She picked up a mirror, caught the lantern’s glow with it, and flashed it onto the wall. She tilted her hand to make the butterfly of light leap and flutter. Her first thought was that she could use the mirror for signaling on war scouts, but then she remembered that her people were done with fighting.
Still, it might be useful for signaling even in time of peace. She studied the two coins lying on her palm. The big disk and the little one gave her no clue about their worth. How could she judge the value of something so useless?
LOCO WANTED TO SEND A TELEGRAM. RAFE WAS IN THE telegraph office at the San Carlos agency when the old man came in. He was dressed in his rusty-black coat and baggy trousers tucked into his moccasins. His drooping eyelid and scarred face looked particularly odd under the bowler hat. The white people at the fort thought him comical, but Rafe knew better. The Apaches didn’t elect comical old men as their leaders.
Loco was happy to see Rafe. Surrounding him in a garland of smiles, he enlisted him to interpret the message he wanted to send over pesh bi yalt, Iron, It Talks. Loco intended his talk for a chief of the Pimas who, he heard, had made threats against him. His message was brief. If the Pima nantan showed his face anywhere around here, Loco and his men would make him wish he hadn’t. “Me lickee him damnsight,” was how he put it.
When Rafe left the office, the telegraph operator was trying to explain the concept of payment to Loco. Loco understood, of course, but he pretended not to. Rafe could see his point. Why should he pay to talk? Next, Loco must reason the Pale Eyes would charge him a fee for the air he breathed.
Al Sieber angled over from the stable and joined Rafe. “I hear tell that Crook took Geronimo’s cattle. He plans to sell them and pay back the Mexican owners.”
“Sounds fair.”
“He ain’t going to replace them.”
“Why not?”
“The Indian Bureau insists the Apaches farm.”
“Why?”
“Maybe the local ranchers didn’t cotton to competition from the Apaches for government contracts,” said Sieber, “and they put a bug in the Indian Commissioner’s ear.”
“The Chiricahua men were willing to herd cattle. Now what will they do?”
“They won’t farm. That’s women’s work.”
Rafe thought of the bruises he had seen on some of those women. They hadn’t gotten them farming. With no work and no game to hunt, there was nothing for the men to do but get drunk, pick fights, beat their wives, and brood. Apache men excelled at those enterprises.
BROKEN FOOT PAUSED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY ABOUT how Old Man Coyote offered to teach the other coyotes to lie in exchange for a white mule, a saddle, and silvermounted bridle. He saw the wagon bumping toward them in the full moon’s light, and he hurried the tale to its conclusion. He had just said, “I’m talking about fruit and other good things,” when the wagon pulled up. Fat Boy drove the team.
Chato and Mickey Free climbed out. They walked to the fire as though they were old friends of the folk there, but no one liked them. Broken Foot’s niece, Wise Woman, detested them.
“Those two could teach the coyotes to lie,” she murmured to Lozen.
Everyone knew Chato and Mickey Free had told Lieutenant Davis that Fights Without Arrows was plotting an uprising. Fat Boy had ordered the scouts to arrest him. A jury of White Mountain men had tried him and sent him to the prison on the rock in the middle of the great water.
They made other mischief, too. They told Geronimo that the Pale Eyes planned to hang him and the other renegades, or send them to that island of rocks to live forever in chains. Chato would draw his finger across his throat, and Mickey Free would open wide his off-kilter eyes and pretend to be strangling in a noose. The Chiricahuas were angry at Fat Boy for arresting Fights Without Arrows, but no one blamed him for believing Chato and Mickey Free. Those two could fool Old Man Coyote.
Fat Boy helped his four passengers climb down. Their clothes hung in tatters, and their feet were bare. Lozen almost shouted with joy when she saw them, Her Eyes Open and Kaywaykla’s fourteen-year-old cousin, Siki, had returned.
While Mickey Free translated, Fat Boy said the four women had walked twelve hundred miles in search of their people. It made his heart glad to see them reunited with their families. The Father in Washington was happy to hear that his Chiricahua children were following the road of peace.
He said that when Fights Without Arrows returned from prison in five years, he would see what progress his people had made. He would see that sobriety and hard work had made them all prosper. Lozen mused that if Fat Boy thought stealing horses wasn’t hard work, he didn’t know what hard work was.
