off. Then his attention was caught by a pinto running fast across the mesa, a woman bent over its neck, wounded. Her bright red hair flowed like a banner behind her. Hawkstone rode after her, rode her down until he could halt the pinto. He pulled her off the horse and carried her into an old mining cave.

  ‘Rachel?’ he said.

  She stared at him with hard green Irish eyes, her face red with riding and the wounds and the country.

  She pulled a knife and tried to stab him: ‘Kill you,’ she said.

  Because she was weak from loss of blood, he easily took the knife away. Then she blacked out, which allowed him to dress the wounds in her shoulder and arm. He stared at her while she slept at the entrance to the shallow cave. Below her bottom lip a vertical tattoo line ran straight to the end of her chin. She wore a buckskin dress to her knees with calf-length moccasins. Except for her hair and skin, she looked as Apache as a native woman.

  But it was the same Rachel he had known in California all those years before. But she was a captive white woman living with the Apache, and he was married with a baby boy, and scouted for the army. But she had been the first white woman for him – the first love that no man ever forgot.

  She woke and they talked. He hadn’t known about the child. It had been a girl, still-born. In tears she told him she had named the girl Peggy. The Christian orphanage kicked Rachel out for being of low morals. As Hawkstone listened he felt the heavy weight of responsibility. She had been on a stagecoach headed for Kansas City to business school, when a Cherokee raiding party jumped the stage – Rachel and three other girls were taken captive. One of the girls killed herself with a stolen pistol; Rachel and the two remaining girls were marched south, and traded for horses with the Apache. The brave, strong warriors rode their ponies while the hungry, thirsty girls marched. When they reached Apache territory, she never saw the other girls again. Years went by and she accepted her life.

  A brave took her as his own. She soon had a son, and raised him to be a warrior. The brave did not beat her often, and treated her as well as another man might. But in a skirmish with soldiers, the brave and the son were killed. The tribe had changed her name to Rachel Good Squaw, and other Apache suitors pushed for her favour, for she was attractive in an unusual way with that red hair, and had earned a reputation as a good, dutiful woman who usually obeyed her man. But she chose nobody. She had her own sod lean-to built by the men who wanted her. It was on a rise about a quarter mile from the village. She grew a garden. Some of the vegetables she traded for deer and antelope meat. Men offered her horses and goods if she would choose them. But she chose none of them, and she gave herself to no one.

  At twenty-seven, Rachel Good Squaw was hardened to her life. In the cave she told Hawkstone she felt little heartache over village people slaughtered by soldiers. She lived with the Apache, but did not love them. She had a few friends, but nobody close. She had thought of returning to the white world, but no man would have her now: she was tainted and branded, and she reckoned it was too late for a life living among Christians of judgment. She needed no man, and had become comfortable living alone.

  Hawkstone felt traces of the same affection return as he listened to her, though she was not the same girl he had left. He told her he had thought of her often while he sailed the world. He told her that when he had left the sea he married because he could not find her. She asked if he loved his wife. He said he might have. Susan was a loving wife who worshipped him with more open honesty than anyone ever had. He saw softness return to Rachel’s hard green eyes. But she wondered, if he truly loved his wife, how could he leave her to scout for the army? She told him she would have nothing to do with him while he was married.

  There was no future for them.

  In Disappointment Creek, the stream of water had turned too cold, and Hawkstone pushed himself out of the flow. He dressed as sunset clothed the mountains around him.

  On a rise across the creek he saw Hattie Smooth Water standing with her arms out. ‘Anson Hawkstone has returned!’ she shouted. ‘He will claim what is his! Five horses, Anson Hawkstone!’ She slid the buckski
n dress over her head, wearing only the calf-moccasins. She turned slowly, arms out, to show off her naked, twenty-year-old perfect body. ‘Yours for only five horses, Anson!’

  Her vicious wolf-dog, Volcano, growled at him as the princess danced, her waist-length black hair bouncing around her bare shoulders.

  A chestnut mare wearing the Mexican saddle waited at the old woman’s wickiup. A small stick and mesquite fire crackled in front of the entrance. The old woman handed a warm piece of venison from the fire to Hawkstone. Black Feather squatted in front of the standing chestnut, the reins in his left hand, venison in his right.

  Other men walked by and nodded greetings. The village air was clouded with smoke from small greenwood fires.

  ‘Welcome home, my blood brother,’ Black Feather said. He held the reins up to him. ‘A returning gift.’

  Black Feather moved with the grace of youth – twenty-three, straight black hair to his shoulders, buckskin-dressed, six feet and handsome, a Colt .45 on his hip – many maidens and non-maidens wanted him. On occasion he would choose one for temporary company. He could track a snake across a mountain range of smooth boulders.

  The old woman said, ‘I go to my bed now.’ She touched Black Feather on the shoulder, then Hawkstone on the chest, and ducked into the wickiup.

  The venison finished, Hawkstone squatted beside his blood brother. ‘You have your own place?’

  ‘A tepee the other side of the village, easy to move – sometimes my sister shares it.’

  ‘Your sister danced naked for me at the creek.’

  ‘She is a foolish girl. Leave her to young bucks easily impressed. Burning Buffalo wants her. You will turn your old eyes away.’

  ‘Hard to do when she dances like that.’