Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  It was probably fortunate that Franks doubled over with a coughing fit that drowned out Jonesy’s protest. Still, as the New Jersey native brushed past, Sam heard it clearly: “Damned if he’s sending me again.”

  Matto, for his part, didn’t grumble, but he looked about as surly as Jonesy as the two rangers stopped before the captain.

  “It’s the dark of the moon,” Franks said wearily. “If they’ve stopped for the night, stay low and you can skyline their teepees against the stars.”

  Matto pressed a finger against a nostril and blew mucous out his nose. “Devils liable to sneak up on us out there.”

  “Son, you be careful,” said Franks. “The last thing I want is for you to get yourself killed. If anybody’s to die, I want it to be a damned Yankee.”

  Sam flinched. What the hell, Captain? What in Billy hell?

  For a moment, everything seemed frozen in time. Then Jonesy whipped out his .45 with a cross-body draw and leveled it between Franks’s startled eyes.

  “You son of a bitch!” Jonesy cried.

  “Hold it!” exclaimed Sam. “He don’t mean—”

  But the New Jersey native had heard it, and so had everyone in the company except Franks, who looked bewildered as he tried to respond.

  “Son—”

  Jonesy cut him off. “Anybody dies, it’ll be you!”

  “Son, I cannot have you speak to me that way.”

  “Speak to you? I’m putting a bullet in your Yankee-hating brain!” He thumbed back the hammer with an ominous click.

  “No!” said Sam. “You got it wrong, Jonesy!”

  “Let’s you and I discuss this,” the captain told Jonesy. “How have I offended you?”

  There wasn’t a trace of stress in Franks’s voice, and Sam didn’t see how. For God’s sake, he was staring into a muzzle primed to kill.

  The longer Jonesy gripped the .45, the more it shook. “Yankee, am I? Damned right I am, and proud of it. My father whipped you once, and I’ll do it again. The hell with you and your Walter both!”

  Franks’s face went dark, exposing a rage so sudden that it must have lurked in his tortured soul. In a split second he had his revolver out at full cock, the muzzle hard against Jonesy’s abdomen.

  “I’ll gutshoot you!” Franks cried. “Talk about my boy and I’ll gutshoot you!”

  Eternity was a twitch of a finger away for both rangers, one of them a livid madman with bulging eyes and the other a now-sober young man with a face gone white.

  Sam had to stop this, but what could he do? If he grabbed either of them, both could die. Good God, what could he do except appeal to their reason?

  “It’s a mixup!” he said. “Captain don’t know what he’s sayin’. He meant Indian, not Yankee!”

  From behind Sam came Arch’s composed voice. “Jonesy, my man, some deeds cannot be undone. Remember thy sweet Mary Jane.”

  But a .45 in his abdomen had already taken the fight out of Jonesy, who seemed afraid to be the first to back down. “Get his gun out of my belly!”

  Sam tried to project calm as he turned his plea to Franks. “Easy, Captain. Please, just listen to me. You said Yankee but meant Mescalero.”

  Franks looked at Sam but kept his revolver in place.

  “Jonesy heard Yankee,” explained Sam, “and he thought you was tryin’ to kill him. It’s Mescaleros we’s after, remember? Not Yankees.”

  Franks’s eyes began to relax. “Yes, Mescaleros. That’s right, Mescaleros.”

  He withdrew his weapon and, almost in the same instant, so did Jonesy.

  As the captain bent over to labor for air, the New Jersey native stumbled away with a shudder. But Sam was doing some trembling of his own.

  As dusk yielded to a troubling blackness, Sam didn’t know how Company A could hold together—if it even mattered anymore.

  Franks and Jonesy had almost killed one another, but the strife didn’t end there. Sam and Arch were still at odds over Matto, and Matto wanted nothing to do with them. Matto’s partners in the abandoned plan to desert were at odds with Matto, and to avoid their questions, Matto wanted nothing to do with them either. Matto was also at odds with Boye, while Boye seemed in conflict with himself.

  But there was more going on than discord. With a possible fight with Apaches at hand, everyone was on edge, and the need to maintain stealth ruled out lighting a smoke that might calm a man’s nerves. All Sam could do was gnaw on jerky and pace in the dark while he waited for Matto and a second ranger to return from reconnaissance. With Jonesy so shaken, a towheaded ranger had volunteered to go in his place.

