“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s true, and I need to get it off my chest. I can’t let Brago sit in jail for something I did.”
Rutledge sighed. The man looked like he was telling the truth. Damnation! “If you’re telling the truth, I’m gonna have to lock you up, you know that, don’t you? I have to let him go and lock you up. You want that?”
“Whatever I deserve, I’ll take,” Grant said.
“But you were sitting with the girl, with Judy…” Rutledge stopped. He was confused. He liked this young man. He liked the way he looked and the way he had stayed by Judy’s side. The orderly had told him how Foreman had refused to leave her alone.
“Why are you leaving her?” he demanded, stalling.
“She has someone else now. She doesn’t need me.”
“Who?”
“Morgan Todd.”
“That bastard! You’d leave her with him? He beat her. Didn’t you know that?”
“I knew. That’s why I shot him. I saw him drag her into the barn. I took Johnny’s gun from his cabin. I ran toward the barn, but before I got there Todd staggered outside and started yelling. I let him go by and ran into the barn. I found Judy—dead, I thought. So I followed Todd and shot him.”
“Mr. Foreman, you were not exactly alone in that compound. A dozen men stood guard around that wall. A company of soldiers slept within three hundred feet of where Todd was shot.”
“The guards were looking out, not in. I didn’t announce my intentions. I just walked up to him and shot him. By then people were running toward me, but I slipped into the orchard and climbed a tree. They ran right past.” Grant hung his head. “I thought he had killed Judy. To my way of thinking he deserved to die.”
“I could not agree with you more. The man’s a scoundrel. He may have wealth, but that does not mitigate the fact that he is a worthless scoundrel. Judy Burkhart deserves better than him.”
Confused, Grant sat down in the chair facing Rutledge’s desk.
“The bastard should have croaked. Can’t depend on a doctor. Usually they kill men in surgery, but Potter saved him. Blast it! Saving a stupid bastard like that. Can’t depend on anything anymore. Nothing ever works out.” Rutledge sighed.
“What do you want me to do? Should I go over to the stockade?”
“Stockade? No. No…go back to Judy. Stay with her.”
“But I confessed.”
“You going to run away?” Rutledge demanded angrily.
“Well, no, but—”
“Then do as you’re told!”
Grant looked so thoroughly miserable that Judy stirred and pretended to wake up for the first time.
He jerked alert. “Hey,” he said slowly, “you’re awake. Thank God…Are you okay?”
“I think so,” she said, looking about. “Where’s Steve? Is he back yet?”
Grant didn’t want to bother her with the details. “Not yet. Johnny went to get him. How do you feel?”
“A little dizzy. Not so unusual for me, huh?”
“You look wonderful.”
“I’m a wreck. How long have I been out?”
“Two days.”
Judy touched her face and winced. “Where’s Steve?”
“You just asked me that,” Grant said, but she looked at him so blankly that he realized she didn’t remember his answer. “He left with the mule train. Johnny will reach him in time.”
“How’ve you been?” she asked.
“Couldn’t be better, now that you’re awake. Does everything work? You know, hands, feet, liver?”
Judy wiggled. “Seems to.”
Relief flooded through Grant.
Judy slept again, this time straight through until morning. She ate breakfast and sat up, and Grant felt so relieved that not even the cramp in his back could put him in a bad mood. Either that chair was getting harder or his back was getting softer.
“Grant, I need to talk to you about Morgan,” Judy said, sounding softer, less sure of herself.
A sense of foreboding seeped into him. “I saw him talking to…I didn’t know you were awake…”
“I was about half-awake. He said he was sorry about what he did. I think he said he wants to marry me.”
Grant leaned back in his chair, studying his booted feet halfway under the bed. “He’ll probably make a real good husband for you now that he’s learned his lesson.”
Staring at the ceiling, Judy fought down the hard lump rising in her throat. Why had she started this? Out of the corner of her eye, she was watching Grant. He wasn’t even looking at her. “Probably,” she whispered.
