by Clay Fisher
He and Juh met now in the center of the packed dirt of their arena. As they did so, the audience of Apache men and women drew in upon them as wet rawhide upon a smooth, hot stone. In an instant the atmosphere went from holiday chdchara, light crowd banter, to funereal stillness. Otsai, the referee, stood with the combatants in the final moment, explaining Huera’s Law of the Ancients to Juh, and lying as nakedly to Ben Allison to say that, should the Tejano be the victor, he would be given his freedom and safe passage out of Apacheria. This, por supuesto, would make both men easier for Flicker. Juh would fight to avoid banishment, Allison to gain his release and his life.
Flicker would be the one true victor.
But where was the black deserter?
As if in answer to my unspoken question, the people on the far side uttered a sound of surprise. Their ranks parted to admit, not only Robert Flicker, but Huera the Blonde—walking unaided save for the black man’s arm. Now it was plain. Flicker had felt he must have the holy woman present to enforce spiritually his reckless actual thinking. Without the sanction of the power represented by Huera, some among them must begin to suffer second thoughts about the degradation of Juh and the false freedom for the big Tejano and even, at the last of it, of the threatened execution of Blackrobe Jorobado somewhere in the ending of this entire murky affair. Flicker must move quickly and without flaw of hesitation. And so, too, God help me, must I!
I leaped to my feet and ran in my limping stumble of a walk out to where tall Allison and broad Juh stood facing one another. I came up to them in the same moment Robert Flicker did, Huera slowing and left behind.
“Nombre Dios!” I gasped to the Fort Bliss soldier. “This is an insanity! You cannot proceed, Flicker.”
“Father Nunez,” he said, “I must proceed. These are my people now. They have their laws. Please.”
He pushed against me gently, reluctantly.
“No!” I cried. “I will not retreat. If you will kill me, you will kill me. I stand here.”
“No one is going to harm you, Father,” he insisted. “Huera can be persuaded on that. These two,” he gestured to Juh and Ben Allison, “are lost already. If they don’t finish one another, the people will take the case themselves. Nothing must interfere with the plan I have for the Nednhi. Juh has shown he cannot be trusted. The Texan is simply persona non grata. How can I release him? How can I permit him to stay?”
“But, Flicker, good God, sir, you are a civilized human being. An officer. An educated man. These poor creatures are only simple nomads. They hate the white man and the Mexican. Will you now add the Negro to that grim list?”
The deserter shook his head. The handsome black face showed no emotion more clearly than that of compassion tinged with real regret. “Father, I am committed to making a final use of my training as a soldier and leader of men. The Apaches have been treated as my people have been treated. They know the same sorrows I know. They will fight for the same thing I fight for; freedom from the white man and the Mexican. That is all that I ask here, all that I seek among these people. You Romans have given them slavery. Texans took away Texas from them. The Mexicans pay blood money for their scalps. I bring them something decent to die for. Can you make a sin of that, priest?”
For the first time I saw what Allison had seen in Robert Flicker from the outset—the madness in him.
There was nothing more to do. Gathering a mite of courage, I scuttled past Flicker and called to the Texan, “Allison, don’t waver; we have a friend here!”
The tall San Saban touched his forehead to me in the Indian manner of respect, and shook his lean head. “Padre,” he said softly, “you’re daft. Look to yourself and the boy. Hasta luego.”
Several Apache men seized me and handled me roughly aside. I did not resist and they released me to rejoin Kaytennae, with Juh’s old wife and Little Buck Buckles.
“Let it begin,” I heard Robert Flicker say in growling Apache. “To the end.”
29
But Ben Allison never crossed lance with Juh.
The Nednhi blamed it on their god Ysun. I gave Jesus Christ credit for being saved. Others saw it in their own different ways. Little Buck cried out, “By cripes, old Ben, I knowed you’d come up with suthin’!” And young Kaytennae murmured, “Blackrobe, even without your cruz that is strong medicine to brew.”
