by Clay Fisher
I lay stunned, senses dimming.
It was then Allison came out of the rocks behind the Apache camp, slashing as a lean wolf against the scalp hunters where that obscene pack yet humped and crawled above the groaning Nednhi woman.
He came among them in total silence.
The great Walker Colt revolver was in his hand but he did not fire it. He struck with its steel butt into the heads of the men on Huera, lifting and heaving aside their slumping bodies in the same motion with his free left hand. So swift, so completely startling was the attack, that four of the men lay about on the beach, heads bleeding, before the remainder of the pack might rally to come up behind the Texan.
Even so, he got to the fifth man, the one beneath the others. And this was the one he meant to kill. The great gun was jammed into the man’s very face, where Allison had pulled him up from his straddling of the now motionless Huera. “Kifer,” the arid voice said in the softness of death, “God damn your soul.” The hammer fell in that moment, the Walker roared its fiery response, enveloping the scalper’s head with its point-blank flame.
Yet God, or Satan, relented of the vengeance.
Kifer, twisting violently aside in the instant of the discharge, was not killed.
The gun’s burst, but a hand’s length from his face, burned him black with powder-spew and waddage. Yet the deadly leaden slug itself, although it carried away the upper half of the right ear, failed of its lethal aim.
In the eye-flick of time wherein Ben Allison understood this—knew that he had missed—the remainder of the scalp hunter pack was upon him from the rear.
The final belief I carried into my own unconsciousness was that they had surely killed him.
13
When senses returned, I was wise enough to remain motionless where I lay, commanding the blur of my vision to steady. It was then I saw the carnage from the raping of Huera spread upon the beach about me. Nausea whelmed me. I nearly vomited into the sand.
The Nednhi men murdered from ambush had been brought ashore, and their hair had been taken by the scalpers. The tops of their heads showed a grayish white of gristle and skull sac, bringing another wave of illness within me. A single blessing obtained; there were but five of them, a mercy of God compared to the greater number I had thought to see slain.
Near me lay Ben Allison. Beyond him, poor hand seeming to reach for his in mute testimony, was the warrior woman Huera. The limbs of both appeared bent in the unnatural postures of departed life. I saw no movement of breath in either form. The Texan was a cake of blood about the head and face from the merciless beating of the scalpers. The bullet furrow of his original injury had been ripped wide and bled a puddle the size of a pottery jar lid beneath the wheaten mane of his hair. Huera had bled heavily, also, but in a lower place; I wept the salten tears of silence to see her so, a broken thing, a child’s Apache doll, left in the long trail of her people’s sorrow.
I thought then, belatedly, of Little Buck. But nowhere in the view I had of the beach did I see the Texas lad.
Not far off, the scalp hunters were gathered about the one tiny fire yet burning. They were in heated, tense discussion. Some of the human reasons for their anxiety lay in the sand just past their guarded council fire.
Two men, either dead or comatose from the terrible damage of Ben Allison’s revolver butt, were stretched full-length and unmoving. A third man was lying with them doubled up in a knot and whimpering like a wagon-crushed dog, his hands groping for his belly in spasmodic agony: the victim of the bullet intended to blow away the head of Santiago Kifer. And then there were yet two more men sickeningly lacerated about the skulls by the Texan’s pistol steel. They were crudely bandaged and propped up against their saddles; one of them babbled in a manner to show that it would be the greater tragedy should he survive—the brain was gone—he mewed and cried as a suckling baby. Again, I nearly puked upon the beach, but did not.
Somehow, God brought it into my still dazed mind that death would come should I show life. It was already miracle enough that, due to the pitch of their fireside discussion, they had not been alerted by my recovery. As I waited, feigning that same broken sprawl as my poor comrades, this truth was borne starkly to my slit-closed eyes.
The man who had been struck in the bowel began to cry like an animal. Kifer came up off his haunches by the fire and was at the man’s side in a single long pace. He knelt, I thought to minister to his henchman’s need. But it was a ministry of darkness. I heard the fellow’s gasp and the ensuing gurgle and bubbling, and I judged these to be the sounds of drinking from a held canteen. They were not. Kifer had cut the man’s throat to still him.
