I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  Shores was watching me, waiting on me.

  I reached for the bottle, wondering where the hell Manuel's girl was with our glasses. Uncorking it, I took a long pull, slid the bottle over toward the Gunnison lawman. He caught it and tilted it without wiping off the neck of it. It gave me a minute.

  Trouble with those Tom Horn killer lies was that they had followed me out of the Indian scouting service. The most of the past three, four years out of army work, I'd put in punching cows and busting bronks for the big outfits like the Chiricahua Cattle Company and the Hash Knife (Aztec Land & Cattle Company) and suchlike. I had even rode a little for smaller ranchers, of the stripe of Ed Tewksbury, until him and the Grahams got into it in the Pleasant Valley sheep fight. And, damn it, no matter if the outfits were big or small, knowed or unknowed, if a man got it out in the chaparral, no witnesses, no sign left about that even an Apache Indian could follow, why it was just automatic that "Tom Horn done it." Several of those lonesome corpses had been white. Those were the ones you didn't want added to your score. But there was those Texas and New Mexico fábulas again. With me letting them grow, grinning over the starts they gave folks, they had taken such root that they'd spread five hundred and a thousand miles, over the years, springing up finally right here under my feet in Arizona.

  Damn! And Doc Shores had those bogus warrants and I didn't dast contest them, and he was still peering at me out of those frosty blue eyes, and I threw in.

  "You are right about judges and juries," I conceded. "I found that out working for the Chiricahua Cattle people and some others of the big outfits. We would bring in our rustlers and horse thieves, with the goods on them cold turkey, and they would, by God, nine times out of eight, walk away from the courtroom laughing at the law and at us boobs what caught them busting it and drug them in to stand before the bar. Shit."

  "Which is to say," guessed Doc Shores, "that you will take the case."

  "It wouldn't be fair to the Pinkerton folks not to."

  "If there's anything I admire outrightly in a man," nodded W. C. Shores, "it is that he's fair. And I can see that fairness shines forth from you in a quality to blind the eyes of Diogenes."

  "Must be new in these parts," I said. "I ain't heard of him." I scratched my head. "Greaser or gringo?"

  "Greek," said Doc Shores.

  I pushed back from the table. "You have got the wrong boy," I said. "I ain't working with no curlyhair foreigners. This Diogenes feller may be all right, but I—"

  "Chop it off at the shoulders," the Colorado lawman scowled, interrupting me. "Shut up and listen."

  The job was to go after a Colorado horse thief who had been costing the ranchers up in Doc Shores's county thousands of dollars. Doc had been hard after him, on a special assignment for the Pinkertons, when he had lost the trail in Arizona. That's where I came in. The story was that this bastard had got over the line into Mexico, and the Pinks, by damn, wanted him back. They still hung horse thieves up in Colorado, and they meant to hang this one high. His stringing-up would serve to be like the coyote hide hung on the bob-wire fence. It would warn off other coyotes (horse thieves) to stay shut of land where the Pinkertons was employed.

  Shores knew nothing of the fugitive, except that he was a Mexican. He used the name Sancarlos, which ought to have told me something, but didn't. Of course, that wasn't his real name. He was said to have friends among the Apache Indians, particularly in Sonora. It was this part of the case that had suggested Tom Horn to Sheriff Shores. If anybody in Arizona could go down into Mexico and find a Mexican and haul him back for hanging as 'an American horse thief, it ought to be Talking Boy Horn.

  I tried to tell Shores I had cut the lead rope twixt me and the Indians. He rightly argued that you could never do that. "Being a squaw man," he finished, "puts a st—" He started to say puts a stink on a man that is forever in his hide, but changed it to, "well, you know, Horn, puts a strange mark on a man. It won't come off in water, nor wash out with settlement soap. You can go among them where I would be dry-gulched the first day. What do you say? The Pinkertons pay first-rate and on the date. You bring this man in, I can get you on the payroll permanent. How old you now, Horn?"

  It hit me like a blunt arrow; I had to think.

  "Thirty," I finally said. "I don't believe it!"

  "Time to think past pickup cow work."

  "God, yes. Jesus. Thirty years old!" I shook my head like a wolf trying to scatter a bad mouthful of poison bait. But the bitter taste scalded still. "All right," I said, "give me the warrant."

