But Ben Allison never crossed lance with Juh.
The Nednhi blamed it on their god Ysun. I gave Jesus Christ credit for being saved. Others saw it in their own different ways. Little Buck cried out, “By cripes, old Ben, I knowed you’d come up with suthin’!” And young Kaytennae murmured, “Blackrobe, even without your cruz that is strong medicine to brew.”
Old Tulip, finishing off the last drop in the mescal jug, brought up some gas, smacked her lips, and suggested that, Ysun and Jesus Christ be damned, she would have to say this was a purely Apache miracle.
She was right of course.
Neither Ben K. Allison nor Friar P. Alvar Nunez had one thing to do with the uproar that now befell the Nednhi camp.
But I will still thank my God.
The black deserter Robert Flicker had no more than signaled the beginning of the mismatched combat, when, out of the U-notch defile of the cliff trail, burst two Indian horsemen. Their wild yelping cries—the piercing brush-wolf barkings with which the Apache traditionally warned their camps to “beware and be ready”—told every Nednhi on the mountain that a very big news-thing was being brought to the old war chief by his trusted scouts.
Yes, it was Tubac and Ka-zanni, the pair dispatched by Juh at Old Campground to trail out the fleeing Kifer and his fellow scalp hunters. The success of these scouts now wrought a stunning reversal to Flicker’s demeaning of the war chief.
Ka-zanni and Tubac rode staggering ponies to the fires of the lance fight arena. They virtually fell from their exhausted mounts. But they themselves could still stand. And listen to this!
They had pushed hard after Kifer hoping to catch him and take his hair in vengeance before he might reach the safety of Casas Grandes. But Kifer was smart and he knew the mountain trails as well as any Apache. De seguro, all the Nednhi knew that of him. Santiago Kifer had learned from his father, and Dutch John Kifer had known things about the Sierra Madre of the North that even the Nednhi did not remember. He had surely taught Santiago where Juh’s Stronghold was, and how to get up to it and back down, and listen even harder to this: that knowledge was going to prove a dangerous matter for the people within the next few suns.
Kifer and his men had run their horses all night through from Old Campground, reaching Casas Grandes with daybreak, Ka-zanni and Tubac right behind them. And what a sight that sunrise had shown all of the night riders, down there in the town!
Camped in and about the Mission of the Virgin of Guadalupe were no less than half a hundred Americano horse soldiers. Kifer quickly hid from the soldiers by going into the old adobe ruin west of the town and beside the river going up into Casas Grandes Canyon. From there, he sent a man into town. This man went to the cantina of Elfugio Ruiz and brought back the young, half-Chiricahua wife of Ruiz. The girl was known by the scalp hunters to have been the secret sweetheart of the nice blond boy named Carson who had had his head chewed off by the wolves back at Old Campground. When they told this half-breed girl what the Nednhi had done to her lover with the long yellow curls, she swore vengeance against the people of Juh and told Kifer all that was going forward in the town.
Ka-zanni and Tubac had, por supuesto, waylaid the simpleton girl as she was sneaking back to the cantina before old Ruiz might learn of her visit to the scalp hunter camp, and they had gotten their own story, by their own means, out of her. There could be no doubt their story matched that told Kifer.
What the Yanqui horse soldiers were doing so far down in Chihuahua State, against all Mexican law, was looking for the Negro deserter Robert Flicker and for the Apaches of the Nednhi raider Juh, the band that had stolen the small son of the governor of Texas.
Word of that crime had come to Post of El Paso and Fort Bliss even as the black one had feared it would, from the Tejano Lipan Apaches who had reported to the fort all of Juh’s hard-drinking talk in their camps. Now these horse soldiers down there in Casas Grandes were not just regular troops but were the ill-famed Apache chasers the black one had scouted for when he was a sargento in the Fort Bliss cavalry. And they were in Casas Grandes not just to look for Juh—they might look forever in those mighty Blue Mountains and never find one Nednhi—but they were looking for a local man to guide them into the Sierra, a man who did know where to seek out Juh’s Stronghold, and who, for a price of blood money, would take the horse soldiers into that legend-place.
But no Casas Grandan had been eager to earn this reward.
