“Good God! He all right? He hurt any?”
She was busy unstrapping the child and removing him from the cradleboard, but she couldn’t have answered anyway, not when Sam had posed the excited question in English. He saw no blood as the woman peeled away the blankets, and he took the baby’s loud wails for a good sign as he watched a loving mother comfort her child against her breast.
Only now did Sam look up at the mesquites where the cougar had disappeared and consider what had happened. He could still smell the cat’s strong, musky scent, and the image of those deadly eyes remained a powerful presence in his mind. Maybe he hadn’t had time before to be afraid, but he did now, and it swept over him like a windstorm and left him with a terrible weakness. Only then did he realize that his arm and chest didn’t feel right, and he quickly checked and found the front of his coat missing buttons and his sleeve in tatters.
He looked up again. The woman had inclined her head toward her baby, but her glistening eyes peered only at Sam. A word seemed to be on her lips, but before she could voice it the other rangers were upon them, brandishing firearms and firing questions.
Sam’s arm and chest felt as if he had twice been branded.
Standing by his saddle at camp in the chill of early evening, he winced as he slipped out of the upper half of his one-piece long johns. He left the woolen garment draped over his belt as he inspected the scratches. Most were superficial, but two bled openly, a four-inch gash over his heart and another of similar length down his left forearm. He had never before been mauled by a wild animal, much less by a mountain lion, and the realization made his wounds hurt that much worse.
“Got you bad, he did.”
Sam looked up to see Boye extending a soaked rag.
“Better clean up good,” the preacher boy added. “Ol’ tomcat, he scratched me once and mighty sick I got.”
Sam hadn’t considered that kind of aftereffect, and it didn’t make him feel any better. After thanking Boye and seeing him withdraw, he began dabbing the gashes and painting the rag with his blood. He sensed that he was being watched, and he turned to see the Mescalero woman looking at him from where she sat only yards away. Was that concern in her features?
As she studied him, she rocked the cradleboard on the ground beside her. After her baby’s terrible scare, he was sleeping peacefully, his thumb in his mouth.
“El cuchillo,” the woman said to Sam. She pointed to the hilt of the Bowie knife showing in its scabbard beside his saddle.
What could she want with a knife?
“Por favor,” she added, motioning to the clearing’s edge where prickly pear grew below squaw-bushes and buckthorns.
Sam’s face must have shown his confusion. Did she really expect him to give her a knife? She was a prisoner, for God’s sake, from a people who would as soon slit a person’s throat as not.
Standing, the woman took up her baby in his cradleboard and approached Sam. When she came within arm’s reach, she placed the cradleboard at Sam’s feet and pointed to his knife again.
“Por favor,” she repeated.
Sam still didn’t know her purpose. But the message of trust was clear, and he felt strangely uplifted in a way that he hadn’t in all the dark months. With no more hesitation he accepted the pledge of her baby for his knife, and she started away across the small clearing.
“What the hell? Squaw’s got a knife!” exclaimed Matto from beyond the fire ring.
“Liable to pig-stick somebody!” added Red. “How’d she get a knife?”
“I’m the one let her have it,” said Sam.
Matto jumped to his feet. “She runnin’ off? Might be bucks out there to bring back. Hey, you! Get over here!”
“Just hold on,” said Sam. “She’s not goin’ anywhere with her baby still here.”
The two men continued to question the woman’s intent, and Sam was no less clueless until she stopped at the stand of prickly pear. Hacking off a pad larger than Sam’s hand, she let it fall to the ground, which was hard-packed with rubble. The cactus didn’t earn its name without a reason, for its needles and fine prickles discouraged handling. Using the knife blade, the woman flipped the pad repeatedly, sometimes reaching a height of several feet. With the impacts breaking the larger spines, she left the pad where it had last fallen and set about scraping away the fine prickles with a rock.
During the course of her task, the baby began to coo, drawing Sam’s attention. He checked, finding the tiny arms flailing, and for a moment Sam forgot that this was the offspring of an Apache. It could have been Elizabeth’s child that he looked upon. It should have been Elizabeth’s child, gracing the New Mexico home that they would never have.
