by Will Henry
"Very well," he said at last, "recall them."
Thus it was the word came once more to Tombstone for Tom Horn and Al Sieber to report "back active."
But Al would not go. His rheumatism was terrible on him just then, and he could not get up into the saddle of his ancient gray Jenny mule to even report for the duty. "Horn," he said, "go and take my place. It is your time, at last. You will do the job."
And so I came alone to the last grim running of the Chiricahua. It went short and mean and dismal.
The command was actually under Captain H. W. Lawton, but Gatewood called me aside and said to go and get my old war dog troop out of Pedro's rancheria and meet him on the trail to Haros River, where Lawton and his super troops was then camped, having lost the line on Geronimo's fleeing fighters. "Don't worry about Lawton," the officer confided to me. "We will get around him." And he was right. He never went near Lawton (like his orders read) but crossed Haros River and, on a hot track found by me and Chikisin and Merijilda Grijole, drove eighty miles down Fronteras way. In three days we arrived at the Chiricahua camp in the Terras (Torres) Mountains. Me and Merijilda went in alone and arranged for Geronimo and Nachee to meet with Bay-chen-day-sen ("Big Nose"), which was their name for homely Captain Gatewood.
The Cherry Cows were done in and, moreover, honored Gatewood as a good man and friend of Red Beard Crook.
At the end of two days interpreting (by Tom Horn) Geronimo stood up and made the talk that got into the history books, ending with those fateful words: "We will go with you to surrender to General Miles. Send that word to him. Ask him to meet us in the Canyon of the Skeleton, and say you will travel with us to that place."
On the next day, August 25, Geronimo and Nachee, with twenty-two warriors and fourteen women and children, began the long march back with Captain Gatewood. Miles met us at the canyon, took Geronimo and Nachee in charge, and transported them by army ambulance to Fort Bowie. There we found out that Bear Coat had traitorously arrested all the Chiricahua—382 Apache souls—under false pretense of a routine "head count" for rations, at Fort Apache, while us and Gatewood had been in Mexico.
Within that same week, Miles arrested most of our loyal war dog Apache scouts, as well, and threw them all on the same train for Florida. Just ten days from Geronimo surrendering in Skeleton Canyon, him and all the Chiricahua was in irons and "on the cars" for Fort Marion, in Florida.
As the prison train left from Bowie Station, the band from the Fourth Cavalry played a nice rendition of "Auld Lang Syne."
So the Arizona days drew down for Tom Horn.
With Geronimo gone and Nopal disappeared, I could see clearly the track ahead. The Indian trail was not to be the ending place of my life, as I had dreamed it to be. I had I ridden out its dimming page of pony hoofprints and had read on it the footnote that despaired me most:
My old German was failing.
His Civil War and Apache war cripplings, the agony of rheumatics that they caused in him, the unhealable great open abscess that was his pitiful left foot, all had grown ever more intolerable both to him and to the army. Each painful day now brought him nearer to the end of his employment as a scout. Already he had lost his chief-of-scouts ranking to me, and the changing made a hurt that I could see far back in the deep black eyes. Our time had dwindled down to its own ending place.
Should I, his boy, have left Al Sieber in his decline, before he himself knew that Seebie's day was twilight lit, it would have been no different than abandoning a hit comrade under battlefield fire. God will know, and my true friends, also, that I would never do that to Old Mad. He was the parent to me that my own father never was, nor could have been. As long as Iron Man could sit the saddle, Tom Horn would side him out. But when the day came, as now it had, where he could no longer get aboard his Jenny mule when the bugles blew, that day would be the last one in Arizona Territory for his son Talking Boy.
Thus were the campaigns ended that brought Al Sieber and me to our final parting. They faded away with Geronimo run to his dying earth, the Chiricahua wild ones scattered forever. It seems like nothing to see these notes. But, ah! every word of them was a splash of Apache blood.
Every line an Indian life.
Chi-ki-sin, forgive us.
Ending Place
I had now been eleven years away from Wyaconda Creek and the Horn farm, in Scotland County, Missouri.
