Return of the Tall Man Read online

  Ten minutes later they were down in the riverbed galloping for the west-bank trail. In half an hour, they had reached the head of the climb on the far ridge and were slowing their mounts for the last, steep scramble up to the switchback. It took them possibly another ten minutes to negotiate this risky going. It was hardly over three-quarters of an hour from Ben’s tart grin starting down through the V-notch to his softly breathed, “Jesus …” as he led his followers around the blind S of the switchback and to an unbidden halt under the cocked rifles and waiting, wolflike stares of Mano Roto and his ten Mimbreño Apaches.

  24

  A Prayer of His People

  “You surprised?” asked Broken Hand in heavily accented English.

  The simple question, where a crackle of rifle fire had been anticipated, startled Ben’s numbed mind into moving again. He automatically made the greeting sign as he replied uncertainly:

  “Well, chief, that’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Unh,” said Broken Hand, nodding.

  They all sat there. The red men stared at the whites, their broad faces expressionless. The white men returned the compliment but not blankly. Even Frank Go-deen, the half white, showed unmistakable apprehension by wrinkling the lance scar across his crooked nose in what was intended as an ingratiating smile. Ben and Big Bat were scared sweatless, both candidly admitting the sentiment with the small, prune-lipped smirks which they presented in lieu of the grins they thought they were furnishing. Only Lame John returned the Apache look, stone eye for stone eye.

  In the stillness Malachi, belatedly lounging along in the rear of his party, came around the corner of the switchback. Seeing the Indians, he threw up his head and snorted loudly. Ben gave him a glance of pure poison.

  “Thanks a hell of a lot,” he told him. “We was just setting here a’wondering what these here fellers was. By jingo, we’re downright beholden to you. Indians, eh? Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Malachi rolled his blue eyes. He blew out noisily through his nostrils, bobbed his head energetically, put back his ears and brayed. Broken Hand regarded him curiously, looking from him to Ben.

  “You talk to the mule?” he said. “He understands you?”

  “Oh, sure,” answered Ben. “He understands me fine. It’s just me has a little trouble understanding him now and again.”

  “I see,” said the Apache chief. “Well, if he hear you so good, maybe you like him answer you Mimbreño question: ask him how you going get away from Mano Roto?” Ben considered the matter, shook his head.

  “It’s no use, chief. He don’t savvy a word about Apaches. He’s a Sioux mule.”

  “Unh, that’s bad.”

  “Chief,” said Ben, “we ain’t no argument whatever.”

  Behind him, Frank Go-deen muttered resentfully, his half-breed sense of humor failing him.

  “Listen, brother,” he told Ben, “perhaps I missed something, somewhere, but I don’t think these New Mexican cousins are making fun.”

  “Brother,” said Ben tightly, “you think I think they are?”

  “I don’t care what I think; or you; it’s them I’m watching, and I don’t see any smiles over there.”

  “You got a point,” granted Ben, letting his set grin fade out and the silence return tenfold.

  Broken Hand permitted the pause to grow. During its tense seconds, Ben noted for the first time that Amy Johnston was not among the Apache ranks. The lateness of the discovery was mute tribute to the shock of meeting Mano Roto around a blind corner, but now Ben shot a quick look at Lame John. Catching the Nez Percé’s eye, he asked, low voiced:

  “John, you see what I see—or don’t see?”

  “Yes, Brother Ben, I saw it before I saw a one of these desert monkeys.” He stared coldly at the small, bandy-legged Mimbreños, his gaze settling finally on Broken Hand. Making the least gesture with the Winchester in his right hand, he said to him very carefully, “This is the new gun, not the old one like yours.” Broken Hand and his braves looked at their assortment of single-shot Springfields and Mexican muzzleloaders, then waited, watching the tall northern Indian. The latter twitched the Winchester again. “I am very fast with it,” he said, “and not afraid to die. What have you done with the yellow-haired woman?”

  The Apache thought it over, understanding the terms of the question. If harm had come to the white captive, this big English-talking Indian was going to take a few of them with him. If not, he was open to further negotiation. It made sense, even to a Mimbreño.

