It only made sense, and yet it was clear to Little Onion that the others didn’t know how to guard themselves, or be sensible. Perhaps it was because they were so far from their own country. She was baffled herself, much of the time, by cacti or bushes that she had never seen before. Was the plant useful? Or was it deadly? She would have liked to know but there was no one to teach her. She tried little experiments with this plant or that, but she had to be cautious. She didn’t want to poison herself.
46
. . . she showed him a heron, standing on one leg . . .
PETEY LOVED BIRDS. He tried to chase the speedy roadrunners, but they soon outdistanced him. He liked to watch the sparrows that sometimes lit near the campfire, pecking at little seeds or kernels of corn someone had dropped. He would sit for long hours, watching hawks soar in the sky. Sometimes Little Onion would point upward, directing his eye to high skeins of geese. Once she showed him a heron, standing on one leg in a small pond, the end of a frog’s foot sticking out of its mouth.
The day his father went away Petey was playing with a small wooden bear Jim had carved for him. Petal was always stealing the bear, but at the moment she was with Cook and Little Onion, eating porridge. His mother and Buffum were trying to fix his grandfather’s crutch, which the old man had broken in one of his fits. It was a cold morning— Little Onion was building up the campfire. Talley and Elf were with Vicky. Petey thought it was safe to play with his bear and he was doing just that when the little blue quail were passing near—the quail were chirping and Petey heard them. He saw them slipping through the grass just behind them. They moved so quickly that he couldn’t get a good look at them. But this time they were very close— he began to creep toward them but the quail sped on. Only now and then did he get a clear look as the blue quail stopped to peck at a seed or bit of gravel. Petey wished he could make one of the blue quail into a pet. They didn’t have Mopsy anymore, and he longed for a pet. He decided to follow the quail and perhaps catch one; he wouldn’t hurt it.
Petey had been out of the camp only a minute or two when Little Onion missed him. She did frequent surveys of the four active children. One thing all the women were in agreement about was that it only took a minute for a child to get in trouble. If there was a snake anywhere near they would find it. If there was a wasp in the vicinity they would get stung.
Little Onion had a good eye—she just glimpsed Petey as he hurried after the quail. She had heard the blue quail chirping earlier and had been thinking of trying to trap a few. Fat quail were good to eat. But blue quail were speedy—she would need to make a good trap.
Tasmin, though exasperated with her father for cracking his only crutch in one of his violent distempers, surveyed the children herself and failed to see Petey, but before she could grow alarmed Little Onion waved at her and left the camp; evidently she knew where Petey had got to and was off to retrieve him. Tasmin forgot about it. She and Buffum were trying to wrap the splintered crutch with some light cord—the task was not made easier by Lord Berrybender’s surly mood.
“I insist that you speak to my wife,” he told Tasmin. “Shameful the way she neglects me. Wives have duties—they are not just free to indulge themselves. Selfish of her to abandon the conjugal bed.”
“I don’t recall your minding her neglect while your Spanish mistress was available,” Tasmin told him.
“Not a bit,” Buffum seconded. “Then you didn’t give Vicky the time of day. No time for old familiar Vicky then. You’d rather do gross things in the buggy with that Spanish girl.”
“Shut up, damn you both! She was a saint!” Lord Berrybender spluttered.
Just then Elf came rushing up to Buffum, who kissed him. Elf was a tiny mite of a boy, but quick on his feet and possessed of merry black eyes.
Tasmin smiled at Elf and looked around for her twins. Petal was with Cook, making a great nuisance of herself. She had captured a vital spoon and refused to surrender it. Vicky sat with Talley, a quiet boy who rarely said much.
Vaguely, at first without alarm, Tasmin registered an absence. The picture wasn’t complete. Something nagged at her. Then she remembered that Petey had wandered off, with Little Onion in pursuit. He had been sitting by himself, playing with his bear—but now where was he?
“Seen Petey?” she asked Cook. “I thought Little Onion went to get him but I don’t see them. That was some time ago.”
