I, Tom Horn Read online

  Hello, Prescott, and good-bye! Tom Horn was outward bound to find Al Sieber.

  Seebie's Boy

  Lucky for any damn fool to be caught sockfoot in December, I knew where I could totter to and at least be given shelter for the night. It was to the stage company I had spotted back out on Gurley, before the saloons began. I could tell them I drove for Murray and the Overland Mail people. There was a sort of comradeship mongst all stagers. Like with roundup crews in cattle country. Or old rodeo cowboys. They would take me in on trust. No question.

  I began to suffer my first maybes when I drew up outside the place and spraddled back to gawk up at the company name. It took the whole of the front of the horse barn to spell out. My socks froze to the wagon-rut slush before I finished it:

  THE VERDE VALLEY & MOGOLLON RIM, NORTH PHOENIX, BUMBLE BEE, OAK CREEK, COCONINO COUNTY & SOUTH FLAGSTAFF STAGELINE & LIVERY COMPANY, AMALGAMATED.

  Christ Amighty, I thought. Might be that such a grand company would, after all, scowl at late-night shelter seekers from a puny outfit like Overland Mail. However, a man, like a gelded jackass, could at least try.

  I walked out of my ice-stiff socks, leaving them standing side-by-each in the middle of Gurley Street. Barefoot, I hammered on the office door, still not quite sobered even with the half-mile hike up from the alley behind the Red Geronimo. Inside, I heard a lot of unfriendly language and wheezing coughs, and the office door was creaked open by an old man in his nightshirt, eyeshade, knee-high boots and carrying a 10-gauge messenger's shotgun, both outside hammers cocked.

  This rheumy old rooster sized me up with one squint.

  "Git," he said. "If one more drunk wakes me up at three a.m. of the morning, I am going to increase his heft by four ounces of DuPont double-ought buck right square in both apples of his goddamn ass."

  For emphasis, he triggered off the left barrel over my hat about three inches. I caught a part of the hot wad and some black powder chunks in my face. If that was the old coot's idea of where my butt was, there would be little telling where he might plant that right-hand barrel. In accordance, I did not take the time to ask any more of him, but took off and ran like a rabbit.

  Once around behind the horse barn, I held up.

  I was in the back corral, or "yard" of the place, where the line kept its busted-down and out-of-service equipment. Ah, yonder was the repair shed, a lean-to ramada, housing at the time the run's road-service wagon. This was actually a big toolbox on wheels and, shivering fit to loosen my rear teeth with the black cold, I figured that toolbox would do to spare my life from freezing. It took no more than ten minutes to chuck out the tools and bust a bale of hay open and dump it into the box. When I'd pulled shut the lid over my head behind me and snugged down into that soft-fine native hay, I was better off than a lost dog in a dry barrel full of butcher-shop sawdust. The hell with that old grouch and his 10-gauge. I was toasty as a tickbird on an old bull buffalo's rump.

  When I woke up, it was to a jarring squeal of wagon axles and jolt of iron rims. By the time I could recollect where I was, the road-service wagon had hauled to a stop and its crew pried open the top of their toolbox. When they found me inside, rather than their rim irons, spoke wrenches, hub spanners, and the like, they were not happy. I tried to make up for their gloom.

  "Why," I said, bright as brass, "where at ever can we be? This here surely ain't where I purchased my ticket for. This ain't North Phoenix, is it?"

  The crew boss pulled a rim-springing bar out from under the driver's box. "No," he said, hefting it in my direction, "it ain't North Phoenix, it's South Prescott. This here is the wagonyard at Whipple Barracks, and we got a contract to maintain their ambulances and other rolling stock. Except that some young smart aleck done pitched all our hand-tools out'n the toolbox and filled it full of fresh hay. Which same half-growed, whiskey-pickled s.o.b. is right now going to get this here spring bar bent into a size-eight horseshoe square over the back of his cowboy hat. Up and out of thar, you damn bum!"

  Whether or not he and his two mean-looking helpers meant to murder me was never contested. Just then, a herd of cavalry remount horses, leastways three, four hundred of them, came thumping through the yard on the whoop-and-holler run, hazed along by four riders. On the instant, I seen real trouble shaping.

