The Valiant Women

by Jeanne Williams

  After such a long time of there being only the four of them, it seemed strange, even slightly uncomfortable, to have strangers at the ranch. But Belen and Chuey were quiet and unobtrusive. That afternoon they rode out with Santiago and Shea to see if any cows were in trouble with calving. When they returned after twilight, Santiago reported that Chuey was incredible with the reata.

  “I think he could cast a mangana on a mosquito!” Santiago marveled. “The way he brought down that bull that charged us! And Belen is very skilled with cows. A young one could not give birth; the calf was turned the wrong way, but Belen reached in and brought it around, helped the worn-out little cow expel it. A fine baby bull.”

  “They’re good vaqueros,” Shea agreed. “Now if this Pedro Sanchez brings his family, we can really chouse out strays. Reckon we could sell some this fall?”

  Santiago laughed. “You want to get rid of wild ones like those that charged us today? A good idea. We should cull off the meanest, skinniest ones, build up our herd from those carrying the best flesh.”

  “We’re really getting started!” Shea’s exultant laughter died as rapidly as it had begun and Socorro knew he was thinking of his dead brother who could not share his luck, or of his starved mother. Aching for him, Socorro took comfort from thinking that the child she carried would help him look forward, not at the cruel past.

  “How will we ask Mangus about the mines?” she questioned.

  “We’ll have to find him. Which may not be the safest thing in the world.” Shea thought for a moment. “I must go for sure since this red hair will be easy to recognize.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Socorro.

  “No, love. We might be killed long before we found any sign of Mangus. I won’t risk you.”

  “Then I won’t risk you!” she flashed.

  “Mangus doesn’t know Santiago,” Shea pointed out.

  “I no hunt Apache!” said Tjúni in positive tones.

  Socorro held Shea’s gaze. “If it’s important enough for you to go, I’m coming! If it isn’t, let’s forget the whole thing. We have enough to eat and a start of cattle.”

  “We have no legal title to this land,” Shea pointed out. “We’ll need more as our herd increases.”

  “And with money we could buy good breeding stock, horses and cattle,” put in Santiago. His eyes glowed and he put on swagger as he strolled about the room. “Ay, it would please me to show Don Narcisco that his brother’s Apache bastard could become a big ranchero!”

  “You think Don Narcisco will agree to the half-share?” Socorro asked.

  “Seguramente sí! He needs cash for his frolics in Hermosillo and Mexico City. Some is better than none.”

  “Then I think,” said Socorro, turning to her husband, “that we should start tomorrow and look for Mangus.”

  “Maybe you took a fancy to that big Apache,” growled Shea. “Maybe you hope he’ll keep you for a wife!”

  “If I did,” she said sweetly, “I’d hunt him by myself! Don’t try to go off without me, Shea. I’d follow you alone.”

  “Not alone, lady,” corrected Santiago.

  With a surrendering shrug, ruefully eyeing his wife, Shea said briskly, “All right, we’ll leave in the morning. And will you pack a bit of honey since there seems to be none on your tongue?”

  She made him change his mind that night in their bed, loving him with great skill and sweetness, driving him to wildness that wasn’t spent in one embrace for he woke her in the night, already aroused by his caressing so that their meeting was swift and violent though they lay tenderly afterward, holding each other.

  “My stubborn hidalga!” he chided, touching her face, her eyes, her throat.

  She bent her lips to his hand. “No, Shea. It is that I could not live without you. If you go to danger, I would rather be with you.”

  “I’m ten years older than you,” he teased. “If you want ardors like those of this night, querida, in twenty years you’ll have to get rid of me and find a new husband!”

  “Burro!” She nipped his ear hard enough to make him yelp. “If you think you can retire in twenty years, you’re badly mistaken!” But as she snuggled against him, feeling infinitely safe and loved in the circle of his hard strong arms, she knew she’d rather be like this, resting with him, even if that was all that could ever be between them, than enjoying the most virile and imaginative lovemaking of anyone else.

