The Big Dry. George Garland
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your boots, if you ever take them off, Mr. Dana—if you can—there might be a whip scorpion in one of them. Dry poison, Mr. Dana.
It was the Army. He hated it, loved it; all one hundred and eighty-five pounds of his five feet and eleven inches was used to it and all that it could hand a man from battle to promotion, to the Sixty-Fourth Article of War.
He rode down the line and prodded his men awake. He cursed and turned his head north again, oblivious to the stars, the slow shuffle of hoofs, or the distant wail of a coyote. A light far ahead appeared on a mountain slope. It went out. Another sprang up. Before morning, Victorio would know how many troopers were on the march up to the ’Frisco Valley. It was uncanny, but it was so.
For a moment he was wondering if the five arrows in each of the prospectors on Gutache Mesa were meant to convey something.
A shiver ran up his spine.
Toward noon next day, Lieutenant Dana rubbed his grim face with a gauntleted hand and halted his troop. A big Queeny freight wagon drawn by six mules ground to a halt. The grizzled old wagoner spat tobacco juice and spoke of the Gutache killings:
“Danged ’Paches didn’t touch the corn or sowbelly in the wagon, so says Lieutenant Botts. And the horses wasn’t took nor killed. Odd as hell, I says. Ain’t the ’Pache way.”
He talked on: Botts reported that it looked like the work of one Indian, since only the tracks of one pony could be found. And that pony wore shoes, also uncommon to Apache ponies. And the left front horseshoe was larger than the other three.
Then he slung whip and roared at his mules and creaked on south, leaving Dana lost in thought.
With many lame horses, Troop A moved on at a walk, spur rowels jingling, shuffling up dust. It was dismount and lead, a general halt every hour on through the hot long miles over Cactus Flat. They moved at a snail’s pace when the order was, “Proceed with haste.”
The Flat seemed long and endless. The wagoner’s tale clung leechlike to Dana’s brain all that afternoon.
He wiped sweat with his yellow neckerchief and felt the grime cutting into his face like pumice. Sweat-caked and smelly, rather a part of the trailing smell of men and horses, he pulled his tunic out from wet skin and trudged on. He was wishing for rain, a downpour. Which, he snorted in disgust, was like wishing he were on the banks of the Potomac with a whiskey julep in one hand and a lady’s delicate fingers in the other. The dream died and he saw smelly greasewood, prickly pear, ground bush, and dry yellow dirt. An antelope halted ahead, curious, and out of range. A vermilion flycatcher flew by. The sun painted the crags of a canyon in deep orange. The sky was still a brass reflector of heat that furred the distant range. Ahead, all ahead, was ambush country.
As the troop marched down off the Flat into the first blind curve of Big Dry road, Dana felt fear down the line of his column. It was downhill all the way in short, stiff-legged steps, carbines ready, in elbow-crook, troop alert. It was a treacherous road, patterned after hairpins and fingernails; it hung against dry walls and flirted with sheer drops down into purpling draws. One more hell of a road.
In sharp contrast, the day was fading away beautifully. An evening daze dominated all distances, broken only by a colorful sky and glints of orange on the Mogollon crags. A vagrant breeze stirred, whisked on above the walls of the road like a song burdened with somber, ageless things a man wanted to hear and then didn’t.
Dana scowled. Something told him not to go on. Across the miles of wasteland the maw of Big Dry Canyon glowed in orange like a rhinoceros afire. He felt alone and no amount of glaring back at the damned canyon could lesson his growing presentiment.
He fell back and said to Reeder: “Sergeant, we split here. I’ll take a detail of twelve and skirt ahead.” Even as he said it, General Bent’s crisp, incisive voice rang in his ears: “Hold intact on the march, Lieutenant.”
Then he said, sternly impatient: “All right, men—Turner, O’Berry, Booker, Yeager, Hutch, Bartlett, Diaz, Bennett, Chaves, Black, Goldsmith, and Harwood—fall in! No horses, just rifles and sharp eyes. Turner and O’Berry to the ridges. Flank the road ahead, low crouch, and ready!”
Fear of attack was of short duration, he told himself. The Apache didn’t strike after dark, in fear of his wandering ghosts. A man could sleep well. But the dawn was early and dangerous. The dusk was late and just as ominous.
O’Berry moved on, swore at the Lieutenant when he thought he was out of earshot. Dana heard and didn’t hear; he had been a trooper once. Then O’Berry returned and said there was no Indian sign anywhere; but he smelled water in the Dry.
“Peel your eyes, Turner. Fail to find Indian sign when it’s there and your blood will turn to ice water.” A man learned that on his first campaign. He didn’t have to learn it twice.
The wagon massacre on Gutache Mesa preyed in Dana’s mind. The prospectors had hit it rich up on Pueblo Creek, so the old wagoner had said; McQueen had tried to buy them out; and trouble was brewing between McQueen and a mine-owner named Turrentine. Therefore, Dana thought on, if the Apache massacre was as phony as it sounded, a mining feud might be all he was marching to.
Shapes were losing detail in the falling mantle of evening. A deep purple thickened the air. Soon, very soon, night would fall. Then they could march on or throw the spider on the fire and sit out the smell of frying bacon. No need for putting out fires or muting a trumpet.
Then it was dark of a sudden, black dark until their eyes got used to it. Dana called the scouts in and waited out Reeder’s approach. Then he ordered the march to continue. Reeder asked how far; he knew this hill; there was a spot around a curve where Major Fremont camped several years ago.
“No water,” Dana replied.
Reeder laughed in the dark; his first hint of insolence, Dana thought. “The San Francisco is a long way off, sir.”
“And wet,” Dana replied, with warning in his voice.
To which the Sergeant wanted to say that the paymaster’s ambulance at the rear carried a barrel of water for the horses, that the men could suffer quarter rations because the command hadn’t the gumption to replenish on the Gila. But he said nothing of the kind, just worked up precious saliva, defiantly, and spat it with a noisy show of independence.
Dana was wise. He smiled, and thought Reeder a good man to have along in case of attack. Troop A reached Little Dry Creek and found caked mud, nothing more. The horses sniffed and looked up before lowering their heads again to the craving smell. A fire lit up the night in quick time. The flames painted dusty men, all hungry.
The spider was on the fire, horses were picketed; and a dozen men were assigned to the troop guard and listening posts ordered extended out.
Then it happened. Something unheard of, and Dana didn’t believe it, since the Apache of this country had never been known to violate his black-of-night rule of no attack.
But there was Turner—a moment before singing as he squatted before the fire—rising to his feet with a stunned look of horror on his face, staring unbelievingly at an arrow in the middle of his belly. Then he let out a scream that faded out in the anguish of despair, and Dana knew he felt no pain but that complete resignation to the inevitable.
And Dana, who had seen men die before, had no time for compassion. He was churning his brain with position and defense, with the un-Apache paradox even as he leaped for the rifles and shouted commands. But it was schooled experience that issued orders, and not he, for his mind was groping for some key to the Apache mystery and it was directing one ear, tuning it, to the expected yells from out in the night. The other ear awaited the thud of Turner’s body as it hit the ground.
Turner slipped to the ground silently, his eyes staring in death. And all was quiet for a moment or two, too quiet. Then suddenly another arrow fell, quivered near the fire. The next came seconds later. Trooper Diaz caught it. The tip stuck out behind his neck, the feather trembling before his very eyes. Diaz fell, clawing at the thing frantically.
Three arrows. Two men