Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  The damnable Kifer now gloatingly recounted how he had come upon them that early morning as he and his rude companions had been making for the river in their escape from Tombstone. The three scalpers had cunningly portrayed honest men long enough to win from the frightened women—from Charra Baca of course—the story of their own flight.

  Charra and the old Apache squaw had gone to see the people of Cochise, Kifer said, repeating what the girl had told them, but they had never arrived there. They were met on the trail to Apache Pass by Chiricahua fleeing from that place. The American troops were riding everywhere with harsh new orders to kill Apaches on sight. The Chiricahua, those who could, were trying to reach Mexico.

  The girl and the old lady had turned around and gone with one small band of these refugees. But the luck of the trail had spoiled as bad meat in the sun.

  A patrol of enlisted Apache scout cavalry, under famed government tracker, Tom Horn, had jumped the band just before daylight. All but Charra Baca and Young Grass were killed. They escaped only because of the intercession of young Horn. “Let these last two go,” Tom Hom told his San Carlos Apache scouts. “He among you who mentions their sparing will answer to Talking Boy.”

  Talking Boy was Horn’s Apache name, taken from his skill as an interpreter of the Apache tongue. Some may challenge the accounting of this legendary fellow here. They will say Tom Horn was not then in that part of the Arizona Territory but mining near Gila Bend. Pues, a mi que me importa? What care I, Nunez, for such arguments? The truth remains: A young white scout was kind to a half-breed girl and an aged Mescalero woman. The San Carlos Apache troops serving under him would have murdered their own Indian sisters. This can be pondered. But forgive it, a preacher who will preach is nowhere welcome. The important fact was that the attack of the San Carlos patrol made the two women glad to travel in Kifer’s protective custody. To be an Apache—or even half Apache—caught out of white company in that time and place was to risk death—or even worse: to be captured and sent to the far-off hell-prison of Florida.

  Concluding his story with his empty laugh, Kifer boasted his true plan had been to sexually use Charra Baca and to knock in the old squaw’s head with a rock, selling her ratty scalp lock for half price, twenty dollars Mexican, in Ciudad Chihuahua.

  “Unloose the gags from the ladies,” Kifer commanded his lurking deputies. “Let’s see if either of them cares to correct my tale of their sorrows.”

  Released, Charra admitted that she had told Kifer about El Naranjal and the map to the mine of the orange grove. She had done so, she said, so that the scalpers would want to help them look for Father Nunez.

  For her contribution, when her turn to speak followed that of the half-breed girl, Young Grass promised heatedly in Apache that, given first chance, she would pare out the living sphincters of the three white scalp hunters and fry them for supper. Kifer, who understood her words, smashed her in the face and bid her mind her tongue, lest he rip it from her head and broil it for his own breakfast.

  At this brutality, Charra began to weep.

  “If you can only forgive me, father,” she pleaded. “But I discovered I did not want to go to Cochise. I wanted to come back and be your daughter. It’s all my fault.”

  “No,” Young Grass said. “The people up there are no longer as they were. Cochise is five years dead and his Chiricahua have lost their power. Cochise had a tumor. It was big and putrid as a soured mare’s bag. It killed him in a few weeks only. And more; did you know, Jorobado, that he accepted the White Eye’s faith at the end? Anh, he told Agent Jeffords he believed they would meet again ‘up there.’ Cochise meant your black robe heaven. You see, Jorobado, your damned religion has made it so even an Apache is afraid to die.”

  I was of course indignant. “What?” I cried. “Do you say that Cochise was fearful to die because he spoke a belief in a life after death? Is that your Indio ignorance?”

  “No, little broken-backed priest,” Young Grass answered, “it was because he said he would see Jeffords where he was going.”

  “Well then?”

  “Well then, the Apaches have no White Eyes where we go.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Kifer,” Belcher snarled into our discourse, “are we going to stand here Injun palavering all day? What the hell abouten the map?”

  Santiago Kifer turned his disfigured face to his deputy, then to me. “The map, padre,” was all he said.

