The Last Stand Read online

  “Sure. Ancient Indian tribe, weren’t they?”

  “Very ancient.”

  “They make that arrowhead?

  “No. It’s a thousand years older than the Anasazi.”

  “Who says?”

  “The scientific geniuses the government employs. Ever since they’ve been looking for something like this. A round ball of it was found in a temple in South America. Another one was uncovered in a dig for some Egyptian Pharaoh. It was the clubbing end of a weapon only the king used.”

  “What makes it so important?”

  “For one thing, it drives a Geiger counter crazy.”

  Involuntarily, Joe took a step backward. “Man, you mean that thing is radioactive?”

  “No,” Pete said. “It seems it has a power far greater than mere atomic energy.”

  “Like what?”

  “They wouldn’t tell us. We’re just stupid Native Americans.” He paused and stared at Joe. “You want to take a close look at this thing?” He held out the arrowhead in his hand. Joe picked it up between his thumb and forefinger and felt the fine point draw a droplet of blood from his flesh.

  “See those semi-circular designs along the edges?”

  Joe nodded. Each one seemed perfectly formed, coming to the end to taper into a pinpoint.

  Pete told him, “With flint, the arrowhead makers heated the stone, touched it with a drop of water and a chip flaked off. It took a long time to make a proper head, carved drop by drop to fit onto a shaft. That’s why those guys were big wheels in the village. Whoever did that one was a real master. Here, let me have that back.”

  Joe handed him the arrowhead, Pete laid it on the ground, took a fist-sized rock from the sand and brought it crashing down on the crystal. Nothing happened. He did it twice more, then handed the arrowhead back to Joe.

  Not even scratched.

  “It looks like glass. But the ancients didn’t make glass.” Pete looked at him. “There is an old song in the village. The old men remember it. They sing about the clear rock all the tribes danced around, the one that sang and danced with them and threw many sparks into the sky. When they got near it, the old ones could have babies once again and the young ones would get twice as strong.”

  “What happened to this rock?”

  “They say…one day the sun disappeared behind the moon. When the sun came back again the rock was gone.”

  “That sounds like a fable, pal.”

  “It’s what the old men tell.”

  “And you can speak the language?”

  “So can my sister. She’s college-educated too.” After a few seconds he asked, “You kidding me about giving me that arrowhead?”

  Joe said, “Nope, it’s yours.”

  “Suppose I sell it for a million dollars?”

  “Good for you.”

  Very carefully Pete took out a worn red handkerchief and wrapped the arrowhead in it, then just as carefully, put it in a shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.

  Joe said, “If that thing is radiating at all, you’re a dead man, pal.”

  Pete scowled a moment, then said, “How come you don’t care none about all that money?”

  “Nothing I need, Geronimo.”

  “You need to get your airplane fixed.”

  “That’ll come,” Joe said. He grinned broadly and added, “If nobody steals it.”

  “Steal it? Hell, man, those bozos from our village would probably think it was a pterodactyl and have bad dreams for a year.”

  “Suppose they had college educations too?”

  “Flyboy, you’re on the poor edge of society here. Alcohol addiction is at an all-time high, malnutrition is common, more people are dying than are being born…hell, who can qualify for college anyway?”

  “You did, buddy.”

  “And the whole tribe thinks I’m some kind of nut.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Why not?” He let out a short laugh. “My horse ran away from me and I picked up a white-eyes flyboy in the middle of the desert.”

  “And you found a priceless artifact.”

  “Not me…you.”

  “Man, you were the guide. You knew what it was. That thing is your baby.”

  Pete turned and looked at Joe, his eyes boring into him. He finally said, “You’re speaking straight, aren’t you?”

  Joe nodded.

  “You know, Joe…right now, if I had a knife and you had one, too, and these were the old days, we’d slash our hands, draw blood and shake.”

  “The old Indian blood brother oath?” Pete nodded. “Can’t we just shake hands without all the gore?”

