Apache Ransom

by Clay Fisher

  “The war chief is right, brothers,” he said. “Let them go. The people can run them down tomorrow. For ourselves, we cannot wait longer. We must be gone for Casas Grandes tonight.”

  Otsai, the killer, held back.

  “What of Huera?” he demanded to know.

  Flicker replied that we would never harm the holy woman as she was our hostage. As well, the Blonde had her sacred power to protect her. Might one lame blackrobe priest, with a humped back and no cruz with him, offset the medicine of a Nednhi gouyan-kân?

  Allison and I leaned together, nearly bursting our ears to hear Otsai’s answer. It was not good.

  He still wanted to go after us. But Juh sided angrily with the Negro deserter, and it grew ugly. Flicker needed some “medicine” of his own, and Tubac gave it to him. “Listen, brothers,” Flicker began, stalling for an inspiration, “we must go and cut off those supply wagons before they come up to Casas Grandes. That is the big part of my plan. Why, those wagons—”

  He was interrupted by Tubac smiting himself on the forehead and calling out, “Ahai! The wagons! I just remembered a thing about the wagons. Jee-le, Ruiz’s wife, told us. There’s a soldier cannon with them.”

  “My God,” said Robert Flicker softly.

  And I heard Ben Allison, lying beside me with his hand over Huera’s mouth, utter a harsh Texas oath.

  Now, suddenly, all was changed.

  With that piece of field artillery in Apache hands and a West Point Academy soldier to operate it, the horse soldiers in my mission were doomed. Flicker could mount the cannon to fire into the garden, and the Nednhi riflemen, stationed on the desert all around the adobe perimeters, would execute any Yanqui trooper coming over the walls to escape the explosions of the fieldpiece inside the garden.

  Explaining this to his followers now, the black sergeant finished, “It will be like shooting agency beef cattle in a corral, brothers. Ysun has sent us this great gun. It is the same gun that defeated Cochise in Apache Pass. Our god has given it to the Chiricahua now. It is his sign to us. It is the plan, brothers. Ugashe—!”

  This time they went. All of them. Yelping and crying at Flicker’s heels like so many red wolves hot for the blood of white horse soldiers caught in a trap.

  “Christ Jesus,” said Allison. “I’ve seen them use that artillery piece at the fort. If Flicker gets that cannon, he’ll chew up them horse troops in five minutes. We got to do something, Padre, and pronto!”

  Unconsciously, he eased his grip on Huera. The woman drew sucking breath to scream. Like a pit viper from the dark, Tulip, hearing the intake of breath, swung her cane at the Blonde. The blow caught Huera just below the breasts, athwart the solar plexus, paralyzing breath and voice. Tulip poked Ben Allison with the end of the mesquite stick. “Put something in her mouth, Tejano. Or I will knock off her head.”

  “I believe you, mother,” Allison said, and he used his red Texas kerchief to gag the holy woman. Handing the Winchester to Kaytennae, he added, “Hombre, you’re in charge. I’ll be back by moon-up.” He was gone before I might say anything. Kaytennae, however, spoke. He put the muzzle of the rifle into his aunt’s ear and murmured in Apache, “If you move gouyan-kân, zas-tee.”

  What he had said was that if the wise holy woman made him do it, he would simply kill her.

  Huera, neither then, nor later, said a word.

  But she knew her adopted nephew.

  And she did not move until tall Ben Allison shadowed back in out of the moon-darkness and said, “Coast is clear, Padre. The Apaches are all down in camp fixing to ride out. Nobody hid out to tail us. It’s meeting time. Kaytennae, where at is this ‘hole’ of yours?”

  “Not far, Al-li-sun.”

  “Padre, I want you to take Little Buck and go with Kaytennae and the others.”

  “Wait!” I cried. “What of you, Allison?”

  “I got to get down off this rock the fastest way there is,” he answered, as if there were nothing more to it than the bare words, “and the fastest way there is, is by the cliff trail. Now once down off the cliff, happen any outhouse luck clings to me, I can beat Flicker and his ’Paches to Casas Grandes and clear them poor damned soldier boys out of there in time. But first off, I got to beat the bastards to the cliff trail.” He turned to Kaytennae. “Gimme the rifle, hombre.”

