Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  “Iff’n I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t refuse it.”

  “If you did get one, you couldn’t read it.”

  “No matter. If someone took a notion to write me, I wouldn’t say no to their efforts.”

  The first miner got back to the real issue. “It’s another way for the politicians to bleed honest citizens in order to pay for their highfalutin ways.”

  Rafe almost laughed out loud. One could look a long time and not stumble across an honest citizen in New Mexico Territory. He’d have to search a lifetime to find one in Arizona, on the other side of Doubtful Pass, where, he was astonished to learn, Cochise would be hauling wood for white men. Wonders would never cease.

  The aggrieved letter-writer expanded on his theme. “It’s like that damned tariff. Why should we pay tariffs on Northern goods so the Yankee manufacturers can live high on the hog whilst we root in the mud? It’s taxation without representation, that’s whut it is. We’uns done alriddy fit that battle.”

  Here it comes, Rafe thought. He took his bottle and shoved his chair farther back into the corner. He tilted it so he could lean against the wall and watch the fight that would surely erupt.

  He had heard this argument before. Individual words cut through the general shouting. “Sovereignty of the states.” “The unrestrained will of the majority perpetrating injustice against the minority.” And the one Rafe heard most often, “Ain’t no damned Yankees gonna tell us what to do with our darkies.”

  Rafe stayed aloof until Shadrach Rogers walked through the door. Apparently San Francisco had spit him out again and he had landed here. The debate turned into a loud hum. Everyone else went out of focus. Rafe stood up and, concentrating on each step, walked straight for him. He swung his left fist in a fast arc that ended at Rogers’ ear. It got his attention, but it didn’t knock him down.

  With a curse at his own incompetence, Rafe grabbed him by the throat and threw him to the ground. Women screamed. Men started swinging at each other. Tables toppled. Bottles and stools took wing like startled birds.

  Rafe saw only the bulge of Roger’s boiled onion eyes. He heard only the gargle of him struggling to suck air past the fingers locked around his throat. Then Rafe felt a blow to the back of his head, and everything went black.

  He woke up in heaven, or close to it. A woman’s warm, naked body lay on top of him. He grunted, put his arms around her, and discovered he didn’t have any clothes on either. He threw all his concentration into opening his eyes and ignoring the drumbeat of pain behind them. In the darkness he could only make out the pale curve of the wagon’s new canvas cover arching over him. He heard a fiddle in the distance. Apparently the fight had ended at The Dove, and the dancing had begun.

  Milagro murmured in his ear, sending a current of excitement the length and breadth of him. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve been through an ore crusher.”

  She giggled and began kissing him slowly and lightly on his neck and shoulders and chest. She paused in her survey of his body to whisper with her lips brushing his. “I can make you feel better.”

  Pain still crashed against the backs of his eyeballs, but Rafe began to feel better anyway. Part of him began to feel very good. He rolled over so that Milagro was under him and returned the kisses she had left on him.

  He lost himself so completely in pain and passion that he almost didn’t hear Red whinny, but he smelled the lantern oil. He raised up on his elbows.

  He heard a splash against the canvas cover and saw the flare of a lucifer through the cloth. A whooshing sound followed it and men’s laughter. The canvas burst into flames that lit the inside of the wagon.

  “iAy, Dios! Milagro scrambled for the rear opening as the fire roared through the canvas and caught the dry wood of the wagon’s bed.

  Rafe grabbed the pouch with his book in it, a blanket, and his faded blue army pants. The heat intensified until he thought his brains would bake in his skull. He tried to push Milagro through the opening, but a rope tangled around her ankle and held her fast. A spark lit her hair and he threw the blanket over it. She screamed and clawed at it, trying to see, while he fumbled with the rope. He freed her, picked her up, and threw her out the back of the wagon. She landed on her feet, staggered forward, fell, and rolled clear. He jumped down after her.

  He untied Red from the picket line and led him away from the inferno. At a distance, the night was chill. He draped the blanket around Milagro’s shoulders, and she clutched it to her, shivering. He pulled on his trousers. With a grim fascination they stood under the glittering sweep of a night sky spangled with jewels, and watched the dancing flames devour everything except the metal fittings.

