Apache Caress (31 page)

For a split second, Tom was back in the arroyo on that hot summer day, standing behind Robert Forester as the crazed officer waved his pistol, planning to kill the unarmed Apache.

Tom hadn’t even realized he’d fired until he felt the recoil, smelled the burnt powder, heard the shot ring out. The lieutenant half turned to look at Tom, surprised and bewildered, one hand going back to the scarlet stain spreading across the back of his blue uniform. Slowly Forester dropped the pistol and fell on his face. Tom’s own gun fell from nerveless fingers as the enormity of what he’d done swept over him.

Holy Saint Patrick
. He had shot an officer in the back to save the life of a friend. He could live with that. Maybe it wasn’t legal, but it was just.

And now the woman was leaving with that friend. That was just, too. She loved the Apache, it had shown in her eyes. Tom wished she knew that Cholla was innocent, but he realized the Apache would not break his vow. And if Sierra never found out what had happened on that fateful summer day, it didn’t matter, because she loved Cholla anyway.

Tom blinked away the tears that threatened to blind him and turned to follow the patrol back to the fort. Moonlight reflected off the metal on the bridles of the horses ahead of him. It was a big golden moon, bright as Usen’s treasure.

Usen’s own. Gold. Ke’jaa’s den
. It came to him in a rush, the meaning of the message. There was gold in the cave where Cholla had found the puppy, treasure forbidden to the Apache but not to a white friend. This was the last thing Cholla was doing for Tom Mooney.

Ahead of him, Schultz, Allen, and Taylor rode single-file, the last man leading the horse that carried Gillen’s body. Those men were almost ready to retire, too, and their futures were bleak. Tom wondered what time it was? If it was after midnight, he was out of the Army and he had just decided he wasn’t going to reenlist. There was a farm waiting for him, and a young schoolteacher needed an escort back to Michigan. He smiled to himself and wondered if she liked poetry and children.

He reined in and looked back one final time. In the moonlight, he saw two riders on Medicine Hat horses. Headed for the border, they were leading a pack mule. A big yellow dog loped alongside them. The woman’s black hair blew out behind her as she rode south.

“Good-bye,” Tom whispered. “Good-bye. ‘May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind always be at your back, and may God hold you in the hollow of his hand forevermore.’ ”

He took the picture from his jacket then, took one last look at it. Then he let the wind take it from his fingers and blow it away toward the hills. He wondered suddenly what the little schoolteacher’s name was?

“Is everything all right, Sergeant?” Schultz called.

“Yes. God is still in control, and things have a way of working out as they should, Corporal.” He watched the pair pause on a rise in the moonlight; then he turned the black gelding up the trail toward the fort.

Sierra glanced back only once and saw Tom Mooney looking after them. Cholla’s friend, she thought. Tom could have told me Cholla killed my husband, and I might have stayed with him, not have come out here. The Irishman had been trying to tell her something, and she had been afraid to listen. What was it?

Abruptly, the words of the old poem came to her again, and she knew then what Tom had tried to tell her. Tears ran down her cheeks as she remembered the very last lines: “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”

She looked over at Cholla. “You are the most honorable man I ever knew,” she said. “You wouldn’t break your vow and tell me Tom killed my husband to stop him from murdering you, not even if it meant losing me.”

He looked thunderstruck. “Who told you what happened in the arroyo that day?”

“No one, my love.” She smiled gently through her tears. “I suddenly understood the honor between friends, and I knew–I just knew. But Robert deserved to die, and justice has been done.”

Now nothing mattered but her love for the big man riding by her side. She shook her hair back and looked at him. “Can we make the border by daylight, my love?”

“If we ride hard.” He smiled at her. “Are you ready?”

Sierra’s heart was so full, for a moment she could not speak. She was turning her back on the world she knew, but whatever the sacrifice, Cholla’s devotion made it worthwhile.

“Without knowing it, I have been ready always, just waiting for you to come into my life. Let’s go,” she said, and slapped her mare with the reins.

With Ke’jaa running ahead of them, the lovers galloped south toward the Sierra Madre mountains.

Yes, a brave did escape from a train carrying Apaches to Florida in September of 1886. Everyone agrees that his name was Massai, that he escaped in the vicinity of St. Louis, and that somehow he managed to return to his own land within a year. He was seen in Arizona by several witnesses who knew him. No one knows how he got there or what happened to him after that. The rest of his life, as with most legendary figures, is either unknown or is shrouded in controversy. Some say he was eventually hunted down and killed. Others say he disappeared across the border with a woman who loved him enough to give up everything to go with him. I’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?

Alberta Begay wrote in a
True West
article that Massai was her father and that he was a Chiricahua warrior who escaped from the train with another scout, a Tonkawa Indian, and returned to Arizona to take the Apache girl who became her mother across the border.

Jason Betzinez, in his book,
I Fought with Geron
imo, says Massai was a Warm Springs Apache scout for the Army.

