I, Tom Horn Page 8

  "Do what, boy?" she snapped. "Don't fret me."

  "No ma'am," I said, tipping my wide hat again. "I wouldn't never do that to any lady. I just purely was wondering how come you to know I was bound to join up with the Apache Injuns?"

  "Oh, my God!" she cried, clapping hands to head. "Two lunatics!" Then, addressing herself to the half dozen disclad young females now peeking into the lobby at all the fuss. "Here, you, Pet. This young jackass won't take my five dollars for dragging this dead piece of meat out of here. Wants you to have the money for the doctor to tend your spur gashes. Ain't that rich!"

  She commenced to laughing like a loon, but Miss Pet hipswung her way over to me with a sober face. And, oh but she was something! The most slimmest and beautiful blonde girl—and I mean all of her blonde—that I had ever dreamed to see in that life. She sidled up to me with a downglance look and murmured husky-voiced, "I want to thank you, mister. Truly I do." After which she eyed me up and down and in the middle, and she stopped there and sort of stared at me and added, "You can take it out in trade anytime, tall boy. Just put it on my bill, Madame," she said to the La Luna woman. "Oh, my!" With that, she touched me where she oughtn't to have, and all the girls giggled and I just grabbed up the Hereford bull man off the settee and drug him out into Tomcat Alley, sweating something fearful.

  And that is how, of course, I met Al Sieber.

  It surely may not seem a proper way, nor moment in a man's time, that he would choose to see printed of himself in the history books. Not neither for Sieber nor Tom Horn. But when you set out to tell of your life and have promised to put it down in a true way, then you don't stand short with your story.

  That was the way that the Missouri farm boy ended his long journey to the West and came at last to live with the wild Indian horsemen of his rainy night dreams.

  Book Two

  San Carlos

  I am certain I had no useful remembrance of anybody inside the madame's place having said who the bull-bodied naked man might be. Nevertheless, when I had propped him up against the adobe wall on the shade side of the alley and doused him with a hatful of water from the cathouse cistern, and he had come around wheezing and groaning like a gut-shot agency beef, it popped square out of me. "Excuse me, Mr. Sieber, but I have come to take the job. Here's your neckerchief and underdrawers."

  He squinted toward my voice. "Awwhhrruggg! he strangled. "Who led us into this ambush? Which way did the troops go?" The thick German tongue faltered, the eyes cinching tighter yet with whiskey pain. "Job, for Christ sake? Who are you? What day is it? We still in Prescott?"

  I gave him his answers, naturally saving my name for last. I could see him wince again for some reason.

  "Oh, by Jesus, yes, Tom Horn," he said. "I'd ought to have remembered. Why, anybody knows of Tom Horn. What day did you say it was? The seventeenth? My God, I'm due back at San Carlos day afore yesterday. Ach!"

  He spoke with a heavy German accent but used American words strung together like any Anglo would. Now and again he would throw in some German for free, but never bothered to translate any of it or even appear to know he was using it. But of course I spotted that language right off. Neither of my sets of grandparents spoke good English, all being Pennsylvania Dutch and of German birth, using that speech mostly. I was the sole one of the Horn kids to pick it up, and that was from my gift with tongues. It always was that I could learn a language in no time.

  So now I said again to Sieber that I had come for the job as his new "boy," and how proud I would be to serve him and learn from him all about the wild Apache Indians. But this time I said it to him in very good low deutsch, and he came up on his feet against the wall like he had got a letter from home. Wunderbar!

  From that moment of our German bonding, I could do no wrong in the piercing black eyes of Al Sieber.

  He was a man of the most uncontrollable savage temper and fighting spirit, really a terror when aroused. But in all of the coming sunshine years that we were together in the U.S. Cavalry's employ, and outside of it too in the Arizona Territory, Al Sieber never one time treated me in any but a gentle and kind manner.

  Those who said in later days that he low-rated Tom Horn and those who denied the true things I told of our Apache scouting days are damned scoundrels and low thieves of a fine man's memory. Seebie was the stanchest friend I ever had. And maybeso the strangest, too. I will let that judgment make itself. For right then and there in Tomcat Alley, he merely cocked his bullet head on its oak stump of a neck at me and said, "All right, Horn. You're hired. Help me to find my mule."

