The sandals were also stowed in the rebozo Shea carried. He’d padded the toes of her boots with the softest strips of rabbit fur and she had firm orders to call a halt if a blister started.
Pinacate increased steadily in size, a longish mountain with its highest elevation on the south. Shea began to suspect uneasily that to know a ranch lay beyond it was like knowing there was a water hole on this side. It could mean almost anywhere.
They reached the bottom of the rocky, scrub-grown peak that evening, camped in a silted wash and began the ascent next morning before dawn.
“Moses must have felt like this when he was fixing to pass out of the desert into the Promised Land,” Shea said as they paused for breath.
“I think the Promised Land was also a desert.”
“What?” He gazed at her in shock. “Then what’s all that about milk and honey?”
“Bees make honey in the desert, very fine honey from mesquite, acacia and cactus flowers.” Her chin poked out stubbornly. “That milk must have come from goats because you don’t hear much about cattle. The scriptures tell about shepherds, not vaqueros. It is muy claro that a country that uses mules and camels instead of horses must be desert!”
“But the Jordan River! The Dead Sea—”
“That tells you! It’s full of salt. As for the Jordan, pues, don’t you remember how Naaman, commander of the Syrian hosts, came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy?”
“Can’t say that I do.” Getting to Mass and confession when his mother began to fear for his soul had been about the total of his religious education.
“When the prophet told Naaman to wash in the Jordan, he became furious! He said the rivers of Damascus were much cleaner and better. It took his servants a time to persuade him to bathe in the Jordan, even to cure his leprosy.”
“Did it?”
“Of course!”
“Then I’d call it a pretty good old river.”
She glared at him. “It wasn’t the river at all, you redhead burro!”
Startled as if a hummingbird had suddenly attacked, Shea blinked, then covered a grin, delighted that she had a temper. It was a sign she was human, had passion that could be reached.
“Not the river?” he asked innocently. “What was it, then?”
“Faith!” she fairly shrieked at him. “Faith and humility!”
He could no longer control his laughter. Flushing, she stamped her foot, but after an indignant sputter, she laughed, too. They were still chuckling when they reached the top of the ridge and looked down and away.
The ranch lay just beyond them, but when they saw it, their smiles froze.
IV
Corrals, a rambling adobe house with smaller ones close by, several ramadas, open shelters for working in the shade where one could catch a breeze. There was a well by some watering troughs with a cluster of trees scattered along an old riverbed.
What Shea didn’t want to see were the bodies.
Socorro gasped and caught his arm. He led her over to a shallow cave, made her sit down. “Stay here. I’ll see if anyone’s alive.” He doubted it from the way buzzards, ravens and coyotes had been feeding.
Leaving everything but the jug and knife with Socorro, he went warily down the slope. As he neared a corral, made by stacking rough lengths of wood between uprights, a coyote trotted into the brush and several ravens scolded as they rose heavily.
What must have been two men sprawled there, eyes pecked out, faces with a strange melted look because the scalps were gone. Shea swallowed the hot scalding in his throat, walked on, watching for any movement. The corpses stank. Must have happened yesterday; much longer than that and the wild scavengers would’ve left nothing but bones.
Four more men lay between the corrals and houses, so mutilated that he couldn’t tell how they’d died. No arrows sticking out of them, though. Buzzards flopped only a little way off, bald red heads grotesquely small on hulking bodies with wingspans almost as much as Shea’s six foot two.
The big house was where the real carnage was. Apparently the attackers had surprised the six men outside, but eight more men, three women and a half-dozen children, from a babe to ones of ten or eleven years, had taken refuge in the house.
They’d fought for their lives. A few still gripped the makeshift weapons they’d snatched up, a hunk of wood, an iron ladle, part of a broken yoke. Such real weapons as they’d had must have been looted by their murderers.
All were scalped, even a baby that had held to its mother’s breast as she tried to protect it. The skirts of all the women, from a toothless aged one to a girl so young she had no breasts, were rucked up about their hips.
