Free The Curse of Iron Eyes by Rory Black Page B

flap up on his
belt. He withdrew his service pistol from the holster and cocked
its trigger.
    Bodine held firmly on
to his reins and studied the sight carefully before he led the
nervous horse towards a large boulder. His mount could smell the
stench of death hanging in the hot canyon.
    What
was left of the dead horse had already gone rigid in the intense
heat that still filled Devil’s Pass. As Bodine got closer, Bodine
could smell the flesh already beginning to rot as he walked his
horse past the carcass.
    The moonlight did not
make the sight any less ugly.
    Then
Bodine’s attention was drawn to the dark shadow beside the boulder.
For a moment he hesitated, then he aimed his pistol in the
direction of the shadow. It soon became apparent that he did not
need his weapon.
    He stared down at the
dead man seated where Iron Eyes had left him. It was a chilling
sight.
    The body was still
propped up against the canyon wall staring blindly into hell
itself.
    Bodine looked all
around him for any sign of the victor in this battle. There was no
one else to be seen.
    The corporal suddenly
felt very afraid.
    The
two bullet holes were clearly visible when Bodine crouched down
beside the body. Two clean shots in the center of the dead man’s
chest.
    Whoever had done this
was good, he thought. Darn good.
    Bodine looked around
and then spotted the large buffalo gun lying in the soft sand. He
plucked it up and checked it carefully.
    To his utter surprise,
he found that the lethal weapon was still loaded.
    Billy Bodine holstered
his own pistol and then turned to his horse. He jumped up into the
air. His left boot entered the stirrup, he threw his right leg over
the army saddle and then laid the buffalo gun across his lap.
    Billy
Bodine’s imagination began to race. He sat silently atop his horse
and held the reins in check. His eyes scoured the area around his
nervous mount. Even the eerie moonlight could not disguise the
horror that lay all around him. Bodine knew that he had to get back
to the rest of the platoon and inform them of his grisly discovery.
He dragged his reins hard to the right and spurred his
mount.
    The
chestnut galloped back in the direction of the rest of Captain
Wallis’s men. Bodine knew that he would have to ride his mount as
he had never done before if he were to alert his comrades of what
he had found before sunrise. He was alone and scared.
    Where was the man who
had created this bloodbath? Or was this the work of something less
than human?
    The cavalryman
thundered along the pass knowing that he too might fall victim to
the same fate as the body behind him.
    Then suddenly, as his
mount was almost at full flight, he spotted something ahead of him
on his left. He pulled back on the reins and slowed the chestnut to
a halt. The horse responded immediately and allowed its master to
stare into the eerie moonlight.
    Bodine squinted into
the half-light at the trail, which led into a small canyon pass. It
was a narrow route, no more than eight feet wide; a trail that he
had not spotted when he had been riding in the opposite
direction.
    He looked at the ground
and then saw two distinctive sets of hoof-tracks in the otherwise
undisturbed sand.
    Bodine dismounted and
knelt.
    He could tell that two
horses had ridden up this trail recently.
    One was a shod horse
and the other unshod.
    Could old Hanks have
been correct? Could it have been an Indian who had killed the man
back at the boulder? He had heard a thousand tales of the horrors
that the Apaches had inflicted on their enemies.
    To the youthful
horseman, they were all true.
    Although he had found
evidence of only one unshod pony, he allowed his fertile
imagination to run unchecked.
    Where
there was one Apache, there had to be an entire tribe of them. This
could be the beginning of another Indian War. After all, Devil’s
Pass was close to the Indian Territory and who knew what other
barbaric acts of carnage went on there?
    It was a terrified
Billy Bodine who threw