“Well,” Grant said briskly. “See how well everything works out.” He had meant to say more, but lies did not come easily to him. He plunged ahead before he could back out. “Funny how things work out. When I went over to the post office yesterday afternoon while Morgan Todd was visiting with you I found out I had a letter that’s been sitting there for a couple of weeks. My mother needs me. My father…had a stroke…”
“Oh no! Oh, Grant, I’m so sorry!”
Grant colored with embarrassment at her distress. “It was only a minor stroke. He’s going to be fine. It’s just that now they need me to run the store. I guess he’s thinking about retiring for good. I’ll be number-one son—for a while, anyway.”
“That’s a wonderful opportunity for you, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice breaking. She forced an apologetic laugh. “I’ll have to learn to talk all over again. Bet you’ll be glad to miss that,” she said, gazing out the window. Her hands twisted at the sheet.
“It won’t take you long. I’d stake money on that.”
“Sure. I’ll be fine. I’ll write you letters. Tell you about what a wonderful time I’m having. Will you be leaving right away?”
Grant shrugged. “I’ll wait till you go home. You can put up with me that long, can’t you?”
“Sure,” she said. “What are friends for?”
Chapter Forty-One
“Wal, I’ll be hornswoggled!” Red McElhaney said, shaking his unruly red hair to get out the sand and burrs he had picked up when he’d dived off his horse. Red had seen Steve Burkhart go down and hadn’t waited for instructions. All his mother’s sons had well-developed survival instincts.
Dap stood up and brushed at his clothes. “They left,” he said.
Johnny surveyed the horizon, shaking his head. He couldn’t understand it, either. El Gato Negro had spared them! He’d had them pinned down, outnumbered four to one, and he had ridden away with Tía and the silver exactly as he had said he would. It didn’t make sense, but there was no time now to ponder it.
He turned to Dap. “I want you to take charge. Take the dead and wounded back to Fort Bowie.”
“Where you going?” Dap asked. He knew the answer already. He’d watched Johnny looking at Tía for the past week.
“South,” Johnny said, his eyes narrowed into slits as he glanced off in the direction the girl had gone.
“I won’t need all these men to nurse a few cripples.”
“You will if you run into Chatto or Geronimo.”
“And you won’t?” Dap growled.
“I move easier alone.”
Dap lifted his eyebrows in consternation. “A smart cock-a-doodle-doo would send somebody else.”
“Well, now you know why I’m going.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Johnny said dryly.
Halfway to the pueblos, Patchy Arteaga pulled Mateo Lorca aside.
“Un momento, General,” he said respectfully.
It was time for a rest stop. Mateo raised his hand. The girl drooped behind him. Dismounting, he steadied her sagging form and then walked a distance away so Patchy could speak to him privately.
“We are being followed.”
“How many?”
“One.”
Mateo looked back over the trail. “The one who spoke for them?”
“Si.”
Eyes closed, Mateo consi
dered this information. Johnny Brago was well known to him: as the man who had shot one of his caballeros for a slight indiscretion, as the man who had lain with Tía, and as a man with a reputation as a fast gun, a man who killed his own kind. Mateo’s lips curled with contempt. “Let him come,” he said slowly. “Keep him in sight. I will tell you when to kill him.”
“Si, General.”
When they reached the pueblos, the sun was still high in the evening sky. Tía drooped with weariness. Mateo helped her down and turned her over to a short man with a sweat-shiny cherubic face. He led her up a long flight of stairs, put her inside a sparsely furnished room, and stationed himself outside the door.
The room had a bed, a bureau, two straight-backed chairs, and a table. Tía stumbled to the bed and dropped across it. She had slept only a few hours in the past forty-eight.
She should have been worried; she knew what Papa intended to do with her. But she was too tired to grapple with that now. Shutting everything out, she curled into a tight little knot in the center of the bed and fell almost instantly into an exhausted sleep.
