When Stryker rose in the predawn, Samson Kearns stood beside his tent. Stryker picked up the set of first sergeant’s stripes he’d gotten with Major Adams’ authority and handed them to Samson. “Sew ’em on, or get ’em sewed on. Make sure every soldier in A Squad looks and acts topnotch when on fort grounds. Practice with rifle and pistol every day. Get those misfits to where they hit what they aim it. Hear?”
“Yes, sir.” Samson took the stripes.
Stryker again dressed in muslin shirt, canvas pants, Apache moccasins, tan bandana, and a cloth wrapped around his head like a broad headband. “I’ll be back in ten days to two weeks. You hold A Squad together until I get back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go to Major Adams if anyone gives you sass or any other problem.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stryker drew his Bowie and tested its edge with a thumb. Nodding, he returned it to its sheath. Without another word to Samson, he walked away, not with the regimented stride of an army officer, but with the smooth loose-jointed step of a woodsman.
Matthew Stryker was born to land in Virginia, but fortune made him the second son, not the man who would inherit the plantation. As a youngster, he’d spent more time in the woods than on the sprawling acres of cotton and corn that made up Seven Oaks in Weyanoke. A hundred black men, give or take a few, and more than half that many black women farmed Seven Oaks’ acres for Ammon Stryker, Matthew’s father. And where men and women gather, children come. Some black as their mammies, some what was called “yaller,” children that were fathered by a white man but doomed to slavery anyway.
Matthew’s best friend as a free-ranging boy was a “yaller” kid by the unlikely name of Leonidas.
“Damned darkies can’t learn to tell their bum holes from post holes,” Ammon Stryker often said, but Leonidas made a liar of him. Oh, he acted the dumb darkie around the master or the foreman, saying yassuh and nawsuh, and crinkling his brow like he wasn’t sure just what he was being told to do. But when Leonidas and Matt Stryker were out together, across the creek and into the woods, no one was smarter that Stryker’s yaller friend. In fact, they spend many hours on the riverbank going through Matt’s schoolbooks so Leonidas learned everything Matt learned, and more.
As second son, Stryker by custom went to Virginia Military Institute from the time he was fourteen. That meant going to Lexington and living like a Spartan for four years. But New Market came before those four years were over, and after the VMI Cadet Corps drove the Yankees off the heights above Bushong’s orchard, Stryker was made an officer among the troops guarding Richmond. He was captured with a piece of cannon shell in his thigh when the Confederate government evacuated Richmond and set fire to the armory. Stryker’s wound wasn’t even from Yankee guns.
He ended up in Anton prison, leg wound and all. Surgeons were busy chopping limbs off men worse off that Stryker, so he was able to talk a volunteer nurse named Martha into helping him.
Leonidas’s ma, a pure black woman who carried on with the traditions her granmammie brought across the ocean from never-never land. As Stryker remembered, she said, “When ya gots sumpin what’s cuts deep inter ya, then ya best pour it fulla rum—the stronger, the better—if’n ya can. Ya gots stickers ’r slivers ’r sumpin down inside, dig ’em out an’ let ’er bleed plenny.”
Then she said to get a wad of spider’s web and slap that into the wound, the cover it up with a weed she called woundwort. Stryker found out later the regular name for it was yarrow. Bind it up tight, she said, and don’t take the bandage off for a week.
Anton was not a healing environment, and nearly half the Secesh rebels that went into the prison never came out. With whiskey that would rot the guts of any drinker, with globs of spider webs, and with woundwort and a bandage made from a dead man’s shirt, Stryker survived. In fact, he walked with hardly a limp when the call went out for southern men to join the Frontier Army.
Stryker joined as a private in the Fifth Infantry. No one mentioned a thing about pay, and Stryker didn’t ask. It turned out to be fifteen dollars a month, paid every three months or every six months or whenever the doddering old men in congress got around to allotting the money.
Still, nearly four years at VMI beat army traditions into Matt Stryker’s bones, and he did the necessary things without even thinking.
Almost before the Fifth Infantry arrived at Fort Kearny, Stryker was a corporal. He made sure his men got the best of whatever there was to be had, and he was forever badgering Sergeant Major Baker for more ammunition.
“Stryker, I’ll swear. Them six boys in your squad shoot up more powder and ball than a whole company oughta.”
Stryker’s squad stood out in the battle at Beaver Creek, and he was given sergeant’s stripes. Some of those men—the Greer brothers from Texas and Mickey Finney; Dick Grady and Orson Bailor—were still with him, and they were good men in a fight, good men to have at your back, anytime.
A shadow hit Stryker from the right and slightly behind, but he’d caught the flicker of movement in his peripheral vision and rolled with the impact, throwing his attacker in a move akin to a flying mare. Stryker grasped the wrist as it went by, so the attacker landed on his back in the desert dust.
Stryker’s Bowie knife came to his hand as he swept it back and up to put the razor sharp steel at the attacker’s throat.
“Enough, Gopan.” Bly the White Mountain Apache put both hands up, fingers spread wide.
“Why attack me, Bly?”
