Lord Apache

by Robert J. Steelman

  Jack Drumm had a different slant, as she put it, on himself, also; it bothered him. Belatedly he realized he must soon find time to write a few lines to Cornelia Newton-Barrett. For some time he had neglected her.

  Behind the new dam the water level grew. Now there was a pond containing small fish, deep enough to bathe in. Charlie and Eggleston finished the adobe building and roofed it with thatch. Jack Drumm blistered his hands cutting brush to build a corral. The beans and corn that the Papago had planted began to burgeon, show miniature fruits. Too, a semblance of peace came to the valley of the Agua Fria. Traffic increased along the road to the new capital. Now there were frequent freight wagons and a twice-weekly coach service. A man named Sloat from Emporia, Kansas, tied up his mules two miles down the road from Rancho Terco and settled there with his wife and six children. The winter sun was good for Mrs. Sloat's rheumatism, and Sloat was impressed by the rampant growth of Charlie's corn and beans. "In Kansas, in November," Sloat enthused, "everything's snowed over, but out here a farmer can work the soil right through the winter! That's for me!"

  George Dunaway rode by, also. Jack was currying old Bonyparts, the mule, when the lieutenant and two men tied their horses to the new hitching post before the adobe and dismounted. Dunaway looked spruce. The ragged black beard was neatly trimmed, his blue shirt ironed till the creases stood out like knife blades, and his boots gleamed in the noonday sun. Jack looked at the flowers clutched in the lieutenant's fist.

  "You're welcome," he said, "but surely you're not bringing me a bouquet."

  One of the troopers snickered but Dunaway fixed him with a malevolent eye.

  "They're for Phoebe," Dunaway explained. "I picked 'em from Mrs. Major Trimble's front yard. Where is she?"

  Jack was startled. "Miss Larkin?"

  "Of course. Where is she?"

  He brushed Bonyparts carefully, not looking at Dunaway. "Oh, I thought you knew! She and Mrs. Glore left. They—they went into Prescott several days ago on the stage."

  Dunaway watched his men lead the mounts to the pool.

  "I'm sorry," Jack said. Though he and Dunaway were hardly friends, there was something almost touching in the way the lieutenant stood disappointed, bouquet still clutched in his hand. Too, Jack Drumm was now the patron, as the Mexicans would say, of Rancho Terco, a host to desert travelers. "Sit down, here, in the shade," he invited, and handed Dunaway a gourd of water from the butt.

  "Thanks." With a sigh Dunaway slumped on an upturned box. "Got quite a spread here."

  "We manage," Jack admitted, not without pride.

  "I'm sorry I missed the ladies. They went to Prescott, you say?"

  "That's where they were bound for."

  "Funny! I've been in and out of Prescott lately, but I didn't run across 'em. Of course, it's the capital now, and growing. There are a lot of people there."

  "I suppose so."

  Dunaway put down the gourd and patted water from his black whiskers with the back of his hand. "It's a hard life, a soldier's," he said. "I never married, maybe on account of that. Wouldn't be fair to ask a woman to follow you to a place like this." He stared into the purple distances.

  "I suppose not."

  "She was real pretty," Dunaway said. "Miss Larkin, I mean. There was a—well, a kind of a substance to her. I mean—she seemed like a real person."

  Phoebe Larkin was real enough; that was true, Jack thought. He glanced toward the reed hut, hoping the reality of Phoebe's person could not be seen. The two women, quickly bored with forced inactivity, were probably watching him and Dunaway, straining ears to hear the conversation.

  "I'm not young anymore," Dunaway admitted. "God, I'm thirty-six already, and I don't know how it happened I got old so quick! But it gets you to thinking, Drumm, thinking how a good woman might make a difference in your life. Well—" He got up, sighed again, put on what was obviously a new hat of the Stetson variety Jack Drumm had often seen in the Territory. Dropping the flowers into the dust, he looked at them for a moment, then ground them with his heel. "Got pickets out all along the wagon road. Just riding out to check on them."

  Jack followed him to where his trooper escort waited. "How's the campaign against Agustín going?"

  Dunaway shook his head. "We keep him penned up pretty well in the Mazatzals, but till we find some way to get infantry up there and flush him out, he's going to be a problem. He can always swoop down and bloody a few noses. Keep an eye out, Mr. Drumm, and don't be fooled. Just when you least expect it that bastard is going to strike!"