  At the back of the wagonyard at Whipple, there was an arroyo about twenty feet deep and sharp-filled with outcrop rock, sides and bottom. If those idiots driving those high-grade remounts didn't get the point of the bunch turned hard right in the next thirty seconds, Fort Whipple and the Fifth Cavalry was going to be out about fifty head of replacement stock.

  There wasn't any time for debate.

  The boss herder was sweeping by the repair wagon even as I saw the danger. I just bailed out of the toolbox and onto his horse's rump behind him without thinking it over any longer than to wind up and make the jump.

  Next thing, I barred one arm over the boss herder's throat from behind, lifted him wide of his damn saddle, and dropped him like throwing off the mailsack at Bacon Springs or Crane Ranch without slowing the stagecoach. Into the empty saddle I went. That poor horse must of thought he'd been mounted by a six-foot cougar. I put the spur rowels into him to their shanks and nearly broke his ewe-neck turning him in full stride to his right. But he didn't fall, and we did get the point of the running bunch headed short of the sharp-rock arroyo. And by we, I mean me, Tom Horn, and that skinny-necked mustang I'd appropriated by long-jump from the tool wagon of the Verde Valley & Mogollon Rim Stageline Company. Those blasted other herders never even knew why their big remuda swerved so hard. In fact, one of the bastards kept right on going and wound up in the bottom of the arroyo himself. In further fact, I was still sitting my borrowed plug up on the rim of the gully and yelling down at this dim-brain that, if his horse had to be shot, he could figure to get the same medicine, and I would be just the doctor to give it to him, when up puffs no less than an oak leaf, or "light" colonel of the cavalry, on foot and mad as a dog-bit badger. He proved to be on my side.

  When he had added his sentiments to mine in the direction of the banged-up herder down in the rocks, he wheeled about on me.

  "Colonel," I said in hopeful haste, "I'm right sorry I let him get by me. But it was all I could do to get the herd turned."

  "I saw it all," the officer said. "How much do they pay you down at the stageline?"

  I started to come up with some offhand yam, then realized he thought I was working with the repair-wagon crew, out from Prescott. So I changed to a better lie.

  "Seventy-five per, and found, colonel. But—"

  "Don't but me. The army will pay you a hundred, no keep. Come on."

  He started off and I held back only long enough to see the boss crewman coming our way on the quick-trot, still swinging the rim-spring bar.

  "Yes sir!" I saluted the bowlegged little officer, and that's how I got to be chief herder for the U.S. Cavalry remount station at Fort Whipple, Arizona, in January of eighteen and seventy-six.

  Early in '76, when I went to work for the Quartermaster herding the remount stock at Fort Whipple, all the horses came overland from California. They came in big trail herds of some four hundred head each. I was the boss of watching them all until the various posts throughout the territory sent and got their due consignments. Since Prescott was headquarters for the Department of Arizona, I handled every head that went into service the first six months of that year. It was some job of work.

  There was but three of us to do it, too. Me and two Mexicans. One of them was half Apache, his mother's half, and he talked more Indian than Mexican. Neither one of them spoke English. Whatever I had yet to pick up of Mex or Apache lingo, I surely came by most of it in those five, six months handling horses by the thousands with Julio Vasquez and Tagidado Morales.

  Morales was the half blood. Because I could speak his tongue and was so dark of hide myself, he thought I had to be part Indian of some kind. From that, he trusted me. When it came time, along early i
n July, for the three of us to say adiós—the last horses for the year was allotted the Fifth Cavalry and we was out of work—Tagidado hung back when Julio rode away.

  He was an older man, ugly as sin or, as his friend Julio said, as his Apache mother. "Nino," Tagidado said, touching my shoulder, "I want to give you something." He reached up and took off the turquoise earring he wore in his left lobe. I had marked it many a time as a most curious piece, but I had never asked him about it. That it was of Indian design was evident. But it looked terrible old too, and I knew it wasn't just Arizona Indian. Now he reached and put the bauble in my hand, closing my fingers over it mighty careful. "Keep it," he said, "but a condition goes with it; a prayer really, Comprende?"

