Last Stand at Papago Wells (1957) (2 page)

"Closest water is twenty miles ... Papago Wells." Lonnie Foreman turned to Jennifer. "Ma'am, if you'll allow it, I'd ride with you all."

"Of course," she said.

Grant Kimbrough had started to speak, then said nothing. Another man was added protection, and boy though he might be, in this country he was a man in years as well as height. And there was something impressive about the way he handled his rifle, something casual, easy, showing long familiarity.

Due south of them was still another rock tank, this one known to Indians only and by rumor to a few prospectors and army scouts. There were Indians there now, six of them, with a recently captured white girl for prisoner.

Junie Hatchett was the last of her family. The others had died fighting in the battle after which Junie was captured. She was a prisoner now with no hope of help from any source at all. Nobody even knew she was alive, and so far as she was aware there was no one to whom it mattered. She was a thin, frightened girl with the face of a tired waif, and she held herself very still now, afraid to breathe for fear it might draw attention to her.

For a moment there was little chance of that. The Indians were eating now, stuffing themselves on the half-raw meat of a captured mule, and when they were gorged they would sleep, and then Junie intended to escape. She knew just how she would do it, and she knew too, she would probably die in the desert.

Cipriano Well was ten miles from Bates Well in the gap through which the trail passed, and she knew it was at least twenty miles further to Papago Wells, but she would attempt to reach it. There was nearly always water there, and there were rocks in which to hide. Sooner or later someone would come.

Junie had never been to Papago Wells, but she had listened to the scout who guided their small bunch of wagons, and he had talked to them about it. She knew also that she would not live out tomorrow. When the half-starved Indians awakened after eating she would be raped and killed. She knew very well they would kill her because this was a war party and they were not returning to their homes in Mexico yet. She would be excess baggage when they were through with her.

Holding her thin body very tight and still, she watched the Indians, and waited, and hoped.

Only a few miles away the lone rider on the zebra dun paused briefly and rinsed his horse's mouth with water. He had come prepared for trouble with two large canteens, and with luck he would reach Papago Wells shortly after sundown.

Logan Cates mounted again and pushed out into the desert, riding west.

Chapter
Two

The water holes that were Papago Wells lay now as they had lain these thousands of years, resting easily in their hollow hands of rocks. Born of the earth's travail, the arroyo in which lay the three tanks had come into being amid the shattering thunder of rock, the uplifting and rending of a vertebra of the continental spine.

Later, Pinacate had come into being, spewing lava in a hot, steaming, inexorable flood over all that land that lay between Papago Wells and the Gulf of California, creating a minor hell here in this lost corner of the land. Dead volcano cones remain where they died when the fires cooled, and here and there among the fields of lava are deep craters, sunk hundreds of feet into the earth, their floors paraded with cacti just as the lava fields are starred with cholla, bisnaga and ocotillo.

This was a lonely land, rent and torn by earthquakes, its surface cracked and shattered into deep arroyos or broken blisters of lava in whose basins there was sometimes water. At Papago Wells the water lay in three smooth rock basins, sheltered in part from the sun, the water crystal clear, cool and sweet, known to few except for Indians and the few wandering animals or birds who came to this sun-baked desert.

In an age long gone there had been greater rainfall and then the rock basins were always full, and then the last of the great reptiles came to drink, and the first of the mammals. After the glaciers retreated in that country to the north, the rainfall became less and less, the land dried out, and much of the grass disappeared.

There was further rending of rock, further volcanic eruption, and the last of the reptiles vanished, a few lingering on to color the legends of the Indians who came drifting down from the north. Yet much remained to tell of the passing of both reptile and mammal. Deep under the sand not far from the wells lay the skull and bones of a saber-toothed cat, and nearer still, the bones of a giant sloth. A quarter of a mile away two mammoths had been trapped in a cienaga by primitive men and killed there by great rocks thrown down upon them, and then eaten.

