I, Tom Horn Page 13

  I missed the second Indian at ten feet, but only because his horse hit a snake hole and collapsed, throwing him clear.

  My third shot was into the back of the third Indian, as he raced past me and missed with his own rifle. The weapon, a .50-caliber Spencer carbine, discharged so near my eyes I couldn't see for powderflash blinding. I fired after the rider on instinct, hipping the Winchester like a sawed-off shotgun. His god Yosen (or Ussen) wasn't mounted with him that day. My bullet took him about five joints up his vertebrae from his saddle. It was a hit of the purest outhouse sort, but I took it.

  As Al Sieber had early taught me, "They all count one knife cut on your gunstock, lucky or otherwise." A dead Indian, the old scout observed, never did understand the difference. Regardless, I was left in a bad shake.

  I stood there a moment, unwilling to believe myself.

  In seconds, I had killed two Apache Indians, failed to kill a third only because his horse had gone down with him. I had done that. Me, Tom Horn, Jr. Killing men. Men I didn't know and who had never done me harm. It wasn't like real life. One fellow with his teeth mashed into his brains in the back of his skull. The other with his spine bones sharded through his bladder and blown out the front of his breechcloth. I had done that. God, but it felt strange.

  It was also nigh the last thing I felt.

  The third Apache's knife would have opened my kidney meat but for the girl on the ground. Regaining consciousness, she saw the Indian get to his feet and close silently on my rear. Her slim hand darted to seize and trip him by an ankle as he passed her. He stumbled and I whirled about. Off-balance, he was exposed for the single instant I required to pulp the base of his brainpan with the steel butt plate of my Winchester.

  I didn't give him a second glance. The soft, rotten feel of a human head giving inward needs no experience to judge. A man knows he has destroyed life.

  The girl was meanwhile afoot. Indian that my closer view disclosed her to be, she had captured the reins of my gelding—cavalry trained to stand on a field of fire— and now brought him up to me.

  "Here, warrior," she said. "Here is your horse."

  The voice reached into me, driven by the luminous eyes.

  Here, warrior; here is your horse.

  Six words that made my world different. Six words spoken in guttural, straight Apache. Words that I understood and answered, in tongue, not even knowing that I did. Six words. And I had found my sweet Nopal, the woman of my life, and we both but children in our years.

  Children?

  Well, strange children. Dark in more than outer skin, or inner doubt of others. We were wild children, Nopal and Talking Boy. We spoke a kindred language beyond the thick Apache accents of our desperate greeting on that bloody wash below forbidden Cibicu Canyon.

  We were ourselves Cibicus, broncos.

  Bunch-quitters.

  "Enjuh, nah-lin." was all I said to her, taking the horse, "well done, maiden child."

  And we mounted up on the rangy gelding, quick as two pumas going aboard the same big deer, and drove him out of there with Apache yells as wild as any Juh, Geronimo, Kaytennae, or Chato of the merciless whitehunting wolf pack gathered above us on the Cibicu Creek.

  It was as well that we were quick.

  Even as we wheeled the bay to go, disaster rode out of the yawning mouth of Cibicu Canyon.

  "Behind you, behind you!" I heard a familiar voice crying. It was my brother Chikisin yelling at us. He had not ridden to save himself, but still had our band of Mexican horses bunched together, holding them until I might either pick up the girl or get myself killed trying it. It was all of bravery any man could offer his brother in such a case. It very well could have meant Chikisin's own death to wait as he had to help me, should such help prove of human provision. I shouted back to him, now, turning the bay to head in on the little herd that he guarded. Only when I had done this did I twist in the saddle to see what his warning cry concerned.

  I had thought it would be the remaining two Apaches with the stolen Mexican herd of Geronimo. Likely, they had also found their saddle mounts by this time and were coming on to avenge their dead brothers. Well, surely old Chikisin and Talking Boy could handle them!

  Alas, the ignorance of white Apaches.

  It was not two Apaches but twenty of them. And they were not coming from the stolen herd but from the forboding entrance to the big canyon. And now, my white God forbid, Chikisin was yelling something else.

  A name; one of recent memory for me.

