
✯ Contents ✯
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Under the thatched roof ramada that ran the
length of the agency ofﬁce, Travisin slouched in a
canvas-backed chair, his boots propped against one
of the support posts. His gaze took in the sunbeaten, gray adobe buildings, all one-story structures, that rimmed the vacant quadrangle. It was a glaring, depressing scene of sun on rock, without a single shade tree or graceful feature to redeem the squat ugliness. There was not a living soul in sight.
Earlier that morning, his White Mountain Apache
charges had received their two-weeks' supply of
beef and ﬂour. By now they were milling about the
2
cook ﬁres in front of their wickiups, eating up a
two-weeks' ration in two days. Most of the Indians
had built their wickiups three miles farther up the Gila, where the ﬂat, dry land began to buckle into
rock-strewn hills. There the thin, sparse Gila cottonwoods grew taller and closer together and the mesquite and prickly pear thicker. And there was
the small game that sustained them when their government rations were consumed.
At the agency, Travisin lived alone. By actual
count there were forty-two Coyotero Apache
scouts along with the interpreter, Barney Fry, and
his wife, a Tonto woman, but as the ofﬁcers at Fort Thomas looked at it, he was living alone. There is
no question that to most young Eastern gentlemen
on frontier station, such an alien means of existence would have meant nothing more than a very slow way to die, with boredom reading the services.
But, of course, they were not Travisin.
✯ ✯ ✯
From Whipple Barracks, through San Carlos and
on down to Fort Huachuca, it went without argument that Eric Travisin was the best Apache campaigner in Arizona Territory. There was a time, of course, when this belief was not shared by all and
the question would pop up often, along the trail, in the barracks at Fort Thomas, or in a Globe barroom. Barney Fry's name would always come up Trail of the Apache
3
then---though most discounted him for his onequarter Apache blood. But that was a time in the past when Eric Travisin was still new; before the
sweltering sandrock Apache country had burned
and gouged his features, leaving his gaunt face
deep-chiseled and expressionless. That was while
he was learning that it took an Apache to catch an
Apache. So, for all practical purposes, he became
one. Barney Fry taught him everything he knew
about the Apache; then he began teaching Fry. He
relied on no one entirely, not even Fry. He followed his own judgment, a judgment that his fellow ofﬁcers looked upon as pure animal instinct.
And perhaps they were right. But Travisin understood the steps necessary to survival in an enemy element. They weren't included in Cook's "Cavalry Tactics": you learned them the hard way, and your being alive testiﬁed that you had learned
well. They said Travisin was more of an Apache
than the Apaches themselves. They said he was
cold-blooded, sometimes cruel. And they were uneasy in his presence; he had discarded his cotillion demeanor the ﬁrst year at Fort Thomas, and in its
place was the quiet, pulsing fury of an Apache war
dance.
This was easy enough for the inquisitive to understand. But there was another side to Eric Travisin.
For three years he had been acting as agent at the
Camp Gila subagency, charged with the health and
4
welfare of over two hundred White Mountain
Apaches. And in three years he had transformed
nomadic hostiles into peaceful agriculturalists. He was a dismounted cavalry ofﬁcer who sometimes
laid it on with the ﬂat of his saber, but he was completely honest. He understood them and took their side, and they respected him for it. It was better
than San Carlos.
That's why the conversation at the ofﬁcers' mess
at Fort Thomas, thirty miles southwest, so often
dwelled on him: he was a good Samaritan with a
Spencer in his hand. They just didn't understand
him. They didn't realize that actually he was following the line of least resistance. He was accepting the situation as it was and doing the best job with the means at hand. To Travisin it was that simple;
and fortunately he enjoyed it, both the ﬁghting and the pacifying. The fact that it made him a better
cavalryman never entered his mind. He had forgotten about promotions. By this time he was too much a part of the savage everyday existence of
Apache country. He looked at the harsh, rugged
surroundings and liked what he saw.
He shufﬂed his feet up and down the porch pole
and sank deeper into his camp chair. Suddenly in
his breast he felt the tenseness. His ears seemed to tingle and strain against an unnatural stillness, and immediately every muscle tightened. But as quickly
as the strange feeling came over him, he relaxed.
Trail of the Apache
5
He moved his head no more than two inches, and
from the corner of his eye saw the Apache crouched
on hands and knees at the corner of the ramada.
The Indian crept like an animal across the porch,
slowly and with his back arched. A pistol and a
knife were at his waist, but he carried no weapon in his hands. Travisin moved his right hand across his stomach and eased open the holster ﬂap. Now his
arms were folded across his chest, with his right
hand gripping the holstered pistol. He waited until the Apache was less than six feet away before he
wheeled from his chair and pushed the longbarreled revolving pistol into the astonished Apache's face.
Travisin grinned at the Apache and holstered the
handgun. "Maybe someday you'll do it."
The Indian grunted angrily. With victory almost
in his grasp he had failed again. Gatito, sergeant of Travisin's Apache scouts, was an old man, the best
tracker in the Army, and it cut his pride deeply that he was never able to win their wager. Between the
two men was an unusual bet of almost two years'
standing. If at any time, while not ofﬁcially occupied, the scout was able to steal up to the ofﬁcer and place his knife at Travisin's back, a bottle of whiskey was his. For such a prize the Indian would
gladly crawl through anything. He tried constantly, using every trick he knew, but the ofﬁcer was always ready. The result was a grumbling, thirsty In- 6
dian, but an ofﬁcer whose senses were razorsharp.
Travisin even practiced staying alive.
Gatito gave the report of the morning patrol and
then added, almost as an afterthought, "Chiricahua
come. Two miles away."
Travisin wheeled from the ofﬁce doorway.
"Where?"
Gatito spoke impassively. "Chiricahua come. He
come with troop from Fort."
Travisin considered the Apache's words in silence, squinting through the afternoon glare toward the wooden bridge across the Gila that was the end
of the trail from Thomas. They would come from
that direction. "Go get Fry immediately. And turn
out your boys."
✯
Chapter Two
Second Lieutenant William de Both, West Point's
newest contribution to the "Dandy 5th," had the
distinct feeling that he was entering a hostile camp as he led H troop across the wooden bridge and approached Camp Gila. As he drew nearer to the agency ofﬁce, the ﬁgures in front of it appeared no friendlier. Good God, were they all Indians? After
guarding the sixteen hostiles the thirty miles from Trail of the Apache
7
Fort Thomas, Lieutenant de Both had had enough
of Indians for a long time. Even with the H troopers riding four sides, he couldn't help glancing nervously back to the sixteen hostiles and expecting trouble to break out at any moment. After thirty
miles of this, he was hardly prepared to face the
gaunt, raw-boned Travisin and his sinister-looking
band of Apache scouts.
His fellow ofﬁcers back at Fort Thomas had eagerly informed de Both of the character of the formidable Captain Travisin. In fact, they painted a picture of him with bold, harsh strokes, watching
the young lieutenant's face intently to enjoy the
mixed emotions that showed so obviously. But even
with the exaggerated tales of the ofﬁcers' mess, de Both could not help learning that this unusual Indian agent was still the best army ofﬁcer on the frontier. Three months out of the Point, he was
only too eager to serve under the best.
Leading his troop across the square, he scanned
the ragged line of men in front of the ofﬁce and on the ramada. All were armed, and all stared at the
approaching column as if it were bringing cholera
instead of sixteen unarmed Indians. He halted the
column and dismounted in front of the tall, thin
man in the center. The lieutenant inspected the
man's faded blue chambray shirt and gray trousers,
and unconsciously adjusted his own blue jacket.
8
"My man, would you kindly inform the captain
that Lieutenant de Both is reporting? I shall present my orders to him." The lieutenant was brushing
trail dust from his sleeve as he spoke.
Travisin stood with hands on hips looking at de
Both. He shook his head faintly, without speaking,
and began to twist one end of his dragoon mustache. Then he nodded to the foremost of the Chiricahuas and turned to Barney Fry.
"Barney, that's Pillo, isn't it?"
"Ain't nobody else," the scout said matter-offactly. "And the skinny buck on the paint is Asesino, his son-in-law."
Travisin turned his attention to the bewildered
lieutenant. "Well, mister, ordinarily I'd play games with you for a while, but under the circumstances,
when you bring along company like that, we'd better get down to the business at hand without the monkeyshines. Fry, take care of our guests. Lieutenant, you come with me." He turned abruptly and entered the ofﬁce.
Inside, de Both pulled out a folded sheet of paper
and handed it to Travisin. The captain sat back,
propped his boots on the desk and read the orders
slowly. When he was through, he shook his head
and silently cursed the stupidity of men trying to
control a powder-keg situation two thousand miles
from the likely explosion. He read the orders again Trail of the Apache
9
to be certain that the content was as illogical as it seemed.
HEADQUARTERS, DEPARTMENT OF ARIZONA IN THE FIELD, FORT THOMAS, ARIZONA August 30, 1880
E. M. Travisin. Capt. 5th Cav. Reg.
Camp Gila Subagency
Camp Gila, Arizona
You are hereby directed, by order of the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, to place Pillo and the remnants of his band (numbering ﬁfteen) on the Camp Gila White Mountain reservation. The Bureau compliments you on the remarkable job you are doing and has conﬁdence that the sixteen hostile Chiricahuas, placed in your charge, will proﬁt by the example of their White Mountain brothers and become peaceful farmers.
The bearer, Second Lieutenant William de Both, is, as of this writing, assigned to Camp Gila as second in command. Take him under your wing, Eric; he's young, but I think he will make a good ofﬁcer.
EMON COLLIER
BRIGADIER GENERAL COMMANDING
He looked up at the lieutenant, who was gazing
about the bare room, taking in the table, the rolltop desk along the back wall, the riﬂe rack and three
10
straight chairs. De Both looked no more than
twenty-one or -two, pink-cheeked, neat, every inch
a West Point gentleman. But already, after only
three months on the frontier, his face was beginning to lose that expression of anticipated adventure, the young ofﬁcer's dream of winning fame and promotion in the ﬁeld. The thirty miles from
Fort Thomas alone presented the ﬁeld as something
he had not bargained for. To Travisin, it wasn't a
new story. He'd had younger ofﬁcers serve under
him before, and it always started the same way,
". . . take him under your wing . . . teach him
about the Apache." It was always the old campaigner teaching the recruit what it was all about.
To Eric Travisin, at twenty-eight, only seven
years out of the Point, it was bound to be amusing.
The cavalry mustache made him look older, but
that wasn't it. Travisin had been a veteran his ﬁrst year. It was something that he'd had even before he came West. It was that something that made him
stand out in any group of men. It was the strange
instinct that made him wheel and draw his handgun
when Gatito stole up behind him. It was a combination of many things, but not one of them did Travisin himself understand, even though they
made him the youngest captain in Arizona because
of it.
And now another one to watch him and not understand. He wondered how long de Both would last.
Trail of the Apache
11
He said, "Lieutenant, do you know why you've
been sent here?"
"No, sir." De Both brought himself to attention.
"I do not question my orders."
Travisin was faintly amused. "I'm sure you
don't, Lieutenant. I was referring to any rumors
you might have heard. . . . And relax."
De Both remained at attention. "I don't make it a
practice to repeat idle rumors that have no basis in fact."
Travisin felt his temper rise, but suppressed it
from long practice. It wasn't the way to get things done. He circled the desk and drew a chair up behind de Both. "Here, rest your legs." He placed a ﬁrm hand on the lieutenant's shoulder and half
forced him into the chair. "Mister, you and I are
going to spend a lot of time together. We'll be either in this room or out on the desert with nothing to
think about except what's in front of us. Conversation gets pretty thin after a while, and you might even make up things just to hear yourself talk.
You're the only other Regular Army man here, so
you can see it isn't going to be a parade-grounds
routine. I've been here for three years now, counting White Mountain Indians and making patrols.
Sometimes things get a bit hot; otherwise you just
sit around and watch the desert. I probably don't
look like much of an ofﬁcer to you. That doesn't
matter. You can keep up the spit and polish if you
12
want, but I'd advise you to relax and play the game without keeping the rule book open all the
time. . . . Now, would you mind telling me what in
hell the rumors are at Thomas?"
✯ ✯ ✯
De Both was surprised, and disturbed. He ﬁdgeted
in his chair, trying to feel ofﬁcial. "Well, sir, under the circumstances . . . Of course, as I said, there is no basis for its authenticity, but the word is that Crook is being transferred back to the Department
to lead an expedition to the border. They say that
he will probably ask for you. So I am being assigned here to replace you when the time comes.
This is, of course, only gossip that is circulating about."
"Do you believe it?"
"Sir, I don't even think about it."
Travisin said, "You mean you don't want to
think about it. Sitting by yourself at a Godforsaken Indian agency with almost two hundred and ﬁfty
White Mountains living across the street. Not to
mention the scouts." He paused and smiled at de
Both. "I don't know, Lieutenant, you might even
like it after a while."
"I accept my orders, Captain. My desires have
nothing to do with my orders."
But Travisin was not listening. Long strides took
Trail of the Apache
13
him to the doorway and he leaned out with a hand
against the door frame on each side.
"Fryyyyyyyyyyy! Hey, Fryyyy!"
✯ ✯ ✯
The men of H troop looked over to the ofﬁce as
they prepared to mount. Barney Fry left the sergeant and strode toward the agency ofﬁce. "Come in here, Barney."
The clatter of trotting horses beat across the
quadrangle as Fry stepped up on the porch and entered the ofﬁce. His short strides were slightly pigeon-toed and he held his head tilted down as if
he were self-conscious of his appearance. He
looked to be in his early twenties, but, like Travisin, his face was a hard, bronzed mask, matured beyond his age. When he took off his gray widebrimmed hat, thick, black hair clung close to his scalp, smeared with oily perspiration.
"What do you think, Barney?"
Fry leaned against the edge of the desk. "I think
probably the same thing you do. Those 'Paches
aren't goin' to stay long at Gila even if we'd give them all the beef critters in Arizona. You notice
there wasn't any women in the band?"
"Yes, I noticed," Travisin answered. "They'll
never learn, will they?" He looked at de Both. "You see, Lieutenant, the Bureau thinks that if they sepa- 14
rate them from their families for a while, the hostiles will become good little Indians and make plows out of their Spencers and grow corn to eat instead of drink. What would you do if some benevolent race snatched your women and children from you and sent you to a barren rock pile over a hundred miles away? And do you know why? For something you'd been doing for the past three hundred years. For that simple but enigmatic something that makes you an Apache and not a Navajo.
For that quirk of fate that makes you a tiger instead of a Persian cat. Mister, I've got over two hundred White Mountains here raising crops and eating
government beef. I can assure you that they're not
doing it by nature! And now they sent sixteen Chiricahuas! Sixteen men with the smell of gunpowder still strong in their nostrils and blood lust in their eyes." Travisin shook his head wearily. "And they
send them here without their women."
De Both cleared his throat before speaking.
"Well, frankly, Captain, I don't see what the problem is. Obviously, these hostiles have done wrong.
The natural consequence would be a punishment of
some sort. Why pamper them? They're not little
children."
"No, they're not little children. They're
Apaches," Travisin reﬂected. "You know, I used to
know an Indian up near Fort Apache by the name
of Skimitozin. He was an Arivaipa. One day he was
Trail of the Apache
15
sitting in the hut of a white friend of his, a miner, and they were eating supper together. Then, for no
reason at all, Skimitozin drew his handgun and
shot his friend through the head. Before they hung
him he said he did it to show his Arivaipa people
that they should never get too friendly with the
blancos. The Apache has never gotten a real break from the whites. So Skimitozin wanted to make
sure that his people never got to the point of expecting one, and relaxing. Mister, I'm here to kill Indians and keep Indians alive. It's a paradox---no
question about that---but I gave up rationalizing a
long time ago. Most Apaches have always lived a
life of violence. I'm not here primarily to convert them; but by the same token I have to be fair--- when they are fair to me."
De Both raised an objection. "I see nothing
wrong with our treatment of the Indians. As a matter of fact, I think we've gone out of our way to treat them decently." He recited the words as if he were reading from an ofﬁcial text.
Fry broke in. "Go up to San Carlos and spend a
week or two," he said. "Especially when the government beef contractors come around with their adjusted scales and each cow with a couple of barrels of Gila water in her. Watch how the 'Pache women try to cut each other up for a bloated cow
belly." Fry spoke slowly, without excitement.
Travisin said to the lieutenant, "Fry's not talking 16
about one or two incidents. He's talking about history. You were with Pillo all the way up from Thomas. Did you see his eyes? If you did, you saw
the whole story."
✯
Chapter Three
The early afternoon sun blazed heavily against
the adobe houses and vacant quadrangle. The air
was still, still and oppressive, and seemed to be
thickened by the ﬁerce, withering rays of the Arizona sun. To the east, the purplish blur of the Pinals showed hazily through the glare.
Travisin leaned loosely against a support post
under the brush ramada. His gray cotton shirt was
black with sweat in places, but he seemed unmindful of the heat. His sun-darkened face was impassive, as if asleep, but his eyes were only half closed in the shadow of his hat brim, squinting against the glare in the direction from which Fry would return.
Earlier that morning, the scout and six of his
Coyoteros had traveled upriver to inspect the tracts selected by Pillo and his band. The hostiles had
erected their wickiups without a murmur of complaint and seemed to have fallen into the alien routines of reservation life without any trouble; but it was their silence, their impassive acceptance of this Trail of the Apache
17
new life that bothered Travisin. For the two weeks
the hostiles had been at Camp Gila, Travisin's
scouts had been on the alert every minute of the
day. But nothing had happened. When Fry returned, he would know more.
De Both appeared in the ofﬁce door behind him.
"Not back yet?"
"No. He might have stopped to chin with some
of the White Mountain people. He's got a few
friends there," Travisin said. "Barney's got a little Apache blood in him, you know."
De Both was openly surprised. "He has? I didn't
know that!" He thought of the countless times he
had voiced his contempt for the Apaches in front of Fry. He felt uncomfortable and a little embarrassed now, though Fry had never once seemed to take it
as a personal affront. Travisin read the discomfort on his face. There was no sense in making it more
difﬁcult.
✯ ✯ ✯
"His mother was a half-breed," Travisin explained. "She married a miner and followed him all over the Territory while he dug holes in the ground.
Barney was born somewhere up in the Tonto country on one of his dad's claims. When he was about eight or nine his ma and dad were killed by some
Tontos and he was carried off and brought up in
the tribe. That's where he got his nose for scouting.
18
It's not just in his blood like some people think; he learned it, and he learned it from the best in the
business. Then, when he was about ﬁfteen, he came
back to the world of the whites. About that time
there was a campaign operating out of Fort Apache
against the Tontos. One day a patrol came across
the rancheria where Barney lived and took him
back to Fort Apache. All the warriors were out and
only the women and children were around. He remembered enough about the white man's life to want to go back to the Indians, but he knew too
much about the Apache's life for the Army to let
him go; so he's been a guide since that day. He was at Fort Thomas when I arrived there seven years
ago, and he's been with me ever since I've been here at Gila."
De Both was deep in thought. "But can you trust
him?" he asked. "After living with the Apaches for
so long."
"Can you trust the rest of the scouts? Can you
trust those rocks and mesquite clumps out yonder?" Travisin looked hard into the lieutenant's eyes. "Mister, you watch the rocks, the trees, the
men around you. You watch until your eyes ache,
and then you keep on watching. Because you'll always have that feeling that the minute you let down, you're done for. And if you don't have that
feeling, you're in the wrong business."
A little past four, Fry and his scouts rode in. He
Trail of the Apache
19
threw off and ran toward the agency ofﬁce. Travisin met him in the doorway. "They scoot, Barney?"
✯ ✯ ✯
Fry paused to catch his breath and wiped the
sweat from his face with a grimy, brown hand.
"It might be worse than that. When we got there
this morning only a few of Pillo's band were
around. I questioned them, but they kept trying to
change the subject and get us out of there. I thought they were actin' strange, talkin' more than usual,
and then it dawned on me. Gatito had spotted it
right away. They'd been drinkin' tizwin. You know
you got to drink a whoppin' lot of that stuff to really get drunk. I ﬁgure these boys ain't had much yet, cuz they were still too quiet. But the others
were probably off at the source of supply so we
rode out and tried to cut their sign. We tried every likely spot in the neighborhood until after noon,
and we still couldn't ﬁnd a trace of them."
Travisin considered the situation silently for a
moment. "They've probably been at it since they got here. Taking their time to pick a spot we wouldn't
ﬁnd right away. No wonder they've been so quiet."
Travisin had much to think about, for a drunken
Apache will do strange things. Bloody things. He
asked the scout, "What does Gatito think?"
Fry hesitated, and then said, "I don't like the way he was lickin' his lips while we were on the hunt."
20
Fry did not have to say more. Travisin knew him
well enough to know that the scout felt Gatito
could bear some extra attention. To de Both,
watching the scene, it was a new experience. The
captain and the quarter-breed scout talking like
brothers. Saying more with eyes and gestures than
with words. He looked from one to the other intently, then for the ﬁrst time noticed the young Apache standing next to Travisin. A moment ago
he had not been there. But there had not been a
sound or a footstep!
The young brave spoke swiftly in the Apache
tongue for almost a minute and then disappeared
around the corner of the ofﬁce. De Both could still see vividly the red calico cloth around thick, black hair, and his almost feminine features.
Fry and Travisin began to talk again, but de Both
interrupted.
"What in the name of heaven was that?"
Travisin grinned at the young ofﬁcer's astonishment. "I thought you knew Peaches. Forgot he hadn't been around for a while."
"Peaches!"
Travisin said, "Let's go inside."
They gathered around his table, lighted cigarettes, and Travisin went on. "I'd just as soon you didn't speak his name aloud around here. You see,
that young, gentle-looking Apache has one of the
toughest jobs on the reservation. He's an agency
Trail of the Apache
21
spy. Only Fry and I, and now you, know what he is.
Not even any of the scouts know. The Indians suspect that someone on their side is reporting to me, but they have no idea who it is. He's got a dangerous job, but it's necessary. If trouble ever breaks out, we have to be able to nip it in the bud. Peaches is the only way for us to determine where the bud is."
"May I ask what he told you just now?"
Travisin drew hard on his cigarette before replying. "He said that he knew much, but he would be back sometime before sunup tomorrow to tell what
he knew. He made one last point very emphatic. He
said, 'Watch Gatito!' "
✯ ✯ ✯
A rear room of the agency ofﬁce adobe served as
sleeping quarters for both of the ofﬁcers. Their cots were against opposite walls, lockers at the feet, and two large pine-board wardrobes, holding uniforms
and personal gear, were ﬂush with the wall running
along the heads of their bunks.
A full moon pointed its light through the window frame over de Both's bed, carpeted the plank ﬂooring with a delicate sheen, and reached as far as the gleaming upper portion of Travisin's body, motionless on the cot. One arm was beneath the gray blanket that reached just above his waist, the other was folded across his bare chest.
A ﬂoorboard creaked somewhere near. His eyes
22
opened at once and closed just as suddenly. Beneath the blanket his hand groped near his thigh and quietly covered the grip of his pistol. He opened his eyes slightly and glanced across the room. De Both
was dead asleep. The latch on the door leading to
the front ofﬁce rattled faintly, and then hinges
creaked as the door began to open. Travisin quietly drew his arm from beneath the blanket and leveled
the pistol at the doorway. His thumb closed on the
hammer and drew it back, and the click of the
cocking action was a sharp, metallic sound. The
opening-door motion stopped.
"Nantan, do not shoot." The words were just
above a whisper.
Travisin threw the blanket from his legs, swung
them to the ﬂoor and moved to the doorway without a sound. Peaches backed into the ofﬁce as he approached.
"Chiricahua leave."
"How long?"
"They go maybe ﬁve mile now. Gatito go with
them."
Travisin stepped back to the doorway and
slammed the butt of his pistol against the wooden
door. "Hey, mister, roll out!" De Both sat bolt upright. "Be ready to ride in a few minutes," Travisin said, and ran out of the ofﬁce toward Barney Fry's
adobe across the quadrangle.
In less than twenty minutes, thirteen riders
Trail of the Apache
23
streaked out of the quadrangle westward. Behind
them, orange light was just beginning to show
above the irregular outline of the Pinals. The morning was cool, but still, and the stillness held the promise of the blistering heat of the day to come.
The sun was only a little higher when Travisin
and his scouts rode up to four wickiups along the
bank of the Gila. Travisin halted the detail, but did not dismount. He sat motionless in the saddle, his
senses alert to the quiet. He said something in
Apache and one of the scouts threw off and cautiously entered the ﬁrst wickiup. He reappeared in an instant, shaking his head from side to side. In
the third hut, the scout remained longer than usual.
When he reappeared he was dragging an unconscious Indian by the legs.
Travisin said, "That one of them, Barney?"
Fry swung down from his pony and leaned over
the prostrate Indian, saying a few words in Apache
to the scout still holding the Indian's legs. "He's a Chiricahua, Captain. Dead drunk. Must have been
drinking for at least two days." He nodded his
head toward the Apache scout. "Ningun says
there's a jug inside with a little tizwin in it."
Travisin pointed to two of the scouts and then
swept his arm in the direction of the fourth wickiup. They kicked their ponies to a leaping start, dashed to the hut and gave it a quick inspection. In a minute they were back.
24
The scouts watched Travisin intently as he studied the situation. They knew what the signs meant.
They sat their ponies now with restless anticipation, ﬁngering their carbines, checking ammunition belts, holding in the small, wiry horses that also
seemed to be charged with the excitement of the
moment---for there is no love lost between the Coyotero and the Chiricahua. Eric Travisin knew as well as any of them what the sign meant: sixteen
drunken Apaches screaming through the countryside with blood in their eyes and a bad taste in their mouths. It was something that had to be stopped
before the Indians regained their senses. Now they
were loco Apaches, bloodthirsty, but a bit careless.
By the next day, unless stopped, they would again
be cold, patient guerrilla ﬁghters led by the master strategist, Pillo.
✯ ✯ ✯
From the direction of the agency a scout rode
into sight beating his pony to a whirlwind pace. He reined in abruptly and shouted something to Fry
through the dust cloud.
"We been sleepin', Captain. He says Gatito made
off with a dozen carbines and two hundred rounds
of forty-fours. Must have sneaked them out sometime last night."
In Travisin, the excitement of what lay ahead
was building up continually. Now it was beginning
Trail of the Apache
25
to break through his calm surface. "We're awake
now, Barney. I ﬁgure they'll either streak south for the Madres right away, or contact their people up
near Apache by dodging through the Basin and
then heading east for the reservation. I know if I
was going to hide out for a while, I'd sure want my wife along. Let's ﬁnd out which it is."
✯
Chapter Four
By midmorning Travisin's scouts had followed
the tracks of the hostiles to an elevated stretch of pines wedged tightly among bare, rolling hills.
They halted a few hundred yards from the wooded
area, in the open. Before them the land, dotted with mesquite and catclaw, climbed gradually to the pine plateau; and the sun-glare made shimmering waves,
hazy and ﬁlmy white, as they looked ahead to the
contrasting black of the pines. A shallow arroyo
cut its way down from the ridge past where the detail stood, ﬁnally ending at the banks of the Gila, twelve miles behind them. On both sides of the
crusted edges of the arroyo, the unshod tracks they had been following all morning moved straight
ahead.
Ningun, the Apache scout, rode up the arroyo a
hundred yards, circled and returned. He mumbled
26
only a few words to Fry, who glanced at the pine
ridge again before speaking.
