It was then, driven by a desperate need to be cleansed of Frost’s use of her body, that Talitha had asked Marc to make love to her. She loved him as much as she could anyone except Shea, found comfort and healing in his strength and passion. But when he learned that she still wouldn’t marry him, he’d ridden off in anger to the Tecolote mine southwest of Yuma Crossing near the Devil’s Highway.
He brought her face up, brushed her mouth with his, then moved back, steadying her. “Prettier than ever, Talitha! Don’t you know that women who don’t marry are supposed to dry up and look like sticks?” When she didn’t smile, he turned to look across the basin toward the settlement. “Where’s Belen? Why are you here instead of at the camp?”
He heard of the outrage in silence, the muscles in his cheek going taut. When she’d finished, he gave her a little shake. “My God, Talitha! Surely this will persuade you to at least move in to Tucson!”
“You stopped at the ranch?”
“Of course. That’s how I knew where to find you.”
“Then you saw that the El Charco people have joined us.”
He glanced through the twilight at the devastated village. “There must have been—what?—fifty miners here? With weapons.”
“They must have been taken by surprise. For the silver and gold. We have no big amounts of them at Socorro.”
“Raiders won’t necessarily guess that—or care. Apaches don’t hanker after coin, you know. They prefer stock and captive women and children.”
She turned away. “I was glad to see you.”
He caught her to him in exasperation. Even in the dimming light, his eyes blazed. “Damn you, Talitha! Can I love you and applaud your bullheadedness?”
“You don’t have to applaud,” she said through her teeth.
“Shea wouldn’t want you to stay now that the soldiers have gone.”
The way he spoke strangled the hope she’d had, that he’d come to stay with her, help run the ranch. Gripped with disappointment and bone-weariness, she tried to wrest free of him.
“I suppose you’re going to join the army, too—the Union one!”
“You know how I feel about slavery, Talitha. And this country gave me hope and faith after I saw the start of freedom strangled in Berlin.” Pleading against her averted face, he said with that inexorable firmness she knew nothing could shake, “I owe my new country much, Talitha. I must pay what I can.”
“Pay,” she thrust. “But don’t try to frighten me out of paying a debt myself!”
With a rough intake of breath, he forced her against him, set his hand at the back of her head, and kissed her till she was weak, desirous, clinging to him, her softness yielding to the hard demand of his body. He started to sink down with her on the grass.
“No!” she choked out as his fingers hurried to find and caress her breasts. “No, Marc!”
“You want me, Talitha.”
She didn’t try to deny it, only put away his ardent, warm hands. “I—I’m engaged to Shea.”
“What?”
“I think you heard me.”
“But—there was only Socorro for him.”
Stabbed deep, Talitha struggled for calm. “I’m not a fool. He can’t love me as he did her; I don’t expect it. But he’s promised to marry me when he comes back from the war.”
Marc released her and strode off a distance. His voice was strange. “To win this astonishing concession, you must have somehow tricked him into your bed.”
Talitha yearned to slap him; she had to clench her hands. “It’s none of your business, but that came after the promise!”
After a moment he faced her. “I’m sorry, Talitha.” There was sadness in his tone, a compassion that was harder to bear than his scorn. “As you say, it’s none of my business.”
“Don’t sound like that!” she said fiercely. “As if you were sorry for me.”
He sighed, pushed back his hair. “You’ll think it’s jealousy, and I’m damnably jealous! But I am sorry. For you. For what you’re getting in return for such total, terrible love.”
“And what do you think I’m getting?” she taunted, cruel in her hurt.
“You’re beautiful. Shea has a man’s needs. And of course he loves you—as a daughter, a child he protected. So he’ll take you with his body and be ashamed of that, feel he’s wronging you.”
She put her hands over her ears, trying to shut out his relentless words, suppressing flashes that betrayed what Shea must have felt in spite of their physical rapture that last long night.
“I’m not his daughter, not a child! I’m his woman.”
“No,” said Marc. It was like being forced to hear some true depth of her own self speaking. “You may be his pleasure, his last sweet flower, but his woman was Socorro.”
