'Fight!'
The chief stepped like a cat into the cleared circle, holding the knife low, cutting edge uppermost, motioning in a gesture like a snake's forked tongue darting in and out.
'Fight!'
Surely if Agustin wanted to dispose of Jack Drumm all he had to do was signal one of the braves! They would drag him into the open and hack him to death with knives and hatches, not wasting bullets.
'Fight!' Agustin's face contorted with scorn. In a half crouch he darted forward; the menacing knife sliced through the stuff of Jack's coat sleeve and drew blood. Involuntarily Jack drew back, and someone in the circle of elders tittered.
'All right!' he cried. 'Damn it all, if that's what you want, you'll get it!'
It was not bravado this time. He was angry, annoyed, humiliated in a way no Englishman could countenance. He tore off the hampering coat, unbuttoned his shirt, and held out his own knife in a reasonable facsimile of the gypsy in the Romanian cafe.
The fight, if so it was called, did not last long. Agustin circled relentlessly, darting in and out and pinking him whenever and wherever he chose. The chief had been born to the knife, the hatchet, the gun. Grinning, he taunted his opponent. The elders shouted jeers and catcalls, much the same as the spectators at the Boxing Club when one of Jem Mace's opponents made a poor showing. Jack was in excellent physical condition, trim and hard-muscled; never in his life had he felt so quick, so alert, so conditioned by the arduous labor at Rancho Terco. Yet these things did not avail. He simply did not know how to fight with a knife.
Sweating and winded, he threw his pale body against Agustin's swarthy one. Knife wrists locked, bodies strained against each other. Lungs laboring, sweat rolling from his brow, he managed to get his heel behind Agustin's naked calf and pushed the chief backward in a hock-trip. But Agustin quickly recovered, only for a moment staggering in lost equilibrium and then gliding forward again. But he spoke to Jack Drumm, a single word. It was an odd thing to say—
The elders applauded too, with appreciation of skill even in a white man. Only the
The end came quickly. Jack's booted foot caught. He toppled and fell, knife flying from his hand. Perhaps he had tripped on one of the wooden ammunition cases. Perhaps one of the elders, impatient at delay of the final bloodletting, had stuck out a moccasined foot. In any case, details were unimportant. Half stunned, he lay flat, the Apache atop him, bare knees on his chest and knife poised.
Had it been foredestined? Had Clarendon Hall, the public schools, Cambridge, Glasgow, the Grand Tour—all these—were they only preparation to die under a savage knife in the Arizona Territory? Fascinated, he watched the blade poised in midair. The world disappeared, Agustin disappeared, there was only the knife —and John Peter Christian Drumm.
He found himself trying to think of a prayer, a plea to a God whom he would soon meet, but could think of nothing. Nothing, that is, except Phoebe Larkin. He saw again her pale face burned by the sun, the high-piled red hair. He saw the sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the cerulean depths of her eyes. He ought to be commending his soul to an Anglican deity, but there was Phoebe Larkin, smiling at him, eyes wet with tears! Was she there, across the Styx waiting to welcome him with tender arms? Or was she—
Suddenly he knew he could not die in the brush hut under Agustin's knife. He knew Phoebe was alive, and he must go to her. Gathering his muscles, tensing his back, he heaved himself into the air, at the same time shouting to the limit of his lungs. He did not know what he yelled; 'God and St. George!' would have been a nice touch. But he shouted, and heaved, and rolled and scrambled to his knees. Agustin, caught unawares, tumbled off him. Jack Drumm sprang like an Indian tiger, reaching for the throat as the tiger did.
Together they rolled on the dusty floor, Agustin's hands vainly trying to break the iron grip on his throat. But Nacho fell quickly on Jack Drumm also, breaking his grip, aiding his uncle. That was unfair, but there it was. Savages knew nothing of fair play. Finally pinioned, Jack stood panting in the middle of the circle, Nacho and some of the elders holding his arms.
Agustin faced him, one hand rubbing a bruised throat. He too was sweating, caked with dust. The bare chest heaved; the leather hat, sign of chieftaincy, had been knocked off. He looked at Jack Drumm. There was no triumph in his stare; it seemed compounded of a strange mixture of emotions—sadness, perhaps, and yet a certain satisfaction.
'
Picking up the beaded leather hat, he held it a moment in his hands. In a corner of the hut the fire still flickered. Agustin dropped the hat into the flames, watching as tongues of flame licked at the oiled headgear.
No one spoke. The elders watched, waited, Nacho did not speak. There was only Agustin, chief of the Tonto Apaches, gazing abstractedly into the fire while the leather curled, blackened, burned. He touched the charred remains of the hat with his toe; they fell into ash. He sighed. Jack Drumm realized it was the first time he had heard an aborigine make that sound. It had always seemed a white man's device.
Suddenly Agustin squared his shoulders. Not paying any attention to the spectators, he raised the deerhide hanging over the doorway of the hut and stalked outside. In single file the elders, and Nacho, followed. In the winter sun waited the others; warriors, a few women and children. Golden light of late afternoon streamed through the dwarfed trees, dappled the rocks, lit the patches of snow. Smoke from cooking fires drifted through the branches of the pines and junipers. From a brush corral a stolen horse whinnied. The people, his Tinneh, watched Agustin. But he did not look at them.
With the easy lope of the trailwise Apache he passed the waiting faces, taking a path through the trees, toward the sun, toward the east. For a moment Jack Drumm, winded and perspiring, glimpsed him among the trees. Then he was gone.
Jack turned to Nacho. The youth was staring at the ground, scratching a cabalistic pattern in the dust with a stick. Jack looked at the camp people. They were still watching the trees where Agustin had disappeared. One woman drew a blanket over her head. A child whimpered, and the mother put a gentle hand over its mouth. Nothing broke the silence except the call of a jay, the mourning of the chill wind.
'We go now,' Nacho murmured.
Jack blinked in the fading sunlight. His arm bled where Agustin had cut him, and he dabbed at the wound with a dirty handkerchief.
Nacho pointed toward the huts. 'We go this way.'
Limping behind Nacho, Jack was aware he had twisted his ankle during the fight. In the aftermath of the struggle he began to tremble. Now that immediate danger was gone, he shook like one of the quaking aspens indigenous to the mountains. With clumsy fingers he wrapped the handkerchief around the wound in his arm and pulled it tight.
'
They stood before a low brush shelter, so cradled among giant rocks it appeared almost a natural part of the landscape.
'You go in,' Nacho gestured.
Was this some kind of trick? But there appeared to be no deceit in Nacho's eyes.
'Go in,' Nacho repeated, and walked away. He joined the rest under the trees; they sat on the rocks, and did not talk to one another, yet seemed united in common feeling.
Puzzled, he pulled aside the deerhide and stepped within. For a moment he stared blindly, eyes unaccustomed to the darkness.
'Jack?'
He blinked.
'Jack?'
Suddenly she was in his arms, clasping him tightly, head pressed hard against his chest, crying and laughing at the same time.
'I knew you'd come!'
