I, Tom Horn Page 6

  Well, Jesus, we were into the rocks now and the old driver was yelling at his leaders and hauling back on his wheelers; the coach skidded slanchwise of the road, and there was a crash of rifle or shotgun fire and the driver pitched off the box like a toy duck in a .22 rimfire gallery. Our skid had raised a big funnel of road dust. Through it I could see three mounted men milling and fighting their own horses. They were all masked and cursing ugly and yelling "get ahold of them headstalls, you dumb bastards!" at each other. But our teams spooked out straight all of a sudden and began to run. The coach stayed upright and I stayed with the coach and, by God, we were away from them and racing.

  It was then I remembered we didn't have any driver. About the time I reared my head up to peer over the top-rack luggage to make sure of this, I saw the road ahead dip off to the right, down the face of a big arroyo. It was narrow and plastered to the drop-off cliff like a damn burro track, and there was no chance in the New Mexican world that any six horses would get down it safe with no driver and no brakes set.

  In that instant I started to jump for the brush.

  Then, atop the women inside beginning to cry out, I heard the voice of a little kid, a girl, sure. And who was going to high roll into a safe place in the sagebrush after that? "Goddamnit!" I yelled. "I don't never have no luck." And I went swarming over the top of that rickety Concord and got to the driver's box.

  The lead-team lines and the swing-team lines were all trailing down among the horses in the roadway. The only set I could grab were the wheelers. I jammed on the brake, full-pull, and lay back with every ounce of my 180 pounds on the wheel team's lines. And, oh God, was it an act of His mercy that I was able to get those six horses veered off the roadway and the coach upright just ten foot short of the pitchdown into the cut.

  For, just as I got the teams hauled up, out of the black pit of the arroyo comes another stage going against us. Had we gone down over the lip, even with me to drive and with all six lines in hand, we would have hit, head on, with both coaches winding up in the rock-jagged bottom of Big Tesuque Gulch, midway of Agua Fria and Cerrillos, out of Santa Fe.

  But it was all right.

  My folks piled out of my coach and the passengers in the other Concord got down and heard our story, and all of them was telling me what a hero I had been. I was about to let it go at that when I saw that two of the men in the other coach had a fellow between them that was walking funny. Next thing I noted was that anybody would walk that way with leg-irons cuffed over his pants and boots, and I went down the far side of my coach like a hot-greased cat and would have got away into the sage and piñon scrub clean, except that this balloon-busted woman grabbed aholdt of me and commenced bawling and slobbering on me in her gratitude for saving her and her little girl.

  I was about to knee her and break for it, anyways, when I felt the poke of a side-by-side shotgun's muzzles in my middle backbones. ‘‘Ease away, Horn," the marshal advised. "You been hero enough for one night. Besides, I need you in one piece to drive our rig on into Santa Fe. Our driver will take your run down to Bernalillo."

  So that's how I never made it to Bernalillo that night, but got a free ride back to Santa Fe.

  They were good about it, though.

  They gave me back my old room at the jail and never charged me a thing extra, saving for one quart of wine for Saldano.

  I didn't make any fuss over it.

  Neither did Saldano.

  Fair was fair.

  Something Strange

  It was something like noon next day when the fat lady who had grabbed me and blubbered about saving her fat little kid showed up at the jail with her husband. The idea was that no boy as clean-cut and valuable a Christian lad as young Tom Horn, Jr. ought to be made to languish in a territorial jail. Not when he hadn't done anything but whip up on a bunch of drunk Mexicans celebrating Christmas Eve.

  It's funny how fate picks out certain ones to follow around. It sounds bogus, too, to say that "fate" decides this and dictates that. It's like a body couldn't come up with any better explanation. But fate did dog the trail of Tom Horn, for good and for bad. There was never any other way to figure it. I surely didn't arrange it the way it all came out. It was always that in the nick of down luck, or the last grasp of a good hand, something strange took ahold of Tom Horn's cards. Always.

  Like in this very case.

  It really wasn't the fat lady. Nor even her fat kid. It was her skinny stick of a husband turning out to be nobody but Mr. Murray, general super for the Overland Mail people. And the Overland Mail people having the contract for all the stageline business between Santa Fe and Prescott. So that anybody Mr. Murray wanted to put to work on the line, he could do it.

