Lord Apache (24 page)

"You—come."

Stumbling into the winter sunshine, rubbing his eyes, he saw the youth who had captured him—Agustín's nephew—waiting. In spite of the chill, the
sobrino
wore only a thin cotton shirt and a breechcloth. He carried a ceremonial lance, and regarded Jack Drumm with an obsidian stare.

"I am Nacho," he murmured.

Jack pulled the remnants of his best woolen suit about him. "Nacho, eh?"

"I am Nacho. You come with me."

"As I remember it, you didn't speak any English when you were tied to that chair down at my ranch along the Agua Fria. As a matter of fact you didn't say anything—just sat there like a carved Buddha!"

Nacho shook his head. "I not know Buddha." He pointed toward the great hut. "You go there. He—
mi tio—
wait."

Inside, the hut was dark and smoky. A fire burned low. In the corners of the structure lay earthenware ollas, scattered furs and blankets, boxes of Springfield ammunition from a looted wagon train. As Jack's eyes became accustomed to the smoky darkness, he saw warriors with painted faces sitting in a ring. A man dropped wood on the fire, kicked it into flame. Fiery tongues leaped up. Sitting on a dais was Agustín himself, Agustín the renegade, the scourge of the Agua Fria. The chieftain wore the high leather hat; twinkling flames reflected from the bits of glass and tin adorning the crown.

When they had first brought him to the camp as a prisoner, Jack Drumm had been very frightened. After a while, unable to maintain the intensity of great fear, fear had turned into despondency, at last almost indifference. Now, standing alone before Agustín himself, he felt fear again. Though the air was cold—the small fire did little to warm the hut—beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead. Fear pervaded his loins also, as if they were filled with an enervating fluid.

"My uncle talk to you," Nacho said, indicating the dais.

In one hand Agustín held a rattle, ornamented with feathers and shells. Around his neck hung the sack of hoddentin, sacred hoddentin, his personal medicine. Sitting cross-legged on the dais, there was great majesty about him. He was broad-chested, large by Apache standards, shiny black hair only slightly tinged with gray. The hawklike nose had been broken in some forgotten fight. Though askew, it gave him a faint resemblance to a woodcut of an ancient Roman senator Jack recalled from a book in his father's library at Clarendon Hall. For a long time Agustín stared unblinking at Jack Drumm, measuring him. Then he spoke.

"Eh?" Jack asked. "What did he say?" His lips were dry, throat parched. His voice sounded strange and husky.

Nacho lingered behind him. "He say—he give you that scar on your face—in a fight."

Jack's fingers moved toward the jagged scar traversing the cheek and ending on his upper lip. The cicatrix seemed to tremble, burn.

"Yes," he admitted. "He did! But he also lost one of his warriors! I buried him near the river, with a stake at his head and his medicine sack hanging from it."

It was sheer bravado. Yet, having said it, he felt better. Nacho translated. Agustín spoke.

"That is so. It was Eskimin you killed. He was old, and not a very good fighter." In a voice high-pitched for such a powerfully built man, Agustín went into a long discourse. Pausing, he looked at his nephew and imperially waved the rattle.

"He says he not know why he lets you live. Maybe, my uncle thinks, it is because he wants to look you. Before—night—everything fighting, all mixed up. But now you prisoner. You stand here, he looks, everybody looks, see what kind of man you are, how—how—"

"Yes?"

Nacho shrugged, a gesture almost Oriental. "How you look when you going to die."

The flush of panic swept through him again but Jack willed himself to resist it.

"Let him take a good look at me," he cried. "He will see how an Englishman faces death!"

Agustín nodded, as if terminating some private thought. Leaning forward, he shook the rattle in imprecation. His voice was rancorous, and from time to time the circle of elders grunted approval.

Jack stood his ground, willing himself not to flinch even when the feathered rattle danced near his face.

"He say, my uncle say," Nacho translated, "you come on his land, along the river, and make camp. He say you stay there, fight his people, kill some. He say he try make you go away, write you—" The youth fumbled for words.

"Letter?" Jack muttered through dry lips.

"I write letter for him. But you do not leave when he asks you."

