flow to the seas, they had to cut straighter and steeper as the rises got more serious. Few of the scattered crags and none of the passes rose above the timberline in this stretch of the Divide, but the juniper and pine thinned out to where the moonlight lit up plenty of open shortgrass, and Longarm was pleased to see they were making good time, considering he was riding strange ridges with no map but the more familiar stars up yonder.
It was a shame, or a blessing, that the folks called Apache had never yet learned to eat fish or admire stars. For mountain trout stuffed with onion-flavored blue-eyed grass and baked in ‘dobe on the coals were fit to serve Queen Victoria, while the stars at this altitude made the black velvet sky seem spattered with diamond dust, at least where bigger fireflies weren’t winking their asses down at you. It sure beat all how every nation seemed to pick some damned harmless thing to worry about. Pawnee just loved to stare up at the sky at night, and thought all the stars had names and medicines for anyone smart enough to ask the right star the right way. Most Indians looked at the stars the same as most whites. So why in thunder did the notorious night raiders of the Na-dene persuasion think moonlit or even starlit nights were so unlucky?
A couple of furlongs on a big fat star near the skyline winked out on him, and he reined in to reach thoughtfully for his saddle gun before he decided aloud, “Rocky outcrop on the next ridge. Ask a foolish question and Mother Nature just might answer. Of course you’d worry about stars giving your position away if you were running a ridge in search of harmful fun. But did the medicine men make up cautionary tales about evil stars just to make sure their young men raided on really overcast evenings?”
Mother Nature didn’t answer. So he set the question aside, not being a fool Indian who had to worry about it. As gents reputed to delight in blood and slaughter—or maybe because they did study war so much—Na-dene speakers sure gave themselves a lot of things to worry about. Like the unrelated Cheyenne, the so-called Apache seemed to have a horror of death all out of proportion to their delight in dishing it out. Nobody mutilated fallen enemies worse than those two nations, because nobody was as worried about their victims coming back from the dead. Longarm could see a certain logic in the otherwise spiteful practice of maiming and laming a fallen enemy after you’d killed him deader than a turd in a milk bucket. The Cheyenne admired cut-off bow or trigger fingers, while the Apache went for the eyes and feet. They called ghosts of any dead folks chindi, and just hated it when they met a chindi with its eyes and feet intact. For there was no way to kill somebody a second time, and how did you outrun or dodge a spook when it had its full power to play hide-and-seek with a poor mortal?
Longarm figured he’d made it over the Divide when they came on a streamlet purling toward the east in the moonlight. He reined in and let the ponies water themselves as he swapped saddles again. Then he took off his hat and belly-flopped in the stream-side sedge to water himself just upstream. Nothing from a canteen or even a pump ever tasted half that refreshing. He’d heard of a spring back East, maybe in York State, where they bottled the water and sold it to rich folk in the cities like it was beer, for Gawd’s sake. The odd notion made a tad more sense as he sipped such fine water after a spell of canteen water on the trail.
He sat up but didn’t rise, seeing the Indian ponies were ground-rein-trained and seemed to be enjoying that lush sedge along the stream so much. He plucked a juicy green stem to chew. It tasted all right, but he felt he’d enjoy a smoke better. So he felt for a cheroot and his waterproof Mex matches as he sat up straighter, with the intent of lighting up before they moved on.
But he never did. Striking a match after dark in Apache country had been known to take years off a man’s life, even when there wasn’t somebody singing soft and sad in the middle distance!
Longarm put the cheroot and matches away as he eased to his feet, moved over to the ponies, and slid the Winchester out of its saddle boot. There was already a round in the chamber, adding up to sixteen if you counted the regular magazine load of fifteen. A Winchester ‘73 cranked sort of noisy, and that first vital round could ride fairly safe in the chamber with the hammer eased down to half-cock. He knew a pony trained not to drag its grounded reins could only be relied on to a point. So he quietly led the pair of them back upslope to a pine they’d passed earlier, and made certain neither would run off when or if it got noisier in these parts. Then he took a deep breath and cocked the hammer of his saddle gun all the way back as he eased in the general direction of that eerie singsong chant.
A friendly Na-dene singer he’d had fun with during a spell of ceremonial drumming had tried to explain the difference between the different “ways,” or what he pictured as Indian psalms. But when you didn’t savvy the lingo and the chanters only seemed to know one tune, they tended to sound a lot alike as well as sort of tedious. A Chinese gal he’d befriended out Frisco way had informed him just as certainly that she’d be switched with snakes if she could hear any difference between “Dixie” and “Marching Through Georgia.” So it was likely all in the way your ears had been brought up.
He worked close enough to get a surer line on the direction that sad singing was coming from. It sounded like a gal, and she seemed to be sounding off in a spooky way, in that inky patch of juniper or whatever growing between two massive moonlit boulders. He felt no more desire to call out to her than he might have had moving in on any blind alley in Ciudad Juarez. He’d read about this place where cruel-hearted gals called Sirens called out to passing strangers just to get them in an awful fix. So he had a better notion, and crabbed sideways to ease in on one blank wall of moonlit granite instead of sticking his paw smack in the bait pan. There was no practical way to scale the slightly sloping rock quietly with his Winchester. But that was one other good reason for packing a side arm. He placed his Winchester against the clean bare rock and, leaving his six-gun holstered, he took a deep breath and went mountain-climbing.
He could hear the singing better as he scraped his denim-clad belly over the top. The words didn’t make a lick more sense to him, of course. But the gal singing alone down there—he hoped she was alone—sure sounded hopeless and resigned as he slithered forward to peer over the edge at her.
He could see she stood alone, her hands up as if she was holding herself erect by gripping a sapling to either side. Longarm recalled the notorious Arapaho solution to caring for sick or elderly kin. He wasn’t sure the Na-dene made a habit of abandoning old ladies to die of starvation if the wolves failed to get them first. It sure looked as if the poor old gal had been left all alone down there by somebody.
He let himself back down the outside surface, partly to give a white man on a mission time to think. He knew he’d never been sent all this way to play nursemaid to some sick old Jicarilla asdza her own medicine man had given up on. Such medicine men weren’t all just rattles and dust-puffing. They cured sick Na-dene at least as often BIA surgeons did, and it sounded as if the old gal was resigned to becoming a chindi in the mighty near future. So there was no sensible reason for him to act like some fool Samaritan.
Then he had both feet on the ground. So he called himself a fool, picked up his carbine, and moved around to enter the cleft, trying to sound soothing, the way you talked to a critter, as he called out, “It’s out of my way, ma’am. But I got a spare pony you can ride as I get you back to Dulce for some proper attention.”
Then he almost shot the ghostly apparition staring at him with big black hollows as she pranced like hell, both arms held high and shouted, “S’s’suhah, Litcaiga Haltchin!”
But Longarm only half believed in chindis, so he struck a wax-stemmed match and saw that what he’d been looking at was a stark naked gal, smeared with clay and wood ash, with a wrist tied to a springy aspen sapling to either side of her as she did a sort of barefoot Irish jig on a good-sized ants’ nest. She must have seen what he was by the same flickering light, for she hissed in English, “Put the light out before they see it and you find yourself in the same sort of trouble!”
