Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  RAFE’S LEG OF THE BUTTERFIELD ROUTE ENDED HERE AT the stone stage station at Siphon Canyon. The canyon was one of the many that formed the six-mile-long cleft dividing the Dos Cabezas and the Chiricahua mountains. Americans called the long defile Doubtful Pass. The Mexicans had named it Paso del Dado, the Pass of the Die. Die in this case meant the singular of dice. It carried the sense of risk, of chance, of taunting fate. What made it chancy were the Chiricahua Apaches who had preyed on travelers here for centuries.

  Covered with alkali dust, Rafe took a bucket to the spring. He stripped in the bitter February cold, and sluiced water over himself, dancing to keep warm. He dried off with some sacking and dressed; then he slept on the bunk in the back room for a few hours. When he woke up, he had time on his hands.

  The westbound stage wasn’t due for two days.

  He volunteered to help Jim Wallace deliver corn and salt beef to the troops bivouacked over the ridge and downslope from the station. Jim was the best driver Rafe had ever met. He was a soft-spoken sensible sort whose only noticeable point of pride was a large front tooth of gold. He had dark, wavy hair slicked back, and the lean, scarred body and hands of a man who had survived here for twenty years. He spoke a little Apache, and he often shared tobacco with Cochise. He was the one who had persuaded Cochise to supply wood for the station.

  Rafe also came along because Wallace had mentioned that Cochise would be here. Cochise had become famous among Indians, Anglos, and Mexicans alike. People said that a look or a word from him could subdue the most fractious of his followers.

  When Rafe and Wallace finished unloading the barrels at the cook tent, Patch set about clearing the area of rabbits while Rafe hunkered by the stream. He broke the thin crust of ice and scooped up the icy water. He looked glumly at the thirty or so tents set in neat rows. He should have been relieved to see the infantry arrive, but he wasn’t.

  In Rafe’s opinion, the neighborhood went into a steep decline when Second Lt. George Bascom arrived. Rafe had disliked him the instant he strode into the station to introduce himself to Wallace. In Bascom’s close-set blue eyes Rafe could see the cold fire of ambition, but no spark of intelligence. Wallace summed Bascom up when he observed, “The lieutenant’s got too much of not enough.”

  Bascom had not the wit to distinguish shades of good and evil. For him the world was neatly divided between those who agreed with him and were right, and those who didn’t and were wrong. Baby fat tautened his sleek, pink cheeks. He cultivated a wedge-shaped beard, maybe to disguise the fact that his Creator ran short on materials when He reached Bascom’s chin. The lieutenant reminded Rafe of a salamander lurking in river grass. He started referring to him as The Newt.

  The weather didn’t lighten Rafe’s mood. The ceiling of iron-gray clouds drooped with the weight of snow, making the sun’s light look like dusk rather than early afternoon. The surrounding peaks seemed to press closer in menace.

  Rafe assessed the ponies tethered outside Bascom’s tent. They had Apache saddles and bridles with the usual oddments of feathers and claws and beading attached. Even though he knew Lozen’s mare wouldn’t likely be among them, he looked for her anyway. He wondered what mischief she was up to.

  “I have a bad feeling about this soiree of Bascom’s.” Rafe climbed up to sit next to Wallace on the wagon seat.

  “The chief brought his wife and a couple kids, his brother, and two nephews with him.” Wallace handed Rafe a canteen of whiskey. The silky liquid warmed Rafe’s throat as it went down. “He wouldn’t be planning any trouble with his wife and little ones along.”

  “I’m not worried about Cochise.” Rafe felt an unease stir just above his belt buckle. “What do you reckon Bascom’s up to?”

  “He says he and his men are passing through, and he wanted to visit with the chief. They’ve probably finished dinner and are drinking coffee right about now. I told Bascom that the chief’s partial to coffee.”

  “Bascom’s not the hospitable type.”

  Wallace shrugged. “John Ward’s been raising holy Moses about the theft of his cattle and that kid. Maybe Ward wants the soldiers to fetch them, and Bascom thinks Cochise can help him do it.”

  “Ward doesn’t care about that boy.” Rafe’s unease festered into foreboding.

