The Shaman's Secret (16 page)

But that flash of lucidity in his eyes had gone. They now swung dully over me—and to the barren lands beyond.

I ate the rest of my dried meat and berries. Tabby? He had repeated it, said it twice. Did it have some other meaning? Or was Mr. Baker apologizing for some harm he had done my mother? The very idea was ridiculous. She had died long before he had come into our lives.

As we rode on after our brief rest, questions tormented me. Everything conspired to make me uneasy. The snake on my arm, wriggling each day. The skinwalker. The shaman's odd words about a snake and a white sun—which set off strange echoes in my mind. Now this. Mr. Baker's mention of my mother. None of it made any sense.

Mr. Baker himself was in a desperate state, but all of us were very weary by the time we rode over the brow of the mountain and sighted the mining camp. From the distance it was a ramshackle affair, a few clapboard houses in the middle of a series of rocky heaps where precious metals had been dug from the earth. What a relief the sight was. It had been hard riding through the day and much of the night. My legs and thighs ached; my vision was blurred by dust and sand.

The sun was setting over the mountains when we rode into the camp. Grimy miners were returning from their day's work. The place had a bit more to it than I had first thought. A saloon bar, a hotel of sorts, a grocery store and a jail, off the beaten dust track. We rode down the main street and every eye in the place
turned on us. I felt a swell of pride at riding behind Waldo. In his cowboy hat, his blue eyes gleaming, he was a fine leader.

“Howdy,” he called out. “We got a sick man here. Is there a doctor in town?”

A huddle of men in those rough blue overalls, carrying pickaxes and shovels, turned their eyes on Waldo and the limp figure of Cyril Baker behind him. It needed but a single glance to see that Baker was dying. But nobody said a word; all eyes just rested on us.

One man who was chewing a wad of tobacco spat it in our direction. It landed on the ground in front of my stallion, just missing the horse. There were a few chuckles at that.

“Please help. We're peaceful folk, American patriots,” Waldo said. “We need your help.”

I would have done anything for Waldo after an appeal like that, but in this hostile hick town nobody moved. From the direction of the saloon next to us I heard twanging guitars and a gust of wild laughter.

“For goodness' sake,” Aunt Hilda burst out. “Are you all numbskulls? We need a doctor fast!”

At that there were a few resentful murmurs. The man who had spat tobacco in our direction turned to a dull-looking man with a bull neck standing beside him and said, “Better call Dobie.”

“Dobie?” Bull Neck asked, his mind moving with the slowness of a beetle.

“Yeah, Red Dobie,” the first man replied.

I looked at the bunch of miners despairingly. They were tough, weather-beaten men, their skin tanned by the harsh sun and scoured by the sand and grime of the mines. They had wrinkled faces and a stunted look of surly hostility. I had heard these parts were primitive and savage; the white settlers as well as the Indians were said to resent outsiders. Life was of less value out here, in this Wild West, than gold or bullets.

But these men seemed to be positive halfwits. We had done them no harm, Cyril Baker was clearly dying and yet they stood there gazing at us like a herd of cattle.

At that moment the door to the Last-Dance Saloon swung open and a tall man strode out. He wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and a couple of holsters on his belt each contained a pistol. He strode toward us, his spurs jangling.

“Who might you be?” he drawled.

All at once a prattle of voices rose up. “Dobie. Red. Strangers. Got Carlito. What you gonna do, Red?”

Dobie Red, if that was his name, held up his hand and the voices stopped. A star-shaped badge glinted on his waistcoat, inscribed with the legend
SHERIFF
.

Slowly he took a puff on his cigarette, then blew the smoke out toward Waldo.

“You ain't answered my question. Coyote got your tongue? I asked you what yer doin' in my town.”

“It's a long story,” Waldo replied. “The short version is that we come in peace. We got a sick man here and we need to find a doctor.”

Dobie Red—or Red Dobie—glanced at Cyril, slumped behind Waldo on his horse. It took but a second to see that he was desperately ill, his breath rattling out of his chest.

“Looks pretty bad,” Red agreed.

“Have you a doctor here?”

“Yeah. We got a doctor.”

