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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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A VERY PRACTICAL JOKE
B
ritt Davis watched the two pasty-faced individuals stride back through the gate in the adobe wall. Their city shoes clattered across the wooden porch. The heavy oak door of the ranch house slammed behind them.
One of the men claimed to be a United States Marshal and the other an American Collector of Customs from Nogales, just across the border. At first, Davis thought maybe one of his Mexican packers had smuggled something, but the case was much worse than that. They ordered Davis to arrest Geronimo and his warriors and take them to Tucson to stand trial for murder. While he was at it, he was to confiscate the contraband stock.
Davis protested that he could not do that without orders from General Crook. The marshal replied that in the morning he would subpoena Lieutenant Davis, his Mexican mule packers, Al Sieber, and the five cowboys here at Sulphur Springs Ranch. If Davis refused to help him, he would raise a
posse comitatus
of every man in nearby Willcox.
Davis analyzed the fix he was in. Making a run for it was out of the question. For miles the prairie lay flatter than that porch floor on the ranch house. The brush was no higher than a jackrabbit's ears.
The five cowboys had watched as Geronimo's people made camp in the shelter of the four-foot-high adobe wall surrounding the house. With much braying and shouting, the packers had settled their mules about fifty yards away. The scouts had chosen to bivouac just beyond them. Geronimo's herd boys had driven the cattle off a half mile where the grass was better. Britt Davis had just pitched his own tent
and was anticipating the rapture of one of the cook's meals when the two city slickers arrived and ruined his appetite.
Fort Bowie was thirty miles to the east, too far to send for help tonight. As a show of good faith, Britt had allowed Geronimo and his men to keep their weapons. If they got wind of this, they would draw down on the escort or break for the border and maybe take the scouts with them. Many of the scouts, were relatives of Geronimo's people. They had come along to accompany them to the reservation, not the gallows.
Davis could obey the marshal, start an uprising, and die with the other Pale Eyes here on the ranch. If he succeeded in arresting Geronimo, he would fail in his duty to General Crook and the army would cashier him. If he defied the marshal, he would find a posse on his trail. If he escaped a lynching, he would face federal court and jail.
Britt almost cried with relief when he saw a tail of dust in the direction of Fort Bowie. The cavalry was coming, or at least one cavalryman. If the soldier was the man Davis thought he was, he would suffice. Now Britt had a plan. He was almost grinning when Lt. Bo Blake rode up and leaped off his horse. Bo could have just dismounted, but leaping was more his style.
“I'm damned glad to see you, Bo! With the Pandora's box I find myself in, I forgot I sent the courier to tell you I'd be here.” Davis grabbed his hand and pumped it. Blake didn't just look the part of the ideal soldier, he fit the bill, too.
Bo lifted off his saddle and blanket, his saddlebags and rifle. He handed his horse's reins to the Apache lad who appeared. Davis was not surprised that Blake didn't give the boy even a suspicious glance. If Davis trusted him, then Bo did, too. In the morning, Bo would get his horse back watered, rubbed down, fussed over, well fed, and most likely with an amulet entwined like a charmed burr in his mane or tail.
Bo turned to Britt. “What's the trouble?”
The cook brought enough venison stew, corn bread, and
gravy for both. While they ate, Davis explained the dilemma and his solution.
“You graduated from West Point a year ahead of me, Bo.”
“Yes, I did.”
“That makes you my superior officer.”
“Yes, it does.”
“You can order me to stay here under the marshal's orders. Then you and the pack train, the scouts, and Geronimo's flock and stock can hightail it while the marshal, the customs man, and the cowboys are asleep.”
Davis knew that meant Blake would have to exceed his leave, but he was desperate. Bo Blake was Irish to the core and always game for a scrap or a joke, but he wasn't stupid.
“Good Lord!” He looked around at the layout. “You propose to pack up and move a bellowing mule train out from under those cowboys' noses, not to mention all these people and cows and horses? There ain't a snowflake's chance in hell we could get out of here without a fight.”
Davis waited. A fight had never stopped Bo Blake before, but he had one more question.
“Can you convince Geronimo to sneak away, what with him spoiling for a tussle and so fretted up about his footsore cows and all?”
“I figure if I stick by the Apaches, they'll stick by me.”
Blake smiled. “Then I'm in the game.”
