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A couple of Chatto's men cut the surviving horse
from the traces and added it to the herd of rustled ones the raiding
party was driving, while the rest of them ransacked the buckboard,
carrying along the driving whip and the raincoats they took from the
hamper. The last I heard from the walnut tree was the dying horse
thrashing to get its feet under it in the sand and screaming in
desperation for its partner--the uproar covered almost entirely by the
pounding thunder of hooves as we got started again, racing away from
the bloody entrance to Thompson Canyon and driving the stolen horses
along ahead of us.
I don't know where I found the wind-hard as I was
in the grip of Asa Daklugie, between the lean belly and the pommel of
the old military saddle-to bawl and protest, but I did. I kicked, too,
and even reached behind myself to beat him on the chest with my fists,
which only made Asa laugh. But after a mile or two of hard riding I
hadn't quit yelling, though, and Asa wasn't laughing anymore. He
reined his horse back almost to a sitting position on the hardpan and
slipped down from it, lithe as a cougar coming off a rock ledge. Then
he lifted me after him and shook me, holding me at eye level before
him, and I shut right up then, like a corked bottle. I never saw a
face like it before or since, and I hope I never do again, either: A
stone gargoyle on a French cathedral would make a Santa Claus
lookalike by comparison with the devilish pointed chin, bony cheeks,
and that drifting eye that seemed fixed on the gates of Hell itself.
Bonito riding close behind us dismounted while his horse was still in
midstride and caught hold of Asa, who, after grabbing me by the ankles
and turning me upside down, had commenced to swing me in circles round
his head like Joshua's battle ax. Bonito stopped him before he could
finish me off and set me gently down beside the boulder that in
another couple of seconds would have had my brains spattered all over
it. They had it out then, the two of them, while the rest of the party
sat their horses in a circle around us, paying close attention to the
argument. It was the first time I'd heard the Apache lingo spoken: It
sounded exactly like two gigantic lizards having a warmish
conversation. So Bonito and Asa chewed the fat awhile, and the upshot
was Asa stepped up to his horse, scowling, and Bonito set me on the
neck of his own pony, swung up behind, and tied me to his belt with a
piece of rope. Then we were off again, at a lope across the bunch
grass and alkali flats, among the spiney yucca and mescal. Even before
we reached the Sierra Madre, I think Asa Daklugie and I were friends.
For as long as I was with the Apache I never held it against the man,
figuring in a similar situation I might have had thought to do the
thing he tried to do with me. Why, I remember one time when we were
camped in the Sierra with the Mexican army after us, our men asked the
women to strangle their infants to keep them from giving our position
away to the Mexicans. You can bet the ladies got the job done, too.
From Thompson Canyon we traveled south against the
foothills of the Burro Mountains in a cloud of dust, fast as the loose
horses could be pushed along. At six and a half I was a pretty fair
rider already, having practiced on Ada's pony, but I'd have left the
saddle many a time if it hadn't been for that bit of rope tethering me
to Bonito. Without stirrups to brace myself I bounced around, hanging
sometimes off one side of the horse, sometimes the other-and then I'd
feel Bonito's strong hand drawing me upright in the saddle again.
Ma always told me, When you're in trouble, pray,
and so I closed my eyes and tried remembering a prayer; after I'd
tried several times and nothing came of it, I quit. (The darkness back
of my tight-shut lids wasn't black enough to hide the two bent white
forms spread-eagled on the bloody sand.) The dust made me cough until
I forgot the lesson I'd learned back at the boulder and I started to
cry again, thinking of the lemonade left behind in the hamper. I
couldn't think how to tell Bonito what I wanted but he understood me
anyway, somehow, because we hadn't ridden another half mile when he
turned the horse of a sudden into a narrow side canyon whose rocky
walls were streaked black by leaching minerals above a flight of rock
steps rising from a sandy bowl. Bonito had my rope untied before I
understood what he was doing, dismounted, and began digging with his
hands in the sandy place. It was soft sand, and before he'd dug down
over a foot his hands came up wet and coated with the clinging sand.
