Apache Ransom

by Clay Fisher

  “We think that she will,” I told him carefully.

  “We?” Juh said.

  I pointed to the Texan. “Yes, the Tejano saved her life, Jefe. It was not me.”

  “You lie, jorobado!”

  When angry with me, Juh would use that word, “hump-back,” rather than to call me Blackrobe. So I took warning.

  Stooping, I drew a large cross in the white sand of the beach. I then made a circle around the cross and stepped within the circle. “I am within la casa de la cruz. No man of my faith lies while standing in the House of the Cross. I say it again, Jefe. The Tejano saved Huera.”

  Juh was a huge man for an Apache. Indeed, for any race. He moved toward the Texan and his eyes were level with those of the very tall man from San Saba. “How are you called?” he asked.

  “Allison,” the Texan answered laconically.

  Juh’s nod was scarcely perceptible.

  “Un-nuh,” he said.

  He stalked past the Tejano, his men following him. They made a wordless half-circle about the two wounded scalp hunters. They just stood and looked at the helpless whites, saying nothing either to them or among themselves. “Blackrobe,” Juh called to me, “what of these?”

  “They will also live.”

  “Enjuh,” the Nednhi chief announced to my total surprise, “good. I would not want them to die now.”

  Allison looked at me, and I at him.

  “Injuns—!” he said and shook his head.

  The Apaches then moved with the precision typical of their desert people. While some of the warriors gathered booty left behind by the fleeing scalpers, others put the bodies of the Apache dead in preparation for burial. At the same time, a detail, with a camp shovel found among the scalper prizes, commenced to dig two deep holes in the beach sand. I presumed these were for a group interment of the Nednhi corpses, to hasten their covering, since night burial was a taboo thing in Apache lore. I should have been alerted when the Indian men were so assiduous in what was very hard manual labor, a condition normally abhorrent to the Apache male. But I was deceived by fatigue and anxiety, as well as by my determination that an Apache, being but another child of God, was as other men and, thus, redeemable.

  In all of this, neither Allison nor myself was permitted to speak with Little Buck, nor was the boy’s headband gag removed so that he might talk aloud. We were likewise refused the simple human charity of touching the lad to reassure him. I essayed a wave in his direction and was promptly smitten across the long bone of my arm with an Apache rifle barrel. Allison, never moving, said out of the side of his mouth to me, “Cuidado, Padre, these babies have turnt spooky on us,” and I understood the Texas argot plainly enough to obey its injunction entirely. Until the party was ready for the burial, neither Allison nor myself blinked an eyelid except of necessity.

  When the digging ceased, Juh informed me that Apache law forbade the presence of extraños, aliens, when war dead were being honored. He apologized for the delay but said he knew I realized their law and would remember that Apache dead must be put beneath the ground before the night was flown, or their shades would never stay quiet. Accordingly, the Tejano and myself must now depart with the first part of the band. With us would go Huera, while the white boy would stay with Juh. It might eventuate, he told me, that the ransom would fall through of payment, or other thing go wrong with the scheme of He Who Has the Plan. In that case, Juh had thought seriously to raise the Anglo lad as his own. The boy would make a good Apache and the work of this particular night would be a pertinent beginning for such an adoption. “A good time for first learning,” was the way he put it, in finishing.

  Naturally, I asked him if he meant to kill the captive scalp hunters when we had gone on. I knew the risk of such intrusions upon Juh’s patience, but the question had to be put. Nothing less would be Christian, and Allison, plainly, had lost his Texas tongue.

  Or, perhaps, did not want to lose it.

  Fortunately, the Nednhi chief remained calm. It was not true, he said, that he or his men would harm the captives. It was simply that they, being the murderers, would now be audience to the last end of the murdered. “They will be held here to witness the presence of death,” he said, “to know how it was for other helpless men to die when they could not defend themselves.”

  I nodded, supposing he referred to the scalper ambush of the Nednhi and, moreover, succumbing to a hard whisper from Allison to, “for God’s sake stop augering it; you want to get me and you made witnesses of, too?”

