by John Benteen
“Shut up!” he rasped. He looked at Fargo. “And you, stand hitched.” His eyes still glittered. “This is the end of it. I’ve been a damned fool for twenty years, livin’ off beans and hay, being passed over for promotion while the Club gets all the gravy. Well, that’s done! If those people back at Terlingua are waitin’ for Murphy and me, they got a long wait ahead of ’em!”
“So that’s it,” Fargo said.
“That’s it.” Fallon nodded. “Neal, let’s get down to cases. Where’s the rest of it—the big money?”
“The big money?” Fargo asked with careful innocence.
“Yes, by God! And don’t tell me you don t know! I had a deal with Sam Finch and four other men. They were running guns to Valeriano, and he was to pay ’em fifty thousand dollars and I was to get my cut! Only Sam never showed up back at Terlingua. Somebody bushwhacked him and his men on the way and took that gold. Chopped ’em up to make it look like Indians did it—Yaquis, I reckon. But it wasn’t Indians; we found tracks of a shod horse in and out, and I’ve got a damned good hunch whose horse it was. But you didn’t have that much money with you when you hit Terlingua. So you must have cached it down here, come back with your slut to find it.”
“You’re talkin’ pipe dreams, Tom,” said Fargo easily.
“I’m talkin’ truth! You know where that gold is and Murph and I want it! And when we get it, we’re takin’ off to South America!” His laugh was a rasping sound. “A man can live pretty good down there on a stake like that!” He laid down the rifle, drew an Army-issue Colt automatic .45 from its scabbard. He took a step toward Fargo. “Now … where’s the money?”
Fargo shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You lie. But that’s all right. I can play games, too. I can get the truth out of you. I learned a lot of tricks from the Moros on Mindanao, Neal. You know what they are; they make what the Injuns used to do look tame. I’m prepared to use ’em all on you.”
He meant it. Fargo’s mind worked swiftly. “And suppose I did know. Suppose I told you. What then?”
Fallon chuckled. “Then you get a quick bullet. What more can a man in your position ask?”
“But the girl—”
“Her.” Fallon’s eyes ranged over Nola. “Well, we’ll throw her into the pot. I expect this bandit, Valeriano, would pay well for her. You know how these Mexicans are about American women. Anyhow, she’ll come in handy to trade with.”
Nola made a strangled sound. Fallon disregarded it. “Well, Neal?”
Fargo looked from the Captain to the Sergeant. He knew what drove these men: a kind of insanity, a bitterness, compounded of too much isolation, too much loneliness, too much hard living and danger, all endured for too little pay and no recognition. He’d seen it before—good soldiers turning rogue. That he understood it, however, made his position no less perilous. He could play for time and hope—there was nothing else left to him.
Slowly, he nodded. “All right, Fallon,” he said. “I’ll take you to the money. But not until after dark.”
“I didn’t aim to leave ’til then,” Fallon said. “I’m no fool. I don’t want to bump into Valeriano and his men, either.”
They waited out the day in the juniper thicket, Fargo bound hand and foot, though the girl was left free. Murphy had whiskey in his saddlebags. He and Fallon drank steadily. The alcohol took effect quickly in the heat. But, finally, Fallon shook his head. As Murphy drank again, he reached for the bottle. “That’s enough, Murph.”
“Don’t hand me that,” the sergeant snapped. “You and me is on an equal footin’ now. I want a drink, I’ll take one.” Defiantly, he swilled more whiskey. Then he shoved the bottle to Nola. “Here, baby doll.” His lips curled. “Take a little slug. It’ll calm your nerves.”
Nola’s lips moved soundlessly. She pushed the bottle away.
Murphy grinned. “You don’t know what’s good for you, kid. You’ll need all the help you can get when we turn you over to the Mexicans. Besides, a little booze lubricates the lovin’.” He thrust out one big hand, and before Nola could move he had her, pulled her to him.
“Let me go!” she spat, struggling. Murphy only laughed, holding her locked powerless in the crook of his massive arm. She screamed, and Murphy hit her. The impact of the blow stunned her. She relaxed in his grasp. Murphy laughed.
“Now,” he said.
Tightly bound, Fargo had to sit there and watch it. When Murphy was through, Fallon took his turn.
