Apache Ransom

by Clay Fisher

  “Uncle,” he said to Loco, the instant we saw the abandoned Sunado and Keet chasing Tin Can and Mean Trick, “I forgot to tell you something; Juh and the black soldier took a big party down from the stronghold to attack some soldiers in Casas Grandes. See, there are Keet and Sunado. They will tell you.”

  What Keet and Sunado had to tell Loco was that nephew Kaytennae was a traitor and a liar, that the white boy was the own and only son of the gobernador of all of the state of Tejas, and that the black sergeant-soldier had sentenced both the priest and the tall, pale-haired Tejano to die for their efforts to free the boy and cheat the Nednhi out of the great ransom of new seven-shooter rifles from Post of El Paso. More than that, also. If Loco and his twenty fresh men would care to go on to Casas Grandes and help in the horse soldier shooting, Juh was certain to reward them with a share of the Spencer guns.

  What had Loco to say to that?

  The comment of the Warm Springs subchief was an echoing “Wagh!” Someone back in the ranks of the Warm Springs fighters shouted out, “Ugashe!” And, de pronto, the entire party of us was strung out on the run past Laguna de Luz going for the Nednhi Falls and the home trail down into the canyon of the Casas Grandes.

  I remembered that return to Old Campground for one thing—the pure fault of Little Buck Buckles.

  As we went by the white sand beach I was straining to look away from it. But the damnable boy called out, “Hey, Reverend, looky there! Jesus! Did you ever see such a passel of ants acoming outen only two dinky holes?”

  I looked, may God forgive the sight.

  But He never will.

  The “two holes” of Little Buck’s delighted outcry were the places where the scalpers’ heads had been before the lobos came, now coal-black with the swarming millions of carnivorous soldier ants dining endlessly on what the wolves could not reach.

  “Wicked boy!” I shouted. “Shut up and hang on to my cowl, or you will bounce off. For a peso, I would give you an elbow and knock you off on my own part.”

  For once, he subsided.

  And indeed even for a wiry boy it was no mean act to stay with Tin Can on that rocky trail. The Warm Springs people had put the boy and myself on the one hinny mule and big Allison—bound securely—on Mean Trick, the other, stronger twin. Neither little beast would be left behind by the Apache ponies and when, shortly, we went “over the edge” at the Nednhi Falls, our Spanish mulitas caught us up easily with the war party’s mad spirit to race the daylight for Casas Grandes.

  33

  We came up with the Juh party and Robert Flicker just at sundown. The meeting was in the higher roughs below the mouth of the canyon of the Rio Casas Grandes. Before us, quiet in the calm of the late afterglow, lay the pink-dusty town and, off to our right upon its separate rise, my “deserted” Mission of the Virgin.

  But it was not deserted.

  Bivouacked within the adobe walls of my courtyard and garden was the scout company troop of Lt. Jefferson Flowers. Forty men, four corporals, two sergeants, four Lipan Apache enlisted scouts, and, most ominously significant, no supply wagons.

  The Indians caught Flicker’s excitement over this discovery. One could feel the animal sense of the kill stirring the intent ranks of dark horsemen. It was a wind-still evening and, in the clear green light of the desert’s departing day, we could all see, off to the north about ten miles, the low dust-sign lying over the old river road to Janos. The wagons. And with them, a ciencia cierta, the artillery cannon.

  A military council ensued.

  Juh and Loco sat as equal chiefs, but both listened to Robert Flicker whose hour it clearly was.

  The main parties, Nednhi and Warm Springs, dismounted. The ponies were led back higher yet into the roughlands and picketed there. In itself, Allison whispered to me, this was disturbing. Indians almost never “tied up” their horses. We were going to see a real “blood fight,” the Texan told me.

  The ponies sequestered, the warriors spread into the nearby rocks, breaking into small groups to rest and eat. A central corps of the most dangerous fighters stayed with the high command in council. This number included several individuals known to us from the Nednhi: Sunado, Keet, Tubac, Ka-zanni, Nazati, Bèle, Tislin, Delgete, Kaytih, and Doce. Otsai, having the all-important charge of the horse herd, was not present. For the Warm Springs, I knew four: Tzu, Vaquero, Tasati, and Mendez, all “bad ones.”

