He nodded and took the wallet. “Got holes in my pockets. Every time I get hold of some money it falls right out.”
“You were the only one I could think of to turn to,” she said.
“Why me, when you’ve got all those men down at the hotel?”
“I don’t know those men.”
“You barely know me.”
“I know enough.”
“I’m no good man.”
“You’re more than you know.”
“Miz Matilda, like I told your son in there, I’ll bring that boy back or I’ll die trying. That’s all I can promise you.”
“I know you mean that. That’s what William doesn’t understand, and that’s why I’m pinning my hopes on you and not those men at the hotel or the army.”
“I’d best be going.”
“Don’t misjudge William or take insult at anything he said to you. He’s out of his element with this, but he is a good man and no coward.”
“I wasn’t judging him.”
“He’s going to take those men you refused and go after Billy. You know that don’t you? He thought you would lead them, and he was going to insist that he come along with you.”
“That’s part of the reason I refused. Best he takes those men and bungles around the border while I see if I can get the boy back. I’ve got enough troubles without toting along a fretting father, and a tenderfoot at that.”
“My Amos could have done it, but William is cut from a different cloth. All the schooling we paid for back East was enough to give him a better life and make him a fortune, but you don’t learn what it’s going to take for this in a schoolhouse.”
“No, ma’am, you don’t.”
“I’d go with you myself if my old bones could stand the saddle.”
“I know you would, and I’d gladly take you along.” Newt turned the horse and rode away. “So long.”
His next stop was at a livery, and then he made call at the nearest mercantile. When he reappeared at the railroad depot he was leading a little red dun pack mule. According to William Redding’s offer, he had outfitted himself for the journey and put his purchases on the Southern Pacific Railroad’s tab. His clothes were the same except for a new pair of boots and an India rubber rain slicker, and the packsaddle’s pannier contained a new cotton duck coat, two hundred rounds of .45-75 ammunition for his rifle, another fifty rounds of. 44’s for his pistol, a pound bag of salt, another pound of coffee, five pounds of flour, a dozen cans of tinned fruit and vegetables, a coffeepot, and a frying pan. Thusly equipped, he loaded his livestock on a boxcar and took the noon train headed west. Few people ever knew he was in San Antonio, and even fewer would miss him if he never came back.
Chapter Three
The train crew let him off in the middle of the night some twenty hours later at a water tank stop west of Willcox, Arizona Territory. The boxcar he rode in was not a normal livestock car, and the crew had no ramp to unload his horse and mule. He jumped them from the open door, and the last the train crew saw of him he was headed across the desert under the moonlight.
He rode into the San Carlos Agency three days later, both he and his saddle stock covered in road dust and gaunt from hard travel, having come over nine hundred miles, the last hundred of it overland.
The agency lay on a hardscrabble desert flat at the confluence of the Gila and San Carlos Rivers. He crossed that flat at a long trot, aiming for the cluster of stacked stone and adobe brick buildings. Apache women paused from their work in the middle of little irrigated fields of corn and shielded their eyes from the sun and watched him pass. The wind blew dust and bits of gravel in rolling waves across the flats and bent over the shin-high, sickly yellow stalks of corn.
A band of Apache was gathered in military-style ranks before the agency house, and an army officer and another white man were calling roll and checking number tags for attendance. Two other white men sat at a table under a brush arbor to one side of the agency house.
Newt reined up alongside that arbor and parked his horse in the edge of its shade. It was a hot day, and neither man at the table moved from their slumped, languid poses in their camp chairs. One was an older man in a sweat-stained flannel shirt. He had both boots propped up and crossed on a stool in front of him and was pretending interest in the large rowels of his Mexican spurs while he gave a study to Newt out of the corner of his eye. The other man, much the younger of the two, had his legs propped up in a similar manner. He had a little piece of rope that he had fashioned into a toy lariat, and he would swing his loop a few times and rope the toe of his boot. He did this three times before he stopped and finally tilted his head back far enough to reveal his face beneath his hat brim.
“Looks like we got company, Al,” he said.
The older man spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dust, then squinted up into the sunlight at Newt. “It do, Tom.”
Newt kept his attention on the Apaches lined up in front of the agency house. Of the sixty or seventy Indians gathered, about a third of them were adult men. They stared straight ahead from their ranks, their faces hard and still, and so stoic as to be made from stone itself.
“Don’t look like much, do they?” the older man beside him said with a touch of an accent that sounded like it might be German. “But don’t let their looks fool you. Those little brown men are the fighten’est sons a bitches this side of Hades.”
“You seem to admire them,” Newt said.
“I do,” the older man retorted.
No two Apache men were dressed alike. Some wore white man clothing, some a mix-match of that and the traditional Apache wear of a headband to hold their long hair back, a belted cotton shirt, long cloth breechcloth, and high moccasins. Others wore little more than the moccasins and a headband, with only a cloth breechcloth in between. They ran mostly to the short side, and not a man among them would weigh much more than half of Newt—mustang lean, weathered little men, with bandy arms and legs like racehorses. Yet, like the man beside him had said, Newt knew without being told not to misjudge them.