That was not the obscene sum.
Wiping his blade, the pack leader started his return to the fire. The man with the ruined brain reached to tug aimlessly at Kifer’s pant leg, making animal sounds. “Charley,” I heard the monster say, “you don’t know nothing, do you?” Again, he knelt, but not to use the knife. His hand felt for and found a stone of melon’s size. I could hear the sodden pounding in of the frontal bones. The baby’s mewing stopped.
“Jess,” he said to the third man, “you going to be able to ride?” He had the rock in his hand, poised to strike again. But the man, Jess, answered yes quickly enough and thanked Kifer for tending to the others, for quieting them. Kifer dropped the rock. “Sure,” he grunted and went on to the fire.
“We got two dead yonder and two more going to die quiet,” he reported. “By using their horses to ride relay, we can make it on into Casas Grandes before them ’Paches change their minds. They quit too easy on us.”
“They did for certain,” said a swarthy, potbellied man. “That was Juh’s own bunch. Them Nednhi are hell.”
“They’ll shadder us account the squaw,” Kifer muttered. “When I was ramming it into her, she kept crying ish-son kân, ish-son kân, but I didn’t catch it then.”
“Christ,” the potbellied lieutenant said, “they’ll dog us sure.”
“Yep,” another agreed. “Never knowed them to leave a holy woman with whites.”
Kifer hitched at his pants. To my dismay, I saw that he was buttoning up. He had not even taken the decency to cover himself since the terrible thing he had done. “Catch up the horses,” he said. “Kick out the fire. Ketchum—”
A bone-thin scalper lounged around the fire while a third man scattered the remaining brands of its bed.
“Yo,” he answered, in the manner I had heard American cavalrymen use. “Whereaway?”
“Go yonder,” Kifer rasped, pointing to Allison, Huera and me. “Slit the gullets of them three. Más pronto.”
“Too bad,” laughed Ketchum, unsheathing his blade, “ain’t none of them got good black hair. Mebbeso, I’ll take the squaw’s anyhows. Might be they’ll pay double for a yeller-pelt Injun. Ha, ha.”
Kifer leaped after him. “You touch that squaw, I’ll sell your hair in Ciudad Chihuahua, damn you. Ain’t I just said she’s ish-son kân?”
Ketchum uttered an obscenity. “Sure didn’t look it when you was astride of her,” he grinned. “Funny how holy she’s got all of a suddent.”
Santiago Kifer just laughed. It jarred the ear, a sound of strangely unsettling timbre. There was a feel of insanity to it, a madman’s low, formless mirth.
Ketchum understood its wordless menace.
He came quickly away from his companion, looming in the inky gloom nearly upon me before I might rally brain and hand, or two good legs, to serve the purpose of my own escape. In the heartbeat intervening, I saw another movement, even nearer me, that put forever from my mind the lure of selfish flight.
Beyond the body of Ben Allison, the hand of Huera moved—I saw it clearly and heard in the same final instant a soft sound from her, as moaning.
Ketchum stepped over me to come first at the Nednhi squaw. A lifetime for God went out of me in the primal urge that blinded
me. Unknowing, by an instinct old upon this earth before ever Christ of Nazareth drew breath, my hand found itself inside my robe. I was on my feet soundless as the Angel of Death, who in sudden fact I was. The Mexican knife of Bustamante given me by tall Ben Allison went into the bent-down back of the scalper Ketchum as his own blade touched Huera’s stirring throat. May God forgive me, I put it to the hilt in him, ripped it upward through the greater muscle of his dorsum, and cut the heart’s very sac.
He was dead in the one strangling gasp.
Over where the fire’s embers winked lastly out on the sand, Santiago Kifer, already to horse, reined his frightened mount around.
“Ketchum,” he called, low voiced, “qué pasa?”
Off in the higher rocks of other mountains southward, a wolf cried lonesomely, sobbingly.
No other answer came to Santiago Kifer’s call.
