We needed to give the horses and mule grain and time to rest after pushing them, so we made camp in the shade of a grove of large piñons on the other side of the ridge, about thirty feet below the top. While I roasted meat and made coffee, Yellow Boy climbed to a jumble of boulders on top of the ridge, where he nested down with his Big Eye telescope to watch our back trail. Carrying a pan of beans and meat up to eat with him, I knew he must be disgusted with me for riding over three hundred miles into Mexico and not killing, or even trying to kill, Villa or Camisa Roja, as I’d sworn to do as a son of Yellow Boy.
We ate in silence. Finishing, Yellow Boy nodded his appreciation, and keeping his eyes across the valley said, “I watch. You sleep.”
I returned to the fire, poured us coffee, and carried it back up the hill. Yellow Boy nodded his thanks and took a few sips while I sat, using my cup to warm my hands against the chilly morning. I waited for him to speak first, waited for the lesson I knew was sure to come, waited to learn how far I’d slipped in his respect.
At last, he turned his eyes to me. “You no kill Arango or Camisa Roja. Why? They try to kill you. You a son of Yellow Boy. Why you no take their lives? You have right. You leave them; you take no honor. You leave them; you take no Power.”
“A dream told me I must not.”
He pursed his lips, then took a long slurp of the black, steaming brew. “A dream? Dreams are powerful medicine. Tell me of this dream, my son.”
I described the details of the burning jaguar dream that had haunted me for months as he drank his coffee and studied my face. I told him how I came to understand the dream was about Villa when I was about to kill him, but still didn’t know how to interpret it until Jesús brought the boiling water and I told him the truth about why we’d been searching for the general. I said, “Jesús looked me straight in the eye and said I was as bad, if not worse, than Villa, for betraying his trust.”
Yellow Boy nodded. “Hmmph. Jesús speaks true.”
“I know. The wisdom of his words filled my ears like thunder, my mind like a flash of lightning, and let me see the truth clearly. Then I understood Jesús was the one I never saw in my dream, the one who rescued me from the burning tigre. Villa, wounded like the burning tigre, was pulling me in, ready to burn what soul I had left, consume me for the rest of my life with the memory of his killing. He lay in that bed an old man who had no Power. There was no honor, no Power in killing such a man.
“Grandfather, this is how I understand the dream and what it means for me. The White Eye di-yen promise I made before I returned to you requires that I heal. Years ago, Villa gave us our lives by killing a bear that almost tore us both to pieces. Giving him his life back, for he was as good as dead before Jesús returned, made me feel like a great rock was lifted off my shoulders. I was free to walk away without his blood on my hands. My dream spoke true. Jesús, unseen in my dream, pulled me away from the teeth and claws of a burning tigre, a loco tigre, one that nearly had me. Do you understand these things, Grandfather?”
Yellow Boy stared out over the valley for a long time slurping his coffee, and I trembled inside, wondering if he’d disown me.
“Same-dream-comes-many-times is powerful medicine, Hombrecito. Man is a fool who no listens to its voice. Sometimes man waits long time to understand what dream tells him. You wise. You listen. You wait. By and by, you hear the speaking of your dream. You keep your honor. You keep my honor. There’s no better thing than to live a straight life. Arango lives, still on fire, still loco. No honor now. No Power now. Maybe Power and honor come again. Maybe he dies, no honor, no Power. He sends no one after you, but he stops no one. Camisa Roja, and big Yaqui, they come. What you do?”
“If they come under the sights of Little David, they’ll die. They chase death. Can we wait here and stop them before they make an ambush on the trail or cross the border to Las Cruces?”
Yellow Boy slowly shook his head. “Roja and Yaqui no ride sun trail. Ride moon trail. Not know the trail we take. Camisa Roja uses Jesús. Learns we return to Apaches in sierras and Las Cruces and Mescalero north of border. We say so in front of Jesús. Camisa Roja knows we use trails out of El Paso Púlpito to Apache camp. Roja and Yaqui ride to El Paso Púlpito before we do and kill us. I watch our back trail now. Think maybe we might have luck; maybe they big fools, but they no come this way. They take faster trail to El Paso Púlpito.”
