Return of the Tall Man

by Clay Fisher

  For Ben, while the strange green daylight of the late afternoon and early evening held on, there were duties other than decisions involving Apaches to attend to. One of these was the matter of Amy Geneva Johnston. Calling Go-deen aside, he asked him to come along as interpreter. When the breed asked for details, Ben looked guilty and lowered his voice to match his manner.

  “Frank,” he said, “I feel awkward as a calf caught nursing the herd bull, but one way or another, we got to give this lady a bath.”

  “Eeh!” cried Go-deen. “Not me, brother! You, maybe, but not Frank Go-deen. Not even for money would I do it, let alone for love. Have you seen the look in her eye? That she-devil would kill us all if she could. My God, that dirty Crowheart and his murdering boy must have given her a life like a dog among their Shoshoni. Wagh!”

  “Pipe down,” snapped Ben. “Damn it, I didn’t ask you for a legal opinion. Just come on along and keep your big mouth shut.”

  “I won’t do it. Shoot me. Go ahead. I’d rather bathe a she-wolf with a litter of blind pups!”

  “Goddam it,” said Ben, “I’m not asking you to help scrub her back. I ain’t going to lay a finger on her myself either. That ain’t the point. But I got to talk her into doing it her own self and for her own good.”

  “What? You lie! You want to see her body.”

  “Lord, I couldn’t be less interested in her body, Frank. But I got to be interested in her mind.”

  “Her mind! Hoh! That’s funny! That’s very, very funny!”

  “To a Milk River mush-head, maybe. To Ben Allison of San Saba, not even a little bit. Come on, Frank, for God’s sake, give me a hand. We got to do it.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  Ben scowled, chewed his lip, kicked dust, took a whirl at putting it in terms a cousin of Crazy Horse’s might comprehend.

  “To set off with,” he said, “she’s a woman. Now right away that makes her different than you and me.”

  Go-deen looked at him, amazed.

  “How many summers did you have when you made this discovery?” he asked. “And why have you kept it a secret from your friends who trust you?”

  “Don’t give me any of that half-Sioux humor,” gritted Ben. “You know what I mean. She thinks different than a man. We don’t worry nor fret about smelling bad or looking like a piece of wet side meat drug through the dry dirt. But a woman, well, a woman, she just naturally has got to care how she looks when there’s men around; even galoots as creepy and far off of handsome as me and you.”

  Go-deen looked at him suspiciously.

  “I’m beginning to understand,” he nodded. “So you caught her watching you today, too, eh?”

  “What the hell you mean? I don’t even know what you’re talking about!” fumed Ben. But his color didn’t go with his declaration of innocence, and Go-deen nodded again.

  “You and that double-crossing Slit Nose,” he said. “She can’t seem to make up her mind which one of you she’s going to go for. That’s after she kills the rest of us, naturally. But it doesn’t matter; we won’t argue it.”

  “You’ll help me with her then?”

  “Well, that depends. Do I get to peek also?”

  Ben colored up again but held his temper.

  “Nobody peeks, damn it. I’m just aiming to let her get herself cleaned off and spruced up. I even brung along a bar of soap I been carrying since starting out from Madison Canyon, Montana. She’s a woman, by jingo, and a white woman to boot; I don’t care that she’s been reared Shoshoni or any other blasted Indian way; she’ll light up when she sees this here cake of settlement soap. Now you going to come along and talk to her for me or not?”

  Go-deen was still studying the logistics of the problem, or rather the moral mechanics. He scratched his bullethead, wrinkled his lance-scarred nose.

  “If I don’t see her and you don’t see her, who sees her?” he asked.

  “I said nobody.”

  “What’s to stop her running away?”

  “I got that all figured out.” Ben held up a length of Apache rope. “I aim to make a surcingle of this,” he said. “I’ll put it around her belly with the knot in back and the slack leading to me, around that big rock yonder. Far side of the rock’s a dandy big pool of spring water. The knot gets wet, she can’t possibly work it loose, and before you can say, ‘Gee, horse fat!’ we’ll have us a spanking-clean woman and one what’ll talk to us and listen to us talk back. We got to try it, for we can’t go on lugging her along tied up. It cuts down our speed too much, and watching her all the time tuckers us. You want any more guarantees?”