Mateo Lorca spent two hours seeing to the details that required his attention. He settled a dispute between two men who had both claimed the same woman in marriage. He gave directions for the conversion of the silver into cash. He ordered supplies from a town in the Animas Valley where his operatives could obtain anything from gold to shellfish. He ate with three of his lieutenants, and then, while the sun was still relatively high in the sky, he went to his room.
Teresa was asleep. With her face unguarded and her arm thrown back over her head in childish abandonment, she looked no more than ten years old. Mateo sighed heavily and turned away. He walked back to the door, but he could not bring himself to pull the latch key. He stood there feeling a hard emptiness in his stomach, cursing himself for his weakness.
The girl is a gringa, he reminded himself. The daughter of that bitch and her gringo lover! Female captives must be treated as the women of my family had been treated by the hated gringos.
Mateo said the words in his mind, but he did not respond. Tiredly he leaned against the door. You are getting old, Mateo. Old and senile and soft. Like a woman. For years now you have been avoiding the taking of female prisoners. Now, instead of a war camp, you rule a small city. Because you have encouraged your men to keep women of their own kind, because you are soft.
A sickness rose up in him, filling his chest and tightening his throat. No matter how hard he resisted, the images kept coming. He saw Teresa as she had been at five with her oversized childish head on her slender, round little body. She had been the most beautiful, magical creature he had ever seen on the back of a horse. The look in her blue eyes as she slowly overcame her own fears and realized that she could master the animal by her will alone, her joy and gratitude when she looked at him—as if he alone had given her this gift. Even in memory, his pride filled him with intense joy.
He needed to put these images aside and remember that Teresa was his enemy. Her mother had hated him so much that she’d flaunted this blond bastard before him and the world.
Deliberately he concentrated on Rita—his bitch of a wife—seeing her as clearly as if she were standing before him. He smiled. She would be devastated. Inconsolable. Fighting for her cub, she would be a tigress. She would be as she had been that first night…
The memory of that night was bright and hard in his mind. He relived it all, every second of it. Mateo straightened. He was fortified; he could feel the heavy pulsation of his lust.
“Wake up, gringa.”
Moaning softly, Tía rolled over, burying her face under her arms.
“Wake up. Or would you prefer that I offer you to my men?” he asked, his voice tight and harsh.
“Ohhh…” Tía turned over, blinking. “Papa?”
“Do not call me that unless you wish to die. You are your mother’s bastard, nothing more.”
Tía sat up in bed. Papa’s black eyes were filled with coldness. Like an animal waking in the night, instantly alert, fear sprang alive in her. She scooted away until her back touched the brass headboard of the bed.
Mateo smiled. With fear in her wide blue eyes, she looked like Rita the night after he’d first mastered her.
In that moment she was Rita. Mateo stepped toward her.
Swallowing, her breast heaving with the sudden fear that gripped her, Tía looked quickly from side to side. A bottle lay on its side near the bed. She threw herself at it, grabbed it by the slender round neck, and broke the bottom against the brass headboard of the bed. The green glass shattered. Turning, she pressed the jagged glass against her neck under her ear.
Mateo stopped. They stared at each other in silence, the tension like a visible wall between them. Tía was aware of the throb of her artery against the cool edge of the glass.
As Mateo started forward, Tía pressed the sharp edge against her skin. “Wait!” he said.
Her eyes opened. Mateo held up his hand to stop her, noticing the tiny stream of blood trickling down her slim throat. She would do it, he realized in surprise. She would kill herself before she let him touch her. She was a gringa, but she was her mother’s daughter.
He stepped back. Now he had something to stir him—a worthy opponent. Smiling, he bowed low before her. “You win this round, niña, but I will return. Next time, I will be better prepared.”
The door closed. Shaking as if she had taken a chill, Tía dropped the bottle and collapsed across the bed.
Mateo Lorca found Patchy in the cantina, enjoying tequila with three friends. The two comrades walked outside, where the sinking sun was still hot in the western sky.
