by Clay Fisher
She had been forced by a pack of men of another race, as surely as ever the white Texas scalpers of Santiago Kifer had befouled Flicker’s golden-haired Huera. And the primary lusters in both times had been half brothers!
Santiago Kifer for Huera the Blonde.
Niño Bonito for Stella Allison.
There was a blood debt owing here, I now could see in the actions of Flicker toward our new campmate.
He owed Ben Allison, this white woman’s brother, for the life of his Apache sweetheart, Huera.
He owed Santiago Kifer for the terror that had ever after affected the mind of Huera.
And he owed Pretty Boy, the second son of Monkey Woman, for the blood and the shame on Stella Allison.
These thoughts of the past came to me in brief reverie while I lingered on at the supperfire, preparing to Flicker’s order a dish of food to be taken to Kaytennae, where he guarded the prisoned Yaqui. It ought to have been Zorra’s chore, of course. But the bawd was already vanished with her victim, Packrat, behind whatever trees would serve, and Father Nunez was again the butt of everyone. Well, almost everyone. The smelly camp guard, Loafer, lingered with me at the fire. Then he heard his inseparable friend, the tall bay horse, whickering from the picket line for him, and even the dog deserted me.
However, Nunez was of a sanguine disposition, always.
I went contentedly enough through the sycamores bearing Kaytennae’s supper. Arriving at the Yaqui’s tree, I discovered that Charra Baca had wandered over from her duty post with Young Grass at the picket line to pester Kaytennae with her thin campdress and all that it did not hide of her remarkable teats and buttocks.
And that face! My God, it would have tempted Jesus of Nazareth, let alone an ordinary Apache Indian. Before either Kaytennae or I might know in what manner she had worked her seduction, she had convinced the Apache youth that he could trust me to take his place with the shotgun guarding Pretty Boy, and she had brought me to believe the same thing.
The next situation I found myself in, I was standing there in the new darkness with an escopeta I did not know how to shoot, my anxious glance dividing itself between the wicked-looking Yaqui prisoner and the disappearing figures, hand in hand, of my daughter Charra Baca and my son Kaytennae.
Ah, well, they were young.
And I doing nothing nearly so important with my time as they might manage to invent for theirs.
“Bless you, my children,” I whispered after them and gave over my attention to scowling fiercely at the Yaqui, lest the fellow think he had inherited some species of churl or fool for a shotgun guard.
36
THE TRACKING OF CHARRA BACA
It went then like the rush of a river over a high place. It thundered by and there was no stopping it.
The Yaqui, even as I first watched him, fainted and hung loose in his bonds. He had, quite plainly, given way to water loss. He must drink now, or perish.
I did not hesitate.
This was a human fellow, no matter how beastlike. No priest of the cloth might stand by and permit him to suffer unto death. It was unthinkable.
What was thinkable was that I, trying to give him of water past his gag, conceived of placing a hollow reed in his mouth in such manner as to pass the gag, so delivering life to him. I attempted this by first sucking a mouthful of water from Kaytennae’s vessel nearby, then expelling it by my own mouth into the reed and thus into the mouth of the grateful Yaqui.
Grateful?
The first thing the brute did was to choke on the water I siphoned and spat into his drinking reed. Indeed, such a show of strangulation did he display that I understood the gag must be let loose or his death would swiftly ensue. Again, I waited not. My fellowman’s life was the responsibility of all my training in the Order of Saint Francis. Seeing Kaytennae’s knife where he had placed it on a rock in preparation to eat, I seized up the blade and slashed the gag free of the Yaqui’s mouth. He gagged, retched—all in strangely controlled silence—spat out the severed gag. Then, before I might remove my hand, and Kaytennae’s knife, from its nearness to his face, an incredible thing followed.
His head struck toward my knife hand like that of a horned rattlesnake. The filed dog-sharp teeth closed with blinding pain on my wrist, and the head jerked itself back to draw my hand against the creature’s chest. In this position, pain forced me to drop the knife. It fell along the front of his body down into—horror of horrors—his two strainingly cupped hands, which he had worked a few inches free of their ropings.
In a trice, Pretty Boy had cut himself entirely free.