  The trip to San Carlos was well over one hundred miles. As well, Sieber had said that he was already a day late in returning there. He then proceeded to take ten days on the way.

  We hunted deer, fished for trout, shot birds. We lollygagged and lay around our camps like we had the whole summer. But Sieber had his reason. He always had his reason. He was sizing up his "boy."

  Although I could not have known it then, Tom Horn was to become the old German's young right arm for the next nine years of the ten-year Apache campaign. But Sieber understood it then. As he told me later, the Apache wars were going to go on for many years. He himself was aging and had been crippled for life by a friendly Apache gone bronco. If he was going to keep his job as chief of scouts for the Fifth U.S. Cavalry, he had to find somebody he could lean on. He had already discarded six or seven prospects in his search, when he "found" me, as he always told it, "lost and crying for his mother, outside a whorehouse in Prescott, Arizona."

  He subsequently confessed he never thought much of me to commence with. I was just barely better than nobody to ride back to the reservation with. But I was young and willing to work. It was only two, three days out, he said, that he began to see I might do for his purpose.

  Along the way he would test this idea. We would be riding along maybe an hour with not a word passed when, of a sudden, he would haul in his mule.

  "Say," he'd ask, "you spot anything peculiar along the way here?"

  "Not unless you mean them tracks we been follering."

  "Tracks. What tracks?"

  "Them three squaws."

  "Squaws you say?"

  "Yes sir. Two Apache, one Pueblo, maybe Pima."

  "What the hell you talking about, Horn?"

  "Apache women track with their feet close together. Pueblos and some others of them pot-maker Injuns walks wide. What peculiar did you pick up, Mr. Sieber?"

  "Hmmmm," he would answer and kick his mule in the ribs and lope on out, leaving me to ponder the matter.

  He didn't fool me long. If Al Sieber was watching me, I was studying him right back. And it was working. Sieber was not much of a talker, ever. Yet he would consider questions, I discovered, if they were put in a sober way. Above all, you must not get funny with him. He was hell on smartass answers, or camp pranks. "Don't jackass around," he would snap. "Some poor soldier may get shot while you're having your hee-haws. Simmer down."

  And God help you if you went past that.

  I never saw Al Sieber take kindly to a joke on him or grin off any wiseacre comment aimed in his direction. I got to understanding why. Life hadn't been all that funny for him. Born in the old country in 1844, one of nine children, he had left home to come to America and serve it on the Union side in the Civil War. He was many times wounded, lastly with a ball that shattered a knee and ankle that healed crooked and left him with a permanent twisting limp. Later, of course, that bronco Apache (the notorious Apache Kid, whom Sieber reared from a fondling) shot him in the same ankle, and it never healed. Sieber had to dress it two times a day the rest of his life. Officer friends from the big war had told him of the West, and one had given him a letter of commendation to General George "Red Beard" Crook, then in command of the Third Cavalry, in the Arizona Territory. Crook, who knew men, mules, hostile Indians, and rare bird eggs in about that order, hired on the powerful German in the line he had followed in the war. Sieber always proudly described this status as "battali
on scout and horse troop forager." Whatever that meant, Crook soon made him chief of scouts for the Third Cavalry. He began at once to earn the reputation old Tag had been so astounded I did not know about. But, when later transferred to the Fifth Cavalry command, he had been going downhill, due to both the ignorance of the officers in that outfit as to what scouts—civilian employee scouts like Al Sieber—did and did not do, and also from his aggravating injuries.

  When I met Al Sieber, he carried twenty major knife, lance, arrow, and gunshot wounds in his body. When he quit the service ten years later, he had garnered another eight serious scars. Also at that time of discharge or separation, he carried fifty-three knife cuts on the butts and stocks of his various guns. He said that twenty-eight of these represented those Apaches who had left their marks on him. People have called all that a lot of nonsense and hogdip. Not me. It remains my opinion that Sieber ought to have had a hundred and fifty-three Apache slashes on that gunwood of his. He easily killed more hostile Indians than the remainder of us put together. It was indeed from him that Tom Horn first learned that the surest way to guarantee the good behavior of an enemy, any skin color, was to kill him. "Explain it to him the once," the old German became wont to tell me, "then when he does it again, kill him. It is a system that never fails."

