The Colonel's Lady Page 7

  Nobody came out of the guardhouse at the last minute to say that Trooper Matthew Reardon was under arrest and was to be held for general court-martial for the offense of attacking an officer's wife. I had expected it, but it didn't happen. I tried to put it out of my mind.

  By eight o'clock we had already sweated ourselves dry, and the order was to drink from our canteens only on a command from Captain Halan. We rode north and west from the fort, across the great boulder-strewn desert and into the barren, bleak foothills of the White Mountains. Early that morning we crossed what had once been a telegraph line—Larrymoor's only connection with the outside world—and the poles had been burned to the ground and the bright copper wire was cut in a thousand places. Morgan grinned widely when he saw it.

  The men rode alert that first day, keeping wary eyes on the high, ragged peaks to the north where Kohi's Coyoteros—the White Mountain Apaches—had their stronghold. Near sundown that day the Papago scout pointed to the west, where a sheer, almost invisible column of smoke climbed leisurely into an endless sky. We watched the column part cleanly, as if it had been cut off with a knife, and after a moment another column began to rise. The smoke seemed harmless and very far away.

  “Sergeant Skiborsky,” Halan said, “take two men and go up ahead with the scout. If there is any trouble you know what to do.”

  “Yes, sir,” Skiborsky said, kneeing up.

  “The Boulder Springs are no more than two miles ahead. We'll bivouac there for the night if everything is all right.”

  “Yes, sir,” Skiborsky said again. He wheeled his horse out of column, studying faces as they passed. “Reardon,” he said, “you and Morgan.”

  I must have shown surprise that he would select, two green men to go with him that far ahead of the main column. “You might as well find out now,” he said, grinning, “what this country is like.” He turned to the Papago. “All right, Juan, let's go.” The Indian kicked his pony and we left the column behind at the gallop.

  After about a mile the country began to get more ragged and dangerous than ever and we slowed to a walk. Finally we got down and led our horses around and over the high-piled boulders. The Indian, traveling lighter and faster, forged on ahead of us.

  Morgan frowned. “I don't like trustin' that redstick so much.”

  “Papagos?” Skiborsky said, looking around. “They haven't been at war with Americans for years. Juan's all right.”

  “Is that his real name?” I asked. “Juan?”

  “Sure. A lot of Papagos have Mexican names. Some Apaches too, for that matter.”

  We moved on and pretty soon we saw an enormous hill, almost a mountain, that looked to be nothing but one great boulder piled on top of another. We topped a rise and headed down into a rocky ravine, and there we saw Juan on his belly drinking from a small pool of water. We headed straight for the spring.

  “Hadn't we better scout this place first?” Morgan said.

  “Juan's already done it, and a lot better than any of us could. There's nothing Apaches like better than killin' Papagos and Pimas. They call them converted Indians. They consider them a disgrace to the Indian race for takin' up with the white men.”

  We stopped at the springs and drank and filled our canteens. Juan took the blanket from his pony's back— the only saddle he used—and cut the sweat from the animal's chest and shoulders with the edge of his hand. He could have been the only living thing for miles around, for all the attention he paid us.

  “Morgan,” Skiborsky said, “can you find your way back to the column?”

  “What the hell do you think I am, a dude?”

  “All right, get back and tell Captain Halan it's all right to bring the patrol in. There's no sign of Kohi.”

  Morgan took a brown twist of tobacco from his shirt pocket—the only kind we could get at the sutler's store —broke off a small piece, and rolled it between his hands to crumble it. He poured the flakes into a charred brier pipe, tamping it carefully, taking his time, plainly daring Skiborsky to tell him to hurry.

  The Sergeant said, “Unbit and unsaddle, Reardon. We'll stay here until the column comes.” Morgan, in good time, lighted his pipe, climbed back in the saddle, and rode off.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” Skiborsky asked after we had set the horses to grazing beside the pool.

  “Morgan? I didn't know him until he got in the wagon outside of Tucson.”

