Lord Apache (11 page)

"What kind of a proposition?"

"Run this spread as a regular stop. They'll leave extra animals here to graze and water, busted wagons that need fixing, whatever. Old man Tully thinks he might even put in a little warehouse. Fifty dollars a month to run the place. Stage line needs a stop, and they'll pay you something too. You can make a few dollars on the side selling grub to people, maybe putting someone up for the night in that shanty over there."

Eggleston's uncle had indeed been a wheelwright, and the valet had once worked at the trade. So long as they stayed, Mrs. Glore could cook meals and Phoebe could help her. Charlie, the Papago, could be the porter when he was not tending his vegetables.

"I'll do it!" Drumm decided.

George Dunaway rode by with B Company. Dusty and sweating, he slid wearily from his mount to stare at the bearded figure in the tall conical hat. "Drumm?"

Jack nodded. "Hello, Dunaway."

Phoebe had been helping Charlie dig weeds from the garden. Flushed and glowing, cheeks pink from effort and the sun, she came to greet the lieutenant. Her feet were bare, the balmoral dress torn and stained. Beulah Glore came too, face sweating from the heat of the kitchen fire, and Eggleston.

"Well, I'll be God damned!" Dunaway stared from one to the other, too astonished even to apologize for his language, while the troops watered their mounts in the small lake beginning to form behind the earthen dam. "I'll be simply God damned!"

"We're still here," Drumm said with some pride.

Dunaway shook his head in disbelief.

"And we intend to stay here—at least, Eggleston and I."

Phoebe Larkin moved a bare toe thoughtfully in the dust. "Mrs. Glore and I are staying, too—for a while. We'll leave for Prescott soon, I guess, but Mr. Drumm has been so good to us we're bound to help out."

The lieutenant eyed her admiringly. Even with her disheveled appearance she was beautiful. The China kerchief attempted to restrain the red hair but much of it escaped in a rich cascade of curls; smudges of dirt on her cheek only accentuated the gentian blue of her eyes; the feet were narrow and well shaped in the Arizona dust. Leaning on the hoe, she looked to Drumm like a goddess of the harvest—Ceres, perhaps. He was annoyed at Dunaway's pleasureful gaze, especially when Phoebe Larkin smiled winningly back.

"Well?" he said, rather sharply.

Dunaway took the crockery cup Mrs. Glore handed him. Still looking at Phoebe Larkin over the rim, he spoke to Drumm. "Heard you captured one of Agustín's Apaches during your last dust-up."

"That's right."

"And let him go!"

Drumm nodded.

"That was a damned fool thing to do!" Dunaway snapped. He wiped his mouth, turned hard eyes on Jack Drumm. "We've been trying to get one of 'em alive for weeks." He pointed toward the slopes of the Mazatzals. "There's no way to flush old Agustín out of there unless we know where he is, how to get in through all those
barrancas
and rocks and passes. Mr. Drumm, you just set back our campaign about a month—maybe more!"

Drumm's shoulder pained him, and he winced. "I don't see how—"

"Let me tell you how, Englishman! If you'd held on to him till we got here, like any proper citizen of the Territory would do, we'd have sweated it out of him—where the old man was holed up, how to get there, the story we need to know to settle Agustín's hash for once and for all!"

Drumm became indignant. "Torture him, you mean?"

The lieutenant scowled, slapped his dusty hat against a thigh. "We'd have gotten it out of him, one way or another! But you let the bastard go! It was a damned irresponsible act!" Dunaway jammed the shapeless hat on his head and climbed again into the saddle. "I hold you responsible for the wounding of Private Murray, do you know that? Murray was hurt down at Mud Springs. Some of Agustín's rascals slipped down the mountain and bushwhacked my pickets at daybreak yesterday!"

"I'm sorry," Drumm said. "Truly sorry—but—"

Dunaway gave him a withering look, tipped his hat to the ladies, and rode away in a cloud of dust. On their last encounter the lieutenant had bested Jack Drumm conclusively; this time Drumm felt he had again come off second best. But he was learning.

