Ghost Warrior (58 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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RAPE STOOD BETWEEN THE CHESTNUT AND THE PACK MULE as they drank noisily from the creek. Without thinking, he fell into a habit he had developed. He stared across the creek, south toward Mexico.
Don't worry about her, he thought. She's hard to kill.
He tugged at the mule, but the animal spread his feet and prepared to resist until the creek froze over. Rafe had named him Lawyer because he objected to everything. He didn't want to dally even this close to Fort Apache. Safety was a dubious commodity since so many Apaches bolted from Cibicu almost six months ago.
Roving gangs of them had raided ranches, mines, and even small towns until reinforemcents arrived from New Mexico and California. The renegades had surrendered in droves then, but not the Chiricahuas. They headed for Mexico, creating their usual havoc along the way. Rafe assumed that Lozen went with them.
Rafe couldn't shake the melancholy that haunted him. The day before, the troops and scouts at Fort Apache had watched Sgt. Dead Shot and two other scouts hung for mutiny, desertion, and murder in the fight at Cibicu. Rafe had his doubts that Dead Shot had turned on the Americans. The battle had been too confusing to know exactly what had happened, but Rafe imagined himself in the scout's moccasins. If Dead Shot had been enticed by Dreamer's promises of redemption and resurrection, Rafe couldn't blame him.
As Dead Shot stood with the noose around his neck, he had looked at Rafe before he fixed his eyes on his family. Rafe thought he saw regret and sorrow behind Dead Shot's stoic expression, and maybe even fear. Rafe looked away as the horse was driven out from under the man he had called friend.
The amount of time between when a noose tightened and when a hanged man's legs stopped jigging was a short one in the vast span of creation, but it always seemed an eternity to Rafe. He used the time to wonder what would happen to
Dead Shot's two young sons. The Apaches were becoming a tribe of orphans.
Rafe lured the mule from the water with a tasty thistle and headed for the scouts' encampment with food and blankets for the hanged men's families. He was only giving them what should have been theirs to begin with. He had had to buy the corn and blankets from one of the thieves operating out of Tucson, and an unctuous son of a bitch he was, too. He hadn't even bothered to paint over the government's stamp on the crates.
The Indian agent and his cronies ran what everyone called the Indian Ring. Rafe knew he couldn't do anything about it. The network of thievery had become so pervasive that an Apache war club set down on an agent's desk would serve no purpose.
When Rafe saw the body dangling from a big oak, he thought some hunter had hung up a deer carcass to drain it of blood. As he rode closer, he saw that it wasn't a deer. In the light wind, Dead Shot's wife turned slowly on the end of the rope. The young woman had not known how to tie a proper noose, and so she must have strangled slowly rather than dying more quickly of a broken neck. Rafe had could hardly believe she would hang herself. She had chosen to die as her husband had so they would spend eternity together with stretched and deformed necks.
A HUNTING EXPEDITION
M
ost people thought Gen. George Crook was crazy. Rafe thought he was the sanest man the army had produced. Crook had added ten years since Rafe first met him, but otherwise he hadn't changed. He was fifty-three years old, tall, strong, and broad shouldered. He didn't drink alcohol, coffee, or tea. He didn't smoke, he didn't swear, and he didn't care about notoriety. He parted his long whiskers in the middle and combed them outward so that they looked as though he were facing into a gale even when no leaf stirred.
On a scout, Crook rode his old mule, Apache, at the front of the column, not matter how perilous the circumstances. Because he always wore a brown canvas suit, the scouts had nicknamed him
ba'cho delitsoge
, Tan Wolf. On the trail they liked to ride with him, and in camp they clustered around his tent. Rafe realized that they had, in their own way, elected him their chief.
The scouts were the reason people thought Crook was mad. When Geronimo kidnapped Loco and six hundred of his followers from San Carlos and headed for Mexico, Crook started after him with forty-two soldiers and two hundred Apaches. He allowed the scouts to ride horses for the first time ever, and he issued them headbands of red cloth to distinguish them from the hostiles. Just about everyone predicted they would turn on the army as they had at Dreamer's ghost dance at Cibicu Creek.
Now the scouts stood in formation for
Nantan
Tan Wolf's speech. Crook had named one of them Moses when he had first recruited him ten years ago, and Sergeant Moses had
served the army faithfully ever since. With Mickey Free translating, Crook turned to him.
