Newt watched the warrior reeling on the back of the horse, obviously drunk as Horn had guessed. What’s more, Newt could see him well enough then that he was pretty sure the warrior was an elderly man, not just by his shape and posture, but by the crackle in his voice.
“Tell him I didn’t come here to fight him,” Newt said. “I only want to trade for the boy.”
Pretty Buck did as he asked, and the warrior across the river shouted something again and rode his horse in a wide circle. Newt heard a splash and soon saw the clay jug go floating along the current past them.
“Watch him, Jones,” Horn called out.
“Surely that old Indian isn’t serious,” Newt said to Pretty Buck. “Tell him to sleep it off and we’ll talk about things in the morning.”
Pretty Buck said nothing. Either Newt’s Spanish had failed him, or the scout’s had.
“Tell him again that I don’t want to fight,” Newt said.
Pretty Buck didn’t get the time to relay that, for the old warrior let out a war cry, and that cry was answered by some kind of cheers or other war cries from the other Chiricahua braves along the river. The old warrior gave his horse a kick to start it forward, tugging at something hanging beside his leg.
Newt put his free hand to the trigger guard on his Winchester, but he did not shoulder the weapon. “Tell him what I said.”
Pretty Buck turned and left him in a trot, saying something over his shoulder that Newt couldn’t make out.
The warrior was coming across the river, still kicking his horse madly and having a great deal of trouble keeping the animal going in a straight line. He brandished a rifle in one hand.
Newt shouldered his Winchester when the Apache was at midstream. At that point the warrior’s horse must have lost its footing, or else the warrior was so drunk that he pulled on its bridle too hard. The horse reared high on its hind legs, front hooves pawing at the air and with its mouth gaped open. At the same time the warrior’s rifle went off, whether intentionally or by accident. Newt saw the streak of flame from its muzzle blaze into the night sky, and the roar of it must have startled the horse enough to put it over the edge. It teetered upright no longer and fell over backward, plunging the warrior into the river beneath its weight.
Newt kept his Winchester up and watched the thrashing animal try to roll over and get its legs back under it. When it was finally upright it came out of the river on his side, rider-less and trailing its bridle reins. It stopped and shook the water from it, and then trotted away toward the thicket where Newt’s own stock was tied.
Newt thought he could make out the old warrior floating in the river, and he watched that dark shape drift on the slow current. The old warrior did not move and floated facedown.
The other Apaches began moving. Newt heard the brush crack on the far bank and the whisper of their moccasins coming over the ground. He backed away with his Winchester kept at ready.
By the time he reached the log and his two companions, he could make out the forms of several more warriors on the far riverbank. The old warrior’s body floated directly before them.
“Let them fetch him,” Newt said to Horn and Pretty Buck.
Whether Horn and the Apache scout had intended to take advantage of the Chiricahuas’ attempt to retrieve the body and open fire or not, they lowered their rifles and did as he asked. Pretty Buck called to the Apaches and must have told them what Newt had said, for it wasn’t long before two of them waded into the river and drug the old warrior out of the water.
A half hour later and there was no sound from the Chiricahua raiding party.
“Well, Jones, you haven’t been three days in Mexico and you’re already a big man among the Chiracahuas,” Horn said to break the silence.
“How’s that?” Newt asked.
“They’ll remember the man who killed Juh.”
“I didn’t kill him. Didn’t even shoot. He fell off his horse; you saw it.”
The three of them waited some more in silence.
“Any chance they’ll talk to us now?” Newt asked later.
“Not likely, but I’ll try,” Horn said.
He explained what was desired to Pretty Buck. The scout called across the river several times but received no answer in return.
“They might take their chief and leave, or they might cross the river elsewhere and try and put the sneak on us from the side or behind,” Horn said.
“I always heard that Apache won’t fight in the dark,” Newt said.
“Who’d you hear that from?” Horn asked. “Grant you, they don’t favor it like a Comanche might, but they’re always looking for an advantage.”
