Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

Whether Baylor was on his way or not didn’t really matter. The Mexican banditti to the south of Tubac and the Apaches to the east made survival there difficult enough. The twenty men holed up behind the settlement’s adobe walls had decided to sneak out after dark and make a dash for Tucson thirty miles north.

  Rafe said he had things to do and let them leave first. If any Apaches were awake tonight, the thunder of eighty hooves would get their attention. He dozed, sitting with his back against the inside of the west-facing adobe wall, trying to extract the last of the afternoon sun’s warmth from it. When the men were long gone and the full moon had risen, he saddled Red and whistled for Patch.

  Rafe rode all night. The sun had yet to make an appearance, but the desert was awash in pale light when Rafe approached Bill’s rambling estate. A breeze blew the odor of roasting meat toward him. His stomach rumbled, and his mouth watered in anticipation of the barbecued pig’s ribs he would share with the old man for breakfast. The chili-laced sauce that Bill slathered on the meat would keep Rafe awake for the rest of the ride to Tucson. Then he saw Patch’s hackles rise. He loaded his Sharp’s and capped it.

  As he drew closer, he saw that most of Bill’s arbors and huts had collapsed into charred ruins. Apaches, most likely, had dismantled Bill’s handiwork and stacked the wood against the base of the boiler. From the size of the heap of ashes there, Rafe could see that the fire they started must have made a hellish inferno even in the February cold.

  He leaned on the pommel and stared at the door Bill had cut into the side of the boiler. From the various openings for fittings issued a stench of burnt, rotting flesh that almost overpowered him. Rafe wanted to ride away, but he dismounted and tried to open the door. He was relieved that Bill had bolted it from the inside. He rattled it.

  “Bill, you old fool, I can’t even bury your sorry carcass.” He stepped back and surveyed the boiler. “Although you couldn’t have done better for a crypt,” he added. “It’ll be standing till the Next Coming.”

  He took off his hat, breathing as shallowly as possible to avoid the smell. He tried not to imagine what Bill’s last hour on earth had been like.

  “You made me laugh, Bill. A man can’t ask better than that from a friend.” He bowed his head and recited the words he had heard so often in his life. “‘We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’”

  In Bill’s case, he thought, the ashes part is surely appropriate.

  A gust stirred up the ashes heaped against the boiler and blew them in an eddy around his legs. He remembered the ashes he had seen smeared on Lozen’s face and Pandora’s when they returned Absalom’s body to him. His Navajo wife had told him many years ago that Apaches believed the ashes kept away ghosts. The odd notion struck him that these ashes belonged to Bill, even though he knew Bill’s remains were inside the boiler. Or at least he assumed they were. Something in there was stinking up the countryside.

  As more ashes blew toward him, he felt a sudden certainty that Bill’s ghost was clutching at him, trying to get him to stay, to visit, maybe read a little Romeo and Juliet to him. Rafe clamped his hat back on his head and tightened the cord under his chin. He shifted the book at the small of his back into a more comfortable position and backed with respectful haste toward Red.

  Chapter 29

  SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

  Tucson had always been a rough-and-tumble town, but after the army left to quell the Southern rebellion in the east, it took on the desperate air of what the Bible called the Last Days. That being the case, Rafe wasn’t surprised to find a celebration in progress when he rode through the main gate of the adobe wall that encircled it.

  Makeshift bunting of cedar and juniper branches basted the rows of adobe houses together. Confederate flags flapped in the February wind. They’d been crudely sewn from bandanas, old army coats, and flour sacks. Most of the town’s inhabitants whooped and hollered on the main street. Some of the men raised considerable dust jigging to a banjo that was playing either “Skip to My Lou” or “The Old Oaken Bucket,” but Rafe couldn’t tell which.

  “They must be expecting a shipment of southern comfort,” Rafe observed to Red. Red flicked his ears in agreement.

  This southern comfort wouldn’t be the sipping kind, though. It would have arms, legs, bad teeth, and a worse attitude. Soldiers of the Confederacy, what Rafe thought of as the rebel rabble, were on the way.

