Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  The second thing he noticed was how old and weary and harmless Red Sleeves looked. The wrinkles in his face had deepened to gullies that pulled the corners of his mouth down into a doleful pout. Rafe almost couldn’t imagine him spreading death and desolation.

  “Hairy Foot! My friend!”

  Before Rafe could react, Red Sleeves engulfed him in a hug that compressed his rib cage and squeezed the breath out of him. Red Sleeves hadn’t bathed lately—but then, who had? Rafe pulled away with the imprint on his cheek of the metal tweezers the chief wore on a cord around his neck. The chief conversed in Spanish.

  “Give me fósforos, my good friend.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “And the stockings?”

  “All gone.”

  Red Sleeves held up a bare foot, the sole of which looked like a very dirty tortoise shell. “Like my moccasins.” He displayed a massive grin packed with teeth.

  Rafe wondered, though, if his moccasins had really worn out, or if he was putting on a show of poverty for Dr. Steck. If he and his people were putting on a show, it was a damned good one. What were they buying with all those horses they’d stolen this fall? Maybe they ate them. Red Sleeves looked like he could eat a horse on any given day.

  “Telescopio?” Red Sleeves asked hopefully.

  “I was telling him about your telescope, Rafe.” Dr. Steck beamed at the ragged crowd, and they beamed back at him. Rafe had never seen Apaches so pleased with a white man. They were good judges of human nature, after all.

  Rafe pulled from his saddlebag the sack made from the sleeve of an old shirt. He took the telescope out and handed it over. Red Sleeves looked through it, exclaimed “Enjuh!” and passed it in turn to the young man whom Dr. Steck called Victorio. Victorio was tall for an Apache, about Rafe’s height, and as muscular as any panther. He would have seemed taller if he hadn’t been standing next to Red Sleeves.

  Rafe remembered him from that time in John Cremony’s tent at the Santa Rita mines, and at the shooting contest when the little horse thief got her name, Lozana. He realized that the last time he had seen the two of them, they were galloping away aboard a pair of Don Angel’s prize horses.

  Rafe surveyed the crowd and found Lozen standing with Pandora among the women at some distance away. He suppressed the urge to smile and wave. Lozen wore a blanket wrapped around her, but below it he saw the fringes of a skirt that hung around the ankles of her old moccasins. She no longer wore the maiden’s hair or ornament. She must have married, maybe to that good-looking, strapping specimen. who couldn’t stop staring at her.

  Victorio handed the glass to her. She aimed it at Rafe, and he stared back into its single eye for what seemed like a long time before she passed it around. All the women stared at him through it and giggled.

  Rafe never expected to see the telescope again, but when it reappeared in his hands, he tried to feel Lozen’s touch on it. He wished he could separate the warmth of her hands from all the others. What foolishness.

  He watched the Apaches walk to where the army had assembled to oversee distribution of the beef and corn. As Lozen turned to go, Rafe saw that she wore a musket in a leather case whose strap rode across her back. A pair of white hawk feathers decorated the case, along with strings of beads and shells, and a small leather bag no doubt full of Apache hocus-pocus. He wondered if the gun was one of those stolen from his wagon. Several of the men had them, but she was the only woman with one.

  He wanted to stride after her. He wanted to yell, “Hey, you, let me see that.” He wanted to catch hold of her arm. He wanted to touch her. Instead he walked to the wagon yard with Red butting him playfully in the small of the back. He was startled to see his wagon and an old friend there.

  “Othello.”

  The mule looked up as though he had seen Rafe a few minutes earlier instead of almost five months. He looked thin, but otherwise he seemed in good spirits.

  Rafe walked around the old Packard. He ran his hand along the familiar gouge taken from the side by a sharp boulder that had tumbled down a slope and barely missed destroying the wagon. He poked a finger into the splintered holes left by Apache arrows. He could remember what event had left each dent and scar and gash in it.

  It would need work to make it serviceable again, but at least he had recovered it. Instead of returning home, home had come back to him. He stepped onto the hub and climbed inside. The lieutenant had been right about the sand.

