Blood and Gold

I swung out of the saddle and led the black to the front of the cabin, where there was a hitching post. I looped the reins around the post and followed Jacob Lawson and his wife, her daughter in her arms, to the corral.

The Apache I’d hit lay dead on his back, blood splashed on the front of his shirt. There was no sign of the other man I’d shot at.

We walked over to the rocks and found two dead Indians and a third who had been hit hard but was still breathing. The Apache was conscious and his obsidian eyes revealed only burning hate and defiance. His Henry lay where he’d dropped it and I kicked the rifle farther away from him.

Jen made to kneel beside the warrior, but I stopped her. “I wouldn’t do that, ma’am,” I told her. “He’s still got a knife and for sure he’ll stick you with it if he can.”

“This man is hurt,” the woman said. “We can’t leave him out here in the rain.”

“Yes, we can,” I said. “If you take him inside, he won’t thank you for it, ma’am, and he’ll try to kill you first chance he gets.” I glanced up the slope behind me. “Come nightfall, the Apaches will be back to carry off their dead. Just let him be until then.”

“But . . . but that’s inhuman,” Jen protested, her blazing eyes searching my face.

I nodded. “Maybe so, ma’am, but this is a hard, unforgiving land and you do whatever it takes to survive.” As the rain lashed down around me, I nodded toward the fallen Apache, looking into his wild, hate-filled eyes. “That warrior is like Comanche I’ve known, only a whole sight worse. You can’t buy his friendship with kindness because he’ll take that as a sign of weakness and he’ll think you are afraid of him. Sure, you can carry him back to your cabin, nurse him back to health, but he’ll reward you for it by killing you the very worst way he can.” I looked at Jen, matching her anger with rising anger of my own. “You let him be,” I said, “or kill him.”

Jacob looked at me, a question in his eyes, as though trying to figure me out. ‘Y’know,’ he said finally, a smile touching his lips, “for a young feller, you talk old.”

“I guess I’ve had some growing up to do in recent times,” I said, matching his smile with one of my own. “Around these parts, just surviving makes a man grow old mighty fast.”

Jacob turned to his wife, his voice making it clear that he’d brook no argument. “You heard what Mr. Hannah said, Jen. Leave this Apache be.” Then, to take the sting out of it, he added: “Wife, he isn’t one of those wounded little animals you’re always finding. This is a fighting man and he’s dangerous.”

The woman looked at her husband, then at me, lifted her nose in the air and turned on her heel and stomped back to the cabin.

Jacob placed a big hand on my shoulder. “She’ll calm down in a few minutes and realize that you have the right of it. Now please let me offer you the hospitality of our cabin. We don’t have much, but what we have you can share.”

My first instinct was to refuse and get back on the trail, but my growling stomach thought otherwise and I found myself nodding. “I’d be obliged,” I said.

I glanced down at the wounded Apache and met his burning eyes. Summoning up the Spanish I could remember, I said: “Todavia endecha. Usted es amigos estara detras para usted.”

The Mescalero glared at me for a few moments, then gathered what saliva he could find in his dry mouth and spat contemptuously in my direction.

“Hell, what did you tell him?” Jacob asked.

“I told him to lay still, that his friends would be back for him.” I shrugged. “He didn’t take kindly to it.”

The Lawson cabin was clean but not well-appointed, though it had a wood floor, unusual for soddies at that time when most settlers made do with hard-packed dirt, occasionally whitewashed, but usually not.

I took off my hat and shrugged out of my wet slicker and Jacob directed me to a bench drawn up to a roughly made table. An Apache bullet had gouged a foot-long scar on the table’s pine top and another had taken a chunk out of the arm of a rocking chair that stood by the fireplace.

As Jen, her back stiff, worked at the stove, Jacob opened the wood shutters and shook his head, his face gloomy, as he surveyed the broken glass panes in the windows.

Glass was hard to come by in the West, and until the panes could be replaced, he’d have to cover them over with wood, making the interior of the cabin even darker than it was now.

Despite the fact that it was still full daylight, Jacob lit the oil lamp that hung above the table and a pale orange glow spread through the small room, making the place seem less bleak. The wonderful smell of frying meat and boiling coffee wafted from the stove and I found my mouth watering, even as my empty stomach growled at me.