Apache Ransom

by Clay Fisher

  “You have the rifle, Tejano,” he said. “Use it, or say what else you will say to me.”

  “Sure enough,” Ben Allison said, pale eyes never leaving the dark ones glaring at him. “This time, try listening, Jefe. I won’t miss like you did.”

  It was here that I came out from behind the rock where I had sought refuge, ears yet ringing from the rifle’s discharge.

  “Por favor,” I pleaded with Juh, “let me speak for this tonto. I know what he was trying to say to you, Jefe. He does not understand that the Apache do not use the hand-sign language. Remember always that he carries the Comanche blood. They are children of the plains. They talk with their hands. But this hombre alto was speaking from his heart, Jefe. Believe it. May I speak now? A life very dear to you depends upon it.”

  “Uh-nuh,” Juh nodded and looked away from Ben Allison. For his part, the Texan retained the Winchester and kept it also on the cock, its gaping .44-caliber bore trained on the belly of Juh. The Nednhi could feel it there, without looking. So could I. It was a trying moment for us all.

  But Huera’s rising fever brought her to cry out in wordless confusion of mind, and it was like the cry of a wounded animal in a trap, dying, or knowing it was about to die. That sound broke even the granite of Juh’s terrible face.

  “Go on, jorobado,” he said. “Speak.”

  Rapidly, I told him that the Texan had determined that Huera’s interior woundings, from the rape of the scalp hunters, had became dangerously infected. He could determine this by scent, where I, an experienced doctor, could not yet detect such odor. The woman must receive treatment immediately. If she did not, the rotting disease, as the Nednhi called gangrenous morbid tissues of the body, would swiftly claim her. Allison, I urged, knew of such treatment.

  This was no falsehood of desperation, I explained to the glaring war chief. The Tejano had only now told me that, back in the ruins of the orange trees, he had noted growth of a particular weed plant familiar to him from the Comanche country. If not precisely the plant, then it was of the same family and, hopefully, of near enough kinship to hold similar medicinal values. It was this sudden remembering that had brought the tall stranger to accost Juh so bluntly the moment before.

  “Allison seeks only your permission to go now, at once, and return with the flowers of this plant which hold magical power to cure the fester of inner wounds.” I sparred with the angry Juh. “Will you say yes, Jefe?”

  He would not look at me yet.

  I thought, even then, he would refuse. A warrior of his reputation who has been humbled before his fighting men has received his own grievous inner wounds. Again, it was a soft moaning from Huera that decided him. Or, rather, stirred him to continue.

  “Un-nuh,” he nodded. “Let Allison describe the blossoms. I will send Kaytennae back for some of them.”

  I turned to the Texan with this offer, but he promptly shook his head. “Jefe,” he said, in Spanish, to the Nednhi, “suppose the boy picked some of the other flowers back there, which grow by those we need, and which are so nearly the same as to defy separation except by a medicine healer.”

  Juh looked at Ben Allison.

  “You are a medicine healer?” he challenged.

  “My Kwahadi grandmother, who was an own-sister to Peta Nocono, father of Quanah Parker, was a healer. I learned from her.”

  “I think you lie to save your life.”

  “I do not, Jefe; I tell the truth to save another’s life. Think of this: can you not always kill me after the woman lives?”

  Juh had to admit the Apache logic of this thought.

  One imagined to see, even, a hint of grudging admiration in the scowling nod.

  His answer, however, failed to echo any such softening. “I have already said that you are a dead man,” he now told Allison, “but I want the woman to live.” He paused, the scowl darkening. “The question is only of that matter. And I do not trust you or this humpbacked priest of Casas Grandes. We will wait for our own medicines. You heard Kaytennae say the people were sending these down the Zig Zag Trail with the fresh horses.”

  Allison glanced at me, and I could not help him.

  In the silence, young Kaytennae spoke.

  “Anh, yes!” he said, excitedly. “Look up there on the great cliff of the trail. There, about a third of the way down. You see where that long blaze of white-colored rock is? Do you note the dark line of the trail crossing its face? Anh, of course. Watch now and you will see the people, with the horses, crawling over that great light-colored rock.”

