5
STILL CONFRONTING US was the great northward bend of the Gila, which is crossed regularly by war parties of Goyotero and Sierra Blanca Apaches on their raids into Sonora. Beyond that, and north, was the country of the Navajo, cousins of the Apache and equally murderous. Pine Leaf redoubled her caution. At night we would camp without a fire in the rimrock high above the river canyon. She would scan the sky and the surrounding peaks and ridges intently. I could see nothing out there but clouds, with now and then a distant plume of smoke which I assumed from its steadiness marked the campfire of a Pima or Maricopa hunting party. These tribes were friendly to both Mexicans and Americans, so I had no worries about what might transpire should we cross their paths. Certainly I knew that the various tribes of wild Indians used smoke signals to convey their intentions one to the other, but believed that the puffs employed in this crude form of communiqué, through the purposeful interposition of a blanket or buffalo robe, would be broken into rhythmic patterns.
“That smoke you’re watching, it’s from a cookfire, isn’t it?” I asked her one evening.
“No,” she said. “Mangas is out there. He is signaling to another band for cooperation in setting an ambush. Single puffs of smoke rising, widely spaced from each other, mean that the man who started the fire has seen something suspicious, maybe dangerous: enemies. Many puffs mean the strangers are well armed and numerous. A steady smoke spells ambush.”
“How do you know it is Mangas?”
“I know him. I was his slave.”
“How long has he been on our trail?”
“Four days now. Your friend is with him.”
“Jorge?” I was startled. “How do you know all this, from the smoke alone?”
“No,” she said. “Remember the other day when I went back along our trail to brush out those footprints you left in the mud? Not far behind us I saw the tracks of Mangas, along with the crooked toemarks of your amigo. Mangas has six men with him. One of them is Delgadito, another Poncé. The others are young, of no consequence.”
An unsettling thought… .
“Who’s Mangas signaling to for help in the ambush?”
“Coyoteros, I think. He has friends among them. See that fireglow out there, far ahead of us downriver?”
I stared but could not see it. Darkness was falling fast now, and the sky to the northwest was dark.
“Look for a glow on the rock, up high, along the ridgeline,” she said.
Then I saw it, just a faint, flickering smudge of reddish yellow.
“The Coyoteros are signaling their agreement,” Pine Leaf said.
Now suddenly I felt a stab of fear, and with it of course resentment at the woman’s aplomb.
“Why didn’t you tell me this when you learned of it?” I snapped at her.
She laughed. “Owen, you have enough to worry about just putting one foot before the other, without having to watch over your shoulder. You march like a crippled old woman. Besides, had I told you of your friend, you might have insisted that we free him from his captivity.”
“Why didn’t Mangas kill him right off?”
“He probably wants to crucify the three of us together. Apaches are very superstitious, all of it mixed up with the magic of the padres. I believe he is thinking of your Christian god Jesús y Maria and the thieves who were nailed to those trees beside him. Apaches love that story. Three is a holy number.”
I considered that for a moment. “If you know where he is, then he certainly knows our location. Why hasn’t he hit us already?”
“Mangas has a hard rule of warfare: ‘Sin ventaja, no salen.’ Without a clear advantage, he will not attack.”
“Six against two seems advantage enough.”
“But I am one of the two,” she said.
AT MIDMORNING THE next day Pine Leaf spotted a column of dust rising far south of the river but heading our way. The country along here was treeless, open but for the sage. Crouching low, we ran toward a pile of red rocks well away from the gorge. She scampered quickly to the top and stared hard, a long time, at the approaching dust cloud. Then she came down.
“Mejicanos,” she said, smiling. “Soldados—how do you call them, dragónes? Dragoons. It must be a reprisal for Apache raids down in Sonora. They ride up here now and then, when their honor finally goads them to roust themselves, and bum a few jacales, kill some women and children, then prance back triumphant with scalps on their lances. Usually they strike the Pimas and Maricopas, though. A scalp is a scalp.”
“Maybe they will take us with them,” I said. “Save us from Mangas and the Coyoteros.”
