Sweet Autumn Surrender

by Vivian Vaughan

  It was mid-morning by the sun, and the day was warming up nicely. The cold water tasted sweet and felt cool as the wind dried it from his lips. He had experienced these things a thousand times before, but his senses seemed heightened today, alerted, as if he were on the run with pursuers after him.

  Ellie stood near, craning her neck to scan the area around them. “The cottonwood branches reach almost to the tops of the cliff,” she mused. “Only birds can reach those grapes.”

  Her melodic voice blended with the singing of a bird high up in the treetops, calling him, singing to his soul.

  “What a relief,” he sighed. “Here I was fearing you would send me up that tree to fetch grapes for your jelly.”

  When she turned her laughing face to him, their eyes held, transmitting a deep and sensual happiness from one to the other.

  Reaching an arm, he drew her around, found her lips, and felt his senses sway at the touch of her.

  Around them the world continued. The horses blew and snorted into the water, slurping it up with such gusto that the burbling of the spring was drowned out—just as his senses seemed drowned in the very essence of this woman.

  Ever since her startling answer to his proposal this morning he had vacillated between a state of euphoria and one of utter confusion. She had set him free. Free.

  His lips stroked hers, savoring, feasting on, consuming her lovely passion, passion she gave freely without reserve, without demands, a gift he held even more dear since her decision to set him free.

  Free…when he wasn’t at all sure that’s what he wanted to be.

  Anxious to reach their destination before nightfall, they ate in the saddle and by mid-afternoon found their way out of the canyon and into a ravine surrounded by a shin oak thicket. Ahead of them hills rolled forward in waves of dusty green and gold.

  At a small creek which Ellie said flowed from the Concho River farther north, they watered the horses, then continued across the grassy banks and now-red soil. In the distance he saw a dark line which could have been either trees along the Concho River or the cliffs themselves.

  “The cliffs,” Ellie told him. “They’re on the north bank of the river.” They looked to be five or so miles off.

  They came upon the river where it made a wide curve. On the opposite side a fractured wall of rock rose some fifty feet above the riverbed. Kale removed his hat, wiped his brow, and stared.

  It looked like an uneven stack of flapjacks, some thick, some thin—some with a reddish tint, others the gray and white of weathered limestone. He could see markings, but from this distance he couldn’t make out what they were, except for some that were obviously stars. Cactus grew from hollows which had been weathered in the sedimentary stone.

  “There’s a good crossing upriver.” Ellie pulled her mount to the west and Kale followed.

  “What now?” he called from behind her.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “There are a number of caves in the cliff.” She shrugged. “I thought we could look around, see what we find. I brought that piece of limestone from Benjamin’s pocket.”

  He followed her, considering her innocence. Even though she had been raised in what folks called a house of sin, apparently it had not touched her…much to Lavender Sealy’s credit, he knew. Lavender had been set on making a lady out of her.

  Which was why she had insisted that Ellie marry Benjamin Jarrett. A wise choice. Were she not his brother’s widow, he would never have met her. And had she married Benjamin for any other reason, she wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.

  In love with him…exactly the thing he had feared. Somehow it now gave him pleasure to think on it. He prayed he could learn to corral his own wandering instincts. He couldn’t stand to hurt her.

  By the time they had found the crossing, picketed the horses, and started their investigation of the cliffs, Kale began to suspect the futility of their trip—except for his own desperate reason for bringing her here: to get her away from the ranch before his brothers pulled their dreadful stunt.

  And to give himself a chance to come to terms with what he now suspected had been stewing inside him all along, since the first time he and Ellie loved, the night she’d come to him in that silky green thing.

  “Ellie,” he began. “I know you have your heart set on matching the drawings on that piece of limestone, but, hell, honey, I don’t see how it’ll be possible. Look around. There’re hundreds of drawings that chip could have come from. Look at them—stars, buffalo, turkeys.”

  “I know,” she called over her shoulder. “Aren’t they a wonder to behold?”