Impulsively, Sam knelt and let the infant take his finger. He was surprised at the grip, and even more surprised to hear himself talking to the little one. Apache or not, the baby was exactly that—a baby—and a baby could touch even the hardened heart of a man whose recent life had been about vengeance.
When Sam raised his head, he saw the woman look at him from across the clearing. Was that a trace of a smile on her lips?
Regardless, she continued the scraping process until evidently satisfied. Taking the pad in hand, she split it open into palm-shaped halves and then returned to Sam.
As soon as the woman pressed one of the poultices against the wound at his heart, he could feel the moist pulp already soothing.
“Su cinturón, your belt,” she said.
Sam held the poultice in place with one hand and removed his leather belt with the other. Working it up to his chest and across the half-pad, he fastened the buckle before allowing the woman to apply the second poultice to his arm.
Until she secured it with the rag, Sam hadn’t considered the fact that the knife had been in her hand all this time. As distracted as he had been, she could have parted his ribs. But now she passed the knife to him hilt-first, a moment before gathering up her baby and returning to her resting place.
Sam needed to dress against the growing chill, but for a moment something else was more important. As the woman sat and withdrew her baby from the cradleboard, he approached and drew her attention.
“Gracias, señora,” he said.
An hour earlier, Sam would never have believed that he would extend thanks to an Apache, but the words came without regret. Her eyes welled, but the greater surprise came when she embraced her baby as only a mother could and smiled at Sam.
“Mi niño, mi niño,” she said through all her emotion. “Gracias, señor. Gracias.”
Sam slept better that night than he had in months, but his buoyed spirits didn’t last long enough for him to hoist his saddle at sunup.
“Taken up with that squaw, have you?”
Bent over with a grip on the pommel and back housing, Sam didn’t know who had come up behind him. But the accusation was reason enough to leave the saddle on the ground and turn.
Before him stood Red, the sunlight accenting his rust-colored bristle.
“Know now why you pushed me away from her,” Red added.
“Don’t be startin’ somethin’. We got ridin’ to do.”
Sam turned again to the saddle, but Red wouldn’t let the matter go.
“Been hearin’ you mumble for months about that dead wife of yours,” Red added. “So much for her, I guess.”
Sam spun, the old rage flaring. “You son of a—”
He didn’t know that anyone else was near until a pair of arms separated them.
“Cease!” shouted Arch.
In the heat of the moment, Sam didn’t like Arch’s arm against his chest any better than Red’s remark. For one thing, the pressure against Sam’s wounds was painful, but what irritated him more was Arch butting in where Elizabeth was concerned.
“Stay out of this!” he yelled at Arch. “It’s between him and me!”
But Arch held his ground as he addressed Red. “Some boundaries aren’t to be crossed. Preying on a man’s loss is one of them.”
Red, h
is face flushing, said something under his breath and walked away. But that didn’t dull Sam’s anger, and he whirled on Arch.
“Don’t do that no more. If somebody says somethin’ about Elizabeth, just stay out of my way!”
All that morning, as Sam’s gray traced winding arroyos and crossed ridge after ridge, Elizabeth rode with him. She was there as the south Diablo cliffs retreated behind, and the Eagle Mountains began to show themselves ahead to the southwest. Her presence grew more powerful with every rise and fall of the Eagles’ distant, blue face as his horse struggled up inclines and plunged into drainages. If not for that unmistakable landmark, Sam would have thought Company A lost, but just because a man could pinpoint his location on a map didn’t mean he knew where he was.
Sam studied the young Apache woman, riding just ahead with her child strapped to her back. Why had Red made such an accusation? Had acts of common decency come to mean more than what they were?
Sam didn’t know, but he hoped he would never again do anything to cast a shadow over his love for Elizabeth. To that end, he summoned up his deep racial hatred for Apaches, in the hope that every squaw and whelp would be included. But somehow this mother and child refused to be a party to it. For these two, Sam could muster only a pretense of hatred, without passion or reason.