“We must ever be watching for attack,” Bly said. “But I see that Gopan is always ready.” Bly scrambled to his feet.
“Thank you for the lesson. I will try to be more wary.”
Bly nodded. “Wary? If the word means taking care, you must. Now we run.” He trotted away, and somehow he raised no dust. Stryker followed, doing his best to imitate Bly’s dustless jog. He was not very successful. Nor did Bly pay any attention to Stryker, it seemed. The Apache moved at a reasonably fast trot, but he blended with the brush and the foxtails and the cactuses. Yes, he moved, but no more than the movement caused by a gust of wind or a desert dust devil.
The dry air of southern New Mexico removed sweat the moment it came from the pores. Bly maintained his effortless pace. Stryker jogged easily at first, but as the sun climbed higher, his legs began to feel the strain and his lungs began to burn as he breathed in, rebelling, perhaps, at an atmosphere with virtually no humidity. But Bly didn’t stop, so neither could Stryker.
Bly pulled farther and farther away from Stryker, and finally disappeared. He didn’t leave much of a trail to follow, and Stryker finally slowed to a walk so he’d not lose what little sign Bly left behind.
The trail dropped into an arroyo and continued—faint footprints in the sand. The gash in the desert floor made a sharp curve so Stryker moved to the inside of the curve so he’d be least conspicuous.
“Well done, Gopan.” Bly’s voice came clearly, but the Apache was invisible. Then he moved, materializing out of the wall opposite Stryker.
“Not so well, Bly. You left me far behind.”
Bly nodded. “White men never run. Walk, or use horses. Apache run better than horses. Fifty miles. Seventy miles. No difference.” He showed his teeth in a smile. “Easy, Gopan. Man no run, man no can run.”
“Practice,” Stryker said, his tongue like a wooden stick.
“Run.”
Stryker nodded. “Run.”
Bly held out a wet-looking green glob stuck on a stick. “Eat.”
Stryker eyed the blob. “What’s this?”
“Good. Wet. You eat.”
“I will.” Stryker took the stick and bit into the gooey blob. It tasted as green as it looked. But it was wet and the taste was not all that unpleasant. In moments, the green blob was gone and Stryker’s stomach was absorbing its water, as none ran in this forsaken corner of New Mexico. “Uum.”
“We run.”
Stryker gave Bly a blank stare, then a nod. “Don’t run, can’t run. I get your lesson.”
Bly struck out again in his loose-jointed jog, seeming to fit the country as if he was a natural part of it. A thought hit Stryker. A part of the country. The white man always tried to conquer and subdue his natural surroundings. The Apache tried to be a part of all that surrounded them.
Although the terrain was just as difficult; although the lack of water pierced like a demon; the afternoon didn’t feel as hard as the morning had. Maybe Stryker was learning something.
Bly jogged some twenty paces in front of Stryker. For some reason, the birds—bluebirds and rock wrens, the odd red-tailed hawk atop a paloverde, robins, and even Inca doves—did not flutter away when Bly passed, but moved a few feet when Stryker came along. A jackrabbit crossed the way ahead of Bly, and the moment it sensed the jogging Apache, it froze. Bly passed. The rabbit remained frozen with its long ears straight up in the air. But when Stryker neared, the big jack bounded away.
The sun completed some two thirds of its journey across the cloudless sky toward the blue-purple outline of the Potrillo Mountains. Another arroyo sliced through the desert floor, and Stryker reckoned it ran from northeast to southwest. Bly disappeared over the edge and was out of sight by the time Stryker reached the place where the Apache had gone into the ravine. The land leading to the arroyo were covered with gramma grass and the occasional one-seed juniper, but over the edge, the sides of the ravine were lined with rock fitted almost as if some giant mason had done a job there. Stryker pulled his Bowie from its sheath. If an attack were to come, this would be a prime place.
He didn’t drop into the arroyo from the same place as Bly. He went into the game-stalking mode. He slipped carefully southward along the edge of the arroyo. Almost half a mile from where Bly went down into the ravine, Stryker found a place where rocks had broken off the edges of the little canyon and created a stairway of sorts. Not a regular step-by-step stairway, but rocks lying so that he could reach the bottom of the ravine without exposing himself and, in his Apache moccasins, without making much noise.
Slowly he descended, taking care not to dislodge pebbles to betray his presence. A tiny sound from the southwest made Stryker freeze in place behind a large boulder. Another hint of sound came. Stryker made his breathing as shallow as he could. His grip on the handle of his Bowie knife tightened. A large animal? Bull elk? Bighorn sheep? Wild horse?
Was the sound a clop? A hoof striking stone? No hint of steel. Then Stryker recognized the sound of a walking horse ... no, walking horses. He squeezed himself into a crack between two boulders and went motionless, trying to breathe so shallowly that his chest and abdomen moved almost not at all.
He could see the bottom of the arroyo with his left eye. No breeze came down the ravine, so he didn’t have to worry about his clothing flapping.
