The Long-Knives 6

by Patrick E. Andrews

  “Listen, Gonzoles, ye counterfeit Irishman, I’ll not be havin’ ye cast aspersions on me sense o’ duty. ’Tis that very thing that brings me here today.”

  “Oh, I’m Mexican, true enough,” Charlie Gonzoles replied, setting the filled glass and the bottle within O’Callan’s easy reach, “and no denying it. But since when did ‘three fingers of yer best’ before half-past ten of a weekday mornin’ have anything to do with duty?” His smile robbed the interrogation of any malice as he continued, “—Which you’ve emptied and are pourin’ yourself a second?”

  O’Callan took the joshing good-naturedly. “Truth to tell, Charlie-o, ’tis this very burdensome duty I have been assigned that’s drivin’ me to drink. I need a change of scenery, a quiet place ... like this empty barn of yer employer’s, to set down in and think upon it.”

  “Would ye be needin’ a headache powder, Terrance?”

  O’Callan ignored the sarcasm. “Speakin of yer fine employer, is Leroy around this marnin’?”

  Gonzoles, who never tired of playing his pseudo-Irish role, spread his hands in a Gaelic gesture. “No, he’s not. We had a murder in town last night. They know who did it—a miner with diggin’s out toward the Chiricahua Mountains. Mr. Hays took a posse out to bring him in. Is yer problem a legal one?”

  O’Callan downed his drink, poured a third. “No. It’s army business. What I need to know is how to have a party for a hundred and fifty hard-bitten troopers, fill ’em up with likker, and keep it from turnin’ into a battle royal? I thought Leroy might be able to advise me, him bein’ a gentleman saloonkeeper and all and familiar with those sort o’ problems.”

  “You don’t need to bother Mr. Hays with that, O’Callan. That’s a simple problem that even I could solve.”

  “Well then, for the love of Mary and all the Saints, don’t stand there flappin’ yer jaw about it, tell me, man!”

  “Like I said, it’s simple. Give them something to take their minds off fighting.”

  Terry O’Callan opened his mouth to profane down this impertinent response, then he stopped, dumbstruck. An idea slowly insinuated its unshaped form in his head, growing nearly full-blown and complete even as he saw it. So commanding a vision was it that one could almost see it running around behind his wide-open blue eyes. He mumbled something about “Good enough for social writin’,” then gulped down the last of his whiskey. He corked the bottle and grabbed it by the neck.

  “But of course! That’s it. Give ’em something to take their minds off fightin’. And I know just the thing. By all that’s Holy, yer a good man, Charlie, me boy. Even be it that yer a Mezkin and not properly a citizen of these United States. Put this on me bill; I’ll settle usual time at the first of the month. I got things to do now. Goodbye, Charlie, and thank you for that brilliant idea.”

  O’Callan jump-started his mount to a full gallop, and the drumming of hoofbeats drifted inside along with the dust as Charlie Gonzoles looked with perplexedly after the departed cavalry sergeant. Brilliant idea? Hell, he’d only stated the obvious. How could O’Callan build anything out of that?

  Sergeant Terry O’Callan paused only once in his headlong plunge toward the fort. He sat at the side of the trail, hat off his head and over his heart as the body of the Olsen baby was taken away in its small casket by a hard-faced man and weeping woman, seated on the wagon box. Relatives of the dead child’s mother had been located and they wanted to give their niece a proper Christian burial. Their opinion of the Olsen in-laws was apparent in the presence of but a single coffin.

  All the while the funeral wagon passed, O’Callan’s mind churned with expectant joy. “That nice handwritin’ o’ Dillingham’s has given me the means,” he thought. “Now I have somethin’ to make it come about. Give ’em somethin’ else to occupy their darlin’ minds, indeed. That I shall, oh, that I surely shall.”

  ~*~

  Da-soda-hae had grown restless. He felt the hot stirring in his loins again that made him look with hungry, liquid eyes on the small ankles and trim, sturdy legs of the young girls of the rancheria. He chafed, too, because his father had so far failed to return from his raid. He had many questions for his father. Not the least of which was about the feeling that itched within his groin and caused his small, shriveled worm to extend painfully to rigid length.