  "Gokliya! Gokliya!" the slender son of Old Pedro was standing in his stirrups to wave. The name did not on the instant come to me. Then it did. It was brought to me by the low voice of the girl clinging behind me on the back of the racing gelding. "He is saying it is Geronimo," she told me. Then, while my gut shriveled still to that information, she added. "Ride a little harder, warrior; I am Gokliya's youngest wife."

  But for a whim of purest chance, we would never have returned to the rancheria of Old Pedro. We had, simply to make traveling easier, put our two grand new Mexican saddles on separate horses, cinched and buckled down. We thus had four saddled horses, with six unsaddled animals, to use in relay. As well, I had not wasted my dicker time with the bronco herders. We had got the best they had in the Mexican bunch, plus our own two mounts, ten prime horses for three riders.

  The twenty Apaches, under Gokliya, failing to come up to us in the first mad race over Big Cibicu Wash, were outdistanced by the first relay of mounts, lost entirely at the second change. It was also by that time grown dark. We kept going. Terms such as outdistanced and lost have little meaning when Apache Indians are after you. The temper of our retreat may be judged by the fact that, until the high valley of our rancheria lay below us, we exchanged no intelligence with the rescued girl. Even then, coming into the village, unannounced, we left the child with Sawn at my camp with instructions to "hide her out, until we could "cool the herd" and return.

  Chikisin and me went on up into the overlook hills with our new Mexican horses and saddles and lay out up there in a far-lonely place called Fish Hawk Meadow. It was a sort of sacred place to the San Carlos Apache, reserved for cleansing the spirit. That was good for our cause. We wanted no company just then, and the spectacular drop-off cliff to the south gave a view near down to the Mexican line. We were looking for our bronco cousins to come after us along the track we had left coming home from visiting them. But they never came.

  After a second long day of laying out and looking down, we whistled in our beautiful new horses and drifted on lower into the valley. We came into the village about noon with a fine story of buying the proud animals off a Sonora rancher up to trade at old Camp Grant We said the saddles were won playing monte with the Mex cowboys.

  Nobody believed us, but Indians love a good lie.

  We had a little more trouble explaining Nopal.

  Finally, Old Pedro had an idea.

  "Why not let the child tell her own story?" he suggested. "One can see she has been a long and a hard way. Go ahead, nah-lin. We are all friends here."

  Nopal looked at Chikisin and me.

  Especially me.

  "Shall I do it?" she said simply.

  I wanted to say, no, for God's sake, but the suggestions of Old Pedro were like the direct orders of Al Sieber, ignored or countermanded at certain peril.

  "Yes," I nodded, fearing the worst, "go ahead and tell it as my father directs you to do."

  Nopal was not long in the tale. She was not Apache-born, but Yaqui, an Indian people wilder even than the wildest Chiricahua or Warm Springs renegades. Taken in a raid by the Nednhi band of Chief Juh when only a toddler, she had no Indian memory but that of her savage childhood among Juh's people. Then, another capture, this time by Mexican forces in a surprise (and most rare!) raid upon the Apaches, who were caught in a trading visit at Fronteras, Sonora. The now six-year-old Yaqui girl was taken, with the other suitable young females captured by the troops, to be sold into slavery, in Mexico, where such India
n girls were a regular item of frontier barter. She was bought by a family in Camargo, Chihuahua, and resold by them deeper into Mexico, to relatives in Durango state.

  She had stayed a servant, a reducido, in Durango for ten years. Then, with a group of other Apache servant women, she had "gone into the chaparral" one night, nigh a year gone. This hopelessly brave little band, known in Mexico as Las Gatos Alocadas, "the Wild Cats," made their ways, together and separately, northward toward their Apache homelands, seven, eight, even nine hundred miles away, through settled Mexican land, under constant pursuit by government troops which, traditionally, made no distinction between the sexes when hunting Apaches.

  The heroic saga of Las Gatas is well known in Mexico and should have its own book written about it, but this is not that tale. Nopal, so named by her Mexican owners because of her wild beauty reminding them of the fragile yet spine-guarded blossom of the nahuatl nopali cactus (which Arizona cowboys God-bless and condemn as the prickly pear), was one of three women to survive the desperate flight. The other four of the original eleven were either killed or recaptured. Of the five recaptured, four committed suicide. There is only a record of one who was sent back to Durango alive.