Everything he said made perfect sense. If we didn’t make El Paso Púlpito before Camisa Roja and Gamberro, they’d be waiting for us when we tried to go through the pass, and in the game they were playing, if you didn’t shoot first, then the odds were high you’d die.
“You speak wise words about our enemies. What must we do? Stay away from El Paso Púlpito? Go around the mountains?”
He slurped his coffee and stared at me, his black flint eyes glittering. “Sí, we can hide. They never see us until we let them. They no see? Cross border; wait in Las Cruces; try to kill you from ambush. Better to kill them at El Paso Púlpito when they fall under the sights of Yellow Boy rifle and Shoots-Today-Kills-Tomorrow.”
“But, if they take the fastest roads, they’ll be ahead of us in two or three days, and we’ll be the targets at El Paso Púlpito. How can we stay ahead of them?”
“Old Apache trick . . .”
“Which is?”
“Surprise enemy. No do what he expects.”
Waving my hand in a circle I said, “Which for us is?”
“Ride soon. Ride in daylight.”
I could hardly believe what he’d said.
“Hear me, my son. Now we lead Camisa and Gamberro by maybe half a day. Camisa Roja knows we ride under no sun. He rides under no sun. We leave pronto. Ride rapidamente. Roja stays with Villa and rides tonight. We stay maybe a day, two days ahead. When he camps at daybreak, we lead maybe by a sun but gain maybe a sun while we ride and they sleep. Comprende?”
I nod, “Sí, Grandfather, comprendo. What about the gringos, Carrancistas, and Villistas? It’ll be hard to avoid them in the daylight. Even villagers living off the main trails will be hostile to a gringo and an Apache. The animals need some rest, or they’ll never get us there ahead of Camisa Roja and Gamberro.”
He took another slurp of coffee. “Gringos use Apache scouts. I’m scout in my jacket. You be gringo officer. Stay away from villages. Stay away from all who know us. Stay away from patrols; let gringos and Mexicans fight. Now, we give animals a little rest. We rest. When sun makes no shadow, we ride. We win race to El Paso Púlpito. Camisa Roja and Gamberro lose bet. Pay with life. I say try.”
I stuck out my lower lip and nodded. “Sí, we’ll try. It’s time to end it.”
CHAPTER 59
RETURN TO EL PASO PÚLPITO
Yellow Boy approached El Paso Púlpito with care, ensuring we didn’t ride into an ambush. Out on the llano we continued riding north past the canyon entrance, and then turned west up an arroyo to follow the backs of the ridges forming the north side of the pass entrance. About three miles up the arroyo, Yellow Boy led us to a saddle between two high hills, and there below us was the trail to Rafaela’s cairn.
Without a sound, we drifted out of the saddle to the trail, stopping often to listen for anything out of the ordinary. By the time the long shadows disappeared into dusk, we reached the spring and cliffs where Rafaela was buried and found no signs of passersby.
We watered the horses and mule, let them rest a bit, and then rode down the canyon to the main trail leading through El Paso Púlpito. Crossing the main trail, we climbed a steep ridge and made camp just below its top on the other side to stay out of sight from the main trail through the pass. Even in the low early evening light, our location gave us a perfect view down the canyon to the llano and the trail Roja and Gamberro would use to approach the pass. I breathed a sigh of relief. We’d won the race to El Paso Púlpito.
Our animals were worn out. Even Satanas, the strongest, looked gaunt. They were glad to get the cool spring water, the extra ration of grain,
a long grass rubdown, and a good roll in the dust. We hobbled them to graze on the western side of the ridge out of sight of the eastern pass entrance, and I built a small fire in a deep pit to cook beans, tortillas, and coffee. Yellow Boy made a place to sit in the stunted piñons on the top of the ridge, so we had a clear line of sight of the trail from the canyon entrance, maybe four miles away, all the way up to our watching post, and west toward the pass.
We ate and watched the moon rise from behind the mountains. While we watched the trail and drank our coffee, I asked, “When do you think they’ll come?”
He looked at me through the steam from his old tin cup, a twisted half-smile creasing one of his cheeks. “Maybe they’re already here and we haven’t seen each other. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night they come.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? Soon now.”
