Our dances done and feasting complete, the moon barely a dim glow behind the mountains, we left our women and children and disappeared into the darkness. We traveled at night and took the shortest trails, determined to avoid Indah and Blue Coats. We crossed the reservation ridges to the Tularosa wagon road, and keeping a fast pace in the moonlight, ate up the distance. We pushed our ponies that first night, making the Jarilla Mountains before sunrise, and resting at the same little spring we’d used during the escape from Mescalero when the Blue Coats took over the reservation and sent their Chiricahua scouts after us. We kept watch across our back trail and the open range as the dawn drove away the night, while Yibá, as the warrior apprentice, took care of the horses and made a hot meal. Soon we would not be willing to risk a small fire.
It was the Season of Large Leaves and very hot in the basin during daytime. The only things showing green on the llano were the creosote bushes and mesquite, and these were beginning to wilt, lose leaves, or turn brown from lack of water.
Water in the desert tanks was low, and the springs were mere seeps, all waiting for the rains to come near the beginning of the Season of Large Fruit. Soon our women and children would cut mescal bulbs from under the yucca plants, and bake them in big, deep pits under a cover of leaves and dirt for three or four days. The heat for baking came from burning coals covered with rocks under leaves lining the pit bottoms. When done, the baked mescal tasted sweet and sticky like Indah molasses smoked by a fire, and we all ate too much. The women dried and cut the leftovers into slabs that supplied us enough food to last through the Ghost Face Season, even with game scarce. We watched for places where the mescal was plentiful so we could bring the women to it when we returned from our raid against the witch.
From the Jarillas we studied the llano as far as Shináá Cho let us see into the far, gray air, but we saw no sign of Indah or Blue Coats. Smoke did not even rise out ranch house chimneys close to the tall, rough, orange and brown mountains the Indah called Organ. The day looked peaceful, but we took no chances. We divided times to keep watch between us, and those not keeping watch slept in the shadows of cliff shelves near the spring where it was cool. As the ending day fell into the west, we all got up and readied our ponies to ride. Since Rufus Pike’s rancho was only about half as far as what we had ridden the night before, it would be an easy trot for the ponies to make Rufus’s rancho before he got up to run for the little house by the corral.
Out on the llano, the night was clear and cold, the moon bright, and the trail clear all the way to the springs where we had waited for the Chiricahua wolves chasing us after the Blue Coats took over the reservation. We rested the ponies there and then rode over the pass Rufus called Baylor and on down the wagon road running on the west side of the Organs to Rufus’s rancho.
Our ponies walked into the bare place in front of Rufus’s ranch house. The stars showed it would be awhile before Rufus opened his door to run for the little house. We rode on back to the pasture where the People had stayed near the big pool of water Rufus had made for his cattle by damming up a spring flowing into an arroyo. We unsaddled, rubbed down our ponies, and put hobbles on them so they wouldn’t wander far. We bathed and then walked back to the ranch house to wait on Rufus. A light touch of gray and a few scattered pools of yellow light began to form in the valley.
The bed Rufus used creaked inside as he sat up and coughed. A match popped into flame, and an oil lantern filled the house with smoky, yellow light. Rufus pulled the latch on the door and pushed it, squeaking and complaining, open. He stuck his head out the doorway and grinned.
“Howdy, boys. Let me take my mornin’ walk, and I’ll whomp us up somethin’ to eat soon as I git back.” He came out the door in the long red pants he called long johns, and he wore his old campaign hat and mule-ear boots. He had that smell of horse and sweat the Indah have when they don’t wash for a long time. I was glad I was upwind of him.
We grinned, watching him trot off. I called after him, “Rufus, we surprise you many times with early visits. Why you no surprised now?”
“I’s awake, listenin’, when you boys rode out to the pasture. A big cat’s been after my calves. Figured it must be you or yore People, and you’d scare off the cat and let me git a little snooze ’fore I had to git up.”
He reached the little house, stepped in, and pulled the door closed. We waited.
While we ate, I told Rufus what we planned, and, his eyes glittering, he said, “Well, I’m a comin’, too. I reckon you’n use my ol’ thunder boomer to chop down a few Comanches, can’t ya?”