Outside the hut the wind howled, but inside the heat became stifling. Jack wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief, dabbed at his forehead. A man sitting close to him pulled curiously at the fabric of Jack's trousers, and he jumped. He remembered his brother Andrew's stories about India, how Andrew had once been caught in a crowd of hostile Punjabis and faced them down. He could do no less.

"More people come, camp along the river where our gods live. The horse-soldiers come too, to protect them." Agustín's voice rose to a singsong wail, reciting Apache grievances, describing how his people had been maltreated, cheated, herded onto reservations like animals, when they had once owned all the Territory and the lands beyond.

"Tell him—" Jack interrupted, but was silenced by a hatchetlike sweep of Agustín's brown hand. The chief stood up; the circle of elders chanted a Greek chorus to his lament.

"This world and the sun were made by the gods, by our gods. It ought to be left as it always was. No man has any business to divide it up, to say the Tinneh go here and the Tinneh there, and the white man will take everything else. We have been here for a long time. The gods made us out of clay and water and baked us in the fire of the sun and put us here to stay. Who made the white people?"

Why was Agustín telling him all this? Jack had a prickly feeling at the back of his neck.

"The Tinneh and the earth are the same. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies is the same. We always lived here until you came, you white people. Maybe you think the gods sent you here to do with us what you want. If we thought that was what the gods wanted we would bow our heads and obey. But the gods did not send you!" Agustín clenched his fists at the smoke-blackened roof of the hut. "
They did not send you
!"

Even through the imperfect screen of Nacho's translation the words carried a towering emotional impact. The words were frustrated; they were tortured and despairing, the words of a powerful man whose magic has unaccountably waned. The old men were moved, also. They wailed, some covered their faces with blankets.

Agustín opened his eyes, the knotted fists slowly relaxed. As if recovering from a spell, he looked about him. His bare chest heaved wetly. He seemed smaller, physically smaller. Breathing heavily, he wiped sweating hands on his cotton pants. The feathered rattle fell to the dirt floor.

"Tell him—" Jack said.

No one paid any attention to him. They were watching Agustín. The chorus wailed, and the sound was a dirge. Someone in the circle started what sounded like a protest, but the rest quickly cut him off and looked again to their leader.

"Tell him," Jack insisted again, "tell him I do not come to fight him any more! If the land was his, it is his again. I do not want his land. All I want is—I want the white woman, the woman with the long red hair. I will die if that is what Agustín's gods want, but first he must tell me what happened to the white woman. If she is alive, I want to talk to her. If she is dead—if she has been killed—I want to go where she lies and tell her I am sorry. Will Agustín—" He turned to the elders. "Will anyone tell me about the white woman?"

Agustín made an impatient gesture.

"He does not know anything about a white woman," Nacho translated.

If he were going to die anyway, he might as well speak his mind. "We are different people," Jack said. "We do not see things the same way. But there can be honor among men who fight each other, like the Tinneh and the white men. So I say—anyone who lies is not an honorable man."

Agustín's eyes glittered. "Who is talking about honor? A white man! The white men steal and kill and lie all the time! They give my people sick beef, and tell Two Star Crook we are making trouble! White men are devils, all of them!" He flung something at Jack Drumm. Startled, Jack caught it. It was the Apache knife, the one that had pinned Agustín's threatening note to the hitching post, the scrawled note commanding Jack to leave Rancho Terco.

"My uncle says enough talk now," Nacho murmured.

The elders drew back to the far recesses of the hut. Someone kicked out the fire and dredged the embers away. The great hut was only dimly lit by winter sun filtering through the brush of its construction. Jack looked down at the fine-honed steel.

"You are brave, you talk loud outside!" Nacho said. "My uncle wants to find out if you are brave inside, where no one can see!"

Jack weighed the knife in his hand. So this was it, this was the end. When he and Eggie were in Galati, near Bucharest, he had once seen two gypsies fight with knives in a cafe. He knew nothing of such fighting, remembering only the slain man, stomach slashed open, life spilling from him like oats from a torn sack. He took a deep trembling breath, and hoped his trembling did not show. The knife betrayed him. A reflected glow shimmered on the mud-daubed wall as his hand trembled also.

"I do not know how to fight this way," he muttered.

Nacho did not speak, did not translate his words. It was too late for words. Agustín smiled a hard-lipped smile. The single utterance, almost spat, could mean only one thing.

"Fight!"

