The Slavers

by Peter McCurtin

  “We all can’t be as hardnosed as you, Carmody. They do the best they can.”

  With the window still open the room was cold in a nice way and some of the smells had gone away. Elbert’s feet and red flannels were still hanging around; that was all right.

  At first, the tequila burned in my sore belly like salt in a cut. Another drink got rid of the belly burn, or if it was still there it didn’t bother me. Knowing that the burn would be back come morning didn’t bother me.

  “How’d you find me, Elbert?”

  Already, Elbert was ahead of me with the bottle. “I gave you an hour, Carmody. Then two hours. I went out and asked around. The Mexicans said three soldiers followed you toward the plaza. After that I tried three saloons before I heard the good news.”

  “You shot your mouth off in front of McKim and Waycross,” I said. “That wasn’t smart, Elbert. Now they know—they think—you’re on to something could harm them. Are you?”

  “Soon as Judge Gratz gets back. I told you that.”

  Elbert was behind the desk; I was on the bed. I figured to let Elbert have the bed as soon as bottle-corking time rolled around. Much had happened but nothing was any different. By now the General was having bad dreams but Thatcher McKim—I knew for a fact—was cut from a tougher part of the cow.

  Up or down, I can get the .44 out fast. Knuckles on the door and a voice I didn’t recognize put the gun in my hand.

  Elbert said it was Ganado, and that’s who it was. The big Indian came in smelling of whiskey gone sour and lifeless in his gut, whiskey soaked and dried by body heat on his clothes. This was one drunken Indian who wanted to be sober—or the money had run out.

  Something drunk by now, Elbert said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Ganado. Come on in and have a drink. But what do you mean asking for a drink? Indians aren’t supposed to drink. You know that. The law is clear on that point, my fine feathered friend. Do Navajos—or did Navajos— ever wear feathers? I forget. What’ll it be—rum or tequila?”

  Ganado didn’t smile. “I have heard something about the slavers,” he said in a voice flatter than usual.

  Masters stopped clowning and I could almost hear one part of his head telling the rest of it to be sober.

  The big Indian shook his head, and I knew he wanted a drink but wouldn’t take it. When Indians drink they finish the bottle—and this Indian was more than a one bottle Indian.

  Ganado said: “An Indian woman in the place where I drink has a cousin who has a friend. This friend is an Indian but was taken as a captive long ago to Mexico. Now he is a Mexican but when he drinks he is still an Indian. This man now works with the slavers, and the word has come to me through many people that the slavers are preparing to raid the large Zuni pueblo at Black Mesa, west of Los Alamos. Sometime this week. It may be too late.”

  “You want coffee, Ganado?” I asked.

  The big Indian nodded his whiskey-soaked head.

  “Everybody,” Elbert agreed.

  The coffee was set to boil. I asked: “You know this place?”

  “In the high country,” Ganado answered. “West of Los Alamos, a long way from here. Even a long way from Los Alamos. My information is not strong: they may be there by now. You will ask who this man whose information I have works for. No one spoke of that. Even if the name was McKim, what good would it do?”

  I didn’t know a damn thing about this Ganado. An ugly, dangerous bastard, he looked like to me. I wasn’t relying on Elbert’s judgment of him one bit.

  “We could be there ahead of them if we travel fast.” What I said wasn’t really a suggestion.

  “I was thinking that,” Ganado said, watching me.

  “These raiding parties, how many men would you say? How many in the past?”

  Ganado said maybe ten to fifteen men, mostly whites, a few Mexicans, with a backsliding Indian along to convince his red brothers that this new life as a slave had the old one beat hollow. About a hundred Pueblos lived up there in the clouds, but in recent times war and sickness and drought had whittled the population of Black Mesa down to the hundred mark. A good part of the Pueblo town was nothing but abandoned dwellings.

  I had an idea. “Would the Pueblos get mad if somebody blew up that part of their town?”

  “It depends on who was doing it,” Ganado said. “You are thinking of dynamite as part of the surprise?”

