by Clay Fisher
He glanced at the oncoming horde of Tombstoners.
“Now kick that horse the hell out of here like I told you,” he ordered me. “Hee-yahh!” he shouted at the bay, when I hesitated. “Vamos, caballo!”
The tall horse responded, charging away through the shoulder-high juniper. Flicker stumbled, nearly went down, regained stride, and flew beside the galloping mount as though a part of the animal. Behind us, the ragged dog Loafer struggled at his lamed gait to follow our retreat. I soon lost sight of him in the dust raised by our horse’s hammering pace. Neither could I longer see the Tombstone posse. But, ah! All too soon and plainly, we could hear it—talking to us with its guns.
The leaden messengers splashed the rocks about us, ricocheting off over the thinning junipers in whining tangent to our flight. Some fragmented themselves, hurling bits of searing lead as though of miniature grape or chain shot in all directions. Flicker, the tall bay horse, and myself were bleeding profusely within the first minute. I could not comprehend such unreasoning rage.
“God’s name, Flicker!” I cried down to the straining black runner at my stirrup. “What is this monstrous wrong we’ve done? What mortal sin is ours that men will seek so desperately to kill us for it?”
Flicker’s eyes were rolling. His tongue protruded blue and swollen as that of a dying Spanish fighting bull’s. The great muscles of his limbs quivered in spasm. Only the command of his unbreakable will drove him onward. Yet he turned the agony of his face upward in gallant attempt to answer me. He could not. In the very moment of the effort, his stride broke staggeringly, the horse was virtually dragging him, and I knew our race was run. Rent in heart, I called upward to our Maker to let the black man and me die as comrades in the mercy of a common bullet. Amazingly, Flicker heard my cry.
I could not believe it as I looked down and saw that tortured bleeding face in a grin that triumphed upward through the dust and pain of our last steps.
“Pray harder for that easy bullet, Nunez,” black Flicker gasped to me. “God might accommodate us. That bunch behind us never will. They’ll swing us slow and leave us spinning till the rope unravels.”
The crashing of the posse guns grew deafening. Powder flame and rifle smoke stabbed our very ears and stank to clot our nostrils. Yet Flicker had one more gasp, one more grin. And the answer to my anguished question.
“About that mortal sin of ours, father,” he confessed. “Its being us.”
17
BLACK APACHE MAGIC
I had imagined we were dead. The flashes and sounds of the posse’s rifle fire were now so near as to blind the eye and deafen the hearing. Only the thick dust thrown up by the careening horses prevented our immediate blowing apart. But I had reckoned without the wily resources of black Flicker one more time. The Negro Apache had learned well from his red foster people in the ten years he had lived among them.
With his vast strength, he vaulted now to the back of the tall bay horse, wresting its bridle reins away from me. As he did, I noted that two possemen riding furiously abreast had broken out of the dust cloud. They were no more than four jumps behind us, and Flicker had seen them before I did. “Down!” Flicker yelled at me. “Lie flat to the saddle!” I ducked low and, with a wrench that nearly broke the poor creature’s neck, the black deserter swung the bay horse completely about face, spurring the animal in the reverse direction to which it had been running. The maneuver put the bay exactly facing and precisely between the on-coming rush of the two posse mounts. All three animals were on the gallop. The Tombstone riders could not, in that desperate fraction of time, get their animals halted or even slowed. As they met Flicker and the bay, they moved apart just enough to permit the bay to pass between them. As this happened, Flicker held out his two arms, bridle reins gripped in gleaming white teeth. He looked like some black crucifix of Satan. One might be forgiven to believe the two possemen had some similar thought, at least in retrospect. Flicker’s arms caught each of them across the swallowing bones of the throat. The sickening impact lifted the two Tombstoners completely from their saddles, their horses thundering out from under them. For a moment they seemed to hang by their chins on the Negro’s extended arms. Then Flicker let them drop. The last I saw of them, they were bouncing like rag dolls in the dust of their fellow riders.
Flicker was not through with his Indian work.
