The Grey Pilgrim

by J. M. Hayes

  They were going to have a crowd for the making of Edith Burns’ historical footnote. Aside from Fredericks and Larson of the BIA, there would be at least two representatives of the local draft board. The Chairman of the Papago Tribal Council was bringing a few of his own people to do a little politicking. It all added up to a dismal failure for J.D.’s attempts to keep it quiet and out of the news. Reporters from as far away as Phoenix were coming. At least he’d made it an iron-clad condition that there be no advance publicity. If there was, he’d promised to personally stake out the offending party on the nearest anthill, or, worse, make sure they missed covering the event. He’d only have a few hours with Mary before the whole thing became public knowledge and Larry started wondering where she was. It was the best he’d been able to do. Maybe it would be enough. J.D. wondered what he’d do if she chose to go home to her husband. Would he tell her about Larry and the red-headed naiad? He didn’t much like himself for not being sure he wouldn’t.

  Tires rolled across the gravel of the ranch yard, and J.D. stepped out of the warm house into about as uncheerful a morning as could be asked for. The sky hung low and threatening, truncating the nearby peaks and masking Arizona’s normally distant horizons. The car was a black-and-white from the Pima County Sheriff’s office. He’d called and left word for Jesus the night before. J.D. didn’t want anyone from the sheriff’s office trying to serve any warrants he didn’t happen to know about. He hadn’t managed to talk to Jesus personally while he was dealing with all the necessary VIPs, but he knew Jesus would want to be there at the finish. J.D. just asked the dispatcher to tell Jesus that the Deputy U.S. Marshal suggested he zigzag his way out to their favorite ranch Monday morning. He’d made the man write the message down and read it back to him to be sure he got it right. Jesus would know what it meant, but the hot shots in the sheriff’s department wouldn’t stand much chance of deciphering it.

  Jesus climbed out of the cruiser looking very tired. He would have gotten the message at the end of his shift, and he must have driven straight out to the ranch.

  “You get yourself on in here and have some breakfast, Deputy,” Edith Burns called from the door behind them. “Let the marshal get back to his pancakes. He ain’t hardly touched them yet.”

  J.D. led Jesus inside and took another shot at the pancakes. There were more than he remembered. Around mouthfuls he filled Jesus in on a slightly censored version of his midnight visit from Mary and Jujul and their agreement for today’s surrender.

  Jesus rubbed the sleep from his eyes and grinned. “Good,” he said. “Then I won’t get chewed out so bad if I don’t show up for my next shift on time. And when I have to explain all the extra mileage on my vehicle I can just tell them to bill the U.S. Marshal’s Office, ‘cause I got commandeered.”

  “Hell,” J.D. told him, “I’m so happy with the way this thing’s going to work out, I’ll cover you out of my own pocket if Uncle Sam balks.”

  When events seem to be going right, it’s usually because you’ve overlooked something. J.D. had hardly finished expressing his pleasure when it started evaporating. A fresh set of tires crunched thorough the gravel outside. J.D. got up to see who else was impatient. He wasn’t expecting anyone from the official party until close to noon. It was his experience that bureaucrats always take at least twice as long to do anything as can be reasonably expected.

  When he saw the Auburn Speedster the zest went right out of his day and he felt like a middle-aged man who’d just spent another sleepless night in what had become a succession of far too many. Larry Spencer wheeled the car up to the porch and climbed out.

  “What’re you doing here, Larry?” J.D. asked. He could hardly have been less delighted to see anyone. Larry seemed a little hurt at the coolness of J.D.’s greeting, but he held onto a bit of righteous indignation just the same.

  “What’s going on out here?” he countered. “You never returned my calls, then a reporter phones me looking for background information on the woman who’s helping bring in Jujul’s band and it’s Mary he’s talking about. I finally pried out of him that something was happening out here today and when my efforts to find you weren’t successful, I just came on out. What’s the deal? Where’s Mary, what’s she got to do with Jujul? I’ve got a right to know, J.D. She is my wife.”

  “I wasn’t sure you were still aware of that,” J.D. snarled. Larry went bright crimson. For just a moment J.D. thought Larry might swing at him, and hoped so because he wanted to hit someone or something real badly just then. The moment passed.

  “Please, J.D., I still love her. I’ve got to know what’s going on. If she’s in danger….”

  “Yeah,” J.D. said through a wave of guilt. “OK.” He reluctantly admitted to himself that Larry might still care, and what she did or what happened to her could still hurt him.

  J.D. ushered Larry into the dining room. Edith Burns immediately set a huge mug of steaming coffee under his nose and began surrounding it with platters of pancakes, sausages, and omelets from the cornucopia of her kitchen. He sat and listened as J.D. went through it again, and once he understood Mary wasn’t in danger, he started shoveling it in.

  Things were getting complex. Mary’s arrival was transforming itself from pleasant fulfillment to frightening uncertainty. On the other hand, J.D. couldn’t think of anything else that could go wrong. But he was counting his wrongs before they hatched.

