Читать книгу The Big Dry - George Garland - Страница 9

AT ABOUT THE TIME Sack was telling Young this, a courier from Fort Bayard got off his horse at a small outpost southeast of Gila Crossing and asked for Lieutenant Dana.

“In the castle there,” came the reply.

The courier looked wise. The long adobe huts surrounded by a hip-high wall of rocks made up Fort Mangus. He knew the joke at Bayard: if an officer offended the high brass they sent him to Fort Mangus. He knew also that First Lieutenant Goodell Dana had done just that.

Lieutenant Dana met the courier with a semblance of hope in his tight face. The officers’ ball at Bayard tomorrow evening was uppermost in his mind as he broke the seal on the dispatch. Then he was reading the order from General Bent, jaws working into crawling ridges and hard flashes shooting about in his eyes. He was still the high cockalorum of Mangus, for the order said:

Proceed to Lieutenant Botts’s camp on Gutache Mesa with haste.

There was more: the General hoped to avoid mounting a full campaign; the Lieutenant should contact a Mr. Joe Sack, who was secretly investigating the Gutache Mesa affair for the Adjutant General of the Territory; the Lieutenant should hold his troop intact on the march, work amiably with Lieutenant Botts until Captain Corday arrived to assume command.

So it was to be Captain Corday again. Such luck shouldn’t happen to an officer.

Alone, he glanced at the dispatch again, kicked a chair, and called in a loud voice for Sergeant Reeder, who entered almost at once.

“As you were, Reeder,” he snapped.

The Sergeant was big and gaunt, but sullen in Dana’s presence; had been since the Mescalero campaign. But so had others from corporals up to the Colonel, even the General.

“Troop A is moving up above the town of Bacon. Tonight.” He gave detailed orders about the token force to be left behind and other things, then said, “That’s all, Reeder.”

But that wasn’t all; his mind was ticking over slowly with reports out of Bacon and Queeny. Conditions were none too good up there. What with the lawlessness and flowing whisky, it was small wonder that more Indians didn’t hit the warpath. Horses were being stolen and cabins burned. The military overlooked these small things.

And now two prospectors had died with burning arrows in them. Five in each. Somehow, Dana felt it, the Army was in for more than it realized.

A little later, Troop A hit the saddle, jogged out, pushed stolidly north toward the Gila River through the sheen of night, carbines laxed, yellow neckerchiefs dim in the starlight. A glum outfit that looked ahead to saddle sores and the eternal chase of an enemy who wasn’t there. This was the Mangus troop. The General was a benevolent man.

The General knew the Army, but not the Apache. From Colorado, he was tame-minded, Ute and Arapahoe influenced.

Dana rode at the head of the column, looking straight ahead, thinking of the past, never forgetting that he was in a rut, long steps from promotion. He had won disfavor in the Mescalero campaign a few months back because he led his men into a trap, lost a dozen, and, most of all, because he had been right in the strategy that finally saved Troop C and the battle. But he had been dressed down because he failed to run when Captain Corday’s trumpeter bounced retreat off the crags. That was the Army. Better to be wrong and obedient than win a victory against orders.

Though he wasn’t the kind to smart under yesterday’s discipline, blame for a scout’s error went against the grain. Young West, the scout, was on the peak late one afternoon looking at White Moon’s war party, at Corday’s and Dana’s. He was there heliographing Corday, telling him of the line of march of White Moon and Dana. But Corday marched on away from the trap he, Dana, had planned. Toward dawn, West rode up and said the attack would come from the south. It didn’t. And when Corday’s trumpet blew retreat there was no place to go.

He wouldn’t forget this Young West.

That campaign was the close past. This one, if it could be called that, lay ahead, up and over weary miles of cactus, yucca, and parched land, up in the manzanita perhaps; all because two prospectors tempted Victorio’s braves and died with five arrows in each of them.

Prospecting, the intelligence said. But was it something else? Somebody was cunning and sharp up at Queeny or Bacon. Was it guns and liquor? It stank even as it smelled Apache and a man held his nose and he didn’t; he got used to it, like he did dust. But where white men gathered there was Indian trouble. They lied and cheated and nobody’s word was good.

The hell with it, he shot back into the empty night.

The officers’ ball was tomorrow night and the pretty McQueen girl would be there. Bonnie had smiled at hero Corday. And tomorrow night while Corday danced with her, he would be lying flat of his back gazing up at empty stars with smells of sweat and leather in the air instead of Bonnie’s perfume.

But that was a hot-head’s fate. A lieutenant until they broke you for more hot-headedness. Ten years of it, he, Senator Tom Dana’s boy from Virginia, kicked out of school early for the sweet little temper he humored. He should have red hair, though it was brown and wavy. He should own a pair of beady gray eyes, but they were soft and brown. He was fashioned a contradiction.

