The patrol crossed into Sonora on April 11, 1886, under the terms of a treaty that allowed American forces to pursue Apache renegades up to 50 leagues into Mexican territory. Captain Garrick Voorssen commanded 16 men, including two Mexican civilian packers, three Indian scouts, and a young corporal named Wendell Crane. Their objective was a small band of hostile Chiricahua that had killed two vaqueros at a ranch the week before.
The rancher, Don Saturnino Quintanilla, had ridden 70 miles to report the attack. He did not say the killers were Apache. He called them only "Los que dejaron las pisadas." The ones who left the prints. When he said it, he crossed himself.
The last Apache scout riding with the patrol was a man the cavalry listed only as Closson. He was about 42 years old, tall for an Apache, with a long pale scar running from the corner of his left eye into his hairline. He wore the dark blue blouse and canvas trousers issued to scouts, but under the blouse he kept a small leather pouch around his throat that no man saw him remove.
On the fourth day, Closson found a single mountain lion print in the mud at the mouth of an unnamed canyon. The print was sharp and complete. A yard ahead of it was the print of a man's bare foot. Then another. Then nothing but dry rock.
Voorssen asked what it was. Closson said he did not have a word for it in English. The other scouts refused to translate. Finally, the Tonto Apache named Biduya said, "He says it is a skin one, a wearer of skins. We should go back."
The captain laughed, a tired laugh, and ordered them to mount up.
That night they camped at a place the Mexicans called El Cuello del Lobo, the wolf's throat. The wind carried a sweet smell none of the men could name. The horses would not lie down. During his watch, Corporal Crane heard what sounded like a coyote directly above him, in the air at the height of a man on horseback. He saw nothing.
By morning, two spare mounts were gone. One had pulled its picket in the night. The other died without any visible injury. On the fifth day, the older arriero found the third missing horse downwind of the camp. The captain came back holding his hat, his right hand trembling so badly he had to put it in his pocket.
Crane heard the captain say, very quietly, "It was the way it had been opened. That is what I cannot get past."
On the sixth day, they crossed a saddle into a basin with a dry creek and the ruin of a Spanish mission called La Misión de San Lázaro de los Ojos. The Mexicans avoided the basin. They said it was a place that remembers. Voorssen ordered the patrol to camp at the upper end, well away from the ruin.
Around midnight, the watch fire went out. Crane found the private from Ohio standing 20 paces beyond it, facing the mission, his mouth hanging open. In the open doorway of the chapel, something was standing. It was the height and shape of a tall man. It was facing the camp.
Crane turned the private around by the shoulders. The moment the private lost sight of the mission, he gasped and began to cry.
In the morning, the private from Ohio was gone. His boots were set neatly together. His rifle was leaning against his saddle. His canteen was full. The only thing missing was the man. A search party found one set of barefoot prints in the dry creek bed leading south toward the mission. The prints stopped halfway across the basin. They did not continue.
Closson rode out alone and worked the ground. When he came back, he reported to Voorssen in private. Crane heard most of it from the other side of the picket line.
Closson said, "Some of my people will not say the name. There are reasons. The name is a door. I will say only what it does. It puts on the shape of what hunts. In open country, a lion. In timber, a bear or a wolf. In the dark places, it puts on a man."
He said it hunts slowly, by waiting. It chooses one out of a group and waits until that one walks out alone. Then it takes him.
Voorssen asked why this patrol. Closson said, "Because one of your men is already looking at it the way the dog looks at the door before the door opens. It showed him in the canyon the first day. It has been with us since then. It is not in the mission. It has been in this camp the whole time."
Closson told the captain he would go find it. If he did not come back by the second sunrise, the patrol was to ride and not look behind them.
He took two canteens, a satchel of pemmican, his Winchester, and a knife with a horn handle. He rode south down the basin toward the mission. He was gone.
That night, Crane and a private from New Jersey named Linus Marbury stood watch. Around 10:00, Marbury pointed at the picket line. Out beyond the horses, in the long grass at the edge of the basin, a man was standing. He was 200 yards off, in what looked like a cavalry blouse and canvas trousers. The right height. The right build. The same kind of clothes.
Crane knew it was not Closson. He did not know how. He did not fire. He told Marbury to look at the fire instead. When they looked back, the figure was gone.
Around 3:00 in the morning, the White Mountain scout called Nalin came to Crane. He gave him a strip of red cloth. He said, "Do not stand watch tomorrow night. Do not stand watch the night after. Tie the red cloth on your arm. Tell no one why."
