The Bullet Stops Here by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone [Johnstone, William W.; Johnsto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 2023-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

They rode south through the sage and chaparral. They rode under a blistering white sun through stands of cheatgrass yellow as summer wheat. Their shirts clung to them, soaked with sweat from the frying-pan heat, and the dust of the ancient road, like chalk, billowed up and coated them until they seemed pale as apparitions.

Walks-the-Horizon ranged ahead from the start. They spent the night on a mesa in the protection of a saguaro cactus forest. When they looked toward Mexico, they saw the flickering flames, large as match strikes in the far distance, of other campfires out in the waste. When the sun came up in the morning, they rode down into the desert past cliffs of sandstone the colors of coral and marmalade.

They rode until their water turned brackish, cooked just short of boiling inside their canteens. The chalk clinging to their clothes turned to grime when their sweat dampened it and then it dried again, hard as shale, in the noon heat. Walks-the-Horizon would appear throughout the day, sitting astride his horse above some arroyo.

Tarantulas and Gila lizards darted between prickly pear and barrel cactus as the hooves of the mounts hammered gravel and the branches of creosote brush whipped the riders’ chaps. The arid wind lifted grit off the hardpan and flung it in their faces so that they rode with their heads down, brims of their hats turned low, and bandannas hiding their noses and mouths.

They wanted to make time, so on the second day Walks-the-Horizon led them off the stage road and through narrow ravines where rattlesnakes sunned themselves on flat piles of tabletop boulders. They rode without water for twelve hours and made a cold camp in a dry creek bed where slinking coyotes watched them from the safety of the darkness, eyes yellow. Their yips and howls went on all night and no one slept well.

By the next day, Talbot, Delacroix, and O’Toole were hurting. The Sonoran Desert was unforgiving, and the part Walks-the-Horizon had chosen to reduce travel time was brutal. They were entering Yuma County and moving toward the Pajarito Mountains, in the heart of Melichus’s territory.

They had run out of water the previous night and faced another eighteen hours in the unforgiving heat without it before they would reach the Gila River. That long without water for both humans and horses was a grueling ordeal that would test their endurance.

As before, Walks-the-Horizon ranged ahead, but not as far as earlier in the journey. They were nearing the mountain range and, just beyond that, the border. When, in the late afternoon, the scout rode up and told them he’d found a spring in an arroyo in the foothills, everyone was relieved.

What he told them next was decidedly less reassuring.

“Apache sign,” he said. “I make it six, maybe eight warriors.”

“This far off the reservation,” Collins said, his voice grim, “can only mean bad news.”

“Is it this Victorio?” Talbot asked, referring to a well-known Apache.

Walks-the-Horizon shook his head. “I do not believe so.

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