Pine Leaf looked me up and down. My hair, tangled and filthy, hung past my shoulders, my beard halfway down my chest. I was dressed in rags, the cotton clothing I’d acquired in the calabozo stained red with Gila dust and ripped to shreds by cactus. She didn’t look much better. “They will spear us for vagabundos, ” she said, “or at best merely laugh and spit upon us and go their way. No, we’ll trail them; tonight I can steal a gun and some horses. They have good taste in horses. Mounted and better armed, we’ll stand something of a chance against Mangas.”
“Where is he now—Mangas?”
She pointed to a low line of sage-grown hills behind us. “He was closing on us before he saw the troops,” she said. “I had not seen them yet, but when I looked back to see how soon he would be upon us, I noticed him looking across the river, then turning his horses away toward those cerillos. He’ll wait now until dark to move again. The soldiers would see his horses otherwise.”
“What would you have done if he had attacked us?”
“Fight him.” She smiled to herself and shook her head—to ask such a question! “Sometimes, Owen, I think you are medio tonto, half addled.”
The dragoons turned downriver when they reached the gorge but did not cross over. They seemed to be looking for a ford; the bluffs were too steep here to reach the river with horses. We followed on our own side, keeping low in the man-high sage. I could scarcely keep up with Pine Leaf, who was moving as fast as a walking horse. By nightfall I was exhausted, legs turned to lead, eyes blurred from too much sunlight. She brought me some bitter water from the river in a huage, or gourd, which she’d hollowed for that purpose, handed me the last few strips of dried antelope meat.
“Refresh yourself, caroshe said. “With luck we won’t have to walk anymore. The soldados are camped just across the way, with two mozos watching the herd. Gan you shoot a bow?”
“Not very well,” I said.
“Que lástima. I’ll leave it with you anyway, in case Mangas comes up while I’m gone. My knife will be enough for these Spaniards.”
I heard her go down through the rocks, the riffle of her body sliding into the water… . The moon was just rising, fat and red on the horizon. … I dozed off.
Next I knew, horses were stamping near my head. Vague shouts in Spanish came from across the Gila, along with scattered shots from carbines and pistols. “Quick, mount up,” said Pine Leaf, standing over me. Her face was streaked with mud. “We must ride fast.”
The moon stood straight overhead. I swung up on the back of a horse, Pine Leaf slapped it on the rump, and we galloped away from the river. All night we rode, trot and gallop, north and west, Pine Leaf leading the way on a finely speckled alazan with two blacks in tow; I on a chestnut. No saddles, only bits and bridles, but I was still a good horseman after four years: you never forget that balance. Bitter alkali dust rose from our horses’ hooves, obscuring the trail ahead, but I noticed Pine Leaf looking skyward from time to time, where the dust cloud was thinner, to check our route against the stars. Toward morning we stopped at a fetid spring to water the mounts. Pine Leaf carried a Spanish cavalry lance and an escopeta, along with a powder horn and bullet pouch. As the light strengthened, I noticed blood caked black on her knife hand.
“Are you injured?”
“No,” she said, noticing it for the first time. “The second mozo struggled when I cut his throat.
It spurts a lot, you know. I had no time to take their hair.”
Of a sudden I was weeping again, the weakness I had felt since the rescue turning my heart to water. I grabbed her and hugged her to me, all the fear and hope and waste of the past four years, all the confusion of emotions, self-contempt, vengeance, love, despair … flooding forth from the red holes of my eyes. Her hard, hot, rank body: the smell of woman and dust and blood.
How in the hell had I come to this?
We dropped down onto the dried mud, and there among the rattling reeds and the sound of horses sucking water, their bellies rumbling with it, we made love. For what would prove the last time… .
“Medio tonto,” she murmured, not unkindly, when we were done.
MANGAS CAME THAT night.
He had his ventaja now; the Goyoteros were with him, at least a dozen of them, from what we could determine as they approached us over the plain through the dusk.
We had found another rock pile for our fort, a hillock that rose from the plain like a fresh smallpox scar, wealed around the edges with huge but strangely light boulders of a dead gray pumice. We piled rocks around the hollow to form a low breastwork, then brought our horses down into the shallow depression thus formed and hobbled them to feed in the sparse needle grass that grew there. Mangas’s marksmen would have no easy time in killing or driving them off.
