Knight of the Tiger Read online

  “Ho, Redondo and John, come meet your brother, Hombrecito, who returns after many seasons learning to be a White Eye di-yen. He’s a great warrior. Welcome him with respect.”

  The boys stopped in midstride, suddenly shy. Redondo said, “My father has spoken around our fire many times of my brother, the great warrior Hombrecito. Welcome to the lodge of our father.”

  I saw Yellow Boy’s slight smile and said, “It’s good to return to the lodge of my father and to see my brothers grow tall.” Redondo’s smile showed clear and bright even in the deepening twilight. “I’ll come to the lodge of our father when I’ve cared for my horse.”

  Yellow Boy said, “Redondo, you and John go to Moon and Juanita and tell them Hombrecito sits at our fire this night. I’ll help him with his horse.”

  Juanita and Moon on the Water were delighted to see me and offered a meal of venison, sweet acorn bread, chilies, beans, potatoes with sage, and dried berries. As we sat around the fire drinking cups of hot coffee, Yellow Boy told me of the years on the reservation while I was gone. Six years earlier, the Mescalero had agreed to share their reservation with the Chiricahuas, who were about to be freed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after being held as prisoners of war.

  Asa Daklugie, the nephew of Geronimo, now Chief Naiche’s power as his primary advisor, as Geronimo had been before he died of pneumonia, had been fourteen or fifteen when the Chiricahuas were put on a train for a Florida prisoner of war camp nearly thirty years earlier. He had been sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and learned well the lessons of cattle husbandry. He had also managed the Apache herd at Fort Sill. Now he was a leader on the reservation and a driving force to establish a cattle herd for the Apaches that was to become the envy of ranchers in the Tularosa Basin and beyond.

  Daklugie had little use for tribal policemen, but he and Yellow Boy got along well. Around the Chiricahuas’ fires, Yellow Boy had listened to stories of their years in the prisoner of war camps of Florida, Alabama, and finally, Fort Sill, and how they had been kept prisoners for twenty-seven years after they got on the train to Florida, though the liar, General Miles, had told them the train would bring them back in two years.

  Yellow Boy stared into the flames and said, “The Chiricahuas were in a bad place for a long time. I’m glad Ussen, the great god who gives the spirits Power, never used me to send them there and that I was lucky enough not to go myself.”

  I stayed five days with Yellow Boy. I wanted to stay longer but knew my mother grew more anxious each day I was gone. When I left, we made plans for him to visit me at the ranch Rufus Pike had left me in the Organ Mountains. I expected to have a very busy time getting my practice started and getting Rufus’s ranch back in shape to raise a few cattle, and I needed Yellow Boy’s help.

  Returning from Mescalero, I began setting up my practice. I dropped by to see my mother every day for lunch, and two or three times a week for supper. We had long talks about my days in medical school and the family members I had not known since I was eight years old. She never pushed me to reveal my true identity to the rest of my kin.

  My brothers and sisters, learning I’d returned, and convinced I was a con artist trying to cheat her out of money or land, barked at me and whined at her, but the M.D. after my name held them at bay. They even stopped by my little office to get my opinion on how our mother was doing. I told them the unvarnished truth: her health was rapidly slipping away.

  It was hard to see her decline so fast now that I was able to spend time with her. Soon she was bedridden and passed away in early September. Holding my hand, her last words to me were, “Enrique, live with honor, and be strong like your father.”

  Suffering from the grief of her death, I refused to deal with my brothers and sisters. They didn’t know me and wouldn’t believe I’d somehow managed to survive the attack that had killed our father.

  I knew only one way to take the ache out of my soul from my mother’s passing and literally ran the grief out of my system. I ran hard and long every day as I had when Yellow Boy had trained me to be a warrior and a survivor, and, like a hot poker on a flesh wound, the running burned away my grief and anger at God for taking her so soon.

  Late one afternoon a few weeks after my mother passed away, I was in my office reading with the windows open, enjoying that smooth, after-harvest breeze from the desert. A gauzy orange, after-sunset glow filled the streets as the streetlights flickered to life. The only sounds on the street came from an occasional Model-T, the creaks and jingle of chains from a team pulling a wagon, or the clop of horses ridden by cowboys heading for a saloon.

  Then the steady thump of boots and the jangle of spurs appeared in my consciousness. They grew louder as they approached my office and stopped. A moment later I heard a loud, demanding knock on my door. I swung my feet off the desk, turned up the lamp, and opened the door.

