‘Never saw him,’ said Baum. ‘He just come up in a black coach an’ give me the money. Said he’d wait in Cinqua until I brought you in.’
Azul nodded, then: ‘Who killed Backenhauser?’
‘Dumfries.’ Baum shrugged. ‘He used my knife, but I never thought he’d do it that way. That man’s halfway crazy.’
‘It was bad?’ Azul’s voice was cold.
‘He butchered him. I thought he’d just slit the guy’s throat an’ be done with it, but he hacked him apart.’
Azul said nothing. Just got his legs placed more comfortably and thought about the future. And the past.
He could understand Amos Dumfries wanting revenge for the death of his son, but not the man’s need to butcher the artist. It was – according to his conscience – justified that a man should seek revenge for the killing of a loved one. But Dumfries’s son had been killed clean, in a fair fight. That – especially by the rules of the pinda-lick-oyi – called for a clean death in return. The Apache side of his nature could understand torture or mutilation – where and when the brutal laws of the Bedonkohe demanded such retribution. But in Backenhauser’s case there was no such justification.
‘Here.’ Baum’s voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘You eat this.’
Azul took the plate of bacon and set it down between his legs. ‘Be easier with my hands free.’
‘Lotta things are easier that way.’ Baum chuckled. ‘Like gettin’ away. You eat like that or go hungry.’
Azul shrugged respecting the German’s professionalism. He ate with his fingers.
Dumfries came back from the horses and asked, ‘Why the hell you feedin’ him? Leave the bastard go hungry.’
‘I got paid to fetch him to Cinqua alive,’ said Baum. ‘I ain’t gonna deliver a starved man.’
Dumfries snorted. Then spat into Azul’s plate.
The half-breed watched the spittle sizzle in the hot fat, then lifted another strip of bacon. Chewed it slowly, and asked:
‘I guess you’d like to see me dead?’
‘Goddam right I would.’ Dumfries’s face got ugly with rage. ‘I’d kill you now, were it my choice. Like I killed that bastard Englishman an’ the whore he was with.’
‘But you won’t,’ said Baum; firmly. ‘Not while I’m here.’
Dumfries slumped on the
ground and began to pick at his breakfast. His eyes were tinged red
with lack of sleep and fury. And Azul got an idea.
They moved on through the desert country of southern New Mexico. Baum led the way, with the rope constantly fastened to Azul’s saddle horn. Dumfries brought up the rear, his eyes seldom leaving Azul’s back. As if he were afraid the half-breed might somehow slip his bonds and escape into the arid wasteland stretching out all around them.
When they halted to eat, or to sleep, Dumfries still watched. It was an obsession. One that Azul played on.
The first day, when they halted at noon, he tried out the idea that had come to him in the morning, when he remembered something old Sees-Both-Ways had told him. Something he had not properly understood until now.
There are many kinds of love, the Chiricahua shaman had said. A man can love his wife, or his brother. His children; his horses. All in different ways. He can love his parents. But in a different way to how he loves his women.
And hate is the same. Different, but the same. It is the other side of the coin. It is right for a man to hate his enemies, but he can respect them at the same time. He can grant them the right to their own beliefs while he goes on hating them. That is important to remember, for otherwise a man’s own hate can undo him, turn him sour. Like a bad apple set amongst other bad apples, so that all infect one another. A man like that sees nothing but his own view. Only the poisoned, brown skin. Never the patches of gold.
He becomes like some old, sick coyote who
snarls and snaps at all the young ones because they have something
he can never find again. And he seeks to destroy them because they
have what he can never have.
‘Must hurt you,’ Azul had said, ‘seeing me alive.’
‘Won’t be long,’ Dumfries replied. ‘Then you get hung.’
‘Four, five days,’ grinned the half-breed. ‘How long’s your son been in the ground?’
Dumfries had moved to strike him, but Baum stopped the older man. Told Azul to stay quiet. But the half-breed had started the same kind of prodding each time they halted.
Baum had gagged him for a while, but Azul still managed to catch Dumfries’s eye and let him know with facial movements what he was saying. And the bounty hunter’s sense of honor insisted that he bring his man in alive, so he had to take the gag out so that the half-breed could eat.
And Dumfries went on getting madder, prodded up through the edges of his hatred into the area of hysteria that bordered on real insanity.
And it came to a head one
night, two days out from Cinqua.
It was a cold and windy night, a lonesome howling norther blowing down from the High Sierras, bringing with it the threat of snow. The fire was built high, but still flickering; the horses turned haunches-back into the wind, heads low. Azul was tied to his saddle and Baum was asleep, Dumfries watching over the prisoner until it was time for the changing of the guard.
‘Your son wasn’t much good,’ said Azul; almost casually. ‘He got mad because he didn’t like the way Backenhauser drew his face.’
‘Close yore goddam mouth,’ grunted Dumfries. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’
‘Baum wouldn’t like that,’ said Azul. ‘And you do what Baum tells you.’
‘The hell I do.’ Dumfries’s voice got hoarse and cold as the wind. ‘He don’t tell me nothin’.’
‘He tells you to keep me alive,’ sneered the half-breed. ‘You’d like to kill me, but you don’t have the guts.’
‘I don’t?’ Dumfries mouth curved back in a feral snarl. ‘You want to find out?’
‘Don’t wake the German,’ Azul prodded. ‘He might get angry with you.’
