by Clay Fisher
Allison looked at me.
It was a gaze to wither a prickly-pear stem.
“Padre,” he said, pronouncing it padry in his irritating cowpen Spanish, “Padre, you ain’t telling me that the pope in Rome don’t teach you fellers how to unstick a letter and glue it back together again. Huh! That’d be like a Texas rustler saying he couldn’t change nor put back a brand. Hell, you got to have some kind of running iron to get along in your business, same as any of us.”
There was no further use to deny him.
Ben Allison had not been conceived in his mother’s womb to be denied.
Yet I continued to stare him down.
Was I not a priest of the True Faith, and he but an ordinary being?
7
Some of the trueness of my True Faith wavered.
Allison stood six and a half feet in his high-heeled Texas boots. He was wide and square of shoulder, lean in hip, flat of muscled belly, menacing of demeanor. The eyes were lobo eyes, pale as wheat straw. The sun-bleached shag of hair, horse-sheared at the back, escaped flat low crown of black Stetson hat as a lion’s tawny mane, yet the color of his skin was Indian dark.
Indeed, he was bowlegged and pigeon-toed as any red man, and, shrinking now under his burning gaze, I recalled his passing mention of the Comanche tribe of Texas.
I determined to secure the requirements.
So, with certain skilled heating and other recourses of deceivement, the document was opened. Spreading its sole page where light of candle might fall across it, the San Saban and I bent low. Our indrawn breaths came as one at what we saw.
Hon. Gov. Buckles and Texas Military,
Is it no use to think of recovering the boy. The captors, who will be the new people of North Mexico, are not yet reliable. They understand this much at least—they know what the ransom is and desire its payment fiercely.
The terms are these:
1. Surrender and delivery in exchange boy’s life, all small arms and ammunitions to suit, Arsenal United States Army, Post of El Paso.
2. Single messenger to come to the sender from governor bearing acceptance of terms and authority to arrange exchanges.
3. No public’s knowledge.
Any carelessness will kill boy in certainty.
I looked up and met the Texan’s eyes across the candle’s fitful light. To my interest, he appeared to have read the document as swiftly as I. But then it was in English, his own tongue and not mine.
“Por Dios,” I murmured. “What do you make of it?”
It was not, the wolf-eyed Texan told me, what he made of it but rather what I did. He knew what he was going to do. The same as before. Go after Juh and get the boy back. Kill as many Apaches in the process as God would let him. And do it más pronto.
“Nothing ain’t changed,” he said. “Dicker or no dicker, they will kill the kid. Ransom notes from hostile Injuns might as well be wrote on bung fodder, for what they’re worth.”
“But God’s Name!” I protested. “The governor must know of the note. He must see it, even as Juh ordered. You cannot take this terrible risk upon yourself.”
“Padre, you coming or staying?”
He started for the study door, and I blocked his way, entreating him to be sane. If he did not wish to trust the Apaches, then think of the lundtico who had planned the El Paso raid by the Nednhi. The one who wrote the note was plainly an educated man, almost of a surety an Anglo. He was of a certainty no Mexican or Indian. And, of whatever race, his mind was frighteningly that of a false messiah. He clearly dreamed to establish in Chihuahua and, little doubt, Sonora, a barbarian nation of armed Apaches. The ransom note said as much.
“Hijo!” I cried out to him. “We have a madman here!”
Allison gently placed both of his hands on my narrow shoulders. The fingers, the size and hardness of desert mesquite burls, sank into my flesh.
“Padre, why you think I’m carting you along? You’re the case-ace chance there is to get anybody white into that Apache camp. Without we do that, we don’t nail us this loco grande or get near the kid, neither one. Now you got a count of three to make up your mind, or I’m going to hoist you up and hang you on yonder hatrack.”
I did not care to be hoisted.
Moreover, in his salt-cured Texan manner, he had shrunk the business down to its true dimension—the life of an innocent child.
“There is no other way?” I parleyed desperately.
He shook his head. There were, he said, two things guaranteed to happen provided the governor of Texas and the commanding officer at Fort Bliss received and understood the contents of the ransom note: both very bad.