  As to the three "lucky ones," they had split up at Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. The two older women had journeyed on toward Arizona, seeking Nana's Warm Springs band. Nopal had turned into the Sierra del Norte seeking the Nednhi. She never found them.

  Instead, Gokliya found her.

  He was bound north and had no time to take the returned "little sister" to the Nednhi, but carried her along with his war party. On the long ride up into the Cibicu Canyon country and the meeting there called to stir the San Carlos Indians into "going out" with Geronimo and his Bedonkohe band of Mexican Apaches, the great chief—ever one with an eye for women—had "seen" beneath the rags and filth and bruises and the hollow-eyed gauntness of the starved girl. When there was time, he had told her, she would be his youngest wife.

  This thought had sobered the weary and weakened girl. Her years in the Mexican settled country had educated her mind, though her heart might remain as wild as any canyon creature. Watching helplessly the butchery of the Mexican cowboys with the stolen herd—the Apaches had unspeakably brutalized them before allowing the dignity of death—the Yaqui girl had of a sudden understood that she had not come this thousand miles from far Durango, still in the rags of her Mexican servitude, only to be sold into another slavery even more degrading as Geronimo's fifth woman.

  She knew from dim memory the treatment afforded young wives by old wives in the Apache pecking order.

  And Gokliya had a reputation as a macho, even among a people notoriously callous in their handling of horses and women. No, she would not stand to be mounted by this murderous Bedonkohe stud "at his convenience" and "when there was time."

  Freedom, as desperately sought as Nopal's, must mean more than that.

  "The end of the story of course you know," the girl finished, soft-voiced. "When I lay in that arroyo on the orders of the men with the Mexican horses and saw Talking Boy so tall and graceful riding away from there, my heart leaped up within me. Gokliya had ordered me to help the herders, the lowest work on a war party. I was still hurt and hungry and sick from the long running from Durango. My heart said to me, Go free. It said, Run, Nopal! Cry out to the tall boy and his Apache friend. Go with them. Go free—!

  "And so I did it," she concluded, lifting her splendid eyes. "And I am free."

  Old Pedro sat looking at her. The ancient head nodded. The rheumy eyes peered forth from their hooded folds of skin. His hand, all bones and shrunken sinews, reached out to touch her gently as a willow leaf will fall on sliding water.

  "We will have something to say to Talking Boy and Chikisin," he told her, "but for yourself, Little Sister, you have found your people. This place is your place. You have come home."

  Nopal took the old hand in her own firm young hands.

  "Father," she said, "I am your daughter."

  And that was the end of it.

  Yaqui Bride

  For four months, at the turn of the year, Nopal and me loved and lived the Indian life. Mostly we stayed with Sister Sawn and our Apache family, with all Sawn's kids and the animals, brother Chikisin, and sometime night visitor, scout Mickey Free, thrown in for full measure. It was wonderful times for all of us. And when it got too much for my Yaqui sweetheart we would go up into Fish Hawk Meadow to be alone for a spell. Those were the grandest times of all.

  Nopal could stalk and shoot game with any young buck Apache. My passion for life of hunting and tracking kept us both out on the mountain. We were not just squaw man and squaw. Though, God knows, we shared what the Apaches called an "always warm" blanket. We were crazy to be at one another when the time was ripe for such play. We would roll and grunt and laugh wild as young creatures on four legs. Then, coupling, we would be wild and tender both, but mostly quiet and drawing it out. It seemed we knew what would come for our two lives, for Nopal had a shadow-spirit, too. Without ever saying a word on it, we used our time like it was gold or silver coin, spending it piece by piece. And when, with early spring, Nopal's belly commenced to round, we were deep-happy with the spending.

  Then it came May of 1877.

  A new agent was down at San Carlos, the first military man ever to hold that post. I had met him before. He was Captain, now Major, Adna Chaffee. When Chikisin came looking for me up at Fish Hawk Meadow that seventeenth day of May, he brought word that ended my loving time with sweet Nopal: Chaffee wanted to see me, Tom Horn; the hour had come to use what I had learned in my spy's apprenticeship among the Apache of Old Pedro.

  When I got down to the village, word waited that the ancient chief wanted to see me before I should depart.

  At his wickiup, I found him already mounted on his bony white mare. "I am going with you, Talking Boy," Pedro croaked. "You will need me." He looked around impatiently. "Now where did those two rascals go to?" he demanded of his wrinkled squaw, Na-to, "Tobacco."