“Speak of the devil.” Davis nodded toward the marshal and the customs man heading their way. Did they intend to subpoena Blake, too?
To Davis's relief they only wanted to gloat. That Yankee writer at Britt's camp on the border, they said, had been their lookout. He had reported on the earlier groups of Apaches, but Britt had spirited them north before they could catch him. These slow-moving cattle, though, they made him a sitting duck.
“This is dry country, boys.” Bo held up a quart bottle of Scotch whiskey. “What do you say to wetting the whistle?”
“I don't say no.” The marshal held out his cup.
Britt and Bo made sure the two men drank most of the whiskey.
With a grin, Blake watched them teeter off to the ranch house a couple of hours later. “Geronimo could scalp them tonight, and they wouldn't wake up for it,” he said.
Britt checked his pocket watch. Only ten o'clock and everyone was asleep. Frogs croaked at the springs. The lead mule's bell jingled now and then when he shook his head. Somewhere among the sleeping Apaches, a child coughed. Britt walked through the gate and stood between the two families who had bedded down on either side of it. His heart sank when he saw that the marshal had dragged his blankets out onto the porch not more than six feet away from them and was snoring like two grizzlies quarreling over a trout.
Davis went back to his tent, called in Sergeant Moses of the scouts, and told him his plan. Moses asked for no explanation. If the lieutenant needed it done, Moses would see that it was.
Davis then sent for Geronimo. While he waited, he rehearsed his story. He would have to mangle the truth if they were to get out of this alive.
 
 
LOZEN LOADED HER RIFLE. FROM THE DARKNESS AROUND her, she heard the men doing the same. She filled her two cartridge belts; then she and the others followed Geronimo to Fat Boy's tent. Thirty or so of the scouts fell in behind them. Everyone expected trouble. Fat Boy wouldn't call for Geronimo at this time of night to chat.
The scouts and the warriors formed a ring around Geronimo, Sergeant Moses, Mickey Free, Fat Boy, and the Bluecoat lieutenant who had just arrived. Lozen felt the tension resonating among them all.
Fat Boy said the two white men were government officials. They came here to collect a thousand dollars fee for the cows Geronimo had brought over the border. If Geronimo didn't pay it, they would take the cattle to Tucson. Fat Boy proposed that Geronimo and his people leave now. His Bluecoat
brother would go with them while Fat Boy stayed behind to throw the officials off the trail in the morning.
Lozen could see that Geronimo was furious. She dared not say anything, but she tried to will him to listen to the Bluecoat.
Fat Boy has honest, laughing eyes, she wanted to tell him. He wants to do what is best for us.
“No!” Geronimo spat out the word as if it tasted bad. “You promised that the cows could rest and graze. Let those men try to take them in the morning.” In his agitation he shifted his Winchester from arm to arm. “Why have you called me from my blankets for such a trivial thing?”
He was about to stalk away, but Sergeant Moses started firing words at him like bullets.
“You talk foolishness, like one of the People With No Minds.” Sergeant Moses had always hated Geronimo. Lozen could tell he was enjoying this. “The young Bluecoat
nantan
is a brave man. He's an honest man. He is risking his life and his standing among his people for you, and you behave like an ungrateful child.”
Moses waved his arm to include the country around them and the serrated rim of mountains in the distance. “All these places, they teach us, ‘Don't make mistakes. Act sensibly.' If you don't listen to what they say, you will get into trouble.”
The sergeant had a lot more to say, and he ignored Geronimo's attempts to interrupt him. Lozen could see Geronimo wither under his attack. When the sergeant paused for breath, Fat Boy spoke.
“Maybe Geronimo is afraid his people cannot sneak away without waking those two white men and the cowboys.”
At first Lozen was as offended as Geronimo. Then she realized what Fat Boy was up to. It might work. Geronimo was shrewd, but he was also vain and oddly gullible.
Geronimo put his foot into the snare. “My people can leave you where you're standing and you would not know it.”
Fat Boy's face eased into the mischievous smile that had
charmed Lozen the first time she saw it. “What a joke it would be,” he said. “If those men woke up in the morning to find that all the Indians and all the cattle, all the mules and all the ponies had gone.”
Geronimo continued scowling, but Lozen had learned to read his rockslide of a face as easily as she read tracks in wet sand. The idea of playing a joke on the Pale Eyes appealed to him.
