Brian Garfield - Apache Canyon

Brady crouched on one knee and frowned, squinting at the smudged and dusty tracks. His eyes lifted slowly, following the sign forward along the ground, and kept on lifting, sweeping the hot yellow-gray rock spires of yonder hills. A hot breath of wind carried gritty dust across his flesh. He turned back to his horse, gathered the reins and swung up to the saddle, at the same time calling across the flats: "Over here, Rubio."

Pete Rubio, scouting the ground for tracks, trotted his horse across the hardpan to stop by him. Brady pointed upward into the hills. "He's gone up there. About an hour ahead of us, as near as I can make out."

"We're gaining on him, then," Rubio said. He settled his squat frame back, stretching bare brown legs against the stirrups, pulling his shoulders together under the faded blue army blouse. The shirttails hung down over his breechclout; a seamed leather belt supported knife and revolver and medicine pouch. Rubio wore no hat. His hair was long and straight and dusty-black. He looked along the line of footprints and said, "Anything keeping us here?"

"Nope." Brady put his horse forward at an easy-swinging trot. The half-breed scout followed him for a Uttle distance, then came abreast of him. "I hope he don't come across some poor pilgrim with a horse," Rubio said.

"If he finds a horse, we've lost him,'' Brady agreed. The trail of moccasin tracks they followed lifted them off the hardpan flats into the rocky hills, with the brassy sun thrashing up heat waves. Brady kept his attention on the dim trail of footprints. "Pretty soon," he said, "he'll take to the rocks. Then we'll have to guess."

"He's a young one," Rubio said. "He don't know all the tricks yet. He'll most likely head for Oxbow Canyon and try to steal a horse from Yeager's outfit."

Brady nodded. "I've been thinking the same thing. Listen-you stick to this trail, and I'll cut over the mountain to Yeager's. Maybe I can be there to meet Tonio."

"Don't count on it. He'll probably spot you going over the ridge. If he does, he'll try to double back."

"That's why you're sticking to his trail," Brady answered. "If I don't see you at Yeager's by four o'clock, I'll try and pick up your tracks. Stick with him."

"Sure," Rubio said, without enthusiasm. "Mind your scalp, hey?"

Brady grinned and swung his horse off the trail, threading a path between eroded boulders and sharp-edged limestone walls. It was slow traveling for a while. He had to make a jump across a narrow arroyo and find a way around a towering shelf of rock; presently he reached the top of the slope and stopped to look for Rubio. In a moment he caught sight of the scout, winding up the canyon floor a half mile away. Brady swept off his hat, felt beads of sweat on his forehead, and dragged a buckskin sleeve across his brow. Looking up, he made a rough measurement of the sun's angle, replaced his hat and rode down the back of the hill until, after another twenty minutes, he reached the floor of a draw. He put his horse up the draw at a canter, swinging easily with the horse's rhythmic movement. Up to the head of the canyon, climbing and dipping, circling and running-in that manner he rose gradually higher into the indigo fortress of the Arrowheads. After another full hour's travel, the spindle tracery of yucca, catclaw and creosote gave way to the dark somberness of the tall pine forest. Here the horse moved almost soundlessly across a floor of soft needles and rich soil; it seemed a different world from the gritty and dusty rockplains a few thousand feet below. This was Arizona-still a strange country to Brady, and he had traveled these deserts and mountain ranges ahnost half his thirty years. And now it was 1878, with the Apaches jumping reservations all over the Territory and summer coming on strong and another dry spring fading into memory.

He threaded the timber at a trot. He rode with ease and a feeling of unshakable self-assurance, a big-boned man on a long-legged horse, with the most disreputable of hats flopping over his craggy face. Dark hair grew shaggy at the base of his neck. Un-like most men of the times, he was clean-shaven-the result of a habit that carried back to his youthful admiration of the stem, clean-shaven regimental commander who had been his father.

He rode past the base of a high blue-gray cliff and re-entered the forest, climbing higher into the Arrowheads, becoming steadily more wary, watching the shadows and listening with care to all the little forest

sounds. Somewhere up in this wilderness of mountains, the war chief Inyo, commanded a steadily increasing party of restless bucks who had jumped the reservations. It was toward Inyo's camp tliat the fugitive Apache youth Tonio was headed; and it was Will Brady's job to stop Tonio, capture him and bring him back.

In time, he crossed a long ridge until at the edge of a cleared pasture he reined in and peered across the open area, inspecting first the log corrals of Yeager's outpost ranch, then the buildings, and finally the entile visible circle of surrounding forest.

Still a good distance from the ranch yard, he let his call sing out ahead of him, and when he rode between the barn and tackshed into the yard, Yeager and the family awaited him on the porch. They were silent, noncommittal, and armed.

Yeager's ranch house was built like a fort, with small windows set high in the walls and guarded by heavy shutters that locked from inside. The stone walls and massive oak doors would withstand any expected attack-and Yeager had dug his well inside the house.

Yeager's black beard reached halfway to his thick waist. His meaty hands held a buffalo rifle. At one side of the door stood his wife. Squat with a copper complexion and stringy black hair that got in the way of her eyes, a Mimbreno Apache woman, was Yeager's wife. She was, perhaps, the reason why, of all the wilderness ranches in this part of the Territory, Yeager's was the only one not in mortal fear of Apache attack.

On the long shaded veranda were Yeager's four sons. The youngest was twelve years old; the eldest sprouted a black beard, but one not as long as his father's. None of them looked particularly friendly.

Brady grinned and touched his hatbrim. Yeager stepped foi-ward to the edge of the porch, allowing his rifle to droop in his grip. "Hello, Brady. You alone?" lam.

"All right," Yeager said, and on some subtle signal from him, the four boys and the woman faded back through the doorway. "Light," Yeager said, and peered at Brady through narrowed eyes.

"I expect you'll have a visitor shortly," Brady drawled. "Mind if I hide my horse in your barn?" "Who's after you?"

"Other way around," Brady said. "Tonio busted out of the guardhouse at Fort Dragoon. He'd been gone four hours yesterday before they found out. He's on foot."

"What makes you think he's headed for my place?" "Far as I know, it's the only place in thirty miles he could get a horse at," Brady answered.

"Tonio," Yeager said. "He's Inyo's son, ain't he?" 'That's right."

"It won't set well with Inyo if you pick him up here," Yeager said.

Brady kept his face blank and stepped down from the saddle. Standing by his horse's head, holding the reins, he said, "You've got to quit sitting the fence sometime, Yeager. It's my job to pick up Tonio, with or without your approval. You aim to try and stop me?"