by Clay Fisher
APACHE
RANSOM
Clay Fisher
Copyright © 1974 by Henry Wilson Allen
E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6185-8
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6184-1
Fiction / Westerns
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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To Eve Ball, and to
Ysun’s people—
the Apache of all bands
Prologue
In the sacristy of a Roman priest in Ciudad Juarez, just over the line from El Paso, there is a document which should be of the historic record, but is not. Penned in old goose-quill script on stained vellum paper, it has the title “Narrative of Father Nunez,” and it was found beneath the vestry stones of an ancient chapel ruin in westernmost Chihuahua State, in October 1933.
It is the basis of this book, which will begin, as Father Nunez’s narrative begins, with this singular dedicatoria:
29 de Septembre
Parroquia de la Virgen de Guadalupe,
Casas Grandes
I am Panfilo Alvar Nunez, once cura of the Mission of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Casas Grandes. Accept what I say, or deny it. There is no one else remaining alive to tell what happened.
Had I been a Tejano, I would have died when the Tejanos died in their demented pursuit, casting for the mountain stronghold of the Nednhi Apache chief, Juh.
But I am a Mexican, a mestizo of the monte in simple truth. That is to say, a man one-half of the Spanish and one-half of the Indian blood. So it was the Apaches permitted me to live, remembering my Indian mother.
It is a certainty that they will come back for me, nonetheless.
Apaches do not care for the truth to be known of them any better than do Anglos. But a priest of the people cannot shield evil.
Too many Tejanos perished on that terrible journey of vengeance.
There must be an accounting.
I give it here in this testimony to a man whose name will not be honored in his own land. If you can find it one time in any Anglo history book, I will lie to God about your confessions for all the days of your life. There is no risk to my vows in this: you will keep your sins and go to hell with them; you will never see the name of this man except that you see it here.
You may not see it even so.
Only God can know if these pages will endure. Revolt against Juarez is everywhere in the north. To the south, behind the fortress walls of the city, the old hero himself lies dying. Chihuahua is without defenses. Red barbarian, brown outlaw, white scalp hunter raven the very earth. Troops of the government hide like rabbits. Murderous ruralista bands menace all they happen upon. The poor and the decent pray for their lives.
Perhaps the truth itself shall die.
That it may not, I consign the name of the tall Tejano from San Saba with my own name here beneath these vestry stones, asking of God only the little time to finish before the Apaches return.
It being his will, this narrative is inscribed to brave men of all faiths.
May I find my own courage, when I hear the fall of unshod pony hooves beyond my garden wall and look up to see the still, bronze face of Juh, war chief of all the Nednhis, watching me in that moment of the arrow’s flight.
Fr. P. Alvar Nunez
Order of the Monks
of Saint Francis
1
Of course one knows Casas Grandes.
It is the equal, nearly, of Fronteras or Bavispe or of Janos, even, as a legend-place of the Apache country. It has been on the maps of the monte since the Spanish came. Only look up there where the borders of Chihuahua and Sonora conjoin with the Arizona Territory. There it is. South, as the Apaches put it, “a two-day pony ride” from the United States. East, “but the look of an eye” from the center-bone of the great Sierra Madre, which the people of Juh call the Blue Mountains.
There it dwells beside the sparkling small river of its own name, the Rio Casas Grandes, itself a marker site in the history of Apacheria. Flowing out from the very foothills of Juh’s forbidden stronghold, the river falls northward to end in the Laguna Guzman, midway to Ciudad Juárez. Its desert course watered the main Apache war trail east of the Sierra, into the United States. It watered, as well, the bean fields, melon patches, and corn plots of Casas Grandes. Or it did on those blessed summers when God left enough flow within its shallow bed to reach our acequias. It was thus the artery of our lives; it was but an iron whim of heaven—some say hell—that it also served the lives of the wild Apache.
Casas Grandes?
Ah! It might be the image of the blind poet’s paradise, or the mirror of Gehenna’s fiery pit; it depends upon the eye.
If one sees no beauty in glow of cactus orchid or bright halo of paloverde tree, for him Casas Grandes would be an ugliness. Did another, gazing westward over the grand rampart of the Sierra, behold only the blank stone of the earth’s spine breaking free of the desert’s crust, he too would cry an abomination upon the place.
For those of us who lived there in that singular time, Casas Grandes was an oasis of Christian hope in a solitude of barbarian death. A bastion, however frail, of God’s house in a wilderness of heathen red horsemen and marauding outlaws of every wickedness. We clung to Casas Grandes as men who knew it was their last retreat, which they must defend from the Devil be he Apache or Anglo.
Casas Grandes was a true outpost. We were all soldiers who lived in it, all servants of the cross.
The mission was built in the seventeenth century by the Franciscans. A German friar supervised construction, demonstrating the plodding genius of his race. Even by that fateful spring when the Apaches came for the last time, the adobes had scarcely broken past their plaster coat, the ancient joists and sills of mountain oak were as sound as the day of their cutting in the nearby Sierra. When I came to it in my turn, I was the nineteenth of its pastors in the Order of our Blessed Saint Francis of Assisi to serve it in unbroken line—a prideful thing for Church and priest alike.
