They'd let her hold one more. When that hadn't set the white eyes packing, they'd drawn the line on a fourth mystical try. Failing four times was much worse, for some medicine reason. But as those vinegar ants had just found out, the small but strong-willed Kinipai could act determined as h.e.l.l for a gal. So she'd put on her black-and-red paint, black for protection and red for victory--or sorcery, as some chanters believed--donned her black antlered mask, and picked up her basket drum and medicine stones to drive the white eyes away. She'd barely started before the others grabbed her and hauled her up the slopes to execute her the safe way. For the only thing her kind feared worse than a haunt was the haunt of a witch. It was likely to pop right out of her mouth the moment she was dead!

Longarm asked if the Indian Police knew anything about her being declared a witch. When Kinipai told him she'd been performing her Night Ways far upslope from any reservation settlement, he saw he could forget about reporting fellow officers and bade her to go on.

He had a better grasp on the unusual situation he'd just found her in when she explained how some wise old hitali had decided they could best avoid her chindi chasing them down the mountain in the dark by fixing it so she'd die after sunrise, after they were all holed up behind their prayer sticks and such. They'd bound her above that big ant pile, knowing the ants wouldn't really get to work on her naked flesh before the warm sun and some of her sweat inspired them to really buckle down.

They'd smeared her with clay and wood ash to mask her protective paint and make her gray, the color of evil spirits and spooks. He had to allow she'd looked spooky as any chindi to him, over yonder in that cleft. He agreed with her that it seemed hardly likely that any of the witch hunters who'd left her to a slow agonizing death were likely to come back by moonlight. He already knew why you didn't start night fires in Apacheria, where a night watch was kept on every high point and the flare of a match could be made out at three miles when the moon clouded over.

He said, "That Hudson Bay blanket is four beaver skins' worth of thickness. I was planning to bed down on top of it, not under it, this time of the year. So I doubt you'll freeze, wrapped up in it till we can find you some more formal wear. How are your feet now?"

She said, "That was strong medicine you rubbed on them for me. I am too strong to scratch the bites and make them worse. Why have you been so good to me, Belagana? Are you an outlaw those pindah lickoyee are after too?"

Longarm said, "I hunt outlaws for the same Great Father. But I think he is wrong about you Jicarilla. Hear me. I have nothing to say about the move to the Tularosa Agency. I have been sent on other business. I was only pa.s.sing through here on my way to La Mesa de los Viejos. My fight is with other white eyes, not your nation."

The Indian girl sat up straighter, eyes wide in the moonlight, and flatly warned him, "You will find neither your kind nor mine in the dry canyons of the Anasazi. Nothing lives there but the chindi of the long-dead Old Ones. Haven't you been told that the mere sight of a chindi will make a living person drop dead on the spot? That is why the chindi prowl the nights this side of the gray spirit world. They want to take us back there with them. They are lonely--lonely--in the ashen world of the dead because the grayness stretches out in many directions, forever, and one can never make it seem less empty!"

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "All in all I'd as soon take my chances with the limbo land the Papists tell of. I still got to get on over to that mesa and, seeing I got two ponies, is there anywheres I can drop you off where you might be safer?"

She sighed and said, "I have no place to go. I have nothing. The very clothes I wore this morning have been declared ahidahagash and burned to nothingness. I suppose I had better go on with you to take my chances with the chindi of the Old Ones. They could hardly be any crueler than my own people will be if they ever catch me!"

Chapter 4.

In good times or bad it was best to travel at night and hole up by day in Apacheria, lest neighbors six or eight miles off gossip about your every move. So they watered the ponies good at a wider creek a ways down the eastern slope, and made day camp atop a pinyon-covered ridge beyond.

For it was best to hole up on high ground, away from natural campsites, in Apacheria.

Pinyon was pine that grew about the size and shape of crab-apple trees, and offered fair cover and shade. Kinipai agreed that the many chewed-up scattered cones they saw meant none of her own folks harvested pine nuts along this ridge that often.

She was the one who spotted smoke-talk as Longarm was tethering the ponies deeper among the trees, with canteen water and cracked corn in their feed bags. Being Na-dene, she didn't call out to him. She joined him and the riding stock, silent as a shadow wrapped in a cream-and-black striped Hudson Bay. He'd been noticing for quite some time she had a pretty little face, by the standards of either race. For while different sorts admired somewhat different marks of beauty, everyone found regular features and a healthy young appearance pleasing.

She was letting some of her other charms show, now that her bare body had warmed up enough to feel a tad stuffy under that thick wool blanket.

Jicarilla were more modest than Paiute, but not as worried as their Navaho cousins about unavoidable flashes of flesh.

