Somewhere in this wilderness lurked Rake Pierce, a needle in a vast haystack. Stryker had no real reason to believe he could find him, but at least he was trying, better than sitting on his ass in the officer’s mess in Fort Bowie or carrying out Forrest’s petty and vindictive orders.
Stryker followed a winding game and Indian trail through Bear Spring Pass. At nearly six thousand feet above the flat the air thinned and he rode through thick forests of walnut, sycamore and pine.
Riding due south he dropped down to a timbered plateau and passed between a couple of craggy mountain escarpments before coming up on Pinery Canyon. He took a switchback route to the canyon floor, and stopped once to allow a black bear to amble through a thicket of ponderosa and Apache pine just ahead of him.
Only then, perhaps wakened by the sudden start of his horse when it scented the bear, did Birchwood wake up.
He lifted himself upright in the saddle and looked around, blinking like a puzzled owl. “Wha . . . wha the hell?”
Stryker smiled. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Birchwood.”
“Where . . . where the hell are we?”
“In the mountains, hunting Apaches.”
The young officer glanced behind him, then at Stryker. “Where’s the company?”
“There is no company. Just you and me.”
Birchwood worked his jaw, then felt the bruise on his chin. “Did somebody sock me?”
“No, you fell down.”
“I need a drink.”
“Like hell you do.”
“Damn you, Stryker—” He got no further than that. Suddenly his eyes rolled in his head and he toppled sideways off his bay.
Stryker shook his head. There were still hours of daylight left, but Birchwood was in no shape to travel. He swung off his horse, grabbed the young lieutenant by the shoulders and dragged him into the shade of the trees.
They would camp where they were and move out at first light in the morning.
Stryker was loosening his saddle girth when he heard a noise. He stood perfectly still, listening into the silence. Nothing.
“I’m imagining things,” he said aloud.
But suddenly he felt as though he was under a glass dome and somebody was studying him. That noise he’d heard had sounded like a man in pain.
He looked around him, at the sunlight splintering through the trees, the shimmer of the deep creek that ran through the canyon, even this long after the snow-melt.
All right, now he needed Birchwood; if for nothing else, he wanted Birchwood to share his anxiety. Stryker untied the sack from the saddle, took out the coffeepot and filled it with water from the creek. He stood in front of the sleeping lieutenant and threw the water into his face.
“Wake up you drunken officer and gentleman,” he said. “Nap time is over.”
Chapter 26
Birchwood spluttered and tossed his head, an action he obviously instantly regretted because he groaned from deep in his belly and kneaded his temples.
His eyes lifted to Stryker. “Why did you do that, damn you?”
“We’ve got work to do.”
“Get away from me, Stryker. You’re the devil.” Stryker smiled. “All right, that’s it.” He grabbed Birchwood by his shirtfront, hauled him to his feet and stuck his face close to his.
“I’m not a forgiving man, Lieutenant, but I’ve been willing to let things slide because you were drunk. From now on, you address me as sir, or Lieutenant Stryker, whatever you please. But if you ever call me only by my last name again, I’ll beat the shit out of you. Do you understand me?”
Birchwood nodded, his mouth hanging slack.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
Stryker’s eyes were merciless. “You’re full of self-pity because you had to kill a dying man. Well, we’ve both had to kill dying men. You get over it, Mister. You don’t crawl into a whiskey bottle and try to forget that it ever happened. Once you do that, you’ll have to stay inside the bottle for the rest of your miserable life, looking out from behind the glass.”
Birchwood was sobering fast. He tried to grab Stryker’s wrist and push it away from him, but the lieutenant was too big, too strong and too angry to be moved.
The young officer gave up the struggle and said, “Sir, don’t talk to me of self-pity. You wrote the damned book on that, sir. Your face was smashed up and you’ve been grieving for yourself ever since, sir.”
Stryker expected his gorge to rise, but it did not. “Mr. Birchwood, you’re correct. I did write the book on self-pity, but I crawled into myself, not the bottle. And I admit, one is just as bad as the other. But I’m trying to break out of me because I don’t like what I see in there. It’s a dark place where slimy things crawl. If you don’t do the same, your military career is over and so are you. And, like me, you’ll lose the woman you loved and you’ll never find another.”
“I . . . I told her my lips would ne’er touch whiskey,” Birchwood whispered, half sober, but still drunk enough to be maudlin.
“She doesn’t have to know.”
Stryker’s big hand had the young man pinned to a tree like a butterfly in a case. But he managed to struggle erect. “You have orders for me, sir?”
Stryker let him go, his arm falling by his side. Suddenly he was very tired, his wounds catching up to him like phantoms in the darkness. “I thought I heard a man cry out,” he said.
“A bird?”
“Maybe. We’re going to find out.”
As he was about to turn away, Birchwood’s voice stopped him. “When I shot that soldier, his brains flew out the other side of his head. They . . . they looked like the oatmeal a little child eats. Gray, like that, but mixed with blood and bone.”
“That’s what happens when you shoot a man up close, Lieutenant. Mr. Colt designed his revolver with that very thing in mind, to scatter a man’s brains. But the Apaches would have killed Private Carter just as surely, only much more slowly.”
“Sir, I don’t think they came back.”
“Then death would have taken Carter in its own good time, and it can be crueler than any Apache.”
“Sir, was I right?”
Stryker nodded. “You did what had to be done, Mr. Birchwood. I regard your action at Fort Merit justified and even commendable.”
The young man was silent for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry, sir. I mean about the drinking and—”
Weary, aware that Birchwood was anxious to worry his guilt like a hound dog that had just caught a jackrabbit, Stryker said, “Let it go, Lieutenant. Just . . . let it go.”
The young officer heard the finality in Stryker’s voice and wisely didn’t push it. “One more question, sir: Why the hell are we here?”
Stryker’s eyes ranged over the canyon, resting on the spot among the trees where he had heard the man’s voice—if that’s what it had been.
He turned his attention to Birchwood again. “Captain Forrest ordered us to scout the mountains to the south. He wishes to ascertain if Geronimo poses any threat to Fort Bowie.”
Birchwood was trying to think in a whiskey fog and it took him a while. “Sir, I don’t see any logic in that order. We can’t scout the whole Chiricahua mountain range.”
“Then try this logic, Lieutenant: The captain wanted us the hell off the post.”
Birchwood smiled. “Bad apples.”
“Correct. The baddest in the barrel.”
To the east, the canyon rose gradually, passing through thick groves of hackberry and yucca, then into stands of mesquite and juniper. Here the rock walls directed heat into the bottom of the canyon like molten bronze pouring into a mold. The sunlight broke apart as it filtered through the trees and splashed like white paint on the underbrush. There was no wind.