"He says the tracks go all the way up. Ain't no
other place they could go."
"Does he think they're still up there?" Travisin
asked the question without taking his eyes from the ridge.
"He didn't say, but I know he don't think so."
Barney Fry pulled out a tobacco plug and bit off a
generous chew, mumbling, "And I don't either." He
moved the front of his open vest aside with a thumb and dropped the plug into the pocket of his shirt. "I ﬁgure it this way, Captain," he said. "They know
who's followin' 'em, and they know we ain't about
to get caught in a simple jackpot like that one up
yonder without ﬂushin' it out ﬁrst. So they ain't
goin' to waste their time settin' a trap that we won't fall right into."
"Sounds good, Barney, only there's one thing
that's been troubling me," Travisin said. "Notice
how clean the sign's been all the way? Not once
have they tried to throw us off the track---and
they've had more than one opportunity to at least
make it pretty tough. No Apache, no matter if he's
drunker than seven hundred dollars, is going to
leave a trail that plain---that is, unless he wants to."
He looked at the scout, suggesting a reply with his expression, and added, "Now why do you suppose
old Pillo would want us to follow him?"
Trail of the Apache
27
Fry pushed his hat from his forehead and passed
the back of his hand across his mouth. It was plain that the captain's words gave him something to
think about, but he had been riding with Travisin
too long to show surprise with the ofﬁcer's uncanny familiarity with what an Apache would do at a given time. He was never absolutely sure himself, but for some unexplainable reason Travisin's judgment was almost always right. And when dealing with an unknown quantity, the Apache, this judgment sometimes seemed to reach a superhuman level.
Fry was quiet, busy putting himself in Pillo's
place, but de Both spoke up at once. "I take it
you're suggesting that the Indians are not really
drunk. But what about that unconscious Indian
back at the reservation?" He asked the question as
if he were purposely trying to shoot holes in the
captain's theory.
"No, Lieutenant. I'm only saying what if," Travisin agreed, with a faint smile. "Could be one way or the other. I just want to impress you that we're not chasing Harvard sophomores across the Boston
Common. If you ever come up against a better general than Pillo, you can be sure of one thing---he'll be another Apache."
Though he was sure of Fry's and Ningun's judgment, Travisin sent scouts ahead to ﬂank the pine woods before taking his command through.
28
In another hour they were over the ridge, in the
open, descending noisily over the loose gravel that was strewn down the gradual slope that led to the
valley below. On level ground again, they followed
the tracks to the north, up the raw, rolling valley, ﬂat and straight from a distance; but as they traveled, the sandrock ground buckled and heaved into shallow crevices and ditches every few hundred
feet. The monotony of the bleak scene was interrupted only by the grotesque outlines of giant saguaro and low, thick mesquite clumps.
Even in this comparatively open ground, de Both
noticed that Travisin and all of the scouts rode halftensed in their saddles, their eyes sweeping the area to the front and to both sides, studying every rock or shrub clump large enough to conceal a man. It
was a vigilance that he himself was slowly acquiring just from noticing the others. Still he was more than willing to let the scouts do the watching. The damned stiﬂing heat and the dazzling glare were
enough for a white man to worry about. He
mopped his face continually, and every once in a
while pulled the white bandanna around his throat
up over his nose and mouth. But that caused the
heat to be even more smothering. He could feel the
Apache scouts laughing at him. How could they remain so damned cool-looking in this heat! With every step of the horses, the dust rose around him
and seemed to cling to his lungs until he would
Trail of the Apache
29
cough and cover his nose again with the kerchief.
Ahead, but slightly to the east, he studied the jagged, blue outline of a mountain range. The Sierra
Apaches. The purplish blue of the mountains and the soft blue of the cloudless sky were the only pleasant tones to redeem the ragged, wild look of the valley.
He pressed his heels into his horse's ﬂanks and
rode up abreast of Travisin. The climate and the
unyielding country were grinding de Both's nerves
raw; he wanted to scream at somebody, anybody.
"I sincerely hope you know where you're going,
Captain."
✯ ✯ ✯
Travisin ignored the sarcasm. "You'll feel better
after we camp this evening. First day's always the
toughest." He was silent for a few minutes, his head swinging in an arc studying the signs that did not
even exist to de Both, and then he added, "Those
mountains up ahead are the Sierra Apaches. Lot farther than they look. Before we pass them we're going to camp at a rancher's place. His name's Solomon, a really ﬁne old gentleman. I think you'll like him,
Bill." It was the ﬁrst time Travisin had used de Both's ﬁrst name. The lieutenant looked at him strangely.
✯ ✯ ✯
It was close to six o'clock when they reached the
road leading to Solomon's place. The road cut an
30
arc through the brush ﬂat and then passed through a grove of cottonwoods. From where they stood, they
could see the roof of the ranch house through the
clearing in the trees made by the road. The house
stood a few hundred yards the other side of the cottonwoods, and just to the right of it a few acres of pines edged toward the house from the foothills of
the Sierra Apaches towering to the east. Fry pointed to the wide path of trampled brush a hundred feet
to the left of the road they were following.
"There's one I wouldn't care to try to ﬁgure out.
Why didn't they take the road?"
Travisin was watching Ningun circle the cottonwoods and head back. "They're making it a bit too easy now," he replied idly.
Ningun made his report to Fry and pointed above
the cottonwoods in the direction of the pines. A
faint wisp of dark smoke curled skyward in a thin
line. Against the glare it was hardly noticeable.
"Know what that means?" Travisin asked. He
looked at no one in particular.
Fry answered, "I got an idea."
They dismounted in the cottonwoods and approached the clearing on foot. The ranch house, barn and corral behind it seemed deserted.
Travisin said, "Go take a look, Barney." Fry
beckoned to four of the Apache scouts and they followed him into the clearing. They walked across the open space toward the house slowly, all abreast.
Trail of the Apache
31
They made no attempt to conceal themselves by
crouching or hunching their shoulders---a natural
instinct, but futile precaution with no cover in
sight. They walked perfectly erect with their carbines out in front. Suddenly they all stopped and one of the scouts dropped to his hands and knees
and put his ear to the earth. He arose slowly, and
the others back at the cottonwoods saw them
watching the pines more closely as they approached
the house. Fry walked up to the log wall next to the front door and placed his ear to it. He made a motion with his right hand and three of the scouts disappeared around the corner of the house. Without hesitating, Fry approached the front door, kicked it open and darted into the dimness of the interior,
the fourth Apache scout behind him. In a few moments, Fry reappeared in the doorway and waved to the rest in the cottonwoods.
He was still in the doorway when Travisin
brought the others up. "Just the missus is inside"
was all he said.
Travisin, with de Both behind him, walked past
the scout into the dimly lit ranch house. The room
was a shambles, every piece of furniture and china
broken. But what checked their gaze was Mrs.
Solomon lying in the middle of the ﬂoor. Her clothes had been almost entirely ripped from her body and
the ﬂesh showing was gouged and slashed with knife
wounds. Her scalp had been torn from her head.
32
De Both stared at the dead woman with a frozen
gaze. Then the revulsion of it overcame him and he
half turned to escape into the fresh air outside. He checked himself, thinking then of Travisin, and
turned back to the room. The captain and the scout
studied the scene stoically; but beneath their impassive eyes, almost any kind of emotion could be present. He tried to show the same calm. A cavalry
ofﬁcer should be used to the sight of death. But this was a form of death de Both had not counted on.
He wheeled abruptly and left the room.
The next step was the pines. Travisin ordered the
horses put in the corral. In case of a ﬁght, they would be better off afoot; though he was sure that Pillo was hours away by now. They threaded through the
nearer, sparsely growing pines that gradually grew
taller and heavier as they advanced up the almost
unnoticeable grade. Soon the pines entwined with
junipers and thick clumps of brush so that they
could see no more than ﬁfty feet ahead into the dimness. They were far enough into the thicket so that they could no longer see the wisp of smoke, but now a strange odor took its place. The Coyotero scouts
sniffed the air and looked at Travisin.
✯ ✯ ✯
Fry said, "i'll send some of 'em ahead," and
without waiting for a reply called an order to
Ningun in the Apache tongue. As ﬁve of the scouts
Trail of the Apache
33
went on ahead, he said, "Let 'em do a little work
for their pay," and propped his carbine against a
pine. He eased his back against the same tree and
looked at Travisin.
"You know, that's a funny thing back there at the
cabin," Fry said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder. "That's only the second time in my life that I ever knew of a 'Pache scalpin' anybody."
"I was thinking about that myself," Travisin answered. "Then I remembered hearing once that Pillo was one of the few Apaches with Quana
Parker at Adobe Walls six years ago. Don't know
how Apaches got tied up with Commanches, but
some Commanche dog soldier might have taught
him the trick."
"Well," Fry reﬂected, picking up his carbine,
"that's about the only trick a 'Pache might be
taught."
Ningun appeared brieﬂy through the trees ahead
and waved his arm. They walked out to where he
stood. Fry and Travisin listened to Ningun speak
and then looked past his drooping shoulders to
where he pointed. The nauseating odor was almost
unbearable here. De Both tried to hold his breath as he followed the others into a small clearing. In
front of him, Travisin and the scout moved apart as they reached the open ground and de Both was
struck with a scene he was to remember to his dying day. He stared wide-eyed, swallowing repeatedly,
34
until he could no longer control the saliva rising in his throat, and he turned off the path to be sick.
Fry scraped a boot along the crumbly earth and
kicked sand onto the smoldering ﬁre. The smoke
rose heavy and thick for a few seconds, obscuring
the grotesque form that hung motionless over the
center of the small ﬁre; and then it died out completely, revealing the half-burned body of Solomon suspended head-down from the arc of three thin juniper poles that had been stuck into the ground a few feet apart and lashed together at the tops. The old man's head hung only three feet above the
smothered ashes of the ﬁre. His head and upper
portion of his body were burned beyond recognition, the black rawness creeping from this portion of his body upward to where his hands were tied
tightly to his thighs; there the blackness changed to livid red blisters. All of his clothing had been
burned away, but his boots still clung to his legs, squeezed to his ankles where the rawhide thongs
wound about them and reached above to the arch
of junipers. He was dead. But death had come
slowly.
"The poor old man." The words were simple,
but Travisin's voice cracked just faintly to tell
more. "The poor, poor old man."
Fry looked around the clearing slowly, thinking,
and then he said, "Bet he screamed for a bullet. Bet he screamed until his throat burst, and all the time Trail of the Apache
35
they'd just be dancin' around jabbin' him with their knives and laughin'." Fry stopped and looked at the captain.
Travisin stared at old Solomon without blinking,
his jaw muscles tightening and relaxing, his teeth
grinding against one another. Only once in a while
did Fry see him as the young man with feelings. It
was a strange sight, the man ﬁghting the boy; but
always the man would win and he would go on as
relentlessly as before, but with an added ruthlessness that had been sharpened by the emotional surge. Travisin never dealt in half measures. He felt sorrow for the old man cut to the bottom of his
stomach, and he swore to himself a revenge,
silently, though the fury of it pounded in his head.
✯
Chapter Five
They camped at Solomon's cabin that night, after burying the man and woman, and were up before dawn, in the saddle again on the trail of Pillo.
They rode more anxiously now. Caution was still
there, for that was instinct with Travisin and the
scouts, but every man in the small company could
feel an added eagerness, a gnawing urge to hound
Pillo's spoor to the end and bring about a violent
revenge.
36
De Both sensed it in himself and saw it easily in
the way the Apache scouts clutched their carbines
and ﬁngered the triggers almost nervously. He felt
the tightness rise in him and felt as if he must shriek to be relieved of the tension. Then he knew that it was the quickness of action mounting within him,
that charge placed in a man's breast when he has to go on to kill or be killed. He watched Travisin for a sign to follow, a way in which to react; but as before he saw only the impassive, sun-scarred mask, the almost indolent look of half-closed eyes searching the surroundings for an unfamiliar sign.
By early afternoon, the thrill of the chase was
draining from Second Lieutenant William de Both.
His legs ached from the long hours in the saddle,
and he gazed ahead, welcoming the green valley
stretching as far as the eye could see, twisting
among rocky hills, looking thick and cool. Over the next rise, they forded the Salt River, shallow and
motionless, just west of Cherry Creek, and continued toward the wild, rugged rock and greenery in the distance. De Both heard Fry mention that it was the southern edges of the Tonto Basin, but the
name meant little to him.
Toward sundown they were well into the wildness of the Basin. For de Both, the promise of a shady relief had turned into an even more tortuous
ride. Through thick, stabbing chapparal and over
steep, craggy mounds of rock they made their way.
Trail of the Apache
37
The trees were there, but they offered no solace;
they only urged a stronger caution. The sun was
falling fast when Travisin stopped the group on the shoulder of a grassy ridge. Below them the ground
fell gradually to the west, green and smooth, extending for a mile to a tangle of trees and brush that began to climb another low hill. Behind it,
three or four miles in the distance, the facing sun painted a last, brilliant yellow streak across the
jagged top of a mountain.
✯ ✯ ✯
Ningun jumped down from his pony as the others dismounted, and stared across the grass valley for a full minute or more. Then he spoke in English, pointing to the light-streaked mountain of rock. "There you ﬁnd Pillo."
Fry conversed with him in Apache for a while,
shooting an occasional question at one of the other scouts, and then said to Travisin, "They all agree
that's most likely where Pillo is. One of 'em says
Pillo used to have a rancheria up there. Pro'bly a
favorite spot of his." The scout sat down in the
grass and reached for his tobacco chew.
Travisin squatted next to him, Indian fashion,
and poked the ground idly with a short stick. "It's still following, Barney," he said. "He must have
known that at least one of our boys would have
heard of this place and remember it. He purposely
38
picked a place we'd be sure to come to, and on top
of that he made it double easy to ﬁnd."
"Well, you got to admit he'll be fair hard to root
out, sittin' on top of that hill. Maybe he just wanted a good advantage."
"He had advantages all along the way. Here's the
key, Barney. Did he ever once try to get away?"
Travisin sat back and watched the outline of the
mountain in the fading light. "Now why the devil
did he want to bring us here?" He spoke to himself
more than to anyone else.
Fry bit off a chew, packing it into his cheek with
his tongue. He mumbled, "You've had more luck
ﬁgurin' the 'Paches than anyone else. You tell me."
"I can't tell you anything, Barney, but I guess one thing's sure. We're going to play Pillo's game just a little longer." He looked up over Fry's shoulder toward the group of scouts. They sat in a semicircle.
All wore breechcloths, long moccasins rolled just
below the knees, and red calico bands around jetblack hair. Only their different-colored shirts distinguished them. Ningun wore a blue, cast-off army shirt. A leather belt studded with cartridges
crossed it over one shoulder. Travisin beckoned to
him. "Hey, Ningun. Aquí! "
The Apache squatted next to them silently as
Travisin began to draw a map in a bare portion of
ground with his stick. "Here's where we are and
here's that mountain yonder," he indicated, draw-Trail of the Apache 39
ing a circle in the earth. "Now you two get together and tell me what's up there and what's in between."
He handed the stick to Fry. "And talk fast; it's getting dark."
Not more than an hour later the sun was well behind the western rim of the Basin. The plan had been laid. Travisin and Ningun gave their revolving pistols a last inspection and strode off casually into the darkness of the valley. It struck de Both that
they might have been going for an after-dinner
stroll.
They kept to the shadows of the trees and rocks as
much as possible, Travisin a few steps behind the
Apache, who would never walk more than twenty
paces without stopping for what seemed like minutes. And then they would go on after the silence settled and began to sing in their ears. Travisin muttered under his breath at the full moon that splashed its soft light on open areas they had to cross. Ningun
would walk slowly to the thinnest reaches of the
shadows and then dart across the strips of moonlight. For a few seconds he would be only a dark blur in the moonlight and then would disappear into the
next shadow. Travisin was never more than ten paces behind him. Soon they were out of the valley ascending the pine-dotted hill. The sand was soft and loose underfoot, mufﬂing their footsteps, but they went on slowly, making sure of each step. In the silence, a dislodged stone would be like a trumpet blast.
40
On the crest of the hill, Travisin looked back
across the valley. The shadowy bulk of the ridge
they had left earlier showed in the moonlight, but
there was no sign of life on the shoulder. He had
not expected to see any, but there was always the
young ofﬁcer. It took more than one patrol to learn about survival in Apache country.
✯ ✯ ✯
They made their way down the side of the slope
into a rugged country of twisting rock formations
and wild clumps of desert growth. The mountain
loomed much closer now, a gigantic patch of soft
gray streaking down from its peak where the
moonlight pressed against it. At ﬁrst, they progressed much slower than before, for the irregular ground rose and fell away without warning;
grotesque desert trees and scattered boulders limited their vision to never more than ﬁfty feet ahead.
Though at a slower pace, Ningun went ahead with
an assurance that he knew where he was going.
Soon they reached a level, bare stretch that
seemed to extend into the darkness without end.
Ningun changed his direction to the right for a
good ﬁve hundred yards, and then turned back toward the mountain and the bare expanse of desert leading toward it. He beckoned to Travisin and slid down the crumbly bank of an arroyo that led out
into the desert. In ﬁve months it would be a rush-Trail of the Apache 41
ing stream, carrying the rain that washed down
from the mountain. Now it was a dark path offering a stingy protection up to the door of Pillo's stronghold.
They followed the erratic, weaving course of the
arroyo until it turned sharply, as the ground began to rise, and passed out of sight around the southern base of the mountain. The top of the mountain still lay almost a mile above them---up a gradual slope
at ﬁrst, dotted with small trees, then to rougher
ground. The last few hundred yards climbed tortuously over steep jagged rock to the mesa above.
Ningun scurried out of the arroyo and disappeared into a small clump of brush a dozen yards away. In a moment his head appeared, and Travisin
followed. They crept more cautiously now from
cover to cover. A low, mournful sound cut the stillness. Both stopped dead. Travisin waited for Ningun to move, but he remained stone-still for almost ﬁve minutes. No sound followed. Ningun shook his head and whispered, "Night bird."
✯ ✯ ✯
He led on, not straight up, but almost parallel
with the base of the mountain, climbing gradually
all the time. They had almost reached the steeper
grade when the Apache pointed ahead to a black
slash that cut into the mountain. Going closer,
Travisin made out a narrow canyon that reached
42
into the mountain on an upgrade. It was gouged
sharply into the side of the mountain and extended
crookedly down the slight grade to the desert below. Ahead, it made a bend in the darkness and was lost to sight. They climbed along the rim of the
canyon for a few minutes while Travisin studied its course and depth, then they doubled back, climbing
steadily up the mountain. A hundred yards further
on, the Apache gave Travisin a sign and disappeared into the darkness. He waited for almost twenty minutes, toward the end beginning to wonder about the Indian, and then he looked to the side and saw Ningun approaching only a few feet away.
The Apache pressed one ﬁnger to his lips, then
whispered to the captain. Travisin nodded and followed him, creeping slowly up the rocky incline above. They reached a wide ledge, Ningun leading
along it to the left before climbing again over a
shoulder-high hump that stretched into a long, ﬂat
piece of ground. Two hundred yards to the right,
the mountain rose higher to a craggy peak, sharp
and jagged. Nothing would be up there. Travisin
and Ningun were on the mesa. Not far away they
heard a pony sneeze.
On this part of the mesa the grass was tall. They
crawled along, a foot at a time, toward the sound of the pony. The grass made a slight, stirring noise as they crawled through it, but at that height it could easily be the wind. Every few feet they would sink
Trail of the Apache
43
to their stomachs and lie ﬂat in the grass for a matter of minutes, and then go on, extending a hand slowly to a ﬁrm portion of ground before dragging
up the legs just as slowly. In this way they covered a portion of the mesa that extended to a scattered
line of small boulders. The occasional snort of a
pony seemed to come from less than a stone's
throw away.
Travisin raised his head gradually an inch at a
time until he could look between two of the rocks.
From there the ground dipped slightly into a shallow pocket, descending from four sides to form a natural barricade. As he peered over the rocks, the moon passed behind a cloud and he could make
out only the dying embers of a cook ﬁre in the
middle of the area. As the cloud moved on, the
moon began to reappear gradually, the soft light
crawling over slowly from the right, ﬁrst illuminating the pony herd and then extending toward the center of the pocket. In a few seconds the entire
camp area was bathed in the light. Travisin felt a
weight drop through his breast as he counted
sixty-three Chiricahuas.
The amazement of it held his gaze between the
two rocks for a longer time than he realized. He
jerked his head back quickly and looked at Ningun
who had been spying the camp from a similar concealment. As he looked at Ningun he realized that the Apache understood now, just as he did, why
44
Pillo had left such an obvious trail. But this was not the place to discuss it.
Making their way back to the outer edge of the
mesa seemed to take even longer, though actually
they snaked through the tall grass at a faster pace than before. They were seasoned enough to retain
their calm caution, but now time was even more
important, if they were to cope with Pillo. In less than two hours the sun would be present to create
new problems. At the edge of the mesa Travisin,
still crouched, peered cautiously to the ledge below, and then past it, determining the quickest route that would lead them to their planned rendezvous with
Fry and the others.
Without speaking, he nudged Ningun and
pointed a direction diagonally down the mountainside. The scout rose to his feet silently and placed himself in position to jump to the ledge below.
Travisin turned his head for a last look in the direction of the hostile camp. As he did so, he heard a dull thud and an agonizing grunt escape from the
scout. He wheeled, instinctively drawing his pistol, and saw Ningun go backward over the edge, an arrow shaft protruding from his chest.
✯ ✯ ✯
Travisin was up and hurling himself at the ledge in one motion. It happened so fast that the Apache
aiming his bow on the ledge below was just a blur,
Trail of the Apache
45
but he heard the arrow whine overhead as he
landed on the sprawled form of Ningun and was
projected off balance toward the Apache a few feet
away. The Apache hurled his bow aside with a
piercing shriek and went for a knife at his waist just as Travisin brought his pistol up. In the closeness, the front sight caught in the Apache's waistband on the upward swing, and the barrel was pressing into
his stomach when he pulled the trigger. The Indian
screamed again and staggered back off the ledge.
Travisin hesitated a second, searching the mountainside for the best escape, but it was too late. He heard the yelp at the same time he felt the heavy
blow at the back of his skull. He heard the wind
rush through his ears and saw the orange ﬂash sear
across his eyes, and then nothing.
✯
Chapter Six
Pillo waited until the ofﬁcer opened his eyes and
started to prop himself up on his elbows. Then he
kicked Travisin in the temple with the side of his
moccasined foot. The Indians howled with laughter
as Travisin sprawled on his back, shook his head
and attempted to rise again. Pillo caught him on the shoulder this time, but still with enough force to
slam the ofﬁcer back against the ground. The other
46
Apaches closed in, a few of them catching Travisin
about the head and shoulders with vicious kicks,
before Pillo stepped close to Travisin and held his hands in the air. He chattered for some time in
Apache, raising and lowering his voice, and at the
end they all stepped back; Pillo was still chief,
though wizened and scarred with age. Travisin
knew enough of the tongue to know that he was being saved for something else. He thought of old Solomon.
Two of the warriors pulled him to his feet and
half-dragged him to the center of the rancheria.
Most of the Apaches were stripped to breechcloths,
streaks of paint on their chests contrasting with the dinginess of their dirt-smudged bodies. They stood
about him, silent now, their dark eyes burning with anticipation of what was to come. Asesino, Pillo's
son-in-law, walked up to within a foot of the captain, stared at him momentarily and then spat full in his face. Asesino's lips were curling into laughter when Travisin punched him in the mouth and sent
him sprawling at the feet of the warriors.
✯ ✯ ✯
He rose slowly, reaching for his knife, but Pillo
again intervened, speaking harshly to his son-inlaw. Pillo was the statesman, the general, not a rowdy guerrilla leader. There would be time for
blood, but now he must tell this upstart white
Trail of the Apache
47
soldier what the situation was. That it was the
Apache's turn.
He began with the usual formality of explaining
the Apache position, but went back farther than
Cochise and Mangas Coloradas, both in his own
lifetime, to list his complaints against the white
man. The Apache has no traditional history to fall
back on, but Pillo spoke long enough about the last ten years to compare with any plains Indian's war
chant covering generations. As he spoke, the other
Apaches would grumble or howl, but did not take
their eyes from Travisin. The captain stared back
at them insolently, his gaze going from one to the
next, never dropping his eyes. But he noted more
than scowling faces. He saw that though lookouts
were posted on the eastern edge of the mesa, the
direction from which he and Ningun had come
hours before, the western side, was empty of any
Apaches.
Pillo was ﬁnishing with background now, and
becoming more personal. He spoke in a mixture of
Spanish and English, relying on Apache when an
emphatic point had to be made. He spoke of promises made and broken by the white man. He spoke of Crook, whom the Apache trusted, but who was
gone now.
"Look around, white soldier, you see many Tinneh here, but you will not live to see the many more that will come. Soon will come Jicarillas, Tontos
48
and many Mescaleros, and the white men will be
driven to the north." As he spoke he pushed his
open shirt aside and scratched his stomach.
Travisin saw the two animal teeth hanging from
his neck by a leather string. It was then that the idea started to form in his mind. It was rash, something he would have laughed at in a cooler moment; but
he glanced at the ﬁre that meant torture. He looked across it and saw Gatito. There was the answer!
The animal teeth and Gatito.
"Pillo speaks with large mouth, but only wind
comes out," Travisin said suddenly, feeling conﬁdence rise at the boldness of his words. "You speak of many things that will happen, but they are all
lies, for before any Tinneh come I shall drag you and your people back to the reservation, where you
will all be punished."
✯ ✯ ✯
Pillo started to howl with laughter, but was cut
short by Travisin. "Hold your tongue, old man! I
do not speak with the wind. U-sen Himself sent me.
He knows what your medicine is." Travisin paused
for emphasis. "And I am that medicine!"
Pillo's lips formed laughter, but the sound was
not there. The white soldier spoke of his medicine.
"All your people know that your medicine is the
gray wolf who protects you, because U-sen has always made Himself known through the gray wolf Trail of the Apache
49
to guard you from evil. I tell you, old man, if you or any warrior lays a hand on me as I leave here, you
will be struck dead by U-sen's arrow, the lightning stroke. If you do not believe me, touch me!"
Pillo was unnerved. An Apache's medicine is the
most important part of his existence. Not something to be tampered with. Travisin addressed Pillo again, turning toward Gatito.
"If Pillo does not believe, let him ask Gatito if I do not have power from U-sen. Ask Gatito, who
was the best stalker in the Army, if he was ever able to even touch me, though he tried many times. Ask
him if I am not the wolf."
The renegade scout looked at Travisin wide-eyed.
He had never thought of this before, but it must be true! He remembered the dozens of times he had
tried to win his bet with the captain. Each time he had been but a few feet away, when the captain had
laughed and turned on him. The thought swept
through his mind and was given support by his
primitive superstitions and instincts. Pillo and the others watched him and they saw that he believed.
Travisin saw, and exhaled slowly through clenched
teeth.
He turned from Pillo and walked toward the
western rim of the mesa without another word. It
had to be bold or not at all. Apaches in his way fell back quickly as he walked through the circle and out of the rancheria. His strides were long but unhur- 50
ried as he made his way through the tall grass, looking straight ahead of him and never once behind.
The ﬂesh on the back of his neck tingled and he
hunched his shoulders slightly as if expecting at any moment to feel the smash of a bullet or an arrow.