  He noticed several strands of fringe lying outside a heap of it in the corner. He brushed the sand away and uncovered a leather bag, beautifully beaded. One of the thieves must have dropped it. No one would leave such a piece of work behind on purpose.

  He opened it and saw the heap of pollen inside, like a remnant of a golden summer’s day. He started to empty it over the side, and then he stopped. He thought of his Navajo woman and the reverence she had had for pollen.

  He shook some of it onto the driver’s seat, and it glittered like powdered sunlight as it fell. He climbed down and sprinkled it on the axles and on the tongue. He scattered the last of it to the four directions as he had seen her do. He did it in memory of her, and—though he would never admit it—he did it in thanks to God for the return of his Packard. He also did it, maybe, for luck. When he finished, he put the copy of Romeo and Juliet into the pouch and stuck it into the back of his trousers. Then he went off to talk to the army’s wainwright about the repairs to the wagon.

  That night Rafe laid his bedroll next to the wagon with the saddle for a pillow. He rolled up in the blankets and tied Red’s tether to his wrist. Even if he woke up with snow stacked on top of him, he would not leave Red alone with the Apaches camped nearby.

  LOZEN MOVED, SILENT AS THE DRIFTING SNOWFLAKES, among the hulking forms of the adobe buildings. A door opened, and a rectangle of light fell out onto the snow. Loud voices spilled after it. Lozen slid into the deep shadow between the officers’ lodge and the room where the Pale Eyes agent, Tse’k, conducted business. She pulled her blanket around her and pressed against the wall. She watched three Bluecoats walk past, silhouetted briefly in the strip of moonlight beyond the front corners of the buildings.

  The door slammed shut, and the light blinked out. Lozen continued on to the wagon yard. She knew where everything was. They all did.

  She also knew that the sentries paced opposite courses around the perimeter of the corral and the wagon yard. She knew when they would pass each other, and where. She left a bottle of whiskey there, as though some careless soldier had dropped it; then she settled into the darkness to wait. The whiskey had cost her a mule, but it would be worth the price. The sentries didn’t let her down. She heard one of them give a low call to the others. She saw them look around, then slip off into the shadows.

  She found Red near Hairy Foot’s wagon. He eyed her warily in the full moon’s light, but he didn’t move. He didn’t snort or whinny. She stared at him, sensing his plan.

  No, she thought. “You can’t fool me. As soon as I try to untie you, you’ll wake Hairy Foot.”

  He could have done it now, but she had the feeling he was playing a game with her. He would let her get close, and then he would alert Hairy Foot. She made a loop in the horsehair rope she carried, so she would be ready to put it around his nose to guide him once she mounted.

  She found his tether line. With fingers light as a moth’s feelers, she followed it to the saddle and the sleeping form. It disappeared under Hairy Foot’s blanket, tied, no doubt, to his wrist.

  His saddlebags lay next to him. She probed them with her fingers. When she found the cloth-wrapped far-seeing glass she eased it out of the bag. She stuck it into the back of her belt under the blanket she wore like a poncho.

  She crouched next to the sleeping figure and stared down at him. In the full moon’s light, Hairy Foot’s face in repose looked young and untroubled, although Lozen knew that he had had his share of troubles. He didn’t appear to be the powerful di-yin that the warriors believed him. He was
appealing in his defenselessness, not a powerful magician who repelled arrows and bullets as though they were horseflies.

  She thought him handsome for a Pale Eyes. She couldn’t see colors at night, but she knew his hair was the yellow of the sacred pollen. He had a strong mouth and a straight nose. His eyelashes were as pale as the moonlight. A snowflake drifted down onto them. Another landed on his brow, then several more fell onto his hair. Lozen felt an urge to brush them off, as she would do for a sleeping child.

  What foolishness. The men would think her stupid if they could see her. But then, she would probably never have another chance to see a white man so close, at least not a live one.

