“El cirujano, the surgeon, did not like the ranger showing him a pistola, but he says the ranger was right in one way. More hours of high fever and the niño would have died.”
Now Nejeunee’s emotions were a flood, but the surgeon had more to tell her.
“He says you will leave for the Mescalero Reservation soon,” related the Pueblo. “Upon his return from Peña Colorado, you are to go with Dubois, the freighter with the crooked look.”
Even in her joy at Little Squint Eyes’s recovery, Nejeunee flinched. The surgeon must have noticed, for he addressed the Pueblo again and motioned to her.
“Dubois is a bastardo,” the scout related to Nejeunee. “El cirujano may be a borracho, a drunk, but he knows this. He wants you to know that an escort will ride with you.”
As Sam stooped to gather firewood in a thicket alongside the road on its northward approach to the Musquiz Creek crossing, he heard rising hoofbeats from both left and right.
At his face, a winter-bared mountain sage grew up through a low-hanging buckeye tree, and through the interlaced limbs he distinguished a freight wagon and cavalry escort coming from down-canyon, the way to Camp Peña Colorado. Meanwhile, across the ford on Sam’s right, riders were approaching from the direction of Fort Davis and points west, including Van Horn’s Wells where he had left Company A five days before.
Sam identified the teamster astride the left wheeler mule first—the vulgar freighter Dubois—and the mere sight of the repulsive Frenchman working the jerk line to halt the team thirty yards shy of the crossing was enough to set Sam’s temples pounding. Dubois was only a few paces away on the team’s far side as he climbed off to stretch alongside the three dismounting cavalrymen in his escort. Concealed in the brush, Sam knew that no good would come out of showing himself, but that didn’t keep him from seething as he replayed the disrespectful things Dubois had said about Nejeunee.
The coiled blacksnake in hand, the Frenchman went about stiff-legged and checked the left-side mules and harnesses. All the while, tobacco juice dripped from his stained, gray beard. He seemed particularly displeased with the flop-eared lead animal, for he swore at it in three languages, and his profanity persisted as he worked his way back up the right-side mules to the wheeler. Now he was so close that Sam almost could have touched him, but who the hell would have wanted to, considering the Frenchman’s body odor?
His inspection of the team done, Dubois stood in place against the backdrop of the wheeler mules and the tangle of brush across the road. Chewing and spitting and cursing, this cur of a man with crooked eyes had crossed a line three days before, and Sam was ready to step out and teach him a lesson.
But then Sam heard horses splashing across the ford, and he looked to see the men of Company A riding up, a dusty and weary bunch astride mounts with more flesh than Sam had expected. A measured ride could do wonders for even jaded animals, but he and Nejeunee hadn’t had the luxury.
Arch rode at the head of the company, his drawn face and slouched shoulders showing the privation of the brutal scout. Tired-eyed, he seemed worn down to sheer gristle, a shell of the man he had been a week and a half ago.
But maybe the rigors of the Diablos had changed the ranger in another way too. Whatever his unspoken issues, Arch had once been a pleasure to be around, a man Sam had considered a friend. Now it wouldn’t have mattered to Sam if he had never seen him again, or his damned red-checked neckerchief either. If Arch couldn’t understand the impact of Elizabeth’s death, why should Sam care about Arch’s ghosts, and whatever role that hidden scar from throat to ear might play?
But maybe a friendship wasn’t easily cast aside, for Sam was concerned by Arch’s odd reaction as Dubois turned to the glint of sunlight in the ranger’s Cinco Peso badge. Between the mule team and the shallows, Arch pulled rein hard, his face blanching as he stared at the Frenchman. Arch’s fingers went to the knot of his neckerchief, and the longer he studied Dubois the more he fidgeted with it.
“No damn flour for rangers,” Dubois told him.
In response, Arch only stared—stared with narrowed eyes and persisted in trifling with his neckerchief. Meanwhile, Jonesy had brought his horse abreast of the lead mules.
“Have you any tobacco?” Jonesy asked Dubois.