  “She’ll chew that rope up and spit it out like kite string,” grumped Go-deen, “but I’ll go with you anyway. I wouldn’t want to miss seeing her running naked across the open into the trees. Bat was right. She’s got a body like sixteen summers. Wagh!”

  “Shut up,” said Ben, “and don’t say nothing I don’t tell you. You give her any dirty half-breed side words, and I’ll spread you out on that rock like a green hide.”

  “Brother,” leered Go-deen, unleashing his walleyed smile, “I don’t understand you. Just to listen to you, one would think you don’t trust me.”

  Ben clutched his bar of soap and strand of Mimbreño rope with renewed determination and paling gills.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’m fading fast.”

  The girl—or woman—Amy Johnston sat by the supper fire, blue eyes downcast, blond hair freed from the grit and grease and lodge smoke of a thousand Indian campgrounds, flowing in a dully burnished, golden flood over her shoulders. Her drying clothes clung to her revealingly, keeping the eyes of her companions divided between the sinewy, graceful figure and the unexpectedly compelling face. She was not a beautiful woman, unless even white teeth, clear, sun-bronzed complexion, a short, straight nose, slender chin, full-lipped mouth, and oval, high-cheekboned facial contour meant beauty. But when a man looked at Amy Johnston, as Ben Allison was looking at her now—for the first real time—he wasn’t conscious of the individual feature or line of figure, but rather of the whole lovely harmony of a young woman of natural good looks reared and conditioned by a life of strenuous physical advantages and hardships such as no white woman could ever boast. And with the sheer physical vitality there came, also, the fascination of a wild thing being tamed or, more exciting yet, of willingly allowing herself to be approached and gentled.

  Ben and his rough companions were presently enjoying this rare male experience. There was more of conquest and exhilaration in it for them than the bedding of a hundred compliant Indian women or sleazy-virtued settlement drudges. Big Bat and Go-deen, as the strange girl warmed and thawed to the open fire of their admiration, strutted and puffed as vainly as two disparate but friendly fighting roosters, vying for her attention and applause—which was indicated by a fluttering raising of the startlingly blue eyes, a dazzling flash of the perfect teeth, or a flooding of dark, pleased color into her sunburned face and never by more than one or two spoken words. In hard fact, she uttered less than a dozen sentences in the swift, happy hour the men spent in questioning and complimenting her. They played it precisely as if they were soft-talking a newly-trapped wild horse, wanting and expecting only to achieve a degree of confidence and calming down, which would allow them to leave her for the night and not find, next morning, that she had dashed her life out against the corral poles.

  In all of this, Lame John sat aside. He said no word to his woman nor to the whites who attended her with such animation and eagerness to please. The transformation wrought in her by Ben Allison’s bar of soap was not as apparent to his savage eyes as to their civilized ones. To him the unexpected wild beauty was not unexpected. He had seen it in the first moment his fierce, proud glance met hers in the silence following the bloody fight with Iron Eyes and the Horse Creek Shoshoni, back in far Montana when, for the twelve sweet hours before the Sioux of Slohan had s
truck and scattered his little band of Wallowa Nez Percés, he had known the wondrous company of this Wasicun woman who was more Shacun, more Indian, than any red girl he had known through all his twenty-one winters among the Wallowas.

  But if the crippled Nez Percé youth could not see the change in his white woman, he could, and very easily, see that in the conduct of his white companions toward her. And, seeing it, his dark heart ached with jealousy; his primitive mind grew clouded with doubt.