  The sensible people had fled the territory. Those left were mostly Southerners, and the Southerners were mostly outlaws. The citizens of Tucson had always been strongly secessionist. Even if they weren’t, they would welcome armed white men of any persuasion.

  Rafe headed for the main plaza and the latest edition of Sarah Bowman’s American House. A man standing on a crate near the door had drawn a small crowd. He pointed at Rafe with a finger that seemed to have more than the required number of knuckles.

  “Beware the serpent on the sideboard,” he roared. “Shun he demon rum.”

  His audience raised high their bottles and mugs of home-made whiskey, and gave him three lusty huzzahs. Rafe glanced at him with a sudden, brief hope. Rum? Had The Great Western procured rum?

  “The inhabitants of this yar earth have transgressed, my brethren. They have broken the everlasting covenant with their Maker.” The prophet raised a dejected-looking Bible and shook it. “It says right here in Isaiah, chapter twenty-four, verse six. ‘Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.’”

  “You got that right, old son,” Rafe muttered. He thought of the ashes blowing around the base of Bill’s boiler and the canting wooden grave markers standing silent watch over the rail.

  He handed Red’s reins to the American House’s hostler and stood in front of the notice tacked to the door. He had read it before, but he read it again, maybe hoping the news had changed since the last time. It was a torn, yellowed sheet from a newspaper seven months old. The article told of Union losses at a place called Bull Run in July of 1861. Untrained rebel forces, under the general who’d earned the nickname “Stonewall” Jackson there, had checked the Union soldiers’ advance and then driven them back. The Federal retreat to Washington City had turned into a rout.

  Rafe shook his head and went inside with Patch at his neels. Patch raised the hair along her back and growled at he dogs already in residence. They moved aside politely to let her pass. For once, the place was fairly quiet.

  The only good to enter Tucson in the last seven months had been The Great Western. She had left Fort Yuma with the army when it pulled out, but she’d braked her old Studebaker wagon here. She had told Rafe then that this was as far east as she cared to go. Her Albert figured he’d be in place to stake claim to the abandoned silver mines when the dustup ended.

  And besides, from what she had heard, the east was in turmoil, too, with brothers killing brothers in numbers that made the Apaches look like pikers. She had winked at Rafe and observed that at least the Apaches hadn’t gotten ahold of cannon yet. “God help us when they do,” Rafe had answered.

  Now Western emerged from the kitchen, her yellow cap of the Third Artillery perched at the usual angle atop a heap of red hair. “No, Rafe,” she shouted jovially. “We ain’t got no rum, despite what Old Hellfire outside says. People been asking fer it ever since he started his sermon this morning.”

  She gave Rafe a hug that squeezed the breath out of him. The two pistols in her belt pressed into him painfully, but her bounteous breasts did, too, and he didn’t complain. She held him out at arm’s length and looked at him, her bottleglass-green eyes bright with tears; then she pulled him against her again. She didn’t say that she feared he had been killed, thus reducing by half her complement of friends outside her immediate household. She was an old soldier. Soldiers didn’t talk about death. That was for amateurs.

  Rafe si
ghed and closed his eyes, luxuriating in the comfort, warmth, and muscular softness of her, wrapped in arms like a pliant fortress of flesh. He was almost as tall as she was, but to be held by a woman her size made him feel like a child again. When she released him, she raised a hand and gestured toward the bar where Paz, the beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter of her Mexican friend, Mrs. Murphy, held court. Paz reached for the bottle she kept out of sight of the riffraff. Rafe knew his credit was good. Western kept his money for him in the strongbox hidden in the dirt floor beneath her bed.

  He collected the bottle of bourbon and two glasses and took them to the table in the corner where Senor Esteban Ochoa sat. Don Esteban stood and extended a slender hand. His large dark eyes lit up, making him even handsomer and more aristocratic, if that were possible.

  “Señor Rafael, I give thanks to God that He has brought you back safely.” He spoke better English than anyone else in town. Only a trace of an accent, his straight, black hair, dark eyes, and honey-colored complexion gave him away as Mexican.