The next day, Sergeant Augustus Threlfall fell asleep in the shade. When he woke, he was not the same. His voice was slightly too smooth. His eyes were a paler blue, almost gray, like ice water on a cloudy day.
Threlfall asked Crane what was under his sleeve. Crane said it was a tobacco pouch. Then he asked the sergeant a question only the real Threlfall could answer: the name of his first wife's sister. The thing wearing Threlfall's face did not answer. It stood up slowly, without blinking, and walked back to its bedroll.
Crane found Nalin and said, "It is the sergeant." Nalin said, "No, it is not yet the sergeant. It is sitting beside the sergeant, but it has not finished putting him on."
At first light, Closson came back. He came on foot. His horse was not with him. He had dry brown blood on his blouse. He stopped a hundred yards out and called for the captain by name.
Voorssen walked down alone. The two men stood close together. Closson leaned in and whispered something into the captain's ear. Six words. Crane could not hear them.
Voorssen stepped back from Closson the way a man steps back from a fire that has flared up. He walked back to the camp and ordered the patrol to ride north in 20 minutes. They did not stop at El Cuello del Lobo. They did not stop at the seep. They rode.
The thing wearing Threlfall's face rode at the back of the column, a quarter mile behind the rest. It no longer pretended very hard. It walked strangely. It did not eat. On the second day across the border, the horse it was riding threw it and ran. The thing got up and walked behind the column on foot.
On the night before they reached the American outpost, Crane stood watch and saw the thing in the moonlight. Its mouth was full of something dark. It was working its jaw the way an animal works its jaw when it is trying to chew something too big to swallow whole.
In the morning, the thing was gone. There were mountain lion tracks leading south. They did not turn into anything else this time.
Voorssen reported three men lost: one private to desertion, one sergeant to brain fever, one arriero to dehydration. The file was closed. Sergeant Augustus Threlfall of Ottumwa, Iowa, was entered on the rolls as deceased on April 22, 1886. No body was returned.
Closson was honorably discharged on May 15. He drew his final pay of $14.40 and rations for one week. He left the post on foot, walking east. He was not seen at any cavalry post again.
Nalin left two days later, also walking east. He was not seen again.
Voorssen finished his career on garrison duty in Wyoming. He never accepted another field command. He retired in 1898 and died the next year of a heart condition. His sister wrote that he had taken to sleeping with a lamp burning and had said he did not want to be alone when he died, because of something he had heard a long time ago that he was afraid was waiting for him.
Wendell Crane mustered out in 1889, drifted south, married a Mexican woman in Cananea in 1892, and lived in northern Sonora until his death. He took confession twice in his life. The second time was on his deathbed in November of 1941, in the parish house at Bavispe.
He told the priest the entire story. At the end, the priest asked what the six words were.
Crane said he never heard them. But the captain told him two weeks later, one night when he had had too much to drink.
The six words, translated from the priest's Latin, were this: It came back wearing my face.
That is what Closson whispered to Captain Voorssen on the morning of the seventh day. That is why Voorssen pulled the patrol out at a dead run. That is why the thing riding home with them was riding behind the column and not in it.
But Crane could not stop thinking about one thing for half a century. If Closson warned the captain that it came back wearing his face, then the man standing in front of Voorssen was the real Closson. The one who survived. The warning made sense.
But the real Closson would not have warned the captain so plainly. The real Closson would have used a sign only the two of them knew. He had not.
Either way, one Closson went into that mission. One Closson came out. Crane rode three days back to the border with that Closson. He watched that Closson walk east into the open country on May 15, alone.
On the night he died, Crane told the priest that for 50 years, every time he looked into a mirror, he checked his own eyes for the pale color that was almost blue. Every time he passed a stranger on a road, he looked at the stranger's hands to see if they were shaking. Every time he saw a man walking alone in the long grass at the edge of his vision, he crossed himself and looked away.
He had understood by the end that Closson had not killed it. He had only sent it ahead, out of Sonora, into the open country to the east, where one of the two Closson's had walked alone on foot.
Crane said to the priest with the last breath in his body, "Father, it is still out there. I have felt it watching me from the day I came home. I have been able to feel it because I had the red cloth on my arm that night. Nalin told me to never take it off. And I never have."
The priest looked under the corporal's sleeve. On his upper arm was a strip of red cloth so old and worn it was almost the color of dried blood. It had been tied there for 50 years and 7 months.
The priest removed it after Crane died, in accordance with his last wish. He was buried with the cloth in his hand and not on his arm.
At the very bottom of the page, the priest wrote a single Latin phrase he did not translate: Audi me, Domine, quia non finita est ista historia.
Hear me, Lord, for this story is not finished.