  One of Burns’ hands came in the front door and bent to whisper in his boss’s ear. Burns’ eyes got big and he stopped dead in the middle of his third stack of pancakes.

  “Jujul’s here,” he announced, answering his guests’ inquiring gazes. “But something’s wrong. He ain’t got but about twenty men with him, and Mary ain’t there.”

  They cleared the dining room table simultaneously, the words pulling them out from under their meal like the trick with the table cloth, leaving steaming plates and platters miraculously behind. J.D. was closest to the door, so he was the first one through, but the mob was on his heels.

  Burns’ ranch house sat on a little terrace above a normally dry stream bed. Dry on the surface, but Burns’ well didn’t have to be very deep. Gentle slopes rose up to normal desert on both sides, but only on the west was that rise clearly visible. Cottonwoods and mesquites along the water course blocked the view in the opposite direction.

  Jujul and a band of horsemen sat along the top of the ridge that divided desert from valley, strung out against the slate grey sky. They looked like a flock of cheap extras for a Hollywood Western.

  When he saw them on the porch, Jujul left the others and brought his roan down the slope. He only came about halfway before he stopped and sat his mount, waiting. J.D. noted the butt of the infamous Sharps protruding from a saddle holster, and he could see how solemn the man looked. There was no sign of Mary.

  “The rest of you stay here,” he commanded. “Jesus, come with me.” To his surprise, everyone obeyed.

  He suppressed a need to charge head long up that slope and start choking “where is she”s out of the old man. The morning had taken on a hard, crystalline edge. A wrong move might shatter it and the shards could fall in lots of dangerous ways, impossible to reassemble again. Jujul dismounted as they reached him and held out a hand. J.D. took it. The grip was hard. Sad, angry eyes bored out of the old man’s face. Before J.D. could tell Jesus to ask him about Mary, Jujul started.

  “I gave you my word, Fitzpatrick,” he said, through the deputy. “As far as I am able, I keep it. First, I promised to surrender myself to you today. I do that now. When you hear the rest you must decide what to do with your prisoner, but I urge that you release me, so that you and I may accompany each other.”

  J.D. wanted to interrupt him, wanted answers to the only important question. But the Indian was getting to it in his own way, and the marshal knew he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.

  “When Marie and I returned to where my village is hidden we discovered it had been found by three men.
Two of them were O’odham, the third claims to be an officer of an army not yet at war with, but opposed to your own. He says he represents a place I have not heard of, a land of the rising sun.

  “There is not time for details now, but he had been very persuasive in my absence. He has convinced most of the young men of the village, those whose blood still runs hot and who lack the maturity to make sound judgements, that he could lead them on a successful campaign against your people. I managed to impress on some how foolish this was, how mighty your nation and how hopeless our cause, but he has promised to arm them with weapons equivalent to your own. He says a boat comes from his distant land, a boat that travels beneath the sea, and it will bring them all they need to fight you.

  “My return divided the young men of the village. But our people have a tradition which allows a war chief to be independent of our normal leadership. Whoever wishes to make a fight proclaims himself, and those who sympathize with his cause or desire plunder or adventure may join him as they wish. I could not dissuade them all, so I thought, perhaps, I might win them back by challenging their new chief to single combat. I am a foolish old man. He knew many tricks and he beat me easily.” For the first time J.D. noticed the bruises on the side of his face.

  “He left me unconscious in the dirt. When I woke, I found he had taken his followers and gone. He had also taken one of the men who came with him, the other ran away. And he took Marie.

  “He left word that he took Marie and the other to insure our silence. If the rest of us would not cooperate with him, then at least we could not tell you, not if we valued the safety of the White Woman or the lawyer John Parker. We should not honor my promise to surrender. We should stay hidden as long as possible and keep ourselves out of both his way and yours.

  “He has thirteen of our young men with him. Seven of their women have gone along as well. There are twenty-three all together. If we leave now we may catch them before they reach the sea.

  “I can offer you only myself and six other old men. The rest I have brought with me are men of the age for this registration thing. I bring them here for that purpose. When they are done they may go home. I do not think they would be of much value in our search. Too many of them have sympathies which lie with those who have followed this stranger. But we can take their horses and provisions for you and as many men as you wish to bring, and we will go and find the man who has stolen Marie, and, with her, my honor.

  “You may decide not to trust me, since part of my word to you has been broken, but I beg you to do so. If I and the other old men from our village are there, we may be able to keep our young men from fighting against you. It is one thing for them to choose to make war on Anglos, another for them to fight their fathers and uncles. What do you say?”

  J.D. said, “Jesus, Jesus!” pronouncing it both ways. “A Japanese spy, a submarine, hostages! No way Jujul could be making all that up. Tell him we’re coming. Let me go think up some lies to tell the others and borrow an arsenal from Bill Burns. You pick us out a couple of the best horses.”

  Jesus relayed the information to Jujul as J.D. sprinted back down the slope. Bill, Edith, Larry, and half a dozen ranch hands stood waiting impatiently on the porch. He wished he could take Burns aside and explain it to him, but there simply wasn’t time. There wasn’t time to concoct any convincing stories either. What could he tell them? That Jujul had brought in part of his people, the rest were coming, Mary with them, and Jesus and he would like to borrow some guns so they could do a little hunting with the old man and a few of his friends to pass the morning? Nobody would be buying that bridge.

