Lord Apache (13 page)

Drumm scratched his chin. The beard itched. "Detective Meech gave me only the barest details. But your version puts a different light on things."

"What can we do? The Buckners are big bugs in Philadelphia, and Beulah and I are just little people. No one will believe us!"

"I have a plan," Drumm said.

They listened.

"With Meech about, as he may well be, we have to be very careful. I told him you two had gone on to Prescott, to visit your uncle Buell, but I do not think he believed me."

"You never!" Mrs. Glore cried.

Phoebe was surprised, also. "But why did you do that? That puts you in as much trouble as us!"

"Never mind that! At any rate, here is what you must do. I want you and Mrs. Glore to remain here, in the hut, night and day. Do not venture out. There will be people passing by, more and more now that Agustín is barricaded in the Mazatzals—stages, freight wagons, travelers and settlers, miners. Even Alonzo Meech may unexpectedly return, hoping to catch you unawares. But you are not to show yourselves. In a few days, I expect a friend of mine—a Mr. Ike Coogan—to come by in the Tully and Ochoa wagons with a contract for me to sign. Coogan is a good sort. I think I can arrange to smuggle you and Mrs. Glore to Prescott in one of his wagons. There your uncle can take over your protection; perhaps help you to get to the Sandwich Islands or Australia, where you will be safe."

A tinge of color returned to Phoebe Larkin's cheeks. The freckles paled. She touched her lips with a wispy handkerchief. Phoebe looked dainty and very feminine; Jack marveled that this was the female who swung a mattock like a man, drove off Agustín's braves with a pistol in each hand—and shot a brutal husband.

"Why, I must ask you again," she said, "are you doing all this for us?"

"Because you have been badly used. We Britons believe in fair play."

She rose, looking him in the eye with that strange gaze he had once before observed. "Mr. Drumm," she said, "I thought you were cold as Mose's toe. But I'm bound to admit I'm a poor judge of men! All anyone has to do is remember I married Mr. Buckner. So I apologize for what I said. Maybe there
is
a little milk of human kindness in you."

"Me too," Mrs. Glore agreed. "That's the God's truth! We both got a little different slant on you now."

Jack Drumm had a different slant, as she put it, on himself, also; it bothered him. Belatedly he realized he must soon find time to write a few lines to Cornelia Newton-Barrett. For some time he had neglected her.

Behind the new dam the water level grew. Now there was a pond containing small fish, deep enough to bathe in. Charlie and Eggleston finished the adobe building and roofed it with thatch. Jack Drumm blistered his hands cutting brush to build a corral. The beans and corn that the Papago had planted began to burgeon, show miniature fruits. Too, a semblance of peace came to the valley of the Agua Fria. Traffic increased along the road to the new capital. Now there were frequent freight wagons and a twice-weekly coach service. A man named Sloat from Emporia, Kansas, tied up his mules two miles down the road from Rancho Terco and settled there with his wife and six children. The winter sun was good for Mrs. Sloat's rheumatism, and Sloat was impressed by the rampant growth of Charlie's corn and beans. "In Kansas, in November," Sloat enthused, "everything's snowed over, but out here a farmer can work the soil right through the winter! That's for me!"

George Dunaway rode by, also. Jack was currying old Bonyparts, the mule, when the lieutenant and two men tied their horses to the new hitching post before the adobe and dismounted. Dunaway looked spruce. The ragged black beard was neatly trimmed, his blue shirt ironed till the creases stood out like knife blades, and his boots gleamed in the noonday sun. Jack looked at the flowers clutched in the lieutenant's fist.

"You're welcome," he said, "but surely you're not bringing
me
a bouquet."

One of the troopers snickered but Dunaway fixed him with a malevolent eye.

"They're for Phoebe," Dunaway explained. "I picked 'em from Mrs. Major Trimble's front yard. Where is she?"

Jack was startled. "Miss Larkin?"

"Of course. Where is she?"

He brushed Bonyparts carefully, not looking at Dunaway. "Oh, I thought you knew! She and Mrs. Glore left. They—they went into Prescott several days ago on the stage."