Seven thousand years ago a man had come to drink, the first of the hunters and food gatherers to find this remote place. He knelt to drink, unaware that another hunter, the saber-toothed cat, crouched in the dead lava behind him. The primitive man carried a hand-ax of stone and a throwing stick with a spear. He heard the cat when it moved behind him and turned in time to make a thrust that tore the cat's flesh. The spear-head broke off and fell into the sand, and the man struck his dying blow with a flint knife. The cat dragged the man some fifty yards before he dropped him, and then died himself, but the spear-head remains, only a few inches under the sand west of the waterhole's edge.

Few travelers came so far south, and they came only of necessity. In normal times there was water to the north, and in this area of some hundreds of square miles what water there was would be found in catch basins from infrequent rains. Any traveler headed into this country did so at his own risk.

Sweet, clear water lay in a large pool at Papago Wells, water several feet deep and shadowed by walls of lava. Back of the main pool was another rock basin, smaller, more confined, with abrupt rock nearly enclosing it, while below the main tank was another, scattered with boulders. In the arroyo below and near this tank was a dense thicket of ironwood, mesquite, palo verde and cat claw.

Rain had worn the rocks smooth, had cascaded over them in heavy storms, polishing them like glass, and in all the wilderness around there was nothing offering such water as this. Bighorn sheep came here to water, prowling mountain lions, occasional jaguar, coyote and antelope. Men came more seldom, rarely stopped for long.

To desert men and animals alike, Papago Wells offered the surest chance for water in many miles, the cool dark tanks, the arroyo with its limited shade, the galleta grass ... it was a place not to be forgotten. Bates Well was dry, Cipriano held little water, Gunsight was a long way behind, the Tule Wells a long way ahead.

Far to the south, moving north and west now, rode a band of dark riders. Churupati, half-Apache, half-Yaqui, and all savage, was their leader. Accepted by neither tribe, from each he drew malcontents, denied by their own people, hating the white man, living only for murder and rapine. Skirting the Manteca and Espuma hills of northern Sonora they rode steadily westward, twenty-three rogue Apaches, riding toward a rendezvous with several smaller bands, to meet on the Sonoita. Scattered to their north were a few isolated ranches or mining claims, occasional Papago or Pima Indians ... and the latter were ancient enemies. A swift foray across the border, murder, loot and burning, then they'd lose themselves in the deserts where they now traveled.

Churupati was a dark, squat man of Herculean strength, flat of nose, scarred of face, living only to kill. Swinging south he struck swiftly at Quitovac where half a dozen Mexicans worked a mine, then north for a quick raid on the horse herds at Quitobaquito, and westward to Papago Wells. At Quitovac he left five of six Mexicans dead, believing he had killed them all, then drove off the mules for feasting at Sonoita. Unknown to him he left behind at Quitovac one Mexican alive, a white man and white woman ... he also left sixty thousand dollars in gold.

Through the desert Churupati and his men moved like shadowy brown ghosts, and always there lay in the back of Churupati's mind a memory of the still, cold waters of Papago Wells.

The water hole lay silent and alone, shaded from the desert sun. In the ironwood thicket below, a quail called. There was no other sound.

A bighorn ram led his flock to drink, dipping their muzzles in the cold, dark water after the sun went down. They were still there, enjoying their proximity to water, when they heard the click of a hoof on stone, still some distance off. Like so many shadows the bighorns vanished into the maze of lava boulders and behind them the pools looked shy and innocent under the wide, white moon.

A saddle creaked, nearer now, and two men came in from the west, conversing in low tones. "We're safe enough, Tony. If the sheriff does follow us out of Yuma he'll stay on the trail to Gunsight, then on through Covered Wells and Indian Oasis."

Tony Lugo was unconvinced. "This Yaqui country," he said.

"You Pimas are all scared of Yaquis," Jim Beaupre said. "Never saw it to fail."

Lugo shrugged. "Pima fight Yaqui many times, and Pima win, usually."