  We filled our own pipes and sat down against a boulder, watching Juan inspect his pony. “He's askin' for trouble,” Skiborsky said finally. “Most men get all the trouble they want in a place like Larrymoor, but Morgan goes on askin' for it.” He puffed thoughtfully. “If the telegraph was up, maybe we'd find out why.”

  I remembered the way Morgan had grinned when he saw the telegraph lines down. “What do you mean?”

  “I figure the law's after him. Government law, probably. He knows his days are numbered, because sooner or later that telegraph will go up again and we'll have a connection with the outside world.”

  “I didn't think civilian law bothered men in an outpost like Larrymoor.”

  “It depends on what the crime is.”

  We sat there for a while, saying nothing. Skiborsky, it seemed, could be as changeable as a chameleon. He could be an iron-hard sergeant, or a drunken clown, or, on rare occasions, he could be the way he was now, easy to talk to and thoughtful and human. Right now I had a feeling that Skiborsky was actually worrying about Morgan and what was going to happen to him. But tomorrow, I knew, the feeling would be gone.

  I watched Juan as he finished rubbing his pony down with his blanket. He was a pretty good size for a Papago, slightly larger than most Apaches but not as thick or big as a Comanche. He wore regulation cavalry pants—without cutting the front and seat out of them, the way Apaches did—and soft buckskin moccasins and a leather vest. His heavy, long-muscled arms were weighted with silver bands and bangles, and around his neck was a sacred necklace of elk's teeth. A battered cavalry campaign hat sat square on his head. Quietly he replaced the blanket on the pony's back, swung up gracefully, and rode away from the springs.

  “Where's he going?”

  “I never ask Juan where he's going,” Skiborsky said. “If it's important he'll tell somebody.”

  After a while we began to hear the complicated sounds of loose steel and screeching saddle leather and stumbling hoofs and we knew that the patrol was nearing the springs.

  “Where's Juan?” Halan asked, after he had dismissed the column and given instructions for setting up the camp.

  “He rode off, sir. He didn't say where.”

  “Any Indian sign around here?”

  “Not a thing, sir. I guess Kohi's goin' to stay in his stronghold after all.”

  But Halan shook his head, looking vaguely worried. “I don't know. We saw some more smoke. They're worked up about something. I wish I knew what it was and what Kohi was going to do about it.”

  The men began building squad fires and putting on the spiders to cook their supper before the sun went down. The horses were put on a picket line and Halan called to Lieutenant Loveridge. “Mr. Loveridge, will you take evening stables?”

  “Yes, sir.” The Lieutenant began checking the mounts for cuts and bruises and fatigue and the hundreds of other subtle but fatal illnesses that horses are heir to. The men began taking heavy bags of forage from behind their saddles for feeding. The sun was still high, I noticed, as I worked beside Morgan. I dreaded to see night come, for night is the time for thinking, and Caroline was there in the back of my mind, waiting to come out.

  “There's Juan now, sir,” Skiborsky said to Captain Halan. “Up there on the ridge. You can just see him.” We all looked up, seeing the small figure silhouetted on the ridge against the fading sky. He rode his pony in a small tight circle. He completed the circle three times.

  “He's spotted something,” Skiborsky said.

  Halan nodded. “It looks like it. Take the men you had before, Sergeant, and we'll go up
and have a look.”

  So we got our horses from the picket line and saddled up again and rode up to where the Papago scout was waiting. We had no trouble spotting the thing that was bothering Juan. Down the rocky grade, on the other side of the ridge, a swarm of vultures glided sluggishly, heavy-winged, around and around. Halan took off his hat and wiped his face with his yellow handkerchief.

  “I guess we'd better go down,” he said quietly.

  We kneed down the grade carefully, keeping wary eyes on the high ground around us. Most of us, after finishing the schooling at Larrymoor, had learned something about Indians, and especially about Kohi and his Coyoteros. The subject of Indians was brought up in all conversations when two or more troopers got together; it dominated all discussion and most of the thinking. And long recitals were heard about Indian torture and savagery.