For the hundred yards he walked with this uncertainty, the spring in him winding, tightening to catapult him forward into a driving sprint. But he paced off the yards calmly, ﬁghting back the urge
to bolt. Nearing the mesa rim his neck muscles uncoiled, and he took a deep breath of the thin air.
There on the western side, the mesa edge slanted,
without an abrupt drop, into the irregular fall of
the mountainside. A path stretched from the mesa
diagonally down the side to be lost among rocks
and small rises that twisted the path right and left down the long slope.
Travisin was only a few feet from the path when
the Apache loomed in front of him coming up the
trail. Though many things raced through his mind,
he stopped dead only a split second before throwing himself at the Apache. They closed, chest to chest, and Travisin could smell the rankness of his body as they went over the rim and rolled down the
path to land heavily against a tree stump. Travisin lost his hold on the Indian but landed on top clawing for his throat. A saber-sharp pain cut through his back and his nostrils ﬁlled with dust and sweat-Trail of the Apache 51
smell. The Apache's face was a straining blur below him, the neck muscles stretching like steel cords.
He pulled one hand from the Apache's throat,
clawed up a rock the size of his ﬁst and brought it down in the Indian's face in one sweeping motion,
grinding through bone and ﬂesh to drive the Indian's scream back down his throat.
As he rose to run down the path, the carbine shot
ricocheted off the mesa rim above him. His medicine was broken.
✯
Chapter Seven
An hour before dawn Fry had ﬁnished spotting
his scouts along one side of the narrow canyon that gouged into the shoulder of Pillo's mountain
stronghold. One scout was a mile behind with the
mounts; the others, concealed among the rocks and
brush that climbed the canyon wall, were playing
their favorite game. An Apache will squat behind a
bush motionless all day to take just one shot at an enemy. Here was the promise of a bountiful harvest. Each man was his own troop, his own company, each knowing how to ﬁght the Apache best, for he is an Apache.
They were to meet Travisin and Ningun there at
52
dawn and wait. Wait and watch, under the assumption that sooner or later Pillo would lead his band down from the mountain. The logical trail was
through the canyon. And the logical place for a jackpot was here where the canyon narrowed to a deﬁle before erupting out to the base of the mountain.
De Both crouched near Fry, watching him
closely, studying his easy calm, hoping that the contagion of his indifference would sweep over him and throttle the gnawing fear in his belly. But de
Both was an honest man, and his fear was an honest fear. He was just young. His knees trembled not so much at the thought of the coming engagement,
his ﬁrst, but at the question: Would he do the right thing? What would his reaction be? He knew it
would make or break him.
And then, before he could prepare himself, it had
begun. Two, three, four carbine shots screamed
through the canyon, up beyond their sight. At the
same time, there was a blur of motion on the opposite canyon wall not a hundred yards away and the Apache came into sight. He leaped from boulder to
rock down the steep wall of the canyon until he
was on level ground. He gazed for a few seconds in
the direction from which the shots had come, then
crossed the canyon ﬂoor at a trot and started to
scale the other wall from which he would have a
better command of the extending deﬁle. He stopped
and crouched behind a rock not twenty feet below
Trail of the Apache
53
de Both's position. Then he turned and began to
climb again.
✯ ✯ ✯
Often when you haven't time to think, you're
better off, your instinct takes over and your body
follows through. De Both pressed against the boulder in front of him feeling the coolness of it on his cheek, pushing his knees tight against the ground.
He heard the loose earth crumble under the
Apache's moccasins as he neared the rock. He
heard the Indian's hand pat against the smooth surface of it as he reached for support. And as his heart hammered in his chest the urge to run made
his knees quiver and his boot moved with a spasmodic scrape. It cut the stillness like a knife dragged across an emery stone, and it shot de Both
to his feet to look full into the face of the Apache.
Asesino tried to bring his carbine up, but he was
too late. De Both's arms shot across the narrow
rock between them and his ﬁngers dug into the
Apache's neck. Asesino fell back, pushing his carbine lengthwise against the blue jacket with a force that dragged the ofﬁcer over the rock on top of
him, and they writhed on the slope, their heads
pointing to the canyon ﬂoor. The Indian tried to
yell, but ﬁngers, bone-white with pressure, gouged
vocal cords and only a gurgling squeak passed agonized lips. His arms thrashed wildly, tore at the 54
back of the blue jacket and a hand crawled downward to unexpectedly clutch the bone handle of the knife. Light ﬂashed on the blade as it rose in the air and plunged into the straining blue cloth.
✯ ✯ ✯
There was a gasp, an air-sucking moan. De Both
rolled from the Apache with his eyes stretched open to see Fry's boot crush against the Indian's cheekbone. His eyes closed then and he felt the burning between his shoulder blades. He felt Fry's hands
tighten at his armpits to pull him back up the slope behind the rock. The same hands tore shirt and tunic to the collar and then gently untied the grimy neckerchief to pad it against the wound.
"You ain't bad hurt, mister. You didn't leave
enough strength in him to do a good job." And his
heavy tobacco breath brushed against the ofﬁcer's
cheek and made him turn his head.
"I feel all right. But . . . what about the blood?"
"I'll ﬁx you up later, mister. No time now. The
captain's put in an appearance." He jerked a thumb
over his shoulder.
Far down the canyon a lone ﬁgure ran, his arms
pumping, his head thrown back, mouth sucking in
air. It was a long, easy lope paced to last miles without let-up. It was the pace of a man who ran, but knew what he was doing. Death was behind, but
Trail of the Apache
55
the trail was long. As he came nearer to the scouts'
positions, Fry raised slightly and gave a low, shrill whistle, then cut it off abruptly. Travisin glanced up the canyon slope without slacking his pace and
passed into the shadows of the deﬁle just as the
Apaches trickled from the rocks three hundred
yards up the canyon. They saw him pass into the
narrowness as they swept onto the canyon ﬂoor,
over ﬁfty strong, screaming down the passage like a cloud of vampires beating from a cavern. Their
yells screeched against the canyon walls and
whiplashed back and forth in the narrowness.
Fry sighted down his Remington-Hepburn waiting for the hostiles to come abreast. He turned his head slightly and cut a stream of tobacco into the
sand. "Captain was sure right about their sign.
They was pavin' us a road clean to hell. Have to
ﬁnd out sometime where they all come from." He
squinted down the short barrel, his ﬁnger taking in the slack on the trigger. "In about one second you
can make all the noise you want." The barrel lifted slightly with the explosion and a racing Apache
was knocked from his feet. A split second later,
nine more carbines blasted into the canyon bottom.
Fry was on his feet after the ﬁrst shot, pumping
bullets into the milling mass of brown bodies as
fast as he could squeeze the trigger. The hostiles
had ﬂoundered at the ﬁrst shot, tripping, knocking
56
each other down in an effort to reach safety, but
they didn't know where to turn. They were caught
in their own kind of trap. They screamed, and
danced about frantically. A few tried to rush up the slope into the mouth of the murderous ﬁre from the
scouts, but they were cut down at once. Others
tried to scale the opposite wall, but the steep slope was slow going and they were picked off easily.
They dashed about in a circle ﬁring wildly at the
canyon wall, wasting their ammunition on small
puffs of smoke that rose above the rocks and brush
clumps. And they kept dropping, one at a time.
Five shots in succession, two, then one. The last
bullet scream died away up-canyon. There was the
beginning of silence, but almost immediately the air was pierced with a new sound. Throats shrieked
again, but with a vigor, with a lust. It was not the agonized scream of the terriﬁed Chiricahua, but
the battle yell of the Coyotero scout as he hurled
himself down the slope into the enemy. They had
earned their army pay; now it was time for personal vengeance.
Half of the hostiles threw their arms into the air
as the scouts swarmed into the open, but they came
on with knives and gun stocks raised. Savage closed with savage in a grinding melee of thrashing arms
and legs in thick dust, the cornered animal, made
more ferocious by his fear, battling the hunter who Trail of the Apache
57
had tasted blood. They came back with their knives
dripping, their carbine stocks shattered.
✯ ✯ ✯
It took two days longer to return to the little subagency on the banks of the Gila, because it is slower travel with wounded men and sixteen Chiricahua hostiles whose legs are roped under the horses' bellies by day and whose hands are lashed
to trees by night. Travisin led and was silent.
De Both held himself tense against the searing
pain that shot up between his shoulder blades. But
oddly enough, he did not really mind the ride
home. He looked at the line of sixteen hostiles and felt nothing. No hate. No pity. Slowly it came upon him that it was indifference, and he moved his
stained hat to a cockier angle. Boston could be a
million miles away and he could be at the end of the earth, but de Both didn't particularly give a damn.
He knew he was a man.
Fry chewed tobacco while his listless eyes swept
the ground for a sign. That's what he was paid for.
It kept running through his mind that it was an awful funny thing to go out after sixteen hostiles, meet sixty and still come back with sixteen. Have to tell that one at Lon Scorey's in Globe.
Pillo rode with his chin on his bony chest. He
was much older, and the throbbing hole in his thigh 58
didn't help him, either. He was beginning to smell
the greenness of decay.
On the afternoon of the fourth day they rode
slowly into the quadrangle at Gila. Travisin looked about. Nothing had changed. For a moment he had
expected to ﬁnd something different, and he
yearned for something that wasn't there. But he
threw aside his longing and slumped back into his
role---the role that forced him to be the best
Apache campaigner in the Territory.
A cavalry mount stood in front of the agency ofﬁce and a trooper appeared on the porch as Travisin, Fry and de Both dismounted and walked to the welcome shade of the ramada.
"Compliments of the commanding ofﬁcer, sir.
I've rode from Fort Thomas with this message."
Travisin read the note and turned with a smile to
the other two. "Bill, let me tell you one thing if you don't already know it. Never try to ﬁgure out the
ways of a woman---or the army. This is from Collier. He says the Bureau has decided to return Pillo and his band to his people at Fort Apache. All sixteen of 'em. Certainly is a good thing we've got sixteen to send back."
Fry said, "Yep, you might have got yourself
court-martialed. Way it is, if Pillo loses that leg, you'll probably end up back as a looie."
De Both listened and the quizzical look turned to
anger. He opened his mouth to speak, but thought
Trail of the Apache
59
better of it and waited until he had cooled off before muttering simply, "Idiots!"
If Travisin was the winking type, he would have
looked at Fry and done so. He glanced at Fry with
the hint of a smile, but with eyes that said, "Barney, I think we've got ourselves a lieutenant." Then he walked into the ofﬁce. There are idiotic Bureau
decisions, and there are boots that have been on
too long.
And along the Gila, the war drums are silent
again. But on frontier station, you don't relax. For though they are less in number, they are still
Apaches.
By nature, Angsman was a cautious man. From
the shapeless specks that ﬂoated in the sky miles
out over the plain, his gaze dropped slowly to the
sand a few feet from his chin, then rose again more slowly, to follow the gradual slope that fell away
before him. He rolled his body slightly from its
prone position to reach the ﬁeld glasses at his side, while his eyes continued to crawl out into the
white-hot nothingness of the ﬂats. Sun glare met alkali dust and danced before the slits of his eyes.
And, far out, something moved. Something darker
You Never See Apaches . . .
61
than the monotonous tone of the ﬂats. A pinpoint
of motion.
He put the glasses to his eyes and the glare
stopped dancing and the small blur of motion
cleared and enlarged as he corrected the focus.
Two ponies and two pack animals. The mules were
loaded high. He made that out right away, but it
was minutes before he realized the riders were
women. Two Indian women. Behind them the
scavenger birds ﬂoated above the scattered animal
carcasses, circling lower as the human ﬁgures
moved away.
Angsman pushed himself up from the sand and
made his way back through the pines that closed in
on the promontory. A few dozen yards of the darkness of the pines and then abruptly the glare was forcing against sand again where the openness of
the trail followed the shoulder of the hill. He
stopped at the edge of the trees, took his hat off, and rubbed the red line where the sweatband had
stuck. His mustache drooped untrimmed toward
dark, tight cheeks, giving his face a look of sadness.
A stern, sun-scarred sadness. It was the type of face that needed the soft shadow of a hat brim to make
it look complete. Shadows to soften the gaunt angles. It was an intelligent, impassive face, in its late thirties. He looked at the three men by the horses
and then moved toward them.
62
Ygenio Baca sat cross-legged in the dust smoking
a cigarette, drawing deep, and he only glanced at
Angsman as he approached. He drew long on his
cigarette, then held it close to his eyes and examined it as some rare object as the smoke curled from his mouth. Ygenio Baca, the mozo, had few
concerns.
Ed Hyde's stocky frame was almost beneath his
horse's head, with a hand lifted to the horse's muzzle. The horse's nose moved gently against the big palm, licking the salty perspiration from hand and
wrist. In the other arm Hyde cradled a Sharps riﬂe.
His squinting features were obscure beneath the hat tilted close to his eyes. Sun, wind, and a week's
beard gave his face a puffy, raw appearance that
was wild, but at the same time soft and hazy. There was about him a look of sluggishness that contrasted with the leanness of Angsman.
Billy Guay stood indolently with his thumbs
hooked in his gun belts. He took a few steps in
Angsman's direction and pushed his hat to the back
of his head, though the sun was beating full in his face. He was half Ed Hyde's age, a few years or so
out of his teens, but there was a hardness about the eyes that contrasted with his soft features. Features that were all the more youthful, and even feminine, because of the long blond hair that covered the
tops of his ears and hung unkempt over his shirt
collar. Watching Angsman, his mouth was tight as
You Never See Apaches . . .
63
if daring him to say something that he would not
agree with.
Angsman walked past him to Ed Hyde. He was
about to say something, but stopped when Billy
Guay turned and grabbed his arm.
"The dust cloud was buffalo like I said, wasn't
it?" Billy Guay asked, but there was more statement of fact than question in his loud voice.
Angsman's serious face turned to the boy, but
looked back to Ed Hyde when he said, "There're
two Indian women out there cleaning up after a
hunting party. The dust cloud was the warriors going home. I suspect they're the last ones. Stragglers.
Everyone else out of sight already."
Billy Guay pushed in close to the two men.
"Dammit, the cloud could have still been buffalo,"
he said. "Who says you know so damn much!"
Ed Hyde looked from one to the other like an
unbiased spectator. He dropped the long buffalo riﬂe stock down in front of him. His worn black serge coat strained tight at the armpits as he lifted his hands to pat his coat pockets. From the right
one he drew a half-chewed tobacco plug.
For a moment Angsman just stared at Billy Guay.
Finally he said, "Look, boy, for a good many years
it's been my business to know so damn much.
Now, you'll take my word that the dust cloud was
an Indian hunting party and act on it like I see ﬁt, or else we turn around and go back."
64
Ed Hyde's grizzled head jerked up suddenly. He
said, "You're dead right, Angsman. There ain't
been buffalo this far south for ten years." He
looked at the boy and spoke easier. "Take my word
for it, Billy." He smiled. "If anybody knows it, I
do. Those Indians most likely ran down a deer
herd. But hell, deer, buffalo, what's the difference?
We're not out here for game. You just follow along
with what Angsman here says and we all go home
rich men. Take things slow, Billy, and you breathe
easier."
"I just want to know why's he got to give all the
orders," Billy Guay said, and his voice was rising.
"It's us that own the map, not him. Where'd he be
without us!"
Angsman's voice was the same, unhurried, unexcited, when he said, "I'll tell you. I'd still be back at Bowie guiding for cavalry who ride with their eyes
open and know how to keep their mouths shut in
Apache country." He didn't wait for a reply, but
turned and walked toward the dun-colored mare.
"Ygenio," he called to the Mexican still sitting
cross-legged on the ground, "hold the mules a good
ﬁfty yards behind us and keep your eyes on me."
✯ ✯ ✯
Eight days out of Willcox and the strain was be ginning to tell. It had been bad from the ﬁrst day.
Now they were in the foothills of the Mogollons
You Never See Apaches . . .
65
and it was no better. Angsman had thought that as
soon as they climbed from the dust of the plains the tension would ease and the boy would be easier to
handle, but Billy Guay continued to grumble with
his thumbs in his gun belts and disagree with everything that was said. And Ed Hyde continued to say nothing unless turning back was mentioned.
Since early morning their trail had followed
this pine-covered crest that angled irregularly between the massive rock peaks to the south and east and the white-gold plain to the west. Most of
the ways the trail had held to the shoulder, turning, twisting, and falling with the contour of the hillcrest. And from the west the openness of the
plains continued to cling in glaring monotony.
Most of the time Angsman's eyes scanned the
openness, and the small black specks continued to
crawl along in his vision.
The trail dipped abruptly into a dry creek basin
that slanted down from between rocky humps
looming close to the right. Angsman reined his
mount diagonally down the bank, then at the bottom kicked hard to send the mare into a fast start up the opposite bank. The gravel loosened and fell
away as hooves dug through the dry crust to clink
against the sandy rock. Momentarily the horse began to fall back, but Angsman spurred again and grunted something close to her ear to make the
mare heave and kick up over the bank.
66
He rode on a few yards before turning to wait
for the others.
Billy Guay reached the creek bank and yelled
across, without hesitating, "Hey, Angsman, you
tryin' to pick the roughest damn trail you can
ﬁnd?"
The scout winced as the voice slammed against
the towering rock walls and drifted over the ﬂats,
vibrating and repeating far off in the distance. He threw off and ran to the creek bank. Billy Guay began to laugh as the echo came back to him. "Damn, Ed. You hear that!" His voice carried clear and loud across the arroyo. Angsman put a ﬁnger to his
mouth and shook his head repeatedly when he saw
Ed Hyde looking his way. Then Hyde leaned close
and said something to the boy. He heard Billy Guay
swear, but not so loud, and then there was silence.
Now, ten days from the time the message had
brought him to the hotel in Willcox, he wasn't so
sure it was worth it.
In the hotel room Hyde had come to the point
immediately. Anxiety showed on his face, but he
smiled when he asked the point-blank question
"How'd you like to be worth half a hundred thousand dollars?" With that he waved the piece of dirty paper in front of Angsman's face. "It's right here. Find us the picture of a Spanish sombrero and we're rich." That simply.
Angsman had all the time in the world. He
You Never See Apaches . . .
67
smoked a cigarette and thought. Then he asked,
"Why me? There're a lot of prospectors around
here."
Hyde did something with his eye that resembled
a wink. "You're well recommended here in Willcox. They say you know the country better than most. And the Apaches better than anybody,"
Hyde said with a hint of self-pride for knowing so
much about the scout. "Billy here and I'll give you an equal share of everything we ﬁnd if you can
guide us to one little X on a piece of paper."
Billy Guay had said little that ﬁrst meeting. He
half-sat on the small window ledge trying to stare
Angsman down when the scout looked at him. And
Angsman smiled when he noticed the boy's two lowslung pistols, thinking a man must be a pretty poor shot with one pistol that he'd have to carry another.
And when Billy Guay tried to stare him down, he
stared back with the half smile and it made the boy all the madder; so mad that often, then, he interrupted Hyde to let somebody know that he had something to say about the business at hand.
Ed Hyde told a story of a lost mine and a
prospector who had found the mine, but was unable to take any gold out because of Indians, and who was lucky to get out with just his skin. He referred to the prospector always as "my friend," and ﬁnally it turned out that "my friend" was buffalo
hunting out of Tascosa in the Panhandle, along
68
with Ed Hyde, raising a stake to try the mine again, when he "took sick and died." The two of them
were out on a hunt when it happened and he left
the map to Hyde, "since I saw him through his
sickness." Ed Hyde remained silent for a considerable length of time after telling of the death of his friend.
Then he added, "I met Billy here later on and
took to him 'cause he's got the nerve for this kind of business." He looked at Billy Guay as a man
looks at a younger man and sees his own youth.
"Just one thing more, mister," he added. "If you
say yes and look at the map, you don't leave our
sight."
In the Southwest, lost-mine stories are common.
Angsman had heard many, and knew even more
prospectors who chased the legends. He had seen a
few become rich. But it wasn't so much the desire
for gold that ﬁnally prompted him to go along.
Cochise had promised peace and Geronimo had
scurried south to the Sierra Madres. All was quiet
in his territory. Too quiet. He had told himself he would go merely as an escape from boredom. Still,
it was hard to keep the wealth aspect from cropping into the thought. Angsman saw the years slipping by with nothing to show for them but a scarred Spanish saddle and an old-model Winchester. All he had to do was lead them to a canyon and a rock formation that looked like a Spanish hat.
You Never See Apaches . . .
69
Two days to collect the equipment and round up
a mozo who wasn't afraid to drive mules into that
part of Apacheria where there was no peace. For
cigarettes and a full belly Ygenio Baca would drive his mules to the gates of hell.
✯ ✯ ✯
It was almost a mile past the arroyo crossing that
Angsman noticed his black specks had disappeared
from the open ﬂats. For the past few hundred yards
his vision to the left had been blocked by dense
pines. Now the plains yawned wide again, and his
glasses inched over the vastness in all directions, then stopped where a spur jutted out from the hillside ahead to cut his vision. The Indian women had vanished.
Hyde and Billy Guay sat their mounts next to
Angsman, who, afoot, swept his glasses once more
over the ﬂat. Finally he lowered them and said,
more to himself than to the others, "Those Indian
women aren't nowhere in sight. They could have
moved out in the other direction, or they might be
so close we can't see them."
He nodded ahead to where the trail stopped at
thick scrub brush and pine and then dipped
abruptly to the right to drop to a bench that slanted toward the deepness of the valley. From where they
stood, the men saw the trail disappear far below
into a denseness of trees and rock.
70
"Pretty soon the country'll be hugging us tight;
and we won't see anything," Angsman said. "I
don't like it. Not with a hunting party in the
neighborhood."
Billy Guay laughed out. "I'll be go to hell! Ed,
this old woman's afraid of two squaws! Ed, you
hear---"
Ed Hyde wasn't listening. He was staring off in
the distance, past the treetops in the valley to a towering, sand-colored cliff with ﬂying rock buttresses that walled the valley on the other side. He slid
from his mount hurriedly, catching his coat on the
saddle horn and ripping it where a button held fast.
But now he was too excited to heed the ripped coat.
"Look! Yonder to that cliff." His voice broke
with excitement. "See that gash near the top, like
where there was a rock slide? And look past to the
mountains behind!" Angsman and Billy Guay
squinted at the distance, but remained silent.
"Dammit!" Hyde screamed. "Don't you see it!"
He grabbed his horse's reins and ran, stumbling,
down the trail to where it leveled again at the
bench. When the others reached him, the map was
in his hand and he was laughing a high laugh that
didn't seem to belong to the grizzled face. His extended hand held the dirty piece of paper . . . and he kept jabbing at it with a ﬁnger of the other hand.
"Right there, dammit! Right there!" His pointing
ﬁnger swept from the map. "Now look at that
You Never See Apaches . . .
71
gold-lovin' rock slide!" His laughter subsided to a self-conﬁdent chuckle.
From where they stood on the bench, the towering cliff was now above them and perhaps a mile away over the tops of the trees. A chunk of sandrock as large as a two-story building was gouged from
along the smooth surface of the cliff top, with a
gravel slide trailing into the valley below; but massive boulders along the cliff top lodged over the depression, forming a four-sided opening. It was a gigantic frame through which they could see sky and the ﬂat surface of a mesa in the distance. On both
sides the mesa top fell away to shoulders cutting
sharp right angles from the straight vertical lines, then to be cut off there, in their vision, by the rock border of the cliff frame. And before their eyes the mesa turned into a ﬂat-topped Spanish sombrero.
Billy Guay's jaw dropped open. "Damn! It's one
of those hats like the Mex dancers wear! Ed, you
see it?"
Ed Hyde was busy studying the map. He pointed
to it again. "Right on course, Angsman. The ﬂats,
the ridge, the valley, the hat." His black-crusted ﬁngernail followed wavy lines and circles over the stained paper. "Now we just drop to the valley and
follow her up to the end." He shoved the map into
his coat pocket and reached up to the saddle horn
to mount. "Come on, boys, we're good as rich," he
called, and swung up into the saddle.
72
Angsman looked down the slant to the darkness
of the trees. "Ed, we got to go slow down there,"
he tried to caution, but Hyde was urging his mount
down the grade and Billy Guay's paint was kicking
the loose rock after him. His face tightened as he
turned quickly to his horse, and then he saw Ygenio Baca leaning against his lead mule vacantly smoking his cigarette. Angsman's face relaxed.
"Ygenio," he said. "Tell your mules to be very
quiet."
Ygenio Baca nodded and unhurriedly ﬂicked the
cigarette stub down the grade.
They caught up with Hyde and Billy Guay a little
way into the timber. The trail had disappeared into a hazy gloom of tangled brush and tree trunks with
the cliff on one side and the piney hill on the other to keep out the light.
Angsman rode past them and they stopped and
turned in the saddle. Hyde looked a little sheepish because he didn't know where the trail was, but Billy Guay stared back deﬁantly and tried to look hard.
"Ed, you saw some bones out there on the ﬂats a
while back," Angsman said. "Likely they were men
who had gold fever." That was all he said. He
turned the head of the mare and continued on.
Angsman moved slowly, more cautiously now
than before, and every so often he would rein in
gently and sit in the saddle without moving, and listen. And there was something about the deep si-You Never See Apaches . . .
73
lence that made even Billy Guay strain his eyes into the dimness and not say anything. It was a loud
quietness that rang in their ears and seemed unnatural. Moving at this pace, it was almost dusk when they reached the edge of the timber.
The pine hill was still on their left, but higher and steeper. To the right, two spurs reached out from
the cliff wall that had gradually dropped until now it was just a hump, but with a confusion of rocky
angles in the near distance beyond. And ahead was
a canyon mouth, narrow at ﬁrst, but then appearing to open into a wider area.
As they rode on, Angsman could see it in Ed
Hyde's eyes. The map was in his hand and he kept
glancing at it and then looking around. When they
passed through the canyon mouth into the open,
Hyde called, "Angsman, look! Just like it says!"
But Angsman wasn't looking at Ed Hyde. A hundred feet ahead, where a narrow side canyon cut into the arena, the two Indian women sat their
ponies and watched the white men approach.
✯ ✯ ✯
Angsman reined in and waited, looking at them
the way you look at deer that you have come across
unexpectedly in a forest, waiting for them to bolt.
But the women made no move to run. Hyde and
Billy Guay drew up next to Angsman, then continued on as Angsman nudged the mare into a walk.
74
They stopped within a few feet of the women, who
had still neither moved nor uttered a sound.
Angsman dismounted. Hyde stirred restlessly in
his saddle before putting his hands on the horn to
swing down, but stopped when Billy Guay's hand
tightened on his arm.
"Damn, Ed, look at that young one!" His voice
was loud and excited, but as impersonal as if he
were making a comment at a girlie show. "She'd
even look good in town," he added, and threw off
to stand in front of her pony.
Angsman looked at Billy Guay and back to the
girl, who was sliding easily from the bare back of
her pony. He greeted her in English, pleasantly, and tipped his hat to the older woman, still mounted,
who giggled in a high, thin voice. The girl said
nothing, but looked at Angsman.
He said, ¿Cómo se llama? and spoke a few more words in Spanish.
The girl's face relaxed slightly and she said,
"Sonkadeya," pronouncing each syllable distinctly.
"What the hell's that mean?" Billy Guay said,
walking up to her.
"That's her name," Angsman told him, then
spoke to the girl again in Spanish.
