“A new idea?” Nana inquired.
“He’s gonna leave the other two fellers some place an’ come after you alone. That’s what he said.”
Now Nana chuckled, glancing over at Naiche. “The big one will leave the others soon to come for us by himself. He has said he will kill us all.”
“He lies!” Chokole cried. “No warrior, not even a white warrior, would be so foolish. It is a trick, what this man tells us. Do not believe him.”
Juh had been listening to all that was said. “I have seen this tall white-eyes with hair the color of wheat who rides the black horse. He kills without making a noise. He has been taught to hide on the face of Earth Mother like an Apache. My spirit voice spoke to me in a dream, saying this white man will be very hard to kill.”
Naiche turned to Juh, anger twisting his features. “Are you afraid of this white man?” he asked.
Juh wagged his head. “I am only telling you what my spirit voice whispered to me in my dream. I am not afraid of him, or of the others.”
Chokole spat upon the face of the white prisoner. “We kill this one slowly, and leave him for the tall one to find. I will kill him in the old way.”
Naiche knew it would be good for the others who followed him to see a white man tortured to death, proving to those who had doubts that Apache medicine was stronger than that of any white man.
He gave Chokole a nod of approval. “Kill him. Stake him out over the ants without his eyelids so his eyeballs will boil in tomorrow’s sun. Cut his entrails from his body in the old ceremonial way. And scalp him. But leave him alive, so this tall one who calls himself a bird will hear his screams across the desert. It will be a message to him and his friends that we want war with him . . . that we are ready to fight him.”
The warrior woman smiled grimly, satisfied with Naiche’s decision. “I will enjoy cutting him,” she said, loud enough to be heard by all the others. “Hear his cries, my People, and know that this is only the beginning of our war with the whites who have taken our land from us.”
* * *
Naiche would not allow a fire, not even a small one to take the chill out of the late afternoon air, while Chokole fashioned wooden stakes from thick ocotillo stems and cut points in them, to be driven into the ground. Strips of rawhide soaked in a clay bowl of water not far away. Juh had found a red ant bed south of the ocotillo thicket, where he placed the unconscious white man, still bound hand and foot. The ants would come from their mound at sunrise, drawn to the smell of blood to feed.
“Tie him across the ant bed,” Naiche ordered, somewhat concerned by their delay. “We have been here in one spot too long.”
Chokole carried her stakes and the bowl of rawhide strips to the ant bed. Thirty-four warriors and women followed her to see the ritual. Five scouts had been sent out into the dark desert on foot to watch for the other white men, or the soldiers. All the Apaches knew what would happen the moment the white man began screaming. Anyone within hearing distance would be drawn to the sound, and they must be ready to hurry south, toward the relative safety of the Pedregosas.
Chokole walked up to the white-eyes, a strange gleam in her eyes. She put down her stakes and rawhide, then she drew her knife.
“You die, for the lives of the Chiricahua people you sent to the land of shadows!” she shouted, hatred for this white enemy thickening the sound of her voice until it was deep, like that of a warrior.
Kneeling beside his head, she seized the front of his hair in her left fist and made a quick, slashing motion across the skin covering his skull and forehead.
A shrill scream rushed from the prisoner’s throat and his eyes flew open. “Oh dear God! No!”
She left him there, with blood pouring from a bare spot in his skull, his bloody scalp lock tucked into her belt. She took up the ocotillo stakes and hammered them into the ground with a heavy stone.
Juh began cutting the man’s wrists free, only to tie them again with longer strips of rawhide to fasten to the stakes. They were wet strips of rawhide that would contract as they dried in tomorrow’s sun, pulling their victim’s shoulders and elbows and hips apart at the joints. But that pain would seem like nothing compared to having his abdomen cut open, and then loops of his intestines jerked roughly from his body cavity to have them tossed all around him. Removing the eyelids was a new touch for Apache, a form of torture learned from their lifelong enemies to the east, the Comanches.
“Please, no!” the white-eyes screamed, his thin voice ending an early morning desert silence.
Chokole actually smiled a genuine smile when she heard him call out for mercy.
She went about the rest of her preparations quickly, saving the trimming of his eyelids for last. All around her, the other Apaches, mostly the women, were preparing to move again, to run south as fast as they could travel until they reached the safe haven Naiche promised them in Mexico.
When the prisoner was staked across the sleeping ant bed, she drove the tip of her knife into the white man’s belly and scooped out a fistful of sticky intestinal loops faintly resembling purple snakes when they slithered from her hand to land on the ground, where they were coated with a layer of caliche dust and sand.
“Ayiii!” she cried to the red and orange streaked heavens, painted by the sun as it inched toward the far horizon with the arrival of dusk.
“Ayiii!” the Apache women cried in a gruesome chorus of voices, a celebration of the white man’s slow death lying across the ant bed.
“It is good,” Juh said quietly to Naiche. “When these white enemies come to the sounds of his cries, they will know we will kill them all.”
Naiche had his doubts, for he secretly feared the spirit dream described by Nana. Would this one white man be so difficult to kill? He looked back along the way they had come. Was this silent killer even now on their trail, following them so he could kill them one by one as he had been doing for the past several days?
