“Wish I’d knowed it was you followin’ us, Arch,” he said as the loss overwhelmed him. “I’d’ve made a walk up a stream while it still mattered.”
They were half a moon in reaching the New Mexico reservation on the Tularosa, half a moon in which Nejeunee had lived with the realization of what she had learned high on the cliff. In all that time, she and Sam-el had spoken only out of necessity, and even that had been painful. But now she faced a day as gray and grim as any she had known, for they rode up to the Mescalero Agency in the snowy meadows of a valley cradled by forested mountains sacred to the Ndé.
It was issue day at the Agency, a frame structure built of pine strips with the bark exposed, and a long line of families waited to file past a window for rations. Alongside the Ndé were small fires, many of them, for the waiting always required hours of cold and hunger. Nejeunee knew it was this way every issue day, a time when a once-proud people held out their hands for Indaa rations like dogs begging for scraps.
In the crowd stirred a pair of shoulders draped with the pelt of a mountain lion, and as the figure approached through the curling smoke, Nejeunee flinched to see a cruel warrior with an eyeless socket and a face frozen in an animal-like snarl.
Gian-nah-tah!
Sam-el must have recognized him too, for he wheeled his horse and faced him. Gian-nah-tah only glanced at Sam-el, perhaps not remembering, but Sam-el did more. He slipped a hand across his waist and rested it under his coat where Nejeunee knew his revolver butt rested.
“I was hopin’ I killed you,” Sam-el told him in Spanish.
But Gian-nah-tah ignored him and addressed Nejeunee in Apache. “You have followed me back, Nejeunee. Now I claim what is mine.”
Grieving for all she had lost, Nejeunee glanced at Sam-el. “I’m no one’s.”
Gian-nah-tah’s face went crimson. “You are mine! Or the child will die!”
He continued to yell threats, and Sam-el turned to her. “What’s he sayin’? Tell me what he’s sayin’!”
Nejeunee did so—and now it was Sam-el who was in a rage as he spun to Gian-nah-tah. But she knew that Sam-el’s role in her life was over, and that any fight would be hers alone.
“A brave man doesn’t threaten Little Squint Eyes,” she told Gian-nah-tah. “He fights ídóí, the great cat, and rides two nights and a day, and stands against his own people, all to save Little Squint Eyes. That kind of man is brave, and worthy, but Giannah-tah is a coward.”
No one had ever dared to call Gian-nah-tah such a thing, and Nejeunee saw dozens of heads turn. But that wasn’t the only development, for breaking through the crowd was a yellow-haired Indaa she recognized as the Indian agent.
“What’s the trouble here?” he demanded in Apache.
But Gian-nah-tah had already lunged and seized the bridle of Nejeunee’s horse, and now he was trying to drag Little Squint Eyes from her shoulders as she fought back. Then a knife flashed, striking the frame of the cradleboard, slashing the blanket across Nejeunee’s arm, and just as she tried to kick Gian-nah-tah away, a revolver roared.
Gian-nah-tah fell against Nejeunee. For a moment he hung there, more dead than alive. Then she shed him with a cry and he slid down the horse’s shoulder and collapsed under the animal’s neck. He lay unmoving and bleeding out in the snow—a stark reminder of a kindly señora’s rebosa against a salt bed profaned by Gian-nah-tah’s hand.
Nejeunee looked up and saw Sam-el, smoke still trailing from his revolver, but there were also the Indian agent and Ndé police rushing toward them.
“I saw it all,” said the agent. “That’s one warmonger who won’t be jumping the reservation again.”
There were conversations to be had with the agent, but finally Nejeunee and Sam-el stood alone with their horses in the gray, bitter cold of a road that would separate them forever. For troubling moments, there seemed nothing to say, not even when Sam-el gripped the saddle horn to climb on his horse. But just as he started to step up, he hesitated and turned again.
“I can’t ride off without sayin’ this. I just can’t.”
Waiting, Nejeunee stared at him.
“I’m glad it took so long to get here,” he added, “ ’cause it give me time to think.”
“Yes. Fifteen times neeldá, the dawn, rescued me after staring all night at Tl’é’na’áí, the moon.”
Sam-el glanced back at the Agency. The Ndé who had waited for rations had all dispersed now.
“When he tried claimin’ you was his, that settled it for me. What happened in war’s not your fault, and I don’t guess it’s mine neither. People we loved are gone, and if we can’t let that be the end of it, there won’t be just two people that died, but you and me too, in a way.”