She replied with a few Spanish phrases, but most
of her words were in a dialect of the Apache
tongue. She was having trouble combining the two
languages so that the white men could understand
You Never See Apaches . . .
75
her. Her face would frown and she would wipe her
hands nervously over the hips of her greasy deerskin dress as she groped for the right words. She was plump and her hair and dress had long gone
unwashed, but her face was softly attractive, contrasting oddly with her primitive dress and speech.
Her features might have belonged to a white
woman---the coloring, too, for that matter---but the
greased hair and smoke smell that clung to her
were decidedly Apache.
When she ﬁnished speaking, Angsman looked
back at Hyde. "She's a Warm Springs Apache. A
Mimbreño," he said. "She says they're on their way
home."
Hyde said, "Ask her if she knows about any gold
hereabouts."
Angsman looked at him and his eyes opened a little wider. "Maybe you didn't hear, Ed. I said she's a Mimbre. She's going home from a hunting trip led
by her father. And her father's Delgadito," he
added.
"Hell, the 'Paches are at peace, ain't they?" Hyde
asked indifferently. "What you worried about?"
"Cochise made peace," Angsman answered.
"These are Mimbres, not Chiricahuas, and their
chief is Victorio. He's never never made peace. I
don't want to scare you, Ed," he said looking back
to the girl, "but his war lieutenant's Delgadito."
Billy Guay was standing in front of the girl, his
76
thumbs in his gun belts, looking at her closely. "I know how to stop a war," he said, smiling.
"Who's talkin' about war?" Hyde asked. "We're
not startin' anything."
"You don't have to stop it, Ed," Angsman said.
"You think about ﬁnishing it. And you think about
your life."
"Don't worry about me thinkin' about my life. I
think about it bein' almost gone and not worth a
Dixie single. Hell, yes, we're takin' a chance!"
Hyde argued. "If gold was easy to come by, it
wouldn't be worth nothin'."
"I still know how to stop a war," Billy Guay
said idly.
Hyde looked at him impatiently. "What's that
talk supposed to mean?" Then he saw how Billy
Guay was looking at the girl, and the frown eased
off the grizzled face as it dawned on him what Billy Guay was thinking about, and he rubbed his beard.
"You see what I mean, Ed," Billy Guay said, smiling. "We take Miss Indin along and ain't no Delgadito or even U.S. Grant goin' to stop us." He looked up at the old woman on the pony. "Though
I don't see any reason for carryin' excess baggage."
Angsman caught him by both arms and spun him
around. "You gun-crazy kid, you out of your mind?
You don't wave threats at Apaches!" He pushed the
boy away roughly. "Just stop a minute, Ed. You got
better sense than what this boy's proposing."
You Never See Apaches . . .
77
"It's worth a chance, Angsman. Any chance.
We're not stoppin' after comin' this far on account of some Indin or his little girl," Hyde said. "I'd say Billy's got the right idea. I told you he had nerve.
Let him use a little of it."
Billy Guay looked toward Angsman's mount and
saw his handgun in a saddle holster, then both pistols came out and he pointed them at the scout.
"Don't talk again, Angsman, 'cause if I hear any
more abuse I'll shoot you as quick as this." He
raised a pistol and swung it to the side as if without aiming and pulled the trigger. The old Indian
woman dropped from the pony without a cry.
There was silence. Hyde looked at him, stunned.
"God, Billy! You didn't have to do that!"
Billy Guay laughed, but the laugh trailed off too
quickly, as if he just then realized what he had
done. He forced the laugh now, and said, "Hell, Ed.
She was only an Indin. What you fussin' about?"
Hyde said, "Well, it's done now and can't be undone." But he looked about nervously as if expecting a simple solution to be standing near at hand. A solution or some kind of justiﬁcation. He saw the
mining equipment packed on one of the mules and
the look of distress left his eyes. "Let's quit talkin'
about it," he said. "We got things to do."
Billy Guay blew down the barrel of the pistol he
had ﬁred and watched Sonkadeya as she bent over
the woman momentarily, then rose without the
78
trace of an emotion on her face. It puzzled Billy
Guay and made him more nervous. He waved a pistol toward Ygenio Baca. "Hey, Mazo! Get a shovel and turn this old woman under. No sense in havin'
the birds tellin' on us."
✯ ✯ ✯
The scout rode in silence, knowing what would
come, but not knowing when. His gaze crawled
over the wildness of the slanting canyon walls,
brush trees, and scattered boulders, where nothing
moved. The left wall was dark, the shadowy rock
outlines obscure and blending into each other; the
opposite slope was hazy and cold in the dim light of the late sun. He felt the tenseness all over his body.
The feeling of knowing that something is close,
though you can't see it or hear it. Only the quietness, the metallic clop of hooves, then Billy Guay's loud, forced laughter that would cut the stillness
and hang there in the narrowness until it faded out up-canyon. Angsman knew the feeling. It went
with campaigning. But this time there was a difference. It was the ﬁrst time he had ever led into a canyon with such a strong premonition that
Apaches were present. Yet, with the feeling, he recognized an eager expectancy. Perhaps fatalism, he thought.
He watched two chicken hawks dodging, gliding
in and out, drop toward a brush tree halfway up
You Never See Apaches . . .
79
the slanting right wall, then, just as they were about to land in the bush, they rose quickly and soared
out of sight. Now he was more than sure. They
were riding into an ambush. And there was so little time to do anything about it.
He glanced at Hyde riding next to him. Hyde
couldn't be kept back now. The ﬁnal circle on his
map was just a little ﬁguring from the end of the
canyon.
"Slow her down, Ed," Billy Guay yelled. "I can't
propose to Miss Indin and canter at the same time."
He laughed and reached over to put his hand on
Sonkadeya's hip, then let the hand fall to her knee.
He called out, "Yes, sir, Ed, I think we made us a
good move."
Sonkadeya did not resist. Her head nodded
faintly with the sway of her pony, looking straight ahead. But her eyes moved from one canyon wall to
the other and there was the slightest gleam of a
smile.
Angsman wondered if he really cared what was
going to happen. He didn't care about Hyde or
Billy Guay; and he didn't know Ygenio Baca well
enough to have a feeling one way or the other.
From the beginning Ygenio had been taking a
chance like everyone else. He thought of his own
life and the odd fact occurred to him that he didn't even particularly care about himself. He tried to
picture death in relation to himself, but he would
80
see himself lying on the ground and himself looking at the body and knew that couldn't be so. He
thought of how hard it was to take yourself out of
the picture to see yourself dead, and ended up with: If you're not going to be there to worry about yourself being dead, why worry at all? But you don't stay alive not caring, and his eyes went back to the canyon sides.
He watched Hyde engrossed in his map and
looked back at Billy Guay riding close to
Sonkadeya with his hand on her leg. They could be
shot from their saddles and not even see where it
came from. Or, they could be taken by surprise.
His head swung front again and he saw the canyon
up ahead narrow to less than ﬁfty feet across. Or
they could be taken by surprise!
He ﬂicked the rein against the mare's mane, gently, to ease her toward the right canyon wall. He made the move slowly, leading the others at a very
slight angle, so that Hyde and Billy Guay, in their preoccupation, did not even notice the edging. Either to be shot in the head or not at all, Angsman thought.
Now they were riding much closer to the slanting
canyon wall. He turned in the saddle to watch Billy Guay, still laughing and moving his hand over
Sonkadeya. And when he turned back he saw the
half-dozen Apaches standing in the trail not a dozen You Never See Apaches . . .
81
yards ahead. It was funny, because he was looking
at half-naked, armed Apaches and he could still
hear Billy Guay's laughter coming from behind.
Then the laughter stopped. Hyde groaned, "Oh,
my God!" and in the instant spurred his mount
and yanked rein to wheel off to the left. There was the report of a heavy riﬂe and horse and rider
went down.
Angsman's arms were jerked suddenly behind his
back and he saw three Apaches race for the fallen
Hyde as he felt himself dragged over the rump of
the mare. He landed on his feet and staggered and
watched one warrior dragging Hyde back toward
them by one leg. Hyde was screaming, holding on
to the other leg that was bouncing over the rough
ground.
Billy Guay had jerked his arms free and stood a
little apart from the dozen Apaches aiming bows
and carbines at him. His hands were on the pistol
butts, with fear and indecision plain on his face.
Angsman twisted his neck toward him, "Don't
even think about it, boy. You don't have a chance."
It was all over in something like ﬁfteen seconds.
Hyde was writhing on the ground, groaning and
holding on to the hole in his thigh, where the heavy slug had gone through to take the horse in the belly.
Angsman stooped to look at the wound and saw
that Hyde was holding the map, pressed tight to his 82
leg and now smeared with blood. He looked up and
Delgadito was standing on the other side of the
wounded man. Next to him stood Sonkadeya.
✯ ✯ ✯
Delgadito was not dressed for war. He wore a
faded red cotton shirt, buttonless and held down by the cartridge belt around his waist; and his thin face looked almost ridiculous under the shabby widebrimmed hat that sat straight on the top of his head, at least two sizes too small. But Angsman did not laugh. He knew Delgadito, Victorio's war lieutenant, and probably the most capable hit-and-run guerrilla leader in Apacheria. No, Angsman did not
laugh.
Delgadito stared at them, taking his time to look
around, then said, "Hello. Angs-mon. You have a
cigarillo?"
Angsman ﬁshed in his shirt pocket and drew out
tobacco and paper and handed it to the Indian. Delgadito rolled a cigarette awkwardly and handed the sack to Angsman, who rolled himself one then
ﬂicked a match with his thumbnail and lighted the
cigarettes. Both men drew deeply and smoked in silence. Finally, Angsman said, "It is good to smoke with you again, Sheekasay."
Delgadito nodded his head and Angsman went
on, "It has been ﬁve years since we smoked together at San Carlos."
You Never See Apaches . . .
83
The Apache shook his head slightly. "Together we
have smoked other things since then, Angs-mon,"
and added a few words in the Mimbre dialect.
Angsman looked at him quickly. "You were at
Big Dry Wash?"
Delgadito smiled for the ﬁrst time and nodded
his head. "How is your sickness, Angs-mon?" he
asked, and the smile broadened.
Angsman's hand came up quickly to his side,
where the bullet had torn through that day two
years before at Dry Wash, and now he smiled.
Delgadito watched him with the nearest an
Apache comes to giving an admiring look. He said,
"You are a big man, Angs-mon. I like to ﬁght you.
But now you do something very foolish and I must
stop you. I mean you no harm, Angs-mon, for I like
to ﬁght you, but now you must go home and stop
this being foolish and take this old man before the smell enters his leg. And, Angs-mon, tell this old
man what befalls him if he returns. Tell him the
medicine he carries in his hand is false. Show him
how he cannot read the medicine ever again because of his own blood." For a moment his eyes lifted to the heights of the canyon wall. "Maybeso
that is the only way, Angs-mon. With blood."
Angsman offered no thanks for their freedom,
gratitude was not an Apache custom, but he said,
"On the way home I will impress your words on
them."
84
"Tell my words to the old man," Delgadito
replied, then his voice became cold. "I will tell the young one." And he looked toward Billy Guay.
Angsman swallowed hard to remain impassive.
"There is nothing I can say."
"The mother of Sonkadeya speaks in my ear,
Angs-mon. What could you say?" Delgadito turned
deliberately and walked away.
Angsman rode without speaking, listening to
Hyde's groans as the saddle rubbed the open rawness of his wound. The groans were beginning to erase the scream that hung in his mind and repeated over and over, Billy Guay's scream as they carried
him up-canyon.
Angsman knew what he was going to do. He'd
still have his worn saddle and old-model carbine,
but he knew what he was going to do. Hyde's leg
would heal and he'd be back the next year, or the
year after; or if not him, someone else. The Southwest was full of Hydes. And as long as there were Hydes, there were Billy Guays. Big talkers with big guns who ended up lying dead, after a while, in a
Mimbre rancheria. Angsman would go back to
Fort Bowie. Even if it got slow sometimes, there'd
always be plenty to do.
Mata Lobo was playing his favorite game. He
stretched his legs stifﬂy behind him until his moccasined feet touched rock, and then he pushed, writhing his body against the soft, sandy ground,
enjoying an animal pleasure from the blistering sun on his naked back and the feel of warm, yielding
earth beneath him. His extended hand touched the
stock of the Sharps riﬂe a few inches from his chin and sighted down the barrel for the hundredth
time. The target area had not changed.
Sixty yards down the slope the military road
came into view from between the low hills, cutting
86
a sharp, treacherous arc to follow the bend of Banderas Creek on the near side and then to continue, paralleling the base of the hill, making the slow climb over this section of the Sierra Apaches. Mata Lobo's front sight was dead on the sudden bend in the road.
He ﬂexed his ﬁnger on the trigger and sighted
again, taking in the slack, then releasing it. Not long now. In a few minutes he should hear the faint, faraway rattle of the stage as it weaved across the plain from Rindo's Station at the Banderas Crossing. Six
miles across straight, ﬂat desert. And then louder--- with a creaking---a grinding, jingling explosion of
leather, wood, and horseﬂesh as the Hatch &
Hodges Overland began the gradual climb over the
woody western end of the Sierra Apaches, and then
to drop to another white-hot plain that stretched the twelve miles to Inspiration, the end of the line. The vision in the mind of Mata Lobo shortened the
route by a dozen miles.
Every foot of the road was known to him. Especially this sudden bend at the beginning of the climb. He had scouted it for weeks, timing the
stage runs, watching the drivers from his niche on
the hill. And through his Apache patience he
learned many things.
At the bend, the driver and the shotgun rider
were too busy with the team to be watching the
hillside. And the passengers, full and comfortable
after a meal at Rindo's, would be suddenly jolted
‚
The Colonel s Lady
87
into hanging on with the sway of the bouncing
Concord as it swept around the sharp curve, with
no thought of looking out the windows.
It was the perfect site for ambush, Apache style.
Mata Lobo was sure, for he had done it before.
And then it began. He raised himself on his elbows and cocked his ears to the sound that was still a whisper out on the desert. Two miles away. Then
louder, and louder; then the straining pitch to the rattling clamor and the stage was starting up the grade.
The Apache pivoted his riﬂe on the rocks in front
of him, making sure of free motion, and then he
lined up again the ﬁve brass cartridges arranged on the ground near his right hand.
When he looked back to the road the lead horses
were coming into view. He waited until the stage
was in full sight, slowed down slightly in the middle of the road, and then he ﬁred, aiming at the closer lead horse.
The horse's momentum carried it along for the
space of time it took the Apache to inject another cartridge and squeeze off at the other lead animal. The horses swerved against each other, still going, then four pairs of legs buckled at once, and eight other pairs raced on, trampling the fallen horses, but to be tripped immediately in a wild confusion of thrashing legs and screaming horses and grinding brakes.
Next to the driver the shotgun rider was throwing his boot against the brake lever when the coach 88
jackknifed and twisted over, gouging into the dirt
road, sending up a thick cloud of dust to cover the scene.
As the dust began to settle, Mata Lobo saw one
ﬁgure lying next to the overturned Concord, his
face upturned to the two right-side wheels, still
turning slowly above him. There was a stir of motion farther ahead as a ﬁgure crawled along the ground, got to his feet, stumbled, pulled himself
frantically across the road in a wild, reeling motion that ﬁnally developed into a crouched run. He was
almost to the shelter of the creek bank when the
buffalo gun screamed again across the hillsides.
The impact threw him over the bank to lie facedown at the edge of the creek.
He aimed the riﬂe again at the overturned stage
in time to see the head appear above the door opening. Mata Lobo's ﬁnger almost closed on the trigger, but he hesitated, seeing shoulders appear and then the rest of the body.
The man stopped uncertainly, looking around,
cocking his ear to the silence. An odd-looking little man, fat and frightened, but not sure of what to be afraid. He clutched a small black case that singled him out as a drummer of some kind. He clutched it
protectingly, shielding his means of existence.
When his gaze swept the hillside, perhaps he saw
the glint of the riﬂe barrel, but if he did, it meant nothing to him. There was no reaction. And a sec-‚
The Colonel s Lady
89
ond later it was too late. The .50-caliber bullet tore through his body to spin him off the coach.
Again silence settled. This time, longer. The
wheels had stopped moving above the sprawled
form of the guard.
Still Mata Lobo waited. His eyes, beneath the red
calico headband, were nailed to the overturned
Concord. He hadn't moved from his position. He
sat stone still and waited. Watched and waited and
counted.
He counted three dead: the driver, a passenger,
and the guard who was in the road next to the
coach---he was undoubtedly dead. But the run usually carried more passengers, at least two more, and that bothered the Apache.
Others might still be inside the coach, dead,
wounded, or just waiting. Waiting with a cocked
pistol. Either way Mata Lobo had to ﬁnd out. He
hadn't laid this ambush for sport alone. He needed
bullets, and a shirt, and any glittering trinkets that might catch his eye. But it was the bullets, more
than anything else, that ﬁnally made him raise himself and slip quietly down the side of the hill.
His Apache sense led him in a wide circle, so that
when he approached the Concord, Banderas Creek
was behind him. He walked half crouched, slowly,
with short toe-to-heel strides, catlike, a coiled
spring ready to snap. Mata Lobo was a Chiricahua
Apache, well schooled in the ways of war.
90
He passed the baggage strewn about the ground
without a side glance and dropped to his hands and
knees as he came to the vertical wall that was the top of the coach. He touched the baggage rack lightly,
then, pressing his ear against the smooth surface of the coach top, he remained ﬁxed in this position for almost ﬁve minutes. Long, silent minutes.
He was about to rise, satisﬁed the coach was unoccupied, when he heard the sharp, scraping sound from within. Like someone moving a foot across a
board.
He froze again, pressing close, then slowly
placed his riﬂe on the ground beside him and lifted a skinning knife from a scabbard at his back.
He inched his body upward until he was standing, placed a foot on a rung of the baggage rack, and pushed his body up until his head was above
the coach. He was conﬁdent of his own animal
stealth. A gun could be waiting, but he doubted it.
Only a fool would have moved, knowing he was
just outside. A fool, or a child, or a woman.
Nor was he wrong. The woman was crouched
against the roof of the coach, her back arched
against the smooth surface, holding with both hands a longbarreled pistol that pointed toward the rear window. She was totally unaware of the Apache staring at her a few feet away, lying belly down on the side of the coach. When she saw him it was too late.
Revolver went up as knife came down, but the
‚
The Colonel s Lady
91
knife was quicker and the heavy knob on the handle
smashed against her knuckles to make her drop the
revolver. Dark, vein-streaked arms reached in to
drag her up through the door window. She struggled
in his grasp, but only brieﬂy, for he ﬂung her from the coach and leapt down to the road after her.
She sat in the road dust and eyed him deﬁantly,
her lips moving slightly, her eyes not wavering from his face. She screamed for the ﬁrst time as she rose from the dust, but it was not a scream of fear.
She was almost to her feet when the Apache's
hand tightened in her hair to ﬂing her off balance
back to the ground. He stood over her and looked
down into the dust-streaked face. Then he turned
back to the stagecoach.
She watched as he rummaged about the wreckage,
sitting motionless, knowing that if she tried to run he would probably not hesitate to kill her. Her
hands moved to her hair and unhurriedly brushed
back the blond wisps that had been pulled from the
tight chignon at the nape of her neck. Her hands
moved slowly, almost unconsciously, and then down
and in the same lifeless manner brushed the heavy
dust from the green jersey traveling-dress, as if her movements were instinctive, not predetermined.
But her eyes were not lifeless. They followed the
Apache's every move and narrowed slightly into
two thin lines that contrasted sharply with her soft face, like ﬁre on water. Her body moved from habit
92
while her mind showed through her eyes.
She was afraid, but only loathing was on the surface. The fear was the stabbing weight in her breast, an emotion she had learned to control. She could
have been in her late twenties, but her chin and the lines near her eyes told of at least six additional years.
Every now and then the Apache would glance
back in her direction, but he found her always in
the same position. She watched him bend over the
still form of the guard lying on his back, and her
eyes blinked hard as the Indian brought the stock
of his riﬂe down on the man's forehead, but she did not turn her head.
There was no doubt now that all were dead. Mata
Lobo was a thorough man, for his people had been
slaying the blanco since the ﬁrst war club smashed through the cumbersome armor of the conquistadors. His deeds were known throughout Apacheria; they whispered the name of the bronco Chiricahua
with the bloodlust ever in his breast. There would
be no survivor to tell of the lone Apache killer.
The sport of the affair had satisﬁed him, but he
was angry. None of the men had been using a
Sharps, so there was no ammunition to be had. He
picked up the guard's Winchester, slinging the cartridge belt over his shoulder, but he liked the feel of the heavy buffalo riﬂe better. In the Sharps he had the conﬁdence that comes only after trial. But he
had only two cartridges left for it.
‚
The Colonel s Lady
93
He turned his attention to the drummer, who
was sprawled awkwardly next to the coach. With
his foot he pushed the body over onto its back. A
crimson smear spread over the shirtfront. The
Apache opened the black satchel next to the man
and emptied the contents onto the ground---
needles, scissors, paring knives, and thread---and
moved on to the horses.
His next act made the woman turn her head
slightly, for with his skinning knife he sliced a large chunk of meat from the rump of a disabled horse
and stuffed it into the sample case. Then he stepped to the front of the horse and cut the animal's jugular vein. Soon after, a Chiricahua Apache with a white woman at his side waded up Banderas Creek
along the shallows. The woman dragged her legs
through the water stifﬂy, slowly, as if her reluctance to move quickly was an open act of deﬁance toward
the Indian.
The Chiricahua carried two riﬂes and a bloodstained satchel and wore a clean shirt, the tail hanging below his narrow hips. With every few steps his glance turned to the cold face of the woman. They
disappeared three hundred yards upstream, where
the creek cut a bend into the blackness of the pines.
✯ ✯ ✯
It was the point riders of Phil Langmade's C
Troop that found the wrecked stagecoach and the
94
dead men, almost two hours later. Twenty days in
the ﬁeld and a brush with Nachee, and because of
it they had missed the stage at Rindo's.
They were returning to the garrison at Inspiration, thighs aching from long, stiff hours in the saddle. Grimy, salt-sweat-white, alkali-caked---both their uniforms and their minds---after days of riding through the savage dust-glare of central Arizona. And of the forty mounts, three had ponchos draped over the saddles, bulging and shapeless. All patrols were not routine.
Langmade sent ﬂankers to climb the ridges on
both sides, and then went in. The troopers spread
out in a semicircle, watching with hollow, lifeless eyes the ﬂankers on the ridge more than the grisly
scene on the road. You get used to the sight of
death, but never to expecting it.
Langmade dismounted, but Simon Street, the
civilian scout, rode up to the dead driver before
throwing off. He walked upstream another hundred yards and then came back, approaching the ofﬁcer from around the coach. The troopers sat still in their saddles, half-asleep, half-ready to throw up a carbine. Habit.
Langmade said, "I don't know if I want to ﬁnd her
inside the coach or not. If she's there, she's dead."
Street's eyes moved slowly over the scene. "You
won't ﬁnd her," he said. "There's a little heel print over on the bank. They went upstream. That's sure.
‚
The Colonel s Lady
95
If they went down they'd wind up in the open near
Rindo's."
Langmade boosted himself onto the side of the
stage and came down almost in the same motion.
He nodded his head to the scout and kept it moving
in an arc along the top of the near ridge.
"Bet they laid up there waiting," Langmade said.
"A month's pay they were Apaches."
Street followed his gaze to the ridge. He just
glanced at the ofﬁcer, his face creased-bronze and
old beyond its years, crow's feet where eye met
temple, his hat tilted low on his forehead, his eyes in shadow. "You're throwin' your money away, soldier," he said. "Apache."
Langmade looked at him quickly. "Only one?"
"That's all the sign says." Street pointed to the
butchered horse. "A war party don't cut just one
steak."
He turned his attention back to the ridge. He was
looking at the exact spot from which the Apache
had ﬁred. Then his gaze fell slowly to sweep across the road to Banderas Creek. And he squinted
against the glare as his eyes followed the course of the creek to the bend into the pines.
Langmade pushed his ﬁeld hat back from his
forehead, releasing the hot-steel grip of the sweatband, and watched the scout curiously. Langmade was young, in his mid-twenties, but he was good
for a second lieutenant. He didn't talk much and he 96
watched. He watched and he learned. And he knew
he was learning from one of the best. But the tension was building inside his stomach, and it wasn't just the aftereffects of a twenty-day patrol.
There were three dead men in the road and a
woman missing and it had happened because he
had failed to bring the patrol in to Rindo's on time.
The report would include an account of the brush
with Nachee, and that would absolve him of blame.
But it wouldn't make it easier for him to face Colonel Darck.
You didn't just look at a stone near your boot toe
and say "sorry" to a man whose wife has been carried off by a blood-drunk Apache---even if you weren't to blame.
There it was. Langmade stood motionless,
watching the scout. Langmade was in command, a
commissioned ofﬁcer in the United States Army,
but he was tired. His bones ached and his mind
dragged, weary of ﬁghting the savage country and
the elusive Apache who was a part of that country,
and always there was so little time.
Learning to ﬁght doesn't come easy with most
men. Learning to ﬁght the Apache doesn't come
easy with anyone. You watch the veteran until your
face takes on the same mask of impassiveness, then
you make decisions.
He waited patiently for Street to say something,
to give him a lead. He remembered forty troopers
‚
The Colonel s Lady
97
who watched the thin gold bars on his shoulders,
and he tried to forget his helplessness.
Langmade said, "The colonel was coming from
Thomas to meet Mrs. Darck at Inspiration." The
scout was aware of this, he knew, but he had to say something. He had to ﬁll the gap until something
happened.
Simon Street looked at the ofﬁcer and a half
smile broke the thin line of his mouth. "We'll ﬁnd
her, soldier. It wasn't your fault. People get killed by Apaches every day."
As the words came out, he realized he had said
the wrong thing and added, quickly, "Know who
this looks like to me?" and then went on when
Langmade looked but didn't speak.
"Looks like that bronco Apache we been chasin'
on and off for ﬁve years. Nochalbestinay. Though
the Mexicans named him Mata Lobo. He was a
Turkey Creek Chiricahua who'd never get used to
reservation life in seven hundred years. Sendin' him to San Carlos was like throwin' a mountain cat a
hunk of raw meat and then pullin' all his teeth
out."
Street pulled a thin cigar from his pocket and
passed his tongue over the crumbling outer layer of tobacco. "You know, at one time there was almost
a thousand troops plus a hundred Apache scouts all
in the ﬁeld at one time huntin' him, and no one
even saw him. You couldn't ask the dead ones if
98
they saw him or not. An Apache's bad enough, but
this one's half devil."
He moved toward the butchered horse. "Boy's
got a real yen for steak, ain't he?"
All the time the tension had been building in
Langmade. Just standing there with his arms heavy
at his sides and the weight pulling down inside his stomach. He had to hesitate until he was sure his
voice would come out sounding natural.
"You've got the sign and I've got the men," he said.
"Just point the way, Simon. Just point the way."
Street had turned and was walking toward his
horse. He stopped and looked back at the ofﬁcer.
"Get your troop back to Inspiration and get a fresh patrol out, soldier."
Street's words were low, directed only to the ofﬁcer, but Langmade raised his voice almost to a shout when he answered:
"We've got men here---get on his track!"