  “Who would do this?” Milagro asked.

  “I think I know who.”

  Leading Red, Rafe walked with her to her small room facing the rear courtyard of La Paloma. Then he mounted and rode Red to a narrow street off the main plaza where Dona Margarita kept a boardinghouse. Maybe Zeke Smith was still awake. Maybe the job offer would still stand.

  Tomorrow, Rafe thought, I will look for Shadrach Rogers.

  Chapter 21

  DUCK!

  The word party had magical properties. It made men appear where a clear-eyed observer would have sworn none existed. Or maybe the possibility of free food and whiskey lured them out—although how the word had spread to them, Rafe couldn’t guess. Men had trickled out of the lilac haze draping the hills around the new stage station about twenty miles west of Doubtful Pass. More of them had trooped out of the desert, their silhouettes shimmying to the sprightly dirge of heat.

  Most of them led mules or burros burdened with prospecting gear. Hairy and tattered and filthy, they looked as though they had spent the winter under the same rocks they hoped would produce their fortunes. They gathered at the new station to attend a party in honor of the stage line’s owner, John Butterfield.

  When the coach and Mr. Butterfield failed to arrive, the prospectors started the party without him. Many had brought their own concoctions fermented of everything from the rock-hard, brown Mexican sugar to the sap of the maguey plant and the buds of the mescal. One claimed to have distilled rattlesnake venom into a potion that would grow hair on the soles of the feet, but Rafe preferred the brew of a rancher named John Ward. Ward’s whiskey was the only attribute that Rafe or anyone else appreciated about him. Ward intended to charge Mr. Butterfield far more than the going rate for it. By ten o’clock, most of the revelers had forgotten who Mr. Butterfield was.

  Near the new stone station stood a ranch house where ten years before Red Sleeves and his warriors had killed the ten people who had lived there. Since then, Red Sleeves had tried to abide by his promises to Dr. Michael Steck or at least to only raid south of the border, but his young men were a different matter. Stock still disappeared. The Apaches were the reason Butterfield’s man, Ezekiel Smith, had asked Rafe to take this leg of the route. The pass was prime country for them.

  John Ward gestured with his whiskey jar toward the ranch house. “I know fer a fack that a duck’s done built a nest under that thar building.”

  John Ward knew a lot of facts, but in Rafe’s experience, few of them assayed out as truth. Rafe finished off the tin mug of Ward’s whiskey. The fumes swirled like jig music.

  He waved the mug at the cactus and scrub. “There are no ducks for five hundred miles.”

  “’Cept the one under that house.” Ward spoke with the contained fury of a circuit lecturer after someone has overhanded a rotten cabbage at his head.

  He was not a man to tolerate contradiction when he was sober, much less when he wasn’t. He had no softness anywhere about him, not in the taut skin stretched over his pink skull, or in the bumpy ridge of his nose, or in lips like a folded barlow knife, or in the plow blade of scapula bones that pushed against his shirt, woven appropriately enough from the fleece of a black sheep or two.

  “Hell, they ain’t no ducks under there,” spoke up someone from the crowd around the kegs.


  “I’ll bet a silver dollar they is,” responded another.

  A clamor rose as people placed their wagers.

  “Felix, git over here.” Ward beckoned to a boy of ten or so.

  Dirty red hair hung to the boy’s shoulders, and a shock of it covered his left eye, which looked perpetually upward. Apaches had captured his Mexican mother and, in spite of his red hair, some said one of them had fathered Felix. When he and his mother escaped from them, Ward had taken them in, but the arrangement couldn’t have been much of an improvement in Feliz’s lot. Feliz meant “happy” in Spanish. Happy, Feliz was not.

  A rawhide thong held up a pair of his stepfather’s castoff breeches. The hems dragged through the dust around his bare feet. He approached as though expecting his stepfather to strike him as soon as he got within reach.

  “Crawl under yon hacienda and fetch that thar duck.”

  “They’s rattlesnakes and scorpions under thar.” The boy stepped back, certain now that he would get hit. John Ward raised a hand to oblige him.

