by Clay Fisher
Almost with the thought, I smelled the raw taint of coal oil mixed with the stifle of the smoke, and I knew the truth. Arson. The mob had decided to burn down the clapboard and adobe-shelled jail. The walls would stand, but all within them—if not released from the cells—would roast in the standing.
More sounds of desperation from the outside.
Above all the voices, I could hear a clear, strong baritone-bass which I remembered from the past. It was the deep roll of Flicker’s rich African tones. My soldier chief was alive! And not only living, but in command out there. Of what? Not the entering mob, surely. Then it struck me. The black American renegade had somehow broken free of his special prison and was leading the inmates in revolt. It had been done in a manner to panic the jail staff and frustrate the hanging pack outside. Fire. The military use of the oldest weapon. Flicker had set that Tombstone Jail on fire. I knew it on pure impulse. Flicker, the master soldier. The artilleryman. The sapper. The arsonist. The black genius who had gone wrong because of being wronged. The bastard! The wonderful, wild, untamable African Apache! He was burning us free.
But wait.
He did not know Nunez was in Arizona, let alone in the dark pit of the Tombstone jail. And who would tell him so? Not Santiago Kifer, God knew. Not that wickedness masquerading as Marshal Henry Karper. And not his two henchmen deputies. Wherever they were, these three would not be moving to save a hunch-backed half-breed priest who could identify their leader as the scourge of God that he was—Santiago Kifer, the Scalper of Sonora.
I coughed on the thickening smoke, reached to find the dog, and he was gone from my side.
I commenced to yell at lungs’ uttermost burst.
I shrieked for help in Spanish, English, Latin, Greek, Low Deutsch, French, the biblical Hebrew, and no less than four of the five main Apache Indian dialects.
Nothing came back to me, even of echo, from outside.
There was, however, something of echo from within the choking pit.
The dog was whining imperatively over across the chamber, and clods of earth were being flung through the blind dark to strike me in a veritable fusillade on face and breast. It came to me that Loafer had chosen an unseemly time to bury the bone that I had removed from his ingrate throat. Moreover, he had now added insult to the hurt by directing his digging into my gasping face. Even strangling on the clot of smoke now solid within the pit, I uttered a curse on the mongrel.
For answer, Loafer gave me back an eager but demanding “Whoof!” and a whine that said, in any language, Hurry, fool human being! Follow me!
In the instant of this strange transmittal from the mangy brute, I smelt a great gush of fresh sweet air. With it came some luminous gray of lesser darkness, let in by the same hole Loafer had dug through the dirt wall of the pit. Merciful Christ, the creature had saved us. Air, light, and the just-vanishing hairy quarters of a huge dog disappearing, butt on, into the seeming solid earth led me to leap after Loafer.
The exit he had made was small. But he was a large perro and I a very small hombre. I became stuck in midpassage but seized Loafer’s tail, crying him on. The brute responded with a surge, and we both came spilling out of the solitary pit into a larger cavern beyond it.
Instantly, the sweet fresh air of first release became of a stench to suffocate life. Struggling to surface, arms desperately wound about the dog, I broke free of the substance with a mighty Anglo shout.
They had a word, the Anglo did, like none other in any tongue. It expressed all of the human experience in just four eloquent letters. Its sibilance had no peer in the languages of all earth’s lands. I employed it now, roundly, nobly, and as if on an instinct that had no reason to exist within a Mexican mestizo priest.
“Shit!” I screeched, long and bawlingly.
And so it was.
The splendid Loafer had tunneled us out into the letrina of the Tombstone jail.
15
SOLDIERS THREE,
AND A TALL BAY HORSE
Many a different face may be put upon misfortune. The humility of crawling forth from a juzgada cesspool can in no real degree be forgotten. The dog and I were excremented lepers, offal-clad pariahs, call us what seems worst. Yet in the moment of our emergence we went unwinded by the populace. Even we ourselves were whelmed over by the greater tragedy; the Tombstone jail was a belching inferno of pillared flame.