"I'm not goin' to guide for dead men," the scout
answered easily. "If a thousand men can't catch
him, you can't count on forty. Maybe just one's the answer. I don't want to tell you how to run your
business, son, but if I was you I'd shake it back to Inspiration and get a fresh patrol out."
Street mounted and then looked down at Langmade, who had followed him over to the horse.
"The trail's as fresh as you'd want it," he said, nod-‚
The Colonel s Lady
99
ding toward the butchered horse. "That mare
hasn't been dead three hours. And he's got a
woman with him to slow him down."
"I've been out longer than that, Simon," Langmade said. "She'll slow him down just so long."
The scout's mouth turned slightly into a smile as
he pressed his heels into the mare's ﬂanks. "That's why I got to hurry, soldier."
He walked the mare toward Banderas Creek and
kicked her into a gallop as he turned upstream.
✯ ✯ ✯
An hour before sunset Simon Street was walking
his horse along the winding trail that threaded its way diagonally down the slope of the forestcovered hill that on the western side joined the rocky heights of the Sierra Apaches. This gradual
leveling of the sierra was a tangled mass of junipers, gnarled stumps, and rock, rising and falling
abruptly from one hillock to the next.
The trail gouged itself laboriously in a general
southwesterly direction, ﬁghting rock falls, pine, and prickly pear, ﬁnally to emerge miles to the south at Devil's Flats. From the crest, and occasionally down the path, you could see in the distance the
whiteness---the bleak, bone-bleached whiteness---
that was the ﬂats.
Street had traveled a dozen-odd miles from the
100
ambush, making his way slowly at ﬁrst along the
creek bank, looking for a particular telltale sign.
He knew the Apache had followed the creek, leaving no prints, but somewhere he had to come out.
The Apache would cover his tracks from the
creek, but he would be coming out at a particular
place for a reason. To pick up his mount. And you
can't leave a horse tied in one place for any length of time without also leaving a sign. To recognize
the place is something else.
Street saw the low tree branch that had been
scarred by the hackamore, and his eyes fell to the
particles of horse droppings that had remained after the Apache had swept most of it into the denser scrub brush. He was on the trail. From then on it
was just a question of thinking like an Apache.
For the scout, that night, it was the last of his
jerked beef and a quarter canteen of cold coffee.
No ﬁre. Cold, tasteless rations while he pressed his back against a smooth rock that was still warm
from the day's heat and dueled his patience against the black pit that was the night.
His Winchester lay across his lap, and the slight
pressure on his thighs was a feeling of reassurance against the loneliness of the night. Dead stillness, then the occasional night sound. He could be the
only man in the world. Yet, just a few miles ahead, perhaps less, was a bronco Apache who would kill
‚
The Colonel s Lady
101
at the least provocation. And with him was a white
woman.
Street rubbed the stock of the Winchester idly.
✯ ✯ ✯
In the dusk Amelia Darck watched the Apache.
He crouched over the slab of red horsemeat, sitting on his heels, and hacked at the meat with his skinning knife. He cut off a chunk and stuffed it into his mouth, but the cold blood-taste of the raw meat tightened his throat muscles and he swallowed hard
to get it down. He would wait.
He cut the slab of meat into thin strips and
spread them out separately on a ﬂat shelf of rock.
When he had more time he would jerk the meat
properly and have plenty to eat.
He looked toward the white woman and saw her
staring at him. Always she stared, and always with
the same ﬁxed, strange look on her face. The eyes
of the Apache and the white woman met, and Mata
Lobo turned his attention back to the meat. The
woman continued to stare at the Apache.
She sat on the ground with her arms extended behind her, full weight on her arms, propping her body in a rigid position, unmoving. Her legs extended straight out before her, the ankles lashed together with a strip of rawhide. And she continued to watch the Apache.
102
Amelia Darck saw an Apache for the ﬁrst time
when she was six years old. His face was vivid in
her memory. She remembered once somebody had
said, ". . . like glistening bacon rind." And always a dirty cloth headband.
Yuma, Whipple Barracks, Fort Apache, and
Thomas. Ofﬁcers' row on a sun-baked parade. Chiricahua, White Mountain, Mescalero, and Tonto.
Thigh-high moccasins and a rusted Spencer. Tizwin
drunk, then war drums. And only the red sun-slash
in the sky after the patrol had faded into the glare three miles west of Thomas. Shapeless ponchos that
used to be men. The old story. And she continued
to watch the Apache.
Mata Lobo glanced at the woman, then stood up
abruptly and walked toward her. He stooped at her
feet, hesitated, then placed the blade of the knife between her ankles and jerked up with the blade,
severing the rawhide string.
His face was expressionless, smooth and impassive, as he eased his body to the ground. A face that in the dimness was shadow on stone. His hands pushed
against her shoulders until her arms bent slowly and her back was ﬂat against the short, sparse grass.
The hands moved from her shoulder and touched
her face gently, the ﬁngers moving on her cheeks
like a blind man's identifying an object, and his
body eased toward hers.
Her face was the same. The eyes open, infre-‚
The Colonel s Lady
103
quently blinking. She smelled the sour dirt-smell of the Apache's body. Then she opened her arms and
pulled him to her.
✯ ✯ ✯
Simon Street was up before dawn. He gave his
tightening stomach the last of the cold, stale coffee while he waited for the sun to peel back another
layer of the morning darkness. It was cold and
damp for that time of the year, and when he again
started down the trail, a gray mist hung from the
lower branches of the trees and lay softly against
the grotesque rock lines.
More often now, the ground fell away to the left,
the trail hugging the side of the hill in its diagonal descent; and in the distance was a sheet of milky
smoke where the mist clung softly to the ﬂats. The
trail was narrow and rocky and lined with dense
brush most of the way down.
Less than a mile ahead the grade dropped again
steeply to the left of the trail, bare of tree or rock, cutting a smooth swatch twenty yards wide through the pines. The mist had evaporated considerably by then and Street could see almost to the bottom of the slide.
First, it was the faintest blur of motion. And then the sound. A sound that could be human.
Simon Street had been riding half tensed for the
past dozen years. There was no abrupt stop. He
reined in gently with a soothing murmur into the
104
mare's ear, and slid from the saddle, whispering
again to the mare as he tied the reins to a pine
branch a foot from the ground.
He made his way along the trail until the slope
was again thick with brush and trees, and there he
began his descent. A yard at a time, making sure of ﬁrm ground before each step, bending branches
slowly so there would be no warning swish. And
every few yards he would hug the ground and wait,
swinging his gaze in every direction, even behind.
He had gone almost a hundred yards when he
saw the woman.
He crouched low to the sandy ground and
crawled under the full branches of a pine, watching the woman almost thirty yards away. She was sitting on something just off the ground, her back resting against the smoothness of a birch tree.
He was approaching her from the rear and could
see only part of her head and shoulder resting
against the tree trunk. The brush near her cut off
the lower part of her body, but there was something strange about her position---her immobility, the
way her shoulder was thrown back so tightly
against the roundness of the birch. Street had the
feeling she was dead. Time would tell.
He lay motionless under the thick foliage and
waited, the Winchester in front of him. And Simon
Street had his thoughts. You never get used to the
sight of a white woman after an Apache has ﬁn-‚
The Colonel s Lady
105
ished with her. An hour later, a week later, a dozen years later, the picture will ﬂash in your memory,
vivid, stark naked of hazy forgetfulness.
And the form of the Apache will be there, too,
close like the smothering reek of a hot animal,
though you may have never seen him. Then you will
be sick if you are the kind. Street wasn't the kind, but he didn't look forward to approaching the
woman.
After almost a half hour he again began to work
his way toward the woman. In that length of time
he had not moved. Nor had the woman. If she was
dead, the Apache would probably be gone. But that
was guessing, and when you guess, you take a
chance.
He crawled all the way, slowly, a foot at a time,
until he was directly behind the birch. Then he
reached up, his hand sliding along the white bark,
and touched her shoulder lightly.
Amelia Darck jumped to her feet and turned in
the motion. Her face was powder white, her eyes
wide, startled; but when she saw the scout the color seemed to creep through her cheeks and her mouth
broke into a fragile smile.
"You're late, Mr. Street. I've waited a good many
hours."
The scout was momentarily stunned. He knew
his face bore a foolish expression, but there was
nothing he could do about it.
106
The woman's face regained its composure
quickly and once again she was the colonel's lady.
Though there was a drawn look and a darker
shadow about the eyes that could not be wiped
away with a polite smile.
Then Street saw the Apache. He was lying belly
down in the short grass, close behind Mrs. Darck.
Street took a step to her side and saw the handle of the skinning knife sticking straight up from the
Apache's back. The cotton shirt was deep crimson
in a wide smear around the knife handle.
He looked at her again with the foolish look still
on his face.
"Mr. Street, I've been sitting up all night with a
dead Indian and I'm almost past patience. Would
you kindly take me to my husband."
He looked again at the Apache and then to the
woman. Disbelief in his eyes. He started to say
something, but Amelia Darck went on.
"I've lived out here most of my life, Mr. Street, as you know. I heard Apache war drums long before I
attended my ﬁrst cotillion, but I have hardly reached the point where I have to take an Apache for a lover."
Simon Street saw a thousand troops and a hundred scouts in the ﬁeld. Then he looked at the slender woman walking briskly up the grade.
Most of the time there was dead silence. When
someone did say something it was never more than
a word or two at a time: More coffee? Words that were not words because there was no thought behind them and they didn't mean anything. Words like getting late, when no one cared. Hardly even noises, because no one heard.
Stillness. Six men sitting together in a pine grove, and yet there was no sound. A boot scraped gravel
and a tin cup clanked against rock, but they were
like the words, little noises that started and stopped 108
at the same time and were forgotten before they
could be remembered.
More coffee? And an answering grunt that meant even less.
Five men scattered around a campﬁre that was
dead, and the sixth man squatting at the edge of the pines looking out into the distance through the dismal reﬂection of a dying sun that made the grayish ﬂat land look petriﬁed in death and unchanged for
a hundred million years.
Emmett Ryan stared across the ﬂats toward the
lighter gray outline in the distance that was Anton Chico, but he wasn't seeing the adobe brick of the
village. He wasn't watching the black speck that
was gradually getting bigger as it approached.
All of us knew that. We sat and watched Emmett
Ryan's coat pulled tight across his shoulder blades, not moving body or head. Just a broad smoothness
of faded denim. We'd been looking at the same
back all the way from Tascosa and in two hundred
miles you can learn a lot about a back.
The black speck grew into a horse and rider, and
as they moved up the slope toward the pines the
horse and rider became Gosh Hall on his roan. Emmett walked over to meet him, but didn't say anything. The question was on his broad, red face and he didn't have to ask it.
Gosh Hall swung down from the saddle and put
his hands on the small of his back, arching against The Rustlers
109
the stiffness. "They just rode in," he said, and
walked past the big man to the dead ﬁre. "Who's
got all the coffee?"
Emmett followed him with his eyes and the question was still there. It was something to see that big, plain face with the eyes open wide and staring
when before they'd always been half-closed from
squinting against the glare of twenty-odd years in
open country. Now his face looked too big and
loose for the small nose and slit of an Irish mouth.
You could see the indecision and maybe a little fear in the wide-open eyes, something that had never
been there before.
We'd catch ourselves looking at that face and
have to look at something else, quick, or Em would
see somebody's jaw hanging open and wonder what
the hell was wrong with him. We felt sorry for
Em---I know I did---and it was a funny feeling to all
of a sudden see the big TX ramrod that way.
Gosh looked like he had an apron on, standing
over the dead ﬁre with his hip cocked and the worn
hide chaps covering his short legs. He held the cup halfway to his face, watching Em, waiting for him
to ask the question. I thought Gosh was making it a little extra tough on Em; he could have come right
out with it. Both of them just stared at each other.
Finally Emmett said, "Jack with them?"
Gosh took a sip of coffee ﬁrst. "Him and Joe Anthony rode in together, and another man. Anthony 110
and the other man went into the Senate House and
Jack took the horses to the livery and then followed them over to the hotel."
"They see you?"
"Naw, I was down the street under a ramada. All
they'd see'd be shadow."
"You sure it was them, Gosh?" I asked him.
"Charlie," Gosh said, "I got a picture in my
head, and it's stuck there 'cause I never expected to see one like it. It's a picture of Jack and Joe Anthony riding into Magenta the same way a month ago. When you see something that's different or
hadn't ought to be, it sticks in your head. And they was on the same mounts, Charlie."
Emmett went over to his dun mare and tightened
the cinch like he wanted to keep busy and show us
everything was going the same. But he was just
fumbling with the strap, you could see that. His
head swung around a few inches. "Jack look all
right?"
Gosh turned his cup upside down and a few
drops of coffee trickled down to the ashes at his
feet. "I don't know, Em. How is a man who's just
stole a hundred head of beef supposed to look?"
Emmett jerked his body around and the face was
closed again for the ﬁrst time in a week, tight and redder than usual. Then his jaw eased and his big
hands hanging at his sides opened and closed and
then went loose. Emmett didn't have anything to
The Rustlers
111
grab. Some of the others were looking at Gosh Hall
and probably wondering why the little rider was
making it so hard for Em.
Emmett asked him, "Did you see Butzy?"
"He didn't ride in. I 'magine he's out with the
herd." Gosh looked around. "Neal still out, huh?"
Neal Whaley had gone in earlier with Gosh, then
split off over to where they were holding the herd, just north of Anton Chico. Neal was to watch and
tell us if they moved them. Emmett ﬁgured they
were holding the herd until a buyer came along.
There were a lot of buyers in New Mexico who
didn't particularly care what the brand read, but
Emmett said they were waiting for a top bid or they would have sold all the stock before this.
Ned Bristol and Lloyd Cohane got up and
stretched and then just stood there awkwardly
looking at the dead ﬁre, their boots, and each other.
Lloyd pulled a blue bandanna from his coat pocket
and wiped his face with it, then folded it and
straightened it out thin between his ﬁngers before
tilting his chin up to tie it around his neck. Ned
pushed his gun belt down lower on his hips and
watched Emmett.
Dobie Shaw, the kid in our outﬁt, went over to
his mount and pulled his Winchester from the boot
and felt in the bag behind the saddle for a box of
cartridges. Dobie had to do something too.
Ben Templin was older; he'd been riding better
112
than thirty years. He eased back to the ground with his hands behind his head tilting his hat over his
face and waited. Ben had all the time in the world.
Everybody was going through the motions of being natural, but ﬁdgeting and acting restless and watching Emmett at the same time because we all
knew it was time now, and Emmett didn't have any
choice. That was what forced Emmett's hand,
though we knew he would have done it anyway,
sooner or later. But maybe we looked a little too
anxious to him, when it was only restlessness. It
was a long ride from Tascosa. A case of let's get it over with or else go on home---one way or the
other, regardless of whose brother stole the cows.
Gosh Hall scratched the toe of his boot through
the sand, kicking it over the ashes of the dead ﬁre.
"About that time, ain't it, Em?"
Emmett exhaled like he was very tired. "Yeah,
it's about that time." He looked at every face,
slowly, before turning to his mare.
✯ ✯ ✯
It's roughly a hundred and thirty miles from Tascosa, following the Canadian, to Trementina on the Conchas, then another thirty-ﬁve miles south,
swinging around Mesa Montosa to Anton Chico,
on the Pecos. Counting detours to ﬁnd water holes
and trailing the wrong sign occasionally, that's
about two hundred miles of sun, wind, and New
The Rustlers
113
Mexico desert---and all to bring back a hundred
head of beef owned by a Chicago company that tallied close to a quarter million all over the Panhandle and north-central Texas.
The western section of the TX Company was
headquartered at Sudan that year, with most of the
herds north of Tascosa and strung out west along
the Canadian. Emmett Ryan was ramrod of the
home crew at Sudan, but he spent a week or more
at a time out on the grass with the herds. That was why he happened to be with us when R. D. Perris,
the company man, rode in. We were readying to go
into Magenta for a few when Perris came beating
his mount into camp. Even in the cool of the evening the horse was ﬂaked white and about to drop and Perris was so excited he could hardly get the
words out. And ﬁnally when he told his story there
was dead silence and all you could hear was R.
D.
Perris breathing like his chest was about to rip open.
Jack Ryan and Frank Butzinger---Frank, who nobody ever gave credit for having any sand---and over a hundred head of beef hadn't been seen on
the west range for three days. R. D. Perris had said, "The tracks follow the river west, but we ﬁgured
Jack was taking them to new grass. But then the
tracks just kept on going. . . ."
Emmett was silent from that time on. He asked a
few questions, but he was pretty sure of the answers before he asked them. There was that talk for 114
weeks about Jack having been seen in Tascosa and
Magenta with Joe Anthony. And there weren't
many people friendly with Joe Anthony. In his time, he'd had his picture on wanted dodgers more than
once. Two shootings for sure, and a few holdups,
but the holdups were just talk. Nobody ever pinned
anything on him, and with his gunhand reputation,
nobody made any accusations.
Gosh Hall had seen them together in Magenta
and he told Emmett to his face that he didn't like it; but Emmett had defended him and said Jack was
just sowing oats because he was still young and
hadn't got his sense of values yet. But Lloyd Cohane was there that time at the line camp when Emmett dropped in and chewed hell out of Jack for palling with Joe Anthony. Then came the time Emmett walked into the saloon in Tascosa with his gun out and pushed it into Joe Anthony's belly before Joe even saw him and told him to ride and keep riding.
Jack was there, drunk like he usually was in
town, but he sobered quick and followed Anthony
out of the saloon when Emmett prodded him out,
and laughed right in Emmett's face when Em told
him to stay where he was. And he was laughing and
weaving in the saddle when he rode out of town
with Anthony.
Until that night Perris came riding in with his
The Rustlers
115
story, Em hadn't seen his brother. So you know
what he was thinking; what all of us were thinking.
Riding the two hundred miles to ﬁnd the herd
was part of the job, but knowing you were trailing
a friend made the job kind of sour and none of us
was sure if we wanted to ﬁnd the cattle. Jack Ryan
was young and wild and drank too much and
laughed all the time, but he had more friends than
any rider in the Panhandle.
Like Ben Templin said: "Jack's a good boy, but
he's got an idea life's just a big can-can dancer with four ﬁngers of scootawaboo in each hand." And
that was about it.
✯ ✯ ✯
The splotch of white that was Anton Chico from
a distance gradually got bigger and cleared until ﬁnally right in front of us it was gray adobe brick, blocks of it, dull and lifeless in the cold late sunlight. Emmett slowed us to a walk the last few hundred feet approaching the town's main street and motioned Ben Templin up next to him.
"Ben," he said, "you take Dobie with you and
cut for that back street yonder and come up behind
the livery. Don't let anybody see you and hush the
stableman if he gets loud about what you're doing.
Maybe Butzy'll come along, Ben---if he isn't there
already."
116
I looked at Emmett watching Ben Templin and
Dobie Shaw cut off, and there it was. His old face
again. All closed and hard with the crow's feet
streaking from the corners of his eyes. And his
mouth tight like it used to be when he thought and
ordered men at the same time, because he always
knew what he was doing. You could see Emmett
knew what he was doing now, that he'd set his
mind. And when Emmett Ryan set his mind his
pride saw to it that it stayed set.
Emmett walked his mount down the left side of
the narrow main street with the rest of us strung
out behind. When he veered over to a hitchrack
about halfway down the second block, we veered
with him and tied up, straggled along before two
store fronts.
Em stepped up on the boardwalk and moved
leisurely toward the Senate House hotel almost at
the end of the block. He stopped as he crossed the
alley next to the hotel and nodded to Lloyd Cohane, then bent his head toward the alley and moved it in a half-circle over his big shoulders.
Lloyd moved off down the alley toward the back of
the hotel.
"Go on with him, Ned," Em whispered. "Stick
near the kitchen door and if anybody but the cook
comes out shoot his pants off."
Ned moved off after Lloyd, both carrying carbines. Em looked at Gosh and me, but didn't say The Rustlers
117
anything. He just looked and that meant we were
with him and supposed to back up anything he did.
Then he turned toward the hotel and slipped his revolver out in the motion. Gosh moved right after him and pointed the barrel of his Winchester out in front of him.
Two idlers sitting in front of the hotel stared at
us trying to make out they weren't staring, and as
soon as we passed them I heard their chairs scrape
and their footsteps hurrying down the boards. A
man across the street pushed through the saloon
doors without even putting his hands out. A rider
slowed up in front of the hotel as if about to turn in and then he kicked his mount into a trot down the
street.
In the hotel lobby you could still hear the horse
clopping down the street and it made the lobby
seem even more quiet and comfortable, feeling the
coolness inside and picturing the horse on the dusty street. But there was the clerk with his mouth open watching Emmett walk toward the café entrance,
his spurs chinging with each step.
It seemed like, for a show like this, everything
was moving too fast. The next thing, we were in the café part and Jack Ryan and Joe Anthony and the
other man were looking at us like they couldn't believe their eyes.
None of them moved. Jack's jaw was open with a
mouthful of beef, his eyes almost as wide open as
118
his mouth. The other man had a taco in his ﬁngers
raised halfway to his mouth and he just held it
there. Didn't move it up or down. Joe Anthony's
right hand was around a glass of something yellow
like mescal. His left hand was below the level of the table. The three of them had their hats on, pushed
back, and they looked dirty and tired.
Jack chewed and swallowed hard and then he
smiled. "Damn, Em, you must have ﬂown!"
The other man looked at us one at a time slowly,
then shrugged his shoulders and said, "What the
hell," and shoved the taco in his mouth.
Joe Anthony wiped the back of his hand over his
mouth and moved the hand back, smoothing the
long mustaches with the knuckle of his index ﬁnger. The other hand was still under the table.
Emmett held his revolver pointed square at Joe
Anthony and seemed to be unmindful of the other
two men. Lloyd and Ned came through the kitchen
door and moved around behind Emmett.
"Get up," Em ordered. "And take off your
belts."
Somebody's chair scraped, but Joe Anthony said,
"Hold it!" and it was quiet.
Anthony was staring back at Emmett. "Do I look
like a green kid to you, Ryan?" he said, and half
smiled. "You're not telling anybody what to do,
cowboy."
"I said get up," Em repeated.
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119
Joe Anthony kept on smiling like he thought Emmett was a fool. He shook his head slowly. "Ryan, the longer you stand there, the shorter your chances are of leaving here on your two feet."
"You're all mouth," Emmett said. "Just mouth."
The outlaw's expression didn't change. His face
was good-looking in a swarthy kind of way, but
gaunt and hungry-looking with pale, shallow eyes
like a man who forgot where his conscience was, or
that he ever had one.
His smile sagged a little and he said, "Ryan, let's quit playing. You ride the hell out of here before I shoot you."
"I'm not playing," Emmett said, leveling the revolver. "Get up, quick."
"Ryan," Joe Anthony whispered impatiently,
"I've had a Colt leveled on your belly since the second you come through that doorway."
I thought I knew Emmett Ryan, but I didn't
know him as well as I supposed. His face didn't
change its expression, but his ﬁnger moved on the
trigger and the room ﬁlled with the explosion. His
thumb yanked on the hammer and he ﬁred again
right on top of the ﬁrst one.
Joe Anthony went back with his chair, fell hard
and lay still. His pistol was still in the holster on his right hip.
Emmett looked down at him. "You're all mouth,
Anthony. All mouth."
120
Nobody said anything after that. We were looking at Em and Em was looking at Joe Anthony stretched out on the ﬂoor. I heard steps behind me
and there was Dobie Shaw tiptoeing in and looking like he'd dive out the window if anybody said anything.
Emmett waved his gun at the other man and
glanced at his brother. "Who's this?"
Jack spoke easily. "Earl Roach. We picked him
up for a trail driver. He didn't know it was rustled stock."
Roach was unfastening his gun belt. He shot a
look toward Jack. "Boy," he said, "you take care of your troubles and I'll take care of mine."
Dobie Shaw moved up behind Emmett hesitantly
and waited for the big foreman to look his way.
"Mr. Ryan---Ben's holding Butzy over to the livery." He went on hurriedly trying to get the whole story out before Em asked any questions. "Butzy
walked right in and didn't move after Ben throwed
down on him, but there was another one back a
ways and he turned and rode like hell when he saw
me and Ben with our guns out. Me and Ben didn't
even get a shot at him 'fore he was round the corner and gone."
"All right, Dobie. You go on back with Ben."
Emmett hesitated and glanced at Jack like he was
making up his mind all over again, but the doubt
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121
passed off quickly. He said, "We'll be over directly.
You go on and tell Ben to keep Butzy right there."
✯ ✯ ✯
Frank Butzinger was ﬂat against the boards of a
stall, though Ben Templin was standing across the
open part of the stable smoking a cigarette with his carbine propped against the wall. Ben wasn't paying any attention to him, but even in the dim light you could see Butzy was about ready to die of
fright.
Gosh Hall pushed Jack and Earl Roach toward
the stall that Butzy was in and mumbled something,
probably swearing. Jack looked around at him with
a half smile and shook his head like a father playing Indians with his youngster. Humoring him.
Emmett stood out in the open part with the rest
of us spread around now. He said, "You sell the
stock yet?"
"A few," Jack answered. "We got almost a hundred head."
"You got the money?"
"What do you think?"
The foreman motioned to Gosh Hall. "Get some
line and tie their hands behind them."
The little cowboy's face brightened and he
moved into the stall lifting a coil of rope from the side wall. When he pulled his knife and started to
122
cut it into pieces, the stableman came running over.
He'd been standing in the front doorway, but I
hadn't noticed him there before.
He ran over yelling, "Hey, that's my rope!"
Gosh reached out, laughing, and grabbed one of
his braces and snapped it against his faded redﬂannel undershirt. "Get back, old man, you're interfering with justice." Then he pushed the man hard against the stall partition.
Emmett took hold of his elbow and pulled him
out toward the front of the livery. "You stay out
here," he said. "This isn't any of your business."
He turned from the man and nodded his head to
the stalls where three horses were.
The stable was large, high-ceilinged, with stalls
lining both sides. The open area was wide, but
longer than it was wide, with heavy timbers overhead reaching from lofts on both sides that ran the length of the stable above the stalls. The stable was empty but for the three horses toward the back.
"Bring those horses up here." Em said it to no
one in particular.
When Dobie and Ned and I led the mounts up, I
heard Lloyd ask Em if he should go get our horses.
Em shook his head, but didn't say anything.
Lloyd said, "Shouldn't we be getting out to the
stock, Em?"
"We got time. Neal's watching the cows," Em reminded him. "The man that was with Butzy spread The Rustlers
123
his holler if there were any others out there. They'd be halfway to Santa Fe by now."
He turned on Gosh impatiently. "Come on, get
'em mounted."
I picked up one of their saddles from the rack
and walked up behind Gosh, who was pushing the
three men toward the horses.
"Look out, Gosh. Let me get the saddles on before you get in the way. You can't throw 'em on with your arms behind your back."
Gosh twisted his mouth into a smile and looked
past me at Emmett. There was a wad of tobacco in
his cheek that made his thin face lopsided, like a
jagged rock with hair on it. He shifted the wad, still smiling, and then spit over to the side.
"You tell him, Em," he said.
Emmett looked at me with his closed-up, leathery face. He stared hard as if afraid his eyes would waver. "They don't need the saddles."
Gosh swatted me playfully with the end of rope
in his hand. "Want me to paint you a picture, Charlie?" He laughed and walked out through the wide entrance.