  Allison and I, under guard, the Texan still bound, were, for reasons of Flicker’s insistence, permitted to remain. This puzzled me, but Allison, with his unclouded simplicity, saw through it immediately. The renegade Negro wanted witnesses, he said. And not Indian ones. A Mexican priest and a Texican white man were just about as good as a black man gone bad could hope for. That is, if Ben Allison was right and Robert E. Lee Flicker had it in his touched mind that he was that night entering the Chihuahuan history.

  “Why, then, praise God,” I whispered, “that means they do not intend to kill us.”

  “It ain’t us we got to worry about,” came the Texas-drawled return. “It’s Kaytenny and the kid. Did you see where at they got to? The bastards had me down in the dirt on my face; I couldn’t see nothing.”

  “Otsai took both of them with him, up the river with the horses. They’ll be safe there.”

  “With crazies nobody’s safe nowhere. Now you listen and you listen hard, Padre. You still got those two butcher knives old Tulip give us up to the mesa?”

  I felt beneath my robe and told him, yes, they were yet there, the Apaches had not searched me. He then instructed me to stay as near to him as I might and, when he gave the word, to cut him free. If, meanwhile, we were separated by the Indians, I was to get to Kaytennae and free him, if I could, as he would then be the last, best chance for Little Buck and myself.

  Before I could assure him of my understanding and willingness, one of our guards, a squat monkey-like Warm Springs stranger, saw us whispering and came over and struck Allison repeatedly with his quirt. Sunado heard the disturbance and came over from the meeting. When the Warm Springs man told him that the blackrobe and the Tejano were talking too much, Sunado ordered Allison taken away. The last I saw of him, they had roped his feet and were dragging him off up into the rocks, helpless on his back.

  Alone, I returned fearful gaze to the council.

  Even as I did so, it was breaking up. The decision had been taken. The Apaches would go for the big gun.

  Flicker ruled that, as premier chief, Juh must remain in command of the base camp. Even I could see this was a device to free the black sergeant of his unpredictable ally. But Juh had lost kinfolk in the artillery killing among Cochise’s band, and he was still supremely a wild Apache, hence deeply apprehensive as to soldier cannon. He made no objection to remaining at the camp, except that he wanted his nephew Kaytennae to go along that the youth might learn how to steal the big guns. Flicker had to remind him that the boy was prisoner to Otsai and must, as a risk to the entire plan, remain so until battle’s ending.

  Juh admitted the need, and Flicker swept on.

  With Flicker would go Loco and the ten Nednhi fighters then present. The Warm Springs chief had far greater experience with white men than any other Chiricahua hostile. He had spent more time on the Americano reservations, San Carlos, Ojo Caliente, Tularosa, Rinconada, all of them, than the rest of the four bands together. So he would be the logical Chiricahua to go with Flicker after that big gun with those white soldiers up on the Janos road. Again, Juh agreed. Knowing the fierce pride and wild heart of the big Nednhi, I could scarcely accept his compliance. But wild Indians are the most sensitive of God’s man-creatures. Like wild horses, they are easily hurt by any surrounding of their freedoms. And I knew that my dangerous friend, the war chief, was, in that moment of “going for the big soldier gun,” feeling within his savage breast the mustang’s nameless fear of entrapment by the brushwings of the corral that he cannot see but knows
instinctively is there.

  I prayed hard then that Juh would see, before it was forever too late, that his corral was Robert Flicker. That Juh would suddenly witness the light, resume command of his people, and drive out the black usurper.

  God was elsewhere that spring evening.

  Within minutes of council’s close, Flicker and Loco, with their ten-man picked war party, were riding for the Janos road.