  He agreed, and when she paused on one of the wider ledges, he leaned beside her against the cliff wall and caught up her hand, lifting it to his lips, inhaling a deep draft of the delicate, tantalizing scent of this woman. “A wonder to behold.”

  Scanning the river and across it the stand of trees they had passed earlier, he realized the sun was fast sinking in the west. “We’d better go. We can make camp over there in those trees.”

  “No. There’s one more place I want to look. Only one. It’s the cave where we always camped. We can camp there tonight.”

  After they fetched their bedrolls and saddlebags and slung the whole lot over their backs, Ellie showed him where to start climbing to reach the cave.

  “Up there?” Even glancing up made him dizzy.

  She nodded. “It isn’t far.”

  “And I’m no goat.”

  “Oh, Kale, come on…you can do it. We climbed it several times—Benjamin, Armando, and myself.”

  The mention of Armando Costello steeled his determination and he glanced up the side of the cliff again.

  She began tugging at her boots. “You should remove your boots, too. It’s easier to get a foothold with bare feet.”

  He stared at her feet, now clad only in black stockings, and thought of them bare, clasped around his…

  “There’s only two things I remove my boots for, honey, and the side of a cliff isn’t a good place for either one.”

  The way she rolled her eyes, he knew she understood. “The side of a cliff isn’t a good place to incite lust, either,” she admonished cheerfully.

  He watched her climb, her buckskin-clad figure definitely inciting lust as she searched for and found one toehold after another. Drawing his mind back to the task at hand, he followed, telling himself that if that damned gambler could climb this cliff, so could he.

  By the time they reached the ledge in front of the cave, both were out of breath. Ellie dropped her backpack inside the lip of the shelter, then immediately began to rummage through it for a lantern and some matches. “The scenes inside this cave are the most fascinating of all,” she told Kale.

  He crouched beside her and struck a match on the sole of his boot. Taking the lantern from her hands, he proceeded to light it. “Now, aren’t you glad I wore my boots?”

  She grinned. “You aren’t interested in seeing the artifacts?”

  He studied her through the dim light with an intensity that set her heart to skipping. Pecking her quickly on the lips, he turned up the wick on the lantern. “I’m interested in what comes after we see the artifacts.”

  His innuendoes dimmed her own inclination to pursue what she knew to be a hopelessly dim chance of finding anything to shed light on Benjamin’s murder. However, she proceeded to show Kale around the room. Soon her enthusiasm for these drawings returned.

  “This is an account of the Comanche and Apache slaughter of the monks and soldiers at the mission outside Summer Valley; it happened over a hundred years ago.”

  Kale rested his hand on her back, massaging her shoulders and neck in a sensual gesture that set her heart pumping at a rapid clip. “I suppose that gambler figured all this out.”

  She laughed. “No, Armando did not figure all this out. Mrs. Wiginton told me these stories.” Slipping her free arm around his waist, she drew him to the other side of the cave. His jealousy of Armando Costello must surely be
a good sign, she thought. Surely.

  “This drawing shows the Indian attack near Mason when they abducted a little girl named Alice Todd.”

  Kale traced the drawing with his forefinger. Then he nodded toward a series of lines; they resembled tally marks. “Wonder what they were counting? Scalps?”

  “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

  “Hmm,” he agreed. “For both sides. The Indians were fighting a war for survival.”

  “Look at all the handprints,” she said. “What do you suppose they mean?”

  “Costello didn’t know?” he quipped.

  “He doesn’t know any more than you do about these things,” she responded. “He’s just…ah, more interested.”

  “More interested?” Catching her palm, he placed it inside one of the painted outlines of an ancient hand. Painstakingly, he adjusted the angle of her fingers, one by one, to fit inside the outline.

  A bittersweet sense of longing arose inside her at the disparity between the rough texture of the stones and the tenderness of his hand on hers. Suddenly she wanted him to kiss her, wanted desperately to feel his lips on hers, warming the chill that swept over her without warning.

