Lord Apache

Uncomfortably he rubbed his hands together. 'Well,' he said, 'are we ready?'

Mrs. Glore fastened her bonnet in place with a swordlike pin and picked up the bags. 'Ready or not, Prescott, here we come at last!'

'Good-bye, Mr. Drumm.' Phoebe held out her hand. It was warm in his calloused fingers. 'You've done so much for us—no one could ever thank you enough. I won't even try.'

He wanted to say something memorable, something cool and composed yet significant, but there was a strange lump in his throat, an emptiness in his breast. He could only stand in the doorway and watch them walk away through the reeds, the sun dappling them as it shone down through the high grasses. Watching them go, he strained his eyes, seeing at last only a patch of color here and a minuscule movement there. Finally they were gone.

He went back to the Tully and Ochoa wagon. Coogan had completed his repairs.

'They will be waiting for you,' Jack said. 'I'm everlastingly grateful to you, Mr. Coogan.'

'Ike,' Coogan corrected. 'Hell, I ain't been called Mr. Coogan since I was brought up before the judge in Phoenix for drunk and disorderly!'

For a long while Jack Drumm stood in the dusty road, watching Coogan's wagon until it went out of sight around the bend. He scanned the low hills, the brush, the rocky slopes, fearing to see a wink of sun, a flash of reflected light from the lens of field glasses. But he saw nothing. Alonzo Meech had probably abandoned the search. Eggleston came to stand beside him.

'The two ladies are gone, then?'

Silently Jack nodded.

'I will miss Beulah Glore,' the valet said. 'She was a fine woman, no matter what sticky business she may have gotten into back in Baltimore.'

'Philadelphia,' Jack said.

'Look at the chickens, Mr. Jack! They miss her too. She used to feed them about now.'

Suddenly he missed Phoebe Larkin more than he cared to admit. He went quickly into the adobe to attend to Uncle Roscoe while Eggleston coaxed the reluctant burro into the corral. For a moment, just before entering the sickroom, he thought he saw a man's figure atop a ridge to the south of the ranch. But as he narrowed his eyes against the glint of the November sun, the figure disappeared—or perhaps it had never been there. He was getting jumpy.

The old prospector was able to talk, though only weakly and briefly. The heart was sound, though, pumping determinedly. Some color had come into the pallid cheeks. Jack bled him, and made a broth of sage leaves, which the Traveler's Guide said were a specific for stroke. Boiling the infusion, he tried to remember the Latin name of the shrub, but could not. Sage was no longer an exotic plant to be identified and entered in his field notebook; it was becoming the common furniture of the desert, this Arizona desert that was for the time being his home.

The next morning Uncle Roscoe was markedly better and wanted to sit up, though Jack forbade it.

'God damn it!' the old man protested. 'I ain't no weakling! It was just a little dizzy spell come on me in the canyon there!'

Leaving Eggleston to feed Uncle Roscoe a dish of chicken soup, Jack wandered listlessly to the road and stared in the direction of Prescott. They should be in the capital by now—Phoebe and Mrs. Glore—and perhaps safe in the hands of the redoubtable Uncle Buell. Looking around at Rancho Terco, it seemed somehow deserted, incomplete, unfriendly.

Looking, he saw something else. Pinned to the new hitching post with a bone-handled knife a note fluttered in the wind. He tugged at the knife, driven deep into the post, and read the note. It was lettered in block characters with what appeared to be a stub of charcoal, and was obviously the work of an untutored hand. The choice of terms was strange, also, and the phrasing queer, though the words had a certain dignity:

This is my place. This river my place all right. I do not want white men heer where I born & my parientes bury.

The writer's scanty English had failed. Parientes, Jack recalled, meant 'kin' in Spanish.

You fight good but spirits ask you go from this place. You send back sobrino—

Jack wrinkled his brow. More Spanish; what was sobrino? Uncle? No, that was tio. Sobrino—yes, that meant 'nephew.'

You send back sobrino but I cannot friend you no more. I finish saying.

He stared at the wrinkled paper. It was signed with a straggling A; an inexpertly made A that lay almost sidewise at the bottom of the warning, but still—an A; A for Agustin.

Chapter Seven

Uncle Roscoe might be seventy, or eighty, or ninety. He was short and wiry, bandy-legged, tough as an old boot and smelling almost as bad. Fretting at the refusal of his left arm and leg to accommodate him, he sat in the shade and unwillingly drank the sage tea that Eggleston brewed.

'But you're getting better,' Jack pointed out. 'Look—you can move your fingers now!'

'Can't hold a pick! Can't hold a shovel!'

'You're coming along nicely,' Jack comforted. 'I daresay if I had had such a stroke, I wouldn't be as far along now as you are!'

'Well, mebbe so,' Uncle Roscoe sighed, 'but I wish things'd move along more pronto! I'm an old man. I don't think the Lord's got me down for any more time.' He told Jack Drumm about the Gypsy Dancer Mine he had spent twenty-odd years searching for. 'Hungarian feller—name of Laszlo something—stumbled on it.' He took a tattered scrap of paper from a pocket. 'Met him in a saloon in San Diego and he showed me this map and some nuggets big as goose eggs. He was in town to buy supplies but a gang of Mexicans laid for him and hit him over the head. They stole the nuggets, but when Laszlo was laid out for the coroner I slipped the map out of his shirt and took off for the Agua Fria. That was in—let me see—fifty-six, fifty-seven—something like that.'

'And you've been looking for the Gypsy Dancer ever since?'

'Oh, I'll find it!' the old man assured him. 'I got the location pretty well narrowed down by now!'

Roscoe was a rich source of information about the Apaches, the Mazatzals, the whole Territory. He knew Charlie the Papago and Ike Coogan, claiming also to have been a ceremonial brother of Kayatinah, the father of Agustin himself, and once adopted into the tribe.

'What you want to know all this stuff for?' he demanded.

'Because the Apaches insist on trying to drive me away from the Agua Fria. We are enemies. To do a proper job of resisting, I must understand them.'

'Ain't nothin' much to understand,' Uncle Roscoe grumbled. He waved his hand toward the hazy distances. 'Once they owned all this—now the politicians and the merchants and the Army is trying to take it away and make 'em live on the Verde River reservation. I don't mean no offense, Mr. Drumm—you been good to me. But you can understand how you'd feel if bandits run you out of your big castle in England!'

'It isn't exactly a castle,' Jack said, 'but I know what you mean.'

'They're proud,' Uncle Roscoe went on, 'and resourceful. They lived off this dry land for thousands of years. They make bread from mesquite beans, and beer called 'tiswin' from the mescal plant. They bake mescal roots in a pit in the ground, too. It tastes like molasses candy; they got a sweet tooth, like anybody. They eat the fruit of the nopal cactus—some folks calls it 'Indian fig.' Their lingo is all gobbles and gargles, but there's a pleasant sound to it.'

Jack looked to the greening fields where Charlie hoed weeds. 'Do the Papagos speak the same language as the Apaches?'

'Purty close,' Uncle Roscoe said. 'At least, they can make each other out.'

'Charlie calls me 'Ostin.' What does that mean?'

Uncle Roscoe grinned a toothless grin. ''Ostin' is Apache talk for 'Lord.' Anything they respect or fear they call 'Ostin'—the bear, snakes, lightning. 'Lord Bear,' 'Lord Snake,' 'Lord Lightning.''

Jack helped him light his pipe. The old prospector lay back in the chair, staring at the great bulk of the