  His direct meaning was not clear, but there was an inference to the query I did not care for.

  “It is well,” I answered Juh. “But how will we carry the woman? A travois will jolt her and start the bleeding again.”

  “They used her that badly, Blackrobe?”

  “As animals. Worse. As human beasts. She is hurt within, Jefe. She cannot bleed more and live.”

  Ben Allison stepped between us.

  Extending his right arm, the palm outward, he spoke earnestly. “Listen to me, schicho; I will carry the woman in my arms upon my horse.”

  Juh moved back, brushing the Texan’s hand away.

  “We are not friends. The Apache does not answer schicho to any Tejano Diablo.”

  I was quick to explain for him that Allison was not a Texas Ranger; that he had but ridden with the ranger band in pursuit of Juh’s raiders because he was a friend of the boy’s mother; that he had, indeed, promised that poor woman, dying of the lung sickness, to care for the child until he might be returned to his father.

  “Is this a true thing, Tejano?” he asked Allison.

  “Yes,” the Texan said. “Altogether.”

  Juh stared hard at him. Then nodded. “We are still not brothers,” he said. “Pick up the woman.”

  Allison knelt and gathered Huera to him. At once, two braves came forward with a horse for him. They assisted me in handing up to the Texan, once he was mounted on the animal, Huera’s motionless form.

  “If she bleeds,” Juh said, “so will you bleed.”

  Ben Allison bobbed his lean head in Indian understanding. Firming his grasp of Huera, he said, in Apache, to his restive pony, “hoh-shuh, ride easy,” and all was ready.

  In that manner—delayed only while Juh dispatched his best scouts, Ka-zanni and Tubac, to follow and report back on the apparent flight toward Casas Grandes of Kifer and the surviving scalpers—we departed Old Campground, going by West Way toward Juh’s Stronghold.

  The Nednhi named by Juh to remain behind with him and the captive white boy on the fouled beach made no move to bury the Apache dead while our section of the party was yet in sight of Laguna de Luz. I carried away with me a nameless boding of evil to come. Nevertheless, I said nothing to Allison. For his part, the big Texan was occupied with guiding his nervous Indian mount while protecting Huera. Neither did he speak to me. The Apaches, naturalmente, ignored us both.

  The only voices we heard in the entire labored climb up out of Old Campground were those of some wolves howling off to the south.

  Shivering, I crossed myself.

  I did not like the sound; it seemed much nearer than the earlier cry of the solitary lobo.

  15

  At a place in the trail above Old Campground, the Apache halted. Kaytennae, youngest of the group with us, came over to where I held my mount with those of Ben Allison and the rearguard warrior, a surly fellow whom I did not know. Kaytennae was another matter.

  I had known the youth from his twelfth summer, when he had been brought to me near death from what appeared to be a deep brain fever. The good Lord God furnished me the power to heal him and return him to his savage people in health. The Nednhi made Indian payment of the debt. Each summer, after that, the boy had been sent down out of the Sierra to stay at the blackrobe’s “school” and be taught the skills of medicine. The Apache, despite all contrary imagi
nations, were an extremely bright people. The Nednhi well knew that white man and Mexican had many learnings that Indians did not and could not possess, living as they did. In rare cases, as it went against their every barbarian instinct, they would trust a youngster to some priest for tutelage. The priest, of course, understood just as well what the terms of his failure would be.

  Kaytennae was a Mexican Apache—most of the hostiles were American bands living in Chihuahua as the occasions of Yanqui pursuit demanded—and a nephew of Juh. He was no more than sixteen in this springtime of the El Paso raid; and he was with the Juh party as “horse boy”—a young Apache soldier’s first employment in war. The duty was not a simple one, and its awarding to any young Chiricahua—most warlike of all the Apache peoples—was always of significance. I was certain Kaytennae would be known to a later history, being of the highest intelligence and most supreme wildness.

