Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Lozen could hear the stories, too, and Rafe felt his cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. He had almost decided to retreat back to the rear of the column when He Makes Them Laugh wandered off to annoy Hat, Soft And Floppy. Rafe had a feeling that he intended to distract the agent from his lectures to Victorio.

  Clum had dogged Victorio for most of the trip. He talked about the advantages of the Warm Springs people uniting with their northern Apache brothers to form one strong, progressive, civilized nation. He outlined his plans for an Apache court at San Carlos with Victorio as one of the judges. Victorio kept his face neutral, but Rafe could imagine what he was thinking. Clum wanted to make Victorio a jailer in his own prison, and Victorio was plenty smart enough to know it.

  “Where is the big red horse?” Lozen asked.

  “Killed,” he said.

  They walked in a silence accented by the sound of the chestnut’s hoofbeats behind them and the two girls chattering together on his back. Rafe thought of Dead Shot, the White Mountain scout. He had taken a shine to one of the young Warm Springs women. He had been sharing his food with her and she accepted it, which, as Rafe understood the custom, meant she had taken a shine to him, too.

  She and Dead Shot were supposed to be enemies, but Rafe had seen the looks they gave each other. He wondered if he himself might ever see that look in Lozen’s eyes. He could make simple conversation in her language now, but simple conversation with a woman who enchanted him was as hard to carry on in Apache as it was in English or Spanish.

  Rafe knew how to say, “I love you,” Shil danohshoo. The words meant. “With me, you are nice.” He knew they would stick in his throat if he ever tried to say them, but he couldn’t help wondering what she would answer if he told her that. He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her to marry him, to be his companion for life.

  Lozen opened her medicine bag and took out the Indianhead penny that Rafe had given her. She looked pensive as she rubbed her thumb across the woman’s face, feeling the raised lines of her feather headdress. She held it up so he could see it. Grains of pollen clung to it and to her fingers.

  “Dreamer says these marks can talk,” she said.

  Rafe looked at the single word engraved there. “Yes, they can.”

  “What do the marks say?”

  “Liberty,” Rafe answered.

  Chapter 52

  THE DEVIL MADE HER DO IT

  In June of 1877, Cheis’s youngest son, Naiche, stood outside John Clum’s door. Naiche was seventeen. He had not received his warrior status yet. His name meant Mischievous and it fit him.

  He was a handsome boy. Some said he was handsomer than Cheis, but no one had ever taken him seriously, least of all his father. As he came each morning to stand motionless in the full glare of the sun while the agency routine bustled around him, he had acquired dignity.

  Everyone knew why he stood there. He was waiting for Hat, Soft And Floppy to tell him what had happened to his older brother, Taza. John Clum took Taza and nineteen other young men east with him to put on an exhibition of dance at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. From there they went to Washington. The other men came back, but Taza did not. Everyone believed the Pale Eyes had poisoned him just as they’d poisoned his father, Cheis. When Clum repeatedly refused Naiche’s request to talk to him, the young man took up his vigil.

  Victorio and the other Warm Springs men were hauling dirt, water, and straw to make adobe bricks for more buildings, so Lozen and her niece and sisters waited for the family’s rations. The line that started at the window where the food was distributed stretched the length of the office and warehouse and snaked around the corner. Three thousand people from various Apache subtribes had gathered for the sugar, coffee, cornmeal, and that white powdery flour that stuck to their fingers when they mixed it with water. Quarrels would almost certainly break out as tempers and old animosities flared up.

  Heat battered them like clubs. The air teemed with flies that crawled over the eyes of the infants in the cradleboards. Smaller children were assigned to wave them away, but the flies plagued them, too, landing on the mosquito bites that the little ones had scratched raw and bleeding. Lozen heard coughing up and down the line.

  They all wanted to receive their sacks of food and leave before twilight, when the mosquitoes arrived like a black fog. People fed green branches onto the fires then and sat in the smoke. Lozen spent a lot of time singing at the bedsides of those racked with malaria. Sometimes they got well. Sometimes they didn’t.