Gosh didn't have to paint a picture. Ben Templin
dropped his cigarette. Lloyd and Ned and Dobie
just stared at Emmett, but none of them said anything. Em stood there like a rock and stared back like he was defying anybody to object.
The boys looked away and moved about uncom- 124
fortably. They weren't about to go against Emmett
Ryan. They were used to doing what they were told
because Em was always right, and weren't sure that
he wasn't right even now. A hanging isn't an uncommon thing where there is little law. Along the Pecos there was less than little. Still, it didn't rub right---even if Em was following his conscience, it
didn't rub right.
I hesitated until the words were in my mouth and
I'd have had bit my tongue off to hold them back.
"You setting yourself up as the law?" It was supposed to have a bite to it, but the words sounded weak and my voice wasn't even.
Emmett said, "You know what the law is." He
beckoned to the coil of rope Gosh had hung back
on the boards. "That's it right there, Charlie. You know better than that." Emmett was talking to
himself as well as me, but you didn't remind that
hardheaded Irishman of things like that.
"Look, Em. Let's get the law and handle this
right."
"It's black and white, it's two and two, if you
steal cows and get caught you hang."
"Maybe. But it's not up to you to decide. Let's
get the law."
"I've already decided," was all he said.
The stable hand crept up close to us and waited
until there was a pause. "The deputy ain't here,"
the old man said. "He rode down to Lincoln yester-The Rustlers 125
day morning to join the posse." He waited for
someone to show interest, but no one said a word.
"They're getting a posse up on account of there's
word Bill Bonney's at Fort Sumner."
He stepped back looking proud as could be over
his news. I could have kicked his seat ﬂat for what he said.
Gosh came back with two coiled lariats on his
arm and a third one in his hands. He was shaping a
knot at one end of it.
Earl Roach looked at Gosh, then up to the heavy
rafter that crossed above the three horses, then
Jack's head went up too.
Gosh spit and grinned at them, forming a loop in
the second rope. "What'd you expect'd happen?"
Jack kept his eyes on the rafter. "I didn't expect
to get caught."
"Jack's always smiling into the sunshine, ain't
he?" Gosh pushed Earl Roach toward his horse.
"Mount up, mister."
Roach jerked his shoulder away from him. "I
look like a bird to you? You want me up on that
horse, you'll have to put me up."
"Earl, I'll put you up and help take you down."
When he got to Butzy and offered him a leg up,
Butzy made a funny sound like a whine and started
to back away, but Gosh grabbed him by his shirt before he took two steps. Butzy looked over Gosh's bony shoulder, his eyes popping out of his pasty face.
126
"Em, what you ﬁxin' to do?" His voice went up
a notch, and louder. "What you ﬁxin' to do? You
just scarin' us, Em?"
If it was a joke, Butzy didn't want to play the
fool, but you could tell by his voice what he was
thinking. Em didn't answer him.
Gosh ﬁnished knotting the third rope and
handed it to Dobie, who looked at it like he'd never seen a lariat before.
Gosh said, "Make yourself useful and throw that
rope over the rafter."
He went out and brought his horse in and
mounted so he could slip the nooses over their
heads, but he stood in the stirrups and still couldn't reach the tops of their heads. Emmett told him to
get down and ordered Ben Templin to climb up and
ﬁx the ropes. Ben did it, but Em had to tell him
three times.
Before he jumped down, Ben lighted cigarettes
and gave them to Jack and Earl. Butzy was weaving
his head around so Ben couldn't get one in his
mouth. Just rolling his head around with his eyes
closed, moaning.
Gosh looked up at him and laughed out loud.
"You praying, Butzy?" he called out. "Better pray
hard, you ain't got much time," and kept on
laughing.
Ben Templin made a move toward Gosh, but Emmett caught his arm.
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127
"Hold still, Ben." He looked past him at Gosh.
"You can do what you're doing with your mouth
shut."
Gosh moved behind the horses with the short end
of rope in his hand. He edged over behind Earl
Roach's horse. "Age before beauty, I always say."
Butzy's eyes opened up wide. "God, Em! Please
Em---please---honest to God---I didn't know they
was stealing the herd! Swear to God, Em, I
thought Perris told Jack to sell the herd. Please,
Em---I---let me go and I'll never show my face
again. Please---"
"You'll never show it anyway where you're going," Gosh cracked.
Earl Roach was looking at Butzy with a blank
expression. His head turned to Jack, holding his
chin up to ease his neck away from the chafe of the rope. "Who's your friend?"
Jack Ryan's lips, with the cigarette hanging,
formed a small smile at Roach. "Never saw him before in my life." His young face was paler than usual, you could see it through beard and sunburn,
but his voice was slow and even with that little edge of sarcasm it usually carried.
Roach shook his head to drop the ash from his
cigarette. "Beats me where he come from," he said.
Ben Templin swore in a slow whisper. He mumbled, "It's a damn waste of good guts."
Lloyd and Ned and Dobie were looking at the
128
two of them like they couldn't believe their eyes
and then seemed to all drop their heads about the
same time. Embarrassed. Like they didn't rate to be in the same room with Jack and Earl. I felt it too, but felt a mad coming on along with it.
"Dammit, Em! You're going to wait for the
deputy!" I knew I was talking, but it didn't sound
like me. "You're going to wait for the deputy
whether you like it or not!"
Emmett just stared back and I felt like running
for the door. Emmett stood there alone like a rock
you couldn't budge and then Ben Templin was beside him with his hand on Em's arm, but not just resting it there, holding the forearm hard. His other hand was on his pistol butt.
"Charlie's right, Em," Ben said. "I'm not sure
how you got us this far, or why, but ain't you or God Almighty going to hang those boys by yourself."
They stood there, those two big men, their faces
not a foot apart, not telling a thing by their faces, but you got the feeling if one of them moved the livery would collapse like a twister hit it.
Finally Emmett blinked his eyes, and moved his
arm to make Ben let go.
"All right, Ben." It was just above a whisper
and sounded tired. "We've all worked together a
long time and have always agreed---if it was a case
of letting you in on the agreeing. We won't change
it now."
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129
Gosh came out from behind the horses. Disappointed and mad. He moved right up close to Emmett. "You going to let this woman---"
That was all he got a chance to say. Emmett
swung his ﬁst against that bony tobacco bulge and
Gosh ﬂattened against the board wall before sliding down into a heap.
Emmett started to walk out the front and then he
turned around. "We're waiting on the deputy until
tomorrow morning. If he don't show by then, this
party takes up where it left off."
He angled out the door toward the Senate House,
still the boss. The hardheaded Irishman's pride had to get the last word in whether he meant it or not.
✯ ✯ ✯
The deputy got back late that night. You could see
by his face that he hadn't gotten what he'd gone
for. Emmett stayed in his room at the Senate House, but Ben Templin and I were waiting at the jail when the deputy returned---though I don't know what we
would have done if he hadn't---with two bottles of
the yellowest mescal you ever saw to ease his saddle sores and dusty throat.
We told him how we'd put three of our boys in
his jail---just a scare, you understand---when they'd
got drunk and thought it'd be fun to run off with a few head of stock. Just a joke on the owner, you
understand. And Emmett Ryan, the ramrod, being
130
one of them's brother, he had to act tougher than
usual, else the boys'd think he was playing favorites. Like him always giving poor Jack the wildest broncs and making him ride drag on the
trail drives.
Em was always a little too serious, anyway. Of
course, he was a good man, but he was a big, redfaced Irishman who thought his pride was a stone god to burn incense in front of. And hell, he had
enough troubles bossing the TX crew without getting all worked up over his brother getting drunk and playing a little joke on the owners---you been
drunk like that, haven't you, Sheriff? Hell, everybody has. A sheriff with guts enough to work in Bill Bonney's country had more to do than chase after drunk cowpokes who wouldn't harm a ﬂy. And even if they were serious, what's a few cows to an
outﬁt that owns a quarter million?
And along about halfway down the second
bottle--- So why don't we turn the joke around on
old Em and let the boys out tonight? We done you a
turn by getting rid of Joe Anthony. Old Em'll wake
up in the morning and be madder than hell when he
ﬁnds out, and that will be some sight to see.
The deputy could hardly wait.
In the morning it was Ben who had to tell Em
what happened. I was there in body only, with my
head pounding like a pulverizer. The deputy didn't
show up at all.
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131
We waited for Emmett to ﬂy into somebody, but
he just looked at us, from one to the next. Finally he turned toward the livery.
"Let's go take the cows home," was all he said.
Not an hour later we were looking down at the
ﬂats along the Pecos where the herd was. Neal
Whaley was riding toward us.
Emmett had been riding next to me all the way
out from Anton Chico. When he saw Neal, he
broke into a gallop to meet him, and that was when
I thought he said, "Thanks, Charlie."
I know his head turned, but there was the beat of
his horse when he started the gallop, and that
mescal pounding at my brains. Maybe he said it
and maybe he didn't.
Knowing that Irishman, I'm not going to ask him.
It was a Sharps .50, heavy and cumbrous, but he
was lying at full length downwind of the herd behind the rise with the long barrel resting on the hump of the crest so that the gun would be less tiring to ﬁre.
He counted close to ﬁfty buffalo scattered over
the grass patches, and his front sight roamed over
the herd as he waited. A bull, its fresh winter hide glossy in the morning sun, strayed leisurely from
the others, following thick patches of gamma grass.
The Sharps swung slowly after the animal. And
when the bull moved directly toward the rise, the
The Big Hunt
133
heavy riﬂe dipped over the crest so that the sight
was just off the right shoulder. The young man,
who was still not much more than a boy, studied
the animal with mounting excitement.
"Come on, granddaddy . . . a little closer," Will
Gordon whispered. The riﬂe stock felt comfortable
against his cheek, and even the strong smell of oiled metal was good. "Walk up and take it like a man,
you ugly monster, you dumb, shaggy, ugly hulk of
a monster. Look at that fresh gamma right in front
of you. . . ."
The massive head came up sleepily, as if it had
heard the hunter, and the bull moved toward the rise.
It was less than eighty yards away, nosing the grass tufts, when the Sharps thudded heavily in the crisp morning air.
The herd lifted from grazing, shaggy heads turning lazily toward the bull sagging to its knees, but as it slumped to the ground the heads lowered unconcernedly. Only a few of the buffalo paused to sniff the breeze. A calf bawled, sounding nooooo in the open-plain stillness.
Will Gordon had reloaded the Sharps, and he
pushed it out in front of him as another buffalo lumbered over to the fallen bull, snifﬁng at the blood, nuzzling the bloodstained hide: and, when the head
came up, nose quivering with scent, the boy
squeezed the trigger. The animal stumbled a few
yards before easing its great weight to the ground.
134
Don't let them smell blood, he said to himself.
They smell blood and they're gone.
He ﬁred six rounds then, reloading the Sharps
each time, though a loaded Remington rollingblock lay next to him. He ﬁred with little hesitation, going to his side, ejecting, taking a cartridge from the loose pile at his elbow, inserting it in the open breech. He ﬁred without squinting, calmly,
killing a buffalo with each shot. Two of the animals lumbered on a short distance after being hit, glassy eyed, stunned by the shock of the heavy bullet. The others dropped to the earth where they stood.
Sitting up now, he pulled a square of cloth from
his coat pocket, opened his canteen, and poured
water into the cloth, squeezing it so that it would become saturated. He worked the wet cloth
through the eye of his cleaning rod, then inserted it slowly into the barrel of the Sharps, hearing a sizzle as it passed through the hot metal tube. He was
new to the buffalo ﬁelds, but he had learned how
an overheated gun barrel could put a man out of
business. He had made sure of many things before
leaving Leverette with just a two-man outﬁt.
Pulling the rod from the barrel, he watched an
old cow snifﬁng at one of the fallen bulls. Get that one quick . . . or you'll lose a herd!
He dropped the Sharps, took the Remington,
and ﬁred at the buffalo from a sitting position.
Then he reloaded both riﬂes, but ﬁred the Reming-The Big Hunt 135
ton a half-dozen more rounds while the Sharps
cooled. Twice he had to hit with another shot to
kill, and he told himself to take more time. Perspiration beaded his face, even in the crisp fall air, and burned powder was heavy in his nostrils, but he
kept ﬁring at the same methodical pace, because it
could not last much longer, and there was not time
to cool the barrels properly. He had killed close to twenty when the blood smell became too strong.
The buffalo made rumbling noises in the thickness of their throats, and now three and four at a time would crowd toward those on the ground,
snifﬁng, pawing nervously.
A bull bellowed, and the boy ﬁred again. The
herd bunched, bumping each other, bellowing,
shaking their clumsy heads at the blood smell. Then the leader broke suddenly, and what was left of the herd was off, from stand to dead run, in one moment of panic, driven mad by the scent of death.
The boy ﬁred into the dust cloud that rose behind them, but they were out of range before he could reload again.
It's better to wave them off carefully with a blanket after killing all you can skin, the boy thought to himself. But this had worked out all right. Sometimes it didn't, though. Sometimes they stampeded right at the hunter.
He rose stifﬂy, rubbing his shoulder, and moved
back down the rise to his picketed horse. His shoul- 136
der ached from the buck of the heavy riﬂes, but he
felt good. Lying back there on the plain was close
to seventy or eighty dollars he'd split with Leo
Cleary . . . soon as they'd been skinned and handed over to the hide buyers. Hell, this was easy. He
lifted his hat, and the wind was cold on his sweatdampened forehead. He breathed in the air, feeling an exhilaration, and the ache in his shoulder didn't matter one bit.
Wait until he rode into Leverette with a wagon
full of hides, he thought. He'd watch close, pretending he didn't care, and he'd see if anybody laughed at him then.
✯ ✯ ✯
He was mounting when he heard the wagon
creaking in the distance, and he smiled when Leo
Cleary's voice drifted up the gradual rise, swearing at the team. He waited in the saddle, and swung
down as the four horses and the canvas-topped
wagon came up to him.
"Leo, I didn't even have to come wake you up."
Will Gordon smiled up at the old man on the box,
and the smile eased the tight lines of his face. It was a face that seemed used to frowning, watching life
turn out all wrong, a sensitive boyish face, but the set of his jaw was a man's . . . or that of a boy who thought like a man. There were few people he
showed his smile to other than Leo Cleary.
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137
"That cheap store whiskey you brought run out,"
Leo Cleary said. His face was beard stubbled, and
the skin hung loosely seamed beneath tired eyes.
"I thought you quit," the boy said. His smile
faded.
"I have now."
"Leo, we got us a lot of money lying over that
rise."
"And a lot of work. . . ." He looked back into
the wagon, yawning. "We got near a full load we
could take in . . . and rest up. You shooters think all the work's in knocking 'em down."
"Don't I help with the skinning?"
Cleary's weathered face wrinkled into a slow
smile. "That's just the old man in me coming out,"
he said. "You set the pace, Will. All I hope is roaming hide buyers don't come along . . . you'll be wanting to stay out till April." He shook his head.
"That's a mountain of back-breaking hours just to
prove a point."
"You think it's worth it or not?" the boy said
angrily.
Cleary just smiled. "Your dad would have liked
to seen this," he said. "Come on, let's get those
hides."
Skinning buffalo was ﬁlthy, back-straining work.
Most hunters wouldn't stoop to it. It was for men
hired as skinners and cooks, men who stayed by the
wagons until the shooting was done.
138
During their four weeks on the range the boy did
his share of the work, and now he and Leo Cleary
went about it with little conversation. Will Gordon was not above helping with the butchering, with
hides going for four dollars each in Leverette, three dollars if a buyer picked them up on the range.
The more hides skinned, the bigger the proﬁt.
That was elementary. Let the professional hunters
keep their pride and their hands clean while they
sat around in the afternoon ﬁlling up on scootawaboo. Let them pay heavy for extra help just because skinning was beneath them. That was their business.
In Leverette, when the professional hunters
laughed at them, it didn't bother Leo Cleary.
Maybe they'd get hides, maybe they wouldn't. Either way it didn't matter much. When he thought about it, Leo Cleary believed the boy just wanted to prove a point---that a two-man outﬁt could make
money---attributing it to his Scotch stubbornness.
The idea had been Will's dad's---when he was
sober. The old man had almost proved it himself.
But whenever anyone laughed, the boy would
feel that the laughter was not meant for him but for his father.
Leo Cleary went to work with a frown on his
grizzled face, wetting his dry lips disgustedly. He squatted up close to the nearest buffalo and with
his skinning knife slit the belly from neck to tail.
The Big Hunt
139
He slashed the skin down the inside of each leg,
then carved a strip from around the massive neck,
his long knife biting at the tough hide close to the head. Then he rose, rubbing the back of his knife
hand across his forehead.
"Yo! Will . . ." he called out.
The boy came over then, leading his horse and
holding a coiled riata in his free hand. One end was secured to the saddle horn. He bunched the buffalo's heavy neck skin, wrapping the free end of line around it, knotting it.
He led the horse out the whole length of the rope,
then mounted, his heels squeezing ﬂanks as soon as
he was in the saddle.
"Yiiiiiii!" He screamed in the horse's ear and
swatted the rump with his hat. The mount bolted.
The hide held, stretching, then jerked from the
carcass, coming with a quick sucking, sliding gasp.
They kept at it through most of the afternoon,
sweating over the carcasses, both of them skinning, and butchering some meat for their own use. It was
still too early in the year, too warm, to butcher
hindquarters for the meat buyers. Later, when the
snows came and the meat would keep, they would
do this.
They took the fresh hides back to their base
camp and staked them out, stretching the skins
tightly, ﬂesh side up. The ﬂat ground around the
wagon and cook ﬁre was covered with staked-out
140
hides, taken the previous day. In the morning they
would gather the hides and bind them in packs and
store the packs in the wagon. The boy thought
there would be maybe two more days of hunting
here before they would have to move the camp.
For the second time that day he stood stretching,
rubbing a stiffness in his body, but feeling satisﬁed.
He smiled, and even Leo Cleary wasn't watching
him to see it.
At dusk they saw the string of wagons out on the
plain, a black line creeping toward them against the sunlight dying on the horizon.
"Hide buyers, most likely," Leo Cleary said. He
sounded disappointed, for it could mean they
would not return to Leverette for another month.
The boy said, "Maybe a big hunting outﬁt."
"Not at this time of day," the old man said.
"They'd still have their hides drying." He motioned to the creek back of their camp. "Whoever it is,
they want water."
Two riders leading the ﬁve Conestogas spurred
suddenly as they neared the camp and rode in
ahead of the six-team wagons. The boy watched
them intently. When they were almost to the camp
circle, he recognized them and swore under his
breath, though he suddenly felt self-conscious.
The Foss brothers, Clyde and Wylie, swung
down stiff legged, not waiting for an invitation, and arched the stiffness from their backs. Without a
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141
greeting Clyde Foss's eyes roamed leisurely over the staked-out hides, estimating the number as he
scratched at his beard stubble. He grinned slowly,
looking at his brother.
"They must a used rocks . . . ain't more than
forty hides here."
Leo Cleary said, "Hello, Clyde . . . Wylie," and
watched the surprise come over them with recognition.
Clyde said, "Damn, Leo, I didn't see you were
here. Who's that with you?"
"Matt Gordon's boy," Leo Cleary answered.
"We're hunting together this season."
"Just the two of you?" Wylie asked with surprise. He was a few years older than Clyde, calmer, but looked to be his twin. They were both of them
lanky, thin through face and body, but heavy
boned.
Leo Cleary said, "I thought it was common talk
in Leverette about us being out."
"We made up over to Caldwell this year," Clyde
said. He looked about the camp again, amused.
"Who does the shooting?"
"I do." The boy took a step toward Clyde Foss.
His voice was cold, distant. He was thinking of another time four years before when his dad had introduced him to the Foss brothers, the day Matt Gordon contracted with them to pick up his hides.
"And I do skinning," the boy added. It was like
142
What are you going to do about it! the way he said it.
Clyde laughed again. Wylie just grinned.
"So you're Matt Gordon's boy," Wylie Foss said.
"We met once before."
"We did?"
"In Leverette, four years ago." The boy made
himself say it naturally. "A month before you met
my dad in the ﬁeld and paid him for his hides with
whiskey instead of cash . . . the day before he was trampled into the ground. . . ."
✯ ✯ ✯
The Foss brothers met his stare, and suddenly
the amusement was gone from their eyes. Clyde no
longer laughed, and Wylie's mouth tightened.
Clyde stared at the boy and said, "If you meant
anything by that, you better watch your mouth."
Wylie said, "We can't stop buffalo from stampedin'." Clyde grinned now.
"Maybe he's drunk . . . maybe he favors his pa."
"Take it any way you want," the boy said. He
stood ﬁrmly with his ﬁsts clenched. "You knew better than to give him whiskey. You took advantage of him."
Wylie looked up at the rumbling sound of the
wagon string coming in, the ponderous creaking of
wooden frames, iron-rimmed tires grating, and the
never-changing off-key leathery rattle of the traces, The Big Hunt
143
then the sound of reins ﬂicking horse hide and the
indistinguishable growls of the teamsters.
Wylie moved toward the wagons in the dimness
and shouted to the ﬁrst one, "Ed . . . water down!"
pointing toward the creek.
"You bedding here?" Leo Cleary asked after him.
"Just water."
"Moving all night?"
"We're meeting a party on the Salt Fork . . . they
ain't going to stay there forever." Wylie Foss
walked after the wagons leading away their horses.
Clyde paid little attention to the wagons, only
glancing in that direction as they swung toward the stream. Stoop shouldered, his hand curling the
brim of his sweat-stained hat, his eyes roamed
lazily over the drying hides. He rolled a cigarette, taking his time, failing to offer tobacco to the boy.
"I guess we got room for your hides," he said ﬁnally.
"I'm not selling."
"We'll load soon as we water . . . even take the
fresh ones."
"I said I'm not selling."
"Maybe I'm not asking."
"There's nothing making me sell if I don't want
to!"
The slow smile formed on Clyde's mouth.
"You're a mean little fella, aren't you?"
Clyde Foss dropped the cigarette stub and turned
144
a boot on it. "There's a bottle in my saddle pouch."
He nodded to Leo Cleary, who was standing off
from them. "Help yourself, Leo."
The old man hesitated.
"I said help yourself."
Leo Cleary moved off toward the stream.
"Now, Mr. Gordon . . . how many hides you say
were still dryin'?"
"None for you."
"Forty . . . forty-ﬁve?"
"You heard what I said." He was standing close
to Clyde Foss, watching his face. He saw the jaw
muscles tighten and sensed Clyde's shift of weight.
He tried to turn, bringing up his shoulder, but it
came with pain-stabbing suddenness. Clyde's ﬁst
smashed against his cheek, and he stumbled off
balance.
"Forty?"
Clyde's left hand followed around with weight
behind it, scraping his temple, staggering him.
"Forty-ﬁve?"
He waded after the boy then, clubbing at his face
and body, knocking his guard aside to land his ﬁsts, until the boy was backed against his wagon. Then
Clyde stopped as the boy fell into the wheel spokes, gasping, and slumped to the ground.
Clyde stood over the boy and nudged him with
his boot. "Did I hear forty or forty-ﬁve?" he said
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145
dryly. And when the boy made no answer---"Well,
it don't matter."
He heard the wagons coming up from the creek.
Wylie was leading the horses. "Boy went to sleep
on us, Wylie." He grinned. "He said don't disturb
him, just take the skins and leave the payment with Leo." He laughed then. And later, when the wagons pulled out, he was laughing again.
Once he heard voices, a man swearing, a neverending soft thudding against the ground, noises above him in the wagon. But these passed, and
there was nothing.
He woke again, brieﬂy, a piercing ringing in his
ears, and his face throbbed violently though the
pain seemed to be out from him and not within, as
if his face were bloated and would soon burst. He
tried to open his mouth, but a weight held his jaws tight. Then wagons moving
. . . the sound of
traces . . . laughter.
It was still dark when he opened his eyes. The
noises had stopped. Something cool was on his
face. He felt it with his hand---a damp cloth. He sat up, taking it from his face, working his jaw slowly.
The man was a blur at ﬁrst . . . something reﬂecting in his hand. Then it was Leo Cleary, and the something in his hand was a half-empty whiskey
bottle.
"There wasn't anything I could do, Will."
146
"How long they been gone?"
"Near an hour. They took all of them, even the
ones staked out." He said, "Will, there wasn't anything I could do. . . ."
"I know," the boy said.
"They paid for the hides with whiskey." The boy
looked at him, surprised. He had not expected
them to pay anything. But now he saw how this
would appeal to Clyde's sense of humor, using the
same way the hide buyer had paid his dad four
years before.
"That part of it, Leo?" The boy nodded to the
whiskey bottle in the old man's hand.
"No, they put three ﬁve-gallon barrels in the
wagon. Remember . . . Clyde give me this."
The boy was silent. Finally he said, "Don't touch
those barrels, Leo."
He sat up the remainder of the night, listening to
his thoughts. He had been afraid when Clyde Foss
was bullying him, and he was still afraid. But now
the fear was mixed with anger, because his body
ached and he could feel the loose teeth on one side of his mouth when he tightened his jaw, and taste
the blood dry on his lips and most of all because
Clyde Foss had taken a month's work, four hundred and eighty hides, and left three barrels of whiskey.
Sometimes the fear was stronger than the anger.
The plain was silent and in its darkness there was
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147
nothing to hold to. He did not bother Leo Cleary.
He talked to himself and listened to the throb in his temples and left Leo alone with the little whiskey
he still had. He wanted to cry, but he could not because he had given up the privilege by becoming a man, even though he was still a boy. He was acutely aware of this, and when the urge to cry welled in
him he would tighten his nerves and call himself
names until the urge passed.
Sometimes the anger was stronger than the fear,
and he would think of killing Clyde Foss. Toward
morning both the fear and the anger lessened, and
many of the things he had thought of during the
night he did not now remember. He was sure of
only one thing: He was going to get his hides back.
A way to do it would come to him. He still had his
Sharps.
He shook Leo Cleary awake and told him to
hitch the wagon.
"Where we going?" The old man was still dazed,
from sleep and whiskey.
"Hunting, Leo. Down on the Salt Fork."
✯ ✯ ✯
Hunting was good in the Nations. The herds
would come down from Canada and the Dakotas
and winter along the Cimarron and the Salt and
even down to the Canadian. Here the herds were
big, two and three hundred grazing together, and
148
sometimes you could look over the ﬂat plains and
see thousands. A big outﬁt with a good hunter could average over eighty hides a day. But, because there were so many hunters, the herds kept on the move.
In the evening they saw the ﬁrst of the buffalo
camps. Distant lights in the dimness, then lanterns and cook ﬁres as they drew closer in a dusk turning to night, and the sounds of men drifted out to them on the silent plain.
The hunters and skinners were crouched around
a poker game on a blanket, a lantern above them
on a crate. They paid little heed to the old man and the boy, letting them prepare their supper on the
low-burning cook ﬁre and after, when the boy
stood over them and asked questions, they answered him shortly. The game was for high stakes, and there was a pot building. No, they hadn't seen
the Foss brothers, and if they had, they wouldn't
trade with them anyway. They were taking their
skins to Caldwell for top dollar.
They moved on, keeping well off from the ﬂickering line of lights. Will Gordon would go in alone as they neared the camps, and, if there were ﬁve
wagons in the camp, he'd approach cautiously until
he could make out the men at the ﬁre.
From camp to camp it was the same story. Most
of the hunters had not seen the Fosses; a few had,
earlier in the day, but they could be anywhere now.