  He gave me the document, and I never glanced at it but stuck it inside my vest. "Where do you want him brought?" I asked.

  "Here," he said. "I'll wait three days."

  "Three days?"

  "I've a tip he's over in the San Pedro Valley. Never went into Mexico. A half-breed name of Nino Pinto spies for me up in Gunnison. Knows this fellow we're after and has located his track down past the Pantano Wash. Says it runs westerly, into the Santa Rita peaks. Pinto's over there in Pantano now. You know where the Santa Rita lateral comes into the main wash? He'll be there."

  "How come you and him don't run this track, if it's so all-fired hot and near?"

  "I told you. This Mex is up in those rocks with some Apache friends—maybe. Neither me nor Nino Pinto is apt to last long enough to climb the first ridge. You can get in there. At least, I told McParlan you could."

  I wanted the job. That thirty years old reminder had spooked me bad. Could be that detective work on the range would be my true life's calling. I better find out. "I'm gone," I said, starting up from the table.

  Just then there was a tinkle of glasses on metal outside the cowhide curtain of the alcove. Doc Shores whip-snaked around the table, caught the guilty girl, and drug her into the alcove so fast I was yet bent over getting up. I didn't even have time to turn to see our eavesdropper, face-on.

  "Well now, little espía" the Gunnison sheriff accused her, "how much did you hear out there? Come on, digame."

  "No, no, patrón," the Mex girl denied the charge. "Yo no persona que escucha a escondidas lo que no debe oír." She was saying that she was never a person who listened to the "hidden things" of others. But I did not care what she said. I knew that voice. I had heard it a hundred times in lonely dreams since Santa Fe and the address of numero tres, Calle Cantina. I swung hard around, and it was her. "Lord God," I said. "Pajarita Morena."

  "Hombre!" was all she whispered back to me.

  The Horsethief

  There was a raggedy sky of buttermilk cloud, shot through by a three-quarter moon. The sand still held the heat of the day. Perfume of sage and cactus and piñon made a grand smell all about us. Our horses went eager and easy, the borrowed black mare nuzzling Sheik and whickering she-horse things to him. I commenced to hum. Pretty quick the words came: Pajarita, Pajarita, Pajarita barranqueño, Que bonitos ojos tiene, Lastimas que tengan dueño. I trailed off; my friend laughed.

  It seemed strange to be riding through the young night with a woman. Tom Horn, the great man hunter. Bound after a Mex desperado with a hanging price on his head. And being sided by Pajarita Morena, his "little bird" from the juzgado in Santa Fe. But happy? Christ, I hadn't been so at peace inside myself since laying with Sweet Nopal up in Fish Hawk Meadow.

  Shores had been decent enough to understand the reunion in the El Coyotero's back room. He had gone out and paid for the bottle, saying only to me, as he ducked past the cowhide, "Three days, Horn. Good luck."

  I had paid Manuel for little Bird's night off, and we had gone to her place. It was at the livery barn next door, a miserable lean-to of a hut tacked onto the hay shed and not fit for a good dog. But the years had not been kind to Pajarita Morena and this was her life now, a cheap whore in a Mexican saloon in old Tucson.

  "Tomasito," she had sighed, "forgive it, this place that you see me in. It is not like numero tres, eh?"

  "Nothing ain't like it was, querida" I'd told her.

  "No," she had whispered, drop
ping her shawl and loosening her reboza. "Not except that we make it so, Tomas."

  And we had made it so, for that little time.

  I dropped Pajarita off in the town of Pantano where, as all good Mexicans have in every town, little Bird had "cousins." I left her outside a dobe shack on the outskirts, promising to see her there in two days, and rode on down the big Pantano Wash, south, toward the Santa Ritas. In the gray dawn I found the campfire of Doc Shores's spy, Nino Pinto, sneaking in and putting the muzzle of my Colt's .44 in his ear to awaken him. He calmed down when I showed him the warrant for the Mexican. With first good daylight, he said, he would take me up the sidewash and put me on the trackline of the horse thief's mount, but he would not go with me beyond those hoof prints.