  He got up and left the fire, walking away from its cheerful company to the side of his grazing Appaloosa. He spoke to the spotted horse, stroking his black muzzle and shining red-bay neck. He glanced at the other mounts, making sure they, too, were at ease and grazing well. Then, before seeking his lonely blanket, and in the invariable custom of the plains and mountain red man to briefly guess the weather upon rising and retiring, he glanced up at the sky. As he did, his thoughts left Amy Johnston and her awkward entertainers as though separated from them by a scalping knife. And the next moment he was leaping for the supper-fire, all taints of jealousy and doubt plunged under by the larger instinct of self-preservation.

  The others, seeing him come, were on their feet when he drew up.

  “Brothers,” said John Lame Elk, “don’t look at me; look at the sky.”

  They did as he said, and the popping of the juniper embers sounded like small artillery in the heavy stillness.

  In the opal green and desert purple of the New Mexican twilight, the Apache smoke columns hung as if etched on water crystal—one to the southwest between them and Fort Webster; one to the northeast between them and Fort Craig.

  They were cut off, head and tail.

  29

  Boulder Meadow

  The war talk at Boulder Meadow held a singular difference from the one at the sutler’s store in Fort Webster. There they had set out with a forty-eight hour start and a general idea of where they were going. Here they were caught with no idea of where to go and with only the remaining ten hours of moonlight to get there. Even Ben Allison, as given to euphemism as was Frank Go-deen to dire prophecy, could see no hope for the coming sunrise.

  “We got two problems,” he summed up after an hour of desperate suggestions and countersuggestions by the four friends. “Water and Apache Indians. Way I see it, if the one don’t get us, the other will. We go for the only water we know, the Rio, and we got Indians there waiting for us. We go the only way we ain’t sure there’s Apaches, and we got no way of finding water.” He waved vaguely off to the west. “Looks like we lose no matter what.”

  “I’d rather fight Indians than no water,” said Go-deen. “You die quicker. I say we run for the river, brothers.”

  Big Bat shook his head quickly.

  “Non, François, never. Ask yourself what have they done? They have put themselves to the south of us and their friends to the north of us. They know that we are not familiar to the country to the west, but that we have just come from the Rio Grande. Comme ça, where will we run? Certainement, you have said it, right for the river!”

  “Bah!” growled the breed.

  “Well,” said Bat, “that makes more sense than running for the river; I’ll accept it.”

  “It wasn’t an opinion,” said Go-deen; “it was an insult. But you Canucks; you’re harder to discourage than a whiskey drummer. I give up. Go to hell.”

  “Way I see it—” Ben began again, but Go-deen hadn’t finished.

  “Be quiet, brother,” he said abruptly and turned to the silent Lame John. “Well, Nez Percé, what do you say? I am weary of listening to white men. What do you see out there in the night? Which way do we go?”

  Lame John lifted his head. The breeze, just stirring now with moonrise, was off the great sweep of land to the west. He sampled it, sniffing as carefully and warily as a wild horse. He wet a forefinger and held it up. He swung his head from due west to due north, crossing the whole area of the compass in that quarter. Finally, he grunted something in his own tongue, then nodded to Go-deen.

  “There’s no water out there, unless you know where to look. That wind is as dry as the Great Salt Sink. It’s a bad choice, Frank, but I make it different than you.”

  “How so?” said Go-deen, frowning.

  “In this way,” answered the Nez Percé youth simply, pointing a lean red arm into the northwest. “That is my home up there.”

  Ben shook his head despairingly.

  “I’m sure with you, John,” he said. “If we only knew our way out of New Mexico and could get up into Utah—”

  “Utah?” queried Big Bat. “You know that country?”

  “No, but I’ve got the best damned map of it you ever saw. Drawn by Joe Meeks. Chilkoot Johnston gave it to me. Made me take it, fact is. Said it would steer me around more trouble than a platoon of Pawnee scouts. Even claimed it would—”

  “Joe Meeks?” interrupted Big Bat, white teeth gleaming with sudden intensity. “The old mountain man? François, you are right—he talks too much. Give me that map, Petit Ben.”

  “But it ain’t of New Mexico, I told you!”