“Hell, got nothing for rangers,” said the freighter. “They tell me, ‘Dubois, you come straight back. Don’t let rangers take nothing, damn sure.’ ”
As the quarrelsome Frenchman turned away and bent over to inspect the front wagon wheel, Arch squeezed his horse past Jonesy and approached. He began to shake, his breathing labored. More striking, from temples to jaw his face seemed to swell until he was all but unrecognizable. He was no longer the composed ranger with a professor’s vocabulary, but an animal-like thing with cold, calculating eyes.
Crowding Dubois, his fingers moved to the coiled rope that dangled against his saddle. As Arch took it in hand, Sam couldn’t imagine what he was doing; every ranger carried a lariat, but only to stake his horse or beat a rattler to death. But maybe rattlers sometime came in a two-legged variety.
Swinging a sudden loop, Arch dropped it over Dubois’s head, and Sam couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The Frenchman’s hat tumbled. “What hell—”
Arch yanked the rope taut around Dubois’s neck, and the man’s outcry became a gurgle.
“ ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ ”
It was the kind of thing Arch would quote, but the growling tone was foreign to the voice Sam knew so well.
Dubois dropped the blacksnake and clawed at the noose, his fingers digging into his throat. At the same time, he stumbled toward Arch’s mount, but the ranger denied him slack with a choking twist of the rope around the saddle horn.
“ ‘If you poison us, do we not die?’ ” Arch continued to cite.
The butt of a revolver showed in Dubois’s holster, but instinct must have taken charge, for all he seemed able to do was thrash at Arch’s saddle and spook the sorrel. When the animal shied, Dubois lost his footing, but the rope at his neck wouldn’t let him fall. Arch was suffocating the life from him, but not without another odd quotation.
“ ‘If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ ”
Maybe the Frenchman was powerless to act, but no one else had watched idly. With shouts and drawn revolvers the three black troopers rushed on foot around the team, only to have Jonesy’s roan block the way. Sam broke through the brush as the troopers yelled at Jonesy and Jonesy yelled back, and just as an Army-issue revolver at full cock leveled on Arch, Sam lunged for the man who had been his friend and dragged him from his horse.
The Army revolver boomed, missing Arch by an instant as he fell under his scared animal’s flailing hoofs. When Sam seized the horse’s bridle, the unscathed ranger rolled clear, and then the troopers were upon them with drawn weapons.
“On yo’ feet!” someone ordered.
No one wanted answers more than Sam as Arch gripped the dangling stirrup leather and sat up.
“What the hell’s this about, Arch?” Sam demanded.
But the ranger seemed dazed as he came to his feet alongside the sorrel. Glassy-eyed and still drained of color, he seemed unaware of the significance of the Army revolver trained on him, or of the questions barked by the soldier behind it.
Sam, knowing that instinct might lead Arch into a foolish act, quickly disarmed him. Meanwhile, past the upside-down V of the horse’s neck and jaw, Dubois writhed on the ground even after the other soldiers freed him from the rope.
The nearer trooper waved his revolver at Arch. “You’s goin’ with us!”
But Sam stepped between the two. “This is a Ranger matter! I’m the one disarmed him and he’s in my custody. Army don’t have any say in this.”
“He try killin’ that man,” the trooper contended.
“Yeah, I’m the one stopped him. This is a Ranger camp you’re in, so you can get that man on his mule and all of you can ride out of here.”
“L
ieutenant ain’t gonna like this.”
“He want to make a fuss, he can take it up with me.”
It was mostly bravado, but to underscore his authority, Sam took Arch by the arm and led him back to the brush. For the first few steps, Sam expected a challenge from behind, but he never looked back as the two of them broke through the latticework of buckeye and mountain sage.
Reaching bright sunshine, Sam checked over his shoulder and confirmed that no one followed. He could have taken Arch to camp, forty yards to his left, but he veered down-canyon instead and escorted the ranger through bear grass clumps, scrub oak, and hackberry shrubs. In a small clearing surrounded by alligator juniper and mountain mahogany, Sam stopped and turned to Arch, whose color had returned. Even more encouraging, his eyes no longer had the look of a man somewhere else.
“All right, I’m listenin’,” said Sam.