Lozen felt the tension drain out through her feet, into the ground and away. What replaced it was the excitement and the joy she always felt when about to steal horses from under the noses of Bluecoats. Now they would steal themselves away.
 
 
THE SUN HAD BEEN UP MORE THAN AN HOUR WHEN THE marshal and the customs man, suffering from the evening's excess and wearing only their long johns, scrambled up a ladder to the flat roof of the ranch house. Cursing, they scanned the horizon with their field glasses. The land between the house and the seam connecting earth and sky was flat and empty except for two salient features. Davis sat on the empty wooden cracker box that the cook had left for him, and he held the mule's bridle.
The two men climbed down, went inside to dress, and then stalked to where Britt sat.
“Where are those Indians?”
“They're gone.”
“Can't I see they're gone? I want to know where they are gone.”
“I don't know.” Davis shrugged. “Lieutenant Blake is my superior. He took command, ordered me to remain in obedience to your subpoena, and left with the outfit ten hours ago. By now they're forty miles from here. They could've headed in any direction.”
“You are lying.”
“Maybe so, but you can't prove it.”
The marshal and the customs man conferred.
“I guess we're beat,” said the marshal. “We might as well go home.”
“If you have no further need of me, I'll return to my post at San Carlos.”
“You can go to hell, and I wish you a happy journey.” But the marshal reached out his hand and grasped Davis's. “It was a mighty slick trick, Lieutenant. I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it.”
The two men walked back to the ranch house where the cowboys were grinning at them over the adobe wall.
HAY-WEIGH ROBBERY
T
he Bluecoat lieutenant called Fat Boy set Squint Eyes' bundle of dried grass on the scale's platform and cut the vine holding it together. When the bundle fell open, a large rock rolled from the center of it. Fat Boy tossed it among the other stones, mesquite limbs, and wads of wet grass he had found in the hay that afternoon.
Squint Eyes screwed up her wrinkled face and screamed at him.
“Hijo de puta.”
Son of a whore.
At sixty, Squint Eyes was as brown and withered as the grass, but her indignation was fresh and full of juice.
“Vaya al diablo, Gordito.”
Next she turned on the scout who caught her with her foot on the scale. “Goddam, no-good, sumbitch!”
The Apache language didn't include profanity beyond the enigmatic epithet, “Knife and Awl,” so Squint Eyes and the other women had learned it from the mule packers, both American and Mexican. When Squint Eyes ran out of Spanish expletives, she reloaded with English.
While Fat Boy weighed their bundles, the older women joked with the scouts assigned to hay detail, and the younger ones flirted. The scouts were desirable. They had new rifles, handsome blue shirts, an air of importance, and accounts at the trader's store.
The army had agreed to pay the women a penny a pound for the hay, but they had become adept at badgering the lieutenant into giving them more. They refused dull nickels, accepting only shiny silver dimes, quarters, and half dollars. They had learned that they got more when they insisted he round the sum to the highest dime instead of a nickel.
Lozen and Stands Alone stood next to their bundles of grass. Lozen felt shabby in her leather skirt and tunic, dirty and stained. Stands Alone's clothes were as bad. The Chiricahua women who'd come to Fort Apache months earlier wore ankle-length skirts of flowered calico. Their blouses were decorated with ribbons, wide ruffles, and belts of silver conchos. They wore many strands of colored glass beads. Brass hawk bells jingled on the fringes of their moccasins.
The sun was setting by the time Lozen's and Stands Alone's turns came. With a grunt, Chato tossed Lozen's bundle onto the platform. Chato now wore the thick red-cloth headband and the dark blue shirt of a scout. Fat Boy had promoted him to sergeant, but he had acquired the worst sort of general's attitude.
Fat Boy opened Lozen's bundle and seemed surprised to find no surprises in it. He handed her a quarter and a dime, the first she'd owned. She stopped to stare at them. They were perfectly round with the images of eagles and people subtly raised on their surfaces. If she made a hole at the edge of each, she could hang them from her earlobes.
Chato shoved her away from the scale. She turned to look at him with an expression that was not quite neutral, not quite harmless, and not at all docile. She saw fear flicker in his eyes. Maybe he was remembering her magical powers and the harm she might do him.
Niece saw the fear, too. She whispered as they walked away, “Be careful of him, Grandmother. He makes up stories about people. If he gets mad at you, he might say you're a witch.”
