Shadow on the Sun (2 page)

“Yeah, sure, you're funny as hell.” Tom lowered his eyes and shivered once. “Come on, let's beat it.”

“Oh . . .” Jim Corcoran stuck out his lower lip. Well, no help for it, he guessed. It was going to be a working afternoon and that was the size of it.

“So,” he said, shrugging, “let's go then.”

The sound passed overhead again, a faint, rushing sibilance.

“There it is again,” said Tom, looking up.

“I didn't hear nothin',” said Jim.

“You wouldn't.” Tom lowered his gaze.

Jim chuckled, standing up.

“You scared o' birds?” he asked.

Tom flat-handed him on the arm, and Jim lost his balance, almost dropping the telescope. He laughed aloud as he staggered.

“
Birds
,” he said.

Below, their horses nickered restlessly. They strained at their ties.

 

“It is
agreed then,” Finley told Braided Feather in the Apache tongue. “No rifles or pistols will be kept by any of your people.

“When one of your men needs to hunt, he will go to the soldiers who rule the reservation. There, he will be given a weapon and a pass which will allow him to hunt for a certain time with the weapon. When the time is ended, the rifle or pistol will be returned to the soldiers.

“I have tried,” he added to the chief, “to get permission for these guns to be held by the Apache police, but it cannot, immediately, be done. Later, when the soldiers understand, as I understand, that your word is good, I am sure we can get the weapons put under the control of the Apache police. Is that agreeable?”

Braided Feather nodded.

“It is agreeable,” he said.

“Is it also agreeable,” asked Finley, “that the making of
tulapai
will be limited so that none of your people can drink so much that they might commit an act which would break the treaty?”

Before the chief could answer, Lean Bear spoke angrily to him. Finley did not interfere in the brief exchange between Braided Feather and his son. He glanced over at Leicester and saw the captain gritting his teeth. He looked at Boutelle, who sat, legs crossed, looking at the two Apaches with hard, critical eyes.

Soon Lean Bear had relapsed into a thin-lipped silence, and Finley's gaze sought that of the chief.

“It is agreed,” said Braided Feather, “if it is also agreed that no white man will be allowed to offer whiskey for sale to any of my people.”

Finley passed this along to the captain, who nodded, a sour expression on his face. Leicester's stomach was upset. There was a dull pain in the small of his back, his wife had been frostily rejecting the night before, and he was sick and tired of haggling with these damned, arrogant savages.

Quickly, sensing the decline of cooperativeness in the air, Finley went over the remaining conditions of the treaty while the captain squirmed uncomfortably on the squeaking stool. The two Apaches, father and son, sat without expression. David Boutelle sat, lips pursed, appraising Finley's words, and the corporal clerk sat with the pen poised between his ink-spotted fingers, waiting for instructions.

Outside, the chill October wind rustled the browning grasses, ruffled the blankets of the Apaches and the dark coats of the cavalrymen, stirred the horses' manes, picked at the canvas of the tent, and was a cold current on which flying things could ride.

 

______

 

They were
almost to their horses, which they had tied up in a space below the rocky shelf on which they'd sat.

“You think Al will be mad because we came here?” asked Jim. Now that they were actually going back to town, the thought of Al's angry impatience was distressing him.

“What's the difference?” asked Tom. “If he don't get mad at that, he'll just get mad at something else.”

Jim chuckled nervously. “That's a fact,” he said. “I think we got us the touchiest brother in the whole territory.”

“Don't I know it,” said Tom.

Only the week before, he'd had a fistfight with Al out behind the shop. His ribs still ached from the drubbing he'd taken.

“Hey, I hear it now,” Jim said abruptly, looking up. His gaze moved along the rock face beetling above them, but he saw nothing.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I dunno.” Tom looked up, curious again. “If it's a bird, it's a hell of a big one.”

“Maybe it ain't a bird,” said Jim. “Maybe it's somethin' in the rocks. Y'know? Maybe a—”

It came at them with such speed that they had no chance to move. One second they were scuffling down the slope toward their horses, the next, they were paralyzed in their steps, faces frozen into masks of dumb horror. Jim was quick enough to fling an arm up, but neither of them had the time to scream.