I now took time to examine the leather-cased musket which Pine Leaf had taken, and found, to my amazement and delight on removing it from its buckskin sleeve, that it was a double-barrel rifle. A fine one, too: a slim, elegant English flintlock in .45 caliber made by Joseph Manton of London and converted only recently to fire by means of percussion caps. Despite its two barrels, the rifle was only marginally heavier than my old Hawken; it balanced perfectly as I threw it to my shoulder. The erstwhile owner had cared for it well: no rust on locks or barrels, no serious pitting on lands or grooves, thus no worry on my part that the gun might throw wild or, worse, rupture if I happened to double-charge it in the heat of battle. The leather bullet pouch was full. Plenty of fine-grained French powder in the horn. From the rifle’s sling hung a separate spring-loaded charger which carried the percussion caps, two dozen of them, ready to be snapped on the lock nipples whenever I reloaded. I found a tin container in the bullet pouch which held more caps.
“Where did you get this rifle?” I asked Pine Leaf. “It’s far too expensive to have belonged to a mere mozo. Too well cared for, as well.”
“I took it from an officer,” she said. “He came into the remuda just when I’d finished with the others. A nice-looking boy, and brave. He tried to draw his saber as I stabbed him.”
From a ciénega we’d passed that afternoon Pine Leaf had plucked two dozen long, straight reeds, which, even as she rode, she busied herself converting into extra arrows for her bow. An outcropping of chert provided her with arrowheads. It was fascinating to watch her knap them, chip chip, finished. They were wicked-looking little bits of stone, with sharp fluted edges that could slice the toughest horsemeat. She bound them to the reeds with thongs from her supply of sun-dried antelope hides. Then, as we awaited the enemy’s approach, she found a dead pelican near the rock pile and from its malodorous feathers fletched her shafts.
As the Apaches drew near, we noticed something strange: behind them two of the horsemen were dragging what appeared to be heavy bundles. One of them consisted of lodgepole pine trunks; the other proved to be poor Jorge. “No trees out here,” Pine Leaf said. “Mangas has brought the makings of his crucifixes with him. He prides himself on thinking ahead.”
Jorge was naked, his body now little more than a hunk of raw meat after being dragged across miles of cactus, volcanic rock, and alkali flats. When they stopped, just out of rifle range on the prairie before us, I saw that Jorge could not stand upright. They had hamstrung him and his feet flopped limply below his ankles.
I counted twenty Apaches in the party. Half of them immediately on halting set to work chopping the lodgepoles to appropriate lengths, then notching the uprights to accommodate the crossbars. Soon they had the three crosses planted in the loose, rocky soil. With the remainder of the wood they built a large bonfire directly behind the crosses, so that the firelight illuminated them from the rear. Now Mangas and a slim young Mimbreño rode toward our rock pile.
“That is Delgadito with him,” Pine Leaf said. “ ‘The Skinny One’ Very brave, very cruel.”
“Tats-ah-das-ay-go!” Mangas yelled. “Quick Killer!” He had a strangely high voice for so large a man. Then he continued in Spanish, no doubt so that I, too, could understand his ultimatum: “You have transgressed against the People once too often. Now you must die, and the others whom you helped to escape will die with you, in the manner of their cowardly god Jesús y MarÍa. I know you will make a fight of it, and a good one, for you have learned the arts of war from me, Mangas Coloradas, the greatest general in the world. You cannot escape. We have you, and we are too many for you. But hear me: for every arrow you throw at us, for every bullet you fire, you and your white-eyed lover will suffer the more before you die. I make you this offer: Surrender now and I will kill you each myself, swiftly, with a single stroke of the knife. Fight us and you will pay for it in pain. I will give you some time to discuss this offer between yourselves. Meanwhile my men shall provide you with some light amusement.” He reined his horse around and rode with Delgadito back out of rifle range.
“I believe I could have hit him from here,” I told Pine Leaf as they galloped back. “This rifle is capable of it.”
“Perhaps you should have,” she said.
“What will they do now?”
