The chittering of the monkey awakened Skye but it was already too late. Above him, as he peered into the gray predawn, were half a dozen skeletal faces. These materialized into Indians standing over him, one with a nocked bow but the others were simply watching. Skye felt for his rifle and found that it was gone.
He scarcely dared move. Victoria was stirring beside him, and then he heard her soft cussing in the quietness.
“We’ve been had,” said Childress from under his cart.
Very carefully, Skye sat up. The Indians let him. They wore loincloths and little else. Some had shirts, many wore a red bandanna or headband that pinned their black straight hair, most had light moccasins. Skye didn’t have the faintest idea who they might be or what they intended to do.
“Jicarilla Apaches,” Childress muttered. “Not tame, no Sah.”
The monkey leaped about, mesmerizing the Apaches.
Off in the gloom, Skye saw a dozen others collecting the horses. They had been hobbled except for the Clydesdale, which had grazed freely, as usual, dragging a halter rope with him. Maybe this was only a horse raid. Maybe he would live a few more minutes. Maybe not.
Slowly Skye lifted his hands, showing that they contained no weapon, and then signed, Friend.
An older Apache laughed.
That was a good joke. Skye eyed the steel arrowhead aimed straight at his chest and subsided into utter quietness. But his gaze searched restlessly for anything, any clue as to what might happen, any means of escape. He saw nothing. These could be his last moments, then. He helped Victoria sit up and held her hand.
The monkey mesmerized the Apaches. They tried to grab the little creature but he was much too agile for them. A young warrior raised his bow but an older one stayed him with a guttural bark.
Some of the Apaches began opening the packs and extracted various items: cookpots, knives, a powderhorn, spare clothes. Others gathered around the red cart, yanked the canvas off, and plunged into the heaps of trade items and robes and pelts in it.
“Bloody thieves. I’ll flay the hide off your backs,” Childress proclaimed from under the cart, rising up in wrath. A foot on his chest flattened him. One young warrior discovered the skeins of blue beads, and exclaimed. He held one up and howled. In moments, the beads were parceled out, along with awls, flints and steels, knives, ladles, cookpots, sacks of sugar, jugs of molasses, bolts of calico, bed ticking, and two pairs of four-point blankets.
Skye observed Standing Alone, imprisoned between two of the Jicarillas and not resisting. She looked grimly at Skye and the trader, but said nothing. She looked disheveled.
Skye dared to hope. This was a looting party, but maybe not a murderous one—at least so far. But he knew the reputation of all Apaches and knew how lucky he would be to see the sun set on this day, or a sunrise tomorrow. He did not know whether these were the ones who had ridden parallel all the previous day, but it seemed likely.
The Apaches seemed to be looking for spirits. They
opened the molasses and sampled it. But as far as Skye knew, Childress wasn’t carrying any ardent spirits, and that was a stroke of luck. They’d all die, and fast, once the Apaches began working on some Indian whiskey.
It was not yet dawn. He adjudged their number at thirty. They had the horses in hand, bridled and saddled, except for the Clydesdale. Shine, ever helpful, snatched the halter rope of the big animal, and led it to the rest of the horses, while the Apaches watched, amazed. Then with one graceful bound, Shine leaped up to the Clydesdale’s neck; halter rope in hand, and sat there over the mane, chattering and babbling.
Most of these Apaches were on foot. Maybe they had a horse-holder down the creek somewhere, or maybe not. The Apaches wouldn’t have many horses. These would be enormously valuable to them.
“I think if we’re quiet, they might leave us,” Skye said softly to Victoria.
The older Apache, probably a war leader, kicked him and waved his knife. The meaning was not lost on Skye.
Skye made the sign for water, but the chieftain just stared. So far, they hadn’t even let Skye or Victoria stand up, and Childress was a captive under his cart.
As the day quickened, one of the younger Apaches discovered the skull and crossbones enameled on Childress’s cart, and drew the rest to it. This occasioned much talk among them. They fingered it, examined the identical insignia on the other side, and studied Childress.
Skye tried a finger message: “Big man makes death.”
