From the hand signs Newt understood that Gok believed that what was left of the Hatchet’s men had fled upriver. That fit with what Newt had already come to believe.
They remained hidden, waiting. Horn could see a large swath of country from the mesa, and they would trust to him to let them know when it was safe. If they heard him shoot they could work deeper into the brush and try to elude pursuit that way.
Newt heard horses walking up the rode from the south an hour later, and then Horn called out to them. Gok got the children on their feet, and Newt led them back to the road.
Horn was leading their own horses and driving several more in front of him. He stopped when he saw Newt emerge from the brush.
“I kept watch to make sure they went on, then it took me a while to round up all the horses I could,” Horn said.
The collars on the kids’ necks were made of a strap of leather fastened with a single rivet, much like a dog collar. There was also a harness ring to run the rope through to string them together. Gok and Newt cut the collars off with their knives. Some of the collars were loose enough to make it easy to slip a blade between the collar and the child’s neck, but others were tighter. Regardless, it was a painful process for all of them. The children’s necks were chafed and red-raw from the collars.
Most of the Apache children took the pain without complaint, and usually without so much as flinching. Billy Redding, on the other hand, cried and whimpered and squirmed when Newt tried to remove his collar. Newt had his hands full trying not to cut him while holding him still at the same time. He was busy with such when somebody said something behind him.
“I’m sure glad to see you, mister.” It was a kid’s voice.
Newt finished cutting the Redding boy’s collar free before he looked around. It was another small boy. It took Newt a moment to realize he was a gringo child. The kid was stockier than Billy Redding with a sharp nose, big eyes, and chin like a little barroom brawler. He looked up at Newt with something akin to anger written all over his face. He wore a crude sack shirt that hung to his thighs, a breechcloth, and what was left of a pair of Apache-style moccasins. Instead of an Apache headband, he had found a castoff rag and used it to cover his head in place of a hat. Had the boy stood on the deck of a sailing ship he could have passed for a tiny pirate. Wisps of red hair stuck out from under that pirate rag.
“They were going to sell us,” the boy said.
“I reckon they were,” Newt answered.
The boy spit as a sign of disgust. “I tried to run away from them twice, but they caught me every time.”
“What’s your name?”
“Charlie. Charlie McComas.”
“What’d you say, boy?” Horn asked, having overheard him.
“Charlie McComas.”
The name seemed to have some impact on Horn, but he didn’t elaborate. Instead, he busied himself with catching horses and getting the kids up on their backs.
There were eighteen kids, and Horn had managed to round up four of the outlaws’ horses. Those four horses, plus the two spares that Gok had taken from the Rurales, made six. Most of the children were small, so they mounted them double and triple as needed, putting the older or stronger children at the back to help keep the younger ones calm and in place.
Gok was already on his horse with the little Apache girl he had been talking to earlier behind him. Newt thought to do the same with Billy Redding, but the boy fought him, whether because he didn’t want to get on the horse or because there had been too many hands on him during his captivity, Newt didn’t know.
“Let me help,” Charlie McComas said.
Charlie took hold of one of Billy’s arms. “We got to go now.”
Billy calmed somewhat, but still stared at Newt with big, scared eyes.
“Your daddy sent me to get you,” Newt said to Billy.
“Papa?” That was the first word the boy had spoken.
“And your grandma Matilda,” Newt added.
Billy began to tear up again, but Charlie soothed him. Instead of mounting Billy behind him, Newt put him in front of Charlie on one of Gok’s horses. Billy clutched the big Charro saddle horn with both hands and never said another word or looked at Newt again. His mouth hadn’t stopped trembling. Charlie McComas reached around him and took the reins.
“You two stick close to me,” Newt said.
“You think they’re up there somewhere waiting to waylay us?” Charlie asked.
Newt understood that Charlie was asking about the Hatchet’s men. He looked to Horn. “Did you see that Hatchet fellow with them?”