We stood in the rear prison yard.
To our right was a lean-to that housed the saddle mounts of those officers on duty. The four animals presently stalled therein, rope-tied to steel manger bars, were in a state of terror. Left as they were, they would surely burn to death or burst their hearts in lunging. Crying out for Saint Francis to attend me, I ran for the lean-to to free them. I was too late.
From the street a great uproar of shouting arose.
Around the jail a torrent of the townfolk poured in pursuit of three desperately fleeing men. In an instant all would be upon me. The thought broke like lightning in my mind that the runners were Santiago Kifer and his ugly deputies. I could see the Winchester rifle that Kifer carried and the shotguns of Crench and Belcher. Did they see me escaped and standing there, I was a dead man. Even pursued by the mob, such villains never permitted witnesses against them to live. Left with no other refuge, I leaped into the great iron stock tank beside the lean-to, submerging myself in the murk of its mossy waters. When I could hold my breath no more, I surfaced. The three devils were just swinging to saddle inside the lean-to. Even as I gasped for air, they pounded past me in their rush for freedom, scattering the people who tried to block them off.
Some gunfire popped and spat in the morning grayness.
The fugitives did not return it but drove their horses safely away into the shadows of the false dawn.
The angered townfolk shouted back and forth in their frustration at losing the guilty quarry. Western Anglo folk set vast store by their law officers. To be betrayed by a man like Kifer, to have hired a wanted criminal for their chief official, was an embarrassment calling for vengeance. Overhearing their outrage from my hiding place in the horse trough was a boon from God. It informed me of events vital to my own immediate survival.
Flicker and his escaping fellow prisoners had faithfully conveyed to the townspeople my accusations against the man masquerading as famed Marshal Henry Karper. This the prisoners had miraculously managed to do while still making good their own flight. Here the good Lord had also augmented Flicker’s efforts to aid the freed felons. Flames from the jail fire, driven by freshening winds, had leaped to the newly erected hangman’s scaffold in the middle of Allen Street. In subsequence, the very gibbet from whence the citizens had planned to “dangle the nigger” had gone up with a roar and vasty rush of whirled embers. Its fall had revealed Santiago and his deputies hiding beneath its platform, from whence they had dashed for the prison stable.
Now, as the crowd yet milled before the burning gibbet, a man came crying from Allen Street that some of his fellows and himself had “got the nigger cornered.” They had worked this wonder of raw courage when the black man stopped to cover the escape of his fellow prisoners.
Flicker seemed doomed. He had seized a gun from the marshal’s office, but the crowd believed him out of ammunition for it now. He was acower inside the hastily emptied San Pedro Saloon, across from the jail. The mob had front and rear exits covered. It remained only for some hero to fill himself with courage from the bottle and so lead the rush to “go in and get the black bastard out.”
The vision of the untamable Flicker driven to earth by such peasants was a desperate one for me. I could not accept it. Quita! This noble savage must not die thus trapped in the house of degeneracy called San Pedro Saloon. But what might I, a man of peace, perform of rescue or salvation? God would need to answer that for me, and for dauntless Flicker.
Wondrously, he did so.
From the burning lean-t
o issued the piteous screaming neigh of the last, forgotten horse.
Sweet Jesu! A horse.
If a king might save his realm or lose it for want of such animal, why not Nunez?
That saddled mount in there represented the last best chance brave Flicker had to enter the Kingdom of Heaven another day than this one dawning now over Tombstone.
“Caballo, caballo!” I cried. “Nunez comes—!”
Leaping from the stock tank, I ran dripping into the furnace of the lean-to.
I do not understand to the present day if it were the shield of water-soaked habit, the luck of the damned foolish, the work of Saint Francis, or some capricious trick of Lucifer. But I was permitted to reach the terrified brute unscathed of flame. I was even able to free the animal and mount myself upon it with but casual scorches. As I tried to turn the beast, however, it went mad beneath me. The roar of the fire reached for us.
Here, a thing of fate obtained.