Even if they had, their voices would not have been audible above the terrible, piercing screech that filled the air around them.

T
he
storm had broken now. Sheets of angling rain swept across the land. In seconds, dust had become mud, dark and viscous, trees and bushes ran water from every wind-lashed leaf and twig, and the distant mountains faded from view behind a curtain of deluge. Men could not keep their eyes open in such a rain. When it struck their cheeks and brows, it stung like whip ends.

Hastily, the tent was struck and the troop rode off at a gallop for Fort Apache. It would take them at least two hours to reach their destination. By then, their uniforms would cling to them with chilling weight and the insides of their boots would slosh with water.

Captain Leicester, teeth gritted against the driving rain, led the way across the meadow toward White Canyon. Already, in his mind, he could see the day in its hapless entirety: the long ride back to the fort, his reporting the results of the conference to Colonel Bishop. The walk to his house, the slinging of his soggy-brimmed hat to the floor, the peeling off of his drenched clothes, the muttered
cluckings of his wife. Then the first sneeze, the first trickle at his nostrils, the first chest cough, and off he'd be on the way to a prime cold with all its attendant miseries.

“Damn!” He let the curse go knifing into the wind-scaled rain and, for the effort, got his teeth wet. Damn it! He set his lips into a thin, trembling line. And why, he thought,
why
? For a pack of lice-infested, mule-eating Apaches! Damn them! The sullen, staring, brooding, leather-faced savages!

Captain Leicester dug his spurs in. “Come on!” he raged. “Come on, damn you!”

 

When David
Boutelle, wet and uncomfortable, tried to guide his horse toward the White River Hotel, a swarm of animated townsmen swept him instead toward the Sidewinder Saloon. There, along with a laughing Finley, he was virtually lifted from his saddle by the cheering men and borne aloft toward the smoke-blue, shouting din of the barroom.

As the two of them were carried through the batwing doors, a cheer went up from the assemblage. Steins and glasses were banged on tables and bar, two-fingered whistles needled at the air.

Then Boutelle and Finley were lowered jarringly to the floor and guided by their shoulders to the counter where glasses waited and Appleface Kelly, dripping rain, slammed his hamlike palm on the dark counter and bellowed for whiskey. The barroom sounded deafeningly with boot-scuffling, ragged-cheering men as they pushed happily to the counter.

When every glass and stein was filled, Appleface slammed his palm on the counter again, and, at the pistol shot report of it and Appleface's shout to “Hold it! Hold it!” everyone fell silent. Boutelle tried to get away, but he was held in a trap of smiling, eager men.

“Boys!” said Appleface. “This here's a gala day! Our wives and kids can finally walk the streets of Picture City without bein' scared of every shadow! We can work our jobs without expectin' arrows in our backs from some damn, murderin' Apache! And for that we got t'thank one man here.”

Appleface beamed and pointed at the Indian agent.

“
Billjohn Finley
!” he declared.

“Hooray for Billjohn!” shouted someone.

“Right!” said Appleface. “Hip, hip—”

“Hooray!” howled the men.

“Hip, hip—”

“Hoo-
ray
!”

“Hip, hip—”

“Hoo-RAYYY!” Boutelle winced at the ear-piercing noise.

Then there was only the sound of mass, convulsive swallowing, followed in seconds by the sounds of fiery coughs, stamping boots, and thick glasses being set down heavily on the counter.

Eddie Harkness and his uncle skimmed along behind the bar, uptilted bottles in their hands, gurgling amber bourbon into the glasses. Boutelle put down his glass, still three-quarters full, grimacing at the hot bite of the whiskey in his throat. He looked around for a way out. He'd made his gesture, now he wanted to go.

“And here's to Mr. David Boutelle from Washington, D.C.!” yelled Appleface. “Hip, hip—”

“Hoo-
RAY
!”

Boutelle smiled thinly and tried to leave, but glasses were being raised en masse again and he was pressed in by the shoulder-to-shoulder drinkers. He took another sip of his drink and clenched his teeth.