  “Been thinking about what you told me, I have.”

  In a night so dark, Sam didn’t know that Boye was beside him until he spoke. Now he saw the young man as a silhouette against the stars on the horizon.

  “You and me both ought to be restin’ up, Boye. Hard to do, I guess, when we might be goin’ up against Apaches.”

  “Was me killed that poor girl, I did, same as pulling a trigger.”

  Sam had already heard Boye tell it, but he let the preacher boy talk.

  “Wouldn’t stand beside her, no, sir. Whore, they called her, and my part in it I hid like David with Bathsheba.”

  Boye paused, and for some reason Sam felt compelled to speak. “My father used to read to me about it.”

  “Committed adultery and murder both, David and me. Been thinking hard about the way David up and repented. He sure done it, yes, sir, and the Good Lord forgive him and called him a man after His own heart.”

  Forgiveness. Boye spoke as if he was on the way to finding it. But as the silhouette faded into the night as discreetly as it had come, Sam relived again his failure to act during Elizabeth’s final moments and wondered if a man could ever forgive himself.

  About midnight, Matto and the tow-headed ranger rode in with a reconnaissance report that Sam listened to with mixed feelings. No more than two miles ahead, up and over yet another crest peak, the Mescaleros were in camp. Just a day ago, Sam’s anticipation would have soared, but retribution now seemed less a passion than an obligation that might rob him of Elizabeth a second time. As Franks had made him realize, she had been an increasingly powerful presence throughout the chase, and he never wanted that intimacy to end.

  Franks, surprisingly clearheaded for the moment, held a council of war and presented a plan of attack. Sam admired his attention to detail, which included factors such as the lay of the land and the angle of the coming sunrise. More than two decades may have passed since the captain’s last Indian fight, but even ill and exhausted, he had a poise that inspired confidence.

  The company dispersed to get a few hours of sleep, but it seemed to Sam that he had barely dozed off before it was time to get up. Within minutes, he was astride the gray and marching with the company for a rendezvous with revenge. Now, more than ever, Elizabeth seemed to be present with every nod of the animal’s head, but he couldn’t tell if she urged him on or pleaded another cause. Was she imploring him to ride with caution? Or was she trying to tell him that she was gone and never coming back, no matter what he did to those Apaches?

  He could see her lips move in the dark, but no matter how hard he concentrated, he couldn’t make out the words.

  Sam didn’t realize he was asleep until a sound from alongside woke him. He turned, looking for Elizabeth, and found only the moving shadow of a rider with the hushed voice of Boye. Sam could distinguish only a phrase here and there, but he pieced together enough to realize that Boye prayed for the souls of the heathens they were about to face.

  Soon, the rider ahead of Sam whispered an order that had come down the line: Maintain absolute quiet. Franks no doubt had given it, but even from Sam’s position in the march, he could hear the captain’s muffled coughs. Nevertheless, Sam passed the order on to Boye before focusing on the great shadow that blotted out the stars ahead. This must be the massive rise Matto and the tow-headed ranger had reported, a site where the ridge thrust sharply upward to a rounded su
mmit higher than any other point they had navigated in the Diablos. Considering the amount of horizon it hid, the mountain was broad as well as lofty.

  At its base, the company dismounted. Sam, securing the gray to a scrub piñon, slid his Winchester out of the saddle scabbard and stuffed his pockets with cartridges for both the carbine and his revolver. From here on, they would be on foot, and every extra round might be critical.

  Sam didn’t know how Franks had managed to step out of the stirrup, but his was the whispering voice of the upright silhouette before which everyone gathered.

  “Walter,” Franks said. “You stay put. This is a man’s war.”

  Sam turned to the shadow beside him, and the shadow seemed to turn to him. He didn’t know who it was, but everyone had to be thinking the same thing: Here they were, about to put their lives on the line at the orders of a man who was in another time and place.

  Sam knew only one thing to do.

  “Captain,” he whispered, “better stay with Walter and guard the horses.”

  Franks stifled a cough. “Yes, the horses.”

  Sam scanned the dark figures alongside. “Boys, it’s up to us.”

