He Rushed to Rescue the Apache Girl — But Someone Had Set a Deadly Trap..!

PART 2:

She put it in her belt, looked at me again. Then she started walking north. I watched her go maybe 30 ft and that’s when the first shot came. Kicked up dirt about a yard to her left and she didn’t flinch. She just changed direction, fast and low, the way a person moves when they’ve been shot at before and know that freezing is the thing that gets you killed.

Three men came out of the rocks above us. Not army, not Apache, something in between, which is the worst kind, men who work for whoever pays that week. And right now I could see from their hats and the brand on the near horse that they worked for a man named Cutter Downe, who ran cattle on land that used to be something else and who had a habit of settling disputes by removing the people who dispute him.

She had her eyes on them and her back was going to be to me in another second. I did not think about this. I want to be clear on that. There was no noble calculation. I just stepped up beside her and put my hand on my pistol and looked at the man in the middle. He pulled up short. His two men spread out a little, which told me they’d done this before, which meant I needed to talk fast and make it good.

“She’s mine.” I said just that. The middle man, shorter than the other two, red beard going gray, the kind of eyes that are always adding up what things cost, looked me over. “Don’t know you.” He said. “Don’t need to.” “She’s an Apache off the reservation. There’s paper on her.” That was a lie, and everyone present knew it.

 There’s no paper on an Apache woman who hasn’t done anything. But lies don’t need to be true to be useful, and his lie was doing exactly what he needed it to do, making her a thing instead of a person, making me the one who had to justify standing here. “Right on.” I said. I said it flat, not loud, flat. There’s a thing that happens sometimes between men.

 It doesn’t happen often, and it’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t been in it. One man reads another and decides whether the next 30 seconds are worth it, whether the money or the pride or the habit of cruelty is worth what it’ll cost against the thing looking back at him right now. The red-bearded man was doing that math. His hand was near his gun, and mine was already on mine, and I was the one who wasn’t moving.

He read whatever he read. “Another day then.” He said. And pulled his horse around. The other two followed. I watched them go over the rocks, and I counted to 60 after I couldn’t hear them anymore, because the ones who say “Another day” usually mean it. She was watching me. “I didn’t do that for you.

” I said, because I wanted to be honest from the jump. I mean, I did, but not because I want anything.” She said something in Apache I didn’t understand. Her voice was lower than I expected. I pointed north, the direction she’d been heading. “Where?” She looked at me for a long time, then she said a word in English.

 One word, “Water.” I had a canteen. I held it out. She took it and drank without taking her eyes off me, which is a thing I still think about. That particular trust that isn’t trust yet, but is the very first edge of it. We traveled north the rest of that day. I didn’t plan to. I had horses to deliver in Chillarosa and $11 waiting, but I could feel what was behind us, and a woman alone with her wrists cut up and three men who knew her face somewhere to the south didn’t need me to explain the arithmetic. I walked the horses and she

walked and we didn’t talk. She had a long, particular stride, efficient. She never wasted a step. I’ve known ranch hands who’d been walking rough country their whole lives who couldn’t move the way she moved. There was something almost irritating about it, the way it made me notice how much noise I was making by comparison.

By late afternoon, she told me her name, Nalie. She said it the second time in Apache and the third time in English, and I got the sense she was seeing how I handled it, whether I’d make a face or mangle it or go blank. I said it back to her the way she’d said it, and she gave me a single nod that felt, for some reason, like more than a nod usually is.

We made camp in a dry creek bed where the walls cut the wind. I brought enough jerky and hardtack for myself, and she didn’t ask for any, and I laid half of it on the rock between us without saying anything, and she ate it without saying anything, and we watched the fire for a while. I asked her eventually what had happened, why she’d been up in that tree.

She was quiet for long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said, “They came to the camp three nights ago. Took three of us.” “Where are the other two?” She looked at the fire. “Gone.” I didn’t ask more. I’d been in enough bad country to know what gone meant when said in that particular voice.

