Tom Horn And The Apache Kid Page 4

  “Better than the one they had ahead of them,” Horn answered.

  “Yes,” Crane admitted.

  As they walked past the Kid, who was eating some pinole bread, he looked up at them.

  “Hey, Tom,” the Kid smiled, “that young Nellie ain’t bad-looking…in the dark.”

  Horn and Crane kept moving toward Sieber. Al sat across the sliced-up Apache, now secured by strips of wang.

  “Mr. Sieber,” Crane inquired, “when will we get to…the enemy camp?”

  “Tomorrow night,” said Sieber; then he rose and walked away. Crane watched after him for a moment, turning to Tom Horn.

  “Mr. Horn, I wouldn’t say you waste words, but that man won’t spare an extra syllable.”

  “Rheumatism,” Horn remarked.

  “Well,” Crane admitted, “he does know his business.”

  “No better man ever followed a set of tracks,” said Horn, “without leaving any.”

  Chapter Seven

  The next evening just after twilight surrendered to darkness, the troopers silently surrounded Goklaya’s ranchería. The unsuspecting village was anything but silent. Lulled by the seeming security of an international border and isolated within a spectral sanctuary high in the hidden peaks, the warriors, along with their squaws, sweethearts, and children, were celebrating the spring feast of fertility—Fermaga.

  The mountain meadow flickered with dozens of fires and echoed with sounds of jocularity. Music, chanting, dancing. Dogs barked and livestock bellowed and brayed. Tizwin and whiskey overflowed into the mouths of drunken warriors. The Apache braves’ powers of fertility would be tested far into the night, but now they drank and, from the fires, ate venison, goat, and dog.

  Goklaya had posted no sentries.

  Captain Crane had the good sense to deploy his force as Sieber suggested. When the time came, half the command would charge on horse back; the other half on foot and from all directions. A dozen of the best riders would run off Goklaya’s horses, then join the attack.

  Horn inhaled the odor of mesquite smoke and smiled.

  “We can thank the feast of Fermaga. They’ll be at it most of the night.”

  “You think Goklaya’s down there?” Crane asked eagerly.

  “He’s there, all right.” Horn nodded and pointed to the largest wickiup.

  “Ol’ Gray Wolf’d give both his stars to be here now,” the Kid said.

  “Then now’s the time to hit ’em,” Crane volunteered.

  “No,” said Sieber.

  “We hit them to night,” Horn added, “Goklaya’ll melt into the dark.”

  “Well, what do we do?” Crane inquired.

  “May as well get some sleep,” Horn said. “Dawn’s the time. They’ll be dead to the world.”

  “In more ways than one,” the Kid grinned.

  Sieber slept. So did the Apache Kid. Tom Horn lay awake. His eyes followed the descent of a falling star as it disappeared into the blue-black sea of sky.

  Within hours the last of the Apache renegade bands would also fall. There would be blood on grass and rock and stream. The blood of the renegade Indians and of troopers and scouts. That was inevitable. Destined. Would it be Horn’s destiny to die and be buried in some unmarked grave in an unnamed place?

  Tom Horn thought of his dog Shedrik, buried long ago on the Missouri farm of Horn’s youth. Tom’s father still plowed that farm. The elder Horn was of Pennsylvania Dutch stock as hard as the earth he turned for the spring planting. But Tom Horn, unlike his half dozen brothers and sisters, wasn’t meant to be a farmer, to milk cows and spread seed and marry some brood woman who also would bring forth seven sons and daughters.

  Tom hated the hoe his father handed him before his eighth birthday. Even then he yearned for a rifle. He’d often skipped school and followed tracks of rabbit, skunk, coyote, and on rare occasions even a wildcat. When he was twelve Tom got himself a rifle and skipped school even more often. With his dog Shed, he’d follow tracks and bring home game. His strong, stern father usually rewarded him with a whipping while his mother watched silently and without sympathy.