“Maybe you come with us?”
“Couldn’t be kept away. When ya leavin’?”
“Tonight we go. Branigan give paper to leave reservation for two moons. Nine suns gone already while we make ready and ride here.”
Rufus scraped the last spoonful of beans from his pie pan plate, filled his face, chewed like a happy cow with calf, then winked and said, “Get some rest, boys. Me an’ my ol’ gray mule’ll be ready.”
We rode away from Rufus’s ranch house when the sun was low in the west, filling the sky with brilliant reds fading to oranges and purples. We crossed the Río Grande at a cattle crossing south of Mesilla village and followed the great river south, staying in the moonlit shadows of the bosque, following nearly the same trail we had followed to Juh’s stronghold. Beela-chezzi had the best memory of the trail in Mexico and took the lead as we crossed the border into the land of the Nakai-yes.
We were careful to pace the horses and not wear them out with too fast a gallop or too little water, stopping to rest them when we could two or three times a night near a water source. We continued to ride at night and rest in the heat of the day. When we arose, we waited for the dark and watched for long dust streamers at dusk, a sure sign of the movement of men and an indication of a direction we didn’t want to go.
It was strange for us to ride with an Indah, and I often caught my brothers watching Rufus. I’m sure they were wondering if an old Indah man on a mule, no doubt an honest friend, could keep up with them. But Rufus stayed with us, chewing his tobacco and spitting enough to leave an easy trail to follow across the tops of creosote bushes.
Rufus took a liking to Yibá, and one dawn, he showed him how to load and aim his big buffalo gun. He promised Yibá he could shoot it when we got to a place where the sound wouldn’t give us away. I saw Kah and Beela-chezzi watching them, and I knew they wished that they, too, could feel the power of the old thunder boomer in their hands. Yibá told me that Rufus’s offer made him want to dance. But he was mature enough to keep his enthusiasm under control and do the job of an apprentice on the war trail. After Rufus made Yibá the shooting offer, Kah and Beela-chezzi became much friendlier toward Rufus.
After two nights of riding west across the rough llano south of the border, passing north of Janos, we crossed the Río Janos and soon reached the Río Carretas, which was then not much more than damp sand in a narrow arroyo. Following the Río Carretas, we drew close to Carretas and stayed alert and careful to avoid discovery by a Nakai-yi peon or a free-ranging Comanche staying in the hacienda of Sangre del Diablo. We found a wagon road toward the springs at Carretas and mixed our tracks in with others to avoid letting the rest of the countryside know new ponies were in the mountains.
The night was more than half-gone as we rode up Higueros Canyon past the springs where Crook and his scouts stopped for the Chiricahuas to camp nearly two moons earlier. We stopped at the springs and rested the horses before riding on up the canyon and then taking the branch that led to the witch’s hacienda. I wanted to find a place where we could hide and study the hacienda in the daylight in order to pick the best places where we could fire down on hiding Comanches.
Half the moon hid behind the mountains, its shadows growing long, and the stars showed we were not far from dawn. We came to another canyon branch and saw the dark outlines of the hacienda and a barn nearby on the top of a low-lying ridge, where I had seen horses and cattle i
n separate corrals while scouting for General Crook.
The south slope of the canyon was not steep and had thick juniper and piñon cover. We climbed it and stopped at about the same height as the hacienda, about three hundred yards away. The air carried the smell of pine, and the spot was warmer than the canyon bottom. Yibá found a place out of sight from the hacienda, where there was plenty of grass, to hide and hobble the horses and Rufus’s mule. We all rolled out our blankets under low piñon branches in the darkest shadows to sleep a little before the sun came.
CHAPTER 31
ALL ARE GONE
Droplets of light fell through the thick piñon branches over us and filled the shadows with bright puddles of sunlight. I opened one eye, saw Beela-chezzi use his be’idest’íné to study the hacienda, lower it, and slowly shake his head. The others still slept, wrapped in their blankets, in the heavy shadows.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. I saw nothing at all. The witch and his Comanches, all are gone.”
