The Silent Kill

By James A. Muir

The half-breed, Matthew Gunn, had trailed his quarry through the waterless hell of the Nevada desert, up to the snow-covered crags of the high Sierras.
In his wake was a trail of blood which tainted his footsteps and marked him as a killer. Now he approached the culmination of his long pursuit-vengeance!
Now he would strike his blow without mercy, because he was called Breed—and the name spelled violent death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9780463566343

Book preview

Chapter One

THE FIRST BUZZARD showed as a black speck against the bright Arizona sky. Eyes less keen than his, senses less attuned to the tiny details of the landscape, might easily have missed it, but Azul saw the bird. Instinctively, he noted its position high above the Salt River Canyon, and let his gaze wander over the landscape. Deliberately, he refused to let his vision focus on any single object: a man scanning the horizon will see more by letting his eyes drift from side to side than by trying to peer into a heat haze. It was an old Indian trick, and Azul was half Apache. He saw the speck joined by others, swinging in lazy spirals out of the blue-gold sky, stark-pinioned wings shifting to catch the thermal currents rising from the sunbaked, rocky landscape.

Gradually the scrawny omens of death gathered in the air, drifting downwards like a scattering of black snow.

Azul let the mustang pick its own way over the rough trail, his left hand holding the single rein loosely as his right stroked the stock of the Winchester canted forwards in the saddle sheath. Buzzards meant death: the more birds, the more corpses. Idly he wondered if the scavengers had spotted dead animals or dead men. As the black cloud grew larger he decided that it must be men: the Salt River country didn’t hold enough game to call down that number of birds. As they descended, he estimated their distance from him and hauled the Winchester clear of the boot. The Arizona Territory was the domain of his own Chiricahua brothers, but it was shared with the Pimas and scattered bands of Mimbreño Apaches. He was dressed as a white man, and could – thanks to his father’s blood – pass as white. That was, at times, useful; here, it could get him killed without warning.

More from curiosity than concern, he turned the pony’s head towards the lowering spiral of birds.

He studied them from under the wide brim of a flat-crowned Stetson, suddenly conscious of the linen shirt and tight, buckskin trousers that made him, at a distance, appear white. Closer up, a watcher would begin to wonder why the pants were tucked into knee-length moccasins and the broad cheekbones and flattish nose seemed a mixture of two races. His hair, falling to his shoulders, was sun-bleached blond, and his deep-set eyes a blue that no true Indian had ever had. He was, he knew, a hybrid, a breed; the contours of his face were those of his mother, Rainbow Hair, of the Chiricahua Apache, daughter of the great war leader, Mangas Colorado. His coloring was that of his white father, Kieron Gunn, a Santa Fe trader who had given Azul his white man’s name: Matthew Gunn. They were both dead now, killed in a scalp hunter’s raid for the Mexican bounty offered on Apache hair. Four men had died, painfully, for that raid, and now he hunted the remaining three.¹ That was why he rode northwards to the Sierra Mogollon, trailing the slaughterers of his parents and people.

He levered a shell into the breech of the Winchester and rode on.

The buzzards were coming down to land, now, and he heeled the mustang to a gentle trot, watching the country around for sign of attack, steering the animal one-handed, the other hooking the trigger and hammer of the carbine in preparation for use.

He came down a dry gully, circling the column of descending birds to approach from up wind, and urged the pony over a low ridge. Reining in behind the cover of a tall saguaro, he examined the scene spread bloodily before him.

The buzzards were down on the ground, stepping with clumsy caution over the hot sand as they approached the bodies littering the shallow depression. Twenty or more steers lay with broken arrows and bullet holes providing both landing places and feeding holes for the flies, and four men, stretched in the ungainly attitudes of sudden death, accompanied the bovine corpses. Their bloodied heads bore mute testament to Indian attack, along with the manner of their dying.

Two hung from the wheels of their chuckwagon, their heads hanging down over the dying embers of the fires that had scorched most of the flesh from their faces and chests. The others were so filled with holes that there would have been no point in torturing them, though their scalps had been taken as trophies.

Azul sat the mustang in the shade of the saguaro, waiting for the buzzards to land and reassure him that no one waited in ambush. It was unlikely, anyway, for the dusty reaches of the Salt River Canyon had little to offer anyone, except refuge – which was why the Apaches used the place – or death. So the presence of a cattle herd was odd. He heeled the pony around, circling the depression until he was sure that no ambush would come from the surrounding mesquit, and then rode down towards the bodies.

The stink of rotting flesh and the heavy, lethargic buzzing of blood-bloated flies told him that the whites had been dead for at least one day, maybe killed early that morning with the buzzards waiting above until they were sure. Either way, there was nothing to worry him. Except the question of why anyone would try to push cattle east through Arizona rather than north to the railheads at Dodge or Wichita or Ellsworth.

He halted the mustang beside a piebald longhorn and studied the brand. It was three big Cs, underlined with a heavy bar, and the markings on the arrows protruding from its flanks and chest told him that Mimbreños had killed the steer. The men, too, carried the marks of a Mimbreño raid on the arrows sticking out of their bodies and the mutilations decorating their chests and faces. Those, alone, were not unusual: white men foolish enough to venture into Apache country had to expect such things; the heavy question mark hanging over the entire scene related to their very presence in the Salt River Canyon. It was not a cattle trail: the land was too hard, too arid, too dangerous to risk a valuable herd. It could lead only to Nevada or California, and those states only after long, difficult months on the trail.