“Well, we've no time to waste. We need to get this man there. Please.”

Red held up a hand. When he lowered it, we saw a Colt glinting in his grip. “Not so fast. I'm gonna have to arrest you first.”

The pistol was pointing straight at me.

I exhaled slowly. Meanwhile Aunt Hilda had started to splutter. I stared at the sheriff, bewildered. Wasn't that the name for a policeman out in these parts? Why was it that everyone in America seemed to pull a gun on us?

“What is it I'm supposed to have done?” I asked.

“No supposin' about it. I know you're a lady, but that ain't ladylike behavior now, is it?”

“Why are you arresting me? You've only just met me.”

“Got the evidence right here. Take you to Redwood City for trial. If you weren't a lady, expect you'd get the maximum penalty.”

“For what? What am I supposed to have done?”

The menace in the man's voice made us all fearful. Aunt Hilda urged her horse on. It trotted up so that it stood by my side.

“For heaven's sake, man,” she said, in her most imperious voice. “Tell us straight out. Why are you accusing my niece? I'm certain it will all turn out to be a ghastly mistake.”

Even out here in the wilds of the West I could see that Aunt Hilda's tone commanded respect. The sheriff gazed up at her, his gun never wavering from my throat.

“No disrespect, ma'am, but your niece here, she done a bad thing.”

“Explain yourself, man.”

“She's a horse thief.” Red waved his gun at my magnificent stallion, the one the shaman had given me personally, the one called Rolling Thunder. “That li'l beaut she's riding is my own Carlito.”

The crowd started to mutter. “That's right, it's Carlito … Damn rustlers … Knew it at once, never mistook a horse in my life …”

Trust me to ride into a mining camp full of toughs on one of their own stolen horses. This would take some
explaining. The mob was getting angrier, mutters turning into fingered guns. How long before their words turned to action, to sticks and stones? Red sensed this because he raised his gun and fired a warning shot into the air. It startled my Rolling Thunder. He reared up, but I managed to get him under control.

“Quieten down,” Red shouted. “Carlito is my horse and I'm gonna do this my way. The civilized law-abiding way. We ain't having no lynching here.”

“What's lynching?” Rachel whispered, as the crowd shuffled at Red's words. It was too awful to explain to her. Lynching meant a mob acting without rule of law, beating someone they took a dislike to, hanging them from a tree or a post. Hanging them till they were stone dead.

“We gonna ride this young lady to the jail. We gonna see proper justice even if it means taking her all the way to Tombstone or Yuma. But I'm gonna do this by the law, you hear?” Red drawled—and my heart lightened a bit. “We do it proper—and
then
you git to see one or two of these here rogues hanged.”

With the gun in my face and the angry mob surrounding me, I could not think of a single thing to say. Aunt Hilda was made of sterner stuff.

“Do you know who I am?” she demanded of the sheriff.

“No, ma'am.”

“I'm Lady Hilda Salter, world-famous explorer and
second cousin of Queen Victoria of England. This is the honorable Katherine Salter, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. She will be a duchess one day.”

“Don't make no difference to me. We are freeborn American citizens—we don't owe your queen nothing.”

His words were defiant, but I noticed that one or two of the men had started shuffling uneasily.

“I've traveled through the wilds of the Himalayas and the darkest jungles of Africa. I've received more courtesy from the Sultan of Borneo—a notoriously bloodthirsty man—than I have from you so-called civilized Americans. Will you hear our story?”

“Better listen, Red,” a sandy-haired youth called out, and other voices rose in agreement. Red nodded and Aunt Hilda began her tale. Truthfully she told how we left San Francisco and journeyed to Calistoga where we picked up a stagecoach and came out to Arizona. Equally truthfully she related how we had been held up by a lone outlaw, who had stripped us of everything we owned.

At the description of the trick that had been played on us, the single outlaw who had made us believe he commanded a gang of robbers, many of the miners broke out into guffaws. He was notorious in these parts, apparently, and went by the name of Bandit Bart.

It was quite a distinction to have been robbed by him—these miners gazed on us with new respect.