  For the final time I hesitated. “Give it to him, if you have it,” Flicker told me.

  Charra Baca added her pleas.

  Young Grass nodded curtly. “Anh, yes. What good is a damn piece of paper to die for?”

  She had the best point.

  I lifted flap to buckskin traveler’s pouch. The vellum tube housing the map appeared in good repair. Removing map tube from pouch, I tendered it to Santiago Kifer. “You need only turn off the fitted cap,” I instructed him, “to find the map rolled within.” Kifer did as I told him. But when he then upended the tube to spill out the map, it was not the map that spilled out. It was some brackish water from the iron horse-trough of the Tombstone Jail. Intact as the tube had seemed, it had, alas, leaked grievously.

  Kifer stood holding it upside down. He did not move. The last drops of horse-trough water seeped from the tube’s dreary end. Only then did the scalper look up at me.

  “If the map is spoiled, priest,” he said, crazed orbs afire, “I will tie your hair to your horse’s tail and whip him away from you.”

  I blanched with fear and could not speak.

  Santiago Kifer felt carefully within the tube and extracted the sodden roll of the two-hundred-year-old map to the lost Naranjal mine. Cautiously, cautiously, he unfurled it. Then he held it up to the light of the new sun.

  He studied it a long, nerve-bending time.

  Then he lowered it to stare bleakly at me.

  “There isn’t a damned line left on it,” he said. “It is plumb water-washed.”

  And, finally, with a fury of softness, “Bring up his horse, Crench.”

  19

  THE MOVING FINGERS WRITE

  Kifer crumpled the useless map and flung it to the sands of the bar, at water’s edge. I was taken next instant by Deputy Belcher, a lank man who stood six and one-half feet in height and was surpassing powerful. No bantam rooster of my five feet and middle years would make sober issue with such a troglodyte. I suffered the deputy to retain his bruising hold.

  Crench, meanwhile, was fetching over my horse. His master, Santiago Kifer, stood Winchester guard over black Flicker. Desperately, I searched mind for means to communicate with the Negro soldier. A matter of consuming importance to the dream for an Apache church had just been rolled into a ball and thrown away. A draft of air, the tiniest dust devil set awhirl across the light sands of the island bar, and the secret of the lost Naranjal mine would float away forever. The current cut in very stiffly here at the bend and was feeding thence into a high-banked gorge immediately below. Espíritu Santo, aid me now!

  Did I say the water-soaked map was useless?

  It was—to Santiago Kifer.

  But to a priest of the company of Saint Francis, trained in the arcane skills of his order, that discarded waddage of ancient paper was yet priceless; there remained a secret method for restoring its every vital line.

  Yet how to tell Flicker he must, if he lived, retrieve the seemingly ruined map. If I might only tell him why I wanted the gold, ah, Jesu! What an ally he could prove. But all that Jesus sent me in that moment of despair was the grunting Crench coming up with my horse.

  “All right, cinch him on,” Kifer ordered Belcher.

  I saw brave Flicker move impulsively to aid me, but Kifer jabbed the muzzle of the Winchester rifle into him and I called over, also, that he should desist.

  “You have another mission more important than my poor life,” I shouted to the American dese
rter.

  “If I have,” Flicker responded with his unquenchable spirit, “you had best remind me of it pronto. Otherwise, adieu mon pasteur. Jusqu’alors!”

  Santa Maria! By this fortuitous accident of a French farewell, a heroic comrade had unwittingly provided me with my method for speaking to him without alerting the scalp hunters. Zut alors! Why had I not remembered Flicker to be a highly educated man, an aborted graduate of the great United States Army university of West Point? Quelle chance!

  “Mon lieutenant,” I waved to my black Apache chief of soldiers, “attendez vous. A brebis tondue Dieu mesure le vent, God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Here is that greater mission of which I spoke: Sauvez vous la carte!”

  My words were broken off by the callused paws of Deputy Belcher seizing me bodily up. In a trice the hairy one had knotted into my long hair a stout tying-thong of rawhide. The free end of this he then bound tightly to the tail of my own horse, held by Crench, and the snorting beast would now drag me until my scalp’s meat ripped from its boning.

