by Clay Fisher
“Hold your fire! It’s the God-blessed, blue-eyed, wandering watchdog!”
Which, indeed, it was.
While Big Bat swore in provincial French, Go-deen cursed in Milk River Sioux, Lame John smiled in grave Nez Percé amusement, and Ben greeted him with unprintable San Saba sentiments, Malachi Johnston—missing and presumed lost since the latter reaches of the night march from Fort Webster—strolled in out of the New Mexican moonlight, sniffed disdainfully at his detractors, selected Frank Go-deen’s blanket, and lay down with a vast grunt by the still-warm coals of the supper fire.
Ben jumped down from the rock and confronted his irate fellow camp mates, slow drawl rich with Texas sincerity.
“Boys,” he said, “I’ll hand whip the first one of you even thinks an unkind word of this here mule.”
30
The Judas Mule
Ben’s personal pleasure over the return of the old mule was short-lived. When camp was broken minutes later, Malachi refused to get up off Frank Go-deen’s blanket and join the exodus. The breed would cheerfully have shot him and hauled him off with a saddle-horn towrope, but Ben said no. Let the butt-headed brute have the blanket. He would get up and follow along when, as and if he was of a mind to, and that was that. It was the way, Ben said, that mules were built. And most especially this mule. They left it—and Malachi—there.
Going on through the night, they had no cause to regret their decision to gamble on Joe Meeks’ map. By its landmarks, easily seen in the glaring moonlight, and by Lame John’s Indian skill at picking the places where their tracks could be either entirely lost on bedrock or bewilderingly tangled by combinations of sand, wash gravel, hardpan, and heavy grassland, they made both excellent and accurate mileage. The predawn starlight brought them into the first camp, a beautiful spot where a small, clear stream wandered in a narrow, timbered draw with fine feed and a leafy cover of aspen, birch, and red willow growing wall to wall in the miniature canyon. On the map it was marked “Sweetwater,” and a sweeter place to rest and hide from horseback Indians in a fiercely hot and arid land could never be imagined.
Lame John’s probe of its silent beauty proved it to be unoccupied, and they moved in just as the true daylight was coming in the east.
All that day—as near as Ben could come in his crude system of marking fingernail scratches for each day on his saddle fenders, it was July fourth—they lay up in the luxuriant oasis. The time was divided between keeping an arroyo-rim watch of the back trail with Go-deen’s brassbound telescope and in working at the very rewarding task of “civilizing” Amy Johnston.
In this direction the Shoshoni-reared woman both came on and held back with typical Indian ability to confuse the white educator. Go-deen had the best luck with her because of his Shoshoni tongue and experience. Having seen the breed in the camps of her Wind River people, she seemed inclined to give to him where she would not with the others in the matter of communication. When it came to other attitudes, or rather other ways of “talking,” she was not so reluctant. None of them missed the manner in which her lovely blue eyes followed the lank figure of Ben Allison about the Sweetwater camp. Least of all did Lame John fail to observe this interest in the tall Texan.
For his part the Nez Percé was still unable to approach the woman who owned his heart and whom he had sworn to follow to the death. He remained as tongue-tied upon the New Mexican map trail of Joe Meeks as he had upon the Montana war trail of the Horse Creek Shoshoni. He, as Ben, could have made reasonable contact with her through the hand-sign language, the lingua franca of all the North Plains tribes, as well as of the northwest mountain peoples of the Oregon and Idaho country. Yet, unlike Ben, he would not try. He would only sit and watch his white woman follow his white friend with her beautiful eyes which said more than all the Shoshoni words or High Plains hand signs in the Indian world.
Ben, lost in the sudden discovery of his ward’s lively intellect and not a little undone by the long looks she kept giving him, failed to note Lame John’s increasing tendency to sit apart. It was, after all, not nearly so interesting as Amy Johnston’s new tendency to sit together.