A spark storm, created by the intense heat, sucked the flames upward in a tower of ascending embers. The resulting vacuum momentarily cleared the area about the horse, and the creature could see the shed exit beckoning. Wildly, it lunged to escape, clearing the lean-to in one mighty crouching bound. I, burred as a Texas fever tick to the old Tejano saddle, perforce went with it.
We alighted running and, behind us, as we did, I heard the crash of the lean-to falling back into the vacuum. Fearing to look over shoulder, I fought desperately for the loose reins of my mount. Again, my fates were watchful. I found the bridle lines. Gathering them in, I was able to force the horse leftward through the scattering onlookers and so around the burning jail. In another few jumps, I had his head.
Into the firelit pandemonium of Allen Street I drove the creature, setting him with last strength toward the doors of the San Pedro Saloon. In truth, I held shut my eyes then. I do not recall a single instant of the passage of the crowd in front of the place, nor the shattering splitting of the wooden doors. I did hear my mount neigh shrilly and felt him take a hurtling jump as if to clear a last obstacle. Then we were both inside the San Pedro, with black Flicker hauling down the rearing horse with one hand and snatching me safely to floor from the brute’s convulsing back with the other. Here, my mind was returning to me some little.
I saw that it was dark of lantern or lampshine within the cantina, that Flicker was alone and defended only by the outer mob’s fear of him. His very voice echoed the last controls of desperation.
“Quién es? Quién es?” he repeated hoarsely, at the same time dragging me nearer to him to peer at what his hand had caught. He saw, then, that it was a servant of Rome, and not just any such.
“Nombre Dios!” he said to me. “You!”
He threw back that handsomest of heads. The broad black chest glistened of sweat and incredible musculature there in the ghostlight of the last saloon that these two men would drink in, in that life. Flicker boomed out his bass and glorious laugh, a sound such as I think none other had ever heard from his black lips. “You!” he roared again. “I shouted to God to send me help, and instead he delivered me you!”
“You’re forgetting the caballo!” I said angrily. “God’s blood, can you tell me you can’t use a horse!”
Flicker looked at me. He tightened his grip on the bridle reins of the shivering tall bay horse. One black hand snaked to the bar and returned with a bottle of Old Crow American bourbon whiskey. He smashed off the neck of the bottle against the wood of the bar’s top.
“Here,” he said to me, offering the ragged beaker, aspill. “Make it a deep pull, padre. Just leave a little for me.”
I took the whiskey from him and drained four fiery gulps of it into my shaking and empty belly. Taking back the bottle, black Flicker gulped strongly of it, threw it with a crash through the long mirror behind the hardwood of the bar. In the same sweep of movement he was up on the horse and had hoisted me to cantle saddle skirt behind him. The horse crouched and squealed to the double weight, and Flicker wrenched its head about to face the outer street. “Hang on,” was all he said to me, and he drove the tall horse forward.
The great bay window of the San Pedro Saloon was the only piece of glass its size within another thousand miles of San Francisco. Once United States Army lieutenant Robert E. Lee Flicker leaped our gallant mount through the window’s precise center pane with a crash and splinter that showered its shards and slivers for a hundred varas across Allen Street. The crowd panicked, shouting and falling over itself. The magnificent bay horse wheeled to the left and thundered away, showering a blizzard of glass bits behind it. Out of the fires of that Gehenna that had so nearly burned us all, the big bay bore its clinging riders southward into the sage. All in the minute of the window’s crashing, we were free of Tombstone, Arizona. And thank a forgiving God for that.
I do not know if they ever rebuilt that jail. I heard there was a newer one in the courthouse on Toughnut Street. Me importa un bledo, I don’t care. We got away from the only one we knew about, and no pursuit came after us.
The only living thing that followed us out of the disappearing town was a ragged apparition of a watch-guard dog who galloped with a halting gait but of a spirit noble as the desert wind. We cried old Loafer on, black Flicker and I, and we laughed to see him come with his outrageous limp and bid him welcome with the laugh to our entattered company.
