The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [110]
Finally Mickey Segundo stirred. He broke open the .50-caliber Gallagher and inserted the paper cartridge and the cap. Then he eased the carbine between a niche in the rocks, sighting on the back of the man’s head. He called in a low voice, “Tony Choddi…” and as the face with the wide-open eyes came around, he fired casually.
He lay on his stomach and slowly drank the water he needed, filling his canteen and the one that had belonged to Tony Choddi. Then he took his hunting knife and sawed both of the man’s ears off, close to the head. These he put into his saddle pouch, leaving the rest for the buzzards.
A week later Mickey Segundo carried the pouch into the agency office and dropped the ears on my desk. He said very simply, “Tony Choddi is sorry he has caused trouble.”
I remember telling him, “You’re not thinking of going after McKay now, are you?”
“This man, Tony Choddi, stole stuff, a horse and clothes and a gun,” he said with his pleasant smile. “So I thought I would do a good thing and fix it so Tony Choddi didn’t steal no more.”
With the smile there was a look of surprise, as if to say, “Why would I want to get Mr. McKay?”
A few days later I saw McKay and told him about it and mentioned that he might keep his eyes open. But he said that he didn’t give a damn about any breed Jicarilla kid. If the kid felt like avenging his old man, he could try, but he’d probably cash in before his time. And as for getting Tony Choddi, he didn’t give a damn about that either. He’d got the horse back and that’s all he cared about.
After he had said his piece, I was sorry I had warned him. And I felt a little foolish telling one of the biggest men in the Territory to look out for a half-breed Apache kid. I told myself, Maybe you’re just rubbing up to him because he’s important and could use his influence to help out the agency …and maybe he knows it.
Actually I had more respect for Mickey Segundo, as a human being, than I did for T.O. McKay. Maybe I felt I owed the warning to McKay because he was a white man. Like saying, “Mickey Segundo’s a good boy, but, hell, he’s half Indian.” Just one of those things you catch yourself doing. Like habit. You do something wrong the first time and you know it, but if you keep it up, it becomes a habit and it’s no longer wrong because it’s something you’ve always been doing.
McKay and a lot of people said Apaches were no damn good. The only good one was a dead one. They never stopped to reason it out. They’d been saying it so long, they knew it was true. Certainly any such statement was unreasonable, but damned if I wouldn’t sometimes nod my head in agreement, because at those times I’d be with white men and that’s the way white men talked.
I might have thought I was foolish, but actually it was McKay who was the fool. He underestimated Mickey Segundo.
That was five years ago. It had begun with a hanging.
EARLY IN THE morning, Tudishishn, sergeant of Apache police at the Jicarilla Agency, rode in to tell me that Tony Choddi had jumped the boundaries again and might be in my locale. Tudishishn stayed for half a dozen cups of coffee, though his information didn’t last that long. When he’d had enough, he left as leisurely as he had arrived. Hunting renegades, reservation jumpers, was Tudishishn’s job; still, it wasn’t something to get excited about. Tomorrows were for work; todays were for thinking about it.
Up at the agency they were used to Tony Choddi skipping off. Usually they’d find him later in some shaded barranca, full of tulapai.
It was quiet until late afternoon, but not unusually so. It wasn’t often that anything out of the ordinary happened at the subagency. There were twenty-six families, one hundred eight Jicarillas all told, under my charge. We were located almost twenty miles below the reservation proper, and most of the people had