Wasn’t it some time ago? Time had passed, but how much time she couldn’t say. Where was Little Onion?
“Probably gathering firewood—it’s chill,” Cook said. She looked around. Where was the helpful girl?
Tasmin hurried over to Corporal Dominguin, the friendliest and most reliable of the soldiers.
“Corporal, we seem to have lost Little Onion,” she told him. “I can’t seem to find my boy Petey, either. Have you seen them?”
Startled, Corporal Dominguin shook his head. He had been idly rolling dice, and watching Buffum, whom he greatly admired. Whenever he could, he did her favors, performed little chores. He had not seen the Indian girl or the little boy but he liked Tasmin and readily agreed to take one of his men and go have a look. Two of the soldiers were cleaning their rifles—they were hopeful that they might see game to shoot at. Lazily they got up and followed Corporal Dominguin.
Tasmin wished desperately that Jim would show up. For some reason she became frightened—the vast, empty place, filled with perils, was enough to frighten her. She had an urge to race off and find Petey herself, though she realized that she would probably only get lost.
When Corporal Dominguin came back he just shook his head. In his hand he held Petey’s little bear.
47
. . . trying to call the blue quail . . .
BLUE FOOT HATED whimpering children. He had not wanted to take the child at all but Tay-ha insisted. Women were easier managed if they were allowed their children. Tay-ha was not sure how the brown woman happened to have a white child, but many whites now passed through the country—mixed pairs were not uncommon. They were all disappointed because they had only managed to catch a brown girl when there were at least five salable white women in camp. But there were only four of them, and a number of soldiers with rifles guarded the women.
“You hit her too hard,” Blue Foot insisted. Tay-ha was very good at ambushes. If he didn’t want to be seen he wasn’t seen. He was already swinging his club when the girl sensed him. She turned and the blow took her in the temple, which was not where he meant to hit her. He swung hard because they were close to the camp and he didn’t want her to scream, but he had meant to hit her in the back of the head. Her own movement caused his miscalculation. They had thrown her, inert and unconscious, over the spare horse and put ten miles between them and the camp before they stopped.
Still, Tay-ha was ready to admit that he had hit the girl too hard. She had been lifeless as a sack when they raped her. She had not opened her eyes.
“Draga won’t like this—she wanted us to catch some white women,” Blue Foot complained.
“I can’t do everything right,” Tay-ha told him. The old man, Snaggle, bent over Little Onion, looking at her closely.
“She has blood in her eyes and more coming out her ears—she’s dying,” Snaggle told them. “It’s pointless to take her any farther.”
Little Onion faintly heard the talk, which seemed to come from a great distance. She tried to stroke Petey, to make him stop whimpering, but her hands wouldn’t fully obey her. She and Petey had been squatting, trying to call the blue quail, and the blue quail were listening. They had stopped, listening to Little Onion’s call. Only at the last second did she sense the man with the club who had somehow got behind her. Then she fell into deep darkness, in her head a pain far worse than any she had felt before. In the blackness all she could do was try to soothe Petey so the men would spare him. If they could only survive a day her husband might come.
Blue Foot was thoroughly disgusted. The white women in the camp would have made them all rich
, if they could have caught them. But Tay-ha had to go club a brown girl who was making birdcalls with the child. They would have to go back to Draga’s great slavers’ camp with nothing to show. Any of the white women would have brought big money—but now that prospect was all spoiled. He had wanted to grab one of the white women while she was making water, but the soldiers were too close.
“Are we going to wait all day?” Snaggle asked. “This girl is ruined.”
Blue Foot knew it was true. She had blood in her eyes. She could have been a useful slave, but that was not to be.
“Just finish her, since you ruined her,” he said to Tay-ha.
He caught the little boy by the ankle, swung him a few times, and threw him as high as he could throw him. While he was swinging the boy, Tay-ha killed the girl. It only required another hard rap.
