As dusk descended, grainy twilight replacing the dust haze, Touch the Sky halted his companions in a jagged arroyo which followed the course of the redrock spine.
“Hobble your ponies and eat something,” he told them. “But we will not make a camp. The horses grazed well before we left, but River of Winds reports there is no grass until we reach Disappointment Creek, a full sleep’s ride from here. The longer we wait, the harder it will be on our horses. Give them a little of the water.”
While he spoke, Touch the Sky was wetting his body with small handfuls of water, then smearing himself with the dark sand of the arroyo’s bottom.
“Hold, brother,” Little Horse said. “Take me with you.”
Touch the Sky shook his head as he made sure his throwing tomahawk was secure in his legging sash. He laid his rifle and bow and quiver aside, opting only for his obsidian-bladed knife and the tomahawk Arrow Keeper had made for him. The latter was the same weapon which he had used to split open the skull of the Pawnee leader War Thunder when he tried to kill Chief Yellow Bear-Touch the Sky’s first kill in battle.
“One person only should go. In open country, even one person is too easy to spot.”
“But tell me, brother,” Tangle Hair said. “Have you seen something, or heard a noise? I have watched that spine closely for some time. If anything larger than a tarantula is moving behind it, my pony would have shied.”
“I have heard or seen nothing. But count upon it, someone is back there watching us.”
“But if you have heard or seen nothing,” Tangle Hair said, “how can you know this thing?”
It was Little Horse who spoke next.
“Tangle Hair, do you recall what Arrow Keeper told the Council of Forty when he announced that Touch the Sky was to be his apprentice?”
“That he has the gift of visions. But he has had no vision here today.”
Little Horse was hobbling the remounts. Touch the Sky noticed that his friend still limped from the shattered kneecap he had suffered while a prisoner aboard the land-grabber’s keelboat.
“No vision, perhaps,” Little Horse said. “But those who have the gift of visions can also learn to notice things the rest of us miss.”
This talk embarrassed Touch the Sky. But Little Horse had seen the mulberry-colored birthmark hidden in the hair over his right temple—a perfect arrowhead, the mark of the warrior. It was the same mark carried by the great warrior of Arrow Keeper’s Medicine Lake vision: the warrior who would someday gather the far-flung Cheyenne bands for one last, great victory against their enemies. Nor could Little Horse forget what Touch the Sky had finally announced for the first time during the recent hunt: that he was the son of a great Cheyenne chief and like his father, destined for greatness. Many had scoffed openly at this, demanding proof which the youth could not provide. But Little Horse had learned long ago that Touch the Sky always spoke straight-arrow.
Tangle Hair knew it was bad luck to talk about such things, so he let it go. By the time Touch the Sky had covered the lightest parts of his body with wet sand, the sky had grown dark enough to let him move up out of the arroyo. First he moved forward a few dozen yards, and then pulled himself carefully over the edge and up onto the still-warm alkali dust of the level plain.
His friend Old Knobby, the hostler from Bighorn Falls, had taught him never to move at night without first fixing on a point in advance. Getting his bearing, he fixed his eyes on the shadowy form of a spiked jolla cactus halfway between his present position and the redrock spine. Then, moving low and silently on his elbows and knees, sometimes even slithering in the sand like a snake, he moved out.
As he drew nearer the dark ridge, fear make his scalp sweat. But he moved steady and slow, stopping now and then to listen.
He reached the cactus, paused to check his bearing, and began low-crawling again. Sweat beaded in his thick black locks and rolled down into his eyes, sand fleas bit at him, and his elbows were chaffing in the rough sand. But finally he felt the rough, porous texture of the redrock under his fingers.
Slowly he rose, pulled himself over the redrock. The moon chose that moment to scuttle out from behind a huge rock pile of clouds. Just downridge to his right, crouched low to spy on the Cheyennes in the arroyo, was a shadowy figure.
Now Touch the Sky spotted the shape of the lone intruder’s horse, picketed well back from the ridge and out of sight from the other side. A Kiowa or Comanche scout, he guessed. Or maybe even an Apache or Bluecoat scout. Either way, it was no friend.
He slid his knife out of its beaded sheath and placed it handy between his teeth. Now he did move like a snake, inch by inch, until he was almost close enough to spit on the crouched spy.
He rose, transferred the knife to his right hand, leaped.
The spy was surprisingly light. Touch the Sky hit him hard, knocking the wind out of him as they tumbled down the back slope of the ridge.
The Cheyenne way forbade killing except in self-defense, and this one had not yet fired on the Cheyenne. Touch the Sky raised his knife hand, turned the blade up so the bone handle was his weapon, and started to plunge it toward his opponent’s temple in a crippling blow.
“Touch the Sky!”
His knife was halfway to its target before the mystery figure shocked him by saying his name. With a supreme effort, he managed to avert his thrust. The handle thucked into the sand only inches from the spy’s face.
Touch the Sky grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head up so his face was exposed to the moonlight.
“Two Twists! Have you eaten strong mushrooms, little brother? What are you doing spying on us?”