  A Mexican in a tan campaign jacket and pants and a bright red shirt stood in the doorway staring at me. Although carrying weapons was against the law in Las Cruces, he was armed. Bandoliers filled with cartridges hung across his wide shoulders, and he wore a gun belt stuffed with cartridges and carried a holster filled with a Model 3 Smith and Wesson revolver. A Winchester rifle rested in the crook of his arm. While I guessed he wasn’t much more than thirty, his skin had the bronze patina of a man who had spent his life in the desert. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  “Sí?”

  He made a little bow from the waist and said in a smooth, tenor voice, “Buenas noches, señor. Enrique Grace? Doctor Grace?”

  “Sí, sí. Por favor, entra.”

  “Muchas gracias, Doctor Grace.”

  Leaning his rifle against the doorframe, he removed and held his sweat-stained, gray Stetson in front of him, but tilted his chin up and looked me in the eye with obvious pride.

  “Señor Grace, I bring you a message from mi jefe, General Francisco Villa. He says to tell you he remembers, with much pleasure, his days with Hombrecito and Señor Yellow Boy.”

  Distant, fond memories of adventures with my friend Doroteo Arango, now known as Pancho Villa, great generalissimo of the revolución in Mexico, filled my mind and warmed my heart.

  “General Villa! He’s an old amigo I’ve not seen in many years. The message, señor?”

  “Mi jefe, he asks you to come and speak with him on a matter of great importance. He’s in the mountains three days’ ride to the west. He sends me to find and guide you to him. Will you come, Doctor Grace?”

  “Sí, señor. The Apache, Yellow Boy, he is to come also?”

  He nodded. “The general, he asks me to also find and bring the great warrior, Muchacho Amarillo. Where is his camp? Will his people give me safe passage to speak with him?”

  “I’ll send word to him. Meet us here in two days from this hour. We’ll ride then.”

  He smiled, obviously relieved. “Muchas, muchas gracias, señor. I don’t like being around Apaches alone.” He held up two fingers. “In two days, we ride in the night.”

  As he stepped out the door and looked up and down the dark street, a dawning realization from far back in my mind prompted me to ask, “Momento, por favor. Su nombre, señor?”

  Looking back at me, he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “My name? I’m sorry, Doctor Grace. I’ve been at war so long I forget my manners. My father named me Guillermo Camerena. Mis amigos, they call me Camisa Roja.”

  I waved him on out the door and muttered, “Damn it to hell. Of all the luck.” I dropped into my desk chair, feeling angry bile in the back of my throat, tasting again the bitterness of Rafaela’s death, and wanting the satisfaction of killing the man who had murdered her.

  My fist slammed the desktop. Camisa Roja. Fate had tricked me again. The man who’d killed Rafaela, the man I’d sworn to kill, I hadn’t even recognized when he was standing within two feet of me. I stared at the doorway and longed for a swallow of mescal.

  After a while, I left my office and sent a telegram to
the Mescalero reservation agent, C.R. Jefferis. I told him I needed Yellow Boy with me for an important trip into Mexico and that it would be a great favor if he’d let him know as soon as possible. I didn’t doubt I’d soon see the man I called Grandfather.

  The next evening, Yellow Boy appeared in my office, startling me. I turned, and he was there, though I’d never heard him approach. He wore his ancient sergeant’s coat, blue with faded yellow stripes on the sleeves, and his flat-brimmed scout’s hat, his long, black hair, streaked with gray, falling on his shoulders. He was ready to travel. His straight-slash mouth curved up a little as he stepped out of the shadows with his ancient Yellow Boy Henry rifle cradled in his left arm.

  “Hombrecito, when Coyote finds Snake ready to strike, like you, he jumps.”

  I laughed. “You walk as the spirits, Yellow Boy. I didn’t expect you until tomorrow evening. Come. Let’s eat.”

  The little restaurant and bar I frequented was five or six doors down the street from my office. The owner, with piggy eyes and red hair that sat atop his head like a flaming brush pile, smiled and nodded when I walked in the door, but he grimaced when he saw Yellow Boy behind me. I’m sure he also saw Yellow Boy’s Henry. I didn’t doubt he’d heard stories about Yellow Boy and how deadly he was with the old Henry. He kept his mouth shut as he showed us to a table covered with a red and white checkered tablecloth.

