by Clay Fisher
He fell at once to work; I watched him, fascinated.
What he was doing, he said, was testing our artillery here and now where the sound of the falls would cover the necessary small noise. Spreading the recharging gear of Bustamante’s ancient Colt revolver, he first put several of the ignition caps on a stone and struck them smartly with the weapon’s steel butt strap. Four of the five caps so smitten “cracked” their tiny explosions faithfully. The fifth fizzled and smoked out. “Not too bad,” he said. Next he poured three mounds of powder, one from each of the three pouches on Bustamante’s belt. Two of the three piles flared nicely when lit. The third smoldered noxiously but did not ignite. He discarded the guilty pouch. “Cuts down our supply,” he said, “but boosts our odds.”
He next removed the old charges from the cylinder of the revolver, discarding them also. With the weapon empty, he worked the trigger mechanism, blunting the fall of the spurred hammer with his left thumb. Satisfied, he stood up and belted on the holster with the gun in it. I did not see what happened then, but by some motion I found I was one instant looking at the big weapon in its carrier and next instant seeing it in Allison’s hand. I blinked and he said, in his drawling way, “God, it don’t pull like my old army model, Padre, but you can pray a lot for me.”
“Ahhh,” I said, in a long manner, almost accusingly, “you are a pistolero.”
He shook his head, denying it.
“Never was,” he said softly. “Folks say things that ain’t so. Then they get to believing them.”
With that, he placed inside his shirt one of the two vicious Mexican blades stolen from Bustamante’s house, proffering the second knife to me.
“Got to carry some kind of medicine, Padre,” he nodded.
“What?” I said, refusing the blade.
“You forgot your cross,” he answered.
By habit, I clutched for my crucifix. It was not there; it was back guarding the dead rangers in the Mission of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I had brought away from my quarters a spare robe and cowl to don when we were safely away from Casas Grandes, but of second cruz I had none. Indeed, to that moment, I had verily forgotten my priesthood.
I forgot it still.
“Give me the knife,” I said, the voice not even my own.
He passed the evil-looking steel again.
“Hide it, Padre,” he ordered. “They’re not likely to look for a cuchillo on a father. We may need that edge.”
“I could never use it, hombre!”
“You don’t know what you could do, Padre.”
“I could never kill!”
“It’s an old tune,” said Ben Allison. “I’ve heard it whistled in many a dark place.”
“God is with us,” I told him. “Be of high faith.”
The Texan looked at me. The lean head bobbed. The pale eyes sought me out.
“Sure,” he said. “Meanwhile, carry a good knife.”
He went on quickly. We were less than one mile from the cross-bench rampart that marked the second uplift of the range. If his eye read the lay of the bench-flat correctly, the Apache meeting of trails, hence the ancient campground, lay about midway of the distance to the uplift. Half a mile, he said, maybe less. This factor, taken with the lateness of the day—the sun was gone, the mountain twilight falling swiftly—narrowed our choices to two.
We could bed down where we were, giving them the next morning to clear out, following them at a respectful remove and hoping to somehow “catch them careless,” and so free the boy and make our run with him.
We could otherwise go on in under cover of the presently gathering dusk, get into the rocks as near to them as possible, figure to make our strike for the boy in the deep dark of night, gambling everything on Ben Allison’s ability to “Comanche sneak” the sleeping Nednhi camp and “lift” the white boy safely from it.
I had the natural-born Mexican right, the Texan concluded soberly, since we were in my country, to vote my preference in any way that seemed fair to me. To this I agreed, asking him, however, if there were not some possible additional options, not so chanceful.
To my relief, he answered that there were, and again they were two in number.
I could go home either by the way we had just come or by the way we would both go, if the Apaches caught us. To which I at once responded, “And what way is that?”
“Why,” he said, as quickly, “by the river, and bald-headed.”
I shuddered. The vision of my barbered corpse floating out of the Sierra with the next high water of the Rio Casas Grandes did not appeal.
“Very well,” I surrendered. “What is ‘our’ vote?”
He hesitated, peering in his wolflike way across the silent bench to where we could now see the first risings of the Nednhis’ camp smoke. “Injuns can vanish just like that fire smoke,” he said softly. “We wait for day, we might never see this bunch again. Nor the boy alive, ever.” Again the pause, the pale eyes burning.
“We’ll go in tonight,” he said. “Now.”
11
We lay in the rocks above Old Campground, I, at least, grateful to Providence that we had reached the vantage undetected. Below us was the Laguna de Luz, the legendary Pool of Light, in the Rio Casas Grandes, midway of the mountain bench. Owing to some peculiarity of light sand bottom and water clear as the air about it, the enchanted lakelet gave forth a luminescent glow, even in the approaching darkness. Its beach, inland of the Nednhi drop-off, was smoothly sanded, perfect for the tribal bathing that now went forward in the quickly made Apache camp.
The behavior of the Indians was that of happiness to come again where only the Apache trod and where the grime, and even blood, of the trail’s long riding might be laved away. All the warriors and most of the horses were either in the pool or moving into it. Two of the band’s number, Huera and the captive Anglo boy, were to be seen making their ways about the shore of the pool, away from the men.