  Pete held out his right hand and Joe took it.

  Nobody was there, but a great audience was watching. It was a solemn group that made no noise, whose appreciation was silent acknowledgement and for a moment Joe’s face had a strange look.

  Joe stared down at his hand, then half-hid it behind his back.

  “You and me, flyboy,” Pete said. “We’re brothers now.”

  “Suppose I don’t like that?”

  “Too bad,” Pete said. “Now, let’s get ourselves some dinner while there’s still light.”

  * * *

  Joe ate his first snake when Pete caught and killed a rattler. Stretched out it was six feet long and thick around as a man’s calf. Pete skinned it, offered the scaly pelt to Joe who refused it. The meat was almost snow white and the carcass could have fed a half dozen, but Pete selected the finest portions, cooked them slowly away from the flames and, when they were finished, held out a good-sized chunk of rattlesnake meat on a stick. Joe fingered the meat off the wooden rod, bit into it without any reluctance at all.

  “You like that?”

  Joe shrugged. “Hell, man, I never even had a bad meal in the Air Force.”

  “Damn,” Pete told him. “You might make a good Indian after all.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Joe saw the contrails, long streaks of artificial clouds generated by the airliners crossing the country at thirty-some thousand feet. The almost invisible dot ahead of them was winged tonnage tearing through the sky at six hundred miles an hour, the distance too far even to hear the rumble of the great jet engines.

  After squinting at the sky a few seconds, Pete said, “How do they breathe up there?”

  “It’s pressurized. Air gets fed to them like we get it down here.”

  “Yeah, I figured that, but suppose it stops.”

  “Then the oxygen masks drop down from the overhead and you do like the instructions told you to. That is, if you were listening before takeoff.”

  But Pete was insistent. “Suppose something happens then?”

  “Pal, hold your tongue.”

  The glance that Pete threw at him made Joe say, “You go on oxygen above ten thousand feet. That’s FAA rules. Some people can fly all day at twenty thousand without getting anoxia and passing out, but that’s only a few.”

  “Where do you stand, flyboy?”

  Joe let out a little grin. “I hate to tell you this, but the first time I went through the altitude chamber back in the old AAF days, I stayed at thirty thousand for a full four minutes before the instructor slapped the mask on my face. I was talking like a drunk, and my handwriting kind of went off the page, but I was still operating.”

  “So why the mask then?”

  “Because real fast I could go blooie and he didn’t want me to have to be carried out of that chamber.”

  “You think I could do that?”

  “Don’t try it. Stay on your horse.”

  “Hell, he won’t let me ride him. I must be a lousy Indian.”

  “Nah…you’re just a lousy rider, Pete.”

  “You didn’t do so hot with your ride.”

  “I got it down, didn’t I?”

  “You know what’s wrong with it?”

  ”Not yet, but I’ll think about it.”

  “Maybe you’d better ask my sister. Her degree’s in engineering.”

&nb
sp; A low whistle came from Joe’s lips. “Aeronautical?”

  Pete shook his head. “Automotive. She can fix tractors and that kind of stuff. Saw her take a generator apart and fix it for Uncle Sho-Sho once. He woulda froze that winter without it.”

  * * *

  Overhead another set of contrails left their imprint on the big blue, this time going in the other direction. Pete checked his wristwatch and said, “Those are the Las Vegas flights. Right on time.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They go by every day at this time. See the direction? Right out of Vegas, those. Just like arrows. We turn here.”

  Joe looked at the side path Pete was steering him to. “Why? I thought we were going toward the Superstitions.”

  “Right. We were. We turn here and head for my hogan. My sister will be real glad to see you.”

  When they made the turn Pete’s horse let out a whinny and his ears pricked up. The horse took a couple of jumpy steps, stared at the two walkers to make sure they weren’t going to change their minds, then took up a place beside them. Up ahead there was a small rise on the horizon that was either a big rock or a small hill and they made that their aiming point. Once, Joe glanced behind them and their tracks in the sand formed a perfectly straight line. Halfway to their marker Joe remarked, “If we weren’t going there, why’d you give me all that bull about the Superstitions?”