“The rope,” she said after a moment. “They left me there to be found by more of them.” So it had been a trap. I’d known that, felt it in those four seconds before I cut her down. What I hadn’t known was that I’d been the wrong man to walk into it. They’d expected one of their own, a man bringing the horses in for Cutter Done, or one of the bounty men who worked the Mescalero edges looking for something to collect on.

They’d expected someone who knew the operation, who’d cut her down and bring her somewhere worse. They’d got me instead, and I had no operation. I had two horses and $11 waiting, and no particular loyalty to anyone except myself. “That’s something,” she said. I didn’t know if she meant the mistake they’d made or something else.

 I let it sit. We were three days from the nearest place I thought she might be safe, which was a mission near the Sierra Blanca run by an old priest named Ortega who took money from nobody and answered to nobody, and had been known to shelter people when sheltering them was the uncomfortable thing to do. I’d stayed there once years back, coming off the worst winter of my life.

 He’d fed me and asked me nothing. I told Nali about Ortega. She’d heard of him. She said he was honest for a priest, which from what I know of priests is about as good as they get. We slept on opposite sides of the fire, which was the right arrangement. And in the morning, she was already up when I opened my eyes, standing at the edge of the creek bed looking north, and the early light came across her sideways, and she was a figure from somewhere older than the territory, older than anything I had names for.

I got up and didn’t say anything and we broke camp. The second day was harder. Her wrists had swollen overnight and she was moving slower by midday, though she didn’t mention it and I only noticed because I was watching for it. I cut two strips from my bedroll and wrapped them for her and she stood with her arms out and let me do it and watched my hands the whole time. Not suspicion. Something else.

Something that had moved a little past suspicion. “You’ve done this before,” she said. “Had horses all my life. They get cut up.” “I am not a horse.” “No, but the bandaging’s the same.” She made a sound, not a laugh exactly, the first cousin of one. That was something. That night she talked more, told me about the camp, about her uncle, who was one of the people Doan’s men had been pushing off grazing land for two years running, about the water rights that had been agreed to in a council she hadn’t been alive for and that nobody honored

anymore. She spoke carefully, like she was choosing each word from a drawer and examining it first. She’d learned English from a teacher at a government school she’d been sent to at 12 and hated and come back from when she was 15, walking the last 30 miles alone because nobody came to get her. “Why did you go back?” I asked.

“To the school?” “No, 30 miles. Why walk back when you could have gone anywhere?” She thought about it. “Home is home,” she said. I understood that. I’d never quite had it the way she meant it, but I understood the shape of the word. She asked me then about myself, and I told her the plain facts. Born in Missouri, came west at 17, had been a ranch hand, a freighter, briefly a deputy in a town I don’t name anymore, and now I moved horses because I was good at it, and because it kept me moving, which had been the point for a

long time. “Moving from what?” she said. And that was the thing about Nollie. She asked questions that went straight to the bottom. I told her about my wife, Margaret, died of fever 6 years before in a sod house in the Panhandle, 300 miles from anything you’d call help. I’d been on the trail when it happened, 2 weeks gone, come back to a grave somebody else had dug. Her sister had done it.

 Good woman, the sister. Bad 2 weeks. I hadn’t talked about Margaret in maybe 4 years. The words came out rusty, slow. Nollie listened without filling the silences. “You blame yourself,” she said when I’d stopped. “I was gone.” “You were working.” “Comes to the same thing.” She shook her head slowly. “It does not come to the same thing.

A man who goes away to work is not the same as a man who abandons.” She said it without any particular softness, the way you’d state a fact about weather. “You know that. You are just used to not knowing it.” I didn’t answer. There’s not much to say when someone puts the thing you’ve been carrying for 6 years into one plain sentence.

The fire cracked. A coyote called somewhere up in the dark hills. “My husband died 4 years ago,” she said. “Broke his back working for a rancher. The rancher paid nothing. We had a daughter.” She paused. “She is with my mother now. I was at that camp to bring back horses we had traded for.” She said this all evenly, like she was reading a list.

