The sun was in mid-sky by the time I got down to the bottom of the canyon. And then by crawling up the other ridge I found that trail.
My hands were bleeding again, and I was lightheaded. One side of my brain recognized that fact, just as if it was standing off to one side watching the whole show. But I kept on going, because I hadn’t sense enough to lie down and die.
This was an Indian trail, and in this country that meant Apaches, and I knew a good bit about them. Not as much as my brother Tyrel, but I knew a-plenty. I knew if they found me I might as well throw in my hand.
The Apache was a fighting man. He was a warrior, and that was his pride. His reputation was based on how many horses he could steal and how many coups he could count. By the white man’s standards this was all wrong, but the Indian had a different way of looking at it. Mercy to your enemy would be evidence of weakness and fear, and the Indian respected only bravery.
He himself had courage, and he had his own viewpoint of honor. I had respect for the Indians. I’d swapped horses with them, fought with them, hunted with them … but the last thing I wanted to see now was an Indian.
On top of the mesa, I drank deep and long at Clover Spring, and then I set out again. Time and again I fell down, and each time it was harder to get up, yet each time, somehow, I managed it. Camp Verde, I knew, was off there to the northwest, and it was on the Verde River, or close to it. The only thing I had in mind was to get to the East Verde River-the same one that saved my neck when I fell-and follow it along to the Verde, then follow that north to the Camp.
All my sense of time was gone. Several times I heard myself talking, and once or twice even singing. My feet didn’t seem to work the way they should, and walking seemed to mean stumbling and falling and getting up again.
And then all of a sudden I was no longer alone. There was an Apache riding on either side of me.
They rode on past and two more came up. They slowed down, walking their horses. They were lithe, bronzed men, dusty from travel, and some of them carried fresh scalps. They did not speak, they did not make any move toward me, they simply watched me out of their flat black eyes. When I fell down they watched me get up. One Apache laughed when I fell and tried to get up, but that was all.
A mile went behind us. I don’t know how many times I fell in that mile, maybe nine or ten times. Each time they waited and let me get up, and I just kept on a-going. The trail finally left the mesa for the East Verde, and the Apaches stayed with me.
When the trail reached the end of Polles Mesa they turned, and one of them rode a horse across in front of me. When I tried to go around him, he backed the horse in. front of me again and, sick as I was, delirious as I was, I understood I was a prisoner. One of them pointed with a lance, and I turned north up the gorge.
After maybe a mile we came to a rancheria. All the Apaches came out, women and children, staring at me. I saw them standing there, and then I took another step and my knee just bent over and threw me on my face.
Something in my mind was for an instant clear and sharp, and something said, ‘Tell, you’re through. They will kill you.”
And then I passed out. I just faded into a black, pain-filled world that softened around the edges until there was no pain, nothing.
chapter four
My eyes had been open for some time before my thoughts fell into place and realization came to me. Over my head was some sort of a brush shelter and I was lying on a couple of deerskins.
Turning my head, I looked down the gentle slope and saw the Apaches. There were six or seven men and twice that many women gathered around a small fire, eating and talking.
It all came back to me then, the Apaches moving up on either side of me, the falling down, the getting up. How long, I wondered, had they followed me?
One of the squaws said something, and a squat, powerfully built Indian got to his feet. He came up the slope, wearing only a headband, breechclout, and the knee-high moccasins favored by the Apache.
He squatted beside me, gesturing toward my leg, the wound on my skull, and my other injuries. And he made the sign for brave man, holding the left fist in front of the body and striking down past it with the right.
“Friend,” I said, “amigo.” He touched the bullet scar on my skull. “Apache?”
“White-eye,” I replied, using the term they gave to the white man. And I added, “I will find him.”
He nodded, and then said, “You hungry?”
“Yes,” I said, and after a moment asked, “How long have I been here?”
He held up three fingers, and added, “We go now.”
“To Camp Verde?”
For a minute there I thought he was going to smile. There was a kind of grim humor in his eyes as he shook his head. “No Camp Verde.” He waved his hand toward the Mogollons. He studied me carefully. “Soldier at Camp Verde.”
He paused while I lay there wondering what was going to happen to me. Would they take me along as a prisoner? Or let me go?
“I need guns,” I said, “and a horse. I can get them at Verde.”
“You very bad,” he said. “You all right now?”
Now that there was a question. To tell the truth, I felt as weak as a cat, but I wasn’t telling him that, so I told him I was all right. He stood up suddenly and dropped a buckskin sack beside me and then walked away. What would come now I didn’t know, and I was too weak to care. So I closed my eyes for a moment and must have passed right out, because when I opened them again it was cold and dark, and there was no smell of fire, no sound or movement.
Crawling from the deerskin bed where I had been lying, I looked all around. I was alone.
They had cared for me, left me, and gone on about their business. I remembered something Cap Rountree had told me once up in Colorado-that there was no accounting for Indians. Most times, finding a white man alone and helpless as I was, they would have killed him without hesitation, unless he was worth torturing first. It was a good chance that they had followed my trail for miles before they caught up, and they were curious about me. There’s nothing an Indian respects more than endurance and courage, and to them that was what I was showing on that trail.
Then I thought of the buckskin sack, and I opened it. My hand, and then a taste, told me it was pinole, so I ate a handful of it and hobbled to the spring to wash it down. When I had eaten another handful or two, I crawled back in my lean-to and went to sleep. When I woke I was ready to go on.
Weak I might be, but I was better off than I had been, and on the fourth day after leaving the Apache rancheria, I made Camp Verde. That day I was on the last of my pinole.
The camp was on the mesa some distance back from the river, and the valley right there was six to seven miles wide. They had a few acres of vegetable garden cultivated, and the place looked almighty good. There was a company of cavalry there, two companies of the Eighth Infantry, and forty Indian scouts under a man named Al Seiber, a powerfully muscled scout who was as much Indian as white man in his thinking.
Well, I was in bad shape, but I made out to walk straight coming up to those soldiers. After all, I’d served through the War Between the States myself, and I didn’t figure to shame my service.
Folks came out of tents and stores to look at me as I came in, and I must have looked a sight. I’d thrown away my pine-branch coat, and was wearing those deerskins around my shoulders. What I’d left of my pants wouldn’t do to keep a ten-year-old boy from shame.
As I came up, there was a man wearing captain’s insignia coming out of the trading post. He was walking with a bull-shouldered man in a buckskin shirt. When the captain saw me he pulled up short