The Deliverance

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “In that case, perhaps you could help us. We’re looking for a gentleman who knows the Utes and can talk their tongue, as well as the Mexicans and can talk Spanish. Your reward would be exactly nothing in terms of wealth, but deep satisfaction in other respects.”

  The Colonel turned serious. “Mister Skye, Sah, your purposes are unknown to me and my partners. You may think me excessively cautious, but I assure you, there is calculation in all that I do, and further, Shine is an important reason I am harvesting furs from the Utes as no one has ever done before. I must know every detail of your intentions, and then I will judge.”

  Skye didn’t reply for a while. He gazed at these ruffians, at the fat man and his monkey, and at Standing Alone.

  “Our purposes are nothing but charity,” he said. “There’s not a peso in it. Let us put up our horses, pay you for some feed for man and beast, and then I’ll tell you a story. And I’d like to hear yours, Colonel Childress.”

  eight

  Skye and the women cared for their horses and the mule, splashed water bucketed from a shallow well over themselves, and settled on the veranda in time for a quiet twilight visit. The man who called himself Colonel Childress always enjoyed that time of day at this arid place not far from where the Arkansas River erupted from the mountains. The place cooled swiftly except in midsummer, and the air was so dry that his armpits chafed.

  The Colonel knew of Skye; so did the Colonel’s colleagues. No man of the western borders was ignorant of this legend of the mountains. The Colonel also knew about the Cheyenne woman, and that excited his curiosity more than anything else. Why was the storied Standing Alone with Skye and Victoria Skye?

  Well, there would be an answer soon enough—if Skye was willing to tell the whole story.

  “Tell us about your post, Colonel,” Skye said, after completing his ablutions.

  “Why, Sah, we’re six in all, out of the Texas Republic but we trade in Taos and sometimes Fort William, up on Laramie’s River. We’ve two Mex boys also, from the ranchos down below, and they herd and do our chores.”

  “That’s a goodly number.”

  “Dangerous land, Mister Skye; not for greenhorns and fools. But the post has loopholes and a small tower, and we can defend.”

  Skye turned toward the others. “Gentlemen, I am Mister Skye, and whom do I address?”

  The Colonel caught the glances, and nodded. One by one, his militia proffered a name. Crowsnest Jones, Horace, Spade, and Deuce. Men with ugly scars, squinty eyes, and a loose-limbed quickness that made them deadly. Men with long knives, dragoon pistols, and rifles standing nearby.

  “Men of the borders?” Skye asked blandly.

  “Every one a Texan and a water man. We’re a seafaring nation, Sah. Texas is. Most of them have walked a teak deck and climbed rigging. Not men to tangle with.”

  “I would not think of it,” Skye said. “I always want to know who I am with. Especially when I may have business to transact.”

  “Business,” the Colonel said, sardonically. “Business or charity?”

  Skye stared at the Colonel with a gaze so intense that the Colonel was taken aback.

  Crowsnest Jones, his skinny cook, hustled around inside the hot building, putting some corn tortillas on a trencher for the guests. He added some cold chorizo and beans, and brought the platter out. The guests could build their own meals from that. Crowsnest Jones was a sailor once, a soldier now. The surname probably had not been Jones until recently. His shirt covered a Louisiana convict brand. All of the Colonel’s men had been handpicked for the reconnaissance.

  Shine stole a tortilla and some beans, and retreated with one graceful leap to the log vigas, where it ate and slurped and licked its little fingers.

  Victoria Skye hissed at him. But Standing Alone laughed, and looked to be ready to toss more tortillas at the bandit.

  Skye finished eating, belched luxuriously, and settled back against the log wall.

  “Victoria and I are assisting our friend here, Standing Alone of the Cheyennes,” he said. “If you haven’t heard of her, I’ll tell her story.”

  He waited, but not a man responded.

  “We are looking for her children,” he said.

  Sheer amazement flooded through Childress.