But at the end of it, she looked at the fire and her jaw was set in a way that told me the evenness was a thing she’d built, not a thing she’d been given. That there was a version of those words that cost a great deal more than the version she’d said aloud. I didn’t offer her anything. I’d learned enough by then to know she didn’t want comfort.

 She wanted someone to sit still and not flinch, and that I could do. The third morning we found the tracks. Five horses coming in from the east, angling toward our line of travel. Fresh, maybe 4 hours old. Not Apache shod horses. The particular way the hooves sat told me weight, and five heavy horses coming at the angle they were coming at meant they weren’t going anywhere. They were waiting.

I looked at Nollie. “Doan’s men,” she said. Not a question. Or bounty men, either way. We had maybe 2 miles to the mission if we moved straight. The tracks were coming from the right side of straight. We could angle west, add 4 miles, maybe five, and come at Ortega from the back slope. Nollie looked at the tracks, and then at the sky, and then at me.

“If we angle,” she said, “there is no cover on the west slope.” I know. They would see us. Yes. So we go straight. Through where they’re waiting. “Through where they’re waiting,” she said, and there wasn’t a shake in her voice. Not a tremor, just the steady statement of what we were going to do. She looked at me.

 “Can you shoot?” “Better than I talk.” “Good,” she said, “because you talk too much.” I almost laughed. I hadn’t almost laughed in a while. We moved straight. I won’t make that mile and a half into something it wasn’t. It was dusty and dry, and my heart was going, and I had one pistol, and the rifle on the near horse and two shells in my jacket pocket I’d forgotten about.

 And Nollie was 3 ft to my left with her own pace and her own jaw set, and her eyes working the scrub oak line the way a person’s eyes work when they know exactly what they’re looking for. The first man came out of the oaks on the left side. He had a rifle, but he hadn’t leveled it yet, and I put my pistol on him before he’d gotten it up.

“I’m going to tell you one time,” I said, “ride on.” He looked at me, and looked at Nollie, and looked back at me. “Don’t wants the woman,” he said, like that settled it. “Don’t can want whatever he likes. She’s with me.” From somewhere in the oaks I heard movement. One horse, two. The other four making themselves known without showing themselves.

Nollie said something in Apache fast and low, not to me. I thought maybe she was praying until I heard, a moment later, an answering call from the ridge above us. Bird call, but not a bird. And I understood then what I had known for 3 days. We hadn’t been alone. There had been eyes on us since some time on the first day, watching, waiting to see what I was.

Four Apache riders came down off the ridge at a walk. Not a gallop, a walk, which is more frightening if you understand what it means. It means they are not hurrying because they do not need to hurry. Don’s man in the oaks took one long look at the ridge and made his decision. I heard them go, four sets of hooves moving south at speed.

 The fifth man backing his horse until he was far enough to turn and run. I stood there with my pistol still out for a moment, then I put it away. The four riders stopped 20 ft from us. One of them was an older man, 60s, gray streaked, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read. He said something to Nollie. She replied.

 He said something else. She replied again, and this time she gestured at me, and he looked at me for a long time, and then he said one word. “What did he say?” I asked her. “He said you are either brave or stupid.” “Which does he think?” “He has not decided.” She paused. “He is my uncle.” The man she told me about. The one Don had been pushing off the grazing land.

He’d been looking for her then, for 3 days. He said something else. Nollie turned to me. “He wants to know why you helped me.” I thought about that for a moment. I could have said the easy things, that I couldn’t ride past, that it was the right thing, that I’m not the kind of man who leaves a woman hanging in a tree.

 All of it true, none of it quite right. “I saw a person in a bad spot,” I said, “and I had a knife.” She translated it. Her uncle listened. Then he said something still looking at me, and this time there was something different in his face. Not warmth exactly, but a settling, a judgment made. “He says,” Nollie told me, “that there are not many men who answer that way.

” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. We made Ortega’s mission by late afternoon. The old priest was in the yard feeding chickens when we rode in, and he looked up and looked at me and looked at the Apache riders and said, “I imagine you are hungry.” Which is about the most Ortega thing that has ever been said in my presence.

