Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Hope possessed those who had come here exhausted, starving, and numb with grief. A medicine man of unparalleled magic would rid their country of the Pale Eyes. He would restore the world to the one they remembered, the one they told their children about.

  Lozen soared among dreams and visions of her own. Joy and sorrow swept through her in waves. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she could not stop laughing.

  When the sky began to pale along the mountain peaks, Dreamer brought his arms down and the drums stopped. The silence reverberated in Lozen’s skull. Her heart pounded, and the hair stirred on her arms and the back of her neck.

  - Dreamer was so small that when he strode though the lines of dancers, Lozen could only tell where he was by the people who moved away, clearing a path for him. In silence, they trailed him toward a hillside swathed in ground fog. He motioned for them to stay where they were and beckoned for Broken Foot, Lozen, Loco, Cochise’s son Naiche, and Red Sleeves’ son Mangas to follow him to the foot of the slope.

  Dreamer raised his arms and began chanting to Life Giver. Lozen’s stomach churned with fear and longing. What if he could bring her brother back to her? What if he couldn’t?

  Something took shape in the fog toward the top of the slope. The shadowy figures of Red Sleeves and Cheis rose slowly from the ground. Horses appeared, too, their heads first, then their necks, withers, and front legs. Victorio’s head and broad shoulders emerged from the fog. Lozen shook with joy and reached out for him.

  The three men rose as far as their waists. The horses cleared the ground to their hindquarters. Then they all began to sink back. Lozen cried out in anguish as the mist and the earth closed over them.

  “Come back,” Lozen whispered. “Come back.”

  WHEN RAFE AND THE SCOUTS ARRIVED TO ARREST Dreamer, he sat eating stew under his wife’s brush arbor as though oblivious of the menace around him. He was as slender as a child, and so pale he could almost be mistaken for a white man. He looked up at his captors with an expression so mild that the word Gethsemane came to Rafe.

  Dreamer’s followers were not so meek. When the lieutenant ordered the scouts to hurry Dreamer along, outrage rippled though the hundred or more watching from a hillside. The party moved out with Lt. Tom Cruse and his Apache scouts surrounding Dreamer. Dreamer’s wife and son followed, and the soldiers guarded the rear. The Apaches trailed them.

  Painted warriors emerged from every side canyon along the way. Rafe estimated seven or eight hundred of them were following Dreamer and his escort. He held his loaded rifle across his thighs and breathed a prayer to the Almighty. He was surprised when he arrived at the army’s campsite without having to pull the trigger.

  The soldiers waiting there had lit their cook fires and pitched their tents as though they were on a routine bivouac. They watered and fed the horses, and stacked arms. They made a circle of the pack saddles and the supplies, and Dreamer’s guards ushered him into it. His wife laid their few belongings under a cottonwood close by and began gathering brush for shelter and a fire. His son led the horses to graze.

  Rafe found the captain sitting in front of his tent while his orderly cooked his dinner. He was in a cocky mood.

  “Do you think it wise to stack arms with the hostiles so close?” Rafe asked.

  The captain laughed. “Don’t fret, Collins. This outing is all bleat and no fleece.”

  “This outing is not over yet.”

  The colonel strode toward them. “Lieutenant Cruse says things looked pretty scaly to him back on the trail.”

  “Scaly, sir?” The captain raised one eyebrow.

  “Yes. Scaly. He says on the way here a number of painted Indians joined the belligerants.” The colonel waved his arm toward a group of them emerging from the dense brush and crossing the creek. “Clear them out of there, Captain. We can’t have them skulking about.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Colonel …” Rafe started to suggest he send out ten or twenty men rather than one, but thought better of it. When the captain headed toward the creek, Rafe went looking for cover. He didn’t get far.

  The captain shouted at the warriors as though they were bothersome children. “Ugashe, go away.” He waved his hand at them.

  Rafe didn’t see who fired first, but the captain went down. Through a hail of bullets, soldiers ran for their carbines. Rafe dived behind the barricade of saddles and supplies surrounding Dreamer. He knew that saving Dreamer would not stop the fighting, but killing him would make bad matters much worse.

