Lord Apache

by Robert J. Steelman

  "Mr. Eggleston proposed marriage to Beulah. I suppose you know that."

  "Yes," he said. "Eggie told me. He is very happy."

  "She did not want to leave me, did not want to go to England without me, but I insisted. After all, I am the one who got her into this horrible mess, and I want her to be happy. If I am at my wit's ends, there is no need for her to be desolate also."

  He picked up the Traveler's Guide and smoothed the rumpled pages. "What will you do, then?"

  When Phoebe Larkin first stepped off the Prescott stage she had looked like a Paris mannequin, the utmost in haute couture. Now she resembled poor sickly Mrs. Ben Sprankle down the road—dress torn and stained, feet bare, nails rimmed with grime. She had not been taking care of herself.

  "I'll just go to Prescott and give myself up. What else is there to do? Mr. Meech, at least, should be glad to see me, if no one else is."

  He looked sharply up from the Guide. "What do you mean by that?"

  She took a deep breath. "Please—I don't want to be unpleasant about anything. I haven't the stomach for it anymore. I—I just came to tell you I was sorry for your loss."

  "Go to Prescott!" he flared. "Give yourself up!" He paced the dirt floor. "What foolish talk!"

  "But what else is there for me? You are going back to England, and I—"

  "I tried to help you!" he cried. "Damn it, Phoebe, your happiness means much to me! I had all the arrangements made! George Dunaway was in love with you! George is a good man, an honest man, and a good provider, too, I daresay. But no! You had to knock everything into a cocked hat with your stubbornness, your willfulness, your headstrong ways!"

  "Stubborn? Headstrong?" She rose quickly; her eyes flashed blue sparks, and under the shabby niching her breasts heaved. "Mr. Jack Drumm, if ever there was a person stubborn and headstrong—pigheaded and obstinate and unseeing—it's you!" Her eyes dimmed with sudden tears. "Call me stubborn! Why, you take the blue ribbon for pure mulishness!"

  He shook a schoolmasterly finger. "I devoted a great deal of trouble and thought to relieving your condition—"

  "My condition!" Her voice was incredulous. "You sound like I was a mare with the glanders!"

  "To relieving your condition," he insisted. "And when I had everything satisfactorily laid out—"

  Angry, she raised clenched fists high in a hopeless gesture. "Stop it, I tell you! Stop it! Don't go on talking about me in that damned cold way!"

  Women's tears unnerved him. Cornelia had used them artfully and effectively. Disconcerted, he paused.

  "Listen!" Phoebe begged. "Listen to me!" She paid no attention to the great tears rolling down her cheeks, stitching their way into her bosom. "Maybe you're just stupid, or maybe it's your English ways that make you unable to show any affection, any love, and regard for others. You're like a damned icicle! So you force me to say something—something I would rather my tongue would rot out than say! Listen to me! Mr. John Peter Christian Drumm, I do not love George Dunaway! Do you understand that? I do not love him. I love someone else!"

  Feeling faint and feverish, he goggled at her.

  "I love you!" Phoebe cried. "There, I said it! And I am ashamed to have thrown away my love on a heartless and unfeeling Englishman!" Wiping her eyes with the soiled hem of her skirt, she fled.

  He stared at the open doorway. Love him? Phoebe Larkin love him? It was impossible. He shook his head. He was much older than she. Besides—he was already engaged to Cornelia Newton-Barrett, and she knew that. In addition, Phoebe was an aggressive kind of female—strange and unpredictable. His own methodical and logical Drumm ways would never accommodate her spirit, her impulsiveness, her rashness. Cornelia Newton-Barrett was much more suited to his phlegmatic temperament. He could never imagine Cornelia acting as Phoebe Larkin had just done.

  Someone seemed to be covertly watching him. Suspicious, he wheeled, and found himself staring into the cracked mirror on the wall. A bearded and shaken countenance stared back wildly at him. The beard, the woolen poncho, the coarse manta shirt—these things had by now become homely and familiar. But his face was somehow different. It betrayed powerful and unfamiliar emotion.

  Stepping forward, he looked questioningly into the mirror. Love him? Impossible! How could anyone love a figure like that? Yet— what was this experience he had just undergone? Love? Did he love her—Phoebe Larkin? He shook his head. It could hardly be love. When he came to marry Cornelia, he supposed love would then come. They would be comfortable together, they would have children to carry on the Drumm name, they would like each other very much, know each other's thoughts, they would grow old and gray together and finally lie side by side in the Drumm plot at Salisbury. That was love, real English love—the genuine article.

