Dust Devil

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  The rocking and swaying of the coach made her drowsy. She tried to forget the perspiration that dotted her upper lip. Her smartly tailored, blue-striped taffeta traveling dress was really too warm for the hot September sun. The two sisters did not make the trip any more pleasant either. Once they discovered she was the "Rhodes girl,” they kept up a steady stream of chatter.

  "Yes, yes — I am visiting a relative in Loving’s Bend,” she responded. "No, I’ve never been there before.”

  She listened as Lizzie Burns described the wicked Fandango dance the brazen women of Mexico City performed — "lascivious” — and how the women — and even children — smoked cigarettes. And Charity Bums told of the beautiful missions there and the enormous bull arena.

  The man sat stone-faced, and Stephanie wondered if he were not a preacher or lawyer instead.

  But when the talk turned to the trouble the Territory had been having with Indians, especially Geronimo, and why General Crook had not done anything about the worsening situation, the man, introducing himself as Hiram Wharton, began a tirade. "Savages! Every last one of them. Dirty heathens! Every man, woman — and yes, child — should be destroyed, lest they breed like rabbits and rise up in revolution. Filthy scum they are!”

  A part of her began to shrivel inside. At Cambria she had been safe with the love of her mother and the people of Cambria to protect her. But out here, what would happen if the raving man found out she was a half-breed?

  She felt dirty, her pride destroyed. But a flicker of her old spirit flamed up at the man’s castigation of the Indians. "You talk as if you know the Indians well,” she said, addressing him. "Perhaps you lived with them for a while?”

  Lizze and Charity tittered. The man’s lips folded tightly beneath his bulbous nose. "I spent one hour with them, Miss — which was enough!” He doffed his derby to expose a balding pate crisscrossed with scars. "Lifted my scalp, the dogs did!”

  "Oh!” the two old maids gasped in unison.

  But Stephanie did not have a chance to reply, for her attention was turned to the coach’s left where cliffs gouged by the now dry channels of the Pecos River crept down to within only half a mile or so of the rocky road. From crevices of these ridges Indians galloped their mounts at full speed toward the coach.

  From above came the messenger’s shout, "Apaches!”

  Impossible! she thought as cries of alarm went up inside the coach. There were no warring tribes that side of the Guadalupe Mountains. And Geronimo and his band were still reported roaming the Ojo Caliente area.

  She smiled grimly at Hiram Wharton’s sudden pallor but felt pity for the fear that caused the two sisters to clutch one another with trembling, bony hands. She reached out a hand to reassure the two women but halted midway as the first war whoop reached her. A yell that curdled the blood like buttermilk. She had heard it as a child.

  And as she watched the riders draw near, their vermilion painted faces hideous in the hot sunlight, she knew that the Indian cry was woven in her destiny. She knew it when she recognized the face of Satana. And knew this was no chance encounter but a planned expedition which had required the Indian’s unlimited patience. Months of watching her every move, of endless waiting for a time when she would be alone — far enough away from possible help.

  Rifle shots shattered the air. One pony tumbled head first into the dust, trapping its rider beneath it. Another rider pitched backward out of the saddle. And still Satana kept coming. That face. It had haunted her dreams. The cruelty that glazed the oblique eyes. The mouth that was almost lipless, that grimaced like a gargoyle.

  These are my people!

  The coach rocked and careened over the rough terrain. Amidst the war whoops there was another burst of gunfire, and the messenger toppled from his perch and bounced to the ground like an India rubber ball. "Hah! Hah!” the driver yelled at his team and flicked his lash over their backs. But already the lather foamed at their mouths.

  The road veered sharply around a sloping bluff, and she grabbed at the tug strap, knowing the coach would not make the curve. The wild team plunged around the bend, and the coach slid off the road and smashed into the outcrop of boulders on the far side. Stephanie tumbled against the body next to her, that of Hiram Wharton’s. An arrow pierced the double chin.