The clear twilight came on. With it there was a momentary alarm when Big Bat, on the telescope watch, passed down the warning word. The next moment, however, he was spurting Gallic curses and threatening to quit and ride back to Fort Cobb on his original business of reporting the Kiowa-Comanche war talk. When Ben could get him calmed sufficiently to detail the strength of the enemy, he spat out another string of French in four letters and bellowed down:
“Ennemi, you say! Quel ennemi? Sacrebleu! It is the damnable mule again!”
It was Malachi. He did not bring Go-deen’s blanket with him, and the breed, like Big Bat, made noises and motions as though Ben had better keep a close watch on his long-eared friend if he did not want fricassee of Montana mule for breakfast. Actually, and Ben knew it, both the threateners would have shot a stranger who said a bad word about the gray-nosed beast. His odd sense of loyalty and his downright wrongheaded toughness were qualities much appreciated on the frontier. Malachi, to put it directly, would do to ride the river with. All of them knew this by now, and Chilkoot’s china-eyed pack mule was as welcome as the summer dusk which came just behind him.
But the dusk did not come alone.
With the very last of the green daylight, on a skylined, low mesa top overlooking their little canyon from the southeast, a row of sharply-cut silhouettes appeared. They sat their scrubby desert ponies without a sound or movement to announce their appearance or purpose or to describe their intention. The stillness hung on interminably and then, floating down from the mesa to the frozen watchers in the trees below, came a familiar, high-pitched, crazy laughter.
“Jesus Christ,” said Ben Allison softly, “it’s Chaco.”
“Sure,” said Frank Go-deen, his words dripping like acid into the frightening quiet. “They never could have followed that trail the Nez Percé laid out for them, but thanks to you they didn’t have to.”
“What,” said Ben, hard-eyed, “the hell are you talking about?”
“The mule,” muttered Go-deen hoarsely. “They followed the goddam mule!”
31
White Man’s Choice
“There is no other way,” said Lame John, low-voiced.
The others nodded and felt their stomachs shrink.
To sit in the shadows of a small canyon somewhere between the San Mateo and Rio Mimbres mountains of a quiet summer’s evening, agreeing to the idea of night-crawling a camp of wolf-pack Apaches not a long buffalo-rifle shot away, was ample prospect to tighten the gut of any white man alive. Or any half-white man.
“It’s true,” growled Frank Go-deen; “we may as well admit it. It’s get them tonight or they get us tomorrow.”
“It’s a Hobson’s choice,” said Ben miserably.
“Eh? A what, mon cher?” Big Bat asked.
“A shotgun choice—no choice at all,” explained Ben and had the curiosity remaining to wonder as he said it how he should remember such trivia when he couldn’t recall his own name. “You see, there was this feller Hobson back a long spell ago—over in England it was—he kept him a stable, livery stable sort of, and when a customer would come in to rent a horse, old Hobson he would—”
Big Bat put his melon-sized hand over his face, shutting off the story of Thomas Hobson of Cambridge.
“Another time, Petit Ben,” he said. “Right now let us consider the suggestion of going up to the mesa and murdering eight Apaches.”
“Seven,” corrected Lame John.
The giant Canuck eyed him.
“I counted eight,” he said.
“You counted right; but I want the boy.”
“Eh? For what purpose, Jean?”
“A hostage—and this time no one-day limit.”
“Damn,” said Ben, “sort of an Apache passport.”
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“Yes, what’s wrong with that?”
Frank Go-deen broke in quickly.
“One thing,” he said. “You can’t depend on using Broken Hand that way again. You ought to know that; you’re an Indian.”
“What is it you talk of?” scowled the Nez Percé.
“The old chief; he has lost face. We made him look like a fool back there at the fort. He would have been luckier had we caved in his skull. We did him no kindness letting him sit guard over his seven friends in the jail cell. Even the squaws will spit on him from now on.”
Lame John nodded thoughtfully.
“I had forgotten,” he said. “Forgive me, Frank; you are right. The boy is useless to us now.”
“Then it is eight?” asked Big Bat.
“Yes, it is eight. But I still want the boy.”
“You can have him. All you must do is be first to him before François or myself. Eh, François?”
“I wish we could talk them to death from down here,” complained the fat breed. “They’d be dead already.”