  Soldiers killed Dreamer’s wife when she tried to reach him. They shot his son as he brought Dreamer’s horse to him. Dreamer crawled toward them. Rafe saw two of the guards aim their Springfields at him.

  “No!” Rafe ran at a crouch along the barricade.

  Bullets thudded into the padded packsaddles and pinged into the boxes of canned peaches, spilling the fragrant juice. The two men fired, and Dreamer went down. He got back on his hands and knees and continued to crawl toward his wife, until a soldier dispatched him with an ax.

  Rafe heard yipping and the thunder of hooves. The Apaches were stealing the stock. He dodged toward the meadow where the ammunition mules grazed, still loaded. One more idiocy to add to Colonel Carr’s inventory.

  Rafe had almost reached it when Apaches began shooting at him from the trees. He saw Lozen bent low against her paint’s neck. Flapping her blanket, she rode straight through the cross fire of American and Apache bullets. The soldiers were surrounded and outnumbered. Rafe knew that if Lozen got away with those ammunition mules, he and the others were dead men.

  He couldn’t bring himself to shoot her, so he aimed for her horse. Maybe Lozen had magic against bullets, too. Rafe was a good shot, but she galloped away with the mules running ahead of her.

  She had stolen three or four thousand rounds of ammunition, enough to keep her people supplied for a long siege. She had taken more than enough to finish off every man here, but when darkness fell, the Apaches stopped shooting and vanished. Rafe stood in the ringing silence and thanked God.

  RAPE STOOD BETWEEN THE CHESTNUT AND THE PACK MULE as they drank noisily from the creek. Without thinking, he fell into a habit he had developed. He stared across the creek, south toward Mexico.

  Don’t worry about her, he thought. She’s hard to kill.

  He tugged at the mule, but the animal spread his feet and prepared to resist until the creek froze over. Rafe had named him Lawyer because he objected to everything. He didn’t want to dally even this close to Fort Apache. Safety was a dubious commodity since so many Apaches bolted from Cibicu almost six months ago.

  Roving gangs of them had raided ranches, mines, and even small towns until reinforemcents arrived from New Mexico and California. The renegades had surrendered in droves then, but not the Chiricahuas. They headed for Mexico, creating their usual havoc along the way. Rafe assumed that Lozen went with them.

  Rafe couldn’t shake the melancholy that haunted him. The day before, the troops and scouts at Fort Apache had watched Sgt. Dead Shot and two other scouts hung for mutiny, desertion, and murder in the fight at Cibicu. Rafe had his doubts that Dead Shot had turned on the Americans. The battle had been too confusing to know exactly what had happened, but Rafe imagined himself in the scout’s moccasins. If Dead Shot had been enticed by Dreamer’s promises of redemption and resurrection, Rafe couldn’t blame him.

  As Dead Shot stood with the noose around his neck, he had looked at Rafe before he fixed his eyes on his family. Rafe thought he saw regret and sorrow behind Dead Shot’s stoic expression, and maybe even fear. Rafe looked away as the horse was driven out from under the man he had called friend.

  The amount of time between when a noose tightened and when a hanged man’s legs stopped jigging was a short one in the vast span of creation, but it always seemed an eternity to Rafe. He used the time to wonder what would happen to Dead Shot’s two young sons. The Apaches were becoming a tribe of orphans.

  Rafe lured the mule from the w
ater with a tasty thistle and headed for the scouts’ encampment with food and blankets for the hanged men’s families. He was only giving them what should have been theirs to begin with. He had had to buy the corn and blankets from one of the thieves operating out of Tucson, and an unctuous son of a bitch he was, too. He hadn’t even bothered to paint over the government’s stamp on the crates.

  The Indian agent and his cronies ran what everyone called the Indian Ring. Rafe knew he couldn’t do anything about it. The network of thievery had become so pervasive that an Apache war club set down on an agent’s desk would serve no purpose.

  When Rafe saw the body dangling from a big oak, he thought some hunter had hung up a deer carcass to drain it of blood. As he rode closer, he saw that it wasn’t a deer. In the light wind, Dead Shot’s wife turned slowly on the end of the rope. The young woman had not known how to tie a proper noose, and so she must have strangled slowly rather than dying more quickly of a broken neck. Rafe had could hardly believe she would hang herself. She had chosen to die as her husband had so they would spend eternity together with stretched and deformed necks.