Soldiers three we were, an army not to be accounted small for all our poverty of number, and but one horse to ride. Kingdoms have been won and lost with less.
16
SPINNING IN THE WIND
After perhaps a mile of double riding, Flicker surprisingly halted the tall bay horse. He got down from the animal and gave him over to me. I could not fathom his impulse and admitted it. He answered that by running afoot some distance, he would conserve the horse and encourage the dog, which was lagging badly.
“Aha!” I said, touched. “What a quaint gallantry.”
Flicker was amused. “You black robes will see things as in a Bible story, always,” he said. “Now an Apache understands life better than that. He would see that I am not truly succoring the dog but rather sparing the horse which might, in the end, save my own life.”
“But you are not an Apache, Flicker.”
“What am I, then, father?” he asked softly.
“A soldier,” I insisted. “The finest I have seen.”
“A nigger soldier,” he said, more softly yet.
“Pardiez!” I snapped at him angrily. “The word comes ugly to my ear; I don’t care for it.”
Here, the dog caught up to us and reared its shaggy height to lick and muzzle at Flicker in gratitude. At the same time it uttered a doleful whimper, as if to agree to what it had overheard, coming up.
“You see, father,” black Flicker laughed, “the dog doesn’t care for the word either. Doubtless he’s heard worse in his own direction, but a dog knows how a nigger feels. That’s why they like us.”
“Absurdo!” I snorted. “You are as bad as my housekeeper, Zorra. Always calling herself a whore.”
“And is she one, father?”
“But of course.”
“Then so am I a nigger.”
“Damnation!” I protested. “If you will not call yourself black, or whore, or half-breed, the world will make its own estimate of you.”
“Half-breed?” he frowned. “Where did that come in?”
“It came in with me; I am mestizo.”
“Ah, yes, I had forgotten.”
“That is because I do not continually remind all mankind of the mixture.”
“And what does that leave you, finally, father?”
“A priest, Flicker.”
“And I am still a soldier, eh?”
I nodded that this was so, and he frowned over it for five seconds. At last he returned my nod and asked, “Did I ever call you half-breed, father?
”
I glared at him, offended. “Did I ever call you nigger, Flicker?”
The black deserter shook his leonine head, handsome as any Roman senator’s. “You are saying, then, that we are two men, nothing more?”
“A little more, if you will have it: two friends.”
Robert Flicker straightened at the words. He released the horse’s cheek strap. The dark hand reached for mine. I gripped it hard, deeply wrought. As the grasp lingered, Flicker, by some instinct of his African huntsmen forebears, tensed suddenly. He swung away from me to stare back toward the north, whence we had come. I saw the wild black eyes narrow.
“Friend Nunez,” he said, deep voice rumbling, “kick up your horse and whistle on your dog. Yonder comes the sun, and not alone.”
I looked where he gestured. A group of many riders was moving out from Tombstone. They were not that far behind us, the members of that straggling clot of horsemen, that one failed to note the winking of the new sunlight along the barrels of the guns they carried. Thinly, we could hear the yelping of the riders, in cry. The vessels of my temples constricted.
“Una fuerza,” I gasped. “Una fuerza armada.”
“An accurate assessment,” black Flicker said. “I would call that an armed posse, anywhere. Now who in the world do you suppose they can be after?”
“Ah!” I said. “They are chasing the evil Santiago!”
Flicker spat to wet drying lips.
“Do you see Kifer and his two pals, father? Look all about now. Take your time. Who do you see that the posse also sees. Mark the direction that it comes.”
I felt a sinking weakness of the belly.
“It is ourselves,” I whispered. “The posse comes this way. It comes for us.”
“It does,” Flicker said.
He knotted his left hand in the leathers of my right-side stirrup. “Put the horse in a lope,” he instructed me calmly. “I’ll run by his side as long as I’m able. After that, you must go as long as you and the horse can. They won’t forgive you, father. Kifer is only a murderer of women and children. But you! You tried to help a black man. You robbed them of stringing up their murdering nigger son of a bitch.”