Massai was also mentioned in General Miles’s
Personal Recollections
and Frederick Remington’s book,
Crooked Trails
.

Southeast of the ruins of old Fort Bowie, there’s a high place with a breathtaking view known as Massai Point. Legend says he hid there, deep in the Chiricahua Mountains.

The Massai legend has inspired at least one other novel, a traditional Western, Paul Wellman’s
Bronco Apache
, published in 1936. That novel became a movie entitled:
Apache
, starring Burt Lancaster. While that film shows Massai and Geronimo on the same train, actually they were sent on different trains from different stations. Geronimo and his men traveled through Texas, and ironic as it may seem, the Army band did play “Auld Lang Syne” as Geronimo’s renegades were forced on board.

How many of the Army officers mentioned in this story were actual people? General Crook, General Miles, Lieutenant Gatewood, Captain Lawton, Lieutenant Colonel James Wade, and Dr. Leonard Wood.

As I indicated, Crook had made a pledge to the Apache so they would surrender. That pledge was promptly broken by the U.S. government. Crook resigned in protest and was immediately replaced by General Miles a favorite of President Cleveland. Crook spent the next four years trying to right the wrong. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1890, there was no one of importance left to speak for the Apache.

Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, the slender, big-nosed officer who had risked his life going into Geronimo’s stronghold to talk with him, was on the wrong side of the political fence because of his connections to Crook. Gatewood would later be sent to Wounded Knee and would be there at the time of the Indian massacre in 1890. He died in 1896, still an obscure lieutenant, virtually without honors and forgotten, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery near his beloved commander. Ironically, Geronimo outlived them both and visited their graves while in Washington to ride in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.

What happened to the Apache? The Arizonians wanted to hang Geronimo and some other leaders of the Indian revolt, despite what Crook had promised. In fact, when the old Indian and his cohorts were shipped to Florida, President Cleveland ordered them to be taken off the train at San Antonio. The Apaches were held there more than a month while white authorities argued over whether they could legitimately be shipped back to Arizona for trial and possibly for hanging. Almost all the Apaches were finally sent to Florida, where they remained for two years before being sent to Alabama. Many of the children were shipped to Carlisle, Pennsylvania to be educated. The Apache did not do well in any of those states. Fully twenty-five percent of them died during that time. Finally, in 1894, those who were still alive were sent to the Fort Sill area.

Geronimo died there on February 17, 1909, of pneumonia caused in part by lying unconscious in the rain all night after a bout with liquor. He is buried in the Apache cemetery under a pyramid of river stones topped with a concrete eagle.

In 1913, the Apache still alive were given a choice of staying in the Fort Sill area or of moving to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. None were allowed to return to Arizona. There were still people alive in that state who remembered the terrible tortures and killings committed by some of the warriors and feared they might occur again.

The few bands of Apache who stayed in the Fort Sill area are now known as the Fort Sill Apaches. You may see some of them do their fire dance if you ever attend the big annual Indian Pageant held during August of each year at Anadarko, Oklahoma; not far from Lawton. There are also several wonderful museums in the area, as well as the old fort; and buffalo and longhorn cattle can be seen at the nearby Wichita Wildlife Refuge. Quanah Parker, the half-breed, last chief of the Comanche, outlived Geronimo by two years and six days, and he is buried at old Fort Sill, along with his baby sister and his famous mother, Cynthia Ann Parker.

Buried in eastern Oklahoma, southwest of the town of Porum, near the Eufaula Reservoir, is Belle Starr, the “beautiful Bandit Queen,” of many novels. She wasn’t beautiful or much of a bandit, but she did like Indian men. At least two of her four husbands were Native Americans. Belle lived at Younger’s Bend on the South Canadian River in eastern Indian Territory. Like Geronimo and Quanah, Belle also died in February. She was ambushed and killed on February 3, 1889, two days before her forty-first birthday and a little more than two months before the Unassigned Lands were opened to settlement in the first and best-known of the Oklahoma land runs. Who killed her is still a mystery.

Belle’s son, Eddie, died violently in 1896. Her daughter, Pearl, only twenty-one at the time of her mother’s death, had no way to support herself and her illegitimate child, so she ran a bordello in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for a while. Legend says Pearl was fathered by notorious outlaw, Cole Younger, but my research unearthed information that disputes this popular belief. Belle had four grandchildren. One of Pearl’s daughters, Jennette, was married briefly to Hugh Fair, an early member of the Sons of the Pioneers singing group.

There really was a railroad strike in the early spring of 1886. It led to confrontations, violence, and death in the town of East St. Louis. And the winter of 1886-87 is remembered as the year of the most terrible blizzards on record. Some ranches lost as much as eighty-five percent of their stock as hundreds of thousands of cattle froze to death.

I’m sorry to report that the Indians were actually loaded on a train on which the windows had been nailed shut, and they had to leave their belongings behind. The Army did auction their horses, but no one wanted the hundreds of abandoned Indian dogs left roaming the area. Because of the danger of rabies and stock killings, local cowboys, soldiers, and the residents of Holbrook shot most of the dogs.