Glancing at Allison, quiet at my elbow, I noted that he was watching the advancing pair with a frown.
I reassured him. It was the Apache custom, I explained in some vanity of knowledge, for the sexes to disrobe and bathe separately. Here, the woman, Huera was only bound on this mission of modesty and not on some venture boding ill for her small charge.
The Texan’s frown deepened. “A woman, Padre?”
“Forgive it, yes. I forgot to tell you. The one coming with the boy is Huera, a warrior woman.”
“My God,” breathed Allison.
“See there,” I whispered back. “She will not leave the boy but that she has selected a place of privacy for herself beforehand. Not even with a male child will the Nednhi women expose themselves. Ah, see—!”
Here, my companion gripped my arm in a bear’s trap of sinewy fingers. “Callate,” he whispered.
I obeyed. It was that, or lose the arm’s use. Huera had halted directly below us. Here, the beach narrowed to a band of rocky shoreline only. The woman indicated to the boy his small inlet. He understood and quite gladly began removing his clothing. Huera, waiting only to see him so obey her, stepped on along the narrow shore and around a screening boulder. We could see this place even better than that of the boy. Again, I had cause to admire Allison’s skills in the stalk. He had so placed us that we could see not only the beach and the men opposite, but in effect command the whole of the pool’s irregular and rock-scarped basin. Yet we were invisible from any view of theirs. But then of course I had to recall that he was part Comanche Indian, a fierce, fierce people of the highest arts in the hunt as in war.
I looked at the big Tejano, now, with this affirming thought in mind, smiling to show him my appreciation. He mistook my motive. “Why, Padre,” he whispered, “how dast you!”
The reproval was so plain, in both small murmur and pantomime of gesture, that I glanced guiltily below.
The woman was stan
ding there naked as the day of her delivery, except for her calf-high n’deh b’keh, her rakish Apache boots. Even as the blood thickened in my temples, she stooped gracefully to discard these last remaining garments. In the action, her rear was upended in our direction, not once but two times. I saw, even if fleetingly and in failing light, the parts of a woman I had never seen before. “God in Heaven!” I breathed. “I am choking.”
Allison set his jaw and put finger to lips, admonishing me to silence.
I turned back to the sinful view below and, thank God, the woman was in the water.
I felt the Texan’s bony elbow in my ribs.
“You watch the boy,” he mouthed to me. “I’ll take care of her.”
I glared at him, offended. But he grinned and leered at me, and what might a man of the cloth do when guilty as was I of panting after forbidden fruits?
I put eye to Little Buck, where the lad splashed and made noises in the water seeming no more in alarm than if in some swimming hole of his homeland. I presumed that the Texan was brute-like in his opposite vigil, and I could envision his animal looks and lickings of evil lips in hunger of the marvelous body disporting on his side of the partition rock.
Even so, I was able to pray for strength and to find sufficient restored faith to see the entire moment for the grand vista of barbarian beauty and peace that it truly was. It was while I was yet so purifying thought and directing unruly eye toward the cross-pool beach and the good-humored calling back and forth of the Nednhi men bathing there, that the first rifle shot rang out. Its startling, alien crash was instantly echoed by the terrifying snarl of many other rifles from the rough terrain behind the white sand beach.
Ambush!
And every Apache man in the water away from his weapon. With a woman and a captive white child isolated on pool’s far side, trapped there and helpless.
I started to my feet but Allison seized me with one long reach, literally throwing me to the ground.
“Stay down, damn you! We got no chance!”
Neither did the poor Nednhi.
There was never a question of battle but only of escape. A man does not count bodies in an instant of that frightful nature. Yet one knew that nearly half of Juh’s force did not gain free of the water. What the eye did record was that, in the Apache fashion of war rules, the men fled with no attempt to reach or defend the lone woman with them. As the hidden rifles continued to stab forth the orchid stamens of their deadly nighttime blooming, perhaps ten or twelve of the surprised war party found bare back of pony and rode out of the trap at Old Campground. These survivors, Juh among them, went by South Way. They had to. The ambushers lay in the rocks cutting off West Way and the trail to home. In less than four minutes, the rifle fire fell away.
In the stillness that followed, the killers came trickling out of the rocks beyond Pool of Light.
One by one, they came down to the fires lit by the Nednhi to broil the evening’s horse meat. As the leap of the flames carried illumination to their faces, I felt the long body of the Tejano stiffen by my side, and I heard his indrawn curse.
“Whites—!”
Then, swiftly, “Oh, Christ Jesus, no.”
“Do you know them?” I whispered, horror numbing me.
“It’s Kifer,” he said.
The name needed no amplification for a mestizo of that Mexican time and place. Nor for a priest of the people. It was a name not alone born, but bred, in infamy. A monstrous, loathsome, hell’s broth of a name.
Santiago Kifer.
The own and only son of the renegade American scalp hunter of the generation gone, Dutch John Kifer, who, through all of the terrible years of the 1840s, hunted down and pelted Indians of all tribes, in Chihuahua and Sonora. An Apache scalp in those noisome days brought two hundred and more dollars, and legend had it that the elder Kifer had made upwards of a hundred thousand American dollars in a single year of his reign of hideousness.
