“No. I was on a scout. When I returned, he was gone. I was sent to track those who took him.”
“And the army?”
“They come. I leave sign for them. But as long as it does not rain, they can follow the wagon tracks, too.”
“How many troops?”
“A dozen. But a courier was sent to Fort Bowie. There will be more.”
“Are you sure?” Zak asked.
Chama cocked his head and a quizzical look spread over his face. “Why do you ask this?”
Zak shrugged. “I don’t know. I have the feeling that things are not quite right at Fort Bowie.”
“What makes you think this?” Chama asked.
“I don’t trust Major Willoughby. He’s in charge, but someone inside that fort had to tell Ferguson where O’Hara was. It’s a big country.”
“I see,” Chama said. “I wondered about that myself. Whoever took Ted knew where he would be.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Why do you say the name of Ferguson? Is that one of his wagons we are following?”
Zak told Chama about the two soldiers, the coach and Colleen O’Hara, his suspicion that Apaches had not killed the two soldiers. He also told him about the men he had seen at the way stations and what they had told him.
“You know,” Chama said, “that there are many whites who want the Chiricahua driven from their lands. They want to kill them or drive them far away.”
“I’m beginning to see all that, yes.”
“Many white people think that the only good Apache is a dead Apache.”
Zak had heard that talk many times before, applied to any red man. It galled him, as it galled Crook, and his blood boiled not only at the blind prejudice of the comment, but because he knew good men and bad of both races, the white and the red. And he knew that the color of a man’s skin did not reflect what was inside the man.
“Fear,” Zak said.
“What?”
“We fear whatever we don’t know, Jimmy. The white man fears the red man because he doesn’t know him. And he never will unless he shakes a red man’s hand and sits down inside his lodge and takes supper with his family. Same goes for the red man, too, of course.”
“I never heard a white man talk the way you do, Cody.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m a breed,” Zak said, “same as you.”
“You are of the mixed blood? Apache?”
“No. My mother was Lakota. Of the Ogallala tribe.”
Chama looked cockeyed at Zak. “Your Indian blood does not show much.”
“Does it matter? Blood is the same in all men. Mine is as red as yours and yours is as red as any white man’s.”
“That is not what the white men say.”
“No, that is true.”
Zak let the sadness of his words hang in the air between them. He could almost see the thoughts work through Chama’s mind, see it twitch ever so slightly in the muscles on his face. He knew it must have been hard on the young man, growing up with the Mescaleros and trying to find his father’s people among the Mexicans, and seeing how they, too, were treated by what the Indians called “the white man.” Skin. Like the coat of a horse or a longhorn cow, it came in all colors on a human. Yet men separated themselves according to their outward coloring and believed their blood was different, when in truth it was all the same.
“My uncle,” Zak said, “
“Your uncle sounds like a wise man,” Chama said.
“He was a wise man. He taught me much. As did my mother, although I did not realize it at the time.”
“When we are young, we do not wish to learn from the old ones. But we learn anyway,” Chama said. “And when an old man dies, he takes all of his wisdom with him. If we do not listen to his words when he is alive, they are lost forever.”
Zak nodded, then shook off the thoughts that came rushing in, the words of Talking Horse, his mother, his own father. Good words. Not the truth, perhaps, but guideposts to the truths that lay hidden in plain sight.
“We’re not going to catch that wagon,” Zak said, “but I aim to put these supply stations out of business. You want to ride along?”
“But, of course. I am on the same trail as you, Cody.”
“There could be gunplay.”
Chama looked down at the pistol strapped to his waist.
“That is why I carry this pistol, Cody. If it is called upon, it will speak.”