  “Croyance, courage!” Flicker shouted.

  Kifer whipped him three times with the rifle’s heavy barrel, the last blow felling the dauntless renegade once more.

  “Flicker, la carte!” I shouted. “Pour l’amour de Dieu, sauvez vous la carte! Qui peut-être restitué, it is restorable!”

  Of course, he did not hear me; in that dark instant, I did not imagine that even God heard me.

  What I did manage then, however, in the very ultimate moment of Deputy Belcher tying me to the horse’s tail, was a final blurred glance at the fallen Negro deserter.

  Flicker had gone down nearly in the water of the current’s set into the beach. His right arm was pinned beneath his body, the left arm outflung. And it was the hand of this left arm that now moved. Its black fingers inched like the sidelong crawling of some wounded crustacean to reach water’s brim.

  To reach it, yet not slide in.

  No, rather to poise above and then enclose within the black retracting “legs” the sodden crumple of la carte, which lay at water’s lap of Rio San Pedro.

  Flicker had heard me; we had the map.

  The lost Naranjal was still ours.

  20

  BEHIND THE WILD HORSE

  My relief at Flicker saving the washed-out map knew the briefest of lives. Belcher, having finished tying my locks to the horse’s tail, stepped back. He searched the nearby ground for a stick to whip the horse away from where we stood. From an eye-corner I saw Flicker try to rise up from where he lay at river’s edge. But he slumped forward partly into the water and lay still once more. He had fainted surely. God grant that, face in the water as he now reposed, he would not drown.

  Deputy Belcher, that evil chupada, that emaciated hairy snake of a man, had found his “whip.” It was a driftwood cudgel, hard and polished as a bone. It would have served to brain the poor animal more easily than to urge it forward. But Belcher was a creature from the caves.

  With a grunt, he swung the heavy club.

  It struck the horse athwart the crouching haunch, and the animal squealed in surprised hurt. Its hesitation before leaping into a run was sufficient for my two hands—left free to permit me to prolong the dragging and hence the enjoyment of my torturers—to reach and seize the rawhide thong that bound me to the horse. Thus, when the poor thing did jump forward, I was able to ease the first shock of my body’s careening course through rock and sand and jagged driftwood of the river bar.

  I knew of course that death would come suddenly. The first direct contact of head with stone, the impalement into any vital organ of sharp driftwood snag—in a dozen ways my wild bouncing behind the terrified horse must end with my life destroyed. Whether or not my miserable hair parted from agonized skull prior to this death or following its grim fact did not interest me. As with any man, my only thought was for God to save me yet.

  He answered me in a strange way.

  Two figures, Apaches on foot, broke out of the heavy brush of the island of the lagoon. One of them ran toward the racing horse that bore me along. The other sped like a red wolf down upon the laughing Crench, where the gross buffoon roared his appreciation of the humor in dragging a mackerel snapper priest to death. Crench did not see the Indian coming for him, for the Apache broke from cover directly behind the hulking deputy.

  Santiago Kifer, of course, did see the Indians break into the open. His rifle leaped to shoulder. But his finger never closed on trigger. The Apache had aimed his charge into the rear of simple Crench with typical cunning. If Kifer were to get off a shot at the Indian, that shot would have to pass through Deputy Crench. Kifer swung away from that shot to take the other Indian, the one running to cut off the horse that was dragging me. Here again the two Apaches had planned their rush with that animalistic instinct for the hunt that is theirs beyond any other race of man. As Crench blocked the first Indian from Kifer’s rifle, so did the two women, Charra Baca and old Young Grass, now interfere with the scalper’s line of sighting on the Apache coming to my succor.

  I could plainly hear Kifer snarling like a kicked dog in his frustration. He ran zigzagging to get an open shot at one of the Indians, but in the time he did this the Apaches had achieved their own intentions.

