When I reached the cistern and made a light with the prepared candle, I feared the Texan had died he lay so wan and still. But, praise God, he had only a bullet furrow in his dense Anglo skull. With a bit of camphor and acrid salts from the cistern’s cache of medicaments, I soon had him restored. Hurriedly, I advised him of our situation. He immediately wanted to go above ground, but I persuaded him we must wait where we were in order to give the Apache time to be well up the Rio Casas Grandes.
“The while,” I said, “tell me of yourself; we must have no secrets, Tejano.” Fortunately, he agreed.
His name, he said, was Ben Allison. He came from the town and county of San Saba, in the state of Texas, where he had some ranchland and a small house on the drainage of the Rio Colorado of Texas. “Midway,” as he explained it, “twixt Brady and Lampasas, and northerly of Cherokee about three days’ drive.” He was not a ranger, he surprised me by saying, but had joined the ill-fated company for good and grim reason of his own.
It developed that he, Allison, was in El Paso to buy a stallion for his ranch mares, but the sale had fallen through and, as he had planned to ride the stud home, he was left without a mount. Rather than buy a poor horse for the journey, he bought a ticket on the stage for San Angelo. It was at the stage depot that he met Henry Garnet Buckles III. The boy was there in the guardianship of his Mexican dueña, rather governess, who was also purchasing passage on the San Angelo stage for the boy and herself. The boy, taken by Allison’s raffish apparel—the man was plainly a pistolero—had struck up a conversation with the tall San Saban, inquiring of him how was the best way for an interested young man to go about getting into the outlaw business.
While circling around that commitment, Allison had gotten from the lad his own most touching story.
The boy was in El Paso to visit his mother, who was ill in the army hospital at nearby Fort Bliss. He had said goodbye to her that same day, he and the governess returning to town to await next day’s early stage.
He did not believe, the boy said, that his mother was improving as she insisted she was. Still, she had smiled many times, repeatedly assuring him she would be home in the spring, and he must tell his daddy so.
Here, the Mexican governess had taken the San Saban aside. The lad’s mother, she confided, was gravely ill of the lung fever. She had come to the post hospital because of the army’s experience with the disease. But the medicos had failed. She had perhaps but days remaining. The boy, por supuesto, knew none of this.
Allison thanked the woman. He returned to the boy and bid him to take heart and believe what his mother told him. He then promised to see the lad on the stage next day, saying he had meanwhile another journey to make, which was private.
It was to visit the mother at the post hospital.
In their young days the boy’s mother and Ben Allison’s sister, Stella Allison, had been closest girlhood friends. Then Stella had been declared missing in the great Brownsville Raid of the Mexican freebooter Cheno Cortinas. Ben and his brother Clinton had not seen Mary Anna McCulloch—the mother’s maiden name—through all the years since that tragedy, not even when she married the governor and sent them a genuine printed invitation to the State House. Now Ben knew it was long beyond that time, and he must go and talk with Mary Anna McCulloch.
The woman wept to see the tall brother of her olden friend. Ben, no creature of iron, could not prevent the shaking of his own voice, nor the answering tear. He hid both, he thought, at least enough not to add to Mary Anna’s burden. When he could, he asked her about the boy, whom she called Little Buck, after his father, known throughout the Southwest as Big Buck. In turn, she wanted to know if any word had ever come as to the whereabouts, or fate, of Stella Allison. When all of this gathering of the old times had been sifted through, the tall Texan said, he and the woman had come to it. As a ranch girl would, Mary Anna put it straight to the mark and did not, again in Allison’s twangy words, “go wide around the rough spot.”
“I am going to die, Ben,” she told him. “You must not let Little Buck know this, but if you can do it, I would pray that you take the stage with him and see he gets home to his daddy. If you could see Big Buck, tell him his Mary loves him and asks he forgive her for keeping the secret of, well, you know what I’m saying to you—the way that it is going to be.”
At this point, memory rose up in the tall San Saban so strongly as to interrupt his narrative. When he had rallied himself, he concluded in the strange pattern of the Tejano dialect.
“Padre,” he resumed, “that was a mean hand to play, leaving that poor woman. I told her that, by God, she was not agoing to die and that, yes, Christ Jesus, I would vow to shelter Little Buck back to the capital, and she could close her eyes on that and rest easier than a bay filly with her nose in the oat bag. Last I seen of her she was smiling and waving me a Comanche farewell sign I had taught her as a kid.”
Again, the big man had to wait, again resumed when he could, the words tightening beneath the Tejano drawl.