When it was over, Nola sobbed quietly. Fargo’s eyes were hard as they shuttled between the two men. “I owe you both a number of things,” he said. “You better hope I never get a chance to settle up with you.”
Nola’s voice was dull. “Let it go, Fargo. It doesn’t matter. Don’t get them stirred up.”
“It matters to me,” Fargo said quietly.
“What matters to you don’t count any more, Neal,” Fallon said.
He had to give Nola credit. She was smart enough not to resist. The two men, full of whiskey, demanded much of her throughout an afternoon that seemed interminable. She gave it, docile, puppet-like, careful not to rouse them to further violence.
At last the sun dropped lower. Finally Fallon arose, stretched. “All right, Murph,” he said. “Time to shove off.” He cut the ropes that bound Fargo’s ankles. “Lead the way, Neal. You take us straight to the money with no tricks.” He pointed Fargo’s shotgun. “You break bad, I’ll give you a dose of your own blue whistlers.”
Fargo did not answer. He mounted the bay awkwardly, and the others climbed aboard, too. Murphy was festooned with Fargo’s bandoleers, carrying his Winchester, pistol and Batangas knife. Nola rode with shoulders slumped. Menaced by all those weapons, they left the juniper thicket, descended the bench, and headed south for the Mule Ears Peaks.
Chapter Eight
The trouble was that Murphy and Fallon were professionals, too. If they had been amateurs, Fargo would have found the chance he sought. But they had as much hard background, as many bloody years of combat behind them as he. They gave him no leeway at all, never made an opening for anything worth trying.
They wound south, crossed the flats. Against the moonlit sky the twin cones of the Mule Ears Peaks loomed blackly. Fargo led them into a canyon, worked up between the peaks, horses laboring with the climb. Time was growing short. Once he’d showed them the money he was finished. And if he didn’t lead them to it he was done for, too.
Well, given a minute of life, a man had a minute of hope. That was all that counted—to stretch life out as far as it would reach. While he breathed, there was a chance. He delayed, took a wrong turn here, a blind alley there, but never quite enough to enrage them. Still, he found no opportunity for a break. Not with the muzzles of his own shotgun trained on him. Fargo, above all men, knew how lethal that was.
Finally, there was no help for it. As dawn cracked the sky with fractures of red and yellow, the bay scrambled out on a wide ledge. This was it. Somewhere high up on this peak was a cave covered by a rock slide. Fargo batted weary eyes looking for the landmark, the hawk-billed rock.
Then he saw it: the token of his doom. He reined in, wondering in his own mind if he should reveal his knowledge. His eyes played over the surrounding mountainside. And then he nodded faintly, letting out a long breath.
“All right, Fallon,” he said. “There it is.” He pointed with bound hands toward the great pile of rubble. “Somewhere behind that.”
In country like this, it did not take much to start a huge avalanche. The one Finch and his men had started had been massive. It had scarred the mountainside, barred the entrance to the cave where the money was hidden with tons of rubble.
“Where?” Then Fallon saw it and swore.
At the same time, Murphy turned in the saddle, bull-like voice seething with anger. “Goddamn you, Fargo! You knew it! You knew it all along! Hell, it’ll take a ten-man working party to dig the money out from behind all that crap!”
“I knew it was cov
ered by a rock slide,” Fargo said. “I didn’t know how big.”
Murphy swung on Fallon, lifting his rifle. “All right, Tom! We know where it is! Let’s kill the bastard now!”
“Put that thing up,” Fallon said. “That’s an order.”
“An order? Listen, you ain’t a captain any longer and I ain’t a sergeant. And this son of a bitch—”
“I said, put it up.” There was still authority in Fallon’s voice. “We ain’t through with him yet, Murph. We need him.”
“Need him?”
To dig, goddamn it! It’s gonna take all of us to jerk that money out from under that rock pile!”
“Oh,” Murphy said. He lowered the rifle. “Yeah. Yeah, hell, you’re right. Why should we sweat when he and this slut can—”
“Gentlemen,” a voice said, seemingly coming from the sky above them. It was soft, touched with an Eastern accent, strangely cultured. “Gentlemen,” that voice from nowhere went on, “you’re wrong, all of you. You’re all going to sweat. And don’t anybody move. There are thirty guns covering you, and the first man that tries to shoot is dead.”