  "Sir?"

  He started, stepped away from the mirror. "Come in, Eggie."

  The valet brought basin and razor, along with a woolen suit and fresh linens, long packed away.

  "Are you ready for me, Mr. Jack? You seem a little—"

  Jack waved a hand in a dismissing gesture.

  "Miss Larkin and I were just—just talking."

  Still shaken by the experience, he sat down and stroked the beard in a final gesture that was almost affectionate.

  "You may proceed," he said, "when you are ready."

  They were all sorry to see Jack Drumm leave. Sprankle wrung his hand, Mrs. Sloat baked him oatmeal cookies from her own family receipt, Ike Coogan brought a stone jug of homemade corn whiskey.

  "You've changed a lot," Ike observed.

  Under the thicket of beard the scar on Jack's lip had healed surprisingly well. Now that he was clean-shaven, it showed only a little. Though the stiff collar and bowler hat felt strange, he was already becoming used to them.

  "Well," he smiled, "I guess it's a long time since you saw me in clothes like this."

  The old man shook his head. "It ain't that. It's something inside."

  "What do you mean?"

  Ike shrugged. "It'll come out."

  Uncle Roscoe was getting ready to go prospecting again in the Mazatzals. "Apaches don't skeer me none! After all, a feller can turn up his toes just onct!" He nodded toward the rugged ridges. "It might as well be up there as here." Extending a horny fist, he shook hands. "You been good to me, Mr. Drumm, and I won't never forget it. When I find the Gypsy Dancer, I'll send you a hatful of nuggets!"

  Charlie and his wife and children came too, solemn-faced and dressed in their best white calzones, with a garland to hang around Ostin Drumm's neck. By now, Charlie had a little English.

  "You come back—sometime?"

  Jack shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Charlie. But I'll miss you and your woman and the children."

  He could not stand to speak intimately to Phoebe Larkin. She avoided him also, until the final leavetaking. When he called them all together to say his farewells, she came in a freshly laundered white dress with a red sash Charlie's wife had given her. The titian hair was combed high in the Grecian style, tied with a ribbon. She wore a pair of the rawhide Mexican huaraches and her face was pale, the eyes betraying recent weeping. She stood silently with the others—the Sloats, the Sprankles, Charlie's family, Uncle Roscoe—around the spring wagon. Charlie would drive the party into Prescott, thence to Bear Spring, where Jack and Eggleston and Mrs. Glore would take the eastbound Atlantic and Pacific cars.

  "Speech!" someone shouted. Others took up the call.

  Embarrassed, Jack allowed himself to be pushed up on the wagon. Clearing his throat, he pulled at the unaccustomed cravat.

  "I'm really not much of a speechmaker. But I want you all to know I'm sorry to leave this place. The Arizona Territory is a rough and cruel place sometimes—sand, wind, cactus, Apaches. But the roughness is tempered for the man who looks beyond those surface things. And to make up for the hard times, too, there are the people of Arizona. They—you—are the salt of the earth, and I'll miss—"

  Phoebe Larkin was staring at him with those great round blue eyes; for
a moment he faltered.

  "I'll miss each and every one of you. And after I've left, I hope you'll think of me as often as I think of you. The North Atlantic is stormy this time of year, and in Hampshire, in England, where I come from, it's cold and rainy and miserable. But there'll always be a warm place in my heart for the A.T., and for you old friends."

  At the end his voice became a little hoarse, and cracked. Perhaps he had contracted an inflammation of the throat from the chill winter nights of Rancho Terco. But Ben Sprankle led a chorus of hip-hip-hoorays, Charlie's children lit Mexican firecrackers, and Uncle Roscoe tootled on a mouth-harp, while Sloat danced a jig. Beulah Glore, the moment of departure near, fell into Phoebe's arms and wept. Phoebe held her tight, patting her ample shoulder, saying, "Beulah, don't cry! You know it's all for the best. Someday, maybe, I'll come to Hampshire and visit you and Mr. Eggleston."

  Jack climbed down from the wagon, held out his hand. Phoebe took it, silently. It felt cold and lifeless in his own.