Horses came, led by a dusky pony with dark points, mane and tail, ridden by a woman, though she dressed like a warrior. She held a bow in her left hand along with three arrows. Three warriors followed the woman, all young, perhaps untried, perhaps out to learn more about becoming a true warrior ... but led by a woman?
“Dahtegte.” Bly spoke from a place not a dozen yards from where Stryker stood, frozen in place.
The Apache horses stopped, as if Bly himself had commanded them.
“Bly?”
Bly answered in Apache.
Dahtegte grunted something that sounded like agreement.
“Gopan. You come out now.” Bly stepped from his cover and turned to look up at Stryker’s hidey hole. “Come,” he said. “Dahtegte is not to be feared now. Not painted for war.”
It seemed too easy. Too pat. Stryker made no move.
“Gopan.”
Stryker said nothing.
“I know of Gopan.” A woman’s voice.
Bly said nothing.
Stryker said nothing.
“Gopan took soldiers to the hill at the place white men call Cooke’s Road. He took mules, then killed them to keep soldiers and white men from wagons from Apache arrows and rifles. That day, Yuyutsu got no horses, no wagons, no children, no women to sell to the Nakaye. Apaches call you Gopan. He who protects.”
Bly said, “Come, Gopan. Dahtegte talk of Apaches. Maybe of Yuyutsu.”
Stryker stepped to the edge of the rocks, his Bowie in his hand.
Dahtegte laughed. “The great Gopan. Can he not trust Apache words? Or does he think we are like him, always speaking with no truth?”
Stryker jumped to the arroyo floor. “Here I am,” he said.
“We go,” she said, and gigged the dusky pony to a trot. The young men followed. Bly jogged along behind. Stryker brought up the rear, watching the moves and manners of the Apaches.
The riders went on in their original direction, which was opposite to that Stryker thought Bly was taking. But before opening his mouth, he thought. Then thought again. Bly’d not said where they were going. So it didn’t matter what Stryker thought. He cleared his head of questions and decided to listen to the desert.
The horses trotted. Bly jogged. Stryker lagged. The ponies left plenty of trail to follow so he didn’t worry about keeping up. He listened instead. The sun nearly touched the mountain range to the west and the shadows of trees and bushes lengthened across the land. A nightjar sent up his churring cry as the horses went by. Quail scattered into the thickets of creosote to the left of the path. Stryker heard and cataloged the sounds and movements as he jogged. He forgot the tired muscles in his legs. He forgot the dry air he took into his lungs. He forgot, and listened to the Earth.
Dahtegte stopped at dusk and said something to the youngsters. They flung themselves off their ponies and disappeared into the brush, pulling leather slingshots from their waistbands as they went.
“Fire,” she said to Bly. “Come,” she said to Stryker, and urged her pony toward a stand of cottonwoods. The trees occupied a swale in the flat land. Closer, Stryker saw that the four trees stood in a rough line beside the sandy bottom of a dry creek. Dahtegte swung a leg over the withers of her pony and dropped lightly to the ground. “Dig,” she said, pointing at the sand.
Stryker drew his Bowie and started for a creosote bush, intending to cut a digging stick.
“No.”
He stopped.
“Use knife.”
Stryker’s Bowie held a razor’s edge like no other, being a James Black Bowie with pieces of a star in the steel. He didn’t like the idea of using the knife to dig a hole in the sand. “No,” he said.
Dahtegte heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Would you die?”
Stryker folded his arms, unconsciously making them a barrier between himself and the Apache warrior woman.
She sighed again, pulled her own knife, which had the appearance of a common kitchen butcher knife, picked a spot between two cottonwoods, and commenced digging. She poked the knife blade into the sand several times, then pulled the loosened sand out of the pit with her hands. She dug the pit about a foot deep before the sand began to show dampness. Another six inches and water seeped into the pit up to the wet sand mark. In a quarter of an hour by the clock in Stryker’s head, there was enough water to give her pony a drink.
“Gopan. Drink,” she said.
Stryker looked at the water. The murk had settled out. The upper two inches of water showed clear as a mountain stream. Stryker scooped water from the pit with cupped hands and drank. It tasted of mud, slightly, but was wonderful to swallow. Stryker found himself wanting to dance a jig in exultation. Water. How great you are, Mother Earth, he mouthed. How great you are.
Stryker drank long and deep, but Dahtegte said nothing. He wiped the moisture from his lips with the back of his hand. “Thank you, Dahtegte,” he said.
She shook her head. “Thank the cottonwood. It always grows where there is water.”
Stryker turned to the nearest cottonwood and bowed his head. “Thank you, sister, for showing us where to find what we need most.”
Dahtegte made a sound in her throat that could have been approval.
“We should take water back to Bly.”
She shook her head. “You know nothing. I show you how. Bly knows. He will do what he needs to live.” She kicked the sand back into the water hole until nothing remained. Only if one knew what to look for could traces of the water hole be seen. Dahtegte hopped on her pony and turned its head toward the place where Bly was to build a fire.
Stryker saw no smoke, which didn’t surprise him, and when they got to where Dahtegte had sent the youngsters away, the land was empty.