“She’s dead! Eight years she’s dead!”
“That has nothing to do with it.” He took her hands again and held them against his heart. She felt the pounding of his blood, powering the sure, massive strength she’d always found in him. “Talitha, my own dear love, you’re my woman. Whether we marry, whether we ever lie together again, whatever happens. That’s why I know how it must be for Shea.”
She bowed her head. His words echoed those she’d cried despairingly at Shea when he’d tried to persuade her she was mistaken in the nature of her feeling. “But I have loved you! All these ways and all these years.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” she said miserably. “But I want Shea, want to make him as happy as I can. And yet—oh, Marc! I’m so mixed up! I love you, too, But it’s different—”
“I know,” he said, with a soft, bitter laugh. “I’m only a man. Shea has always been your god.”
Small use to say that it had been Shea’s devastation, his loneliness approaching that of a bewildered orphan, that made it impossible for Talitha to leave him. She might not be his woman, but he needed her. And when he came home …
Lifting her head, Talitha kissed Marc’s cheek. “Please, Marc. Be happy.”
“Oh, I will be.” He got out flint and steel and knelt by her tinder, grinning up at her in the gathering night. “I still have the sun. And so do you, Tally. Remember that.”
Belen came up while Marc was coaxing the fire, delighted to have a friend to share their camp in that haunted basin. Marc had been given a parcel of tortillas by Carmencita, and these served as scoops for the pinole stew. They sweetened their coffee with chips flaked off a piece of hard brown sugar and talked of the war.
“The United States simply abandoned us,” Talitha accused. “We can’t be blamed for siding with the Confederacy if they’ll offer any sort of protection against things like this.” She jerked her head toward the mining camp.
“The Gadsden Purchase has been a funny case from the start,” Marc reminded her equably. “There’ve been very few real settlers. Buying and protecting it has been pushed by a bunch of Texas railroad men and mining interests financed by speculators from both coasts and Europe, helped by an expansion-minded Democratic administration. You could say Arizona was developed mostly because of the Democrats’ increasing need to add western states to their balance of voting power.”
“Marc!” How could he put it that coldly?
Talitha thought of her friend Larcena Pennington, recovering from lance thrusts whose scars she’d carry to the grave; of doughty Pete Kitchen and his refusal to budge from his fortress on Potrero Creek; of Socorro’s grave, and Santiago’s. Surely this was how a territory was made, through the lives, courage, and suffering of its people. In the flickering light, Talitha looked at Marc defiantly.
“Whatever the government does, some of us will stay. And it’s to us the land really belongs, not to those boards meeting in San Francisco or Ohio or New York.”
He raised his tin cup in wry salute. “The Apaches think it’s their country. Papagos, Pimas, Maricopas, and Yumas say the same. Notwithstanding, the federal government has poured a lot of money into securing this southern link between East and West. Ten millio
n for the Gadsden Purchase, hundreds of thousands on boundary commissions and railroad surveys. There was the wagon road built from El Paso to Fort Yuma, the exploration of the Colorado River, and the establishment of forts. Starting in 1858, the government subsidized the Overland Mail to the tune of six hundred thousand dollars yearly.” Marc spread his hands. “For all of this, Arizona’s remained a no-man’s-land. Even after this war’s over, it’ll be a long time before it’s a place to live in in any safety.”
Belen shrugged heavy shoulders. “Don Marcos, in my country, the boundaries of which were sung by angels and Yaqui prophets, and the eight cities located by sacred visions, there is no safety. The yoris, the Mexicans, would take the fertile lands decreed to us by God. So there is fighting. So there will always be till we’re left in peace. What is safety?” He spat into the dust.
They were all weary and soon unrolled their blankets. The men put Talitha between them, and though she was distressed at having hurt Marc again and disturbed by his assessment of how Shea felt about her, she was still grateful to have him close in this valley of death, to know that she could reach out and touch him.
Comforted, she slept.
They were up before sunrise. Marc helped Belen dig the long common grave and Talitha collected stones for heaping on top, not that there was enough left on the bones to tempt scavengers. By midmorning the pitiful fragments of what had been men, women, and children were decently covered, and the three of them heaped on rocks and stones. Don Elizario lay among his workers.