  "De seguro," I answered, "go ahead."

  He told me I was a young man and that he knew I was spiritbound to the Indios and would one day go and live among them. He meant the Apaches, of course, and not the tame ones. "I had a son," he said. "The people of Mangas Coloradas took him as a small child. We heard they traded him to the Warm Springs people, but he was never returned, nor was it even known if he lived. When he was taken, he wore upon a circlet chain about his small neck the mate to this turquoise earring of the feathered serpent. Perhaps today, should he have lived, there somewhere rides a young Apache of your own tender years who will wear that earring in his right lobe. If you ever see him, show him your earring and tell him its story. The rest I will leave to God."

  I didn't think too much of the story, as Mexicans are hot to be believed except at considerable risk. I assured this old man, however, that I would be faithful to the trust and would wear the earring when it came to pass that I should go among the wild Apache.

  "Remember to do it," old Tag said. "It will preserve your life one day. That sign has medicine power."

  He got on his runty Sonora mule and started off.

  "Hey!" I yelled after him. "Alto!"

  He waited, and I loped my horse up to him. "Listen," I said, "I am a shadow man, you understand?"

  "Yes, of course," old Tag eyed me noddingly, "I knew that you were. We all are. But only some of us know it. Most do not. What do you want, joven?"

  "Well, you are right, you see. I have always dreamed of los Indios. The broncos, the wild Indians, you understand, not the reducidos, the tame ones. Yet until this moment that you spoke of going to live with them, I had never thought of that. That was my shadow telling your shadow, eh?"

  The old half-breed shrugged. "Pues, perhaps. But one does not require his sombra to inform him of your feeling for my mother s people. What is it, now?"

  "I want to know what is the best way for a white man to find the broncos? I mean, without getting killed doing it. What should I do if I want to go and live with the wild Apache?"

  "Easy," said old Tag. "Go and find Seebie."

  "Seebie? Quién es?"

  "Al Sieber."

  He said it as though I would at once say, Oh! of course, Al Sieber! Now why didn't I think of that?

  But I just frowned in my special dense way, and old Tag said, "What? You do not know Sieber? You never heard of the name?"

  "Never. Not till this moment, anciano."

  Later, men would say that I couldn't possibly have failed to hear of Al Sieber working at Camp Verde and then Fort Whipple all those months. Whipple and Verde were important posts. Anyone hanging around them must have heard of Sieber. The only alternative was that Tom Horn was a damned liar (again!) and never set foot in either place. He couldn't have it both ways.

  Well, he did.

  People forget that in 1876 Al Sieber wasn't of the same renown he was by 1886. You might as well say that anybody in that day who hadn't heard of Tom Horn was a damned liar and never lived in Arizona Territory. But who was Tom Horn in 1876? Nobody. And Al Sieber wasn't that much more of a somebody either.

  Except to the Apaches,

  And, ah! that was the difference.

  Old Tagidado knew it.

  "Well, hijo mío," he said patiently, "now you have heard the name. And it is the one you must know if you are a white man thinking to find the true broncos."

  "All right," I replied, "can you then tell me, tio, where I may find this Al Sieber? A dónde está, amigo?"

  Old Tag gave me a mixed Indian and Mex look.

  "Your sombra served you well in sending you to ride after me and ask this question," he said. "It so happens that Seebie has been in Prescott ten days, and what do you suppose he has been doing? Looking for someone to work with him. He has been given a big promotion to chief of scouts and requires an assistant now. Que tal! And do you know what else, chico? No, you don't. Well, I will tell you; he is leaving today and he did not find anyone. If you hurry, you may catch him still."

  "A dónde?" I repeated. "Nombre Dios, a dónde?"

  "You know of the place called Geronimo Rojo?"

  "Uncle," I said, wheeling my horse, "I know it well. Adiós. Vaya con Dios. Wagh!"

  And I lit out on the flat gallop for Prescott and the Red Geronimo Saloon, not even thinking to say mil gracias to old Tag for his information.

  Well, that was all right.

  He would understand.

  We were both hombres de sombras.

  It wasn't our faults the way things happened to us, or that we got directed into doing them to others.

