Return of the Tall Man Read online

  Now all his white family was gone, and he was home with the people of his grandmother and of his dead mother. They were glad to have him with them, but Quanah would suggest that it would be safer for his friends to travel on as soon as they were able. Ben, himself, it was hoped, would stay and make his home on the plains. He could live with his great-aunt, Spider Woman, and as a Water Horse could ride with Quanah and the picked braves in the great war that was coming that summer. Naturally, Quanah understood that he might not wish to fight his other blood, and if this were the case, he would furnish an escort of warriors to take Ben and his friends into the Texas settlements or even back north through the lands of Satank. Quanah had just now made war plans with the Staked Plains Kiowas of Eagle Heart and White Horse, western cousins of Satank and Satanta. They were his strong friends, as was Lone Wolf, the chief Kiowa fighting man of all tribes. With their help Quanah could promise Ben and his companions a safe journey to the Arkansas.

  What had the Texas Brother to say to all of this? the Kwahadi chief concluded. Would he stay with Quanah and fight on his grandmother’s side? Or would he go back home and fight with the soldiers, with his father’s people, against his red cousins?

  Ben thanked him for his good heart and for his promises of safe conduct. He could assure him, he said, that he had no intention of joining the soldiers to fight the Indians. Not that summer or any other summer. He knew now that they were partly his people, something which he had felt all along. Knowing this, he would never fight them. Not unless he had to do so to save his own life or to keep his own word.

  When he made these two exceptions, Quanah looked up at him quickly.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked. “About your life and your word? I have already said your life would be in my hands, that I would guard it with my own.”

  “Where I am going,” smiled Ben tightly, “it will not be in your hands to guard my life.”

  “What is that? Where do you think to go?”

  “To keep my word.”

  “Ah? And what word is that?”

  “To bring back to that old man who saved my life in the sliding mountain his only child, that yellow-haired woman Dominguin sold to Mano Roto.”

  “No! By the gods! You don’t mean it?”

  “Would you go if you had given your word to the old man?” Ben asked quietly. Quanah looked startled, then frowned a little.

  “Of course I would go. What has that to do with you?”

  “You said it yourself.” Ben shrugged with a grin. “We’re near-brothers, once removed. Yes, and both of us Water Horses, too. My word is the same as yours.”

  “Well-spoken,” said Quanah, a glint of humor showing in his gray eyes. “But as to my word, how am I to keep it if you go over into Apache country? Beyond the Pecos, I can’t help you. If I could go along, it would be different, but there is this war; I cannot leave it, for I have already given my word to Eagle Heart, White Horse, Lone Wolf, and many others.”

  “I understand that,” said Ben

  “Then you did not expect me to go with you?”

  “Of course not. You would be doing us a great favor to put us safely across the river, let alone worrying about what happens to us on the other side. In this life nothing is certain. My white people have a saying about that, if you’d care to hear it.”

  “Naturally,” agreed Quanah. “Don’t forget I am half brother to your white side.”

  “We say, ‘You pay your money, and you take your chances,’” answered Ben. “How’s that?”

  “Pretty good. You want to hear how the Kwahadi says the same thing? ‘Spit in the wind, and smile when you get splattered.’ You think that fits as well?”

  “Better!” laughed Ben. “You people are wonderful!”

  “Well, realistic anyway.” Quanah smiled a little sadly. “When will you want to go, cousin?”

  “If we could rest a day and leave with darkness tomorrow, it would be good, I think. What do you think?”

  “The sooner the better. But, yes, you do need the one day’s rest. We will give you everything we can.”

  “We don’t need anything that twelve hours’ sleep and plenty of fat cow won’t cure, cousin.” Ben grinned, already feeling immensely better. “I’ve never been too much of a believer in whoever lives up there,” he pointed to the cluster of stars showing through the lodge’s smoke hole, “but having that old woman spot that Water Horse mark when she did has very nearly convinced me.”

