Lord Apache (14 page)

For a moment he thought she was going to fling her arms around him, as she had that day when he pulled her from the flooded Agua Fria. But she seemed to have learned a lesson.

"That was very nice of you," she murmured, looking down at the yellow flowers. "It—it was thoughtful."

"You're a real gentleman," Mrs. Glore confirmed. "And that's the God's truth! There ain't many of 'em left around anymore!"

He shifted from one foot to the other. "A—well, perhaps a kind of going-away present. The Spanish called them
incienso
. They used the dried sap for incense in their early churches in Arizona."

"Jimmie brought me flowers, once, in Clover Lick," Phoebe said.

"Who?"

She seemed in a reverie. "A boy I knew, a long time ago. He—he was killed in the mines." She looked at him unseeingly. "Jimmie Frakes. He was blond, blond like you, Mr. Drumm."

Uncomfortably he rubbed his hands together. "Well," he said, "are we ready?"

Mrs. Glore fastened her bonnet in place with a swordlike pin and picked up the bags. "Ready or not, Prescott, here we come at last!"

"Good-bye, Mr. Drumm." Phoebe held out her hand. It was warm in his calloused fingers. "You've done so much for us—no one could ever thank you enough. I won't even try."

He wanted to say something memorable, something cool and composed yet significant, but there was a strange lump in his throat, an emptiness in his breast. He could only stand in the doorway and watch them walk away through the reeds, the sun dappling them as it shone down through the high grasses. Watching them go, he strained his eyes, seeing at last only a patch of color here and a minuscule movement there. Finally they were gone.

He went back to the Tully and Ochoa wagon. Coogan had completed his repairs.

"They will be waiting for you," Jack said. "I'm everlastingly grateful to you, Mr. Coogan."

"Ike," Coogan corrected. "Hell, I ain't been called Mr. Coogan since I was brought up before the judge in Phoenix for drunk and disorderly!"

For a long while Jack Drumm stood in the dusty road, watching Coogan's wagon until it went out of sight around the bend. He scanned the low hills, the brush, the rocky slopes, fearing to see a wink of sun, a flash of reflected light from the lens of field glasses. But he saw nothing. Alonzo Meech had probably abandoned the search. Eggleston came to stand beside him.

"The two ladies are gone, then?"

Silently Jack nodded.

"I will miss Beulah Glore," the valet said. "She was a fine woman, no matter what sticky business she may have gotten into back in Baltimore."

"Philadelphia," Jack said.

"Look at the chickens, Mr. Jack! They miss her too. She used to feed them about now."

Suddenly he missed Phoebe Larkin more than he cared to admit. He went quickly into the adobe to attend to Uncle Roscoe while Eggleston coaxed the reluctant burro into the corral. For a moment, just before entering the sickroom, he thought he saw a man's figure atop a ridge to the south of the ranch. But as he narrowed his eyes against the glint of the November sun, the figure disappeared—or perhaps it had never been there. He was getting jumpy.

The old prospector was able to talk, though only weakly and briefly. The heart was sound, though, pumping determinedly. Some color had come into the pallid cheeks. Jack bled him, and made a broth of sage leaves, which the
Traveler's Guide
said were a specific for stroke. Boiling the infusion, he tried to remember the Latin name of the shrub, but could not. Sage was no longer an exotic plant to be identified and entered in his field notebook; it was becoming the common furniture of the desert, this Arizona desert that was for the time being his home.

The next morning Uncle Roscoe was markedly better and wanted to sit up, though Jack forbade it.

"God damn it!" the old man protested. "I ain't no weakling! It was just a little dizzy spell come on me in the canyon there!"

Leaving Eggleston to feed Uncle Roscoe a dish of chicken soup, Jack wandered listlessly to the road and stared in the direction of Prescott. They should be in the capital by now—Phoebe and Mrs. Glore—and perhaps safe in the hands of the redoubtable Uncle Buell. Looking around at Rancho Terco, it seemed somehow deserted, incomplete, unfriendly.

Looking, he saw something else. Pinned to the new hitching post with a bone-handled knife a note fluttered in the wind. He tugged at the knife, driven deep into the post, and read the note. It was lettered in block characters with what appeared to be a stub of charcoal, and was obviously the work of an untutored hand. The choice of terms was strange, also, and the phrasing queer, though the words had a certain dignity:

This is my place. This river my place all right. I do not want white men heer where I born & my
parientes
bury.

