“A Mescalero woman and her baby was brought in last week,” he said, fearing the worst for Little Squint Eyes. “They still here?”
The officer leaned to his left, evidently to see around Sam. “Lieutenant?” he called.
Looking back, Sam saw the doorway frame a rawboned young man in uniform with a second lieutenant’s shoulder boards.
“Sir?” responded the junior officer.
“What was the disposition of the Indian woman and child?” asked the major.
“They departed this morning for the reservation in New Mexico by way of Fort Stockton.”
Sam took heart. They, he had said. Not just she, but they. Still, Sam had to make sure.
“The baby too?” he asked the lieutenant. “He all right?”
“Both are accompanying a civilian freighter.”
Sam flinched. “That Frenchman?”
“I believe his name is Dubois, sir.”
Dubois! Sam’s pulse began to hammer. That disrespectful bastard!
From behind the desk, the major spoke up. “Was Dubois by your decision, Lieutenant?”
“Does it pose a problem, sir?”
“You’ve been here but a short time. Dubois is an intemperate man prone to quarreling.”
“They by themselves?” Sam pressed the major. “Just them two and the freighter?”
With eyebrows raised, the major looked past Sam again, evidently an unspoken inquiry of the junior officer.
“They travel with a three-man escort from the Tenth Cavalry,” said the lieutenant.
Maybe Sam thanked the major and lieutenant for the information. Maybe he simply brushed past the junior officer and rushed outside where the parade ground unfurled before him in bright sunshine. Whichever, Sam was angry and troubled as he untied his horse from the hitching post and dug his boot into the stirrup.
“You have the look of a man on a mission, Samuel,” said Arch from the bottom of the steps.
Sam swung up into the saddle. “He said things about her, Arch. That damned Frenchman said things, and now they give him a chance to act on them.”
“It represents an Army matter now.”
“It’s more than that to me.”
Sam could have wheeled his mount and put spurs to it, but there was something in Arch’s look that made him hold the animal. Could it be that he wanted Arch to pose the question that he had been afraid to ask himself?
“Samuel, have you developed feelings for this woman?”
But Sam stayed silent as the flapping of the parade ground flag tolled off the seconds. If he did need to examine what was inside him, he wasn’t ready yet to face what he found.
“She and her child are being returned to their kind,” Arch finally said. “You should surrender the responsibility for their welfare.”
“I’m goin’, Arch. Call it Ranger business or whatever you want to, but I’m goin’.”
Reining his gray toward the east-lying guard house and the Fort Stockton road beyond, Sam dodged a waiting grave with the animal’s every pace.
Astride a big roan with a US Army brand and bedroll, Nejeunee rode in the dust of Crooked Eyes’s freight wagon as it rumbled north through the canyon of the Limpia.
She could see stacked crates bang against one another above the high endgate, and a grease bucket swing with a screech from the undercarriage. Against the groan of a wobbly wheel came the pop of a blacksnake against mule hide. The hoofbeats of the escorts’ horses were constant, one set rising up from behind Nejeunee and the other two from alongside the wagon.
But as the canyon walls closed in, left and right—most dramatically across the shining creek where a three-hundredfoot palisade of red rock sprang up—one echo alone made Nejeunee want to unshoulder the cradleboard and shelter Little Squint Eyes.
The freighter’s broken Spanish.
He had to twist around on the wheeler mule for her to see his face down the left sideboard, but with a bent smile that matched his eyes, he persisted in shouting intimate things that no Ndé ever discussed. He peppered his remarks with cursing that was without equivalent in Ndé, which had no profanity. But Spanish had enough swear words for both languages, and Nejeunee wished she could close her ears.
The best she could do was slide her horse to the right so that the wagon blocked her from his view. But Crooked Eyes only grew more vulgar, and when one of the Negro troopers evidently challenged him, the freighter silenced the soldier with a loud outcry.
Where a large, bare cottonwood stood on the left of the road, the wagon creaked to a halt in front of Nejeunee. Checking down the sideboard, she found Crooked Eyes summoning the troopers with a gesture and unfamiliar words. As the riders gathered about him, he swung off the wheeler mule and climbed up against the sideboard. Sunlight flashed in the butt of his holstered revolver as he rummaged inside, and when he faced the soldiers again he tossed one a bottle.