  She could cut the line without waking him, but this was more of a challenge. She took a deep breath. Whatever happened, the spirits would take care of her. Even if every Bluecoat in the fort arrived on the run, shooting as they came, she could escape them. She knew that for a certainty.

  She lifted the edge of the blanket so slowly it seemed not to move at all. She folded it gently back on itself, exposing his wrist and the rope. She laid her slender fingertips on the knot, feeling the ridges and valleys, the intertwinings. It was a simple knot. She concentrated her attention on it.

  She had teased out the first end of it when she felt a prickling at the nape of her neck. She glanced up and saw him staring at her. She dropped the knot, and—still at a crouch—she ran into the shadows under the wagon, then out the other side and away, dodging under the bellies of the sleeping mules.

  Rafe lay still, frozen not by fear but by disbelief. Had she been real or a dream? He could still see her glossy black hair as it fell forward, embracing her oval face like a fanned pair of raven’s wings. The moon had left a trail of light like quicksilver along her arched nose, full lips, and high-set cheekbones. He realized that his wrist still tingled from the feather-light touch of her fingers. He put a hand on the knot and found it half untied. She had been real, all right.

  She must have known better than to try to untie the line from Red’s halter. She must have sensed that he wouldn’t stand still for it. Actually, Rafe would like to see her try to ride Red, but not tonight.

  He remembered the Apaches talking about her in connection with his telescope. For some reason they had given it to her, before all the men had had a chance to look into it. That had struck him as odd at the time. He groped for the saddlebag. The telescope was gone.

  Chapter 20

  FIDDLING AROUND WHILE THE PACKARD BURNS

  Others might prefer the bustle of Santa Fe, but Rafe liked the village of Socorro, the adobe oasis at the northern end of the Jornada del Muerto. In English, soccoro meant “aid,” or “relief,” and Rafe was always relieved to reach it alive after a passage through the Horn. He usually went to the cantina called La Paloma. The Dove.

  Mexicans made up most of The Dove’s clientele, which also suited him. The farmers and muleteers, the shopkeepers, wood-hewers and artisans drank there. They got into their share of squabbles as the evening progressed, and they took aboard so much liquid cargo that they sloshed when they tottered outside to relieve themselves.

  All in all, though, the Dove—like Soccoro itself—basked in a sense of contentment. Its people went about their business and their pleasure with the self-assurance that came from living in the place where they were “bred and buttered,” as Absalom used to say. Maybe that was what attracted him, since a sense of belonging had always eluded him.

  Tonight The Dove was crowded with more Americans than usual. Rafe sat in a corner at a table with one of the few chairs that could claim a back. He conferred with a bottle of the local brew witched from the agave plants that covered the desert for miles around. Between sips he watched the women who, with trays held high, slipped among the tables crowded close together.

  The women were heartbreakingly beautiful. They all enchanted him, even the brazen ones whom he suspected would cheerfully lay him out with a stool and pick his pockets. He was always astonished that women persisted in being so completely unlike men, in spite of eons of association. Women’s coexistence with men seemed to him the pairing of meadowlarks and tanyard dogs.

  When Milagro, his favorite, glanced his way, he held up his empty glass. She crossed the smoky room with the slow sway of her hips that inspired him to drain the glasses faster so he could watch her amble toward him and away again. He especially liked watching her walk away. She was, as her name proclaimed, a miracle.

  She smiled with her full, red lips and regarded him from somewhere far behind her sad eyes. “Another, Senor Rafael?”

  “Yes, please, Senorita Milagro.”

  She swayed off, with his attention trailing after her like a hungry puppy. He jumped when someone cleared his throat in his ear. He turned to look up into a broad face with bulging red cheeks, a turned-up nose, and fox-colored side-whiskers. The man leaned down to make himself heard over the noise, and his face loomed too close. Rafe pushed his chair away from it.

  “Would you be Mr. Rafe Collins?” the whiskers said.

  “Not if I had my druthers.” Rafe realized that he was already having trouble focusing—and the evening was young yet.

