by Clay Fisher
“With my last strength, I ran downward toward the mule train. God let me reach its haven but, once there, He deserted me, and the doomed Mexicans would not be convinced of my sobbing tale.”
Here, Flicker interrupted her scowlingly. “Why not, for God’s sake?” he asked Stella Allison. “Were they crazy?”
“No, they said I was,” she answered him. “They insisted I could not have escaped from a Yaqui camp. They said I must mean Apache, bad enough certainly. But there were no Yaqui camps this high on Rio Moctezuma as the one I described, nor had there ever been. My mind would clear, they told me, when we were safe in Nacozari.”
“But this is incredible, senora,” it was my turn to object. “Do you say they did nothing to your warning?”
“Oh, yes. One of them climbed to a nearby point of high land and examined to the south, but he saw nothing and came back down laughing to reassure me that he had the eyes of a mountain sheep and that no Indians of any tribe were moving between us and Nacozari. As for Yaquis, well, I was not the first white woman to have a confusion of mind following long captivity among los bárbaros.”
“But the man was wrong.” Flicker broke in to say it flatly.
And Stella Allison nodded. “Yes. The Yaqui are like rock wolves. No one sees them in such rough country. They were there, where I said. And so was the village of Monkey Woman where I had described it. She had moved her campo into the country two months before, and no Mexican in North Sonora even knew she had done so. That’s how the Yaquis hide.”
“We know it,” Flicker said. “Go on.”
“You know the rest. You and the Apache with you over there.” She pointed to the place of the massacre along the Nacozari trail, and to the buzzards wheeling above it, thick now as cornfield crows. “There was no sight nor sound of Indians until the Mexicans made their noonhalt. Even then the Yaquis waited until the muleros had built a fire and were ready to cook their midday food. Then they came out of the ground itself, it seemed, right among the Mexicans. It was over in a breath, even before I could turn to run again.”
We both sat nodding but saying nothing. Gathering herself once more, she forced on.
“The leader beat me senseless when he caught me,” she said. “But that was a merciful thing. Just before I lost consciousness, I saw what the others were doing to the dead Mexicans; they were cutting out their buttocks and ramming the flesh onto broiling sticks.”
I paled at the horrible thing she had said, but black Flicker never blinked.
“We have heard of this among them,” he said. “It’s a ceremonial thing; they don’t eat the flesh. You must know that. But what is done to dead men doesn’t count, regardless. We’re still alive and want to stay that way. That’s what matters. It’s question time, white sister.”
Stella Allison nodded her understanding, saying she would do her best to be coherent and helpful.
“All right,” the Negro Apache said. “Did we get all of the Yaqui that you know of?”
“Yes, I saw seven on the trail behind me. You killed six and took a prisoner.”
“Ah, yes, that prisoner,” Flicker said. “Let me see if I can answer my own question on him; he’s your new husband, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“He damn near got you back, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but for you and Father—”
She hesitated, looking at me, and I said to her quietly, “I’m Father Alvar Nunez. This is Robert Flicker.” I stroked the sun-bleached hair away from the battered face. “These others,” I swept the circle of our company that had gathered silently behind us, “are also friends. Do not be afraid of the Apaches; they are not broncos.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Flicker said in his deep voice. “We are all your friends here; you’ll never be hurt again. We’re going to take you home to Texas.”
Flicker’s emotion showed beneath the words. I was surprised by it. There was plainly for him, as for myself, some connection with the past in this pale-eyed white sister of Ben Allison. I ought to have guessed what it was, but I did not in that crowded moment.
We had other and surely more dangerous matters to attend to in that camp at Sycamore Water.
Shuddery proof of this came in the woman’s answer to Flicker’s very next question.
“Ma’am,” he said, “what do you think we ought to do with your new husband, yonder?”
“Kill him,” she said, the words calm as the quieted gray eyes that backed them. “You must kill him, don’t you understand? You can’t risk letting him get away.”
“He won’t get away, white sister.”