Ten of those years had been spent in the Arizona Territory with the Apache Indians. A man just doesn't saddle up and ride off from such a span of his lifetime, but I was determined to do it. A rumor had come that Miles was disbanding the scout force, firing the civilians first. Well, I had about my fill of that. I went up and resigned from the service, then and there, before they could order me off the reservation again.
In the office of Miles's aide, I ran into Al Sieber.
He was feeling some recovered, and I was pleasured to learn the army had offered to keep him on.
When I told him what I'd done, he just nodded and said, "Yes, I envy you. You're young. That's the time to ride away." He shook the bullet head, now showing iron gray, the old growl but an echo. "I waited too long," he said. "Now I can't do it. We ain't up to it, me and old Jenny. They're pensioning us both, Horn."
He stopped, looking down south toward the Sierra Madre and Mexico.
"Ride out, bucko," he said. "If you hear hoofbeats coming behind you, it will be me and Jenny, but don't look around. It'll only be our shadows follering on."
Nothing I could say would cheer him. Finally, we made our parting. It didn't no way match up to what we wanted to say of good-byes. It don't never.
"Yeah, well," I managed, swinging up on my restless horse, "hasta la vista."
Al Sieber nodded, raised one gnarled hand.
"Cuidado" was his single word to cover the ten years of it.
I went up White River to Pedro's rancheria and was aiming to say good-bye, but there wasn't anybody there I wanted to touch the brow to. The chief was sick, over to Fort Huachuca seeing the army surgeon. Chikisin had gone with him. Sawn, my Apache "sister," had gone off down into Mexico somewheres with Mickey Free. Her nine kids, by at least four fathers, was along with them. I finally asked for Na-to, (Tobacco), figuring she was too old to be traveling, but the eldest wife of Pedro had taken her journey the spring before. It was to visit Yosen in his great kinh ("house") up above the moon. The Apache who told me this said, as I was leaving, that he had just remembered an old friend of mine who was at home. "In fact," he said, "he's staying with me."
I went with him to his wickiup, glad enough.
It's a wan-gill feeling to come home and find all of your friends have gone away. At least I would get to talk to someone who could remember me with sufficient kindness to care that I had come. Whoever it was, they would help me lighten my burden of chin-da-see-le, homesickness. But I had forgotten that Apaches count all things as old friends.
My guide, Choddi, (Antelope), told me to wait outside his house, por favor. "It is a very old friend who waits in there," he said. "He might not recognize you in the darkness." I heard a jangle of chain, a rasping growl, and out came Choddi dragging a bundle of moldy bones and falling hair and trembling hindquarters that at first I didn't realize was a stone-blind timber wolf.
But the poor thing got a whiff of me and quit growling and went to making circles with his mangy tail, and I said, "My God, is that you, Snarler?" and when he heard my voice he commenced to whimper and bawl and, well, it was all I might do not to join him, I was that choked.
"Yes," Choddi said, "Snarler."
"Well," I said, rubbing the old wreck's ears, "I am happy that you are taking care of him."
"I have been meaning to," Choddi nodded, "but other matters have interfered."
"What?" I said. "Tell that again."
"I promised Sister Sawn I would shoot him, while she and the children are away. But I haven't done it yet. To tell you the truth, Talking Boy, I haven't got a bullet for my gun."
I
took the rusted chain from the Indian. "I will take care of him for you," I said. "You tell Sister Sawn that I did it. Tell her Snarler remembered me."
"Mil gracias," said Choddi. "Ussen guard your horses."
"Y lo mismo a usted," I answered, touching the brow.
My horse was trained, as all I ever rode, to walk behind me, off rein or on. Now the animal was following me and Snarler down the river to the forks of the White and Black. I wanted a pretty place for the old tame wolf, one where he could watch the game trails and hear his kinfolk howling off over in the Sawbuck Mountains. I knew the spot.
We climbed to it, and him and me sat up there a spell. He couldn't see a lick, but his old white muzzle worked that upriver wind better than most human sets of eyes, and he give a soft moaning sort of sound that I knew was his thank-yous for bringing him to a decent place. I eased out my Colt's .44 and shot him in the back of the neck, and he just gave a little sigh and sunk down right where he was. I left him lay there, head pointing down the wild lower canyon of the White. My last Apache friend.