  "I know," Jack said. "I surely know."

  The women had been watching, listening. After the soldiers left, Phoebe called from the hut. "Who was that, Mr. Drumm? Was it Lieutenant Dunaway?"

  He stood near the doorway, pretending to sharpen his knife on a chunk of granite. "I am sure you know it was."

  Phoebe peered around the edge of the doorframe. The slatted light filtered through the reeds onto her hair, lighting it in random glints.

  "He—he brought you flowers," Jack added, not wanting to tell her but feeling obligated to be fair to George Dunaway.

  "Me? Flowers? But why?"

  "Dunaway is a lonely man. He said a soldier's life was hard out here, and I suppose it is. Anyway, I gather he—well, he thought you beautiful, and wanted to bring about a—a closer acquaintance."

  Someone giggled.

  "Anyway," Jack said, "I told Dunaway you were not here, that you and Mrs. Glore had gone on into Prescott. He was very disappointed."

  Again someone giggled. This time he thought it was Phoebe Larkin. What was the term for it he had heard—cabin fever? Was the long and boring confinement beginning to addle the two females?

  "So he thinks me beautiful," Phoebe mused.

  "That is his opinion."

  Bearing down so hard on the knife, he cut his finger and swore.

  "And what is your opinion?" Phoebe asked.

  He sucked at the wounded finger. "What is my opinion of what?"

  "Do you think me beautiful?"

  "I have not got time," he said coldly, "to stand here engaging in idle talk! Of course you are beautiful, Miss Larkin! I think you are only trying to make me say something ridiculous."

  Stalking away, he still heard female laughter from the hut.

  Next day a Tully and Ochoa wagon came by. Ike Coogan got stiffly down, calling a greeting, but before Jack could speak the old man was supervising the removal from his wagon of what appeared to be a corpse. Jack watched the Mexican swampers carry the frail body to the shade of the ramada. The man was old, looking to be seventy years of age or more. The white beard stuck stiffly into the air, and his lean body was as rigid as a board.

  "Who is that?"

  Coogan wadded a gunnysack under the old man's head. "Uncle Roscoe."

  "Uncle Roscoe what?"

  Coogan shook his head and spat. "No one ever heered his last name, but everyone in the Territory knows him. Been prospecting these mountains for forty years, I reckon. Uncle Roscoe was here before I was, and I been here nine years longer 'n God, so that should give you an idee."

  Jack knelt, put an ear to the ragged shirt. "The pulse seems regular, though slow. What's wrong with him?"

  Coogan pointed toward the loaded burro the Mexicans were untying from the rear of his wagon. "Old Pansy was loose in Centinela Canyon. I knew then something must be wrong. I climbed up the hill, and shore enough there was poor Roscoe laid out under a bush with an empty canteen. Maybe it was apoplexy—I dunno—and he got that far hopin' to flag down help. Anyway, I drug him onto the wagon and brought him here. Ain't nothin' much we can do fer him, is there?"

  Jack Drumm had spent two years in Glasgow at medical school before deciding he was not cut out for a physician, but he did remember some of his lectures. He rolled back a wrinkled lid and stared at the dilated pupil. Uncle Roscoe groaned, tried to raise a hand. It fell back; he subsided.

  "There's a bed in that new adobe," Jack said. "If you'll have your swampers carry
him there, I'll bleed him of a quart or so. That should help."

  Coogan grinned. "Why, that'd be salubrious! Pore old coot! The landscape wouldn't be the same without old Roscoe! By God, that's nice of you, Mr. Drumm!"

  When they had settled Uncle Roscoe comfortably, and Jack Drumm had signed the contract with Tully and Ochoa to manage the Agua Fria station, Coogan suddenly asked, "Where are them two ladies that was here—Miss Larkin, I think, and the old lady that was traveling with her?"

  Though Coogan's Mexicans appeared to have no English, Jack drew him confidentially aside. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

  Briefly Jack told the story—how the two women had fled prosecution, how Detective Meech dogged their tracks, how they were trapped along the Agua Fria and were now awaiting salvation, how Meech might even now be watching.

  "What do you say?" he asked. "Will you help them?"

  Coogan bit off a chunk of Wedding Cake plug.

  "Do you believe their story?" he asked.

  "I believe them. They are being unjustly persecuted."