The shoulder did not improve. Instead, Jack developed a fever again. Suppuration from the wound turned yellow and foul-smelling. He felt it sapping his strength but he continued to work alongside the others. They were concerned for him, uneasy at his dogged persistence, and finally almost angry when he refused to rest.

"But there is much to be done!" he insisted. Leaning on the shovel he was using to dig irrigation channels to newly leafed beans, he looked about. "Where is Charlie? He should be here to show me where to run these damned ditches!"

"I don't know, Mr. Jack," Eggleston said, mopping his bald head. "He went out early this morning with a sack on his back. Perhaps he is looking for edible plants of some sort."

Mrs. Glore trundled by a load of mesquite wood cut for the kitchen fire. "He don't like
my
cooking, that's a fact!" Laying down the load, she struggled for breath. "You know what Charlie favors? Yesterday I seen him with a snare, trapping them little mice that runs around the bushes. He throws 'em in the fire to singe 'em, and gobbles 'em down like they was patty foo graw!"

Phoebe shuddered; her face grew pale. "I'm glad
I
didn't see him! I'd have lost all my suppers for a week back!"

That night Drumm sat by candlelight and wrote a long letter to his brother Andrew:

It is so very strange—I was on the final leg of my Grand Tour, yet here I find myself suddenly the majordomo of a flourishing settlement along the banks of the Agua Fria River in this backwater of civilization! You spoke of the doggedness, the determination, which I think most of the Drumms possess. Well, perhaps mine has betrayed me into a foolish adventure! Yet there are compensations. The winter air is like wine; the sun shines beneficently, the birds sing in the
saguaro
and
pitahaya
—they are cactuses, you know—and a very pretty young lady, Miss Phoebe Larkin, has stopped here along with her companion until they find suitable transportation to Prescott. I think our Eggie is rather fond of Mrs. Glore. However, I do not find Miss Larkin to my taste. She is a very forward female, inclined to be rough and strident, though she did participate magnificently in the latest attack on us by the renegade Agustín and his bloodthirsty Apaches.

He concluded with a request for Andrew to cable him the sum of five hundred pounds, payable at the Merchant's and Drover's Bank of Phoenix, A.T. (that meant "Arizona Territory," he explained), and sealed the letter, meaning to send it by stage to Prescott and thus eastward on the cars. Hearing rustling outside the lean-to, muted voices, he started in alarm and reached for his pistol. "Who is it?" he called. "Eggie, is that you?"

The valet was supposed to be on watch atop the tower they had built from precious lumber.

"Phoebe?" he asked. "Mrs. Glore?"

The intruder was Charlie, the Papago. Grinning from ear to ear, he entered the lean-to. "
Ostin
," he said to Jack Drumm, holding up a hand in salute. Jack did not know what the word meant, but it seemed a term of respect, like "sir," perhaps, or "your honor." Phoebe Larkin was behind Charlie, carrying a bucket, and Eggleston brought up the rear of the procession.

"What is this?" Jack demanded. "What is this all about?"

Phoebe set down the bucket, filled with black mud from the river.

"Charlie and I," she explained, "are going to cure your shoulder. You've gone long enough with that festering wound. Now it's time for back-country remedies to take over."

Over his protests, Phoebe unbuttoned the ragged shirt. "You remember—you asked this morning where Charlie was? Well, I don't speak Papago but with signs I made him understand what I wanted. He went out and got certain plants and together we ground them up and mixed them into this mud. Now we are going to manufacture a poultice and put it on your shoulder."

He tried to resist but Eggleston and Charlie easily bore him to the pallet. Phoebe mixed the evil-smelling concoction with a stick.

"Mr. Jack!" Eggleston said severely. "This is for your own good, sir! I am only a valet, but I am getting very tired of your stubbornness!"

Jack Drumm stared unbelievingly. Eggleston appeared frightened by his own temerity but kept a firm hold on his master while Phoebe Larkin smeared the black stuff on the wound. She covered it with fragrant-smelling leaves, the whole bound in place by a strip from a ruined blanket.