  As if privy to her thoughts, he bent and covered her lips with his own.

  Oh, Kale, don’t leave me…please don’t leave me, she cried…but only in the silence of her heart.

  Lifting his lips a degree, he searched her imploring eyes. “What’s he more interested in than I am, Ellie?”

  She curled her lips together, pressing them against her teeth. She stared at him.

  “Certainly not in you,” he whispered. “That isn’t possible.”

  “I know,” she admitted. Turning then, she began searching the walls for a broken place to match the chip she found in Benjamin’s pocket. Kale followed, holding the lantern.

  “It’s like looking for that needle in the haystack folks are always talking about,” he told her.

  She nodded.

  “What’s it going to prove?”

  “That Benjamin was here before he was killed,” she responded. “Then we can look for other signs of him, piece together a trail like you did with the puddin’-foot.”

  They made their way around the room, Kale holding the lantern, Ellie searching with both her hands and her eyes for a chip in the ancient mural on the walls of the cave. When the orb of light dipped toward the floor, she reached for the lantern.

  Kale had squatted on his heels. An object made of silver glinted from his palm. He turned it over in his hands. “Look at this,” he called up to her. “Someone lost a belt buckle.” He started to tease her with Armando Costello’s name again, but without warning she sank to her knees beside him, snatched the buckle from his hand, and emitted a sound somewhere between a whimper and a death keening.

  “It’s Benjamin’s,” she whispered.

  Kale stared at her. “You’re sure?”

  Nodding mutely, she held the buckle closer to the light.

  Kale frowned. “I never knew Benjamin to wear fancy—”

  “I’m sure,” she repeated. “I bought this buckle myself, from a drummer who came through Summer Valley with trinkets and things from Mexico. It was for Benjamin’s birthday, and he always wore it.” She closed her fist around the buckle, hiding it from view. “I don’t know why I didn’t miss it among his clothing.”

  When her voice quivered, Kale pulled her to his chest. He soothed her head, his own still ringing from the impact of their discovery. Benjamin had come here…to this cave…just as she’d thought. He had come here, then he had been killed.

  With gentle hands he held Ellie back. “Why don’t you go out on ledge there, get some air? Let me look around.”

  She shook her head. “I’m all right. You might miss something.”

  There was truth in what she said, of course. He’d have dismissed the buckle had Ellie not been along.

  They searched until dusk began to fall, but to little avail. As diligently as they inspected every nook and cranny, even sifting the ashes in the firepit in the center of the cave, they found nothing conclusive. A dark stain on a piece of firewood could have been blood, and if so, it could have been Benjamin’s. Then again, it could as easily have been the blood of an animal, or not even blood at all.

  “There’s nothing else here, Ellie.”

  “Except this.” She had spent the last half hour painstakingly comparing the chipped fragment of limestone to every inch of the walls she could reach. “Come look.”

  Kale’s stomach churned with misgivings. He turned to see her holding her hand against the wall, as though merely resting it. As he watched, she withdrew her hand and part of the drawing fell away, etched as it was on the chip she had taken from Benjamin’s pocket.

  “He was here, all right,” Kale admitted. “His buckle proves it; matching this chip confirms it.”

  “And he was in trouble when he was here,” Ellie added.

  “Now we have to figure out why…and how…and who.”

  “The who should be obvious,” she stated.

  “You mean the Raineys?” he questioned.

  “Who else?”

  “I don’t know, Ellie. I’ve seen a lot of land-hungry men in my day. Men like the Raineys, who’d take a man’s land at the drop of a hat, killing whoever stood in their way. But frankly, I’ve never known a one of them to go to so much trouble to hide it. Mostly, they come right out in the open, knowing there’s no one to stand in judgment.”

  “Except Carson,” she argued. “And you.”

  He grunted. “The ranger and the gunfighter?”

  She had no answer for him. They began to climb down the hillside and recrossed the river, pitching camp beneath the trees, as Kale had previously suggested. The first thing they had agreed on after Ellie matched the fragment of limestone was not to spend the night in the cave. Neither could bear the idea of sleeping in the place where Benjamin might have been murdered.