  Without turning his head, Pete answered, “To keep your mind cooking, White-eyes. You city types need to have points of destination or you fall apart. Me good guide. Me show you mountain to look at. White-eyes stay happy. Eat snake.”

  * * *

  The object on the horizon Joe thought to be a rock or a hill turned out to be the weathered remnants of an old, broken wagon. Sand had covered most of it, leaving the front end and part of the seat projecting upward.

  “Prospectors,” Pete muttered. “They probably ate their horse and walked the rest of the way. Lot of them did that.”

  “You never saw it before? I thought you knew this area.”

  Pete informed him, “One big wind will uncover one thing and blanket something else. Nothing stays the same out here.”

  “So how do you navigate, pal?”

  This time Pete gave him a big grin. “By airplanes, brother. We watch the tracks they leave in the sky. Always the same. Always on time. At least, most of the time.”

  Joe noticed the drone of the twin-engine plane before his buddy became aware of it. When it got closer he said, “Twin-engine Aztec. A private job.”

  With a quick look upward, Pete nodded. “It’s going into my territory. They make a trip twice a month. Last time they stayed a full week before they pulled out.”

  “You have an airstrip?”

  Pete gave a small shrug. “Just a runway the tribal police scraped out the time the Governor flew in. The state even bought us one of those wind socks and found a metal shed so they could paint the name of the field on it.”

  “Man, I never saw any field mentioned on my charts.”

  Once more, Pete squinted at him and nodded. “Not a name, really. Just a number, a big, white 21. You can hardly see it now. The state even had a radio installed there. And don’t ask me why. Nobody except Cholly Blue Sky knows how to use it. He used to have one like it in his truck that he took out of a wrecked B-25 that had to land out near the mountains. Ran out of gas, that one did.” He paused and his eyes met Joe’s. “You know what a B-25 is?”

  “Sure,” Joe answered him. “I got about ten hours in one of those.” For a moment he paused, his mind ranging over the past few days. Finally he said, “Tonto…what are those guys doing out here?”

  “The ones in the plane, Lone Ranger?”

  Joe nodded.

  “They buy our fossils.”

  “Bull. The only fossils you have out here will be bleached-out horse bones. Maybe an ox.” He knew Pete was going to throw it in, so he added, “…and an old cowboy or two.”

  “Come on, Joe, you even found one yourself. That arrowhead—”

  “Made a great story,” Joe finished for him. “You even bashed it with a rock that probably was a piece of sandstone that wouldn’t rip toilet paper.”

  The hurt look on Pete’s face didn’t last long and Joe could see him trying to formulate an answer. Then Pete said, “I just figured you white-eyes liked to hear wild stories from us native types.”

  “We do, pal, so tell me what kind of fossils you were really looking for in the desolate sands of your state.”

  Sequoia Pete ran his fingers through his hair and made another eloquent shrug. “The income-generating kind, flyboy.”

  A small smile started at the corners of Joe’s mouth. “Damn. You already hinted at it, didn’t you? It’s all tied up with that story about the gold reserves in the Superstitions, right?”

  Pete didn’t answer him.

  “A lot of guys have scrabbled around in those hills for generations, haven’t they? And now it’s starting all over again. Well, pal, if it attracts money to your encampment I can’t blame you a bit for encouraging it, but you sure are going far out to advertise it, aren’t you?”

  “Flyboy, our economy is floundering. Y’know what I mean? The Native American is only something on the History Channel. You see the memorial at Wounded Knee. Sometimes one of us shows up in a battered pickup truck or doing a ceremonial dance for tourists, but you never see what alcohol has done. You never see one of us in a Cadillac convertible. You hardly ever hear of an Indian sports figure except Jim Thorpe, or one of us up there in Congress. Hell, man, you even give us a name from a place none of us have ever been to. India. Man, I had curried rice once and didn’t like it at all.”