“I saw him, and you did, too,” Horn said.
Newt looked down the road behind him at the bodies lying there.
Horn saw him looking and shook his head. “We didn’t get him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Newt considered that, thinking aloud. “Couldn’t be but four or five of them left, and you hit one of them.”
“Yeah but the Hatchet ain’t one to go forgetting what we did to him today.”
“He’s real mean,” Charlie butted in.
“Which one was he?” Newt asked, but he had a good idea already.
“Ain’t no man I ever saw dresses like him,” Horn said.
“Let me guess,” Newt said. “The man in the orange glasses.”
“That’s him.”
“Give me gun, mister, and I’ll help you fight him,” said Charlie. “I’d rather be whipped with a switch twice a day than let him take me again. You didn’t see what he did to an Apache woman with that hatchet of his.”
“I saw it, boy,” Newt said, and it pained his heart to think that such a little boy had to see such things.
Gok had started north, and the children fell in behind him, with Horn and Newt riding in the rear. Newt kept close watch on Billy and Charlie.
They left the road in a short while, and Gok led them through a mesquite-choked valley and over the top of a low ridge. Once over the ridge he turned north once more, paralleling the road most times, but with the ridge keeping them out of sight of it and anyone on it. Without asking, Newt knew that Gok thought there was a likely chance that the Hatchet could be lying in wait somewhere on that road.
Horn’s foot must have been better, for he was more his usual self, talking to the children to try to lift their spirits, or simply talking because he loved to talk. Newt knew that Horn thought the worst of it was over, and that had as much to do with his good mood as his healing wounds. Horn thought they were done and on the downhill stretch, with nothing left except to ride back to the States and hand the boy over to his family and listen to everyone call them heroes.
Newt knew better. It never was that easy. He looked to the north at the way ahead and saw nothing but mountains and mile after mile of scrub brush and nothing. And more nothing, as far as the eye could see, all the way to tomorrow and on to the rest of the days to come. That out there was danger. You didn’t measure that kind of journey in miles. You took its measure by surviving it. You survived it by winning any way you could, and you won by surviving.
It wasn’t over by a long shot. Wouldn’t be over until he took the boy back to Matilda, and there were a million things besides the Hatchet that could stop them. Trouble around the bend, waiting to see if they could take it. Newt could feel it in his bones. Like his dear departed ma had always said, the Devil never rests, and he rides some men more than others. If it wasn’t one thing it would be something else. There was always trouble, since the day he was born.
Gok’s laughter drew Newt back into the here and now. It was quiet laughter because Gok was too much of a warrior to risk an enemy hearing him when he was running and hiding, but it was laughter just the same. And it was Horn that made him laugh.
Newt listened to the rest of the story Horn was telling, and listened to them all chuckle when the punch line came, even many of the children who had nothing much to laugh about in a long, long time. Horn didn’t know it, but his story caused even Newt to crack
a smile. Newt would have laughed with them, but he held it in because that was his habit. He would have told Horn thanks, but Horn wouldn’t understand what he was thanking him for.
Newt looked to the north, toward the border again. To hell with trouble, and to hell with the Hatchet or anybody else that thought they could stop him. Three hundred miles wasn’t all that far. If the Devil was going to ride him, well, he better take a deep seat and a faraway look, because it was going to be a long hard ride.
Chapter Sixteen
Gok changed directions the morning of their second day with the children. Instead of continuing northward he led them to the east into the big mountains again. The Bavispe River’s course was in the shape of a “U,” flowing northward from its source on the Chihuahua line until it made a great bend around the northern end of the Sierra Madre sixty miles short of the border. It flowed southward from there, down the other side of those great mountains on its long journey to merge into the Yaqui River. They had recovered the children on the western side, and Gok intended to cross over and rejoin the river and then follow that valley to the border.
