“Yep. He left no one alive here to pull a trick like that again.”
Hearsay held that Red Sleeves took his name from a scarlet shirt he once had owned, but Rafe thought otherwise. He imagined the chief's sleeves scarlet with the blood of both the guilty and the innocent.
Rafe looked around at the Americans, their own sleeves
rolled up, digging and hammering and hewing. “Looks like old Red Sleeves has decided to let bygones be bygones.”
Rafe, Absalom, and Caesar, with Pandora riding behind him, followed a trail up into the mountain overlooking the mines. Stands of cedars scented the air. Streams cascaded between the willows and cottonwoods at the bottoms of shallow canyons. Birds sang. Rafe was always struck by the difference between the scenery in the mountains and the desert below, as though Heaven and Hell were within sight of each other.
In a meadow of sweet grama grass, fifty or sixty ponies grazed. They had burrs in their tails and skepticism in their eyes, and if a coyote had run under them, he would hardly have cleared their bellies. They would have looked just as at home in a Mexican corral, which was probably where they came from.
“Do you see your two horses?” Rafe asked.
“Nope. I reckon the chief has them up one of those red sleeves of his,” said Absalom.
Rafe could see why Red Sleeves refused to leave this place, even though white men had despoiled the valley below. In a grove of cedars stood the clusters of hide-covered tipis, arbors, and domed brush shelters. Naked children raced back and forth. Smoke and the smell of roasting horse meat snagged in the branches above. Rafe looked for Pandora's reaction, but she would have made a formidable poker player.
The women gave them sideways glances. The men stood or squatted in groups and smoked cigarillos. They looked as though they were engaged in what Texans called swapping lies. They ignored the three men, but the children gathered in clumps to watch them approach.
Caesar turned to help Pandora off the horse, but she hand already slipped down. Without a backward glance, she limped to the nearest group of women tending a cook fire. They acted as though she had just come back from the river with water.
“You didn't expect gratitude, did you, Caesar?” Rafe asked.
“I di'nt do it for the thanks, suh.”
“Should we explain how we came to have the woman?” asked Absalom.
“They'll get the story from her.”
An individual rose from the fog of smoke surrounding the nearest group of men, and he kept on rising.”
“Good lord,” Absalom murmured. “He must top six and a half feet.”
“Speak of the devil,” Rafe answered.
“Is that Red Sleeves?”
“I suppose so.”
Each item in Red Sleeve's inventory exceeded specifications, from his bowed legs and long muscular torso to a forehead broad enough to lay out a poker hand were it horizontal. His nose and nostrils resembled the prow of a ship going downwind with the sails unfurled. His mouth looked capable of swallowing a prairie chicken, leaving only the claws to pick his teeth with. Age was beginning to leave its tracks in the leathery surface of his face. Rafe guessed he'd weathered sixty years at least.
“Hermano,”
Red Sleeves said.
“¿Tienes tabaco?”
Rafe pulled a braid of tobacco from his pocket, cut it in two, and handed him half.
“¿Y fósforos?”
“Unos pocos
. A few.” Rafe always kept a few friction matches separated from his supply of them so anyone asking wouldn't know how many he had. Apaches were always begging matches, and they didn't need them. They could strike a light with two sticks and a pinch of dried grass almost as fast as he could pull a match from his pocket. With flint, steel, and dried moss they could produce fire as fast as with a match.
“¿Tiene usted pelo de búfalo?”
Rafe asked.
Red Sleeves stood silent for the briefest of moments, just long enough to betray curiosity about why the Pale Eyes wanted buffalo fur.
He held up a hand, a signal to stay put. He gestured to one of the women who ducked into a lodge and came out
with a large sack. Red Sleeves brought it to Rafe.
An Apache child of twelve or thirteen moved closer for a better view. Her shaggy black hair and the Mexican blanket she wore as a poncho made distinguishing her sex difficult, but Rafe had a feeling she was a girl. She had an angular grace about her. The poncho reached only to her knees, exposing bony calves covered with scratches and scars. Even barefoot she moved with ease across ground so rough and thorny Rafe winced at the thought of walking shoeless on it.
When she got closer, Rafe could see that she wasn't interested in him or Absalom or Caesar. She studied Rafe's big roan with the look of someone who intended to either make an offer or help herself to him.
“Don't let it cross your thieving little mind, sprat,” Rafe said cordially. But he couldn't blame her for coveting Red.
Red came from thoroughbred and Percheron stock. He stood two hands above the average American horse and twice that much taller than the Mexican ponies the Apaches rode. He had a generous forehead, slender muzzle, wide nostrils, a dark mane, and tail. In his youth he had held the position of near wheelhorse of the first artillery piece. Red knew it was a post of honor, and he always behaved accordingly.
He had a skinful of courage, a skullful of savvy, and a sense of humor. Rafe hoped no one ever played the bugle call for an artillery charge, though. Red would take off like cannon shot.
The Apache girl diverted her attention from Red long enough to stare up at Rafe. He saw sagacity in her wide, dark eyes, as though someone much older were using her as a disguise. He half expected her to say something in a voice that would sound nothing like a child's. She held his gaze long enough to let him know that he didn't intimidate her. Then she strode off to join the women at the cook fire.
“There's a hoyden if ever I saw one,” said Absalom. “Brown as pan gravy, sassy as a jaybird, and full of the dickens.”
“We'll take turns guarding the horses tonight.” Rafe knew the gleam of the horse-acquiring itch when he saw it.
Absalom nodded toward the Apache men. “I wonder if the two scoundrels who lifted our horses are among that mob.”
“Wouldn't you recognize them?”
“I was preoccupied at the time, Rafe. And picking one Indian out of a crowd is like trying to identify a particular crow in the flock.”
“Maybe if they turned around,” suggested Caesar. “We would recognize their bottom halves.”
Rafe and Absalom laughed as they rode away.
“What's in that poke Red Sleeves gave you?” Absalom asked.
“Buffalo hair.”
“Are there buffalo in these parts?” Absalom looked eager to hunt them.
“Naw. They must have traded with the Lipan Apaches farther east.”
“What are you going to do with the fur?”
Rafe wanted to tell Absalom that he asked too many questions for someone who desired to reach California alive. To say that would be too much like giving advice, and Rafe considered advice just another sort of meddling.
“I'm going to knit some stockings.”
Rafe, Absalom, and Caesar rounded a bend in the trail. They did not see the girl throw her arms around Pandora and hold her close for a long time. They didn't hear the two of them crying from happiness.
COYOTE KEEPS IT UNDER HIS HAT
N
ight had fallen by the time Rafe settled up with the blacksmith. Rafe gave Absalom and Caesar their share of the silver pesos as they sat near the fire, scooping up eggs and beans with leathery tortillas. When he finished eating, Rafe rooted to the bottom of his pack and took out a pair of carding combs. Then he sorted through the sack of bison fur. He was pleased to see that someone had picked most of the burs, twigs, and larger specimens of life from it.
He teased out a clump of fur, laid it onto one of the combs, and pulled the other one across it. He stroked the carding combs back and forth until the fibers lined up among the iron teeth. He peeled the hair off in a fluffy cylinder and laid it on his bandana. He pulled out another handful and repeated the process.
Absalom began cleaning his rifle with vinegar and sacking. Caesar took out a stack of calico squares with a needle and black thread stuck through it. He took off his shirt that was already a patchwork in the same calico print. The calico patches might have come from any old castoff, but Rafe noted the reverence with which Caesar handled them. Maybe the cloth had been a frock, the only good one a slave woman might own. Maybe it was the only thing she could leave her son when she died.
Caesar laid the torn tail of the shirt across his thigh and positioned one of the calico patches under it. When he picked up the needle, it disappeared in his big hand. He turned under the raw edges of the tear as he worked and laid down a neat bird-track of stitches.
When the pile of carded fur glowed like a golden cloud
in the fire's light, Rafe took out a peeled willow stick sharpened at both ends, with a four-inch disk set a quarter of the way up the shaft. He moistened the wool and wound it onto the upper end of the spindle. He laid the shaft across his thigh with the point of the short end resting on the ground. With his free hand he tugged at the hair, stretching it gently as with the palm of his hand he rolled the spindle along his thigh to his knee. He slid it to the top of his leg to start the process again. When most of the first strand had wound itself onto the spindle, he worked another clump into the tail end of it. Spinning never failed to soothe him.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Absalom asked.
“A Navajo taught me.”
Rafe didn't add that the Navajo had been a velvet-voiced woman and that the year he had spent with her had been the happiest of his life. That year defined contentment for him, a concept with which he would otherwise have been unfamiliar. His memories of her included her spinning, always spinning. With a small weighted drop spindle and a bowl of carded wool, she spun while walking. The yarn would lengthen like spider's silk at the ends of her fingers.
She had died in his arms, killed between sunup and sundown by the cholera that the gold rushers hauled west along with their iron stoves and millstones, their pianofortes, family portraits, and the good china. He didn't mention to Absalom that he had wept when he saw the light in her eyes extinguished like a candle, or that for months afterward when he lay at night in his blankets, tears angled across his cheeks until they dampened the pale hair curled around his ears. Even now, almost two years later, sorrow as unavoidable as a desert sandstorm swept over him from time to time.
She didn't tell him her real name. Indians had odd notions about the power of names. But in the dark, when he whispered in her ear, he called her Dream Weaver. To tease her he had sometimes called her Spider Woman, the holy being who gave the knowledge of weaving to her people. To honor Spider Woman, she always left a hole in the middle of each
blanket she made, like the hole at the center of a spider's web.
He had one of her blankets with him still. When he saw the hole, it reminded him of her absence. The spindle had belonged to her, and when he held it he imagined the warmth of her small brown hand.
She hadn't taught him to knit, though. In Texas when he was young, he and his sister would gather snagged clumps of buffalo hair from the bushes. His mother had taught him to make stockings from them.
“Aren't stockings of buffalo wool on the rough side?” asked Absalom.
“Yep.”
Rough but substantial, he thought. These might last long enough to keep my feet warm until a bullet or an arrow or a rattler sends me to the place where warm stockings aren't necessary. Given the prevailing moral wind in this territory, that might not be so long from now.
A full moon and a sky spangled with stars supplied almost enough light for Rafe to see his work without the campfire. The Apaches' fires twinkled on the mountainside above them. A cool breeze carried the sound of their laughter, flurries of it at first, then gusts, then finally a full-out gale.
“Do you suppose they're laughing about that joke they played on Caesar and me?” Absalom asked. “Them presenting their posteriors for our inspection and making off with our mounts to boot.”
“Maybe so,” Rafe said. “Apaches do like a joke.”
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A HUNDRED OR MORE PEOPLE FROM SKINNY'S AND RED Sleeves' bands gathered at Broken Foot's fire to hear his stories. The warriors sat in front, then the apprentice boys, and finally the women and children. Sister sat with her arm around her cousin, the one called Dazsii, Stands Alone. She pressed against her, as though to make up for the two years she hadn't been able to touch her or see her, as though to keep her from being stolen again.
Stands Alone stared toward the fire, but Sister had the feeling she wasn't hearing the stories. Sister had told her that she had found the bodies of Stands Alone's mother and sister at Janos. Stands Alone's father had died from the bite of a rattlesnake several months earlier.
Grandmother had bound up Stands Alone's broken ankle and sung over it. Sister and Grandmother had made room for her in their brush shelter. Tonight she would share her blankets with her as she had when they were children.
In the cleared space near the fire, Morning Star and Loco were telling the story of the white man and the black white man who had chased them to recover their two stolen horses. Morning Star poured water onto the front of his breechclout, as though he had urinated on himself, and everyone laughed. He grunted as he pretended to lift a heavy shotgun to his shoulder. The laughter grew louder when he and Loco bumped into each other and waved their pretend weapons and stared at them when they refused to fire.
They chased their phantom ponies in circles while people doubled over. Weak with laughter, the children clung to each other. The women put their hands over their mouths and giggled behind them.
Cousin and Morning Star pretended to fling themselves onto the horses' backs. They fell off, rolled in the dust, got up, and tried again. With their arms wrapped around the invisible ponies' necks, they galloped into the darkness, weaving from side to side.
When the uproar finally died down, Broken Foot limped to the center of the circle. He had invited them all here tonight, and he and his wife would give presents to those who stayed until he finished his stories. People came not so much for the presents but because he was a good storyteller.
“Long time ago, Trickster Coyote saw some miners, some diggers coming. They rode fine horses, and they led mules piled with good things. Coyote knew about Pale Eyes, so he made a plan.”
From somewhere among the boys came the sound of a voice. Broken Foot peered into the darkness. “You,” he
pointed his nose at Talks A Lot. “My wife's brother couldn't come tonight, but he promised me tobacco. Go to his camp on the other side of the ravine and get it for me.”
Talks A Lot stood up and raced away. Everyone else laughed. They knew that Broken Foot's wife's brother would send the boy to someone else for the tobacco. That person would guess what was happening and would pass him farther along. Talks A Lot would return footsore and exhausted the next morning, and he might think twice about interrupting the next time.
Broken Foot continued. “Old Man Coyote defecated by the side of the trail. He took off his hat and put it over the turds. He waited for those Pale Eyes diggers to pass by.
“âWhat do you have under your hat?' they asked.
“âA magical bird, all brightly colored,' Coyote answered. âHe can answer any question I ask him.'
“âCan that bird tell you where to find money?' they asked.
“âSure.'
“âShow him to us.'
“âOnly the one who owns him can talk to him.'
“That really got the diggers excited. They put their heads together again.
“âSell him to us,' the diggers said.
“âNo. He's worth too much.'
“âWe'll give you our horses and our mules and everything.'”
Coyote pretended to consider the offer. “âAll right,' he said. âBut I've had this bird a long time. He likes me a lot. If you let him out before I've gone far away, he'll fly after me.'
“âAll right,' the diggers said.
“âWhen I come to that last ridge over there, I'll wave to you. Then you lift the hat just a little bit and reach under it and grab him and hold him so he can't fly away.'
“The diggers waited until Coyote rode far away. When he waved to them, they reached under that hat, and they grabbed real hard. They grabbed so hard they squeezed that brown stuff right out between their fingers. Those Pale Eyes were
so mad. Even today they try to kill Coyote whenever they see him.” To fool Coyote into thinking he wasn't talking about him, Broken Foot added the usual deception, “I'm talking about fruits and flowers and other good things.”
The sun was still a few hours from rising when people went off to their shelters. Sister and Stands Alone whispered as they always had. Sister was about to tell her cousin who was courting whom these days when she heard a faint roaring inside her skull. It grew louder.
“Enemies,” she whispered. She shook Grandmother. “Enemies are coming.”
She ducked through the low opening. Stands Alone and Grandmother followed her. Embers winked from the fire circles. Starlight illuminated the shelters. From a nearby shelter she heard Loco snoring like Old Ugly Buttocks the Bear.
Sister held her palms up. She looked toward the stars and turned slowly. When she faced east, the spirit stopped her.
She ran to She Moves Like Water's shelter.
“Someone bad is coming!” She kept her voice low. One didn't shout and attract enemies.
Morning Star grabbed his lance and bow and quiver.
“Come back,” She Moves Like Water called after him. “She's just a child.”
“She sees what we cannot.” Morning Star didn't stop to wonder how his sister knew that enemies were coming, and he wasn't surprised that she knew. He found her shivering, her eyes wild and staring.
“From which direction?” he asked.
She pointed toward the east and the boulders where a few sentries kept watch. Morning Star ran from lodge to lodge calling softly to the men inside. They were emerging from the shelters when the first shots rang out. The shadowy horsemen swept down from the rocks, firing as they came. Children screamed, and the women took what possessions they could. They rolled them into their blankets, grabbed their babies, and ran. The light of a burning lean-to illuminated the Red Paint men as they darted from cover to cover.
They kept up a steady fire with their bows and arrows so the women and children could escape.
Sister was collecting water jugs when she heard the hoofbeats and saw a horseman galloping toward her. Morning Star leveled his bow and swiveled, following the horse's course. He fired and the rider jerked and pitched sideways. His boot caught in the stirrup, and the horse passed Sister, dragging his rider by the heel.
Sister saw Grandmother and She Moves Like Water disappear into the ravine. She found her cousin Stands Alone limping through the confusion. She put her arm around her waist and helped her down the slope, too. Sister pulled brush over the two of them; then they waited.
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THE GUNFIRE WOKE RAFE. HE LISTENED UNTIL HE LOCATED the source, the Apache encampment on the mountain.
“What do you suppose that is?” asked Absalom.
Rafe slid back into his blankets and fluffed up his saddle. “It's probably a
tiswin
celebration that got out of hand. Most of them do.”
“Tiswin?”
“A nasty brew they make from fermented mescal.”
Caesar picked up his old firelock pistol and started off.
Absalom called after him. “You can't help Pandora this time.”
“Got to try, don't I.” It wasn't a question.
Caesar untied his horse from the picket line and rode up the trail into the green defiles of the mountain. He dismounted before he reached the Apache camp and crept forward. Men moved about in the glow of the burning shelters. When Caesar saw they were not Apaches, he stepped into the light.