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SHADOW RIDER BLOOD SKY AT MORNING

JORY SHERMAN

For Arlie Weir

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Zak Cody cut sign that morning just after he passed…

Chapter 2

Zak holstered his pistol, climbed up onto the seat of…

Chapter 3

The memory of that day had come unbidden, dredged up…

Chapter 4

Major Willoughby read the short note attached to the back…

Chapter 5

The tracks were still fresh, clearly visible even in the…

Chapter 6

Zak knew how dangerous Felipe had become. He’d just been…

Chapter 7

Zak saw the flash out of the corner of his…

Chapter 8

Ben Trask poured two fingers of whiskey into Hiram Ferguson’s…

Chapter 9

The two men continued to argue. They had been at…

Chapter 10

That was the story Zak heard as told to him…

Chapter 11

Sergeant Leon Curtis bellowed down from the driver’s seat.

Chapter 12

The land shimmered under the furnace blaze of the sun.

Chapter 13

The Big Fifty.

Chapter 14

Lieutenant Theodore Patrick O’Hara dozed on the bunk, pretending to…

Chapter 15

Cloud shadows grazed across the land like the lingering and…

Chapter 16

Colleen fanned herself as she faced the class of Chiricahua…

Chapter 17

In the distance, across the eerie nightscape of the desert,…

Chapter 18

Ben Trask cursed the rising sun. He jerked the cinch…

Chapter 19

They rode through the night and into the dawn, Zak,…

Chapter 20

The eastern sky drained its blood, turned to ashes. Tiny…

Chapter 21

Trask pulled his hat brim down to shield his eyes…

Chapter 22

Zak clamped a hand over Colleen’s mouth and pushed her…

Chapter 23

Julio Delgado heard a sound. He looked up from the…

Chapter 24

Delbert Scofield finished smoking his cigarette, crushed it to bits…

About the Author

Other Books by Jory Sherman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Zak Cody cut sign that morning just after he passed Dos Cabezas. The tracks were both disturbing and puzzling. There was blood, too, mixed in with the dirt and the rocks. At least six men, he figured, on unshod ponies, had lain in wait for the stagecoach. There were drag marks, and these led him to a gruesome discovery.

The bodies of two men lay spread-eagled on their backs near a clump of mesquite and cholla. Their throats were cut, gaping like hideous grins. Blue-bottles and blowflies crawled over the wounds and clustered on their eyes. The men were hatless and scalped. They wore army uniforms and they had been stripped of their sidearms.

Zak stepped off his horse to examine the dead men more closely. One of them, a young lieutenant with blond fuzz still on his face, had blood on his shirt, a few inches under his armpit. He pulled the shirttail out and saw the wound. It appeared the young man had been stabbed there. The other man wore a sergeant’s chevrons on his shirt. He had a dragoon moustache and there were small scars on his face that had long since healed. A fighter, from the looks of him. His nose had been broken at least once in his lifetime, which Zak judged to have been about forty years.

Moccasin tracks all around the bodies. Hard to tell the tribe. Chiricahua maybe. This was their country. The hair on both men’s heads appeared to have been pulled back to take their scalps, slit their throats. A few strands around the dollar-size patch where the scalps had been lifted were sticking straight up.

At least one of the men had voided when he died. The young lieutenant, he decided, when he bent over to sniff. He smelled like a latrine. The urine smell stung his nostrils, so they hadn’t been dead long. An hour, maybe less.

He set about deciphering the tracks, walking around the wagon’s marks where it had stopped. Wagon or stagecoach, he couldn’t tell for sure which just then. Six separate sets of horse tracks. Four horses, shod, pulling the wagon or coach. A depression where one body had fallen, close to the side. The driver, probably. On the other side, more marks, indicating a struggle, then another depression a few feet away from the wagon tracks.

Then the wagon had driven off. And it wasn’t trailing any of the unshod horses. Who had been driving? Why had he or they been allowed to leave? Was the lieutenant the target? The sergeant? Both? Strange, Zak thought.

He mounted up and continued down the road in the direction the wagon had gone. The pony tracks led off on another tangent. Business finished. Where had they gone? There was no way to tell without following the tracks. And even then, he might not know why they had attacked the wagon, or coach, and why they had just let it drive off. None inside the wagon had stepped down. He had accounted for all the tracks.

Yet someone had escaped.

Why?

Zak touched a hand to his face. Two days of stubble stippled his jaw. The hairs were stiff enough to make a sound like someone scraping a match head across sandpaper. He touched spurs to his horse’s flanks and left the smell of death behind.

The wind moved miniature dust devils across the land like dervishes on a giant chess board, with squares painted burnt umber and yellow ochre. Cloud shadows slipped across the rocky outcroppings and small spires like wraiths from some surreal dream, slinking and rippling over the contours of the desolate earth, making the land seem to pulse and breathe. Little lakes shimmered and vanished in the smoke of shadows, only to reappear again farther on in silver curtains that danced enticingly along the old Butterfield Stage route that wound through stone cairns and cactus like the fossilized path of an ancient serpent grown to gigantic size.