  Around Tucson it had been Cochise and his Chiricahuas. Or maybe the Pinaleno. And the newspapermen wrote long stories about the Army campaigns against them and sent the stories back east to be printed in the big-city papers. But in the White Mountains it was different. There was no publicity up here, and Army officers avoided Larrymoor like the plague. There was little chance for advancement, and no chance at all for glory. But there were plenty of chances to fight and die, if that was what you were looking for.

  We learned quickly that most of the officers were bitter, with reason, but the men for the most part took it philosophically, for there was no other place for them to go. Some of them—like Morgan, maybe—almost dreaded the day when peace would come to the frontier north of the Gila. It was their last stronghold, too, in the face of the oncoming tide of “civilization,” just as it was with Kohi and his White Mountain Apaches. They fought to the death and showed no quarter, the troopers and the Indians, but they had one thing in common: They both had learned to hate the white settlers now coming into the Arizona country.

  I could see that hate now on Skiborsky's face, for he had already guessed what we would find at the bottom of the grade. The vultures, startled, flapped noisily and rose heavily into the air as we approached. We saw then that it had been an Apache camp—a permanent camp, more or less, for the wickiups had been laid out in orderly rows, like an army camp. The wickiups had all been burned. Burned, and scattered, and hacked, and strewn all over the floor of the valley.

  We found more than twenty fairly new graves at the far end of the camp, the mounds covered with the vulture-cleaned bones of horses. Halan looked shaken, almost sick.

  “Well,” he said flatly, “we know now what Kohi is mad about.”

  It was pretty clear what had happened, but the Captain sent Juan out to scout the nearby valleys before any of us put it into words. It didn't take Juan long to find what he was looking for. He reported that there were traces of a wagon train—twelve to fifteen wagons in it—less than a mile to the east. The trace, Juan guessed, was nearly a month old.

  So the pieces fitted together. The men from the wagon train had attacked the Apache village, burned it, scattered it, killed everybody they could find—women and children and old men, mostly, because the signs showed that the braves had been away at the time of the attack. Hunting, probably. Anyway, the wagon train would never have made the move if the warriors had been there.

  Skiborsky cursed softly as we kicked around through the ashes. “So this is the white man's civilization,” he said bitterly. “You can't blame Kohi much, I guess, for not wanting any part of it.”

  “How about that wagon we saw coming from Tucson?” Morgan said.

  “Part of this same wagon train, probably, that had to stop with a busted axle or something. Whether it was or not wouldn't have made any difference to Kohi, though. His village had already been sacked and burned. His old warriors and women and children already killed. What puzzles me is why he hasn't raised more hell than he has.”

  “Maybe this'll teach him to go back to his reservation and stay there,” Morgan grunted.

  “What would he do on a reservation? They can starve in the summer. And in the winter they can freeze. While the 'Indian experts' in Washington fiddle away time and rob him blind.”

  Halan, hearing that, said, “That's enough of that, Skiborsky.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Juan was grinning widely, for the Papagos and Apaches were bitter enemies. He poked here and there among the burned-out wickiups while Halan got the thing organized enough in his mind to make a report. The vultures circled lazily above us and began to drift away. There was nothing for them now. Apaches always bury their dead where they fall, if possible, and that was what they had done here. They had cut the throats of the dead men's horses and poured the blood on the graves and left the dead horses beside them in the belief that the animals would serve the dead in the next world. But the horses were picked clean now. And the vultures drifted, watching, waiting.

  It was near dark when we headed back toward the bivouac. We saw another gauzy column of smoke rise gracefully in the distance. But what was being said with the smoke we could only guess.

  Sleep came slowly that night to most of us. Mountain darkness came down suddenly and cold and we lay in our blankets listening to the mournful barking of coyotes in the distance—wondering if they were really coyotes or Apaches. The coyotes themselves couldn't tell. Larrymoor and Weyland and Caroline seemed a long way off. I wondered what the Colonel would have thought up for me by the time we got back to the fort. If we got back. As I listened to the coyotes, it didn't seem very important.

  Reveille was at four o'clock that morning. Skiborsky came around and gave every sleeping trooper a heavy cavalry boot in the ribs.

  “Rise and shine, buckos. See to your carbines and stand by until you get other orders from the Captain.”

