While Kaytennae led us the short distance to the secret “mouth of the Pipe,” he told us his story of discovering the “other way down.”
He had been hunting alone one day with a new rabbit bow Juh had made for him on his twelfth birthday. He had gotten lost in the timber on a part of the mesa where he had never been. Suddenly, a puma kitten, also seeming to be lost, leaped from the brush nearby where Kaytennae rested. When the Apache boy moved toward the baby mountain lion, it ran. Kaytennae gave chase.
After a long run, the cub went into one end of an old downed cedar log that had become petrified with the centuries. It lay abutted into the shelf from whence it had toppled, and Kaytennae, crawling into it after the mewing kitten, could, strangely enough, see a dim light beyond. Going toward the light, he came into the very stone of the mesa itself and found there a large room as big as an Apache beehive jacal. This was the mouth of the Pipe.
But the lion cub was gone. Tracking the cub in the dim daylight that filtered from a crevice in the mother rock far, far overhead, Kaytennae followed the small footprints on the smooth sand of the cavern’s floor. On the far side was a big rock and behind the rock began a long decline—like the stem of a ceremonial clay pipe—boring downward into the mountain at a gentle slope. Kaytennae went down it a long way, but then he thought he heard the growls of the cub’s mother, and he climbed up again and out through the petrified cedar tree and home to Juh.
When he told his story to the war chief, Juh said the lion cub was a positive sign from Ysun that Kaytennae should become the tribal bearer of the secret of the Pipe. Juh then said that only he knew the location of this “other exit” from his stronghold, and that Kaytennae, after the Indian way, must keep its secret until he passed it on to his own son, in his own time.
Kaytennae had never been back to the Pipe, but Juh had told him how it went on from where he had turned back when he heard the lion’s growls. Now, they would all have to trust him to remember what the war chief said. “And look!” he finished, pointing ahead in the moonlight. “A good omen to begin with; there is the old stone cedar, exactly as I recall it to be.”
We stumbled forward, Little Buck, Ben Allison, and I, not believing yet the reality of such a tale.
But there it was, the petrified downed cedar log.
And into the end of it we went, and on along its hollowed center on hands and knees until, de pronto, we broke free of it into the cavern of the mouth.
“Christ Jesus,” breathed tall Ben Allison. “Even moonlight shines into it. It’s eerie as hell.”
“Gives a feller the fantods,” shivered Little Buck. “Let’s get agoing.”
“Down into the stem there is no light to follow us,” Kaytennae said. “But Juh told me there were tallows here, not of Indian kind. Do you have matches, Al-li-sun?” He sought with his fingers along a ledge above the portal rock of the stem. Directly, he found what Juh had said he would find. I could not believe it when Allison scratched a stick-sulphured match and I saw the tallows of the war chief’s story.
They were of the manufacture of the Church dating two centuries and more into the past. I would guess them to be made by the Jesuits of Sonora, possibly for the legendary Lost Mines of Tayopa, and stolen by Indian miners from whom the Apaches had secured them.
“Santissima! Qué maravilla!” I murmured.
Allison put his match to one of them. It caught and smoldered, then burst into a good clear flame—after two hundred years! “Mary save us!” I cried.
The Texan peered across at me in the shifting aurous light. “Ain’t nothing against Mary, Padre,” he said, “but seems to me this save is on old Kaytenny.”
I opened mouth to admit the credit due the Apache youth, but the boy was quicker than I, denying it.
“No, Al-li-sun,” he said. “Juh is the one.”
“Juh, hombre?” The Texan squinted.
“Think about it,” the young warrior said.
Allison frowned hard, and of a sudden the pale eyes widened and the dark face brightened. “By God, Padre,” he said, “the kid’s right. When Juh turned them back from us by saying there was only one way down off the mesa, he knowed of this other way, and knowed Kaytenny knowed it. I don’t get it, but I ain’t augering it; that Injun wanted us to get away.”
“He did it for the white boy,” Kaytennae said. “And for me.”
“For Little Buck? For you?” I was truly puzzled.
“Yes, Blackrobe. Juh believed he owed you for my life. That calls for another life returned. He has just given you that life—the Texas boy.”