  A system that never fails. Those five words were to mark my life. Yet when first I heard them, my guardian shadow was asleep. It did not warn me. When next they fell upon my ear, they were from my own lips. But that was twenty years and seven hundred miles away. By then, I did not even remember where I had learned them, but only why; it was to use them like Judas in the Bible, as pieces of silver to buy the death of a fellowman.

  At the time that Al Sieber spoke them, however, I had not yet so much as thought of me killing anybody. Surely I wasn't dreaming of shooting or knifing Indians, as my aim was to live with them. True, I had a pretty hard view of life and was not a fearful sort But that was concerning hardships and maybe not fretting about anybody else doing harm to me. Nobody sets out to just shoot down other folks. I know full well what's been said of Tom Horn, coming to that, but those that say such brutal things of me are fools. No boy of sixteen summers is hiring on as a killer. Not in his mind, he isn't. If his life comes to that in its ending, then that's why he leaves his story of how that happened. Of how a good man can turn to such dark ways and never understand that he has done it, or even that it is wrongful and wicked, played his way. And even say, as Tom Horn will say to his grave, that he never harmed an innocent man but once. And that one man was himself.

  So, no, when Sieber said that about giving a guilty man one more chance, then killing him, that sixteen-year-old Missouri boy riding by his side over the Sierra Ancha range toward his new life with the Apache bronco Indians, did not "hear" the words as meaning exactly what they said. It was only the sort of thing rough men said on the western frontier. It was spoke as a way of thinking out loud. Just of warning those you did business with, or might, that they would not get two chances to "muddy the water at my camp."

  I actually thought then that Sieber was letting me know, by saying such a thing, that I was to be mightily cautious how I answered to him in the coming work.

  Certainly, there was nothing dark in my mind that last July morning when we drew near journey's end.

  I could think of nothing but those Apache Indians and Sieber's gruff hints about their government home.

  The big Apache reservation called San Carlos, he said, was two pony rides across and three up and down. Something in the practical order of a hundred miles by about sixty. But he was not talking of boundaries and blocks as they would be drawn on the army's maps, he warned. His meaning was that piece of the actual country that the Indians understood they had to stay on, or else. Now that land lay ahead twixt Salt River Canyon, the Gila Mountains, Escudilla Peak, and the south terminal of the Holbrook stage road, at McNary Junction. It was a "God-lonesome chunk of real estate for size," Sieber said, and of that quality described by the old scout as "the natural hell where mother rattlesnakes tell their babies they will go, if they ain't good."

  Since to reach it the burly German and I had just come across the hidden pine paradise of the Tonto Basin, scaled the great Mogollon Rim, and loafed south along its precipice through virgin ponderosa and incense cedar timber watered by clear creeks bank-deep in mountain meadow grass to our mounts' bellies, you can imagine how that slag heap of bare rock, salt sage, and Gila monster turds hit my eager eye. I simply could not accept it when we busted out to our overview of it from the east shoulder of Aztec Peak, breathing our saddle animals there at about six thousand feet.

  "Well," Sieber said, "that's it."

  "Jesus," I said. "That's what? The back door into God's private brickyard?"

  "San Carlos," Sieber grunted.

  "No! Why, that is the forlornest looking goddamn stretch of snagrock granite and skeleton sand this side of the Jornado del Muerto on the Santa Fee Trail. It can't be San Carlos. We must have died and gone to hell."

  "It's San Carlos," Al Sieber said. "Ride out"

  So it was that I, Tom Horn, came to San Carlos Apache Indian reservation and the true beginning of my life among the wild bands of the Chí hinne, the red people of Apacheria.

  Everybody knows my story in the Arizona Territory days, and nobody wants to hang me for what I done down there. But it all weighs in the final scale, and so what follows must be judged against the rest of it to end with a fair memory of Tom Horn.

