by Jake Logan
As he was led away, his wrists cinched tighter than ever, Slocum said, “So that’s it, eh? You’re a fool, Chief. A prideful fool.” Slocum knew that uttering such words to an Apache chief could well get him killed. And he didn’t care. What more could they do but kill him? “Damn fools,” he muttered as he sagged, exhausted, against the pole in the middle of a dark, dank hut.
16
He awoke in the dark to the sound of soft feet padding their way into the dark little skin-covered hut. Someone had entered and was drawing close. He tensed his muscles, though there was little else he could do, considering his wrists and feet were bound to the pole. He felt sure that if he worked it hard enough, he could probably pull out the pole, but all that would do was collapse the structure and leave him under it. What good would that do? No, he had to try to get at that boot knife. He could still feel it was there.
“Slocum? John Slocum?” It was the Indian girl. He didn’t think she was any more pleased to see him than her tribesmen had been, but he somehow didn’t think she had it in her to kill him. But then again, after today’s events, what did he know?
A cool hand touched his forehead, slipped down his face. “Are you hurt, John Slocum?”
“Hello, Princess,” he whispered, matching her own lowered tone of voice. “Well, I’ve been more comfortable, I can tell you that much.”
He felt her warm breath, smelled its musky, honeyed scent as she breathed close to his cheek. “Maybe I can help,” she said.
“Please, yes. Cut these bindings. I can barely feel my hands and feet.”
“They tied your feet, too?”
“Mm-hmm. Hey, what are you doing?” He felt her fingers snaking into his boot, then a slight chuckle, and she withdrew his boot knife. “How did you know about that?”
“A long time ago, I watched you dress, remember?”
“Hmm.”
She slipped the blade through the hide wraps around his ankles and his feet were freed. The relief was instant, and Slocum spread his legs cautiously, easing his boots back and forth, flexing his feet and calves. The pain would come soon, pins and needles like fire ants crawling up his legs. But he could sustain them. He’d been in similar situations before and he knew that the pain meant he still had limbs that would work.
“Okay, now my wrists.”
But she tensed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought I heard something,” she said in a quieter whisper.
“I think it was my heart,” he said, half joking.
“No, no.”
“Princess, cut my wrists free, dammit.”
“That’s no way to talk, John Slocum. I only want to help you.”
He felt her pull away, as if she might leave.
“I know, Princess. Just cut me loose and I’ll be glad to thank you properly.”
“What do you have in mind, John Slocum?” But she only teased him by whispering close to his face again. He felt her warm breath on his cheek, fluttering his eyelashes.
Then her hands were working his belt, then the buttons on the fly of his denims. “Princess, what are you doing?”
He felt her hand slide into his parted trousers, felt the warmth of her slim fingers as they closed around his member, already nearly full with an uncontrollable urge.
“I am doing just what you want me to, I believe.”
He swore he could see her smiling in the dark.
She was standing before him, but now she slowly knelt. Again, he felt her hot breath on him, but much lower down now. And soon her warm mouth touched him at the tip, kissed him tenderly there, as if it were a special flower that required such a reaction. She did an odd thing then. She rubbed it against her cheek, under her nose, across her mouth, to the other side of her face, as if she were marking herself with his scent. It was odd, but it felt so good to him. Even in his current situation, it provided a much-needed distraction from the uncertainty of his predicament. He vaguely wondered if Julep was being well treated. He hoped not as well treated as he was . . .
“Oh, John Slocum,” the Indian maiden murmured, then whispered a flurry of quiet, hurried oaths in Apache, before taking him fully into her mouth. He felt himself bumping the back of her throat, and still it seemed she wanted more. He heard her breathe through her nostrils, matching her increasing rhythm with her breathing, her tongue snaking under his shaft with strength, drawing back on him lightly with her teeth.
She pulled on him as if she were sipping water from a stream, pulling, pulling, harder and faster with each backward motion of her head. He wanted to hold her hair, guide her to a slower rhythm, savor the moments there in the dark with this Indian princess.
Before he realized it, he felt himself tighten, felt sure she was going to drain him any second, but with a smacking sound, she stopped.
She, too, had sensed the coming explosion and wished to avoid it, he guessed. Or perhaps she wished to prolong it. Fine with him, as long as she didn’t just leave. The thought made him momentarily tense. Until he felt her breath on his face again. She was pressing into him now, very close, and he couldn’t even reach out and knead the twin mounds of her backside. What he really wanted to do was part them and . . .
She had the same idea. He heard the lower part of her deer hide dress slide up, just enough, he bet, and then her heat warmed the tip of him once again. He felt her hands spreading herself wide over him, and then she was on him, and slid down over him slowly, fully, until he filled her tightness.
Her breath leaked out in a stuttering whisper, and she stayed like that as deep as she could take him, as if she were savoring a toothsome treat. Then he felt her hands on his shoulders and she lifted herself up just a bit. One leg rose up, then the other. With her legs wrapped around him, she began pulling away, then toward him, over and over, faster and faster, until her breathing once again came at a rapid rate, matching her fevered efforts. He did his best to buck with her, in counterpoint to her hard-driving rhythm. Her mouth and nose were pressed to his neck, and soon he felt her bite him lightly, as if to keep from screaming.