  Yes sir. Mr. Murray drug the town marshal out of his snug bunk that January a.m. He got him to persuade the Mexican judge to open up court on New Year's Day and retry the case of the Territory of New Mexico v. Tom Horn and, well, ten minutes after that fat lady hit the Santa Fe Jail, I was a free man.

  Nor was that the whole of it.

  Mr. Murray then put me on as a straight-pay employee of Overland Mail. I wasn't hired to clean out no corrals nor to hitch up relay teams neither. Nor yet to muscle up luggage to top rack or into trunk boot. No sir. The fat lady wasn't going to let the line super put "that fine Christian boy" to such Mexican chores. Her hero wasn't born to shovel manure nor swamp baggage; he was a driver!

  The super wasn't that convinced, but he understood who sat on the driver's box at his house. So that is how it went. I was hired on to handle the Santa Fe-Los Pinos run of the regular Overland Mail contract, as of the next morning, Monday, January 2, 1875. It was from that time that the "something strange" commenced in earnest to take over the life of Tom Horn.

  For two months I drove the Los Pinos section. They paid me fifty dollars per month. As well, I was provided a rifle. This was supposed to be to be for "guarding the mail and protecting the passengers." Actually, it was to keep up appearances. That is, to remind folks they were "away out in the wild West," but of course safe as hickory nuts in a squirrel holler with good old Overland Mail Company.

  It wasn't, however, "west nor wild enough" for me.

  I asked for a transfer to the Los Pinos-Bacon Springs run, which was the same as the Crane Ranch run. I was given it and drove this section two more months and wasn't happy yet, so complained to Mr. Murray, who then called me back to Santa Fe. I thought I was fired but instead was given a helper and sent really on west with a special trust —the safe herding of a big bunch of replacement mules to the Beaver Head Creek station. You may think my heart didn't bound up at that news!

  Beaver Head Creek was hard by Verde River. That was in Arizona. And in that part of Arizona that was the heart of the wild Apache Indian country. More. Those mules were to replace ones just run off by the Indians. The hostiles were off the reservation again out there. Tom Horn was at last going to get where he'd all along been bound. Out where the fierce red horsemen rode and the U.S. Cavalry bugles blared right behind them.

  It was high time, I figured.

  Two months short of a year after I had left home, I arrived with the herd of mules at Beaver Head Station. I had over a hundred dollars cash money on me. I had an as-new Winchester 73 rifle, a top saddle horse, a .44 Colt's revolver, and all my own outfit to ride range or work a way station or nighthawk against stock thieves, anything.

  Behind me was two thousand miles of chancy trail, Scotland County, Missouri, to Yavapai County, Arizona Territory.

  I ought to have had sense enough to lay over and fatten up on the Beaver Head job, but no, not me. Within a few weeks of getting there, I quit Overland Mail and struck out on my own. My course lay down river to Camp Verde, a government post as well as outpost, being the base camp for the Fifth Cavalry. I worked my way, as I always did, and weeks got confused into months—I never could remember time except by seasons or maybe holidays—and it was way late in the summer of 75 that I got to Camp Verde.

  There, in the fall
, I went to work for a wood contractor supplying the army and government civilians with fuel. My job was night boss, putting me in charge of all the Mexican teamsters and choppers, as well as guarding the work oxen from Indians raiding them. The pay was seventy-five dollars a month, half again what I'd been getting driving stage. The fellow I worked for was George Hansen. He was a foreigner Swede or Skowegian, but all right anyway. The job lasted till the winter's supply of cordwood was in, three months. By then, it was Christmas again. I had been away nearly a year from Santa Fe and still wasn't to Prescott, where I'd set out to go.

  But I had learned a lifetime in that year.