  Don Estaban reminded Rafe of the fact that there were men who wore grace and elegance as easily as others wore their skin. Rafe was always grateful to Don Esteban for that, for it was easy to forget, given the general quality of the citizenry of Arizona. Don Esteban, Mrs. Murphy, Western, and her swarm of adopted children—they gave him reason to believe humanity still had hope.

  Don Esteban bowed to Western and Mrs. Murphy and pulled out a chair for each of them. They now had a quorum of the Union sympathizers in Tucson. Western held on her lap one of the orphans she had recently adopted, a doe-eyed Mexican boy three or four years of age. Another one, slightly older, wrestled with Patch on the dirt floor.

  “Who are they expecting out there?” Rafe poured boubon into a glass and set it in front of Don Esteban. “Are the rebs coming?”

  “They are already here.” Don Esteban nodded thanks for the bourbon. “Under the command of a Captain Sherod Hunter.”

  “I’ve met him.” Rafe poured himself a drink “Can’t say it was a pleasure.”

  “He arrived yesterday with a hundred worthless wretches who call themselves the Confederate Arizona Volunteers,” added Western.

  “Where are they?”

  “Most of them have gone to ground in the saloons. I told them their custom warn’t welcome here.”

  Mrs. Murphy spoke, her husky Spanish accent mixed with Texas, Tennessee, and Ireland. “Captain Hunter told Don Esteban he had to take an oath of loyalty to the rebels or leave town.”

  “The captain was quite civil about it,” said Ochoa. “Apologetic, even.”

  “Sherod Hunter has a lot to apologize for,” Rafe muttered.

  “He said he had heard I was a Union sympathizer, but he hoped that I would see that the Union was a thing of the past. He asked that I take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy so that he would not have to confiscate my property and turn me out.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I owed everything to the Government of the United States and that I could not betray it.”

  “When do you have to leave?”

  “Tonight. Captain Hunter will allow me a horse and a pair of saddlebags with whatever I can carry, plus a rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition.”

  “Twenty rounds of ammunition!” Western exploded. “Why didn’t he just stand you up in front of a firing squad and be done with it?”

  “Where will you go?” asked Rafe.

  “Mesilla.”

  “By yourself? That’s at the nether end of three hundred miles of Apache territory.”

  Ochoa shrugged. “God looks after children and fools.”

  “Crossing the border into Sonora would be closer. Besides, Mesilla is in the hands of John Baylor and his secesh rabble.”

  That Baylor had taken southern New Mexico rankled Rafe. He was mortified to the marrow by the buffoonery of the United States Army there. The chief buffoon was Maj. Isaac Lynde, who surrendered his five hundred men to Baylor’s three hundred hairy Texans-on-a-tear. It hadn’t helped the Union cause when many of the United States soldiers filled their canteens with whiskey for the hard retreat across the mountains from Arizona. They hadn’t arrived in fighting trim.

  “I have business contacts in Mesilla.” Don Esteban’s smile shifted into irony. “And the people in charge there do not know me.”

  He did not have to add that the people in charge were Anglos, and Texans to boot, and to them one Mexican looked very much like another.

  “I’ll go with you,” Rafe said. “I know that country.”

  New Mexico. The lovely hoyden named Lozen seemed to be always on the roam there. Rafe had a brief but vivid memory of waking up in Fort Buchanan’s wagon yard and seeing her face hovering over him like some wild sprite from one of Shakespeare’s fantasies. He remembered the look of elusive chagrin that passed over her face when she realized she had failed once again to steal his horse. The thought only now occurred to him that she could easily have slit his throat while he slept and taken Red, but she hadn’t.

  Now he would be returning to the forested high country she no doubt thought of as home. He wondered if he would see her again. He wondered if she had lived through all this bloodshed.

  Maybe New Mexico wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Warfare raged there and lots of it, but at least so many soldiers in blue uniforms and gray ones meant the Apaches were keeping their heads down.

  Don Esteban smiled. “You will be the archangel Rafael, sent by God to guide Tobit.” Don Esteban leaned down to rub Patch’s ears. “That Rafael had a dog, too.”

  “Who was Tobit?”

  “It’s an ancient tale from the Apocrypha. I’ll tell it to you as we ride.”

