Fool's Gold (An Apache / Cuchillo Oro Western #12)

The Apache Series:

#1. THE FIRST DEATH

#2. KNIFE IN THE NIGHT

#3. DUEL TO THE DEATH

#4. THE DEATH TRAIN

#5. FORT TREACHERY

#6. SONORA SLAUGHTER

#7. BLOOD LINE

#8. BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

#9. THE NAKED AND THE SAVAGE

#10. ALL BLOOD IS RED

#11. THE CRUEL TRAIL

#12: FOOL’S GOLD

and more to come …

APACHE 12: FOOL’S GOLD

First published October 1878

Copyright ©1978 by William M. James

This electronic edition published August 2024

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Series Editor: Mike Stotter

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

In 1851, in the Terre Haute, Indiana, Express, John Babsone Lane Soule wrote: ‘Go West, young man!’ This book is dedicated with great thanks and admiration to Stan Corwin who has taken the whole works and done just that with such success.

Chapter One

HE’D NEVER LIKED summer. No, never at all. The heat always prickled at him, making him irritable and mean.

He’d been riding his small wagon southward from Truth Or Consequences for three days. Three days that had been the nearest thing to hell that Benjamin Robinson had been able to imagine.

The trail had been brutal, ripping its jagged way through stark mountains. His eyes were tired and raw from the constant baking glow of red and fiery orange. Splintered boulders and mile after mile of sand, stretching out to the sun-dimmed bowl of the horizon.

The unshaven cavalry officer he’d met a half day out of the township had warned him about the results of taking that particular trail.

‘It’s called Jornada del Muerto,’ he’d told him.

Benjamin Robinson had precious little Spanish, beyond knowing how to curse and threaten. And tell prospective customers just how much each of his whores cost for ten minutes in the back of the wagon.

‘What’s that mean?’ he’d asked.

‘It means the Journey of the Dead Man,’ the young officer had replied.

Eight miles ahead of the rattling wagon a man lay on his side at the edge of the rough trail. There was dried blood around his nose and mouth, and purple swellings on both cheeks that partly closed one eye. As he lay, half asleep, his head cradled in his arms in the slightly cooler shaded side of a large boulder, his right hand moved, scratching at the fragments of rock. Or, what remained of his right hand did so. It had been hideously mutilated, with ridges of old scarring at the palm. The thumb was gone and part of the fingers.

The man was an Apache. A member of the Mimbreños tribe. Tall and solidly built, wearing a thin cotton shirt and trousers. He appeared to be weaponless, but as he rolled in an uneasy half sleep, there was the shape of something hidden in the small of his back. The shirt was untucked, and it fluttered in the scorching wind, revealing the hilt of a knife in a worn leather sheath. A great triangular knife, with a hilt of gold studded with uncut gems. A weapon of great age. A cinquedea, as the Spanish Conquistadores called it.

The man’s name was Cuchillo Oro.

And he was a distance along the road toward death.

It was still a long way to Fort Thorn.

The mules that Benjamin Robinson had bought for hard-won gold were spavined and ailing. Seeming hardly able to set one hoof in front of the other. He cursed them and cracked a whip at the leader, bringing a puff of red dust and no other reaction. A wheel grated on a rock and the whole rig lurched to one side, bringing squeals from inside.

‘Shut your damned mouths!’ he snapped.

There was a muffled voice asking how long before they could camp.

‘I figure ’bout another ten miles or so. That could bring us maybe close enough for me to ride in on the horse tomorrow and bring fresh water and food and all that, so we can go on in looking like a Jim-dandy outfit and not like three old sluts a dog dragged in from under a tree.’

There was a rustling noise inside and the wagon shook as someone jumped down from the tailboard. Then twice more. Robinson didn’t bother to look round, staring sullenly ahead into the shimmering distance as they rolled on. Hearing the crunch of feet on the sand, and knowing that his ladies were going to register yet another protest.

‘Ben.’

He took no notice of the voice.

‘Ben!’

He spat over the side, finally looking round at the speaker. As he’d expected, it was Sarah.

There were the three of them, stumbling along together, faces masked with dust, streaked with runnels of sweat down the sides of their noses, and along the lines of their chins.