  The coach rolled twice more, and when it stopped with a final splintering crash, she groped for her reticule and scrambled from the wreckage. The small Smith & Wesson glinted in her hand. One shot. For herself — or the Indian who loped toward her — Satana? His triumphant grin was terrible. Like looking at a death’s skull, she thought distractedly, and raised the pistol and calmly fired into Satana’s face.

  An animal howl of rage. Her blood-soaked adversary leaped upon her, knocking her to the ground. He whipped the knife from the band at his breechcloth. And Stephanie welcomed the quickness and mercifulness of death. Her neck arched to receive the blade.

  Satana suddenly smiled. "I will not take your life,” he told her in the Apache language she had learned as a child.

  And Stephanie knew a fear greater than at any other time in her life.

  She could hear the carnage being performed on the other three occupants of the coach. The screams from the two sisters who had unfortunately survived the coach’s crash; the hasty chopping of fingers for rings; the unwieldy slash of the knife through the scalp of the struggling coach driver.

  Satana was missing out on the scavenging. With a sharp blow of his knife butt, he struck he across the temple. She slumped to the ground in blackness. When next she came to, she was slung like a sack of booty across a pony led by Satana. Craning her neck, she could see him on the pony in front. A black derby sat on his head, a cravat about his bull-like neck.

  Thirst parched her throat, and sweat gathered at her armpits. The pony’s steamy flanks reeked. Her muscles, stretched abnormally, ached. It was all a nightmare. And this was just the beginning, she thought, swallowing the fear that threatened to choke her.

  The camp was reached by a tortuously winding path through a maze of arroyos and canyons carved by the varying courses of the Pecos. She noted it was a makeshift camp, for the short sparse grass was still untrampled before the tepees. A thin stream meandered through the camp and out through another shallow canyon.

  Stephanie cringed as the squaws screamed like harpies at the sight of Satana’s captive. They pinched her, and one old hag spat upon her. Satana yanked her from the pony and dragged her, hobbled as she was, through the opening of the tepee. In its darkness she could make out a grossly fat squaw bent over a kettle that boiled on the firepit.

  Satana sent Stephanie reeling to the ground. "You will be my second wife and wait on Little Chipmunk.”

  The fat squaw, Little Chipmunk, turned and grinned at the news, displaying missing teeth.

  "I can’t be your wife,” Stephanie replied in Apache. "I already have a husband.”

  A frown ceased the greasy face. A gleam of intelligence flickered behind the eyes. "You know the language,” he said. "That is well.”

  Stephanie nodded, waiting. Something told her she must not underestimate the Indian.

  "Then you also know,” he continued, "that you were promised to me by our fathers.”

  "But I did not make that promise.”

  Satana shrugged. "That is no matter. You have lain with another man. You have been unfaithful, yes? For this, we mark such a woman, as you must know.”

  Stephanie shuddered, little tremors that increased to great heavings of her body while Satana advanced on her.

  Above Little Chipmunk’s urging cries of "Hiyah! Hiyah!” she heard her own piteous screams.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 41

  June, 1910

  Santa Fe, Territory of New Mexico

  The two men, delegates to the Territory’s Constitutional Convention, stood in the shadows of the Mess Hall as the children of the Santa Fe Boarding School for Indians filed in groups of platoons for breakfast, the first of their allotted
two daily meals.

  Normally the two men would not have been allowed past the main building that housed the Indian Bureau’s office for the school. But they had not asked. And in the dawn’s half light their gray Prince Albert coats blended with the steel gray of the ramshackle Mess Hall so that few were aware of their presence.

  "My God, Cody!” the dapper Swanbeck said. "I wouldn’t have believed it. A government boarding school — it looks more like a prison farm!”

  Cody Strahan followed the direction of the man’s glance and saw the thin boy in tattered corduroy knickers who shuffled along with the others but carried a heavy lead ball maybe six inches in diameter with a chain attached to his chafed ankle.

  It was worse than he had expected. He knew of the Indian Bureau’s kidnappings — taking children from their parents to the schools, so that the parents would go three and four years without seeing their children; of the food deficiency; of the poor health service . . . all the horror tales that were whispered and never really believed. But he had not expected this — or the sight of two children digging furtively in the trash barrel for food, their skeletal look, the rags that clothed them.