Shea leaned against the lintel. He’d seen battlefields, but nothing like this. Birds and beasts had feasted here, too, but he could see that several of the men had been shot. And weren’t Apaches said to usually take children, often women, into captivity?
Dazed, he made the women’s clothes as decent as possible and put the baby’s head beneath its mother’s arm so its wound didn’t show.
He had to get these people buried, a huge task in itself. He didn’t want Socorro to see that. As for the Promised Land—if this was any sample, they’d be better off at one of their tinajas! Except, sometime, the Areneños would turn up.
Stepping out the open back door, he found two more children, evidently caught as they tried to run in from play or chores. They were so chewed up that he couldn’t tell whether they were boys or girls, they were just thin and brown and little.
Faint at the sight and stench, he circled the buildings and corrals. The remains of a butchered cow lay by the trough which was dry. Cattle were crowding up, evidently hoping for water.
Going over to the well, he lowered the big rawhide bucket by its rawhide rope which passed over a pulley. It must have held over ten gallons, weighing close to a hundred pounds, so it didn’t take too long to water the stock enough to hold them till he could finish the job. Had to get back to Socorro, tell her to wait while he took care of the bodies.
She wasn’t in the shallow cave. Shea’s heart plunged. Then he saw her down the slope quite a distance, not far from the most outlying corral, kneeling by something obscured by the brush which had kept him from seeing her as he climbed.
He ran toward her. She glanced about imploringly. He could see now that she was giving water to a man, supporting his head and shoulders.
The man’s left thigh looked to be half-shot away. It teemed with maggots; good thing, ugly’ as they were. Cleaned out rotten flesh better than any surgeon.
He choked on the water, struggled feebly, moaning. “Out of his head, poor devil,” said Shea, dropping on one knee to examine the wound. “Looks like a musket ball passed through, tore a big hole on its way out. Don’t think it touched the joint.”
“He has fever. If we could get him into some shade—” Her eyes widened as she remembered. “Is anyone else alive?”
“No.”
“Apache?”
He shrugged. “No arrows. But everyone was scalped.”
She shuddered and held the man closer against her. Young, good-looking vaquero, little more than a boy. And he’d kept his hair. “How’d you find him?” Shea demanded.
That small chin thrust out in a way he was beginning to recognize. “When you were gone so long, I got worried and started down to work my way around the corrals in case you were in trouble.”
“Damn it, I told you to wait! What if this man had been a scalper?”
“Well, he wasn’t! And—and if anything happened to you, I’d want it to happen to me!”
Her eyes sparkled with held-back tears. Shea’s anger dissolved along with the irrational jealousy he felt at seeing her fuss over the vaquero. Besides, there was too much to do.
“Let’s get him under a ramada. Maybe you can get his fever down, dress that wound with mashed agave. Can you fetch our other gear?”
She nodded and started up the ridge. Shea hefted the youngster as gently as he could an
d packed him down to the ramada farthest from the house of death. He’d hoped to get the dead men away from the corrals before Socorro returned, but she reached them before he did, put down her burdens.
Kneeling by the raddled, stinking corpses, she made the sign of the cross over each and bowed her head for a moment. Then she picked up the food and water, hurrying to the ramada, at once making the man a pillow of the rebozo-wrapped food. She didn’t look up as Shea passed her with the first body, but began to bathe the vaquero’s face and throat with the edge of her rebozo.
On his reconnaissance of the space behind the big house, Shea had glimpsed an arroyo. Digging separate graves for all these people was pointless; the thing was to get them decently covered with the kind earth, and that quickly!
More cattle had come up and were bawling their heads off, so as soon as he’d got the remains of the second man to the shallowest part of the arroyo, Shea hauled up more water, pausing as he struggled with the bucket to see that there were dozens of the animals now. Surely Apaches would’ve run them off to slaughter or sell?
Cows with satisfied thirst gave way to newcomers who crowded in as fast as they could at the long broad trough and seemed to fairly soak up the water. Shea’s back and arms were aching by the time the last of them were drinking. He lowered a much smaller bucket and took it over to Socorro.
