Deathlands – Pony Soldiers by James Axler
Deathlands – Pony Soldiers by James Axler
Prologue
THE LAND WAS A SHIMMERING bronze oven. The noonday sun sailed through a clear sky, etching shadows across the desert, edges as sharp as a razor cut. A lone hawk circled on a thermal, eyes searching the barren wastes below for any sign of life. It had seen the clumsy movements of men an hour ago, but they were of no interest. Now the bird’s attention focused on a flicker of movement near the base of one of the giant saguaros that sentineled the red-gold earth.
It was a diminutive Gila monster, barely six inches long. The coral-and-black patterns dappled its stubby body as it moved slowly, legs splayed, head raised as it watched for any potential enemy.
The man beside the cactus flapped a hand at the creature, which hissed angrily and spit venomously in his direction. When the hand was again raised menacingly the lizard scuttled down a narrow arroyo toward the east, its tail snaking a peculiar pattern in the dust.
The man hawked, gobbing a ball of orange spittle to his left. He was partly in the shadow of the cactus, but the sun was scorching through his thin cotton breeches. He shuffled his feet in the soft leather moccasins. His thick black hair was greased and tied back in a bandanna of patterned cloth. His face was broad and flat, the eyes brown slits that stared out across the floor of the canyon toward the winding trail a hundred yards off. He wore a loose shirt in pale blue cotton, tucked into a wide leather belt. A hunting knife in a sheath of tanned deerskin was on the left hip. The middle finger of the right hand was missing, and the finger next to it carried a heavy ring of hand-tooled silver, which held a chunk of raw turquoise in a rough claw setting.
The man sighed, rolling his head around to ease the neck muscles. He’d been waiting for nearly three hours, ready for someone to come riding along the trail. Just to his right there was a long sliver of petrified wood, its heart rich with purple and red shards of rock. The bones of Yietso, the great giant of the legends of the Navaho. At the thought of the old enemy the man tried to spit again, but the heat had dried his mouth.
Nobody had seen any Navaho in the canyons for more years than the fingers on ten hands. This land belonged to “the people.” He was eighteen years old and fiercely proud of his warrior heritage, proud of being a fighting man of the Mescalero Apaches.
His gun lay beside him, cocked so that the flat click wouldn’t betray him to an enemy. It was a stolen rifle, a battered Sharps .50-caliber buffalo gun, its butt patterned with hammered brass tacks in the shapes of the moon and stars.
The name of the young Indian was Hears Little Sees Far, references to his deafness, caused by a misfired cartridge in that same gun, and his keen eyesight.
There was a small piece of jerky in the pouch at his belt, and he absently chewed at a strip of it. By lying still he was conserving his bodily fluids, holding off from needing water. His pony was tethered in a box canyon three miles east, and there was a metal canteen tied to the blanket. It was covered in canvas and stamped with the letters U.S. and the number 7 on its side.
A half hour drifted soundlessly by. The hawk gave up watching the skittering lizard, fearing the closeness of the hiding man. It angled its wings and sailed off southward, across the serrated land. There might be better pickings in the steep-sided valley where the river ran, even at the height of the New Mexico summer.
Hears Little Sees Far kept his breathing steady, conserving his energy. The word around the wickiups of his tribe was that a lone man drove his wagon along this trail once every seven days. The white man carried liquor on his wagon. Sometimes he would even have a white woman with him. The Mescalero youth had never had a white woman before, and his loins surged at the thought. His hand crept out and caressed the narrow trigger of the old buffalo rifle at his side.