  The astonishment was palpable. No one said a word. The Colonel thought that such a quest was the most quixotic venture he had ever heard of, and he had heard of plenty of foolish things. But he was smitten by the whole idea, because he was a born Don Quixote. And for other, more profound reasons. His interest quickened, and he began to see possibilities in this.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “We’re going to find that boy and girl and return them to their mother, and to their people. Wherever they are, we’ll find them. Some thread will lead the way. If they’re alive, down in the Mexican silver mines or hoeing the fields or herding the cattle, we’ll find them. I’m hoping you might help us deal with the Utes who stole them and probably sold them—to someone, somewhere.”

  “My dear Mister Skye, Sah. A most admirable enterprise, but we can’t help. We’re not in the brat business.” He laughed. “Maybe we should be. Steal flesh and peddle it. Beats trading for buffalo robes.”

  “How long have you been open for business here?”

  “A week. But we’ve been in this country for some while, scouting and trading from our wagons. We decided on this place, got out the axes, and began laying up logs a fortnight ago.”

  “I thought so. New logs. No one at Bent’s Fort knows of this post. Any band show up here yet?”

  “No. They’ll find us. We’re open for business. Mister Skye, Sah, what you’ll do is head straight into Mexico. There’s slave markets in every town. Taos first, then the city of the Sacred Faith, and then the duke of Albuquerque’s town, and on down the royal road clear to the City of Mexico or beyond. You have an entire walled and private nation to search, and you no doubt can devote a lifetime to the task. Some hacendado down there has the brats, if they’re still alive. Not the Utes.”

  “Why not the Utes, mate?”

  “Because stolen children are commodities to them; they even sell their own. A working-age brat is worth a horse, and Utes lack horses because they’re a mountain tribe. Sometimes they keep a little nit a few months, looking for a place to peddle him. But not four years. There are two choices: the children are dead or the children are alive in Mexico trapped in slavery.”

  Skye nodded.

  Shine leaped from viga to viga, using his prehensile tail to swing through the air, until he landed on Skye’s bench, and then he sprang gracefully to Skye’s shoulder and stole his battered black hat.

  “Hey!” roared Skye, as the top hat sailed toward Victoria, who caught it.

  But Shine wasn’t done. He plucked the medicine bundle from Skye’s chest, lifted the thong over Skye’s head, and ran off with it.

  Standing Alone leaped to her feat, stricken, and cried out.

  The thieving monkey whirled the sacred bundle around and around merrily, and then sprang toward the Colonel and lowered the thong over the Colonel’s head. Childress stared at the small leather packet that contained some redskin’s totems, stared at the delicately dyed leather full of symbols that meant something to those people.

  Standing Alone trilled like a wounded bird, and staggered toward the Colonel, stared at the bundle as it rested on a new bosom, and wailed.

  “Grandmother,” he said in his rudimentary Cheyenne, “what is this?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, as if this sight were too much for mortal eyes.

  “Grandmother?”

  “I will say this: Whoever wears the sacred bundle must help me find my children. I gave the sacred bundle to Mister Skye, and now it is no longer upon his breast.” She began a strange chant, dolorous and sad, like a death song the Colonel once had heard sung by an ancient Aztec. But something melodic and haunting about her song told him she was singing about life at its very roots, not de
ath.

  He fingered the bundle and found it light, and yet oh, so heavy.

  “What did she say, mate?” Skye asked.

  “It seems you were the one to find the boy and the girl, Sah,” the Colonel said. “My monkey has upset her universe. The sacred bundle obligates whoever wears it.”

  But the Cheyenne woman tugged at his sleeve.

  “Grandfather,” she whispered, “now you have worn the bundle, and now you must help me find my children, for that is the meaning of this. It is your fate.”

  “She says, Mister Skye, that now I’m committed to her cause, because I have worn the bundle.”

  Skye held out a hand, wanting the bundle back, but Childress was in no hurry to return it.

  Maybe there was merit in it. Childress had always lent himself to any good cause, and maybe he could lend himself to this one, and serve several good causes at once. Maybe this would be a way to serve President Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. Maybe … it would offer concealment for his other designs, the original ones, worked out long ago in another land.