When Fat Boy, Mickey Free, and Chato had rumbled off into the night, people laughed and cried and hugged each other. Broken Foot put his arms around his wife and sobbed. Finally, Her Eyes Open told her story.
“They took us all the way to Mexico City,” she said. “They sold us to a man who grew yucca and made pulque. Because I was old, I cleaned their house. Granddaughter and the other two worked in the fields.
“We pretended to believe what the Black Robes taught so our masters would trust us. In winter I stole a knife for myself and a blanket for each of us. One evening we got permission to go to the Mexicans’ god-house by ourselves. Instead, we walked away.
“The cactus fruit ripened as we headed north, and we ate it. One night while we were sleeping, a mountain lion attacked her.” Her Eyes Open glanced toward the figure huddled in the cave of her blanket. “He bit into her shoulder and tried to drag her away. My granddaughter and Young Woman beat at the lion with rocks. I stabbed him until he died. When we lit a fire, we saw that the lion had clawed off her face.”
The woman under the blanket pushed it back to expose the scarred and twisted mask of her face. Everyone groaned at the sight of her.
“I put the skin back and held it in place with thongs. I rubbed the lion’s saliva on the wounds to help them heal. In the morning, I bound cactus pads against them. We found a cave where our people hid supplies. We walked some more until the Bluecoats found us and brought us here. Now we are with you, and our hearts are happy.”
Lozen was happy, too, but she wondered for how long. She thought of the uneasiness that Chato’s and Mickey Free’s lies were causing. She thought of her old friend, Fights Without Arrows, on that faraway rock in the middle of the water. She thought of Geronimo’s fear that the Pale Eyes would hang him. She thought of the men who were drinking tiswin and quarreling with each other and with their women. Fat Boy had arrested some of them for drunkenness and for beating their wives. The arrests made the men angry and afraid.
Life could not go on this way much longer.
THE POUNDING ON THE DOOR INCREASED BY A FACTOR OF A hundred the throbbing in Al Sieber’s skull. The Chief of Scouts wanted to kill whomever was responsible, but it would require too much effort. The iron latch rattled with the force being applied to it.
What the goddam hell time of day was it, anyway?
Sieber pushed himself to a sitting position and swung his legs over the edge of the cot. When he muttered, “Stop that, you son of a bitch,” the words shrieked in his ears. Maybe he shouldn’t have had that last bottle of whiskey the night before.
He opened the door a crack and put his arm across his eyes to keep the sun from driving spikes into them. Through a roil of nausea, he saw the newly minted captain, fresh from the wrong side of the Mississippi. The captain waved a paper in Sieber’s face.
“What the hell is that?”
“A telegram.”
“Nobody sends me telegrams.” Sieber started to ease the door shut. Now was not the time to be slamming doors.
“It’s not for you.”
“Then why the goddam hell did you bring it?” Maybe he would slam the door, and the devil take it.
“It’s from Lieutenant Britton Davis at Fort Apache. He sent it to General Crook, but the general isn’t here.”
“Of course he’s not here. T
hese are my goddamn diggings, not his, you shavetail mule’s arse.”
“I mean the general’s not on the post, so the telegraph operator brought it to me.”
Sieber squinted at the paper, trying to make the milling letters form into ranks and come to attention. The lieutenant could see he was having trouble and so he read it aloud.
“‘Chiricahuas refuse to quit inbibing spiritous drink—stop—They refuse to quit beating their women—stop—In—surrection possible—stop—Please advise—stop.’”
Seiber didn’t know what insurrection meant, but he was familiar with “spiritous drink.”
“Ain’t nothing but a tiswin drunk.” He dismissed the telegram with a wave of his hand. “Pay it no mind. Davis will handle it.”
He fell back onto his cot and started snoring as soon as his head hit the saddlebag he used for a pillow. The captain dutifully returned to his office, filed the telegram away, and forgot about it.