“Cripes,” said Little Buck. “He did like me.”
Ben Allison took the second of the three ancient torches and lit it from the first one. He passed the new light to Kaytennae and started to put the third, unlit torch inside his shirt front.
“No,” the Apache youth said. “Leave one.”
It was the Indian way, and Comanche-reared Ben Allison understood. Something is always left for those who follow. “Enjuh,” he said to Kaytennae and put back the unused tallow. “Lead out, we’re way late.”
So it came to pass that a Nednhi Apache boy led three strangers down through the mighty rock of Juh’s Stronghold, twelve hundred feet by the pipestem—a descent to be remembered in nightmares for a man’s lifetime—out into the inner ranges of the Sierra Madre of the North and over them by goat and coyote trails to the other drainage and so, at last, on midday of the second sun, out upon the ancient Chiricahua trail of South Way—not one mile distant from Old Campground!
We were all achingly weary and sore of foot, but when we came out on that old Apache track and young Kaytennae told us where we were, our spirits were restored. Allison said, “By God, we still got time to head them to Casas Grandes. Come on.” Little Buck Buckles yelled out, “That’s so, old Ben. Yee-hawwhh!”
Kaytennae glanced at me. “Blackrobe,” he grinned, “I think you are glad now that you cured me of the horse fever. Ugashe, Padre, I am proud of you, too.”
He had never called me padre in his life, and I went with him and Ben Allison and Little Buck down out of the rocks and into the main roadway of South Way, the historic Apache trail to Pa-gotzin-kay, feeling in some manner as if my priesthood and my preaching mission in this remote monte of my mother’s dusky people had, at long last, borne fair fruit.
I was ready, as I am sure were my fellows, to thank a just and generous Maker for delivering us from the Apache wilderness. Indeed, I had just expressed this sentiment to Allison, trudging along at his side in the warm midday dust of the trail, when Kaytennae suddenly stopped ahead of us. In three more strides we were up to him, seeing what he saw: we had walked happily into a trap.
There, just beyond a rocky turn, sat a score of Indian horsemen. They were Apaches, and, more than that, Apaches known to Kaytennae.
“Enjuh,” said our young guide, raising his right hand to the leader of the silent pack. “I am glad to see you again, uncle. How have you been?”
The man so addressed was a frightful-looking fellow. Of medium age and stature, he was horribly disfigured by some accident of war or of the hunt—we later learned he was torn nearly asunder by a grizzly bear—and when he now smiled in response to Kaytennae’s greeting, his face seemed one great, reopened wound. I shivered in the broad day and hot sun.
“Well,” he said, “I think the real question is where have you been, nephew of the Nednhi.”
With that, he waited. His followers’ only movement was to nod their heads in agreement to what he said.
“These are my friends, uncle,” said Kaytennae, gulping hard. “Here is Blackrobe Jorobado, from Casas Grandes. There is the Tejano, Al-li-sun, a quarter-blood Comanche whose grandmother was own-sister to the father of the great Quanah Parker. And this is his little son, by a white woman,” he lied, in concluding. “We are on a little journey going down to Casas Grandes, and I became confused and took the wrong turn. I can’t imagine how I got on South Way, starting from Old Campground.”
“Neither can I, boy.”
“Well, uncle, how are all my cousins among your Warm Springs people? How is my uncle Victorio? And old Nana? You know, the Nednhi think that I am a Warm Springs. Did you ever hear that?”
“Boy,” said the disfigured chief, “you’re a poor liar. Just like Juh. And your manners are no better than his. You haven’t introduced me to your friends.”
Kaytennae made a nervous laugh.
“Oh,” he said to us with a futile little wave, “lo siento mucho. This is my uncle Loco.”
Allison and I looked at one another.
Loco—! The craziest of the crazy. God’s name!
“Padre,” Ben Allison said to me from the side of his mouth, “what were you just saying about thanking the Lord? Cancel my share of the ceremony. Jesus!”
Loco made a sign to his warriors and they swept around us on all sides, and Loco pointed with his rifle toward Old Campground and said, “Ugashe.”
And that is how we came back to Old Campground, the comrades three: Alvar Nunez, Ben K. Allison, and Henry Garnet Buckles III.