  In the present case, the boy was selected to approach me for the simple reason that none of his fellows seemed disposed to do so. At least, that was my guess.

  “Blackrobe,” he now said, first touching his forehead to show respect, “look down there.”

  I did not have to ask where.

  We had climbed no more than half a mile. Old Campground lay directly below us, no greater distance downward than perhaps six hundred feet. The moon had risen as we made our way upward and now lit Pool of Light and the white-sanded beach with nearly dazzling brilliance. The eye, unaided, could make out a stone on that pure sand no bigger than the head of a man. Still, I was puzzled at the boy’s direction, for the campground lay deserted of visible life. The bodies of the Apache dead had been “honored” and were gone. Gone also were the men and horses with Juh. Plainly, the work of the burial party had been done and that party, with the two scalp hunter prisoners, was on its way up the path by which we had just come to this spectacular overlook.

  “What is it, Kaytennae?” I said. “I see nothing down there but some small stones on the beach, one or two, near where the last of the fire smolders.”

  “Two,” the boy said softly.

  “Well, yes,” I answered. “I see them, if that is what you mean. Is that such a strange thing, niño?”

  “Not to us,” murmured Kaytennae. “Watch.”

  Allison, listening to the exchange, which was in the bastard Spanish of the monte, kneed his horse nearer to us. He had been relieved of Huera’s burden by the other Apache, who had the woman resting on a pallet of their blankets while we awaited Juh and the remainder of the party. In consequence we were, for the moment, free of any witness save young Kaytennae. I could sense the Texan’s tenseness, as opposed to my own relative calm.

  “Can you imagine what the boy is talking about?” I asked him, feeling, in fact, quite relieved and grateful to God to be where we were, alive and with hope to remain that way. The big man nodded quickly.

  “I can,” he said. Narrowing the pale eyes, he peered hard and for some moments at the distant beach. Then, wiping his eyes, he shook the lean head.

  “Damn!” he said, plainly disturbed. “I wish we had them field glasses of Bustamante’s.”

  “Well, they are in the sack of things you left strapped to Mean Trick. Along with my own bag of small belongings similarly fastened to Tin Can. If it has come to wishes, hombre, I could do much better than that. I would say, let the field glasses be here, and let us be there, with dear Lata and sister Jugada. No es verdad?”

  “Very damn much so,” grimaced the Texan.

  But there was a surprise here.

  Kaytennae, as I had spoken in Spanish, understood the reference.

  Reaching into his own war bag, he came forth with a bulky object, which he tendered to me.

  “Gemelos de campaña,” he said. “Mejicano.”

  I accepted the offering, and he spoke the truth; in my hand lay a fine pair of Mexican cavalry field glasses.

  Allison took them from me, unbidden.

  Almost in the instant that he raised them, granting only a swift moment of focusing, I heard him say, “Oh, Christ,” under his breath. Next moment, Kaytennae had taken the glasses back from him.

  “What is it?” I asked the silent Texan.

  “It’s Custer Johnson and that young feller, Carson.”

  “The scalpers—they’re dead!”

  “Worse; alive.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Not hardly,” said Ben Allison, low voiced. “They’re buried to their necks on the beach.”

  “Nombre Dios! The stones—!”

  “Their heads,” nodded the Texan. “That’s all of them that your friend Juh left sticking out of the sand.”

  “But why?” I cried out. “For what?”

  Into the stillness that fell between us came a sobbing, doleful howling of wolves, immediately near. I felt a chill of ice about my heart. And Allison nodded once more.

  “For them,” he said.

  16

  Juh came but half an hour later. We heard the striking of pony hooves upon the trail, then the blowing-out of climbing horses. “Be quiet,” Kaytennae warned Allison and me. “Stay in your places.” With that he left us to go and await his famed uncle.

  When Juh had come up onto the overlook, he went first to the side of Huera. We could hear him speaking to her in Apache, but we could not hear that she replied to him. Presently, he arose and stalked over to where we were. “The woman does not say anything,” he said in Spanish to Allison. “What do you say?”