His thinking was that it would be harder for anyone to track them in the rough breaks of the high country, and they were less likely to run across Mexican army patrols or any other enemies that might be more than glad to find so many Apache children with only one warrior and two worn-out white men to protect them.
Newt was concerned that they would lose some of the horses in the high country, if his last trip over those mountains was any indication, or have to abandon them completely. But Gok insisted. He said that his people would be gathering soon to go back to the reservation, and if they hurried they could catch up to them and ride with them back to the border to meet the American army waiting to escort them back to their final destination. He also said that there were many villages and towns along that leg of the river, and that Newt or Horn might go to one of them and buy supplies. Newt didn’t know the country, and there was merit in Gok’s plan, regardless of Newt’s concerns about the horses and being put afoot so far away from the border.
So into the mountains it was, climbing and always climbing. Horses or not, it was so rough at times that they had to dismount and lead the horses. Soon, all was forgotten but the demands of putting one foot in front of the other. After a day of such travel the horses, men, and children were worn out. They made camp in a wide-bottomed swag between two knobs sloping up to a bald granite peak, not because it was a good camping place, but because they could go no farther. Newt guessed the camp was somewhere above four or five thousand feet of elevation.
The children collapsed to the ground almost as soon as they slid from the horses’ backs and their feet touched the ground. Newt went to each of them in turn.
“Drink, boy,” Newt said. “You need to drink.”
Billy Redding turned up the half cupful of water Newt had been holding out for him and took a sip. Not the whole cupful, but a sip. All of the other children had practically snatched the cup away from him and sucked down their portion with greedy gulps.
Billy hadn’t said anything since those few words he had spoken when Newt had informed him that his father had sent him after Billy. Some of the other children were traumatized to the point they were a bit shaky and probably not as they had been before being taken captive, but Billy was the worst of them. Newt guessed that maybe the boy had been treated more roughly than the others, or maybe the change from being a rich man’s son to an Apache captive, to being stolen once more by slave traders was too much for him. In Newt’s experience, most people could only take so much.
The kid seemed to be free of any major injuries, and he didn’t seem sick, yet he wouldn’t eat unless made to, and now he didn’t want to drink. They had ridden a dry trail for almost two days with nothing but four canteens and two canvas water bags to water that many horses, eighteen kids, and three men. The men did without, the kids got a ration of a half-cup of water occasionally, and the gaunt horses drank the rest. All of them, men and beasts, were thirsty, except for Billy.
The oldest child among the rescued captives was a Mexican girl wearing what had once been a pretty blue dress. The bottom of it had been torn off, and Newt realized that it was the same fabric as what covered Charlie McComas’s head. Her face was bruised and she walked with a severe limp, and looked as if she had seen some rough treatment from the Hatchet’s men. That being said, she and the McComas boy seemed to have weathered their ordeal better than the others. She took the cup from Newt and continued giving the rest of the children their ration of water.
Newt looked back to Billy Redding and saw that the boy had lain down on the ground and curled up into a ball on his side with both arms around his knees.
“He thinks he’s dead,” Horn said from where he was building a fire. “Seen it before, but maybe he’ll snap out of it.”
“Give him time,” Newt said. “They’ve been through a lot.”
Charlie McComas was helping Gok unsaddle the horses.
“Now that’s a tough one,” Horn said.
“That he is.”
“You know who he is, don’t you?”
“He didn’t say.”
Horn gave an ironical grunt. “All those licks on the head you’ve taken in the boxing ring must have rattled your noggin. That there is Charlie McComas, Judge McComas’s boy. Everybody thought he was dead.”
“Reckon that judge will be glad to get him back.”
“No, the judge is really dead. Chatto’s Chiricahuas killed him and the boy’s mother last spring and ran off with the boy,” Horn said. “Judge McComas had plenty of political connections, and his wife’s brother is a Kansas senator or some such. That boy there is the main reason the army come down here last spring.”
“Well, there he is in the flesh.”