Two Twists was the brave young junior warrior who had led the warriors in training, under Touch the Sky’s direction, in narrowly averting the first Kiowa-Comanche raid on the women and children during the recent hunt. He was named after his old-fashioned style of wearing his hair in two braids, instead of the single braid or loose locks preferred by most Cheyenne men.
Two Twists sat up, still gasping for breath.
“I want to join you,” he said. “But I was waiting until you had traveled farther from our hunt camp before I made my presence known, so you might not send me back.”
“Join us? Little brother, I am proud of the way you stood and held during the attack on our women and little ones. You will someday be a warrior to be reckoned with. But you have yet to count your first coup, yet to be blooded for your tribe. Pups are quick to bark like dogs, but barking and biting are two different things.”
“I can bite,” Two Twists said with confidence. “As deep as a rattlesnake! Please, Touch the Sky, do not send me back. My sister, Singing Bird, is among the prisoners! My father was killed by Utes in the Wolf Mountains, my mother by Bluecoats at Washita Creek. Singing Bird is my only family, the soul of my medicine bag. She is not strong, Touch the Sky, she must be rescued soon or she will surely die. Please let me lift my battle lance beside yours and help to save her!”
“I do plan to save her, if she is still alive. And that is why I ride with two of the finest warriors on the plains. You heard River of Winds describe this fierce Comanche called Big Tree, the one who makes his brothers cower in fear. Are you ready to ride against such as him? Your feeling for Singing Bird is strong and good, little brother, and I admire you for it. But the heart should not rule the head in combat.”
“But Touch the Sky, I—”
“I have spoken, buck. Point your bridle east and return to the hunt camp. If your sister can possibly be saved, we will do it or die trying.”
Touch the Sky rose and stepped up onto the ridge, signaling to the others that he was all right. He had started to descend back toward the arroyo when Two Twists cried out bitterly behind him.
“All right, play the big Indian! If you have a right to die saving my sister, then so do I. You treat me like a child still sucking his mother’s dug! I am not so young that I cannot remember what it was like for you when you joined our tribe! You were not much older than I am now. You were called a spy, a white man’s dog, a woman face, and the others refused to use their names in front of you, as if you were a paleface. During all of this, I felt sorry for you. I was sure you were better than your enemies who tormented you. Now you too turn on a less-experienced buck and tell him he is not a man!”
These words, and Two Twists’s angry tone, irritated Touch the Sky. Yet something plaintive in the youth’s speech also touched his heart. There were some nuggets of truth mixed up with the childish spite of his words. Right now Two Twists felt like an outsider who belonged in neither world, the child’s or the man’s—and hadn’t Touch the Sky chaffed under that same feeling?
“Is the calf bellowing to the bull?” he demanded.
“No,” Two Twists said. “Only crying to be heard.”
That settled it. Touch the Sky had watched this youth stand tall before enemy fire, firing one bullet for one enemy. Now he had listened to him state his case boldly like a man, not fawning to those in power as Swift Canoe liked to do. The injustices and scorn heaped on Touch the Sky made him reluctant to heap them on others.
“Are you willing to die?” he demanded. “For surely this is a suicide mission if ever I have seen one. We are vastly outnumbered in a hostile land.”
“If I must die, then it will be the glorious death my father died!”
“Some call it glorious, but there is little glory in watching Comanches feed your guts to their dogs while you are still breathing. Bring your pony, then, and join us. But I tell you now, Two Twists, and you had better place my words close to your heart. My mission is to save our women and children. At the first sign that you are endangering that mission, I will order you back to the hunt camp. If you disobey me then, sassy words will not sway me again. Now quit smiling and show a war face, for soon you will need it.”
~*~
Something was troubling Juan Aragon.
Whatever it was nagged at him like a toothache, but he couldn’t spell the thought out plain.
He slipped into the shanty-and-sod no man’s land, known as Over the River to soldiers and Indians alike, through a series of cutbanks which led down from the Comanchero camp in the nearby hills. The son of an Apache father and a Mexican mother, Aragon wore his hair cut short in contrast to most Indians—this because he knew from experience that long hair was convenient to grasp when cutting a man’s throat, and he was the last man to help his enemies kill him.
He was smaller than most full-blood Apaches. But his legendary skill with the machete in his shoulder scabbard, and the long-muzzled cavalry pistol in his holster, added much to his stature.
Himself a former slave who had escaped from forced labor in Old Mexico, he had grown up as hard and ruthless as the hacienda jefes who controlled the slaves. He had also seen firsthand the inner workings of the illegal slave trade. Now he led his band of Comanchero slave traders, all half-breeds like himself except for one full-blooded Comanche, toward the one place which could buy all the young Indian women he chose to supply.
Over the River had sprung up in the days when water still flowed in the now-dry tributary ditch which separated this isolated hovel from the more respectable town of Silverton. The Silverton side was strictly limited to white settlers and the soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Union, which sat on the northern boundary of the Llano Estacado. The other side was their solution to the problem of providing entertainment for the Indian scouts and interpreters, as well as the reservation Indians who frequently visited the fort to receive their ration allotments and sometimes ended up waiting for days. Officially, no one from Silverton ever crossed the “river” and it was forbidden to Army personnel—though Aragon knew for a fact that a new shipment of pretty Arapaho or Cheyenne girls could lure even the paleface soldiers over while the girls were still fresh.
