Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache by W. Michael Farmer

Author:W. Michael Farmer [Farmer, W. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Five Star Publishing
Published: 2015-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

ANGRY WOMEN

* * *

The desire for sleep left me after Deer Woman’s visit, and I thought about her the rest of the night. My father taught me always to do the right thing. He said a man does not take scalps, mutilate dead bodies, or take a woman who is not yet married, even a captive. An unmarried woman’s virtue is her father’s property. If she loses her virtue before marriage, then her father loses her value. Deer Woman said Delgadito took her many times, and I knew my father saw them at least once, but he had turned away and said nothing because it wasn’t his business to tell Sons-nah. She had no more value to her mother than a woman divorced or widowed. She did not command, nor deserve, a high bride price.

I thought Deer Woman and Delgadito should be beaten and made to marry. Delgadito had no honor with women. He had forced many captive Nakai-yi women before he killed them. What he did to those women was shameful. He didn’t act like a true Apache man, and I believed Deer Woman would never be his wife. He had no interest in a woman like her carrying and raising his children. What would she teach them? He could not trust her around other men. How would he know for certain she carried his child? He would not know. He would not take her for a first wife, but only for pleasure and maybe as a second wife. I hoped the old man she deceived into a marriage had good ears and eyes to catch them. He would cut off her nose and maybe shoot Delgadito.

I knew speaking the truth made Deer Woman very angry, but I didn’t care. Perhaps this night I had made an enemy for life. I knew I must watch her. A woman with no virtue can cause much trouble in a camp, even get undeserving men killed and start long blood feuds between families. The wisdom of my father grew in my mind as I thought about these things. I was glad I did not take Deer Woman and had endured her insults.

Dawn came. I sang to Ussen and then looked northwest in the direction I remembered for the vaquero fire and saw a thin plume of smoke rising straight into the sky. I used the Shináá Cho and saw men saddling horses by a wagon, its top covered in white cloth. Some of the vaqueros sat on the ground, their legs crossed, eating as the Indah do.

Although I watched from a far distance, I saw Nakai-yes walking around with rifles in the crooks of their arms and the ones sitting down, keeping their rifles across their knees, and eating from pie pans like those Rufus used. They were nervous, scratching their dirty, wooly faces, and straining their necks out of their shirts to look east across the desert toward the river called Pecos by the Indah. Their ponies were in a corral next to an Indah windmill.

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