  “A kidnapping will set the army into action faster than a few missing steers. Hell, everybody around here has come up short in their steer inventory, thanks to the ’Pache and the Mex banditti. I imagine Ward’s sorry they didn’t kill Felix. That would have gotten the army’s attention even faster.”

  “Cochise had nothing to do with any of it. I saw Felix with the Indians who probably took the cattle. They were headed north, and they had on moccasins like those the White Mountain tribe wears. The boy didn’t look kidnapped to me.”

  “Maybe you should tell Bascom that.”

  “Reckon I will.” But Rafe could see that he was already too late. As though watching a runaway team careen toward a cliff’s edge, he saw the fifty-four soldiers of Bascom’s command load their rifles and take up positions around the tent. The soldiers tensed when they heard shouting from inside it.

  “That shavetail is doing something stupid,” Wallace said.

  A knife blade appeared through the tent wall and glided downward. A large, brown hand gripping a tin coffee mug pushed through the opening. Cochise leaped out just behind the mug. He dodged through the astonished soldiers and sprinted into the creosote bushes behind the tent. He zigzagged up the slope as though running fresh and well-hayed on a level straightaway. The soldiers opened fire, fifty rounds at least by Rafe’s reckoning. Cochise, who must have been fifty years old, never slowed down. The last Rafe saw of him, he still gripped the mug.

  “Hell-fire! You damned dunderheads!” With arms waving and eyes a-bulge, Bascom rushed out in a spray of spittal, oaths, and orders. “Hold these savages prisoner. Cochise’ll return that boy or pay dearly. By God, I’ll show the filthy heathen who’s in charge.”

  Wallace swore steadily under his breath. In a workmanlike manner, he attributed to Bascom the same lineage and wished him the same fate as his most intractable mules.

  Rafe blew out his breath in exasperation. The damned fool has dragged us all feet-first into the fire now, he thought.

  Chapter 24

  “SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY”

  A high stone wall extended out from the stage station and enclosed the stalls where the horses were kept. Each stall had a loophole at the end of it, and Rafe, Jim Wallace, and the station’s hostler peered through them at the Apaches outlined against the gunbarrel-gray sky at the crest of the hill.

  Bascom’s sergeant, John Mott, joined Rafe at his loophole. Mott was probably no more than thirty years old, about Rafe’s age, but he looked ten years more than that. Years in the sun had tanned his face and hands to the texture of saddle leather. Squint lines radiated out from his pale gray eyes. Rafe was relieved to see him among Bascom’s green troops.

  Bascom expected an attack from Cochise, so he had moved his camp to just outside the walls. Rafe could have spit and almost hit the lieutenant’s tent, the rip in its side sewn up with large, uneven stitches. It reminded Rafe of a wound that wouldn’t heal any time soon.

  Leave it to The Newt to locate his tipi the closest to the walls, Rafe thought.

  Cochise and his men had appeared on the hill an hour or so ago. At the sight of them, Bascom and his command had crowded inside the gate. Now the station’s yard teemed with soldiers and mules.

  “The Newt looks pale as a bleached shirt, don’t he?” said Wallace.

  Neither Rafe nor Wallace worried about their immediate safety. They knew that no sane Apache would attack a fortified position, not even if they outnumbered the defenders, which in this case they certainly did. But they could not convince the lieutenant of that. He rushed around, giving his men one order, then changing his mind on the next pass, and issuing a conflicting one.

  “The chief’s carrying a white flag,” Sergeant Mott cal
led out. “He wants to parley.”

  With the white cloth flapping in the cold wind, Cochise and three of his men walked down the hill toward the station. They stopped just out of rifle range and waited. The sergeant took a large white handkerchief from the front of his tunic and tied it onto a guidon pole.

  “The lieutenant must be shitting his breeches just about now,” Jim Wallace observed to Rafe.

  For a few moments Rafe thought Bascom would order his men to fire on Cochise and his delegation. Instead, he selected a corporal and two privates to go with him. He ignored Wallace, who spoke a little Apache, and Rafe and the sergeant, who were the only other ones with any knowledge of them. Rafe knew why. Bascom could not abide anyone who was more competent than he was. That narrowed his society to just about zero.