  "I—I will be thinking of you more than anybody, Phoebe," he stammered. His throat constricted in a spasm, and he popped a lozenge into his mouth. "I sincerely tried to do what I thought best for you—with George Dunaway, I mean—but it did not work out. Now I must leave you, and I want you to know I have paid Mr. Sloat to keep an eye out for you, run the ranch. In Prescott I will make some further arrangements which may better your state. I—I cannot be too specific at the moment but you will hear the details in the next few days, I think." He cleared his throat, stared into the bowler hat. "It is little enough I am doing, God knows, but perhaps it will help."

  "I thank you," she said coolly, "but I always killed my own snakes, Mr. Drumm, and I always will. I do not mean to sound ungrateful—it is just the way I was made, I guess."

  "Well," he said, "if sometime chance should put you in the way of a visit to England, I hope you will come to Clarendon Hall. Cornelia and I will be very happy to receive you." Things were getting awkward. Unnerved by her composure, her calm gaze, he bumbled on. "You would like Cornelia! She is a smashing girl—good at lawn tennis and things like that." He put his hat on backward and had to reverse it. "Rides well, too, Cornelia does." Hastily he climbed into the wagon, loaded high with Mrs. Glore, Eggleston, and their extensive luggage.

  Swiftly the spring wagon rolled away in the dusty road. Beulah continued to weep on the valet's shoulder. Proud in the new coat and pants Jack had given him, Charlie chanted a Papago song, bare feet propped on the dashboard. Jack looked stiffly ahead, arms folded.

  After a while, he could not resist the temptation to look back. There was the playa, shimmering in the winter sunlight. There too was the brooding bulk of the Mazatzals, dim and purple in haze, summits outlined in a rime of new snow. Along the greenery marking the Agua Fria he saw a brief sparkle of white—perhaps a dress, with a red sash. Maybe Phoebe Larkin was watching, waiting. He waved, knowing that at such a distance she probably could not see the gesture.

  In Prescott, Sam Valentine was obliging. He riffled through the papers Jack Drumm gave him. "They all appear in order. No problem at all! I'll have the Clerk of the Legislature take care of it first thing in the morning. But why—"

  "I want Phoebe Larkin to have Rancho Terco," Jack explained. "It's the least I can do for her, after the way I—I—" He broke off. "It's a personal matter, Sam. I'd rather not explain. But Miss Larkin loves the country, and I want the property to go to someone—sympathetic."

  "And the money?" the legislator asked. "You've got a contract with the stage company, and with Tully and Ochoa, I hear. Then there's the income from other sources—"

  "All of it." Jack was impatient to be done with the business. He suspected Valentine knew all about Alonzo Meech and his dogged pursuit of Phoebe Larkin and Beulah Glore, but did not want to mention it. And if Phoebe was caught, as seemed likely, the proceeds from the sale of the ranch would pay for a good lawyer to defend her. "I owe it to her, Sam," he said.

  Valentine shrugged. "Whatever you say, though you're giving up a gold mine! And it goes without saying—the Territory is the loser when you go, Mr. Drumm. I had hopes you'd stay, maybe take out citizenship papers. I'm sorry our paths divide this way."

  "You'll send her the necessary papers, then, when it's all arranged?"

  "By the first stage," Valentine promised.

  As they drove from the capital the next morning they passed the church, the sprawling huts of Mex Town. Bells chimed; the sound made him think, however unwillingly, of Phoebe, of Father Garcés's place with the burro and the cow within a pole fence, of Alonzo Meech standing in the shadow of the church. Meech had said the Buckner family was impatient with his failure to catch Phoebe Larkin. Well, perhaps the detective had given up the hunt and gone back to Philadelphia.

  "A penny for your thoughts," Beulah Glore teased.

  Jack shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing at all. My mind was completely vacant."

  Beulah pursed her lips. "I doubt it, somehow. You was thinking of something—I could tell from the look on your face." Affectionately she pressed against the valet. "Mr. Eggleston here tells me Hampshire is just beautiful—all green and fresh and roses and country churchyards and things."

  "In the summer that is true," he said. "And there is nothing like an English spring. The autumn is very pleasant, too, until the rains come. But I am afraid we are in for some rough times when we cross the ocean. The Prescott Enterprise reports gales on the Atlantic, with several vessels lost."

  Beulah smiled. "With Mr. Eggleston by my side I'm not afraid of the wildest wind that blows! That's the Lord's own brassbound double-strength triple-distilled truth!"

  Oddly, the first face Jack Drumm saw at Bear Spring was a familiar one. The burly Corporal Bagley, Dunaway's bosom friend, lounged on the platform at the Atlantic and Pacific station, oiling the action of a long-barreled Starr revolver. When Jack called to him, he was surprised.

