by Clay Fisher
Some Nednhi had been skeptical at first but Juh had won them over. Now all the Apache bands of the Chiricahua praised the great, bold adventure. Nana, Victorio, Mangas, Eskiminzin, Loco—even the wild young Bedonkohe, Geronimo—were reported ready to follow Juh and the mysterious black extraño.
However, the black soldier had not taken so generous a view of the war chief’s success. Juh had done too many things wrong. He had killed all those Texas Rangers. He had done too much talking up in the Davis Mountain camps of the Texas Lipan chief, Magoosh. Little doubt he had let slip the identity of the fugitive black man in his Mexican stronghold whose plan it was to kidnap the son of the Texas governor. Those Lipans would have reported this to the officers at Fort Bliss. American cavalry and Texas Ranger volunteers alike might even then be riding for Casas Grandes. The entire plan could be imperiled.
All of this, Kaytennae now concluded, he had just reviewed with his aunt Huera. It was why he had left us, to plead with her for our safety. She had seemed sympathetic, perhaps realizing at last that she owed her life to the Tejano, Al-li-sun. But Kaytennae could not be sure.
At that point where he would have asked his aunt to tell him if she would join in helping him free the prisoners—all of them, Little Buck, Blackrobe Jorobado, and the tall one with the pale eyes—the black one had come hurrying down from his big jacal.
And that was where the trail for Kaytennae’s two friends, and the white boy they had risked their lives to rescue from the Apache, now grew dark and dim.
It was made that way by what Kaytennae had heard while feigning the moccasin repair behind the wickiup of Huera the Blonde; and what he had heard was that the black one had a new plan.
Well, not really a new plan.
A delay in the old one.
The black one had convinced Huera that Juh had put them all in danger by his faulty leadership. The only way that Juh might now redeem himself would be to personally battle the one who had brought the war chief to a humbling before his own war party. A committee of three warriors who had been on that raid—standard procedure among the Nednhi in war business—had been appointed to consider the matter of their leader’s failures. Their verdict, only now brought to He Who Has the Plan: Juh must fight and kill the Tejano Allison.
But wait; that would merely restore Juh to a warrior’s place among the Nednhi, a matter of personal honor as an Apache fighting man shamed by a Pinda Lickoyi, a damned pale-haired White Eye and, worse yet, one from the hated Texas country.
As to who would be the future war leader of the Nednhi, He Who Has the Plan sought from Huera, the holy woman of the band, the warrior woman whose spirit-words were law in the stronghold, her own vision of that man upon whom this crucial honor would now fall.
Here, our teller-of-tales put out his hands in helpless gesture to us both.
“I am sorry for you, my friends,” Kaytennae said, “but more of sorrow is within me for my aunt.”
“Your aunt, boy?” Ben Allison broke in sharply. “What about her? Has that feller done her harm?”
“No, no, Al-li-sun,” he said, pronouncing the name syllabically, as did Juh and the others, “she has done him an honor.”
“Ah, no,” I breathed, guessing the tragedy.
“Ah yes, Blackrobe,” Kaytennae nodded, “he is the new war chief of the Nednhi.”
24
In the pause that greeted Kaytennae’s revelation, Allison and I saw past the boy to where the fringe of the timber bordered the meadowland. This was up from our knoll above Huera’s wickiup a matter of only thirty paces. Up there, coming out of the trees, was the powerful figure of Juh. Kaytennae, reading our faces, did not move to swing around. “Who is it coming there?” he asked. “My uncle?”
Allison nodded, but said nothing.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“If you are talking of someone and what you are saying is bad, he feels it.”
“Nonsense, he is here to see that you are doing your job of watching us.”
Kaytennae did not answer, and Juh drew up to us.
The mescal was not in him any last bit now. His huge face seemed drawn. There was more of sadness than of menace in his air. He appeared beaten.
Kaytennae’s face reflected the change.
“You have heard then, uncle?” he said.
“Yes. But I don’t believe it. Do you, nephew?”