  “Two of us, three if Elbert comes along, fifteen of them. We may be laying for them, but we still need an edge.”

  Elbert was fooling with the coffee pot. He turned around, not liking the conversation. “You’re planning murder, Carmody, and you, Ganado. I won’t take a hand in murder. You won’t either. What you’re planning makes you bad as they are.”

  That was noble of Elbert, the damn fool. “You’re right again,” I said. “It’s the Army’s job. Tell you what, Elbert. You trot on down and tell General Waycross the good news.”

  “The hell with you,” Elbert growled. “I still say it’s murder.”

  Five years in prison had turned Elbert into a man I didn’t completely understand. To me, using bullets and dynamite on the slavers was better than they deserved.

  “I’ll ride with you,” Elbert said, “but I won’t use a gun.”

  “Then stay here with the law books. Up on the mesa there won’t be time for legal arguments. Come on, Ganado, we got to lay in some supplies.”

  An hour later we were heading west from Santa Fe, our saddlebags fat with dynamite and extra shells for handguns and rifles. The Indian owned a Sharps and an old Army .45. After paying for bullets, dynamite and grub there was enough money left to get him a Winchester .44. The Sharps was a great gun, big-bored and about as accurate as a rifle can be, but Ganado would have to shoot faster than one bullet at a time. The surprise we were planning for the slavers wouldn’t last more than five seconds; then they’d be shooting back.

  The light was thinning and the morning was cold when we left Santa Fe. If Waycross had set more men to watching us, we didn’t see them. I didn’t think they were watching; it’s never hard to spot a soldier in or out of uniform.

  Santa Fe is a town built a mile high, and when you climb down you can tell how far you’ve traveled by the heat. It took us a good part of the morning to get down to where it can’t get much hotter. My belly was sore as a gumboil and I sweated more with pain than heat. The muscles kept on telling me that a man with fierce cramps in his gut should be in bed.

  We rode without talking. South of Santa Fe was ranch and mining country, mostly basin land. It wasn’t good country—but a man could find water and stay alive. Down that way they raised cattle and grew alfalfa and brought out gold and silver. Out where we were going far west of Los Alamos, a long way west of the Rio Grande, there was nothing. I didn’t know the country out there, but I knew it was the hind end of creation. It was the kind of country so bad that even the politicians didn’t fight about it. Some hundreds of years in the past the Spaniards rode all the way up there from Mexico City looking for the so-called Seven Cities of Gold. All they found was what we were going to find—a bunch of half-starved Zuni Indians squatting on top of a big rock.

  We carried two canteens apiece and that much water had to last until we came to the Rio. The desert ran away in front of us, flat and burned dry by sun since time began. Down from Santa Fe and away from there, the cottonwoods were still with us. After that it was just yucca and creosote bush and cactus short grass. Then, further into the day, it was nothing but yucca and desert.

  The hottest time of that long day we stopped to rest and water the animals. The Indian ate peaches from a can, but I didn’t put anything but water in my aching belly. The yucca we were resting by didn’t throw enough shadow to cover a dog. And that’s what I felt like, a whipped cur with a sore belly.

  Leaving out the rests, we had been in the saddle for over twelve hours. In, say, Colorado, that wouldn’t be all that bad; out there it was enough to make a man wish he’d picked himself another line
of work.

  “Los Alamos?” I asked the Indian.

  “Not far,” was what he said.

  We started off again and now the desert was different, the going a lot harder. The sand was soft and white and sometimes it gathered itself and rolled away in dunes that went for miles. Down toward the Mexican end of California they have country like that, where the glare of sun on white sand hurts the eyes worse than sun-glare on snow.

  It was close to six o’clock, with the sun starting to weaken. The Indian’s horse was hardened to this bad country, but I had to ride cagey to get my animal to the top of one more hill of shifting white sand.

  “Los Alamos,” Ganado said.

  There it was, all five houses. Even from a mile away, it was certain that Los Alamos would never be any competition for St. Louis. But there was a German trader there, Ganado said, who didn’t ask more than double the usual price for a stringy beefsteak and a bottle of bad whiskey. I thought that was fair enough; any man who picked out Los Alamos as a place to live deserved some kind of extra payment.