First, the governor would send the single man as messenger, all right. Decoy messenger. Behind him would stalk whatever number of rangers, or other volunteers of Indian-killing credentials to pass muster as pedigreed Apache chasers, as thought needed for the job; the job being the wiping out of the Nednhi.
Second, the army commander would send a bogus string of canvas-tarped wagons to look like the demanded load of small arms and ammunition along down to whatever rendezvous was subsequently set. Then, when the Indians came in to get the guns, they would find them at the shoulders of US troops and again get wiped out.
There was not, the tall San Saban concluded, one man in Texas out of ten hundred that thought they knew Indians, and did know them. The sole reason he himself might be gambled on as an exception was that his maternal grandmother had been a full-blood Kwahadi Water Horse Comanche, and blood sister, also, of the sinister chief, Peta Nocono, father of fabled Quanah Parker.
He had, the big man said, lived as many years with the Comanche as with the white man.
He knew the ways both thought.
And in this case the way that the white men would think would, sure as the sunset, kill Little Buck.
He knew, too, he added at the last, the ways of the Texas Rangers. They were brave as wounded bear-dogs in any fight, could whip up to ten times their own number of any other breed of man, Apache or Mexican.
That’s what made them so especially dangerous to Little Buck Buckles.
If Governor Big Buck Buckles and the CO out at Fort Bliss both somehow managed to consternate Ben Allison and obeyed the ransom note to the dots over every single i, the rangers would still get the captive boy killed by forcing for the Apache stronghold on their own.
“Ain’t nine of them already died to prove it?” the big Tejano finished. “You want that poor little kid to make it ten?”
I did not, por supuesto.
In some way Ben Allison’s quiet, pale-eyed words had reached me. Made me feel more of an hombre del monte than a soft-bodied priest. And I must confess it, may Jesus forgive me, they had put me once more, and hotly, to thinking of the supple woman Huera.
“Tiene razón, usted,” I told him, “you are right.”
Then, a welling of human adventure rising in me as nothing else I had ever experienced of the flesh, “Let us go and see Bustamante—!”
8
The twin-like devotion, one to the other, of the two hinny mules made our work easier. Since they would not bear separation, both were kept in the livery barn of Alcalde Bustamente. If either the mayor or myself wished to ride, the other hinny went along as pack animal or simply running free as a pet dog might.
When I explained this to Allison, he grunted that he wished to God we were at home, in Texas, where a man could steal himself a couple of good horses and be on his way without all this nonsense of creeping around the back side of the town to come at Bustamante’s stable without the villagers seeing us.
However, he granted that in the present case it was best that it not be commonly advertised what we were about. In fact, he advised me, as we lay hidden in the deep arroyo at town’s edge behind the livery yard, it would be an even better idea not to let Bustamante himself know of
our plans for his half of the twin hinny contract.
When I inquired with priestly indignation if he were suggesting we steal the mayor’s mule, he protested as offendedly that, no, he certainly was not suggesting it—he was about to arrange it.
And so it went.
In the broad, bright light of midmorning, that most improbable of tall Tejanos spirited both hinnies out of the livery stalls of Bustamante’s barn and into the Arroyo Casas Grandes behind that structure without bringing solitary village cur to yap or nosy settlement urchin to stumble upon the outrage. Chispas! He was beyond any question a premier cuatrero, a supreme horse thief; yet, hold, one must be fair to Providence.
It is also true that no Anglo of common sort, one without Comanche blood, could have done the thing unaided. Nor could Ben Allison have brought it to pass, either, except that, through my presence, he had the help of God.
Still, he plagued the mind to wonder.
From the barn of Bustamante, also, in the less than ten full minutes that he was gone—while I skulked in the sage of the arroyo—the big Texan, to use his own term, “borrowed” bridles, saddle pads, surcingles, and a valuable horsehair riata, or throwing rope.
In addition, he entered the main casa, stole the food from Bustamante’s table, a large jug of the mayor’s private aguardiente, two villainous-looking scabbard knives, and, munificence of Mary! Bustamante’s prized and ancient revolver, a memento of the Texas Ranger battlefield at Matamoros, on the far ocean coast of Tamaulipas State.