Bitter bile filled my throat. The witch had escaped once more? I sat up, snapped out the Shináá Cho, and scanned the hacienda, the corrals, and the barn. The posts with crosspieces where I had seen the big hunting birds were still there, but no birds. The corrals were empty, and around the hacienda there were no signs of life, no smoke from fires, no animals of any kind, nothing.
Sleep left the others, too. They stretched and studied the hacienda. I looked over at Rufus, who raised his brows and shrugged. I said to him, “I’m going over there. Shoot anyone who comes near me.”
He nodded, lifted the long-barreled, heavy Sharps rifle out of his blankets, and pulled the big side-hammer to safety. I pulled the Henry out of my blankets, levered a cartridge into its breech, and let the hammer down to its safety position. Walking and sliding in grass and piñon needles, but staying out of sight from the hacienda, I worked my way to the canyon floor.
The wagon road up to the hacienda was an easy climb to the top, with three or four switchbacks, but it made it hard for me to stay out of sight. I stayed in the piñons close to the road as I ran from the shadows of one tree to the next. I stayed low in case hidden guards at the top watched the road. In the shadows of a piñon at the top of a ridge, I waited, studying every window and wall around the hacienda and the barns and corrals off to one side. Truly, nothing lived there now. I left my hiding place and began to look closely at the hacienda and its grounds.
Many tracks, at least four or five suns old, led down from the hacienda, but none up. The fine, brown caliche dust showed signs of no more than twenty mounted riders and maybe twice that many ponies. I saw one distinct set of tracks made by pesh líí‘beshkee’é (iron horseshoes); the rest of the pony tracks were just shallow holes made by hooves covered in rawhide.
At the hacienda walls, I felt evil spirits hovering in the light wind blowing through the place. I cocked the Henry and walked through the open gates. Cold charcoal lay gray and black in the big circle of black rocks surrounding the remains of an old fire at the center of the compound. A tall post with a crosspiece, like the one I had been hung on at the witch’s hacienda near Casas Grandes, stood stinking and streaked with dry, black bloodstains near the old fire.
Something drew my eyes from the post back to the circle of rocks. Prickles grew on the back of my neck as I realized pieces of a burned skull and the outline of partially burned bones forming a skeleton lay in the ashes. I wanted to run out the gates and down the hill far, far away from there, but I forced myself to stay and see it all, hoping I might find some clue to where the witch had vanished.
A breeze pushed through the compound, carrying the smell of gourd flowers and rotting meat, as I walked through empty rooms one by one. I found broken whiskey bottles and clay pots, empty cans with pictures of fruits and vegetables, pieces of broken harness leather and frayed rope, a room with bloodstains on the floor, and a broken knife. Empty rifle cartridges lay scattered throughout the rooms, but nothing else; no chairs or tables or cooking pots, nothing. I had never seen a place so empty of life.
When I had watched this place two moons earlier, the barn and corrals held many horses and longhorn cows. The depth and scatter of their droppings showed that my eyes had not deceived me. A big pile of fresh bones, bits of meat and gristle rotting and making the pile stink like a carcass under big black birds, bleached in the sun behind the big barn. The bone pile said the witch had much dried and jerked meat, evidence he’d planned a long trip. I saw nothing of wagons or buggies, not even any rope or harness chains. I walked back down the ridge following the same path I used coming up, careful not to leave tracks.
When I returned, Yibá brought the water sacks and trail food, and we all sat in a circle to eat. The others asked many questions about what I had seen and what I thought we should we do. I told them of the lifelessness of the place, that it just lay in the bright sunlight, stinking like a dead body, looking like the burned skeleton in the fire’s ashes.
When we finished eating, I lighted one of my black cigarros, smoked to the four directions, and passed it around the circle.
After finishing the cigarro, I said, “Now we must decide what we do.”
Kah crossed his arms and stared across the canyon at the empty hacienda and said, “The witch is not here? Ussen has saved him again? It must mean it’s not for us to take our revenge against him. Let’s leave this place of evil and return to the land of the Nakai-yes no more.”
Beela-chezzi frowned and looked at Rufus and then me. I wanted to frown, too, but kept my face a fixed mask. Rufus cut a chew, rolled his shoulders, and said nothing as he studied Kah through the dust-coated lenses that rode on his nose. Yibá said nothing. As an apprentice, his job was to listen to the warriors and learn, but his eyes showed that he feared we all thought as Kah did.