  When we got down there I saw a wooden sign that said Volmersburg. The Indian didn’t manage to smile all the way; the look on his wide, flat face was close. “Los Alamos,” he said. “The German wants them to change the name. Volmer is his name.”

  I sort of thought it might be. This feller Volmer was an important citizen in Los Alamos. Three of the five shanties had his name stuck up over the door. Hotel, saloon, trading post—all Volmer. In any other settlement they would have used Mr. Volmer’s hotel for storing harness.

  They wouldn’t get many visitors in a town like Los Alamos and Volmer came out to greet us with a Henry repeating rifle. The dying sun glinted on the brass work of the rifle. The German knew Ganado, but he didn’t down the rifle and rush out with open arms. There were no banks in Los Alamos and I didn’t look much like a man prospecting for gold.

  Ganado said who I was. “Can we sleep here?” he asked. “Move on west in the morning.”

  Volmer looked like General Grant—the clipped beard, the wild hair, the bulldog jaw. Just like Grant would look and smell if he hadn’t washed his clothes or had a bath for a year.

  “Climb down,” Volmer said. “You boys sure look like men could use some whiskey. A dollar apiece to sleep over. The whiskey’s your business.”

  Ganado didn’t have a nickel and I gave the German all I could find in my pockets—four dollars and ten cents.

  “Should get more for a bottle out here,” Volmer said. “But I ain’t mean. Pay me the extra some other time.”

  Volmer closed up the store and the saloon as soon as it got dark. He told us good night and went off to bed, the Henry repeater in his hand. The hotel was a one-room shanty with four creaky cots and desert sand for a floor. The kerosene lamp gave out more smoke than light, and with all that sand out there Volmer didn’t see any pressing need to build an outhouse. We opened cans and ate from them, and then I took the bottle and climbed onto the bed with the least stink.

  It was a bed; and with whiskey in my belly, it stopped hurting. Ganado came in after a while and lay on his back, staring at the roof.

  “If the slavers come this way, will the German tell them?” I didn’t want the slavers to switch the surprise.

  “No chance of it,” Ganado answered. “Volmer makes his living off the Navajos and other Indians.”

  Ganado didn’t say anything after that and maybe he was asleep. I pulled on the bottle and thought about things.

  We were up and out of there before first light. A lamp flared bright in one of the shanties without a name over the door; Volmer came out carrying the repeater and watched us ride off.

  “Hurry back,” he called.

  We headed west again and, not counting the Zuni pueblo, the German’s collection of shacks was the last settlement between there and Arizona. The Rio Grande was dead ahead but the country we rode across looked like it never heard of water.

  “About fifty miles,” Ganado said.

  Late that afternoon we took our animals across the Rio, not so wide or grand so far north from Texas, and made camp on the other side. Over there the country wasn’t the same: desert but more rock than sand; and sunflowers growing in dry river beds proved that some rain could and did fall.

  Ganado got together enough wood to make a small fire while I opened more cans. The sun had dropped behind a distant line of mountains and the last light was thick and red. I heard animals moving our way and I took the .44 out of the holster.

  “No,” Ganado said, crouched at the fire. “Two of them. No need for the gun.”

  Ganado stood up and said something in Indian talk. That brought them in and all I saw were shapes, men and animals, until they got in close. Two young Indians on donkeys, they looked like men riding around with no particular place in mind. They looked more beaten down than the burros, and the cans I’d set down on a rock took more than half their attention.

  “Navajos banished from their tribe,” Ganado told me. “Maybe from Arizona. There may be others. I don’t think so.”

  Ganado spoke again in their language. “Two cans—peaches,” he said to me. “They like peaches. Say something while you’re giving them the cans.”

  I was ready to do that. “Very good peaches,” I said.

  One of the Indians said something to Ganado. It sounded like the peaches weren’t enough. “They don’t have anything to open the cans,” Ganado said. “Let them use the knife.”