Belen made a cross and fixed it among the rocks. “God pity them,” he said and bowed his head.
Marc and Talitha did likewise, though she had her old angry feelings that if God was all-powerful and good, He wouldn’t allow such things to happen; if He wasn’t all-powerful and good, there was little use in praying. And still she prayed. At the limits, a mortal must cry for help.
Marc insisted on going with them to the ranch. “It’ll ease my mind to know you got home safe from this journey,” he said. “Besides, if I cut northeast and hurry, maybe I can catch up with the troopers. It’s not healthy to ride alone through Cochise’s and Mangus’s prime territory.”
Talitha fought down a longing to beg him to stay. One man wouldn’t make that much difference to the cause of either North or South. It made a difference to him, though, and so she couldn’t plead.
They reached the Socorro late one afternoon. Next morning before sunup, he was on his way. After he’d said his good-byes to the rest of the household, Talitha walked with him to the corral.
She was sick of this. Sick of seeing the men she cared about go off to kill or be killed, and for reasons that had nothing to do with the dangers here. Pressing his hands to her face, she murmured huskily, “Take care of yourself. Come back safe!”
He brought up her face to kiss, her mouth. For a long, tremulous moment he held her matched to his body, and she knew that he’d slept last night as poorly as she. If he’d come to her, she might not have been able to remember she belonged to Shea, for she loved this man, too, and in this time of parting her anguished flesh cleaved to his.
“Marc!”
He bowed his face to her hands, then quickly took the reins Belen offered. His eyes went over her as if to fix her image forever in his mind. “God keep you, love.”
“Come back,” she said. “Please. Come back.”
He bent to brush her cheek with his fingers. “I’ll have to. You’re my woman.”
She watched through tear-blinded eyes as he rode into the rising sun. Like Shea. Like John Irwin.
Now all her men were gone.
III
It was early in August when Cat, who was standing watch from a perch on the corral, called that there was a horseman coming. “He’s wearing a serape and sombrero and seems to be alone,” she reported.
“Ring the bell twice,” Talitha said.
That was the signal for all in hearing to make for the houses and arm themselves, just in case the announced visitor wasn’t friendly. Three rings meant raiders, positive danger. So, when the bell sounded, there was always a heart-stopped tension while waiting for that dreaded third peal.
Taking up a rifle, Talitha peered out the window, sighed with relief as she thought she recognized the rider, but waited a few more minutes till she was sure.
“It’s Pete Kitchen,” she told the twins, who’d dashed inside and grabbed weapons from the rack by the door. “Tell Cat to ring once.”
An isolated sound of the bell after an alarm meant there was nothing to fear and work could be resumed. The twins lingered, though, eager to see the man whose prowess as a fighter and determination to hold his ranch against raiders of any color had made him almost a legend.
With a smile of thanks, Kitchen turned over his reins to Miguel, who led the horse off for watering. Lean and erect, of medium height, Kitchen took off his sombrero and bowed with Southern courtliness.
“I’m sure glad to find you all right, Miss Talitha.” His blue-gray eyes twinkled in his ruddy face as he noticed the rifle she’d leaned against the wall. “Glad you keep a sentry posted.” He tweaked one of Cat’s black ringlets. “Is this your bell ringer?”
“One of them.” Talitha was fond of this rough, kindly, indomitable man. It was to his house she’d stumbled after Judah Frost’s assault, and it was his gentle wife, Doña Rosa, who had helped her bathe and made her rest. Doña Rosa lit candles on the graves of the marauders, red and white, who were buried in front of the ranch they’d tried to despoil. “Come in, Mr. Kitchen, and stay for dinner. How are Doña Rosa and all those pretty nieces?”
“Fine. Or were when I left for Tucson last week.” He grinned. “Sixty-eight of us voted an ordinance of secession. Elected Granville Oury to be territorial delegate to the Confederate Congress and petitioned Jeff Davis for troops. Colonel Baylor’s taken Mesilla and proclaimed the Confederate Territory of Arizona! He’s the governor, of course. Some doings!” Kitchen sobered. “But Tubac’s finished, Miss Talitha. That’s why I rode over here, to see if you were still at the ranch.”