“Have some fun with your friend.”
“What will we do … when they’re done?”
“He will come out again and ask us for an answer.”
‘I’ll shoot him then.”
“Good.”
I WILL SPARE my gentle reader a description of the torture that followed. Suffice it to say that, though Jorge was half-dead already and, one would think, beyond feeling any further pain, he was not so fortunate. His screams tore my heart. Finally, when the red devils grew bored with their games, they pulled down one of the crosses, hammered Jorge’s hands and feet to it with thornwood spikes, and elevated it again. Delgadito then fetched a firebrand and applied it to the dying man’s feet. Jorge’s head came up from where it had been resting on his breast. He stared wide-eyed, wild-eyed, into the dark, his gaze directly on me I swear, and screamed in a loud girlish squeal, “Owen! I beg you! Kill me!”
With that I could take no more: I broke. Vaulting over the breast-work, I crawled down through the cactus toward a sagebush that I knew would provide me cover within rifle range of the indios. By now it was dark enough that I could hope the Apaches hadn’t seen my movement. But of course they had. In an instant, half of them were spurring their ponies toward me, no war whoops, dead silent, lances at the ready. As they approached, I heard an arrow whistle over my head and one of them reeled in his high-peaked Mexican saddle. Then another arrow, another man down. I raised the rifle and with two quick shots dropped another pair. The remaining Apaches split off to either side of me, and a lance thudded in the sand at my feet. I ran back to the rock pile.
“You are a damned fool,” Pine Leaf hissed. “Do I have to explain everything to you? That’s precisely what they wanted you to do! That’s why they tortured your friend, to lure you out and kill you! Now reload quickly; they’ll come again.”
By now it was dark as Erebus. The Apaches scattered their fire, which had provided the only light on that gruesome scene. The moon would not rise for another hour or more, though already we could see a faint graying along the rim of the eastern horizon. I had read, in our schoolboy storybooks, that Indians were always reluctant to strike in the dark. They were said to be too fearful of Night Spirits, those evil demons that snatch away the souls of the righteous, to risk mortal danger after the sun has set. Do not believe it, not of the Apaches: No, for they,
those sons of darkness, they revel in it, for only then can their full stealth be exploited to the maximum. Darkness concentrates their evil, so that they move more silently after sunset, strike more swiftly, bite more fatally than the serpent in your bedroll. They themselves are the Night Spirits!
Barely had I recharged my barrels when the first Apache was over the wall and into our fort. I had the impression of a heavy-bodied cat pouncing silent into our midst. Only the hot stink of man sweat and wood ash announced its humanity. He writhed away before I could shoot, then sprang at me. Pine Leaf’s lance caught the warrior through the throat just as his knifepoint touched my belly. She thrust him away before he could gut me. “Be alert, tonto!” she said as his body wriggled on the spear. Reaching over with her knife, she plunged it into his heart.
Then three more were among us, naked save for breechclouts and moccasins, their hard, slippery bodies slick with bear grease, knives slicing the darkness. We wrestled there in the sand behind the wall. Grunts and whistling breath through flat noses, punches, the hollow thwack of elbows on skulls; I felt a hot wire bum across my chest and bicep, grabbed a fist, twisted, and stuck the Apache’s knife into his own breast. The next, I broke his neck. Pine Leaf had killed the third. Blood dripped down my arm, into the sand. In the darkness it looked black.
“Can you still see to shoot?” she asked.
“Barely.”
“Get back closer to the horses.” She pulled loose a white breech-clout from one of the dead and wrapped it around her head like a bandanna, pirate style. “You’ll recognize me by this. Shoot all others who come over the wall.”
I ran back to the ponies. The alazan stamped his hooves, nickering with fear. One of the blacks tried to kick me. I saw the pale flash of Pine Leaf’s bandanna against the gray of the pumice-stone wall; then more Apaches were into the fort. I aimed as best I could and fired; flame lancing from the muzzle illuminated the scene for an instant and gave me enough of a sight picture to fire again. As I reloaded, an Indian came at me. I clubbed him with the barrels, then smashed his skull with the brass-shod butt.
Deadville Page 14