So why did the canyon shelter the corpses of four dead cowboys and the fly-blown remnants of their herd?

Azul was pondering the question when he heard the voice. Low and harsh, it sounded like an animal in pain, or a man close to death. Either way, it came from a cactus thicket off to the right, and it jumped him from his pad saddle as surely as a bullet.

He hit the sand as complaining buzzards lifted for the open sky, cackling their protest at the interruption of their feasting, black wings flapping heavily as he rolled for the cover of a dead horse. He sprawled across the animal, coming down on the far side with the Winchester pointing towards the source of the sound. He levelled the carbine over the animal body, but there was no sign of movement, only the labored beat of buzzard wings above his head and the droning of the flies settling back to their eating. Cautiously, moving silent as a stalking cat, he began to wriggle backwards, away from the horse. He kept his body below the level of the sight line across the body of the horse, holding a straight line that took him backwards into the surrounding mesquit, and slipped through the low-lying scrub.

Then he rose up and began to run, crouched over, around the hollow, circling wide to come up behind the source of the sound. With innate Apache caution, he dropped to his belly and began to crawl forwards on the far side of the hollow. He stopped as he spotted the man making the noise. Mostly hidden by a fold in the ground overhung by two thick mesquit scrubs, the figure was pinpointed by the turkey feather arrows protruding from its back. Azul lifted to one knee and saw that it was a man, a cowpuncher by his well-worn clothes and thick leather chaps. He moved fast through the scrub, fetching up behind the cowpoke before the man even heard him coming.

‘Hola,’ Azul let the muzzle of the Winchester rest lightly against the man’s neck as he spoke. ‘What happened?’

The cowboy twisted around, groaning at the pain of the arrows, and opened his mouth to scream when he saw Azul.

‘Quiet.’ A tanned hand clasped his mouth shut. ‘The Mimbreños may be around, still. And that could mean death for us both.’

The wounded man opened his eyes wide in surprise. Obviously, he had expected an Apache come back for a last scalp; instead, he saw something he couldn’t understand: a man neither Apache nor white. Azul grinned at the confusion.

‘Don’t worry … I don’t want your hair. Could even be I might help you.’

‘Yeah?’ The cowboy sounded doubtful. ‘You gonna take those arrows outta my back?’

Azul glanced at the missiles. Two were lodged loose in the ribcage, not deep enough to threaten anything more than loss of blood or internal poisoning. The third was deep under the right shoulder blade, dangerously deep, and he wondered if he could take it out.

‘I can try,’ he said calmly, ‘if you can stop yourself screaming.’

‘I got nuthin’ to lose,’ grunted the cowboy, ‘though I cain’t be certain of my mouth.’

‘Bite on that.’ Azul shoved a strip of leather, cut from the man’s chaps, into his mouth and slid the throwing knife from its sheath in his moccasin.

He didn’t want to risk lighting a fire, so he applied the knife unsterilized. It was a slender-bladed thing, razor-sharp along both edges, and pointed like a needle. In Azul’s deft fingers, it worked like a scalpel to cut the two lower shafts clear of the cowboy’s body. The third was more difficult, and the hot afternoon was beginning to fade into night before he pulled the Mimbreño arrow clear.

Throughout the ordeal the wounded man sank his teeth deep into the strip of leather, his body heaving as he muffled the groans forcing from between his lips. Then, as Azul pulled the stone arrowhead loose, he passed out.

It was opportune, for it gave Azul a chance to slip away into the scrub, gathering the desert herbs needful for the poultice he wished to apply. The deeper secrets of the healing art were known only to the shamans, but all young Apache warriors picked up some knowledge of the essential curing plants: it was one more way to stay alive in a hostile world. Risking a small fire, Azul set the leaves and roots to boil in a billycan he found near the wagon and when they were reduced to a thick, green paste, he applied the mixture to the cowboy’s wounds.

Then he walked off into the scrub and settled down to sleep. For a while he lay awake, pondering the unlikely course his journey had taken. He had been forced into killing a Texas Ranger in Piedras Negras and, consequently, was a wanted man in Texas. The Mexican authorities of Chihuahua State sought him for the killing of the scalp trader, Ramon Padillo. He sought only to find and kill the Americans, Nolan and Christie, and their Mexican partner, Manolo, for the slaughter of his parents. Yet now he was camped out in the badlands playing nursemaid to a man he had never seen before, whose name he didn’t even know.

It was, in the final analysis, a kind of summation of his dual character, a result of his mixed blood. Were he pure Apache, he would have left the white man to die; were he pure white, he would not have been foolish enough to venture into the Salt River country. Which brought his thoughts back full circle to the original question of why the cowboys were there at all.

Whatever the answer, it would not be forthcoming until the morning when the cowpuncher came round. If he did. Azul pulled his blanket over his shoulders, listening to the wary, growling approach of the coyotes closing in on the dead beeves, and drifted off into sleep.

He woke with the sun, watching it rise high, bright and indifferent over the surrounding bluffs, throwing long shadows across the sand as the freshly-risen flies settled to a new day’s feasting. The night-prowling coyotes were gone, but all around the hollow, buzzards and vultures sat sleepily on the branches of pinon trees and saguaro limbs, like unsympathetic mourners at a funeral. Azul ignored them: were it not for the scavengers, the Southwest would be a moldering cesspit of bones and sun-rotted flesh. He grinned, remembering the words of old Sees-Both-Ways, the Chiricahua shaman: everything has a purpose, the ant, the coyote, the vulture: they all clean