  Sergeant Mott spoke to Bascom before he handed him the white flag. Bascom cut him off with a wave of his hand, turned, and stalked away.

  “What did you say?” Wallace asked when the sergeant rejoined him and Rafe on the bench.

  “I told him if he wants to avoid a war bloodier than he can imagine, he must release the hostages. I told him he can rely on Cochise to keep his word and work to get Felix Ward and the cattle back. Was I right about the chief keeping his word?”

  Both Rafe and Jim Wallace nodded.

  “Bascom said he would give them their freedom when the boy is restored.” Sergeant Mott hitched up his belt and crossed his arms over his chest. “I reckon he thinks that even if Cochise didn’t snatch the lad himself, he can make all them brunets jig to his tune.”

  “Shit,” Wallace breathed softly. “’Pache don’t jig to nobody’s tune but their own.”

  From the blacksmith shop where the Apache prisoners were locked up, Cochise’s brother, Ox, began chanting in a high, loud voice. The soldiers crowded around the loopholes so they could watch the parley. Rafe, Wallace, the hostler, and Sergeant Mott had already selected holes with a view of Cochise’s face. Bascom’s face didn’t matter. For all his gold braid and bluster, he was helpless as well as powerless, and Rafe knew it. Wallace knew it. The sergeant knew it. The hostler knew it. Cochise was the one who would decide whether they lived or died here. The irony was that Cochise’s decision, and everyone’s lives, depended on what Bascom said and did.

  They could tell that the talks were going badly. Jim Wallace swore under his breath.

  “I can’t let him get us slaughtered.” Wallace unbuckled the belt that held his holster.

  “I’ll come with you,” Rafe said.

  “I’ll go, too.” The hostler took the pistol from the back of his trouser belt and hung it by its lanyard on the peg with Wallace’s.

  Rafe added his Colt revolvers to them, but he didn’t feel good about it. He studied the bushes and rocks and the shallow ravine that lay along the route to the hill. From here he could see almost to the bottom of the ravine. Nothing stirred there. Rafe remembered Wallace’s advice about driving a stage. “When you see Apaches, be careful. When you don’t see Apaches, be more careful.”

  The big iron hinges squealed as two soldiers pulled the doors ajar. Rafe scratched Patch’s ears and told her to wait for him. She sat with her ears cocked, eyes intent until the closing gate blocked her sight of him.

  Rafe, Jim, and the hostler started across the broken ground. They had passed the midpoint when nine half-naked warriors appeared over the rim of the ravine. They alarmed Rafe, but they didn’t surprise him. He should have known the Apaches had performed their invisibility act. He whirled and sprinted toward the high stone wall that seemed to have moved itself considerably farther away since he left it.

  Bullets whined past him from at least three directions. He heard Jim Wallace shout for help. Rafe didn’t slow down. If the Apaches had gotten Wallace, Rafe knew he could be of no use without his pistols.

  He had almost reached the wall when the lead ball hit him like the flat of a hand shoving against his left shoulder blade. The force of it knocked him off balance. He tripped on a rock and pitched forward. He felt the grittiness of the sand against his cheek and in his mouth, but no pain from his back, only a spreading numbness. He got halfway to his feet again when Bascom pelted past and knocked him down. Neither he nor the three soldiers with him offered to help.

  Rafe lay with eyes closed, the stones pressing into his cheek, and prepared to attempt verticality again. When a pair of hands grabbed him under the arms, he tried to fight them off. He wondered how he could kill himself before the Apaches did it in their own, leisurely way.

  Then he saw the iron tips of Sergeant Mott’s boots at nose level. He felt Patch licking his face. The sergeant hauled him to his feet and half supported him, half dragged him toward the gate.

  He saw the hostler make a run at the far end of the stone wall and scramble up it. A soldier’s head and shoulders popped up at the top of the wall, fired straight down into his face, and then disappeared. The hostler fell backwards and lay still. Rafe, Patch, and Sergeant Mott slipped through the gates before the soldiers slid the big bolt home.

  “Jim Wallace?” he asked.

  “The hostiles got him,” Mott said.