  34

  Flicker and his Apache raiders were back within four hours. They had the big gun. And more. Ysun had ridden with the Indians. Only two wounds had been taken, by Tislin and Delgete, neither serious, and all of the soldiers with the wagons and the guns were dead. Not one left alive to bear the news to Lieutenant Flowers that his soldier cannon was gone. Even the wind had been kind; it had come up to blow stiffly along the river, northward, carrying from the site of the wagon attack all the sounds of rifle and pistol shooting in the brief massacre.

  Robert Flicker showed me the captured cannon.

  We pushed through the Apache curious, six and eight warriors deep, about the mighty weapon. I noted that none of the Indians would touch the cannon but that all were intensely stimulated by its presence. The Negro sergeant told me he himself had had to guide the four-mule artillery hitch to move the fieldpiece. I did not need to be told the rare skill required to get that great rifled gun into the roughland rocks from the Janos road, unassisted. By then I knew Robert Flicker’s genius. This driven man, given any decent fortune and common kindness of brother man, would have been in the American history books not those of Chihuachua. Yet fate, cruel and relentless, had flawed the fine mind, perverted the remarkable gifts.

  R. E. L. Flicker, barring intervention of Providence, would lie in the lost grave of human injustice with his father, Black Jim.

  No priest of the faith could fail to suffer these spiritual glooms in the Apache camp above Casas Grandes that evil night before the dawn that would signal the shelling of his beloved Misión de la Virgen de Guadalupe. The seethe of activity to emplace the cannon admitted no lesser despair. One knew, even though but a soldier of the cross, that the new day would bring not only death to good men of both sides, but destruction of his own life’s work. There remained no possible escape for the church and its small enclave of court and garden and ancient burial plot. To be certain, I consulted with Flicker. His bearing was sober, his sympathy unquestionable. But I was right; when, with first sunlight, he would commence his firing of the rifled cannon into my ancient mission, he would not halt its barrage while one adobe brick remained to stand upon another.

  “Father Nunez,” he said, “God will have to judge between us. This vengeance is mine, not His.”

  I still could not decide his sanity, and cannot yet. But Robert Flicker was a man to remember.

  Now my own time of decision came upon me, interrupting priestly concerns for the moral judgments of men. Ben Allison had left me with a charge. If I knew not where the Texan was, I must seek out Kaytennae and Little Buck. As the night hours fled swiftly, I grappled with this trust. Finally, an hour before daybreak, I asked God to again forgive me and, checking a last time to be sure the knives of Bustamante were yet strapped beneath my robe, I sneaked away from where my two Warm Springs guards had fallen fitfully aslumber.

  Almost in the moment that my footsteps faded up the canyon track toward the horse herd’s picket lines, I sensed the sudden quickening of the fates that ever seems to funnel the affairs of men to a common end from many separate beginnings.

  Why I knew this, quién sabe?

  It was simply that something told me that all would not run wildly to the finish, and that those of us who would survive the running must run first.

  I found the Apache pony herd in the canyon’s curve and had the luck of God to find Kaytennae and Little Buck held in the same spot and by a nodding guard. I went directly down the bank of the river and cut Kaytennae free but had only begun to saw upon the Texas lad’s bonds when, without warning, the Nednhi youngster bolted from my side into the rocks above the channel.

  Next instant I heard a guttural Apache curse and saw the lean form of Otsai bound after Kaytennae like a red panther. There was not a sound in any of this. But the guards of Kaytennae and Little Buck, five men, the same ones who held the herd under Otsai’s command, had the Indian “inner ear” for noises of the night in enemy country. They were awake on the instant and leaping silently to join the Nednhi killer in his pursuit of the nephew of Juh.

  Only then was the stillness broken. The breaker, por supuesto, was Little Buck Buckles.

  “Crimeny, Reverend,” he blurted, wiping sleep from rounding blue eyes. “What you doing with that there Mexican toad-stabber? Hey,” he looked around the Apache picket line, “where at are all the Injuns?”

  It was an excellent question.

  For once, I had an equal answer.

  “Why,” I said, slashing through his ropes, “they’ve run off into the rocks after your friend Kaytennae, and I suggest you and I do the same thing. Come on, chico. Más aprisa!”