“He's the one to be careful. Lies gnaw at the liar's own soul.”
Niece, Lozen, and Stands Alone followed the happy crowd of women to the Fort Apache mercantile. The trader, George Wratten, left his door open long after sundown. He was an honest man, and he spoke Apache fluently. His store had become the gathering place for the Chiricahuas. Lozen always looked for Hairy Foot there, but the scouts had mentioned that he worked mostly around San Carlos.
Lozen wandered the narrow aisles in a daze. She inhaled the aroma from the coffee and tobacco. She touched the smooth, cool sides of the canned goods. She draped the chintzes and calicos across her hand, marveling at how light and colorful they were. She studied the beads and ribbons, the knives, axes, hawk bells, and tinware.
She picked up a mirror, caught the lantern's glow with it, and flashed it onto the wall. She tilted her hand to make the butterfly of light leap and flutter. Her first thought was that she could use the mirror for signaling on war scouts, but then she remembered that her people were done with fighting.
Still, it might be useful for signaling even in time of peace. She studied the two coins lying on her palm. The big disk and the little one gave her no clue about their worth. How could she judge the value of something so useless?
 
 
LOCO WANTED TO SEND A TELEGRAM. RAFE WAS IN THE telegraph office at the San Carlos agency when the old man came in. He was dressed in his rusty-black coat and baggy trousers tucked into his moccasins. His drooping eyelid and scarred face looked particularly odd under the bowler hat. The white people at the fort thought him comical, but Rafe knew better. The Apaches didn't elect comical old men as their leaders.
Loco was happy to see Rafe. Surrounding him in a garland of smiles, he enlisted him to interpret the message he wanted to send over
pesh bi yalt,
Iron, It Talks. Loco intended his talk for a chief of the Pimas who, he heard, had made threats against him. His message was brief. If the Pima
nantan
showed his face anywhere around here, Loco and his men would make him wish he hadn't. “Me lickee him damnsight,” was how he put it.
When Rafe left the office, the telegraph operator was trying to explain the concept of payment to Loco. Loco understood, of course, but he pretended not to. Rafe could see his point. Why should he pay to talk? Next, Loco must reason
the Pale Eyes would charge him a fee for the air he breathed.
Al Sieber angled over from the stable and joined Rafe. “I hear tell that Crook took Geronimo's cattle. He plans to sell them and pay back the Mexican owners.”
“Sounds fair.”
“He ain't going to replace them.”
“Why not?”
“The Indian Bureau insists the Apaches farm.”
“Why?”
“Maybe the local ranchers didn't cotton to competition from the Apaches for government contracts,” said Sieber, “and they put a bug in the Indian Commissioner's ear.”
“The Chiricahua men were willing to herd cattle. Now what will they do?”
“They won't farm. That's women's work.”
Rafe thought of the bruises he had seen on some of those women. They hadn't gotten them farming. With no work and no game to hunt, there was nothing for the men to do but get drunk, pick fights, beat their wives, and brood. Apache men excelled at those enterprises.
 
 
BROKEN FOOT PAUSED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY ABOUT how Old Man Coyote offered to teach the other coyotes to lie in exchange for a white mule, a saddle, and silvermounted bridle. He saw the wagon bumping toward them in the full moon's light, and he hurried the tale to its conclusion. He had just said, “I'm talking about fruit and other good things,” when the wagon pulled up. Fat Boy drove the team.
Chato and Mickey Free climbed out. They walked to the fire as though they were old friends of the folk there, but no one liked them. Broken Foot's niece, Wise Woman, detested them.
“Those two could teach the coyotes to lie,” she murmured to Lozen.
Everyone knew Chato and Mickey Free had told Lieutenant Davis that Fights Without Arrows was plotting an uprising. Fat Boy had ordered the scouts to arrest him. A jury of
White Mountain men had tried him and sent him to the prison on the rock in the middle of the great water.
They made other mischief, too. They told Geronimo that the Pale Eyes planned to hang him and the other renegades, or send them to that island of rocks to live forever in chains. Chato would draw his finger across his throat, and Mickey Free would open wide his off-kilter eyes and pretend to be strangling in a noose. The Chiricahuas were angry at Fat Boy for arresting Fights Without Arrows, but no one blamed him for believing Chato and Mickey Free. Those two could fool Old Man Coyote.
