I, Tom Horn Read online

  It was my job—not very comfortable one!—to translate this long statement for Chaffee. Sieber was laid up sick with his old Civil War hurts, Mickey couldn't talk English, and Merijilda let on like he couldn't either, so I was stuck with it. But Major Chaffee surprised me.

  "Son," he said to me, "the old man has made me see for the first time what kind of people we are dealing with in these Cibicu Indians. I will need to give it more time. But I am not going to send you up there, only ask you to be steady where you are, and keep prepared."

  I thanked him, for I knew this man was a fighter.

  "Major," I added, "you may count on me. And I hope, when it does come time to go after those devils, that you will remember Tom Horn."

  Chaffee grinned, the smile lighting his sunburned face like noonlight on pink granite. "Goddamn it, Horn," he said, "one good thing about being such an ugly son of a bitch as you are is that you will get remembered. I could no more forget the natural beauty of your person than I could Al Sieber's."

  "Thank you, Major Chaffee, sir."

  "Don't give me any of that shit, Horn."

  "Yes sir," I said. "I would never try that."

  He eyed me, no smile now. "Well, don't," he advised and gave me a parting shove and slammed the door so hard he caught the butt of my buckskin pants in the damn doorjamb, and a little of the butt along with them.

  It was with some relief that I sought out Pedro and prepared to depart for the rancheria. But I was simple of mind to think that day was through troubling my small Apache world. We had no more than gotten our mounts untied from the rail in front of the agency office than here came an army ambulance up the street in a cloud of dust to halt right atop us. In it was the quartermaster of the Sixth Cavalry—which had relieved the Fifth in Arizona whiles I had been with the Indians—and he got down from his wagon in some agitated state and went on the near-trot into Chaffee's office. I gave a uneasy sign to Pedro and said, "Jefe, let us get away from here, for my white man's nose smells army troubles."

  The old chief only nodded and turned his mare.

  "You have a good nose, my son," he said. "Noble and bent and big, like an Indian's. I believe you. Vaya!"

  That was the vaya that came too late.

  Even as I lifted my heels to drive them into my horse's flanks, the office door banged open and the florid granite of Major Adna Chaffee's face was split to bawl after me.

  "Hold it, Horn. Get your ass back in here!"

  I got down and went in and had my world changed again, all in under five minutes of that bright May morning. The quartermaster's message was for me:

  It was an order, effective immediately, issued that same day by General Willcox, from Sixth headquarters.

  As thus:

  The QM informs no further funds supplied to meet civilian payroll. In consequence, all scouts & packers of this nomenclature are discharged on this date. Further, a general order accompanies, which mandates that no white person, not in active employ of the military or other arm of the government of the United States, will be allowed to live at the agency or upon the reservation. All those herein described are to be advised of the order and compelled to leave on receipt.

  Signed,

  WILLCOX

  ACG DA 6th USCAV

  It may be imagined that this disclosure came as a knee buckler to Tom Horn. While it naturally affected all the scouts and white employees at San Carlos, I was the sole one of them with an Indian wife and living way off in the hills with her people. And I was for certain sure the only one of them with a wife but fifteen years old and five months pregnant. That was the cruncher.

  I was still numb from it when I rejoined Old Pedro outside. I told him of the news as we rode down the agency street. He thought a bit, then said quietly.

  "What will you do, Talking Boy?"

  We had come to the chaparral at the edge of the agency clearing. Pedro halted his old white.

  "I am going home," he said, pointing to the mountains. "Where are you going?"

  "I don't have a home anymore," I answered. "If I go back with you, it will only bring trouble to the people up there. I wouldn't do that to you, or to them."

  The old man looked at me a long time.

  "I will tell Nopal," he said. "Is there a message?"

  I nodded quickly. "Tell her I will come for her before the baby is born. She will understand."

  "Yes," Old Pedro said. "She is an Indian."

  There was a last stretching of silence. Only those know it who have suffered it. Two men parting, whose shadows are telling them that their lives together cannot be the same again, yet whose tongues refused to say such a thing aloud.