“Try this,” he said, filling one of their gourds. “It should taste sweeter than that tinaja juice!”
She thanked him but lifted the young vaquero and held the gourd to his mouth. He drank and seemed quieter. Compressing his lips, Shea handed her another gourd.
“You drink, too,” she insisted.
Shea tilted the bucket and took a long delicious draught. Pure and cool, it tasted better than the finest whiskey or wine. “Stay here till I come back,” he commanded.
“Eat a little first,” she suggested.
He wouldn’t be able to keep it down. Not with what he had to do. “Later. Use the tinaja water to bathe the kid.”
Several coyotes faded out the back door as he’ entered the house. Ravens flapped out doors and the several small windows. Shea looked at the bodies and choked back vomit. Arms dragged off, feet, legs. And what was left—
Hadn’t he seen a wheelbarrow out back?
Into it, breathing as thinly as possible of the tainted air, he loaded the human debris, jolted the grisly burden to the arroyo, having to stop to retrieve an arm that fell off, a head that separated from gnawed shoulders.
Nineteen people, eight of them children, and the six men by the corrals. Twenty-five human beings wiped out.
Why?
The way everyone was scalped made him think of bounty hunters. But these folks weren’t Apaches.
As he placed the mother and baby on top of other corpses, Shea gritted his teeth and wished he could get hold of whatever devils, red, white or brown, who’d done it. Might they have cruel deaths and a long hell!
It took several trips. When the last bodies were dropped into the gulch, he found a shovel and ax in one of the sheds and chopped a covering of limbs and brush for the burial before he caved in the arroyo sides to add a layer of crumbled white earth.
Panting, he rested in the shade a few minutes before he tossed and rolled rocks on top to discourage animals. Not enough, but he’d add more later.
He carried ax and shovel to the house. Iron was rare in this region. That the raiders hadn’t taken such things pointed more than ever at men who’d only wanted scalps.
Sweet Jesus, give me a crack at them and I promise to cleanse your earth of as many as you give me aid to put away!
You could say the Sonoran government asked for it by granting bounty on Apache scalps. But it wasn’t some high muck-amuck paying the consequences. It was people like this, working hard to scratch their living from a bleakness he couldn’t have imagined from Ireland. Those women, the kids, that baby!
The long room with a fireplace at one end served all the needs of living. Chilis dangled from the beams, strings of garlic and many-colored corn. A black iron kettle on the hearth held dried remnants of beans. Either the raiders had eaten their victims’ food or some animal had.
There was a trestle table with carved chairs, benches of rawhide pulled taut over wooden frames. Bridles, saddles, and other gear dangled from pegs or lay on the floor. There were several chests, opened and plundered, and in one corner a niche with Guadalupe, the brown madonna of Mexico.
In the storeroom off the kitchen baskets and clay jars had been wantonly broken, kicked over or spilled. Birds and small wild things had foraged the trove, leaving their tracks and droppings. But there was still a lot of usable food.
The other room held a big canopied bed, posts handsomely carved though the mattress was of shucks and it was covered with serapes. There were a number of straw mats and more serapes stacked in the corner. Evidently the owner of the ranch and his wife had kept a certain rough state though now they lay jumbled with their vaqueros and servants.
The odor of decay was thick. They’d have to stay here till the vaquero died or got better. Shea found steel and flint and started a fire from the waiting tinder and mesquite, carried good-sized branches to burn where the bodies had lain. In several places, blood had soaked the hard-packed dirt floor. He carried in shovelsful of earth and scattered it over the stains.
The mesquite was exuding its fragrant smoke, purifying the foulness. It was all Shea could do to ready the place for Socorro.
Near sundown now and he hadn’t eaten since morning. Before they entered the Promised Land! Now he was ravenous.
Shea glanced quickly inside the other small houses, probably the homes of married vaqueros. Fireplaces, grinders, tortilla grills, a bean pot. No furniture. A few garments hung on pegs and mats and serapes were rolled in a corner.