  The young Apache surrendered the gun and Allison started off. But Kaytennae called after him, “There is only the one thing, Tejano; it is already too late over there. Don’t you see the lights moving?”

  Allison stopped short. We all came forward to where he stood. Off through the pines we could see the torches of the people going on foot with the departing mounted warriors into the distant U-notch.

  “Lo siento,” murmured Kaytennae. “The trail is shut.”

  Quietly, Allison agreed. “Only your hole in the rock left, old Kaytenny,” he said. “Everybody move out.”

  At once, Tulip refused. “I have heard of that hole,” she said. “I won’t go down it; and this one,” she kicked Huera brutally, “isn’t strong enough. But I will tell you something, big Tejano. I like you. You may think I am too old, but I am not. And once I was beautiful, did you know that? Anh! My mother called me Antelope Child. Isn’t that pretty? Anyway, the hell with that. I want you to get away, and I brought some things for you in case you beat Juh down there with the lances.”

  She stood up and shook off her voluminous blanket. The moon was peering among the pines now and we all saw the amazing store of articles carried beneath the bulky cover. There was Bustamante’s Walker Colt and full belt. Also the alcalde’s two wicked-looking butcher knives. And Allison’s horsehair riata stolen from the same mayor’s casa. And one more thing: the Spanish slave iron and chain removed from Little Buck.

  Faster than any of us might reply, Tulip had flung the slave collar about Huera’s bronze neck and toggled the free end of the chain to a jack-pine sapling. Tapping the heavy mesquite cane on the holy woman’s back, Tulip said to Ben Allison, “Go ahead. I will stay here and hit her like a damn pack mare if she makes one squeak. Don’t worry about me. When the holy one and I have spent this night together, we will both be beautiful.” Ben Allison went to the homely elder wife of the war chief and said, “Mujer linda, don’t tell Juh,” and implanted a resounding kiss full on the lips of Antelope Child. “Hasta la vista,” he waved, and he and I and Little Buck went swiftly off through the forest following Kaytennae.

  Positively the only thing said further of parting came from the Texas boy, recovering for his first words since being dumped in the rocks by tall Ben.

  “Cripes,” announced Little Buck Buckles. “There ain’t been this much fun since me and Toadie Burnet smoked old Miz Tarberry outen the crapper at Prairie Star school. You should have seen her go without them bloomers to bother her stride. Tarnation—!”

  31

  While Kaytennae led us the short distance to the secret “mouth of the Pipe,” he told us his story of discovering the “other way down.”

  He had been hunting alone one day with a new rabbit bow Juh had made for him on his twelfth birthday. He had gotten lost in the timber on a part of the mesa where he had never been. Suddenly, a puma kitten, also seeming to be lost, leaped from the brush nearby where Kaytennae rested. When the Apache boy moved toward the baby mountain lion, it ran. Kaytennae gave chase.

  After a long run, the cub went into one end of an old downed cedar log that had become petrified with the centuries. It lay abutted into the shelf from whence it had toppled, and Kaytennae, crawling into it after the mewing kitten, could, strangely enough, see a dim light beyond. Going toward the light, he came into the very stone of the mesa itself and found there a large room as big as an Apache beehive jacal. This was the mouth of the Pipe.

  But the lion cub was gone. Tracking the cub in the dim daylight that filtered from a crevice in the mother rock far, far overhead, Kaytenna
e followed the small footprints on the smooth sand of the cavern’s floor. On the far side was a big rock and behind the rock began a long decline—like the stem of a ceremonial clay pipe—boring downward into the mountain at a gentle slope. Kaytennae went down it a long way, but then he thought he heard the growls of the cub’s mother, and he climbed up again and out through the petrified cedar tree and home to Juh.

  When he told his story to the war chief, Juh said the lion cub was a positive sign from Ysun that Kaytennae should become the tribal bearer of the secret of the Pipe. Juh then said that only he knew the location of this “other exit” from his stronghold, and that Kaytennae, after the Indian way, must keep its secret until he passed it on to his own son, in his own time.

  Kaytennae had never been back to the Pipe, but Juh had told him how it went on from where he had turned back when he heard the lion’s growls. Now, they would all have to trust him to remember what the war chief said. “And look!” he finished, pointing ahead in the moonlight. “A good omen to begin with; there is the old stone cedar, exactly as I recall it to be.”