  She could not, in truth, imagine anybody else. Shea was her lover, brother, father, child. She prayed with sudden ferocity that she would not be condemned to live after he was dead.

  XIII

  To hunt an Apache!

  Who might be anywhere in these hundreds of miles of mountains and plains ripped by cañons, arroyos and dry riverbeds. Tjúni had said this was the month for gathering cholla buds, the principal food available in early spring, and the Apaches would not be higher than the cactus grew. So Shea and Socorro twined their way across the plateau through the jagged Whetstone range, moving eastward.

  Neither Santiago nor Tjúni knew that region, except that the San Pedro River cut through it north and south and the Chiricahua Mountains reared like fortresses south and west of the abandoned Santa Rita mines in New Mexico. Further east, three hundred miles from Rancho del Socorro, was the Texas border city of Franklin, sometimes called El Paso del Norte, Pass of the North, with Santa Fe and Albuquerque several hundred miles straight north.

  A vast country. The small adobe settlements west of the Pecos in Texas till one came to the old towns on the California coast were tiny scattered candle flames almost invisible under the blazing desert sun.

  Shea must have been having the same thoughts. When they stopped that evening on the banks of a dry wash, hobbling the horses and Viejo in the best grass they could find, Shea turned slowly, gazing at the mountains that rose from the desert on every side of them, the north and eastern ranges flushed crimson by the last light of the vanished sun.

  “If there’s gold in California, enough to keep calling, there’ll be a road through here,” he said. “Army posts to defend it, whores, sutlers and saloons for the soldiers, little cockroach clusters where people will stick. But right now it doesn’t seem there’s anyone here but God.”

  “And Apaches?” she suggested with a thin laugh, for it was a dangerous thing they were doing.

  There were many bands, split again in groups small enough to forage a living. Mangus’s word might not have reached them all. It might be disregarded. Or the pair might be set upon and killed before their identity was known.

  “I expect Mangus will find us, not the other way around,” Shea admitted. “But we won’t have a fire tonight.”

  It was chilly. They sat close together on their bedrolls, serapes around them, and munched jerky and parched corn pounded with the last of the walnuts. Tjúni had fixed several bags of this for them; they had their bows and Mangus’s arrows for silent hunting as well as rifles. The most important of their supplies was water, the only thing that Viejo carried in addition to the water bags slung behind both saddles.

  “We found no water today,” Shea said. “If we don’t find some tomorrow, we’ll water the horses from Viejo’s load, and if we don’t hit some by noon the next day, we’ll just have to start back. We don’t kill our animals—or ourselves—over this.”

  Weary from the long ride, they went to sleep as soon as they’d eaten, bedrolls made up together. “It’s been a long time since we slept out,” Socorro murmured, head on his shoulder, arm across his chest. “Look, querido! How bright the stars are!”

  “Mmm. Roof turns the weather but it also hides a lot of other things.” He stroked her hair. “Reckon we should sleep outside now and then just so we won’t forget.”

  “Let’s do! Sometimes let’s leave the house and let it be the way it was when we first found each other—no, not when you were so weak, but after, when you were well, when we were all alone! Can we, Shea?”

  “It’s a fine notion, lass,” he chuc
kled. “We’ll do that! If the ranch grows and Americans come and there’s a road and towns, we can still go back to our beginning when it was just the two of us in the beauty and death of the desert. It’ll be our special feast.”

  And then, though they had both thought they were too tired, they loved each other beneath the stars while coyotes called and wind stirred the tall grass.

  They found water next morning, thanks to Viejo, who persisted in following a dry wash to a place where he lifted up his voice in a shattering bray and began to scrape at the sand with his hoofs. In a few minutes, the sand darkened with moisture.

  Shea and Socorro dismounted, got sharp sticks, and dug, too. Water began to seep into the hollows. By the time Viejo was straining up what he’d uncovered, Castaña and Azul were crowding in, snuffing. Shea knelt. With his hands he scooped out the wet sand, rapidly enlarging the hole till the horses could drink.