Ben, thinking desperately the whole while, now shook his head, held up an objecting hand. He made the no-good sign and talked quickly.
“Listen, it won’t work. It’s too damn risky for what we stand to gain. We’re putting all our chips on the table, at one time and on a blind bet at that. You just can’t walk in on eight Apaches like that. We might get some, even most of them, but they would get all of us in the process. That ain’t good poker where I come from.”
Lame John, surprisingly, agreed.
“It’s true, Brother Ben,” he murmured. “But it is still the best gamble we have. Sometimes there is no good way out; only the least poor one.”
“That’s true, too,” said Ben, “but in this case let’s play it my way—white-man style—according to Hoyle.”
“Do not ask him who Hoyle is,” said Big Bat hurriedly. “There is not the time to listen. Accept his word, and hear his plan.”
“I did not know he even had a plan,” said Lame John stiffly.
“I’ve been working on it.” Ben grinned. “It’s good poker, providing you’re down to your last stack of blues and been dealt nothing but two deuces.”
Lame John’s frown deepened.
“In plain words, brother,” he demanded, “what do you talk of?”
“A bluff,” answered Ben slowly; “a pure, cold, beautiful, brass-out bluff.”
“Go on, mon cher,” said Big Bat, leaning forward, white teeth gleaming in the moonlight. “You have something exceptional, une idée par excellence, I can taste it. Allons!”
Once more Ben’s sunny grin widened.
“You ought to be able to taste it,” he said. “It’s your own cooking warmed over.”
Chaco slept fitfully. His mind would not let him go deeply to rest. The eagerness to be up in the ghost light of the predawn and belly-creeping that camp of yanquis was greater than the weariness of the trail which had brought him to their hidden canyon. Murder was in Chaco’s heart, and its pleasant image reflected in the imagination would not allow him to sleep well. He turned upon his saddle blanket, putting his back to the rising of the moon and to the peaceful picket of the Apache ponies staked just back from the canyon’s edge on the mesa.
The movement put his hatchet face toward the canyon and the camp of the enemy. He saw the flicker and leap of the firelight rebounding its shadows from the far wall of the gorge and sat bolt upright. What was this? The fools building a fire in the middle of the night? With eight Mimbreño Apaches lying on the lip of the mesa above them? Idiocy! Strangeness! White insanity! But, no, wait—
That was no white man’s sound coming from that canyon camp and from that leaping flare of midnight flame.
Chaco crouched, half-arisen, listening fearfully.
But there could be no doubt of it:
“lha hyo oya iya iya o iha yaya yoyo.
Aheya aheya yaheyo ya eye heyo eheyo …”
There could be no doubt whatsoever; it was the death song of the Sarsi Kiowas. And being sung with the true words in deep, growling voices. Wagh! There was even the high-pitched yipping of a squaw’s voice wailing over the heavy ones of the men. Eeh-heyih! How, by all the gods, had Kiowas gotten to that canyon down there?
Now his braves had left their blankets and come up through the moonlight to crouch with him, rolling their eyes and grunting questions in guttural Apache, both to him and to themselves.
This was a trick of the yanqui devils; it had to be. But these were resourceful, hard-fighting white men. They had proved that to Chaco and to all of the seven braves who were with him—the same seven who had been locked in the Fort Webster guardhouse and left to die but for that old woman, Broken Hand, and what water he might bring them from the well in the riverbed. So it would be better to go have a look at what they might be up to this time. You couldn’t trust crazy men like those. They might even be packing up and leaving in the middle of the night, just as though Chaco and his seven were not up there on the mesa. Wagh! Better go look. Don’t take a chance wasting all Chaco’s hard work in shooting away that rusty leg-iron lock to let them out of the juzgado. Nor all their foot running up to the rancheria to get fresh horses and guns and warn the main people of the whites’ escape. And all their hard pushing ahead of the main band, following that cursed blue-eyed mule. Ah, no, it was still dah-eh-sahl death to the white man, no mistake of that.