Stepping down, Crooked Eyes called the riders’ attention to Nejeunee, for they all looked at her. Whatever he had in mind, they seemed unconvinced, but after he passed out a few silver dollars, the riders exchanged glances and nodded. When one of them dismounted and approached Nejeunee, she didn’t know what to expect.
“Git down off’n yo’ horse,” he told her in passable Spanish.
She did so, and the soldier tied the roan to the rear wheel and led her to the cottonwood, where Crooked Eyes waited with the other men. Again, the freighter spoke to the soldier on foot, and he in turn addressed Nejeunee.
“You’s can take off yo’ load and rest a spell.”
Nejeunee welcomed the chance, for Little Squint Eyes had seemed in discomfort and she needed to check him. Retreating to the cottonwood’s trunk, she brushed the furrowed bark as she shed the cradleboard. Placing it on the ground, she knelt on both knees before it with her back to the road.
The day before, she had suspected that Little Squint Eyes was teething, although she had found no sign. Now, though, as she gently pulled down his lower lip, she saw a small, white cap against the pink of his bottom gum. It was yet another milestone of which his father would never be aware.
Moistening her finger in her mouth, Nejeunee set about massaging the tender area as she sang a Ndé lullaby in the hope that it might also soothe.
“Sapristi! Now we alone, damn sure.”
Focusing on her baby’s needs and dwelling on two men she had lost in different ways, Nejeunee had no idea that trouble brewed until Crooked Eyes spoke from behind. Turning, she found him hovering, his dirty face a vile blaze in the sky. He smirked through tobacco-stained whiskers as he eyed her, and even though acts of outrage were all but unknown among the Ndé, Nejeunee recognized the look for what it was.
Alarmed, she scanned the wagon for the horse soldiers, for they had been kind to her. But not until she noticed a plume of dust at a bend up-canyon did she realize that they had ridden away.
“No damn use you fight,” the freighter growled.
Nejeunee tried to get her feet under her, but Crooked Eyes seized her shoulders and prevented it.
“Idzúút’i!” she cried.
Twisting out of his hold, she scrambled away a few feet before rough hands clutched her from behind.
“Wildcat, huh? Dubois tame you!”
With fists and elbows and knees, Nejeunee fought, but Crooked Eyes had a dominating position as he fell upon her and attempted to pin her shoulders. She could smell his reek, taste his foul breath, see the decay in his tobacco-stained teeth. His holstered revolver dug into the soft tissue below her ribs, and it must have been equally painful to him, for he cursed the pistola and wrenched it free.
“Now we have fun under cottonwood!” he said, tossing the weapon away from the trunk.
In the clash, they bumped the cradleboard, and Little Squint Eyes began to cry. He must have sensed that something was wrong, for his wailing grew louder until it was a heartbreaking shriek in Nejeunee’s ears. But Crooked Eyes had a callous disregard for the infant’s distress.
&n
bsp; “Sacre bleu! He holler like panther!” He turned to Little Squint Eyes. “Dubois shut you up!”
Taking his hands from Nejeunee, Crooked Eyes reached for the cradleboard. At the same instant, she squirmed out from under him, and just as the Indaa gripped the willow frame, she lunged for the nearby revolver and found it.
“Damn whelp!”
Facing away from the cottonwood’s base, Nejeunee only heard Crooked Eyes’s shout and the crash of wood against wood, but she whirled in terror and watched the splintered cradleboard slide down the trunk’s unforgiving bark.
“Mi niño!”
With a cry, Nejeunee cocked the revolver and fired, but the roar was muffled as Crooked Eyes fell upon her again.
CHAPTER 23
Sam was troubled and riding hard.
He didn’t know how much of a lead the wagon had, but as he pushed his horse through the winding canyon of the Limpia, he was thankful for the store of grain at camp. With the Ranger company a rider down, he had allowed his animal a greater share, and with nourishment and rest the gray had put on flesh almost before his eyes. Now, its hoofs covered ground in a jog-trot that, under ideal conditions, could carry a rider seven miles every hour.