  Later, they sat side by side, having finished a supper of sausage and fried bread, like the night before. But unlike the night before, their passions were aroused not for each other, but at the cold-blooded killers who had robbed them both of a man they had loved and admired and depended upon.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. “You’re no gunfighter, Kale. I know that now. But the Raineys don’t. They could fear your wrath as much as they do Carson’s badge.”

  Kale tossed a twig he had been chewing into the fire. “They’d better. Benjamin Jarrett was the best man I ever knew, and he didn’t deserve to die.”

  “No, he didn’t,” she agreed, keeping to herself the newfound knowledge that the Jarrett family had produced more than one good man.

  They arrived back at the ranch near dusk the following day. Little had happened during their absence, but Kale was disappointed not to have received replies to his wires.

  “We did hear from Carson, though,” Ginny told him. “He’s still in Mexico.”

  “Don’t reckon we’ll see hide nor hair of him anytime soon,” Zachariah added. “He’s up in the Sierra Madres, place called Real de Catorce, chasing silver bandits with that hell-raising friend of yours, Santos Mazón. Said he hopes we can handle things down here.”

  Kale told them, then, what he and Ellie had discovered at the painted cliffs, and as he had predicted on the trail, the brothers did not take well to the findings.

  “Saddle up,” Rubal demanded. “We’ll ride over there tonight and see what the Raineys have to say for themselves. They can’t fight us all and win.”

  “Tomorrow,” Zachariah told the group. “Come morning we’ll ride to the Circle R. Tonight we have a duty that’s been too long neglected.”

  He meant a family service at Benjamin’s grave, where Ellie discovered much to her astonishment the brothers had built a picket fence while she and Kale were away.

  Zachariah conducted the service, reading first from the Book of Genesis, a passage which Ellie had never heard, but which surprised her with its vio
lence: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

  Afterwards the group sang “Rock of Ages,” and Ellie was glad Benjamin had taught her to sing it.

  Zachariah spoke a few words then in remembrance of their brother.

  “Benjamin was more father to us than brother,” he began. His eyes rested on Ellie, and she noticed the deep sadness within them, a sadness reflected in the eyes and faces and carved into the hearts of everyone there.

  “Father and husband,” Zachariah corrected himself.

  Ellie stood between Ginny and Delta, and at Zachariah’s next words she looked up to find Kale studying her from across the grave. She felt her face flush.

  “Although Benjamin left no children of his own seed,” Zachariah intoned, “we are his children. We will carry on his good name and keep to his high ideals.”

  Again Ellie felt Zachariah’s eyes on her. She stared hard at the ground, thinking her expression would surely give away her thoughts. “To this end, we pledge ourselves, each in the manner appointed, to see after his widow, Ellie.”

  Zachariah’s words gave pause to Ellie. She wasn’t sure she grasped his meaning; she didn’t think she would like it if she had.

  Forcibly she pushed aside the memory of Kale’s strange proposal. The group sang about crossing the River Jordan, and again she was glad Benjamin had taught her so well. Obviously, he had taught the others the same things.

  When the service ended, she thanked Zachariah and the brothers for building the fence.

  “It was Kale’s idea,” Rubal told her.

  “Kale’s orders,” Jubal corrected.

  But when she turned to Kale, he stared across the valley. “I see our friends are back.” He nodded toward the rock shelter, where Ellie saw the flicker of a campfire.

  “Don’t worry yourselves,” Zachariah told them. “They’ve been there ever since you two struck out for the cliffs. The boys and I visited with them; they claim they have a right to be there.”

  “They don’t,” Ellie seethed.

  “Certainly not when they use it as a base to spy on Ellie, or to burn her out,” Kale informed his brother.

  “Regardless,” Zachariah continued, “they say the Raineys claim land to the edge of the crest there. Said Matt Rainey himself holds the deed.”