The troopers dared not fire on the brave who was dragging King away with him for fear of hitting the officer, and when the other Apache reached the hilltop and found shelter he opened fire on them, forcing them to cover. A moment later King was dragged over the brow of the hill close to where the other Indian was covering the retreat of his fellow. Here he was relieved of his field glasses and cartridge belt, his carbine and revolver having already been appropriated by his captor.
“Now you kill him?” asked the Ned-ni of Shoz-Dijiji.
“No,” replied the Be-don-ko-he.
“Take him along and kill him slow, by and by?” suggested the other.
“No kill,” snapped Shoz-Dijiji with finality.
“Why?” demanded the Ned-ni, an ugly look distorting his painted face. “Juh right. Shoz-Dijiji’s heart turn to water in face of pindah lickoyee. Good! I kill him.” He turned his rifle toward King. There was a flash and a burst of flame and smoke; but they did not come from the rifle of the Ned-ni. He was dead.
King had understood no word of what had passed between the two Apaches, and he had only seen that one of them had prevented the other from killing him, but that he did not understand either. No other eyes than his had seen Shoz-Dijiji kill the Ned-ni, for the hill hid them from the sight of all others upon the field of battle. Now his captor turned toward him.
“You savvy white girl, Billings ranch?” he demanded.
King nodded, puzzled. “She like you,” continued the Apache. “Me friend white girl. No kill her friend. You savvy?”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” ejaculated Lieutenant King. “How did you know me? I never saw you before.”
“No, but I see you. Apache see everything, know everything. You see white girl again you tell her Shoz-Dijiji no can return her pony. Him dead.”
“Who, Shoz-Dijiji?”
“No, pony. I am Shoz-Dijiji,” and he tapped his chest proudly. “Pony dead.”
“Oh.”
“You tell her by and by. Shoz-Dijiji no can send her pony back; he send back her white-eyed lover instead. You savvy?”
“Why, I’m not her — well, I will be damned!”
“Now I go. You move — Shoz-Dijiji shoot. This time he kill. You savvy?”
“Yes, go ahead; and you needn’t think I’ll try to get you after what you’ve done for me,” and he glanced at the dead Ned-ni beside them. “But, say, before you go won’t you tell me how and where and when you got a pony from Wichita Billings?”
“Me no savvy,” stated Shoz-Dijiji, and turning, he leaped swiftly down the hillside to disappear a moment later from the sight of the astonished subaltern.
As Shoz-Dijiji had vanished among the hills so had the other warriors, and as the commanding officer reassembled his troop a crestfallen second lieutenant walked down a hillside and approached his captain. The “old man” was furious at himself because he had ridden directly into an ambush, because he had lost some good men and several horses, but principally because the hostiles had slipped through his fingers with the loss of only two of their number. And so he vented his spleen upon the unfortunate King, who had never guessed until that moment how much contempt, sarcasm and insult could be crowded into that single word “Mister.”
He was relieved of duty and ordered into arrest, released and returned to duty, three times in the ensuing fifteen minutes after he rejoined the troop. His spirit was raw and sore, and he conceived for his superior a hatred that he knew would survive this life and several lives to come; but that was because he had been but a few weeks under the “old man.” Before that campaign was over Lieutenant King would have ridden jubilantly into the mouth of Hell for him. But just then he did not know that his captain’s flow of vitriolic invective and censure but masked the fear the older man had felt when he saw the youth’s utter disregard of danger leading him straight into the jaws of death.
The old captain knew a brave man when he saw one and he knew, too, that the steadying influence of experience in. active service would make a great Indian fighter of such as his second had proven himself to be, and in the depth of his heart he was very proud of the boy, though he would have rather his tongue had been cut out than to admit it in words. It was his way to win loyalty by deeds, with the result that his men cursed him — and worshipped him.
In the light of what Lieutenant King had heard of the character and customs of Apaches he found it difficult to satisfactorily explain the magnanimity of the very first one it had been his fortune to encounter. He found his preconceived estimate of Apache character hanging in mid-air with all its props kicked from under it, and all he could do was wonder.