Alas, we were not all children of the same forgiving God who came to Casas Grandes.
The final morning was of a kind to make the tasseled quail burst with song. The sun was everywhere within and without the mean hovels of the waking town. The people were in a glad spirit such as the Lord had fashioned the springtime to assure. Cactus wren, twit sparrow, ocotillo bird, and chaparral finch answered back the quail. All were likewise challenged by the reedy roosters of the village, each from his separate small mountain of cow chip or burro dung beside his master’s dusty palace.
Quito! That sand pink dawn would make a pullet crow!
All cassocked and belted as I was, fresh from the early mass, I felt inspired to leap atop the mission wall and flap my arms to let God know his chanticleer could also cock-a-doodle-doo.
It demonstrates the original ignorance of man.
That was no pristine morning for Casas Grandes; it was a sunrise spoken of from that day in fearful whispering.
Its shadow fell first across my garden.
2
That moment is engraved in my spirit. One breath I was glorying in God’s goodness; the next, I heard the soft swish in the sand of pony hooves moving up beyond the mission wall, and I knew they were there.
Th
e wall rose perhaps four feet, framing thus only the upper bodies of man and mount. In the way that the eye will see all at a glance, I determined there were nineteen warriors in the band. That is, eighteen men and the leader. They sat, seventeen in the backing main pack, Juh in front, and on his flank a strange warrior whom I did not recognize. It was as my glance lingered on the strange Apache that I saw the twentieth rider.
He was no Apache.
Mounted behind the unknown warrior, his slight body had been obscured until he leaned outward to see what had halted the war party. When he saw me he made as though to cry out, as would be natural in such a small boy seeing his first civilized face in God knew how many pony rides from the place of his abduction. At once the handsome warrior struck him a backhanded blow, and the white child withdrew again behind his captor. I remarked at the time that he did not whimper or make any sound. I knew by this that they had had him some days at least.
Of course one could deduce this by the look of the party itself. The ponies were red with the sweated-on dust of far places. Faces and bodies of the riders were caked with grime. Even in these most impassive of nomad peoples, it was to be seen that the journey had been long and difficult and ridden at a killing pace. The dark faces were hollow with fatigue. The ordinary careful grooming of the Apache showed not in the nineteen riders who came to my wall. There was no question, even before Juh spoke, that this was a war raid party, that death was the twenty-first horseman who rode with them.
“Blackrobe,” Juh said in that rumbling grizzly-bear voice I knew so well, “have the people prayed and gone away? We are in sore need of water and an hour to let the ponies breathe.”
He spoke in Spanish, with Indian phrasing, a peculiarly Apachean speech familiar to all who might have intercourse with their fierce number. It was a patois I had myself mastered and now used in reply.
“Yes, Jefe,” I told him. “The people have prayed and gone. No one is here. Enter and be as you would in your own camp.”
“Enjuh,” he growled, in his own guttural tongue, meaning “good.” With the word he turned to his followers, waved, and repeated, “enjuh, enjuh,” and the weary horsemen turned and came swiftly along the wall behind the mission. Here, on that side away from the town, was a portal gate wide and high enough to admit a single bent-over rider. I swung open the gate and the Nednhi raiders of the great Juh filed in with the speed and urgency of desert wild sheep driven to some rocky cul-de-sac of desperate need.
I soon learned the reality of this allusion.
My beloved mission was to become, in the space of fewer minutes than there were barbarian guests within its low ramparts, a fortress of Indian war.
My first understanding of this came with the thin far shrilling of a Mexican cavalry trumpet. I knew the sound and had not heard it within a twelve-month, or longer. Government troops were of a severe rarity in northwestern Chihuahua. “Federales,” I said to Juh, and tucked my habit and ran for the wall.
I could see the command about three miles away across the flats to the southeast. The sun, being behind them, silhouetted them nicely. I thought I could comprehend, then, the urgency of Juh’s weary company. The chief, unheard by me, had come up behind me.
“Anh, yes,” the deep voice said, in Apache. “Huera planned it well.”
“Huera?” I said. “Is that the new warrior?”
“Anh.” Juh continued watching the oncoming Mexican column. “Huera saw the trap in a dream.”
“Trap?” I was at once alerted.
“There,” Juh said, pointing to the left of the cavalry. “Squarely in the sun.”
I saw the smaller dust cloud of a lesser band of horsemen bearing in on the mission. They rode a course converging with that of the federale riders. “Quiénes son ellos?” I said quickly, “Who are they?”
“Texas Devils,” rumbled Juh.
“What! Texas Rangers here?”
“Anh.”
“After you, Jefe?”
“Anh, and now the Mexicans are after them.”
“Huera’s plan again?”
“Anh.”
In my heart I did not like this. I grew wrathful but cautious, as one always must be with Apaches.
“Well, too bad,” I said. “It is not going to work. The rangers will win to the mission before the Mexican cavalry. I will grant them sanctuary. Not even government soldiers will invade Church ground where sanctuary has been granted.”
