The life slowly began to come back into his hands, blood circulating where the rawhide thongs had shut it off. His hands began to tingle and then to burn with a pain that was almost as bad as sticking them in flames. He waited and gritted his teeth, all the while never taking his eyes off Gok standing before him.
When, after a long while, he stood, more than one of the Chiricahuas readied their rifles for trouble. Gok was wearing a gunbelt decorated with silver Mexican pesos hammered and engraved into conchos and with other fancy silverwork. An ivory-handled Colt pistol and a Bowie knife rode on opposite hips, and the holster and the sheath were decorated much the same as the gunbelt. Gok made no move to put his hand near either of the weapons. He simply waited and watched with that unreadable, stoic expression.
Newt held out one hand, palm up and open. “Dame mi pistola.”
Gok didn’t flinch. Newt kept his open palm waiting.
“I ought to kill you,” Newt said.
Horn was up on one foot, balanced against the tree they had tied him to. He looked frantic the instant Newt said that.
Either Gok didn’t understand any English, or he was that confident, for he reached behind the small of his back and drew out Newt’s pistol with the blue crosses in the grips. He put the pistol in Newt’s hand.
Newt holstered it. His breathing was slow and heavy. Gok was a powerful man, but Newt towered over him many inches. Yet Gok held his ground, waiting for something that he did not say.
“When do we start?” Newt asked.
Horn repeated the question, and Gok answered.
“First light,” Horn said.
Gok watched Horn translate, and it was plain that he wanted some kind of confirmation from Newt.
Newt took a deep breath and let it out. “Enjuh.”
For the first time, Gok smiled, or almost, and nodded. “Enjuh.”
With that, Gok turned and walked back to the fire and lay down on his blanket. The other warriors were slower to relax any at all, but they eventually hunkered down by the fire, closely watching the two white men. Newt and Horn were wondering what to do next.
“Did you ask him about Pretty Buck?” Newt asked Horn.
“I told you, don’t say the names of the dead,” Horn said.
“They killed him?”
Horn looked up at the point of the mountain where Newt had thought to go and look for Pretty Buck. That look said it all. Pretty Buck wouldn’t be riding with them west.
Horn sat back down against the tree and gingerly began to examine his burns. The sole of that damaged foot looked terrible. Great blisters were already formed; the pale white of the stretched skin and fluid pockets stood out starkly in the firelight and against the soot-black and charred skin surrounding the blisters.
It was a while before he seemed to notice that Newt was still standing and hadn’t moved at all. “What are you looking at?”
Newt gestured at Gok. The old warrior seemed to already be asleep.
“Let’s wait until morning,” Horn said. “We ain’t out of the woods, yet. Not by a long shot.”
Newt spat a bloody wad of phlegm at the fire and kept his gaze on the sleeping Gok. “You tell him I want my damned boots back.”
Horn started to protest.
“And you tell them not to eat my horse.”
Chapter Ten
“You never did pay me that twenty dollars you promised me when we got to the border.” Horn was riding his horse with his bad foot bare and out of the stirrup on that side. He had rigged a crude bandage out of the sleeve of a spare shirt, and there was something pitiful in the ragged spectacle of him slouched in the saddle and letting his horse make its own way along the narrow eyebrow of a mountain trail they traveled. He squirmed in the saddle often, probably because the burns on his inner calf were rubbing against the fender of his saddle.
Gok was several yards in the lead. Newt watched the old warrior’s broad back, thinking things, but mostly wondering why the Apache was so confident that they wouldn’t kill him in revenge for what he had done to them.
“I was talking about that twenty dollars,” Horn said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“What good would it do you now?” Newt answered. “You said this morning that our chances of surviving this were looking slimmer by the minute.”
“It’s the principle of the matter. It would remind me why I came with you.”
Newt thought about the wallet of cash in his saddlebags and wished he had trusted Horn more and earlier, and gone ahead and paid him. “Nothing to spend it on out here anyway.”
“I could hold it in my hands. Help pass the time, you know, thinking on how I could spend it.”
“We’ve got plenty to think about. You want to carry the money, you can.”
“How much money have you got?” Horn looked at the saddlebags. “If you’ve got enough we could ride back to the border and hire us some fools to come back down here and get that kid and get their feet burned.”
Newt leaned in the saddle and looked down at the mountainside dropping in an almost vertical descent several hundred feet below them. He guessed them already well over five thousand feet of elevation, and the trail they rode on was barely wide enough for a horse. In no place was it good enough or smooth enough to let a rider on it quit thinking about that fall.
“You know any fellows fool enough to go after the boy?” Horn asked.
“Only two,” Newt said. Then he thought about Pretty Buck and regretted saying it. He hadn’t really known the Apache scout, but he had seemed a good sort. Too good of a sort to go under so young and the way he had.
Gok disappeared ahead of them when the trail dipped sharply downward into pine forest. With the trail becoming less challenging, he kicked his pony to a trot. For a seasoned Chiricahua warrior, Gok surprised Newt how careless and unworried he traveled. Or perhaps Gok knew they were nowhere close to the Hatchet’s gang, and that the terrain was too rough to worry about Mexican regulars.