They had to live there after the Americanos went back over the Rio Bravo, called by them the Rio Grande.
But the impasse gave Santiago Kifer a natural inspiration. He would offer, for a guarantee of United States and Texas amnesty for himself and his band, to take the command straightaway to Juh’s Stronghold.
Suiting action to inspiration, Kifer sent down to the encampment of American cavalry a local intermediary to inquire of the young officer in command if he would parley with the scalp hunters in regard to the whereabouts of the Nednhi Apache who, led by the missing Negro sergeant, had stolen Governor Buckles’ small son? Kifer’s only price for the information was amnesty for his men and himself. Could a deal be made on this basis?
The officer, replying to the query, wanted to know why he should accept such an offer, when he understood from others of the Casas Grandans—specifically from Señora Elfugio Ruiz, who had relatives among the wild Apache—that the stronghold was impregnable. No, he told the intermediary, Kifer would have to come up with something firmer than just the whereabouts of Juh’s hideout, and/or the guiding there.
The scalp hunter was ready for that.
He knew a place, he sent back by the same local courier, where dynamite charges could be placed, and the one trail into and out of the great mesa could be obliterated, trapping the entire tribe of the Nednhi Apache and the Negro deserter for all time—if the Americano officer would care for that solution.
However, Kifer’s suggestion was that the mere conveying of this dynamite threat to the Apache would result in abject, complete, and immediate surrender. No man—and no Apache man, woman, or child—would choose starvation over Americano capture. The Nednhi all had Americano cousins among the three other Chiricahua bands who were on the reservations up there, and they weren’t starving.
So if Kifer took the officer to the stronghold, it would be all over for Juh, one way or the other.
And the officer could begin polishing up his insignia for next promotion: to bring Juh in would rank with the reduction of Geronimo, Nana, Loco, or Victorio; not to mention whatever the black deserter was worth.
It was done, they had a deal, agreed the young white officer.
Regarding the black man, he would be turned over to the Texas authorities to face a charge of murdering a young girl in El Paso. As for Juh and the Nednhi and the surrender of the son of the governor of Texas, unharmed and in good health, the officer would follow Santiago Kifer into the Sierra the first day that the hard-riding troops were rested and the supply wagons got up to Casas Grandes with the necessary explosives to implement the destruction of the Zig Zag Trail.
How long would that be? Kifer had wanted to know.
Two to four days, replied the officer. Make a guess of three days; three days from next morning, not the present one.
That had been a day and a half ago, Ka-zanni and Tubac said. They had ridden home to the stronghold in that record time to warn the people. Even so, that would mean that Juh—or He Who Has the Plan—had something only in the order of another day and a half, two full days at most, to take what action they would, flight or battle.
Here, Robert Flicker, saying not one word the entire time, stopped the panting scouts.
“Schichobes, old friends,” he said to Tubac and Ka-zanni, “did you hear a name for the young officer?”
Tubac, the spokesman, frowned a little.
“Why, you should know him,” he answered. “Isn’t that your old troop you told us you scouted for?”
“Did you get a name?” Flicker said, low voiced.
“Yes, a very odd one. Pretty, though.”
“Was it Flowers? Lieutenant Flowers?”
“Why, yes. You see, I told you you should know him.”
“Very handsome officer,” Ka-zanni offered, so that he would not be left out. “The young wife of Ruiz told me he was the kind of a man that makes the things of a woman grow warm and tingle. But we didn’t see him.”
The dark face of Robert Flicker looked as if it had turned to stone.
“Two days,” he said, half-aloud.
“We can still catch them in Casas Grandes.
“Trap them inside the mission garden.
“Keep them in there and kill them as they planned to kill us. Trap and starve. Let no one of them escape. When we have them wounded enough, wagh!”
He swung about to face the excited Nednhi crowding now all about him and the returned scouts.
“I, too, know how to use the dinamita!” he cried. “And we will capture it from their army wagons and use it ourselves to blow in the walls of Blackrobe Jorobado’s church and his gardens, when we are ready for the last rush upon the soldiers.
“It will be the greatest of beginnings of the war of the Apache people to win Chihuahua for themselves!
“To your ponies!
“To Casas Grandes!
“Ugashe—!”