Then he felt the reason why—she pulled back once, twice, then hung there, squeezing him hard, milking him with an unseen hand.
“Oh, John Slocum,” she said in a slow, weary sigh.
They stayed that way for the better part of a minute, until she parted from him and rebuttoned his denims. Then she stood before him in the dark.
“Thank you, John Slocum. That was the only nice thing to happen to me here in this foul place.”
“Why do your people live here?” he said. “Surely there are other Apache you could join up with.”
Princess said, “My people are what you would call outcasts.”
“What did they do to earn that word?”
“A long time ago they refused to do something, that is more to the point.”
Slocum didn’t ask what she meant, hoped instead she’d offer the information. But after a few seconds, it was clear she wasn’t about to tell him, so he changed the subject. “Do you know what the chief plans to do?”
She didn’t look at him.
Finally he said, “Princess, please. I have to know. Every second he waits is another second that Deke and his people gain on you. We cannot let that happen.”
She spun fast on him, fire blazing in her dark eyes. “Why do you care? Why do you care what happens to my people?”
“If you put it that way, I don’t care what happens to your people.”
Her smug smile dropped as he continued to speak.
“Any more than I care what happens to any other people I come across in my travels. But it’s different when someone, hell anyone, has a rough run of it, and especially if they’re treated poorly by others who have no right to treat them that way.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
Slocum squinted in the
dank little hut, thought about a better way to explain himself, but before he could reply, the chief’s voice cut in. “This white man would have us believe that we should have our sacred dwelling place back.”
The well-muscled older man pushed the rest of the way in from the doorway. “He says that what the white devils have done to us has been wrong, that he can somehow save us from their guns. He says many things, but always out of one side of his face. The other lies even to himself.”
Slocum shifted on the pole, wincing at the cutting pain in his wrists as the leather dug in deeper. There was no comfortable position when you were tied tight to a pole by the wrists. It felt as though the bindings were made of hot wire dipped in liquid fire. He supposed he should be grateful that they weren’t also lashed around his forehead.
“Whatever happened to hospitality?” he asked aloud.
Neither the chief nor the princess responded, but Slocum could tell she was bothered by seeing him in pain like this, and he was glad for it. Maybe it would convince her that he spoke the truth. After all, what could he possibly have to gain by lying to her? This last thought emboldened him enough that he gave voice to it.
“How could I possibly benefit from having come back to you now? As you can see, I’m not in the best of shape, you have my horse, most of my gear. As much as I like my old Appaloosa and my own bedroll and such, they aren’t worth risking my neck, or the neck of the woman who is with me. We could have gladly gone on our way, keeping our distance from you. But that didn’t happen, did it?”
“He speaks the truth,” said the princess.
“He makes me angry,” said the chief in a low growl, not taking his gloomy, heavy-lidded eyes from Slocum.
“Leave. Now.” The chief said this to the young woman. She regarded him haughtily for a moment, then obeyed. The chief glowered for another few seconds, then he, too, turned to go.
“Chief!” barked Slocum, his voice carrying as much anger as had the Apache leader’s. It was forceful enough to stop the man in his tracks, though the chief didn’t turn around.
“Dammit, man, you have to listen to me. That canyon is filled with angry whites, more than you have here, and there are more on the way. They’ll be here any day now. But the worst of it is they have enough firepower—guns, ammunition, cannons, Gatling guns, explosives, you name it, they have it—to kill every single one of you, your family, all the women, children, the old, the sick, it won’t matter.”
The chief didn’t move, so Slocum continued. “Those white men in the canyon are angry, not just at you, but at a whole lot of other people, too. But you and your people will be the first to die. All your warriors on horseback with arrows and spears and war clubs and axes, they won’t make a bit of difference against all those white man’s guns. And the sad thing about all this is . . . you know it. You know that what I’m saying is the truth.”
To Slocum’s surprise, the chief let the deer hide door flap slip closed. He turned once again to face Slocum. This time, though, he looked as if he’d aged ten years in two minutes. His once-rigid shoulders sagged, his wide, bright eyes looked dimmed, even in the darkened interior of the hut, and his firm-set jaw had dropped as the man bent his head, considering all that Slocum had told him.
“Chief,” Slocum said in a quieter voice. “Unless you do something soon, your people will die.”
“There is nothing that can be done. We cannot leave this place. As bad as it is, this is our home now. And one day, perhaps our sacred canyon will once again become our home.”
He looked up at Slocum, who saw for the first time the weight of leadership on this man’s shoulders. He was looking at a tired, broken man. “Chief, it will take much more than hope. And it will take more effort than you have given, more planning, more of everything, most of these things you do not have. And the more sickness your people experience, the weaker your tribe becomes.”
“You think I do not know this? You speak to me as if you know of hardship. We are outcasts. This small band of Apache, we are all that remain of a group that left others, a warring tribe.” He almost growled the words, turning away.