“Old Nantan Lupan will have a conniption fit when he finds out we got Charlie. The newspapers and the politicians gave him hell for coming back without the boy,” Horn said.
“Hard to find anything down here, much less keep it. Who’s Nantan Lupan?”
“That’s what the Apaches call General Crook. Means chief wolf, or the big bad boss wolf, or something like that.”
Newt saw Gok’s head turn at the mention of that name, and he noticed the flash of anger it caused.
“The general didn’t try all that hard to find the boy, maybe because he didn’t believe we would ever find him, or because he had other things on his mind. But we asked about Charlie after we got the Apaches to surrender,” Horn said. “One of the squaws claimed that the boy had been alive and well up to the point we hit Chatto’s camp right before the surrender. Most of the Apaches got away from us that day, and we never even knew that the boy was in the camp. But he was, only he didn’t get far before one of the warriors running from us stopped long enough to smash in his head with a rock. You see, our White Mountain scouts got trigger happy and shot a squaw during that fight, and the warrior killed the boy in retaliation.”
Newt thought about the freshly healed scar at the edge of Charlie’s hairline that he had seen the first time the boy removed his pirate rag. It was about the size of what a big rock would make.
“The McComas family put up a big reward for the boy,” Horn added. “We stand to make a tidy profit if they’ll still pay.”
“We’ve got a long ways to go yet.”
“What are they paying you to bring the Redding boy back?”
Instead of answering, Newt walked over to help Charlie and Gok finish with the horses.
“Know’d it. They’re paying you a king’s ransom, ain’t they? That’s why you come down here,” Horn called after him. “I should have asked you for five hundred dollars instead of three, but I wasn’t sure you could afford it, and I never thought it would go this far. Thought I would guide you down below the border for a few days and you would see that it was no use and want to go back to the States and say what a big try you had made to get the boy back. Sounded like easy money then.”
“Some kind of hero, ain’t I?” Horn clucked his tongue and shook his head.
“Think what stories you’ll have to tell when you get back,” Newt said.
The mention of stories caused Horn to break into a long and rambling tale about his boyhood on a Missouri farm and a favorite dog of his. Newt only caught parts of the story because he was watching the children. They had lain down close to the little fire Horn had built. It was cold at night that high up and that late in the year, and instead of sleeping separately the children had piled together like a litter of puppies and covered themselves with blankets. Newt wondered whether it was the cold or the captivity they had shared that made them sleep that way.
Gok sat on the ground close to them with his niece on his lap. The little girl was asleep with her head resting on his chest and her arms around his neck. He was stroking her hair, lost in thought.
“Enjuh,” he said when he saw Newt watching him.
* * *
The next morning they were rigging makeshift blanket ponchos for the children when Charlie McComas came into camp carrying a stick in one hand and six dead pack rats in the other. The boy pitched them on the ground beside the fire and went and got Newt’s skillet out of the saddlebags.
Newt finished cutting a slit in the middle of the blanket he was working on and slid it over Billy’s head. He pointed at the rats. “What you got there, Charlie?”
“Breakfast.”
Horn saw the way Newt responded to that and laughed. “Never ate rat, Jones?”
“No.”
“Apaches favor it.”
“Apaches like mule, too, and I don’t think they’re one to recommend what I eat.”
“You’ll eat it if you’re hungry as I am.” Horn stepped closer to watch the boy work.
Charlie raked some coals out of the fire and set the skillet on them. He held out a hand to Newt. “I don’t have a knife.”
Newt gave him his. “Be careful, it’s sharp.”
Charlie wrinkled his nose as if that was a foolish thing to say, then he forgot about Newt and began to skin and gut the rats like he had done it many times before. He put the cleaned carcasses of the little rodents in the skillet and squatted down to tend to his cooking. He was so tiny and so intent on his work, with his tongue sticking out of one corner of his mouth, that it caused Newt to chuckle.
Buzzard Bait Page 13