  Coogan chewed, leaning on the long rifle, staring at the dust. "I could get in trouble."

  "That's right," Jack admitted. "I myself am already in deeper trouble. But there is a time when a man must be ready to accept trouble in a good cause."

  Coogan grinned a tobacco-stained grin. "Ain't no cause better 'n a pretty gal!"

  "Then you'll help?"

  "Shore enough!"

  Between them they arranged for Coogan to drive the wagon down the road and into a stand of bamboo along the river. The two women could then leave the reed hut with their valises, walk under cover of the river greenery to the wagon, and board the vehicle without being seen by a lurking Detective Meech. Coogan would cover them with wagon canvas and take them to Prescott.

  "No hurry," Coogan called. "I got to grease them wheels, and wrap a felloe with wire where it got busted."

  Across the river the brittlebush with its dusty gray leaves was blooming; butter-yellow flowers laid a carpet on the rocky slopes. Quickly Jack picked a bouquet and hurried to the reed hut. They did not hear his scratching at the door. When he did enter they were startled and nervous. The long confinement was telling on them. Phoebe's face was pale, and Mrs. Glore had developed a tic.

  Hurriedly Jack explained the plan. The two women started immediately to pack. Phoebe noticed the brittlebush flowers; she stared silently at the bouquet.

  "Ah—this is for you," Jack muttered, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. It was a foolish idea, of course; emotion had betrayed him. The blooms were only common, and Phoebe Larkin must have seen them all along the river.

  For a moment he thought she was going to fling her arms around him, as she had that day when he pulled her from the flooded Agua Fria. But she seemed to have learned a lesson.

  "That was very nice of you," she murmured, looking down at the yellow flowers. "It—it was thoughtful."

  "You're a real gentleman," Mrs. Glore confirmed. "And that's the God's truth! There ain't many of 'em left around anymore!"

  He shifted from one foot to the other. "A—well, perhaps a kind of going-away present. The Spanish called them incienso. They used the dried sap for incense in their early churches in Arizona."

  "Jimmie brought me flowers, once, in Clover Lick," Phoebe said.

  "Who?"

  She seemed in a reverie. "A boy I knew, a long time ago. He—he was killed in the mines." She looked at him unseeingly. "Jimmie Frakes. He was blond, blond like you, Mr. Drumm."

  Uncomfortably he rubbed his hands together. "Well," he said, "are we ready?"

  Mrs. Glore fastened her bonnet in place with a swordlike pin and picked up the bags. "Ready or not, Prescott, here we come at last!"

  "Good-bye, Mr. Drumm." Phoebe held out her hand. It was warm in his calloused fingers. "You've done so much for us—no one could ever thank you enough. I won't even try."

  He wanted to say something memorable, something cool and composed yet significant, but there was a strange lump in his throat, an emptiness in his breast. He could only stand in the doorway and watch them walk away through the reeds, the sun dappling them as it shone down through the high grasses. Watching them go, he strained his eyes, seeing at last only a patch of color here and a minuscule movement there. Finally they were gone.

  He went back to the Tully and Ochoa wagon. Coogan had completed his repairs.

  "They will be waiting for you," Jack said. "I'm everlastingly grateful to you, Mr. Coogan."

  "Ike," Coogan corrected. "Hell, I ain't been called Mr. Coogan since I was brought up before the judge in Phoenix for drunk and disorderly!"

  For a long while Jack Drumm stood in the dusty road, watching Coogan's wagon until it went out of sight around the bend. He scanned the low hills, the brush, the rocky slopes, fearing to see a wink of sun, a flash of reflected light from the lens of field glasses. But he saw nothing. Alonzo Meech had probably abandoned the search. Eggleston came to stand beside him.

  "The two ladies are gone, then?"

  Silently Jack nodded.

  "I will miss Beulah Glore," the valet said. "She was a fine woman, no matter what sticky business she may have gotten into back in Baltimore."

  "Philadelphia," Jack said.

  "Look at the chickens, Mr. Jack! They miss her too. She used to feed them about now."

  Suddenly he missed Phoebe Larkin more than he cared to admit. He went quickly into the adobe to attend to Uncle Roscoe while Eggleston coaxed the reluctant burro into the corral. For a moment, just before entering the sickroom, he thought he saw a man's figure atop a ridge to the south of the ranch. But as he narrowed his eyes against the glint of the November sun, the figure disappeared—or perhaps it had never been there. He was getting jumpy.