He lost considerable interest in that one perky nipple when she calmly told him, "They already know I got away in the dark. They do not know about you helping me yet. If you mount up again and ride like the wind you may get away. If they catch you with me I don't think they will be as worried about your chindi. I'm afraid they will kill you faster on the spot."

As he followed her back through the trees, Longarm smiled dryly and said, "You're afraid? I've seen the carved-up remains of old boys your hackis had killed about as sudden as they felt like. But I reckon we'd best stick together for now, seeing you've got on my best blanket."

They were near the western edge of their pine-needle screen by then. So Kinipai pointed that way and told him to see for himself as she dropped the big blanket to the pinyon duff, revealing every bare inch of her short, finn, tawny body. He decided she'd likely wind up fat by the time she was thirty, but she sure curved swell at the moment. Then he saw she'd been asking him to look at the far-off puffs of white smoke hanging over the higher ridges to the west.

It wasn't true, as some whites thought, that Indians sent a sort of Morse code in smoke. To begin with, few Quill Indians knew how to read or write in any alphabet. Moreover, they didn't want strangers reading their mail. So they worked it more like white military men who agreed beforehand on pa.s.swords and countersigns. So many puffs in a row meant one thing or another that could change as the situation called for.

Knowing this, Longarm wasn't too surprised when he asked Kinipai just what that smoke-talk said, and she told him she wasn't in that thick with the hacki, or warrior society, of her own nation.

He stared thoughtfully at the meaningless, drifting smoke puffs for a time. Then she hissed and said, "Over that way, to the north!"

He said, "I noticed," as they both stared in total ignorance at far more distant smoke rising from a higher crest in the morning sunlight.

He finally said, "When I cut you loose, that bare gravel betwixt the rocks had already been churned up by your prancing feet. After that, we both moved across green gra.s.s that'd had time to gather a new dusting of dew and spring backup by now."

She protested, "Those agency police ponies are shod. They will have left hoofprints, many hoofprints."

He nodded but said, "Not too near that cleft they'd left you in. And would you be tracking down even Indian lawmen if you'd just put a witch to death? How do you know they are chasing you? Mayhaps they're trying to get away. I don't know about you, but I'd be scared skinny if I tied up a wicked witch on an ant pile and came back the next morning to find her gone and the ants in dreadful shape!"

It didn't work. The frightened young gal threw herself against Longarm to bury her face in the front of his shirt and bawl, "I am not a wicked witch! I have no bishi to protect us, I have nothing--nothing--not even the medicine stones handed down from my poor old uncle, and how much bishi did he ever really have if that snake he was dancing with could kill him with just one bite?"

Longarm held her soothingly. It seemed only natural to pat such a pretty bare b.u.t.tock as he replied, "I'm sure it was a big snake, knowing how modest your medicine men act. I told you we'd get you some more duds to wear. And those scared folks who took you for the real thing ain't likely to a.s.sume you've lost any powers you ever had, seeing they failed as full-fledged way-chanters to kill one pretty little thing."

She sniffed and said, "Thank you. I think you are pretty too. I wish we weren't going to die so soon. To purify myself for that Night Way I had to avoid womanly pleasures, even with my own hand, for four whole nights. Last night was the fifth and I was rubbing--rubbing--as I sat that pony bareback with its spine teasing me but never quite enough!"

Longarm got a better grip on her bare behind and snuggled her a bit closer as he replied in a desperately casual tone that he hadn't been getting any since leaving Denver.

So the next thing they knew they were down on that blanket, spread on springy pine needles, with her on top and bouncing up and down like a delighted kid on a merry-go-round while he was still shucking out of his duds. Like many an Indian or Mexican gal used to sleeping on floor pallets, Kinipai bounced with her haunches, with bare heels braced to either side of his hips as she braced her little palms against his hairy chest to slither up and down his beanpole in a delightful but sort of teasing way. So once he had his torso as bare as her own, with his jeans down around his booted ankles, he rolled on top to hook one elbow under either of her chunky brown knees and finish right.

She gasped that he was fixing to rupture her innards, but begged him not to stop seeing that they were both about to get killed in any case and this seemed a far nicer way to die.

After they'd both climaxed more than once and she found herself still alive and well, sharing a three-for-a-nickel cheroot with him as they lazed naked on the blanket in the shade, Kinipai giggled and confided, "I have never had anything that big in me, unless you want to count the time some of us were acting silly with corncobs when we were locked away to await the Pollen Dusting Way."

Longarm just chuckled and enjoyed another deep drag. He didn't need to be told how silly kids acted when they first found out why boys and girls had been built differently. Na-dene gals who'd started their first monthly period got locked up in a dark brush lodge to get over it together so their elders could throw them a fine dance and sprinkle them with corn, bean, squash, and tobacco pollen to make them strong and fertile women now that they were grown. Like the Pueblo they'd likely learned from, Na-dene set great store by pollen. It was never burnt as a sacrifice to the Holy Ones. To burn pollen was to destroy hope. But dusting a young gal's hair and making her sneeze with such powerful medicine was meant as one h.e.l.l of an honor for her. It wasn't true Na-dene knowingly mistreated women. They just treated them unusually, by a white man's standards. It was usually Anglo or high-toned Mexican gals who went insane after they'd been captured by so-called Apache raiders.

