That moment is engraved in my spirit. One breath I was glorying in God’s goodness; the next, I heard the soft swish in the sand of pony hooves moving up beyond the mission wall, and I knew they were there.
The wall rose perhaps four feet, framing thus only the upper bodies of man and mount. In the way that the eye will see all at a glance, I determined there were nineteen warriors in the band. That is, eighteen men and the leader. They sat, seventeen in the backing main pack, Juh in front, and on his flank a strange warrior whom I did not recognize. It was as my glance lingered on the strange Apache that I saw the twentieth rider.
He was no Apache.
Mounted behind the unknown warrior, his slight body had been obscured until he leaned outward to see what had halted the war party. When he saw me he made as though to cry out, as would be natural in such a small boy seeing his first civilized face in God knew how many pony rides from the place of his abduction. At once the handsome warrior struck him a backhanded blow, and the white child withdrew again behind his captor. I remarked at the time that he did not whimper or make any sound. I knew by this that they had had him some days at least.
Of course one could deduce this by the look of the party itself. The ponies were red with the sweated-on dust of far places. Faces and bodies of the riders were caked with grime. Even in these most impassive of nomad peoples, it was to be seen that the journey had been long and difficult and ridden at a killing pace. The dark faces were hollow with fatigue. The ordinary careful grooming of the Apache showed not in the nineteen riders who came to my wall. There was no question, even before Juh spoke, that this was a war raid party, that death was the twenty-first horseman who rode with them.
“Blackrobe,” Juh said in that rumbling grizzly-bear voice I knew so well, “have the people prayed and gone away? We are in sore need of water and an hour to let the ponies breathe.”
He spoke in Spanish, with Indian phrasing, a peculiarly Apachean speech familiar to all who might have intercourse with their fierce number. It was a patois I had myself mastered and now used in reply.
“Yes, Jefe,” I told him. “The people have prayed and gone. No one is here. Enter and be as you would in your own camp.”
“Enjuh,” he growled, in his own guttural tongue, meaning “good.” With the word he turned to his followers, waved, and repeated, “enjuh, enjuh,” and the weary horsemen turned and came swiftly along the wall behind the mission. Here, on that side away from the town, was a portal gate wide and high enough to admit a single bent-over rider. I swung open the gate and the Nednhi raiders of the great Juh filed in with the speed and urgency of desert wild sheep driven to some rocky cul-de-sac of desperate need.
I soon learned the reality of this allusion.
My beloved mission was to become, in the space of fewer minutes than there were barbarian guests within its low ramparts, a fortress of Indian war.
My first understanding of this came with the thin far shrilling of a Mexican cavalry trumpet. I knew the sound and had not heard it within a twelve-month, or longer. Government troops were of a severe rarity in northwestern Chihuahua. “Federales,” I said to Juh, and tucked my habit and ran for the wall.
I could see the command about three miles away across the flats to the southeast. The sun, being behind them, silhouetted them nicely. I thought I could comprehend, then, the urgency of Juh’s weary company. The chief, unheard by me, had come up behind me.
“Anh, yes,” the deep voice said, in Apache. “Huera planned it well.”
“Huera?” I said. “Is that the new warrior?”
“Anh.” Juh continued watching the oncoming Mexican column. “Huera saw the trap in a dream.”
“Trap?” I was at once alerted.
“There,” Juh said, pointing to the left of the cavalry. “Squarely in the sun.”
I saw the smaller dust cloud of a lesser band of horsemen bearing in on the mission. They rode a course converging with that of the federale riders. “Quiénes son ellos?” I said quickly, “Who are they?”
“Texas Devils,” rumbled Juh.
“What! Texas Rangers here?”
“Anh.”
“After you, Jefe?”
“Anh, and now the Mexicans are after them.”
“Huera’s plan again?”
“Anh.”
In my heart I did not like this. I grew wrathful but cautious, as one always must be with Apaches.
“Well, too bad,” I said. “It is not going to work. The rangers will win to the mission before the Mexican cavalry. I will grant them sanctuary. Not even government soldiers will invade Church ground where sanctuary has been granted.”
Juh uttered a grunt. Glancing at him, I saw the gargoyle’s beak of his face break into what had to be a Nednhi grin. “We will help you give them sanctuary,” he told me, and turned to order his fellows into place along the wall.