Newt had asked Gok early that morning about his lack of caution. Horn had translated where he needed to, and the gist of it was that Gok claimed he would be able to sense when enemies were around, long before they arrived. Gok had said nothing since.
Newt placed little stock in Gok’s supposed “medicine” powers and figured the old warrior knew this ground intimately and had reason to suspect there was no danger. Newt also suspected that Gok’s friends might be trailing them. He often checked his back trail for signs of them.
A small black bear flushed from the timber a hundred yards in front of them, and Newt’s hand went reflexively to the buttstock of his Winchester in its rifle boot on his saddle before he realized it was only a bear. Still, he was glad to have his weapons back.
The Apache had risen from their blankets an hour before daylight. They ate more of the mule meat, and then without a word to either Gok or the white men, they mounted their horses and rode away to the south. Newt’s and Horn’s weapons and other belongings were left in a pile beside the fire. Knowing how short of guns and ammunition the renegade Apache were, Newt hadn’t expected that.
When they went over the dip in the trail, they found Gok stopped in the middle of it at the edge of the pines. He seemed concerned.
“What’s the matter?” Newt asked.
Gok obviously didn’t understand him, or was too intent on something ahead to answer.
“Que pasa?” Newt repeated.
Newt then realized that Gok was watching the little black bear running fearfully at high speed down the mountainside. Gok remained where he was, even after the bear was long out of sight.
“Just a bear,” Newt said.
Gok said something. Said much in fact while he sat his horse and refused to move ahead.
“That bear has him spooked,” Horn said.
“Only a bear,” Newt repeated.
“Apaches think bears are special. Most of them won’t eat one, and those that kill one don’t want to touch it. They think that the spirits of wicked
people sometimes become bears and that to touch one or eat of its flesh will let that bad spirit possess them. Some Apaches feel the same about owls and coyotes.”
Gok said more.
“He says he had the bear sickness once.” Horn asked Gok to retell a part of it, then continued his translation when Gok was finished. “Says that when the bear heart took over his own that he foamed at the mouth and could not sleep. When he did sleep after many days, he had bad dreams.”
“No bueno,” Gok said when Horn was finished. He didn’t so much as gesture at the way the bear had gone, as if he feared to do that much. Only his gaze showed where the bear had gone.
“Just a bear,” Newt said for a third time.
Gok changed back to speaking Apache. Newt looked to Horn and saw that Horn was again having a hard time understanding Gok.
“He says you should not laugh at the bear sickness, and that even a good man can be overcome with the bear heart,” Horn said.
“I’ve been worse things than a bear,” Newt replied.
“He says that when you think you are well from the bear sickness, you will still never be the same,” Horn added. “Always, a bit of the bear’s heart will live in you. You will do things that you would not do without it. That’s the bear and the bad spirit acting out.”
Newt motioned at the trail ahead of them, impatient to be moving. When Gok finally kicked his horse forward he turned from the trail and went up the mountain, as if afraid to go near where the bear had crossed their path or its tracks.
“Superstition,” Newt said, more disgusted with the detour than Gok’s beliefs.
“Gok’s got magic,” Horn said. “All the Chiricahua say that about him. There was a time when all the young braves wanted to follow him on raids. They said he could tell when the Mexicans or the Americans were coming long before they ever showed. Lozen was like that, too. When they wanted her to use her magic she would go up on a hill and spread her arms out until her palms tingled and told her which way they should go or where the enemy was.”
“She?”
“Woman, but a warrior. Not unheard of, but rare,” Horn said. “And one of the prettiest women I ever saw, but too mean and hated white men too much for me to spark her.”
“I wish we had got that bear,” Newt said. “We could use the meat.”
Horn looked less sure, and Newt noticed that.
“Don’t tell me you’re scared of bear spirits, too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not, but you spend long enough with the Apache you get to thinking things that you didn’t consider before. I stayed with old Pedro in his camp for most of a winter once. I saw a medicine man in that camp predict when we were going to have company three days before the guests arrived.”
“Not shocking that the rumor spread about somebody coming.”
“No, nobody knew. And he predicted how many were coming and whether they would be man or woman and what band they belonged to. I’m only saying . . .”
Gok called back to them over his shoulder.
“What did he say?” Newt was getting tired of having to get Horn to translate everything, and his head still hurt. Those two things were both in his tone and the growling way he talked.
“Shush Bijii,” Horn said. “He says you have the Bear Heart. The sickness is gone, but he can see the bear in you. And the bear spirit will come and go in you, and it worries him that maybe he cannot trust you as he once thought.”
“Never ate a bear in my life.”
“Never once? From your accent I would have guessed you from east Tennessee, or parts nearby. Kentucky or Arkansas, maybe. You’ve got the mountains in your talk,” Horn said.
“Tennessee, right enough.”
“And a hill boy like you never ate bear?”
“Only bear I was ever around, I watched him drink a beer.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“What kind of bear drinks a beer?”
“A Langtry, Texas, bear. Belonged to that judge I told you about.”
“What were you doing in Langtry?”
“I was fixing to ride to Mexico.”
“See? Maybe there’s something to what Gok says. How’d that trip turn out?”