He fell back to the column. “All right, Sergeant Reeder. This isn’t quite the time to show trail-lousy. The General said, ‘with haste.’ ”

Sergeant Reeder said something, inarticulate though conforming. Dana didn’t hear what he said next—“Bastard of a loo-tenant!” He was thinking of Bonnie McQueen again, seeing in memory a woman with life in her fine face and figure. She challenged all men. Only one would win her. And hadn’t he as much right to dance with her at Fort Bayard as the other officers? He had, though General Bent thought otherwise.

“Proceed with haste,” he scowled into the night. What the General meant, actually was:

On to Gila, Mr. Dana, but don’t stop there. Go on up where it’s dry and hot and desolate. Smell dust and look at beargrass and yucca and rocks as they saw into the flesh and bruise you. Shake out your boots, if you ever take them off, Mr. Dana—if you can—there might be a whip scorpion in one of them. Dry poison, Mr. Dana.

It was the Army. He hated it, loved it; all one hundred and eighty-five pounds of his five feet and eleven inches was used to it and all that it could hand a man from battle to promotion, to the Sixty-Fourth Article of War.

He rode down the line and prodded his men awake. He cursed and turned his head north again, oblivious to the stars, the slow shuffle of hoofs, or the distant wail of a coyote. A light far ahead appeared on a mountain slope. It went out. Another sprang up. Before morning, Victorio would know how many troopers were on the march up to the ’Frisco Valley. It was uncanny, but it was so.

For a moment he was wondering if the five arrows in each of the prospectors on Gutache Mesa were meant to convey something.

A shiver ran up his spine.

Toward noon next day, Lieutenant Dana rubbed his grim face with a gauntleted hand and halted his troop. A big Queeny freight wagon drawn by six mules ground to a halt. The grizzled old wagoner spat tobacco juice and spoke of the Gutache killings:

“Danged ’Paches didn’t touch the corn or sowbelly in the wagon, so says Lieutenant Botts. And the horses wasn’t took nor killed. Odd as hell, I says. Ain’t the ’Pache way.”

He talked on: Botts reported that it looked like the work of one Indian, since only the tracks of one pony could be found. And that pony wore shoes, also uncommon to Apache ponies. And the left front horseshoe was larger than the other three.

Then he slung whip and roared at his mules and creaked on south, leaving Dana lost in thought.

With many lame horses, Troop A moved on at a walk, spur rowels jingling, shuffling up dust. It was dismount and lead, a general halt every hour on through the hot long miles over Cactus Flat. They moved at a snail’s pace when the order was, “Proceed with haste.”

The Flat seemed long and endless. The wagoner’s tale clung leechlike to Dana’s brain all that afternoon.

He wiped sweat with his yellow neckerchief and felt the grime cutting into his face like pumice. Sweat-caked and smelly, rather a part of the trailing smell of men and horses, he pulled his tunic out from wet skin and trudged on. He was wishing for rain, a downpour. Which, he snorted in disgust, was like wishing he were on the banks of the Potomac with a whiskey julep in one hand and a lady’s delicate fingers in the other. The dream died and he saw smelly greasewood, prickly pear, ground bush, and dry yellow dirt. An antelope halted ahead, curious, and out of range. A vermilion flycatcher flew by. The sun painted the crags of a canyon in deep orange. The sky was still a brass reflector of heat that furred the distant range. Ahead, all ahead, was ambush country.

As the troop marched down off the Flat into the first blind curve of Big Dry road, Dana felt fear down the line of his column. It was downhill all the way in short, stiff-legged steps, carbines ready, in elbow-crook, troop alert. It was a treacherous road, patterned after hairpins and fingernails; it hung against dry walls and flirted with sheer drops down into purpling draws. One more hell of a road.

In sharp contrast, the day was fading away beautifully. An evening daze dominated all distances, broken only by a colorful sky and glints of orange on the Mogollon crags. A vagrant breeze stirred, whisked on above the walls of the road like a song burdened with somber, ageless things a man wanted to hear and then didn’t.

Dana scowled. Something told him not to go on. Across the miles of wasteland the maw of Big Dry Canyon glowed in orange like a rhinoceros afire. He felt alone and no amount of glaring back at the damned canyon could lesson his growing presentiment.

He fell back and said to Reeder: “Sergeant, we split here. I’ll take a detail of twelve and skirt ahead.” Even as he said it, General Bent’s crisp, incisive voice rang in his ears: “Hold intact on the march, Lieutenant.”

Then he said, sternly impatient: “All right, men—Turner, O’Berry, Booker, Yeager, Hutch, Bartlett, Diaz, Bennett, Chaves, Black, Goldsmith, and Harwood—fall in! No horses, just rifles and sharp eyes. Turner and O’Berry to the ridges. Flank the road ahead, low crouch, and ready!”

Fear of attack was of short duration, he told himself. The Apache didn’t strike after dark, in fear of his wandering ghosts. A man could sleep well. But the dawn was early and dangerous. The dusk was late and just as ominous.