  The stillness deepened as we squinted upward where the late sun painted the west wall of the monolith mesa.

  I could see nothing at first. Then, of a sudden, I did see Kaytennae’s small “dark line.” It was not as of horses and men, however, but of the tiniest ant-like specks. In the pellucid mountain light, the distance to the mesa deceived even the eyes of an hombre del monte such as myself. I was momentarily overwhelmed by the magnitude, the mystique, of Juh’s fearful stronghold.

  Not so Ben Allison.

  “The people are one hour down that trail,” he said, speaking to Kaytennae, “and two hours yet from the bottom of it. No es verdad, hombre?”

  It was a skilled thing to call the youngster a man; Kaytennae stood a visible bit taller for the courtesy.

  “Yes, that is true,” he said. “They will be here with the sunset.”

  “Just so,” Allison nodded. “With the sunset, also, the woman will be already dying.”

  I was watching Juh when he said this, and I thought to see the war chief’s bronze face show emotion.

  Juh, let me explain, was different from the other Chiricahua. He had neither the fine features and light color of the Warm Springs band, the chiseled profile and leaner physique of the Cochise band, nor the short, flat-boned, almost Comanchean look common to the Bedonkohes. He had been described in that time, by Anglos who knew him, as appearing more Asiatic than Apache. One American officer, an erstwhile reservation agent, who had met Juh more often than any other white man had, said that the Nednhi chief was a reincarnation of the Mongol barbarian of four centuries gone, “Mongoloid in form, feature, every aspect of the Tamerlanian horseman.”

  Now, looking at Juh, as he stared at the Texan, I understood for the first time this peculiar difference.

  He did seem a stranger among his own kind.

  “Tejano,” he said, almost gently, “what are the flowers called?”

  “The butterfly weed,” Allison answered. “It is an orange prairie milkweed.”

  “How does it work?”

  The Texan had explained the medicinal effect to me so that I understood it to be a powerful diaphoretic and expectorant. That is to say, it would cause profuse sweating and induce coughing up of excess body fluids, cleaning the system as a purgative. I now put these qualities into Apache terms for Juh, seeing that Allison was beyond his depth in doing so.

  When I had done, the Nednhi merely nodded.

  “Bring up the Tejano boy,” he ordered his men.

  Little Buck was dragged forward and Juh put his hand on the lad’s head. “If you are not returned within the hour,” he told Ben Allison, “this small head will be carried up the Zig Zag Trail in a sack.”

  I saw the Texan’s pale eyes turn cold.

  I did not believe Juh would behead the boy, for we were now brief hours from the meeting with He Who Has the Plan and the possible fruition of the ransom plot.

  Yet Juh, Mongol atavism or not, was an Apache.

  Neither He Who Has the Plan, Ben Allison of San Saba, nor Father Panfilo Alvar Nunez of Casas Grandes could stay his dark hand should that hand be seized with the madness of hesh-ke, the unreasoning Apache rage to kill.

  The difference was that Ben Allison had played this game before, and he knew its deadly rules.

  In a snaking lunge too swift to follow,
the Texan seized Kaytennae and whirled him into helpless lock of one long arm. The youth’s body was held between Allison’s own and the Apache pack that was backing Juh. The muzzle of the short Winchester rifle was jammed beneath the boy’s ear.

  “Ojo por ojo,” he told Juh. “If I return to find the white boy’s head held in a sack, you will find this Apache cub’s brains blown out upon your canyon wall, believe it. Do we have an understanding?”

  I thought to see Juh’s eyeballs burst from his skull. But he loved Kaytennae.

  “Lo entiendo,” he grated.

  “Basta,” rasped Ben Allison and turned and went with Kaytennae back into the riven cliff.

  19

  Allison and Kaytennae were returned with the flowers of the butterfly weed within the hour. Meanwhile, the condition of Huera had worsened. The Nednhi had gathered about her fetid pallet and were muttering that they could smell the odor of the rotting death. Allison, sniffing the same air, confided to me that he thought otherwise but that we must let the Apaches continue to believe their holy woman lay dying. In that way, if his Comanche potion broke the fatal fever, the Nednhi would think we had greater power than Huera, thereby improving our own chances of survival.