Then he spun back and said, “When my father’s fathers found the canyon, they knew it was a gift from the Great Spirit Father, a gift that we must treat with respect. My people long ago settled here, for it was a land of plenty.” He gestured wide with both hands to indicate the unforgiving landscape beyond the dim walls of the hut.
“And all was well for a long time. No one bothered us, we lived in peace, the whites traveling were unaware of us, even as they sought ways to venture down into our little world. But we all knew that it could not last forever. That one day the whites, for there were so many of them, would find us.”
As he spoke, he walked behind Slocum. He waited for the chief to free his wrists, but the man, smiling, walked back around to face Slocum.
As if reading his mind, the chief said, “Not yet. You have not proven to me I can trust you.”
Slocum nodded. “Fair enough. But let me ask you—how did you and your people learn to speak such good English if you spent so much time isolated down in the canyon?”
Again, the chief’s sly smile stretched across his face. It made him look younger, more confident. “I never said that the foul whites who now reside in our canyon were the first to come among us.”
“There were others?” Slocum had assumed Deke and his cohorts were the first.
“There was one other. An old white woman. We do not know how, but she had been traveling with a burro, carrying books, walking alone across this land.” He shook his head at the memory.
“This was a long time ago. I was but a young man then. She made her way down among us. We were afraid, but when we found that she was alone, and that she wished us no harm, we slowly welcomed her into our lives. She stayed with us for a long time, and taught us many things, as we did for her. She learned the Apache tongue and we learned her English. We also learned to read her books. She taught one of us, then more and more, until many of us took up these new ways.”
“What happened to her?” asked Slocum.
“Time took her, as it will all of us. But she was an old, old thing by then. She had become more one of us than we had become white.”
“Was she . . . among those in the burial ground at the far end of the canyon?”
The chief nodded. “Yes,” he said. “the place the whites have desecrated. I do not know if good can ever be brought back there.”
“First you need to be alive to be able to try, don’t you think?”
The chief regarded him a moment. “You do not lie about this, do you?”
“No, Chief, I am not lying.”
“I believe you,” said the chief, and once more turned to go.
“Then why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you at least let me go?”
“There is one simple reason.” He looked back at Slocum. “The girl.”
“The girl?” Slocum felt a knot tighten in his gut. “You mean your daughter?”
The chief smiled, shook his head as if pitying Slocum. “She is not my daughter. She is my wife.”
17
Deke watched approvingly as the dozens of fresh-faced new recruits lined up for inspection. They’d streamed down into the canyon’s southern—and only—entrance late the day before, in good spirits and ready to begin what Deke had told Shinbone and the others who were out recruiting for the cause was going to be a hell of a second coming. The “Second Rising of the South” was what Deke had actually taken to calling it.
Cooter, the man he’d selected to be a sort of second in command under Shinbone, told him that old Shin had taken Lemuel and Mort and split off from the main group of recruiters. Said they had to go on a secret, special mission for Deke, but that they’d meet them back at the canyon. Coot was surprised that Shin and the boys hadn’t been there when he’d arrived with
all the recruits and the wagons of fresh supplies. They’d even managed a few more cases of weapons and ammunition, which they’d left up top, under guard. Said they’d also found some blood near the canyon entrance. Looked to be a scuffle of sorts had taken place.
All this news—the odd little revolt of Rufus and kin, the disappearance of Julep and Slocum, Shinbone’s “secret mission” that Deke had no knowledge of, and then Shin and the boys’ disappearance—why, it made Deke’s head swim. What could it all possibly mean?
He had spent a good hour roving back and forth in the rubble of his wrecked campsite, massaging his bandaged hands. It dawned on him later, hours after he’d trashed the place, that it was as it should be. It was a sign from God telling him to leave the canyon forever, take the arms, lead his people in a mighty uprising against the foul Bluebellies.
And today was the day. He’d see what they were made of, first hauling up all the weapons from the secret cave guarded by his own sons, then they’d cut their teeth in battle against the filthy savage Apaches. Them dropping the rock on Henry’s head let Deke know that they were still around, still playing their Indian games.
And now here he was, inspecting the troops, his troops, and truth be told, he’d seen better. They were a ramshackle lot, straw hats, bare feet, no shirts, lots of corncob pipes, barely a few dozen teeth between the lot of them . . . But he wasn’t about to tell them what disappointments he saw. After all, these people were Southern folk, and when the true test came, as he suspected it would, by gum, they’d show their true worth.
“Now you all have listened to me yammer on for pretty near an hour. And you’re all still here, so I guess that means y’all wanna stick with me.” He eyed them, noticed a few shocked looks, and realized that of course they planned on following him—they’d come all that way, hadn’t they? On nothing more or less than the promise of seeing the South rise again.
Deke cleared his throat and said, “What I mean is . . . it’s time to clear out the stockpile. I’ve had wagons brought over to the cave, and men have been working on loading her up. So you all head on over there and finish off helping, then we’ll get them wagons on up to the top. You’ll note that them wagons is narrow. That’s to get them through those tight spots on the trail heading up to the rim. Now.” He clapped his big hands together and winced at the pain his damaged fingers felt. “Any questions?”