With Blood in Their Eyes

Chapter Seven: 1918

Chapter Seven 1918 Sisson took the lead then, heading them back toward the Dragoon Mountains and the Stronghold. It was a good place if they could get up there. For years the Apaches had used it as a place of refuge and attack. The Dragoons were the most rugged mountains in Arizona, and no one, except the Apaches, had been able to maneuver his way through them easily. Sisson didn’t like the odds. Tom Power was smart, but it seemed to Sisson that smart people had a way of getting too smart and doing things that were dumber than any dumb person would do. He thought of smart as a circle. Go too far toward smart, and you found yourself back at dumb. But there was nothing to do about it. It was just the way. You had to follow the smart ones just because they were smarter than you were. And even when you knew what they was doing wasn’t smart, they was still smarter than you, and if you did something else, it would be wrong because you were dumb. You just had to trust them. Only thing was, mostly you didn’t trust them. TheDragoonMountainsareaseriesofpilingsofweatheredgranitethatlook like they’ve been dropped down from above rather than pushed up from below. They are spectacularly rugged mountains with large spires and steep, narrow canyons from which rock had weathered and shattered. The great Apache leader Cochise had made his stronghold in the rugged, nearly impenetrable rocks and crags of the Dragoons. It was a good place to hide. It was a good place for anyone to hide. And if Braz Wootan and his gang of vigilantes had beaten them to it, they would be hidden away, just waiting in ambush. Sisson had spent many of his younger years as an Indian scout. He boasted that he had scouted out the Indians that had killed Custer. He was too young to have actually done that, but he had helped chase the last of the Sioux back to the reservation, and that made his claim almost but not exactly true. There weren’t many men in the state who had the knowledge that Sisson had about pursuit and escape. And his was all knowledge that came from the experience of having done it, not from reading about it. He couldn’t read. He could only do things. In Sisson’s experience, the best way to avoid an ambush was to find your way around it. The next best way was to split up your forces in order to flank and ambush the ambush. Since they were only three, and two half blind, the second 58 With Blood in Their Eyes was no option at all. He would take the first option. He would go around to the north, as the vigilantes would be expecting them from the south. He would come around the north end of the mountains, come back up either from the north or from all the way around to the west. They would try to come up behind the ones who were waiting for them. He guessed that Tom was thinking somewhat along those lines, too. That’s what he guessed, but he wasn’t good at guessing what Tom would do. And that put him back into the puzzle again. You couldn’t tell the smart ones what to do, even if it was the right thing to do, because the smart ones were smarter than you, right or wrong. That hadn’t bothered him with the Old Man. In a lot of ways, the Old Man was like Tom. He was smart, and he was sharp in the tongue and quick to temper up. You didn’t want to cross the Old Man in any serious kind of way. He would take after you with a big mouth and a bigger stick. He was mean, but he didn’t brood. Tom Power was a brooder. Sisson supposed that was because Tom had to grow up under the Old Man’s shadow. It was not fun to be a grown-up dealing with the Old Man’s temper. He could only imagine what it had been like for a young boy. But the Old Man was gregarious in a way that Tom wasn’t. Tom never dealt with anyone straight up. He was always a little ways off from everyone else, always a bit to the side, always figuring, always looking for the edge. Sisson supposed...