Don Luis walked over to me and held up his hand, and I took it. “Vaya con dios,
amigo,” he said gravely, and then he lifted a hand to the men at the gates and
they swung them wide.
We went through the gates with a rush at the same instant as all sixteen men
fired. Some had targets chosen, having spotted lurking Apaches, others fired at
bits of likely cover.
We hit the trail running, with Spanish Murphy and myself in the lead. I saw the
dark form of an Apache rise up almost directly before me and chopped down to
fire with my pistol, but the horse struck him and knocked him rolling. A hoof
spurned his body, and then we were past and running, with the vaqueros on the
wall picking targets from those we drove from hiding.
The tall pine was a mile off, and we rode directly for it through the half-light
of the early dawn. We covered that mile at a dead run, slowing to a trot as we
neared the tree. I glanced around swiftly.
“How is it? Are we all here?” I asked.
“I was the last one,” Battles said. “We all made it.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“They burned my shoulder,” Rocca said. “It is nothing.”
So I led them away at a fast trot for a little way, then I ran the horses again
for a good half-mile, slowed to a trot and then a walk, then ran them again.
At noon we drew up at a small seep that came from the base of a grass-covered
dune. We watered our horses, exchanged saddles to fresh horses, and pushed on.
We kept a good pace, riding wide of any places of ambush, and watching for dust
clouds. There were bandits as well as Indians to be feared, and there were
soldiers, too, who might resent our being here. All this while the children did
not cry, they did not once call out. The Apaches had taught them that, if
nothing more.
At midafternoon we rode into a deserted village. The ruins of a large adobe
still stood, and a half-completed church. There was water running in an
irrigation ditch.
In a corner of one of the houses was a skeleton, still half-clothed, of a
Mexican who had died fighting. The left arm of the skeleton showed a break that
had mended badly, leaving the arm shorter and crooked.
Tampico looked at it then at the dried leather of the holster on which an
initial had been carved. It was a large B.
“So this is where it happened, Benito,” he said, and then glancing around at me,
he said, “I knew him. He was a bad one, but brave.”
We made coffee there, and a hot soup from the jerked beef, and some corn,
potatoes, and onions found in the deserted fields, now gone to weeds. We ate
quickly, but we ate well.
Spanish wiped his hands on his chaps and looked at me. “Let’s be gettin’ on,” he
said. “There’s a smell of death about this place.”
John J. Battles was already in his saddle, waiting. We mounted up and moved out,
riding fresh horses again, so as to use none of them too hard.
It was hot and still in those late hours of the day, and the dust did not rise.
Suddenly Murphy indicated a place on the horizon where a blue-gray finger of
smoke made a question mark against the mountains. It was ahead of us off to the
east. We knew what it meant, and we pressed on, picking up the north star for
guiding, following it as best we could, with what the terrain offered. After
midnight we stopped among some willows and made dry camp in an arroyo.
Short of daybreak we were in the saddle again, and pushing on. We passed a
village off to our right.
“Tres Alamos,” Rocca said. Three Cottonwoods … it was the name of many
villages. Later we passed near another village, but avoided it, for there was no
time for answering questions, and they would not like us bringing the Apaches on
them. This was Senokipe — hollow tree. I loved the names the country gave, the
sound of them made music to the ear. Santa Rosalia … Soledad … Remedies …
Soyopa … Nacori … Chimala … Kiburi. Okitoa, a sparrow hawk’s nest, Batuco,
a waterhole, Cumuripa, a rathole … Matape, the red cliff, and Bacadeguatzi,
meaning “at the white mountain.” The men who came first to this land used the
names descriptive of it, the names that grew as naturally from the land as the
cottonwood, the willow, or the ocotillo. Dawn came up in crimson light over the
eastern mountains, it flushed the mountainsides with a kind of dull flame.
“I don’t like it,” Rocca muttered gloomily. “It looks like blood.”
In the next hour we counted three smokes … three and an answering smoke.
We stopped at a small creek, watered the horses, and shifted saddles.
“If anything goes wrong,” I said to Dorset, “you take the children and ride for
the border. Harry can handle his own horse and one of the youngsters.”
Rocca turned in his saddle. “I can smell Apaches. They have been by this way,
and not long since.”
Murphy chuckled. “You’re dreamin’, boy. Nobody can smell that good.”
“They have been here,” Rocca insisted. “And they will come again.”
Now that we were further north, the grass was sparser, there were bare
sandhills, and the bare brown-red rock of the mountains was streaked with the
white of quartz. The sun was hot two hours before noon. The air was still,
nothing stirred anywhere. Dancing heat waves emphasized the dead quiet.
My skin crawled. Again and again I shifted my rifle to wipe the sweat from my
hands. Sweat streaked the dust on the faces of my companions, and the sweat
trickling down my spine was cold and clammy under the slight stir of wind. I
tried to assay our chances and came up empty.
John J. Battles suddenly spoke. “I’d like to see the leaves turning red and gold
again, and hear the wild geese honk.”
“You’re thinking of a northern land,” Spanish Murphy said. “I remember a time
like that in Wyomin’. I drove a herd east from Oregon.”
Dorset edged close to me. “Tell,” she said softly, “do you think we’ll make it?”
I did not want to talk, it was a time for listening. “We’ve had luck so far,” I
answered.
We switched horses again and pushed on through the nooning time — four bold but
lonely men, a girl scarcely become a woman, and the youngsters, four of them.
With the spare horses, three per rider, and our pack horse, we made a solid
bunch. Our other pack horse had long since been lost.
Somewhere, still far off to north of us, lay the border, a thin line drawn on
maps, and a thin line in our consciousness, but a strong one across our lives.
North of it there might be help. And further north still there was sanctuary.
We slowed the horses to a walk. It was very hot. The sun was lost in a brassy
sky.
I think we all knew that the Apaches would come. We could elude a few, but we
could not elude them all. The Apache had no regard for horse flesh. He would
ride a horse to death and then eat him, so he rode often at a killing pace. And
there were the talking smokes, speaking across the distance.
I did not hate the Apache. He was my enemy as I was his because of the time and
the circumstances, but he was a fighting man, and a strong man who endured much
to live in this country. If they captured us they would kill us. There would be
torture for the men, worse perhaps for the girl, but it was their way of life,
and you judge each man by his time and his way of life.
We walked our horses while the saddles creaked, and we blinked our eyes to see
past the sting of the salty sweat trickling into them. Dark stains showed on our
shirts. We drank water from our canteens, and kept on.
We knew there was a waterhole ahead. Rocca knew where it lay, Spanish knew, and
I knew. We thinned out as we rode nearer, and we cut for sign, but found none.
We could see a cottonwood up ahead, and a small clump of willows. Off to the
east, fifty yards or more from the waterhole, rose a bare upthrust of rocks
perhaps half a mile long, and not more than a hundred yards wide for most of its
length.
Pulling up, I studied those rocks. “That waterhole now,” I said. “If somebody
was up in those rocks anybody at the waterhole would be a sitting duck.”
“We got to have water,” Murphy said.