“Think they’ll charge us?”
“No, they won’t charge three guns across open ground. Apaches don’t go for the hero stuff like a lot of other Indians,” Horn said. “They’re crafty fighters, and what an Apache admires is winning and not getting yourself killed doing it.”
“I’m guessing they’ve got us outnumbered three to one.”
“They still won’t try to rush us from all the way across the river. A Comanche might, or a Sioux might just to show his buddies how crazy brave he is, but Apaches don’t go for that foolish stuff,” Horn replied. “Now, what they may do is wade across the river a ways up or down it and put the slip on us. Stalking is more their style, and it won’t be hard for them to work in on us in this brush.”
“Any chance they’ve got the boy with them?”
“No, but he may be where they were going before they run on to us, or where they came from.”
“Are you saying we pull out of here and see if we can trail them tomorrow?”
Horn folded down the brim of his hat. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Then I guess there’s no sense waiting.”
Horn searched the brush on their side of the river, as if the Chiricahuas might already be surrounding them. He stood and moved in a stooped-over fashion toward the horses. Horn and Pretty Buck waited until he came out of the thicket leading their mounts before they rose up from behind the log.
Instead of mounting, they led the horses for the first half mile away from the river. They picked their way as best they could, careful not to crack any brush and avoiding rocky ground. Often, they stopped to listen for the sounds of the Apaches on their back trail, but there seemed to be no pursuit.
They were on the far side of a strip of dense oak and mesquite thicket and once more upon open ground before they got on their horses. Pretty Buck took the lead and headed west. It was too dark to see much of anything, and Newt had no idea where the scout was taking them.
Somewhere hours later they entered the foothills of the northern Sierra Madre with the black shadows of high mountains. Pretty Buck led them on a winding course and into a canyon that slashed between two of those rock-strewn hills. They followed a dry creek and made camp under a leaning cottonwood next to a few small potholes of stagnant water in the middle of the rocky streambed. They made no fire, and Pretty Buck went up on the side of the canyon to stand the first watch. Newt and Horn left their boots on when they lay down, kept their horses saddled, with each man keeping hold of a bridle rein.
Sometime later, Newt came awake. He was startled to find that he had slept so long, and light was already spreading across the sky. He sat up and shoved away his blanket and looked around him. The bottom of the canyon was a narrow strip of trees sloping upward toward a saddle connecting the two hills that confined it.
He looked through the stark, bony shadows of the trees toward that pass in the hills, and he searched up the nearly vertical walls of the canyon rising up a hundred feet above him, trying to orient himself. Horn still lay asleep under his blanket, but there was no sign of Pretty Buck.
The fact that Pretty Buck hadn’t woken one of them earlier bothered Newt. He left his horse ground-tied alongside Horn’s and went in search of the missing scout. A rocky point jutting slightly out into the canyon provided a route up the bluff and a vantage point to see dow
n the canyon the way they had come. It was a natural place for Pretty Buck to have chosen to stand watch. Newt entered a thick clump of willows, intent on climbing up to that point. He had some inclination that Pretty Buck might have fallen asleep.
The willow thicket was dense, and it took some effort to push through the numerous limbs. He ducked under the last one to get free of the tangle, and he barely had time to recognize the high-topped Apache moccasins and several pairs of bare brown legs at eye level to him before a carbine butt struck him on the temple and drove him to the ground.
He was all but blinded by the force and pain of the blow, and he struggled to regain his faculties while his arms were gathered roughly behind him and his wrists were lashed together with rawhide thongs. He fought against them enough that, for a brief moment, he managed to roll onto his side. His right eyebrow was cut badly from the blow they had struck him, and he stared upward at his attacker through a bloody slit. An Apache warrior, his face seamed with tiny scars and creased with weather lines and his cheek bones smeared with war paint, leaned over and peered down at him. His dark eyes were sunk deep within his skull, and the hate and the intensity in them burned like living fire.
