body wouldn’t have to worry, but knowing Apaches the way we did, we knew that
twenty of them could be hidden out there in a matter of yards, and nobody the
wiser.
We were taking our time, saving our horses. An Apache, who often rode his horses
to death, will make sixty to seventy miles a day if he’s in a hurry. On foot
he’ll cover thirty-five to forty miles a day even in rough country. That was
about what we were doing a-horseback.
About an hour after dark, we rode down into a little hollow choked with mesquite
brush and built ourselves a tiny fire of dried wood and made coffee. The fire
was well hidden in the hollow and the brush, and it gave us a chance to get the
coffee we dearly needed.
“What you think?” Rocca said suddenly. “One rider?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, “a small man or a boy.”
“What are you talking about?” Battles asked.
“We’ve been picking up tracks,” I told them. “A shod horse. A small horse, but a
good one. Moves well … desert bred.”
“Injun, on a stolen horse,” Spanish said promptly. “No white man would be ridin’
alone in this neck of the woods.”
Rocca shrugged doubtfully. “Maybe so … I don’t know.”
Those tracks had been worrying my mind for quite a few minutes, for whoever rode
that horse was riding with caution, which meant it was no Apache. An Apache
would know he was in country where his people were supreme, and although he
would keep alert, he would not be pausing to scout the country as this rider
was.
In my mind I was sure, and I knew Rocca was sure, that the rider was no Indian.
Unless, maybe, an Indian child.
When the desert sun was gone the heat went with it, and a coolness came over the
land. The horses, quickened by the cool air, moved forward as eagerly as if they
could already smell the pines of the Sierra Madre. From time to time we drew up
to listen into the night.
About an hour before daylight we gave our horses a breather. Rocca, squatting on
his heels behind a mesquite bush, lit a cigarette cupped in the palm of his hand
and glanced at me. “You know the Bavispe?”
“Yes … we’ll hit at the big bend … where she turns south again.”
Tampico Rocca knew this country better than I did. After all, he was half
Apache, and he had lived in the Sierra Madre. Battles was sleeping, and Spanish
he went over to listen to the night sounds, away from our voices. I was hot and
tired, and was wishing for a bath in that river up ahead, but it wasn’t likely
I’d get one.
Rocca was quiet for a spell, and I settled back on the sand and stared up at the
stars. They looked lonely up there in the nighttime sky, lonely as we were down
here. I was a solitary man, a drifter across the country, with no more home than
a tumbleweed, but so were we all. We were men without women, and if all the
nights we’d spent under a roof were put together they would scarcely cover four
or five weeks.
Men have a way of drifting together without much rhyme or reason, just the
circumstances of their living brings them together, just as we had been brought
together in Yuma. Now the three of them were chancing their lives to lend me a
hand, but that was the way with western men, and chances were I’d have done the
same for them.
We started on again when the first streaks of dawn were coloring the eastern
sky. The cactus began to be separate from the other shadows, and the rocks stood
out, dark and somber. We rode single file, nobody talking until the gray sky was
yellowing overhead, and then in a quiet corner we stopped, found a place to hide
a fire, and made a small breakfast
We were careful to build our fire in a hollow and under a mesquite bush, where
the rising smoke would be dissipated by the branches overhead … though using
dry wood there was little smoke. Our time for hot meals was about over. Barring
some sort of accident, we should soon come up to the Bavispe. Once we crossed
that we would be in the heart of Apache country, with them on every side of us.
The Apache, in a sparse, harsh land where raising any crops was mighty nigh
impossible, turned to raiding and robbing.
Generally, the men I’d heard talk of the Indian thought it was taking his land
that ruined him. As a matter of fact, it had much to do with it, for an Indian
couldn’t live on a fixed ten acres or a hundred acres and live as he liked. He
needed lots of hunting ground, and country that would support fifty Indians
would support ten thousand planting white men.
But the Indian was whipped the first time one of them had a rifle for his own.
It was the trader who whipped the Indian by giving or selling him things he
couldn’t make himself. From that time on, the Indian was dependent on the white
man for ammunition, for more guns, for more of the things he was getting a taste
for. It was good sitting there in the cool of early morning, with the faint
smell of woodsmoke in the air, the smell of frying bacon, the smell of good
coffee. We were taking a chance, but we had scouted the country with care.
“How old’s the boy?” Spanish asked suddenly.
“Five … I think. About that.”
“You think he’s still alive, Tamp?” Battles asked.
Rocca shrugged. “Depends on whether he’s a nervy kid, maybe. We’ll pick up some
tracks soon.”
“Seen any more of that strange rider?” Battles asked. “I been watching for
tracks all morning.”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t seen any.”
“What’s it like up yonder?” Spanish asked.
“Oaks … then pines. Running streams, rocks. All anybody could want but grub.
They have to bring it in. They get it from the Mexicans, or they kill them.” He
gestured. “The Apaches have almost cleared this part of Sonora of the Mexicans.
At least the rich ones. And the poor ones can only stay if they’ll provide food
for the Apaches.”
My thoughts went back over the desert to Laura. She was a pretty woman, and she
was brave … holding herself up, like she did, with her little boy lost, and
all. But somehow she left me uneasy. But I was never very comfortable around
women … except Ange. And the Trelawney girls I’d known back home in the hills.
We sat there quiet a little longer, listening to the horses cropping at the
shrubs. Rocca was smoking and squinting at the hills around.
None of us knew what might be waiting for us up yonder. Even if we found the boy
alive, we still had to get him from the Apaches and get him back across the
border. Our chances were none too good. I looked over at Rocca and said, “Shall
we move out?”
He rubbed his cigarette into the sand, and got up.
Me, I just stood there a moment or two thinking. All of a sudden I wished I was
somewhere else. We were facing up to a lot of hell, and I looked forward to none
of it. Besides, there was something about this whole affair that made me mighty
uneasy.
We crossed the Bavispe and took a thin trail that led up through scattered oaks,
along steep switchbacks toward the pines. The only sound was the chirping of
birds, the grunting of one of the horses over a steep part of the trail, or the
clatter of a falling rock.
For an hour we climbed, pausing several tunes to let the horses catch their
breath. Finally we rode out on a bench under the pines where stood the ruins of
stone houses built of rough lava blocks with no mortar. There were at least a
dozen of them in sight, and maybe more back under the trees. The walls were of a
sort of gray felsite, and here and there one appeared to be better built than
the others, as though built by different hands, by different thinking.
Rocca indicated a slight depression in the grass near one of the walls. “We’re
still on the trail.”
A crushed pine cone looked as if it had been scarred by a sharp-shod hoof. There
were other signs too.
The country here was wild and rugged, and we saw no water. We were now over six
thousand feet up, judging by the growth around us, and still we climbed. The
trail occasionally wound along a rim with an almost sheer drop falling off on
one side or the other. We rode with our rifles in our hands, our boots light in