Shoz-Dijiji was wondering, too. He knew that he had not acted upon impulse and perhaps that was why his action troubled him in retrospect. He tried to be sorry that he had not slain the hated pindah lickoyee, yet, when he thought of the happiness of the white girl when she learned that her lover had been spared, he was glad that he had not killed him. Too fresh was the wound of his own great grief to permit him to be callous to the possible grief of another in like circumstance, and in this case that other was a friend who had been kind to him. Yes, Shoz-Dijiji was satisfied that he had done right. He would have no regrets. As for the Ned-ni — well, he had earned death by his insult.
Following the fight with “B” Troop the little band of Ned-ni broke up once again into still smaller parties and scattered by ones and twos, so that there remained nothing in the way of a trail for the soldiers to follow. Shoz-Dijiji moved directly south into the Sierra Madre, searching for Juh. To every familiar haunt of the Apache went the silent, terrible figure, searching, ever searching; his sorrowing heart like lead in his bronze breast, his soul a torment of consuming fires of hate.
From many a commanding peak he scanned the country north and south, east and west, through the field glasses he had taken from the young officer, and then one day he came upon the spoor of an Apache in the soft earth beside a bubbling spring. You or I might not have been able to discern that a man had stepped there, but Shoz-Dijiji saw the dim print of an Apache war moccasin. He plucked some of the down-pressed grass and breaking it knew from the condition of the juices within that a man had stood there on the preceding day, and then he sought and quickly found the direction of the other’s trail, leading toward the south.
Not again, no matter where it went, did Shoz-Dijiji lose sight of the spoor of him whom he followed. Early the next morning he left it momentarily while he ascended a peak and scanned the mountains to the south. Ah, at last! In the distance, tenuous, vapory blue, almost invisible rose a tiny waft of smoke. Indians! Apaches, doubtless. Ned-ni, perhap Juh! Be good, O Usen! Let it be Juh!
It was noon when Shoz-Dijiji passed silently and unseen the sentries of the Ned-ni and stalked majestically into the camp. His quick eyes took in every detail of the scene. He saw two of Juh’s squaws and several of his children, but Juh he did not see. But Juh must be near. His long search was ended.
Warriors gathered about him, asking many questions; surprised to see him in the flesh, whom they had thought dead. He told them of the fight with the white soldiers, of the scattering of the balance of the hostiles; that the troops might be following them down into Mexico. He did not ask for Juh; that was not his way. He waited. Perhaps Juh would come soon, but he was impatient. A terrible thought smote him.
“Were many of the Ned-ni killed when you fought the white-eyes?” he asked.
“No,” they told him, “two warriors, whose bodies we brought along and buried, and a squaw was missing.” They did not mention her name. Seldom do the Apaches call their dead by name. But there was no need — Shoz-Dijiji knew that they spoke of Ish-kay-nay.
“Was she killed by the soldiers?” asked Shoz-Dijiji.
“We do not know. Juh would not return to find out.”
“Juh — he is not here,” remarked Shoz-Dijiji, casually. That was as near as he would come to asking where Juh was.
“He is hunting in the mountains,” said a warrio
r, waving an informatory hand in the direction of a rugged ridge above the camp.
Shoz-Dijiji walked away. He could not wait. He went from shelter to shelter, talking, but only to throw off suspicion, for he knew that some of them must guess why he was here. When he could, he slipped away among the trees and moved rapidly up the shoulder of the ridge, diagonally that he might cross the spoor of the man he sought, nor had he long to go before he picked up the imprint of a great moccasin, such a moccasin as Juh might wear.
A human tiger, then, he tracked his prey. Up rugged mountainsides ran the trail, across rocky hogbacks where none but an Apache eye might trace it, down into dank ravines and up again along the bold shoulder of a mighty peak. It was there that Shoz-Dijiji heard something moving just beyond the curve of the mountain ahead of him.
He stopped and listened. The thing was approaching, already he had interpreted it, the sound of moccasined feet moving through low brush. Shoz-Dijiji waited. Two seconds, three, five. The figure of a man loomed suddenly before him. It was Juh. The end of the hate-trail had been reached. Juh was returning to camp.
The chief saw and recognized Shoz-Dijiji instantly. He was armed with bow and arrows and a knife. Shoz-Dijiji carried these and a revolver in addition. The carbine he had cached before he entered the Ned-ni camp.
What does the Be-don-ko-he here?” demanded Juh.
