Buffalo Soldier: Chasing Ghosts by Charles Ray

Author:Charles Ray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Uhuru Press
Published: 2016-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

ten

The next day, they were on the trail again before the sun had baked the chill from the air and the waist-high mists still clung to the earth. Ben wondered how Hightower could find a trail through the shifting gray eddies of mist, but the man bore on, stopping now and then to dismount and feel the earth as if he could somehow feel the presence of his quarry through his fingertips.

At the end of the valley, to Ben’s surprise the trail seemed to be heading out of the mountains. He wondered if Grey Wolf was planning more raids before getting to his final destination.

It was still a long way down the mountain, again through narrow lanes that gave Ben the itchy nervousness again, and caused him to let the column stretch out to avoid offering a bunched target to anyone lurking in the rocks.

Fortunately, there were no more ambushes. At midday, they finally reached the base of the mountain. Ben called a halt and they ate cold rations washed down with water from their canteens. Hightower mentioned that the trail was turning back to the north, and Ben didn’t want to lose too much time. He hoped to be able to catch up to the renegades before nightfall.

That was, however, not to be. Grey Wolf’s renegades had, based on the condition of their horses’ droppings, widened the lead yet again. Ben wondered at the pace they were setting; it was if Grey Wolf had a schedule to keep.

Well, Ben, too, had a schedule to keep. He wanted to get back to Fort Union and allow his men to get some much-needed rest, but before he could do that he had to see that the renegade Apache’s reign of terror was ended. Grey Wolf had to either be brought back in chains to face a judge to answer for his crimes, or brought back wrapped in a blanket.

Ben understood a lot of the anger felt by the tribes over being pushed out of their ancestral lands, onto marginal land that had little or no water and none of the game they were accustomed to hunting. He could see why they would often rebel against unscrupulous Indian agents who shorted them on rations or treated them as less than human. But, the slaughter of innocents, especially women and children, wasn’t, in his opinion, an acceptable way to express that anger.

For Ben it wasn’t really personal. He’d taken an oath, and for nearly a decade he’d kept to that oath. His job was to protect the law-abiding settlers in the territory against all enemies, be they renegade Apaches or rustlers. As he thought that, the outlaw Flores and his Flower Market came to mind. Men like Flores, though they seldom dirtied their own hands, fed the lawlessness that infected much of the western territory of an ever-expanding country, and even though going after rustlers and other outlaws wasn’t the mission he’d been sent on, he felt an obligation to do something about that as well.

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