  “I don’t understand the gods either.” Quanah frowned. “Isatai, our medicine man, the chief priest of the Kwahadi, he has been telling us for many moons how badly we shall beat the white man. Yet each year we lose more ground and more buffalo. Each year the white settlements come farther out along the streams, into the plains. They are a week’s travel closer than they were in the time of my father; indeed, even since my own youth.”

  He paused, shaking his head, handsome features a study in pagan frustration.

  “I pray harder all the while; Isatai rattles the gourds and shrieks upon the eagle-bone whistles more fiercely all the time, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The white man can’t hear it. He keeps coming.”

  Ben nodded, watching him a moment.

  “You know that he will always keep coming, don’t you?” he finally said.

  “Yes, I know this. I have known it from the first. But Isatai keeps promising these wonderful things, and in my heart I want them so badly …”

  He let the words trail off, and again Ben nodded.

  “We have another saying for that,” he told him. “It’s a hard saying. You want to hear it?”

  “These are hard times. Say it.”

  “‘Wish in one hand, urinate in the other—see which fills up first.’”

  Quanah sighed deeply, returning the nod.

  “It’s a good saying. Especially for us Indians.”

  “It’s a good one for anybody,” said Ben. “Wishing won’t buy a bag of mesquite beans.”

  “No,” said Quanah, “and it won’t get you and your friends across the Pecos either. You had better close your eyes. I will take care of all else while you sleep; fresh ponies, food, blankets, guides, everything.”

  “We will want the old white horse and the mule with the gray whiskers,” said Ben. “They have been with us from the first mile.”

  “A Kwahadi understands this,” replied Quanah. “One has brothers with four legs as well as with two. It will be as you say.”

  Ben stood up, touching his fingertips to his forehead.

  “God be with you, Cousin Quanah,” he said.

  Again the Kwahadi chief gave him his slow, sad smile.

  “I would rather have you with me, Cousin Ben,” he said. “I think you would be a better fighter.”

  Ben stood staring a long, thoughtful time after the proud figure of his Kwahadi kinsman. It was well that he did so, forming thus a lasting picture of him for his scrapbook of memories. For after he had disappeared, as with the mysterious gray-eyed Oglala benefactor before him, Ben Allison never saw Quanah Parker again.

  21

  The Apache Road

  They traveled light and fast, moving by night and the illumination of the moon in its third quarter. Their guide was Short Dog, a middle-aged Comanche who knew the country across the Pecos. The identity and destination of the enemy were known—Broken Hand’s band of the Mimbreños, a branch of the Gila People, and now moving west by north for their fortress stronghold in the Pinos Altos Mountains below the Sierra Diablo.

  Short Dog struck first, and by pure guess, for Horsehead Crossing, the most used of the horse Indian trails from New Mexico to Texas. They came to the crossing, over one hundred and fifty crow-flight miles of buffalo pasture, with dawn of the third night from Quanah’s camp in the Concho River country. There in the pink light of growing day they found Short Dog to be wrong.
There were no Apache pony tracks at Horsehead Crossing newer than two weeks.

  “We will go up to Toyah Creek,” said the squat brave. “If not there, then they crossed at Quito. We can go to sleep on it.”

  With dusk they turned up the river. Short Dog’s second guess was good. The pony prints at Toyah Creek Crossing were fresh, made within three days. Big Bat and Frank Go-deen got down and sorted out the individual horses of the party. Looking at one another, they nodded in agreement, Go-deen turning to Ben.

  “Eleven,” he said. “That’s the right number. With the woman’s horse, it makes twelve. That’s what’s here. Eleven Apache prints and a shod horse from Dominguin’s stock. How old?” he said to the Comanche, using hand-signs. “Three days, you said? Eeh! I can do better than that, and I’m only half Indian.”

  Short Dog got down and felt the Apache pony tracks very carefully and with his eyes closed, face upturned, as though trying to guess what it was he felt. Then he lay on the ground and smelled the tracks. He moved on, picking up some of the droppings left by the New Mexican ponies. He squeezed them, picked them apart, sniffed of them. He found a place where one of the geldings had spraddled and staled the ground. He dug in the sandy earth, sifting and turning it in his fingers. Finally, he looked up at Go-deen, replying to him, as addressed, with hand talk.