  "Mr. Drumm!" Dropping the weapon into the holster at his belt, he strolled to the spring wagon and shook hands, tipping his upswept cavalry hat to Mrs. Glore. "What in blazes are you doing here?"

  Jack explained. Bagley listened, fondling his brushy mustache.

  "But why are you here?" Jack asked. "The last time I saw you, George Dunaway and you were hanging on each other in front of the Lucky Lady saloon in Prescott."

  Bagley looked abashed. "That's right. We were really spifflicated that night. George got a reprimand out of it. Major Trimble burned him good! They sent me to watch this Godforsook railroad station with a detachment of guardhouse lawyers! Watch against what?" He waved his hand about. "Sagebrush, jackrabbits, wind, and sand! God, what a thirst a man can raise out here! I'd give my—" He coughed, delicately, looking at Mrs. Glore. "I'd give a purty for a mug of ice-cold lager!"

  He invited them to sit on the platform, helped unload their baggage, and told them the eastbound train was delayed. "Last week she was to steam through here on a Wednesday. It was Friday night before she showed."

  "My goodness," Beulah said, paling. "Whatever are we to do, Mr. Drumm, if there's no train?"

  "We'll make out all right," Jack reassured her. "Now just don't worry, Beulah!"

  Sitting in the shade on boxes Corporal Bagley provided, they listened to the clatter of the telegraph instrument inside, scanned the cactus-studded distance for the train. The wind blew, sand filled the air. Wheeling low over the station, a hawk pumped skyward again with a snake in his talons.

  "This Presbyterian church," Beulah mused, while Eggleston snored against her shoulder. "Mr. Drumm, I'm a River Baptist— always have been. When Mr. Eggleston and I get married, I ain't going to be committing a sin, am I? I mean—is it all right for Baptists and Presbyterians to marry each other in England?"

  "Perfectly all right. Eggie's church will welcome you, and you will become quite a respectable member of the organization—known for your good works and all that kind of thing."

  Beulah was comforted, and after a while also dozed off. Jack itched; the
heavy wool suit was scratchy, and though it was January in the Territory, he sweltered. Where was the train? He strained his eyes looking into the distance. After a while he dozed too, or thought he did. He dreamed the A. and P. cars were arriving at the station. The diamond stack chuffed smoke; the conductor swung a flag—they were at last ready to go. But the smoke pursued Jack Drumm. Through the open window it boiled; thick, almost viscous. The smoke was red, red as a vampire's lips, red as blood, red as Phoebe Larkin's flowing tresses. The stuff curled around him, clinging tentacles of scarlet, wrapping him with their coils, pinioning him, sapping the strength from his body. He was helpless, bound tightly with the scarlet strands. Crying out, all he could manage was a despairing croak. "Phoebe!" he cried. "Please, why are you doing this to me? Phoebe!"

  Someone gripped his shoulder. "Whatever is the matter, Mr. Drumm?" Anxiously Beulah Glore peered into his face, mopped his fevered brow with a handkerchief. Eggleston watched over her shoulder, his face concerned. "Were you dreaming?" Beulah asked.

  Shamefacedly he sat erect. The wind was still blowing sand and tumbleweed, the sun beat down, the tracks shimmered in the heat. The eastbound train had not yet arrived.

  "I—I suppose so," he stammered. "1 dozed a little, then—"

  Embarrassed, he got up to stroll the station platform. Inside the board shack the telegraph sounder clattered its metallic language. Corporal Bagley and the operator bent over a penciled message.

  "Christ!" Bagley muttered. He chewed at his mustache. The operator, a wispy man in shirtsleeves and eyeshade, looked at Corporal Bagley uncertainly. "Last night," he said in a hushed voice. "Not twenty-four hours ago!"

  They became aware of Jack Drumm's presence.

  "What is it?" he asked. "What has happened?"

  Bagley swallowed; his Adam's apple bobbed, twitched, came to an uneasy rest. He picked up the paper and scanned it again, lips moving silently.

  "Mr. Drumm," he said finally, "this is railroad business, and they told me I wasn't to stick my nose in it. It's Army business, too, and on that account, beggin' your pardon, it ain't any of your business. But I'm bound to admit you got a kind of a stake in it." He spread the paper flat on the desk. "This here is from Major Trimble at Fort Whipple. He says to be on the lookout for some action. Agustín has busted out of the Mazatzals and is raising a hell of a lot of sand."