  You didn't worry if you were a shadow man.

  You just lit out.

  You did, anyway, if fate had just tapped you on the shoulder to be Seebie's Boy.

  Miss Pet

  I had a good horse and outfit under me once more. I had earned myself back into a decent state, had money in my pocket, and a purpose in my mind. If I was out of a job, it was by hard work, not by prowling Tomcat Alley or drinking Whiskey Row dry. Moreover, I had good references. Matter of fact I was riding past one of them on my way into Prescott. This was the firm of Tully, Ochoa, & DeLong, beef contractors and general freighters for the military. Between horse herds from California coming in to Whipple, I'd filled in delivering beef herds for them to local Indian agencies. They were mighty good people, but I just waved at them now riding past on my classy blood bay gelding. The work paid cheap and wasn't steady. Nothing like good enough to compare with going to live with the wild Indians. Wagh!

  Ah! that was a grand morning to be sixteen years old, yet grown tough and smart as a desert-bred mustang. There is no time in a man's life so glorious as that minute when he figures the boy in him has at last haired over, making him full-grown and ready to growl.

  Not unless it's that other minute old Tag told me about, where a man is truly growed old but feels one brief day like he was a boy again and could pee his mark as high on the wall as any macho young stud in Mexico.

  Well, naturally I couldn't speak to that. I just reckoned nobody had better challenge Tom Horn to any wall-wetting contests that particular sunfresh July morning of eighteen and seventy-six.

  Wasn't I about to find the great Al Sieber down at the Red Geronimo Saloon? Hadn't my sombra sent me to him by way of old Tag? Wasn't I as good as hired by the new chief of scouts for the whole Fifth Cavalry, at San Carlos, the main Apache Indian reservation in the territory? Well, wasn't I?

  No, as a matter of fact, I surely was not.

  I never even got to the Red Geronimo Saloon. I was stopped on my way to it, going by Madame La Luna's New Orleans House, taking the shortcut through Tomcat Alley. Madame came stomping out into the street just as I drew up. She spooked hell out of my hot-blooded red bay gelding, and it was plain she was mainly unsettled about something. "Here, you," she said, spotting me. "You look like you had more muscle between your ears than compis mentis. Get down off that damn horse and come along. I've got a chore for you. Pays quick cash and no questions. Come along in, didn't you hear me? Don't just sit up there gawking with your mouth hung open fit to trap flies. Ain't you never seen a woman in a nightgown before?"

  "No ma'am," I said, touching the brim of my hat, polite. "Not so close to high noon, I ain't."

 
; She wasn't young but she had a body like she was, and she saw me admiring her splendid lines and she mellowed down a bit from that. Fact is, I swear she blushed a tinge. "Goddamnit," she said, "foller me, boy."

  Well, I went into her whorehouse with her and sure enough she did have a job of work for somebody laid out in there. It was a fellow built like the prize herdsire Hereford bull of the whole cow business. Big and blocky and thick-strong all over, and mean-looking like he would charge you on or off your horse. He was passed out cold drunk snoring on a tapestry settee in the red plush lobby of the place. And, saving for his stovepipe riding boots and Mexican cartwheel spurs, complete with pure silver jingle-bobs, he was naked as a new-hatched nest-bird. "Jesus H. Christ, ma'am," was all that I could think to say.

  "Yes," she agreed. "And I will give you five dollars to haul this drunk son of a bitch out of my decent house without waking him up or scratching my hardwood floors. Here are his clothes, and when he comes alive you tell him he owes me for Clara, Bonnie May, Charlene, and Pet. And tell him Pet says if he ever again tries to bed her with his boot-irons on, she will cut off his cajones and mail them to his C.O. at San Carlos in a plain paper bag. Now get!"

  I thanked the lady for the work, taking pause only to struggle on the man's pants for him and to ask Madame La Lima to please donate my five-dollar fee to Miss Pet so she might see the doctor about her spur cuts.

  "You're a nice lad," Madame said to me. "Don't ever take up with the likes of this lunatico. You would do better to join up with the Apache Indians."

  "That's remarkable," I said, admiring her again. "How ever did you guess I aimed to do that?"