  And often Tom would silently watch the caravan of prairie schooners creaking west through Missouri clay stretching toward the flat prairies, across the muddy Red River, through the vast Llano Estacado, west into the wind-slashed canyons over the Mescalero Ridge, always west—toward their manifest destiny. Tom Horn knew that it would be his destiny, and soon. Meanwhile, he reveled in the stories of Missouri’s living bad men. Frank and Jesse James were still riding and robbing and with them the Daltons and the Youngers, unreformed guerrillas from Quantrill’s Raiders who had splattered Missouri and Kansas red with blood. But the outlaw life never appealed to Tom. He had never stolen so much as a tomato and never would. Tom Horn would earn what he got—not from farming, not out of the land, but off it, hunting.

  When he was fifteen, after scores of whippings, mostly for forgotten reasons, the climax came. A neighbor boy thought it great sport to shoot down dogs. He emptied both barrels of a shotgun into Shed. Tom caught up to his dog’s killer and thrashed him senseless. With tear-flooded eyes, young Tom Horn buried Shed, then went home, only to receive another whipping because his clothes were torn.

  The older man struck his son with a leather harness. This time Tom struck back. But Tom was no match for the bigger, stronger man, who beat him with hammer fists and left him a bloody heap with broken face and ribs.

  A week later, when he could walk, Tom Horn took up his rifle, kissed his impassive mother, said good-bye at Shed’s grave, and sought his own manifest destiny—west.

  While he couldn’t whip his father, Tom was big and strong for his age. He worked his way west on the railroad as a section hand to Dodge City—the Dodge City of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Tom landed a job in a livery stable. He loved horses and would ride every chance he got. Then he got a chance to be a cowboy. He signed on as a drover and helped take a herd to Santa Fe across the trail that John Simpson Chisum had blazed a few years before. In Santa Fe he rode shotgun for Overland Stage and then moved farther west to Arizona. In Prescott he secured a job delivering beef to the Indian agency.

  At Fort Whipple Tom Horn met the man who should have been his father and became just that—Al Sieber, chief of scouts. Al took an immediate liking to the tall, handsome lad who had a natural proclivity for riding, shooting, and hunting. Both men spoke German and Tom managed to pick up a lot of Spanish. He had a quick facility for language.

  With Sieber was a young Indian not quite Tom’s age. Tom heard that the young Apache’s true name was Ski-Be-Han, son of an obscure chief called Togo-De-Chug. Years ago, the chief’s few followers had deserted him and held him up to ridicule, considering him inept, ineffectual and a drunken sot. Even his squaw left Togo-De-Chug and their infant boy and went to live with another brave. The boy suffered the derision and laughter directed at his father until the night the broken chief died drunk in a pigpen.

  Sieber felt sorry for the orphaned lad and took him in. The youngster rarely left Sieber’s side. Sieber was everything the old chief hadn’t been. He was strong and respected. No one laughed at Al Sieber, chief of scouts. The lad wished that Al Sieber was his father. The young Apache learned to speak and think and even feel as a white boy would. Sieber called him Kid, and as he grew his true name was almost forgotten and he became known only as the Apache Kid.

  Tom Horn lay near the now quiet meadow where Goklaya and his followers slept. For some it would be their last before the final sleep. Horn thought of the years since that meeting at Fort Whipple…Sieber, the Apache Kid, and Tom Horn—the Eagle and his claws.…

  Sieber taught Tom Horn how to think like an Indian. At the same time he taught the Apache Kid how to live like a white man. He enlisted them both as scouts more than a de cade ago.

  Together they rode for Crook against the great Apache chiefs Mangas Colorados, Vittoro, Eskiminzin, Loco, Chato, Cochise. All those chiefs were dead now—all but Goklaya.

&
nbsp; And through the years Sieber taught Horn and the Kid what he called the great commandment from nature’s bible: “Every living thing wants to go on living.”

  Every living thing wants to go on living—the Indians in the village below, the troopers and scouts who were now awake and at the ready, the Apache Kid, Al Sieber, and Tom Horn. Yes, Tom Horn wanted to go on living. He reflexively checked his Winchester and his .44. How many lives that wanted to go on living had these weapons taken? Tom never kept track. How long would it be before someone took his life? Tom rarely thought of that prospect—but he thought of it now.

  He also thought of a young woman he had seen but twice and spoken to only once. Not just a brood woman, Shana Ryan was made for more than having children. She was obviously well educated, a capable woman, strong yet feminine. There was something in those eyes that bespoke deep emotion, even passion. Those strange male stirrings swelled in Horn, and he wished he could put his arms around that ripe, well-turned body and feel the warm tenderness of those soft red lips.