  Yes, he had expected it, he corrected himself. He was just getting old. Nearly sixty-five. I don’t want to face life’s ugliness anymore, he told himself. I’m tired.

  Then what had prompted him to suggest this visit to the Territory’s Senate Investigating Committee? He could recall his pompous words, "We were turned down in ’68 because of our slavery stand. Do you think the United States Congress will grant us statehood this time if the condition of the treatment of the Indians was known?”

  And the murmured denials . . . "A few isolated cases of the Indian Bureau’s mismanagement”; "the Indians are rich, they can afford better schools and doctors if they wanted them.”

  Cody knew differently, as everyone did. The IBA’s fraud was rampant. But no one else concerned himself with the appalling treatment of the Indians. So why did he have to involve himself?

  But he knew the answer to that. The nightmare that had haunted him for so long . . . how long now? Almost twenty-five years, wasn’t it, since Geronimo and his men surrendered to General Miles? Twenty-five years since he learned that Stephanie was alive.

  And that was where the nightmare had started. The guilt that had driven him to the Mescalero Indian Reservation in 1886 where the government had moved some of Geronimo’s warriors and their families. It had been Rosemary’s letter that had lured him out of his ranch recluse after four years.

  "The government reports a white woman with the band, Cody, a captive for four years,” Rosemary had written. "It has to be Stephanie, for it was four years ago when she left Cambria to find you!”

  For four years he had believed his wife had died in Satana’s raid on the Las Vegas-Chihuahua Stagecoach. And when he finally set out for the reservation with Rosemary, both of them nervous with excitement, he kept reminding himself that there would be adjustments for Stephanie to face, that it would not be easy for either her or him. But his spirits rose with each mile. After all those years of wanting and loving Stephanie, she had at last returned that love, had at last sought him out. And now they were to be together again.

  But they were not. Stephanie refused to return with them, refused in fact to even see them.

  "It’s that bastard, Satana!” Cody had grated. "He won’t let her see us!”

  He had pushed past the Apache scout reservation policeman, who also acted as an interpreter, and entered the tepee belonging to Satana. It was dark inside. But he heard the sudden intake of breath. "Stephanie?” He paused. "It’s me, Cody. Are you alone?”

  The silence seemed to stretch through an eternity. Then, an almost inaudible, "Yes.”

  "Stephanie!” He started toward where the voice came from, his hands outstretched. Tears filled his eyes, and he was glad for the darkness. "You don’t know how I’ve hated myself, kid. How I’ve pun — ”

  "No! Get away! Get out!” The words came in staccato syllables, as if she had to recall each word.

  He had halted. There was real panic in her voice. Fear. He let his hands drop to his sides and began talking to her gently, as he would to a frightened horse. "I love you, kid. Even when I knew all the time you loved Wayne, I couldn’t help but love you. I’d never hurt you. But I won’t leave here without you. Do you understand?”

  "Please,” she whispered, and he heard her voice catch in a sob. "Please — go away. I’m not your Stephanie . . . not anymore.”

  He could imagine the degradation she had been subjected to and the humiliation she had endured. He had seen and heard of captives treated worse than slaves, like animals. "Kid,” he said, talking slowly as if to a child, "no matter what has happened — we can work it out. Please give my love a chance to make everything up to you.”

  She stepped out of the shadows then, nearer the shaft of sunlight that peeked through the entrance’s flap. "Do you really mean that, Cody?” she taunted, her voice raspy with its old mockery. "Take a good look — and tell me if I’m the girl of your dreams.”

  Cody’s stomach knotted and turned over. He thought he was going to be ill. Stephanie’s nose had been cut away, all the fleshy end gone. Both nostrils were wide open, denuded of flesh. "It’s not very pretty, is it? Still want to take me back to Loving’s Bend as your wife?”

  Jesus help him, he wanted only to run. To hide and cry like a boy for all that was lost. But still, he tried. "It wasn’t your beauty I loved. It was your spirit. What’s on the inside.”

