Stryker's Revenge Read Free

features. But the scout looked and never flinched.
    He’d recently asked Hogg why this was so, and the man had answered only, “Lieutenant, I seen the wounded at Gettysburg, Chickamauga and a dozen other places.”
    Stryker lit his smoke, then turned again to Sergeant Hooper, telling him he needed a smart soldier to carry a message to Fort Bowie.
    “Beggin’ the lieutenant’s pardon, but I don’t have one o’ them,” Hooper said.
    A smile tugged at the corners of Stryker’s mouth, doing nothing to soften the stiff, grotesque mask of his shattered and deeply scarred face.
    “Then send me a stupid one,” he said.
    “Plenty of those, sir,” the sergeant said. He turned to his left in the saddle and yelled, “Trooper Sullivan. Come ’ere an’ speak to the officer.”
    Sullivan, a small man with the look of a belligerent rodent, rode out of line and drew rein in front of Stryker.
    “Now mind your manners, Sullivan, or I’ll be ’avin you,” Hooper warned. He wore a ferocious scowl on a countenance as round and red as a penny. The sergeant had been a desert soldier for nearly fifteen years, but, unlike most men, his skin still burned scarlet in the sun and never tanned.
    Stryker returned Sullivan’s salute and said, “Ride to Fort Bowie and tell them the Norton and Stewart stage has been attacked. Six dead. No survivors. Ask them to detail a burial party, then lead them here to the saddleback yonder. Tell them I am headed north toward the Cabezas in close pursuit of the hostiles.”
    The lieutenant studied the trooper’s face. “Can you remember that?”
    Sullivan repeated the message word for word, and Stryker decided the man was not as dumb as Hooper alleged.
    “Then get going,” he said. “And good luck.”
    After the trooper rode away, cantering to the west in a cloud of yellow dust, Stryker spoke to Hooper again. “Sergeant, Mr. Hogg and I will ride ahead. Follow on with the rest of the patrol and the pack mules.”
     
    Lieutenant Stryker sat his horse and studied the scene before him, his mouth working. He’d prepared himself for the worst during his ride to the saddleback, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination.
    His eyes met those of Hogg, and the scout grimaced. “Damned Apaches never clean up after themselves, Lieutenant.”
    Perhaps it was an attempt at humor. More likely Hogg was reaching out to him in clumsy reassurance, telling him that any normal man would be appalled by what he saw.
    One thing Stryker did not need was sympathy. He’d read too much of that in the faces of others over the course of the past few months, not only for his broken face, but for losing his beautiful wife-to-be and promising Army career.
    Without a word he swung out of the saddle and stood with the reins in his hands, looking around, forcing himself to swallow every bitter drop of this vile medicine.
    The woman, a girl really, was the most noticeable, her body being the only one that had been stripped naked. She was lying spread-eagled on her back, her open blue eyes fixed on the indifferent sky, as though horrified that it thought nothing of how she’d been outraged.
    Hogg had said the girl had been used hard, and she had, probably by all twenty of the Apaches. They had not been gentle.
    And she’d been pregnant.
    Her belly had been cut open, and her unborn son, a small, white, curled thing about six inches long, had been placed at her left breast as though suckling.
    An Apache joke.
    The scout was at Stryker’s side. His eyes went to the girl, then back to the officer. “Lieutenant, you ever been in Kansas?” he asked.
    Stryker shook his head, saying nothing, his eyes still on the woman’s ravaged, bloodstained body.
    “Some flat, long-riding country up there. A man on a tall horse can stand in the stirrups an’ pretty much see forever. Into tomorrow, if a feller’s farsighted enough.”
    “You say.”
    “Uh-huh, I do say. I was only there oncet, back in ’seventy-eight when ol’ Dull