“I must believe it; our aunt told me.”
“To your face? And you did not come to warn me?”
“It was not to my face. I overheard it from outside her wickiup, when he sent me away. As for coming to warn you, I had your own orders to guard these prisoners.”
Juh nodded. “Enjuh. Perhaps you thought if you left them, I might shoot them as he ordered?”
“No. You would not do that.”
“Enjuh, boy. You know me better than I know myself.”
“Perhaps it is that I love you better than you love yourself, uncle.”
Again Juh nodded, again shook his head frowningly.
“I still don’t believe it,” he said. “Why would the black one turn against me? It was his plan. No, I won’t think ill of him. He has brought us too much hope and made us feel like men again. He won’t do this thing to me.”
But Juh was wrong.
“Uncle,” Kaytennae told him, low voiced, “do not humble yourself to turn and stare, but three men come now from the big jacal. They look this way and they are bound this way.”
“The committee? Already? No!”
“Uncle, they’re coming here.”
“Who is it? Give me their names.”
“Sunado. Keet. Nazati.”
I watched the war chief, knowing these names myself. They were good fighters and bad men to make argument with. They were also Juh’s favored drunken friends, as I well knew from the frequent trips of the quartet to the cantina of my parishioner Elfugio Ruiz, in Casas Grandes. But all that Juh did was to heave a great sigh and murmur, “All my good friends.”
Sunado, Keet, and Nazati stopped a respectful ten feet away. “Jefe,” Sunado said, “we have all met with him. We don’t like it, but we are the committee for your preparation. What do you think?”
Juh would not face them.
“If men who rode with me have voted against me, I do not think anything; it is the law.”
“Will you resist?” asked the second man, Keet.
“No.”
“Enjuh,” Keet said. “Does the Tejano know of the law?”
“Ask him.”
“He knows,” Kaytennae offered. “He will fight.”
“It will be at sunset,” Nazati said.
“Al-li-sun will be ready,” volunteered Kaytennae.
At this point, the Texan, not content to be represented by a stripling among grown men, objected.
“Jefe,” he complained, indicating Kaytennae, “can you not send this ish-ke-ne away? This is a grave matter. It concerns only you and me.”
“I like to hear the boy talk,” Juh scowled.
“Well, if that is the Apache way,” Allison shrugged. “Among the Comanche, boys do not talk. Neither do women. Men talk.”
“Are you saying men do not talk among my people, Tejano?”
“I don’t know, Jefe. Go ahead, boy. Your uncle wants to hear your opinion in this serious business.”
“Bah!” Juh exploded. “Will you get out of here, Kaytennae. Go and help your near-mother, that oldest wife of mine, to take care of that white cub. He has bitten her two times already and run away from her both times. You can run faster. Besides, don’t hang about men all the while. I’ve told you that!”
I thought to see just the trace of a grin on young Kaytennae’s face, but he left immediately, trotting to be gone, and of course I must have been mistaken. I did not imagine, however, the simple keenness with
which Ben Allison had gotten the boy out of harm’s way.
But Texans are forever overdoing a thing.
“Kaytennae!” Allison called out. “Tell Little Buck to be of high spirits. The Nednhi are people of their word, absolutely. No harm will come to him as long as Juh remains chief. Tell him that.”
Surely now he had gone too far.
Juh roused up from his apathy. He stormed up to the Texan and stood with him nariz a nariz, nose on nose. “What is that you say, Tejano? ‘As long as Juh remains chief’? I do not like the sound of that.”
“Dispénseme, Jefe,” the Texan murmured, “I thought you knew. I thought they had told you all of it.”
He gestured to Sunado, Keet, and Nazati, who scowled and moved about most uneasily. And now, at last, Juh whirled about to face the hangdog trio.
“What is this that you have not told me?” he demanded, the bear’s voice growling deep again. “There is something here you dared not say to your war chief. Say it now!”
His hand went to his knife.
In answer, the three Winchester rifles of the committee made loud clicks as their hammers were cocked.