“It is time to go now,” Juh told him, handing him the thin rawhide jaw rein tied to the lower lip of his horse. “We have waited here too long.”
Naiche swung aboard his bay and signaled the rest of his band to move southward. Heavily laden pack horses led by the women, and twenty-two warriors, prepared to ride out onto the desert and travel all night to get to the far mountains and safety.
Chokole mounted her pinto and rode up beside him in the fading light. She pointed down at the dying white man staked out over the ant bed. “He will scream for many hours,” she said.
“It will be a message to the other whites who follow our tracks,” Naiche told her, giving the northern horizon a careful examination, looking for dust sign. “When they find him, they will know we are sending them a warning.”
Juh overheard their conversation and gave the northern desert a passing glance. “The tall one will come,” he told Naiche.
Naiche wondered how Juh could be so certain of it. Had his spirit voice foretold the future?
Suddenly, one of the five men who had been sent to watch their backtrail came running over a small hillock, shouting, “Horses come! Three riders are coming!”
Naiche whirled his bay around to face the young warrior. “From which direction?”
The man stopped, his chest heaving and sweat covering his body even though the morning temperature was still low. He pointed back the way they had come, toward the north.
“Only three riders?” Chokole asked.
When the scout nodded, too out of breath to speak, she looked at Naiche. “I told you the white man lied when he said the tall one was leaving the other two behind and coming by himself. It must be the three white-eyes who have been following us.”
Naiche nodded, his eyes searching the horizon, watching three small dots appear and get slowly larger in the hazy late afternoon sunlight. His heart thudded in his chest, and his stomach roiled. At last, he was to come face-to-face with this man who had killed so many of his followers.
“Let me lead a small war party out to meet
them,” Chokole asked, her face fierce. “The tall one’s tricks will be of no use on the desert flats. Even Apaches cannot disappear when there is no place to hide. Let us see if he is truly flesh and blood, or Spirit Walker.”
Naiche looked at Juh and Nana to see what they would advise.
Juh shook his head. “It cannot be the tall one,” Juh said with certainty.
“And why not, old one?” Chokole asked, scorn in her voice.
“It is not his way,” the old man answered. “He would not be so easily seen. His way is to walk in shadows, to steal silently through the night on feet that make no sound, to kill without being seen. I know this from my visions.”
Chokole snorted through her nose and turned her gaze to Naiche. She didn’t dare say anything against the old one out loud, for the Apache revered the ancients, but she allowed Naiche to see her disagreement.
Finally, he told her, “Take ten warriors with you and ride out to meet the three who follow us.” He stared into her dark eyes, his face like stone. “Chokole, do not return unless you have killed the white-eyes.”
Her teeth flashed in a savage grin and she jerked her pony’s head around. Holding her Winchester above her head, she gave an Apache war cry and quickly pointed out ten warriors to follow her.
As they rode off in a cloud of dust, Nana began to chant in a low voice, praying for the Spirits to guide Chokole’s bullets to their marks.
* * *
After a while, when there was no sound of gunfire, Naiche rode to the top of a small hillock and peered into the distance. He could barely make out the war party returning in the semidarkness, leading the three horses and their riders back toward the tribe.
As they got closer his mouth became dry, and he felt a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He turned to Nana and said, “Keep the others here. Do not let them see what Chokole has found.”
He kicked his horse into a gallop and rode out to meet the returning war party. As he got nearer, the images on the horses became clearer.
It was the three warriors he’d left to guard their backtrail at the juncture of the Dragoons and the desert. They were all dead, tied to their horses with sticks and rope, butchered as all the others had been by the tall one and his friends.
He held up his hand. “Stop here. I do not want the others to see this, for it will cause them to lose faith.”
Chokole’s face was twisted, as if she tasted something bitter. “What shall we do with them? They deserve a ceremonial burial, for they died honorably in battle with our enemies.”
“Cut their ropes and leave the bodies here in this arroyo. Bring the ponies. We must be on our way before the bluecoats find our trail and follow us here. We cannot afford to be caught on the open desert.”
“But—” Chokole started to say.
“Enough!” Naiche growled. “We will honor our fallen by singing songs of their bravery around our campfires once we are safe in the Pedregosas. Until then, we must keep on the move until we find cover.”
Chokole nodded, her lips a thin, white line. She knew she must not say anything else. She glanced at the three dead warriors, whose mothers and sisters would be singing a death song tonight. She made a silent vow to kill the white-eyes who did this or lose her own life trying.
After the ponies were emptied of their burdens, Naiche led the war party back to the main body of his tribe. He reined his horse to a halt in front of his people, who were waiting for him to tell them what to do.
“Stay here and wait for the three white-eyes who follow us,” Naiche said, pointing to the five men who had been watching their backtrail. “Hide yourselves well, and be brave in battle. You must kill them, and then you may rejoin our tribe.”
He rode off, leading his people toward the Pedregosas that could barely been seen against the evening sky in the distance. Once there, they could make their way toward Mexico and join up with Geronimo and his warriors to form an unstoppable force that would drive the white man from their land forever.
