Free Shadow River by Ralph Cotton

scrambled to their feet and began buttoning their tunics as if that was them doing their part. Sam watched them all hurry to an open gap in the wall and stand looking in the direction of the battle. Even the rifleman guarding the Apache left his position and ran to the others. The Apache prisoners sat stone-faced, staring straight ahead, as if none of this mattered to them.
    Hurriedly, Sam rose with the knife and cut through the rope circling the tree, holding the panther’s right front and rear paws stretched out. As soon as the rope went slack, the cat swung her freed paws back and forth as if searching for Sam, her big claws bared, ready to slice open anything that got close. As the wounded bleeding cat sensed her freedom at hand, she found a new burst of energy and swung about wildly on her left paws.
    Sam quickly sliced the rope drawn around the tree holding the cat’s left fore and rear paws. As soon as he cut the rope, he dived backward into the ditch. But he saw the cat hit the ground and catch herself and look all around, crouched on all fours. Blood dripped from her wounded side. But she was free, and wasting no time. Each of her four paws had a two-foot length of cut rope hanging from them.
    Given her new resurgence of strength, Sam knew her next move would be to leap up onto the wall and bound along it and disappear off onto the hillside into the night, ropes and all. Yet, in the flicker of a second, it dawned on him how crazy this cat had acted from the very start.
    â€œOh no,” he said, seeing the big cat had spun and stood staring at him huddled there in the shallow ditch. At the gap in the wall, the soldiers had heard the cat squall out. They turned, guns in hand, just in time to see her spring forward onto Sam and roll and wallow atop him down in the ditch.
    Sam had just enough time to draw his Colt as she hit him. But in spite of her wounds, her rage was so sudden and intense, his knife flew from his hand in one direction and his Colt in the other. The cat was weakened enough by its ordeal that Sam managed to get his hands around its throat and hold it back, but it did him little good. The long, sharp fangs didn’t reach his face, his neck, his jugular vein, but the claws slashed at his chest, at his shoulders.
    Across the campsite three soldiers raised their rifles as one and fired. The shots missed the cat, but the roar of explosions and the impact of bullets knocking chunks of stone from the wall caused the cat to leap away and up atop the wall. By the time the soldiers fired again, Sam heard the cat breaking through the vine bed and vanishing into the darkness.
    The Apache prisoners still sat watching stone-faced as Sam struggled to his feet, his hands raised high, four red slashes of the cat’s claws stretched across his bare chest. Blood ran down from the claw marks. Rifles turned and trained onto him, their barrels already smoking. He froze in place, seeing the other soldiers also raise and aim their rifles.
    â€œTenga su fuego!”
a soldier shouted, ordering them to hold their fire. But one rifle shot exploded anyway just as he finished his words.
“Tenga su fuego, embecile!”
he repeated, staring hard at the bungling soldier. He started forward cautiously toward Sam, a long saber in hand. Beyond the walls in the distance, Sam heard the battle raging in the ruins farther downhill. He only hoped Burke had lain low as he told him to do. He glanced all around as the soldier drew closer, the saber rising slowly, pointing at him, glistening in the firelight.
    â€œWho are you, hombre?”
he asked in stiff English, “and why do you come to disturb our entertainment?”

Chapter 7
    Clyde Burke lay hidden among the rocks on the stretch of terrace where Burke told Sam he would wait. He’d heard the gunfire coming from the direction of the other gunman camped inside the walls of the lower ruins. He also heard the commotion and gunfire from the other side of the