While he watched, a potbellied, naked boy child ran through the ranks laughing and squealing. An Apache woman called for him to come back while she held up the brass nametag on the necklace she wore for the army officer to see.
“What are they doing?” Newt asked.
“Taking roll and giving out rations,” the older man with the big spurs said.
“Is that army man there in charge?” Newt asked.
“That’s Lieutenant Davis. That other fellow with him is the agent,” the older man replied while he worked his chewing tobacco around in his cheek, as if contemplating spitting again.
“Who should I talk to about hiring an Apache scout?” Newt asked.
Both men looked up at him when he said that.
“What would you want a scout for?” the older man asked.
“Going hunting.”
The older man took his feet down off the stool and stood. He nodded at Newt’s rifle resting across his saddle swells. “What kind of hunting are you aiming to do? I got a feeling you ain’t going after elk meat.”
“I’m going to Mexico.”
“Are you the one they sent the telegraph about?”
“What telegraph?”
“The lieutenant got a telegraph from some muckety-muck with the railroad. It said one of their hired men was coming here and requested we give him an Apache scout.”
“Didn’t know about that. Where’s my scout?”
“You picked a bad time. You talk to the lieutenant if you want, but they won’t give you a scout.”
“Why not? I’ll pay him fair wages.”
The older man pointed at the lines of Indians, as if they said it all. “You got any idea what this place is? It’s a bomb is what it is. Those are Chiricahuas. Know what they are? They’re Apaches, and then they ain’t. Meanest of them by far, and we’ve got them and all kinds of other bands to keep on this reservation and to make sure they act halfway civilized.
Every time we turn our back or so much as take a sneeze, there’s a dozen of them slipping away and going off raiding. The Apache don’t like us, they don’t like each other sometimes, and they least of all like starving on this patch of hell we’ve forced them to live on.”
“I just want to hire a scout.”
“And I said you won’t get one. Talk to the lieutenant if it makes you happy, but you won’t.”
The younger man threw a loop on his boot again and chuckled. “Don’t you read the papers?”
Newt looked to the older man. “I’m not much of a reader.”
The older man frowned at the younger before he continued. “What he means is that Crook’s army just spent two months chasing all over hell and half creation trying to get these savages back on the reservation. We got Chato’s bunch and most of the miscreants, but it’s a touchy thing right now keeping them here. And we’ve still got the problem of the ones down in Mexico that haven’t turned themselves in yet like they promised.”
“Your problems don’t concern me. All I need is a tracker.”
“Mister, don’t you know who you’re talking to?” The younger one threw in. “This is Al Sieber, Chief of Scouts, and the man who knows more about Apaches and hunting them than any white man west of anywhere and more than most Apaches to boot.”
“I’ve got a hundred dollars, gold coin, to the Apache scout that will hire on with me,” Newt said. “And you and Mr. Sieber here can sit and talk about Apaches all you want while I go to Mexico.”
“General Crook knows about the Redding boy’s capture.” The older man ignored the rising temper in Newt’s voice and continued as calm as he had been before. “There’s already two companies of cavalry on the trail. Last we heard they were camped at San Bernardino Springs on the border, and have thirty White Mountain scouts out looking for the boy.”
“The Reddings didn’t send me out here to wait on the army,” Newt replied. “I don’t know much about Apaches, but I know enough that I need an Apache to catch one. And that’s what I aim to do.”
“Say you could hire one? Any Apache you get to go with you is liable to turn on you once you’re on the trail. You thought about that?” the younger asked.
Newt stepped off his horse and brushed past them and headed toward the lieutenant calling roll.
“Stubborn, ain’t he?” the younger man said when Newt was out of earshot.
“You better watch that talk, Horn. That ain’t no pilgrim there,” the older replied.
“He’s going to get himself killed, pilgrim or not.”
“Probably, but killing him will take some doing, if I don’t miss my mark.” The older turned to the younger with a twinkle in his eyes. “You don’t have a clue who that is, do you?”
“Big ugly cuss with a face that looks like a bear worked it over.”
“How many big ugly fellows packing a Smith pistol with blue crosses in the handles have you heard of?”
The younger man took a second look at Newt, as if reappraising him. “Is he the one that tamed the mob in Shakespeare?”
“That’s him. Made him a name for that, and prizefighting in the mining camps. Bareknuckle or with gloves, they say he don’t care.”
“Then he’s the same that got Cortina?”
“That’s him.”
The younger grunted as if slightly impressed. “Well, fist-fighting or locking horns with Cortina is child’s play compared to hunting Chiricahuas. They can tell all the stories they want about that fellow yonder, but he doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into.”
The older man shook his head. “Maybe so, but I don’t think he cares.”
* * *
The stocky young lieutenant, as the Chief of Scouts had forewarned, refused the lending of one of his Apache scouts, or any Apache tracker for that matter. In fact, he seemed greatly irritated by Newt’s arrival and made it plain that his help wasn’t needed and that the recovery of the Redding boy was army business.