  “So?”

  “We figured we had it made for a time. The government thought we had a uranium deposit on our land. Turned out to be a trace of something not worth fooling with.” Pete paused reflectively. Then mused, “Probably the best thing for us. The government would have run us off our land again.”

  Joe disagreed. “They couldn’t do that, pal. Those days are gone.”

  “Who do you think you’re kidding? The government can do anything it wants to.”

  “Tell me about the gold.”

  “It wasn’t bullion.”

  ”Dust?”

  “Not even nuggets.”

  “Then what’s it all about?”

  “Feet. Little feet.”

  Joe looked at him in bewilderment.

  “One of the kids found them out in the desert—about two inches long and had broken off the legs. The boy thought they had come from a doll and gave them to his sister. When papa bear heard the story, he took them down to the trading post and sure enough, it was gold all right.”

  Joe asked, “Where are the feet now?”

  “Come on, buddy, old papa bear was a whiskey Indian. He traded them in for a few quarts of rotgut and didn’t come home for a week. The old man at the trading post showed ’em to a tourist one time and sold them on the spot. A month later a guy showed up who said he was from some state college and wanted to know where they were found.”

  “Somebody tell him?” Joe asked.

  “Nah. Nobody knew. The kid had even forgotten. He just waved at the desert and said it was someplace out there.”

  Deliberately, Joe let a full minute go by before he said, “Then somebody found something else, didn’t they?”

  Pete nodded. “It was another kid. He found a shiny gold head with feathers on it. Maybe the size of a quarter. Broken off the rest of the upper body.”

  “I hope it didn’t get turned in for some booze.”

  Pete said, “This one smart Indian boy, this one. He took it to the right places. He had the top guys at the university examine it and they all finally agreed on what it was.”

  Joe just waited. He knew Pete was holding back the punch line to irritate him, but he played the game.

  After a long silence, Pete said, “It was Aztec gold, flyboy.”

  “Their camp
grounds were pretty far south, Man-Who-Can’t-Ride-Horse,” Joe said. “What would they be doing up here?”

  “They were being chased.”

  “Posse?”

  “Army, White-eyes. Spaniards in metal armor. Carrying old funnel-nosed guns loaded with black powder and projectiles. Made big noise. Killed people far off. You know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “The story is, those Aztecs knew the Spaniards were after their images, gathered them up and took off northward. By the time the Spaniards got wise to what happened, the Aztecs had a good lead on them.” He shook his head. “Hell, those statues didn’t have a monetary value to them. They were part of their religion. They signified something else, something more important. Not money.”

  It was a story Joe had heard before but never paid much attention to. Gold was a great metal to play with—soft and could be carved into articles of jewelry, or melted and cast into larger shapes. Freely available in some locations, and rare in others and, where the Aztecs lived, must have been plentiful enough to use in slingshots.

  “They probably transported it in leather bags,” Pete said. “No traces of wagons or travois poles ever showed up. No bones of pack animals, though between scavengers and sand erosion, bones wouldn’t have lasted this long.”

  “So the feet and that head probably just broke off and fell through a hole in one of those bags.”

  Pete nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Where were they going then?”

  Pete turned his head and looked at the mountainous ridge in the distance. “There,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because there are other stories nobody paid attention to. Stuff like chunks of weathered gold being picked up out there. A long time ago a tribal elder had a gold plate with a feathered bird carved on it. I saw that. Don’t ask me where it is now.”

  “There’s a story you haven’t talked about so far, isn’t there?”

  “Man,” Pete exclaimed, “you got a mind like a cop.”

  “So tell me the story.”

  “Sure. Whenever there was a find, it always came from a place in a straight line from south of here right up to the Superstitions. Hell, flyboy, there was no place to hide anything between their home grounds and the mountains anyway.”