If the name “Griswold” sounded familiar, remember that a distant cousin of Julia’s, Melanie Griswold, married into this saga in
Nevada Nights
and was killed in a buggy wreck on her wedding day. I know some of you will really like the handsome train robber called Nevada and will ask about him. Yes, he’ll turn up again later. Who is he? I won’t tell yet, but if you’ve read
Nevada Nights
, I’ll bet you can guess.

Some of you have written to say you didn’t know this was a series and to ask why it is called Panorama of the Old West. I hate the word “series,” probably for the same reason many of you do. In most series, if you miss a book, you can’t figure out what’s going on. A “panorama” is an all-encompassing picture, and I’m going to do just what the Cheyenne do here in Oklahoma, tie one tale to another, until I’ve painted a big picture of the history of the old West. I’ve tried to write each so that you can read only one without being confused. Of course, I hope you’ll want to go back and read them all.

My editor has been forwarding a lot of mail. I
always
answer all of it, so if you didn’t get a reply, remember that letters are sometimes lost in the forwarding process. I love to hear from readers. Please write c/o Zebra Books, 475 Park Avenue South, NY NY 10016. I’d appreciate your including a long, self-addressed, stamped envelope. Canadians, please remember I can’t use Canadian stamps, so please purchase the appropriate exchange voucher at your post office. Why a long envelope? Because I’m going to send you a bookmark with a list of all my books on one side and a drawing of the most handsome Indian “hunk” you ever saw on the other, and I don’t want to fold him in half.

Before you ask, I’ll tell you that, yes, he is a real live guy who is part Apache, has blue eyes, and lifts weights for a hobby.
Romantic Times
magazine liked this bookmark so well, they gave it an award at their 1990 convention.

Someone asked if I would list all my books so far and specify when they came out. Well, here they are.

THE PANORAMA OF THE OLD WEST
SERIES

Zebra Heartfires

CHEYENNE CAPTIVE
February, 1987 ISBN# 0-8217-1980-7

CHEYENNE PRINCESS
September, 1987 ISBN# 0-8217-2176-3

Zebra Hologram/Lovegrams

COMANCHE COWBOY
September, 1988 ISBN# 0-8217-2449-5

BANDIT’S EMBRACE
March, 1989 ISBN# 0-8217-2596-3

NEVADA NIGHTS
July, 1989 ISBN# 0-8217-2701-X

CHEYENNE CARESS
January, 1990 ISBN# 0-8217-2864-4

QUICKSILVER PASSION
September, 1990 ISBN# 0-8217-3117-3

APACHE CARESS
October, 1991 ISBN# 0-8217-3560-8

You should be able to order many of my past novels through your favorite bookstore or directly from Zebra.

Was Indian Territory as tough as writers tell you? You’d better believe it! One hundred three Deputy U.S. Marshals working for “Hanging Judge” Parker were killed during his twenty-one years as judge at Fort Smith, most of them in Indian Territory. There is no town in Oklahoma called Sundance, but we had plenty of towns just as tough, such as Ada.

My mother was born and reared in Pontotoc County. In the town of Ada, the county seat, on the night of April 19, 1909, two years after statehood, an armed mob took four men out of the jail where they were being held for committing murder during a ranchers’ feud. All four were lynched.

A number of my correspondents want information on some particular tribe or how to track down Native American ancestors. Tracking down an ancestor is going to be very difficult unless you have some solid information and details. Your public library will help you with researching either of the above. I’m not very knowledgeable on any tribe that doesn’t have some connection with my home state.

What am I going to write about next? In my research I have found stories of white men who turned their backs on their own civilization to ride with the Indians. Some of these men actually lived; others are only intriguing, mysterious legends.

In 1864, the frontier was being ravaged by the Plains tribes who took advantage of the fact that the white soldiers had all gone off to fight in the Civil War. But I told you about that in Trace Durango’s story:
Cheyenne Princess
.

The Union was so desperate that an offer was made to release any Confederate soldier from a prison camp if he would sign up to join the Yankee Army and go West to fight Indians. These Southerners were known as “Galvanized Yankees.” I mentioned them earlier in
Quicksilver Passion
, my version of Colorado’s legendary gold-rush days.

Now suppose a rich, arrogant young Southern officer named Rand Erikson ended up in a hellhole of a Yankee prison? Suppose he was so desperate to get out, he joined the “Galvanized Yankees” and was sent to fight the Sioux? What if he was captured and turned over to a vengeful young Sioux woman whose warrior husband had just been killed by soldiers? Rand’s very life may depend on whether he can charm this Indian girl into falling in love with him so he can escape. What will happen if he takes this Sioux girl back to the wealthy, aristocratic society and the elegant fiancee he left behind? Then a handsome, virile man is caught between two very different women and two different lifestyles.