Newt drew up his knees and kicked at those trying to bind his ankles, but the Apache peering down at him lifted the Springfield rifle he held and drove the butt-plate downward into Newt’s skull a second time.
Chapter Eight
There was blessed nothingness, and then the pain came back. Newt’s skull felt like it had been cracked and was about to bust wide open from the inside. With every beat of his heart his head throbbed in unison, and the overwhelming misery and dizziness begged him to clench his eyes shut tight and simply lie down and curl into a ball and drool himself back into empty oblivion. But pain was not new to him, and pain made him mad. To give in to it was the same as admitting he had lost, and not to fight it was the same as proving he couldn’t take it. There was a pure clarity to pain, and it brought with it a drive to lash out. Fanged and clawed animals knew that primal drive and single-mindedness. Some men knew it. Simple, animal emotion—beat the pain, then bite and slash back at those that caused it.
He forced his eyes open and took a deep, ragged breath. The world around him was a cloudy blur, but he did not need to see clearly to determine that he was sitting on the ground and bound with his back to a tree. His bonds were so tight that when the nausea overcame him he could only move his chin to one side and tilt his head enough to vomit on one of his legs instead of both of them. He wretched so hard that he expected to see blood.
When his guts were empty, he lifted his sagging head once more and found that he could see a little better. Seven Chiricahua warriors sat around a fire, all of them squatting with their arms resting on their bent knees and staring at him, and several of them smiling or laughing as if watching a man puke on himself was truly funny.
Seven Apaches—stone-cold warriors and blooded men of the kind only a desert could give birth to, all staring at him out of those brown flint eyes, the fierceness of their gazes exaggerated by the war paint smeared upon their faces. Their laughter and their guttural utterances were only a dull dream to him, washed over by the continual pounding in his skull.
Newt looked around for Pretty Buck, but the scout was nowhere to be seen. All the warnings given to him about trusting an Apache came back to him right then. Either Pretty Buck fled at the arrival of the war party without giving any warning to the two white men, or he had purposely sold them out.
One of the Apache warriors, the small one wearing the white cotton shirt with the sleeve garters and a breechcloth over pants of the same color tucked into the tops of his knee-high moccasins, reached into the fire and drug out a knife he had left in the coals. Half the blade was glowing cherry red when he pointed it at Newt, and he slung his long hair off one cheek and gave Newt a grin as wicked as the glowing carbon steel. Newt wasn’t sure if it was his blurred vision tricking him, or if he could really see the waves of heat lifting off the blade. But the one thing he was sure of was that knife was meant for him.
Newt blinked and blinked again, trying to refocus his vision. The one with the knife was on his feet and moving around the fire. Newt tugged against the rope tied around his chest to secure him to the tree trunk he rested against, and he jerked so fiercely at the rawhide thongs that bound his hands behind him that they dug into his wrists and the blood began to flow. When the Apache neared, Newt stiffened and braced himself for the bite of hot knife and everything, real and imagined, that came with that.
And then the Apache went past him, followed by another of the warriors.
Newt knew that his hearing was coming back when he heard Horn scream. He knew that it was Horn’s voice, even before he turned his head and saw the young packer tied in a similar fashion to a nearby tree. Horn screamed again and cursed at the top of his lungs. Newt couldn’t help but hear, and he watched it all. That was what they wanted. They wanted him to see it happen to Horn and to know that the same or worse would soon happen to him.
The other warrior sat on Horn’s outstretched legs so that he couldn’t move them while the Apache with the knife dabbed the blistering steel against the soles of Horn’s bare feet. Newt looked down at his own feet and realized that they had taken off his boots, too.
There are storytellers who spin tales of brave men who spit in their captors’ eyes and laugh at torture and fate. Horn was a brave man and he was tough, but he didn’t laugh. Oh, he did spit some, but that was only the drool spraying while he screamed his bravery like a wailing infant. He cursed them in three tongues, sobbing those oaths in a quavering crescendo of passion each time the knife flicked out and seared his flesh. They burned the sole of one foot, and they worked their way up his leg, slitting one pants leg and leaving raw red hickeys of wet flesh inside his calf muscle. Never did they leave the knife blade against him long, but long enough.