“I, Shoz-Dijiji, have come to kill a great liar. I have come to kill a great coward who cannot protect his women. I have come to kill Juh.”
“You cannot kill Juh,” said the older man. “Strong is the medicine of Juh. The bullets of the white-eyes cannot enter the body of Juh — they will bounce back and kill you. Nakay-do-klunni made this medicine himself. Go away, before it kills you.”
“Nakay-do-klunni is dead,” replied Shoz-Dijiji. “His medicine is no good.”
“What he made for Juh is good.”
“Shoz-Dijiji will throw away all his weapons except his knife,” said the young warrior. “Let Juh do likewise. Then, with his knife Shoz-Dijiji will cut the vile heart of Juh out of his breast.”
Juh was a big, strong man. He was afraid of no one in a hand-to-hand encounter, so the other’s proposal met with instant approval. With a sneer he tossed aside his bow and arrows and Shoz-Dijiji similarly discarded all his weapons but his knife. Like great fighting cats the two drew closer. Juh taunted and insulted his adversary, after the code Apachean. He applied the vilest epithets to which he could lay his naturally vile tongue to the mother of Shoz-Dijiji, to his father, to his grandmother, to his grandfather, to all his forebears back to the first one, whose dam, according to Juh, had been a mangy coyote; then he vilified the coyote.
Shoz-Dijiji, grim, terrible, silent, crept stealthily toward his lifelong enemy. Juh mistook his silence for an indication of fear. He rushed upon the son of Geronimo thinking to bear him down by the suddenness and weight of his bull-like charge. His plunging knife was struck aside and the two closed, but Shoz-Dijiji gave back no single step. With as great effect Juh might have charged one of the ancient pines that soughed above them.
Each seeking to sink his blade in the flesh of the other, they surged and strained to and fro upon the rocky shoulder of the mountain. Below them yawned an abyss whose sheer granite wall dropped straight a thousand feet to the jagged rocks that formed the debris at its base.
“Pihdah lickoyee,” growled the Ned-ni. “Die, son of a white-eyed man!”
Shoz-Dijiji, the muscles rolling beneath his copper hide, forced his knife hand, inch by inch, downward upon the straining, sweating warrior. Juh tried to break away, but a mighty arm held him — held him as he had been bound with thongs of rawhide.
In his efforts to escape, Juh dragged his antagonist nearer and nearer the edge of that awful precipice waiting silently behind him. Juh did not see, but Shoz-Dijiji saw, and did not care. Rather than permit his enemy to escape the Black Bear would go over with him — to death; perhaps to oblivion, perhaps to Ish-kay-nay. What did it matter? Closer and closer came the sharp point to the breast of Juh. “Speak the truth, Juh, for you are about to die.” Shoz-Dijiji spoke for the first time since the duel had begun. “Say that Shoz-Dijiji is no pindah lickoyee.”
“Juh speaks the truth,” panted the other; “You are white.” The Ned-ni, straining with every ounce of strength that he possessed, slowly pushed away the menacing blade. He surged suddenly to the right, almost hurling them both to the ground. It was then that he realized how close they had been to the edge of the abyss. A pebble, struck by his foot, rolled a hand breadth and dropped over the edge. Juh shuddered and tried to draw away, but Shoz-Dijiji, determined never to relinquish his hold until his enemy was dead, even if he must die with him, dragged him relentlessly to the verge again. There they toppled for an instant, Juh trying to pull back and the Black Bear straining to precipitate them both to the rocks below. Now Shoz-Dijiji’s feet were upon the very edge of the precipice and his back was toward it. His time had come! Surging backward he threw his feet out over the abyss, bringing all his weight into his effort to drag Juh over with him. The chief of the Ned-ni, seeing death staring him in the face, voiced a single, piercing, horrified shriek and hurled himself backward. For an instant they rocked back and forth upon the brink, and then Juh managed to take a backward step and, for the second, they were saved.
Heaving, straining, dripping sweat that ran down their sleek bodies in rivulets, these men of iron who scarce had ever sweat before — so lean their thews and fatless — struggled, turning, twisting, until once again they stood upon the verge of eternity. This time it was Juh whose back was toward the awful gulf.