In the second trice he had struck me a terrible blow on the head, dizzying me, and had bound me in his place to the sycamore stump. It was the ultimate ingratitude that he also stuffed into my mouth the same foul gag my Roman charity had removed from his treacherous jaws.
The last I saw of him was the ghostly flit of his squat body going through the sycamores toward the picket line. Next I knew, there was an uproar of horses neighing and mules braying and an old Mescalero squaw screeching. This outcry was almost instantly followed by the hammer of many hooves, and past me swept our entire remuda of pack and saddle animals, set free by the escaping Yaqui to prevent our use of them in any immediate pursuit of him.
Lastly among our stampeded livestock, here came the Yaqui himself astride the best horse in the camp, the tall bay from Tombstone.
That would have been enough, God knows.
But, as hell would have it, just at the moment the Yaqui ran his mount toward me, here came Charra Baca flying afoot from her trysting with Kaytennae to see what had happened to her picket line animals.
Pretty Boy uttered a growling war shout, leaned from the racing bay, seized up the slender girl in his apelike arms, and vanished with her into the night and at a full gallop away from the sycamore grove.
Now there was the belated rushing up of Flicker, Packrat, Zorra, Young Grass, and the Allison woman, with my adopted son Kaytennae in the lead.
Flicker was remarkable.
When told what had happened, he did not berate either Kaytennae or myself.
All that he said was, “There is hell to pay now, and we had best start counting out our money.”
At once, Kaytennae insisted that we must go after the girl, even to the camp of Monkey Woman. He would go alone if need be, the young Apache said. It was his fault, all of it. Moreover, the girl had captured his heart. He would gladly die to get her back. What had Mirlo to say to that?
Flicker answered that Kaytennae was right.
We did have to go after Charra Baca.
The only question was how? We could not wait to regather our horses which Pretty Boy had so thoroughly scattered. The Yaqui would be ten miles away.
We needed another of my miracles, the black Apache said, and he turned to me with a bitterness for which I could not blame him.
“Nunez,” he snapped, “you let this rabbit loose; where’s your hound to run him?”
His words struck something in my memory. A spark flew outward from this flint.
“God’s name, Flicker!” I cried. “A hound you say? Listen, we have such a hound.” I wheeled about to call Loafer from the darkness, and when the confused old brute tottered up through the trees, I triumphed to Flicker, “Remember which horse the Yaqui chose to ride? Name that horse for me.”
“You said it was the tall bay.”
“It was. And this old dog will follow that horse to hell, if that’s where we’re going. Quickly now, fashion me a leash for our Yaqui rabbit hound.”
They did so, no more talk then.
Within minutes, the attacking force was ready.
Young Grass, Zorra and Stella Allison were left behind with Packrat. Their orders were to round-up and recapture our freed horses and mules, all that could be found, and then ready the camp to move that same night. A rendezvous on
Rio Moctezuma—known as Tanque Roqueño, and familiar to both Kaytennae and Packrat—was agreed to by our Apaches. If our rescue force failed to appear there the following day, Packrat was to make his own escape, guiding our comrades safely from the country and seeing to it that Stella Allison got home to Texas.
But the gray-eyed woman at once balked at this proposal for her special custody. She might remember the way where Loafer could not find the scent, she pointed out. Moreover, she must go with us. She would go. No orders from Flicker or Kaytennae or, coming to that, from Alvar Nunez, the Catholic priest, could stop her. She was going with us to the camp of Monkey Woman.
If a crippled minion of the pope of Rome could volunteer, a resurrected Hard-Shell Baptist from San Saba, Texas, could surely do the same, she insisted.
There was no real argument to her point of her possible value as a trail-guide, should the old dog fail. Flicker saw it, Kaytennae saw it, even Nunez could understand it.
“All right,” the black leader said. “Ride up here with me.”
We had two horses, Flicker and Kaytennae each having caught a mount instinctively as the escaping Pretty Boy drove our animals out of the camp, to scatter them through the night. Now Flicker took Stella Allison up behind him on his horse and I, the master of the pack, shook loose the rope that bound old Loafer.
“Hi on!” I shouted to the ancient dog.