Of course, all bets were off when dealing with a witch. So they'd barely smoked that cheroot down before Kinipai was nagging him some more about that smoke-talk. She'd doubtless learned, while learning English, how white eyes put up with much more nagging before they hit a grown woman. Hitting children for any reason was considered sort of unmanly by most Indians. But any Indian could see a grown woman had no call to carry on like some bawling baby.

Longarm told Kinipai so, adding firmly but not unkindly, "Whether they're looking for us or trying to get away from you, I doubt they have the least notion where we are right now."

She whimpered, "Hear me, my people are the best trackers this side of the gray spirit world and we were riding ponies, steel-shod ponies, all this way!"

He stretched out his free arm for another smoke, saw that his duds lay an unhandy distance away on the pinyon duff, and reached down to feel her up some more instead as he replied, "You're bragging a mite, no offense. n.o.body tracks better than Papigo, as some of your Chiricahua cousins learned to their sorrow a spell back."

He began to treat her friendlier down yonder as he added, "Don't ever stop running once you raid Papigo. They can track a sundial's shadow and cut its throat after sundown."

She reached down for his private parts as he a.s.sured her, "I'd be able to brag on scouting and being scouted by heaps of nations, including your own, if I hadn't been raised so modest. I made sure we rode across all the dry sod and slickrock I could find for us as we made her this far. We left that creek to cross gravel scree and mummified pine needles getting here."

She laughed and said, "This is crazy, crazy! We are playing with one another and carrying on a calm conversation at the same time!"

Having risen to the occasion some more, Longarm rolled his naked hips between her welcoming brown thighs and let her guide it in for him again as he grinned down at her and observed, "I know, and it sure seems friendly. I hardly ever go back for seconds with a pretty half-wit, but there's some gals I really enjoy talking to like this."

She hugged him down against her with her strong arms and chunky legs as he continued in the same tone. "There's this one old gal I know down Texas way and another up around Bitter Creek who both like to jaw with me about my work for the Justice Department. So every time I find myself that far afield, either direction from my home office, I seem to find myself having a conversation much like this one and ... Never mind, that's two other stories, and right now I'm fixing to shoot my wad in a wicked witch!"

She bit down tight with her innards and pleaded with him to make it last and take her with him. So he tried his best, and managed to make it almost a mutual o.r.g.a.s.m while they both made promises n.o.body born of mortal woman would ever be able to keep.

This time he really made it to his tobacco and matches. So as he sat on the blanket beside her lighting up, Kinipai sighed and told him, "I still say I would ride with you forever in the dark desert grayness of the dead. But there is a bare chance we could make it if we are not more than one good run from the reservation line to the cast!"

Longarm took a drag on the cheroot and held it out to her as he said, "I know where we are. My kind ain't as afraid to look up at the stars as your kind, no offense. I've been studying on a downhill dash for the Chama Valley. You'd know better than me whether your hacks are sore enough to spill blood off their official reserve."

Kinipai took a luxurious drag to give herself time to consider. "I don't know. The BIA has my people very cross. Some of the younger hackis want to stand their ground and fight. But our older nadas, who have fought the blue sleeves already, think it may be better to move to Tularosa Canyon and live poorly than to give the pindah lickoyee the excuse to see we do not live anywhere forever."

Then she asked, "What has this to do with you and me? You are not N'de and I have been banished as a witch, to be killed even slower!"

Longarm said, "Your kind as well as mine will suffer considerable if armed and dangerous so-called Apache make any reservation jumps whilst the BIA is meeting with their chiefs to discuss their future! I told you why I doubt anyone's hot on our trail. But sooner or later someone's sure to take you up on even one steel-shod hoofprint, and it might be best to leave him inside the reservation line as we work our way down past Stinking Lake. I told you why I have to work at least that far south. Others may or may not figure you're riding with me aboard a police pony. They're just as likely to dismiss any police pony tracks as the sign of a routine patrol by Sergeant Doli and his boys.

Witch hunters with a guilty conscience might be a tad more interested in avoiding such patrols than tracking them. But in any case, once we're south of Stinking Lake, we can beeline for the haunted canyons of La Mesa de los Viejos, and what the h.e.l.l, would you be tracking a wicked witch into chindi country if you believed in either witches or haunts that could kill you with a dirty look?"

She said she hoped he was right, but asked if they could screw at least one more time before they wound up as chindis themselves.