family, and all your other relations that have been living off this business, you are all going to pack up and move back into Tucson to-morrow."
"I guess not," said Al, and he explained, among other things, how at a word from him the commandant at the post would order Heney off the reservation. The license was in Bernard's name.
"I know that," said Heney, cackling unpleasantly. "But you are going to speak well of me to the commandant."
"Oh, I am, am I? Well, I'd like to know why."
"I'll tell you," said Heney, and the cackling ceased. Then he showed him just the kind of evidence he had been gathering. "Now you go and you go quick."
Heney's hand went back to his pistol pocket and he meant to shoot, if necessary. He knew how hard his brother had worked to get together the capital invested in this business, and he knew that if it failed, Ben would be ruined. Frank was nerved up to desperate measures. But his brother's partner decided to move, and he did move the next day.
Thus, Frank Heney became "Nan Tan Frank," the Apache Indian trader, and his training by the Indians was begun. The store stood on an upland about three miles from the army post, and in between lay the uneasy camp of the Apaches. Geronimo had about one hundred braves out on the warpath most of the time, but a couple of hundred were always at home, and bands of the warriors kept coming in to see their squaws and get supplies.
Like cowboys and all other children, Indians have their "fun." When they got drunk, especially on moonlit evenings, they had a way of riding up and down in front of the store firing off their guns and calling out to the "Nan Tan" (Captain) insults which they knew he understood for he had learned Apache. ("Only about six hundred words in the whole lingo," he says.) If he was in the store, he stayed in, but he used often to go visiting the officers at the post and sometimes he met the Indians on his way back. These encounters were good exercise for the nerves. With a whoop, the drunken devils would charge on the dead run straight at him, wheel, jostle and challenge him for whisky. There was no danger unless you showed fear, but then, as all white men know, Indians were likely to do anything. They'd kill, set fire to the store and go out on the warpath, trusting to the "treaty of peace" to cover up the particulars of crime.
At the end of a lively year and a half, Frank had for his brother a clear balance sheet and for himself some rich experience in dealing with elemental human nature in the rough, man to man. And he was pretty much of a man. But he wasn't much of a lawyer, and that's what he wanted to be. He had done no reading, and, of course, he had had no practice. Once in his ranching days a train had killed a neighbor's steer, and when the cowboys gathered round the carcass to "cuss" the road, he asked why they didn't sue. "Sue!" they shouted. "One man sue a railroad for one cow!" It was absurd. Heney said he'd take the case. They didn't know he was a lawyer, but his offer promised fun, so they all "slicked up" and rode to town to see the cowboy lawyer tackle a corporation. Heney got a judgment for $50. But how collect? Heney's client presented the bill to the station agent and when he explained that he had no authority to pay it, the cowboys yelped, "Didn't we tell you so!" But Heney wasn't through. A freight train pulled in and Heney's client approached the locomotive with a great piece of chain. Winding it around the driving wheel, he carried it under the rail and linked it up. Then he went off into the shade of the nearby water tank and, with his rifle across his knees, waited to see that nobody touched "that there attachment of his." There was some delay, much telegraphing; but in the end the agent received orders to pay and the attachment was removed. Heney always refuses to say whether this proceeding was "by advice of counsel."
When Frank Heney rode into Tucson from Fort Apache in 1888, he came panting to be at the business of life. He was nearly thirty years old and his association with the educated young officers at the post had made him feel that he was wasting his days. His saddle was hardly cool when he opened his first law office, and that was hardly warm when he appeared as one of the candidates for the Democratic county convention and as one of the jolliest crowd of young roisterers in Tucson. His boyhood wasn't quite over yet; he needed a jolt or two to turn up the serious side of his character.