With a long sigh, Arch glanced down and shook his head. “I was aware throughout, but I was helpless to do other than observe.”
“So what’s that mean? You know how close you come to gettin’ killed?”
“I do. And I acknowledge my indebtedness to you.”
“I don’t give a damn who owes who what. You got some explainin’ to do.”
Arch looked away—far away, it seemed—and when he turned back, his eyes were wet. He began to tremble as he had in the road, and he brought his fingers to his temple as though it pounded to some terrible memory. Sam knew what it was to suffer inside with a pain that couldn’t be deadened, but he never realized what it looked like on a man’s face until now.
With compassion that surprised himself, Sam put a hand on Arch’s shoulder.
“What was it the Frenchman done to you? I don’t like the SOB either.”
“His eyes. The misalignment. That great a deviation from the norm. One other. That’s all, just one other person.”
“You sayin’ he reminds you of somebody?”
For a moment, Arch couldn’t speak, and when he did, his voice was hoarse with emotion.
“Trauma and intellect. Daggers of intellect. No matter how many daggers I throw, the unresolved trauma remains too strong.”
Arch was talking in riddles more than ever, but Sam didn’t interrupt.
“Intellect assured me the freighter wasn’t my stepfather,” Arch continued, “but the young boy inside refused to listen.”
“Your stepfather? That what this was about? You gettin’ back at him for somethin’?”
Wringing his hands, Arch glanced down and stirred the dirt with his boot. “Trauma unresolved . . . The power it wields . . .”
Looking up, he faced Sam for a moment, and then he untied the knot in the soiled neckerchief that Sam had never seen him without. In moments Arch’s neck was bared to the winter sun, and it was as troubling as Sam’s glimpse in the Diablos had suggested. A scar, faint except across the bulging Adam’s apple, stretched in a band from ear to ear. Sam had little doubt that his earlier suspicions were correct, but he had to ask.
“A rope do that? Looks it.”
“Even as it fades with every year,” Arch quietly managed.
“You’d think somebody hung you.”
Arch grimaced and his cheek developed a tic. “More times than I can remember.”
Sam only stared, but he was trying to piece everything together: a boy, a stepfather, a hanging. No, many hangings.
“Never was a man so cruel to a boy or his mother,” Arch continued. “Without provocation, he descended into manic fits of violence and assaulted her. For the most minor of offenses, he dragged me to the barn, positioned a rope over a rafter, and hanged me to the point of unconsciousness. In all but body, I died again and again, but it was never enough for him.”
“Good God,” Sam whispered. “Good God Almighty.”
“When I was eight he doused us with lamp oil. He went in search of a match, and she took me and fled into the night. Six months later, we were ensconced with her family in London. I received the best of educations, but no one taught me how to forget a pair of eyes so malevolent, so misaligned—eyes identical to the freighter’s.”
“So that’s it.” Sam found a deep breath. “When it comes down to it, I guess you and me’s not so different after all.”
“I suppose you refer to vengeance.”
Sam knew that neither of them had to say more, but Arch, to his credit, did so anyway.
“I . . . I may owe you an apology, Samuel. All that’s happened between us, the Diablos, the aftermath . . . Perhaps I saw myself in you. Perhaps my criticisms were a way of suppressing my own latent desire for retribution.”
“It can take hold of a person, Arch. Vengeance can damned sure do it.”
For a moment, Arch stared down.
“I never realized I had the need to avenge,” he acknowledged quietly. “Now that it almost demanded my life, I understand why a man on a journey of revenge needs to dig not one grave, but two.”
They started back to camp, two men caught up in foredoomed journeys, and at least one of them deep in thought. An extra grave had been dug as soon as a Mescalero had seized Elizabeth’s silver locket and killed her, an act perpetrated despite Sam’s dead-center rifle shot moments before. Sam knew he might as well crawl inside that three-by-six now and be done with it—except for one faint hope that lingered in the face of all the impossibilities.
And her name was Nejeunee.
Never had Nejeunee been so happy, and never had Nejeunee been so sad.