They rose silently, following Chaco to the canyon’s rim. They were followed, in turn, by a strange phenomenon. Though there were but eight of them, they cast nine shadows. The ninth shadow was very tall. Its maker let them look into the canyon long enough to see the figures of Baptiste Pourier, Frank Go-deen, and Amy Geneva Johnston moving through the tree leaves against the light of the newly lighted fire and long enough for them to listen to one more chorus of the Kiowa death song—their own chorus.
Then the shadow spoke.
“Cuidado—look out!” barked Ben Allison in Spanish and pulled the long-barreled .44.
Chaco wheeled in time to take the first smashing slug through the chest at twenty feet. His body jackknifed backward, off into space. His braves panicked and broke like rabbits, their only thought to get to the pony picket, precisely as Ben had gambled they would.
They fired at him on the way. But on the foot run, in moonlight, the rifle is not the weapon. Not even at twenty feet. But the handgun, fired from fixed crouch and by an expert in unsighted pistol work from ranges as short as the width of a card table to as long as the span of a cow town’s dusty street, is the weapon. Ben got three more of them down before the remaining four ran into the sudden, hip-levered blasting of Lame John’s Winchester at the pony picket. One of the four, hit but still on his feet, got a mount free and galloped off, hanging on the far side of the animal. Lame John shouldered the carbine and put five shots through the running horse, slamming it to its knees. The Apache rolled desperately to avoid being pinned, but was caught by one leg. Before he could work the member loose, Lame John came up and knocked his brains out with the Winchester’s wickedly curved steel butt plate. As he did so, Ben’s tall form shadowed up behind him. He straightened, wiping the butt plate on his elk-skin leggings.
“You had a good idea, Brother Ben,” he said. “Let’s go.”
32
Six Nights to Four Corners
They dumped the bodies of the Apaches into the canyon, hiding them there under the trees and in the water of the stream so that decomposition might be delayed and sight denied the omnipresent vultures of the wasteland. This precaution against early discovery of the Mimbreño dead by their alerted fellow tribesmen taken, they packed the camp gear on Malachi, took fresh mounts from the Indian picket, set out once more.
They made good time. Malachi, on a lead rope now, dug in and stayed with the Apache ponies. Go-deen’s old white gelding and Lame John’s big Appaloos
a followed behind him faithfully as sheepdogs. The second camp was made at four that morning at a spot marked “Rock Tank” on Joe Meeks’ map. This was past the Sierra Luera, halfway to the Ki-ah Mountains. There was no Indian sign the next day. The following night they stayed in the dry course of the Zuni River, west of the arid Zuni Range. There was a good cover of cottonwoods rooted in subsurface water, and again no Apaches were sighted through the day. The following night they swung wide of old Fort Wingate and that dawn camped just north of Fort Defiance on the headwaters of the Rio Vara, fringing the Chuska Mountains.
It had been early agreed that they would not contact the military. The war conditions being what they were, the far garrisons had all they could do to defend themselves. Moreover, they were all watched by the hostile Apaches. To have gone into one of them would have been to simply join a surrounded, cutoff detachment of frightened men, with further complications of explaining Amy Johnston. They would certainly have been detained by the post commander until a proper escort could be furnished out of the area, and that could mean anything from thirty days to three months. All the party, including Amy Johnston, preferred the little risk now left in reaching the Utah line.
A sole concession was made to Big Bat’s conscience.
The little cavalcade waited in the moonlight a mile from Defiance while the big Canuck rode in and tossed a note wrapped around a rock over the stockade and aroused the sleepy sentries on the catwalk with a cautiously subdued bellow of “Allons! Mes petits!” to make sure they understood the message was not from Mangas the Younger or any of his murderous friends.
The note contained what meager information the French-
Canadian scout had been able to buy from Soledad Dominguin concerning the intentions of the Comanches to join the Kiowas in building a late summer war fire on the South Plains. Added was a terse instruction to put the details on the telegraph to Colonel Adam McNair at Fort Cobb, Indian Territory; the whole, not over six or seven sentences marked with the soft lead of a knife-shaved bullet nose on the flyleaf torn from Lame John’s Bible, was signed and sealed with an undecipherably flourished “Baptiste Pourier.”