Again he had to stifle unreasoning jealousy as he approached the ramada. Socorro had held him, a stranger, the same way a few short weeks ago, saved his life.
Was he blithering ingrate enough to grudge this poor lad the same mercy?
Shea reined himself in sharply, but a niggling part of him would grumble that she didn’t need to pillow that dark, probably verminous head against her breast; she didn’t need to be smiling quite that sympathetically as she coaxed bits of moistened meal cake down him!
“So you’re back amongst us?” Shea said, stooping down.
That smooth brown cheek had never been shaved. It was a fine lot of curly black hair that had escaped the knife. Broad, high cheekbones, a full handsome mouth if it hadn’t been dry and cracked. But it was the eyes that rocked Shea.
In a small town in the Sierra Madre, villagers had asked several off-duty San Patricios if they would kill a tigre that was killing their stock. This tigre had killed off all the local dogs who’d been used to trail him. Besides, the soldiers had rifles, not worn-out old muskets! There would be a big barbecue and baile for them if they succeeded, floods of good mescal and lots of pretty girls!
What soldiers ever turned down such an offer?
Michael, Shea and two experienced hunters, with the U.S. Army Model 1841 percussion rifles they’d brought across the Rio Grande, set off with a rancher who took them that night to the depredating tigre’s home territory.
One of the hunters threw back his head and gave out a blood-curdling roar, imitating a trespassing rival male. In seconds there was an answering yowl, followed by the giant cat himself.
The tigre got the full load of four rifles, but still crashed after his foes till they had to run. Villagers brought torches after the beast collapsed. Hauled up by one sinewy spotted leg, hitched over a pole set between uprights, his tawny body, marked with black rosettes and spots, looked immense. He must have weighed as much as Shea and from nose to tail measured eight feet.
But Shea, in the flare of torches, had looked into fierce golden eyes that had in them all the wonder, ferocity and beauty of the wilds. He felt no pride as they glazed and he suddenly despised the exulting villagers who p
elted the limp body with rocks and mud.
“What’s the matter?” Michael had asked, and then, peering at his twin, shook his head disgustedly. “Come out of it, Shea! Sure, you can’t blame the poor folk for wanting to keep their livestock!”
“I don’t,” said Shea. But those eyes had burned into him. He hadn’t stayed for the barbecue and dance.
Now he looked into those same tigre eyes.
Lashes long and soft as a girl’s closed over them. “Thousand thanks,” the vaquero said weakly. “Are—are they all—?”
“Twenty-five dead. Fourteen men, three women, eight children.”
The young man made an obvious effort to fit the people he’d known, perhaps loved, to that numbering. “Todos,” he said after a moment. “All.” His hands clenched convulsively. “There must be a reason that I live! It must be to avenge this rancho.”
“You—had family here?” Shea asked.
The youngster said dully, “Don Antonio Cantú, the ranchero, was my father, though I am called only Santiago. My mother died a long time ago.”
“Then you own the ranch.”
“No.” The cat eyes were surprised. “Don Antonio never married my mother. She was a slave.”
“Slavery is forbidden in Mexico,” Socorro remonstrated.
The boy grinned feebly. “She was Apache, madama, stolen from her people and sold to Don Antonio when she was ten years old. She belonged to him like his horse or cow.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Yanquis!” He spat the word. “Scalp hunters. There must have been a dozen of them. They rode up from the old riverbed yesterday morning, dropping those of us who were outside and riding up to the house. I crawled into the brush beyond the corral, covering my blood.”
He stopped. Tears formed and ran slowly down his cheeks. “I had no weapon. There was nothing, wounded like this, that I could do. I—I heard the women scream. I kept fainting as I bled, it was like a faraway bad dream. Some of the Yanquis came back to scalp my friends. One said he thought there’d been another body but the others hooted at him, said he was so greedy he was seeing things.” The young face contorted. “They counted the money they would get, grumbling that there were so many children who were worth only twenty-five pesos. Then one said they had a fine bargain anyway, for these scalps were much easier to take than those of Apaches for which they’d be paid.”
The Valiant Women Page 5