  Agreeing, I bid the Texan recall that Huera had proclaimed him a devil, a vanished spirit from the pile of ranger bodies in the mission garden. If he succeeded now in saving her, the Apaches would also be more inclined to accept his seeming return to human form, a matter that surely had been worrying them. “A witch doctor or medicine healer is quite another thing from an evil spirit,” I advised him. “Do your best.”

  Allison said nothing to this, but fell instead to his perilous work.

  There is little use to detail it; it would be credible only to the barbarian mind: within the following hour and by use of the boiled extract of the weed blooms, the Texan had induced a sweat in the woman such as I had never seen—she exuded a veritable torrent of vile fluids-of-evil from her pores—and not alone was the deep fever broken, but the woman was sitting up, clear-eyed, asking for food to eat.

  The Nednhi, Juh among them, went quickly and quietly to their saddlebags and brought forth mule jerky, dried fruits of the prickly-pear cactus, and earth-baked mescal root. All watched in rapt silence as the war chief himself fed the recovering holy woman.

  Allison and I heaved a joint sigh. For added personal emphasis to our gratitude, I made a cruz in the air. Seeing it, the Texan nodded, “Make mine the same, Padre,” he said, and did not smile, saying it. As soberly, I made a second cruz for him.

  You may believe we were not laughing. When I have said Ben Allison was a man of outrageous native humor, it is not the same, at all, as saying that he was himself an odd or lumpish fellow. Entirely to the contrary. Standing there in that chancefully gained moment of relief, the wheaten mane of crudely barbered hair, the restless wolflike eyes, the bony, muscular tallness of him, the Comanche-dark complexion, all conspired to render of the Texan the most compelling picture of a frontier pistolero más peligroso. Yet it was the remarkable measure of the man that, in the same silent pause wherein I gauged the dangerous and romantic look of him, he would humbly ask a Catholic blessing.

  As though they, too, respected the sign, the Apaches now let us alone, busying themselves with cleaning the captured new Winchester rifles, eating, and smoking. Their talk was of the Texas raid, but guarded, and we caught nothing of value in it. Presently, most of them slept. We ourselves drowsed; the day faded.

  The Apaches from the mesa came in at sundown.

  There was a greeting flurry but, as the ascent of the great cliff could not be risked by dark, we prepared to spend the night there in Waiting Camp of Cañon Avariento. It was a practice of the centuries for the Indians. Here they would rest after descending the cliff or, if returning from war or trading journey, before reclimbing it. As well, it served as a traditional meeting ground for those other Chiricahuan bands that might come this far to visit Juh’s remote people, but not care to scale the great mesa wall itself.

  Such jots and tittles of information were cheerfully furnished Allison and myself by young Kaytennae.

  The youth had been assigned by Juh to “join our fire,” presumably to watch us as we watched Huera. Kaytennae was a delightful companion. He understood considerable English from his days with me in Casas Grandes. He also spoke enough of it to make himself clear when need be. That he kept his ability to himself only showed the keenness of his mind; not even his fierce uncle knew that the youth had learned the inglés, at Misión de la Virgen de Guadalupe. Yet, curiously, Kaytennae now chose to share his secret, unasked, with an entire stranger. The confidence was a tribute to the Texan. Rare men are like that. You easily tell them things you would not confess to your bishop. Children impose trusts upon them. Women cluck over them. Lost dogs follow them home. And acolyte Apache warriors are brought to give them aid and comfort, even if they are the enemy.

  Kaytennae imparted truths to us that night, at his own offer, which could not have been drawn from him under torture. He began by telling Ben Allison that he was not born into the Nednhi band, but adopted by it, utter news to me. He was, moreover, unknown as to precise years, having come to the Nednhi only a short time before those people brought him to me. Indeed, he had been found wandering alone, in the same high fever that I had treated, which by its nature left his memory clouded upon recovery.

  By feature and physique, handsome of the one, graceful of the other, the Nednhi thought him to have come from the Warm Springs people, a Chiricahuan family living near Ojo Caliente, in the New Mexico country. But those people, under their hard-fighting leaders, Nana and Victorio, were so warlike and rebellious as to be continually on the run from the American horse soldiers, and so it became increasingly difficult to contact them. Kaytennae had settled in with the Nednhi and become a Mexican Apache of record. Indeed, he now informed us proudly, Juh planned the new name ceremony for him upon return to the mesa. This because of the high quality of his conduct in the El Paso raid, a notably dangerous mission.