Even Fargo was paralyzed with astonishment. His eyes raked the darkness of the mountainside, strewn as it was with boulders and clumped with sparse cactus. It lay still, silent, seemingly deserted in the tricky moonlight.
Then the voice spoke again—but, this time, in no language that Fargo could understand.
And suddenly they were there. And all at once Fargo knew it had not been a mirage that time before; nor an illusion of heat.
For the Apaches appeared.
Unmistakable in silhouette, they reared up suddenly from cover that would not have concealed a lizard. They seemed to grow like strange plants out of the steep cliffs above, and the moonlight struck gleams from the barrels of the rifles in their hands.
That disembodied voice came again. “You see? You’re covered. Throw down your guns. Every last one of them.”
“Captain.” Murphy’s voice was strangled.
Fallon sucked in a rasping breath. “I don’t understand this—”
“They’re Apaches,” Fargo said. “They’re bronco Chiricahuas, and you’d better do what they say.”
“No—” Fallon balked. “Apaches? They can’t be—”
“But we are,” said the unseen speaker. “The big man is right. We’re Chiricahuas, and we’ve never signed any peace treaty with you white-eyes. So drop them. The guns. Within the next thirty seconds.”
“It’s a lie,” said Fallon. “I’d know if Injuns had jumped the Reservation—”
“Lie or not, twenty seconds,” the voice said.
There was the sound of rifle bolts working, carbine levers snicking. It was one all three men knew. Fallon made a noise in his throat. “Drop your guns, Murph.”
The sergeant had sense enough to obey. Weapons clattered to the rocky floor of the ledge. Then, from high above, on the towering cliff, there was the sound of sliding shale. A man appeared, descending with catlike grace down the slope of the peak.
He dropped the last ten feet lightly, and then he was on the ledge before Fargo and the others. They could see him in the gleam of the moon. Naked to the waist, he was young, coppery, black hair shining in the silver light. His teeth shone as he grinned, tilting the muzzle of his carbine toward the Americans on the ledge.
“So someone finally led us to it,” he said. “I knew, if we waited long enough—”
“Led you to it? Waited?” Fallon’s voice rang with astonishment.
“We killed five men. None would talk. But they had money. Much money. Money we need. For weeks we have watched, waiting for someone to take us to it. I knew that sooner or later someone would. We trailed you all of today, and when we saw where you were going, we circled ahead … ” He chuckled. “Now, you’ll all dig. You’ll dig until you bring out the gold.”
The other Indians closed in, forming a tight group around them, stationed on the mountainside and descending to the ledge. Fargo, his caution overpowered by his curiosity, spoke for the first time. “Who the hell are you?”
“At the Indian School, Carlisle, they called me Billy Black. I prefer to be known as El Tigre. It is a good fighting name for an Apache.”
He moved into a puddle of moonlight. With a clearer view, Fargo recognized him. He had seen him through the field-glasses weeks before, on a rearing horse. Yes, it was the same Indian.
“Now,” the man said, smile fading. “Get down, all of you. You damned white dogs. Get down and begin to dig.”
They dismounted. Murphy made a sound of rebellion in his chest, but it died as a half dozen braves moved in on him with aimed rifles. Fargo’s eyes swept over them; it was a strange sensation—he felt as if he had been catapulted back in time. These were wild Apaches all right. There was none of the hangdog look of Reservation Indians about them.
At El Tigre’s orders, a couple of bucks led their horses down the ledge. “Listen—” Fallon began. “I don’t know—”
“Then I will tell you.” El Tigre’s voice held an edge of irony. “You remember Geronimo?”
“Hell, yes. Everybody does.”
“My mother and my father were part of his band. They left the Reservation because they had been cheated and they were starving. With many other Indians they fled to the Sierra Madre of Mexico. The white man’s soldiers came after them. Finally, they were defeated, had no choice but to surrender. After all, they were promised that no reprisals would be taken against them.”
The Indian’s voice had the ring of steel on steel. “Again the white man lied. Instead of being returned to the Reservation, they were all handcuffed—men, women, children. Loaded onto a stinking train, sent to a prison camp in Florida. In such a place, so different from the high desert, they died like flies . . .” He moved the gun barrel. “That was where I was born, in that prison camp.”