  "Jefe" I said, turning my bay horse back toward the agency, "do you have any message for me?"

  Old Pedro said, "Yes. I am still your father."

  He rode away on the bony white mare, back up into the mountains of White River. I watched after him, feeling bad. At the last turning of the trail, he halted the mare and looked back. I saw him raise his left hand in the old Apache farewell. I returned the sign and said, "Good-bye, my father," but of course he did not hear me.

  He was too far away.

  Scheflin's Ledge

  At San Carlos the other scouts, packers, and wranglers were getting ready to go. I found the most of them aiming to go over to Tucson, the place for white drifters from as far as Texas and California. If there was anything doing, you would learn of it in Tucson. It was the Denver of Arizona, or the Kansas City. So off we went to it, not one care amongst us.

  Of our particular traveling bunch, out of the twenty-odd members of it, I remember there was Arch McIntosh; Sam "Bowlegs" Bowman; Frank Monic; "Some Long" Jim Cook (six feet eight inches tall!); Charley Mitchell; Buck, or Buckskin Frank, Leslie; Burt Sage (known as "the breed," which he wasn't); Francisco Bennet; Ed Clark (called Biggie); Joe Yescus; and, of course Merijilda Grijole.

  Half the total was just packers, but most of my good pals named here was scouts and interpreters. We made a rough-feathered flock of birds, you may believe, and it don't need me to tell you who was the head turkey; it was naturally big Al Sieber.

  Well, we hung around Tucson some that summer, but not long enough to molt. Along from California came old Ed Scheflin (Schieffelin), and, him and Sieber being camp-mates long before, Ed confides to Al that him and his California bunch has come back to make their millions. It seemed old Ed had struck a ridge of the pure plata over in the Cochise country sometime back, but been drove out by the Apaches, his partner Lennox kilt on the discovery site by the redguts, and so forth. Now, Scheflin was back with his tough hombres from the mother lode diggings of California. They was outfitted to go into the Apache country and to stay there. Al and his boy was welcome to throw in and come along, but double-mum was the word otherwise.

  Me and Al caucused on it for all of five minutes, voting to go as soon as the drinks were settled up.

  By that time of the summer, most of our San Carlos packer pals had been forced to take jobs freighting for the private business and were gone on. There were but five, six left in Tucson. Sieber got the OK from Ed Scheflin to count these good old boys in.

  The scowling German also had a word of last warning to the Silver Ridge Gang, as we called ourselves: we would not be on Scheflin's mother lode ledge twenty-four hours before every bad Indian in the territory would know that a "lone band" of white men had come into their Apache parlor, without soldier guards.

  One of Ed Scheflin's Californy Boys, big as a grizzly and twice as gruff, answered for all the others of us.

  "Ed assures us there is heavy mineral over there, and a lots of it," he growled. "If there is any bad Injuns to go along with it, they will just have to look out for themselves. Whichaway do we head out, Sieber?"

  Al Sieber liked that kind of talk; it was his kind.

  "Come on, boys!" he said. "Foller me!"

  We camped that first night outside Pantano, a long thirty-mile day over toward the valley of the San Pedro River. Sieber a
nd me lay out by ourselves and talked of a lot of things. The main drift of it was that Al advised me to think hard about some other business than cavalry scouting. He said to forget about my Apache wife, that her people would care for her and for my kid as well, when she bore it. "There is no next day for a white man with a squaw wife," he said. "It will hold you back wherever you go. Let her be, Horn. If we make a strike here, take your stake and ride away, a good long way, from them Injuns. Wasn't I so old and crippled up, I would go with you. But I will end here."

  I thanked him and said I didn't know rightly what I would do about Nopal. Having been back with white men, I was brought to see it different than up at Old Pedro's rancheria, or the solitudes of Fish Hawk Meadow.

  "One thing sure," I said. "No matter I admire the Injun ways and with respect and love the good Apaches to the end, I ain't going to squander the rest of my life in squawing it, Al. But Nopal is carrying my kid and I still feel deep for her. I will go back to see that the baby is safe born, and its mother well off. Advice can't stop that."