  We got up numbly in the before-dawn cold of the mountains and took our prepared places around the patrol area, waiting for the sun. Dawn is the favorite time of attack for Apaches. They almost never attack at night, believing that a warrior killed in darkness will wander in darkness forever in the afterlife. After a while the guards came in, stiff and evil-tempered with the cold, and took their places behind rocks or boulders or brush, to wait.

  Nothing happened. The sky paled in the east, and after a long wait the sun popped brilliant and blazing over the ridges, and the men began to relax their death holds on their carbines.

  “Juan,” Halan called, “you'd better go out and see what you can find.”

  The Papago padded off on foot, as silently as a cat, and we all held our places. After fifteen or twenty minutes he came back and said there was sign of Apaches in the nearby hills, but they had pulled out during the night.

  We fed our horses and watered them and inspected them and doctored them, and after all that was done we had ten minutes to cook breakfast, eat it, and get in the saddle.

  “How do you like the cavalry?” Skiborsky grinned at Morgan.

  “Go to hell!”

  It was the fourth day out that Juan came back from a lone scout looking excited and more than a little worried. He led us up to some high ground and pointed to some smudged, meaningless traces. Halan and Skiborsky got down and inspected the traces thoroughly, while Juan prowled around the area, breaking up animal droppings with a stick.

  Halan looked up. “Chiricahua?” he asked the scout. Juan nodded. The Chiricahuas shod their ponies with stiffened, iron-hard rawhide. The trace was simple to identify.

  “How long ago?”

  The scout shrugged. About as long as it took a white man to eat four or five times. A day and a half, or thereabouts.

  “It doesn't make much sense, sir.” Skiborsky frowned. “What would Chiricahuas be doin' up here in Coyotero country?”

  “Maybe they're renegades, Sergeant.”

  “Maybe, sir, but I thought the Cochise renegades were goin' with Geronimo down in Mexico.”

  Halan stood up slowly and beat some dust from his sweaty campaign hat. “It could be,” he said thoughtfully, “that Kohi is offering them something up he
re in the White Mountains that not even Geronimo can offer them. But don't ask me what that something could be, Skiborsky. I don't know.”

  We came out of the mountains that day and met an E Company patrol in a dry creek bed and bivouacked with them for the night. The next day we cut another wide swath across the desert and headed back for Larrymoor.

  Once out of the mountains, we felt safe from attack. The men dozed in their saddles, sweated dry and dumb with fatigue. We smelled of horses and stale sweat, and were filthy with the peculiar clinging filth of the desert, and we were crawling with a hundred different kinds of sand lice that we had picked up in the brush. We didn't look much like soldiers, toward the end of the sixth day. We looked and felt more like a band of saddle tramps, and the men became irritable, and our thighs became chafed from the incessant friction of saddle leather, and our nerves wore raw as we listened to the everlasting rattle of loose steel and the grunting of the horses.

  Even Halan became drugged with fatigue and heat. He rode slouched and heavy at the head of the straggling column, fully aware that such riding would likely cost him the service of a good horse because of saddle sores, but sunk too deep in apathy to care. Ten minutes of every half hour we loosened our cinches and led our mounts, and our feet became sore, for thin-soled cavalry boots were never made to walk in. Not over the gravel and rocks of the desert.

  Fifteen minutes of every hour we dismounted and un-bitted and grazed. We did it, not thinking of our horses, because it was cavalry routine. We did it automatically and dumbly, thinking ahead to the time when we would see Larrymoor again. The men wondered out loud if the pay wagon had got through from Fort Hope, in the New Mexico country. And if the pay wagon hadn't got through, would the sutler extend credit until it did? Then we would bit up, tighten cinches, climb wearily into the McClellans, and ride again.

  Kohi must have known how men feel near the end of a desert patrol. Because that was when he hit us.

  Kohi must have smiled as he saw us straggling raggedly into the rocky draw. Later, I imagined that I had picked Kohi out of that swarming band of Indians firing down on us from the jagged walls of the draw, and I imagined that I had seen him smiling. But it was only imagination, of course.