His eyes glistened, and as he stretched out a hand his voice began to quake. “I miss what we had, Nejeunee. I miss it so bad.”
For a long while, she held her stare—remembering, longing, praying. Then she went into his arms, and his touch was a balm to wounds that only time might heal.
“Take me to our canyon, Sam-el,” she whispered. “Hold my hand and walk with me by the waters that sing only for us.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is based on the 1881 pursuit of a Mescalero Apache band into the Sierra Diablo of Texas by Texas Rangers, the ensuing battle of January 29 that proved to be the last engagement with Indians in the state, and the aftermath. Although all characters are fictitious, I have largely held to historic fact and authentic Apache culture and Mescalero language. My most important sources were:
RANGER-MESCALERO ENGAGEMENT AND AFTERMATH
W. H. (Bill) Roberts, SoundScriber interviews by J. Evetts Haley, Big Spring, Texas, 29 March and 21 December 1946, J. Evetts Haley Collection, N. S. Haley Memorial Library, Midland, Texas. Roberts was one of the rangers who participated in the events, and these recently recovered recordings provide much information not previously available to historians.
Captain George W. Baylor, Company A, Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers, report of scout to J. B. Jones, adjutant general, Frontier Battalion, Austin, Texas, 9 February 1881, Texas State Library and Archives, Austin. Baylor was the ranking officer during the events.
Lieutenant C. L. Nevill, Company E, Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers, report of scout to J. B. Jones, Austin, 6 February 1881, typescript in El Paso Public Library, El Paso, Texas. Nevill commanded one of the companies involved in the events.
Lieutenant C. L. Nevill, Company E, Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers, to J. B. Jones, Austin, 7 and 8 February 1881, typescripts in El Paso Public Library.
Lieutenant C. L. Nevill, Company E, Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers, to Captain Neal Coldwell, Quartermaster, Frontier Battalion, Austin, 9 February 1881, typescript in El Paso Public Library.
Monthly Return for February 1881, Company E, Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers, Texas State Library and Archives.
Major N. B. McLaughlen, Tenth Cavalry, commanding Fort Davis, to assistant adjutant general, Department of the Pecos, San Antonio, Texas, 5 February 1881, in telegrams received, District of the Pecos, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Medical Return for Fort Davis, entry for 8 January 1882 by post surgeon Paul R. Brown, Fort Davis Archives, Fort Davis, Texas.
Balmos, Dick, “Trail’s End,” The Cattleman (August 1952), 148, 150, 154, 158, 160, 162, 164. This article comprises the recollections of former ranger Sam Graham, another participant.
Baylor, George Wythe, El Paso Daily Herald series on 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15 August 1900. Relating his recollections of the events, the series comprises articles respectively titled “The Last Fight in El Paso County,” “Colonel George Wythe Baylor,” “A Lively Running Fight,” “When the Camp Was Entered,” and “Civilization vs. Barbarism.”
Baylor, George Wythe, Into the Far, Wild Country: True Tales of the Old Southwest, Jerry D. Thompson, editor (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1996), 213, 304-22. This memoir includes Baylor’s account of the events.
APACHE CULTURE
AND HISTORY
Ball, Eve, In the Days of Victorio (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970).
Ball, Eve, with Nora Henn and Lynda A. Sanchez, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, reprint, 1988).
Bourke, John Gregory, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, Extract from the Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892).
Cremony, John C., Life Among the Apaches (New York: A. Roman & Co., Publishers, 1868).
Mails, Thomas E., The People Called Apache (New York: BDD Illustrated Books, reprint, 1993).
Sweeney, Edwin R., Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Thrapp, Dan L., The Conquest of Apacheria (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967).
Worcester, Donald E., The Apaches: Eagles of the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of twenty-four books, Patrick Dearen is a former award-winning reporter for two West Texas daily newspapers. As a nonfiction writer, Dearen has produced books such as A Cowboy of the Pecos, Saddling Up Anyway:The Dangerous Lives of Old-Time Cowboys, and Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier, Revisited. His research has led to fourteen novels, including The Big Drift, winner of the Spur Award of Western Writers of America. His other western-themed novels include When Cowboys Die, The Illegal Man, To Hell or the Pecos, Perseverance, and Dead Man’s Boot, which received the Elmer Kelton Award from the Academy of Western Artists, the Will Rogers Bronze Medallion, and finalist recognition in the Peacemaker Awards of Western Fictioneers.
A ragtime pianist and wilderness enthusiast, Dearen lives with his wife in Midland, Texas.
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