  How was it, he wanted to ask Halcon, that a boy just entering his twelfth summer and barely made a hunter could be tinglingly filled with the same urge that overcame the warriors returning from battle? Why did he find himself compelled to look upon the young girls and feel his little lance swell and grow tight beneath his loincloth? Was it right to feel this way? Could it be natural to awaken in the middle of the night with the sap spurting from him when he dreamed of Bluebird or Raven Wing bathing naked in the creek? Should so few days into his new life make the physical pleasures of childhood stale and unsatisfying?

  But his father was not here.

  Halcon still hugged the sandstone cliffs of northern Sonora and schemed to strike at the white men again before returning to his tribe. So the message said that had come to the rancheria. Da-soda-hae—“He-Who-Sits-There”—who had been called after the boyhood name of the greatest war leader of the People, Mangus Colorado, did not know of his father’s lonely trial as he waited for replacements for the men lost in battle. Yet, the boy sat in his own solitary vigil, under the frigid winter sky, seeking answers among the unspeaking stars. The constellations wheeled on toward midnight and the boy rose, stiff and cold, to go to his wikiup.

  Inside, he tied into place the thick bearskin that formed a weather tight cover for the doorway, slipped out of moccasins and loincloth, and went, naked, to sit cross-legged beside his mother at the fire. He sat as he had done when a small child, close in, his cheek pressed to her warm thigh.

  “You are troubled, my son,” Niente said softly.

  The big dark-black eyes looked up at her face. “Yes, Mother. My father has not returned and I—I have ... ” his voice trailed off.

  “I understand a troubled heart,” Niente told her son.

  And well she did. She had been born to a captive white child, a girl of no more summers than Da-soda-hae, who had barely passed into puberty before she was introduced to the expected duties of a woman and a slave. Foremost among those duties had been to serve the carnal appetites of her master and any braves to whom he chose to offer her. Two warriors provided her first experience with sex and she had been impregnated the same night.

  When the baby was born, in the rancheria of Halcon’s father, it had come in to a new status.

  Neither a full member of the band, nor a white slave as was its mother, the baby presented a problem. Since there was no precedent for this in the tribe, she was named for her new station: Niente—which is an Apache distortion of the Spanish word, “nothing.”

  Niente did not receive the same harsh treatment her mother had been forced to endure, yet she was not fully accepted either. She was tolerated by the older women, ignored by her peers, and given only perfunctory instructions in the religion of the People by the shaman. It wasn’t until the great Halcon, son of the chief and war leader of the band, had come suddenly to choose her as his third wife that many of the tribe knew anything of her except her name. She was still young, not more than twenty-five summers, yet save for Da-soda-hae, she was barren.

  Despite this, Halcon kept her for wife and cherished her more than most Apache men did their women. Her son, and only issue, had inherited from her his light skin—in fact no darker than a moderately tanned pen-dik-oye. He had likewise inherited her preference for being alone and her inclination toward long and sober contemplation.

  She reached out now and stroked his soft black hair, ran her fingertips along his child’s round cheek and traced the outline of his immature jaw. Her eyes filled with moisture from tears she would never shed and she smiled at the happiness, his nearness brought her. He was so like his father, yet was a part of her as well. His eyes sometimes seemed of a mixed color,
their blackness overlaid with the blue of the sky, so that they had no definable color at all. It was all a great mystery.

  “Never fear, my son. You are only experiencing the agony of growing up. Your father shall do great battle with the pen-dik-oye and return with many cattle and horses to enrich the People and feast your hunters loincloth as should be.”

  “I do not fear for him in war, Mother. I only long for him to be near to us.”

  “So do I, my child, so do I.”

  Eight

  Far from the sere desert around Fort Dawson and the difficulties assaulting Sergeant Terrance O’Callan, far-reaching decisions were being made along the banks of the Potomac. In the hallowed halls of the War Department, a large meeting room had been set up for a gathering as unique as it was important. Enough stars clustered around the conference table to form a respectable constellation.

  Generals rubbed elbows with admirals, cabinet members, and an occasional scientist in sober, civilian dress. The proposal they had come to consider would affect the lives of many people in the United States and around the world.