THE MERCURY HIT 125 DEGREES AND CRACKED THE GLASS of Britt Davis’s thermometer. With a sideways flick of his wrist, he tossed it away. It traveled two feet up, two feet out, and three thousand feet down. He did not watch its fall. The trail was less than three feet wide here, and the view from the edge of it made him dizzy. Making himself dizzy was not a good plan.
The packers raised a shout at the rear of the column. Another mule must have fallen over the side. Chato and the forty scouts had already scampered up the mountain and disappeared over the ridge. With awe and envy, Davis had watched them go. He was still impressed by their strength, agility, and reckless courage. General Crook was right. They were the tigers of the human species.
Al Sieber shouted, “Look out below.”
Britt Davis pulled his horse up against the rock wall. The loaf-size rock that Sieber had dislodged came bounding at him as though launched from a catapult. It hit the ground a rat’s length, not counting the tail, from Britt’s feet, ricocheted to one side, and went over the edge. Britt continued toiling up the trail.
All summer Geronimo’s band had led the soldiers and scouts down one side of the Sierra Madres and up the other. Davis thanked God every day for Chato and the other scouts, because maps were only useful as tinder here. The men’s sweat-soaked clothes hung in shreds. Davis’s wardrobe had been reduced to overalls, undershirt, and the brim of his felt hat. A third of their animals had perished. The remaining mules’ and horses’ heads drooped until the sharp rocks abraded their lips.
Worst of all, Davis was dogged by the thought that this was all his fault. When General Crook sent no reply to his telegram four months ago, he should have sent another. Or he should have gone to see the general. Instead he had sat tight and hoped the Geronimo’s Chiricahuas would settle down and start farming the way Loco and his people had.
With no word from Tan Wolf, Geronimo became convinced that the Bluecoats planned to arrest and hang him. So off he went again with forty-two warriors and a hundred women and children. They cut the telegraph wires, splicing them with thongs so the breaks were almost impossible to find. Then they scattered into the mountains. Chief Chihuahua’s crowd headed east, and Geronimo’s went south.
Geronimo’s bunch knew that the Mexican ammunition wouldn’t fit their Springfields and Winchesters, so they attacked the camp at the border. They killed seven soldiers and made off with a plentiful supply of cartridges. Chihuahua’s trail through New Mexico had been bloodier. Britt had heard about the ranch family massacred near Central City. The soldiers had found the three-year-old daughter alive but hanging from a meat hook forced through the back of her head. She died soon after they took her down.
All in all, Davis’s conscience was the heaviest piece of equipment he carried. He clambered up the last quarter mile and reached what would have seemed like the roof of the world if he hadn’t already stood on hundreds of ridges like it. Stretching to the horizon were the same desolate ranks of mountains—barren, abrupt, and brooding—that he had seen for the past two months. The same array of bony ridges and yawning abysses filled the spaces between them.
The scouts were smoking cigarillos in the shade of their horses. Al Sieber had pulled his hat over his eyes. Compared to Sieber, Davis looked natty in his overalls and undershirt. Sieber wore cotton flannel drawers, an old blue blouse, and the torn brim of a felt hat. He looked asleep, but he spoke when he heard Davis approach.
“The boys have lost them. Old Gerry must have sent a few of his men ahead with spare horses to throw us off while the rest doubled back and dodged across that rocky piece of ground a few miles behind us.”
Davis wished the scouts had discovered that before the column had followed them up here, but he didn’t blame them. Chato and his men were the best in the tracking business, but chasing Geronimo’s crowd was like trying to catch smoke in a net. The renegades were the best of the best at evasion, or the worst of the worst depending on one’s point of view. They were the most tigerish of the tribe.
“They seem to know where we are all the time,” he said.
“The scouts say they have a di-yin, a medicine woman. She keeps them posted on our whereabouts.”
“Do you believe that?”
Sieber shrugged. “I’ve seen them work some strange hocus-pocus, but it don’t keep them from losing at cards.”
Chapter 64
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE …
Kaywaykla’s friend, Henry, was half a hand taller and at least seventy years older than he was, but the two went everywhere together. The Henry was the ancient flintlock musket that Lozen had given him. Kaywaykla polished the brass eagle on the Henry until he could use it to reflect the sun’s rays as a signal when he stood sentry duty.