Down below, I got on my horse and gave him his head.
He was a rangy tall bay of the kind I liked, black legs, a star and no snip, eyes full and dark as an Arab's, a reaching easy gait that ate the miles like magic. He was what the Mexican hotblood breeders called a kehilan, a Barb or Turkey word that meant "drinker of the wind." I called him Sheik, and had given four prices for him off a Sonora breeder down Fronteras way. Now I didn't call him nothing. Just turned him loose with me on him.
But he knew the way to go.
Upriver was Indian country and would be for our time.
Downstream lay the trail out.
Sheik just gave a low whicker, blew out soft through his nostril bells, and struck out down the river.
I was to wander three more springs in Arizona, and search through as many winters, looking for Nopal and little Sombra, yes, and trying to find something of my own-self somewhere in the long ride, but I never made it. The new grass followed every snow, and Tom Horn followed every new grass. When that last spring of 1890 came along, I had found nothing. But that summer something at last found me. It was a letter from the Pinkerton Detective Agency's home office, in Denver, Colorado. The "Pinks" had heard of Tom Horn, and decided he was the man hunter they wanted to hire that August, Enjuh, ugashe, so be it.
That night, me and Sheik left Tombstone in the dead of the two-A.M. darkness. I didn't want anybody to know we had gone, nor which direction we had took. There was no more good-byes for me in Arizona. My sombra, my shadow, was warning me. Get out! Get out! If you don't, you will be like Sieber, staying too long. Adiós muchachos. Enjuh, schichobes. Ride away, Talking Boy, ride away. If you hear hoofbeats following you, remember what old Al said. Don't look back. Only shadows are there.
So it was me and the rangy bay went north.
We thought it was Denver we were bound for, but Denver was not our north. We had another place to go up there, old Sheik and me. It was to be our ending place.
History called it by another name.
And wrote it dark for me.
It was Wyoming.
Book Three
Pinkerton Detour
I went by way of Tucson, the Pinkerton letter having advised that route. I was to meet their man in a certain saloon there, down in the Mexican quarter. Idea of that was to save me the long ride up into Colorado, if their contact didn't figure I was all the Arizona papers libeled me into being. Which was to say, liar, cheat, Indian lover, ambusher and bushwhacker, bullshitter, ladies' man, big talker, and top tracker. The last proved to be what the "Eye That Never Sleeps" was interested in, lucky for the liar and cheat and bull thrower.
I got me a chair and drug it to the front wall of El Coyotero, the cantina designated for the meet. I have a working suspicion of such meetings and never took on one full face. I would lay back in the dark against my wall and let the other fellow walk into the lamplight and show himself first. I would then contact him. Or I would if he looked safe. That is to say, appeared to be looking to hire a man and not collect the bounty on him.
If I didn't take to his cut, it would be either gun or run, depending on which "out" I was offered. I did not ever shoot my way out of any set, or deadfall, where I could escape it sombra-style. To "shadder out" of a scrape, as they say, is second nature to a scout and hunter like Tom Horn. The idea of a market hunter, and that is what I had been for the past ten years, whether stalking whitetails or muleys for venison, or Chiricahuas or white cow thieves for blood money, the idea, to repeat, was to "bring home the bacon." If you didn't fetch back the game you had gone after, or furnish cold proof it was dead meat where you'd left it, you didn't get paid. And Tom Horn never worked free.
That night, however, I didn't expect any trouble; my sombra wasn't twinging me any. After all, the Pinkertons were not pony apples. They had run the U.S. Secret Service during the Civil War and were "the law" most feared by the guilty throughout all the West. When you got a letter from them, handwrote by Mr. James McParlan, the Denver superintendent—and the man who had busted up the outlaw coal miner gang, the Molly Maguires, single-handed —you didn't look to get cut down by their agent.
You could get outflanked, though.
"Hello," said the low voice behind me. "If you were already on salary, I'd fire you."
"Yes," I said. "And if you hadn't of spoke up just now when you did, your wife would of had to buy a black dress. You made more noise coming through that winder than a drunk going up a gutter pipe to get into his house without using the front door. What kept you?"
It wasn't a cold bluff, it was stiff-froze.