One Irish, fat as a sow, red hair matted over her spotty shoulders. Rosa, she called herself, though Benjamin knew her real name was Bridget. Arrived over from the bogs of Ireland eighteen years ago at the age of fourteen, and had drifted casually into whoring, finding it a natural activity for someone whose favorite pastime was lying flat on her back picking her nose.

There was Evita. That wasn’t her name either. Benjamin had won Evita in a rigged game of poker four years ago from a drunk trapper up in Montana. She was around five feet tall and weighed at least two hundred and forty pounds. Evita was an Indian, probably Oglala Sioux, the trapper thought. He’d called her ‘Squaw,’ never bothering to give her a proper name. At least Benjamin had done that for her, making sure she was fed regular. Evita never spoke more than one word at a time, and never smiled. But she screwed up a storm and was always popular with the johns who came lining up whenever they hit a town.

Benjamin was a student of human nature, like all pimps, and he’d noticed that Evita, despite her dirt and gross body, was more popular with the better-educated men. He’d puzzled nights over that, deciding that it must be that they liked the contrast between her rank acres of flesh and their own starched and whale-boned, whey-faced bitches of wives.

But Sarah was the best.

And the worst.

‘What in hell you want, Sarah?’

‘We want some water.’

‘There ain’t none to waste.’

‘Ain’t wastin’ it, you miserable old bastard! We want to drink it!’

He shook his head. Sadly. That such a pretty girl, and such a damned fine lay, should also be the lippiest female he’d ever had the misfortune to set his eyes on.

Sarah was only about twenty-three, as near as he could reckon it. With a face as round and yellow as the sun, with narrowed almond eyes, she should have been called ‘Peach Blossom’ or ‘Moon of a Thousand Heavenly Delights.’ But her name was Sarah Rogers and she was out of San Francisco.

Chinese mother and a wealthy father who ran a private school for the education of the daughters of rich merchants. That was where Sarah had gotten her lip, Benjamin always thought.

Bright as new paint and damned good with money. After the first week or so she’d taken charge of all the money the outfit made. And he’d noticed that she was careful to put a little by for herself each month. Wrapping up the creased and dirty dollars and posting them off. Making sure he never saw where they went.

He’d asked her about it once, and she’d told him it was to be her future. The look in those beautiful eyes told him not to press it further. Sarah was expensive, but she was the most popular. She really seemed to enjoy what she did. And she was the only whore who’d ever worked for Benjamin Robinson who wouldn’t let him touch her. Not unless he paid the twenty-five dollars like everyone else. He’d blustered and threatened and she’d smiled up at him in a manner that turned his blood cold.

‘You’re much stronger than me, Ben,’ she’d said. ‘And you could surely take me if’n you had a mind to. But if you did, then I’d come callin’ on you one night, late, and I’d take a kitchen knife and I’d make sure you never stuck that in any girl ever again.’

He knew with a sick certainty that the girl meant it, and he’d kept away.

‘We’re thirsty, Ben,’ she moaned, wiping sweat from her eyes.

Evita stood at her side, eyes locked into some nameless dream, fingers absently rubbing her right breast, so that the nipple stood out through the cotton of her shift.

None of them were wearing more than shift and drawers, finding the heat intolerable in dresses. The customers liked to see whores in red satin and frills and laces. Benjamin Robinson believed in giving his customers just what they wanted, and the shiny dresses were neatly folded in trunks in the back of the wagon, ready for the next town.

‘You just all got to wait. I tell you that it won’t be long.’

It wouldn’t be long for Cuchillo Oro.

It had been a bad beating. The two white men who had stopped him on the trail and drawn guns on him before he could reach for his own pistol had been so contemptuous of him that they had not even bothered to kill him.

They had made him get down and remove the gun-belt, then hit him over the head with the barrels of their handguns, kicking him into unconsciousness with their boots while he lay on the sand.

It happened that they hadn’t bothered to search him, as Apaches didn’t very often carry anything worth the taking. So the knife had stayed hidden.

And that was a foolish mistake on the part of Stanley and Andrew Doubleday.

Because if they’d known who it was they’d taken with such ease, they’d have treasured him like he was made from gold.