O’Berry moved on, swore at the Lieutenant when he thought he was out of earshot. Dana heard and didn’t hear; he had been a trooper once. Then O’Berry returned and said there was no Indian sign anywhere; but he smelled water in the Dry.

“Peel your eyes, Turner. Fail to find Indian sign when it’s there and your blood will turn to ice water.” A man learned that on his first campaign. He didn’t have to learn it twice.

The wagon massacre on Gutache Mesa preyed in Dana’s mind. The prospectors had hit it rich up on Pueblo Creek, so the old wagoner had said; McQueen had tried to buy them out; and trouble was brewing between McQueen and a mine-owner named Turrentine. Therefore, Dana thought on, if the Apache massacre was as phony as it sounded, a mining feud might be all he was marching to.

Shapes were losing detail in the falling mantle of evening. A deep purple thickened the air. Soon, very soon, night would fall. Then they could march on or throw the spider on the fire and sit out the smell of frying bacon. No need for putting out fires or muting a trumpet.

Then it was dark of a sudden, black dark until their eyes got used to it. Dana called the scouts in and waited out Reeder’s approach. Then he ordered the march to continue. Reeder asked how far; he knew this hill; there was a spot around a curve where Major Fremont camped several years ago.

“No water,” Dana replied.

Reeder laughed in the dark; his first hint of insolence, Dana thought. “The San Francisco is a long way off, sir.”

“And wet,” Dana replied, with warning in his voice.

To which the Sergeant wanted to say that the paymaster’s ambulance at the rear carried a barrel of water for the horses, that the men could suffer quarter rations because the command hadn’t the gumption to replenish on the Gila. But he said nothing of the kind, just worked up precious saliva, defiantly, and spat it with a noisy show of independence.

Dana was wise. He smiled, and thought Reeder a good man to have along in case of attack. Troop A reached Little Dry Creek and found caked mud, nothing more. The horses sniffed and looked up before lowering their heads again to the craving smell. A fire lit up the night in quick time. The flames painted dusty men, all hungry.

The spider was on the fire, horses were picketed; and a dozen men were assigned to the troop guard and listening posts ordered extended out.

Then it happened. Something unheard of, and Dana didn’t believe it, since the Apache of this country had never been known to violate his black-of-night rule of no attack.

But there was Turner—a moment before singing as he squatted before the fire—rising to his feet with a stunned look of horror on his face, staring unbelievingly at an arrow in the middle of his belly. Then he let out a scream that faded out in the anguish of despair, and Dana knew he felt no pain but that complete resignation to the inevitable.

And Dana, who had seen men die before, had no time for compassion. He was churning his brain with position and defense, with the un-Apache paradox even as he leaped for the rifles and shouted commands. But it was schooled experience that issued orders, and not he, for his mind was groping for some key to the Apache mystery and it was directing one ear, tuning it, to the expected yells from out in the night. The other ear awaited the thud of Turner’s body as it hit the ground.

Turner slipped to the ground silently, his eyes staring in death. And all was quiet for a moment or two, too quiet. Then suddenly another arrow fell, quivered near the fire. The next came seconds later. Trooper Diaz caught it. The tip stuck out behind his neck, the feather trembling before his very eyes. Diaz fell, clawing at the thing frantically.

Three arrows. Two men gone. Dana fired into the night. The order to charge the unseen enemy was changed to “Scatter!”

A man screamed in the dark, flailed about noisily, and his voice was unnaturally calm as he said, “It’s me, Booker. Right in the middle.”

Guns barked and bullets whined, spat hard against trees and rocks and died. Then Reeder’s crisp voice, rattling off orders expertly from unexcited lips, cried out, “Through my forearm!”

Troop A waited for the big attack, taut, sharp-eyed, staring into the darkness over rifles, Reeder obliquely off the south road, Dana on the north, nobody in the blacked-out camp. Troop A continued to wait. Waited for nothing.

And Lieutenant Dana thinking over and over again: “Five arrows: The mark of Victorio!” Thinking also: “It’s not like the Apache. All arrows came from the same direction, from one bow, perhaps. And at night. It isn’t the Apache way.”

There was little sleep in camp that night. The troop was on the move before dawn, with three dead men in the paymaster’s ambulance. On the column plodded, a grim, scared bunch of troopers who were wishing the dawn would not slide up in the morning sky that day. The dawn belonged to the Apache.

Lieutenant Dana felt the onus of command. Every name on the roll and horse book was his responsibility. Three men were dead. That added up. The night attack didn’t. But together they were the two and two that made four. Even now Chaves was riding hard for Fort Bayard with the news.

And Dana was not a man to discount plain facts. He knew that, as sure as he was alive at the moment, the mark of Victorio had fallen like a dark cloud over the thin strip of civilization in the morning shadows of the Mogollons.