  “Will you and your people come with us, Western?” Rafe had to ask, although he knew that Western would be all right here. No one ever troubled her, at least not more than once.

  “No, but I thank you kindly for inquiring. I figure the United States Army will rout this rabble, and Albert and I will return to Fort Yuma with them quicker’n an earthquake wakes weasels.”

  “Why do you want to go back to Yuma?”

  “It has its charms.”

  Rafe had carried a load of flour and bacon to Fort Yuma once, and he hadn’t noticed any charms whatsoever. He hadn’t even stayed long enough to impoverish the officers in a high-stakes game of whist.

  “A soldier died there,” Western said.

  Rafe waited for the rest of the story. A soldier dying in Yuma was hardly worthy of comment.

  “He went to hell; but in a week he returned, shivering like a cottonwood leaf in a high wind, and collected his blankets.”

  Rafe threw his head back and laughed. Dear God, but it felt good to do it.

  Chapter 30

  LIGHTNING DANCES ALL AROUND

  Morning was the time to weave baskets. Not even the grandmothers could say why, but that was the way it had always been. This morning was a particularly fine one. The women brought their children and their bundles of withes to the cottonwoods by the stream. They spread blankets and shared the food they had brought. They fed whatever child happened to toddle to them on legs just getting accustomed to walking.

  Corn Stalk hung Wah-sin-ton’s cradleboard from a low limb. The baby stared at the feathers and bird vertebrae strung along the canopy and dancing in the breeze. Other mothers leaned their cradles against the tree trunks or hung them so that they dangled like oversize fruit.

  Some of the babies slept. Some watched the birds sing and squabble on nearby limbs. The little girls set down their miniature cradles and buckskin dolls. They began building a brush shelter by the stream and preparing a feast of twigs, acorns, and mud cakes. The stream rushed past, chuckling at the small boys who chased beside it, following the bark boats they had made. The sky shimmered as blue as the flowers of the wild flax. The trees and bushes and grasses glowed in vibrant green splashed with sunlight.

  Lozen helped Daughter tie withes together to form the b
asket’s frame while Stands Alone, Maria, She Moves Like Water, and the others set out their materials. Shallow baskets held the red bark of the yucca root and the black fruit of the devil’s claw to work into designs. Stacks of mulberry withes to be used for the vertical framework were left whole. With teeth and fingernails the women split into thirds those that would form the horizontal rows. They scraped out the piths with the points of their knives.

  Most of the women were making the wide-mouthed burden baskets for the coming harvest. The harvest would be dangerous, though. Cheis and his warriors had driven most of the Pale Eyes east across Doubtful Pass and into this country. They had divided into the Bluecoats and the Graycoats, and they swarmed everywhere, carrying their war with them.

  Everyone speculated about why the Pale Eyes had gone to war, but not even Red Sleeves or Cheis or Victorio could explain it. The Bluecoats and the Graycoats were too busy killing each other to hunt the Ndee, but both sorts of soldiers fired on them whenever they saw them. The women had to gather what food they could, even if it meant staying higher in the mountains where fewer plants grew. Food supplies were so low that the men were talking of a raid into Mexico. Talks A Lot and several of his friends had already gone on one, their first alone.

  The long withes nodded and whispered over the women’s heads as they twined the split strands in and out among the vertical ones. Stands Alone was so large with the child inside her that she had to work at arm’s length. Broken Foot’s second wife, a young Mescalero woman named Nteele, Wide, pointed with her chin at Stands Alone.

  “Looks like that one is about to push out a pony.” She patted her own stomach. “I think I’m going to produce a bison.”

  “I hear when you Mescaleros drink tiswin, you sneak off to do something with the bison,” said She Moves Like Water. “I hear that the bison over there, they look like Mescaleros.”

  Wide threw back her head and laughed. She was round and solid as a cactus fruit. She had a merry laugh and twinkling eyes. Broken Foot had brought her to live with him and his first wife a year ago. She was not a Chiricahua, but people liked her, anyway. They joked about her accent, though, and the strange words she used. They remarked about the odd shape of her moccasins. Some of the women called her Kiowa because her people’s lands bordered those of that tribe. She took it with good humor, and she gave as good as she got.