  My time mongst the broncos, both of Arizona and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, went a ten-year run, and it came out about a even mix of hell and happy things, 1876 through 1886. And I would give all my life to live any one of those ten years again. To ride and raid once more with my blood-oath Chiricahua brothers, or campaign with my dear-remembered fellow scouts of the Third and Fifth U.S. Cavalry regiments, Department of Arizona.

  Lord God, but those were times few white men then living knew, and no white man now living can ever know again. The times are gone, and the wild Apache vanished forever. I wish I had died in those grand years when Tom Horn rode knee-and-knee with names like Mangas, Loco, Del Shay, Nana, Kaytennae, Alchise, and Eskiminzin. And when he was the true chi-kis-in, the "full brother," to the Four Families of the Chiricahua people, the children of Cochise, Juh, Victorio, and Geronimo.

  Ay de mí, as the Mexicans say.

  Those were the hours of our lives.

  And, ah! how swiftly flown.

  Sieber's Mule

  At San Carlos, Sieber got me put on the government payroll as what he told the army was "an interpreter of Mexican."

  Since most everybody in the territory—white, Indian, and Mex—spoke and savvied enough cowpen Spanish to get by, I queried Sieber as to what sense there was in hiring an interpreter.

  "No sense at all," he nodded gruffly. "But you got to be something. You sure as bobcat sign smells bad don't think you're a scout yet, do you?"

  "No sir, but I mainly hope to become one. It has been my biggest dream since I was a little tad, back in Missouri. I would make a prayerful wish on it every night.

  Sieber looked at me disgustedly. He had little stomach for any fancy flying about with words.

  "Well," he said, "hold your one hand in front of your pecker-flap and take a good pee in it. Hold your other hand out to the side and wish into it hard as you are able. See which hands flows over first."

  He glared at me three blinks of those eyes black as obsidian rockglass, then growled, "Get your horse and fetch up my mule. We got Injun business waiting."

  You can imagine my excitement at that. Here was Tom Horn actually at San Carlos Agency in the heart of the wild Apache country. He was readying to ride out with the chief of scouts for the entire Fifth Cavalry of the U.S. of A. And that chief had just said that it was time for them to get cracking at their dangerous work—finding Indians! I could scarcely hold in.

  I brought up Sieber's famous iron-gray mule from the picket line, an
d we got out of there laying a handsome dust. We went about half a day up into the White Mountains, following the lonely course of the White River to its joining with the Black. Here, Sieber drew in his mount. It was but a mile or so more up the river, he said, to the rancheria (Apache camp) of the noted chief, Old Pedro. Pedro's band was a mixed one numbering about one thousand people. The old chief claimed six hundred of these were men of war age, a high percentage and risky, even though Pedro tried faithfully to control them. The point, Sieber concluded, was that this was an important band of Apaches to the cavalry, as they could be visited in fair safety and much could be learned of the renegade bronco Apaches.

  These "bronks" were the bad Indians of course, and the ones I yearned to join up with and learn about. So far, I hadn't seen a solitary one of them and was accordingly put out to hear the bunch ahead was tame Indians, or reasonably like tame. Still, I listened close to what the old scout had to say.

  Pedro's people called themselves the San Carlos, he went on, which was a white man's name. There wasn't any truly bred San Carlos band. Not in the bloodline sense that there was Gila, Tonto, Mescalero, Jicarilla, and Chiricahua bands of Apaches. But Sieber stressed that, as an outpost or listening place for the army, the rancheria of Old Pedro was a duty post of great value to the cavalry at San Carlos and elsewhere in the Arizona Territory. "Of which fact," he finished, with an odd squint at me, "more may be made later"

  For right then, another matter impended. Before we got up to the Apache camp, Sieber said, he wanted me to ride his mule aways so that he might observe if she was favoring her off hindside, as it felt to him she was. He got off her with his usual groan from the pain of his wrong-healed wounds and held her for me. I was some surprised, since he didn't ordinarily permit anybody to handle that she-mule, let alone to ride her. But I figured it best to do what I was asked, or told. So I slid off my bay right smartly and legged up onto Sieber's mule. Next thing I knew, I was laying down in the riverbank rocks mad enough to bend a cold horseshoe in my teeth.