The writer's scanty English had failed.
Parientes
, Jack recalled, meant "kin" in Spanish.

You fight good but spirits ask you go from this place. You send back
sobrino—

Jack wrinkled his brow. More Spanish; what was
sobrino
? Uncle? No, that was
tio. Sobrino—
yes, that meant "nephew."

You send back
sobrino
but I cannot friend you no more. I finish saying.

He stared at the wrinkled paper. It was signed with a straggling A; an inexpertly made A that lay almost sidewise at the bottom of the warning, but still—an A; A for Agustín.

Uncle Roscoe might be seventy, or eighty, or ninety. He was short and wiry, bandy-legged, tough as an old boot and smelling almost as bad. Fretting at the refusal of his left arm and leg to accommodate him, he sat in the shade and unwillingly drank the sage tea that Eggleston brewed.

"But you're getting better," Jack pointed out. "Look—you can move your fingers now!"

"Can't hold a pick! Can't hold a shovel!"

"You're coming along nicely," Jack comforted. "I daresay if I had had such a stroke, I wouldn't be as far along now as you are!"

"Well, mebbe so," Uncle Roscoe sighed, "but I wish things'd move along more pronto! I'm an old man. I don't think the Lord's got me down for any more time." He told Jack Drumm about the Gypsy Dancer Mine he had spent twenty-odd years searching for. "Hungarian feller—name of Laszlo something—stumbled on it." He took a tattered scrap of paper from a pocket. "Met him in a saloon in San Diego and he showed me this map and some nuggets big as goose eggs. He was in town to buy supplies but a gang of Mexicans laid for him and hit him over the head. They stole the nuggets, but when Laszlo was laid out for the coroner I slipped the map out of his shirt and took off for the Agua Fria. That was in—let me see—fifty-six, fifty-seven—something like that."

"And you've been looking for the Gypsy Dancer ever since?"

"Oh, I'll find it!" the old man assured him. "I got the location pretty well narrowed down by now!"

Roscoe was a rich source of information about the Apaches, the Mazatzals, the whole Territory. He knew Charlie the Papago and Ike Coogan, claiming also to have been a ceremonial brother of Kayatinah, the father of Agustín himself, and once adopted into the tribe.

"What you want to know all this stuff for?" he demanded.

"Because the Apaches insist on trying to drive me away from the Agua Fria. We are enemies. To do a proper job of resisting, I must understand them."

"Ain't nothin' much to understand," Uncle Roscoe grumbled. He waved his hand toward the hazy distances. "Once they owned all this—now the politicians and the merchants and the Army is trying to take it away and make 'em live on the Verde River reservation. I don't mean no offense, Mr. Drumm—you been good to me. But you can understand how
you'd
feel if bandits run you out of your big castle in England!"

"It isn't exactly a castle," Jack said, "but I know what you mean."

"They're proud," Uncle Roscoe went on, "and resourceful. They lived off this dry land for thousands of years. They make bread from mesquite beans, and beer called 'tiswin' from the mescal plant. They bake mescal roots in a pit in the ground, too. It tastes like molasses candy; they got a sweet tooth, like anybody. They eat the fruit of the
nopal
cactus—some folks calls it 'Indian fig.' Their lingo is all gobbles and gargles, but there's a pleasant sound to it."

Jack looked to the greening fields where Charlie hoed weeds. "Do the Papagos speak the same language as the Apaches?"

"Purty close," Uncle Roscoe said. "At least, they can make each other out."

"Charlie calls me 'Ostin.' What does that mean?"

Uncle Roscoe grinned a toothless grin. "'Ostin' is Apache talk for 'Lord.' Anything they respect or fear they call 'Ostin'—the bear, snakes, lightning. 'Lord Bear,' 'Lord Snake,' 'Lord Lightning.'"

Jack helped him light his pipe. The old prospector lay back in the chair, staring at the great bulk of the Mazatzals, remembering a long time ago when he lived with the Indians.