  "Dispénseme, patrón," he apologized, "but only a little past this point where I will take you, you will see that unshod horses come in to join the shod horse of the Mexican. I would guess six at least. My father was one-half Jicarilla Apache," the breed said. "I know those unshod pony prints. Estan los bárbaros."

  I forgave him and told him to lay out in the chaparral beyond his campfire for two days. If I did not come back, he was to go tell Sheriff Shores that his Mexican horse thief wouldn't be coming in.

  "Suerte," the little mestizo nodded, when he had put me on the trackline of shod and unshod horses later that morning. But he was only wishing me luck as a courtesy. He knew he would never see Señor Horn again. Los bárbaros would see to that. And for a fact, they damned near did. Well, trim that down a little; they could have seen to it.

  I ran the tracks all that day until the light commenced to fail. It was late sundown when the Apaches rode out of the rocks on either side of me and said, in Spanish, for me to not move myself or my horse, lest we both be shot from the two sides, mas pronto y mas despacho. I answered them in their own guttural tongue, saying I understood the need for delicacy. This delighted them, and one of them, the apparent leader—who somehow seemed vaguely familiar to me in the thickening darkness—said to the others, "Yes, this must be the one. Who else would speak our tongue? Enjuh, enjuh. Ugashe." And so they herded me up the final twisting ascent of the Pantano lateral wash and brought me, in the full of night, to the camp of the horse thief.

  I ought, by this time, to have been ready for anything. But I was not.

  When they had dragged me off my horse and over to the fire, where the Mexican stood alone, it came as a total disbelief to face him across the smoky flames.

  It was Merijilda Grijole.

  I was struck mute, but still the first to speak.

  "But you cannot have done it!" I objected to Merijilda. "They have accused the wrong man. You, a horse thief?" It was lunático, I added, moon-nonsense.

  "You have the warrant," he said. "Look at the name upon it."

  I had forgotten the paper in the excitement of finding him there. Now I took out the paper and he was right; his real name was there along with the alias Sancarlos. I still could not accept it. Merijilda assured me I must do so. Listen, he said:

  He had gone up to Colorado when Miles let us all go back in '86. There was work up there at the mines for a man who knew mules. A large trade went forward freighting supplies to the high camps by mule train. Merijilda had risen to be head packer for the A.L.&M. Syndicate, operating above Boulder in the Ward, Jamestown, and Utica #1 strikes. He had done well. Then a number of ranches in the area began suffering big losses to a master horse thief who had defied identification. But one midnight a friend had come to Merijilda, saying the horse thief had at last been found. He was a head packer for the Syndicate and Utica #1, a Mexican named Grijole.

  Merijilda had fled in the night and been running each night since. He was trying to reach Sonora, to live with the unsurrendered Chiricahua of Juh. On the way he had met these good comrades and fallen in with them, as they, too, were attempting to reach home in the Sierra Madre del Norte.

  "Hijo! Merijilda said, concluding, "you remember this fellow don't you?" He pointed to the leader of the Apaches. "He remembers you."

  I turned, and the muffled figure of the Apache stepped into the fire's full light; it was the half brother to Naiche (Nachee) and Tahza, the sons of Cochise—my enemy, Hal-zay.

  "Those were other years," the resonant Indian voice greeted me. "I remember you but I have forgotten those bad times."

  "It is best to see ahead," I agreed. "Only old men look behind them."

  "Yes." He lapsed into silence, looking down.

  "Are there any others here that I might know?" I said to fill the stillness. "Anyone from those old days none of us remembers?"

  "There is one," answered a slender figure, moving forward. "I am still here, brother."

  That voice. The slight body. The music of the soft words. My heart leaped.

  "My brother!" I cried. "It cannot be you!"

  "Yes," Chikisin said, "it can."

  And we wept to be there together, even though white men know that Apaches never cry.

  Of course I could not arrest Merijilda. But I had that warrant with his name on it, and I had come to take back a Mexican horse thief. Here, Chikisin had a thought.

  Hal-zay had a prisoner he was guarding back to Sonora, a bad man who had murdered his squaw and fornicated with a war chief's wife. By Apache law he must die. Therein, my brother Chikisin saw the opportunity.

  "I think Hal-zay will let you have this man cheap," Pedros son told me. "We are all tired of watching him all the time. And feeding him, too. Also, he makes his dirt right where we chain him at night. An animal. Make Hal-zay an offer. Anything at all."