The little boy hit the frozen ground. Blue Foot intended for the fall to kill him—he didn’t seem like a strong boy. Old Snaggle went over and inspected him.
“He’s still breathing,” Snaggle reported. Enraged—why couldn’t anything go right?— Blue Foot looped his rawhide rope around one of the little boy’s feet—then he jumped on his horse and rode off as fast as he could go, through some rocks and some cactus. When he came back Snag-gle was quick to report that the boy was dead.
“This has been a wasted day,” Blue Foot complained, as the four of them rode south.
“More than that,” Snaggle reminded him. “We watched that camp for three days.”
“There were just too many soldiers,” Tay-ha said. “We might catch somebody if we went to Mexico,” Bent Finger suggested. He was the youngest slaver—no one paid much attention to him.
“We are not going to Mexico,” Blue Foot said, in a tone that suggested to Bent Finger that his comments were unwelcome.
They rode south, under a full moon, for most of the night. Here and there they saw campfires—Comanche campfires, probably. They were on the great war trail that the Comanches used when they made their raids into Mexico. A day’s ride west of the war trail was the big slavers’ camp known as Los Dolores. There, at the moment, the old woman Draga reigned—a woman crueler but more efficient than most of the other slavers.
“I wish you hadn’t hit that girl so hard,” Blue Foot chided. “I hate going back with no captives to show.”
“Shut up about it,” Snaggle told him. “Tay-ha didn’t mean to kill her, but what’s done is done.”
48
. . . Tasmin came running out, panic in her face.
I’M EAGER TO SEE TASMIN and the rest,” George Catlin said.
“Me too,” Kit Carson put in. “We’ll have us a regular reunion.”
Old Greasy Lake had refused to leave the yellow buffalo, so Kit and Willy had thrown in with George Catlin and set out in search of the Berry-benders. A few days later they had the happy luck to run into Jim Snow, who was packing home a sizable load of buffalo meat, a welcome sight.
“It’s just like Jim to have buffalo when the rest of us are making do with prairie dog,” Kit remarked.
Then Tom Fitzpatrick, who had been trapping on the south Canadian with little luck, drifted in, and he also was looking for the Berrybenders.
“I thought I might court that pretty cook a little bit more,” he told them, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say.”
Kit Carson felt that the sentiment was very dubious.
“It don’t make my wife’s grow fonder,” Kit said. He knew Josefina would soon be throwing things, once he got home—mad because he had been away so long.
Jim was glad to see them all, though he was surprised that George had risked himself in the Comanche country.
“I had a military escort, you see,” George said. “And after that I had Greasy Lake.”
Jim supposed that the arrival of so many old friends would throw the camp into an uproar of welcome—but he soon saw that there had been trouble. All the soldiers had their rifles at the ready. Before they were even in camp Tasmin came running out, panic in her face.
“Hello, George—I’ll hug you in a minute,” she said, going straight to Jim.
“Little Onion has been taken, and Petey,” she told him. “They’ve been gone since yesterday. None of us saw or heard a thing. Can you please go find them?”
“I doubt it was Comanches—you’d have heard plenty if it had been,” Tom Fitzpatrick remarked.
“Please go find them,” Tasmin repeated, her eyes on her husband.
George Catlin was shocked by how the years had roughened Tasmin—roughened all the women. Beauty was still there, but they were no longer peaches-and-cream English girls, fresh off a boat.
While Jim and the others were debating what to do, Tasmin gave George a kiss and a long hug.
“George, I’m frightened—really frightened,” she said. “We lost Monty to cholera and now one of my twins is missing—it’s very hard.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “But who’s that little girl I see with the wild curls—she must be yours?”
“Yes, that’s Petal—make what you can of her,” Tasmin said, before rushing back to Jim.
“Tom thinks it’s slavers—there’s some big camp south of here where they trade captives,” Jim told her. “That old Draga, that once had Buffum, is there.”
“Slavers steal people to sell,” Jim pointed out. “They might be alive.”
It was almost night, and the only clue to the direction was the little bear that Corporal Dominguin had found south of the camp.