  Rafe stepped between them. “Let’s have a look see.”

  Torches held aloft, the crowd surged across the ranch yard, with one of Ward’s whiskey kegs riding the crest. They gathered in a crescent around the front of the house. The corners of the building sat on boulders that raised it a couple of feet off the gravelly soil. The black strip of night encircling it at ground level gave the impression that scorpions and rattlesnakes were the least of the evils under it.

  “Let’s pry off a few of them thar clapboards and see if we kin find the duck,” someone suggested.

  A cheer went up. While most of the crowd revived their strength with drink, some went back to the stage station for tools. Changing off as they grew weary or thirsty, the men worked by torchlight. By two in the morning the heap of lumber that had been the house burned merrily, illuminating its own destruction. Five headless rattlesnakes hung over the hitching rail beside the banjo picker.

  Most of the wrecking crew lay asleep or passed out around the dooryard. One dark corner of the house remained, and the men who were still standing stared at the dog.

  “By jimminy,” one of the miners said. “The duck’s got fur.”

  With feet planted apart and back a-bristle, the dog defended the shelter she had found there. Rafe moved closer and crouched for a look. Even in the predawn light and the shadows under the corner, he could see that she was a sturdy bundle of grit and gristle. She was snub nosed, savage eyed, and dust colored. She snarled at Rafe.

  Two puppies milled and squeaked between her legs. Rafe wondered how the mother had dissuaded the rattlers from eating her young. She and the snakes must have arrived at some sort of uneasy armistice under the house. Or maybe these two were the survivors of a larger litter.

  Rafe didn’t see Ward aim his old revolver. He jumped when the pistol went off in his ear and the mother fell. Her legs jerked as though chasing a rabbit in her dreams, and then she lay still while the puppies struggled to crawl out from under her.

  Rafe rounded on Ward, but the man was quick. He grabbed one of the puppies by the neck and squeezed, shaking him to and fro. Rafe picked up the remaining animal. Ward threw the dead puppy onto the fire and reached for the one Rafe held. He saw the look on Rafe’s face, thought better of the plan, and turned away, muttering.

  Sober as a stone now, Rafe walked through the litter of sleeping men, broken fence rails, rotting horse tack, and tilting grave markers. He could sleep a few hours with the puppy on the cot in the back room of the stage station before the stage coach arrived in the morning.

  Shouting and a pistol shot woke him. Apaches! He grabbed his new shotgun and ran outside, but instead of Indians, he found that it was raining baggage and blowing invective. A carpetbag plummeted toward him as though it were packed with cannonballs. A pickax followed and buried itself in the bag.

  The first Concord coach of the Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company had arrived. At least three hundred men jostled and argued around it while the hostlers struggled to hitch the new team in the confusion. Some men threw their bags and satchels onto the rack atop the coach, and others tossed them down again. They accompanied all of it with swearing that would make a mule driver feel outclassed.

  Rafe walked closer to inspect the coach. It was a beauty. It was made of the finest hickory, springy and tough, with steel fittings and axles. It was dark red, with a yellow-and-brown-striped undercarriage. A painting laid down in oils on the lower panel of the door depicted the desert, with slants of sunlight illuminating saguaro cacti against a sunset sky and lilac mountains. Rafe peered inside at the russet-colored leather upholstery and side curtains.

  He stooped to inspect the wide leather thoroughbraces, heavy straps woven through the steel stanchions of the undercarriage. They lifted the coach above the axles and gave it a comfortable swing. It looked like the perfect vehicle, and Rafe knew it would never do. It was durable, yes, but cumbersome and top-heavy. A careless driver would turtle it at the first arroyo. Though the necessity pained him, he would have to suggest that Mr. Butterfield employ something lighter.

  The riot finally caught Rafe’s attention. The station manager had only recently arrived from Connecticut and was no bigger than a minute. The miners’ lice received more of their notice than he did.

  “What’s the problem?” Rafe shouted in his ear.

  “They’ve heard of that strike north of Gila City. They’re all in a fever to go there.”