  For a moment all the dark figures stayed in place. Then one separated, followed by a second—Matto and the other reconnoiterer, he supposed—and within moments Sam was climbing a steep slope with eight men he couldn’t see.

  As his boots dug into snow, however, a light that was only a memory seemed to lead the way. It was a sliver of sunlight, dancing against blue calico. The locket from which it reflected had bounced against Elizabeth’s breast as she had fled through Bass Canyon, and then that dying Apache had snatched it from her neck.

  No larger than a seated liberty quarter, the silver ornament was as lost as Elizabeth. Still, he could almost feel its polished contours between his quaking fingers again, a weak-kneed cowboy releasing its catch on a long-ago day and opening it for a pretty miss under a big live oak. Too backward to ask her any other way, he had let the engraver choose the formal words inside:

  May I

  Have your

  Hand in marriage?

  The locket had cost Sam a month’s pay, but the answer he had found in her eyes would have been worth a lifetime of eighteen-hour days in the saddle.

  Now, three years later, that’s all he had left: memories. No Elizabeth, no locket, no shred of hope for today and even less for tomorrow. Just memories that prodded him on, almost against his will.

  After a grueling climb, the ground leveled off, and Sam could see three fires aglow on a lower level ahead. Distance was always difficult to judge at night, but he figured that he and the company had closed to within half a mile. Around Sam, the silhouettes of rangers dropped into a creep, and so did he, knowing that any Apache lookout might skyline them.

  From the middle of the company came the sudden click-click of a Winchester lever, and every silhouette froze. Sam pivoted with his carbine at his hip and leveled it on a man-like form ten paces to his right. There were other forms as well, peering out of the night, a small army ready to ambush. Almost too late, he recognized the shadows for what they were.

  “Spanish daggers!” he whispered.

  He heard a murmur pass through the men, but somehow no one squeezed off a shot.

  They went on, a shaken company of rangers bearing to the right of the fires as the wind soughed a lament. Little by little, day began to break, although Sam had a limited view of the east. A lot of shadows roamed the intervening night, obscuring the horizon’s glow—the work of outcrops and swells in the summit, he figured.

  When the company neared a point overlooking the fires, the men in the lead crouched lower and stopped, far too soon to suit Sam. From here, he could see muted streaks of red back in the east, allowing him to gauge the angle of the coming sunrise. Advancing, he came abreast of the ranger in front. Not here, Sam wanted to say, but all he could do was tug on the man’s arm and proceed in a crawl.

  As he slowly led the way along the undulating ridge, the mountain pushed back, its snow numbing his fingers, its spiny cholla and ocotillo clawing his coat. Once, he planted a knee on a pincushion cactus, all but crippling him. But he pushed on, driven by memories that flashed like images through the spokes of a rumbling wagon wheel in a canyon of death.

  Finally, Sam wormed his way to the mountain’s far slope and found the kind of strategic position for which the captain had hoped. Down and away to his left lay the campfires, flickering in a gloomy flat, while to his right, past a jutting outcrop that he saw only in silhouette, the eastern horizon burned orange in anticipation of the sunrise. Most importantly, the first rays seemed sure to strike the campfires—and Sam now had eight men with Winchesters flattening themselves almost directly between the camp and the imminent sunrise.

  Sam, down on his belly, peered through the long, flexible blades of a beargrass clump. A hundred yards away and maybe seventy-five feet below, three figures draped in blankets tended small fires that rippled in the wind. The firelight cast a soft glow against a row of teepees just beyond, while fifteen or twenty horses or mules were staked nearby.

  There was something serene about the camp, a charmingly simple quality that was strangely appealing. For a moment, Sam had to remind himself that these were the ruthless Apaches who had upset his entire world. What the hell was the matter with him? Had these animals hesitated for even a moment before swooping down on Bass Canyon?

  Searching for bitterness, he found it, and with it came a hatred greater than any he had ever known. They had taken Elizabeth away from him, and they would pay.

  Sam shook with rage as he glanced over his shoulder. A pinpoint of light had just broken the flaming horizon. In three or four minutes the full sunburst of January 29, 1881 would flood the camp—and just as Franks had said, the Mescaleros would be blinded as Company A attacked out of the sunrise.