Tony Lugo was not one to harry a subject. He had said his word and he let it remain so. If Jim Beaupre wanted to stop at Papago Wells, all right. The sheriff in Yuma was a determined man and the tall boy they had killed in Yuma was his nephew. The fight had been fair enough and the boys had started it, the nephew and two companions, hunting a reputation. They were young, but even so they should have known better, and when they jumped the two strangers it was with careless contempt and the desire to be known as having killed their man.

Beaupre was an old buffalo skinner, dour, tough, weather-beaten, a man with a tang of salty humor in him and a wicked hand with a Bowie knife. Veteran of fifty Indian battles and twice that many hand-to-hand fights, he merely looked old, cantankerous and down-at-heel. Lugo--well, the half-breed had scouted for the Army, had stolen horses from the Apache and Hualapai, had done his share of fighting wherever he encountered it. Neither man wanted trouble, but the boys did. Three of them, two nineteen and one just turned twenty, and they believed they had chosen some old fool of a prospector and a harmless Indian. Now one of the boys lay dead, another had lost an arm, the third was close to death but might recover, with care.

The moon was bright on the waters of Papago Wells when they stepped down from their saddles. Men and horses drank, then retired to the thicket below, a little too wise to remain close to water where other men might come, yet knowing enough to not go too far away, nor to build a fire. In the meantime their horses could graze on galleta grass or tornillo beans, and Beaupre and Lugo would be seeing anyone who came to the Wells for water.

What Beaupre did not guess was that many would come to the Wells, and not so many would leave. Perhaps in some dark, secret convolution of his subconscious the half-breed knew it, but he had said what he had to say and it was enough to have spoken. What would be, would be.

To the south and east of Papago Wells, the party of twelve riders seen by Logan Cates had decided to turn north. The decision, taken suddenly, was as suddenly fatal.

A party of renegade Indians, headed for the rendezvous on the Sonoita, was awaiting them in a shallow wash. When the twelve riders appeared, dozing in the saddle, weary from their long ride, hot from the desert sun, the Indians opened fire. It was point-blank range, at a distance of no more than forty yards, and their first volley emptied four saddles, stampeded the horses and broke up the group.

This group was the sheriff's posse out of Yuma, and after that first savage volley they never reorganized. It had smashed destruction upon them at the end of a hot, dusty day when they were half asleep. Hunting two running men as they were, they had no idea they were themselves hunted. The sheriff himself was riding a half-tamed bronco, and before he got his horse stopped he was four miles away and all alone.

Behind him there was scattered shooting, and he had an idea little of it was being done by his own men. The nearest water was at Gunsight Wells, and he hesitated whether to try for it or to return, and when he started again the bronc caved under him. For the first time he realized his horse had been shot.

Alone then, the sheriff thought of his wife in Yuma. He knew enough of the desert to know how small were his chances of survival, but he had courage. He swore softly, realizing what those three reckless youngsters had cost, and then he began to walk. The following afternoon, still many miles from Gunsight Wells, his tongue swollen and his eyes glazed, he shot himself.

The Indians had been successful. There had been but nine Indians, and they had cut the posse in half. After the first smashing volley they had killed another man, and the sheriff, unknown to them, had been added to the list. Four of the six who survived were soldiers from Fort Yuma under the command of a veteran Irish sergeant, and these alone held together, rolled into a shallow place in the desert, and opened fire.

A fight with disciplined soldiery had no place in the Indian plans, so they slipped away to the south and Sergeant Sheehan gathered what ammunition was left on the slain men and horses, and with what canteens they could find and two recaptured horses for the extra weight, they started west. The following afternoon they were rejoined by the one remaining civilian, a man named Taylor, who had also kept his horse. Of the twelve these six remained.

The soldiers were of a small patrol sent out to report the condition of water holes along this route to Tucson, and they had joined the sheriff on his return toward Yuma. That the move had been a fatal one Sergeant Timothy Sheehan would be the first to confess.