Newt left the agency within an hour of his arrival, and he turned in the saddle and looked back once when he was a quarter mile from the camp. Two Apache scouts, noticeable by the matching red headbands they wore, were following him. That West Point lieutenant intended to make sure he left the reservation.
The Apache scouts, or policemen, or whatever they were, hung back well behind, but they kept him in sight. Sometimes they were far enough back that he could only make out the dust clouds their ponies stirred up, and sometimes they were close enough for him to see them plainly with their slumped riding posture and the Springfield rifles draped across their ponies’ withers.
Regardless of their continued presence, he made camp in the mouth of a draw at the foot of a bald, scrub brush hill. He built his fire at the back of that draw against a boulder pile and made his bed where he could see anyone coming to him.
It was well after dark when he heard horses rattling over the rocks to his camp, and he threw back his blanket and took up his rifle. He cracked the Winchester’s receiver open enough to make sure there was a round in the chamber, then closed it and waited for them, sitting against his saddle for a backrest and the Winchester across his lap. Shortly thereafter, two men dismounted on the far side of his fire. One was an Apache and one was the young white man he had talked to back at the agency. Newt heard more rocks rolling beyond them, and he assumed that there were others out there.
“You got the lieutenant some agitated,” the white man said with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his skinny neck. “He doesn’t like you causing trouble.”
Newt put his thumb on the hammer of his Winchester. “Are you wanting some trouble of your own?”
Chapter Four
The white man said something to the Indian with him that must have been in the Apache tongue, and then hunkered down on his heels and took off his army campaign hat and began turning it by the brim in his hands, restless like. He wore the same cocky grin that he had given Newt back at the agency.
He was young enough to be cocky, maybe in his twenties, and tall—as tall as Newt but skinnier. His sandy hair was already thinning, regardless of his youth, and a wispy, narrow mustache shone on his upper lip. Those round, bright little eyes of his gleamed in the firelight on either side of a long, Roman nose.
The Apache with him was more on the edge, and he remained standing with a Springfield carbine resting in the crook of one elbow.
“Tell that Indian to sit down and put away his rifle, or I won’t take him as friendly,” Newt said.
The white man said something else in Apache, and the warrior squatted beside him without answering. He kept the rifle in the crook of his arm and stared back at Newt with a bland expression.
“He’s only halfway there,” Newt said.
“That’s because he’s only half a mind to do what you said,” the white fellow answered. “He doesn’t like giving up his gun. Says that was the first thing the reservation men asked him to do when he got here, and nothing’s been good since.”
“You’re taking the long way around,” Newt said. “Say what it is you’ve got to say. That West Point shavetail back there at the agency put me in a foul mood, and I’d just as soon sleep as talk to another of you government men.”
“What I came here for is to see if you really got a hundred dollars of railroad money to pay a man to guide you.”
Newt cocked the Winchester. “Kid, there’s easier men to rob and easier ways to make a hundred dollars.”
“You got it all wrong. You said you needed a tracker.”
“Him?” Newt pointed at the Apache.
“Him and me. My name’s Tom Horn, and this here is Pretty Buck.”
“Pretty Buck? What kind of name is that?” Newt looked again at the Apache. The Apache was no older than Horn, maybe younger. And truly, he had a face that was so round and smooth and pretty as to be almost feminine.
“He doesn’t like that name. It’s what the soldiers gave him,” Horn said. “But you couldn’t pronounce his real
name, so it will have to do.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“He can. He’s been scouting for Sieber and the army for three years. Went with us to Mexico the last time and served admirably.”
“Sibby,” Pretty Buck repeated Horn’s words, as if that said everything that needed said.
“Ask him if he knows anything about the Redding boy.”
“Already did. He says that the reservation gossip is that it was Chiricahuas who got the boy,” Horn said. “There’s one little band of the worst of the renegades that we didn’t get rounded up this summer, and they are still roaming around Mexico raising hell.”
“Does he know where we can find the boy?”
Horn twisted on his heels a little and made a wave of his hand toward the south. “Big country down there. Rough country. Boy could be anywhere if he’s still alive, but he’s got a few ideas. Knows the campgrounds they’re liable to use.”
“What kind of Apache is he?” Newt nodded at Pretty Buck.
“Nednhi. That’s a band of the Chiricahua.”
“And he’s willing to help us go after his own people?”
“He’s willing to hire on and take your money so he can buy a bolt of calico for a girl he’s taken a shine to,” Horn replied. “If you don’t know anything about Apaches, the first thing you’d better learn is that they like nothing better than the prospect of a good fight. Doesn’t matter who they’re fighting.”
“Hard to trust him when we’ll be hunting his kin.”
“Next thing you’d better remember is that there’s hard feelings among the Apaches toward the broncos that won’t settle down for peace. Every time there’s a raid on a white farm, the reservation Apache get the blame just like the ones that really did the raiding,” Horn said. “That, and scouting for the army is the only way a warrior can live like he admires and make him a name since we won’t let them make war when they’re of a mind to.”
“What about you? You said that Sieber was the Chief of Scouts. I admit I’ve heard of him, but I don’t know you from Adam. You some kind of Indian fighter yourself, or are you only wanting some money to buy a girl some calico?”
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