“But if he did—!”
“If he did,” Flicker said, “I would run him down for you—just for you.”
“My God, you want him to get away!” She stared at my black chief of soldiers. “Don’t you know who he is?”
Flicker stared her back. “We weren’t introduced,” he answered in his sardonic way, his strange gentleness with the white woman momentarily abraded. “There wasn’t time, yonder, ma’am; I didn’t get the name.”
Stella Allison’s gray eyes filled, her hands shook.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my fault. God, but it’s hard to forget. It doesn’t yet seem real that I’m here.”
Flicker took the trembling hands in his.
“Ho-shuh, lady,” he said, using the old Apache word to be easy, to be steady. “It can wait.”
“No,” Stella Allison said. “It can’t. That’s Niño Bonito tied up over there. He’s the head of the Yaqui broncos lobos. They run in a pack with those stolen rurale uniforms to mark them as Pretty Boy’s band.”
“Niño Bonito,” Flicker mused, “Pretty Boy.”
“Yes,” said Stella Allison. “He’s the second son of Monkey Woman.”
Now the handsome face of Robert Flicker tensed.
Now there was no more musing, no more cynical abrasiveness.
“The what?” he said unbelievingly.
Stella Allison repeated herself, and Flicker turned to me and to those of our intent company behind me.
“My God,” he said. “Santiago’s brother.”
34
HAND OF THE DEVIL
There followed a council of war.
That Monkey Woman’s campo, or camp, was but a night march distant had to be weighed. Flicker and Kaytennae weighed it, decided our stock still must be watered before journeying on. As well, the company could still employ the time to organize itself for the coming push for El Naranjal. Kaytennae estimated that there remained some six to eight hundred miles to the Tepehuane country, plus the unknown farther distance to Ghost Canyon and the orange grove. The matter of the “acquired” mule train—whether to keep it or return it to Nacozari—presented a morality problem. Flicker decided it expeditiously.
“We’ll take the mules and their packs,” he said. “Father Nunez, here, will bless Nacozari in return.”
I sputtered a bit but salved my guilt by promising myself that we would bring a share of the gold to the alcalde of Nacozari for distribution among the poor.
Flicker now made his assignments for the beginning of next day’s drive through Yaqui land.
Young Grass would have charge of the picket line and the pack animals. Assisting her, learning the Apache trade, would be Charra Baca. Zorra was to be camp cook. Her assistant would be Stella Allison. (It had already been decided by the gaunt sister of my old pistolero that she would remain with us, rather than be left in Nacozari). Campmaster, the Apache term for he who had charge over the entire baggage of the march, would be Packrat. Watchman of the camp would of course be the old dog, Loafer. His assistant would be Father Nunez.
This last was Flicker’s African humor.
I suffered him to enjoy it.
After all, if the dog were guard of the camp and I commanded him, Nunez was in fact himself chief
watchman.
Flicker and Kaytennae as a matter of course would be our scouts, the Apache specifically our guide, the Negro deserter our warrior outrider.
Upon this arrangement, we all retired to our various duties del campo. In a little time of the very pleasant desert afternoon, certain pairings of campmates commenced to evidence themselves. This is a peculiarity of the human nomad, of course, and will show itself among members of any traveling group in wilderness country. It was the nature of the pairings I observed that was of interest to my eye. And, yes, in a case or three, to my heart. Romance, even its first whisper of suspicion, had been my life’s curiosity. And often its despair.
Flicker, completely without his own consciousness of it, I am certain, managed to circle in the vicinity of Stella Allison. Zorra presently was seen to be spending time away from her cookfire consulting with our American Apache campmaster. I heard her calling Packrat, who was even less in stature than I, her little Chaparra. This was a name translating into the Anglo nickname of Shortie. Packrat seemed not to resent the name, or the game, even if scowling furiously for camp consumption.