This rusted weapon, Allison assured me, was itself worth the entire risk of our levy upon the house of Bustamante. It was, he said, a genuine Walker Colt. It came fully charged of cylinder and accompanied by the proper belt pouches of cap, ball, and powder. If it would discharge when triggered, the Texan vowed, he and I alone might start a new Mexican war—and win it!
Such esprit was a contagion.
The man contaminated me from the outset with his impossible optimism and incorruptible simplicity of belief that, where men were in the right, they could not fail.
I had thought myself well armed with my own faith, but Ben Allison’s clear-eyed credo outmarched it that day. When we had stolen safely past the town and were five miles away up the river trail into the mountains, pausing to look back and down upon my beloved mission outside Casas Grandes, I understood the first hint of my former error of belief.
The theft of the two small mules was a laying on of Ben Allison hands.
God had very little to do with it.
9
At the five-mile halt, Allison took a pair of soft buckskin n’deh b’keh, Apache Moccasin boots from the booty-sack of things stolen from Bustamante. Where indeed the alcalde of Casas Grandes had come by these items was less the wonder than that the big Tejano had found them in his lightning raid of the mayor’s casa. He seemed always to be guided by some mind less simple than his own, this tall man from San Saba. Again and again, I was to see him demonstrate this absolute gift, but never was I given to understand it. If not my God, then some spirit kân of his Comanche ancestors certainly rode beside him. He himself saw it as but another article of his peculiar faith. “The Lord helps them as helps themselves,” he would shrug. “Let’s mosey.”
Donning the Apache boots, now, he cinched up the great Walker Colt about his waist, took a good long pull at Bustamante’s jug, passed same to me. “Drink up, Padre,” he said, scanning the ascent ahead. “She’s going to be steeper than a slate roof.” To my astonishment, he took back the jug, poured some of the fiery liquid in his palm, and gave each of our mules a snifter. The perverse brutes dumbfounded me by sucking noisily and smacking rubbery lips for more. “Never knew a Mexican jackass didn’t take to gardente,” he nodded. “Specially if there ain’t no mescal.”
We went on, climbing steadily. The river was far below now, on our right. The walls of the first rampart of the Sierra yawned before us. Our way was by a goat track suspended on the sheer face of a plunging cliff. In places it bulged beyond the perpendicular to literally lean out over the canyon of the Casas Grandes. I had never been this far, having come only to the five-mile turnout below. But the Apaches had traveled it for three hundred years. Even I, a soft man of the villages, could follow the hoof-channeled path of the centuries. As for Allison, he soothed my fears of the increasingly dizzy heights by assuring me that, wherever a “red-ass Apache” might go, a quarter-bred Kwahadi could “hang with him easy.”
When I objected this was fine for him but did not include in its guarantee a bent-backed priest of Saint Francis, not even one whose own mother had been an Òpata Indian of these same northern Sierras, he proved equally helpful.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Never knew no half-breed priests. Howsomever, it don’t matter. Some of the best folks around are half-breeds.”
“Gracias, hombre. And I have even known some good Anglos. Even some good Tejanos.”
“Why, sure you have, Padre. Bastards ain’t all whelped out of the same stray bitch.”
“A verity of the ages,” I agreed. “Excuse me now, I need the breath for climbing.”
The Apache “road” was pitching upward acutely. In places we perforce dismounted and went afoot, the little mules following like mountain sheep. For the main, however, they strove valiantly to bear their riders without such charities of dismounting. It was in their heritage. They were mulas de España, Spanish she-mules, proud blood, but mortal all the same.
The Texan was so tall he continually put this or the other boot sole to the ground to assist his mount, Jugada, Mean Trick, in the climbing. This could not fail of embarrassing the poor thing, but she did not falter. My own animal, Lata, Tin Can, bearing a small man of God who towered four feet and eleven inches, the blessing of a humpen spine from birth, suffered no such humbling.
Up and up we went. The hours, and the day, fled.
