Apache Springs by Frank Leslie

Author:Frank Leslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

Wolf had alerted him to the possible danger, as the horse, even more attuned to trouble than his rider, often did. The stallion had suddenly lifted his head and whickered deep in his chest, casting one brief glance over his shoulder.

Yakima had turned then, as well, and caught a glimpse of a horse and rider descending a steep grade maybe a hundred yards behind him. Horse and rider were a small, light-brown blur against the gray rock behind them, and then, as fast as Yakima had spied them, his shadower was gone, riding on down the grade and out of sight behind the boulders that fairly choked this canyon he’d found himself riding through, following the faint trace of an ancient Indian trail.

Yakima glanced behind him again now. Nothing. Just rocks of all shapes and sizes.

He turned his head forward, nudged the .44 residing in its holster thonged to his right thigh, and loosened the Yellowboy in its scabbard jutting over his right stirrup fender. He looked around at the canyon whose northern wall, on his right, had grown taller the farther he’d ridden along its base. It must have been two hundred feet high in places—flues and chutes and crenellated, castle-like walls of eroded sandstone. There was virtually no growth except a few patches of wiry brown brush and cat claw, maybe a greasewood tuft or two.

To the south, on Yakima’s left, was a massive jumble of boulders that had likely tumbled down from the northern ridge. That ridge, if comprised of all the rock that now nearly squeezed off Yakima’s passage in places, must have been as tall as the northern ridge at one time. But something, maybe an earthquake, had caused that wall to collapse into the canyon.

Yakima knew he hadn’t come this way. But maybe he’d find a western exit to the canyon. Apache Springs was north and west, and it really didn’t matter which way he took to get there.

He cast a cautious glance behind him again. Not seeing his shadower, he kept riding.

The canyon turned this way and that, ever so gradually.

The hot sun’s rays were relieved by long shadows angling out from the northwestern wall.

Yakima followed another curve in the wall to his right, turning back toward the north, and abruptly jerked back on Wolf’s reins. The horse whickered uneasily, blew. Staring at something on the ground a ways ahead and near the base of the northern wall, Yakima put the horse a little farther ahead, then stopped him again.

He stared down at what remained of a man who’d been staked out spread-eagle on the canyon floor. Little more than a mere skeleton. There were three men, in fact. Two more skeletons lay just beyond the first one.

The half-breed stared at the nearest man—sun-bleached bones to which a few bits of sun-mummified skin and scraps of clothing clung. A few sparse patches of skin also clung to the skull, and hair clung in similar patches to the scalp. The bony wrists were lashed with dried scraps of rawhide to stakes that had been driven into the ground.

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