Fargo said, “The Apaches were taken out of there, shipped to Oklahoma.”
“Indeed,” said El Tigre. “I was one of them. I grew up there, raised by my aunt. My mother and my father both rotted away in that Florida swamp camp But always I heard stories of the old, wild, free days, when all the country of the Southwest belonged to the Apaches. I dreamed those stories; they haunted me. Then, at last, after graduation, I was allowed to come back to Arizona. I saw—” He shook his head. “Never mind what I saw. Now you dig. All of you damned white men; you dig.” He thrust his rifle forward, menacingly.
They dug. Under the threat of those Apache guns, Fargo, Fallon, Nola, and Murphy were put to raking the slide rocks away from the mouth of the cave. The radiance of dawn flooded the side of the peak. They gasped with fatigue. Still, El Tigre and his men forced them to keep working.
At the orders of El Tigre, a half dozen of the Indians worked beside them. Brawny, tireless men, they had coppery bodies that gleamed with sweat. The size of the rock pile diminished. Then El Tigre, hawk like, his eyes never leaving the captives, ordered more men to the work. Presently, he made a sound of satisfaction. Three huge boulders were rolled aside. There, gaping in the wall of the peak, the dark mouth of a cave was revealed.
He said something in Chiricahua dialect. An Apache crawled into the narrow opening. Exhausted, the whites dropped to the ground, panting, muscles aching and fingers bleeding from long hours of brutal labor. Nola, pale and gasping, leaned against Fargo. But she had done her share, had worked hard in an attempt to satisfy the Indians and gain some measure of good will.
Fargo waited tensely. Suppose something had gone wrong. Suppose Finch had, in his agony, given him erroneous directions? Suppose—no, the money had to be there!
It was. Within the cave an Apache gave a crow of satisfaction. Then he scrambled forward, thrusting through the opening two sets of bulging saddlebags. El Tigre hastened forward to take them. The Indian disappeared again, brought out another pair, equally crammed. When the Apache chief opened their flaps, Fargo caught the glint of coined gold.
Beside him, Fallon made a lustf
ul sound staring at those saddlebags. “Damn!” he whispered. “A goddamn fortune, and these lousy Injuns beat us to it!”
It was his bad luck that El Tigre heard that. The young Indian whirled. A rawhide quirt dangled from his right wrist. He raised it high, slashed. The braided lash caught the captain across his face.
El Tigre’s dark eyes flamed. “One more statement like that and you’ll be skinned alive, here and now. I mean it.”
“Fallon,” Fargo said, “you’d better keep your mouth shut.”
El Tigre looked at him “A wise bit of advice.” He turned back to the saddlebags. “This gold wouldn’t even begin to pay for what the white men have stolen from my people.”
“Maybe not,” Fargo said. “But what do you aim to do with it?”
El Tigre let coins trickle through his fingers. His mouth was a thin slit. “Buy rifles,” he said tautly. “Ammunition. This will buy a lot of guns and bullets. Enough to equip an army. And then the white men will really begin to pay.”
He closed the saddlebags, stood up, looked down at the captives, and his eyes glinted with hatred. “I didn’t finish telling you my story. I said I grew up in Indian Territory. My aunt told me about the old, wild days. Even before I was of age for the manhood ceremonies, I had begun to dream of the day I’d return to my people’s land—to the Southwest. And how I’d take it back from the whites.”
He sucked in a long breath. “But I realized that I had to know as much as white men to fight them. So I kissed white tails. I kissed every white tail in the Indian Territory until they sent me to Carlisle. I made some of the highest grades ever registered there and pretended to be crazy about the white man’s civilization, to love it. I made myself into a white Indian, And finally, they sent me home—back to the San Carlos agency to teach school.”
He gestured to the other Chiricahuas. “You wonder where these Apaches came from? Well, they’re a legend come true. A long time ago—when I was a little boy—I first heard the tale. How, when Geronimo surrendered, a half dozen families refused to come in with him. Instead, they split off from the main band, went deeper into the Sierra Madre. The American Army thought it had all the Indians. It didn’t even know this band existed, and no Apache ever breathed a word of the secret to white men. But among us, everybody knew there was still a band of wild Chiricahuas living down in the Mexican mountains just as their ancestors had a hundred years before. And the legend was true.”