“Jesus!” the potbellied man said. “Let’s get shut of here.”
The others, crowding their horses into his, gave wordless mutter of agreement.
Kifer knew the smell of death as few men did.
He drew it now into his nostrils and heeled his mount away from the stench growing at Old Campground.
“All right,” he said. “Ride out—!”
14
To dispel the darkness of spirit and flesh, I lit a new fire on the beach at Old Campground. The pack of Santiago Kifer would not return that night. If the red wolves of Juh did so, well, a priest still had his vows. All four of the wounded with me—Allison, Huera, and the two scalpers abandoned by their mates—had recovered consciousness and required aid. A man of God could not deny them. Such skills as were mine and what power of prayer I possessed would alike be used for the murderers as for those they had tried to murder. God would understand it if, in the while, I cared first for Huera and the Texan.
Allison, from first splash of cold pool water on his battered face, came swiftly back. With that remarkable skull of his, thick as any Nubian’s, he was again more bloody than beaten. Within five minutes of regained senses, he was on his feet helping me with the others.
We could do little for Huera. We cleansed her with fresh water and the Texan made a tea of strongly boiled mountain fescue and an alpine weed I did not know but which he said was cousin to an herb the Comanche used as astringent and antiseptic agent. It had power, this I saw, for when he laved it gently over the tortured parts of the Nednhi woman, she cried out in hurt and, only moments later, opened her eyes for the first time.
Within another few minutes, the bleeding below had slowed and, before long, stopped altogether, “Now,” Allison said, “if she don’t get infected, she will likely make it. Happen she don’t meanwhile sull up on us, she will.”
“Sull up?” I asked. “Qué significa sull?”
“Well, Padre,” he said, holding the Apache woman close to him to stop her trembling, “it’s like what a wild horse does when he cain’t get free, or has broke a leg and knows he’s caught. He will just stand there and take to shaking, then pitch over dead. Sometimes there ain’t a mark on them. They die anyways.”
I had studied in the Franciscan Academy of Medicine, in Valdosta. One in so many frontier priests were so prepared. Now I nodded to the Texan, understanding.
“It is called choque, Tejano. The systems of the body diffuse. The blood depresses. The heart stops.”
“You got to keep them warm,” he told me. “Pass me over two more of them Nednhi blankets yonder. Steep some of that tea we brung along from Bustamante’s. Más aprisa, Padre. She’s looking to sull on me; I can feel her heart tugging. God damn it—”
He took Huera by the shoulders, shook her sharply. Putting his mouth to hers, he blew his breath into her. Then he shook her again and put his lips to her ear.
“You hear me, little Injun?” he said, in English. “Schicho, I’m your friend. Hoh-shuh, hoh-shuh, easy now. We’ll guard you. You’re safe with us. But I want you to stop that shaking. Hoh-shuh, little sister. Do you hear my words?”
There was a moment when I feared the darkest thing.
But presently the closed eyes reopened, the lips moved, and I heard the words, “Anh, yes, I hear you, brother,” and, unbelievably, her violent shivering diminished and she murmured, “Enjuh, it is warmer now.”
Allison patted her like a child, wrapped about her the blankets that I brought, laid her carefully by the fire’s warmth. “Enjuh, enjuh,” he said. “No harm is here. We are your friends, sister.”
She lay back, breathing eased, faint color replacing the ashen gray of her skin. I knew the immediate peril was suspended. I caught the Texan’s eye.
“That was a remarkable thing you did,” I said.
“Sometimes a hurt thing will gentle,” he answered, “other times not. Depends if they believe you.”
“She did then, Tejano, for she lives.”
He only nodded and looked around the deserted beach.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked. “You got him safe-hid somewheres?”
“He’s gone. The men that had him must have let go of him to join the ones beating you to the earth. I pray that when they thought to look for him, he had vanished into the rocks. But I have called to him with no reply.” I paused, shaking my head, glancing apprehensively up into the shadowed boulders of the south margin. “I fear greatly that he, too, may be crouching up there in the state of mute fear, sulling, as you say. He was witness to horror.”