  The man threw back his head and laughed so loudly that people turned to stare. “Oh, I see. You wouldn’t be Rafe Collins if you had another option. Very good.” He extended a hand the shape and size of a small shovel, and Rafe took it. It was calloused and strong. “My name is Ezekiel Smith. People call me Zeke.” He pulled a stool from a nearby table. “Is it all right with you if I set?”

  Rafe nodded.

  “I’m looking for drivers.”

  “What’s your cargo?”

  Zeke winked. “Two legged cattle.”

  “People?”

  “Passengers, mail, and a little freight.”

  “My wagon won’t accommodate passengers.”

  “We won’t be needing your wagon.” Zeke raised a hand, and Milagro headed his way with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. “Have you heard of John Butterfield?”

  “The same John Butterfield who thinks he can run a stage line from St. Louis to San Francisco?”

  Zeke’s eyes took on an evangelistic glow. “It will be one of the great achievements of the age.” He made a grand sweep with his arm, and Rafe rescued the tequila bottle just before he knocked it off the table.

  “Think of it. A stage line that spans the continent twice a week. We’ll cover almost two thousand and five hundred miles in twenty-five days, traveling a route of stage stations located twenty miles apart.” Zeke’s eyes glowed. “Two hundred and fifty coaches are being built as we speak. And tank wagons and stage stations with corrals and smithies. We’re hiring drivers, conductors, station keepers, blacksmiths, mechanics, hostlers, herders, wainwrights, wheelwrights. Only the best. Butterfield insists on it. His motto is, “The mail must go through.’ When we finish, there will be two thousand men and two hundred stations along the line.”

  Rafe shook his head, surprised yet again at how mankind’s follies could surprise him. “Did anyone mention to Mr. Butterfield how happy he will make the Apaches?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, he will provide them with a reliable source of plunder.”

  “Oh, yes—that.” Zeke dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Chief Cochise himself has agreed to supply wood for the station at Doubtful Pass.”

  “He did?” Rafe was more than astonished, he was “dumbfoundered,” as Absalom used to say.

  “I’ve talked with the chief. I believe him to be a man of his word.”

  Rafe sat back in his chair. He wasn’t considering the job. He was thinking of John Butterfield and men like him. Men who dreamed large. Men who weren’t content with a single old Packard wagon and a span of mules. He had a moment’s regret that his own horizons were limited to those encircling the vastness of New Mexico and Arizona Territory.

  “I thank you for the offer.”

  “Then you accept?”

  “I decline.”
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  “But why, man? Did I mention that the pay is good?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You must have a reason.”

  “I don’t reckon I want to work for any man.”

  “I see.” Ezekiel Smith rose with a sigh. “If you change your mind, I’ll be staying at Dona Margarita’s on the plaza.”

  Rafe nodded and watched him stride toward the door. Dreaming a thing and making it a reality were quite different. Rafe didn’t know about Butterfield, but he suspected if any man could build stage stations in the middle of Apache country he would be Ezekiel Smith.

  Rafe went back to his conference with the tequila bottle while American voices rose steadily from the other side of the room. Through the haze of tobacco smoke, he made out several miners and a few lieutenants from the United States Army. Rafe could tell by the miners’ drawl that most of them came from the South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas, maybe. He deduced by the lieutenants’ stubborn reliance on reason that they were recent West Point graduates.

  “What do you mean I have to pay to send a letter?” The miner was outraged.

  “The government says so.” The lieutenant settled back in his chair and crossed his arms on his stomach, probably to bring attention to the brass buttons that were his badge of authority here.

  “What the hell kind of newfangled notion is that?” a second miner put in. “Person at t’other end always pays fer the letter.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “It’s tyranny!”

  The lieutenant tried to explain. “People refuse to accept their letters, and the post office loses money. Has to return them to the sender at government expense.”

  “I ain’t never re-fused a letter in my lifetime,” said a third miner.

  “Jesus, Rufus, you ain’t never got a letter in your lifetime.”