  “Gentlemen, let’s get down to business,” Admiral Standis, the chairman, announced when the guard at the door indicated all were present.

  Throats cleared and chairs scraped as the assembled experts, politicians, and military men took places at the large, oval table. Seated to the right of the admiral, Secretary of the Interior Samuel J. Kirkwood nodded to the rumple-suited men of science he had brought along.

  The scientists produce reams of paper and one opened a small brassbound wooden chest. From it he took a small instrument of unfamiliar nature and set it up on a tripod. When the last shifting of bodies, stroking of beards, and shuffling of notes ended, the chairman went on.

  “When the proposal was brought to the navy to assist in establishing stations to observe and report on the weather, it was met with great enthusiasm. I’m sure you all know that sailing ships, and even steam-powered vessels, are highly vulnerable to conditions of the wind and water, storms and the like. To be able, through some scientific means, to predict the weather would be a godsend to the United States Navy. Such an advantage could make us the most powerful fleet afloat. Our, ah, British cousins notwithstanding.” Admiral Standis paused and cleared his throat.

  “Therefore, we entered the program with considerable energy. Thanks to the efforts of Secretary Kirkwood, Secretary of War Lincoln, and the attorney general, I am now prepared to announce that such a project, that of reliably predicting the weather, is ready to be instituted. It is the President’s wish, and that of the secretaries of war and interior, that this enterprise be expanded. Naturally, a chain of stations along our east coast, or any other singular coast, would not accomplish the desired results. We propose to establish weather observation and reporting stations all across the nation and, ultimately, around the world. Of course, the navy has no bases on dry land. That’s where you gentlemen of the army come in.” A suppressed rumble of muttering voices filled the room.

  ~*~

  Early the morning after his visit to Lester Wells, O’Callan rode back into the small village. His twinkling blue eyes noted a considerable increase in activity over the previous day.

  Leroy Hays and his posse had returned with their prisoner and a hanging was soon to be held. Men, women, and children filled the wide, leveled stretch of hard-packed desert soil that served as a main street—though it hardly deserved the name. The town’s businesses faced each other across this straight strip, which sported at its central—and only—intersection not a bandstand, but a gallows.

  Behind the tall facades of the main drag and its ominous decoration, two narrow, twisting, and uneven tracks served the low, flat-topped adobe buildings wherein the inhabitants of Lester Wells resided. It was from these and outlying ranches that the people swarmed to the gallows plaza to observe what they assumed would be a speedy and public trial and equally quick execution of the captured killer.

  Terry O’Callan threaded his way through the growing crowd of overalled and homespun-clad thrill seekers and rode his horse up to Hays’s saloon. He dismounted, beating the trail dust from his uniform. Shouldering his way through a throng of men, he went directly inside the cantina, but had to stop a moment to let his eyes get used to the windowless, dark interior. No matter how often, or how recently, he had entered this emporium of spirits, O’Callan always examined it closely, a soldier’s instinct too deeply ingrained to ever take his surroundings casually.

  The walls and floors were made of rough-hewn lumber, the latter being hopelessly and perpetually stained with the results of some of the least accurate tobacco chewers of Arizona Territory. The bar itself was a simple device, made up of four barrels that supported three heavy four-by-twelve railroad trestle planks laid across them. The top surfaces had been carefully planed, sanded, and given a thick coat of varnish so that glasses and bottles could be slid down the length to thirsty customers. Today, Leroy Hays himself tended the bar while Charlie Gonzoles arranged the crudely made, gaudily painted chairs in neat rows. Hays looked up and spotted O’Callan. He gazed at the short little sergeant with mild surprise as O’Callan walked to the bar.

  “Sneak off fer a snort, O’Callan?” he greeted the cavalry sergeant.

  Terry O’Callan’s voice tightened with mild anxiety. His plan could work, would in fact work, if he got Leroy’s cooperation. “Naw, it tain’t that. I got important business with ye, Hays ... Official army business, that is.”