It wasn't a lot of water but it was enough, and I never tasted sweeter
in my life-and plenty better than lemonade. Bonito brought it to me in
his cupped hands and then he was up on the horse once more and we were
off, at a gallop this time to catch up and Bonito's arm so tight
around me I could feel his heart pounding against his ribs.
After that we never stopped until dusk, when the
party made a halt at the southern end of the Burros and we sat our
horses, looking out across the plain sweeping up from the south and
the lights of Lordsburg coming on between us and the darkening peaks
of the Pyramid Mountains beyond the alkali playas. Human nature's a
strange thing. I mean, not more than six hours before I'd seen my
parents butchered by what in those days folks called savages and I'd
been kidnapped myself-ripped from the belly of civilization into a new
world of savagery and bloodshed. And-already-I was starting to come to
terms with the horror and adjust to the circumstances I was in. The
most comfortable explanation is, I was still in shock and all that had
happened simply had no reality for me, yet. It does cause a man to
wonder, though, about the human race. Moral creatures aren't supposed
to be as adaptable as all that, are they?
Anyway-exhausted and hungry as I was after
traveling twenty miles and more as a prisoner of the demon Apache,
somehow I was even more curious about these fierce-looking warriors
speaking a savage incomprehensible tongue than I was frightened of
them. From astride the horse, and with Bonito's long arm circling my
waist the way a barrel hoop grips a barrel, I watched as the spring
sun sank beyond the Pelloncillo Mountains in the west, and a train-a
string of black cars wreathed in smoke and drawn by an engine spouting
red sparks visible even at that distance in the coming dark-crawled
eastward across the desert toward Deming, New Mexico, and El Paso.
Believe me or don't, after that first look I paid no more attention to
that train slouching between one of the white man's cities and the
next. Instead, I turned my attention to the war party, motionless
(except for the milling riderless horses, some of them loaded with
packs of dried meat) for the first time after all those hot and dusty
hours.
I wasn't one of those little boys raised on
cowboy-and-Indian stories in the boys' books and illustrated weeklies;
in fact, I'd never taken any stock in Indians one way or another-not
even after we came West. Now they owned some stock in me, though, it
seemed we had something in common. So I was watching them closely now,
trying all the while not to appear to be doing it. There were
twenty-five or thirty Apache warriors gathered horseback on that rocky
outcrop where the plain broke against the juniper foothills of the
Burros, all of them dressed in long shirts dyed in bright colors and
left partway open in front on their gleaming hairless chests, the
breechcloths just visible beneath the long shirttails-and below that
not a seamstress's stitch, apart from the buckskin leggings making the
upper part of the moccasins, the toes turned up and back an inch or
so, and the bandanas or strips of scarlet cloth around their heads to
hold the long, loose hair away from the forehead and eyes. Those
eyes.fierce as an eagle's, deep as a deer's, and separated by blades
of bone dividing the broad faces as far as the wide, thin-lipped
mouths, drawn down at the corners like djinns in an illustrated
fairy-tale book, contemplating some ogre act. Terrified all over
again, I looked away from the set faces to the cartridge belts and
knives sticking from under the colorful shirts, the rifles held loose
in the crook of the arm or across the saddlebow. Not a single man
carried a bow and arrows-as big a cheat to me, in spite of my terror,
as a circus without a Bearded Fat Lady or the Freak With Two Heads
would have been. For what seemed like a long time the men and horses
held stock-still, staring away across the plains where evening shadows
pooled in the swales like groundwater rising from below. At last, one
man-I recognized him as Chatto, though I didn't know his name
yet-extended his arm wordlessly toward the southeast. He put his horse
forward and the rest of the party followed him in silence, downhill
from the ridgeline onto the sotol desert.