  He weighed the risks. The things he had told Skye about himself were true enough, but there was so much more to it. He was indeed engaged in a filibuster but not on his own behalf. He was serving Lamar’s great vision of a Republic of Texas stretching from sea to sea. He had come here with a few picked members of the Texas militia to reconnoiter northern New Mexico in advance of the army that was even then being marshaled in Texas. The whole of this province was being held by scarcely a hundred armed Mexicans, and was there for the plucking. Ah! What an enterprise! But of this Skye knew nothing. Childress believed in smoke as the best way to conceal true purpose.

  Thus did Colonel Childress sit on that veranda pondering this sudden turn of events. And the more he pondered them, the more opportunity he saw.

  “Mister Skye, Sah, I do believe I greatly favor your cause. What a noble heart you have, gallantly assisting this lovely princess of the Cheyennes. My own jaded heart is soft and tendah toward any urchin trapped by the greed of cruel masters. If you should desire my company whilst you roam northern Mexico in pursuit of mercy and grace and communion with saints, Sah, I think I might join you. I am not a bad companion of the road. Perhaps I can even contribute a bit to your enterprise, for I have an able tongue, and a sturdy cart, and the assistance of the little pirate and thief Shine, who has talents you cannot fathom, all of which will become manifest as we ransack Mexico, each in our own fashion.”

  Skye was staring again. “Colonel, the bundle, please,” he said, holding out his hand. The mountaineer meant business.

  nine

  The bundle,” said Skye, holding out his hand. But Childress was not surrendering it. The monkey jumped to the trader’s shoulder and scolded Skye.

  “The bundle,” Skye repeated.

  Childress did not lift the thong over his head.

  “Make your Little Person give the sacred medicine bag back,” Victoria snapped. “It is Skye’s.”

  Childress addressed her, inflating himself in his chair.

  “Ah! If it were a mere thing of material value, gold, rubies, aphrodisia, rupees, Grecian statuary, anything of that miserable sort, I would remove the dead weight from my neck at once, for I have no patience with mere wealth. But this is purely a mystical gift and it was intended that I should receive it so that I might be empowered by the Spirits. Thus it represents my destiny, my incubus, which my discerning monkey at once recognizes.”

  He scratched the simian’s jaw.

  “The bundle,” said Skye.

  Childress addressed Victoria. “Shine didn’t steal it; he merely bestowed it, and now I am committed to your noble cause, without reservation or cavil. Someday, when this is over, I will return it to your esteemed husband …” He peered at her. “But let us ask the woman whose will and intention matters most to us.”

  He turned to Standing Alone, who stood transfixed, understanding little of this, and spoke to her in her tongue, his fingers lifting the sacred bundle even as he spoke to her.

  Standing Alone replied in the simplest manner: she approached the fat Colonel, lifted the bundle from his possession, and gently gave it to Skye. He felt its mysterious power as it lay in his hand, and then he lifted his hat and settled the medicine bundle upon his chest, where it belonged. That made things right. The Cheyenne woman nodded.

  But Standing Alone was not through. She was talking in her tongue to Childress, and pointing at the monkey.

  “She says, Sah, that I must come with you. The monkey is very wise. I am at your service, Sah.”

  Skye saw how it would be. He had gotten in with a daft adventurer, a self-confessed privateer and soldier of fortune, alleged Texan, and only God knew what else. Those gents on the veranda were not traders. Skye had spent years among Indian traders, and none of them resembled this phalanx of cutthroats. Colonel, indeed! Buccaneer, fraud, mountebank, confidence man, these were the correct titles. Skye had made mistakes in his life, but this would not be one of them.

  “Colonel, tell our friend Standing Alone that we respect her wisdom, and we are honored that she asked us to look for her children. But we’re going on our way now, without your help.”

  “Skye—”

  Standing Alone somehow fathomed what Skye was saying. She probably grasped plenty of English after all those seasons at the gate of Bent’s Fort, though she didn’t speak it.

  She did not hesitate, but rushed to Skye, a tall, proud woman who each day seemed younger than the previous day, and gently pressed her hands over his.

  “All come,” she said, and then spoke in her own tongue to Childress.