The chief stepped like a cat into the cleared circle, holding the knife low, cutting edge uppermost, motioning in a gesture like a snake's forked tongue darting in and out.

"Fight!"

Surely if Agustín wanted to dispose of Jack Drumm all he had to do was signal one of the braves! They would drag him into the open and hack him to death with knives and hatches, not wasting bullets.

"Fight!" Agustín's face contorted with scorn. In a half crouch he darted forward; the menacing knife sliced through the stuff of Jack's coat sleeve and drew blood. Involuntarily Jack drew back, and someone in the circle of elders tittered.

"All right!" he cried. "Damn it all, if that's what you want, you'll get it!"

It was not bravado this time. He was angry, annoyed, humiliated in a way no Englishman could countenance. He tore off the hampering coat, unbuttoned his shirt, and held out his own knife in a reasonable facsimile of the gypsy in the Romanian cafe.

The fight, if so it was called, did not last long. Agustín circled relentlessly, darting in and out and pinking him whenever and wherever he chose. The chief had been born to the knife, the hatchet, the gun. Grinning, he taunted his opponent. The elders shouted jeers and catcalls, much the same as the spectators at the Boxing Club when one of Jem Mace's opponents made a poor showing. Jack was in excellent physical condition, trim and hard-muscled; never in his life had he felt so quick, so alert, so conditioned by the arduous labor at Rancho Terco. Yet these things did not avail. He simply did not know how to fight with a knife.

Sweating and winded, he threw his pale body against Agustín's swarthy one. Knife wrists locked, bodies strained against each other. Lungs laboring, sweat rolling from his brow, he managed to get his heel behind Agustín's naked calf and pushed the chief backward in a hock-trip. But Agustín quickly recovered, only for a moment staggering in lost equilibrium and then gliding forward again. But he spoke to Jack Drumm, a single word. It was an odd thing to say—
Inju
. Jack remembered that word—old Charlie used it a lot.
Inju
. Good!

The elders applauded too, with appreciation of skill even in a white man. Only the
sobrino
, Nacho, remained impassive. From the corner of his eye Jack saw the young man standing somberly in the shadows, arms folded. But Agustín darted snakelike toward him again and he retreated, stepping backward, hoping to let the chief tire himself in the attack. Perhaps something would happen. Agustín might stumble, fall—

The end came quickly. Jack's booted foot caught. He toppled and fell, knife flying from his hand. Perhaps he had tripped on one of the wooden ammunition cases. Perhaps one of the elders, impatient at delay of the final bloodletting, had stuck out a moccasined foot. In any case, details were unimportant. Half stunned, he lay flat, the Apache atop him, bare knees on his chest and knife poised.

Had it been foredestined? Had Clarendon Hall, the public schools, Cambridge, Glasgow, the Grand Tour—all these—were they only preparation to die under a savage knife in the Arizona Territory? Fascinated, he watched the blade poised in midair. The world disappeared, Agustín disappeared, there was only the knife —and John Peter Christian Drumm.

He found himself trying to think of a prayer, a plea to a God whom he would soon meet, but could think of nothing. Nothing, that is, except Phoebe Larkin. He saw again her pale face burned by the sun, the high-piled red hair. He saw the sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the cerulean depths of her eyes. He ought to be commending his soul to an Anglican deity, but there was Phoebe Larkin, smiling at him, eyes wet with tears! Was she there, across the Styx waiting to welcome him with tender arms? Or was she—

Suddenly he knew he could not die in the brush hut under Agustín's knife. He knew Phoebe was alive, and he must go to her. Gathering his muscles, tensing his back, he heaved himself into the air, at the same time shouting to the limit of his lungs. He did not know what he yelled; "God and St. George!" would have been a nice touch. But he shouted, and heaved, and rolled and scrambled to his knees. Agustín, caught unawares, tumbled off him. Jack Drumm sprang like an Indian tiger, reaching for the throat as the tiger did.

Together they rolled on the dusty floor, Agustín's hands vainly trying to break the iron grip on his throat. But Nacho fell quickly on Jack Drumm also, breaking his grip, aiding his uncle. That was unfair, but there it was. Savages knew nothing of fair play. Finally pinioned, Jack stood panting in the middle of the circle, Nacho and some of the elders holding his arms.