  Maybe when he got back to Bowie…if he got back…

  The campfires below were cold white ashes. The warm April dawn spread softly across the moist meadow. From one of the distant wickiups a baby cried but not for long. A mother’s breast provided milk and promised safety and there was silence again.

  The braves below outnumbered the troopers and scouts almost two to one. Then there were the women and children, some of them capable of making war.

  There could be no compromise, no negotiation, no bloodless surrender. If the situation were reversed the Apaches would not hesitate. They would attack and hit hip and high without warning, as they often had on white and Mexican villages and even on their own people.

  Horn looked toward Sieber. The Apache Kid glanced from Horn to Sieber. Captain Crane’s eyes, already grown older, were fastened on the chief of scouts.

  The Eagle gave the signal to attack.

  Chapter Eight

  Horn, astride Pilgrim, followed at hoof and heels by the Apache Kid, led the attack and headed straight for Goklaya’s wickiup. Horn and the Kid kept up an alternating barrage of lead aimed at the wickiup’s entrance. Whoever was in there would have to stay in.

  The village erupted with screams, human and animal, as from every point of the compass death lanced out of the barrels of rifles and guns. The attack was devastating and, from a military point of view, an almost immediate success, turning the quiet village into an abattoir.

  The yelling cavalry charged at Goklaya’s remuda and succeeded in scattering the frightened horses. Several of the wickiups were set afire and the flames and smoke added to the chaos. Dogs barked, babies cried, and squaws screamed because death was not for the braves only. Women and children caught in the crossfire fell upon the already fallen, lifeless bodies of their husbands and fathers.

  Charging horses lurched, twisted, and slipped in the soft, moist earth as troopers flew off their mounts onto the retreating Apache braves.

  Sieber yelled commands, and Captain Crane yelled them again and carried them out. His soldier’s instinct and training prevailed, and Captain Crane never paused to consider the deaths of the innocents, because unless all re sis tance was crushed, he, too, might be dead at any moment.

  Horn and the Kid, both with Winchesters in hand, leaped off their mounts and raced toward the entrance of the large wickiup.

  Goklaya and two squaws were tearing off a back section of the structure as Horn and the Kid smashed through the front entry with pointed rifles. Both squaws, gripping knives, plunged at the intruders. Without hesitation the Kid swung the stock of his Winchester, clubbing one squaw on the side of the skull, as Horn’s rifle butt broke the other squaw’s knife wrist, then plunged into her rib cage, knocking her to the floor.

  Goklaya realized that it was too late to try to fit through the small, jagged rupture at the rear of the wickiup. He spun like a frenzied cat and with the same movement pulled a knife and a Colt .45 from his silver-studded weapons belt.

  Just as Goklaya’s gun cleared the black-leather holster, Horn fired his Winchester. The bullet shattered the barrel of the chief’s Peacemaker, and blood splattered from the palm of Goklaya’s right hand. But the Indian’s left hand, still holding the hunting knife, raced at Horn’s throat with the full weight and strength of Goklaya’s body behind it. The Indian was too quick and too close for Horn to fire his long gun again. But Horn was too quick for Goklaya’s knife, which missed its twisting target by a hairsbreadth.

  Horn and Goklaya fell to the ground, grappling in a whirlwind of fury. The fingers of Horn’s right hand clawed and dug into Goklaya’s wrist as the gleaming blade of the Indian’s knife quivered less than an inch from Horn’s eye. The scout’s left hand grabbed a mass of Goklaya’s hair and tore the chief’s head backward, giving the Apache Kid a clear and unmoving target. The Kid quickly wacked his Winchester’s barrel across Goklaya’s forehead, knocking him off Horn and onto his back.

  In the next instant the tip of the Apache Kid’s long gun pressed against Goklaya’s nose, and the great warrior knew he had been captured.

  Outside in the village, most of Goklaya’s braves who were not already dead suffered the same fate. About a dozen had vanished into the rocks and narrow ridges. The body count, excluding women and children, was at least twice that number. Of the remaining warriors, nearly half had suffered wounds before throwing down their arms in surrender.