Finley noticed the younger man standing in his wet clothes, and when the cheers had abated and the men had gone back to their
separate groups of drinking and gaming, he worked his way over to Boutelle.

“You'd better go get yourself a change of clothes,” he said.

Boutelle smiled politely. “I intend to,” he said. He looked at Finley's rain-darkened coat. “What about you?”

“Oh, I'm used to it,” Finley said pleasantly. “I've slept out many a night in wetter clothes than these.”

“You don't talk like a native of these parts,” said Boutelle, finally getting enough room to take off his hat and shake the raindrops to the floor.

“I'm not,” said Finley. “I'm from New Jersey, but I've lived here over seven years.”

“Rutgers graduate?” asked Boutelle.

Finley nodded. “That's how I got this job,” he said. Rutgers University was the sponsor for the Apache nation.

“I see.” Boutelle slid a clean square of handkerchief from his inside coat pocket and patted at the perspiration that scored his upper lip. The hot room was beginning to reek of steaming wool. This, added to the pungent odor of cigar and cigarette smoke, made Boutelle's stomach edgy.

“Well, I've got to go now,” he said, picking up his hat.

“How long will you be staying in town?” asked Finley.

“Not long,” replied the younger man. “Just until the Apaches are established on the reservation.”

“Uh-huh.” Finley nodded. “Well, that should be about a day or two.”

“Mmm.” Boutelle put his handkerchief away. “We'll see.”

Finley knew what the younger man was thinking, but he said nothing. Boutelle, like the majority of newly arrived people from the East, believed, quite firmly and—to them—logically, that the Indian nation was composed of treacherous savages, rarely to be
taken at their word, never to be trusted. Indians were, like any wild animals, to be penned in, watched over, and kept from doing evil. Finley imagined that Boutelle was one of the legion who conceived of Indian reservations as some kind of open-air zoo.

He would say nothing, however. It was not his place to lecture. Besides, Boutelle would be gone in two days at the latest; there was no point in risking friction. Even if he did say something, it would not likely alter Boutelle's trend of thought. Words rarely changed a young man's attitude.

“Perhaps I'll see you later in my office,” he said to Boutelle.

“Perhaps, Mr. Finley.”

Boutelle made his turn from the bar without noticing the approach of the small Indian. The first he saw of him was as an obstacle in his path, and he twitched back as the Indian ducked aside.

“What do you want, Little Owl?” Finley asked in the Indian tongue.

The old Apache glanced timidly at Boutelle, then looked at Finley once again, his dark eyes abject. At his right side, his hand rubbed slowly on the leg of his grease-stained buckskins as though cleaning itself.

Finley grunted once and reached into his pocket. His hand moved quickly to Little Owl's and met it, palm to palm. The gesture took only a moment, and then the small Indian was padding down the length of the bar away from them.

“Did you give him drinking money?” Boutelle asked in surprise.

“Just a loan,” said Finley.

“I thought giving liquor to the Indians was against your principles.”

“As a rule, it is,” Finley said apologetically, “but—well, I guess I just can't think of Little Owl as an Indian. He isn't really anymore.
He's a hang-around-the-town Indian, hasn't even got a tribe to call his own. He lives outside of town with his wife and children.”

“At the town's expense, I presume,” Boutelle said acidly.

“No, no,” said Finley, lying a little. “Little Owl works during spring and fall roundups. He's a pretty good little puncher.”

Boutelle glanced down the counter and saw the old, stolid-faced Apache carrying a stein of beer into the back room.

“
He
works with cattle?” Boutelle asked.

“Yes, quite a few Indians do,” said Finley, taking a cigar from his pocket. He bit off the end and spit it into the gaboon. “Not that they're very good at it,” he went on, smiling. “They're too timid with the stock.”

He chuckled at the expression on Boutelle's face.

“You've never thought of Indians as being timid, have you?” he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “They are, though. They hate to take a risk, any kind of risk at all. That's why they plan their battles so carefully. That's why a chief like Vittorio has lasted so long. He figures things out to the last detail.”