  Several times they had to be held back while Shea dug more and the hole refilled, but at last the three animals were watered. Shea and Socorro dug another hole and filled their empty water bag from it.

  To help spot the place on the way back, they tied a strip torn from the bottom of Socorro’s chemise to the highest cholla they could find. Short of rain or wind, they should be able to follow their tracks fairly well, but they didn’t want to take a single unnecessary chance about water.

  By midafternoon they were threading their way into mountains, keeping to the arroyos as much as possible. At a narrow pass between two yellow-white cliffs an Apache slipped out of the rocks and said to Shea in Spanish, “Why do you come here, Hair of Flame?”

  Socorro couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was one of the warriors who’d been with Mangus. Her heart came into her throat as she saw other men appearing along the ravine, some with bows, a few with rifles.

  “I would speak with Mangus Coloradas,” Shea said calmly.

  “That is good.” A flicker of amusement showed in the Apache’s dark eyes. “He would speak with you to know why you have left your place to come into his.”

  Turning, he led the way.

  The camp was in a meadow ringed by cholla-covered slopes and watered by a spring that trickled down from the mountains. Conical brush shelters, about a dozen of them, were set up near mesquites grown large and wide-branching because of the water. Naked children dodged about with squeals and laughter.

  Mules and horses grazed at the edge of the meadow, and older boys were practicing with bows and arrows, wrestling or, on horseback, charging imaginary foemen with lances clasped in both hands, controlling their mounts with their knees and legs.

  Girls of that age helped their mothers with the cholla bud harvest, some collecting buds, knocking them into baskets with forked sticks, others rolling them about in baskets with small bits of sandstone in order to clean off the innumerable thorns, and a large number busy at large pits where they were layering, on top of a bed of hot coals, saltbush, cholla buds, hot stones, buds, hot stones, and so on till the top of the pit was covered with a very thick layer of saltbush with earth on top.

  Buds that had already been through this baking lay drying in the sun, protected from dirt by more saltbush. This had been the next food chore that Tjúni had planned. It looked even more laborious than preparing agave.

  As Socorro took in all this, she was watching intently for Mangus. He was not among the warriors who’d followed them in and now stood lazily about.

  “May we water our animals?” Shea asked their guide.

  The long-haired warrior nodded and took off Viejo’s pack while Shea and Socorro unsaddled. They were watering their horses, Viejo slurping blissfully beside them, his still hairless scars from the mountain lion vibrating up and down, when a giant figure strode down a slope.

  He had a deer over his shoulder. When he reached the camp, he let it drop. Several women came up to take charge of it while Mangus looked carefully at his guests.

  “Why have you left your valley, Hair of Flame?”

  Shea’s eyebrow shot up. “I had never understood that we could not leave it, Great Chief.”

  Something glimmered in Mangus’s eyes. “No. But you are safer in the place known to be under my protection.” His massive shoulders made a dismissing gesture. “Now you are in my camp, you are safe as if at your ranch. Come, rest, have food and drink. Your woman will sit with us. She is valiant and to be honored.”

  They sat on fiber mats beneath the largest mesquite. Luz, Mangus’s niece, her face even handsomer now that it was no longer bruised and bleeding, murmured a greeting as she brought atole, corn gruel, and gourd bowls of a fermented drink so fiery that Socorro took one swallow and choked.

  “Tiswino,” Mangus explained, looking somewhat hurt at Socorro’s involuntary reaction. “Good brew, this, with much brown sugar from Chihuahua.”

  Socorro didn’t want to think of how he’d got it and was glad when he appropriated her portion and Luz came back with joint fir tea.

  “Now, Hair of Flame,” said Mangus. “Why have you come?”

  He listened quietly. When Shea finished, he said, “If only miners came and took the ore, it would not matter. But they would bring families. Soon there would be a fort, bad white men selling poison liquor, maybe even a refuge for scalp hunters as the Santa Rita mining village was.”