Again, he spun the tall bay in the Apache reverse. Again, he drove the panting mount between the fleeing, riderless horses of the unsaddled Tombstoners. But this time he came between the animals from the rear, and so their paces were equaled to our own mount’s pace rather than opposed to it.
In result, we were running with a good saddled fresh horse on either side of our failing tall bay.
Before I might realize Flicker’s demented intent, he had seized me up under the arms, swept me off our bay, and jammed me into the saddle of the right-hand running horse. As quickly, he himself leaped to mount the left-hand riderless horse.
“Whip up! Whip up!” he yelled to me, booming out his deep laugh. “We have the bastards beat!”
In the dust and confused cross-firing of the posse, we did indeed make it away from the revengers from Tombstone, Arizona. I followed Flicker. The tall bay horse, running loose, chose to follow me. By a kindness of the Master, there appeared another follower, also.
This one was in seeming pursuit of the loose bay horse. How the rascal had arranged to stay with the bay in all of the shooting and shouting, we never did discover. But it was the wolfish dog Loafer, as you have little doubt surmised, and the ragged pariah was thus rejoined and the soldiers three made whole again.
We of course, as the Arizona folk said, “laid tracks away from there.”
There remained a little nervous running to do before the rifle bullets lost their trajectory and only stung when they struck. But once given our new mounts, the mining camp riders were simply no match for black Flicker and his Mexican Apache training. By the time we had hit a side-canyon trail down into the valley of the San Pedro, it was over with.
Issuing from the narrow cleft far below, we could still see the cheated Tombstone riders clenching their fists after us and screaming down no-doubt terrible threats.
“Don’t pay them any mind, padre,” Flicker grinned. “A man of the cloth ought not to listen to such language.” He clucked to his horse and we resumed the canter of our course toward the cottonwood and willow timber of the Rio San Pedro. “Besides,” my companion concluded, “it was I who sent for a priest—not those ingrates.”
The statement intrigued me, returning my mind to my arrest on the streets of Tombstone.
“You are not of the true faith, Flicker,” I said. “I wondered at the time why I was called to tend your soul.”
Flicker turned in the saddle, his easy expression gone. “I had a hidden knife. I meant to take whatever priest they sent me as hostage,” he said. “When the jailer came to let the father out of my cell, I would put the knife at the priest’s throat and kill him if the jailer refused us passage to freedom. Opening the cell door would also be the jailer’s last memory of life, should he hesitate or call out.”
“It is difficult for me to accept this, Flicker,” I protested. “An innocent human life, even two, for your own freedom?”
“You are forgetting the words of your Master,” he reminded me. “‘All that a man has, will he give for his life.’”
“Yes, yes, I know. But, damn it, Flicker. You would have killed even me, your friend from the old times?”
“I don’t know, father. You saved my life ten years ago. But if one of us had to die—well, I don’t know.”
“You know. You could not have done it.”
“Your damned religion again,” Flicker said. “Always imagining that others follow those ridiculous rules set down in that black book you carry so fondly.”
He had reminded me that I still had my buckskin travel
er’s bag fastened to my crucifix belt. The thought raised up my spirits.
“Halt your mount, comrade!” I cried to the black deserter. “You were inspired to think of my book. It has a special content even you may profit by.”
We were just without the sanctuary of the river brush, but my companion indulgently brought his horse to stand. I fished among the treasures of my belt bag and produced the Bible. “Herein lies a secret of the Scriptures unrevealed to no other man than yourself,” I said. Let its confidence now be a measure in your mind of my regard.” With that, I opened the hollowed-out Bible and extracted from it my flat bottle of grape brandy.
The flask was three-quarters full, and Flicker received its sacrament with gratitude. He left a lipful for me, and I drained it hastily. The black Apache renegade smiled.
“Father Nunez,” he said, wiping mouth with back of sweated, dust-grimed hand, “God bless you till you’re properly promoted. Let’s get to the river. That grape of yours requires a benediction of water. Phew!”
He turned his horse for the willows. I put my mount to following. Far across the flats behind us a doleful howl echoed. It was old Loafer crying, Wait for me! Flicker and I only laughed and went on into the trees.