But the lay of the sparsely wooded canyon was an impediment. Repeatedly, the road crossed the Limpia, its banks and gravelly bed slowing the gray’s progress even though the creek was dry except for water holes. Still, the frequent crossings would delay a wagon even more, and Sam knew it was only a matter of time before he overtook the party.
Not ten miles out of Fort Davis, he came upon someone sooner than he had expected. In a sunlit stretch of canyon marked by towering, red-rock palisades, he drew rein before three Negro soldiers who sat back against a great, hewn boulder at a water hole on the left of the road. They seemed in high spirits, laughing and poking one another in the ribs, and the glinting whiskey bottle they passed around may have explained why.
Sam didn’t waste time with greetings. “Seen a freight wagon come by?”
A soldier with bloodshot eyes rose with bottle in hand. “Jus’ de one we’s with,” he said with slurred speech.
Sam looked left and right, finding only three US Army horses secured to a leafless hackberry tree. “Where is it?”
“Up road a ways.” The soldier motioned. “ ’Round dat bend yonder.”
Sam checked, but saw nothing over his gray’s ears except empty road disappearing to the left of palisades that angled up from its bed.
“How come you not with it?” Sam pressed.
“Freighter say give him a hour.”
“Hour? What for?” Sam’s pulse began to race. “The Indian woman up there?”
Holding the bottle out to the side, the soldier cocked his head and studied it with a frown. “Baby too.”
A terrible rage rose up from the dark place where Sam’s soul had been.
“You’re supposed to be with them! Why the hell aren’t you with them?”
“Dat white man have ’portant business with de Army. We do what he say.”
The soldier tried to take a swig, but the whiskey flew as Sam lunged and knocked the bottle from his lips.
“I’m reportin’ this!” Sam cried, his hand stinging. “You can damn sure bet on it!”
Gigging his horse for the road, Sam left in his wake a startled soldier and a shattered bottle, but the rage went with him as he galloped the animal around the next bend in the canyon. Facing a straightaway, he heard the faint crying of a baby almost as soon as he saw the wagon beside a cottonwood ahead. His ever-present bedroll flopped against the cantle as the gray’s forelegs reached out again and again, and when Sam arrived at the tree and shouted for Nejeunee, he pulled rein so hard that his horse virtually sat back on its haunches.
The baby’s cries came from the concealed side of the trunk, but there were also outstretched legs with boot heels up, and Sam dismounted with a full spin and bolted for a sudden display of black hair and calico edging into view at waist level alongside the cottonwood’s coppery bark.
Nejeunee, her eyes wide and glistening, sprang up with Little Squint Eyes at her breast.
“Tell me if you’re all right!” Sam shouted, assessing in a glance the still form beyond her.
Nejeunee seemed too startled to respond, but she rushed to him with a sob and looked up into his eyes as if she needed and expected more. Sam didn’t know the conventions of Apache culture, but when he opened his arms, mother and child came inside. Distracted by the unmoving boot heels he saw over Nejeunee’s shoulder, Sam couldn’t digest all that he felt as he held them tentatively at first, and then closer. Still, for a moment he almost seemed at home.
Little Squint Eyes must have sensed Sam’s protective arms, for his crying stopped. At first, Nejeunee had trembled in Sam’s embrace, but with the passing seconds, she too grew more composed, although she seemed in no hurry to take her head from his shoulder.
“Mi niño,” she sobbed. “Crooked Eyes hurt mi niño.”
Sam kept his hands on her shoulders as he withdrew far enough to look at Little Squint Eyes.
“What did he do to him? What did the bastard do?”
It wasn’t all that Sam wanted to ask. He wanted to ask if the Frenchman had violated her, but he didn’t know how. Instead, he listened as Nejeunee told him all that she evidently wanted him to know, limiting her account to what Dubois had done to Little Squint Eyes. As Sam listened, he checked the bruising around her eye and the scratches on Little Squint Eyes’s face, and when she finished he eased away and went to the Frenchman stretched out facedown past the cottonwood trunk.
