'No, but I was given to an Apache,' Naiche said. 'I lived in the Bosque Redondo, but I didn't like it. I ran away.' 'Run away again,' Maria said. 'I will take you to my home. I have two children who are damaged.
My girl is blind and my boy cannot think too well. Come to my home, and I will take care of you. We'll leave the others at the railroad, but you can come to Mexico with me.' But again, Naiche shook her head.
'My time is coming,' she said. 'It will come when I finish this food you gave me. I do not want to go away and miss it. When you miss your time, then you cannot rest.
'Besides, I like the crows,' Naiche added. 'I have one that comes to my house and tells me secrets. That is why I know I have to stay here and wait for my time. She is up there now, my crow.' Maria had no more time. She saw that she could not persuade the old woman, and she needed to be far from town with the other women when morning came.
Maybe if it was still snowing, the men would be too lazy to follow the women. That was her hope, and her only hope. The women she was taking away were ugly, dirty, and weary, but they still had the places between their legs. The men wouldn't like losing those places. Maybe they would pursue them, and maybe they wouldn't. But Maria had to go, and go at once.
'I will give you this advice,' she said to Naiche. 'Do not put your scorpions on the killer with scabs in his hair. He don't care about women. He will sting you worse than you sting him.' Old Naiche didn't answer. She looked into the smoke, the smoke that had ruined her eyes.
Again she dipped her hand into the bucket of strippings from the pig's guts.
Maria crept out. The snow had stopped, which made her fearful. She had to hurry, and she had to get the women moving. Several crows sat on top of old Naiche's hut. Maria wondered which one was the crow that had told the old woman secrets. She wondered, but she did not have time to find out. The snow had stopped. She had to get the women and the two scared girls, and go.
When Mox Mox and his seven men rode into Crow Town, he made the men ride their horses back and forth over old Naiche's little brush shelter, trampling her to death.
At first, the horses shied, and didn't want to crash through the shelter. Mox Mox pointed to a sandhill, about one hundred yards away.
'Go to the top of it and blindfold them shittin' horses,' he instructed. 'Head them for this brush and keep on spurring.' Old Naiche heard. While the men were blindfolding the horses, she tried to crawl out, but Mox Mox was waiting for her with his leaded quirt.
He quirted her in the face until she gave up. She crawled back into her hut and waited for the hooves to bring her darkness. Soon she heard the horses coming hard. The crows began to caw.
Naiche tried to be ready, but she had begun to feel regret for not going with Maria. It was a sharp regret, so sharp it made it hard for her to be ready.
But the horses were coming hard, whether or not she was ready. Naiche clawed open her little pit and dug quickly with one hand into her scorpions and centipedes. She raked a handful of them up and shoved them under her blanket. Perhaps one of them would bite The-Snake-You-Do-Not-See. The horses were closer. Naiche still had scorpions in her hand when they crashed through the branches of mesquite.
The hooves did not immediately bring her death, though they broke both her hips and crushed one hand.
'She's still stirring--ride again,' Mox Mox said. The seven men wheeled their horses and rode again, and again. Because they couldn't see, the horses were frightened. Soon the men stopped racing. They merely spurred their mounts, causing them to jump into the broken branches. The rotten buffalo robes were soon kicked away, the mesquite branches broken.
'I guess that will teach her,' Hergardt said.
He was German, the largest of the seven men. He was also, by common consent, the dumbest. Hergardt was so dumb he often put his boots on the wrong feet. He was strong and would pull his boots on without looking, as easily as most people pull on socks. Later, he would wonder why his feet hurt.
Hergardt rode a big bay horse. The other men dismounted and began to pile the broken mesquite limbs into a pyre, but Hergardt kept riding his horse back and forth over the body of old Naiche.
'What will it teach her?' Mox Mox asked him, looking at the body of the dead woman. A hoof had broken her neck. 'I could cook you for a week and it wouldn't make you smart,' Mox Mox said. 'Being burnt just teaches you that you're burnt.' Mox Mox had found Hergardt in San Francisco, when he returned from his years on the sea. He had gone to sea to escape Goodnight, who had pursued him all the way to the Great Salt Lake. Mox Mox knew he could not go back to the Southwest for a while.
Goodnight had been too persistent. Mox Mox put out the story of his death at the hands of the Ute, and went to sea for seven years.
Hergardt was making his living as a wrestler when Mox Mox docked in San Francisco. He wrestled all comers for a dollar a bout. Mox Mox began to promote him and soon had the price up to ten dollars a bout, although Hergardt was far from invincible. Many smaller, quicker men beat him.
'You deserve to be burnt, but it wouldn't teach you nothing,' Mox Mox observed. 'Stop riding over her. She's dead. It's time to light the fire, Jimmy.' Jimmy Cumsa lit the branches. He was a Cherokee boy from Missouri, very quick in his movements; almost too quick, in Mox Mox's view. Mox Mox liked to have a sense of how his men worked together, if there was a fight. Six of them he could keep up with, but Jimmy Cumsa--Quick Jimmy, they called him--was so swift that Mox Mox could seldom anticipate him. He would see Jimmy in front of him one minute, and the next minute, Jimmy would be behind him.
'Watching you burn people would teach me something, Mox,' Jimmy said. 'It would teach me not to stay around you too long.' 'You been around me for a year. What keeps you, if you don't like my ways?' Mox Mox asked.
Jimmy Cumsa didn't answer. He was watching the hut burn. The old woman's thin garments began to burn too.
He knew it irritated Mox Mox, when he didn't answer a question, but Jimmy Cumsa didn't care. He did not belong to Mox Mox, and didn't have to answer questions. Jimmy was careful of Mox Mox, but he was not afraid of him. He had confidence in his own speed, as a rider, as a runner, and as a pistol shot. He was not an especially good pistol shot, but he was so fast it fooled people, scaring many of them into firing wildly, or doing something