  After bowls of chili verde seasoned with the fires of hell and wiped clean with corn tortillas, Yellow Boy grinned, belched his appreciation, leaned back in his chair, and studied me. After a while, he said in Apache, “So, Hombrecito, Arango sends for us. This is a debt we wait a long time to pay. We owe him much.”

  “How do you know he would do this, Yellow Boy?”

  “Five suns ago from the camp of our amigo the Apache, Kitsizil Lichoo’, who the Mexicans call Pelo Rojo, an uncle of my wives came to Mescalero. He said Arango’s army marches to cross the Sierra Madre through El Paso Púlpito. Arango camps in a side canyon on the sunrise side of the mountains. He buys weapons, supplies, and bullets from the Indah (white men) across the border.”

  I nodded. “Villa sent Camisa Roja to find and guide us back to his camp. Villa says it’s important that he speak to us. Can you believe it? Of all the people he might have picked, he sent the man I once swore to kill.”

  “Hmmph. Ussen laughs many times at men, makes many jokes.” From inside his sergeant’s coat, Yellow Boy pulled out one of his short, black cigars and moistened the tobacco by pulling it past his lips before lighting it. “The war between the Mexicans has lasted many seasons, Hombrecito. Many die, but much blood is yet to be spilled.”

  “You speak true. We must help Villa with open eyes. How much blood must we shed for him until our debt is paid?”

  Yellow Boy put a fist over his heart. “When it is enough, here you will know.”

  I knew he was right and said, “We’ll meet Camisa Roja tomorrow night and ride for Mexico. I’ll get Satanas from the ranch tomorrow.”

  Yellow Boy shook his head. “Better we ride when no other man knows. I already bring Satanas from your rancho. Your big rifle, Shoots-Today-Kills-Tomorrow, your medicines, blankets, and supplies, you make ready, then we go tonight.”

  “All right, before the moon clears the Organs, I’ll be ready to ride.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CHALLENGES

  We found Camisa Roja cleaning his weapons in the smoky light of a flickering kerosene lantern outside the livery stable door. He was discussing the revolución with old man Parsons, the liveryman. Roja showed no surprise when Yellow Boy and I stepped into the circle of light, but Parsons, seeing Yellow Boy, headed for his office in the back of the barn.

  Roja saluted us with his hand up and palm out. “Buenas noches, señores.” He nodded toward Yellow Boy. “You’re Muchacho Amarillo, the great warrior General Villa says I must bring with Doctor Grace. Mis amigos call me Camisa Roja.”

  Yellow Boy, his hand up, palm out, returned Roja’s salute. “Buenas noches, Camisa Roja. Many seasons pass since the Hacienda Comacho raid. You fight well there. The Apaches say you kill Elias and Apache Kid. If this is true, you’re a great warrior also.”

  The furrows in Roja’s brown face grew deep. “Señor, you were part of the raid on the Hacienda Comacho?”

  “Sí, señor, I was at the Comacho raid. Elias and the crazy hombre who shot Comacho, they stole my daughter.” He pointed to me and said, “She was Hombrecito’s woman, Rafaela. Muchacho Amarillo and Hombrecito found Elias and took my daughter back. I sent the crazy man to the land of the grandfathers.”

  Camisa Roja’s shoulders relaxed. “You’re the one who shot out Billy Creek’s eyes? Muchas gracias, señor. The Comacho family and their vaqueros, we’re all in your debt.”

  Yellow Boy slowly shook his head. “No, I didn’t send this hombre to the grandfathers for the Comachos. Comacho deserved to die, deserved to suffer. He tortured Rafaela. I vowed one day to kill him myself.

  “Billy Creek stole my daughter. Hombrecito and Muchacho Amarillo said this hombre must die. I shot out his eyes. You also drew near to the grandfathers when you shot Hombrecito’s woman. We returned to Hacienda Comacho the day after the Elias raid. Hombrecito burned hot with anger, burned to send you to the grandfathers, but you were gone. Ussen smiled on you. Ussen let you live that day. You have much good luck.”

  Camisa Roja bit his lower lip, shaking his head. “I . . . I don’t kill women . . . except in the revolución. I killed no woman at Hacienda Comacho.”

  I stepped into the lantern’s light so he could clearly see my face and said through clenched teeth, “When you rode up with the vaqueros from El Paso Carretas, you swung off your horse, kneeled, and shot at her as she ran for the big piñons across the arroyo. She was wearing pants and a shirt, and I watched you take careful aim. It was a very long shot, and you made it, god-damn you!”

