the Lonely Men (1969) Read Free

square of sunlight that lay inside the door, even the drone of the flies ... I was alive.
    The blood of Apaches was still on my hands. There had been no water in which to wash until now, but soon I would ... soon.
    The room was like many of its kind, differing only in the plank floor. Most floors were of stamped earth. There were several rough board tables, some chairs and benches. The room was low-raftered, the walls were of adobe, the roof of poles and earth. I could smell bacon frying in the kitchen, and coffee.
    Spanish Murphy hitched around in his chair. "Tell, we make a team, the four of us, why don't we stick together?"
    The man came in from the kitchen with tin plates and a frying pan filled with bacon. He dumped the plates on the table, then forked bacon onto them. He went out and returned with the coffeepot and a plate of tortillas. Still another trip and he brought a big bowl of frijoles -- those big Mexican brown beans -- and a dried-apple pie cut into four pieces.
    "We'll need a couple of horses," I said, looking around at Case.
    "You'll get 'em," Case replied. "I think the Comp'ny would like to get them to a safer place. We've been expectin' an attack almost any time."
    He gestured toward the bacon. "You got to thank Pete Kitchen for the bacon. He raises hogs down to his place, calls 'em his 'Pache pincushions, they're so shot full of arrows."
    John J. Battles, a solid chunk of a man, glanced across the table at me.
    "Sackett ... that's a familiar name."
    "I'm familiar," I agreed, "once you know me." It wasn't in me to get him comparing notes, figuring out who I was. Once he did, he'd bring up the fight in the Mogollon country, and how Ange was murdered. It was something I was wishful of forgetting.
    "I still figure," Spanish said, "that we'd make a team."
    "If you want to risk hanging." John J. Battles grinned at us. "You all heard what Case said."
    "Me," Rocca said, "I wasn't going nowhere, anyhow."
    "Later," I said, "it will have to be later. I've got a trip to take."
    They looked at me, all of them. "My brother's kid. I hear tell he's been taken by the Apaches. I've got to go into the Sierra Madres after him."
    They thought I was crazy, and I was thinking so myself. Rocca was the first: one to speak. "Alone? Senor, an army could not do it. That is the Apache hideout where no white man goes."
    "It's got to be done," I said.
    Case, he just looked at me. "You're crazy. You're scrambled in the head."
    "He's just a little boy," I said, "and he's alone down yonder. I think he will be expectin' somebody to come for him."

    Chapter 2
    Laura Sackett was a strikingly pretty young woman, blonde and fragile. Among the dark, sultry beauties of Spanish descent she seemed a pale, delicate flower, aloof, serene, untouchable.
    To the young Army officers in the Tucson vicinity, Laura Sackett was utterly fascinating, and this feeling was not dulled by the knowledge that she was a married woman. Her husband, it was known, was Congressman Orrin Sackett, who was in Washington, D. C. Apparently they had separated.
    But nobody seemed to know just what the status of the marriage was, and Laura offered no comment, nor did she respond to hints.
    Her conduct was irreproachable, her manner ladylike, her voice was soft and pleasant. The more discerning did notice that her mouth was a little too tight, her eyes shadowed with hardness, but these characteristics were usually lost in the quiet smiles that hovered about her lips.
    Nobody in Tucson had ever known Jonathan Pritts, Laura's father, and none of them had been present in the vicinity of Mora during the land-grant fighting.
    Jonathan Pritts was now dead. A narrow, bigoted man, tight-fisted and arrogant, he had been idolized by his daughter and only child, and with his death her hatred for the Sacketts had become a fierce, burning urge to destroy.
    She had seen her father driven from Mora, his dream of empire shattered, his hired gunmen killed or imprisoned. A vain, petty, and