  As Sam watched and waited, he consciously slowed his breathing, knowing he must in order to draw a bead on those devils. But the sun seemed suspended, half above the horizon and half below. Would it never rise higher? How long must he be caught up in this purgatory of endless waiting?

  Suddenly the sun was there, a swollen fire exploding over faraway crags in full glory, an orb too dazzling to look upon. Whirling to the camp, Sam whispered to the ranger at his left, a whisper passed down the line from one man to another.

  Captain’s orders!

  Sam didn’t look to see, but he knew that every ranger did as he did: rose and knelt with one knee to the snow. He threw the rifle butt against his shoulder and supported it with a forearm against his upraised thigh. At this distance, the camp was at the limit of a Winchester’s range, but he hadn’t been this close to those butchers since he had lain in Bass Canyon and done nothing.

  He worked the lever with a double click, and the hammers of eight Winchesters joined his in springing back, the firing pins primed to snap forward against .44 cartridges. He looked down the barrel at a smoke-shrouded teepee and held his aim for a moment, wondering if he would ever again feel this close to Elizabeth—wondering with dread because he already knew the answer.

  “Now!” he cried, and he squeezed the trigger.

  CHAPTER 13

  The roar was like thunder.

  Stooped over sotol hearts roasting in the coals, a startled Nejeunee looked up into the brilliance of Sháa, the sun, as quick groans came from the teepee behind her. Wheeling to the flap, she heard a second roar and more groans, and then there was bedlam.

  “Indaa!” came a shout.

  Blanket-draped and bleeding warriors burst from the teepee, simultaneous with a chorus of yells from the ridge across the fire. From the cradleboard at Nejeunee’s back, Little Squint Eyes began to cry as she spun from the teepee and looked up through the rising smoke. Down the snowy mountainside charged Indaa, maintaining a battle cry that echoed across the hollow.

  Confused and shaken, Nejeunee turned one way and then another, not knowing what to do. Suddenly Quick Talker and One
Who Frowns were with the wounded Ndé milling beside Nejeunee. The older woman seemed too stricken with fear to utter a sound, but Quick Talker repeatedly called out for the husband she believed awaited her on the other side of death.

  More gunfire erupted, individual shots rather than a volley, and Ndé began to fall. Nah-kay-yen the gutaaln went down at Nejeunee’s feet, the first to validate his own concerns about the fate of a People already dead. Two other men dropped almost as quickly, one of them sprawling lifelessly across the roasting sotol hearts. A fourth warrior managed to reach the horses and leap astride a paint, only to collapse across the animal’s neck and slide headfirst to the hoofs.

  For a moment more, stunned Ndé huddled about Nejeunee, and then a warrior broke for the arroyo and rising slope behind the teepees. Others fled in his wake, leaving Quick Talker standing in the line of fire, incapable of doing anything but wail. One Who Frowns brushed past Quick Talker and rushed after the men but made only a few steps before an unseen force twisted her half-around. Nejeunee didn’t know how One Who Frowns stayed on her feet, but she did, a pitiful figure clutching her side and hobbling on, laying a blood trail in the snow.

  One warrior alone stood his ground. From beside the staked horses, Gian-nah-tah shouldered his Winchester and fired three quick shots at the Indaa. Evidently out of ammunition, he too fled. He momentarily disappeared in the arroyo behind the teepees before reappearing beyond, enemy gunfire chasing him up the agave-studded rise. Bullets shook cholla stalks and scrub juniper and sprayed snow against his heels, but somehow he eluded even the slugs that ricocheted off outcrops and whizzed back through camp.

  To Nejeunee, the sequence of events came rapid-fire, images and sounds playing out almost simultaneously as the smoke from campfires and rifle muzzles hung in her throat. It was too much to process, but Nejeunee acted instinctively.

  “Run, my sister!” she shouted, taking Quick Talker’s arm.

  The two of them bolted after the others to the crying of Little Squint Eyes. Ahead, One Who Frowns sank to the ground and began to squirm, painting the snow a stark red. As Nejeunee neared, the wounded woman made eye contact and stretched out an imploring hand. It was heartbreaking, and so was the pain in her wrenched face. But there was nothing Nejeunee could do as she passed, not even when One Who Frowns moaned Nejeunee’s name. The Indaa were about to kill Little Squint Eyes, just as they had his father, and Nejeunee would do whatever necessary to save him.