  The old prospector was able to talk, though only weakly and briefly. The heart was sound, though, pumping determinedly. Some color had come into the pallid cheeks. Jack bled him, and made a broth of sage leaves, which the Traveler's Guide said were a specific for stroke. Boiling the infusion, he tried to remember the Latin name of the shrub, but could not. Sage was no longer an exotic plant to be identified and entered in his field notebook; it was becoming the common furniture of the desert, this Arizona desert that was for the time being his home.

  The next morning Uncle Roscoe was markedly better and wanted to sit up, though Jack forbade it.

  "God damn it!" the old man protested. "I ain't no weakling! It was just a little dizzy spell come on me in the canyon there!"

  Leaving Eggleston to feed Uncle Roscoe a dish of chicken soup, Jack wandered listlessly to the road and stared in the direction of Prescott. They should be in the capital by now—Phoebe and Mrs. Glore—and perhaps safe in the hands of the redoubtable Uncle Buell. Looking around at Rancho Terco, it seemed somehow deserted, incomplete, unfriendly.

  Looking, he saw something else. Pinned to the new hitching post with a bone-handled knife a note fluttered in the wind. He tugged at the knife, driven deep into the post, and read the note. It was lettered in block characters with what appeared to be a stub of charcoal, and was obviously the work of an untutored hand. The choice of terms was strange, also, and the phrasing queer, though the words had a certain dignity:

  This is my place. This river my place all right. I do not want white men heer where I born & my parientes bury.

  The writer's scanty English had failed. Parientes, Jack recalled, meant "kin" in Spanish.

  You fight good but spirits ask you go from this place. You send back sobrino—

  Jack wrinkled his brow. More Spanish; what was sobrino? Uncle? No, that was tio. Sobrino—yes, that meant "nephew."

  You send back sobrino but I cannot friend you no more. I finish saying.

  He stared at the wrinkled paper. It was signed with a straggling A; an inexpertly made A that lay almost sidewise at the bottom of the warning, but still—an A; A for Agustín.

  Chapter Seven

  Uncle Roscoe might be seventy, or eighty, or n
inety. He was short and wiry, bandy-legged, tough as an old boot and smelling almost as bad. Fretting at the refusal of his left arm and leg to accommodate him, he sat in the shade and unwillingly drank the sage tea that Eggleston brewed.

  "But you're getting better," Jack pointed out. "Look—you can move your fingers now!"

  "Can't hold a pick! Can't hold a shovel!"

  "You're coming along nicely," Jack comforted. "I daresay if I had had such a stroke, I wouldn't be as far along now as you are!"

  "Well, mebbe so," Uncle Roscoe sighed, "but I wish things'd move along more pronto! I'm an old man. I don't think the Lord's got me down for any more time." He told Jack Drumm about the Gypsy Dancer Mine he had spent twenty-odd years searching for. "Hungarian feller—name of Laszlo something—stumbled on it." He took a tattered scrap of paper from a pocket. "Met him in a saloon in San Diego and he showed me this map and some nuggets big as goose eggs. He was in town to buy supplies but a gang of Mexicans laid for him and hit him over the head. They stole the nuggets, but when Laszlo was laid out for the coroner I slipped the map out of his shirt and took off for the Agua Fria. That was in—let me see—fifty-six, fifty-seven—something like that."

  "And you've been looking for the Gypsy Dancer ever since?"

  "Oh, I'll find it!" the old man assured him. "I got the location pretty well narrowed down by now!"

  Roscoe was a rich source of information about the Apaches, the Mazatzals, the whole Territory. He knew Charlie the Papago and Ike Coogan, claiming also to have been a ceremonial brother of Kayatinah, the father of Agustín himself, and once adopted into the tribe.

  "What you want to know all this stuff for?" he demanded.

  "Because the Apaches insist on trying to drive me away from the Agua Fria. We are enemies. To do a proper job of resisting, I must understand them."

  "Ain't nothin' much to understand," Uncle Roscoe grumbled. He waved his hand toward the hazy distances. "Once they owned all this—now the politicians and the merchants and the Army is trying to take it away and make 'em live on the Verde River reservation. I don't mean no offense, Mr. Drumm—you been good to me. But you can understand how you'd feel if bandits run you out of your big castle in England!"