  The Texan stood to it quietly.

  It was true, he said. Huera had bled on him in the trail up to this place. Easy as he had held her, the motion of the horse beneath them had been exaggerated in the steeper places. The bleeding had begun again. “I will say more, Jefe,” he told Juh. “If we do not find a better way to carry her, she is done.”

  “Jefe,” I broke in anxiously, “can we not abide in this place with her long enough to have the blood clot?”

  Juh shook his head. The Nednhi chief knew from preliminary scouting that Kifer and five of the scalpers were still at large, and were going toward Casas Grandes which they would reach about the same time as those other Texas Devils who might come to the town following their comrades who had died in the garden of my church. If such a pursuing Tejano force should learn from Kifer of the affair at Old Campground, the trail of the Nednhi to their stronghold would be too fresh for safety. The droppings of the ponies would yet be green. It was a chance of delay that no Apache war leader could accept. Huera, if carrying her would kill her, must then die. They would not leave her for the enemy again.

  Both Allison and I understood that this was Indian thinking of the purest sort and not to be denied by any white or Mexican logic. I informed Juh we respected him and would say no more. But I had yet to fully know Ben Allison.

  If they must carry the woman, he said to Juh, then there was an Indian way to do it. He, a simple Kwahadi Comanche of the Water Horse band, and so by inheritance from his pureblood grandmother on his mother’s side, need not remind a great leader such as Juh of this way.

  Of course not, Juh graciously agreed.

  But since the Tejano Comanche brother of the quarter blood had introduced the matter, red courtesy rules required he be permitted the honor of saying the way.

  I do not know how Allison kept his face grave, but he did. The way, he said, after thanking Juh for the privilege of saying it, was the old method of two pack animals of utmost reliability being fastened abreast and the Plains Indian blanket-sling being fashioned to stretch between the brutes. It was the easiest known manner of carrying wounded in the field. Even the ignorant White Eye cavalry employed this method with bad cases. Of course, the entire thing was that the two pack animals be of the highest discipline and obedience.

  Of course! growled the Nednhi chief.

  But did the Tejano see any such animals in this sweat-caked
band of wind-broken and hard-run Apache horseflesh? Why, Ysun’s name! Half of them weren’t even Nednhi horses, but stolen settlement mounts barely good enough to carry a single rider in good health.

  Was this a sample of Comanche war thinking?

  Did Allison’s stupidity explain, perhaps, the fact of the great Tsaoh people’s growing weakness in war?

  Tsaoh was a borrowed Comanche word of uncertain other origin meaning approximately “enemy.” It was one of their own names for themselves, and Ben understood it.

  He would never, the Texan apologized, dare to suggest a thing without having its full details in his mind; he would expect anger from that. But, in the present case, he had the two pack animals not only in his mind but to his immediate hand. Juh had but to grant him two warriors, or go with him himself, and he, Allison, would lead them directly to the best double-sling carriers in the Indian country.

  With this boast, he muttered aside to me that he hoped devoutly that Tin Can and Mean Trick would live up to his recommendation. For, he added, if they did not, neither would we. Live, he explained gratuitously.

  I had no time to reply to him.

  Juh told the others to wait for him. He then called young Kaytennae to his side and said, “Get your horse.” Thus it was that Ben Allison rode back with Juh, war chief of all the Nednhi, and his acolyte nephew Kaytennae, to bring up the hinny twins. But a terrible and ugly thing came first to pass.

  When Kaytennae had found his mount, and Ben Allison regained his, Juh raised a hand and grunted, “Wait.”

  With the command, he went afoot to the edge of the overlook. I went with him on an instinct of fear.

  Pointing below, he said to me as matter-of-factly as if the delay were merely one of camp-breaking detail, “We must wait, you see, Blackrobe, until our brothers have dined. Should we return at this time, we would frighten them off. They are extremely timid, you know.”