Chapter 41
As Falcon rode through moonlight across the desert, he talked to Diablo in a low, soothing tone. It was something he’d done for years. He found expressing his thoughts out loud served several purposes. The tone of his voice reassured Diablo that all was well, and made the horse less skittish and less likely to buck or bolt if he came upon something unexpected in the semidarkness. In addition, speaking his innermost thoughts out loud allowed his more critical and logical conscious mind to pick them apart and find any obvious weaknesses or inconsistencies that might otherwise go unnoticed. The process had served him so well over the years that he now did it without thinking, automatically.
“Naiche must have found those three dead guards I sent on ahead by now,” he murmured, sitting back against the cantle of his saddle in a relaxed manner as the big stud moved steadily through the night.
“So, he now knows even better that someone dangerous is on his trail. Hopefully, that will spur him to push his people hard, to make them travel around the clock without getting any rest. Tired warriors don’t make good fighters, so the more he pushes them the better for me—and for the army if Hawk and Jasper ever manage to meet up with them. And if they recognize the fires I set as a signal,” he added after a moment of thought.
As he remembered killing the three guards he found himself almost regretting his crusade against the renegades. After all, he reasoned, there was no way this particular bunch of Indians could have had anything to do with Marie’s death. Perhaps he was becoming as bad as a lot of people who had settled the West, letting his thinking degenerate into the old adage, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Searching his heart, trying to look deep inside himself, he came to the conclusion that he was being too hard on himself. He really had no particular animosity against Indians or any other minorities, in general. It was only the ones who took it upon themselves to break the law—to raid and kill and go to war against innocent people—that he hated and wanted to kill.
The murder of his wife Marie was only a symptom of the disease of disrespect for the rule of law. Understandable, maybe, in such a young, wild frontier, but a sickness he would do everything in his power to eradicate. It wasn’t so much the letter of the law or the sometimes flawed men who tried to enforce it that Falcon believed in, but the general premise that if a collection of people were to live in close proximity there must be rules of behavior based on mutual respect and dignity which had to be followed. Those who took it upon themselves to ignore such common sense rules had to be punished or there was no safety for anyone in the land.
He further reasoned he would be acting no differently if a band of marauding white men were on a killing rampage. He would still feel the need to do all he could to wipe them out. The fact the killers were Indians was secondary to the need for their complete destruction.
After he came to this conclusion, he felt better about his mission, less afraid he was becoming hardened and callous to the killing he was being forced to do. His mind was cleared of all self-doubt, and he was able to concentrate on the job at hand, which was making life, and death, as miserable as possible for Naiche and his followers.
Without slowing Diablo, he reached back into his saddlebag and pulled out the tin of bootblack and applied some more to his face. Earlier, he taken the precaution of wrapping burlap around Diablo’s hooves, to muffle any sound the stud might make as they traversed the desert. He knew Naiche was sure to have posted more guards after finding his last three hadn’t survived their assignment.
Falcon was both hampered and helped by the desert terrain. On the one hand there were precious few places any ambushers could hide, but on the other hand it was going to be almost impossible for him to arrive unnoticed across the miles of flat land. He was lucky the moon was only half full and there were plenty of scudding clouds to give at least intermittent cover of darkness.
The padding on Diablo’s feet was so effective and his ride was so quiet that he could hear the
occasional rattle of a snake disturbed in its slumber by his passage, or the swish and clatter as a lizard or kangaroo rat scurried out of his path.
From up ahead a faint cry came carried on the evening breeze. At first it was so low Falcon thought it merely the moaning of the wind, or the cry of a distant night bird. Soon it became louder, reminding him of the screech of a big female mountain lion in heat, screaming for her mate.
Suddenly, the cry changed and became screams for help, in a voice Falcon thought he could recognize through the agony.
“Damn, Diablo,” he muttered as he pulled back on the reins and cocked his head, listening. “That sounds like Cal Franklin up ahead. If the Indians got to him and staked him out, that means they’ve got someone waiting to see if I take the bait.”
He slipped out of the saddle, leaving Diablo ground-reined next to a mesquite bush. He took his shotgun rather than his Winchester with him, for he knew there would be no aiming in the darkness and he wanted something with a wide spread to it.
Crouching to keep from outlining himself against the horizon in case the moon came back out, he shuffled his feet to minimize sound and moved as silently as a wraith toward the terrible sounds ahead. As he walked, he loosened the rawhide hammer thong on his pistols and rearranged the scabbard of his Arkansas Toothpick so it was within easy reach.
The closer he got to the source of the sounds, the surer he was it was Cal Franklin making them. The damn fool must have gotten careless and let some of Naiche’s scouts take him prisoner, Falcon thought. The one thing practically everyone in the area of marauding renegades agreed on was not to be taken alive, for the Indians left ample evidence it was a most horrible way to die. Knowing Cal, he had probably been riding along daydreaming about all his gold dust and what he was going to spend it on in Tombstone.
Every few feet, Falcon stopped dead still and held his breath, searching the darkness ahead for any sign of human presence. He realized that no man, not even an experienced Apache warrior, could sit for hours in dark waiting in ambush and the not make some noise, no matter how slight.
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