After riding six hours I was past feeling the
saddle-wolf, and when the sun rolled off a platform of slate-colored
cloud and dropped through an opening of golden sky behind a ragged
line of black mountains, I stiffened like a piece of jerked beef in
the cold that seemed one with the sudden darkness. I began to snuffle
and then to blubber some-and shut up when I felt Bonito's horny hand
against the side of my face. Afterward, he pulled his shirt tail
forward to make a sort of tent around me, and I could feel the warmth
of his hard body then and smell the Indian smell, strong but without
the sour white-man odor. The night was moonless, with only the
aftershine of day to see by until at last that faded away too and we
rode in total darkness through the click of unshod hooves and the
bitter-tasting dust. Ahead and to the right as we swung eastward
around the town, Lordsburg glimmered like the coals of a campfire
burning just a few hundred yards off, though it must have been a good
ten miles over there, at least. Presently I was past the stiffness,
too, in a kind of frozen trance: I remember having a vision of Ma in
which I understood-though I knew nothing as yet of the nature of
death-that I would never see her or my father again, not in this
lifetime anyway. And still, I was too cold and miserable to feel that
sense of smothering panic the death of a loved one always brings.
Even in daylight, riding a horse across the
Southwestern desert is like rowing a boat on the Sea of Cortez-you
have the same feeling of going no place while spending a lot of wasted
effort on the job. On a dark night, it's more like getting down under
the covers with your head toward the foot of the bed and thrashing
about with your arms-except it's the horse that's doing the thrashing,
not you. In my waking moments I considered how even a red Indian has
to sleep sometime, but these Indians didn't appear to need rest-in
fact, we never stopped more than once or twice the entire night, and
then only for a minute or two each time. (Of course, I couldn't have
known the large herd of rustled horses we were bringing with us across
the playa had convinced Chatto the raiding party needed to cover as
much ground as possible during the night, for fear the alkali cloud
would be observed by soldiers, ranchers, and prospectors in the
vicinity who might have had news of the massacre already.) One of the
times we did stop, I overheard, from under Bonito's shirt, a hurried
conversation between him and Chatto, sitting his horse between two
parallel lines gleaming in the faint starshine and holding a long
knife in his hand. Their pow-wow lasted just a couple of seconds
before Chatto put the knife up with a grunt and turned his horse away.
I didn't learn until later those silver lines were the rails of the
Southern Pacific Railroad, and that Chatto had wanted to cut the
telegraph line running beside it, before Bonito talked him out of
doing it. It wasn't anything to the Apache whether the Talking Wire
lived or died, while cutting its throat would have tipped the enemy
off to where our party had crossed the rail line on its way down to
the border.
Chatto called a halt finally, just before dawn, and
we all ate a little of the dried meat called pemmican. I was starving,
having had no food since breakfast at the Mountain Home the morning
before, and the small strip Bonito gave me left me hungrier than ever.
I started to cry-and then something astounding happened: Bonito spoke
to me-in English! I couldn't have been more surprised than if
it had been the horse that did it. "Nada-no more," he said,
turning his empty palms up. Bonito explained for me how four pack
horses had wandered off in the night and we'd be on short rations
until we came on game to shoot, nearer to Mexico. He spoke
unselfconciously, as if it was the most natural thing in the world
that an Apache warrior should be comfortable in the language of the
Americans-which it was, of course, on account of the years he'd lived
around the agencies and on the reservation at San Carlos. Bonito's
English wasn't very good English, but it beat my Apache all to
flinders, and so I never thought to criticize him for it. Finally,
Bonito tore his bit of meat in half and offered it to me--so I took
it. White kids were spoiled in rotten in those days, same as now.
The sun came up all at once, blinding white and
already hot like an atom bomb, the way it does on the desert, as we
started forward again, keeping well to the east of the Pyramid
Mountains. By this time we were far out on the alkali flats, glaring
white as the sun itself and almost as hard on the eyes, though the
dust cloud holding between us and the eastern horizon dimmed it
considerably. Chatto drove us on like a whirlwind, the horses keeping
to a fast lope as we crossed the lakebed of the Aleman Valley, the
dried mud crazed and curling where it had peeled away from the
underlying dust, aiming for a rise of stony hills to the west. I was
sweating like a young pig inside the suit Ma had dressed me in the
morning we left Silver City; then it had been charcoal gray, but now
it was pancake colored with the thick dust. The saddle-wolf had gone
along with the stiffness, but my mouth felt dry as a week-old
newspaper, I had a killing thirst, and the hole in my belly matched
the gaping tear in the knee of my woolen pants.