  “What do you know about the woman?” asked Broken Hand, genuinely interested. “What do you care about her?”

  “She is my woman,” said Lame John and moved the hammer of the Winchester to full cock.

  “Well, now, I thought she was my woman.” The Apache chief nodded. “I just give lots money for her.”

  “Produce her,” said Lame John. “Or die.”

  Broken Hand studied the Winchester carbine enviously.

  “That’s a wonderful gun,” he said. “I think maybe you able do what you say with it. You brave man, too. I do what you ask.” He made a sign to his braves, and when they hesitated to obey its order, he snarled, “Bring the woman! Goddam, you want to get shot?”

  Apparently they did not, for after another moment’s scowling, three of them rode over to a pile of boulders, one dismounting to drag Amy Johnston, bound hands to leg-irons and gagged, out into the tiny meadow of the ambush.

  The look of glad relief in Lame John’s dark face was brief. It flickered and went out like a blown candle. He looked from the dirt-stained, miserable captive to Ben Allison. It was a glance which plainly begged for help or backing in the wild resolve forming in his savage heart. Ben could not speak Nez Percé, but he was a gifted reader of men’s faces. He threw Lame John the wait-a-moment sign.

  “For God’s sake, John,” he said, “don’t do nothing.”

  The Nez Percé hesitated just long enough for Broken Hand to push his pony forward, the first move any of the Mimbreños had made toward the trapped men.

  “That’s good advice. Your friend is smart.” He nodded. “You hold still. Girl all right.”

  He seemed not unfriendly with the words, and Go-deen and Big Bat both spoke quickly to Lame John, urging him not to start anything. Ben, seizing the opportunity to take the play away from the single-minded Nez Percé youth, kneed his pony up to Broken Hand’s.

  “We’re glad to see the woman is well,” he told him. “We’ve come a long ways to see her.”

  “Why?” said Broken Hand.

  Ben repeated the Amy Johnston story. He did a great job with it, practice having improved his memory of its more dramatic aspects—some of the best of which he now added for the first time. The Apache chief was impressed.

  “Hell of good story,” he grunted. “You talk fine.”

  Frank Go-deen, tempted beyond fear, threw up his hands in exasperation.

  “Sure, you bet, Cousin Broken Hand! He’s the biggest talker north of the Arkansas River. I always said it!”

  Broken Hand iced him with a stare.

  “Half-breed,” he ordered, “close mouth.”

  “Very much what I had in mind,” decided Go-deen, edging his pony behind Ben’s and alongside Big Bat’s.

  The latter gave him a look to equal the Apache’s.

  “You have le caractère remarquable, mon ami; it passes belief,” he told him. “You have the absolute talent to say the precise right thing at the exact wrong time. Zut! Did you hear the chief? Gardez-vous le silence!”

  One of the Apaches, a sullen youth, little more than a boy really but carrying a sawed-short double shotgun big enough for any man, now rode up to Broken Hand. He pointed arrogantly at the huge French Canadian and the potbellied Milk River breed, both special privilege and an end to his young warrior’s patience showing in his angry manner.


  “Too damn much talk!” he declared. “Too many tongues busy. Let’s go.”

  “You’re right, Chaco,” agreed Broken Hand immediately. “This is no place for talk. We will go up the river a ways.”

  “I want to go home,” said the youth. “Why will you go up the river first?”

  “Be patient, boy. There is yet some thinking for Broken Hand to do. You know Mangas. We don’t want him to get excited.”

  “You going to camp upriver then?”

  “Yes, one more night. Then ride in.”

  “It makes no sense.”

  “We do what I say, boy. We make camp. Then I go on into rancheria when moon come up. Talk easy with Mangas. Maybe say he can have woman after me. Maybe before. Whatever necessary.”

  The youth looked at Ben and the others.

  “What of these?” he demanded.

  “You keep them in camp. Good bait for trade to Mangas. Use to put him in bad position. We bring four prisoners, what can he say to woman?”