We would have done grimly better to await the dog.
Being with us, Loafer most surely would have smelled out the menace ambushed ahead. Perhaps, even from across the flat, he had scented the danger. Possibly, his doleful wail had been a warning, not a plea to tarry for his laggard approach. No matter. Man only proposes. The Holy Spirit disposes. And in that triumphant moment that Flicker and I rode laughing through the river brush, the Holy Spirit had disposed to our dire peril.
Someone had come to the Rio San Pedro before us.
18
FIGURES IN A STILL LAGOON
We broke free of the willows. Our horses halted suddenly, throwing heads and pointing ears. Before us lay the Rio San Pedro. And something more.
The river slowed just here. The long sweep of its bend formed an island spit half-mooned by a lagoon where an old channel had been. Cottonwoods and desert sycamores stood lordly there. The water ran purling over pebbled and bedrock bottom, clear as morning sky. In the lagoon’s placid mirror I could see the drift of cloud puffs overhead. There was something else mirrored in the quiet glass of that lagoon: the figures of three men.
“Good day, priest,” Santiago Kifer greeted me. “You’re coming up in the world, I see. Got a man Friday, now.”
I sat my horse, head down, staring at the mocking images reflected in the lagoon. Beside me, black Flicker did the same, and spoke to me below-voice. “Very dangerous fellows, father. Let them make every move. Watch the marshal.”
Astounded, I whispered back to him, “God’s name, that isn’t the marshal; it’s Santiago Kifer.”
Nodding, eyes narrowing, Flicker said, “I know who it is,” and he raised his head, and so did I, and we let our glances play on the three evil men before us.
My companion’s dark face was a mask, the eye-slits examining the impostor marshal of Tombstone, Arizona. No outward emotion showed to say what Robert Flicker knew of this wicked thing he studied there. When he spoke, the rich Negro drawl of word fell almost gentle to ear.
“You are the scalper,” he said to Santiago Kifer.
Kifer laughed harshly, giving no other answer. His men echoed the mirthless sound. Flicker’s eyes moved in the mask of his face to take in the deputies. He dismissed them with a curl of lip. The pit-viper eyes came back to Kifer. The voice was too soft now, ominous.
“Don’t you know me, scalper?”
“Am I supposed to?” Kifer grunted. “One of your kind looks just like another. A nigger’s a nigger to me.”
“Try harder,” said Robert Flicker. “Think back.”
Kifer turned to me. “Padre,” he said, “who is this nigger Apache? Do we need him where we’re going?” He cocked his Winchester rifle as he spoke.
“Well, now, I’m not sure,” I answered hastily. “Where are we going?”
Santiago Kifer smiled, and I would rather he had not. “Games are past,” he said. “We’re talking about the lost Naranjal mine, hunchback.”
“You’re mad,” I suggested. “I know of no such mine. Ah, is that breakfast fire smoke I see beyond the willow trees? Would there be a cup of coffee for a poor crippled priest?”
Kifer’s obscene smile widened. “Why, naturally,” he said. “It’s a long ride to ‘somewhere between Durango and Sinaloa,’ where the mine is, eh, padre? Come along. I’ll have one with you. Crench, pull the nigger off his horse. I want the bastard tied to that sycamore.”
“No coffee for Sergeant Flicker?” my black companion asked softly of Kifer. The scalper flinched, paled.
“Sergeant Flicker?” he rasped. “Well, well, well.” His color improved, and he waved Crench away from Flicker. “Leave him on his horse,” he nodded. “I want to see him bounce.” Again, he raised the Winchester.
He was going to shoot Flicker off his mount. The black renegade could whirl the horse and run. Or he could sit on him where he was and gamble on God doing something to save him. And I knew what Flicker thought of God.
“Wait!” I cried out to Kifer, leaping from my own mount to plead with him. The scalper merely struck me a vile blow athwart the privates with the barrel of his rifle. Down I went, bawling like a castrated calf. But in the trice required for Kifer to thus tend to my appeal, Flicker came off his horse with the single bound of a black jungle cat. Before the scalper might turn from striking me down, Flicker pounced on him and wrenched the Winchester from his grasp. In the same motion, he drove the weapon’s steel-shod butt into the scalper’s mid-body. Kifer stiffened. His was the paralyzed look of a solar plexus blow. He could not move even to fall down. But others could, and did.