  We stumbled forward, Little Buck, Ben Allison, and I, not believing yet the reality of such a tale.

  But there it was, the petrified downed cedar log.

  And into the end of it we went, and on along its hollowed center on hands and knees until, de pronto, we broke free of it into the cavern of the mouth.

  “Christ Jesus,” breathed tall Ben Allison. “Even moonlight shines into it. It’s eerie as hell.”

  “Gives a feller the fantods,” shivered Little Buck. “Let’s get agoing.”

  “Down into the stem there is no light to follow us,” Kaytennae said. “But Juh told me there were tallows here, not of Indian kind. Do you have matches, Al-li-sun?” He sought with his fingers along a ledge above the portal rock of the stem. Directly, he found what Juh had said he would find. I could not believe it when Allison scratched a stick-sulphured match and I saw the tallows of the war chief’s story.

  They were of the manufacture of the Church dating two centuries and more into the past. I would guess them to be made by the Jesuits of Sonora, possibly for the legendary Lost Mines of Tayopa, and stolen by Indian miners from whom the Apaches had secured them.

  “Santissima! Qué maravilla!” I murmured.

  Allison put his match to one of them. It caught and smoldered, then burst into a good clear flame—after two hundred years! “Mary save us!” I cried.

  The Texan peered across at me in the shifting aurous light. “Ain’t nothing against Mary, Padre,” he said, “but seems to me this save is on old Kaytenny.”

  I opened mouth to admit the credit due the Apache youth, but the boy was quicker than I, denying it.

  “No, Al-li-sun,” he said. “Juh is the one.”

  “Juh, hombre?” The Texan squinted.

  “Think about it,” the young warrior said.

  Allison frowned hard, and of a sudden the pale eyes widened and the dark face brightened. “By God, Padre,” he said, “the kid’s right. When Juh turned them back from us by saying there was only one way down off the mesa, he knowed of this other way, and knowed Kaytenny knowed it. I don’t get it, but I ain’t augering it; that Injun wanted us to get away.”

  “He did it for the white boy,” Kaytennae said. “And for me.”

  “For Little Buck? For you?” I was truly puzzled.

  “Yes, Blackrobe. Juh believed he owed you for my life. That calls for another life returned. He has just given you that life—the Texas boy.”

  “Cripes,” said Little Buck. “He did like me.”

  Ben Allison took the second of the three ancient torches and lit it from the first one. He passed the new light to Kaytennae and started to put the third, unlit torch inside his shirt front.

  “No,” the Apache youth said. “Leave one.”

  It was the Indian way, and Comanche-reared Ben Allison understood. Something is always left for those who follow. “Enjuh,” he said to Kaytennae and put back the unused tallow. “Lead out, we’re way late.”

  So it came to pass that a Nednhi Apache boy led three strangers down through the mighty rock of Juh’s Stronghold, twelve hundred feet by the pipestem—a descent to be remembered in nightmares for a man’s lifetime—out into the inner ranges of the Sierra Madre of the North and over them by goat and coyote trails to the other drainage and so, at last, on midday of the second sun, out upon the ancient Chiricahua trail of South Way—not one mile distant from Old Campground!

  We were all achingly weary and sore of foot, but when we came out on that old Apache track and young Kaytennae told us where we were, our spirits were restored. Allison said, “By God, we still got time to head them to Casas Grandes. Come on.” Little Buck Buckles yelled out, “That’s so, old Ben. Yee-hawwhh!”

  Kaytennae glanced at me. “Blackrobe,” he grinned, “I think you are glad now that you cured me of the horse fever. Ugashe, Padre, I am proud of you, too.”

  He had never called me padre in his life, and I went with him and Ben Allison and Little Buck down out of the rocks and into the main roadway of South Way, the historic Apache trail to Pa-gotzin-kay, feeling in some manner as if my priesthood and my preaching mission in this remote monte of my mother’s dusky people had, at long last, borne fair fruit.

  I was ready, as I am sure were my fellows, to thank a just and generous Maker for delivering us from the Apache wilderness. Indeed, I had just expressed this sentiment to Allison, trudging along at his side in the warm midday dust of the trail, when Kaytennae suddenly stopped ahead of us. In three more strides we were up to him, seeing what he saw: we had walked happily into a trap.