Fat Boy helped his four passengers climb down. Their clothes hung in tatters, and their feet were bare. Lozen almost shouted with joy when she saw them, Her Eyes Open and Kaywaykla's fourteen-year-old cousin, Siki, had returned.
While Mickey Free translated, Fat Boy said the four women had walked twelve hundred miles in search of their people. It made his heart glad to see them reunited with their families. The Father in Washington was happy to hear that his Chiricahua children were following the road of peace.
He said that when Fights Without Arrows returned from prison in five years, he would see what progress his people had made. He would see that sobriety and hard work had made them all prosper. Lozen mused that if Fat Boy thought stealing horses wasn't hard work, he didn't know what hard work was.
When Fat Boy, Mickey Free, and Chato had rumbled off into the night, people laughed and cried and hugged each other. Broken Foot put his arms around his wife and sobbed. Finally, Her Eyes Open told her story.
“They took us all the way to Mexico City,” she said. “They sold us to a man who grew yucca and made pulque. Because I was old, I cleaned their house. Granddaughter and the other two worked in the fields.
“We pretended to believe what the Black Robes taught so our masters would trust us. In winter I stole a knife for myself and a blanket for each of us. One evening we got permission
to go to the Mexicans' god-house by ourselves. Instead, we walked away.
“The cactus fruit ripened as we headed north, and we ate it. One night while we were sleeping, a mountain lion attacked her.” Her Eyes Open glanced toward the figure huddled in the cave of her blanket. “He bit into her shoulder and tried to drag her away. My granddaughter and Young Woman beat at the lion with rocks. I stabbed him until he died. When we lit a fire, we saw that the lion had clawed off her face.”
The woman under the blanket pushed it back to expose the scarred and twisted mask of her face. Everyone groaned at the sight of her.
“I put the skin back and held it in place with thongs. I rubbed the lion's saliva on the wounds to help them heal. In the morning, I bound cactus pads against them. We found a cave where our people hid supplies. We walked some more until the Bluecoats found us and brought us here. Now we are with you, and our hearts are happy.”
Lozen was happy, too, but she wondered for how long. She thought of the uneasiness that Chato's and Mickey Free's lies were causing. She thought of her old friend, Fights Without Arrows, on that faraway rock in the middle of the water. She thought of Geronimo's fear that the Pale Eyes would hang him. She thought of the men who were drinking
tiswin
and quarreling with each other and with their women. Fat Boy had arrested some of them for drunkenness and for beating their wives. The arrests made the men angry and afraid.
Life could not go on this way much longer.
 
 
THE POUNDING ON THE DOOR INCREASED BY A FACTOR OF A hundred the throbbing in Al Sieber's skull. The Chief of Scouts wanted to kill whomever was responsible, but it would require too much effort. The iron latch rattled with the force being applied to it.
What the goddam hell time of day was it, anyway?
Sieber pushed himself to a sitting position and swung his legs over the edge of the cot. When he muttered, “Stop that, you son of a bitch,” the words shrieked in his ears. Maybe he shouldn't have had that last bottle of whiskey the night before.
He opened the door a crack and put his arm across his eyes to keep the sun from driving spikes into them. Through a roil of nausea, he saw the newly minted captain, fresh from the wrong side of the Mississippi. The captain waved a paper in Sieber's face.
“What the hell is that?”
“A telegram.”
“Nobody sends me telegrams.” Sieber started to ease the door shut. Now was not the time to be slamming doors.
“It's not for you.”
“Then why the goddam hell did you bring it?” Maybe he would slam the door, and the devil take it.
“It's from Lieutenant Britton Davis at Fort Apache. He sent it to General Crook, but the general isn't here.”
“Of course he's not here. These are my goddamn diggings, not his, you shavetail mule's arse.”
“I mean the general's not on the post, so the telegraph operator brought it to me.”
Sieber squinted at the paper, trying to make the milling letters form into ranks and come to attention. The lieutenant could see he was having trouble and so he read it aloud.
“‘Chiricahuas refuse to quit inbibing spiritous drink—stop—They refuse to quit beating their women—stop—In—surrection possible—stop—Please advise—stop.'”
Seiber didn't know what
insurrection
meant, but he was familiar with “spiritous drink.”
“Ain't nothing but a
tiswin
drunk.” He dismissed the telegram with a wave of his hand. “Pay it no mind. Davis will handle it.”

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