I remained with the Nednhi watching the rangers and the cavalry come on apace. The feeling of a thing being terribly wrong grew within me. But the totality of the Apache chief’s grim meaning was not to be conceived by even a mestizo mind, let alone that of a simple Franciscan cura.
The rangers, seven of them on foaming horses, won the race but narrowly—by the length of an arching rifle shot. Long Mexican lead was splashing the mission wall as I swung open the portal gate to admit the first of the gasping Texas horses. Busy with the heavy panel, anxious to swing it fast behind the last of the Texans, I did not see the horror that followed. I was yet shouldering shut the portal, all the rangers safely through it, when the ear burst of point-blank rifle fire thundered behind me.
As my heart leaped, the most dire fear that invaded it was that the Texans, riding with repeating rifles in hand, had instinctively begun to fire, seeing the Apaches dismounted in the mission courtyard. Would God this had been the tragic depth of it; it was not.
When the barking of the rifles ceased and I dared turn, I saw no pitiful scatter of Indian dead. Instead, where all had fallen within a circle of six pasos, the rangers lay riddled with Apache bullets. Even as I stared, paralyzed by disbelief, the Nednhi were over the bodies, smashing each in the face or back of the head, as scalping knives flashed to complete the coup de grace by gun butt. Sheer stupefaction rooted me. When finally I could force my limbs to act, I was barely in time to leap astride the last ranger body before the blood-spattered Nednhi had finished the other six.
The killing lust was in them and they came for me in a closing circle like the red wolves that they were. I had no belief—indeed, I had certain knowledge to the contrary—that they would respect the robe. There was, however, one whisper-thin chance. Seizing the cross girdled at my waist, I flung it up in their faces and cried out in the same instant, in their thick Apache tongue, the death word, dah-eh-sah.
The sun, by a grace of the Holy Ghost, struck the burnished silver of the crucifix. There was a burst of light in their slitted eyes and, as my cry of death! echoed, they paused the heartbeat needed for their great-chested leader to intervene.
Juh feared the cross. He knew it was the medicine of the blackrobes. Springing between his murderous pack and myself, he swung the butt of his rifle so as to knock the blade from the hand of the warrior Huera, who led the scalpers. As Huera cursed and stepped back, Juh said, to my amazement, “Gouyan, you are well named, a wise woman indeed.”
A woman? This fiercest of the Nednhi pack? Then it was I knew that before me was a living legend, one of the near-mythical Apache warrior women. I knew also why my eyes had refused to leave the handsome young stranger among Juh’s swarthy henchmen.
A priest is not by the mere fact of his devotions an empty vessel. He does not become, with ordainment, a gelded beast of the field. Indeed, I had experienced some persistent difficulty with this portion of the vows. The tantalizing bobble of a noble pair of breasts or the graceful sway of rounded young buttocks, whether well cloaked in village rebozo or covered by Apache buckskin pants, pues, ay de mi! They had never failed to send their signals to my guilty loins.
So it was from the first meeting with the warrior woman Huera.
I knew it, and she knew it.
But she broke her piercing return of my open stare to now fix Juh with a baleful glare, crouching as if to attack the Nednhi chief with the blade she had retrieved from the garden walk. It was a moment of real danger, for among the Apache the warrior woman is ish-son kân, god-woman, and considered holy. Yet Huera yielded as suddenly as she had cursed Juh. Turning without word for him or look for me, she fell to the Apache business of the massacre—the stripping of the dead enemy of arms and ammunition. In this work she was clearly the director, and even I could note the unusual urgency with which the Nednhi sprang to obey her bidding.
I thought I could understand that.
Each ranger wore two heavy Colt revolvers cross-belted at the waist. In addition, and far more excitative to the Apache, each carried a short repeating rifle of obvious new design. Huera directly bore one of these to where Juh and I stood, presenting it to the chief with a guttural comment in Apache. Juh nodded, dark eyes burning like pit coals beneath the deep overhang of his brow. He handed the rifle to me.
“Here, Blackrobe,” he said. “Look at this besh-e-gar. Have you ever seen one of its kind before?”
Besh-e-gar was rifle, and I took the weapon from Juh knowing instantly and even from my little knowledge of arms that not alone I but perhaps no one of the Chihuahuan monte, at least of Casas Grandes, had seen such a deadly weapon.
