I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

I have no reason to doubt it

  Geronimo waited until Sieber and me and Merijilda had our sixty-two Indians all mounted and lined out ready to trail down to the Bavispe. Then he showed.

  He patted Sieber on the back and thanked him for taking all those poor, broke-down, and agey Indians off his hands, as they hampered him on his raids, etc. Sieber patted him right back and told him not to fret over it, as those agey Indians would be in fine fettle long after Geronimo had been cut down by a soldier bullet. "But of course, jefe, that is what you wish," he said. "A war chief goes to war. He likes to die."

  Geronimo behaved like he didn't get the point, turning his back on Sieber to smile on me.

  "Look out," Merijilda said in my ear. "He is coming to it now. I should have told you, hermano. But I was afraid you would get us all killed."

  "What in God's name you talking about?" I said.

  "You will see," Merijilda Grijole replied. "Lo siento mucho, hombre. What could we have done?"

  "By God," I said, the thought draining me, "it's Nopal, ain't it? You've learn't something!" I accused him. "She's dead!"

  Merijilda shook his head. "Be still, hombre," he warned. "Listen to Gokliya, and don't talk."

  In the stillness following that, Geronimo edged his mount forward. He brought him almost to my boot toes.

  "I have a reward for you," he said to me. "Some payment for your good work you did here and in other places I remember." He put a meaning on the part about those other places he remembered, staring it into me. Then, he turned to the knot of hard-faced bucks who had come with him to say good-bye to Iron Man. "Bring it over here!" he called in Apache. "Bring out our gift for this young interpreter."

  Out of the group of Chiricahua scowlers rode Hal-zay, the magnificent Indian from the crossing of the Bavispe. He bore a bundle before him on the horn of his saddle. I could not imagine what variety of present it might contain, being of no familiar shape or dimension. But, in the silence of Hal-zay's approach, a hint came plaintively from the bundle itself. It was a cry, muffled but yet distinct and singular enough even to a fool like Tom Horn.

  That was a baby they had in those wrappings—my baby.

  Merijilda, standing faithfully with me as he ever did, saw my struck look. "Yes, it is yours," he said, "but think very hard before you do anything with it."

  Before I might query him on that, Hal-zay was there holding out the bundle to me.

  "We don't want it," was every word he said.

  Al Sieber, who had meanwhile gotten up on his mule, moved that animal in between us, blocking me.

  "Don't take it!" he said sharply. "Once you accept it, it can never go back to these people. You refuse it, and it's still theirs."

  "But, my God, Al, it ain't theirs; it's mine!"

  I butted up past the Jenny mule to come at Hal-zay again. "Where is the mother?" I demanded. "Where is my young wife Nopal? The child is hers alone to give!"

  "She does give it!" barked Hal-zay angrily.

  "Where is she?" I insisted. "Let me hear her say it"

  "No."

  "I knew it! She is dead, then."

  "No."

  "What, no? Then how? Safe, happy, sick, what?"

  "Take the child."

  "No, now I will say it to you. No."

  "If you do not, I will smash its head." Hal-zay raised his gun butt as if to do the very terrible thing, but again the old German was before me, shoving Jenny once more between us. His face was a dark red, like beef liver.

  "Warrior," he rumbled from the chest, "if you touch that baby, your own brains will be splashed on your fine saddle." He stood in his stirrups to yell past Hal-zay, to Geronimo. "Now, I am getting mad, Gokliya. You let this cub of old Cochise's come up here and make a fool of me, threatening my talking boy, holding up my Indians, here, who want to be on the trail to their new home. I want to know, right now, what is your purpose?"

  Sieber was getting one of his famous "mads" on. Geronimo knew it and answered him quick and straight.

  The child's mother, the Yaqui girl known as Nopal, was now the wife of his nephew Hal-zay, he said. He, Geronimo, had given his concern in the young squaw to Hal-zay as a wedding gift. The woman was presently home down in Mexico, carrying Hal-zay's baby. She had "given" the other baby to be taken to Terras Mountain, when she heard Talking Boy would be there.

  Geronimo flung up a hand to make an accent.

  "She said that Talking Boy only talked. He promised to come back for her and her baby, but he never did it. ‘Give him his child,' she told me. ‘I will have my own. Tell him Nopal waited a long time for him. Tell him the baby's name is Sombra, after its father's shadow. Tell the father that the mother never thinks of him anymore.' "

  The famed chief lowered the unflung arm.

