The sun was high and hot, unrelenting in its punishment for two fools riding up into the grasslands with only the vaguest notion of where we were going and what we were going to do when we got there. We were more or less in the dead center of a big, empty square between cattle trails far to the north, east, south, and west of us, leaving little by way of civilization along the way. That much suited me well enough—I’d had more than my fair allotment of run-ins with cowboys in cow towns and I could do without the odor of them or their stinking charges. Besides, there wasn’t much that depressed a man more than the sight of men working themselves to death for next to nothing just so a few big-wigs at the top of the pile could keep getting richer. I’d decided early in life that work was no way to spend one’s few and short days before that old Angel of Death came calling for his due.
Yet if somebody had asked me the day before what I did to earn my living, I could have laughed and told him I did no such stupid thing, whereas here I was slumped in the saddle with a job of work at hand and, at least for the time being, a profession.
Edward Splettstoesser, bounty hunter.
Jesus.
“Look alive, Edward,” Boon called to me from ahead. She was reading my mind again. “We ain’t but just getting started out.”
“You know,” I called back, “I do believe we are riding right into the heart of Indian Country.”
“We’ve been in the Comancheria for days already,” she said. “Or what’s left of it, anyhow. Still some Kiowa bands about, raising hell. See that smoke over to the east?”
My back stiffened and I looked. Sure enough, a thin gray column rose from the horizon to my right. It wasn’t particularly close, but too close for comfort.
“Nothing like they used to be,” Boon said. “But meaner than ever. I don’t blame ’em none, either. Government’s been warring them to death since they ran out of Confederates to kill. It’ll come to a head soon enough.”
“I’d rather not be in the middle of it when it does,” I said, never imagining for a blink of the eye that I would be.
“If they scalp you, you can just turn that big beard of yours up and wear it on your head,” she offered. “Hardly anybody will notice the difference.”
Boonsri did not laugh often, but when she did it was uproarious. I wasn’t in the mood for mirth. Apart from my anxiety at the volume of her laughter so close to that camp, I reckoned the two of us had already had more than enough Indian troubles.
Barely a year had passed since our run-in with the Mescaleros along the Texas Big Bend, east of Chihuahua. Boon had spotted the smoking ruins of a stagecoach behind an outcropping of rocks and mesquite and insisted on investigating. It smelled like trouble to me and my nose wasn’t lying: no sooner had we gotten within spitting distance of the stage, we were circled by a band of a dozen Mescalero Apaches mounted bareback and armed with a shiny new U.S. Army repeater apiece.
All but one of them were men, and the one woman among them dressed in the same cotton tunic, leather waist-belt, and knee-high moccasins. Like her fellows, she wore long, loose hair that draped over her shoulders. And like her fellows, she did not appear terribly friendly.
It was her that rode up from the rest, her horse snorting as she neared Boon and me. The woman tilted her head back so that she looked down her nose at us, first me and then Boon. I edged a little closer to my own mount, thinking about going for my rifle and seeing how many of them I could knock off their horses before the end. Without so much as looking at me, Boon said, “Don’t.”
The Mescalero woman said something in Chiricahua to her. Boon listened, gravely and intently, despite the fact that she couldn’t understand a single word, as I knew damn well. At the time, I couldn’t tell if the woman was their leader, or if she was just talking to Boon because they were the only two women there. Did she think Boon was an Indian, too? Didn’t seem likely. Mostly, my mind was just spinning in every direction looking for some hidden solution to our dilemma. When an older man with a hard, square face loped up beside the Mescalero woman and aimed his rifle—a brand-spanking new Springfield Trapdoor—at me, I decided it was too late for solutions.
I raised my hands like I was being robbed. The square-faced man’s eyes widened and he tightened his grip on the rifle before he couldn’t take it anymore and exploded into a fit of raucous laughter. Boon turned redder than any of them, she was so embarrassed by me. But the rest of the braves got to chortling pretty good at my expense, too, so in a way I figured I’d just saved our lives by acting the fool like that.
Then the square-faced man directed a pair of his men to ride up to us, where they jabbered until we understood that they wanted us to climb back up into our saddles. I thought we were being set free, but Boon gathered more from their talk than me.
“Hand over your rifle,” she instructed me. “Slow and easy.”
Her Colt came out and spun on her finger so that the butt faced out. One of the men took it. I wasn’t even through untying my saddle scabbard before the other was upon it and yanking the Winchester free.
“They just leaving us out here unarmed?” I protested.
“No,” Boon said. “They’re taking us with them.”
I could feel all the blood drain out of my face.
“Why?” I said.
She shrugged.
Terrific.
The two fellows who took our guns also took our reins, and we rode without power over our destinies with the little band of Mescalero Apaches for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Along the way it became clear to me that the square-faced man was, in fact, the leader of the band, though the woman held some measure of authority, as well. I wondered if she was his wife or his sister, but for the most part I just quietly panicked over what they had in store for us wherever we were going.
Where we went was a camp that might or might not have been across the border into Mexico, where our mounts were confiscated and we were both roughly directed to be seated in front of a smoldering fire. The remaining women of the camp had kept things running, it seemed, while the men and the one woman were out carousing, setting fire to stagecoaches and abducting nice folks like me and Boon.
All told, there were fewer than thirty of them in the camp. I knew the Army was giving the Indians of every tribe an honest-to-God drubbing, but I hadn’t heard of any legitimate bands reduced to such small numbers. These, I concluded, were some manner of outlaws, off-agency and off-treaty.