It resembled superficially the fine Henry Patent rifles that the Americans possessed in some number and which the Indians firmly believed could shoot all week from one loading. Indeed, some models of them would fire as many as sixteen of the short .44-caliber rounds they accepted. But this was no Henry rifle.
Peering at the deeply blued barrel, I saw upon it an unfamiliar name, Winchester, together with a date, 1866, not as recent as one would have expected but still, for our remote frontier, a new gun de seguro.
What dark portent that fact bore for me, and for so many others then unknowing of their fates, will be seen.
For that moment Juh took back the shiny new rifle and lifted his thick shoulders almost in apology.
“We had to do it, you see, Blackrobe. We are out of ammunition, and we knew the Texas Diablos had these beautiful new guns and plenty of brass-cased ammunition for them. We killed three of them in an ambush when first they took our trail across the Rio Bravo, from Tejas.”
“Texas,” I said. “You struck in Texas?”
“Anh, along the stage road below the Cerro Alto but more toward El Paso del Norte, only a little ways out.”
“God’s name! That is approaching the city itself? I cannot accept it. What brought you there, Jefe?”
“The boy,” Juh grunted, moving his head to indicate the small white captive. “And these new guns. It is all a part of the plan, Blackrobe.”
“You mean Huera’s plan again?”
“No. Another’s.” The Nednhi chieftain paused, eyeing me. “Huera’s plan was only to get these other seven new guns and shiny brass bullets for them. Since we had no more ammunition, she was leading the diablos to where we knew the mejicanos rode, where her scouts had sighted them and were leading them in a line to cross our trail and so the front of the diablos.”
“Incredible.”
“Nothing really. Huera knew the diablos would run for a place to fight from. Your church here was the only place. Huera said, ‘We will get there first and when the diablos rush into the mission to fire on the mejicanos, we will kill them all and take their great new guns and kill all the mejicanos, also. That way there will be no one left alive to know that we have the guns, or where we go with them.’” Again Juh paused, again bent his craggy-browed gaze upon me. “That Huera is a devil herself. I am glad she is my virgin aunt and not some sister of the enemy. Enjuh!”
I objected feebly, protesting that here we were speaking of guns when the life of a white captive child was in direst peril. To this, Juh wrinkled the massive face once more in that red wolf’s smirk that was a smile in Apacheland’s view. “The boy and the guns go together, Blackrobe. Do I need to tell you that?”
He lost the grin instantly and I did not care for the look that replaced it. Fortunately, we were interrupted by the at-hand blaring of the Mexican cavalry bugler, and Juh was running for the walls with Huera and the others, levering the new Winchesters on the Apache lope.
Yet at the last possible moment, the warrior woman saw that the white child stood frightened and alone with the Apache horses. She veered from her race for the low ramparts, ran to the boy, seized his arm and, to my utter astonishment, dragged him to me. Thrusting him into my care, she said in Apache, “His life is your life, Blackrobe,” and she was gone.
But in that moment of the passing of the child, our eyes met.
I had not seen her so closely, nor with her riding headband thrown back. The eyes were not the snake’s glitter black of her people. They were a golden hazel color, as of sunlit water pooling over desert sand. And her hair, released from the band, tumbled thick as ripened wheat, of a brown and glowing gold, over its Indian-dark undercolor. I was stunned.
She was what her name was.
Huera, the Blonde.
Certainly a Nednhi, or other Chiricahua-bred Indian woman in every feature of face and splendid form, she was yet a golden chestnut, even palomino, blonde. And she was, in that arm’s-length exchange of the dirt-caked white boy, the most savagely exciting female of any race or complexion ever touched by this priest of the True Faith.
My guilty heart hammered, and not from fear of dying in the fight to come, or from cruel decision of Apache visitor, or even will of God. I was excited of that woman, racing yonder to kill my countrymen who thought to find but seven Texas Rangers within those mission walls. The smell of her, the look of her, the wildness radiating from her animal litheness, her cold Apache quickness to kill overcame all that lived beneath those Franciscan robes. I would never be the same priest again. Huera had looked at me.
It was in that numbed moment, before the crash of Apache rifles greeted the doomed Mexican cavalry and while the white boy clung to me in seeming mute fear, that I felt the grasp of another hand upon my habit’s lower hem. I caught up my breathing as the tug came again—and yet again. Nombre Dios, could it be—?
Sweet Mary! Yes, my downward glance disclosed it: the seventh ranger was not dead.