APACHE LAMENT
APACHE LAMENT
PATRICK DEAREN
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, a Cengage Company
Copyright © 2019 by Patrick Dearen
Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Dearen, Patrick, author.
Title: Apache lament / Patrick Dearen.
Description: First Edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032030| ISBN 9781432855680 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781432855697 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432855703 (ebook)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5570-3
Subjects: LCSH: Texas—History. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3554.E1752 A616 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032030
First Edition. First Printing: March 2019
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5570-3
Find us on Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage
Visit our website—http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/
Contact Five Star Publishing at [email protected]
Printed in the United States of America
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For my wife, Mary, who walks with me by the singing waters
MESCALERO GLOSSARY
anee: over there
Bik’egu’indáán: God, Creator
datl’ijee: turquoise
elchínde: children
ént’í: he is a witch
Gáhé: mountain spirits
ga’í: rabbit
góbitseegháleglíní: rattlesnake
gutaaln: medicine man
guu’ k’as: cold
ídóí: mountain lion
idzúút’i: go away
inádlu: he laughs
Indaa: white person, white people
ink-tah: sit down
itsá: eagle
ixéhe: thank you
kunh-gan-hay: fire-place; camp
kuughà: teepee
Ndé: Apache
neeldá: early morning, dawn
nejeunee: friendly, kind, friend
niishjaa: owl
nil daaguut’é: a greeting; how are you?
ntsaa: big
Sháa: sun
shilth nzhu: you’re really dear to me; you’re close to my heart
shimá: mother
tádidíné: sacred pollen
Tl’é’na’áí: moon
tsé: rock
tseenaagaaí: white-tailed deer
yá: sky
yah-ik-tee: is not present; said of someone dead
yah-tats-an: it is dead; said of an animal
CHAPTER 1
He wondered if Elizabeth’s cries still echoed through the desolate pass called Bass Canyon.
Twenty-seven-year-old Sam DeJarnett relived the moment in the Carrizo Mountains of Trans-Pecos Texas as if the gunshot had just now felled him from his horse. The scorching earth under his cheek. The loaded cylinder of the Colt revolver hard against his pelvis. The pain in his temple from the grazing slug that had thrown him flat on the desert floor where the rocky heights on either side hovered closest.
Between a pitaya cactus and a twisted yucca, Sam had found a window into perdition on that May morning in 1880. A runaway schooner careened off-trail to the left and two more to the right, their mule teams in a panic. Rifle muzzles flashed fire and threw white smoke across milling emigrants and fierce, painted riders. And lost and helpless in the mayhem was a stumbling figure in bonnet and blue calico.
The searing sun glinted from a silver locket as she whirled, frantically shouting Sam’s name. Then she bolted for him, and the dust rose up thick and bitter when a slumping Apache devil with bleeding breast turned his paint horse after her.
Sam saw it all—Elizabeth’s dress flying in the catclaw and her white-ruffled petticoat shredding and the lathered horse running her down. On the first pass its shrieking rider leaned and snatched away her locket, and then he wheeled his mount after her again and readied a stone-head war club with horsetail pendant. But Sam was powerless, paralyzed in a nightmare. He was awake but he was asleep, and he experienced things distantly as if an onlooker and not a participant.
A corner of his mind spoke through his haze, pleading with him to do something with the .45 pinned beneath him. But it had been so much easier to lie there drifting into oblivion and dream and forget Elizabeth and that locket clutched in an Apache hand . . .
Bass Canyon was behind Sam now, eight months by time and a dozen miles southeast across the lowlands by distance. But it was a darker presence than ever on this frigid morning of January 26, 1881, for with every pace of his iron-gray horse through a trampled dusting of snow, he gained on those sons of hell who had taken so much from him.
Mescalero Apaches.
Reports suggested there were a dozen of them, not counting women and children. For months, they had repeatedly spilled blood on both sides of the El Paso road and then vanished into this Chihuahuan Desert complex of six-thousand-foot crags broken by sinuous passes and greasewood flats. US Army soldiers had died at Paso Viejo and Ojo Caliente, and just eighteen days ago this last remnant of Victorio’s band had swooped upon the El Paso–bound stage in Quitman Canyon and killed the driver and his passenger.
As heinous as those acts had been, the outrage in Bass Canyon was all that Sam could think about. Good God, why hadn’t he done something? He had lost his smoking Spencer carbine in the hard fall, but he’d still had a revolver in reach, so why the hell hadn’t he?
Elizabeth! I laid there and just let it happen, damn me to hell!
How many, many times, through mornings breaking as gloomy as his sleepless nights, had Sam wished that the grazing bullet had struck him flush.
You’s here for a reason.
His father’s long-ago words always competed with the ghost of Bass Canyon, and they invariably came with a memory of the warm clasp of hands before a dog-eared book gracing a hand-hewn table alive in lamplight. But as comforting as his father’s conviction had been in Sam’s childhood, he recognized it now as founded on an utter lie.