  The wails and moans of the wounded and the crying of women and children still pierced the camp as Horn and the Kid stepped out of the wick-iup’s entrance, holding Goklaya between them. Then, as if an unseen blanket smothered the village, there was silence.

  All living eyes, Indians’ and troopers’, froze on the great Apache chief. There was blood on his hand and head.

  Then Sieber motioned to Crane, and the two men moved forward. They stopped a couple of feet from the brace of scouts still holding Goklaya.

  “Captain Crane, meet your prisoner Goklaya,” said Horn. “Around here the Mexicans call him Geronimo.”

  At last Horn had said the word Geronimo. Sieber, the Kid, Crook, and Horn had vowed never to speak that name until the last of the warring Apache chiefs had been subdued. The other officers and men knew and respected that vow. They, too, had sworn never to call him by his bloodstained name until he was dead or captured.

  Now the deed was done. The word could be spoken. Geronimo stood captured, bloodied but unbent. By sight his age was indeterminate. He might not have been fifty, but actually he was more than sixty. He was tall, nearly six feet, and broad of chest. He had a terrifying countenance, with black, bullet-hole eyes that reflected cunning and hate but never fear—even now. He had a hawk nose and a thin slash of mouth that, because of an old wound, drooped to the right in a perpetual sneer.

  Geronimo had been captive before, but never before by force. Always he had surrendered voluntarily, when it suited him—when the snows painted the peaks above the timberline and winter drew close and cold. When there was no grass to graze his herds, no food to feed his followers and no ammunition to kill his enemies, Geronimo would call for a yoshte with the white man’s army. He would agree to go back to San Carlos and be a reservation Indian. A good Indian.

  And then in the spring, with full bellies, Geronimo and his followers would bolt the reservation on stolen horses, with guns and ammunition enough to start a new war until he wanted to surrender again.

  But this time he hadn’t wanted to surrender. Geronimo had been beaten by those more cunning and crafty and as cruel as he. There were the dead women and children as testament to that cruelty. Geronimo had not only been captured, but he had been humiliated. He stared at the Apache Kid, then spoke.

  “Hayasaha-more.”

  “What did he say?” Captain Crane asked.

  “Nothing much,” Horn answered. “He swears to kill the Kid.”

  Geronimo turned his face and spoke to Horn. “Nan-Tan-Lupan.”

  “Gray Wolf’s busy,”
Horn replied. “He sent us little lambs instead.”

  “Yoshte, Nan-Tan-Lupan,”Geronimo said.

  “You can tell that to Captain Crane. And you’ll have to tell him in American.”

  Geronimo looked at the young captain.

  “I want to talk with my friend General Crook.”

  The young captain spoke with surprising authority. “You’ll have to talk with General Nelson Appleton Miles.”

  Chapter Nine

  Fort Bowie turned out in full parade for the proceedings. At Sieber’s suggestion, Captain Crane had sent a rider north across the border to dispatch word of Geronimo’s capture.

  But strangely there were no cheers at the sight of the returning troopers, scouts and their prisoners. The civilians, soldiers, miners, and other citizens of Fort Bowie stood without words at the wonder of the event. Geronimo and the remnants of the bloodiest brigade of renegades in the southwest— or anywhere—marched to the beat of hooves and drums. They were horse less and weary, many of them still streaked with the now brown-dry smears of their own blood.

  As the procession moved past Ryan’s store, Horn looked for Shana. She was there on the porch. She smiled, even more beautifully than Tom remembered. This time there was no mistaking the wave. Horn touched the brim of his hat and rode with the rest toward headquarters.

  General Nelson Appleton Miles stood in full and splendid regalia, shiny as a newly minted silver dollar. Somewhere he had liberated a long white feather of some sort, and apparently in the belief that it added a splash of dash, bravado, or gaiety, he had planted it at a jaunty angle on the brim of his cavalry hat. In truth, it looked ridiculous.

  Captain Crane saluted and spoke to his commanding officer. “General Miles, your prisoner. Geronimo.”

  Besides raiding, killing, mating, smoking, and drinking, Geronimo was partial to talking. He considered himself an outstanding orator, the equal of Satanta, the Kiowa chief who was known as the Great Orator of the Plains. On the occasions of his past surrenders Geronimo had publicly speechified for the better part of an hour on the merits of his case. He saw no reason to make an exception in the present situation.