"They don't never call
themselves
'Apache.' That's just a Mexican word that means 'enemy.' Their name for theirselves is
Tinneh
. It means 'The Men'—and that's what they are: men, real men." He watched a circle of blue-gray smoke drift in the wind. "Missionaries never had any effect on 'em. The Apaches got their own religion, and stick by it—all kinds of gewgaws and ceremonies. Sacred cords, sacred shirts, medicine arrows and lances, pieces of quartz and petrified wood. What means most is
hoddentin
. That's cornmeal, usual dyed red or blue, they hang in a bag around their necks. Kind of a charm, to protect 'em in battle."

Now Jack understood the little sack filled with blue grains he had taken from the neck of the Apache killed in the first fight at the Agua Fria, the sack he later hung on the broken lance of the dead man.

"The men folk," Uncle Roscoe went on, "are good sewers, do all the sewing for the family. But an Apache is scared to death of his mother-in-law." He chuckled. "He won't talk to her or face her if he can help it. I've seen 'em walk a mile out of their way just to sashay around a mother-in-law!"

Cornelia Newton-Barrett's mother, Jack remembered, was also somewhat of an ogress.

"They love to play cards, gamble, run footraces. Mostly they're happy. But when someone dies they set the whole village afire— they live mostly in brush huts—and move away. They don't want to be reminded."

Jack looked toward the graves, amulets swinging in the wind. He had thought of the Apaches as murderous beasts; certainly they had tried to kill him. It was unsettling to view them as human beings; family men, people who doted on mescal candy and feared a mother-in-law and were in their own way religious.

"They eat horses, too," Jack was reminded, and looked where old Bonyparts grazed, along with a lame ox and some horses left at the Rancho Terco station under the terms of his recent agreement with Tully and Ochoa. There was a spring wagon, also, that was being towed to Prescott when an axle broke. Eggleston, at a crude forge, was making repairs.

"Horses and mules is a special treat," Uncle Roscoe agreed. "They eat sunflower seeds, too, and wild potatoes and berries and rabbits and whatever else comes to hand. They grow a little corn, when folks leaves 'em alone. But now most of 'em has been herded onto the reservations. The rest is being chased from pillar to post. No, times are a-changing for them, 1 guess—" For a moment the old man seemed to doze, then opened his rheumy eyes. "And for the rest of us old geezers, too, like me and Ike Coogan."

Times were changing the fastest along the Agua Fria. Rancho Terco was a natural site for a stage stop; midway between Phoenix and the new capital, it began to grow like the tent towns in the gold country of California twenty-five years earlier. Prescott furnished fresh vegetables, lumber, beef cattle, and excellent beer from a new brewery. Phoenix supplied wheat, barley, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, mutton, and wool. It was also an important distribution point where goods and supplies unloaded from the steamers of the Colorado Steam Navigation Company at Yuma could be shipped by wagon to Florence, Tucson, Prescott, and the many mining camps and Army posts.

The merchants of the Territory—Fish and Collingwood, Lord and Williams, Leopoldo Carrillo, Zeckendorf, Tully and Ochoa— maintained fleets of freight wagons that weekly plied the rutted roads with bolts of gingham, lard and sides of bacon, saddles from St. Louis, kegs of bourbon, rum, and brandy, cartridges for the Army, patent medicines. Sometimes the cargo even included barrels of oysters and clams shipped all the way from San Francisco in ice renewed at the new ice-making factory in Yuma. Temporarily balked by the Apache rebellion, the economy now boomed again. But still Agustín sat stubbornly atop the Mazatzals, a brooding threat the Army could not eradicate. From time to time he reminded the Territory of his presence by quick, stinging raids along the river, Jack Drumm's Union Jack carried aloft as a totem.

Though Jack had not yet heard from his brother Andrew, enough money was coming in to keep Rancho Terco viable. Cora, beans, and winter melons flourished under Charlie's care; Eggleston discovered pan-size fish in the river; Uncle Roscoe, recovering from his stroke, found a bed of wild potatoes. "Dee-lishus!" he cackled. "All you got to do is fry 'em, peel and all, with a little wild onion!" Roscoe found the wild onions, also, and they feasted on fresh new potatoes. But the mealy taste made Jack think of Clarendon Hall. He and Andrew used to filch potatoes from the kitchen to roast at their secret hiding place in the depths of the forest behind the house. Unwillingly, he found himself thinking also of Cornelia Newton-Barrett. What must she think of him? When last he wrote Andrew he had neglected even to mention Cornelia in his letter, to speak of his intention toward her, his anticipation of seeing her soon. Guilty, he found a stub of candle and started to write: