Ghost Warrior Read online

  He was small, slender, and strong. He had acquired an old wool vest with brass buttons on the front. He had hung two of the buttons from the holes in his earlobes. He had knotted cords through the button holes and tied bird skulls and lizards to them. Six dead rats dangled from a thong passed through their mouth. They looked as though they were clinging to it with their teeth.

  “The Pale Eyes leave their garbage everywhere, and the rats swarm over it.” He lifted one by the tail. “Look how fat they are. They’ll make a lot of grease in the stew.”

  He wrinkled his long nose, stuck his upper teeth out over his lower lip, and did a scuttling little dance, chanting a rat song he made up on the spot. The boys laughed as they rubbed their bruised tailbones.

  “Cousin, your brother’s wife wants you,” he said when he finished.

  Sister felt suddenly ashamed. A child was beginning to make a bulge in She Moves Like Water’s belly. She vomited every morning. She always had work to do, and she needed Sister’s help.

  The hide had cost Sister a lot of work, and she wanted to take it with her. If she left it here, the boys would wear it out. She thought of how many times her brother had told her that a leader gave his people whatever he had that they needed. She remembered what Grandmother told her, “Whatever you give away comes back. It might not be anything you can see, but it will come back.” She slid the hide toward Ears So Big; then she and He Makes Them Laugh started at a lope back to camp.

  Sister’s cousin always had a good-natured disregard for the opinion of others, but even if he cared what people thought, he could still keep company with her. He was the son of her mother’s brother, which made him Sister’s cross-cousin. Cross-cousins could never marry each other, and so they were not bound by the same constraints as others.

  When Sister reached her brother’s wife’s cluster of lodges and arbors. She Moves Like Water kept her voice low when she scolded.

  “Have you been going around with those boys again? People will say bad things about you. You’ll disgrace the family.”

  “Granddaughter,” Grandmother called from the cooking arbor. “Grind more cornmeal. We have a guest.”

  When Sister saw the guest, she understood why She Moves Like Water did not want to start a loud argument. Cheis was the leader of the Tall Cliffs People. His name meant “Oak,” in the sense of an oak tree’s strength and endurance. He was tall, and Sister had to admit he was as handsome as her own brother. He was a man people expected would provide for them and protect them.

  He had brought his people to hold council with the Red Paint men about avenging the massacre at Janos. He was almost twice as old as Morning Star, who was twenty-four, and he should have been with the older men at the fire of his wife’s father, Red Sleeves. Instead, he had settled down here and offered tobacco to Morning Star, Loco, and Broken Foot. He had been discussing horses ever since.

  One reason he kept away from Red Sleeves’ camp was that his woman’s mother, Red Sleeves’ third wife, was there. Cheis never spoke her name. Instead, he used the title for a wife’s mother, She Who Has Become Old. Avoiding contact with one’s wife’s mother was the respectable way to behave. Today it was also prudent because Red Sleeves’ third wife was not happy, and when she wasn’t happy no one was.

  Red Sleeves had captured her on a raid when she was a beautiful thirteen-year-old. That she was Mexican wouldn’t have mattered if she had accepted her position as the least important wife. But being third, or even second, wasn’t in her nature. The resentment of Red Sleeves’ first two wives had simmered for forty years.

  Earlier that day, She Who Has Become Old had fallen asleep with her hair draped over a boulder to dry. Someone had worked the spiny seeds of the come-along bush into it. Her Mexican slaves had spent all afternoon combing them out. Everyone heard about it. Wife number one or wife number two had probably done it, but few of the women liked her, so the choice of pranksters was large. Cheis had reason to avoid Red Sleeves’ camp, all right.

  “People say that your little sister is good with horses.” Cheis smiled in Sister’s direction.

  Sister felt her cheeks grow hot at the attention. She bent her head over the grind stone.

  “She has horse magic,” Broken Foot said.

  “You should have seen her ride in Janos,” added Loco.

  While Loco told the story of the wild horse race, Sister scooped the cornmeal into a gourd bowl. She worked deer grease into it and added dried gooseberries, pinon meal, and water. She patted handfuls of the stiff dough into flat cakes and laid them on the stone in the coals.

  “Will you make a charm for my horse, little sister?” Cheis asked.

  Sister glanced at her brother. He raised one eyebrow, maybe as surprised as she was that Cheis would ask a favor from a child. Sister started to answer when a woman’s voice sounded from the darkness. A boy’s yelp followed it.

  “Get out of my way, you little lizard.”

  Consternation passed so quickly over Cheis’s face that Sister only thought she saw it. He stood abruptly and almost broke into a trot so he would be out of sight when She Who Has Become Old appeared.

  THE SUN WAS POISED TO SET WHEN RAFE, ABSALOM, AND Caesar reached the Santa Rita mines. Until its abandonment thirteen years earlier, the Santa Rita had been a Mexican outpost. After the United States’ victory over Mexico three years ago, the territory changed hands, and a few dozen Americans had arrived to dig for the silver recently found there.

  They gave the impression that working for silver rather than taking it at gunpoint was a new proposition for them. The Mexicans they had hired were mostly outlaws from the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. They, too, looked capable of slitting a man’s throat for the gold in his teeth. Rafe kept his pistols ready whenever he came here.

  A rattler slithered from among rocks and headed for a nearby mine shaft. Its dappled pattern of light and dark looked like sunlight and shadows on water as it flowed into the darkness.

  Absalom nodded at the pole notched along its twenty-five-foot length. “Is that what the peons used to climb to the surface?”

  “Nope. Apache slaves. They worked on their knees in holes as black as a scalp hunter’s heart. They broke up the rock with picks, put the chunks in those bags, and carried them out on their backs.”

  “I imagine even Apaches fell off them now and then.”

  “Hell yes. Didn’t matter, though.” Rafe started the wagon forward again. He raised his voice so Absalom could hear him over the rattle of the trace chains, the complaints of the axles, and the miners’ dogs, barking and howling like the chorus of a Greek tragedy. “The mine owners could always buy more Apache slaves in Chihuahua City. They still can, for that matter.”

  Rafe stopped at the blacksmith shop. “Rogers,” he called.

  A hulking lad appeared from the back of the shed. He wore a greasy leather apron over a pair of wool trousers with the cuffs rolled up. Sweat-damp spikes of coarse brown hair stood up like a dry stand of yucca above the red bandana tied around his head. He didn’t look older than twenty.

  “Did ya bring a nip of the critter, mate?”

  “I have no whiskey to sell.”

  “Did ya bring the horseshoes then, an’ the pig?”

  “The shoes and the iron are in the wagon. Tell José to unhitch the teams and give them grain.”

  “Let the nigger do it.”

  “He has business to attend to.” Rafe nodded to Caesar.

  Caesar rode alongside the wagon, lifted the canvas off Pandora, and helped her settle in behind him.

  “Bloody hell.” Shadrach Rogers spat a stream of tobacco. “We ain’t plagued with enough savages around here, but what you’ve got to import more, and niggers besides.”

  “I’ll be back soon. Get that wagon unloaded.” Rafe mounted the big roan he called Red and flicked the reins. Absalom fell in beside him, on a gray, and Rafe motioned for Caesar to ride next to him, too.”

  “Where does he hail from?” Absalom asked when they’d l
eft him behind.

  “English by way of Australia.”

  “One of the prisoners there, then?”

  “I suppose.”

  “How did he get here?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Absalom glanced at the rotting wooden frame of a crude ore crusher. “Did the Mexicans ever turn a profit here?”

  “They hauled out twenty thousand mule loads of copper ingots a year for the mint in Chihuahua City. A mule load is a hundred and fifty pounds. You can cipher the sum.”

  “Why did they abandon it?”

  Lordy, Rafe thought. The man is filled to the brim with why.

  “Apaches started causing death and destruction on a perpetual-motion basis.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “About thirteen years ago scalp hunters befriended an old Red Paint chief named Juan José. His men got the chief and his people drunk—then he pulled the canvas off a cannon loaded with nails and scrap iron. He lit the fuse with his cigar, so I heard, and mowed them down, wheat, chaff, and weevils.” Rafe stared glumly between his horse’s ears. “It wasn’t just an evil act, it was a stupid one. The old man’s successor was a firebrand named Mangas Coloradas. He escaped the postprandial entertainment. Mangas is probably the shrewdest leader the Apaches have ever had, and the largest.”

  “Doesn’t Mangas Coloradas mean Red Sleeves?”

  “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 as
ked.

  “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.

  Chapter 6

  COYOTE KEEPS IT UNDER HIS HAT

  Night 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.