  He told them the basics. He left out the part about the mysterious stranger who claimed to be Japanese, and he left out the part about the other hostage. It just complicated things, would take too long to explain. And he didn’t want them telling the officials and reporters who should be descending on them in a few hours. Maybe the guy wasn’t really Japanese. Even if he was, they didn’t need to start a war scare. Too many Arizonans already expected the yellow hordes to come pouring into the United States momentarily by way of Mexico. Oriental Americans had enough problems without their neighbors suddenly having reason to think each and every one of them might be a potential spy. And, if you added Indian allies….

  “I’ll come,” Bill said. “And I can mount a dozen armed hands in no time, give us a numerical advantage.”

  “No,” J.D. told him. “Thanks, but no. I trust the old man. The fewer outsiders get mixed in, the less apt we are to come to any shooting. I really think we stand a better chance without you.”

  Burns sucked on the cigarette he’d just lit off the butt of its predecessor as he fought his disappointment. He might not like it, but he understood.

  “And I need you to keep the heat off with the press and officials who come in later. Make a big deal out of the members of the village who are here to register. Play down the fact that there’s a problem. Don’t even hint Mary’s a captive. Tell them Jujul is having trouble convincing a few diehards and we’ve gone back to his village to help negotiate.”

  “We’ll do it,” Burns said, happier now that he had something to do.

  “I’m coming with you,” Larry said.

  “Jesus, Larry!” J.D. exploded. “Don’t be an ass. You’ll just slow us down, and if there’s a problem out there I’ll have you to worry about as well as Mary.”

  “God damn it, J.D.,” he said. “I’ve got to come. She’s my wife. I can’t stand around here pretending nothing’s wrong and making happy faces for a bunch of reporters and bureaucrats, and I sure as hell can’t go back to Tucson and calmly wait by the phone. Either you take me along, or I head back to town and spread the word and get a real rescue effort mounted.”

  J.D. should have talked him out of it. He should have found something that seemed useful for Larry to do that also kept him out of the way and off the front pages. But he couldn’t think of anything under the pressure of the moment, especially after the threat to go public. The only alternative was to punch Larry’s lights out, bind and gag him and have Bill and Edith keep him out of sight until they got back. It was a good idea, except for involving the Burnses in a felony.

  “All right,” he agreed. “Bill, find him a gun too, maybe a shotgun and some double-ought so he’s got a chance of hitting what he aims at.”

  Larry tried to thank him, but J.D. was already on his way back up the slope toward Jesus and Jujul. He’d just noticed the gentle rain that was beginning to sweep across the ranch yard. If it kept up, they could lose the trail.

  Out of Our Jurisdictions

  They put Larry up on a big skittish brown colt where he tried to look right at home, not like someone who hadn’t been on a horse since his mid-teens and then only the old mare that refused to hurry even for her feed bag. There was a roll of blankets and supplies tied up behind him and a twelve-gauge automatic shotgun in a saddle holster within easy reach of his right hand in case he proved brave enough to let go of the reins. A bandolier of shells hung over his shoulder. It was obvious he thought he cut a dashing figure and J.D. almost changed his mind and left him behind when Larry wished out loud for someone with a camera to record the scene.

  They rode hard, with Larry riding harder than the rest. Everyone else was a natural extension of their animal. Larry held on for dear life, bouncing and swaying and wearing blisters in unnatural places.

  They stopped after a couple of hours. J.D. was cold and sore, the steady drizzle had soaked him. He was ready for a rest but it was too soon. He was glad when Larry, not he, started to climb down from the saddle only to be stopped by Jesus.

  “We’ve cut their trail,” Gonzales said. “Stay where you are. The Papagos are studying it. This rain’s going to make them damned hard to follow. We need to memorize any peculiarities now, while they’re relatively fresh. We’ll move on again in a minute.”

  Larry started to protest, but he noticed J.D.’s cold scrutiny and shut up. He might be in pain, but he still had
his pride.

  The Papagos leaned far out of their saddles studying the damp earth. J.D. couldn’t see what they were looking at and couldn’t see what they were following when they started out again.

  They kept it up all day. So did the rain—slow, steady, soaking, and cold as death. When they stopped, Jesus had to tell J.D. several time before he reined his animal in. He’d ceased functioning in the normal fashion. Everything was on automatic pilot while the real J.D. curled up somewhere inside and hid until it was over.

  “Too dark to follow a trail anymore,” Jesus said. “Might as well climb down and eat something. Try to get some sleep. We’ll start again at first light.”

  Larry unhooked his foot from the stirrup, swung back over the saddle, and ended up flat on the ground, confused about how he got there. He tried to get up and couldn’t.

  J.D. fumbled through his wet saddle bags and dug out a flashlight Burns had sent along.

  “Look at the blood,” Jesus said.

  “Shit. Stupid kid’s ridden himself raw.”