The next pairing was the one that lifted the pulse of Alvar Nunez. It was of my foster daughter Charra Baca and the slender Warm Springs Apache, Kaytennae, whom I had always regarded as a foster son. These were my family. And, ah! What handsome savages they both were. It was, I thought, a mating made in Indian heaven, and also one that would work well in promoting our Apache church—to draw in the wild Apaches.
I said nothing to them, fearing to frighten off the painfully shy Kaytennae. But I did chance a knowing wink and nod to Charra, who laughed aloud and deliciously.
She was a creature of complete wile.
For a moment my own loins stirred to the mere sight of her moving body, flame of long red hair, and slant of luminous eye. Then I remembered my parishioners at Casas Grandes and all the damnable lies they had told of my lust for women, yes, and even plump girls. That left me to watch only Packrat and the scheming whore of Fronteras, and I found myself even savoring the memorable lines of my former housekeeper’s derriere—upended in her present task of gathering firewood.
Angry at my mortal clay, I cast about to join my own assigned campfellow, only to find the rascal with all four feet in the air and snoring to shake the sycamore leaves and unsettle the flies that buzzed about his canine couch. This dereliction of his duty by Loafer left me with only the Yaqui prisoner for company.
We had all been warned by Flicker to leave “Pretty Boy” alone. He was not to be spoken to, fed, or given water. The black leader had not decided yet what he would do with Santiago’s brother. Meanwhile, he knew he wanted the Yaqui to suffer. If he strangled on his gag, or his tongue swelled for water and choked him to death, so be it. Such things happened.
Something drew me to the man, no matter.
I was standing watching him, while talking to his present guard, Kaytennae. This was along quite late in the day. Indeed, twilight was agather above the last rim of the sun. I had only time to note that the neck and face of the prisoner were terribly swollen from heat and water lack and to think that he would surely die in his bonds if not given to drink, when a distraction of fateful simplicity hove near.
It was Zorra, who had just found a small sacklet of fresh limes in the plunder of the mule-packs. She came waving the lovely fruit and announcing that a cooling ade of their juices would be made by her, forthwith. In this same moment, Flicker chose to shadow up from somewhere in the grove.
“Nunez,” Flicker said, “I’ve been thinking of the map. As you can remember it, what does it actually show of the country about it? Was the scale in miles, kilos, hectares, varas, what? Can you remember any of it?”
“Before God!” I cried, “I won’t have to remember it. With the juice of those limes that the bawdy one has just discovered, Nunez can restore the map itself. Miran, Uds.!” I waved, taking the limes from Zorra, as Flicker and even Kaytennae crowded forward. “Watch this.”
I then quickly expressed some juice from the fruit into a tin pan, brought forth the water-spoiled map, and immersed it in the juice. I then said to my comrades, “Esperan, wait—”
Before their unbelieving eyes, then, the lime juice restored each original dot, jot, line, twist, measurement, and imprinted direction of the ancient map to the lost Naranjal mine. For me, it was a small Franciscan miracle. For my Apache companions, unversed in priestly arcaneries, it was very big medicine. As such, it restored my mystique among them.
The problem proved, however, to be one of the wrong people being impressed.
As we all laughed and cried out in our various delights at the little magic of Father Nunez, I looked up, drawn by some instinct of uneasiness, and saw that the glittering eyes of the Yaqui captive had steadied in their wildness and were concentrating on the map in my hand, as though it were a doomed bird and the Yaqui the serpent in our brief paradise.
“What is it?” Flicker demanded, noting my startlement.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just thought to see the Yaqui watching us—and the map—as if he understood what has happened. As if he knew the map had been ruined. And knows it has now been restored.”
“How would he know anything of the map?” Flicker asked, scowling hard.
I frowned in my turn, also darkly.
“From Santiago Kifer?” I guessed.
“Jesus,” Flicker nodded. “Maybe. If they’ve met since Santiago got around us, the bastard just might know about the map—about it having been ruined, I mean.”