The knife eventually cooled, and they returned to the fire and shoved it back in the coals. Newt knew that his turn with the knife was next from the way they watched him. He tried not to think about all the stories he had heard about how long an Apache could make such tortures last.
He watched the knife in the coals while the seconds ticked away with each beat of his heart, and the blade grew hotter. He tried to find some morsel of willpower from deep within that could see him through, and that could make things better than they were. But it wouldn’t come, as if the usual force that bound him together had bled out from his wounds or vomited forth from his guts. He only felt weak and weary, and for one of the few times in his adult life, he could also feel the fear creeping over him. And he hated that fear, and the more he feared the more he hated it and the more his anger rose. He grasped at that hate and fed it and mixed it with the fear. He glared back at the Apaches with gritted teeth, and he had understood why Horn had bawled profanity amid his screams of pain.
One of the warriors went behind Newt and began to untie the ropes securing him to the tree trunk, while four more of them put a loop from a lariat around his ankles. That they had other things in store for him was readily apparent when the sixth one of them led up Newt’s pack mule.
The instant that they released him from the tree he fought them. He managed to kick one of them into the fire, and he give a glancing head-butt to another one, but there was only so much he could do with his hands still tied behind his back and five of them on him. They drug him by his heels to the one tall tree in the canyon, an ancient cottonwood with multiple trunks that towered above the rest of the low vegetation. One of the warriors tied a rock to the free end of the lariat and threw it over a high limb. The rock was removed and the rope was tied then to the mule’s packsaddle, and Newt was hoisted into the air until he hung upside down with his head suspended some four feet off the ground.
The pain in Newt’s head grew worse hanging that way. From his upside-down point of view, he watched the Apaches bring tinder and firewood and lay the beginnings of a fire beneath him. They sco
oped up some coals from the other fire with the very same knife blade they had burned Horn with, then carried them over and lit the tinder. The new fire was slow to blaze, but smoke drifted upward in a choking cloud.
Newt saw the tickle of tiny flames growing larger within the kindling beneath the firewood, and he squirmed and tried to swing himself away from the heat and the smoke. The warriors seemed to find great fun in his antics, but their attention was drawn away when another warrior arrived from down the canyon leading Newt’s horse. Apparently, the Circle Dot horse had spooked during the Apaches’ arrival or wandered off.
The horse was led past Newt, and the warriors followed it to a point several yards away. They gestured at the gelding in some kind of argument and seemed especially interested in the brand on its hip. Soon, the warriors gathered around the horse.
Only one of the raiding party remained squatted before the fire beneath Newt’s head, never once glancing at the Circle Dot horse, but instead keeping an intent watch on his captive. He appeared to be the oldest of them by far, a stocky, barrel-chested man, in a breechcloth and dark wool pants tucked into his knee-high moccasins. He wore a vest over a white cotton shirt, and some kind of Mexican silver necklace hung down to his chest. He had a broad face with a jutting chin, and the skin of his face was like old leather soaked in bourbon, with deep age lines and what looked to be a dimpled bullet scar below the outer corner of his left eye.
There was another scar on one knee that looked to be from a bullet, same as the one on his face, but it wasn’t only the scars that marked the man. It was something in his gaze and the single-mindedness with which he watched Newt suffer. He sat quietly in front of that fire with his mouth set in a tight line while the other warriors argued over the horse. The flames grew higher, as if the intensity of the old warrior’s watch fed them as much as the firewood.
Before him on the ground, the old warrior had Newt’s saddlebags, and he finally tired of watching Newt’s growing torment and opened one of the bags. While he pilfered through the contents he spilled on the ground, the twisting, creaking rope rotated Newt on his axis enough that he could see Horn.
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