Juh uttered a grunt. Glancing at him, I saw the gargoyle’s beak of his face break into what had to be a Nednhi grin. “We will help you give them sanctuary,” he told me, and turned to order his fellows into place along the wall.
I remained with the Nednhi watching the rangers and the cavalry come on apace. The feeling of a thing being terribly wrong grew within me. But the totality of the Apache chief’s grim meaning was not to be conceived by even a mestizo mind, let alone that of a simple Franciscan cura.
The rangers, seven of them on foaming horses, won the race but narrowly—by the length of an arching rifle shot. Long Mexican lead was splashing the mission wall as I swung open the portal gate to admit the first of the gasping Texas horses. Busy with the heavy panel, anxious to swing it fast behind the last of the Texans, I did not see the horror that followed. I was yet shouldering shut the portal, all the rangers safely through it, when the ear burst of point-blank rifle fire thundered behind me.
As my heart leaped, the most dire fear that invaded it was that the Texans, riding with repeating rifles in hand, had instinctively begun to fire, seeing the Apaches dismounted in the mission courtyard. Would God this had been the tragic depth of it; it was not.
When the barking of the rifles ceased and I dared turn, I saw no pitiful scatter of Indian dead. Instead, where all had fallen within a circle of six pasos, the rangers lay riddled with Apache bullets. Even as I stared, paralyzed by disbelief, the Nednhi were over the bodies, smashing each in the face or back of the head, as scalping knives flashed to complete the coup de grace by gun butt. Sheer stupefaction rooted me. When finally I could force my limbs to act, I was barely in time to leap astride the last ranger body before the blood-spattered Nednhi had finished the other six.
The killing lust was in them and they came for me in a closing circle like the red wolves that they were. I had no belief—indeed, I had certain knowledge to the contrary—that they would respect the robe. There was, however, one whisper-thin chance. Seizing the cross girdled at my waist, I flung it up in their faces and cried out in the same instant, in their thick Apache tongue, the death word, dah-eh-sah.
The sun, by a grace of the Holy Ghost, struck the burnished silver of the crucifix. There was a burst of light in their slitted eyes and, as my cry of death! echoed, they paused the heartbeat needed for their great-chested leader to intervene.
Juh feared the cross. He knew it was the medicine of the blackrobes. Springing between his murderous pack and myself, he swung the butt of his rifle so as to knock the blade from the hand of the warrior Huera, who led the scalpers. As Huera cursed and stepped back, Juh said, to my amazement, “Gouyan, you are well named, a wise woman indeed.”
A woman? This fiercest of the Nednhi pack? Then it was I knew that before me was a living legend, one of the near-mythical Apache warrior women. I knew also why my eyes had refused to leave the handsome young stranger among Juh’s swarthy henchmen.
A priest is not by the mere fact of his devotions an empty vessel. He does not become, with ordainment, a gelded beast of the field. Indeed, I had experienced some persistent difficulty with this portion of the vows. The tantalizing bobble of a noble pair of breasts or the graceful sway of rounded young buttocks, whether well cloaked in village rebozo or covered by Apache buckskin pants, pues, ay de mi! They had never failed to send their signals to my guilty loins.
So it was from the first meeting with the warrior woman Huera.
I knew it,
and she knew it.
But she broke her piercing return of my open stare to now fix Juh with a baleful glare, crouching as if to attack the Nednhi chief with the blade she had retrieved from the garden walk. It was a moment of real danger, for among the Apache the warrior woman is ish-son kân, god-woman, and considered holy. Yet Huera yielded as suddenly as she had cursed Juh. Turning without word for him or look for me, she fell to the Apache business of the massacre—the stripping of the dead enemy of arms and ammunition. In this work she was clearly the director, and even I could note the unusual urgency with which the Nednhi sprang to obey her bidding.
I thought I could understand that.
Each ranger wore two heavy Colt revolvers cross-belted at the waist. In addition, and far more excitative to the Apache, each carried a short repeating rifle of obvious new design. Huera directly bore one of these to where Juh and I stood, presenting it to the chief with a guttural comment in Apache. Juh nodded, dark eyes burning like pit coals beneath the deep overhang of his brow. He handed the rifle to me.
“Here, Blackrobe,” he said. “Look at this besh-e-gar. Have you ever seen one of its kind before?”
Besh-e-gar was rifle, and I took the weapon from Juh knowing instantly and even from my little knowledge of arms that not alone I but perhaps no one of the Chihuahuan monte, at least of Casas Grandes, had seen such a deadly weapon.
It resembled superficially the fine Henry Patent rifles that the Americans possessed in some number and which the Indians firmly believed could shoot all week from one loading. Indeed, some models of them would fire as many as sixteen of the short .44-caliber rounds they accepted. But this was no Henry rifle.
Peering at the deeply blued barrel, I saw upon it an unfamiliar name, Winchester, together with a date, 1866, not as recent as one would have expected but still, for our remote frontier, a new gun de seguro.
What dark portent that fact bore for me, and for so many others then unknowing of their fates, will be seen.