Now Shoz-Dijiji was seeking to push him over the edge. So rapt had each been in this pushing and pulling toward and away from the verge that one might have thought each had forgotten the rigid knife-hand clasped in the grip of the other. Perhaps they had, momentarily; but it was Shoz-Dijiji who remembered first. With a twisting, sudden wrench, he tore his wrist free from Juh’s grasp.
“Die, Ned-ni!” he growled, glaring into the eyes of his foe. He drove his blade deep into the breast of Juh. “Die! Ish-kay-nay is avenged!”
Again and again the blade sank deep into the heart of the Chief of the Ned-ni, his arms dropped limp, he reeled and tried to speak, to beg for mercy. Then it was that Shoz-Dijiji, the Be-don-ko-he, put both palms against the bloody chest of his antagonist and pushed him backward. Screaming, Juh toppled from the rocky ledge and, turning and twisting, his body fell down, down to the jagged rocks a thousand feet below.
18. THE WAR DANCE
A young man dismounted in the yard of the Billings ranch and approached the owner who, following the noonday meal, was tip- tilted in an arm chair against the adobe wall of the building, picking his teeth and conversing with his daughter.
“I don’t reckon you’re the boss?” suggested the young man.
“Yep,” said Billings, “I reckon as how I am.”
“I don’t reckon as how you ain’t needin’ no hands?”
“What kin you do?”
“I kin ride some, and rope.”
“Ben sick?” asked Billings, noting the other’s pale face.
“Got lost. Pretty near cashed in. Reckon I would have ef a Siwash hadn’t come along an’ give me some water. He told me how to reach your ranch — that was nigh onto three weeks ago — then I run into a scoutin’ party of reg’lars from the post an’ they took me in with I ‘em. I ben in the hospital ever since. Worse off’n I thought I was I reckon.”
“Three weeks ago?” mused Billings. “You was tarnation lucky that Siwash wasn’t no Cheeracow. Thet was jest about when they was goin’ out.”
“Thet’s what gets me,” said the youth, “he was a Cheeracow. He told me he was, an’ not only that, but he was painted up all right enough for the warpath.”
“I reckon you must hev had a touch of fever right then,” said Billings, skeptically.
The other laughed. “No,” he said, “I was all right in the head; bu
t I’m here to tell you I was pretty near plumb sick when I stuck my ol’ head up over the top o’ that rise an’ seen this here hostile lookin’ me right in the eye with his ugly, painted mug. Say, I ken see him right now, a-sittin’ there on his ewe neck roan. I did a back flip down thet hill an’ pretty near kilt myself for sure.” He grinned broadly at the recollection.
“Three weeks ago — a ewe neck roan,” soliloquized Billings. “Did he have a blaze face?”
Wichita Billings could feel the flush that overspread her face and she was glad that she was standing a little to the rear of her father as she listened eagerly to the conversation.
“Yep,” affirmed the young man, “he had a blaze face.”
Billings half turned toward his daughter. “Now how in all tarnation did that Siwash git a-holt of that cayuse?” he demanded. “Musta took it out o’ the c’ral right under the noses o’ those there soldiers. I missed that critter the next mornin’ an’ I never ben able to see what in “all tarnation become of him. thet beats me!”
“Well, I reckon your hoss is down Sonora way somewheres by now,” said the youth.
“Fed?” inquired Billings. “Nope.”
“Dump your roll off at the bunk house and turn your hoss into the fust c’ral there,” Billings directed. “I’ll have the chink rustle you some grub. You ken go to work in the mornin’.”
“What I can’t understand,” said Billings, when he had come back from the kitchen, “is why that Siwash’ didn’t plug that kid.”
“Maybe they ain’t all bad, Dad,” said Wichita, who thought that she understood perfectly why Shoz-Dijiji had not killed the boy.
“No,” admitted her father, “the dead ones ain’t so bad.”
His vengeance accomplished, Shoz-Dijiji was as a lost soul wandering in Purgatory, facing a goalless eternity. He ranged northern Sonora, a solitary figure, grim, terrible. He avoided Indians as sedulously as he did Mexicans, for the greatest wrong that had ever been done him had been committed by the hand of an Indian. He felt that all men were his enemies and that henceforth he must travel alone. He could not know that the wound, so fresh, so raw, the first hurt that ever had touched his inmost soul, might be healed by the patient hand of Time; that though the scar remained the wound would cease to throb.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 591