  The Colonel translated. “She wants me to help you to find the Utes and look for her children in the nation across the river; she means the Mexicans, Sah. The monkey has told her that I must come with you on this great quest for justice and liberty and reunion. I accepted with pleasure.”

  Craziness. The woman had never seen a monkey before, so the monkey was a new god.

  Skye had rarely felt such misgivings. He felt trapped. Here he was, committed to Standing Alone, being pulled and tugged by a Cheyenne tribal medicine bundle and a thieving monkey named Shine and a fat trader who sounded more like a pirate, and probably was one.

  He turned to Victoria.

  “Big medicine,” she said. “Little Person gives the fat man the medicine bundle. Skye, we go get them damned Cheyenne Dog Soldier children, and he comes with us,” said Victoria, gesturing toward Childress. “You and me and Standing Alone and the fat man and the Little Person.”

  Monkey or not, Victoria wanted Childress along. Skye gawked at her. Suddenly he laughed, the miraculous, booming Skye laugh that shook the mountains and shivered the grasses, and settled his mind and lifted his heart.

  “All right, we will.”

  All those hard-eyed scoundrels on the porch stared. He wondered whether the warrants for their arrest numbered in the twenties, fifties, or hundreds. They weren’t border men; they were men a thousand miles beyond the borders, and for good reason.

  Skye eyed the fat man. “How are you going to travel?” he asked. “Not by horse, that’s certain.”

  “I have a cart and a dray.”

  “We need more horses.”

  “I’ll arrange it. What will you offer?”

  “I need the loan of them.”

  “I will do it.”

  “At dawn, then, Colonel?”

  “I sleep late,” he said.

  “We’ll be ready whenever you are.”

  “Our accommodations leave something to be desired, but you are welcome.” He waved toward the gloomy chamber.

  Skye had already peered into the rectangular dirt-floored room stacked with trade goods but redolent of sweat and viler odors. This outfit had yet to erect bunks or build an outhouse, and were simply making their beds among the spiders and snakes.

  “Think we’ll camp down by the river, Colonel.”

  “As you wish, Sah.”

  He led h
is silent women down to a flat near the water where they could bathe. The sky didn’t threaten, and they could unroll their robes on soft dry silt that would shape to their bodies.

  Standing Alone retreated to her own space thirty or forty yards distant, as usual, leaving Skye and Victoria alone under the bright canopy of stars. A chill breeze swept out of the western mountains, and by dawn Skye would be pulling his robes tight around him.

  He could hear the water lapping. Far off, a coyote barked. He listened closely. Not all coyote sounds were coyotes.

  Victoria huddled close this time, which was not like her.

  “Skye, that thing you call monkey. I know what it is,” she whispered.

  “It’s just a critter from far south.”

  “No! It is a Little Person!”

  Skye sat up. “What is that?”

  “Only my people know them. A few Absaroka have seen them. But that is one. Aiee! I never thought I would see one.”

  Skye waited intently. If Victoria didn’t want to say more, nothing could persuade her to.

  “Sometimes they are friends and help us. Sometimes one of our warriors or hunters is in trouble, and a Little Person helps him. He brings a lost horse, or brings wood to splint a broken leg, or finds water. They live in caves and hidden places. This man the Colonel, he does not know this, but I know.”

  “Then we have a helper,” Skye said.

  “Ha! Skye, you don’t know nothing. The Little People are tricksters too, like the coyote, making everyone miserable. Maybe this Little Person makes us miserable. They steal, too, and that is how I know. This Little Person, he would steal everything we got and hide it if he could.” She paused. “Don’t you trust no Little Person.”

  “The Colonel obviously does.”

  Victoria laughed sardonically. “Look at him. Fat man run by a Little Person like a gelded horse hitched to a wagon and he don’t even know it.”

  Skye didn’t reply. Sometimes silence was best. He squeezed her hand. It wasn’t the monkey he was worried about; it was the erratic and strange Colonel from Galveston Bay who could put them all into a parcel of trouble. But when he thought of those missing Cheyenne children, and the ever-blooming Standing Alone, who was so filled with hope now, he didn’t have any regrets.