Dunaway watched his men lead the mounts to the pool.

"I'm sorry," Jack said. Though he and Dunaway were hardly friends, there was something almost touching in the way the lieutenant stood disappointed, bouquet still clutched in his hand. Too, Jack Drumm was now the
patron
, as the Mexicans would say, of Rancho Terco, a host to desert travelers. "Sit down, here, in the shade," he invited, and handed Dunaway a gourd of water from the butt.

"Thanks." With a sigh Dunaway slumped on an upturned box. "Got quite a spread here."

"We manage," Jack admitted, not without pride.

"I'm sorry I missed the ladies. They went to Prescott, you say?"

"That's where they were bound for."

"Funny! I've been in and out of Prescott lately, but I didn't run across 'em. Of course, it's the capital now, and growing. There are a lot of people there."

"I suppose so."

Dunaway put down the gourd and patted water from his black whiskers with the back of his hand. "It's a hard life, a soldier's," he said. "I never married, maybe on account of that. Wouldn't be fair to ask a woman to follow you to a place like this." He stared into the purple distances.

"I suppose not."

"She was real pretty," Dunaway said. "Miss Larkin, I mean. There was a—well, a kind of a
substance
to her. I mean—she seemed like a real
person
."

Phoebe Larkin was real enough; that was true, Jack thought. He glanced toward the reed hut, hoping the reality of Phoebe's person could not be seen. The two women, quickly bored with forced inactivity, were probably watching him and Dunaway, straining ears to hear the conversation.

"I'm not young anymore," Dunaway admitted. "God, I'm thirty-six already, and I don't know how it happened I got old so quick! But it gets you to thinking, Drumm, thinking how a good woman might make a difference in your life. Well—" He got up, sighed again, put on what was obviously a new hat of the Stetson variety Jack Drumm had often seen in the Territory. Dropping the flowers into the dust, he looked at them for a moment, then ground them with his heel. "Got pickets out all along the wagon road. Just riding out to check on them."

Jack followed him to where his trooper escort waited. "How's the campaign against Agustín going?"

Dunaway shook his head. "We keep him penned up pretty well in the Mazatzals, but till we find some way to get infantry up there and flush him out, he's going to be a problem. He can always swoop down and bloody a few noses. Keep an eye out, Mr. Drumm, and don't be fooled. Just when you least expect it that bastard is going to strike!"

"I know," Jack said. "I surely know."

The women
had
been watching, listening. After the soldiers left, Phoebe called from the hut. "Who was that, Mr. Drumm? Was it Lieutenant Dunaway?"

He stood near the doorway, pretending to sharpen his knife on a chunk of granite. "I am sure you know it was."

Phoebe peered around the edge of the doorframe. The slatted light filtered through the reeds onto her hair, lighting it in random glints.

"He—he brought you flowers," Jack added, not wanting to tell her but feeling obligated to be fair to George Dunaway.

"Me? Flowers? But why?"

"Dunaway is a lonely man. He said a soldier's life was hard out here, and I suppose it is. Anyway, I gather he—well, he thought you beautiful, and wanted to bring about a—a closer acquaintance."

Someone giggled.

"Anyway," Jack said, "I told Dunaway you were not here, that you and Mrs. Glore had gone on into Prescott. He was very disappointed."

Again someone giggled. This time he thought it was Phoebe Larkin. What was the term for it he had heard—cabin fever? Was the long and boring confinement beginning to addle the two females?

"So he thinks me beautiful," Phoebe mused.

"That is his opinion."

Bearing down so hard on the knife, he cut his finger and swore.

"And what is your opinion?" Phoebe asked.

He sucked at the wounded finger. "What is my opinion of what?"

"Do you think me beautiful?"

"I have not got time," he said coldly, "to stand here engaging in idle talk! Of course you are beautiful, Miss Larkin! I think you are only trying to make me say something ridiculous."

Stalking away, he still heard female laughter from the hut.