“Maybe they’re already here? How? We’ve ridden long and hard to stay ahead of them, and we started with a day and a half lead.”
“They know all hidden trails. They know how to travel fast because they fight wars during many harvests, and they have friends in villages we have to ride around. Wait. You see. Rest. You watch from halfway in the night to the morning sun.”
After I lay down by the warm glow of the fire pit, it seemed only seconds passed before I felt the familiar tap ofYellow Boy’s rifle barrel on the bottom of my foot to awaken me. All was well.
From the star positions and where a nearly full moon hung high in a twinkling, diamond-filled sky, I knew it was past midnight. I took my blanket, binoculars, Little David, and my cup, poured some coffee, and climbed up the ridge to Yellow Boy’s aerie.
I found his place in the piñons, and wrapping the blanket around me, sat cross-legged in the freezing air. With the moon high overhead, the trail down the canyon out to the llano was easy to see, brightly lit in the moon’s icy white light. Using my binoculars and starting at the canyon entrance, I began a systematic search of every possible hiding place along the trail toward us until I reached the place where the trail north to the spring branched off the one leading west to the pass. I saw nothing.
It occurred to me that the jaguar-on-fire dream hadn’t visited since I left Villa in the land of the living. I knew I’d rationalized letting Villa and Camisa Roja live, using an interpretation of the dream, but, truly, I still didn’t fully understand why I hadn’t killed them. I believed it was “the right thing to do,” but it put Yellow Boy, Jesús, and me at risk of being killed. I wondered if my years at medical school had made me too soft to survive in this hard land, too soft to live as my Apache grandfather had taught me.
As I sat musing on my fate and life’s strange twists and turns, my binoculars returned again to the canyon entrance, and I realized something had changed. A small dust cloud, pale and ethereal in the moon’s white light, was approaching from the llano.
I threw off my blanket to get Yellow Boy. Before I could tap his foot, he sat up from his blanket, perfectly alert, and raised his brows to ask what was happening. I jerked my head toward our place at the top of the ridge and held up the binoculars. “Come and see.”
He grabbed his old brass telescope and joined me to study the little dust puff approaching from the llano.
It hung in the cold, still air for maybe five minutes. Then it began to fade away, never reaching the canyon entrance. The riders making it weren’t moving. I could see some black specks that weren’t in the scene before the cloud and might be the riders, but the power of my glasses was too low for me to tell in the dim light.
Yellow Boy’s telescope had about twice the lens size of my binoculars and four times the magnifying power, and Yellow Boy had the best night vision of any man I’d ever known. He stared for a couple of minutes before he said, “Five hombres. One on horse at the canyon door uses big eyes. He looks for signs of firelight. Others climb off horses. Make water on mesquite.”
“Can you tell who they are?”
He shrugged. “Still too far.”
“What do you think we ought to do?”
“They wait. Watch. No see firelight, come in canyon, camp in piñon shadows on south side of canyon, eat, rest. Maybe wait for sunrise before they scout canyon looking for sign. If it’s dorados, after they make camp, then learn they war with Apache. We go to their camp, take horses, water. Pull them into canyon, look for horses, look for water. They walk. Need for water grows.” He reached out and grabbed a handful of air. “We pick off one by one.”
In half an hour, the man using the glasses was satisfied no one was staring back at him and led the others up the trail toward the pass. Maybe three hours before dawn they stopped to camp at the third canyon on the south side of the trail.
Yellow Boy and I took only our knives and pistols, eased down our ridge and over to the ridge of low mountains forming the south side of the canyon, and began running toward our pursuers’ camp. I hadn’t run in weeks. Cold air filling my lungs and my body warming from our long, fast strides felt good, very good. Two-thirds of the way down the south side trail, Yellow Boy turned to run up the slope to the top of the ridge. When we reached the top, we ran along the ridge crest toward the east, until we reached the top of the ridge above the canyon where the men camped. Sure enough, a small fire blazed and men ate.
We studied them with our glasses. I saw Camisa Roja and Gamberro sitting cross-legged off to one side of the fire. There were two others I didn’t recognize, and the fifth one sat by the fire. I whispered, “Oh, no. Damn it, I told him, I told him.”