Recently, within the past two summers, only, the officials in Ciudad Chihuahua had once more begun to pay for “Apache hair,” and the whelp of the old wolf had appeared to follow the awful hunting of his sire throughout the Sierra Madre of the North.
The mention of the name, now, was a blasphemy.
“No, el Espíritu Santo no quiera!” I cried, in suppressed whisper. “God forbid it!”
“If He did,” Allison murmured grimly, “Kifer didn’t pay Him no heed. That’s the son of a bitch yonder, and by my count there’s ten men with him. All Texicans, you can bet.”
Kifer was Texas-bred, known to hire only the best of Indian hunters. In working rule, this usually meant only other Tejanos. Even the Apache feared the Texas men, most probably because of the fierceness of the Texas Rangers in their warfare against the red man. And here was the dreaded Santiago Kifer, with a big band of Texas scalp hunters, only a few pasos away, around the margins of Laguna de Luz.
In first panic of the ambush, I had forgotten Huera and Little Buck. The Apache woman, when I belatedly looked to find her, was disappeared from the water, either having dived beneath some shoreline rock-shelf or having left the pool to seek hiding in the boulders below us. But the Anglo boy was still visible, and he was out of the pool and running along the south shore calling out to the men he had seen attack the Apache camp.
Of course! Dear Jesu, of course!
Were they not white men?
Had they not come against the Indians with flaming guns and from perfect ambush?
And could not his lonely young heart hear the message those twanging drawls brought to his ears, as the Texans moved in about the Nednhi fires?
What other possible thought could invade the imagination of Little Buck but that the vengeful minions of his father had somehow caught up with his abductors and that he was then as good as on his way home to his father and his poor ailing mother. He had only to reach the white heroes beyond the pool and reveal to them they had found and saved the son of the governor of all Texas.
“God Amighty,” I heard Ben Allison mutter beside me.
With his oath, I was again to my feet. And his big fist was again knotted in my robe and slamming me flat to rock-hard ground.
“You jump up on me one more time,” he rasped, “I’m going to cave in the side of your skull, you hear me?”
I nodded, but was still desperate.
Where was the woman?
Ought we not to look to her safety, if the boy were in no danger?
No and no were his terse answers.
The woman was a red Indian. Naked or not, she could look out for herself. As to the boy being in no danger from Kifer and his wolf pack, nothing could be further from the truth. The moment he told them who he was, up went the Apache price for his life.
Santiago Kifer was wanted for murder in every Texas county west of Fort Worth.
He had nothing to lose by holding the boy for blood money. Christ knew, if he had to, Kifer would sell Little Buck back to the Apache faster than he would give him up, free, to Governor Buckles or the state of Texas.
“But they won’t harm him none, meanwhile,” he concluded. “And the Injun woman’s safe away into the rocks without they ever knowed she was part of Juh’s bunch. So we just lay low till something breaks open.”
We had not the time to settle ourselves to his advice, when the something broke.
And devastatingly into the open.
It was the warrior woman, Huera; she had circled the pool in the rocks above Little Buck to get ahead of the running boy, and she came now down out of those rocks, in full view of the scalper pack on the white sand beach.
To a man they saw her.
The superb pagan nudeness of her body gleamed for that fatal instant in the water-refracted red light of the Apache fires. Then she had seized the boy and, like some mountain lioness of lithe bronze, bounded with him back into the cover of the scarp
-rock.
She was too late and forever too late.
With a chorus of ugly cries, the Texas scalp hunters were after her.
12
Ben Allison was gone from my side in the instant that the Apache woman, Huera, revealed herself to the scalp hunters. Terror seized me. God in Heaven, had he deserted us? Sweet Mary! What a coward’s truth—all that a man hath will he give for his own life. I was abandoned, with Huera and the boy—my only chance to cower where the Texan had left me and to pray that Santiago Kifer and his ugly vultures would be circling elsewhere when the dawn came.
But the brave small boy? And Huera, lovely slim Huera? I could not desert this twain. They were of my own blood, each of them. Jesus be with me, I must go to them.
As I rose up from my hiding place, the scalper pack closed on Huera in the rocks of the south margin, dragging her down to the sanded beach. Two of them had Little Buck, fighting and twisting like a catamount cub. Never believe that the human beast does not snap and growl. The men of Santiago Kifer were upon Huera as mad animals, attempting to mount her two and three at the same time. The sound of their snarling was that of brutes. Untutored as I was, I knew they would kill her with their fornicatings. A virgin as she must be, in her holiness among the Nednhi, she would have no experience of coupling by which she might reduce the woundings of repeated entrances. She would die there on the sand, while they yet ravaged her.
Bounding down from my rocks, I raced along the pool’s track to reach the lust-mad pack. Drawing close, I heard Huera softly moaning and I could see that she lay nearly still. With a blind oath, I hurled myself upon her attackers. But one of them felled me instantly with a boot into my manhood. Then another struck me below the heart. And a third balled oaken fist to pit of my stomach, shot bony knee upward beneath my chin as I fought to rise up yet again.