Taking Dubois by the shoulder, Sam rolled him over to see dilated eyes fixed in a blank death stare. The freighter’s last moments hadn’t been easy, judging by the thrashed ground at his boots and the dark pool beside his torso. An 1860 Colt Army revolver lay nearby, and when Sam picked it up and smelled the barrel, he could distinguish the fresh powder residue. At the base of the cottonwood lay the cradleboard, its hoop frame broken, and he pieced together the desperate moments of which Nejeunee hadn’t spoken. She had experienced a terrible episode, and the only thing he could take heart in was the fact that the Frenchman’s body was still fully clothed.
Sam thought quickly. Those drunken soldiers would return soon, and they would find an Army contractor killed by a member of an enemy band. To their superiors, it might not matter that she was a woman and that the killing may have been justified; a white man was dead, and a Mescalero Apache was responsible. In the fight against her band, soldiers had died at Paso Viejo and Ojo Caliente, so her guilt almost certainly would be a given. Whether the escorts shot her on sight, or the Army hanged her or locked her away, the consequences would be severe for both Nejeunee and Little Squint Eyes.
Any way that Sam added it up, he couldn’t afford to trust Nejeunee’s fate to an Army that believed as he once had: that every Mescalero must be exterminated.
“Listen,” he said, turning to her, “we’ve got to get out of here. Take Little Squint Eyes and anything you need and get on the horse.”
As Nejeunee rushed toward the broken cradleboard, Sam looked back at the Frenchman’s dead eyes and realized he had something to do. Hurrying to the wagon, Sam climbed up against the sideboard and rummaged inside the cargo bed. Within arm’s reach he found what he expected: the freighter’s business ledger, wrapped in a slicker. Marking the page of the last entry was a pencil, and Sam took it and wrote a hasty letter to Fort Davis’s commander:
Sir:
Under my authority as a Texas Ranger, I have took the Indian woman and child. I will bring the horse back the first chance I get. The freighter hurt the baby and tried to outrage the woman and was shot in self defense. Please report this to the Rangers at Musquiz Canyon.
Sam DeJarnett
Company A, Texas Rangers
Tearing out the letter, Sam folded it in two places and wrote “Major, commanding Ft. Davis” on the outside. Not bothering to rewrap the ledger, he left the book where he
had found it. Spying airtights and jerky, he filled a burlap sack and then carried it with him as he hastened to the Frenchman’s body. On the breast just below the filthy beard, a spot free of blood, Sam left the note with a rock holding it in place.
Maybe his words wouldn’t do any good, but at least he had tried. There was a chance the escorts wouldn’t even deliver the letter, for they had reason to suspect that it related their irresponsible actions. Sam only hoped that one of the soldiers could read, for he purposely had left out any mention of them.
With a glance at the still-empty Fort Davis road past Nejeunee, who waited on horseback with Little Squint Eyes in her arms and the damaged cradleboard at her back, Sam swung astride his gray and faced her.
“Vámonos! Let’s go!”
Side by side, they fled down the road toward the next shielding bend.
CHAPTER 24
It was a place Sam wished he could stay forever.
Four miles up a narrow, twisting canyon, he sat in warm sunshine before a sparkling stream whose waters quietly sang as they wound through rocks and clumps of cattails. Across from him, a mountain laurel added greenery where dormant mimosa and desert willow hugged the bank. On the sharp rise just beyond, sparrows flitted in the bare limbs of walnuts and gray oaks, while from somewhere above came the throaty gobble of a turkey. After stressful hours, this was a place of peace.
Where the road turned east for Fort Stockton, Sam and Nejeunee had veered northwest into a high-desert valley with yucca and mesquite chaparral. With only naked hills on their right, they had pushed hard for canyon-rent crags standing dark against the west sky. Navigating broken country for hours, Sam had often checked over his shoulder. But not until he had reconnoitered from a high ridge at the mouth of this canyon had he breathed a sigh of relief.
He had been able to look back a dozen demanding miles, almost as far as the Fort Stockton road, and there had been no sign of pursuit. That didn’t mean that the Army had forgotten about Dubois. But for now, at least, as Sam watched a floating twig meander downstream between rocks and cattails, he was content and even elated.
Apache Lament Page 21