Old Tulip, finishing off the last drop in the mescal jug, brought up some gas, smacked her lips, and suggested that, Ysun and Jesus Christ be damned, she would have to say this was a purely Apache miracle.
She was right of course.
Neither Ben K. Allison nor Friar P. Alvar Nunez had one thing to do with the uproar that now befell the Nednhi camp.
But I will still thank my God.
The black deserter Robert Flicker had no more than signaled the beginning of the mismatched combat, when, out of the U-notch defile of the cliff trail, burst two Indian horsemen. Their wild yelping cries—the piercing brush-wolf barkings with which the Apache traditionally warned their camps to “beware and be ready”—told every Nednhi on the mountain that a very big news-thing was being brought to the old war chief by his trusted scouts.
Yes, it was Tubac and Ka-zanni, the pair dispatched by Juh at Old Campground to trail out the fleeing Kifer and his fellow scalp hunters. The success of these scouts now wrought a stunning reversal to Flicker’s demeaning of the war chief.
Ka-zanni and Tubac rode staggering ponies to the fires of the lance fight arena. They virtually fell from their exhausted mounts. But they themselves could still stand. And listen to this!
They had pushed hard after Kifer hoping to catch him and take his hair in vengeance before he might reach the safety of Casas Grandes. But Kifer was smart and he knew the mountain trails as well as any Apache. De seguro, all the Nednhi knew that of him. Santiago Kifer had learned from his father, and Dutch John Kifer had known things about the Sierra Madre of the North that even the Nednhi did not remember. He had surely taught Santiago where Juh’s Stronghold was, and how to get up to it and back down, and listen even harder to this: that knowledge was going to prove a dangerous matter for the people within the next few suns.
Kifer and his men had run their horses all night through from Old Campground, reaching Casas Grandes with daybreak, Ka-zanni and Tubac right behind them. And what a sight that sunrise had shown all of the night riders, down there in the town!
Camped in and about the Mission of the Virgin of Guadalupe were no less than half a hundred Americano horse soldiers. Kifer quickly hid from the soldiers by going into the old adobe ruin west of the town and beside the river going up into Casas Grandes Canyon. From there, he sent a man into town. This man went to the cantina of Elfugio Ruiz and brought back the young, half-Chiricahua wife of Ruiz. The girl was known by the scalp hunters to have been the secret sweetheart of the nice blond boy named Carson who had had his head chewed off by the wolves back at Old Campground. When they told this half-breed girl what the Nednhi had done to her lover with the long yellow curls, she swore vengeance against the people of Juh and told Kifer all that was going forward in the town.
Ka-zanni and Tubac had, por supuesto, waylaid the simpleton girl as she was sneaking back to the cantina before old Ruiz might learn of her visit to the scalp hunter camp, and they had gotten their own story, by their own means, out of her. There could be no doubt their story matched that told Kifer.
What the Yanqui horse soldiers were doing so far down in Chihuahua State, against all Mexican law, was looking for the Negro deserter Robert Flicker and for the Apaches of the Nednhi raider Juh, the band that had stolen the small son of the governor of Texas.
Word of that crime had come to Post of El Paso and Fort Bliss even as the black one had feared it would, from the Tejano Lipan Apaches who had reported to the fort all of Juh’s hard-drinking talk in their camps. Now these horse soldiers down there in Casas Grandes were not just regular troops but
were the ill-famed Apache chasers the black one had scouted for when he was a sargento in the Fort Bliss cavalry. And they were in Casas Grandes not just to look for Juh—they might look forever in those mighty Blue Mountains and never find one Nednhi—but they were looking for a local man to guide them into the Sierra, a man who did know where to seek out Juh’s Stronghold, and who, for a price of blood money, would take the horse soldiers into that legend-place.
But no Casas Grandan had been eager to earn this reward.
They had to live there after the Americanos went back over the Rio Bravo, called by them the Rio Grande.
But the impasse gave Santiago Kifer a natural inspiration. He would offer, for a guarantee of United States and Texas amnesty for himself and his band, to take the command straightaway to Juh’s Stronghold.