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149
Until ﬁnally, very late, they talked to a man who
had sold to the Foss brothers that morning.
"They even took some fresh hides," he told them.
"Still heading west?" The boy kept his voice
even, though he felt the excitement inside of him.
"Part of them," the hunter said. "Wylie went
back to Caldwell with three wagons, but Clyde
shoved on to meet another party up the Salt. See,
Wylie'll come back with empty wagons, and by
that time the hunters'll have caught up with
Clyde. You ought to ﬁnd him up a ways. We'll all
be up there soon . . . that's where the big herds are heading."
They moved on all night, spelling each other on
the wagon box. Leo grumbled and said they were
crazy. The boy said little because he was thinking
of the big herds. And he was thinking of Clyde Foss with all those hides he had to dry . . . and the plan was forming in his mind.
Leo Cleary watched from the pines, seeing nothing, thinking of the boy who was out somewhere in the darkness, though most of the time he
thought of whiskey, barrels of it that they had
been hauling for two days and now into the second night.
The boy was a fool. The camp they had seen at
sundown was probably just another hunter. They
all staked hides at one time or another. Seeing him 150
sneaking up in the dark they could take him for a
Kiowa and cut him in two with a buffalo gun. And
even if it did turn out to be Clyde Foss, then what?
Later, the boy walked in out of the darkness and
pushed the pine branches aside and was standing
next to the old man.
"It's Clyde, Leo."
The old man said nothing.
"He's got two men with him."
"So . . . what are you going to do now?" the old
man said.
"Hunt," the boy said. He went to his saddlebag
and drew a cap-and-ball revolver and loaded it before bedding for the night.
In the morning he took his riﬂes and led his horse
along the base of the ridge, through the pines that were dense here, but scattered higher up the slope.
He would look out over the ﬂat plain to the south
and see the small squares of canvas, very white in
the brilliant sunlight. Ahead, to the west, the ridge dropped off into a narrow valley with timbered
hills on the other side.
The boy's eyes searched the plain, roaming to the
white squares, Clyde's wagons, but he went on
without hesitating until he reached the sloping ﬁnish of the ridge. Then he moved up the valley until the plain widened again, and then he stopped to
wait. He was prepared to wait for days if necessary, until the right time.
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151
From high up on the slope above, Leo Cleary
watched him. Through the morning the old man's
eyes would drift from the boy and then off to the left, far out on the plain to the two wagons and the ribbon of river behind them. He tried to relate the boy and the wagons in some way, but he could not.
After a while he saw buffalo. A few straggling
off toward the wagons, but even more on the other
side of the valley where the plain widened again
and the grass was higher, green-brown in the sun.
Toward noon the buffalo increased, and he remembered the hunters saying how the herds were moving west. By that time there were hundreds,
perhaps a thousand, scattered over the grass, out a mile or so from the boy who seemed to be concentrating on them.
Maybe he really is going hunting, Leo Cleary
thought. Maybe he's starting all over again. But I
wish I had me a drink. The boy's downwind now,
he thought, lifting his head to feel the breeze on his face. He could edge up and take a hundred of them
if he did it right. What's he waiting for! Hell, if he wants to start all over, it's all right with me. I'll stay out with him. At that moment he was thinking of
the three barrels of whiskey.
"Go out and get 'em, Will," he urged the boy
aloud, though he would not be heard. "The wind
won't keep forever!"
Surprised, then, he saw the boy move out from
152
the brush clumps leading his horse, mount, and
lope off in a direction out and away from the herd.
"You can't hunt buffalo from a saddle . . . they'll run as soon as they smell horse! What the hell's the matter with him!"
✯ ✯ ✯
He watched the boy, growing smaller with distance, move out past the herd. Then suddenly the horse wheeled, and it was going at a dead run toward the herd. A yell drifted up to the ridge and then a heavy riﬂe shot followed by two reports that were weaker. Horse and rider cut into the herd, and the buffalo broke in confusion.
They ran crazily, bellowing, bunching in panic to
escape the horse and man smell and the screaming
that suddenly hit them with the wind. A herd of
buffalo will run for hours if the panic stabs them
sharp enough, and they will stay together, bunching their thunder, tons of bulk, massive bellowing heads, horns, and thrashing hooves. Nothing will
stop them. Some go down, and the herd passes over,
beating them into the ground.
They ran directly away from the smell and the
noises that were now far behind, downwind they
came and in less than a minute were thundering
through the short valley. Dust rose after them, billowing up to the old man, who covered his mouth, coughing, watching the rumbling dark mass erupt
The Big Hunt
153
from the valley out onto the plain. They moved in
an unwavering line toward the Salt Fork, rolling
over everything, before swerving at the river---even
the two canvas squares that had been brilliant
white in the morning sun. And soon they were only
a deep hum in the distance.
Will Gordon was out on the ﬂats, approaching
the place where the wagons had stood, riding
slowly now in the settling dust.
But the dust was still in the air, heavy enough to
make Leo Cleary sneeze as he brought the wagon
out from the pines toward the river.
He saw the hide buyers' wagons smashed to
scrap wood and shredded canvas dragged among
the strewn buffalo hides. Many of the bales were
still intact, spilling from the wagon wrecks; some
were buried under the debris.
Three men stood waist deep in the shallows of
the river, and beyond them, upstream, were the
horses they had saved. Some had not been cut from
the pickets in time, and they lay shapeless in blood at one end of the camp.
Will Gordon stood on the bank with the revolving pistol cocked, pointed at Clyde Foss. He glanced aside as the old man brought up the team.
"He wants to sell back, Leo. How much, you
think?"
The old man only looked at him, because he
could not speak.
154
"I think two barrels of whiskey," Will Gordon
said. He stepped suddenly into the water and
brought the long pistol barrel sweeping against
Clyde's head, cutting the temple.
"Two barrels?"
Clyde Foss staggered and came to his feet slowly.
"Come here, Clyde." The boy leveled the pistol
at him and waited as Clyde Foss came hesitantly
out of the water, hunching his shoulders. The boy
swung the pistol back, and, as Clyde ducked, he
brought his left ﬁst up, smashing hard against the
man's jaw.
"Or three barrels?"
The hide buyer ﬂoundered in the shallow water,
then crawled to the bank, and lay on his stomach,
gasping for breath.
"We'll give him three, Leo. Since he's been nice
about it."
Later, after Clyde and his two men had loaded
their wagon with four hundred and eighty hides,
the old man and the boy rode off through the valley to the great plain.
Once the old man said, "Where we going now,
Will?"
And when the boy said, "We're still going hunting, Leo," the old man shrugged wearily and just nodded his head.
When Mickey Segundo was fourteen, he tracked
a man almost two hundred miles---from the Jicarilla Subagency down into the malpais.
He caught up with him at a water hole in late afternoon and stayed behind a rock outcropping watching the man drink. Mickey Segundo had not
tasted water in three days, but he sat patiently behind the cover while the man quenched his thirst, watching him relax and make himself comfortable
as the hot lava country cooled with the approach of evening.
Finally Mickey Segundo stirred. He broke open
156
the .50-caliber Gallagher and inserted the paper cartridge and the cap. Then he eased the carbine between a niche in the rocks, sighting on the back of the man's head. He called in a low voice, "Tony
Choddi . . ." and as the face with the wide-open
eyes came around, he ﬁred casually.
He lay on his stomach and slowly drank the water he needed, ﬁlling his canteen and the one that had belonged to Tony Choddi. Then he took his
hunting knife and sawed both of the man's ears off, close to the head. These he put into his saddle
pouch, leaving the rest for the buzzards.
A week later Mickey Segundo carried the pouch
into the agency ofﬁce and dropped the ears on my
desk. He said very simply, "Tony Choddi is sorry
he has caused trouble."
I remember telling him, "You're not thinking of
going after McKay now, are you?"
"This man, Tony Choddi, stole stuff, a horse and
clothes and a gun," he said with his pleasant smile.
"So I thought I would do a good thing and ﬁx it so
Tony Choddi didn't steal no more."
With the smile there was a look of surprise, as if
to say, "Why would I want to get Mr. McKay?"
A few days later I saw McKay and told him
about it and mentioned that he might keep his eyes
open. But he said that he didn't give a damn about
any breed Jicarilla kid. If the kid felt like avenging his old man, he could try, but he'd probably cash in The Boy Who Smiled
157
before his time. And as for getting Tony Choddi, he didn't give a damn about that either. He'd got the
horse back and that's all he cared about.
After he had said his piece, I was sorry I had
warned him. And I felt a little foolish telling one of the biggest men in the Territory to look out for a
half-breed Apache kid. I told myself, Maybe you're
just rubbing up to him because he's important and
could use his inﬂuence to help out the agency . . .
and maybe he knows it.
Actually I had more respect for Mickey Segundo,
as a human being, than I did for T. O. McKay.
Maybe I felt I owed the warning to McKay because
he was a white man. Like saying, "Mickey Segundo's a good boy, but, hell, he's half Indian."
Just one of those things you catch yourself doing.
Like habit. You do something wrong the ﬁrst time
and you know it, but if you keep it up, it becomes a habit and it's no longer wrong because it's something you've always been doing.
McKay and a lot of people said Apaches were no
damn good. The only good one was a dead one.
They never stopped to reason it out. They'd been
saying it so long, they knew it was true. Certainly any such statement was unreasonable, but damned
if I wouldn't sometimes nod my head in agreement,
because at those times I'd be with white men and
that's the way white men talked.
I might have thought I was foolish, but actually it 158
was McKay who was the fool. He underestimated
Mickey Segundo.
That was ﬁve years ago. It had begun with a
hanging.
✯ ✯ ✯
Early in the morning, Tudishishn, sergeant of
Apache police at the Jicarilla Agency, rode in to tell me that Tony Choddi had jumped the boundaries
again and might be in my locale. Tudishishn stayed
for half a dozen cups of coffee, though his information didn't last that long. When he'd had enough, he left as leisurely as he had arrived. Hunting renegades, reservation jumpers, was Tudishishn's job; still, it wasn't something to get excited about. Tomorrows were for work; todays were for thinking about it.
Up at the agency they were used to Tony Choddi
skipping off. Usually they'd ﬁnd him later in some
shaded barranca, full of tulapai.
It was quiet until late afternoon, but not unusually so. It wasn't often that anything out of the ordinary happened at the subagency. There were twenty-six families, one hundred eight Jicarillas all told, under my charge. We were located almost
twenty miles below the reservation proper, and
most of the people had been there long before the
reservation had been marked off. They had been
fairly peaceful then, and remained so now. It was
The Boy Who Smiled
159
one of the few instances where the Bureau allowed
the sleeping dog to lie; and because of that we had less trouble than they did up at the reservation.
There was a sign on the door of the adobe ofﬁce
which described it formally. It read: d. j. merritt--- agent, jicarilla apache subagency---puerco,
new mexico territory. It was a startling announcement to post on the door of a squat adobe sitting all alone in the shadow of the Nacimentos.
My Apaches preferred higher ground and the closest jacales were two miles up into the foothills. The ofﬁce had to remain on the mail run, even though
the mail consisted chieﬂy of impossible-to-apply
Bureau memoranda.
Just before supper Tudishishn returned. He came
in at a run this time and swung off before his pony had come to a full stop. He was excited and spoke
in a confusion of Apache, Spanish, and a word here
and there of English.
Returning to the reservation, he had decided to
stop off and see his friends of the Puerco Agency.
There had been friends he had not seen for some
time, and the morning had lengthened into afternoon with tulapai, good talking, and even coffee. People had come from the more remote jacales, deeper in
the hills, when they learned Tudishishn was there, to hear news of friends at the reservation. Soon there were many people and what looked like the beginning of a good time. Then Señor McKay had come.
160
McKay had men with him, many men, and they
were looking for Mickey Solner---the squaw man,
as the Americans called him.
Most of the details I learned later on, but brieﬂy
this is what had happened: McKay and some of his
men were out on a hunting trip. When they got up
that morning, McKay's horse was gone, along with
a shotgun and some personal articles. They got on
the tracks, which were fresh and easy to follow,
and by that afternoon they were at Mickey Solner's
jacale. His woman and boy were there, and the
horse was tethered in front of the mud hut. Mickey
Segundo, the boy, was honored to lead such important people to his father, who was visiting with Tudishishn.
McKay brought the horse along, and when they
found Mickey Solner, they took hold of him without asking questions and looped a rope around his neck. Then they boosted him up onto the horse
they claimed he had stolen. McKay said it would be
ﬁtting that way. Tudishishn had left fast when he
saw what was about to happen. He knew they
wouldn't waste time arguing with an Apache, so he
had come to me.
When I got there, Mickey Solner was still sitting
McKay's chestnut mare with the rope reaching
from his neck to the cottonwood bough overhead.
His head drooped as if all the ﬁght was out of him, and when I came up in front of the chestnut, he
The Boy Who Smiled
161
looked at me with tired eyes, watery and red from
tulapai.
I had known Solner for years, but had never become close to him. He wasn't a man with whom you became fast friends. Just his living in an
Apache rancheria testiﬁed to his being of a different breed. He was friendly enough, but few of the whites liked him---they said he drank all the time
and never worked. Maybe most were just envious.
Solner was a white man gone Indian, whole hog.
That was the cause of the resentment.
His son, Mickey the Second, stood near his dad's
stirrup looking at him with a bewildered, pathetic
look on his slim face. He held on to the stirrup as if he'd never let it go. And it was the ﬁrst time, the only time, I ever saw Mickey Segundo without a
faint smile on his face.
"Mr. McKay," I said to the cattleman, who was
standing relaxed with his hands in his pockets,
"I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to take that man
down. He's under bureau jurisdiction and will have
to be tried by a court."
McKay said nothing, but Bowie Allison, who
was his herd boss, laughed and then said, "You
ought to be afraid."
Dolph Bettzinger was there, along with his
brothers Kirk and Sim. They were hired for their
guns and usually kept pretty close to McKay. They
did not laugh when Allison did.
162
And all around the clearing by the cottonwood
were eight or ten others. Most of them I recognized as McKay riders. They stood solemnly, some with
riﬂes and shotguns. There wasn't any doubt in their minds what stealing a horse meant.
"Tudishishn says that Mickey didn't steal your
horse. These people told him that he was at home
all night and most of the morning until Tudishishn
dropped in, and then he came down here." A line of
Apaches stood a few yards off and as I pointed to
them, some nodded their heads.
"Mister," McKay said, "I found the horse at this
man's hut. Now, you argue that down, and I'll kiss
the behind of every Apache you got living around
here."
"Well, your horse could have been left there by
someone else."
"Either way, he had a hand in it," he said curtly.
"What does he say?" I looked up at Mickey Solner and asked him quickly, "How did you get the horse, Mickey?"
"I just traded with a fella." His voice shook, and
he held on to the saddle horn as if afraid he'd fall off. "This fella come along and traded with me,
that's all."
"Who was it?"
Mickey Solner didn't answer. I asked him again,
but still he refused to speak. McKay was about to
The Boy Who Smiled
163
say something, but Tudishishn came over quickly
from the group of Apaches.
"They say it was Tony Choddi. He was seen to
come into camp in early morning."
I asked Mickey if it was Tony Choddi, and ﬁnally
he admitted that it was. I felt better then. McKay
couldn't hang a man for trading a horse.
"Are you satisﬁed, Mr. McKay? He didn't know
it was yours. Just a matter of trading a horse."
McKay looked at me, narrowing his eyes. He
looked as if he were trying to ﬁgure out what kind
of a man I was. Finally he said, "You think I'm going to believe them?"
It dawned on me suddenly that McKay had been
using what patience he had for the past few minutes. Now he was ready to continue what they had come for. He had made up his mind long before.
"Wait a minute, Mr. McKay, you're talking
about the life of an innocent man. You can't just toy with it like it was a head of cattle."
He looked at me and his puffy face seemed to
harden. He was a heavy man, beginning to sag about
the stomach. "You think you're going to tell me what I can do and what I can't? I don't need a government representative to tell me why my horse was stolen!"
"I'm not telling you anything. You know Mickey
didn't steal the horse. You can see for yourself
you're making a mistake."
164
McKay shrugged and looked at his herd boss.
"Well, if it is, it isn't a very big one---leastwise we'll be sure he won't be trading in stolen horses again."
He nodded to Bowie Allison.
Bowie grinned, and brought his quirt up and
then down across the rump of the chestnut.
"Yiiiiiiiiii . . ."
The chestnut broke fast. Allison stood yelling after it, then jumped aside quickly as Mickey Solner swung back toward him on the end of the rope.
✯ ✯ ✯
It was two weeks later, to the day, that Mickey Segundo came in with Tony Choddi's ears. You can see why I asked him if he had a notion of going after McKay. And it was a strange thing. I was talking to a different boy than the one I had last seen under the cottonwood.
When the horse shot out from under his dad, he
ran to him like something wild, screaming, and
wrapped his arms around the kicking legs trying to
hold the weight off the rope.
Bowie Allison cuffed him away, and they held
him back with pistols while he watched his dad die.
From then on he didn't say a word, and when it was
over, walked away with his head down. Then, when
he came in with Tony Choddi's ears, he was himself
again. All smiles.
I might mention that I wrote to the Bureau of In-The Boy Who Smiled 165
dian Affairs about the incident, since Mickey Solner, legally, was one of my charges; but nothing came of it. In fact, I didn't even get a reply.
Over the next few years Mickey Segundo
changed a lot. He became Apache. That is, his appearance changed and almost everything else about him---except the smile. The smile was always there,
as if he knew a monumental secret which was going to make everyone happy.
He let his hair grow to his shoulders and usually
he wore only a frayed cotton shirt and breechclout; his moccasins were Apache---curled toes and leggings which reached to his thighs. He went under his Apache name, which was Peza-a, but I called
him Mickey when I saw him, and he was never reluctant to talk to me in English. His English was good, discounting grammar.
Most of the time he lived in the same jacale his
dad had built, providing for his mother and ﬁtting
closer into the life of the rancheria than he did before. But when he was about eighteen, he went up to the agency and joined Tudishishn's police. His
mother went with him to live at the reservation, but within a year the two of them were back. Tracking
friends who happened to wander off the reservation
didn't set right with him. It didn't go with his
smile.
Tudishishn told me he was sorry to lose him because he was an expert tracker and a dead shot. I 166
know the sergeant had a dozen good sign followers,
but very few who were above average with a gun.
He must have been nineteen when he came back
to Puerco. In all those years he never once mentioned McKay's name. And I can tell you I never brought it up either.
I saw McKay even less after the hanging incident. If he ignored me before, he avoided me now. As I said, I felt like a fool after warning him about Mickey Segundo, and I'm certain McKay felt only contempt for me for doing it, after sticking up for the boy's dad.
McKay would come through every once in a
while, usually going on a hunt up into the Nacimentos. He was a great hunter and would go out for a few days every month or so. Usually with his
herd boss, Bowie Allison. He hunted everything
that walked, squirmed, or ﬂew and I'm told his
ranch trophy room was really something to see.
You couldn't take it away from the man; everything
he did, he did well. He was in his ﬁfties, but he could shoot straighter and stay in the saddle longer than any of his riders. And he knew how to make money.
But it was his arrogance that irked me. Even though he was polite, he made you feel far beneath him. He talked to you as if you were one of the hired help.
One afternoon, fairly late, Tudishishn rode in
and said that he was supposed to meet McKay at
the adobe ofﬁce early the next morning. McKay
wanted to try the shooting down southwest toward
The Boy Who Smiled
167
the malpais, on the other side of it, actually, and Tudishishn was going to guide for him.
The Indian policeman drank coffee until almost
sundown and then rode off into the shadows of the
Nacimentos. He was staying at one of the rancherias, visiting with his friends until the morning.
McKay appeared ﬁrst. It was a cool morning,
bright and crisp. I looked out of the window and
saw the ﬁve riders coming up the road from the
south, and when they were close enough I made out
McKay and Bowie Allison and the three Bettzinger
brothers. When they reached the ofﬁce, McKay and
Bowie dismounted, but the Bettzingers reined
around and started back down the road.
McKay nodded and was civil enough, though he
didn't direct more than a few words to me. Bowie
was ready when I asked them if they wanted coffee,
but McKay shook his head and said they were leaving shortly. Just about then the rider appeared coming down out of the hills.
McKay was squinting, studying the ﬁgure on
the pony.
I didn't really look at him until I noticed
McKay's close attention. And when I looked at the
rider again, he was almost on us. I didn't have to
squint then to see that it was Mickey Segundo.
McKay said, "Who's that?" with a ring of suspicion to his voice.
I felt a sudden heat on my face, like the feeling
168
you get when you're talking about someone, then
suddenly ﬁnd the person standing next to you.
Without thinking about it I told McKay, "That's
Peza-a, one of my people." What made me call him
by his Apache name I don't know. Perhaps because
he looked so Indian. But I had never called him
Peza-a before.
He approached us somewhat shyly, wearing his
faded shirt and breechclout but now with a streak
of ochre painted across his nose from ear to ear. He didn't look as if he could have a drop of white
blood in him.
"What's he doing here?" McKay's voice still held
a note of suspicion, and he looked at him as if he
were trying to place him.
Bowie Allison studied him the same way, saying
nothing.
"Where's Tudishishn? These gentlemen are waiting for him."
"Tudishishn is ill with a demon in his stomach,"
Peza-a answered. "He has asked me to substitute
myself for him." He spoke in Spanish, hesitantly,
the way an Apache does.
McKay studied him for some time. Finally, he
said, "Well . . . can he track?"
"He was with Tudishishn for a year. Tudishishn
speaks highly of him." Again I don't know what
made me say it. A hundred things were going
through my head. What I said was true, but I saw it The Boy Who Smiled
169
getting me into something. Mickey never looked directly at me. He kept watching McKay, with the faint smile on his mouth.
McKay seemed to hesitate, but then he said,
"Well, come on. I don't need a reference . . . long as he can track."
They mounted and rode out.
McKay wanted prongbuck. Tudishishn had described where they would ﬁnd the elusive herds and promised to show him all he could shoot. But
they were many days away. McKay had said if he
didn't have time, he'd make time. He wanted good
shooting.
Off and on during the ﬁrst day he questioned
Mickey Segundo closely to see what he knew about
the herds.
"I have seen them many times. Their hide the
color of sand, and black horns that reach into the
air like bayonets of the soldiers. But they are far."
McKay wasn't concerned with distance. After a
while he was satisﬁed that this Indian guide knew
as much about tracking antelope as Tudishishn, and
that's what counted. Still, there was something
about the young Apache. . . .
✯ ✯ ✯
"Tomorrow, we begin the crossing of the malpais," Mickey Segundo said. It was evening of the third day, as they made camp at Yucca Springs.
170
Bowie Allison looked at him quickly. "Tudishishn planned we'd follow the high country down and come out on the plain from the east."
"What's the matter with keeping a straight
line," McKay said. "Keeping to the hills is longer, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but that malpais is a blood-dryin' furnace
in the middle of August," Bowie grumbled. "You
got to be able to pinpoint the wells. And even if you ﬁnd them, they might be dry."
McKay looked at Peza-a for an answer.
"If Señor McKay wishes to ride for two additional days, that is for him to say. But we can carry our water with ease." He went to his saddle pouch
and drew out two collapsed, rubbery bags. "These,
from the stomach of the horse, will hold much water. Tomorrow we ﬁll canteens and these, and the water can be made to last ﬁve, six days. Even if the wells are dry, we have water."
Bowie Allison grumbled under his breath, looking with distaste at the horse-intestine water sacks.
McKay rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He was
thinking of prongbuck. Finally he said, "We'll cut
across the lava."
Bowie Allison was right in his description of the
malpais. It was a furnace, a crusted expanse of
desert that stretched into another world. Saguaro
and ocotillo stood nakedly sharp against the whiteness, and off in the distance were ghostly looming The Boy Who Smiled
171
buttes, gigantic tombstones for the lava waste.
Horses shufﬂed choking white dust, and the sun
glare was a white blistering shock that screamed its brightness. Then the sun would drop suddenly,
leaving a nothingness that could be felt. A life that had died a hundred million years ago.
McKay felt it and that night he spoke little.
The second day was a copy of the ﬁrst, for the
lava country remained monotonously the same.
McKay grew more irritable as the day wore on,
and time and again he would snap at Bowie Allison
for his grumbling. The country worked at the
nerves of the two white men, while Mickey Segundo watched them.
On the third day they passed two water holes.
They could see the shallow crusted bottoms and the
ﬁssures that the tight sand had made cracking in the hot air. That night McKay said nothing.
In the morning there was a blue haze on the edge
of the glare; they could feel the land beneath them begin to rise. Chaparral and patches of toboso grass became thicker and dotted the ﬂatness, and by early afternoon the towering rock formations loomed
near at hand. They had then one water sack two
thirds full; but the other, with their canteens, was empty.
Bowie Allison studied the gradual rise of the
rock wall, passing his tongue over cracked lips.
"There could be water up there. Sometimes the rain
172
catches in hollows and stays there a long time if it's shady."
McKay squinted into the air. The irregular
crests were high and dead still against the sky.
"Could be."
Mickey Segundo looked up and then nodded.
"How far to the next hole?" McKay asked.
"Maybe one day."
"If it's got water. . . . Then how far?"
"Maybe two day. We come out on the plain then
near the Datil Mountains and there is water,
streams to be found."
McKay said, "That means we're halfway. We can
make last what we got, but there's no use killing
ourselves." His eyes lifted to the peaks again, then dropped to the mouth of a barranca which cut into
the rock. He nodded to the dark canyon which was
partly hidden by a dense growth of mesquite.
"We'll leave our stuff there and go on to see what
we can ﬁnd."
They unsaddled the horses and ground-tied them
and hung their last water bag in the shade of a
mesquite bush.
Then they walked up-canyon until they found a
place which would be the easiest to climb.
They went up and they came down, but when
they were again on the canyon ﬂoor, their canteens
still rattled lightly with their steps. Mickey Segundo The Boy Who Smiled
173
carried McKay's riﬂe in one hand and the limp,
empty water bag in the other.
He walked a step behind the two men and
watched their faces as they turned to look back
overhead. There was no water.
The rocks held nothing, not even a dampness.
They were naked now and loomed brutally indifferent, and bone dry with no promise of moisture.
The canyon sloped gradually into the opening.
And now, ahead, they could see the horses and the
small fat bulge of the water bag hanging from the
mesquite bough.
Mickey Segundo's eyes were ﬁxed on the water
sack. He looked steadily at it.
Then a horse screamed. They saw the horses suddenly pawing the ground and pulling at the hackamores that held them fast. The three horses and the pack mule joined together now, neighing shrilly as they strained dancing at the ropes.
And then a shape the color of sand darted
through the mesquite thicket, so quickly that it
seemed a shadow.
Mickey Segundo threw the riﬂe to his shoulder.
He hesitated. Then he ﬁred.
The shape kept going, past the mesquite background and out into the open.
He ﬁred again and the coyote went up into the
air and came down to lie motionless.
174
It only jerked in death. McKay looked at him angrily. "Why the hell didn't you let me have it! You could have hit one of the horses!"
"There was not time."
"That's two hundred yards! You could have hit a
horse, that's what I'm talking about!"
"But I shot it," Mickey Segundo said.
When they reached the mesquite clump, they did
not go over to inspect the dead coyote. Something
else took their attention. It stopped the white men in their tracks.
They stared unbelieving at the wetness seeping
into the sand, and above the spot, the water bag
hanging like a punctured bladder. The water had
quickly run out.