Not that the treaties were worth the paper they were written on. But still.
We were fed some sort of roasted meat. I could not place the flavor and I did not want to. I was hungry enough that I ate everything I was given without waiting until it was cool enough to not burn my lips and gullet. I had a sense it was wolf meat, and had it not been such lean times, I might have had an issue with it. Wolf meat tastes vile. The way things were, I wished for more.
“What happens now?” I asked Boon, as if she’d know.
She chewed her meat without complaint.
“Hard to say,” she said, her mouth full. “Never heard of any Apache filling your belly before killing you, though.”
“You heard a lot about Apache?”
“No.”
I was not reassured. Boon was clutching at straws. Neither of us had the first clue what was to happen next. I wondered if the Mescaleros would let me have some paper and the pencil I kept in my saddlebag to write a last letter, but I dismissed the idea when the only person I could think of sending it to was Boon. I could just tell her my final thoughts before I was killed.
They were: “Should’a left that stagecoach alone.”
“It was a trap, all right,” she agreed.
The woman watched us intently while we spoke and finished eating. Soon thereafter, old square-face re-emerged from the buffalo-skin entrance to his wickiup and strode stiffly to the fire. I guessed it was time and thought about praying. It wasn’t much of a thought. If God thought it was okay for us to be in this position, I wasn’t going to beg him to get us out of it. There just wasn’t any talking to people like that.
Square-face spoke to the woman, and the woman took Boon by the forearm to guide her up to her feet. I stood up, too, but square-face barked something harsh and one of his men pushed me back down on the ground. Someone laughed. I really amused them with my antics, it appeared. I ought to have been in the circus.
Once Boon was up, the woman stepped aside to let square-face look her up and down. He said something in a low voice I couldn’t hear, so I wouldn’t have understood it even if he was talking American. But Boon nodded—just the once—and together they went back through the buffalo hide. She looked back before she disappeared into the wickiup.
I said, “It’s been a real pleasure riding with you.”
Boon said, “Don’t be a moron. I’ll see you in the morning.”
It must have been going on midnight by then, though I could not say for sure or for certain, and I was awake another two to three hours by that fire, well past the time it died down to nothing but cinders and ash. And all that while, the woman from the raiding party sat across from me and stared like she could see into my future, to the moment of my demise. For a while I thought perhaps she would take me to another of the slapdash wickiups scattered around the periphery of the camp, but she only gazed at me without expression until I got used to it and fell asleep under the starlight.
At first light, Boon woke me with a nudge in the ribs from her boot. I opened my eyes to find her with the reins to her palomino in hand, her gunbelt reaffixed to her waist. The camp was cold and otherwise vacant, apart from my horse staked some twenty feet distant.
“We lost a day’s riding,” she said. “Come on.”
“What happened?” I asked her.
“Saddle up.”
It was half an hour before I caught up with her on a thin, barely recognizable trail snaking up the Texan side of the Big Bend toward El Paso. The band leader’s Springfield was tied behind her cantle. I didn’t ask her about it. I didn’t ask her about anything. We rode silently until making our own camp that night, and she sold the rifle in El Paso the following day. Boon always preferred working with short guns.
Maybe she just didn’t want to look at it and remember anything. I never knew. I just assumed she’d saved my life again, somehow.
Now that we were roaming through the middle of Comanche country, I couldn’t help but ponder on whether she’d have to do that again. Whatever it was that she’d done.
We put that camp smoke behind us and I kept alert, scanning the horizon on all sides for signs of new friends, but I didn’t see another living soul the rest of the day, unless beeves and prairie birds have souls. I knew for a fact mosquitoes did not, and I saw plenty of them, too.
After an early supper of salted venison and cowboy coffee that just about knocked the boots off my feet, Boon retrieved the paper on Dejasu and opened it up on the ground to the back side. There, Willocks had scrawled a rough map of the Panhandle with dotted lines for trails he could conjure from memory. Said trails led to a point in the state’s upper northwest corner where it met with both Indian Territory and the New Mexico Territory. The marshal made an X there, underneath which he’d written the words RED FOOT.
I’d never heard of it. I hadn’t heard of Stiff Neck, either, until we were in it. Mayhap Red Foot was a cholera town, too. Or mayhap it only existed in Willocks’s imagination. There was no telling with a character like that.
“Last known whereabouts,” I said, gnawing on the cold venison and remembering the wolf meat fondly. “Not much to start with.”
“We’ll go about it the way we always do. Ask questions.”
“We been doing that near three years now,” I complained. “This is a hell of a lot of country to hide in.”
“And this one with more reason to hide,” she agreed.
“Can’t shake the feeling we’re getting farther away from where we want to be,” I said, “instead of closer.”
“There’s no place you need to be,” Boon said, folding the paper back up. “It’s my ride and you don’t have to come along if you don’t like it.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I’ve got to have a moment,” she said.
That was Boon’s code for needing to make water, and she rose to wander off into the darkness to do so, the conversation effectually closed.
Three years come September. Three years since she saved my hide and recruited me to help her hunt down a father meaner than Satan and a mother who was probably dead. Three years of the sole friendship of my whole life, though I didn’t suppose I would ever really understand Boonsri Angchuan. And it wasn’t on account of her being a woman or coming from faraway Siam. It was just because she was Boon.
When she returned from her moment, she doused the fire and slid into her bedroll, her Colt within reach as always.
Way I figured it, if God was willing and the creek didn’t rise, we’d reach Red Foot before noon assuming we lit out before dawn.