Almost every boy over the age of nine had a rifle. They wore two cartridge belts on their hips. They made hundreds of arrow points from the hoops of the Bluecoats’ discarded water barrels. They rolled the tops of their high moccasins low on thin legs shiny with grease rubbed in to make them run faster. They stalked through the village, scowling like wolf cubs from under their shaggy bangs.
After his old Henry musket, Kaywaykla’s next-best friend was Santiago McKinn. McKinn’s mother was Mexican, and his father was a Pale Eyes. Six months ago Geronimo had killed his older brother, but he had stolen Santiago and the horses the two boys were herding.
The freckle-faced, pale-haired captive boy had taken to the Chiricahua life as though he had been with them from birth. Lozen thought of him as misplaced in a Pale Eyes family, like a catbird fledgling in a kingbird’s nest. Whenever she looked at Santiago’s sun-yellow hair, brown eyes, and deeply tanned face, she thought maybe this was what her son would have looked like, if she had said yes to Hairy Foot’s proposal and gone with him.
Lozen dreamed of Hairy Foot often. Sometimes she dreamed he was chasing her, trying to kill her. Sometimes she dreamed that he was holding her in his arms as he once had. She felt his hand on her neck then, and his heart beating in time with hers. She woke with tears stinging her eyes.
The longing for his touch evaporated with the urgencies of each new day, and the struggle to survive until sunset. She didn’t like the longing, anyway. So many loved ones had been killed. Why should she mourn one man who still lived, and who was nzaadge goliini, an outsider at that?
Lozen had made her Enemies-Against medicine for this raid, and now she was packing the things she would need. She and the warriors would be traveling north in search of cartridges and revenge, and they had a long way to go. This was the beginning of Ghost Face. The weather would be cold before they returned to Mexico. Kaywaykla and Santiago tried once more to persuade her to let them serve as her apprentices and take care of her horses on the war trail.
“Your duty is to protect the women and children,” she said. “You must do whatever you have to to stay alive. We old ones will die one day, and you will carry on the fight.”
Lozen finished tying her blanket roll to the back of the saddle. The boys stood one on each side of her horse’s head so they could lead him to where the
men were gathering.
“Remember this,” Lozen said. “People who have easy lives are weak. Hardship is our friend. It makes us strong.”
Lozen, Broken Foot, Geronimo, and eight others raided all the way to Fort Apache. They attacked at night and killed twelve White Mountain people within sight of the fort. They rode twelve hundred miles, lost one man, killed thirty-eight, and stole 250 horses arid mules. Newspapers clamored for Gen. George Crook’s head. His superior, Gen. Philip Sheridan, decided the time had come to transfer Crook and assign another soldier the job of taming the tigers.
Gen. Nelson Miles arrived tall, lean, erect, starched, pressed, and barking orders. Like General Crook, he also made one of his first acts a tour of San Carlos and Fort Apache. Unlike General Crook, he didn’t talk to the leaders except to lecture them. He returned disgusted with what he saw as their drunken, squalid ways.
He dismissed most of the Apache scouts from service. He said the cavalry could work more effectively alone, which proved to Rafe that the man was an idiot as well as an ingrate. Al Sieber knew Miles, and he didn’t think as highly of him as Rafe did.
“Miles breaks into a powerful rash whenever he brushes up against a whiff of danger.” Sieber pulled a silver coin from the pocket of his denim trousers, flipped it into the air, and caught it. “I’ll bet you a dollar he gets no closer to the border than Tucson.”
Rafe knew better than to take the bet. The Apache scouts had already dubbed Miles Always Too Late To Fight. They were never wrong.
Miles fired off a series of memos critical of General Crook. He hatched a plan that would eliminate the scouts loyal to Crook and would solve the entire Apache problem, too. Machiavelli would have admired it.
CHATO SAT BACK IN THE RED-PLUSH SEAT AND WATCHED the Kansas wheat fields unroll as the train, snorting and belching smoke and cinders, rushed toward the setting sun. Chato was a happy man. He and Mickey Free and a eight fellow scouts had traveled all the way to Washington. The president had shaken their hands. He had thanked them for their service to the United States. In a solemn ceremony, he had hung large silver medals around their necks on shiny red ribbons.
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