He fed us. He cleaned Nollie’s wrists and looked at her temple and gave her something for the swelling. Her uncle and the other three ate in the yard and then made camp at the edge of the tree line, which was the way they did things. Close enough to be present, far enough to be their own. I sat with Ortega after dark on his porch while the others slept.

 He gave me coffee that was thin but hot and didn’t ask me about anything except whether I was staying the night. “Couple days, maybe.” I said. “Make sure they get clear.” He nodded like that was a perfectly sensible reason. The Chillarosa man’s horses. “I’ll send word. He can wait.” Ortega smiled.

 He had the kind of face that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. “She is a particular woman.” he said. “I noticed.” “Her uncle is a man of standing among his people.” “I gathered.” “You did well.” the old priest said, not effusively, just the plain statement of it, the way you tell a man the brakes on his wagon held. I sat with that for a minute.

 I hadn’t had anyone say something like that to me in a long time. Not because I hadn’t done things worth saying that about, maybe. Just because there hadn’t been anyone paying attention who knew the difference. Nollie found me out there an hour later when Ortega had gone in. She sat on the top step of the porch, one step below where I was in the chair.

She had Ortega’s blanket around her shoulders. We sat in quiet for a while. The tree frogs were going and there was enough moon to see the outline of the hills. “My uncle.” she said finally. “He will go back to the land. There is nothing else for him.” “Dawn won’t stop.” “No, but we will not stop, either.

” She said it simply, not defiant, just factual, the way she said most things. “What will you do?” I asked. “Go back to my daughter, work. There is always work.” She was quiet a moment. “What will you do?” “Deliver the horses, get my $11.” “And then?” I didn’t have a good answer for that. “And then whatever comes next.

” She turned and looked at me. The moonlight came across her face, and her expression was considered, deliberate, the same look she’d given me that first morning on the ground with my knife in her hand, except now it had something in it I hadn’t seen before. “You could come back this way,” she said. “There is always work here.

 Horses need moving.” “That’s true.” “My uncle would not object.” “That’s something.” She turned back to the hills. “I am not asking you,” she said. “I am telling you that the road back through this country would not be unwelcome.” I understood the weight of that. From this woman in this moment, with her uncle in the tree line, and her judgement about men as calibrated as any I’d encountered, “The road back would not be unwelcome” was not a small thing.

It was perhaps the largest thing anyone had said to me in 6 years. I looked at the hills the way she was looking at them. “I’ll come back this way,” I said. She nodded once, that same nod as the first day when I’d said her name right, the one that meant more than it looked like. She stood, pulled the blanket around her, paused a moment with her hand on the porch post.

 In the moonlight, her fingers were wrapped in the white cloth I’d cut from my bedroll 2 days ago. “Nollie,” I said. She turned. “I’m glad I stopped.” She looked at me for a moment, then “I know,” she said, “I could tell.” And she went inside. I sat out there a while longer. The hills were dark and still, and the frogs kept going.

 Inside, I could hear Ortega moving around, banking the stove for the night. My $11 was still waiting in Chillarosa. The horses needed delivery. >> [snorts] >> There were a dozen things on the practical side of the ledger that hadn’t changed. But I sat there in that chair, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in long enough that it took me a moment to name it. Not happiness, exactly.

 Something steadier than happiness. The sense of having been seen for what I actually was. Not what I’d been written off as. Not what 6 years of moving had worn me down to look like. But the actual thing underneath. The man who stopped. The man who showed his empty hands. The man who set his knife down and backed up two steps.

Worth seeing. Somebody had decided I was worth seeing. I went to sleep in Ortega’s chair, and didn’t dream about anything. In the morning, she was gone with her uncle and the three riders. But on the porch step where she’d sat was a small piece of worked leather. Beaded in a pattern I didn’t have the knowledge to read.

 She tied it with a piece of the white cloth from my bedroll. I put it in my breast pocket. 2 weeks later, I was back through that country.