Apache Ambush. Will Cook

the guardhouse.” He knocked ashes off his cigar. “Do you think I’m after Sickles because of his wife?” O’Hagen’s voice was troubled and he did nothing to conceal it. He had a bluntly honest manner that occasionally disturbed the major.

      “That was anger talk,” Calvin said. “There’s talk going around, but I haven’t spread any of it. Men are always adding two and two and getting five.” He pawed through the papers on his desk until he found O’Hagen’s patrol report. “This,” he said, waving it, “is what is eating me, Mister. In this you state that the reservation Apaches in Contreras’ band are out. Mr. Sickles has given me every assurance that none of the Indians are off reservation.”

      “Lovington’s didn’t catch fire by itself,” O’Hagen said. “And Sickles wouldn’t tell you if there were Apaches loose. I saw the sign and they’re out, a band of Mimbrenos. The hills are crawling with Apaches that have never gone to the reservation—White Mountain, Chiricahuas, Coyoteros, Mescaleros, Jicarillas—they’re movin’ about, small bands of ’em. To hell with what Sickles says. I believe my eyes.”

      “My job is to police the reservation, not conduct a personal war against Apaches,” Calvin said. “Mister, I can assume nothing more than the fact that you are trying to make a liar out of me with this patrol report.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “Let’s try to keep a tidy house, Mister. There’s no need to report every Apache band you run across.” He held up both hands when O’Hagen opened his mouth to speak. “All right! So a ranch is hit, a mine sacked, some teamster killed. Are we to shout, ‘Indian War’?” He shook his head. “A report or two like yours and we’d have a peace commission out here, wanting to know what was going on.”

      “That’s a question I’d like answered, too,” O’Hagen said. “Major, there’ll never be a wholesale banding of Apaches; they don’t do that. Apaches are the only Indians who’ll raid alone, or in small bunches of three and four. The ambush is their war, and when they hit some small place, they wipe it out, clean.”

      “There’s no sense in discussing it further,” Calvin said. “It’s up to Crook in the morning. You’re now under arrest of quarters; is that legal enough to suit you? Absent yourself only to attend mess.” He fingered O’Hagen’s report, wanting to tear it up, deny its existence, but he was army and would send it through channels. “You’re positive you don’t want to alter this?”

      “No, sir. Is that all, sir?”

      Calvin nodded and O’Hagen went outside, there pausing to draw the cool night air into his lungs. The guard was changing by the main gate and he watched the sergeant walk up and down the rank, a lantern bobbing with each step. He listened to the sounds for a minute, tipping his head back when he caught the faint scent of soap. Libby Malloy stepped from the blackest shadows and said, “I was listening through the wall, Tim.”

      “That’ll get you in trouble,” O’Hagen said, a pleasure breaking the usual solemnity of his face.

      “Why don’t we both get out of here,” Libby said. “I mean it, Tim. We could find some place where people didn’t look sideways at us.”

      “Where is that place? Do you really know, Libby?”

      Her shoulders rose and fell. “I guess I don’t. I’d still have an Apache baby and you’d still remember that you left a man buried in the sand.” She touched him fleetingly, then came against him. “Tim, Tim, whatever’s going to become of us? I wish you had never found me. I really wish that!”

      “No, you don’t.” He brushed her hair gently. “Libby, there’s an answer some place. There’s an answer for everybody.”

      “Sure,” she said and stepped back. “You wanted to marry a woman like Rosalia because she has position. A woman who can make you forget, but she can’t. I love you, Tim, and I can’t make you forget.”

      She turned quickly and he watched her hurry across the parade to the long row of enlisted men’s quarters and when she entered Herlihy’s place, he left the headquarters porch. His boots rattled on the duckboards and he entered his small room, fumbling for the lamp.

      He built a fire in the sheetiron stove and stood with his back to it, toasting his hands. His eyes roved around the room, once bare with a Capuchin drabness as most army quarters were. But it was no longer so. The planked walls were covered with bright serapes and Indian blankets. Here, a shirt worn by Mangus Colorado, the great Apache chief. There, the colors of a long-dead cavalry patrol, the standard re-wrested from the bands of Contreras and Choya.

      Crossed knives, crudely made but deadly in Apache hands, decorated one wall. A half dozen war lances were stacked in one corner next to a long-barreled needle rifle. Aside from the pine dresser, the one chair, table and bunk, this could have been an Apache trophy room, filled with hard-won items. The accumulation of his lifetime on the frontier.

      Over his bunk were the mementos of his youth. A never-to-be forgotten youth in a Coyotero wickiup with Contreras and Choya as older brothers. Hanging by the head board was a buffalo-bone bow with elkhide quiver still half-filled with arrows; this had replaced the red wagon and sled of other boys his age. His own Apache knife was there. How different from the jack knife in some denim pocket. The clothes he had been wearing when he had been picked up were there, breeches without front or back, the way Apaches cut them. Too small now, but at twelve they had fit him.

      Seven years an Apache. More than seven, for he found that the fetters in his mind were not put aside easily. Apache lessons were always long remembered.

      O’Hagen moved to his desk and rummaged for a cigar. He took his light from the lamp and sat down in the lone chair, his eyes veiled and meditative. He was not a happy man; small mannerisms revealed this. He was an officer in the United States Army, class of ’63, yet he was not of this army. He knew too much about Apaches, and as he had discovered, knowing too much could be worse than not knowing enough. The language, their thinking, their rituals—he knew them all. And he knew what no other white man knew, the secret of their signals flashed on polished silver disks!

      Timothy O’Hagen was a white Apache midst an army of green officers who bungled along, outrun, outfought. He did not belong to this group. Misery loved company, he found out, and because he did not have the misery of defeat to share, he, found himself on the outside looking in.

      After carrying water into his quarters, O’Hagen drew the curtains and stripped for his bath. He had that ‘patrol’ smell, the unwashed rancidity of four weeks without water. Now he had the guardhouse smell. He decided that one was as bad as the other.

      He could dimly recall his father saying that a man never missed what he never had, yet Timothy O’Hagen felt a sharp lack. A woman could do that to a man. A woman like Rosalia Sickles. She had never been his and yet he missed her. He wondered what it added up to. She wasn’t like Libby Malloy. Libby rode a horse like a man and he had heard her swear. Yet Libby had been real where Rosalia was not. All he had left was the memory of polite conversation, a forgotten rose pressed between the pages of Philip St. George Cooke’s Cavalry Tactics—and a three year romance that had never really bloomed had ended.

      O’Hagen dressed. Looking back he could see the impossibility of his dreams. He had the Apache stink about him; Rosalia could trace her family back to Cortez. Add to this his Irish impetuousness, his aggravation at her ever-present duenna—a female watchdog to see that her chastity was preserved, and the odds of courtship became almost hopeless.

      He pulled himself away from further speculation.

      Knuckles rattled his door and he crossed the room. Sergeant Herlihy stepped inside, a grizzled man with each troubled year of his life etched into his face. He wore a walrus mustache, gray-shot, but his hair was darkly kinky.

      “Glad to see he let you out, sor,” he said. “Th’ back of me hand to th’ lot of ’em, meanin’ no disrespect, sor.” He looked around the room. “Would you be havin’ any drinkin’ whiskey about?”

      “You already smell like a hot mince pie,” O’Hagen said. “Under my shirts