“Sergeant Moses, do you think we will catch the Chiricahua in Mexico?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“They can hide like coyotes and smell danger a long way off.”
“We are going to keep after those Chiricahuas until we catch them all. We wear the President's clothes, and we eat his grub. He wants us to catch them, and so we will.” Crook held up a sheet of vellum. “I have signed a paper so that even if I get killed, the President will know what you all did for him. No matter if I live or die, the President will reward you for your service.”
Crook had obtained permission from Mexican authorities for his men to cross the border in pursuit of Geronimo's renegades, but no one knew what to expect. The general had sent out Apache scouts as spies, but as he wrote in his report, “the Mexicans were having a revolution that week.” So many Mexican soldiers and partisans were running around that the scouts were lucky to return with their scalps intact.
Each man could take what he wore, a blanket, and forty rounds of ammunition. The mules carried extra ammunition and rations for sixty days. Crook put Rafe in charge of the pack train and mule drivers.
Rafe felt uneasy crossing the border. He remembered the war there as if it had happened last month instead of thirty years ago. He couldn't imagine being in Mexico and not having Mexican soldiers shooting at him. He also knew what kind of country they'd face and the difficulty of finding Geronimo and his men. All the mountains in Arizona could fit into the Sierra Madres.
The soldiers and scouts rode down the sweltering San Bernardino Valley. They passed the mouth of Guadelupe Canyon and the stream that marked the boundary. They reined their horses up just north of it.
Crook stood in his stirrups. “We're on our own now,
boys,” he shouted. “If we succeed, we will most likely solve the Apache problem.”
“And if we fail, General?” asked Rafe.
“The politicians will trim my comb.”
Crook flicked Apache's reins and led his little army into Mexico. The rough country swallowed them up as though they had never existed.
 
 
“AMERICANS DON'T CROSS THE LINE,” SAID FIGHTS WITHOUT Arrows.
“These do,” said Lozen.
He and Lozen, Broken Foot, Geronimo, and forty warriors looked down from the ridge at the Apache army scouts occupying their camp. The Chiricahua women there had hung up white flags to tell the warriors not to shoot, but Fights Without Arrows and the others fired off taunts and insults. The scouts shouted back.
The soldiers themselves had camped downstream at a broad bend of the Bavispe River. Lozen and the others took turns watching them from the heights. Within a couple days,
Nantan
Tan Wolf himself rewarded their patience.
As Crook rode Apache through the tall grass, he held his shotgun ready and watched for quail to start up. Instead of quail, Geronimo and his men rose out of the grass. The hunter had become the hunted. If he was frightened, Crook gave no indication.
“Let's kill him now,” said Fun.
“No.” Geronimo took the general's rifle and the string of quail he had shot. “We're almost out of cartridges. We can't risk a fight.” He turned to Lozen. “Grandmother, go to the Bluecoats' camp. Tell them I want that red-haired coyote, Lop-Eye, to explain my words to Tan Wolf.”
Lozen took off her headband and let her hair fall loose around her shoulders. She rubbed dirt into her face and wrapped her blanket around her waist so the Bluecoats would not see that she was wearing a breechclout instead of a skirt. When she shuffled into camp, the soldiers ignored her. She
saw Rafe, but she gave no sign that she recognized him, and he did the same. The soldiers had heard about her. She was safer if she was invisible, just another squaw come to beg.
Lozen searched until she found Mickey Free. No one liked or trusted him, but his Apache was fluent even if he had never bothered to learn Spanish tenses. In English, he only remembered how to swear and ask for tobacco and whiskey.
After much discussion, General Crook convinced Geronimo and his men to come with him to his camp for talks. When they rode in with Crook, the general looked as though getting captured by Geronimo's men had been part of his plan.
After days of discussion, Crook convinced Geronimo to bring his people to the reservation at Fort Apache, fifty miles northeast of San Carlos. Crook's two hundred scouts were a happy lot. They had proved themselves to Tan Wolf, and in the bargain, they had made a good start winning at cards everything the Chiricahuas owned.
Crook took back with him fifty-two warriors and 273 women and children, most of them on foot. The women held up branches of cottonwood leaves against the searing sun. Geronimo stayed behind.
He said his own people had scattered in fear of the soldiers. He needed time to gather them. He didn't mention that he had something else in mind. Lozen had made a suggestion, and for once Geronimo listened, but carrying it out would take time.