  "But I don't want him!"

  "Take him. Hal-zay will be reasonable. Cowboys and soldiers both have been pressing us. This man killed a white woman, too. It was over near old Camp Rucker."

  "Damn it, brother!" I exploded. "He is an Apache. I require a Mexican."

  Chikisin palmed his hands. "Did I say he was an Apache? He is not. He only had the Apache wife that he slit the throat of, who was the sister of Hal-zay. He himself is a Mexican, raised by the Nednhi, Juh's people. Hi!" he called over to Hal-zay. "Bring out the Mexican. There is a buyer here."

  I had not a peso on me, but Hal-zay proved insistent. When, casting desperately for some trade item, I remembered the turquoise earring old Tagidado Morales had given me at Fort Whipple, and I mentioned it as a "fine piece, possibly Aztec, even Tehuantec." The muscular brave grunted, "Enjuh, let me see it, I'll take it"

  I dug the bauble out of my doeskin personals bag and held it out for inspection. The fire made it glow like blue ice in my hand. Merijilda, seeing it there, gasped aloud. "God's name, look at this—!" He ripped open his shirt. Gleaming against the dark chest, worn as a pendant on gold chain, was the other earring. I had found the lost son of old Tagidado Morales.

  When I had told the story, Merijilda was unstrung with emotion, but he gathered himself to placate Hal-zay with a favorite palomino horse in trade for the earring, plus three boxes of .44-40 Winchester shells I had in my saddlebags, for which I got the prisoner and a safe conduct out of the Santa Ritas.

  It was also arranged that Merijilda would go to Pantano and say to Pajarita at the house of her cousin that the tall boy had to help Sheriff Shores take the Mexican horse thief to Denver, but that she might go with Merijilda to Mexico, where I would find them when my work up north was done.

  Before dawn, I and Merijilda rode out, north. Chikisin, with Hal-zay and his broncos, headed south. The last I saw of Merijilda "Morales," he was wearing his two earrings of Tehuantec turquoise, waving to me from Pantano Wash outside the town as I cut away through the chaparral for Tucson with my "prisoner."

  I don't know if Merijilda ever found Pajarita, or if she went with him. I only know that old Tag's earrings were strong stuff, just as he said. Maybe they didn't save my life; then again, maybe they did. Something guarded me all the ten years that I rode among the wild broncos.

  One thing I do know; they surely saved a son for old Tagidado, and found a father fo
r Merijilda.

  Oh, yes, one other thing I lay to the power of old Tag's turquoise earrings. The Mex prisoner worked out just fine. He talked only Apache. Couldn't speak a damn word of English and only enough Spanish to deny he understood anything said to him, or of him. Including the fact that his name was Merijilda Grijole, and he was a dirty murdering Mexican horse thief wanted by the legal law in Colorado.

  I can't recall if they hung him, or not.

  I rather doubt it. Those days were passing. I did give Nino Pinto five American dollars, and some chaw tobacco that was getting too old for me, to identify my boughten prisoner as the man that was wanted in Colorado. But I don't figure that was perjurous.

  I gave the son of a bitch more than Hal-zay's Apaches would have given him; I gave him a chance.

  Having attested to which fact, I will tack on one last p.s. to this Pinkerton detour affair with Sheriff Shores. It is put in here to prove one thing. That is how banefully little true history tells of a man's real life as he himself knowed it and fought it out.

  I must have seen half a dozen print accounts and had another six sent me, clipped out of the Pantario Wash Scout, and they all give it like this, total:

  Sheriff W. C. "Doc" Shores, of Gunnison County, Colorado, met Horn in Arizona and asked him to help catch a well-known Mexican horse thief, which Horn did. . . .

  Well, maybe that's fair enough.

  Somehow, I don't reckon that old Greek fellow Diogenes, that Doc Shores was telling me about, would agree.

  Yellow Journals

  Sometimes a man has to laugh, even though they're after his life.

  That's talking about newspapermen and the double-hung tongues they got. How they can he the way they do and get it printed for the gospel passes the limits of a simple cowboy's mind. They will shrink a thing up to nothing when it's the truth, blow it up like a dead steer's belly when they've invented their own private history for the front page; the bastards.