  Chapter 61

  A HUNTING EXPEDITION

  Most people thought Gen. George Crook was crazy. Rafe thought he was the sanest man the army had produced. Crook had added ten years since Rafe first met him, but otherwise he hadn’t changed. He was fifty-three years old, tall, strong, and broad shouldered. He didn’t drink alcohol, coffee, or tea. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t swear, and he didn’t care about notoriety. He parted his long whiskers in the middle and combed them outward so that they looked as though he were facing into a gale even when no leaf stirred.

  On a scout, Crook rode his old mule, Apache, at the front of the column, not matter how perilous the circumstances. Because he always wore a brown canvas suit, the scouts had nicknamed him ba’cho delitsoge, Tan Wolf. On the trail they liked to ride with him, and in camp they clustered around his tent. Rafe realized that they had, in their own way, elected him their chief.

  The scouts were the reason people thought Crook was mad. When Geronimo kidnapped Loco and six hundred of his followers from San Carlos and headed for Mexico, Crook started after him with forty-two soldiers and two hundred Apaches. He allowed the scouts to ride horses for the first time ever, and he issued them headbands of red cloth to distinguish them from the hostiles. Just about everyone predicted they would turn on the army as they had at Dreamer’s ghost dance at Cibicu Creek.

  Now the scouts stood in formation for Nantan Tan Wolf’s speech. Crook had named one of them Moses when he had first recruited him ten years ago, and Sergeant Moses had served the army faithfully ever since. With Mickey Free translating, Crook turned to him.

  “Sergeant Moses, do you think we will catch the Chiricahua in Mexico?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “They can hide like coyotes and smell danger a long way off.”

  “We are going to keep after those Chiricahuas until we catch them all. We wear the President’s clothes, and we eat his grub. He wants us to catch them, and so we will.” Crook held up a sheet of vellum. “I have signed a paper so that even if I get killed, the President will know what you all did for him. No matter if I live or die, the President will reward you for your service.”

  Crook had obtained permission from Mexican authorities for his men to cross the border in pursuit of Geronimo’s renegades, but no one knew what to expect. The general had sent out Apache scouts as spies, but as he wrote in his report, “the Mexicans were having a revolution that week.” So many Mexican soldiers and partisans were running around that the scouts were lucky to return with their scalps intact.

  Each man could take what he wore, a blanket, and forty rounds of ammunition. The mules carried extra ammunition and rations for sixty days. Crook put Rafe in charge of the pack train and mule drivers.

  Rafe felt uneasy crossing the border. He remembered the war there as if it had happened last month instead of thirty years ago. He couldn’t imagine being in Mexico and not having Mexican soldiers shooting at him. He also knew what kind of country they’d face and the difficulty of finding Geronimo and his men. All the mountains in Arizona could fit into the Sierra Madres.

  The soldiers and scouts rode down the sweltering San Bernardino Valley. They passed the mouth of Guadelupe Canyon and the stream that marked the boundary. They reined their horses up just north of it.

  Crook stood in his stirrups. “We’re on our own now, boys,” he shouted. “If we succeed, we will most likely solve the Apache problem.”

  “And if we fail, General?” asked Rafe.

  “The politicians will trim my comb.”

  Crook flicked Apache’s reins and led his little army into Mexico. The rough country swallowed them up as though they had never existed.

  “AMERICANS DON’T CROSS THE LINE,” SAID FIGHTS WITHOUT Arrows.

  “These do,” said Lozen.

  He and Lozen, Broken Foot, Geronimo, and forty warriors looked down from the ridge at the Apache army scouts occupying their camp. The Chiricahua women there had hung up white flags to tell the warriors not to shoot, but Fights Without Arrows and the others fired off taunts and insults. The scouts shouted back.

  The soldiers themselves had camped downstream at a broad bend of the Bavispe River. Lozen and the others took turns watching them from the heights. Within a couple days, Nantan Tan Wolf himself rewarded their patience.