  Rafe swayed, leaned his back against the wall, realized that the contact hurt, a lot, and slid down it, anyway. His last thought, before he went unconscious from loss of blood, was bitter disappointment that the Apaches hadn’t killed George Bascom.

  SHE WORE ONLY A BREECHCLOUT AND MOONLIGHT. LIKE war paint, the moon’s silvery glow outlined the straight ridge of her nose and the curves of her high cheekbones. It lay in an arch across the top of each taut, upturned breast. Her hair floated in a midnight forest around her. Rafe ached to wander into that wilderness and never come out.

  “Lozen.” He didn’t know if he said it aloud or not. He did know that he was naked, unarmed, and defenseless, and he didn’t care.

  “She walks in beauty … .” He was surprised he remembered the poem. He couldn’t remember from which army officer he had learned it or who had written it. “She walks in beauty like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

  She smiled like a desert sunrise, bright and lovely, but with the certainty of misery and devilment to come, and more heat than a man could bear. He walked toward her, unable to stop himself even if he’d wanted to. She put a hand to her waist and the breechclout fell away.

  Dear Lord, he thought, she’s more beautiful than any woman has a right to be.

  He walked into the fortress of her arms and into the fragrance of smoke and sage and horses. He cupped her breasts in his palms, lowered his head and kissed them. She pulled him to her, and he put his arms around her. He kissed her neck and shoulder. Passion so addled him that the boundaries of his body vanished. He could not have said where her skin and his touched. His skin became her skin. When he kissed her, his mouth melded with her soft, full one. His bones became hers, his desire hers.

  When he entered her, her muscles tightened around him as though she held him in her strong hand, and squeezed with a slow, tantalizing rhythm. He thought the heat inside her would sear him. He thought the exaltation that flooded him would drain the life out of him. Then he stopped thinking.

  With unconcern, he saw her big knife flash in the moonlight. He felt the flat of its tip a cold triangle under his ear. He tilted his head back to expose his neck to her.

  The old Navajo song, Yeibichai, the “Prayer of the Night Chant,” echoed in his head.

  May it be beautiful before me.

  May it be beautiful behind me.

  May it be beautiful below me.

  May it be beautiful above me.

  May it be beautiful all around me.

  In beauty it is finished.

  He felt the blade slice like a caress across his throat while she smiled at him, bewitching, beguiling. He died and climaxed at the same time in a spate of warm blood and hot semen. Death was worth it.

  With a grunt he woke up, heart pounding and
body drenched in sweat despite the cold air. The cot’s blankets twisted around him in a clammy knot. His arm and shoulder throbbed with an ache that penetrated his bones. His cock throbbed, too, but it was already slumping from the perpendicular. He lay shaken and panting from the dream.

  “She walks in beauty like the night … .” He had dreamed of Lozen before, but never like this. He looked around in the pale light. He remembered that he was in the storeroom next to the station manager’s office. Lieutenant Bascom had established his quarters in the office, and Rafe could hear him and Sergeant Mott arguing there. Rafe could hear mules braying outside, too. From the pitch of their complaints he could tell what was bothering them.

  He tried to say, “The mules need water,” but his own mouth was dry as dust and all that came out was “water.” It didn’t matter. No one could have heard him over the argument, anyway.

  “That misguided fool, Michael Steck, has coddled the savages.” Bascom’s shouting reminded Rafe of the mules’ braying. “With the connivance of the government, he’s made pets of them while they murder and plunder at will. It’s time to teach them a lesson.”

  The sergeant spoke too low for Rafe to hear everything he said, but “Damn fool,” and “West Point jackass” did filter through the thin planks of the wall.

  “Corporal,” Bascom shrieked, “Arrest this man for insubordination.”

  Moments later the door of Rafe’s room slammed open, and four soldiers propelled John Mott through it. They locked manacles on his wrists and ankles and fastened the long chains to a beam overhead.

  They left, and the sergeant looked Rafe up and down. “Son, you’ve got the hoofmarks of the nightmare all over you.”

  “I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet, all right.” Rafe wondered if he had said anything aloud while he dreamed of Lozen, but he was too embarrassed to ask. He glanced toward the wall that separated them from Bascom. “What happened?”