  He stared at me and then looked at the ground and said, “Sí . . . I shot at a man running from the attack on my patrón. I didn’t know I shot a woman. Of this, I have mucho regret, señores. I didn’t kill women then, but now I kill anyone my general says must die. It is war. Comprende? Doctor Grace, if you still want revenge, let’s settle it now and be done with it one way or the other.”

  Yellow Boy shook his head. “No more of this. Hombrecito knows you didn’t deliberately kill his woman. If he wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be here now. His wisdom grows. This night we ride. Take us to Villa.”

  Camisa Roja wasted no time packing and saddling his sturdy little pony, loading his pack mule, and paying Parsons.

  I said to Yellow Boy, “I can pay for the train to ship us and our animals over to Hachita or Animas to save us time and keep the animals fresh.” But he wouldn’t have it. He shook his head. “I no ride iron wagon. You ride iron wagon. I ride the land alone.”

  We mounted and rode out of Las Cruces at a fast jog, passing Mesilla, following the dusty road toward El Paso. Ten or twelve miles south of Mesilla, Roja turned toward the Río Grande and used a cattle crossing to its western side.

  Yellow Boy and I looked at each other, grinning. We were following nearly the same trail we’d taken to the camp of Pelo Rojo and his Sierra Madre Apaches thirteen years earlier. On the other side of the river, the trail led up switchbacks to the plateau above the valley. On top of the plateau, we pointed toward Hachita, but bore south past the Hatchet Mountains on the eastern side of the New Mexico bootheel. Passing the Hatchets, the trails led down into Mexico. These were the trails Apaches, smugglers, and cattle thieves had followed since the time of the conquistadores.

  We kept in the shadows of the mountains and hills, and Yellow Boy often paused to check our back trail. Across the border, Camisa Roja led us straight as a bow shot toward the eastern edge of the Sierra San Luis, the low mountains near the border filled with a maze of canyons guarding the eastern front of the high sierras.

  To reach Villa’s camp, we rode for three nights and slept during the day, each of us
taking a turn as sentry. When I stood guard, my mind returned to my days in Mexico. I remembered the days and nights I had with Rafaela, the raids on the hacendado herds with Villa, and the life and death challenges I’d had from Apaches and a jaguar. Two days earlier, I had dreamed that jaguar was on fire. What could such a dream possibly mean? I was stumped, but I believed mystical dreams had purposes and that eventually I’d understand what it was trying to tell me.

  Deep in the third night, near dawn, we rode up a big, gravelly wash leading into a wide canyon. We saw tracks from a small herd of horses, a few cattle, and five or six wagons. As the eastern sky turned red, we saw firelight twinkling through dark tree silhouettes and smelled smoke. Camisa Roja told us to wait for him by the canyon’s south wall while he alerted the sentries it was safe for us to come in.

  CHAPTER 3

  NEW CAMP, OLD AMIGOS

  I knew the canyon. When I lived with the Apaches in Pelo Rojo’s camp in the Sierra Las Espuelas, I rode through it all the way over its high pass and down into the San Bernardino Valley. Villa camped in a side canyon where spring water filled a large natural tank to form a blue-green pool at the bottom of high red and beige cliffs on the eastern wall. On the canyon floor junipers, cottonwoods, and sycamores provided shade and firewood.

  Six wagons were parked under the tall trees. One, a chuck wagon, served one of two fires. Several middle-aged women and young girls in threadbare, faded skirts and dresses worked around it. One stirred a big, crusty black iron pot of bubbling stew; another stretched over a cast-iron skillet, frying empañadas and then tossing them into a big, cloth-lined basket; another turned sizzling meat on a rough iron grill. After three nights in the saddle, the smell of their food made my belly rumble.

  Roja raised his rifle with his left arm and waved it back and forth. I saw motion in several places high up on the cliffs from lookouts waving back. Roja motioned for us to come on in.

  Near the cooking fire, stacked like tipi poles for quick access, Mauser bolt-action rifles, their well-oiled barrels gleaming, stood ready for action. Six or seven men wearing campaign hats with bronze medallions pinned on the front of the crowns lounged by the second fire, drinking coffee from heavy crockery cups. Their gazes never left us, but they said nothing as we rode up.