  The land assigned to the Warm Springs people was called The Flats. No trees grew there. No mountains offered cool, shaded canyons with streams flowing through them. Most nights when Lozen’s family gathered at the fire they talked about leaving, but they knew that if they abandoned the old ones here, they might not be able to come back for them for a long time.

  Lozen had never seen her brother so uncertain, so distraught. The longer they stayed, the harder it was to leave because there were fewer able-bodied people and more of those who would have to be left behind. Victorio confessed to Lozen that he made the wrong decision. They should have gone with Broken Foot Victorio was waiting for the young men to return from raiding. They would bring supplies to feed the women and children when they all fled this place. The wait became more difficult each day.

  Victorio felt as though he’d dug himself into a pit. The more he tried to free himself, the more sand fell in on him. Lozen saw him suffocating with doubt and worry. She remembered how enraged and humiliated Cheis had looked in the years after the white men betrayed him and hung his relatives up by ropes. Victorio had the same look.

  No one could see how the situation could get worse, and then it did. At the end of June, John Clum resigned in a blizzard of insults and accusations. Maybe he was angry because his superiors would not increase his salary in spite of the fact that he had assembled more than 4,500 Apaches here.

  Maybe he was mortified that his prize exhibits—Geronimo, Ponce, and Old Fatty—had slithered off into the night not long after he gave in to Eskiminzin’s threats of a mutiny and had the blacksmith remove their shackles. Maybe he was coming to realize the magnitude of his responsibility. Maybe the wailing of the women got on his nerves when he finally told Naiche that his brother had died of pneumonia in Wah-sin-ton and been buried with a fine ceremony.

  Maybe he was angry because his work here had not gained him the acclaim he thought he deserved. Maybe he was frustrated because nothing he could do would ever turn San Carlos into the tranquil Eden he envisioned. His charges all spoke the same language, and still the enterprise was a tower of Babel. Maybe the mosquitoes and the heat got to him, and the tarantulas, the scorpions, and the rattlers that moved into his new quarters before he did. And so he left.

  The man who replaced him made everyone appreciate Hat, Soft And Floppy. At least Clum had been honest. Soon after Henry Hart took over, shipments of tools, blankets, and food began to disappear. The weekly quota of flour lasted only three days. Coffee and sugar were cut by fifty percent. Hart issued hundreds of passes to the women to go looking for wild food, but they didn’t find much.

  Mines and sawmills sprang up inside the reservation borders. White ranchers started timbering and grazing their cattle there. Mormons settled on adjoining land. They diverted the river, destroying the irrigation systems that the Apaches had constructed with their bare hands. Some of the Warm Springs men went to the mines to look for work. Many of them bought whiskey there, and some were killed in ensuing fights.

  One sweltering night late in August of 1878, Hairy Foot appeared in the cloud of mosquito-repelling smoke belching from the fire of green wood. He dipped his tin cup into the pot of stew. He sat with Victorio and Mangas and He Makes Them Laugh. Lozen stood where she could watch him.

  Even given the fact that Hairy Foot must have strong magic, Lozen couldn’t explain the odd sensation in her chest whenever she saw him. She felt as though his spirit were tugging at hers. She recognized him as o
ne of those rare individuals who stood outside the boundaries of race and nationality, of language and beliefs. She also sensed what other women knew about Rafe, that he loved them not for what he could get from them, but for who they were.

  He gave out the coffee and tobacco he had brought, and the blankets. He distributed lengths of bright calico to each of the women and penny whistles to the children. They started blowing into them with all their might, but they stopped when they saw him reach into his pocket again. He took out a small, horseshoe-shaped metal object with a thin projection in the middle.

  He put it between his lips, vibrated the center piece with his finger, and blew a frisky tune that sounded as though he had a mouthful of cicadas. Lozen tapped out the rhythm with a stick on the stew pot, and Daughter’s children danced to it. Two-year-old Charlie Mangas stomped and whirled with a ferocity that made everyone laugh. Lozen had the feeling Hairy Foot knew that the music and the laughter were the best present he could bring them.