Mickey Segundo told the story at the inquiry.
They had attempted to ﬁnd water, but it was no
use; so they were compelled to try to return.
They had almost reached Yucca Springs when
the two men died. Mickey Segundo told it simply.
He was sorry he had shot the water bag, but what
could he say? God directs the actions of men in
mysterious ways.
The county authorities were disconcerted, but
they had to be satisﬁed with the apparent facts.
McKay and Allison were found ten miles from
Yucca Springs and brought in. There were no
marks of violence on either of them, and they
found three hundred dollars in McKay's wallet. It
The Boy Who Smiled
175
was ofﬁcially recorded that they died from thirst
and exposure.
A terrible way to die just because some damn
Apache couldn't shoot straight. Peza-a survived because he was lucky, along with the fact that he was Apache, which made him tougher. Just one of those
things.
Mickey continued living with his mother at the
subagency. His old Gallagher carbine kept them in
meat, and they seemed happy enough just existing.
Tudishishn visited them occasionally, and when
he did they would have a tulapai party. Everything
was normal.
Mickey's smile was still there but maybe a little
different.
But I've often wondered what Mickey Segundo
would have done if that coyote had not run across
the mesquite thicket. . . .
Picture the ground rising on the east side of the
pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and
pines higher up. This is where everybody was. Not
all in one place but scattered in small groups: about a dozen men in the scrub, the front-line men, the
shooters who couldn't just stand around. They'd
ﬁre at the shack when they felt like it or, when Mr.
Tanner passed the word, they would all ﬁre at once.
Other people were up in the pines and on the road
which ran along the crest of the hill, some three
hundred yards from the shack across the pasture.
Only Good Ones
177
Those watching made bets whether the man in the
shack would give himself up or get shot ﬁrst.
It was Saturday and that's why everybody had
the time. They would arrive in town that morning,
hear about what had happened, and, shortly after,
head out to the cattle-company pasture. Almost all
of the men went out alone, leaving their families in town: though there were a few women who came.
The other women waited. And the people who had
business in town and couldn't leave waited. Now
and then somebody came back to have a drink or
their dinner and would tell what was going on. No,
they hadn't got him yet. Still inside the line shack and not showing his face.
But they'd get him. A few more would go out
when they heard this. Also a wagon from De
Spain's went out with whiskey. That's how the saloon was set up in the pines overlooking the pasture and why nobody went back to town after that.
Barely a mile from town those going out would
hear the gunﬁre, like a skirmish way over on the
other side of a woods, thin specks of sound, and
this would hurry them. They were careful, though,
topping the slope, looking across the pasture, getting their bearings, then peering to see who was present. They would see a friend and ask about this Mr. Tanner and the friend would point him out.
The man there in the dark suit: thin and bony,
178
not big but looking like he was made of gristle and hard to kill, with a mustache and a thin nose and a dark dusty hat worn square over his eyes. That was
him. Nobody had ever seen him before that morning. They would look at Mr. Tanner, then across the pasture again to the line shack three hundred
yards away. It was a little bake-oven of a hut, wood framed and made of sod and built against a rise
where there were pines so the hut would be in
shade part of the day. There were no windows in
the hut, no gear lying around to show anybody
lived there. The hut stood in the sun now with its
door closed, the door chipped and splintered by all the bullets that had poured into it and through it.
Off to the right where the pine shapes against the
sky rounded and became willows, there in the trees
by the creek bed, was the man's wagon and team.
In the wagon were the supplies he had bought that
morning in town before Mr. Tanner spotted him.
Out in front of the hut, about ten or ﬁfteen feet,
was something on the ground. From the slope three
hundred yards away nobody could tell what it was
until a man came who had ﬁeld glasses. He looked
up and said, frowning, it was a doll: one made of
cloth scraps, a stuffed doll with buttons for eyes.
The woman must have dropped it, somebody said.
The woman? the man with the ﬁeld glasses said.
A Lipan Apache woman who was his wife or his
woman or just with him. Mr. Tanner hadn't been
Only Good Ones
179
clear about that. All they knew was she was in the
hut with him and if the man wanted her to stay and
get shot, that was his business.
Bob Valdez, twenty years old and town constable
for three weeks, carrying a shotgun and glad he had something to hold on to, was present at the Maricopa pasture. He arrived about noon. He told Mr.
Tanner who he was, speaking quietly and waiting
for Mr. Tanner to answer. Mr. Tanner nodded but
did not shake hands and turned away to say something to an R. L. Davis, who rode for Maricopa when he was working. Bob Valdez stood there and
didn't know what to do.
He watched the two men. Two of a kind, uh?
Both cut from the same stringy hide and looking
like father and son: Tanner talking, never smiling, hardly moving his mouth; R. L. Davis standing hipcocked, posing with his revolver and riﬂe and a cartridge belt over his shoulder and the funneled, pointed brim of his sweaty hat nodding up and
down as he listened to Mr. Tanner, smiling at what
Mr. Tanner said, laughing out loud while still Mr.
Tanner did not even show the twitch of a lip. Bob
Valdez did not like R. L. Davis or any of the R. L.
Davises he had met. He was civil, he listened to
them, but, God, there were a lot of them to listen to.
A Mr. Beaudry, who leased land to the cattle
company, was there. Also Mr. Malsom, manager of
Maricopa, and a horsebreaker by the name of
180
Diego Luz, who was big for a Mexican but never
offensive and he drank pretty well.
Mr. Beaudry, nodding and also squinting so he
could picture the man inside the line shack, said,
"There was something peculiar about him. I mean
having a name like Orlando Rincon."
"He worked for me," Mr. Malsom said. He was
looking at Mr. Tanner. "I mistrusted him and I believe that was part of it, his name being Orlando Rincon."
"Johnson," Mr. Tanner said.
"I hired him two, three times," Mr. Malsom
said. "For heavy work. When I had work you
couldn't kick a man to doing."
"His name is Johnson," Mr. Tanner said. "There
is no fuzz-head by the name of Orlando Rincon.
I'm telling you, this one is a fuzz-head from the Fort Huachuca Tenth fuzz-head cavalry and his name
was Johnson when he killed James C. Baxter a year
ago and nothing else."
He spoke as you might speak to young children
to press something into their minds. This man had
no warmth and he was probably not very smart.
But there was no reason to doubt him.
Bob Valdez kept near Mr. Tanner because he was
the center of what was going on here. They would
discuss the situation and decide what to do. As the law-enforcement man he, Bob Valdez, should be in
on the discussion and the decision. If someone was
Only Good Ones
181
to arrest Orlando Rincon or Johnson or whatever
his name was, then he should do it; he was town
constable. They were out of town maybe, but
where did the town end? The town had moved out
here now; it was the same thing.
Wait for Rincon to give up. Then arrest him.
If he wasn't dead already.
"Mr. Malsom." Bob Valdez stepped toward the
cattle-company manager, who glanced over but
looked out across the pasture again, indifferent.
"I wondered if maybe he's already dead,"
Valdez said.
Mr. Malsom, standing heavier and taller and
twenty years older than Bob Valdez, said, "Why
don't you ﬁnd out?"
"I was thinking," Valdez said, "if he was dead
we could stand here a long time."
R. L. Davis adjusted his hat, which he did often,
grabbing the funneled brim, loosening it on his
head and pulling it down close to his eyes again and shifting from one cocked hip to the other. "This
constable here's got better things to do," R. L.
Davis said. "He's busy."
"No," Bob Valdez said. "I was thinking of the
man, Rincon. He's dead or he's alive. He's alive
maybe he wants to give himself up. In there he has
time to think, uh? Maybe---" He stopped. Not one
of them was listening. Not even R. L. Davis.
Mr. Malsom was looking at the whiskey wagon;
182
it was on the road above them and over a little ways with men standing by it, being served off the tailgate. "I think we could use something," Mr. Malsom said. His gaze went to Diego Luz the horsebreaker, and Diego straightened up; not
much, but a little. He was heavy and very dark and
his shirt was tight across the thickness of his body.
They said that Diego Luz hit green horses on the
muzzle with his ﬁst and they minded him. He had
the hands for it; they hung at his sides, not touching or fooling with anything. They turned open, gestured, when Mr. Malsom told him to get the whiskey and as he moved off, climbing the slope,
one hand held his holstered revolver to his leg.
Mr. Malsom looked up at the sky, squinting and
taking his hat off and putting it on again. He took off his coat and held it hooked over his shoulder by one ﬁnger, said something, gestured, and he and
Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Tanner moved a few yards
down the slope to a hollow where there was good
shade. It was about two or two-thirty then, hot,
fairly still and quiet considering the number of people there. Only some of them in the pines and down in the scrub could be seen from where Bob Valdez
stood wondering whether he should follow the
three men down to the hollow. Or wait for Diego
Luz, who was at the whiskey wagon now, where
most of the sounds that carried came from: a voice, a word or two that was suddenly clear, or laughter, Only Good Ones
183
and people would look up to see what was going
on. Some of them by the whiskey wagon had lost
interest in the line shack. Others were still watching, though: those farther along the road sitting in wagons and buggies. This was a day, a date, uh?
that people would remember and talk about. Sure, I
was there, the man in the buggy would be saying a
year from now in a saloon over in Benson or St.
David or somewhere. The day they got that army
deserter, he had a Big-Fifty Sharps and an old
Walker and I'll tell you it was ticklish business.
Down in that worn-out pasture, dusty and spotted with desert growth, prickly pear and brittlebush, there was just the sun. It showed the ground cleanly all the way to just in front of the line shack where now, toward the midafternoon, there was
shadow coming out from the trees and from the
mound the hut was set against.
Somebody in the scrub must have seen the door
open. The shout came from there, and Bob Valdez
and everybody on the slope was looking by the time
the Lipan Apache woman had reached the edge of
the shade. She walked out from the hut toward the
willow trees carrying a bucket, not hurrying or
even looking toward the slope.
Nobody ﬁred at her; though this was not so
strange. Putting the front sight on a sod hut and on a person are two different things. The men in the
scrub and in the pines didn't know this woman.
184
They weren't after her. She had just appeared.
There she was; and no one was sure what to do
about her.
She was in the trees a while by the creek, then she was in the open again, walking back toward the hut
with the bucket and not hurrying at all: a small ﬁgure way across the pasture almost without shape or color, with only the long skirt reaching to the
ground to tell it was the woman.
So he's alive, Bob Valdez thought. And he wants
to stay alive and he's not giving himself up.
He thought about the woman's nerve and
whether Orlando Rincon had sent her out or she
had decided this herself. You couldn't tell about an Indian woman. Maybe this was expected of her.
The woman didn't count; the man did. You could
lose the woman and get another one.
Mr. Tanner didn't look at R. L. Davis. His gaze
held on the Lipan Apache woman, inched along
with her toward the hut; but must have known
R. L. Davis was right next to him.
"She's saying she don't give a goddamn about
you and your riﬂe," Mr. Tanner said.
R. L. Davis looked at him funny. Then he said,
"Shoot her?" Like he hoped that's what Mr. Tanner
meant.
"Well, you could make her jump some," Mr.
Tanner said.
Now R. L. Davis was onstage and he knew it and
Only Good Ones
185
Bob Valdez could tell he knew it by the way he levered the Winchester, raised it, and ﬁred all in one motion, and as the dust kicked behind the Indian
woman, who kept walking and didn't look up,
R. L. Davis ﬁred and ﬁred and ﬁred as fast as he
could lever and half aim and with everybody watching him, hurrying him, he put four good ones right behind the woman. His last bullet socked into the
door just as she reached it and now she did pause
and look up at the slope, staring up like she was
waiting for him to ﬁre again and giving him a good
target if he wanted it.
Mr. Malsom laughed out loud. "She still don't
give a goddamn about your riﬂe."
It stung R. L. Davis, which it was intended to do.
"I wasn't aiming at her!"
"But she doesn't know that." Mr. Malsom was
grinning, turning then and reaching out a hand as
Diego Luz approached them with the whiskey.
"Hell, I wanted to hit her she'd be laying there,
you know it."
"Well, now, you go tell her that," Mr. Malsom
said, working the cork loose, "and she'll know it."
He took a drink from the bottle and passed it to
Mr. Beaudry, who drank and handed the bottle to
Mr. Tanner. Mr. Tanner did not drink; he passed
the bottle to R. L. Davis, who was standing, staring at Mr. Malsom. Finally R. L. Davis jerked the bottle up, took a long swallow, and that part was over.
186
Mr. Malsom said to Mr. Tanner, "You don't
want any?"
"Not today," Mr. Tanner answered. He continued to stare out across the pasture.
Mr. Malsom watched him. "You feel strongly
about this army deserter."
"I told you," Mr. Tanner said, "he killed a man
was a friend of mine."
"No, I don't believe you did."
"James C. Baxter of Fort Huachuca," Mr. Tanner said. "He come across a tulapai still this nigger soldier was working with some Indians. The nigger
thought Baxter would tell the army people, so he
shot him and ran off with a woman."
"And you saw him this morning."
"I had come in last night and stopped off, going
to Tucson," Mr. Tanner said. "This morning I was
getting ready to leave when I saw him; him and the
woman."
"I was right there," R. L. Davis said. "Right, Mr.
Tanner? Him and I were on the porch by the Republic and Rincon goes by in the wagon. Mr. Tanner said, 'You know that man?' I said, 'Only that he's lived up north of town a few months. Him and
the woman.' 'Well, I know him,' Mr. Tanner said.
'That man's an army deserter wanted for murder.' I
said, 'Well, let's go get him.' He had a start on us and that's how he got to the hut before we could
grab on to him. He's been holed up ever since."
Only Good Ones
187
Mr. Malsom said, "Then you didn't talk to him."
"Listen," Mr. Tanner said, "I've kept that man's
face before my eyes this past year."
Bob Valdez, somewhat behind Mr. Tanner and to
the side, moved in a little closer. "You know this is the same man, uh?"
Mr. Tanner looked around. He stared at Valdez.
That's all he did---just stared.
"I mean, we have to be sure," Bob Valdez said.
"It's a serious thing."
Now Mr. Malsom and Mr. Beaudry were looking up at him. "We," Mr. Beaudry said. "I'll tell you what, Roberto. We need help we'll call you. All right?"
"You hired me," Bob Valdez said, standing alone
above them. He was serious but he shrugged and
smiled a little to take the edge off the words.
"What did you hire me for?"
"Well," Mr. Beaudry said, acting it out, looking
past Bob Valdez and along the road both ways, "I
was to see some drunk Mexicans I'd point them out."
A person can be in two different places and he
will be two different people. Maybe if you think of some more places the person will be more people,
but don't take it too far. This is Bob Valdez standing by himself with the shotgun and having only the shotgun to hold on to. This is one Bob Valdez.
About twenty years old. Mr. Beaudry and others
could try and think of a time when Bob Valdez
188
might have drunk too much or swaggered or had a
certain smart look on his face, but they would
never recall such a time. This Bob Valdez was all
right.
Another Bob Valdez inside the Bob Valdez at the
pasture that day worked for the army one time and
was a guide when Crook chased Chato and Chihuahua down into the Madres. He was seventeen then, with a Springﬁeld and Apache moccasins that
came up to his knees. He would sit at night with the Apache scouts from San Carlos, eating with them
and talking some as he learned Chiricahua. He
would keep up with them all day and shoot the
Springﬁeld one hell of a lot better than any of them could shoot. He came home with a scalp but never
showed it to anyone and had thrown it away by the
time he went to work for Maricopa. Shortly after
that he was named town constable at twenty-ﬁve
dollars a month, getting the job because he got
along with people: the Mexicans in town who
drank too much on Saturday night liked him and
that was the main thing.
The men with the whiskey bottle had forgotten
Valdez. They stayed in the hollow where the shade
was cool watching the line shack and waiting for the army deserter to realize it was all up with him. He would realize it and open the door and be cut down
as he came outside. It was a matter of time only.
Bob Valdez stayed on the open part of the slope
Only Good Ones
189
that was turning to shade, sitting now like an
Apache and every once in a while making a cigarette and smoking it slowly as he thought about himself and Mr. Tanner and the others, then thinking about the army deserter.
Diego Luz came and squatted next to him, his
arms on his knees and his big hands that he used
for breaking horses hanging in front of him.
"Stay near if they want you for something,"
Valdez said. He was watching Beaudry tilt the bottle up. Diego Luz said nothing.
"One of them bends over," Bob Valdez said then,
"you kiss it, uh?"
Diego Luz looked at him, patient about it. Not
mad or even stirred up. "Why don't you go home?"
"He says Get me a bottle, you run."
"I get it. I don't run."
"Smile and hold your hat, uh?"
"And don't talk so much."
"Not unless they talk to you ﬁrst."
"You better go home," Diego said.
Bob Valdez said, "That's why you hit the
horses."
"Listen," Diego Luz said, scowling a bit now.
"They pay me to break horses. They pay you to
talk to drunks on Saturday night and keep them
from killing somebody. They don't pay you for
what you think or how you feel, so if you take their money, keep your mouth shut. All right?"
190
Diego Luz got up and walked away, down toward the hollow. The hell with this kid, he was thinking. He'll learn or he won't learn, but the hell with him. He was also thinking that maybe he
could get a drink from that bottle. Maybe there'd
be a half inch left nobody wanted and Mr. Malsom
would tell him to kill it.
But it was already ﬁnished. R. L. Davis was playing with the bottle, holding it by the neck and ﬂipping it up and catching it as it came down. Beaudry was saying, "What about after dark?" Looking at
Mr. Tanner, who was thinking about something
else and didn't notice. R L. Davis stopped ﬂipping
the bottle. He said, "Put some men on the rise right above the hut; he comes out, bust him."
"Well, they should get the men over there," Mr.
Beaudry said, looking at the sky. "It won't be long till dark."
"Where's he going?" Mr. Malsom said.
The others looked up, stopped in whatever they
were doing or thinking by the suddenness of Mr.
Malsom's voice.
"Hey, Valdez!" R. L. Davis yelled out. "Where
do you think you're going?"
Bob Valdez had circled them and was already
below them on the slope, leaving the pines now
and entering the scrub brush. He didn't stop or
look back.
"Valdez!"
Only Good Ones
191
Mr. Tanner raised one hand to silence R. L.
Davis, all the time watching Bob Valdez getting
smaller, going straight through the scrub, not just walking or passing the time but going right out to
the pasture.
"Look at him," Mr. Malsom said. There was
some admiration in the voice.
"He's dumber than he looks," R. L. Davis said.
Then jumped a little as Mr. Tanner touched his arm.
"Come on," Mr. Tanner said. "With a riﬂe."
And started down the slope, hurrying and not
seeming to care if he might stumble on the loose
gravel.
Bob Valdez was now halfway across the pasture,
the shotgun pointed down at his side, his eyes not
leaving the door of the line shack. The door was
probably already open enough for a riﬂe barrel to
poke through. He guessed the army deserter was
covering him, letting him get as close as he wanted; the closer he came, the easier to hit him.
Now he could see all the bullet marks in the door
and the clean inner wood where the door was splintered. Two people in that little bake-oven of a place. He saw the door move.
He saw the rag doll on the ground. It was a
strange thing, the woman having a doll. Valdez
hardly glanced at it but was aware of the button
eyes looking up and the discomforted twist of the
red wool mouth. Then, just past the doll, when he
192
was wondering if he would go right up to the door
and knock on it and wouldn't that be a crazy thing, like visiting somebody, the door opened and the
Negro was in the doorway, ﬁlling it, standing there in pants and boots but without a shirt in that hot
place and holding a longbarreled Walker that was
already cocked.
They stood ten feet apart looking at each other,
close enough so that no one could ﬁre from the
slope.
"I can kill you ﬁrst," the Negro said, "if you
raise that."
With his free hand, the left one, Bob Valdez motioned back over his shoulder. "There's a man there said you killed somebody a year ago."
"What man?"
"Said his name is Tanner."
The Negro shook his head, once each way.
"Said your name is Johnson."
"You know my name."
"I'm telling you what he said."
"Where'd I kill this man?"
"Huachuca."
The Negro hesitated. "That was some time ago I
was in the Tenth. More than a year."
"You a deserter?"
"I served it out."
"Then you got something that says so."
Only Good Ones
193
"In the wagon, there's a bag there my things
are in."
"Will you talk to this man Tanner?"
"If I can hold from hitting him one."
"Listen, why did you run this morning?"
"They come chasing. I don't know what they
want." He lowered the gun a little, his brownstained-looking tired eyes staring intently at Bob Valdez. "What would you do? They came on the
run. Next thing I know they a-ﬁring at us. So I pop in this place."
"Will you come with me and talk to him?"
The Negro hesitated again. Then shook his head.
"I don't know him."
"Then he won't know you, uh?"
"He didn't know me this morning."
"All right," Bob Valdez said. "I'll get your paper
says you were discharged. Then we'll show it to
this man, uh?"
The Negro thought it over before he nodded,
very slowly, as if still thinking. "All right. Bring him here, I'll say a few words to him."
Bob Valdez smiled a little. "You can point that
gun some other way."
"Well
.
.
." the Negro said, "if everybody's
friends." He lowered the Walker to his side.
The wagon was in the willow trees by the creek.
Off to the right. But Bob Valdez did not turn right 194
away in that direction. He backed away, watching
Orlando Rincon for no reason that he knew of.
Maybe because the man was holding a gun and that
was reason enough.
He had backed off six or seven feet when Orlando Rincon shoved the Walker down into his belt.
Bob Valdez turned and started for the trees.
This was when he looked across the pasture. He
saw Mr. Tanner and R. L. Davis at the edge of the
scrub trees but wasn't sure it was them. Something
tried to tell him it was them, but he did not accept it until he was off to the right, out of the line of ﬁre, and by then the time to yell at them or run toward
them was past, for R. L. Davis had the Winchester
up and was ﬁring.
They say R. L. Davis was drunk or he would
have pinned him square. As it was the bullet shaved Rincon and plowed past him into the hut.
Bob Valdez saw him half turn, either to go inside
or look inside, and as he came around again saw the man's eyes on him and his hand pulling the Walker
from his belt.
"They weren't supposed to," Bob Valdez said,
holding one hand out as if to stop Rincon. "Listen, they weren't supposed to do that!"
The Walker was out of Rincon's belt and he was
cocking it. "Don't!" Bob Valdez yelled. "Don't!"
Looking right in the man's eyes and seeing it was
no use and suddenly hurrying, jerking the shotgun
Only Good Ones
195
up and pulling both triggers so that the explosions came out in one big blast and Orlando Rincon was
spun and thrown back inside.
They came out across the pasture to have a look
at the carcass, some going inside where they found
the woman also dead, killed by a riﬂe bullet. They
noticed she would have had a child in a few
months. Those by the doorway made room as Mr.
Tanner and R. L. Davis approached.
Diego Luz came over by Bob Valdez, who had
not moved. Valdez stood watching them and he saw
Mr. Tanner look down at Rincon and after a moment shake his head.
"It looked like him," Mr. Tanner said. "It sure
looked like him."
He saw R. L. Davis squint at Mr. Tanner. "It ain't
the one you said?"
Mr. Tanner shook his head again. "I've seen him
before, though. Know I've seen him somewheres."
Valdez saw R. L. Davis shrug. "You ask me, they
all look alike." He was yawning then, fooling with
his hat, and then his eyes swiveled over at Bob
Valdez standing with the empty shotgun.
"Constable," R. L. Davis said, "you went and
killed the wrong coon."
Bob Valdez started for him, raising the shotgun
to swing it like a club, but Diego Luz drew his revolver and came down with it and Valdez dropped to the ground.
196
Some three years later there was a piece in the paper about a Robert Eladio Valdez who had been hanged for murder in Tularosa, New Mexico. He
had shot a man coming out of the Regent Hotel,
called him an unprintable name, and shot him four
times. This Valdez had previously killed a man in
Contention and two in Sands during a bank
holdup, had been caught once, escaped from the
jail in Mesilla before trial, and identiﬁed another time during a holdup near Lordsburg.
"If it is the same Bob Valdez used to live here,"
Mr. Beaudry said, "it's good we got rid of him."
"Well, it could be," Mr. Malsom said. "But I
guess there are Bob Valdezes all over."
"You wonder what gets into them," Mr. Beaudry
said.
The stories contained in this volume originally appeared in the following publications:
"Trail of the Apache," Argosy, December 1951
"You Never See Apaches . . . ," Dime Western Magazine, September 1952
"The Colonel's Lady," Zane Grey's Western, November 1952
"The Rustlers," Zane Grey's Western, February 1953
"The Big Hunt," Western Magazine, April 1953
"The Boy Who Smiled," Gunsmoke, June 1953
"Only Good Ones," Western Roundup, New York, Macmillan, 1961 ( Western Writers of America Anthology) About the Author
ELMORE LEONARD has written more than forty
novels during his highly successful career,
including the bestsellers The Hot Kid, Mr.
Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty,
and Rum Punch, and the critically acclaimed
collection of short stories When the Women Come
Out to Dance, which was named a New York
Times Notable Book of 2003. Many of his books
have been made into movies, including Get Shorty
and Out of Sight. He was named a Grand Master
by the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with
his wife, Christine, in Bloomfield Village,
Michigan.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive
information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Resounding praise for the incomparable western ﬁction of New York Times bestselling Grand Master
✯ ✯ ✯
"Leonard began his career telling western stories. He knows his way onto a horse and out of a gun fight as well as he knows the special King's English spoken by his patented, not-so-lovable urban lowlifes."
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"In cowboy writing, Leonard belongs in the same A-list shelf as Louis L'Amour, Owen Wister, and Zane Grey."
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"Leonard wrote westerns, very good westerns . . . the way he imagined Hemingway, his mentor, might write westerns."
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"A master . . . Etching a harsh, haunting landscape with razorsharp prose, Leonard shows in [his] brilliant stories why he has become the American poet laureate of the desperate and the bold . . . In stories that burn with passion, treachery, and heroism, the frontier comes vividly, magnificently to life."
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Trail of the Apache and
Freaky Deaky
Other Stories
Touch
Three-Ten to Yuma and
Bandits
Other Stories
Glitz
Blood Money and Other
LaBrava
Stories
Stick
Moment of Vengeance and Cat Chaser Other Stories
Split Images
The Complete Western
City Primeval
Stories of Elmore
Gold Coast
Leonard
Gunsights
Mr. Paradise
The Switch
When the Women Come
The Hunted
Out to Dance
Unknown Man No. 89
Tishomingo Blues
Swag
Pagan Babies
Fifty-two Pickup
Be Cool
Mr. Majestyk
The Tonto Woman &
Forty Lashes Less One
Other Western Stories
Valdez Is Coming
Cuba Libre
The Moonshine War
Out of Sight
The Big Bounce
Riding the Rap
Hombre
Pronto
Last Stand at Saber River
Rum Punch
Escape from Five Shadows
Maximum Bob
The Law at Randado
Get Shorty
The Bounty Hunters
Killshot
Map designed by Jane S. Kim
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
TRAIL OF THE APACHE. Copyright © 2007 by Elmore Leonard, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Title Page
Contents MapChapter One: Trail of the ApacheChapter Two: You Never See Apaches...Chapter Three: The Colonel�s LadyChapter Four: The RustlersChapter Five: The Big HuntChapter Six: The Boy Who SmiledChapter Seven: Only Good OnesAbout the AuthorPraiseBooks by Elmore LeonardCreditsCopyright NoticeAbout the Publisher