"There!" she said. "Now you just lay back there and let those yarbs work! In Pocahontas County my Uncle Buell knew every yarb—herb—there was. Were? Anyway—"

The poultice did not smell as bad as he had feared. There was a resiny fragrance to it, and the coolness of the mud was balm to the inflamed shoulder. Eggleston and Mrs. Glore tiptoed out to let the two of them alone. Phoebe sat beside him, candle flickering on her hair and lighting responsive flames. When for a long time he did not speak, she asked, "Isn't that better?"

He nodded, bemused by the candlelight and her presence.

"We never really got a chance to talk," she said. "Maybe it's my fault. I know I come on pretty strong at times, like a mule with his ears laid back. But I
like
to hear you talk, you're so educated and all." She paused for a moment. "Tell me about England," she said softly. "What's it like? When I was a little girl I had a book about England—all about the old kings and such."

He told her about the Plantagenets; about the Wars of the Roses, Henry and his innumerable wives, Queen Elizabeth, the Stuarts, the Restoration, all about Pitt and Castlereagh, to whom he was distantly related; and about the Whigs, and Queen Victoria.

"Did you ever see her—Queen Victoria, I mean?"

"Once. My father took me to Buckingham Palace. I was very small—don't remember much about it."

"And—about you!"

He was getting drowsy. "What about me?"

"Tell me about you!"

He felt peaceful; his shoulder no longer hurt. Sleepily he murmured, "I'll make a bargain with you, Phoebe."

"What bargain?"

"If you tell me," he said, "the truth—the
truth
, mind you—about how you came to be here, and why you are staying here, I'll tell you all about John Peter Christian Drumm."

She looked at him, eyes somber, almost black, in the glow of the candle. "I
told
you! My father—"

He shook his head. "All that business about your father being a judge in New York City, a crowd of suitors begging for your hand, the judge packing you off to travel, your wealthy uncle in Prescott—"

"Don't you believe me?"

Perhaps, being drowsy, he was insensitive to her agitation.

"It is cut from the whole cloth," he told her. "You do not talk or act in the least like a refined young lady from a great metropolitan center. You know about 'yarbs' that certainly do not grow on Manhattan Island, and are very familiar with guns. Mrs. Glore speaks of being 'from far up the holler and weaned on a bullet.' You refuse to return to Phoenix, speaking of some dreadful experience there. Yet when you have a perfectly good chance to travel to Prescott, you beg off with some cock-and-bull story about Mrs. Glore's liver. I am not a complete idiot, you know, in spite of Lieutenant Dunaway's opinion." He shaded his eyes from the candle with a hand and looked at her. "Tell me—what is your secret, Miss Phoebe Larkin, or whatever your name is?"

He had meant it jokingly, in the best of good humor, but she grew distraught. "You—you—" She broke off, twisting the handkerchief in her fingers. "I have told you everything—at least, what I was lief to tell." She gave him a long and tragic look. Never had he seen her so lacking in composure. Gone was the clever and confident young woman; Phoebe Larkin suddenly became a fearful child, eyes misting with tears and pain.

"I am sorry," he blurted, trying to rise on an elbow. "Phoebe, excuse me! I did not mean to—"

Suddenly she fled; he heard footsteps diminish into the night. Along the river the coyotes howled; the frogs stopped for a moment at the sound, then resumed their drumming.

What was the mystery?

The next day he found out. After lying late abed, he wandered out into the sunlight. Raising an arm over his head, he found his shoulder almost free of pain. The fever had abated, also. Standing thus, flexing his arm, he watched a traveler approach from the direction of the capital. Alonzo Meech, the Pinkerton detective, got creakingly down from the decrepit mare and shook hands.

"Bon joor," Meech said. "That's French for 'it's a hell of a nice day.'"

Jack looked around for Mrs. Glore, hoping she had coffee on and boiling, but Beulah was not in the kitchen. He did not see Phoebe Larkin, either. Eggleston was feeding the chickens that a teamster had traded Mrs. Glore for peach pies, and Charlie stalked mice under the spreading ironwood tree.

"So the Apaches didn't get you," Drumm remarked.

The detective shook his head. He looked dusty and funereal as ever, and weary also. But there was something enduring in his manner.