Read Online Ghost Warrior by Lucia St. Clair Robson - Free Book Online Page B

Sweat-damp spikes of coarse brown hair stood up like a dry stand of yucca above the red bandana tied around his head. He didn’t look older than twenty.
    â€œDid ya bring a nip of the critter, mate?”
    â€œI have no whiskey to sell.”
    â€œDid ya bring the horseshoes then, an’ the pig?”
    â€œThe shoes and the iron are in the wagon. Tell José to unhitch the teams and give them grain.”
    â€œLet the nigger do it.”
    â€œHe has business to attend to.” Rafe nodded to Caesar.
    Caesar rode alongside the wagon, lifted the canvas off Pandora, and helped her settle in behind him.
    â€œBloody hell.” Shadrach Rogers spat a stream of tobacco. “We ain’t plagued with enough savages around here, but what you’ve got to import more, and niggers besides.”
    â€œI’ll be back soon. Get that wagon unloaded.” Rafe mounted the big roan he called Red and flicked the reins.
Absalom fell in beside him, on a gray, and Rafe motioned for Caesar to ride next to him, too.”
    â€œWhere does he hail from?” Absalom asked when they’d left him behind.
    â€œEnglish by way of Australia.”
    â€œOne of the prisoners there, then?”
    â€œI suppose.”
    â€œHow did he get here?”
    â€œHe didn’t say.”
    Absalom glanced at the rotting wooden frame of a crude ore crusher. “Did the Mexicans ever turn a profit here?”
    â€œThey hauled out twenty thousand mule loads of copper ingots a year for the mint in Chihuahua City. A mule load is a hundred and fifty pounds. You can cipher the sum.”
    â€œWhy did they abandon it?”
    Lordy, Rafe thought. The man is filled to the brim with why .
    â€œApaches started causing death and destruction on a perpetual-motion basis.”
    â€œWhy’s that?”
    â€œAbout thirteen years ago scalp hunters befriended an old Red Paint chief named Juan José. His men got the chief and his people drunk—then he pulled the canvas off a cannon loaded with nails and scrap iron. He lit the fuse with his cigar, so I heard, and mowed them down, wheat, chaff, and weevils.” Rafe stared glumly between his horse’s ears. “It wasn’t just an evil act, it was a stupid one. The old man’s successor was a firebrand named Mangas Coloradas. He escaped the postprandial entertainment. Mangas is probably the shrewdest leader the Apaches have ever had, and the largest.”
    â€œDoesn’t Mangas Coloradas mean Red Sleeves?”
    â€œYep. He left no one alive here to pull a trick like that again.”
    Hearsay held that Red Sleeves took his name from a scarlet shirt he once had owned, but Rafe thought otherwise. He imagined the chief’s sleeves scarlet with the blood of both the guilty and the innocent.
    Rafe looked around at the Americans, their own sleeves
rolled up, digging and hammering and hewing. “Looks like old Red Sleeves has decided to let bygones be bygones.”
    Rafe, Absalom, and Caesar, with Pandora riding behind him, followed a trail up into the mountain overlooking the mines. Stands of cedars scented the air. Streams cascaded between the willows and cottonwoods at the bottoms of shallow canyons. Birds sang. Rafe was always struck by the difference between the scenery in the mountains and the desert below, as though Heaven and Hell were within sight of each other.
    In a meadow of sweet grama grass, fifty or sixty ponies grazed. They had burrs in their tails and skepticism in their eyes, and if a coyote had run under them, he would hardly have cleared their bellies. They would have looked just as at home in a Mexican corral, which was probably where they came from.
    â€œDo you see your two horses?” Rafe asked.
    â€œNope. I reckon the chief has them up one of those red sleeves of his,” said Absalom.
    Rafe could see why Red Sleeves refused to leave this place, even though white men had despoiled the valley below. In a grove of cedars