  “You tell me nothing. I know of Meeks. He spent as much time in Taos as he did in the Tetons. The map!”

  “Well, hell,” said Ben and dug it out.

  Among the lanky Texan’s sterling qualities, infallibility was not one. Joe Meeks’ map, brought forth and poured over with brow-drawn squints and held breaths, delineated the entire western one-third of New Mexico, including all of Taos, Rio Arriba, Santa Ana, Bernalillo, Valencia, and Socorro counties lying west of the Rio Grande. Only below the Pinos Altos country they had just left, in Grant County, did the detail fade away to sketchiness. For the rest of it, a blind man with a good pony and a fairly large canteen could have ambled right straight up into Utah with not a dry camp nor a grassless one to discomfit him along the way. The back slaps which Frank and Big Bat exchanged were only diminished in their gladness by the looks they paused to insert for Ben’s benefit. As for the latter, he only grinned and bore the onus of being the company blockhead as best he could, meanwhile defending himself with a slow-drawled, mightily pleased, “Well, for hell’s sake, how was I to know he spelt New Mexico,

  ‘A-p-a-c-h-e C-o-u-n-t-r-y?’” Which, being not altogether an unfair question, his comrades accepted as the apology due them under the circumstances.

  It was now agreed they would rest until midnight, forcing on from then until first light. They had remaining to them at least a week of moonlight strong enough to read Joe Meeks’ map by. In the seven nights—as the Apaches, unlike the Comanches, did not move by dark—they might with but ordinary luck and no lame ponies make the mountain lion’s share of the three hundred and fifty indicated miles to the Utah corner. Since the map showed not only water and grass but also suitability of daytime cover—rocks, timber, canyons, ridges—at the various campsites, their principal concerns were reduced to two: laying a blind trail for the Apaches in getting from camp to camp; not coming into a water hole already occupied by them. Of the two problems, Lame John accepted responsibility for the first, Big Bat for the second. Go-deen generously offered to supervise both performances. Even Amy Johnston, evincing her first genuine excitement when informed they were now turning northwest to strike for her Shoshoni homeland, made a shyly impulsive suggestion that she be permitted to “cook for the warriors on the long journey.” Delighted, the comrades agreed.

  The blankets were spread, the horses brought in and put on tether, rifles laid to hand. It was nine o’clock.

  Ben took the first of three one-hour watches. Lame John was not asked to share guard duty. The Nez Percé said nothing, but he knew.

  The camp quieted. Seated on the rock which overhung the fire spot, Ben looked down on his companions and felt a little taller than any of them. He realized how far he was from Montana and quest’s end. Yet, having gotten Chilkoot’s willowy daughter safely away from the fam
ed Apaches who never surrendered a female captive, even having succeeded in finding her at all after a quarter-century of trail dust blowing over the tracks of time, a man had to admit he had done fairly well so far. It maybe wasn’t Christian to take such a secret pride in something he had bossed but hadn’t exactly brought off unassisted. But Ben couldn’t help it. He felt so entirely good about the whole affair that if he hadn’t been sitting smack in the middle of Joe Meeks’ “A-p-a-c-h-e C-o-u-n-t-r-y,” he just naturally would have reared up on that rock and hurrahed the moon till hell wouldn’t put up with it.

  So ran the satisfied, uncomplicated mind of Ben Allison. Directly, self-approval became a better sedative than seventy miles of hard riding. Ben’s shaggy head nodded, fell forward. He slept through his own watch, Frank Go-deen’s, and fifty-five minutes of Big Bat Pourier’s. At that point he was awakened by a loud rattle of dislodged stones. Rubbing his eyes and peering hard while trying to keep his heart from pounding right out through his wishbone, he was able to make out some approaching movement in the southerly brush. At once he rasped down a hoarse “All out!” warning to the sleepers below.

  Bat, Go-deen, and Lame John came off their blankets, rifles sweeping the scrub, bellies knotted tight. There was another rattle of stones and bobbing of juniper tops, then an amazed, happy yell from Ben.