The drum of hooves on the dry lakebed became a
clatter ahead, where the outriders had begun to climb toward a rocky
defile overlooking the valley floor. Making its way uphill among
teetering stone columns balancing smaller rocks atop them, clusters of
Spanish Bayonet, and century plant, the war party looked satisfyingly
picturesque to my eyes-colorful and romantic as Charlie Russell or
Frederick Remington could have painted it. Surefooted as mules and
fleet as antelope, the Indian ponies dodged the debris without
breaking stride, then struck a faint wagon track and vanished one
after the other into the narrow pass at the summit of the ridge. From
under Bonito's arm, I looked back to the playa for the rest of the
party and saw that only a handful of the riders was following us now.
"Where did the others go?" I asked Bonito-the first
I'd dared speak to him since breakfast.
He looked down, grimfaced but not unkindly, on my
small tow head.
"They will join us bime-by. For now, the men have
work to do."
I saw there wasn't anymore to be gotten from him on
the subject and decided I didn't need to know, anyhow.
"What's your name, Sir?" I asked, respectfully.
A rattlesnake, moving fast, wound sideways across
the path ahead and all three of us left the ground briefly to get over
it.
"I am Bonito," the warrior said, simply but with
dignity.
"I'm Charley," I explained. "McComas," I added,
remembering my manners.
Bonito didn't respond with any of the polite
formalities, such as, "Pleased to meet you, I'm sure." In fact, he
didn't say anything more at all, which I thought very rude of him.
Instead, he took the rifle from his shoulder and laid it across the
horse's neck ahead of me as we entered in silence between the stony
walls of the defile.
The pass was blocked ahead by the panicked horse
herd trying to crowd on through ahead of the shouting drivers. We hung
back long enough to let the dust settle some and emerged after only a
few hundred yards on the westfacing slope of the narrow ridge. From
there, we dropped steeply down from the summit and continued south
across the incline, following Chatto and the loose horses ahead. Away
to the west, over in Arizona Territory, the snowy peaks of the
Chiricahua Mountains stood against a shiny spring sky, and between us
and the mountains another broad plain-a mirror image of the one we'd
just crossed-shimmered like a lake beneath the climbing sun. Ahead to
the south were more mountains, deep blue in their covering of pine
forest but much closer in and more comfortable seeming, and I
understood, somehow, that these mountains were what we were headed for
today.
Before we'd ridden on much farther across the
slope, Chatto turned his horse and came loping back toward Bonito, who
kicked his horse forward to meet him halfway. They had a brief chat
above my head, and before they were through having it the sound of
guns came-pop-pop-pop-from the pass behind us. Bonito fixed his good
eye on Chatto then and laughed, and Chatto laughed with him. Along
with everyone else they dismounted from their horses and Bonito lifted
me after down after him-all eager and excited because I thought we
were going to eat lunch, now. Instead, we sat about for the longest
time while the horses grazed the thin grass, waiting. We'd been
sitting for an hour or so when human figures appeared in the mouth of
the defile, going on foot and leading their horses. Silently, with no
more expression than so many stumps, my Indians watched these others
come on. As they neared they looked thick and misshapen, and stumbled
now and again as if they'd been put together wrong. The horses too
were laden down, packs hanging from the saddles on both sides. They
were almost up to us when Chatto looked over at me, and smiled. He had
the most boyish and irresistable kind of grin-Tom Sawyer with long
hair and a headband.
"The young eagle eats the same as the grown bird,"
Chatto said, in English. "My men bring food to feed him with."
So here, I thought, was another red Indian
speaking the King's English in the middle of a howling wilderness!
Convenient, yes-but sort of a letdown as well. After just twenty-four
hours, the Apache were starting to seem only a little less like our
Silver City neighbors than the ones in Silver City had been like those
other ones back in St. Louis.