The cliff tops pulled in together above us, the great crack in the mountain—the Grand Canyon of the Casas Grandes—yawned black as the pit below. In those times when we halted to rest the mules, the silence was fearful. In it, we could hear the whispering of the river a thousand feet beneath us. It was an ethereal sound, stirring the soul, arousing something I could not name from deep within me. Near the top, I made mention of the feeling to my companion. He nodded at once.
“It’s your Injun blood. Makes you feel like you’d been a place you never was. Ain’t that it?”
That was, of course, precisely it.
Impressed anew with his strange gift of seeing and feeling things beyond my educated ken, I questioned him closely in this case.
“I don’t rightly know, Padre,” he said. “Injun blood ain’t the same as any other. It’s old blood, and wild. Carries things in it to put pictures in your mind, just like they was printed in a book. Yet it skips, too. Some don’t get it. My brother Clint never had an Injun thought. Me, I been Injun-hunchy and spooky-wild since I was a kid and could remember. It’s more like I was three-quarters Kwahadi than one.”
I agreed with him. He walked, thought, and looked like a Comanche Indian. It was only the pale, tawny hair and wolfish eyes and the arid Tejano drawl of speech that marked him an Anglo. He even had an Indian sense of humor I thought: wry, sly, outrageous, self-effacing, bawdy, yet always quick to sober, or turn sensitive.
We remounted and began the final ascent of half a thousand feet to the topping out of the cliff trail at the brink of the ancient Nednhi Falls. I shivered, feeling the blood of my Opata mother. Spurring the tiny Tin Can, I kept her as close behind tall Ben Allison as her sister hinny, Mean Trick, would permit. Casas Grandes was another world and three hundred years away. Beyond the Nednhi Falls, even God did not go. Beyond the Nednhi Falls, the Apache waited.
10
We broke out suddenly upon a high Sierran bench, or flat, and I thanked God that the cliff trail was behind.
The rock-strewn level before us held a wild, lone
ly beauty. Blue juniper, dwarf cedar, red-limbed madroño, and aromatic mountain scrub of the high country softened the jumble of great and small boulders that littered the flat and hid, from our view, the continuance of the trail and, of course, any Apache horsemen upon it.
The Texan held up a warning hand, and we reined in our mounts, listening, in a parklike scatter of silver-trunked trembling ash saplings. Of animal or bird life we saw and heard none, a certain sign, Allison told me, that the Apache had passed but minutes before us.
To our immediate right, the river went over the lower cliff in that roaring outleap of green water known to us Casas Grandeans as the Nednhi Falls, although not appearing as any falls, whatever, on the Spanish maps. Inward of falls’ brink, the stream tamed to placid meadow brook, looping in grassy course back through outcrop of stone and straggle of tree to where lay the fabled Old Campground of the Chiricahua people.
It was here, Juh had once told me, that the four families met historically. Old Campground was the intersecting place of two great Apache trails. The first, called South Way, went down five days’ travel below Casas Grandes, to Pagotzin-kay, the so-called Apache stronghold of the Bedonkohe, Warm Springs, and True Chiricahua bands. The second trail, West Way, trended west by north two days’ journey across the high divide of the Sierra Madre to Cañon Avariento, the secret entering cleft to the Nednhi band’s retreat. This retreat, called by us Juh’s Stronghold, was continually confused by both Mexican and American “authorities,” with Pagotzin-kay.
All of this local information I called out above the thunder of the waters to an attentive Ben Allison; and I was proud to be able to at last contribute something of value to our adventure.
When I had done, he motioned me to follow him away from the falls. Under a rocky overhang, we dismounted. Here, the Texan got down the aguardiente jug of Bustamante and rationed each of the mules another palmful of the fiery liquor. They muzzled it up with shameful pleasure, as though the alcalde and the cura of Casas Grandes had weaned them on the evil fluid. Allison freed them to trot away and fall to grazing in a nearby, hock-deep stand of mountain clover. He beamed with admiration of the small brutes, that is, as much as his dark and narrow face could beam. Turning to me, he nodded, “Damndest critters ever I see,” literally the second words he had uttered since starting up the last, terrible ascent of the cliff trail. He then pulled me in under the overhang with him, handed me the jug, and said, “Better have one, Padre. It’s apt to be a long night.”