“All is not well?” Patchy said, studying his chief’s face.
Mateo frowned aside the question. “Bring Johnny Brago to me…alive.”
“The one who followed us?”
“Sí. Are your men still watching him?”
“Sí.” Patchy paused. “I will see to it.”
“Alive and unhurt. I would have the pleasure of changing that myself.”
“Sí, mí general. It will be as you wish.”
“Pronto.”
“Within the half hour, mí general.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Like a toy city beneath the billowing skirts of a female colossus, the pueblos sat at the bottom of a massive, smooth sweep of limestone. From the canyon wall opposite the pueblos, Johnny watched the activity through field glasses.
For all intents and purposes, it was a city he watched. Men, women, animals, children, came and went as naturally as if they lived in Fort Bowie and their existence was guaranteed by the full resources of the U.S. Cavalry. But why shouldn’t they feel safe? No one had ever followed El Gato Negro to his lair and lived to tell about it.
Johnny knew enough about El Gato Negro to know that if the man captured him, he would not live to tell about it, either. The whereabouts of the Black Cat’s mountain hideaway was worth his life. If the army knew where El Gato Negro was, they would come after him with a thousand soldiers. They wanted him that badly. As an intruder who carried this knowledge, his only chance, if he had one, was to sneak in after dark, take Tía, and sneak out again without her being missed.
Not a small order. Johnny drew his bowie knife and tested the edge for sharpness. Taking out a whetstone, he honed the blade long and patiently until the edge gleamed with deadly sharpness. Next he took one of his blankets and cut a hole in the middle for his head. It would serve as a serape. After dark, dressed like a Mexican, perhaps he could slip in and get close enough to be effective.
He ate three biscuits and some bacon he had squirreled away in his saddlebags and then stretched out to wait for darkness. He’d closed his eyes for only a moment when a sound beside him drew his attention outward. Slowly he opened his eyes. A dozen fierce-eyed vaqueros surrounded him, their rifles aimed at his chest.
“You will come with us.” The man who spoke had a round, morose face with large, doleful eyes and full, tre
mulous lips. His clothes were hidden beneath a serape covered with once colorful patches. Now they were merely dirty.
Johnny frowned. It didn’t make sense. They should have killed him on the spot. Slowly he rose to his feet.
“¡Andale!” The one in the dirty serape prodded him with the barrel of his rifle. Johnny moved with more alacrity, but not as much as they would have liked, just enough to stop the pain in his ribs.
They tied his hands behind his back, took his knife, guns, and rifle, and then they paraded him through the village streets. Men and women watched from doors and windows, much as they would have in Tombstone if the sheriff had brought in a prisoner: curious, impassive, but not personally concerned. As soon as he had passed, curtains dropped back into place and families returned to their dinners. Johnny smelled the rich, beefy aroma, and his stomach growled.
“Wait here.”
“Here” was in the central courtyard at the bottom of a long stairway that led up to two pueblos that sat far above all the others. The man in the dirty serape climbed the stairs and knocked on one of the doors. El Gato Negro appeared, they talked briefly, and then the man came back and spoke to the men guarding Johnny. They called him Patchy.
Upstairs, El Gato Negro walked to the other door, opened it, and disappeared inside. Patchy rattled off orders in rapid, slurred Spanish. Then all the Mexicans walked away until they were out of earshot and talked together in low tones.
What were they up to now? Uncomfortable, Johnny strained his ears to hear, but it was no use. Damn! He hated surprises.
Mateo Lorca walked next door to the room where he had left Teresa. As soon as his hand touched the door latch, a scuttling sound started inside. When the door swung wide, he saw Teresa crouched in the far corner of the room, the broken bottle pressed to her throat.
He chuckled softly. “Still prepared, I see.”
Tía licked dry lips but did not reply. Her eyes were hard with determination. That was good, thought Mateo. Her stubbornness fanned the flames of his own resolve.
“A friend of yours has come to call.”
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