  “This woman has changed you. You’re sick with her.”

  “It’s a lie, but I paid much money for her. She is my woman. I won’t have him to kill her.”

  “Basta!” snarled a hard-faced subchief, driving his scrubby mount out of the Mimbreño line and up to face his chief and the angered youth. “That’s enough, you hear, Mano? If you want to camp one more night, all right. No stay here talk all day though. Come on. Goddam!”

  “Yes, I agree, Hota.” Broken Hand nodded. “Vamonos.” He pointed to the new prisoners. “Tie feet under pony’s belly. Get that big Indian first. You, Chaco, you do it.”

  The ill-tempered boy rode over to Lame John and put the shotgun into his ribs with a curse.

  “Go over there,” he said, pointing to the other Apaches who were shaking out binding ropes. “Move quick!”

  He jabbed his weapon hard into Lame John, wanting only the excuse to close his finger on the first trigger and blow his side out. The Nez Percé accommodated him. Snaking his right hand across his own body, he seized the gun barrels, jerking them back across his flattened stomach. When Chaco’s finger shut down, the charge blasted the horn off the saddle but did not touch Lame John. In the next instant, Chaco was swept bodily off his scrubby mount and pinned in front of his opponent with a left-arm stranglehold. With his right hand, Lame John jammed the stolen shotgun between his hostage’s kidneys.

  “Now,” he said to Broken Hand, “if you want to shoot, shoot. I am waiting.”

  Of the Apaches, only the chief moved. And he only enough to raise his twisted arm in mute protest.

  “That is my nephew,” he said, “the son of my sister and her husband who are dead. He is last of my blood.”

  “How do you love him?” asked Lame John.

  “As a son. What do you want?”

  “To get away; only to get away.”

  Ben, Go-deen, and Big Bat exchanged glances. Ben was stunned, but the other two were something less. “He’s an Indian,” shrugged the one, while the other snapped, “Even worse, an idiot. I always said it.”

  Ben shook his head numbly. “By God, it ain’t so,” was all he could manage.

  But it was so, and John Lame Elk in the last corner was bargaining for his own life.

  “How you expect to get away?” Broken Hand wanted to know. “Where you hide we no find you?”

  “I will take the boy.” Lame John would not look at Ben or the others. “When I have reached the Great River, I will release him unharmed. If you try, meanwhile, to come after me or to get him away from me, I will kill him. You have my word both ways.”

  “No,” said Broken Hand slowly, “I will not let you take him away. Not to the Great River. First, I say you kill boy right now.”

  “How far then?”

  “You take him one sun. We no follow. I promise it.”

  “You mean you will give me a twenty-four-hour head start. Then I turn the boy loose without hurt, and I have your word you will not come after me?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one will follow me?”

  “I have said it.”

  “All right, I take your word. I’m going now.” He motioned with the shotgun. “Bring his pony over here. Be very careful.” The pony was brought over by the ugly subchief. Chaco slid onto him, still dazed from the suffocation of the stranglehold. Lame John poked him savagely with the gun. “Ride straight,” was all he said.

  “God Almighty,” breathed Ben to Big Bat as the Apache boy started his pony toward them, “he ain’t going to take the word of that red ape! They’ll ambush him sure!”

  “Say nothing—stand still,” warned the Canuck giant.

  “Frank,” he said, appealing to Go-deen, “we can’t let him ride out of here like this, double cross or no double cross. He’s rode the river with us. It ain’t human!”

  “Neither is Broken Hand. Do what Bat says—don’t move your eyelids. Your friend is as good as safe across the Rio Grande right now. The chief has guaranteed it.”

  Ben couldn’t accept the assurance or wouldn’t. “No, sir, by God!” he muttered and reached for the .44. It was then he found he could not move his right hand. The reason was Big Bat Pourier’s paw closed over his wrist with the grip of a Green River bear trap.

  “Petit Ben,” he said out of the side of his mouth, “if you move, I will break your bones like a chicken wing. You do not get yourself killed for that dog of a Slit Nose. Pull away and let them past!”