  Rafe played several more tunes before he put the mouth harp away, and the children curled up on the new blankets laid out where the smoke would roll over them. Rafe spoke his stumbling Apache in the low, diffident tones of the people around him. He had known for a long time that Apache, like its close relative Navajo, had to be the most difficult form of communication ever invented. Any white man who thought the Apaches were a simple, primitive people had never tried to learn their language.

  “They say that you are not receiving as much issue corn as you used to. They say you do not see as much coffee, sugar, or beef, either.”

  “Gunku,” Victorio said. “That’s true.”

  “And the flour is mostly chaff,” said Rafe.

  “Gunku!” She Moves Like Water agreed emphatically.

  They all leaned forward to listen as Rafe told them about the Tucson Ring. A group of businessmen there connived with Harry Hart, the new agent, to sell the goods to the mining camps and the local merchants. They used the talking wires to communicate with Hart. A corrupt government inspector was altering the reports to cover the thefts.

  “In English, Harry is another name for chidin, the devil,” he said.

  “He is well named,” said Victorio.

  “Dreamer told me that in English your name is Hairy,” added Lozen.

  “Do you think I’m a devil?”

  “Lashi.” She smiled. “Maybe.”

  “Harry Hart switches the good flour for the bad grown around here. He has men unload the inferior goods to distribute to you. Then they drive the wagons to a ranch to the south. The bad men meet them there and collect the better merchandise.”

  Rafe had seen the shipment’s invoice, and he told them what was on it—food, clothing, blankets, knives, axes, shoes, cloth, even a case of lucifers packed in small boxes of a hundred each. He told them what route the wagons would take and when they would be passing. He described the best place to hide along the way. He mentioned that White Mountain men would be driving. Harry Hart was so greedy he would rather order the people being robbed to deliver the goods than pay outsiders.

  When Rafe left, Victorio and Lozen looked at each other with a grim sort of glee. They understood Hairy Foot’s unspoken message as easily as Harry Hart read the decoded, staccato language of the talking wires.

  RAFE ARRIVED EARLY AT THE PLACE HE HAD DESCRIBED AS superb for an ambush. He led the string of four army mules he had borrowed. He had won the use of them playing cards with the captain of the small garrison at San Carlos. The captain knew Rafe was up to something, but he was so disgusted with Harry Hart he didn’t care. Rafe knew he could have used his own wagon team, but they were used to pulling, not packing. Mules were creatures of custom, and he didn’t want to risk delays trying to turn them into pack animals.

  Rafe found Victorio, Mangas, He Makes Them Laugh, and a couple spavined, sore-backed mules standing around the telegraph pole. The mules were grazing. The men were gazing skyward. Lozen, dressed in breechclout, moccasins, and belted army shirt, perched with her legs wrapped around the top of the pole. She cut the wire with her knife.

  “My heart is glad to see you, Hairy Foot,” she called to him.

  She eased down the pole, leaping the last ten feet to land lightly. Rafe noticed that she was wearing a necklace made from the spent casings of copper cartridges. She led one of the mules to where the wire dragged the ground. She jumped onto his back and stood up so she could cut off as much of the iron wire as she could reach.

  She held up the coil of it. “We can string beads on this and make bracelets for the feast of Broken Foot’s daughter.”

  The thought occurred to Rafe that Broken Foot and his lovely, petulant daughter had gone to live with the Mescaleros on the Tulerosa reserve a couple hundred miles away, but he knew that Lozen knew that. Distance seemed to mean little to Apaches.

  Rafe assessed the single weapon they had among them, Victorio’s Winchester. “Are you going to rob the wagon train with one gun?”

  “We will shame the White Mountain drivers,” said Victorio. “They know that they’re doing wrong, but I think maybe they aren’t men enough to defy Da’ighaazha Chidin, Hairy Devil.”

  Rafe knew they meant the Indian agent, Harry Hart, but this wasn’t the time to explain the difference between Harry and Hairy. Or Hart and heart, for that matter. “Do you have cartridges for the carbine?”

  “No.” Victorio’s smile was equal parts resignation and devil-may-care.