They had Jesús, his face bruised and swollen, his hands tied. I pointed at him and Yellow Boy nodded, whispering, “When they sleep, I take their horses, ride for our camp. You empty their water barrel and canteens, free Jesús, climb to top of ridge, and follow way we come back to camp. If they follow you, they’ll die by my rifle. This I promise you, my son.”
I had to use every skill I’d learned from my Apache mentor to get down the ridge to the dorado camp without being heard. Their fire had burned to yellow-orange coals glowing beneath gray ash, and the sentries were dozing for a few seconds at a time before their heads nodded over and they jerked awake. Yellow Boy crept to the rope where their horses were tied, introduced himself to each one by letting them sample his breath, and he theirs, and then cut and held each end of the rope as he swung up on the middle horse. The horses were ready to run when he was ready to spook them.
Jesús, exiled from the fire, slept in a fetal position, shivering in the freezing air, without blankets on the bare ground. I eased my hand over his mouth. He jerked in surprise, but I felt him smile when he recognized my smell and outline in the feeble light from the fire’s coals. I held a finger to my lips signaling silence, and he nodded. I cut the rope binding him and looked around for their water cask while he rubbed circulation into his hands and wrists.
The cask was with the saddles, pack-mule harness, and their meager supplies. Slowly, I eased the cask onto its side and used my knife to pry the bung out to let the water dribble into the dry, thirsty sand. I emptied all the canteens I found with the saddles and figured that, even if I’d missed one or two, they’d all be thirsty by midday.
Faint gray lit the eastern horizon when I crawled away with Jesús. A hundred yards up the canyon from the camp, I was whispering the plan to him when one of the dorados staggered up from his blankets to water a piñon. Wobbling back to his blankets, he stared in the direction where Jesús had slept. Jesús wanted to run. I held him by the wrist and put my finger to my lips to signal silence, mouthing, “Wait, wait.”
Looking over all the camp, the dorado finally realized Jesús was gone and roared, “Damn!”
Yellow Boy answered with an ear-splitting, angry scream and drove the horses straight through the middle of their camp, scattering hot coals in all directions. All the dorados hid in their blankets except one, the one in the red shirt, who rolled to his feet and fired in the direction of the horses disappearing into the soft gray light filling the freezing air.
In the
confusion, Jesús and I scrambled to the top of the ridge and started down the other side. I couldn’t believe how lucky and successful we’d been to steal the horses, free Jesús, and destroy their water supply. We could have killed them all, but I suspected Yellow Boy planned to make them wish we had.
When Jesús and I reached camp, Yellow Boy sat in the piñons watching the dorado camp with his Big Eye telescope. He looked at Jesús’s battered face and grunted. “Hmmph. Why does Camisa Roja and Gamberro bring you to hunt us?”
Jesús, still trying to catch his breath, leaned over, hands on his knees, and said, “Bait . . . They believed . . . I planned to kill the general . . . They believed Doctor Grace . . . wouldn’t let them kill me . . . If I looked bad enough, they thought they could draw him out to help me.”
I knew he could barely see out of his puffy eyes. I asked, “Did Villa send them?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him tell them to do it. Roja says he has a personal score to settle with you. Gamberro says if he kills you, Villa will make him a general. If they can kill you, they believe there is much to gain for them both. The other two hombres came for the promise of dinero.”
Yellow Boy motioned toward his chest. “Do they know I’m with Hombrecito?”
“They never speak of Muchacho Amarillo.”
Yellow Boy showed one of his rare smiles and said, “Now, they know.”
I asked, “Grandfather, what will we do now?”
“Camisa Roja knows spring in rocks up canyon where your woman’s bones rest. Arango gets water there when División del Norte cross El Paso Púlpito. They come for water by and by. They no find if Hombrecito shoots straight.”
I smiled and said, “They won’t drink.”
While Yellow Boy kept watch and I took care of the stolen horses, Jesús ate the leftovers of bread and meat from our supper like a starving man. When he finished, I did the best I could for him, washing away the dirt and treating infections beginning on his face and upper body.
Knight of the Tiger Page 33