Eight months passed, but in that period Geronimo, Lozen, and the rest of their warriors stole 350 head of cattle from the Mexicans. Lozen's plan was to breed them like the Pale Eyes did, except that the herd would belong to everyone in common, as was theirs custom. They weren't going to trust the San Carlos agent to feed their people. The Indian agents' idea of an adequate diet for them was starvation rations supplemented with donated hymn books and sermons. Lozen wryly observed in council that the hymn books were not good to eat, no matter how the women cooked them.
Whenever the Pale Eyes met in council, they talked themselves
red-faced about the Ndee becoming self-sufficient. They were not amused when the Ndee leaders pointed out that before the Americans arrived they had been quite self-sufficient. With this cattle, the Chiricahua could take care of themselves on the white men's terms.
Geronimo became edgier as he approached the border. Lozen understood why. Seven years ago, Hat, Soft and Floppy had put chains on him, humiliated him, and locked him in a small room. Would the Pale Eyes do it again, in spite of Tan Wolf's promises? Would they hang him and his men as they had Dead Shot? Would they sell the women and children into slavery? Lozen decided that if they tried to chain her she would kill herself with her knife the way her brother had.
 
 
GENERAL CROOK SENT LT. BRITTON DAVIS, CHIEF OF Scouts Al Sieber, and Company B of the Apache scouts to wait at the border for Geronimo. Davis was born in Brownsville, Texas, and he had the drawl to prove it. He needed to prove it from time to time. He was not the tall, weedy sort that Texas soil usually produced. He was not yet aware that the scouts had nicknamed him Fat Boy, but he would probably be amused when he found out.
Davis was a year old when the Civil War broke out twenty-four years ago. His maverick father had led a regiment of Unionists throughout the conflict and left the United States Army with the rank of brigadier general. That made his son Britton an oddity, a Texan who had graduated from West Point and did not cherish a gut-deep grudge against the damned Yankees.
Army life was a lark for Britt Davis. He was as resourceful and resilient as the leanest Texan, and smarter and more good-natured than most. He thought that leading a company of Apache scouts was the best sort of adventure. He was fair luminous with the prospect of escorting Geronimo and his band of brigands to San Carlos, and then to Fort Apache where they would live.
As the weeks dragged by, Davis wondered if Geronimo, the old jilt, intended to leave him at the altar as he had so many others, but he didn't complain. He fished for river trout, and he hunted quail, pronghorns, and wild pigs. He gave his prey to José María Soto, whom he dubbed “the cook from dreamland.”
He discussed literature with a Yankee in a sack coat and a low-crowned wideawake hat clamped down on a bald spot shiny as a peeled onion. The Yankee claimed to be writing a novel about the Apaches. When he was out of earshot, Al Sieber allowed as how, like all writers, he was so lazy he had to lean against a tree to break wind.
In December Cochise's son Mischievous brought a dozen warriors and twice as many women and children. Davis escorted them to San Carlos, and no one could accuse him of dillydallying. He kept them off the main trails and still managed to move them along at forty or fifty miles a day. They covered the 175 miles in less than five days. He made the trip north again with Mangas and Chato and fifty or sixty of their people, then returned to the border camp to wait.
Finally, in February of 1886, a patrol sighted Geronimo's band. The women, children, and old folks outnumbered the fifteen or sixteen warriors four to one, and they were all well mounted. Geronimo was not happy to see a protective escort of the army's scouts, a third of whom were now Chiricahuas. Mickey Free translated his complaints.
“We made peace with the Pale Eyes.” Geronimo's glower made it clear why he had a reputation as a bad piece of business. “Why should we need protection from them?”
Davis chose his words carefully. He did not want to stampede the old desperado back across the border. “There are bad white men just as there are bad Indians,” he said. “They might drink too much whiskey and start trouble.”
“If they attack us, we can take care of ourselves.”
“If they see me with you, they will know you are at peace. You will not have to risk the lives of your women and your children.”
Geronimo took his time thinking about that. Gradually the
scowl lines smoothed out some, making him look slightly less murderous.
“We are brothers.” Geronimo shook Davis's hand. “From now until forever.”
“And what is that?” Davis nodded to the cloud of dust behind them.
“
Ganado
. We will camp here while they graze.”
Ganado
. Cattle. With a herd of cattle, they could travel only twelve or fifteen miles a day. Cows had to graze. They needed lots of water. They had to stay on the beaten trails. They would be impossible to hide.
Dear God, Davis thought. What am I to do?

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