  "Now you have the truth,'' he said to Sieber. "Hal-zay loved the woman, after stealing her from Pedro's village. The woman is in good health. I think your talking boy is lucky to be the same. We don't want any trouble here. Do you?"

  Sieber now raised his arm.

  And quick.

  "No trouble, jefe," he said. "Ease your men."

  I started forward at this point, determined to take the child before it might come to grievous hurt. The old German reached out with his good foot and fetched me a kick in the chest, going by, that like to caved in my wishbone. "Stay out of this, Talking Boy," he said. "There's a current settin' in here that's running deeper than you been trained to get acrost. Backwater, damn you!"

  Hal-zay upreared his rifle butt once more.

  "You will not take the child?" he said.

  "He can't take it!" Sieber flared at the Indian. "You know that would spoil the child for being received again by its mother's people. What are you trying to do, warrior? Kill a little baby? Is that the great fighter we've all heard about? The famous hesh-ke half brother to Tahza and Naiche?"

  Instantly, Hal-zay reined back his horse, crying out, "I will kill you, Iron Man!" and the clot of warriors with Geronimo surged forward to back him with their guns. It would have been one more "dark and bloody ground in Arizona" right then and there, but for one person brainier than the lot of us added together, red and white.

  "Idiotas!" screeched old Mary Cornmeal, hobbling down from the side of the nearby rise, where she had been waiting to go with the Geronimo people back to their stronghold in Sierra del Norte. "What is all this cháchara about the giving law and killing small babies with gun butts?" She puffed up to Hal-zay, confronting him with raised walking cane.

  "You want to make laws, do you, big baby fighter?" she snapped. "I will give you a law. Yes, and you, too, simpleton," she said to Geronimo. "Don't try to hide from me behind this braying burro who says he is the seed of Cochise. I wiped your bottom often enough when you were a baby this size, Yawner. I can still do it!"

  She whirled back upon Hal-zay, almost falling down with the vim of the turn.

  "Here is your law," she rasped. "If another Indian of the people accepts the child for the alien father, the child remains of our people. You recall that rule? Well, you had better!" She brandished the walking stick. "I accept this child for its father; give it over to me, at once."

  Hal-zay looked helplessly to Geronimo.

  Geronimo made an angry sign, meaning yes. Was not Mary Cornmeal the own-sister of Nana, and an elder of the Warm Springs tribal keepers, and council on laws? Santa! They were helpless. The old magpie had them by the cajones. Give the brat over to her. Ugashe!

  Hal-zay obeyed, glaring at me as old Mary took the whimpering bundle to her scrawny breast.

  He didn't say anything.

  Neither did Tom Horn.

  Geronimo and his war bucks rode away, Hal-zay going last behind them. They took a "Mexican" direction, southeasterly around the shoulder of Terras Mountain. Sieber ordered our remaining sixty-plus Indians, now including Mary Cornmeal and the baby, to move out at once down the Bavispe River trail. We reached the crossing for noon-halt but went on over and kept going. We were deep into Mexico, an
d Sieber wanted to get back into U.S. country mas pronto.

  It had been a bad journey for him.

  Getting back over the border with our Indians, few and mostly aged as they were, was the best he could hope to get out of it, now.

  As for my lasting memory of it, it was seeing old Mary Cornmeal coming along on her ratty-ass mule, Mangas, holding Nopal's and my baby in her arms and singing "Pajarito Barranqueno" (Little Bright-eyed Bird) to it, in a fifty-fifty mix of Apache and Mexican.

  She was a grand old lady.

  The baby, Sombra, was a boy, about eight months old when we got him. He was near-dark as a pickaninny for hide, very ugly, and with jug-handle ears that stuck out from under his thatch of black wild hair, to brand him mine, then and thereafter, amen.

  The last I heard of him, he was living with old Mary and her grandson Merijilda Grijole, somewhere down in Sonora state. Near Fronteras, I think. There was even some story that his mother was with them, later on, Hal-zay having been killed by an old man blind on tizwin. Nopal never coming up out of Mexico to surrender, it may have been so that she joined Mary and Merijilda, as commonly told around San Carlos. I scarcely know.