I said, “This witch has now escaped our vengeance three times. Twice, I nearly killed him. His Power is great, but Ussen didn’t give me the Power to send him blind to the Happy Land and then save him when we fought. Ussen gave you, Kah, Power to save me in my time of great need after the witch nearly killed me. Ussen gave me Power, and I vowed to use it.
“Every time we fail or lose, the test is not to quit, but to keep on until we win. This witch must die. I will kill him. If you don’t believe this, then return to the reservation. I won’t hold it against you. What’s your word, Beela-chezzi? Speak.”
Beela-chezzi nodded and said, “Yellow Boy speaks true. We may not find the witch before we return to the reservation, but we must try and try again until either we kill him or he kills us. Our will not to quit is Ussen’s measure of our strength.”
I looked at Rufus, who spat his brown juice to his right side, and said, “I ain’t got much say in what ya’ll oughter do. I’m kinda like ol’ Yibá there, just along for the ride and to help ya if I can. But let me tell ya this, boys. I been around since yore daddies was Yibá’s age. If that damned Mex-Comanch mongrel had killed and scalped any of their people, they woulda rid after him till he was a havin’ his bald brain roasted over a hot fire and steam’s a blowin’ out his ears before they sent him to the Happy Land blind and chokin’ on his private parts.”
Beela-chezzi’s eyes filled with the same fire that filled mine. I wanted to jump up and yell for us to find Sangre del Diablo and do to him as Rufus said our fathers would have. But I held back and waited for Kah to speak.
Kah nodded, fire also filling his eyes.
“I haven’t spoken as a true warrior. My woman carries our first child. It will never be in danger from this witch. I’m willing to ride any desert, climb any mountain, to help you send him blind to the Happy Land.”
The word came from our mouths in a shout. “Enjuh!”
Kah said, “How will we find the witch, Yellow Boy?”
I looked out across the canyon to the empty hacienda and the words flowed without me even having to think about them. “The witch hunts Apaches for scalp money. Many Apaches go back to San Carlos and Fort Apache with
General Crook. Not many left for him to kill and scalp. A few still stay hidden in camps in the mountains around us, and sometimes he even raids the Nakai-yi villages to take their hair and claim it is Apache. Juh did not return to San Carlos, and Geronimo still raids for horses and cattle here in the land of the Nakai-yes before he goes back to the reservation. Juh’s son, Kitsizil Lichoo’, planned to make a camp with a few warriors from Elias’s camp in the mountains north of here, and the camp of Elias is to the south of where we sit now. There are several other camps we haven’t seen.
“I think the witch plans to wipe out the Apache camps, as he did our people, and he knows the place where Elias camps because the two Comanches, who escaped with the witch and that we later killed, knew where it was. I think he rides for the camp of Elias to take scalps. Elias feared the witch would do this and believed lying to us would help the witch and protect his people. He thought wrong, made a bad bargain. I say we go to the camp of Elias as fast as our ponies can get us there. Maybe we will be in time to warn him and ambush the witch. Maybe not, but we move closer to him.”
Beela-chezzi, Kah, Rufus, and Yibá nodded their heads.
“Enjuh. We ride.”
CHAPTER 32
RÍO PIEDRAS VERDES
We followed the same trail south back into the mountains Crook used to lead the Chiricahuas north to Carretas. John Rope had shown me where the trail to Juh’s stronghold crossed the path of the Chiricahuas. I believed that if we rode back to Juh’s stronghold trail and then rode for the stronghold, we would find the trail Kitsizil Lichoo’ had followed to the camp of Elias. We rode in the daylight, anxious to make fast time and hoping to find the pesh líí’beshkee’é (iron horseshoe) mark in the old tracks on the trail, but we didn’t see it until we found the trail Kitsizil Lichoo’ followed to Elias. Sangre del Diablo must have ridden north and then south around the Sierra del Carcay Mountains to find the trail he knew to Elias’s camp, and rode at night to stay out of sight until he was past Juh’s stronghold. All this meant he was riding slower and farther than my band, and we might have a chance to get to Elias before he did.
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