  "I don't know about the Mexican," Tobacco answered, "but the red-haired son of a bitch is off in the grass with Sister Sawn. I saw them going at it, when I was picking up firewood earlier. Wagh! No shame. No shame at all. Pah!"

  I grinned at her. "Admit it, mother. You were peeping on them."

  "A lie!" the old crone cried out. "I came on them by accident."

  "Did you stay by accident?" her leathery husband inquired. "You are the one to be ashamed. Seventy winters, and the fire in your jacal still smokes!"

  "Smokes, do you say?" the old woman challenged indignantly. "Ha! You should have some of the embers of my fire in your breechclout, senita! You would do a lot better job with that young Chihuahua wife, the bitch coyote! Let me tell you what I know of her—"

  "Cállate," said the old man. "Here is Mickey now."

  He gave Tobacco a look to repay her having called him senita, "senile," and, with Mickey looking a little washed out in gills, off the three of us rode down the river. At the forks, a handsome young fellow came out of the alders on a magnificent black horse to join us. This was Merijilda Grijole, a pureblood Mexican caught and raised by Geronimo's Bedonkohe family of Chiricahua Apaches. Due to his kinship with the dangerous Gokliya, he made a habit of "laying out" of the camps like Pedro's to spare the nerves of the tame Indians who lived in them.

  Geronimo was a name to jump a reservation Apache near as high as it did a white settler living too far out of Tucson or away from one of the army forts.

  Me and Merijilda, however, hit it off on the spot.

  He was a loner and a liar and an easy laugher the same as Tom Horn. Our shadows shook hands in the grin we shared on meeting up. Mickey Free of course saw how it was and said, enjuh, it was a good thing.

  ‘You will need every friend you got, where you are going," was the exact way he put it. But I never was one to quibble a man's good intentions. Mickey always meant well. He just did bad at it now and again. That was of course his Apache moccas
ins tripping over his Irish cavalry boots.

  Down at the agency, Major Chaffee had us in at once.

  His problem was one left him by the civilian agents that had gone ahead of him. The Indians, newspapermen, and merchant folk all over Arizona had said for years the civilian agents were crooks outright. I, myself, had seen supplies meant for Indians hauled away by white freighters by the wagon-train loads. There was supposed to be 12,000 Indians getting issued supplies. No more than 5,000 ever showed up by my count. The "difference" went to crooked white and Mexican merchants who bought the "surplus" at ten and fifteen cents on the dollar that honest Arizona traders had to pay. This graft was starving the Indians and the whites likewise.

  The whole thing, Chaffee told us, had to stop.

  His answer was to ask Pedro the old chief's help in "getting to" the Indians of the entire country, carrying to them the glad news that an honest White Eye was now at San Carlos. One they all knew. If some feared him, all respected him. It was Bad Talker Chaffee (the name taken , from his spectacular profanity). He was the oak leaf chief who had been their enemy but never lied to them. Pedros role was to frame the appeal to the discouraged and alienated Indians.

  "Your job, Horn," Chaffee snapped, wheeling suddenly on me, where I squatted against the wall with Merijilda and Mickey, "will be to take Pedro's words into the Cibicu country and preach it to the bad Indians out there. What do you say to that, jefe?" he turned back to Pedro. "Horn's been living with you. Why not send him to live around with the Cibicus the same way? He could be able to influence them to come in."

  Pedro, who so far had been sitting on a canvas camp-stool in front of the officer's desk, now stood up. He always arose when he talked to the army people or to anyone important. This was to let everyone know it was not a talk, anymore, but a speech.

  "I say, no," he began. "He must not go there unless you allow me to send at least one hundred good warriors with him. Two hundred would be even better, and I offer that many to you now. Soldier captain (all officers were capitán to Pedro), you know soldiers. I am an Indian chief, as was my father and my father's father. I have more influence with these Indians than any man on the earth. I know the Apaches as you know your soldiers, too. But the day you send this boy to the Cibicu country alone will be the day he dies. I say this to you now, capitán; no white man can go among the Cibicus and return. They will put Talking Boy to the fire, roast him like a quarter of agency beef, and send you an old squaw to tell you to keep your flour and your sugar and your lies and send out some more of your warriors for them to burn."