  That was some many winters back, even after I looked for them before leaving Arizona. The boy would have been seven years old at that time. I mean sure to find him and his mother, when I get home again to Arizona.

  I know it wont be too late. Not ever.

  People can always start again.

  Closing Up

  Going almost up to the Mex line with our sixty-odd Apache "peacefuls," we veered over to the Bonito Canyon and hid in it until American troops could get down and "escort us in" officially. Our boys showed up in time to bluff off some Mexican Cavalry that had got on our tails, and we went on into San Carlos with no trouble. There, we done good, too.

  Another batch of hostiles, forty-nine of them, came in right after we did, and on their own. They were from the Mescal Meadow meet, and thus were credit on Al Sieber's ledger. Which naturally meant on Tomasito Horn's, also. For the next months of that winter of 1878-79 small bands of wild Indians dribbled into San Carlos, all of them driving stolen Mexican horse stock ahead of them. We picked up another couple hundred hostiles with these winter dribbles. Fact was, I spent all of my time running down to the border to bring over these horse thieves (including their stolen animals) in a way to get them through (around) the U.S. Customs station at San Bernardino. There was a heavy duty on Mex stock to prevent just this kind of Indian thieving, but the U.S. men had to look the other way and the Mexican owners to foam at the mouth from despair.

  The Indians would not come in without their horses.

  And we had to get the Indians in.

  I think they call it politics.

  The main Mex paper in Tucson, El Fronterizo, suffered editorial stroke every edition for months, but I don't know of a solitary case where the government paid over a dollar of proper duty to any of the Mexican horse ranchers. But what could the poor sungrinners do? The U.S. had the soldiers.

  The spring of 79, a really big surrender of hostiles took place. Hundreds of them came in by day and by night, for weeks on end. The winter had been fierce in Sonora and Chihuahua states, bitter cold, with the Mexican Army driving after the bárbaros without letup. The U.S. was the "lucky" winner. Old Loco, for example, had 650 Indians with him, at San Carlos, by that spring. Sieber had me secretly run a herd count on their stock—just this one band now mind you—and I made it something over five thousand head of horses and mules! San Carlos was running over its Apache cup. Only Geronimo and Juh were still down in the Sierra Madre del Norte fighting the Mexicans. And of course we considered them hopeless anyhow. But them and their Chiricahua aside, it seemed to Sieber and me that we had about cornered the Apache Indian market for the San Carlos Agency, come that early summer.

  We were precisely right.

  In June 1879, all the scouts and interpreters were again cut loose and fired off the reservation. The excuse was the same as before; appropriations had run out and the Quartermaster department was broke. Good-bye, Al Sieber and son! They had done it to you yet; once more.

  They had also lied to us again.

  The real reason for our turning out was that the soft-on-Indian people back east had got control again, fired Major Chaffee, and put in a damn civilian, name of Tiffany, as agent at San Carlos. He was the bastard had us run off, and no wonder. In his first year, starting August of 79, he came up short $54,000 in his accounts, and was the next several years in the territorial courts explaining "how" he had done it.

  Me and Sieber already knew how it worked.

  Tiffany just sold all the Apaches' supplies in the private market at five dollars a hundred for flour, ten dollars a hundred for sugar, and like prices for everything that ought to have gone to his Indians, and he was undercutting the civilian merchants by about 120 percent, the way Al Sieber and I worked it out for ourselves. Tiffany got rich and got arrested. The Indians went hungry and raised hell about it and got shot. Tiffany to my memory never served a day in jail. The Apaches served life sentences, every one of them, and died by the hundreds for their wrong of being born Indians, and free, and wanting to stay both.

  It did not seem to me their human spirits could bear another winter of such justice; the Apache had finally to fail. Swift-off, it appeared I was right.

  In December, Geronimo and Juh, with 108 men, women, and pups of all ages, asked unexpectedly to surrender through the old friend of Cochise, Tom Jeffords. The place was agreed as old Camp Rucker, a supply base in Cochise County. Neither Sieber nor me could go down, of course, being fired. Archie McIntosh, General Crook's old chief of scouts, was the one did the interpreting. The officer who took the surrender for the army was a Captain A. S. Haskell, aide to General Willcox. It did now look to be for undeniable certain that the "broncos had been broke." Al Sieber knew better.

  "Wait," was all he said.

