33

We came up with the Juh party and Robert Flicker just at sundown. The meeting was in the higher roughs below the mouth of the canyon of the Rio Casas Grandes. Before us, quiet in the calm of the late afterglow, lay the pink-dusty town and, off to our right upon its separate rise, my “deserted” Mission of the Virgin.

But it was not deserted.

Bivouacked within the adobe walls of my courtyard and garden was the scout company troop of Lt. Jefferson Flowers. Forty men, four corporals, two sergeants, four Lipan Apache enlisted scouts, and, most ominously significant, no supply wagons.

The Indians caught Flicker’s excitement over this discovery. One could feel the animal sense of the kill stirring the intent ranks of dark horsemen. It was a wind-still evening and, in the clear green light of the desert’s departing day, we could all see, off to the north about ten miles, the low dust-sign lying over the old river road to Janos. The wagons. And with them, a ciencia cierta, the artillery cannon.

A military council ensued.

Juh and Loco sat as equal chiefs, but both listened to Robert Flicker whose hour it clearly was.

The main parties, Nednhi and Warm Springs, dismounted. The ponies were led back higher yet into the roughlands and picketed there. In itself, Allison whispered to me, this was disturbing. Indians almost never “tied up” their horses. We were going to see a real “blood fight,” the Texan told me.

The ponies sequestered, the warriors spread into the nearby rocks, breaking into small groups to rest and eat. A central corps of the most dangerous fighters stayed with the high command in council. This number included several individuals known to us from the Nednhi: Sunado, Keet, Tubac, Ka-zanni, Nazati, Bèle, Tislin, Delgete, Kaytih, and Doce. Otsai, having the all-important charge of the horse herd, was not present. For the Warm Springs, I knew four: Tzu, Vaquero, Tasati, and Mendez, all “bad ones.”

Allison and I, under guard, the Texan still bound, were, for reasons of Flicker’s insistence, permitted to remain. This puzzled me, but Allison, with his unclouded simplicity, saw through it immediately. The renegade Negro wanted witnesses, he said. And not Indian ones. A Mexican priest and a Texican white man were just about as good as a black man gone bad could hope for. That is, if Ben Allison was right and Robert E. Lee Flicker had it in his touched mind that he was that night entering the Chihuahuan history.

“Why, then, praise God,” I whispered, “that means they do not intend to kill us.”

“It ain’t us we got to worry about,” came the Texas-drawled return. “It’s Kaytenny and the kid. Did you see where at they got to? The bastards had me down in the dirt on my face; I couldn’t see nothing.”

“Otsai took both of them with him, up the river with the horses. They’ll be safe there.”

“With crazies nobody’s safe nowhere. Now you listen and you listen hard, Padre. You still got those two butcher knives old Tulip give us up to the mesa?”

I felt beneath my robe and told him, yes, they were yet there, the Apaches had not searched me. He then instructed me to stay as near to him as I might and, when he gave the word, to cut him free. If, meanwhile, we were separated by the Indians, I was to get to Kaytennae and free him, if I could, as he would then be the last, best chance for Little Buck and myself.

Before I could assure him of my understanding and willingness, one of our guards, a squat monkey-like Warm Springs stranger, saw us whispering and came over and struck Allison repeatedly with his quirt. Sunado heard the disturbance and came over from the meeting. When the Warm Springs man told him that the blackrobe and the Tejano were talking too much, Sunado ordered Allison taken away. The last I saw of him, they had roped his feet and were dragging him off up into the rocks, helpless on his back.

Alone, I returned fearful gaze to the council.

Even as I did so, it was breaking up. The decision had been taken. The Apaches would go for the big gun.

Flicker ruled that, as premier chief, Juh must remain in command of the base camp. Even I could see this was a device to free the black sergeant of his unpredictable ally. But Juh had lost kinfolk in the artillery killing among Cochise’s band, and he was still supremely a wild Apache, hence deeply apprehensive as to soldier cannon. He made no objection to remaining at the camp, except that he wanted his nephew Kaytennae to go along that the youth might learn how to steal the big guns. Flicker had to remind him that the boy was prisoner to Otsai and must, as a risk to the entire plan, remain so until battle’s ending.

Juh admitted the need, and Flicker swept on.

With Flicker would go Loco and the ten Nednhi fighters then present. The Warm Springs chief had far greater experience with white men than any other Chiricahua hostile. He had spent more time on the Americano reservations, San Carlos, Ojo Caliente, Tularosa, Rinconada, all of them, than the rest of the four bands together. So he would be the logical Chiricahua to go with Flicker after that big gun with those white soldiers up on the Janos road. Again, Juh agreed. Knowing the fierce pride and wild heart of the big Nednhi, I could scarcely accept his compliance. But wild Indians are the most sensitive of God’s man-creatures. Like wild horses, they are easily hurt by any surrounding of their freedoms. And I knew that my dangerous friend, the war chief, was, in that moment of “going for the big soldier gun,” feeling within his savage breast the mustang’s nameless fear of entrapment by the brushwings of the corral that he cannot see but knows instinctively is there.

I prayed hard then that Juh would see, before it was forever too late, that his corral was Robert Flicker. That Juh would suddenly witness the light, resume command of his people, and drive out the black usurper.

God was elsewhere that spring evening.

Within minutes of council’s close, Flicker and Loco, with their ten-man picked war party, were riding for the Janos road.