  The Texas boy was awake now. The blue eyes snapped. “Tuck up your skirts, Reverend,” he cried. “Happen you think you’re agoing to stay up with me in that there pope-of-Rome suit, you’re daft. Thisaway!”

  He darted down the canyon, not up it to follow Kaytennae’s flight. Since he was my major charge now, I followed him. After one quick fall into the rocks as I tripped on my robe, I hoisted high the garment of my office and fled, with Little Buck, back toward the main Apache encampment and Robert Flicker’s ominously pointing “big soldier gun.”

  If I needed a spur, the Texas boy provided it in the next common leap. “Attaboy, Reverend,” he panted, as I gained even with him. “I was feared you might have broke your butt yonder. And I got need for you and that there blade of yourn. Let her out a notch!”

  He increased speed and I only recaught him by inspired effort.

  “What?” I gasped. “What did you say?”

  “Hold onto your knife,” he answered, voice held low now. “I know where at they got old Ben Allison. Heard one of these here pony-guard bucks a-telling Otsai abouten it. They didn’t know I savvied Mexican.”

  “Spanish!” I puffed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nor Spanish neither. Rustle your backside, Reverend. We’re nigh there.”

  My impudent, atrocious scoundrel of a guide was correct. After a skid and a hard turn to go, to the right, up an ascending dry tributary to the Casas Grandes, we came upon a level, upper widening of the wash. There we found and, by a miracle, freed Ben Allison. God had provided that the Texan’s twain of Apache watchmen had heard the sliding of rocks on the higher slope occasioned by the swift silent hunting of Kaytennae by his own duped guards, and the two had disappeared to scout the sound only seconds before we arrived.

  One was to presume they reappeared only seconds after we departed, also. For, even as the three of us scuttled back down the sandy arroyo, we heard the dry rattle of rocks marking their return, then the angry gutturals of their Apache oaths to find their prisoner cut free and gone.

  “Lay low!” Ben Allison hissed and pressed both Little Buck and me back into a shallow indenture behind a gnarl of desert piñon. Next moment, the two Apaches hurtled by, down-gully, growling in their rage. Only when they were safely gone did the big Texan lift us up from the rock and sand and say, in that dusty-dry, San Saban drawl. “Well, Padre, we’re back in your bailiwick. You got any bright ideas on where two Texas boys might hole up in a Mexican parish? Just for a couple of days, till the rangers gets here.”

  I knew it was but his Texas way of reassuring the boy and me. I was grateful for it, but the damnable upstart ignored it.

  “Listen, old Ben,” he said, “we got fust to help out old Kite, ain’t we? Wouldn’t be none of the three of us a-standing here augering it, wasn’t for him.”

  I quickly told the Texan of Kayten
nae’s dire peril higher on the slope. Allison nodded frowningly. “I reckon you’re right, Bucko,” he said to the governor’s red-haired heir, “but if we’re going to get to Kaytenny, we’re going to have to do it powerful quick.”

  He gestured toward the rock-studded expanse of the higher ground.

  “Yonder comes the sun, boy. She’s agoing to be broad day in five minutes.”

  We looked, and it was true.

  On the slope, the upper rocks were just being tipped by the red sunlight of the new day. There was already enough illumination, even on the lower slope, to make out Otsai and his fellows prowling like lobos monterías for scent, or sight, of the escaped youth.

  It was then that Kaytennae did his very brave thing. We could only believe that he did it in hope to save Apache lives—to stop the war before the black soldier started it with the big gun—for to think the young warrior would do it to spare the trapped American troops is to be utterly ignorant of the Apache way.

  Suddenly, from the high rocks, up there where the sun had already arrived, the stabbing flashes of a helio mirror lanced down toward the bivouac of soldiers at my mission. Otsai and his hunters saw the bright rays of the signal and gave cry. Down below, the American troops were running from their blankets to evacuate the center of my compound. We could hear their confused shouts, see their ant-small forms race to clear the center area, to get to the shelter of the mission walls. In the same instant, we saw the belching flash of the cannon directly below us and heard the whining shriek of the first big shell sent hurtling into Misión de la Virgen.