  A born Mexican could not separate his Spanish from mine. I had picked up some Apache. I had grown to six foot one inch. I was quick as a scrub bull, wily as a water-hole mustang. I could disappear like a collared wild pig, live on slime water and green mesquite beans, was a mean fighter with my hands, expert with either pistol or rifle or sawed-off shotgun, and getting wise enough not to boast of any of it. I had passed a birthday that fall, November 20. By my count, it would make me sixteen, soon as the year turned. And I didn't believe there was any man I couldn't hold up my hub of the wagon with. Youth equals ignorance, however. The boy wasn't yet born who could hold even with a man in a man's game. I would never have made it without help, but there was that strange force guiding me yet.

  In Prescott, a man was waiting for me who would alter my life forever. The Apache, some of them, called him El Hombre Hierro, the Iron Man. Others of the hostile bands called him Old Man Who Is Always Mad. Yet others, those living on or nearby the army posts, called him Seebie. The Arizonans, a good many of them, referred to him as that g.d. son of a bitch. Or, with equal heat, that g.d. German son of a bitch.

  The U.S. Cavalry knew him by another name.

  As did history and Tom Horn.

  It was Al Sieber.

  Hello Prescott

  Prescott looked like home to Tom Horn.

  I came to it over the Mingus Mountains by the pass above the mines at Jerome. Then down the long sweeps of that high-country grass, which was as fine a cow and antelope pasture as God ever made, into the Granite Dells. Once past the dells, the town lay before you in its cup of gray rock and green pine.

  Near on sat the unbelievable spreadout of buildings that was Whipple Barracks, the biggest army settlement west of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Whipple was where I was bound, only my luck or my chance or whatever you want to call it hadn't told me so yet. First, it sent me on into Prescott itself. And, once into that place, I saw what it was that made this main hub of Yavapai County rouse up my memories of old Missouri.

  Prescott was built by middle westerners, not Mexicans. It looked more like Memphis, my hometown, than it did anything in New Mexico or what I had seen, so far, in Arizona. It had a town square and false-front Kansas City buildings all around it. The houses fanning away into the rocks back of the center of town could have been freighted in and reerected from Topeka, Saint Joe, Independence, Sedalia, Jeff City, why, just anyplace a body could name from back home. Hell, better even. The houses in Prescott were painted. And the hotels, like the Yavapai House, were full of brass spittoons and real-live palm trees planted in dirt, where you could stub out your cigar butts, handy as anything. It was a real town, Prescott.

  The saloons began just beyond the stage office at Gurley Street and Mount Vernon Avenue and ran from there on. I had heard the rumor that there were other businesses than sour-mash mills in Prescott. But from what I could see, riding in at ten a.m. of the morning, it appeared from the sheer number of saloons that there would be more whiskey drunk in that one town than in all the rest of Arizona Territory. It was told about that Prescotters used whiskey to chase their water with. A man had to admit it was possible. There likely was more rotgut than good water available.

  The only things natural that growed there was granite outcrops, rock dust, and red-bark bull pines. The creek that ran through town was said to be damp in certain years but mostly it ran to ragweed, rusty cans, chicken dusting puddles, and old bedsprings. It was therefore and desperately needful, the natives claimed, to drink bottled fluid so as not to dehydrate and die of thirst right spang in the middle of the big city. As far as I saw, even that early in the morning, a scant few of them were taking any chances on such a terrible end.

  I decided it had been a long ride from Verde.

  Besides, at the 5,600-foot altitude, the wind, just then on the rise, cut at a man like an Apache scalp ax. After a quick tour of the square and turn of the sights along Whiskey Row and Tomcat Alley, with detours to see the old log Governors Mansion and the site where they were aiming to raise up the new all-stone courthouse, the damn wind got sharper still. I reckoned I had seen enough of the tourist attractions to hold me till noon dinner.

  What I needed was a shot of that antidehydrater.

  I shanked a spur into the flank of the rangy bay I was riding and swung him for the hitchrail outside the Red Geronimo Saloon & Theatre of the Performing Artes.

  At the time, I thought nothing of that place's name. But the day in my life was fast running up on me when Geronimo would mean the difference of live or die for Tom Horn. And I would remember back to that morning in Prescott, and the Red Geronimo.

  For now, I only wanted a drink before setting out to find lodgings less splendid than the potted palm trees of the Yavapai House, yet still more accommodating than my high-cantle Mex saddle for a pillow and the bay's trail-sour horse blanket for coverlet. The need was imperative. Or at least the choice of common brains.