  Sieber nodded. He chunked a big piñon root on our fire that would hold the bank through the night.

  "Well, Horn," he said, "study it. Here we are, fired out of hand again, and the Injuns helling worse than ever they was before. Why? Because of the Injun Bureau and them damn civilian do-gooders back east. Government hire don't make sense. Right when you're needed most, they can you. No, boy. Learn yourself another trade, cattle, horses—stay with this mining, if it suits you—but get out of the Injun-scouting business."

  I was studying it, all right, but pulling blanks.

  "Hell," I said. "You was the one told me I was born to that life. Was you lying then, or now?"

  "Neither. You ain't like I thought you was, Horn. Not like me, nor Long Jim, nor Frank Leslie, nor Archie McIntosh, nor the others. You been forgetting you was born white. I warned you about that. So did Old Pedro. Now, here's my last word on it: remember who you are; forget who they are. Don't go back to the blanket."

  Those gimlet black eyes of his, so natural to the human bear that Al Sieber was, bored into me for one final twisting scowl.

  "You do go back to squawing it," he said, "and me and you will wind up hunting one another."

  With that, he was done. He rolled over to tighten the cinch of his horse blanket about his bulk and was snoring inside half a minute.

  But I knew what he had meant. It was that if Tom Horn wanted to run with the Indians, Al Sieber would make a gun-butt notch out of Talking Boy just as quick as he would any other war-age Apache.

  I lay wide-eyed a good hour pondering it; I don't recall if I came to any choice, or not

  We made Benson with the second day's ride. But on the third day, getting deep into the Cochise country and cutting away from following the San Pedro south, to swing easterly, Scheflin lost his track. It took him three days more to get back on it. Then, at last, coming sundown of the sixth day, he stopped us on a high-lonesome salt-cedar brake, flanking down out of the Dragoon Mountains.

  "Boys," he said, "we have arrived. Right here is where we was camped when Lennox was kilt." He looked around, a little wild in the eye, and us the same. "Come along on," he said, "and I will show you the very spot where I was digging."

  It wasn't far off.

  When we were there, it all lay as he had described it in Tucson. There was his exploration, twenty-three feet deep by our excited measurement. Its exposure was all ore, and high-grade ore. The men like to went mad.

  When all had quieted some, Scheflin spoke out "We got our agreement," he said. "You all will get to stake, both ways from discovery. Every man will have a recorded claim. Each will pay me one-quarter for bringing you in, as signed to in Los Angeles. I will be filed as owning one-quarter of each claim, for the first fifty each way from discovery. Agreed, boys?"

  "Agreed!" they all shouted, and he went on.

  "Now, what will we call it? Got to have a name. Let me show you something first. Over here."

  We all trooped behind him, leaving our horses. He led us off only about three or four rods. "See that?" he pointed. We squinted hard in the late light, all nodding. It was a slab of rock wedged upright, like a cemetery marker. There was a stake back of it, holding it firm and holding something else, too; it was a human skull. "That's Lennox," Ed Scheflin said. "I put my monument square atop where they kilt him."

  That big bunch of hairy-eared miners and frontiersmen shifted around, uneasy. "You put Lennox's head on the stick, Ed?" one of them asked.

  "Not hardly," Scheflin answered. "When I snuck back to bury him, the head was took. I put just the body under and got shut of this place mas pronto. Come daybreak, I was thirty mile north and not looking back."

  "How you know its Lennox's skull?" another man said. "Them three gold teeth and the twin bullet holes in the back of it. They turned him over, wounded, and shot him twice in the base of the skull piece. I seen that." Scheflin looked around through the glooming twilight. "It was just this time of day," he said. "Its how I got away. Bad shooting light. They plain missed me."

  There followed a nervous stir of rough miners' boots and a wash of coughs and throat clearings.

  "Well," Jim Cook said, "whyn't we call the camp after that headrock you put up for Lennox? That'd be approprious."