  They picketed the mules out of sight and took up positions in the rocks near the trail. Lozen sprinkled dust over Rafe and showed him how to make himself part of the landscape. As he lay near her, he tried to ignore the itches that tormented his nose, his ear, his right shoulder, left side, leg, foot, and most places in between, but he couldn’t have gotten the grin off his face if his life had depended on it. He had never, in all his reveries on those long rides between towns and forts, imagined he would be lurking on this side of an Apache ambush.

  When the wagons appeared, Rafe walked to the middle of the trail. He thought about pulling his bandana up to hide the lower part of his face, but that seemed ridiculous. He did feel like a highwayman, holding up his right hand and cradling his Sharps in the crook of his left arm. The first wagon jolted to a stop, as did the one that followed it. Victorio, Lozen, Mangas, and He Makes Them Laugh appeared from their hiding places. The drivers must have known they were going to be robbed, but the presence of a Pale Eyes made the transaction seem official.

  Rafe recognized the driver of the first wagon. “Big Mouth, how is your family?”

  Big Mouth answered warily. “My family is good, Hairy Foot, but my wife’s mother is sick. Maybe the di-yin will come to our camp and sing for her.” He pointed his chin at Lozen.

  Lozen gave him a look that indicated she would consider it.

  “Leave the wagons here,” said Victorio. “We will not hurt you.”

  The drivers climbed down and started back on foot. Their moccasins sent up puffs of dust with each step. Victorio had served as a magistrate on John Clum’s tribal court. He understood a little bit about the white men’s system of justice.

  He called after them. “If someone speaks against Hairy Foot in the Pale Eyes’ council, that man will regret it.” As for himself, he knew he would get into trouble, but he didn’t care. He surveyed the wagons, goods, and animals stalled in the middle of the road. “We must move these before someone comes.”

  “We can drive them to that arroyo.” Rafe looked up and down the empty road. “No one will see us there, and we can choose what’s useful and unload and repack. You should take only what’s rightfully yours and leave the wagon mules here.

  “Enjuh,” said Victorio.

  “Do you know how to drive a wagon and mule team?”

  “No.”

  “We can learn,” said Lozen.

  “I’m sure you can.”

  Rafe assigned He Makes Them Laugh the job of leading the mules. Victorio and Mangas were to take the second wagon, and
he would manage the first one. Lozen could come along with him. He showed Victorio where the brake was, told him how to hold the reins and what to do with them, and gave him a quick lesson in cracking a whip. He expected to handle the first team himself, but when he climbed aboard, Lozen was sitting in the driver’s seat with the reins in her hands.

  He shook his head in exasperation, reluctant to waste more time teaching her. As it turned out, it took precious little time. Lozen set the mules in motion as if she had been staging all her life.

  “So, Chidin Alch’ise, Little Devil …” She looked over at him. “How do you like being a wild Apache renegade?”

  He threw his head back and laughed. The two of them joked and chuckled all the way to the transfer point in the arroyo. Rafe couldn’t remember when he had felt this happy.

  WHEN HARRY HART CALLED RAFE INTO HIS OFFICE A FEW days later, he didn’t have to guess what the topic of conversation would be. Hart’s tantrum made John Clum’s look like tempests in a coffee pot. He screamed at Rafe that he would never work for the government again.

  “And when I prove that you are responsible for the theft of government goods, I will see that you rot in jail.”

  Rafe smiled and laid Victorio’s gift, the war club, on the desk. Hart gave it the look Rafe had come to expect and anticipate with pleasure. He stared at it as though it were a rattlesnake. He grew pale around his dingy collar.

  “If any more wagons lose their way and wander into your Tucson friends’ clutches …” Rafe gave him a wolf’s grin. “There will be hell to pay.”

  Rafe walked out, still wolfish about the gills. Hart’s threats didn’t bother him. In the past thirty years, he had outlasted scores of army officers, governors, commissioners, Indian agents, and bureaucrats of indeterminate stripe. He would outlast this one, too. As for Victorio and Lozen, now that they had supplies, only one lack prevented them from bolting like a spooked team with the bit in their teeth. They needed horses.