Or maybe not. If no additional significant snow came out of the dark-gray clouds, at least he and the other nine Texas Rangers on horseback could track down those murderous Apaches. Sam and the other men of Company A may have been a ragtag bunch—wide-brimmed hats creased ten different ways, worn duck trousers tucked into cracked leather boots, shabby coats of wool or buffalo hide—but they had firepower and Cinco Peso badges that gave them the authority to butcher those soulless animals.
It was a reason worth living for, all right.
“Damned cold weather to be in when we ain’t got paid in so long.”
Sam was unconcerned about the forty dollars a month, and he certainly didn’t need a reminder about the weather fr
om Matto, a stocky rider on a leggy bay at his left. A swarthy twenty-eight year old, the square-jawed man had mustered in out of New Mexico Territory during the summer heat, but frost now clung to the drooping black mustache that accentuated his perpetual scowl.
“Sets me to shakin’, it’s so cold,” Matto added.
He had an aggravating habit of making an unpleasant situation worse, and Sam snugged his ratty wool overcoat around his neck. Still, the biting north wind in his face managed to find his marrow.
“Rattles my teeth,” Matto grumbled.
Sam flexed his gloved fingers, which abruptly seemed as numb as they were stiff.
“Toes about gone too.” Matto just couldn’t keep his gravelly voice quiet.
Sam, suffering now, shivered to an icy gust and hunched over the saddle horn.
But Matto had even more to say. “No part of me but’s not froze. I—”
“If only that lingual organ of yours might freeze,” interrupted the rider ahead of Sam.
Sam didn’t care to engage Matto, but he was glad that Arch Brannon had, even if Sam had no idea what this ranger with the red-checked neckerchief had meant. Arch may have been a onetime hide skinner, but he had a vocabulary better suited to the classroom than the buffalo plains.
“Always tryin’ to prove you’re smarter than anybody,” charged Matto.
“Your tongue,” simplified Arch. “A frozen lingual organ would hinder your boundless protestations.”
Sam hadn’t expected to make friends when he had joined the Rangers at Fort Davis three months after Bass Canyon; he had set out on a mission and nothing else had mattered. But he did have a friend in Arch, a wiry rider of thirty who wore his frayed neckerchief winter and summer. Sam welcomed anyone who could take his mind off things, but Matto was in no mood for foolishness.
“One of these days,” Matto growled at Arch, “you’re goin’ to take a step too far with me.”
“Oh, I dare say I’m not much for waltzing,” said Arch.
Arch had a caustic wit as sharp as the bone-handled knife at his hip, but Sam wasn’t so sure that he should test Matto. There were good-natured men a person could hooraw and expect the same in return, and then there were scowling men like Matto who seemed to carry something dark and sinister inside.
Sam sat upright in his saddle. “Better get our jawin’ over before we hit those hills. Looks like a place to be on our guard.”
“The foothills of Sierra Diablo, the Mountains of the Devil,” said Arch. “Do you suppose His Satanic Majesty has set it aside as a playground in which his Mescalero minions might frolic?”
Sam flinched at the memory of that Mescalero war club falling toward Elizabeth. “Shut up, Arch.”
It was the most abrupt Sam had ever been with Arch, and his reaction wasn’t lost on his friend.
“Samuel, I’m sorry,” said Arch. “What’s said in jest can still be insensitive. I know what those Mescaleros took from you.”
All Sam could do was look down at the saddle horn.
“If yonder’s the Devil’s mountains,” spoke up a rider from behind, “then a right proper place for chastening, it is.”
In memory, Sam was still in Bass Canyon, but he didn’t have to pull himself back to the here and now to recognize the drawl. Back at Fort Davis, Boye had introduced himself as “Boye, the preacher boy,” and a boy of late teens was what he was. He couldn’t muster more than peach fuzz on his freckled face, but judging by his frequent comments, he had man-sized guilt.
“He’s had me by the collar, the Lord has, and he’s ready to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Boye added.
“Why don’t you stuff that collar of yours down your throat,” snarled Matto. “Or better yet, I’ll do it for you.”
“An instrument of the Almighty, you’d be. Just more retribution for all I done.”
“Sweet Mary, I don’t want any chastening,” another rider spoke up from behind. “All I want’s to get back to New Jersey and be with my Mary Jane.”
Mary Jane.
If there was anybody who aggravated Sam more than Matto, it was the fast-talking young Yankee named Jones—Jonesy to the men—who never let anyone forget that he had a sweetheart waiting for him back home. Didn’t he ever give a thought to the possibility that not everybody was so lucky?
Suddenly Sam didn’t want to be around any of them. Urging his gray ahead, he came abreast of Captain Franks on point. The captain rode the best horse in the company, a muscled black gelding with bright eyes. Sam just wished that Franks was equally as stout. Old enough to be the father of any of the men, the captain had suffered ever since they had struck out on scout from their Musquiz Canyon headquarters four days before.