  Ed Clark snorted at that. "You mean Head Rock, Arizona?"

  "Hell no, he don't mean Head Rock," Frank Leslie said. "He means Monument."

  "No," Ed Scheflin said. "I mean Tombstone."

  There was a spooky pause, then some burly hardrock gopher spoke out aloud, "Amen!" and yet another fellow prospector pulled a half-full quart bottle of Old Crow out from under his California coat, busted it on the outcrop crown of Ed Scheflin's twenty-three-foot vein of silver, and bawled out, ‘Tombstone, she is—!"

  And, simple as that, the meanest town in the Arizona Territory got nominated, baptized, and deserted, all in about thirty-five seconds of that darkening summer's night, in the gut of the Cherry Cow country.

  Tombstone Summer

  Next day the whole camp (fifty-nine men) turned out in black dawn so as not to be left when light enough for "staking" streaked the east. Sieber and me was up with the earliest. But the bottle got to going around the breakfast fires, and Iron Man took his belts every turn. It was midday when I got him away. By this time, the only claims left were away up on the divide. For appearance' sake, we put in our stakes and piled up rocks for our monuments, with the regulation tin can wedged in at the top with our "description paper" tucked in it.

  That was the official first day for Tombstone, Arizona. It would cut the story short to say that, within one year, those fifty-nine men had swoll to seven thousand. Claims were running out so far from discovery they made Al's and mine look like hot prospects. They were filed nearer the San Pete than they was Scheflin's strike and wouldn't mine a good grade of sand, let alone of stamp-mill silver. But Al Sieber had "been there before," as old mineral hunters say. He was able once more to advise me on "proper caution of forethought."

  "Bucko," he said, "here is what well do. We can make us a better clean-up in this here camp by meat-shooting deer and antelope than by trying to outdig these hard-rock gophers. Let them handle the double jacks and bull-prod drills. Blisters ain't our style. Nor getting blowed apart by giant powder. I and you will just go up on the ridges and loaf around and hunt deer."

  "But what of our claims?" I protested. "Maybe blisters ain't our style, but dying rich is my ambition."

  "We can get two dollars and a half for every carcass we pack out of the hills. Maybe it ain't the short haul to owning the mint, but leave me tell you something: in hard-ass fact, them claims of ours ain't worth a dollar cash. We could work them all summer and come up owing ourselves money on payday. But, just wait till fall, when enough suckers collect and sufficient tinhorns show up, and we can sell out and ride away winners.

  "Now you study it, Horn. It oughtn't to take you the rest of August to pick twixt hunting and hard work."
<
br />   "No sir," I said, "that's a fact. Let's go."

  It was the Sixth of October that me and Al was laying around our deer camp up in Middle Pass of the Dragoons, and a very old friend of the better days showed up to share our noon dinner with us.

  "Hola" grinned Mickey Free, shadowing in out of the nearby bull pines. "Qué pasa, hombres?"

  "Pull up a deer rib and squat down," Sieber told him. "Qué pasa with you, you little bandy-legged fart? We know it ain't good news, so save it till we've et."

  "De seguro" agreed the wild-haired half-breed, cutting himself a slab of deer ribs off our roasting spit. "But you won't like it any better on a full belly. Guess who is up from Mexico again?"

  "Oh, Christ," groaned Sieber. "Not him."

  "Mas suerte de la próximo" Mickey grunted between wolfing bites at the hot deer meat. "Try it again."

  "It is him," the old German scowled.

  "A ciencia cierta, Seebie," Mickey Free nodded. "In the mining camp below is Lieutenant Von Schroder and a squad of six men, me guiding. He carries a letter from General Willcox. It says you and Talking Boy are under orders to report in at Fort Whipple, mas pronto. Your pay starts when you do. Enjuh?"

  "What the hell do you mean, is it good?" Sieber complained. "I ain't even finished my coffee yet."

  Well, we chewed it over with Mickey, and Sieber reckoned he would do it. I couldn't come to it for myself that easy. I had made my split of the blanket with the Indians.