And he didn’t understand why, considering where the hoofs of his horse were taking him.
In midday, Company A dropped off the final hills and pushed south into the desert plain that five days before had been a sea of snow. On Sam’s immediate left rose the barren Carrizos, and for the next four or five miles he would ride under their looming crags before veering southeast with the range. A few miles farther, Company A would intersect the beaten road from El Paso to Fort Davis, and now that the weather had warmed and Mescaleros no longer were a concern, the company’s desperate ride finally seemed over.
But Sam knew that his was just beginning, for as soon as he struck the road, he must pass through Bass Canyon.
CHAPTER 17
So it had come to this for Nejeunee.
All of Sam-el’s attention—the food and protection and rescue of Little Squint Eyes—had been a lie acted out with evil intent. His kindness had been deception, his strife with Mat-to and Red Hair an invention, and he had even accepted the wounds of Ídóí, the great cat, in order to preserve this chance to inflict the cruelest of torture on her.
Yawning ahead was the canyon where Indaa had died at the hands of the Ndé the previous spring, and she knew now that Sam-el had brought her back so he could kill her here, and Little Squint Eyes as well.
Teasing kindness and then denying, Sam-el had perpetrated torment worthy of Gian-nah-tah. But even Sam-el couldn’t realize the depth of Nejeunee’s pain, for before she died she would relive the greatest loss of her tragic life: he-who-cannot-bementioned.
Inside this broad pass eight moons ago, he and other Ndé had fallen, even as she had waited with his unborn son in the boulders of a side gulch echoing with gunfire. There had been no line of sight by which to watch the attack, but she had heard it all—the rumble of wagons and the thunder of horses, the war cries of the warriors and the screams of the Indaa.
And then the terrible silence that had taken he-who-cannotbe-mentioned away forever.
This pass was a place of awful memories, a rugged cut between bare mountains either gray like ashes or dark with rocks created in fire. Had it been she alone who the Indaa escorted between its wide jaws, she would have accepted it and joined her sisters in the Land of Ever Summer. But Little Squint Eyes deserved to grow into boyhood and beyond, to find his place under Sháa, the sun, and Nejeunee would seize the only chance he had.
As she came abreast of a crooked Spanish dagger, only Sam-el rode behind her.
“Ayeee!”
With a cry borrowed from the warriors of the People, Nejeunee wheeled her horse around the yucca and fled back for the open desert. Rubble flew from the furious hoofs as a blur of lechuguilla and pitaya surged by. She heard shouts in a strange language as ocotillo clawed at the ruffle of her dress, but she raced on, asking Bik’egu’indáán’s Son, Jesucristo, to give the dun more than it had left.
A rifle boomed and a ricochet whizzed through the creosote, and then came more shouts and growing hoofbeats from behind like the pounding of an earthen drum. Out on the desert plain, her horse broke through scrub mesquites and stumbled in a hidden arroyo. She fell against the dun’s neck and barely held on, and no sooner had the animal regained its stride across the narrow ditch than a rider came up on Nejeunee’s right and cut her horse off, forcing a halt.
It was Sam-el, and she knew that the end was at hand.
With a silent prayer she reached inside her blouse for her phylactery. If Bik’egu’indáán would just spare her long enough to remove it from her neck . . . If Jesucristo would allow her to part the buckskin and withdraw that special item . . . Only then could she find comfort in facing the journey to the afterworld exactly as had he-who-cannot-be-mentioned.
It was all that Nejeunee asked as she waited for death before this heartless Indaa.
But for a moment, Sam-el paid her no mind. His attention was focused on someone behind her, and their shouts back and forth were loud and angry. Then the yelling stopped, and Sam-el looked at her.
“Matto near’ killed you,” he said. “How come you runnin’ off this way?”
Little Squint Eyes began to cry, and Sam-el took notice. “Your niño’s all scared. You need to see about him?”
Nejeunee understood the words, but not the man. Was this just more of his cruel game?