“Well, Padre, that was a long night awaiting for the stage to leave come sunrise. So I wandered out on the town, had me some Old Crow bourbon whiskey, enough to leach out the last sense in my pea-gravel brains, and wound up acrost the river in Ciudad Juárez, skunk-drunk and snoring it off in a Mexican whorehouse.
“When I got back over the Rio, the sun was three hours high and the San Angelo stage was fifteen miles out and rolling east at a six-horse clip.
“I done what I could. I knowed where the fastest horse in them parts was, and I went and got him. Didn’t have time to discuss the price. Didn’t figure it to do no good anyhow, as they wouldn’t sell him to me the day afore. So I merely stole the son of a bitch and took out after the stage.”
I had to laugh, here, even as a man of God.
This lean, fierce-looking Anglo was a passing odd and quaint fellow. He had a sort of sun shining within himself, which illuminated his view of things even when events were dire. In this case, he nodded his understanding of my levity—that it was not an ignoring of the sorrow in his tale—and finished quickly.
He said that, about six miles out of El Paso, he had come upon ten rangers quartering in off the prairie from up by Cerro Alto mountain. They were running a hot track and a bad rumor. Some friendly Lipan Apaches had told them that Juh had been camped in the nearby Tinaja Pintas for several days. The Nednhi chief had with him a band of what the Lipans called “bad” Indians—known raiders and haters of the Tejanos—riding out of the Mexican Sierra Madre Mountains. More, and worse news, Juh had boasted he would soon be the “biggest man” of all the Chiricahuan “four families.” Since this number would include such as Cochise and the original “pure” Chiricahua; old Nana and famed Victorio of the Warm Springs Chiricahua; and young Geronimo of the intractable Bedonkohe Chiricahua, the boast was strong medicine.
Of course it was known that Juh was addicted to some even stronger medicine—the raw and gut-rotting whiskey of the Pinda Lickoyi, the White Eyes. As a legendary drunkard, even by Apache standards, Juh’s talk had to be watered down severely. It remained a fearful claim: the Mexican Nednhi Chiricahua were in Texas to carry off the only and small son of Governor Henry Buckles, then known to be visiting his bedridden mother in the post hospital at Fort Bliss.
The ranger troop had been on its way to El Paso, after a three-day scout up from Jeff Davis County, to check the rumor and to mount guard over the youth if anything were found. North of El Paso, they had struck the trail of a sizable band of hostiles heading due-line to cut the stage road east of that city. Knowing the San Angelo run would be rolling that morning, they had swung east to intercept it and turn it back until they had “chaperoned” the Apache war party safely across the Rio Grande.
It was at this point that my tall patient’s memory once more constricted his throat. He went on to the bitter ending only with difficulty.
“It was right then, Padre, that I had to break in on the ranger captain and tell him his coach was an hour early leaving El Paso, and we was already seven, eight miles behind it. I asked and got permission to ride with them, and we put the hooks to our ponies clean into the shanks. It was maybe an hour later, nearing high noon, that we seen the smoke ahead.
“You know what we found. All dead but the boy, and him only figured to be alive because there wasn’t no body for him in the wreckage of the burning coach. The captain sent one man back to El Paso to report the massacre, and the rest of us cinched up and whipped on. We wasn’t more than thirty minutes back of the Apache and they knowed it. We damn near got them at the river, then again down past Guadalupe and Bravos, on the Mexican side. We hung on. The captain was determined to do or die.
“He made it the bad way.
“The bastards set us a trap in the salt cedar brakes of the Santa Maria. Got Captain Caldwell and two men down and the rest of us had to fort up under a sandbank. Had to watch them beat in the heads of all three—still alive—and ride on out free as chaparral cocks.
“That was yesterday, sundown. We lost them by dark and gambled on a blind stab for Casas Grandes, as the Lipans said that Juh’s bunch come from the Sierra back of here. We was praying we could beat them to their home trail and waylay them like they done us.
“You seen what happened.
“Your damn bugle-tootling Mex cavalry jumped us four mile out and it was ‘run for the river, ranger,’ all over again. The onliest stream we could see was yonder dry wash, so we hit for your blackbird corral here on the hill. We never seen the Apache this morning, until we seen them inside your churchyard.”
The San Saban drew a final, long breath.
He looked upward, into the gloom of the cistern’s stairwell. “God help and keep all you Texas boys laying dead up yonder,” he said, in that arid, soft voice I was to remember so keenly. “And all them sungrinner horse soldiers, too, I reckon.”
Then, the soft voice honed to an edge of knife-steel. The pale gray eyes turned to blaze upon me.
“And Christ Jesus give me the gut-strength, Padre, to trail up and kill every last one of them Apaches of yourn that was here this day.”