Kaytennae shook his head and said something in Apache to Flicker. It was that there should be no concern. For two reasons. We had done all our talking in English, a tongue as foreign to the Yaqui as Apache to an Anglo, and we still had both map and Yaqui under camp guard.
Where was any danger in that?
“Of course not,” Flicker said. “You got it figured, Kite.”
He then ordered Zorra back to the cookfire to get our supper served más pronto. I was told to get the hell away from the prisoner, while Kaytennae continued his job of sitting shotgun on the second son of Monkey Woman. “After all,” Flicker finished, with one of his rare, quick grins, “we’ve got the map back. It shows great detail and covers much more area than I had thought, and it will take us to El Naranjal, sin duda. As for our friend Pretty Boy, if he can get away from Kite and my diamond hitch to that stump, I’m a Yori. Meanwhile,” he waved, “we all owe a vote of thanks to the fine hand of Father Nunez.”
“No, no,” I objected. “It was the hand of God.”
But we were both wrong.
It was the hand of the devil.
35
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
It was a fine lingering oil of a sunset. The purple dusk that followed stole like a soft patina over the finished painting. Then the early dark that came on was filled with the heated redolences of the desert, a night to walk apart from others with one of special choosing. Particularly after such a splendid meal as that prepared from the packs of the mule merchants of old Nacozari by our cook from Fronteras. This was the same cook who, even now, was admiring aloud the magnificence of turquoise necklace, earrings, and shirt-belt with which the homely, small Packrat had adorned himself from his Apache kit bag against whatever the evening might bring of opportunity.
As for Flicker, he had already left the supperfire with Stella Allison. “Need to talk to her some more about the Yaqui campo she got away from,” my chief of soldiers explained to me, catching my cocked eye-brow. “Got to learn all I can to get around that place, eh, padre?”
I had mumbled something about learning to get around something else, but he had only chuckled in that basso profundo way he had and said, “Why, Father Nunez, what a thing to hint. Don’t you know I hate the White Eyes? Haven’t you lectured me on it often enough?”
But I was happy for my black friend.
He and Stella Allison were of an age, something in their late thirties one would guess. Both had known mean lives among the bronco Apache. Both had learned from these lives that now was the only time for anything; in Apacheria as in Tierra del Yaqui, tomorrow did not exist.
There was another thing between them, which drew them.
I had forgotten its common bond when first noting the black Apache’s interest in the white woman, or at least his empathy for her plight. Flicker had known a great love among the Nednhi Apache of Chief Juh. This was a medicine dreamer named Huera, the Blonde. Huera had been of supposedly pure Apache blood, but she had waist-long hair, yellow as paloverde blooms, and a roseate glow of dark complexion indicating European blood or, perhaps, even descent from Cortez, the Golden Castilian. In any event, Huera had been the Apache love of Robert Flicker’s lonely life. She had been all to him.
Then had come the pack of Santiago Kifer hunting Indian hair in the Sierra. The scalpers had caught the Nednhi band containing Huera in a night ambush of the Apache fire. All warriors had been killed and the golden-haired medicine woman pack-raped by the bestial Texans. Last and first astride her moaning terror of resistance was Santiago himself. The story that came to Flicker of the awful thing came from me, Nunez, and my then comrade, the tall Texan pistolero, Ben Allison. We had come upon the rape scene by accident, and Allison had very nearly lost his life in ambushing and attacking the Texas rapers in utterly gallant attempt to save the Apache woman.
From that day, Flicker had hunted Santiago Kifer.
Not until the breaking out from Tombstone jail had he ever met the scalper chieftain. Then had come the blinding of Santiago by the shotgun blast of Chongo. The hunt had seemingly ended in a thing worse than death for Santiago Kifer, and Flicker had abandoned his hatred.
Now came this Texas woman, the very sister of the pistolero who had tried with his life to save Flicker’s Apache woman, Huera. And this Stella Allison that Flicker had rescued from the Yaqui broncos lobos of Pretty Boy had lived the same hell that Huera had lived.