  The more muscular athlete of the two, the younger man, he who ran up behind Crench, now did a thing I had never seen. He leaped up into the air, five or six feet off the ground. Twisting his hurtling form, he projected his two feet into the very small of the back of the mighty Crench. It was as if the big deputy had been battered from behind by such a log as the Crusaders employed to break down the gates of some walled city of the infidels. He gave a single rupturing screech and collapsed on the sand in a jerking heap of flesh.

  Before the yelling Santiago Kifer could then fire at the Apache, the Apache swept up the escopeta of Crench and fired one of its twin barrels in a reverberating crash of gunfire toward the scalper chief. I could literally see the leaves and twigs of the willows behind Kifer shred and fly from the bird shot of the heavy charge. Bawling like a throat-cut steer, Kifer threw both hands to his face. He dropped his Winchester rifle in a reflex of intense pain and great fright to do so and cried out repeatedly, as he did, “My eyes! My eyes! I can’t see! I can’t see—!”

  He went to his knees in the sand, moaning his fear, crying out for God to help him in the bloodied sightless wounding of his face.

  But God sent help to another instead.

  Beyond Kifer I could see Robert Flicker’s black body stir and rise up from water’s edge, as from the dead. Being in the stream’s cool wash had revived the fighting Negro, and he was now on his feet again, stumbling toward the discarded rifle of the scalper.

  Now, too, God was hearing my own unspoken prayers.

  The small dumpy Apache—who had run out of the willow copse to head off the horse that was killing me—proved swift as some human cannonball. Unbelievably, he guessed precisely the angle that the crazed animal would veer and gallop. The course passed the horse near an inclined up-pitch of driftwood log. The fat Apache ran up this log with the speed of a darting ground rat. As the horse galloped by, he leaped from log’s end to the wildly bucking back of the animal, and he clung there.

  Not alone did he stick to that horse, but he managed to find the flying reins of the bridle and to haul the brute to a sliding stop that was so abrupt as to end me up under the crupper of the animal.

  If one can be grateful for being sat on by a thousand-pound horse, I was grateful.

  The chubby Indian leaped to the ground, untied my hair from that of the horse’s tail, bridle-led the animal up off my chest, and got it quieted down some safe distance from me. By this time, Flicker had Kifer’s Winchester—and Kifer under guard of the weapon’s muzzle—and the first Apache was using his knife to cut free the two captive women. From the uproar of the insane moments before, there came a sudden stillness on
that little beach. We stood looking at our rescuers, unable to find tongue to speak our gratitude. Then, as by some common signal, all commenced to laugh.

  When enough of this relief had been taken, black Flicker greeted the two Apaches. Of course they were members of the raiding party of which he had been the leader. They had their story to tell and would tell it. But first Flicker directed the binding of the blinded Santiago Kifer and of Deputy Crench, using the same bonds as were employed to tie Young Grass and Charra Baca. The missing Belcher remained a mystery for later solving. He had apparently seen how things were going against his cause and had faded into the river brush. He was armed with shotgun and knife and must be considered extremely dangerous. A search to determine his line of flight must be made, but not yet. First must come a catching-up of other things.

  Things such as what had come to pass with poor Kaytennae. And such as what had become of the other raiders, Lupe, Go-ta-chai, and Tule Moon. And then lastly, what were we all to do, trapped here thus on this small island in the middle of the Rio San Pedro, in enemy Arizona.

  Flicker waved his hand, deciding it.

  “Earlier,” he said to me, “you mentioned something of a coffee fire and smoke wisping to suggest breakfast. I see the place past these willows. Let us go over there and discover if these scalpers left us anything but their three fine horses, eh?”

  “All right,” I replied. “Ladies,” I said, with a gallant sweep to bow, offering each an arm, “may I?”

  Charra Baca laughed and took my arm, but the old Mescalero harridan scowled at me and said all priests were afflicted of their brain powers and she would walk alone. The tough cherub of an Apache, whom I now understood to be called Packrat, rescued my intent, however.

  With a grin he took my free arm.

  “Ugashe, black robe,” he said, in Apache, “let’s go.”

  And, por supuesto, away we went.