  “Two days and one half. It was noon of the third day they stopped here. They made no fire. Only watered and relieved the ponies and themselves. That’s the best I can do; can you do better?”

  “Thank you,” Go-deen signed to him. “I was only having a little fun with you. You read trail better than a Sioux, even an Oglala.”

  The Comanche grinned, showing canines filed sharp as the fangs of his namesake.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’ll show you where they made their third fire.”

  “What?” said Go-deen. “It’s broad daylight now!”

  “Sure. Are you afraid?”

  “But it was your idea to travel by night.”

  “Only in my own country. In the Apache country,” he pointed across the Pecos, “I do not know the land well enough to track by moon. I must have sun.”

  Go-deen gulped, nodded, turned to Ben.

  “You catch those signs?” he asked. “He says we’ve got to travel daytime now. He doesn’t know the country well enough from here on to go by night. What do you think?”

  Ben shook his head, referred the matter to Big Bat and Lame John. The former grinned and said that it was no time now for thinking. That time was long past. Lame John, who had recovered enough from his beating in the Comanchero camp during the ride out to have said perhaps ten words, now looked at his questioner.

  “I have but one thought, Brother Ben,” he said. “You know what it is.”

  Ben knew what it was. Since losing the Johnston woman to the Apaches in Dominguin’s camp, the proud Nez Percé had been acting like a man in a trance. He would reply to direct questions monosyllabically and no more than that. He had not spoken a volunteered word since leaping for the Comanchero’s throat back on Clear Fork. In his heart and mind was a single resolve: to find Amy Johnston again or die on the trail to that end.

  “All right,” said Ben, “that’s it. Let’s go …”

  They put their horses into the Pecos, sent them splashing across to the far bank. Over there, there was no more talk. Short Dog led the way; the others followed. They were in the land of the enemy now. Talk would serve no purpose, save to disturb the stillness.

  In Apacheria that was a poor idea.

  They went sixty-five miles across country as desolate as the Great Salt Sink. Not even Frank Go-deen, that tracker and man of the northern wilderness par excellence, could follow the trail of the Mimbreños over such sandblasted rock and greasewood scrub. Short Dog, on the other hand, seldom hesitated long enough to get off his pony, reading the enemy signs as though he had dipped his n’deh b’ken, his soft-tanned Apache boots, in red barn paint.

  At the end of the dry going, they struck a mountain chain, the Guadalupes, Short Dog said, and followed the foothills—drier than the approaching desert—north to Guadalupe Pass. Here they found the headwaters of the Delaware Branch of the Pecos and rested two days, refreshing their mounts on the excellent streamside grass. Going through the pass, they came into arid desolation once more. Beyond Granite Peak, skirting the Cornudas Mountains, striking for the Hueco chain and Hueco Pass, they found the entire way a deathtrap of dehydration in the fierce summer heat. Save for the uncanny memory of Short Dog—the Comanche found water each day where no natural sign of it could possibly have guided a stranger—they would have been dead and sun-dried a dozen times between the Pecos and the Rio Grande del Norte. As it was, they came safely through the Organ Mountains at old Fort Fillmore shortly before dawn of the thirteenth day. Below them spread the fertile valley of the river, the stream itself lying out beyond the silent walls and weed-grown irrigation acequias of the historic post where Baylor and Sibley dreamed briefly of adding all the West to the Confederate States of America. In the eerie green light of the last stars, the brick and adobe buildings and the abandoned bottomland and fields edging the willow-dark channels of the “Great River” took on a ghostly patina effective even upon the stoic Short Dog.

  “No good,” he sighed uneasily. “Come on; we go quick.”

  They swung south of the fort, going across the Rio Grande at the old Indian crossing of Santo Tomas. On the west bank, they struck a trail without a wheel track or buffalo hoofprint in it, yet wide and deep and rutted with countless ages of horse and foot travel.

  “What is it?” Ben asked Short Dog in Spanish.