  Leroy Hays noted the serious tone and demeanor of his visitor and jerked his head toward the partition that separated the barroom from his office and storage area. “I got a trial and hangin’ coming up shortly. Charlie’s fixin’ the place for court now, but he can cover for me for a few minutes.” He led O’Callan back to his office and motioned him in, closing the door behind them. “Now, what’s the trouble out at Fort Perdido, O’Callan?”

  “Lord love us all! Sure an’ ye’re startin’ to use that heathen name fer our beloved Fort Dawson, are ye? Has everyone gone daft? Colonel Dawson was a fine an’ brave man. Sure it is he deserves a fort named after him. An’ equal so that it be treated with the proper respect.” His tirade done, O’Callan calmed and addressed the purpose of his visit. “No trouble, Hays, it’s just that I’ve got a small favor to beg o’ ye.” Hays took a bottle out of his desk drawer and poured them each a shot. “Hell, I’ll be glad to do what I can. What is it you need?”

  Terry O’Callan took a deep breath so he could get it all out without being interrupted. Then he blurted out his request.

  Hays stopped short, the glass halfway to his lips. “You just wait a minute, O’Callan. What kind of deviltry are you up to?”

  O’Callan raised his hand in a calming gesture. “No deviltry, Hays. I assure ye that it’s all decent and above board. Ye do have the names, don’t ye?”

  “Shore I do,” Hays admitted.

  “I figgered ye would,” O’Callan answered with a relieved sigh. “I truly need those names, an’ to tell ye the truth, I’m never very sober when I’m over there, Hays.”

  Hays sputtered through his drink, then belted out a full, deep laugh, slapping his thigh. He shook his head as his mirth subsided. “I gotta hand it to you, O’Callan, you’re frank and honest enough about that ... but, I don’t think it’s the kind of information I should give out. What do you want to know fer?”

  “What I’m gonna do is a secret. If I break the law, ye kin come and arrest me.”

  “You know I ain’t nothin’ but a town marshal, O’Callan. I ain’t got any authority outside o’ Lester Wells and in particular, not at the fort. You soljer boys are the real law in these parts.”

  “Hays,” O’Callan pleaded desperately, “I know ye run an honest game here and I trust ye. I’ve just got to have those names and I have a proposition I think ye’ll agree to. I’ve got a hundred dollars that I’ll give to ye, an’ if I misuse the names, ye kin keep it. And once ye find out what I’m usin’ ’em fer an’ ye agre
e that it was a good cause, ye kin return me money.”

  Hays thought a moment. “Well, that sounds fair enough to me. Sort of a bond, like. I’ll write it all out and we’ll both sign. You give me the money and I’ll give you their names.”

  “That’s fine, Leroy. I appreciate this. Just ye be careful with the money. ’Tis part o’ me savin’s fer me retirement. To become a gentleman saloonkeeper like yerself, ye know.”

  Hays laughed sympathetically. “I’m flattered. But I don’t know if there’s all that much glory and satisfaction in this trade. You stayin’ for the hangin’?” he asked casually as he scribbled away on the list of names.

  “Naw. I’ll stay for some drinkin’, but executions were never me idea of a spectator sport.”

  Leroy drew up the agreement next. O’Callan’s money changed hands and he pocketed the list. Then the two men sat in comfort while they consumed several shots of Leroy Hays’s excellent rye whiskey. Their contemplation and small talk were interrupted when Charlie Gonzoles knocked lightly on the door before opening it to stick his head into the room. “Time to start the trial, Leroy ... ah, Yer Honor.”

  “Okay, Charlie, be right there. You might as well stay for the trial,” he suggested to O’Callan. “No whiskey can be sold until after.”

  “Right ye are, Leroy. What this fellow do?”

  “Murdered his partner for full claim in a mine. But instead of doing it nice and quiet-like, he chose to take care of it right here in Lester Wells, in front of about a dozen witnesses. So now it’s my job to hang him.”

  The trial went quickly enough. The biggest problem developed over selecting a jury of twelve men who were not also witnesses to the killing. Once the first two citizens had told their story, there was no doubt that the accused would hang. By early afternoon it was over and the bar open again. O’Callan had three more shots of Leroy’s good rye and headed back to Fort Dawson while the condemned man was being led to the gallows.