Next day a Tully and Ochoa wagon came by. Ike Coogan got stiffly down, calling a greeting, but before Jack could speak the old man was supervising the removal from his wagon of what appeared to be a corpse. Jack watched the Mexican swampers carry the frail body to the shade of the ramada. The man was old, looking to be seventy years of age or more. The white beard stuck stiffly into the air, and his lean body was as rigid as a board.

"Who is that?"

Coogan wadded a gunnysack under the old man's head. "Uncle Roscoe."

"Uncle Roscoe what?"

Coogan shook his head and spat. "No one ever heered his last name, but everyone in the Territory knows him. Been prospecting these mountains for forty years, I reckon. Uncle Roscoe was here before I was, and I been here nine years longer 'n God, so that should give you an idee."

Jack knelt, put an ear to the ragged shirt. "The pulse seems regular, though slow. What's wrong with him?"

Coogan pointed toward the loaded burro the Mexicans were untying from the rear of his wagon. "Old Pansy was loose in Centinela Canyon. I knew then something must be wrong. I climbed up the hill, and shore enough there was poor Roscoe laid out under a bush with an empty canteen. Maybe it was apoplexy—I dunno—and he got that far hopin' to flag down help. Anyway, I drug him onto the wagon and brought him here. Ain't nothin' much we can do fer him, is there?"

Jack Drumm had spent two years in Glasgow at medical school before deciding he was not cut out for a physician, but he did remember some of his lectures. He rolled back a wrinkled lid and stared at the dilated pupil. Uncle Roscoe groaned, tried to raise a hand. It fell back; he subsided.

"There's a bed in that new adobe," Jack said. "If you'll have your swampers carry him there, I'll bleed him of a quart or so. That should help."

Coogan grinned. "Why, that'd be salubrious! Pore old coot! The landscape wouldn't be the same without old Roscoe! By God, that's nice of you, Mr. Drumm!"

When they had settled Uncle Roscoe comfortably, and Jack Drumm had signed the contract with Tully and Ochoa to manage the Agua Fria station, Coogan suddenly asked, "Where are them two ladies that was here—Miss Larkin, I think, and the old lady that was traveling with her?"

Though Coogan's Mexicans appeared to have no English, Jack drew him confidentially aside. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

Briefly Jack told the story—how the two women had fled prosecution, how Detective Meech dogged their tracks, how they were trapped along the Agua Fria and were now awaiting salvation, how Meech might even now be watching.

"What do you say?" he asked. "Will you help them?"

Coogan bit off a chunk of Wedding Cake plug.

"Do
you
believe their story?" he asked.

"I believe them. They are being unjustly persecuted."

Coogan chewed, leaning on the long rifle, staring at the dust. "I could get in trouble."

"That's right," Jack admitted. "I myself am already in deeper trouble. But there is a time when a man must be ready to accept trouble in a good cause."

Coogan grinned a tobacco-stained grin. "Ain't no cause better 'n a pretty gal!"

"Then you'll help?"

"Shore enough!"

Between them they arranged for Coogan to drive the wagon down the road and into a stand of bamboo along the river. The two women could then leave the reed hut with their valises, walk under cover of the river greenery to the wagon, and board the vehicle without being seen by a lurking Detective Meech. Coogan would cover them with wagon canvas and take them to Prescott.

"No hurry," Coogan called. "I got to grease them wheels, and wrap a felloe with wire where it got busted."

Across the river the brittlebush with its dusty gray leaves was blooming; butter-yellow flowers laid a carpet on the rocky slopes. Quickly Jack picked a bouquet and hurried to the reed hut. They did not hear his scratching at the door. When he did enter they were startled and nervous. The long confinement was telling on them. Phoebe's face was pale, and Mrs. Glore had developed a tic.

Hurriedly Jack explained the plan. The two women started immediately to pack. Phoebe noticed the brittlebush flowers; she stared silently at the bouquet.

"Ah—this is for you," Jack muttered, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. It was a foolish idea, of course; emotion had betrayed him. The blooms were only common, and Phoebe Larkin must have seen them all along the river.