  I had been using a Bowie knife to round-slice the tops of the cans. “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “No,” Ganado said. “Let them use the knife. They will feel that you trust them. They will go away.”

  I trusted Ganado because Elbert said he was an Indian I could trust. These two beggars mounted on jackasses? I gave them the knife and got ready to use the gun.

  I didn’t have to use the gun. They used the big blade with much care. The one who talked wiped off the peach juice with even more care and handed the knife back to me, handle forward, better mannered than a French waiter in a New Orleans eating place.

  The Indian said something long-winded to me that Ganado translated.

  “You are a fortunate man to own such a knife,” Ganado said.

  The two exiled Navajos took their cans of peaches and prodded their burros away from camp.

  “Poor bastards,” I said.

  Ganado said nothing. Later he said he didn’t want any peaches. It was the same story with the stewed tomatoes.

  By ten o’clock the next morning, riding since an hour after the coyotes stopped howling, the sun was hot enough to make me sweat. Off in the distance, many miles still to go, the broken line of mesas shimmered in the waves of blue heat that bounced back from the desert flatlands. One mesa was bigger, a darker color than the others—not black, more like a dark red. With the light a certain way it could look black.

  The place we stopped at was hard and rocky, a good place to look for recent signs of shoed horses.

  Ganado stood up. “Nothing,” he said. “Not this way—if they came. And this—I think—is the way they would come.”

  We crossed a dry lake, leading the animals over the worst parts where the mud was cracked deep by the sun, the edges hard and sharp as stone. Across the dry lake and ten miles beyond it the country was all rocky—we made good time on that stretch. Another ten miles, or so, we were riding on an upward slant. Black Mesa was another ten or fifteen miles away, but in the dry clear air it looked close enough to touch if you stretched an arm far enough.

  Now we were high enough to see a long way back. We watered the animals and wet our own throats, watching for anything that moved down there in the baked hell of the desert. Nothing stirred the dust and not even a buzzard wheeled in the hard blue sky. No glint of sun hitting metal.

  We went up a long slope edged with big rocks along its spine. Ganado pointed and we led the horses through a narrow draw that would have taken a stranger hours to find. Out from there, going down the far slope,
we were close enough to Black Mesa to pick out the trees and crops growing on the other slope that climbed by stages to the foot of the mesa. No Iowa farmer would go wild about the corn and beans, melons and peach trees that fought for life on that slope; but by Southwest Indian standards the Zunis on Black Mesa were looking forward to a pretty fat harvest.

  We were up so close we could see the mesa but not the town on top. Some hours of sun remained and there should have been Zuni farmers working where the crops were, but it was like they’d walked off and left it for good. We couldn’t see them watching us; but they were there, way up on top of that huge, dark rock that went straight toward the sky.

  Ganado pointed again. A trail, more a broken, narrow path, started behind a jumble of rocks come loose from the side of the mesa. The beginning of the path was hidden and the path itself couldn’t be spotted easily even by a man with field-glasses. If the Zunis had been a warlike people, like most of the Apaches still were and the Navajos were once, they could have lain back at the top, where the path ended, and knocked the slavers, or anybody, to the bottom with no trouble at all. But the Zunis had been peaceful farmers for a long time, long before the Spaniards and Mexicans left and the Americans arrived. To the Navajos and especially the Apaches the word Zuni was a dirty word. Still, they had managed to survive and more or less prosper. They hadn’t done anything desperate, so the stories went, since the day they had pushed some Spanish priests over the edge of the mesa, two hundred years before.

  Ganado, leading his horse, was in front of me. One place, where the path broke and fell away, we had to jump across and coax the horses to jump. Ganado’s animal did fine, but mine started to slide back. I was about to keep him company at the bottom of the mesa. I yanked and yelled. The son of a bitch dug in, sparks flying from the rock under his hoofs.

  When I got to the top Ganado was looking back across the desert we had crossed. I looked but didn’t see anything at first. Then I finally saw it—a white puff of dust traveling our way but still a long way off.