  One month later, almost to the day, January 1880, Victorio, rumored to have with him 350 fighting men of mixed Chiricahua, Mescalero, and his own Warm Springs wild ones, swept up the Rio Puerco Valley burning, killing, and looting through the San Mateo Mountains. The raid went 90 days and 900 miles, and when it ended with Victorio safely back into Mexico, the Apache war blood was stirred into a six-year killing fever.

  From that day and date it was war to the last warrior. The army knew at length what Iron Man Sieber and Talking Boy Horn had been telling it since 1876. The Chiricahua, the bad Apaches, whether Warm Springs, Nednhi, Bedonkohe, or Cochise bands, had got to be destroyed. The only way it could be done was by blood-trail pursuit right on into Mexico. But it was to require another two years of unavoidable dah-eh-sah for the good Apache, and ambush body counts of their own dead by the cavalry, to convince the government back in Washington, D.C., of the same thing. And we who had to hold off the hostiles, meanwhile, did not have two years to wait. Not for what we scouts called our "Hot Trail" Treaty with Mexico, nor for anything from Washington, D.C. We had to do the job with what we already had of weapons—nothing but our guts against the Indians' guts, our Winchesters against their Winchesters. Our officers had their orders, and passed them on to us: Keep after the devils; run the last Cherry Cow Indian out of the U.S. of A. "dead or killed;" build a cavalry bonfire under the Chiricahua that would burn out every last jacal, wickiup, rancheria, or secret camping place known to the wild Indians.

  And then burn the Indians.

  Naturally, Tom Horn and Al Sieber was called back for the torching.

  We didn't go entire because of the pay. $150 a month.

  We could have made as much or more meat-hunting for the mining camps. But we had got infected with the six-year fever. Killing a human being that had to be killed got to be like that. Me and Al Sieber, we couldn't stand to stay behind when "Boots and Saddles" was sounding, the ammunition being issued, the packmules diamond hitched, and our tame Apaches that was going with us to run their bad brothers starting to cry out and ki-yi like redb
one hounds.

  We had to go. The trumpets was blaring again. I ran for my rangy bay, Sieber limped for his Jenny mule. Hostile Apache trail had been cut, and we must run it to the kill. "Mount up! Mount up!" the sergeants bawled, and "Forward ho!" the lieutenants. Column twos and column fours, the salty troopers rode. Some would die and some get wounds and all grow older in a hurry. But that was how they drew their pay. The same as me and Sieber. Find the track of those "bad ones," run it down, start the rifles barking. Let the dust fall. Have a smoke. Check the dead and kill the crawlers—living wounded—count them all alike, "good Injuns," and go home, true heroes.

  When the Apache undertake a journey of the people one man is appointed "closing-up rider." He is the one who keeps the nomad marchers bunched and moving to their ending place. Now it had come time for Tom Horn to be the closing-up rider on his own journey with the Apache people. What remained must be bunched and moved along.

  There was six years of Indian fights to come, the ones where I was in them myself. These I mean to note in their order, and the bare bones of them only. Call it a Tom Horn field book maybe. It will be some mistakes in it here and there, and things left out deliberate to spare decent folk still living. But the meat of it won't shine of taint, nor stink from being spoilt; it will hang prime.

  Here is where the guidons flew that followed me and Sieber on that six-year march to kill the Chiricahua broncos.

  Cibicu Creek

  In May of 1880 Victorio came back up out of Mexico to set things off. He raided thirty days through the Black and Mogollon ranges, killing to our count thirteen American Mexes and seventy-eight Anglos, including soldiers, settlers, and travelers.

  Me and Sieber, with a lean troop of our Apache scouts, pursued Victorio's main bunch for three straight weeks. We got into five shooting scrapes with them but got only three Apache dead to show for it, two of them squaws. We did not, as was accused, kill any of the Indian kids and never did except through accident of fire.

  Good old General Willcox was in career trouble now, regardless. The newspapers and the damned Indian apologizers in Washington, D.C., lied about our low casualty claims, saying, "The notorious Tom Horn and the Prussian Sieber are said to have ‘accounted for' no less than two-score of the fleeing Indians, over half of them helpless children." Such miserable falsehoods were naturally credited to Willcox's command. We saw one eastern report that actually accused the general of "trying too hard to kill Indians." No commander can win a war like that where the real enemy, the lying reporters, can make up their own battle blamings and bogus body totals.