“Behind you, Flicker!” I yelled suddenly. “Cuidado!”
I was too late. The two deputies of Kifer had already slipped in behind the black rider. It was Belcher who struck him in the back of the skull with the flat of his shotgun’s stock. Flicker went down soundlessly.
I was taken in an anguish of selfish grief. This was my chief of soldiers for the lost Naranjal expedition. How dare the devils! For once I acted fearlessly.
With a wild dive, I seized the Winchester rifle from Flicker’s slackened grasp. By some accident of allied ignorance, I was also able to cock the weapon and bury its muzzle past the front sight in the hairy belly of Deputy Belcher. His face sickened.
“Gawd’s sake, padry, don’t shoot!” he gasped, skin the color of goat curd. “That thing’s got a honed trigger.”
As he said this, I heard Crench moving up behind me.
“Deputy Crench,” I warned, “I believe it is merely required that I crook finger rearward upon this trigger and—”
“Crench!” Belcher shouted. “Hold whar you be! You trying to get my innards blowed out? Here, padry,” he pleaded. “See, I’m dropping the escopeta.” He let fall his shotgun and said to Crench, “Come around hyar whar the padry can see you, you tallowbrain.”
Crench slunk into view. At another curse from Belcher, he laid his shotgun atop that of the first deputy, then he blinked stupidly at both of us. “Now what?” he said.
It was Santiago Kifer who answered the question. None of us had seen the master scalper recover from the gut blow dealt him by Flicker. But we all saw him now, kneeling beside the black man, a knife to Flicker’s throat.
“Unless you lay down that rifle, padre,” Kifer rasped at me, “I’ll bleed the bastard out clean as a market chicken.”
Shaken, I obeyed. Crench and Belcher retrieved their shotguns, and Kifer strode over to face me. “Nigger’s alive,” he said, gesturing to the motionless Flicker. “They got heads like petrified Zunni gourds. You can’t bust them open with anything less than a pickax.”
“Thank God,” I breathed, cross
ing myself. “But this priest of the people would feel better were the brave fellow to regain his senses and arise.”
Incredibly, it was as if Flicker heard me. His lids stirred, fluttered wide. His vacant gaze found me.
“Ah, Father,” he mumbled, seeing me cross myself again, “you’ve prayed me back to life, eh?” Focusing painfully, he said to Kifer, “Why didn’t you kill me, scalper?”
Kifer rubbed his mummified ear. “I wasn’t certain if you were a vital party to the hunt for the orange grove gold mine. If you were, you might know things we need to know to get there. Comprende?”
“For Gawd’s sake, Kifer, get on with it,” the hairy-bellied Belcher interrupted nervously. “We know the damn priest has got the map on him.” The brute deputy shot a glance to the distant blufftop. “We got to get a move on, ‘marshal.’ Them hard-rock gophers back to Tombstone are riled total. There’s no bee as mad as one’s been stung. They’ll come after us.”
Kifer laughed his senseless laugh. “Never mind those muckers,” he sneered. “They’ll not posse up on us again. The nigger cured them of that.” He paused to turn to me, licking spittled lips. “All right, priest,” he said. “We’ve come down to it; I want the map. Hand it over.”
“Pardiez!” I delayed clumsily. “What map is that?”
Santiago Kifer was rubbing the mummified ear again, a bad sign. “Why,” he said, “the one our new partners in the willow thicket yonder told us you had. Bring the ladies out, Crench,” he ordered. “There’s nothing like eyeball witnesses to jog a man’s memory.”
“New partners? Witnesses?” I croaked weakly. “I don’t understand.” But I was bearing false testimony. I knew all too well who those witnesses must be who were in that willow thicket. When Crench and Belcher dragged them forth a moment later, trussed up and gagged like prisoners in a tumbrel, they were of course Charra Baca and the Mescalero ancient, Young Grass.