  Ben looked at Lame John, now but a pony-length distant. The latter stared through him, kept his rangy Appaloosa moving directly toward him. Ben’s pony stepped back, letting Chaco’s mount pass, with Lame John’s shouldering through behind the Apache boy’s scrub. They were gone around the blind turn of the switchback then, with only the brief, flinty ring of their animals’ hooves striking back from the bedrock depths of the trail to mark the passage. Then the hoof sounds, too, were gone, and there was only the bake-oven silence of the high desert to answer for the disaffection of John Lame Elk.

  After five seconds of listening to this stillness, Ben Allison shook his shaggy head, gathered his slack reins.

  “Sonofabitch,” he said under his breath.

  “What was that? What did you say?” demanded Broken Hand, pushing forward querulously.

  “Nothing,” answered Ben, “just a prayer of my people; come on, let’s go …”

  25

  Mimbreño Mercy

  The Apaches went up the Mimbres only as far as old Fort Webster. The crumbling post, abandoned in 1861 by its Confederate-sympathizing garrison, had an excellent well in the nearby riverbed and was a favored, indeed protected, stopping place of the nomad Mimbreños.

  Here the prisoners were put in the still-intact “juzgado” of the moldering ruin and allowed the freedom of their arms and legs. The liberty was no risk. The cell door was of mountain oak four inches thick, the bars of one inch drill steel, the walls of thirty-inch adobe. The temperature inside the eight-foot-square room was comparable to that of an Apache beehive bread oven. They were given no water; the cell room had no window. They breathed, or rather gasped, for air through the eighteen by twenty-four inch opening of the door bars.

  “It is not a prison cell,” groaned Big Bat; “it is an invention of the Holy Roman Inquisiteur! Voilà! I am dying. I am a fish on the riverbank!”

  Ben and Frank Go-deen echoed his groan but could not add meaningful words to his estimation of their quarters. This was at four p.m. At seven thirty, the sundown and the long purple twilight fading, the cell was opened and the prisoners ordered outside. Big Bat, his enormous bulk more vulnerable to the intense heat, had lost consciousness and had to be dragged forth. It took four of the Apaches, one to each arm and leg, to move him. Go-deen, an older man than either of his companions, was also near the edge. He still had his eyes open, but his senses were not respon
ding properly. The subchief called over Broken Hand, who looked at the two and ordered water given immediately and in regulated small amounts.

  “They will not live the night otherwise,” he said.

  Ben, in better shape, was motioned by the chief to follow him. He led the way to the sutler’s store, roofless and doorless and windowless but located centrally in the fort’s ground plan, hence the proper place for the chief’s fire. Bidding Ben to sit down along the front wall of the empty store, he gave him food—parched corn and sun-dried mule meat—and freshwater from the river well.

  “Eat a little first,” he advised; “then drink sparingly.”

  For a time Ben said nothing, too busy obeying the elemental urges of survival. When he had finished, he sat quietly waiting for Broken Hand to lead the talk. After several minutes of smoking his Sonora cigarillo, the latter tamped the butt carefully out, placed it in his shirt pocket, nodded soberly to his silent guest.

  “For a white man,” he said, “I like you.”

  “I am a quarter-blood Tshaoh,” said Ben, “a Kwahadi of Quanah’s people. My mother’s mother was a Water Horse.”

  “The Tshaoh?” said Broken Hand. “Hmmm. Much interesting. I was wondering how you got so far into Apache country without we see you. You bring Comanche guide, do I lie?”

  “You don’t lie; he deserted us this morning.”

  “When he saw us?”

  “Yes, when he saw you.”

  “Smart Comanche.”

  “Very smart,” agreed Ben.

  “Smart Nez Percé, too.”

  “No,” said Ben. “Treacherous. He was a brother on the long trail with us. The Comanche only came because Quanah ordered him.”

  “You don’t understand Indian. Nez Percé no traitor. Just smart.”

  “Well, maybe so. I notice you trusted him.”

  “Sure. He is Indian.”

  “And you?”