“Will you and Willy go with me for a day?” Jim asked Kit. He knew the two of them were anxious to get home to their wives—and home was north, not south.
“We’ll go with you—you got that bad arm,” Kit told him.
Willy Bent saw the trouble as confirmation of what he had been telling his brother all along: that Texas was too raw and dangerous for a trading post to work. If the Indians didn’t steal the goods, the slavers would steal the help.
None of the Berrybenders could stop thinking about Petey and Little Onion. Petal was disturbed by the continued absence of her twin.
“I need Petey to come back now!” she said several times.
Cook broke down in tears as she was serving the buffalo roast—the little boy had been her favorite of all the children.
George Catlin attempted to amuse the children by drawing whimsical sketches.
“Here’s a fairy and here’s an elf,” he said.
Petal studied the drawing critically. “That’s a fairy but that’s not an elf,” she said, pointing at her cousin. “That’s an elf.”
“Why, I didn’t realize you had an elf,” George said. “I’ll just change this fellow into a leprechaun.”
Tasmin and Jim were far too tense to sleep. They both found the night endless, the tension wracking. Jim knew it was unlikely that Petey was alive— slavers couldn’t sell a child that young. Little Onion was resourceful—she might escape. But a tiny boy had no value to slavers, or Indians either.
Tasmin trembled with rage and fear. “I’d like to tear whoever took them apart with my teeth,” she said. “If there’s a bad storm I fear Petey won’t survive.”
The three men left at dawn. Willy Bent, the best tracker of the three, soon found the tracks of five horses, all of them unshod.
“I make it four men—the fifth horse is probably a packhorse,” Willy said.
Ten miles on they found the two bodies. Petey’s small corpse was filled with cactus thorns. Blood had frozen on Little Onion’s eyes.
“My God,” Kit said, looking at Petey.
Willy’s stomach flipped—he vomited.
The horse tracks continued southwest. “They’re not in a hurry—we might catch them,” Willy told Jim.
“No, I’ll catch them, in time,” Jim said. “We have to take these two back. Tasmin will want to clean them up and bury them proper.”
“I don’t know that I’d take ’em back,” Willy said, still shaken by the violence of his revulsion.
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br /> “She’ll want to clean them up,” Jim repeated. He felt hatred rising in him, but he was determined to try and contain it until the hour of his vengeance came. He also felt guilt. He had not really much known his little boy; he had never found a tone that allowed him to give proper credit to Little Onion’s virtues—after all, she had died trying to protect Petey.
George Catlin had never witnessed such grief as racked the Berrybender family that wintry afternoon. The Berrybender sisters—Tasmin, Buffum, Mary, Kate—took turns with Father Geoffrin’s one pair of tweezers, easing the fine cactus thorns out of Petey’s small body. Tasmin worked as if turned to stone; the others wept and wailed. Petal raced around in wild despair. “Petey got too many stickers!” she cried. “He’s got too many stickers!” She crawled up in Father Geoffrin’s lap and cried herself to sleep. Cook fainted—Tom Fitzpatrick helped her up when she came to.
Vicky, holding Talley, was pinched and silent, but the old lord wept and blubbered.
“Dastardly of them to kill our Onion—such a fine lassie,” he said, more than once.
“I suppose it’s no matter that they killed your grandson,” Vicky told him. “After all, you can get plenty more of those.”
“Bad of me, scarcely knew the boy,” Lord Berry-bender admitted.
Tasmin remained stoical as they cleaned Petey and wrapped him in a little shroud, but a river of grief swept through her when she set about cleaning Little Onion’s broken head. She couldn’t manage it—couldn’t see for crying.
“You’ve lost your best wife, Jimmy,” she cried. “She was your best wife!”
The two were put in one grave, Petey in Little Onion’s arms.
Tasmin ran sobbing out of camp. Jim let her go, but Father Geoff and George Catlin, fearing that she might go too far and be taken herself, followed her.
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