The chieftain muttered something, and some of the warriors prodded Childress to his feet. They marveled at his girth, poking fingers into him to see what all that fat felt like. The Texan fetched his straw hat, stood quietly while they absorbed his stature, and then he launched into a soft, conversational, almost delicate address:
“I’ve thrown better men than you to the sharks,” he said blandly. “I’ve strung up your kind by your thumbs and delivered
a hundred lashes, and I’ll do the same to you. Let me have that whip, the one you have in hand there, you miserable cur, and I’ll flail your skin right off your back and take your nose off and snap your eyes out for good measure, and while you’re poking arrows into me I’ll cut your chief over there to pieces and feed him to the wolves. Then I’ll pull out your arrows and stuff them down your gullets, you bloody buggers.”
All this Childress delivered with such aplomb that Skye marveled. Had the privateer no fear? Skye’s own fear caught the spittle in his throat and silenced him and set his heart to racing, but here was the fat man blaspheming everything about the Apaches. The mad Texan was about to get them all massacred.
“You miserable dogs, you curs who sniff your own vomit, give me that whip and I’ll show you a thing or two,” he said, never raising his voice, and yet the power of his words reached every one of the Jicarillas.
Childress walked slowly with his hand outstretched toward the Apache boy with the whip in hand, and surprisingly, the boy surrendered it. Childress plucked it up, and suddenly the whip turned into a live, whirring thing, rattle-snaking here and there, snapping and popping, while the Apaches stood spellbound.
“Put everything back in that cart or I’ll cut your heart out,” he said, never raising his voice. But he did point at the cart, and at the loot the warriors had lifted. Some of it now adorned them.
Skye had never seen anything like it. Not in all his years in the Royal Navy, or all his years in the mountains, had he seen a man as vulnerable as Childress rake a hostile crowd with sheer force of will. The stern commands issued out of him with the precision of a metronome, and the plaited whip whirred and cracked, but no one moved.
It was not enough. The chieftain said something.
Half a dozen warriors circled Childress just outside of
whip range, then rushed in and subdued him. Only one felt the lash. At another wave of the hand, other warriors caught Skye and Victoria and Standing Alone, and began stripping away their clothing, relentlessly, methodically, until they had it all.
Victoria snarled but she was helpless against such brute force, and so was Standing Alone. Childress had been reduced to the buff, and then it was Skye’s turn. By the time the Apaches were done, Skye’s party didn’t own a stitch of clothing except for Childress’s hat. For some reason, they awarded him his hat, which perched on his head majestically, as he stood in huge white array. His gargantuan white belly and piano legs rose like a mountain under his Panama.
Skye could not even describe his feelings, standing there before them all with every last shred yanked off of him, and now adorning the Apaches. The chieftain had commandeered his black top hat along with his rifle, powderhorn, and knives. A subchief had his bear-claw necklace. But they did not take his medicine bundle. Victoria cringed and covered herself, but Standing Alone seemed resigned to her fate, and stood calmly, her slim beauty astonishing. Then, with innate Cheyenne modesty, she turned her back upon them, and stood quietly, all the more galvanizing for having turned her back to them.
At a word from the chieftain, the Apaches swiftly loaded their booty onto the backs of the horses and their own backs, and vanished as silently as they had come, padding out of the secluded bottoms. Skye watched his horses head downriver, along with the Clydesdale with the monkey riding the mane.
Dawn had scarcely penetrated this canyon on the west slope of the Sangre de Cristos. Skye watched the Apaches vanish around a bend in the creek, and waited a moment more for surprises, but nothing else happened. He felt helpless, more so than ever in his life because he was naked.
He turned, wanting to inventory what was left, and found
that nothing was left. Only the cart, and the useless harness for the Clydesdale, which was lying beyond the cart. The cart was empty. Every bit of merchandise and every pelt was gone. The canvas that covered it was gone.
The Colonel approached. His Panama stayed proudly atop his vast acreage of flesh.
“We’ve walked the plank, and now we’re bobbing in the sea,” said Childress. “A plague on their bloody bodies. Where’s Shine?”
“He rode the Clydesdale.”
Something vital seemed to bleed from the Colonel. “Lost him, too, then.”
“The Clydesdale was last; he can’t keep up with those lighter horses.”
“Then the Apaches’ll kill him. They won’t let him return here.”
“You got any ideas?”
The Colonel brightened. “I will perform my ablutions and then we can sit down under the cart and wait. None of us can walk more than a hundred yards in this cactus.”
Skye thought it would be a long wait.