Five men in all, together with their horses and two
mules, came up and threw down the packs around where we sat, watching
them. One or two seemed familiar faces, and I saw then that they
belonged to our own party, stragglers in the rear of Chatto's
fast-moving band. Without delay, they set about ripping the sacks open
and spilling the contents over the grass, laughing and gesturing at
each other as they did it. I knew enough about pirates to guess what
they spread around on the ground was called loot. Most of it was
ammunition-boxes and boxes of rifle and revolver shells-but there was
tinned food also, flour and sugar, dried beans, tea and coffee, bolts
of calico, knives, matches-and whisky. The nearest onlookers pounced
on it, but Chatto ordered them to lay the bottles all together on the
grass at the center of the circle of warriors sitting back on their
heels to admire them. (They did it tenderly, like a mother putting her
babies to rest on a goosedown quilt.) The looters displayed a handsome
rifle and led the mules forward to be admired, too. The animals still
had their draft collars on, and the cut traces hanging down gave me a
bad feeling; so much so that I stopped laughing suddenly, along with
the others. One Indian in turning over a pack exposed a great red
stain, clotted with sand but bright and freshlooking still, and all at
once I began to cry. I bawled and bawled, while Chatto's war party sat
in silence and listened gravely, almost respectfully, until at last
Bonito stood up and walked toward me. Expecting a beating, or worse-I
hadn't forgotten that boulder back at the entrance to Thompson Canyon,
you can bet-I only cried the harder, but he never laid a hand on me.
Instead, he picked up a Bowie knife, shiny in its new scabbard, from
the grass. Bonito took me by the hand, pulled me up onto my feet, and
unbuttoned my suit jacket. Finally, he secured the knife to the
waistband of the trousers and rebuttoned the jacket over it.
"Your Pa died hard, a brave man," Bonito said
quietly. "You must now be brave too, Charley."
The men, using the hatchet they'd carried away with
them from the rancher's wagon, hacked the tin cans open and I ate my
first meal in nearly thirty-six hours: corned beef, I recall it was,
and the kind of cracker or hardtack called soldier bread in those
days, dried fruit, and hard cheese. I ate until I had to unbutton my
coat again-and then I fell asleep, or something like sleep in which I
must have traveled the rest of the afternoon, because my next actual
memory is of arriving at last at the blue mountains. (Named the Animas
Mountains in the New Mexico bootheel, for the sunset bells of the
Angelus, perhaps.)
Led by Chatto, and with Bonito and me riding just
behind, the war party was climbing up through the foothills when I
awoke, across the folded ridges lying over one against the other like
waves and golden in the evening light below the purple peaks and a
silver slice of moon fixed low in the western sky. We made a wild,
fantastic spectacle spread out over the mountainside, the riders
throwing long shadows across the bunch grass and rabbitbrush, the
sunlight catching their scarlet headbands and glinting along the
barrels of their upright rifles as the horses breasted the steep at a
run, the way a horse will. The air grew sharper as we approached the
outlying juniper thickets, and colder still when we entered the pine
forest above the junipers. I began to shiver violently, and went on
shivering after Bonito brought me under his shirt, like a child kept
safe in its mother's belly. As dark as it was in the forest, I
wondered how the horses saw to keep to the trail-if there was a
trail-or avoid falling over logs and stones. The hooves drummed on the
ground as if the mountain was hollow inside and the night grew very
dark, until I could no longer make out the boughs of the pine trees
against the night sky.
The next I knew I was wrapped in a blanket, lying
on my back on the hard ground facing up to the stars and feeling the
Bowie knife half under me, bruising my hipbone and ribs. Stiffly, I
raised up on one elbow for a lookaround-and wished straightaway I
hadn't done it.
Fires burned in the camp, making bloody stains on
the darkness; in the dim circles of light cast by the flames, savage
figures pranced like demons in hell-or out of it. The fires were
enclosed on three sides and covered by flat rocks, to prevent them
being spied from a distance. The sound of inhuman conversation and the
smell of cooking came from over there, but I wasn't hungry and
stretched myself out on the ground again, after watching aghast for a
minute or two. Alone in the cold spring night, high on the
mountainside below Animas Peak, I wept silently-for my mother and
father, for Ada and Mary, for my soft bed at home, for friends in
Silver City--most of all, for myself, Charley McComas. It wasn't any
kind of prayer, but it was the best I could manage and anyway it
didn't matter because, before I could stop crying even, I fell asleep. |