Little Squint Eyes was well, thanks to Jesucristo and the helper He had sent, Sam-el. But Sam-el, for all his kindness and aid, was only a memory now, destined to fade farther and farther into the past. And soon she would start for the Mescalero reservation where Gian-nah-tah, if he lived, might be waiting to claim what was his.
The extremes of her emotions warred like Ndé and Indaa, and in her search for peace she focused on Little Squint Eyes. Still, in every detail of his face, she saw the father who would never know him.
She and Little Squint Eyes were alone in the tent, and the infant had just satisfied his appetite at her breast. Cooing and gurgling, he now delighted in batting the buckskin phylactery hanging from her neck.
Maybe the time had come to let him hold the keepsake hidden within and tell him of his father’s love.
Securing the tent flap, as if mere canvas might discourage ghosts, Nejeunee parted the pouch and withdrew the very object that he-who-cannot-be-mentioned had clutched on the first stage of his journey to the afterworld. Even in the muted light, the forbidden keepsake was striking, and a smitten Little Squint Eyes reached for it. Whispering of a Ndé warrior as tender as he had been skilled, Nejeunee guided it into the tiny hands, and as the infant explored its polished contours, he managed to release the catch.
The keepsake, no larger than a coin, had passed from the fingers of father to son, and now it sprang open: a silver locket baring everything except the secret of the Indaa engraving inside.
CHAPTER 22
The moment Sam awoke in his tent at daybreak, he knew what he had to do.
All through the long winter night, as wind had popped the canvas wall, and the rangers beside him had snored and snorted, a young Mescalero woman and her child had lived in his dreams. Nejeunee seemed with him even now, so vividly had she walked the hours with him. He could see her dark eyes and darker hair, but most of all he could see the smile that was for him alone.
On what must have been a trail of tears for her, Nejeunee had found reason to smile only once, shortly after he had rescued Little Squint Eyes from the cougar. But the impact on Sam had been so great that he yearned to see again the uplift of the corners of her mouth, a smile that had engaged her eyes.
And it would never happen unless he stepped back from his grave and tried to live again.
Still, as he squatted at the fire later in the morning and stared into his coffee, Sam began to doubt. What good would it do to try to see Nejeunee, when soldiers had escorted him from the post and lef
t in question whether he could return? Regardless, with Little Squint Eyes so sick, had Nejeunee paid him even a passing thought since that last moment together?
Then someone spoke Sam’s name, and he looked up through the drifting smoke to see Arch standing over him.
“It’s imperative I post a letter for the capital through Army channels today,” Arch said. “Ranger headquarters must be apprised of Captain Franks and our engagement with Mescaleros. A courtesy report to Davis’s commander is also warranted. Should the incident yesterday have been relayed up the chain of command, I may need to maintain the appearance of being in your charge.”
Just like that, the decision was made for Sam. He would ride into Fort Davis, and while he was there, he would do everything in his power to see the one person who might spare him from a waiting grave.
“It’s time I showed those clueless Yankees how it’s done.”
A passionate Franks had said it upon setting out on the trail of the Mescaleros. Now that Sam and Arch stood across a cluttered desk from the seated commanding officer in a musty, dimly lighted office at Fort Davis, Sam only wished that Franks were here to relate the Rangers’ success where the Army had failed. There was a lot about the sunrise fight that bothered Sam—he had unknowingly helped kill women—but the attack had been justified and vital.
With unexpected ease, Sam and Arch had gained entry to the post, but there was nothing surprising about the images that dominated Sam’s thoughts as Arch began to narrate the events of the battle to the major with gray-flecked muttonchops. As the adobe interior wall beyond the officer’s balding pate went hazy, Sam saw in memory an overwhelmed young woman, alone and desperate in a snowy arroyo as she fought for her baby. He saw her crush the child to her breast and face him, a man and woman at critical moments in their lives. And he saw her eyes, soft and pleading as they reached across different cultures to touch something inside him that he didn’t know existed anymore.
With Nejeunee so powerful in his mind, Sam didn’t realize that the briefing had concluded until the commanding officer bade them good day. Arch turned to the anteroom, but Sam continued to face the major.
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