Then Waldo interrupted and took up the story of how we had been kidnapped by Apaches. Aunt Hilda was quite annoyed that he had butted in, but I could see he had some plan. I was tense as I listened, for I didn't want to betray our Apache friends. In the end they had treated us quite decently. Even though they had clearly stolen Red Dobie's magnificent horse, well, they had sort of given it back, hadn't they? I did not want to betray their trust.

Waldo did not let me down. He didn't tell the miners how the Apaches had let us go, giving us food, water and horses. Instead he related how we had escaped in the dead of night, stealing their horses and riding through night and day to this place. The Apaches were the thieves, he declared, not us. Cyril Baker was dying because the Indians had beaten him so savagely.

His story, I could see, had turned the tables.

But still Red Dobie was suspicious. He turned to me, his eyes blazing. “What about those?” he asked, pointing to the embroidered moccasin boots I wore. “How come you all dressed up like a fancy Indian squaw?”

My heart fluttered and for a moment I couldn't speak. “The Apaches stole my boots,” I said. “Seemed only fair that I
borrow
a pair of theirs.”

A huge laugh rose from the crowd at my words. Several of those rugged, sunburnt miners were rolling around as if I had said the wittiest thing ever. It was
that
funny.

“We've been through hell and come out the other side,” Aunt Hilda broke in. “Now will you let us take this man to the doctor?”

Red signaled with his gun and a couple of young men came over to Waldo, with Mr. Baker lying limp behind him. “Take him to Doc Cotton's,” he said. “Make sure he gets the best treatment.” He spread his legs wide and grinned up to him. “Say Red Dobie's gonna foot the bill—after all, these strangers brought my Carlito back home.”

“Thank you,” Aunt Hilda said. “That's … well, mighty gracious of you.”

Red waved his pistol in the air as if to say it was nothing. Then, to my relief, he put it back in his holster. “In return I need your help for something. Can you tell me where those Apaches are hiding out? I'm gonna get a party of men to—”

“Flush 'em out,” Waldo interrupted.

“Yeah. We need to do a little spring cleaning out here.”

I was seized with anguish; if we were to bring death to the Apaches as the price of saving our skins, I would never forgive myself. I had a sudden vivid flash of the Apache camp. The settlers riding through it on horseback, setting fire to the wickiups, shooting women and children, whoever happened to be around. And if the warriors were there, including my own brave friend Boy, that would be worse.

A massacre.

“The Apache camp is over there,” Waldo said, indicating the direction we had come from. “I'll tell you exactly how to find it.”

To my horror he gave a detailed description of the camp—and the Indians who lived there—right down to the eagle-shaped stone guarding the entrance. Bile rose from my stomach into my mouth and for an instant I could hardly breathe. The sun shining on his blond hair, his blue eyes glowing, Waldo calmly betrayed every detail. A shimmering veil of anger covered my eyes as I gazed at him and heard the words coming out of his mouth. So he had meant those things he'd said about the Apaches; he thought they were savages who deserved to be enslaved or put to death.

It didn't matter how handsome and amusing Waldo was, I could never, ever feel friendship for him again.

Rachel was as shocked as I was. She looked at him, her eyes widening, the color draining from her face. As we moved toward Doc Cotton's surgery, a posse of cowboys gathered. They raised a cloud of dust as they galloped over the desert toward the distant mountains.

A cloud of dust that signaled death to the Apache camp.

Past Bill Sherman's General Store was a sign swinging on an iron hook saying
COTTON'S SURGERY
. It was illustrated with a picture of a cowboy with his arms round a grizzly bear. The man I took to be the doc was sitting on the porch, swinging back and forth on a rocking chair while he puffed on a pipe. A grubby child played with a hoop and stick beside him. When he saw a crowd of people rushing toward him, carrying a body on a stretcher, the doc jumped up, knocking his pipe out.

“Trouble?”

“No shooting today,” one of the stretcher bearers replied. “This man's real sick.”

“Bring him in.”

The five of us went in with the stretcher bearers—who laid Cyril out on the bare pine table. It was clean enough, but I saw deep scratches on it and ragged dark stains. Perhaps of blood. Cyril was bad; he was spectral, burning up. His eyes were open, but looked at nothing.