Suiting action to inspiration, Kifer sent down to the encampment of American cavalry a local intermediary to inquire of the young officer in command if he would parley with the scalp hunters in regard to the whereabouts of the Nednhi Apache who, led by the missing Negro sergeant, had stolen Governor Buckles’ small son? Kifer’s only price for the information was amnesty for his men and himself. Could a deal be made on this basis?
The officer, replying to the query, wanted to know why he should accept such an offer, when he understood from others of the Casas Grandans—specifically from Señora Elfugio Ruiz, who had relatives among the wild Apache—that the stronghold was impregnable. No, he told the intermediary, Kifer would have to come up with something firmer than just the whereabouts of Juh’s hideout, and/or the guiding there.
The scalp hunter was ready for that.
He knew a place, he sent back by the same local courier, where dynamite charges could be placed, and the one trail into and out of the great mesa could be obliterated, trapping the entire tribe of the Nednhi Apache and the Negro deserter for all time—if the Americano officer would care for that solution.
However, Kifer’s suggestion was that the mere conveying of this dynamite threat to the Apache would result in abject, complete, and immediate surrender. No man—and no Apache man, woman, or child—would choose starvation over Americano capture. The Nednhi all had Americano cousins among the three other Chiricahua bands who were on the reservations up there, and they weren’t starving.
So if Kifer took the officer to the stronghold, it would be all over for Juh, one way or the other.
And the officer could begin polishing up his insignia for next promotion: to bring Juh in would rank with the reduction of Geronimo, Nana, Loco, or Victorio; not to mention whatever the black deserter was worth.
It was done, they had a deal, agreed the young white officer.
Regarding the black man, he would be turned over to the Texas authorities to face a charge of murdering a young girl in El Paso. As for Juh and the Nednhi and the surrender of the son of the governor of Texas, unharmed and in good health, the officer would follow Santiago Kifer into the Sierra the first day that the hard-riding troops were rested and the supply wagons got up to Casas Grandes with the necessary explosives to implement the destruction of the Zig Zag Trail.
How long would that be? Kifer had wanted to know.
Two to four days, replied the officer. Make a guess of three days; three days from next morning, not the present one.
That had been a day and a half ago, Ka-zanni and Tubac said. They had ridden home to the stronghold in that record time to warn the people. Even so, that would mean that Juh—or He Who Has the Plan—had something only in the order of another day and a half, two full days at most, to take what action they would, flight or battle.
Here, Robert Flicker, saying not one word the entire time, stopped the panting scouts.
“Schichobes, old friends,” he said to Tubac and Ka-zanni, “did you hear a name for the young officer?”
Tubac, the spokesman, frowned a little.
“Why, you should know him,” he answered. “Isn’t that your old troop you told us you scouted for?”
“Did you get a name?” Flicker said, low voiced.
“Yes, a very odd one. Pretty, though.”
“Was it Flowers? Lieutenant Flowers?”
“Why, yes. You see, I told you you should know him.”
“Very handsome officer,” Ka-zanni offered, so that he would not be left out. “The young wife of Ruiz told me he was the kind of a man that makes the things of a woman grow warm and tingle. But we didn’t see him.”
The dark face of Robert Flicker looked as if it had turned to stone.
“Two days,” he said, half-aloud.
“We can still catch them in Casas Grandes.
“Trap them inside the mission garden.
“Keep them in there and kill them as they planned to kill us. Trap and starve. Let no one of them escape. When we have them wounded enough, wagh!”
He swung about to face the excited Nednhi crowding now all about him and the returned scouts.
“I, too, know how to use the dinamita!” he cried. “And we will capture it from their army wagons and use it ourselves to blow in the walls of Blackrobe Jorobado’s church and his gardens, when we are ready for the last rush upon the soldiers.
“It will be the greatest of beginnings of the war of the Apache people to win Chihuahua for themselves!
“To your ponies!
“To Casas Grandes!
“Ugashe—!”
