"Philadelphia," Jack said.
"Look at the chickens, Mr. Jack! They miss her too. She used to feed them about now."
Suddenly he missed Phoebe Larkin more than he cared to admit. He went quickly into the adobe to attend to Uncle Roscoe while Eggleston coaxed the reluctant burro into the corral. For a moment, just before entering the sickroom, he thought he saw a man's figure atop a ridge to the south of the ranch. But as he narrowed his eyes against the glint of the November sun, the figure disappeared—or perhaps it had never been there. He was getting jumpy.
The old prospector was able to talk, though only weakly and briefly. The heart was sound, though, pumping determinedly. Some color had come into the pallid cheeks. Jack bled him, and made a broth of sage leaves, which the Traveler's Guide said were a specific for stroke. Boiling the infusion, he tried to remember the Latin name of the shrub, but could not. Sage was no longer an exotic plant to be identified and entered in his field notebook; it was becoming the common furniture of the desert, this Arizona desert that was for the time being his home.
The next morning Uncle Roscoe was markedly better and wanted to sit up, though Jack forbade it.
"God damn it!" the old man protested. "I ain't no weakling! It was just a little dizzy spell come on me in the canyon there!"
Leaving Eggleston to feed Uncle Roscoe a dish of chicken soup, Jack wandered listlessly to the road and stared in the direction of Prescott. They should be in the capital by now—Phoebe and Mrs. Glore—and perhaps safe in the hands of the redoubtable Uncle Buell. Looking around at Rancho Terco, it seemed somehow deserted, incomplete, unfriendly.
Looking, he saw something else. Pinned to the new hitching post with a bone-handled knife a note fluttered in the wind. He tugged at the knife, driven deep into the post, and read the note. It was lettered in block characters with what appeared to be a stub of charcoal, and was obviously the work of an untutored hand. The choice of terms was strange, also, and the phrasing queer, though the words had a certain dignity:
This is my place. This river my place all right. I do not want white men heer where I born & my parientes bury.
The writer's scanty English had failed. Parientes, Jack recalled, meant "kin" in Spanish.
You fight good but spirits ask you go from this place. You send back sobrino—
Jack wrinkled his brow. More Spanish; what was sobrino? Uncle? No, that was tio. Sobrino—yes, that meant "nephew."
You send back sobrino but I cannot friend you no more. I finish saying.
He stared at the wrinkled paper. It was signed with a straggling A; an inexpertly made A that lay almost sidewise at the bottom of the warning, but still—an A; A for Agustín.
Chapter Seven
Uncle Roscoe might be seventy, or eighty, or ninety. He was short and wiry, bandy-legged, tough as an old boot and smelling almost as bad. Fretting at the refusal of his left arm and leg to accommodate him, he sat in the shade and unwillingly drank the sage tea that Eggleston brewed.
"But you're getting better," Jack pointed out. "Look—you can move your fingers now!"
"Can't hold a pick! Can't hold a shovel!"
"You're coming along nicely," Jack comforted. "I daresay if I had had such a stroke, I wouldn't be as far along now as you are!"
"Well, mebbe so," Uncle Roscoe sighed, "but I wish things'd move along more pronto! I'm an old man. I don't think the Lord's got me down for any more time." He told Jack Drumm about the Gypsy Dancer Mine he had spent twenty-odd years searching for. "Hungarian feller—name of Laszlo something—stumbled on it." He took a tattered scrap of paper from a pocket. "Met him in a saloon in San Diego and he showed me this map and some nuggets big as goose eggs. He was in town to buy supplies but a gang of Mexicans laid for him and hit him over the head. They stole the nuggets, but when Laszlo was laid out for the coroner I slipped the map out of his shirt and took off for the Agua Fria. That was in—let me see—fifty-six, fifty-seven—something like that."
"And you've been looking for the Gypsy Dancer ever since?"
"Oh, I'll find it!" the old man assured him. "I got the location pretty well narrowed down by now!"
Roscoe was a rich source of information about the Apaches, the Mazatzals, the whole Territory. He knew Charlie the Papago and Ike Coogan, claiming also to have been a ceremonial brother of Kayatinah, the father of Agustín himself, and once adopted into the tribe.
"What you want to know all this stuff for?" he demanded.
"Because the Apaches insist on trying to drive me away from the Agua Fria. We are enemies. To do a proper job of resisting, I must understand them."
"Ain't nothin' much to understand," Uncle Roscoe grumbled. He waved his hand toward the hazy distances. "Once they owned all this—now the politicians and the merchants and the Army is trying to take it away and make 'em live on the Verde River reservation. I don't mean no offense, Mr. Drumm—you been good to me. But you can understand how you'd feel if bandits run you out of your big castle in England!"
"It isn't exactly a castle," Jack said, "but I know what you mean."
"They're proud," Uncle Roscoe went on, "and resourceful. They lived off this dry land for thousands of years. They make bread from mesquite beans, and beer called 'tiswin' from the mescal plant. They bake mescal roots in a pit in the ground, too. It tastes like molasses candy; they got a sweet tooth, like anybody. They eat the fruit of the nopal cactus—some folks calls it 'Indian fig.' Their lingo is all gobbles and gargles, but there's a pleasant sound to it."
Jack looked to the greening fields where Charlie hoed weeds. "Do the Papagos speak the same language as the Apaches?"
"Purty close," Uncle Roscoe said. "At least, they can make each other out."
"Charlie calls me 'Ostin.' What does that mean?"
Uncle Roscoe grinned a toothless grin. "'Ostin' is Apache talk for 'Lord.' Anything they respect or fear they call 'Ostin'—the bear, snakes, lightning. 'Lord Bear,' 'Lord Snake,' 'Lord Lightning.'"
Jack helped him light his pipe. The old prospector lay back in the chair, staring at the great bulk of the Mazatzals, remembering a long time ago when he lived with the Indians.
"They don't never call themselves 'Apache.' That's just a Mexican word that means 'enemy.' Their name for theirselves is Tinneh. It means 'The Men'—and that's what they are: men, real men." He watched a circle of blue-gray smoke drift in the wind. "Missionaries never had any effect on 'em. The Apaches got their own religion, and stick by it—all kinds of gewgaws and ceremonies. Sacred cords, sacred shirts, medicine arrows and lances, pieces of quartz and petrified wood. What means most is hoddentin. That's cornmeal, usual dyed red or blue, they hang in a bag around their necks. Kind of a charm, to protect 'em in battle."
Now Jack understood the little sack filled with blue grains he had taken from the neck of the Apache killed in the first fight at the Agua Fria, the sack he later hung on the broken lance of the dead man.
"The men folk," Uncle Roscoe went on, "are good sewers, do all the sewing for the family. But an Apache is scared to death of his mother-in-law." He chuckled. "He won't talk to her or face her if he can help it. I've seen 'em walk a mile out of their way just to sashay around a mother-in-law!"
Cornelia Newton-Barrett's mother, Jack remembered, was also somewhat of an ogress.
"They love to play cards, gamble, run footraces. Mostly they're happy. But when someone dies they set the whole village afire— they live mostly in brush huts—and move away. They don't want to be reminded."