The Wild Girl Read Online Free

unprepared for the creature he beheld now in the oak tree, hissing and growling, trying to strike out at his dogs with its hands as if it had claws on the end of its slender fingers. He wondered for a moment if this might be the devil himself, come finally to test him, taking the form of this wild creature, half human, half animal, squatting nearly naked in a tree, shredded clothes falling from its slight body, hair tangled and filthy. The creature had dirty yellow stripes painted crudely on its face, framing eyes black and bottomless as time itself, and filled with a scalding rage as it growled, spat, and swiped at his dogs.
    And then with a sense of relief so vague that he hardly noticed it himself, he realized that the creature was not Satan at all, only perhaps Satan’s vessel, a heathen, and a spectacularly unclean one at that. Flowers had been advised when he first came down into Mexico that a small band of wild Apaches still inhabited the hidden canyons and valleys of the Sierra Madre, the high mountain country so rugged and inaccessible that few white men had ever seen it and most Mexicans were afraid to pass there. But Billy Flowers had always traveled alone and feared heathens no more than he did man or beast, of which he considered them to be simply a kind of hybrid. He could see now beneath the rags and the filth that this one was a girl, barely more than a child, and he called off his dogs, who were instantly obedient, quit their baying and began to pace around the base of the tree, panting, slavering, whining, their bony ribs heaving. The girl fell still herself, silent and watchful.
    “‘Thou shalt break the heathen with a rod of iron,’”
said Billy Flowers in incantation, raising his rifle to his shoulder.
“‘Thou shalt dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.’”
He looked into the girl’s eyes and could find there no hint of fear in her bold, strangely calm gaze, no suggestion even of a shared humanity. It was exactly like looking into the eyes of a lion or a bear, as he had done so many times before in his life in that decisive moment before he dispatched them, their eyes luminescent, impenetrable, casting back only his own reflection.
    Flowers lowered his rifle, slipped it back into the scabbard that hung from his saddle, shook his head and muttered to himself in some disgust. It had been revealed to him, the face of his own fear—the vision of Satan in the person of a child, this young girl. He knew that the Mexican government had recently reinstated the bounty on Apache scalps in an attempt to rid the country once and for all of the scourge of savages that had plagued them for so many generations. Yet, though this would certainly be a legal kill, Billy Flowers had never before taken another human being’s life, and he would not do so now, even one so primitive and so far from God as this one.
    Flowers reached into his saddlebag and brought out a small package of waxed paper, which he unfolded to reveal a single tortilla folded around a piece of honeycomb from a beehive he had raided earlier. He carried very little food when he was hunting, eating mostly what he killed, believing that the flesh of the lion and the bear gave him and his dogs the strength of the animal. But he had a weakness for sweets and had never been able to resist honey.
    Now he stepped forward again, peering up at this wild child in the tree, unwrapped the tortilla, and watched as the girl cut her eyes to it, the dogs, too, attentive to his every move. “I expect you’re hungry, heathen,” he said in a voice not without some measure of kindness. He pulled off a piece of the tortilla, squeezing honey onto it from the piece of hive like a sponge. “Yessir, missy,” he said, taking a bite, chewing slowly, licking his fingers with great care and relish. “I expect you’re mighty hungry.” He pulled off another piece and reached it up toward her. “Here. Go on. Take it.”
    The girl watched him impassively, but