The trail evidently smelled strongly, as it was heavily indented by the tall bay carrying double. Loafer let out one “whoof!” of discovery and charged off at the end of his rope. I came after him, as swift afoot as most desert men and despite my crippled form.
Behind me came the two horses with the three comrades.
Loafer made no sound running the track of the tall bay. His wolf blood, and his training by Santiago to be sentinal dog of the scalp hunters’ camps, made him a silent worker. Before long the moon was up and we could sight-trail in many places. Here and there, Stella Allison did recognize pieces of country, enabling us to make several dramatic shortcuts to gain miles on our quarry.
As the night fled, so did we, silent beneath the Sonoran moon.
We came in the thick gloom of 4:00 a.m. to the low bluff of Rio Moctezuma, above the camp of Monkey Woman.
“Está alli,” said Stella Allison, low voiced, “there it is.”
“Muzzle the dog,” said Robert Flicker.
I did so, and we all stood watching the darkened village below, seeing it as some ghost town of mud and juniper poles, apale in the last of the setting moon.
And now, finally, God showed his hand.
To the north of the village, along the riverbank trail inward-bound toward the shadowy huts, came two riders we knew, Pretty Boy and Charra Baca. We had beaten them to the Yaqui camp. God had thus granted us the chance to see where Pretty Boy would imprison his flame-haired Apache captive, or what the Yaqui would otherwise do with the girl.
And what Robert Flicker and Kaytennae could see, they could go and get back from the enemy.
I could hear both warriors sucking in their breaths at my side.
“Ussen is good to his children,” the Apache said.
“Tell that to Nunez,” Flicker advised.
“No, no,” I said hastily. “Let Ussen have the hand from here; God has had it far enough: This is Indian work.”
“Well, that takes care of Kaytennae’s salvation,” Flicker said. “Any last words for a poor nigger boy, Nunez?”
I stiffened, then said softly, forgiving him, “You know who your God is, Flicker.”
But Flicker did not answer me. He crouched with Kaytennae at bluff’s edge, watching Pretty Boy and Charra Baca come into the village below. The two watched, still, as the Yaqui camp came alive to the late-night arrival. Fires sprang up here and there about the encampment, while a council was called to convene at the central hut of Monkey Woman. Attending this excited gathering were Pretty Boy with Charra Baca, and a handful of tribal subchieftans. Presumably, Monkey Woman was within and conducting the closed meeting of war. During the ensuing tense half-hour, Flicker and Kaytennae said nothing to any of us on the bluff, only watching constantly below. Finally, Pretty Boy came out of the meeting-house with Charra Baca and surrendered her to a detachment of Yaqui guards. These squat fellows delivered the girl to another hut, separate from the others, and hard down by the fording place of the river. Here, Charra was imprisoned, a watchfire lit and guards mounted at the entrance.
At this point, black Flicker at last turned his eyes from watching below and spoke to slim Kaytennae.
“Are you ready, warrior?”
And the handsome youth answered in Spanish, “Ya! lo creo, yes, I believe it, Mirlo.” Then, in guttural Apache, “Ugashe!”
Flicker nodded grimly and told me to hold the horses and to wait with them and with Stella Allison back down in the draw up which we had come to the bluff-top.
“Keep the damn dog quiet,” he said. “We will get back to you here if we can. Be ready to go.”
37
ESCAPADA DE TANQUE ROQUEÑO
Flicker and Kaytennae disappeared, scaling down the bluff’s face. We took the horses back from the bluff and tied them in the gully, leaving Loafer muzzled and tied with them. Then Stella Allison and I returned hurriedly to the bluff. Our two warriors had just emerged on the sanded bank of the Rio Moctezuma (Montezuma River, or West Fork of Rio Yaqui) below our vantage. We could see them as shadowed doll figures in the waning moonlight.
Into the current of the stream they plunged. They moved in a way to let me know that Flicker had a military plan in mind. He was not just making a blind stab at freeing Charra Baca. I marveled that Kaytennae would go with the black deserter so easily. Apaches will not ordinarily submit themselves to the directions of another. But now we saw the two heads bobbing together down the stream toward Monkey Woman’s secret village, and we watched to see where our swimmers would come out.