“Don’t be a fool!” warned Sunado.
Keet and Nazati added their nods, thumbs hooked over rifle hammers. “Huera has ruled it,” said one of them.
The mention of the warrior woman slowed Juh.
His hand dropped away from the blade.
“What has she ruled?” he asked.
“There will be a new war leader of the Nednhi named tonight. After you fight the Tejano.”
“Well, of course,” waved Juh, relieved. “When I have killed Al-li-sun, who would—” He stopped in mid-speech, to stare at the three committeemen.
“Win or lose,” Sunado told him, “there will be a new leader.”
It was then that Juh knew where the dangerous game of tribal power had brought him.
He ignored his three attendants to stare across the encampment toward the big jacal of Robert Flicker.
“Get out of my way,” he said to the three. “I am going up there right now.”
Sunado, Keet, and Nazati stood aside.
“That is right, Jefe,” Sunado said. “And we are going up there right behind you.”
Juh strode off, never looking back at them. It was as though he had not heard Sunado. But he had heard him. He knew it was not an honor guard they marched in his rear, all that wordless way across the rancheria that had been his before the black soldier came.
25
In the kingdom of Juh, Tulapai was queen.
Named for the potent corn-mash liquor brewed by the Nednhi, Tulapai loved the spiritous life. Indeed, she was next only to Juh in her enjoyment of the jug. Some among the band said the eldest wife of the war chief had originally been called Antelope Child, and that Juh had rechristened her in honor of her skills in the fermentation of his favorite potable. Gazing upon the beauteous Antelope Child in the present, full flower of her reign over the house of the war chief, one might be forgiven the thought that Juh had chosen well in the matter of her name: his first love did more closely resemble a jug of tulapai than the fawn of the graceful pronghorn.
Tulip, as she was known in Casas Grandes, was ugly, short, broad of beam, dark and pocked of hide, enormous of head, with a mouth that seemed to open as a traveler’s purse, wide enough to engulf the world in its unexpected, indeed spectacular, sunburst of a smile.
She was beyond all Apache question the happiest in heart among the four Chiricahua bands.
Nothing daunted Tulip.
Not even Little Buck Buckles.
I discovered this now as I came, seeking sanctuary, up to the wickiup of the old wife.
“Hija mía!” I cried in genuine relief. “It is a thing of pure joy to see that you are at home.”
“Blackrobe,” she laughed, “you do not fool me; what do you want? But no, wait, that is an ungracious thing to say to a poor humpbacked priest. Forgive it. I am as glad to see you as you to see me. This damned white boy is destroying my household. You can see where he is.”
I could indeed. Little Buck was tethered outside the wickiup on a dog stake, with an ancient Spanish slave iron locked about his middle and running by a rusted length of chain to a three-foot hard pine “spike” malleted into the rocky ground.
However, he was not muzzled, and he greeted me with the same fervor as when first he aided me in the dangerous matter of saving the life of Ben Allison from the Nednhi scalpers during the Texas Ranger killing.
“By Tophet, Reverend!” he yelled out. “It’s abouten time you showed up. Where’s old Ben Allison?”
“Chitón, hijo!” I ordered him. “In God’s Name, be quiet. I am trying to find a place to hide.”
Even as I spoke, Tulip found the back of my frock with a hand the size and tenderness of a mummified ham and literally hurled me into the wickiup, where I would be safely out of village view. She then picked up a rock, not a small one either, and shied it at Little Buck on the end of his dog chain. She did not miss, and the Texas boy yelped like a cur well hit.
“You heard the blackrobe,” Tulip smiled. “Be a good boy.”
Little Buck, rubbing his abused buttock, growled something not in dog language which astonished me for its mature evil. Tulip laughed outright.
“You hear him, Blackrobe?” she cried, entering the wickiup and seating herself across the fire-spot from me. “That’s a man-child! I wish Ysun had been so kind to me. But I will make him Apache, inside and outside. He will be the true son of Juh and Tulapai. Shut up, boy.”