  “If you allow the mining,” Shea countered, “I will undertake that no families are brought in, no whiskey-selling riffraff. And you may have gifts from the supplies. Cloth, brown sugar, wheat, serapes.”

  “Guns? Powder and ball?”

  “Can you promise they would be used only to hunt or to defend?”

  Mangus made an exasperated sound between his teeth. “Can I promise the sun will shine just enough to bring the crops but not burn them?”

  “You may have any other goods of the conductas. And the miners will have only a few guns for hunting. They will know they are in the country only by your favor.”

  “You admit that?”

  Shea laughed. “How can it be otherwise?”

  “I will talk to my people,” Mangus said. “Tonight you will have your answer. Tomorrow you may go.” He rose, considered for a moment. “Come with me, Hair of Flame, to answer questions. My niece and wives will see to your woman.”

  “Thank you,” said Socorro. “But I would just like to watch what’s done with the cholla buds so that Tjúni won’t find me so useless when we gather ours.”

  “That woman of the Desert People?” Mangus asked, benignly looking down at Socorro from his great height. “Her name means ‘saguaro fruit’ but she is more like the spines!”

  Smiling at his own joke, he went off with Shea toward a knot of men.

  Socorro watched the work at the baking pit awhile. Now and then a woman glanced curiously at her. Socorro would smile. Usually they smiled back. Not always.

  One unsmiling woman had a mutilated nose. Socorro had heard that, or death, was the punishment for an adulterous woman. Unnerved, Socorro moved next to where the buds were being dethorned in the baskets where they were rolled about with sandstone.

  Just watching the tedious labor made her sigh. She secretly hoped Tjúni wouldn’t insist that they prepare vast quantities of buds.

  Surely their crops would produce enough to lessen dependence on wild foods. It was priceless to know what these were, where to find and prepare them, but when they made up most of the diet, a woman’s life was filled with simply locating and preparing them. In the desert so much time and effort went into the struggle to get enough food that there wasn’t much energy left for other things.

  Ruefully turning away, Socorro stared with shock into gray-blue eyes that watched her from the brown face of a small girl with yellow, yellow hair. Dirty as it was, the color shone through. On her back she carried a cradleboard which barely cleared the ground and into this was laced a big dark-skinned baby with the same startling eyes.

  They couldn’t be Apache. Well, the baby might be mixed, but the girl—she was certainly Am
erican or of Europe. Socorro was no good judge of children’s ages, having not been much around them, but she guessed this one at six or seven.

  Scrawny, dirty, dressed in a cotton rag so filthy that it had no discernible color, the child had something arresting about her, a toughness, a defiant sadness, that touched Socorro.

  Testing the English Shea had taught her, Socorro asked softly, “Who are you?”

  The girl’s eyes dilated, then narrowed to pinpoints. She whirled away but she couldn’t move fast because of the cradleboard and Socorro was beside her quickly.

  “Do not be afraid.” Socorro tried desperately to think of the right words. “I want to be your friend.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t look happy.”

  No response. “Brother?” Socorro asked, pointing at the baby who watched her out of those strange pale eyes. His hair was black and straight, his skin coppery.

  “Yes, brother,” said the girl, adding in a burst of pride, “He’s very good when I take care of him.” Her words were hesitant as if it were hard to remember them.

  “That is a big help to your mother.”

  The thin shoulders jerked. In a choked voice the girl muttered, “She’s dead. It was in the mountains.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. Juh’s wives can’t hurt her now.”

  This was not a child to cuddle and croon over, though her very prickliness and unseasonable maturity made. Socorro long to do that. “Do you know who you are?”

  The girl shot her a scornful blue glance. “Of course. Mama told me to say my name every day, my brother’s, too, and practice talking so I wouldn’t forget.” She sighed a little. “Sometimes I don’t but most days I remember.”

  “Will you tell me your name?”

  “Talitha. Talitha Scott. I was born in 1840.” As if saying it warmed her and caused pain at the same time, Talitha’s voice softened. “My brother is James.” She looked at Socorro. “Mama always hoped some white people would come help us get away. Will you?”