Maybe, but he had granted her a chance to hold her baby one last time, and she left her phylactery in place and removed the cradleboard. Soon, Little Squint Eyes was at her breast and as secure as her arms could ever make him. Soothing him with soft words, she thought about his father as she closed her eyes against the afternoon sun and waited for what was to come.
All her emotion must have been obvious, for Sam-el pro-longed the moment with words she didn’t expect.
“How come you shakin’ so? You look scared to death.”
Nejeunee opened her eyes, anticipating a muzzle before her. But against the backdrop of a blue sky, there was only Sam-el with a look of concern.
“Nobody’s fixin’ to hurt you, señora.” He glanced past her. “Matto’s already rode on.”
Nejeunee only stared at him, weighing his words against what she might find in his features.
“I ever tell you what’s goin’ to happen to you?” Sam-el asked. “We’s carryin’ you and your baby back to the Army post at Davis. I figure they’ll take you back up to the reservation in New Mexico. We got to keep ridin’ for that to happen, though.”
As Sam-el motioned to the pass and Nejeunee turned her horse and started back, she wanted to believe him. Despite the conclusion to which she had jumped, he had given her no reason not to trust, except that he was an Indaa, and the Indaa had been an enemy for too long to think of them as anything other than animals.
Until now.
Where the road cut through a grove of big Spanish daggers not far inside the pass, Nejeunee dismounted with her captors to rest the horses. The gap was a few hundred yards wide here, and while the other men stretched their legs or massaged cramps, Sam-el seemed preoccupied with something past the left-side arroyo that bordered the road. After turning briefly to the other men—he seemed to take special interest in Matto sitting back against a dagger trunk—Sam-el motioned to Nejeunee.
“Best you stay with me,” he said.
Was that emotion she heard in his voice?
She did as Sam-el and secured her horse to a yucca, and then followed him across the bone-white rocks of the arroyo. She had no idea where he was going, but she traced his steps in silence through lechuguilla and pitaya and over ground too sterile for even cacti. Occasionally he looked back, but he seemed less concerned with her than with the receding distance. Checking for herself, Nejeunee saw Mat-to still re
sting against the Spanish dagger.
At a place where nothing grew, near the base of a sharply rising slope equally bare, Sam-el hesitated, and Nejeunee did so as well. A rising wind tugged at the back of his shirt and drew her attention to his shoulders, which strangely drooped as if stripped of life. Something was wrong, and she stayed back while he continued on alone.
Up until now Nejeunee had followed too closely to see around him, but as Sam-el pulled away she saw swirls of dust crawling across an Indaa grave only yards ahead. Unlike the crevices which her people preferred, this grave consisted of an eroded mound stretching left to right and stacked with rocks.
Nejeunee cringed, for her ingrained fear of the dead was strong.
At the head of the grave, Sam-el stopped and stifled a sob, and Nejeunee was surprised. Animals didn’t mourn their dead, unless it was a lone, mournful howl of a dog that had caught the death scent of its master. But maybe Nejeunee was coming to realize things she had never considered before.
In an act that stirred memories of the adobe mission of her youth, Sam-el fashioned a cross out of dead sotol stalks bound with rawhide from his pocket. His lips trembling, the dust whipping about his legs, he set it at grave’s head and stood staring down until a shout came from the Indaa among the Spanish daggers. Without looking up, Sam-el raised an arm in acknowledgment, and then when a second summons came he started back and Nejeunee followed.
All the way, his shoulders stayed bent, and Nejeunee wondered who lay buried in this place of tears.
Sam wished he had never returned to Bass Canyon.
The pass was behind him now, ten miles and an entire craggy range away to the northwest, but he might as well have still been standing over that mound of dirt and rock. He had never realized how much his wounds had healed until the canyon had reopened them. The hopes necessary to sustain every man bled out as if the events of the previous May had just happened.
At least at Elizabeth’s grave Sam had accomplished one thing, not because it meant anything to him, but because it would have to her.
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