  She laughed sharply and sneered. "That spirit is dead. Now get, white man. Run, before I change my mind!” The nausea was acrid on his tongue. He turned on his heel and left with her mocking laughter following him.

  Rosemary had brushed past the reservation policeman toward him. She grabbed at his lapels. "She’s not coming, Cody?”

  He had taken her hands. "It’s not her, Rosemary. I asked the woman if she had heard of Stephanie, but — she didn’t know of another white captive with the Chiricahuas.”

  Yes, Jesus help him, he thought, as he stood and watched the pathetic Indian children file past him. His guilt had hounded him, driven him there to the school, after twenty-five years, to somehow atone. How many more reservation schools did he have to visit, how many Indians did he have to beg absolution from before Stephanie would put his tortured soul to rest? And was she still alive? He mentally calculated what her age would be. Forty-seven.

  He shook his head slowly. He was a stupid old fool. Going back into the past like that. Still, as the last child stepped inside the mess hall, he turned to his companion. "Let’s go inside.”

  The stout woman looked up from where she stood at the head of the three rows of wooden tables. Her thin mouth parted in surprise at the sight of the two strangers. She unfolded her arms and swooped down on them, looking, Cody thought, like a giant crow, dressed as she was all in black. "What are you two doing here? Do you have a pass? You’ll have to be reported at once to the office!”

  "We’re with the New Mexico Congress,” Cody said calmly. "And are here, with the Governor’s knowledge, to observe government boarding school conditions.”

  There was a silence in the room as all the small heads turned to watch the interruption, something that was unusual in the school, which was run in a military fashion. The matron clapped her hands. "Back to your breakfast!”

  At once the round faces ducked in compliance. She turned back to the two men. "I’m sorry,” she began again, a meant-to-be-charming smile plastered on her square face. "There are rules we must follow, you understand. If you’ll come with me, I’m quite sure the superintendent can arrange a tour for you.”

  Cody ignored the thick hand that gestured toward the doorway. "This is as good a place to start a tour as any.” He brushed past her and began walking down the aisles between the tables. It was worse than he had expected. The children were drinking coffee and eating hard bread — at least he thought it was. The loaves were so covered
with flies it was difficult to be sure.

  He snapped around. "We’ll see the superintendent now,” he told the other delegate, disregarding the matron who stomped along behind him.

  Superintendent Jackson removed his glasses and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. "Gentlemen,” he said in a reedy voice, "you must understand. We do the best we can with the little we’re allotted.”

  "The treasury records indicate otherwise, Jackson,” Cody said. "In fact, they show the apportionment out of the Indians’ reserves for food to be quite large.”

  A band of sweat broke out again on the little man’s forehead. "But you must understand. We’ve clerks and secretaries and cooks’ salaries to pay out of this.”

  "What of teachers and nurses?” Swanbeck asked with a grimace. "It doesn’t appear that your students are in the best of health.”

  "Teachers and nurses won’t work for that kind of salary,” Jackson whined. "We’re doing the best we can.”

  "I don’t believe you are,” Cody said. "We saw one child, a boy of not more than five or six years, dragging a ball and chain about his ankle. A ball and chain, my God!” Cody was surprised at how incensed he was over the matter. I’m getting old, he thought. Used to be, nothing rattled me.

  "He’s a problem child. Chase-the-Wind has been running away continually since he came here six months ago. On top of that Mrs. Duffy—our matron—reports he’s a bed-wetter.”

  "Get him,” Cody said.

  "What?”

  "You heard me. We want to talk to some of these children ourselves.”

  The superintendent searched for Chase-the-Wind’s files while the boy was being sent for. Cody pulled out his pocket watch. He was almost sorry he had suggested the investigation. If they didn’t hurry, they’d miss the season’s opening of the Santa Fe Opera House that evening, one of the few pleasures he allowed himself when he came to Santa Fe. That evening Texas Guinan, a vivacious woman who reminded him much of Stephanie, was playing in The Gay Musician.