Allison refused the thought. “Not him,” he said. “He ain’t the kind to sull. That kid has got more gall than a grizzly bear’s bladder. He’ll show up, providing Kifer ain’t got him.”
He looked past me to where the wounded scalpers were at last sitting up. “Maybe they was the two had Little Buck,” he said. “I’d best find out before they go under.”
I told him I doubted the men were in danger of dying. “Just as you, hombre,” I concluded, “they have heads of stone, rather than bone.”
“You’re a poet and don’t know it,” he answered. “Stay by the squaw. Get some of that tea down her.”
Glad enough, I remained with Huera. I was still tending her when I saw Allison coming from beyond the fire. “Cuidado, Padre,” he said. “The ’Paches are back.”
He was supporting the two befuddled scalp hunters and, as I strained to see the returning Indians, he sat the pair against a boulder behind me, warning them to say nothing and to behave as though too ill to understand anything. “The padre’s got a pull with the chief,” he added. “He’ll maybe be able to mumbo jumbo them into leaving you be.” One of the men, a beardless young brigand, not unhandsome, thanked Allison. The other, an older and vicious-looking fellow, merely nodded. He seemed to know the quality of the mercy he might expect from the Nednhi. “Remember,” Allison said, “chitón!”
It was a Spanish expression of the monte, meaning, “be mum.” Both men nodded agreement and lay back.
With growing unease, I returned my gaze to the outer darkness. Again, I saw and heard nothing, absolutely. On the verge of angrily reproving Allison, for no man of that country cared to hear the word Apache spoken carelessly, I saved my lecture. In the last of the rocks reached by our fire’s feeble light, there came a hint of movement. Then followed the dry click of unshod hooves striking trail stone. Ghostly horsemen materialized, seeming to emerge from the very marge of Laguna de Luz. Thirteen of them, halting now to sit in slant-eyed silence, just beyond the fire.
Juh, and the twelve surviving Nednhi.
Come back for Huera, the Blonde.
Even in the uncertain drama of the moment, I wondered at the instincts of the tall Tejano. How had Ben Allison known those shadow horsemen were inbound to our fire, when I had no warning of their approach?
Was it that “wild” thing in the Indian blood, of which he had told me?
And, if it was, would the Nednhi return the feeling; would they know
, by their own instincts, that Allison was a quarter-brother of the blood?
It did not seem so in the first of it.
After an interminable stillness, during which Juh and the others examined the entire visible range of the beach, the fire’s proximity, and all within it, a single hand sign was made by Juh to the braves in the rear of the immediate group flanking him.
There was a grunting of assent, a stir to make way among the foremost ponies. Up from the rear of the savage troop rode two warriors leading a captured horse between them. Astride this animal, his feet tied beneath its belly with buckskin thongs, an Apache headband gagging small Anglo mouth, was, por supuesto, the urchin son of the governor of all Texas.
“Praise God, Jefe,” I said to Juh, “I make you the Sign of the Cross.”
Although his impassive, broad face showed no least flicker of emotion, I knew he was pleased. As has been said, he believed in the power of the medicine in the cruz of the blackrobes. “Un-nuh,” he nodded, which, in Apache, signified approval without praise or permission.
All of the Nednhi now dismounted.
Allison stood where he was, not moving except to breathe. The two bloody-headed scalp hunters pressed back against their boulder, white not from their wounds alone. Beneath my hand, Huera made a soft sound and sufficient movement for the Apache to note. Juh turned to me. “She will live?” he asked. He knew of my reputation in medicine. Often enough, the Nednhi had brought their seriously wounded to me at Mission of the Virgin, in Casas Grandes. On more than one hard-pressed retreat, such gravely hurt fellows had been left in hiding with me while the band fled on into the Sierra Madre. Once, even, Juh had taken me to Janos, there to treat the great Mangas Coloradas, himself, when the Gila chieftain had been nearly killed in an Anglo trap. So these fierce bárbaros now listened, and leaned with Juh, to hear my answer for their holy woman.