30
When the Nednhi broke from the lance fight fires to run for their war ponies, Ben Allison also ran. Flicker saw him go and yelled to Juh to recapture him. Juh shouted to others to stop the Tejano, but the mill of men and women and excited oldsters was too great. Ben reached Kaytennae and Father Nunez who, you may believe it surely, was praying hard that no one would begin shooting in the melee. The Texan swooped down on Tulip and Little Buck, seizing up the white boy.
“Foller me!” he ordered and went long-legging his way up the slope toward the rocks and timber. Kaytennae and I leaped to follow, but here came Huera the Blonde waving her Winchester and commanding us to halt.
Allison left Little Buck in the rocks and bounded back down the slope. Huera heard him and whirled about. The Tejano in that instant was no more than thirty feet from her, a dead man de seguro. Yet, in the moment that Huera fired, Tulip tripped her up with her knobbly mesquite walking cane. Down went the Blonde, the rifle blasting harmlessly, and Allison wrested it from her and tossed it to Kaytennae, all in a breath.
Hauling the holy woman to her feet, the Texan barred his arm across her throat, strangling her. If she wanted to taste the air of life again, he rasped in her ear, she would call off her fellow tribesmen now rushing up. He eased his arm, and her voice wobbled forth just in time to slow the Nednhi in their approach to see who had fired the rifle shot. It was then that Allison seized back the Winchester from Kaytennae and yelled for us to run.
Kaytennae went away from there like a rabbit from a burning brush heap. I jumped after him. To my amazement Tulip scuttled along behind us. Overtaking me, she passed young Kaytennae and was first to the rocks, where she gathered in Little Buck protectively. The boy did not care for the embrace but Tulip smacked him a good smack and said, “Cállate, shut up,” and then yelled down the slope to where Allison was dragging Huera up toward us by her sun-bleached hair, “Wagh, Tejano! Más aprisa, hombre!” And the Texan, in turn, yelled at the Apache pressing him to hold back or he would blow out the soft belly of their warrior woman with her very own “Yellow Boy” Winchester rifle.
The threat worked to get him and the woman safely into the rocks with us. It was here that I panted to him underbreath that Kaytennae had told me he knew a secret way to go by foot down off the mesa. Allison only nodded, “That’s fair good news, Padre; stay down,” and levered the brass-framed Winchester to throw a shot at our pursuers who were coming on again.
At this point there were some forty Nednhis
in the group that had followed Allison and his “holy shield” into the higher rocks at timber’s edge. On the warning shot, they slowed and spread a bit but did not stop. The Texan fired three more rounds, the bullets whining away into the night from the rocky slope, deflected and screaming wickedly. There were two yells, as from hits, and the wailing cry of a woman, and the Apache scattered back and took cover.
“Old Kaytenny,” Allison said, “get set to lead your first war party. On foot, hombre.” He exploded two more ricocheting shots among the Nednhi. “Ugashe—!”
And so we went up and out of the amphitheater of the rancheria basin, into the mesa forest.
The Nednhi came after us, of course.
There was no moon yet and we were not on a traveled trail. Kaytennae followed a pathway of sorts, but we who came behind him suffered frequent and noisy collisions with stump and stone, standing tree and down. It made our tracking a matter of “listening us out” and no people on earth hear more keenly than the Apache.
So we ran a patterned flight of going a desperate pace for so far, then halting to freeze in place and listen intently to locate the pursuit.
It was during the third of these dangerous delays that we heard Juh puffing up to join the momentarily halted searchers and, directly after Juh, we could distinguish the clear voice of Robert Flicker who took advantage of the pause to officially, and smartly, restore the war chief to his command by saying, “You are the leader, Jefe. What will we do?”
Juh suggested total pursuit but when someone informed him his first wife was with the fugitives, he roared out, “What? You expect me to hunt down my own woman? Fools! And you, black one! You ask me what we will do? I will tell you. Nothing. They can’t escape. There is only one way down off this mesa of mine. All know that!”
The logic was Apachean. And Robert Flicker, realizing the truth in Juh’s rhetoric, sided with him.