The Peacemaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

cartridge belt and sliced through the arrow shaft, just behind the arrowhead. Nolan clenched his teeth and grunted.
    Indy cringed. She had always had a hard time bearing up to other people's pain. Shatto, she noticed, seemed totally unaffected. He was fast and efficient, as if he'd removed a hundred arrows. Maybe he had, she thought. Maybe he was some sort of Apache medicine man.
    "You sure you know what you're doing?" queried Nolan, looking up skeptically at the Apache.
    If Shatto answered, Indy didn't hear him. He got up and moved around to Nolan's back and hunkered down.
    "Don't move, Captain," cautioned one of the other troopers. "Don't even breathe."
    "Will you hurry up?" Nolan grated out.
    The words were hardly out of his mouth when Shatto grabbed hold of the feathered end of the shaft and pulled straight toward him.
    The captain cursed at the top of his lungs, then fell forward, unconscious. The remainder of the whiskey was now used to pour over the front and back of the wound, then his shoulder and upper chest were bandaged with strips torn from one of Indy's petticoats.
    Finished now, Shatto moved back and watched as the troopers mustered to pick up their captain and ease him into the ambulance and place him on the long bench.
    Minutes later, everyone was in position: a new man in the driver's seat, Sergeant Moseley sitting next to Indy watching over her and the captain, and the remaining troopers mounted and ready to go. Moseley lowered the canvas curtains and gave the order for the ambulance to start forward.
    Indy glanced back and saw the Apache vault up onto his pinto. He sat his horse with an arrogant, loose-limbed casualness that said he was a man who knew he had complete control, over his mount and everything else. His proud, handsome face wore an expression of supreme confidence—a confidence that manifested itself in every gesture he made.
    Was he an Apache chieftain? she wondered. She had read a little of Cochise, and one or two others, but the name Shatto had never come up in any of the reports. Perhaps he was a newly appointed chieftain, having stepped into the position as the result of another's death.
    Even as the ambulance moved forward, she stared at him. There was something about him . . . something that set him apart from the others.
    It was that something —that difference—that had sparked her awareness of him. She wondered if their paths would ever cross again, and she wondered why she was curious about such a thing.
    She stared after him even after the ambulance had rounded a curve and she could no longer see him. "How much longer will it take to get to Bowie?" she asked Moseley.
    "We'll be there in no time, ma'am. No time at all."

Chapter 3
     
     
    Camp Bowie sat on a plateau at the base of a domed mountain overlooking Apache Pass. A clear sky and a full rising moon held back the dark of night. From inside the curtained ambulance Indy looked uninterestedly between buildings at the raw, crudely constructed post that would be her home for the next few months. A dozen or more buildings built of wood and adobe made a broken square around the parade ground, which by day, when the regimental flag waved, would become the center of activity.
    The events of the last hours had left her body numb, her spirit languishing and her clothing and hair disheveled. In her present condition, even if Bowie's streets had been paved in gold, she would have thought them ugly. In fact, Bowie had no streets, no grass, no trees for shade or any amenities as far as she could tell. It was by far the most primitive, uncivilized-looking post she had ever seen, and she had seen a good many of them, all east of the Mississippi, she reminded herself, which may have had something to do with it, but didn't give her any comfort.
    The bugler blew the 8:30 P.M. tattoo as the ambulance creaked and rattled between two adobe structures. In half an hour he would blow taps and the day would officially be over. Turning right, and