  “I will be called Looking Glass,” he told us. “This from my ableness to signal with the sun-mirror.”

  We congratulated him, asking if he preferred to have that name used. He was at once apprehensive, saying that to employ the new name before the ceremony would be worse than for a warrior to look upon the face of his mother-in-law previous to a war party departure. So he remained Kaytennae to us then, and to myself so long as I knew him.

  At the very last of our low-voiced talk that warm spring night in Cañon Avariento, the Apache youth looked carefully to see that his elders were all intent about their own, larger fire—where a deer carcass was being spit-roasted and the mescal bota passed freely—then turned back to us frowning seriously.

  A great trouble had come among his people, he said.

  It was something he must tell us.

  Kaytennae did not want Allison, who had saved the life of his aunt Huera, and who had shown the courage of a Spanish bull under the angry rifle of Juh, to go up on the mesa unwarned.

  Por supuesto, he added, sensing my hurt, his dear teacher Blackrobe Jorobado was an equal worry to his heart. Still, the greater peril awaited the big Tejano. It was for him that death lurked up there in the meadowed forests of Juh’s Stronghold. The respectful truce that Juh had extended to the Texan, was an Apache grace entirely.

  And the one who awaited Allison and myself up on the mesa was not an Apache.

  “What is that you say, niño?” I interrupted quickly. “Not an Apache? Aha! We had suspected as much. Are you now telling us that He Who Has the Plan is indeed an extraño, an alien?”

  “Completely, Blackrobe.”

  “Very interesting, hijo. But if he is not of our land, then of which land? And what race?”

  “Chitón!” said the youth softly. “Juh comes.”

  Allison and I looked up across the fire. Juh towered there,
broad Mongol face staring down at us.

  “Párese,” he ordered Kaytennae, “stand up.”

  The boy did so and Juh scowled heavily and fingered the coil of his pony quirt as though he weighed a decision to strike the youth across the mouth with its braided horse-hide lash.

  Yet to hit another in the face is the severest of Apache insults, warranting a return of violence, even of murder. Hence, although he had been drinking steadily with his fellows, Juh let fall to his side the hand that gripped the quirt. The coil loosened, hung slack.

  “Ugashe,” he rumbled, “go.”

  Kaytennae departed, not looking back.

  “Blackrobe,” Juh said, deep voice slurred with mescal, “you know I do not want you bothering that boy. He is a talker and you have an advantage over him, besides. Why do you harry me?”

  “Jefe,” I assured him, “we exchanged nothing but talk of the trail.”

  “That is a lie. I heard the name of He Who Has the Plan.”

  “It may be true, Jefe. If so, it came about in a natural way of discussing the journey. Was the boy forbidden to hear that name, or to speak it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you yourself care to tell us of this man? To let us hear his name? Kaytennae refused, absolutely.”

  “Enjuh, I am glad I did not cut him with the látigo.”

  “We are all glad, Jefe. Un-nuh.”

  “Un-nuh,” he echoed and seemed settled of mind.

  But Allison held up a long Texas arm.

  “Momento, Jefe. Will you tell us of the boy, Little Buck? I would not mention it except that I promised his mother to look after him. You know of that.”

  At first halting glower, Juh appeared angered by this broaching of a forbidden subject. Yet the Apache’s love of children is overriding, and the Nednhi, for all his murderous reputation, was reached. He stepped back to our fire, the change in his demeanor marked.

  “That ish-ke-ne, that boy-child, he manners himself like no other whelp of the Pinda Lickoyi that I have ever caught. He fears nothing. He does what he is told. He rides as if your Comanche people had taught him. He eats raw mule. His Spanish is better than your Spanish. He has his own war song, which he sings in a fine, clear voice and has promised to teach me its tune and wordings. His body is muy duro for a white boy, and inside he is like us; what must be done, he does; nor has he wept one tear for his mother, or his father, or for anything of his old life. Wagh—!”