“What’s this of Tubac?” Belen asked.
Since everyone had come in, Carmencita and Juana began to set out the meal, and it was while eating heartily that Kitchen told how Apaches were ranging up and down the Santa Cruz, plundering and killing. Among their victims were the superintendent of the Sopori ranch and the innkeepers at Canoa. The few men left at Tubac had defended themselves stoutly, however, and got a message for help through to Tucson, where Granville Oury hurriedly collected twenty-five volunteers.
Kitchen winked. “Since I was going that way anyhow, I figured I might as well have the benefit of an armed escort. We sure surprised those heathens! They lit out, and so did a gang of about seventy-five Mexicans who’d come up from Sonora to rob and loot. That bunch stopped at Tumacácori, though, and stole everything they could carry off. Killed a harmless old man even the Apaches hadn’t bothered.”
“Everyone’s left Tubac? Colonel Poston?”
“Oh, he’s been supervising the Heintzelman mine down south, but while he was off looking for new sites in the Papago country some mean Sonorans talked the laborers into killing Poston’s younger brother and two Germans who worked at the Heintzelman. Poston buried them and took off for California.”
So debonair Charles Poston, who’d offered open-handed hospitality to all who passed through Tubac, who’d married couples free and thrown in a festive wedding feast, whose Christmas parties had been attended by officers from the fort and ranchers from as far away as Magdalena and Sopori, the one touch of glamor in Talitha’s life—Poston was gone.
“Now it’s really going to be Tucson, Tubac, Tumacácori, and to hell!” Kitchen went on. “Though we can hope the Confederacy will send us some troops. I have to tell you, Miss Talitha, that I reckon you sure ought to get out of here while you can. Be glad to send over a few dozen of my men to help you move.”
The abandonment of Tubac was even more shattering to Talitha t
han that of Fort Buchanan. It had been where she’d learned to dance, had thrilled to the knowledge that men admired her in the lovely gowns Judah’s sweetly beautiful wife, Lenore, had had made up for her. But she could remember earlier years when the presidio had been deserted, when Apache raids had emptied the Santa Cruz Valley.
Straightening her shoulders, she smiled at Pete Kitchen. “It seems strange, Mr. Kitchen, but I lived here before you did, before the mining companies came, and the soldiers. If the O’Sheas could start the ranch when they did, we should be able to hold it now.” The grizzle-mustached man looked so worried that she ventured a tease. “At least there aren’t any scalp hunters these days.”
“Only because no one’s paying for hair,” growled Kitchen. He glanced at the children, who were eating at a second table. “I hate to think of you over here without O’Shea, but your men are trusty and you have good thick walls and a well inside them. Mostly Apaches choose the most gain for the least risk. If it looks like they’re going to lose a lot of men, they’ll hunt easier pickings.” Slowly, he got to his feet. “You got plenty of ammunition?”
“Enough for a small war,” Talitha assured him, then inquired with wicked innocence, “By the way, when are you moving to Tucson?”
“Me?” His mustache fairly quivered. “Doggone it, girl, I—” At the vaqueros’ chuckle, he broke off and scowled a moment before he laughed, gripped her hand, and shook it as he would have a man’s. “Good luck, Miss Talitha. I’ll get over once in a while to see how you are. If I can do anything, send for me.”
“You’re very kind.” They both knew the chances of getting a message to him in case of a raid were pitifully slight. “Give Doña Rosa and her nieces my love.”
“I’ll do that.” He sighed gustily. “They’d enjoy a visit from you, but I reckon we’re still years away from when folks can go see each other for the plain fun of it.”
Patrick had fetched his ewe-necked but serviceable horse. Donning his serape in spite of the heat, Kitchen snugged down his sombrero, waved, and jogged off westward, toward abandoned Tubac and often-despoiled Tumacácori, though he’d swing south at Calabazas, also deserted, heading for his ranch on Potrero Creek.
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