  As Crook rode Apache through the tall grass, he held his shotgun ready and watched for quail to start up. Instead of quail, Geronimo and his men rose out of the grass. The hunter had become the hunted. If he was frightened, Crook gave no indication.

  “Let’s kill him now,” said Fun.

  “No.” Geronimo took the general’s rifle and the string of quail he had shot. “We’re almost out of cartridges. We can’t risk a fight.” He turned to Lozen. “Grandmother, go to the Bluecoats’ camp. Tell them I want that red-haired coyote, Lop-Eye, to explain my words to Tan Wolf.”

  Lozen took off her headband and let her hair fall loose around her shoulders. She rubbed dirt into her face and wrapped her blanket around her waist so the Bluecoats would not see that she was wearing a breechclout instead of a skirt. When she shuffled into camp, the soldiers ignored her. She saw Rafe, but she gave no sign that she recognized him, and he did the same. The soldiers had heard about her. She was safer if she was invisible, just another squaw come to beg.

  Lozen searched until she found Mickey Free. No one liked or trusted him, but his Apache was fluent even if he had never bothered to learn Spanish tenses. In English, he only remembered how to swear and ask for tobacco and whiskey.

  After much discussion, General Crook convinced Geronimo and his men to come with him to his camp for talks. When they rode in with Crook, the general looked as though getting captured by Geronimo’s men had been part of his plan.

  After days of discussion, Crook convinced Geronimo to bring his people to the reservation at Fort Apache, fifty miles northeast of San Carlos. Crook’s two hundred scouts were a happy lot. They had proved themselves to Tan Wolf, and in the bargain, they had made a good start winning at cards everything the Chiricahuas owned.

  Crook took back with him fifty-two warriors and 273 women and children, most of them on foot. The women held up branches of cottonwood leaves against the searing sun. Geronimo stayed behind.

  He said his own people had scattered in fear of the soldiers. He needed time to gather them. He didn’t mention that he had something else in mind. Lozen had made a suggestion, and for once Geronimo listened, but carrying it out would take time.

  Eight months passed, but in that period Geronimo, Lozen, and the rest of their warriors stole 350 head of cattle from the Mexicans. Lozen’s plan was to breed them like the Pale Eyes did, except that the herd would belong to everyone in common, as was theirs custom. They weren’t going to trust the San Carlos agent to feed their people. The Indian agents’ idea of an adequate diet for them was s
tarvation rations supplemented with donated hymn books and sermons. Lozen wryly observed in council that the hymn books were not good to eat, no matter how the women cooked them.

  Whenever the Pale Eyes met in council, they talked themselves red-faced about the Ndee becoming self-sufficient. They were not amused when the Ndee leaders pointed out that before the Americans arrived they had been quite self-sufficient. With this cattle, the Chiricahua could take care of themselves on the white men’s terms.

  Geronimo became edgier as he approached the border. Lozen understood why. Seven years ago, Hat, Soft and Floppy had put chains on him, humiliated him, and locked him in a small room. Would the Pale Eyes do it again, in spite of Tan Wolf’s promises? Would they hang him and his men as they had Dead Shot? Would they sell the women and children into slavery? Lozen decided that if they tried to chain her she would kill herself with her knife the way her brother had.

  GENERAL CROOK SENT LT. BRITTON DAVIS, CHIEF OF Scouts Al Sieber, and Company B of the Apache scouts to wait at the border for Geronimo. Davis was born in Brownsville, Texas, and he had the drawl to prove it. He needed to prove it from time to time. He was not the tall, weedy sort that Texas soil usually produced. He was not yet aware that the scouts had nicknamed him Fat Boy, but he would probably be amused when he found out.

  Davis was a year old when the Civil War broke out twenty-four years ago. His maverick father had led a regiment of Unionists throughout the conflict and left the United States Army with the rank of brigadier general. That made his son Britton an oddity, a Texan who had graduated from West Point and did not cherish a gut-deep grudge against the damned Yankees.

  Army life was a lark for Britt Davis. He was as resourceful and resilient as the leanest Texan, and smarter and more good-natured than most. He thought that leading a company of Apache scouts was the best sort of adventure. He was fair luminous with the prospect of escorting Geronimo and his band of brigands to San Carlos, and then to Fort Apache where they would live.