I did remember there was a paneless window cut in the adobe wall on along from where I was. And I did figure he had to have crawled through that. But mostly I was betting blind. Which sometimes works.
He laughed a low chuckle and said, "You're hired."
And that was how I met W. C. "Doc" Shores, the sheriff of Gunnison County, Colorado. He introduced himself, saying he hoped I was Tom Horn, but if I wasn't, I would do. Naturally, I admitted I was guilty. Shores nodded and said, "Come on, I will buy us the bottle. They got to have a back room here, where we can lay this thing out."
I knew the El Coyotero like the inside of Sister Sawn's wickiup. Being Mexican, it was my dish. I liked the people and their cooking and the real way they looked at life and, had I a second choice to being born a Chiricahua Apache, I'd have made it sungrinner Mexican. So I said to the owner Manuel Arroyo, "Don't let anyone disturb us, hombre, Just send us in a bottle of the best you got. We are going into the back room and don't need any compañeras de cuarto. Comprende?" I winked. "No chanza esta noche."
Manuel nodded. "Lo entiendo," he said. "No fun tonight."
"Yes," I specified. "And no roommates."
"Sí, amigo. Only the girl who brings your glasses."
"Bueno."
"Gracias. Enjoy the night."
"Sí, bueno. Lo mismo. Saludos."
"Suerte," Manuel said. "Where is that damned girl?" Shores stood aside, holding the cowhide curtain for me to precede him into the alcove.
"I can see," he said, "why the Indians named you Talking Boy."
"You talk, you learn things," I answered.
"Talk can kill you," he said. "Remember it."
I was to remember it, God knows. But that was yet years to the north. For now I was sitting pretty tall on my horse. People knew of Tom Horn. Big people. Important ones. Even the Pinkertons. In the man-hunting business they didn't grow no bigger nor more important than the Eye. And they had sent to find Tom Horn. Who was Doc Shores to schoolteach me? The sheriff of Gunnison County? Hell, I had worked for Buckey O'Neill, of Yavapai. And Glenn Reynolds, Gila County. Yes, and Commodore Owens, over in Apache County. Real lawmen, gun packers, shooters, cold trailers. The best. Yet had the Pinks sent for them? Even for them? Hell no.
They had sent for Tom Horn.
"Tell you what," I said to the Gunnison sheriff, meeting his e
yes across the rickety table we settled to inside the alcove. "You keep quiet and I'll keep talking. It ain't my style to sing low. Was it, I reckon Mr. McParlan wouldn't never have heard of Tom Horn."
Shores stared back. He had the palest blue eyes I ever saw. And he was a big cuss, like me. Six two, maybe. Going close to two hundred pounds. All catgut and baling wire. It occurred to me a little late in the evening that maybe Mr. Sheriff W. C. "Doc" Shores had also ridden down a few men in his own time.
"Horn," he said, not unpleasant but no grin to crinkle the edges of it neither, "McParlan never had heard of Tom Horn. It was me told them who to write."
"You did? I'll be damned. Well, thanks." I frowned after a moment's thinking it over. "Say," I said, "how come you to hear of me?"
"It's my business to know who will kill a man if he has to. I keep a list. You're on it."
"Be damned if I am!" I bit back at him. "I ain't never killed anybody. Not white, I ain't."
Shores tapped his vest pocket. "There's a New Mexico warrant in here says you did."
"The hell!"
"And a Texas."
"Christ Jesus, I ain't ever even been in Texas!"
"Tell that to them. They think you have."
"That's just talk, goddamnit."
"In Texas they call it testimony. Juries believe it. Judges sentence on it. Same for New Mexico. But the rope, now, it don't say a word. Never."
I knew those stories about Tom Horn in Texas and New Mexico. Every time some poor son of a bitch was found shot out in the lonelies, Tom Horn was given the credit. It got to be like I was running out hanging warrants for old Lucifer. Whoever got hit, it was my bullet. I had always more or less let those lies ride, seeing how pale they turned folks faces who was watching me. It made a man feel dangerous. Mysterious. Big on the land. Yet he knew he hadn't done the things they said. None of them that involved white men. So what harm could come of letting people scare themselves? They enjoyed it too.