the scourge of the Agua Fria. The chieftain wore the high leather hat; twinkling flames reflected from the bits of glass and tin adorning the crown.
When they had first brought him to the camp as a prisoner, Jack Drumm had been very frightened. After a while, unable to maintain the intensity of great fear, fear had turned into despondency, at last almost indifference. Now, standing alone before Agustin himself, he felt fear again. Though the air was cold—the small fire did little to warm the hut—beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead. Fear pervaded his loins also, as if they were filled with an enervating fluid.
'My uncle talk to you,' Nacho said, indicating the dais.
In one hand Agustin held a rattle, ornamented with feathers and shells. Around his neck hung the sack of hoddentin, sacred hoddentin, his personal medicine. Sitting cross-legged on the dais, there was great majesty about him. He was broad-chested, large by Apache standards, shiny black hair only slightly tinged with gray. The hawklike nose had been broken in some forgotten fight. Though askew, it gave him a faint resemblance to a woodcut of an ancient Roman senator Jack recalled from a book in his father's library at Clarendon Hall. For a long time Agustin stared unblinking at Jack Drumm, measuring him. Then he spoke.
'Eh?' Jack asked. 'What did he say?' His lips were dry, throat parched. His voice sounded strange and husky.
Nacho lingered behind him. 'He say—he give you that scar on your face—in a fight.'
Jack's fingers moved toward the jagged scar traversing the cheek and ending on his upper lip. The cicatrix seemed to tremble, burn.
'Yes,' he admitted. 'He did! But he also lost one of his warriors! I buried him near the river, with a stake at his head and his medicine sack hanging from it.'
It was sheer bravado. Yet, having said it, he felt better. Nacho translated. Agustin spoke.
'That is so. It was Eskimin you killed. He was old, and not a very good fighter.' In a voice high-pitched for such a powerfully built man, Agustin went into a long discourse. Pausing, he looked at his nephew and imperially waved the rattle.
'He says he not know why he lets you live. Maybe, my uncle thinks, it is because he wants to look you. Before—night—everything fighting, all mixed up. But now you prisoner. You stand here, he looks, everybody looks, see what kind of man you are, how—how—'
'Yes?'
Nacho shrugged, a gesture almost Oriental. 'How you look when you going to die.'
The flush of panic swept through him again but Jack willed himself to resist it.
'Let him take a good look at me,' he cried. 'He will see how an Englishman faces death!'
Agustin nodded, as if terminating some private thought. Leaning forward, he shook the rattle in imprecation. His voice was rancorous, and from time to time the circle of elders grunted approval.
Jack stood his ground, willing himself not to flinch even when the feathered rattle danced near his face.
'He say, my uncle say,' Nacho translated, 'you come on his land, along the river, and make camp. He say you stay there, fight his people, kill some. He say he try make you go away, write you—' The youth fumbled for words.
'Letter?' Jack muttered through dry lips.
'I write letter for him. But you do not leave when he asks you.'
Outside the hut the wind howled, but inside the heat became stifling. Jack wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief, dabbed at his forehead. A man sitting close to him pulled curiously at the fabric of Jack's trousers, and he jumped. He remembered his brother Andrew's stories about India, how Andrew had once been caught in a crowd of hostile Punjabis and faced them down. He could do no less.
'More people come, camp along the river where our gods live. The horse-soldiers come too, to protect them.' Agustin's voice rose to a singsong wail, reciting Apache grievances, describing how his people had been maltreated, cheated, herded onto reservations like animals, when they had once owned all the Territory and the lands beyond.
'Tell him—' Jack interrupted, but was silenced by a hatchetlike sweep of Agustin's brown hand. The chief stood up; the circle of elders chanted a Greek chorus to his lament.
'This world and the sun were made by the gods, by our gods. It ought to be left as it always was. No man has any business to divide it up, to say the Tinneh go here and the Tinneh there, and the white man will take everything else. We have been here for a long time. The gods made us out of clay and water and baked us in the fire of the sun and put us here to stay. Who made the white people?'
Why was Agustin telling him all this? Jack had a prickly feeling at the back of his neck.
'The Tinneh and the earth are the same. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies is the same. We always lived here until you came, you white people. Maybe you think the gods sent you here to do with us what you want. If we thought that was what the gods wanted we would bow our heads and obey. But the gods did not send you!' Agustin clenched his fists at the smoke-blackened roof of the hut. '
Even through the imperfect screen of Nacho's translation the words carried a towering emotional impact. The words were frustrated; they were tortured and despairing, the words of a powerful man whose magic has unaccountably waned. The old men were moved, also. They wailed, some covered their faces with blankets.
Agustin opened his eyes, the knotted fists slowly relaxed. As if recovering from a spell, he looked about him. His bare chest heaved wetly. He seemed smaller, physically smaller. Breathing heavily, he wiped sweating hands on his cotton pants. The feathered rattle fell to the dirt floor.
'Tell him—' Jack said.
No one paid any attention to him. They were watching Agustin. The chorus wailed, and the sound was a dirge. Someone in the circle started what sounded like a protest, but the rest quickly cut him off and looked again to their leader.
'Tell him,' Jack insisted again, 'tell him I do not come to fight him any more! If the land was his, it is his again. I do not want his land. All I want is—I want the white woman, the woman with the long red hair. I will die if that is what Agustin's gods want, but first he must tell me what happened to the white woman. If she is alive, I want to talk to her. If she is dead—if she has been killed—I want to go where she lies and tell her I am sorry. Will Agustin—' He turned to the elders. 'Will anyone tell me about the white woman?'
Agustin made an impatient gesture.
'He does not know anything about a white woman,' Nacho translated.
If he were going to die anyway, he might as well speak his mind. 'We are different people,' Jack said. 'We do not see things the same way. But there can be honor among men who fight each other, like the Tinneh and the white men. So I say—anyone who lies is not an honorable man.'
Agustin's eyes glittered. 'Who is talking about honor? A white man! The white men steal and kill and lie all the time! They give my people sick beef, and tell Two Star Crook we are making trouble! White men are devils, all of them!' He flung something at Jack Drumm. Startled, Jack caught it. It was the Apache knife, the one that had pinned Agustin's threatening note to the hitching post, the scrawled note commanding Jack to leave Rancho Terco.
'My uncle says enough talk now,' Nacho murmured.
The elders drew back to the far recesses of the hut. Someone kicked out the fire and dredged the embers away. The great hut was only dimly lit by winter sun filtering through the brush of its construction. Jack looked down at the fine-honed steel.
'You are brave, you talk loud outside!' Nacho said. 'My uncle wants to find out if you are brave inside, where no one can see!'
Jack weighed the knife in his hand. So this was it, this was the end. When he and Eggie were in Galati, near Bucharest, he had once seen two gypsies fight with knives in a cafe. He knew nothing of such fighting, remembering only the slain man, stomach slashed open, life spilling from him like oats from a torn sack. He took a deep trembling breath, and hoped his trembling did not show. The knife betrayed him. A reflected glow shimmered on the mud- daubed wall as his hand trembled also.
'I do not know how to fight this way,' he muttered.
Nacho did not speak, did not translate his words. It was too late for words. Agustin smiled a hard-lipped smile. The single utterance, almost spat, could mean only one thing.