  In late December in old Arizona it can freeze a man's nose-drips twixt nostil and mustache. Cold? You can break off your horse's breath and melt it in your mess-kit can for coffee water. It gets so cold at five thousand feet in north central Arizona that the snow won't fall but freezes in the air. You have to build a fire to thaw out enough of a hole in the flakes to move about and breathe. In Verde, I heard of a man up in Holbrook that froze his stream solid in a rainbow arch from his front-fly to the hole in the crapper seat. He couldn't bust himself loose, either, for fear of snapping off his pecker. So he set fire to the cob box on the wall next the seat, figuring to free up his stream from the heat. But somebody had soaked the dry cobs in bear grease to soften the swipe of them against the winter chafe. The smoke from the oily cobs clotted up the outhouse air so thick and fast the poor feller strangled hisself and wasn't found till the spring melt thawed his body and let it fall out the door.

  So I needed that one glass of rotgut rye I had promised myself at the bar of the Red Geronimo Saloon.

  As it turned out, one glass wouldn't do it. I ordered up one more. Which called for a third to fortify with full safety against the storm that surely must be building up outside. Three good belts of course called for four. To which five is only one more. So I had that.

  When I next looked around, I was laid out snug in the snow of an alley just off Gurley Street. From the mine-shaft blackness all about, it had to be way along in the night. Also, my pockets was all turned out, empty as a whore's hope chest, and I was right back where I started out in Kansas City in that other alley—flat-ass busted.

  My bay horse was gone, my whole outfit with him, including my new 1873 model Winchester. My colt belt pistol was likewise lifted. Along with my money poke pinned inside my horsehide button-up vest, near some two hundred dollars saved up from the three months of wood camp bossing in Verde.

  But it wasn't until I wiggled my toes to see if I was still working all of a piece that I discovered what I thought was the last straw; the sons of bitches, or some son of a bitch, had stolen my boots!

  But it stayed for another, real son of a bitch, to apply the actual clincher, or drencher.

  Down the alley came a mongrel stray dog. He was nosing into every trash barrel, sniffing out any crumpled paper or heap of horse dung that might give promise of something to eat, or at least carry off and bury. But when he got to me, he veered off. After a long stare and a spooky snort or two, he
lifted his leg on my hat, wheeled about, scraped snow and grit in my face, and traveled on out into Gurley Street without so much as one good-bye woof.

  I took that dog's opinion as a portent. He had been sent to do his work on me by mi sombra, my shadow.

  The Mexicans say that a man's shadow not only follows him but goes ahead of him. It stalks his life but guides him too. It was the same thing as an Anglo like me saying his fate led him on. It was what I called "something strange," back when I had felt it push me along so strong in Santa Fe. And it was what had meanwhile come to make me understand that Tom Horn was an hombre de sombra for real and forever; a man not truly responsible for his misdeeds and wrong directions.

  Most won't believe that a growed-up fellow could lay there in the freezing slush, peed on by a passing dog, and have such thoughts to parade through his aching head. But most won't believe anything of what happened to Tom Horn, either. God knows they proved that. So it's no point in trying to explain a cowpen Spanish saying like hombre de sombra to them. All a man can do is tell his life the way it truly went; and Tom Horn truly did ride his whole life with somebody else's hands on the reins of his horse.

  What drew me away from Scotland County, Missouri? Lured me into that alley in Kansas City? Directed me onto that flatcar bound for Newton, Kansas, with Staked Plains Bronson aboard? What put me in the freight-wagon business with teamster Blades? Brought fat Mrs. Murray to make her skinny husband hire me on the drive the Overland Mail? Steered Pajarita Morena into my cell, and me to her red-lighted casa numero tres down old Calle Cantina?

  I will tell you what; it was the same thing that got me out of the wood-chopping venture at Camp Verde and bent my tracks to Prescott where, as will be seen, my life took its first deep set from me meeting up with the one man who would change it all for me. The man my sombra had in secret store for me six months down the trail from that night the mutt dog peed me into getting up out of the snow behind the Red Geronimo Saloon, determined to once and for all give up hard liquor and take that fateful new direction in my life.