“Wonderful.”
The look on Newt’s face made Horn think he was lying. “Mexico ain’t so bad. I reckon there are worse places. You can say that about it, don’t you think?”
“You can say that about anywhere.”
“Well, maybe we ought to rethink Mexico and consider the good things.”
Newt frowned at him as he was wont to do. “Too much talking.”
“But you haven’t talked no more than a few sentences since we broke camp this morning,” Horn called after Newt as the big man kicked up to a trot and pulled ahead of him. “I tell you, Jones, we’ve got to work on those social skills.”
Chapter Eleven
They followed trails that only an Apache would know of, and perhaps saw places that none but an Apache had ever seen. They stayed north of where the peaks of the Sierra Madre began to really touch the sky, skirting those looming crags and following a winding way through narrow passes and over some of the steepest, roughest terrain Newt had ever ridden a horse over.
Always, they kept a westward course, and sometimes their way grew so rough that they had to dismount and lead the horses over boulder-strewn cuts and shale bank slides where one false step and a quick fall could cripple or kill man or beast. Gok seemed to think nothing of the bad country they traversed, but Apache were more at home on foot than on horseback, and it appeared that he thought a horse could go anywhere a man on his own legs could go without using his hands. Maybe he was right, but once during the day Horn’s horse fell off the trail and ended up in the bottom of a gully on its back with all four legs sticking straight up. They were an hour righting it and half again that time finding a way for it to climb back up to the trail.
They made one night’s camp in a glade cut in between two mountain peaks. It was nothing but a scooped-out hole in the mountains with a little running water coursing down its middle, but as pretty as a manicured city park to Newt and a place he would never have imagined existed until he stumbled upon it. Horn said the Apache knew of lots of such places and made them their strongholds and summer camping spots.
Newt said nothing to either Gok or Horn. He simply unsaddled and brushed down the Circle Dot horse and hobbled it to graze on the mountain grass, and then he lay down after wolfing down a cold supper of leftover bacon he carried in his pocket. He was asleep long before Horn had the coffee ready. Horn and Gok sat up long into the night telling stories and theorizing about the big man with them.
Again, an hour or more before sunup they were riding west. Horn was quiet for once and appeared as if he hadn’t slept at all.
Newt pointed at Horn’s bandaged foot. “Bothering you? You look rough.”
“Naaa.” Horn shook his head. “Bit sleepy, I guess.”
“That’s what you get for sitting up all night working your jaws.”
Horn scoffed. “That’s what I like about Apaches. You take an Apache man. He’ll stay up all night telling stories and sharing his tiswin with you.”
“Tiswin?”
“Apache beer.” Horn looked a little put out at being interrupted, but went on. “Like I said, he’ll stay up all night enjoying good company, then he’ll lay down and sleep ’til noon or so while his women get the place revved up and his meal ready. He’ll get his belly full, then smoke him some tobacco and tell a few more stories. Then he’ll get up and go hunting or maybe go visit somebody else’s lodge. Now tell me that ain’t living easy like.”
Newt ignored him. Gok was leading them down a last, long decline, and a mesquite-choked flat was visible a mile or more below them, with the ribbons of two rivers coming together on that flat.
They were halfway down to the flat when Newt thought he saw dust rising up from along one of those rivers. Gok apparently saw it, too. Their chose
n path down a canyon led them out of sight of the river. When they once more could see the flat, Gok dismounted in a pile of boulders that had tumbled down from above in the far-flung past. He motioned for Newt and Horn to dismount, and they did so and left their horses and followed the old warrior to a vantage point where they could study that dust cloud without revealing themselves.
Newt peered at the dust and said as if to himself, “Passel of men on horses.”
Gok must have recognized the English word for horse, because he nodded and then said, “Rurales.”
“Yep,” Horn agreed. “Those do look like Rurales.”
Newt wasn’t sure how they could tell who was making that dust cloud, unless their vision was twice as good as his. But they seemed sure.
“Country lawmen,” Horn said in case Newt didn’t know what a Rurale was. “Kind of like roving police or those Texas Rangers. There are companies of them stationed all over this country. Most of them are ill-equipped, and some of them are little better than highwaymen with a badge, but I bet that’s old Pablo Chavez’s bunch. If it is, they’re nobody to mess with.”
“We’ll let them pass, and then we’ll cross behind them,” Newt said. “No problem.”
Horn hobbled over to a rock and took a seat. He propped his game foot up on his other knee and picked at something on the bottom of it.
“Cactus sticker,” he said. “I sure miss wearing my boot. We never appreciate our feet like we should.”
“We should have ridden into Casas Grandes like I said and left you there,” Newt scolded. “You’re in no shape for this.”
“I’ll keep up. Let’s just sit here a while and let those Rurales pass. A little rest will do my foot good, and I’ll be right as rain. You watch.”
“You barely made it every time we got off and led the horses.”
“Yeah, but I made it. And I’ll keep making it. Mama Horn didn’t raise no sissies.”
“How come you to come with me? And don’t tell me it was for the money.”
Horn smiled that smile of his. “How come you’re down here?”
“That boy’s grandmother is my friend—”
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