“I’m going to kill him,” he said. Then, shouting into the desert: “Do you hear me, Ponci, you son of a bitch? I’m going to kill you!”
The echo rolled back from the Quigotoa Mountains.
Keytano’s wife awakened him. He sat up in the blankets and reached for the wooden shingle she offered him. On it was his breakfast of boiled beef and bread.
“He is gone,” he wife said.
“Who is gone?” Keytano asked as he bit into the meat.
“Chetopa. He is gone, and he has taken five warriors with him.”
Keytano sighed, then put down his meal. “This is not good,” he said.
“Will he make war?” she asked.
“He cannot make war, he can only make trouble,” Keytano said.
“But he can make much trouble,” Keytano’s wife suggested.
“Yes,” Keytano agreed. “He can make much trouble.” Keytano sat there for a long moment, just staring ahead. His wife picked up the food he had put down and held it out to him.
“Eat, my husband,” she said. “You cannot be strong here, and here”—she put her hand to her heart, then to her head—“if you do not eat.”
“Yes,” Keytano agreed. “I must eat. Then I must consider what to do.”
Arnold Johnson drove the rented team and buckboard toward Arivica. He had two accounts in Arivica, which he normally serviced by stagecoach, but after his run-in with Gentry, he would not be using the stagecoach again. They could just get their revenue somewhere else. They would not get one more cent from Arnold Johnson, or from Thurman Leather Goods.
His samples were in the back of the buckboard, plus he was even carrying the fulfillment of one order. When he traveled by stage, all he could carry was his samples. He could never fulfill an order because there was rarely room for the extra baggage on the stage.
The more he thought about it, the more he believed that he should have been traveling this way all the time anyway. It was certainly more comfortable than being inside a hot, airless coach box. And if he had to share another coach with someone like Falcon MacCallister ... well, he just didn’t know what he would do.
He didn’t know which was worse, having to share the coach with MacCallister, or with the Indian woman. There should be a law prohibiting Indians from traveling with white people, just as there was a law prohibiting the Colored from traveling with white people.
Indians and Coloreds should know their place, and their place was definitely below a white man.
“Below a white man,” he said aloud, and he laughed. “Yeah, I would like to have one of them below me right now.”
He rubbed himself as he thought of Cynthia. Cynthia was a black woman who had set herself up with her own crib back in Calabasas. Johnson was one of her best customers.
And, up in Harshaw, he was a frequent visitor to an Indian woman named Sasha.
The Indian girl who had been riding in the coach with him was prettier than either one of them. He thought of her lying naked in the ditch, and he wished he had gone up with MacCallister to see her. He wondered if the men who took her did have their way with her.
What would it be like, he wondered, to be an outlaw, to be completely free of all convention? Why, anytime you wanted a woman, you would just take her. And you wouldn’t have to pay her either. He imagined himself as one of the more storied outlaws of the West.
“Johnson the Terrible,” he said out loud.
No, that didn’t sound good.
“Kid Johnson.”
He shook his head. That didn’t sound right either. Maybe his first name.
“Arnold the Outlaw.”
“Arnold the Evil One.”
“Evil.”
“Evil Arnold! Yes!” he said aloud.
For the next several minutes, as Arnold drove the buckboard, he fantasized himself as Evil Arnold, robbing banks, holding up stagecoaches, and raping women. He felt himself getting an erection.
While one of his warriors held the reins to his horse, Chetopa slithered on his belly up to the crest of the ridge. Looking down onto the road that ran through the valley floor below, he saw a single buckboard, occupied by only the driver. There appeared to be some things in the back of the wagon, though from his distance, he had no idea what they were.
He went back to the others and looked at the war party he had gathered. There were five of them, ranging in age from sixteen to thirty. Each warrior was in paint, having chosen his own particular design.
Chetopa’s war paint consisted of yellow around one eye, black around the other, and three red slashes on each cheek.
It had not been hard to gather his band. Some he had known since they were boys growing up together. Others had come to the village during the breakup of the Chiricahua. All had a thirst for adventure, and most had their own reasons to hate the white man.
Early that morning he had walked though the village calling for all who were brave of heart to join him. These