Stella Allison told me, as we waited, that the fording place of the stream being below the village was standard with the Indians. They always placed their camps upstream of a crossing, so that use of that place would not make bad water at campside. Flicker had known this, of course, but Stella had been able to describe the ford exactly for him. Particularly how the roadway on our side of the crossing went around the backside of the bluff to intersect the gully behind us. “I believe Flicker will try to get out that way,” she now said to me, her English still halting from the near twenty winters in Apache rancherias. “He questioned me on it at length.”
“Flicker is a marvel,” I nodded. “A black genius.”
“He’s a strange man,” Stella Allison answered quietly. “He’s like me. Been hurt a lot. Maybe too much.”
“No, my daughter,” I said, “you will both be well again in your hearts. Nunez feels it.”
“I feel something, too,” the gaunt woman told me. “I can’t think of Flicker as a nig—” She broke off the word awkwardly. “He doesn’t seem like the colored men I’ve known. Most of them are so, pues, hombres reducidos.” She spoke, lapsing into Spanish to find the phrase she required. “You know what I mean, Father Nunez; their lives have been so cruel for them.”
“They are broken in spirit?” I suggested.
“Yes, that’s it. But Flicker—”
“Flicker is anything but broken in spirit, daughter,” I laughed. “He is the damndest man I have ever known. He and your brother Ben, they are los hombres más raramente que todo el mundo.”
“They would make a pair,” she said, returning my laugh softly.
“They did make a pair,” I told her. “Of enemies.”
Quickly, as we scanned the river to follow the bob of the two heads toward the village, I told her the story of Flicker’s life, before and after his ill-fated attempt to be a new messiah of the Apache, and of my adventure with Ben Allison in fighting Flicker over the ransom and r
escue of the small son of the then governor of Texas.
When I had finished, she asked after her brother and the other Allison children—Clint, Star, and Arjay—and I had to remind her that my knowing of her Big Ben, as she called him, had been ten long years ago.
“The last I saw of Ben Allison,” I said, “he was setting out to hunt down this same Santiago Kifer that we deal with now. That was in Casas Grandes, after Flicker ruined my mission with his damned Civil War cannon. Ah! those were grand days, child.”
We fell silent; then she said quickly, “Mira, padre. They are landing now. See? There they go, bent-double and running to get into the shadows of the prison hut.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do see them. And thank God that those Yaqui guards are watching only the front of the hut. It permits Flicker and Kaytennae to make it thus safely to the rear of the prison. The Yaqui were not thinking of an approach from the river. That’s the work of Dios, daughter. Nothing less.”
I saw the flash of Stella Allison’s teeth in the paling moonlight. “Yes,” she smiled. “With maybe a little help, father.” Then she wasn’t smiling anymore and once again our talk stopped and the stillness extended itself.
For a long time it seemed nothing changed below. The gathering about Monkey Woman’s jacal lingered awaiting the result of the council still going forward therein, or appearing to do so, and the minutes stretched endlessly.
Then, without warning, our two brave shadows broke from the blackness at the rear of the prison hut. They dashed from thence to the sentry fire in front of the hut. And, even at such a distance, we saw by the fire’s glow the flash of naked steel. It was our steel. And being driven by our shadow-men into Yaqui flesh. But the last sentry died noisily and his screaming alerted every tribesman in the camp. On the blufftop, Stella and I knew cold fear.
Now, belatedly, we saw our bigger shadow, Flicker, kill this damnable death-howler. In the same instant, we saw his slender companion-shade, Kaytennae, dart into the prison hut. The Apache youth was in there only long enough for Flicker, on the outside, to seize a certain very tall horse tethered at the fire. Then Kaytennae was back outside the hut with Charra Baca and the two of them were being forced by Flicker up onto the saddled back of the tall mount. We heard Charra Baca’s high voice lifted in Chiricahua insult to the Yaquis, now running up from every quarter of the aroused camp. The girl’s yell was echoed by a wild African scream from Flicker’s black throat, as the latter struck the double-ridden horse in the quarters. The horse let out a shrilling neigh and charged off toward the fording place. He at once outdistanced the Yaqui foot pursuit, which then swung like a pack of yammering mongrels onto the track of the fleeing “big shadow.”