  There, just beyond a rocky turn, sat a score of Indian horsemen. They were Apaches, and, more than that, Apaches known to Kaytennae.

  “Enjuh,” said our young guide, raising his right hand to the leader of the silent pack. “I am glad to see you again, uncle. How have you been?”

  The man so addressed was a frightful-looking fellow. Of medium age and stature, he was horribly disfigured by some accident of war or of the hunt—we later learned he was torn nearly asunder by a grizzly bear—and when he now smiled in response to Kaytennae’s greeting, his face seemed one great, reopened wound. I shivered in the broad day and hot sun.

  “Well,” he said, “I think the real question is where have you been, nephew of the Nednhi.”

  With that, he waited. His followers’ only movement was to nod their heads in agreement to what he said.

  “These are my friends, uncle,” said Kaytennae, gulping hard. “Here is Blackrobe Jorobado, from Casas Grandes. There is the Tejano, Al-li-sun, a quarter-blood Comanche whose grandmother was own-sister to the father of the great Quanah Parker. And this is his little son, by a white woman,” he lied, in concluding. “We are on a little journey going down to Casas Grandes, and I became confused and took the wrong turn. I can’t imagine how I got on South Way, starting from Old Campground.”

  “Neither can I, boy.”

  “Well, uncle, how are all my cousins among your Warm Springs people? How is my uncle Victorio? And old Nana? You know, the Nednhi think that I am a Warm Springs. Did you ever hear that?”

  “Boy,” said the disfigured chief, “you’re a poor liar. Just like Juh. And your manners are no better than his. You haven’t introduced me to your friends.”

  Kaytennae made a nervous laugh.

  “Oh,” he said to us with a futile little wave, “lo siento mucho. This is my uncle Loco.”

  Allison and I looked at one another.

  Loco—! The craziest of the crazy. God’s name!

  “Padre,” Ben Allison said to me from the side of his mouth, “what were you just saying about thanking the Lord? Cancel my share of the ceremony. Jesus!”

  Loco made a sign to his warriors and they swept around us on all sides, and Loco pointed with his rifle toward Old Campg
round and said, “Ugashe.”

  And that is how we came back to Old Campground, the comrades three: Alvar Nunez, Ben K. Allison, and Henry Garnet Buckles III.

  32

  When Juh and Robert Flicker led the big war party out of the stronghold it marked the third time only in all Nednhi history that horsemen had gone down the great cliff by night. But Ysun was with the venture. The descent was made without loss of man or animal, and minutes before midnight the party was on the floor of Cañon Avariento. The moon of course was virtually day-bright, and the little Apache horses knew each rock and step and sinuoso in the track. They were across the divide, out of Sonora back into Chihuahua, by noon halt next day. Traveling only with resting times for the ponies, the party was in Old Campground by 6:00 a.m. the second day. Here, to save something of their war mounts, the Nednhi stopped four hours to water and graze the little animals and catch a wolf nap for themselves. Thus it was that when Loco and the Warm Springs raiders, coming up from Pa-gotzin-kay, found us in the trail and took us with them on to Old Campground, we found the pony droppings of Flicker’s band still warm and smoking.

  We found more than that, also.

  Four old friends were there.

  There were two of them chasing the other two. The warriors of the committee, Sunado and Keet, were trying to catch up two fresh mounts for their own old ponies who had gone lame on the forced march, causing the two men to stay behind when the Nednhi pushed on for Casas Grandes. And the two fresh mounts were Tin Can and Mean Trick, my twin hinny mules. Missing us in the melee atop the mesa, they had followed the war party down the great cliff sniffing the airs of home with each mile over West Way toward Casas Grandes.

  Now the little ones had just come upon the stranded war party members and were trying to get around them and go on home down past the Nednhi Falls. Keet and Sunado were cursing and throwing rocks and hoh-shuh-ing and coaxing the mules by turn. Allison and I surely would have laughed to see this display of cunning and good taste by our small friends the hinny twins except that the presence of the two Nednhi was very poor medicine for us. It meant that Loco would be informed in detail of Juh’s mission in Casas Grandes, instead of hearing the lies we had planned to tell him when we saw that the big war party had already passed through Old Campground. But Kaytennae, quick in the mind, as always, beat them to it.