Lowering her voice, she stared intently at me.
“What is it, Blackrobe? Why are you alone? What has happened to the tall one? Say, do you know that if I were twenty summers younger, I would buy him from Juh. He has a look to him, that big Tejano. I will bet you that his women are all with child.”
“Be still, you harridan!” I chided her. “He has no woman at all. And you cannot buy him now for any price. You will be lucky to get Juh back.”
This brought her into the wickiup with me.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Something bad, eh. It’s that damned desertor, isn’t it, that bastardo negro!”
“Yes,” I said and told her of the treachery of Huera against Juh and of the support of the warrior woman for the black soldier, of the placing of the war chief in camp arrest by his own men and of his march across the rancheria to see the black one.
“Ah!” she said. “Then you and the Tejano were left there for the moment unguarded, and he has made his escape. You see, priest? I told you that he was a real studhorse.”
“He may be,” I granted, “but he is still with the Nednhi herd. When we were alone, he did indeed think to get under cover. We made for the timber above the knoll where, as he put it, we could straighten out our brains. Just as we got to the pines, out of them stepped some more of Juh’s war party. They fell on poor Allison with their rifle butts and beat him to the ground. They bound him with a horsehair riata and drove him away with kicks and quirt thongs. The last I saw of them, they seemed bound for the big jacal, after Juh and the others.”
Tulip’s happy nature failed.
“Who led the ones that beat the Tejano?”
“Otsai.”
“Damn.”
“Yes, that is a bad fellow.”
“Otsai hates Juh. He always had it in his mind that he, himself, should be war chief. I warned Juh many times to kill him along a dark part of the trail. You know, Blackrobe. The way you Mexicans do it. As an accident.”
“What will we do?” I asked.
“It would help if we knew where they took the Tejano.”
“I’m sorry. I did not have the courage to stand there and wait to see. I could only think to remember that Juh had sent Kaytennae to stay with you, so I ran here as fast as I might.” I paused. “An
d where is he?” I asked. “Where is Kaytennae?”
“Never mind,” said Tulapai, the oldest wife of Juh. “Here.” She handed me, out of the darkness, an unglazed clay jug. “Do like the Tejano said. Straighten out your brain.”
“Hija!” I objected. “This stuff will straighten out the entire body.” But I took a long and glugging pull at it, all the same. Choking, I passed it back to the eldest wife. “Madre Dios!” I gasped. “You have poisoned me!”
“What?” she cried. “Is it possible? It is, it is! I gave you the wrong jug. That is the one we keep the black medicine in for dipping the sheep.”
“Santissima!” I yelled. “Carbolic?”
I fell over forward grasping belly with both hands.
So did Tulip.
Only she was dying of laughter.
“Dispénseme, Jorobado,” she wept, when she could control the laughing, “but I could not help myself. You have always been so puro, such a simplon. Now you know we do not have any sheep. Ha, ha, ha—!”
“Curse you!” I said, recovering weakly. “How would I know you don’t have any sheep? You steal anything you want, you bárbaros, you!”
“You will live, then, Blackrobe?”
“I don’t know; I thought you were my friend.”
“I had better be,” the ugly woman said. “Do you know what the talk is in the rancheria? For you, I mean, Jorobado? Dah-eh-sah. Yes, that’s what I said.”
“But I am a priest!”
“So was the one who started the talk.”
“No! Huera?” I could not accept it. “She wants me dead? Impossible! Ask Kaytennae. He was there, he saw it all. We saved her life, Allison and I!”
“Kaytennae has already told me. I’m sorry, Blackrobe. The boy also told me something else about his fierce young aunt; he said he saw you looking at her in the same way the black soldier does: but she hates you. She says to the people now that you are the one who freed the Tejano from the dead-pile of the diablos at your church. She is telling it that Allison is an evil shade and you are his master. She says that, as long as you live, Allison cannot be killed. She says therefore that Juh will die in the fight with the big Tejano, unless you are killed before the fight.”