  “Camino Apache,” grunted the other.

  “The Apache Road?”

  “Sí, hombre; it runs from here to the Arizona country; to the Big Colorado River even. Also south into the Sierra Madre in old Mexico and north as far as the Sierra Diablo. There are branches, too, leading to all the Apache places. White Mountains, Mescalero, Chiricahua, Gila, all of them. From here there is no tracking; we only follow the road.”

  “Por Dios!” exclaimed Ben. “Isn’t that asking for trouble? Using the same trail they use?”

  “It’s their country,” shrugged Short Dog. “They know it better than we do.”

  “So?”

  “So the road goes where the water is; where the road does not go, neither does the water. That’s it.”

  Ben looked at the barrel-chested Comanche.

  “So we go where the road goes, or we don’t go at all, eh?”

  “I said that’s it.”

  Ben sat silently, eyes narrowed to study the brooding stillness ahead. Behind him and Short Dog, the others held their ponies quiet, watching with him. The only sound came from Malachi, serving the little band as pack animal and, according to Ben, as Indian watchdog. Ben swore the old mule could smell a hostile farther than a Sharps big fifty would shoot one. Whether this claim had served him merely as an excuse for bringing the obstinate brute along or was a legitimate talent of Malachi’s had yet to be demonstrated. To this point in the trail, they had seen neither feather tip nor lance tassel of the retreating Mimbreños or any other Apache. And now Malachi, lifting his jughead to sample the New Mexican morning air, gave a snort of impatient approval accompanied by a rusty-lunged bray loud enough to awaken the soldier dead four miles away at Fort Fillmore.

  Ben looked around at him and nodded a grinning “thank you” in English. Then quickly in Spanish to Short Dog:

  “The mule agrees with you. Vamonos!”

  At fifty miles west of Santo Tomas Crossing, the Apache Road led into the dry riverbed of the Rio Mimbres. For another forty twisting miles, the road followed the course of the waterless stream, turning sharply northward at approximately mile twenty. The second, roughening twenty miles ended at Mimbres Station on the abandoned Overland Mail line to Tucson. Here the channel sands began to mo
isten, the road abandoning the streambed and taking to the left, or west, bank. Here, too, Short Dog called a daylong halt. They would rest the present night through, he said, then give the following day to their horses on the strong feed which grew in the damp swales of the Mimbres. They would take cover in the charred timbers and still-

  standing walls of the burned-out stage station, and as for the stock being seen, they would simply have to pray a little. The ponies had to have the rest and the grass. Also, they were getting too close to the Apache now. They were but two short rides from Sierra Diablo, one long ride from the Pinos Altos foothills where dwelled the people of Mangas Coloradas. As for Broken Hand and the particular band they were trailing, that was getting a little too warm for comfort as well. The pony droppings in the riverbed just now were still wet inside. Under a sun such as that they had ridden under since morning, they should be dry to the middle. The answer was that the Mimbreños who had the white woman had ridden through here, where they now sat their ponies, not later than that same day. Short Dog was sorry, he concluded, but he had somehow missed two camps of the Apache. They had fooled him and were now only miles ahead. With this thought-provoking confession, the homely Kwahadi brave turned to Ben and the others.

  “Pues, hombres,” he said, “que dicen? What do you say; you want to push on and run into them or rest here as I have suggested? It’s up to you. Quanah ordered me to show you where they took the woman, and I am going to do it one way or the other.”

  “What do you mean, one way or the other?” said Ben.

  “My way or your way.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t know; you haven’t said your way yet.”

  “Listen,” said Ben hurriedly, glancing around at the loneliness of the riverbed where they sat their hipshot ponies, then upstream at the gaunt skeleton of the old station, “this is your decision, not mine. You do what Cousin Quanah told you—your way.”

  “All right.” The Comanche nodded. “We stay here.”

  “Boys,” said Ben to his waiting companions, “Short Dog says we’re right on old Broken Hand’s tail. Says we’ll run up his rump if we’re not careful. Wants to lay over here one day. Give them time to move on a little.”