But he also knew that girls didn’t last long here. The lucky ones, the strongest ones, might still be sold for hacienda labor in Chihuahua once they ceased to lure money here. The others would join the many rows of shallow, unmarked graves behind Over the River, stones piled on them to keep the animals off.
Tonight he had an Arapaho girl to show to the old Mexican named Valdez, who sold whiskey from a clapboard shanty and kept women out back in a row of dark brown adobe huts. So far the soldiers and white settlers had ignored the Indian-slave trade. Nonetheless, Juan Aragon and his men entered the squalid village with one hand on their weapons—they had made many enemies over the years, and after dark very few lights burned in the treacherous, narrow alleys of Over the River.
They passed a few adobe buildings, unmarked by signs and poorly lit inside. Aragon carefully studied each open doorway, making sure no rifles protruded. Loud voices spilled from each, and he knew that men were getting drunk and gambling inside all of them. Money was flowing, white man’s gold, but what of that? Aragon had seen the wealth and power of the hacienda owners, and white man’s gold could help him achieve that.
A figure stepped outside one of the clapboard shanties and, in the space of an eye blink, Aragon’s machete was in his hand. The wide, curved blade glinted cruelly in the light of a three-quarter moon. The figure froze, recognizing Aragon immediately.
“It’s only that half-wit Comanche thief they call Sticks Everything in His Belt,” Benito, one of Aragon’s men, said. “He has slipped outside to steal something lashed to the ponies.”
“Steal what you will,” Aragon said in his voice which was like a dry husk. “But touch these ponies, hombre, and you sleep with the worms.”
Finally they reached the last and biggest shanty, one which even boasted a crude awning: a ragged flap of canvas mounted on old corral poles. Valdez lived in the slope-roof partition off to one side of the saloon. While Benito went into the saloon side to get Valdez, Aragon led the girl into the one-room living quarters.
As always, his men stood watch outside. Aragon lit a coal-oil lamp, then ordered the girl to sit on the crude shuck-mattress bed in the back corner. The room had a rammed-earth floor and was furnished only with the bed, two kegs for chairs, and a crude deal table. A fire pit in one corner also served as an oven.
“What is it tonight?” Valdez said in Spanish as he stepped inside. “Another skinny Apache with buck teeth?”
“They’re all skinny to you, fat brown one. You eat too much of your profits. No, my friend, tonight I have a fine young Arapaho virgin for you.”
“They’re all skinny to me, they’re all virgin to you, no? Take her clothes off,” Valdez said impatiently. “My help is robbing me blind while we talk.”
The girl cowered when Aragon reached for her buckskin dress. He said something to her sharply and she submitted as he pulled the garment over her head and dropped it on the mattress. Valdez picked up the lamp from the table and stepped closer, inspecting her as if she were a side of beef.
Tears of shame and humiliation welled in her eyes as Valdez reached out and roughly pinched her various parts.
“She’ll do,” he finally said, “but I’d swear by the two balls of Christ she’s no virgin. She has at least twenty years on her, and no twenty-year-old Indian woman is still virgin.”
“So what? She’ll pass for one once they’ve got your panther piss inside them.”
“Fifty dollars,” Valdez said.
“In a pig’s ass, old man! Two hundred.”
“You thieving bastard! I’ll give you one hundred.”
“You’ll make that on her in one week, you old fart. One hundred and seventy-five.”
“I can buy white women for those prices! One hundred and twenty-five, and that’s my last offer.”
They finally agreed on a price of a hundred and fifty dollars. Aragon knew the old Mexican was desperate for women right now, and wisely he seldom brought him more than one or two at a time, to keep the prices up. Valdez wanted Cheyenne women, of course, as everyone knew they were called the Beautiful People throughout the plains. But they were far north of here and difficult to come by.
Now he thought of his young cousins, being held back in the Comanchero camp. Delshay was a boy and would go with the next delivery to Old Mexico. But Josefa, though only eleven, would come here. Many of the drunks asked for young girls.
“’Sta bien, old man,” Aragon said as he pocketed the double-eagle gold coins Valdez drew from the rawhide pouch on his belt. “Next time I come, I’ll have a fresh young Apache for you.”
Outside, Aragon found the Comanche brave named War Song waiting with his men.
“I bring word from Iron Eyes and Hairy Wolf,” he told Aragon in Spanish. “They are waiting in the Blanco with a load of about twenty Cheyenne prisoners, all young women and small children.”
Safe in the darkness, Aragon permitted himself a wide smile. This was indeed a stroke of fine fortune. “Tell them,” he replied, “I’ll be there soon.”
But even as he slipped back out of Over the River and toward the safety of the remote hills, Aragon finally realized what had been bothering him every since the raid on his Apache clan’s cave. It was Victorio Grayeyes, his cousin. He had seen him sprawled, apparently dead, half in and half out of a fissure. But in the confusion of that night, had anyone verified that he was dead?