“Captain—”
Franks broke into a coughing fit that discouraged conversation. Unable to step up into the stirrup at their Eagle Springs bivouac that morning, Franks had brought his horse alongside a rock in order to gain the saddle. For half a week he had wiped his draining nose against his sleeve, but today he had also developed a frightful cough.
Clearly, the captain wasn’t up to a chase through a winter storm, but just minutes ago the rangers had stumbled upon this fresh Mescalero trail. For months, the raiders had eluded the Army, and for Company A to pass up this opportunity was out of the question.
“How far ahead you think they are?” Sam asked.
“I expect closer than New Mexico and farther than a Winchester shot,” rasped Franks, patting the stock of the carbine angling up butt-first behind the cantle. As they all did, the captain carried a lever-action Winchester ’73 in a saddle scabbard.
Sam’s .44 carbine, with an effective range of a hundred yards, had cost him twenty-eight dollars, all deducted from his first month’s pay. From the moment he had hoisted the weapon, he had dedicated its twelve-round load for that war party. If the rifle didn’t finish the job, he would turn to his Bowie knife or the cartridge belt at his waist, where his .45 Colt revolver with the seven-and-a-half-inch barrel rode butt first, ready for an easy cross-draw. One way or another, those filthy Apaches would be his.
“I want us to wipe out ever’ one of them,” said Sam, noting a canyon that opened up ahead. “Exterminate them like the den of snakes they are.”
Franks hacked up phlegm and expectorated into the wind. But not all of it made it to the snow at his horse’s forefoot; an unsightly streamer caught on Franks’s gray-stubbled chin. Sam was embarrassed for him, for the captain seemed not to notice, as if his senses already focused on survival at the expense of propriety. Just days ago, his shoulders had been square and broad, but now they were bent like those of a man who had seen too many years.
“I know you’ve got special cause, son,” said Franks. “Too many people have shed tears because of what those Indians have done.”
When Franks coughed again, Sam thought he could hear a rattle in his chest. It persisted, inducing the captain to wince and bring a hand to his rib cage.
“You hurtin’?” asked Sam.
“Got my horse shot out from under me by Yankees in the war. Tore something loose. Ever since, my ribs ache when I get a chest cold.”
Sam wondered if that’s all it was, a chest cold. He could remember his father’s rattling cough before pneumonia had killed him, and the thought preyed on him as they approached those ominous foothills. After all these months, this was Sam’s chance—his chance, damn it—and he needed Franks’s leadership and experience to lead them straight into a hornets’ nest if necessary.
“I’m worried you’re not up to this,” said Sam.
The captain gave him a hard stare. Remarkably, Franks’s shoulders straightened, and no sooner had he wiped the phlegm off his face than he set his jaw.
“I’ve got a score to settle too,” he said. “Just one bunch of Indians, and the Tenth Cavalry riding every which way can’t do a thing about it. We’ve been fighting Indians on our own since Texas was a republic, and before the war I killed my share and more. It’s time I showed those clueless Y
ankees how it’s done.”
With the disrespect he put into the word Yankees, it almost sounded as if Franks was still fighting a war that had been over for a lot of years.
“Know much about the country ahead?” asked Sam. “The Diablos?”
“Word of mouth and Army maps. Trail’s bearing for what the Mexicans call La Nariz, the nose. Can’t see it from here. We’re too close to the hills. But you remember that unusual landmark in the north you could see from camp this morning?”
Sam remembered that flat-topped summit, all right. Even from almost twenty miles away, La Nariz had loomed up over intervening hills in dramatic fashion—a great fist of rock, dusted white by snow, that guarded those Diablo foothills.
Franks coughed and dabbed at his nose. “That peak stands at the Diablos’ southwest edge. Past it, the land rises west to east, the highest desert around and I guess the driest. Hardly a water hole to be found, just rocky gulches climbing up to a summit ridge along the east. Right there at a cliff is where the Diablos end. One step, you’re on that ridge, looking out over the salt flats, and the next you’re falling half a mile nearly straight down. The Diablos are like that their whole length, twenty-five miles north to south. I suppose that’s how they got their name—the Diablos, the Devils.”
Franks coughed, and then added something that seemed to say it all.
“I don’t know how the Almighty did things, but if He had any brimstone left over after finishing hell, He must’ve used it to make the Diablos.”
As the Mescalero trail brought them to the mouth of a canyon with two-hundred-foot bluffs, Franks ordered a halt and instructed Jonesy and a ruddy-faced private named Red to conduct reconnaissance. It would be risky, and Sam wondered if Jonesy’s Yankee heritage played a role in his selection. For that matter, Sam doubted that any of the rangers liked the loudmouth northerner, about whom Arch had once remarked, “Perhaps a kindly buzzard will lift Jonesy from the saddle and spirit him back to New Jersey.” It was true that Sam was sympathetic about Jonesy’s repulsive features—a crooked jaw that froze his face in a grimace—but sympathy couldn’t make up for Jonesy’s constant talk about the girl back home.
Apache Lament Page 1