  Rafe had heard the stories, too, of nuggets weighing five hundred pounds, of gold enough to ransom all the kings the world could produce. Rafe went back into the station. He took a packet of stale soda crackers and a tin of powdered milk from the storeroom. They would have to do for the puppy. He added them to the woolen shirt and socks, the linen drawers, and the coat stuffed into his rucksack. He put the dog on top of the coat, gave her a piece of jerked beef to chew, and slung the rucksack over his shoulder.

  He loaded his shotgun and walked outside. He picked up eleven stones, put them in his pocket, and climbed onto the driver’s high seat. The conductor, Toomey, pushed his hat back and settled in next to him with his own shotgun across his knees and his bugle in hand.

  Perched above the fray, Rafe fired into the air. When he had everyone’s attention, he heaved the rocks at the eleven men who looked least likely to cause trouble. His aim was as good as his judgment.

  The chosen cursed him, but he said in a voice just loud enough for everyone to hear, “Those men are going. The rest of you stand back.” When the rejects began objecting, Rafe aimed his revolver at them. “Mr. Butterfield said that nothing on God’s earth must stop the United States mail, and I’ll shoot any son of a bitch who delays it.”

  He returned the pistol to his belt. “While I throw the baggage off the left side, you eleven men hand your things up to Toomey on the right. If we aren’t loaded by the time I finish Hamlet’s speech, what’s on the ground stays there.”

  Reciting “To be or not to be,” he began heaving boxes and trunks overboard. Men dodged into the fall of luggage to retrieve their things. Rafe worked steadily in rhythm with the words of the soliloquy. He stowed the heavy canvas mailbags with something like reverence. He thought of all those letters scattering the breadth of the country with their tidings glad and sorrowful, official and intensely private. Carrying nails and lumber, corn and salt pork was a living. Delivering the mail was a calling.

  He reached the last lines of the speech as he and Toomey pulled the oiled tarpaulin over the heap of trunks and lashed it down.

  And enterprises of great pith and moment

  With this regard their currents turn awry.

  And lose the name of action.

  He was so intent on his work that he didn’t notice the silence that had fallen below him until he tightened the last knot and spoke the last word. He looked down to see the men staring up at him. Most surprising of all was that his audience now included a tall, handsome Apache and a shorter, stoute
r man who bore a resemblance to him.

  Rafe recognized the tall Indian as Cochise. The other one was the chief’s brother, Coyundado. In the distance stood three Apache women with mules piled high with mesquite branches. True to his word Cochise had delivered the firewood for which he had contracted.

  The sight of him made Rafe feel better. He would be passing through Cochise’s territory. He saluted Cochise, and the chief and his brother saluted back in crisp military fashion. They looked solemn as a brace of chickens on a roost, as Absalom used to say. Then the corners of Cochise’s sinuous mouth twitched in a smile so fleeting and rare that Rafe assumed he was mistaken in thinking he saw it.

  Well, he thought, I guess we do seem a mite peculiar to you, Chief.

  He set the rucksack at his feet and rolled back the top of it so the puppy could see out. Rafe looked at the new day from the height of the driver’s seat of this most amazing coach. A sense of exhilaration raised the hair on his arms and started his heart like a quarterhorse with a fast field behind him.

  Rafe had always sworn he would never work for any man, but then Rogers burned his wagon and vanished again. Some said Rogers had heard Rafe was hunting him and had hightailed it for Mexico, as if the Mexicans didn’t have troubles enough. In any case, he left Rafe little choice but to take this job.

  If Rafe was going to work for any man, Butterfield was the one. Delivering the mail from Memphis to San Francisco twice a week safely and on time—that was a notion only a lunatic would promise. In less than a year, though, Butterfield’s surveyors, engineers, and pick-and-shovel men had cleared roads, leveled riverbanks at fords, constructed bridges, sunk wells, and built stage stations. They had done it in blistering heat, under the threat of death by thirst and Indian attacks. Butterfield promised to get the mail through on time. Rafe intended to fulfill his part of the bargain.

  He picked up the six reins, each held singly between his fingers, the three from the animals on the near side in his left hand, the offside ones in his right. As always, he felt the power of the horses surge along them, flow into his fingers and up his arms, spread into his chest, and then outward through his entire body.