A Lady Bought with Rifles

by Jeanne Williams

  “Wonderful!” I said, dumbfounded at this outpouring of goodwill. “I had meant to look today for someone who might make Sewa an artificial foot. This is much better than I’d dreamed.”

  Emilio beamed. “You will try your riding clothes, señorita?” he asked. “I wish them to fit exactly.”

  Gathering them up, I went to my room, changed, and emerged feeling very much the ranchera. The soft belt of the skirt fitted snug at the waist, the vest had a jaunty cut, and the jacket gave ease around shoulders and arms without being bulky.

  “It feels altogether right, Emilio,” I told him. “And I’m glad to have it, for tomorrow I ride with my sister.”

  He looked stunned. A glance passed between him and María. “Ah,” he said with a heartiness I found strained. “It is good that you become at home here. But be careful while riding, señorita. Our horses must be different from those of England.”

  “I’ve learned that,” I said with a laughing grimace. The Sanchezes departed, leaving Sewa and me to admire our new clothes.

  “And you’ll be able to walk,” I told her in mixed language and signs.

  She nodded with such joy in her eyes that my heart ached for her. To have to be glad that one had a contrivance instead of a real foot!

  She took a scrap of leather that had dropped from the clothes and wrapped it around Ku, who blinked at this robing while Sewa laughed merrily and said, mostly in gestures, that till he could get his coat of a thousand colors, this one would have to do.

  Consuelo promised to bring Sewa her meals and tea and stay with her awhile each time so the child wouldn’t get too lonesome. Now that the Sánchezes were kindly disposed toward Sewa, I felt easier about leaving her for the day. I kissed her good-bye next morning after breakfast, explaining that I’d be back by night and that she must ask Consuelo for anything she needed, then hurried to the front of the house.

  Four vaqueros were waiting. They wore bandoliers and rifles were thrust in their saddle scabbards. Two were holding saddled horses, Reina’s black and the little chestnut mare I’d ridden before. Reina came out, smiled graciously, and mounted smoothly while the vaquero holding my mare gave me the cradle of his hands to boost me up.

  “So your outfit was ready,” noted Reina. “Let us hope your riding soon becomes as appropriate as your clothes.”

  We rode out the gate beneath the heavy arch carved with the three crowns that gave the hacienda its name, two men ahead, two behind. “Is there trouble?” I called to Reina.

  “No more than usual.” She shrugged. “But there have been clashes between soldiers and Yaquis near the boundary and one never knows what a gang of Sierra Yaqui may do.”

  I felt like saying there seemed no point in taking chances, but was sure that would bring down her scorn, so I patted my mare’s neck and took in the country.

  Mesquite and giant cardones, prickly pear, cholla, iron-wood, palo verde—I closed my eyes to imagine English oak, yew, wych elm, and chestnut, but I could no longer evoke a sense of reality about them. I opened my eyes again to the glaring sky, the reflecting desert, and wondered if it would ever seem familiar. I doubted it. One might as foolhardily hope to be comfortable with God.

  Cattle were scattered about, and as the day heated, those that could find shade got under it, lying under the cottonwoods and giant mesquites shading watering tanks of earth. These few bright green spots showed where water was and a swath of green followed a dry stream bed. Reina explained that Las Coronas could ship cattle by driving them thirty miles to the railroad at a place called the Switch.

  By noon the Bacatete Mountains rose jaggedly before us. I wondered how many Yaquis were hiding there and what was happening on the other side of the range down on the Yaqui and Mayo Rivers in Cruz’s Eight Sacred Pueblos.

  The mountains were the boundary of the estate and we stopped in the foothills to rest. The vaqueros loosened the horses’ girths and made a fire for coffee, which we drank black and steaming from tin cups, washing down bread and cheese.

  “There are jaguar in the mountains,” Reina said. “Also the bighorned wild sheep. It is a place fit only for wild beasts and wild Indians.”

  I was too tired to make any comment, though I suspected she was trying to intimidate me.

  I hadn’t been on a horse since riding back from Cruz’s five days ago. My muscles screamed and I had to keep myself from hobbling by an effort of will. Reina looked as fresh as when we started and her back was arrow-straight as she bantered with the men. So long as she was clearly la patrona, she could be friendly, and the vaqueros watched her with admiration that made me despair of getting help from them should I ever clash with her.

  After our short break, the girths were tightened and we continued, riding along the mountains. Suddenly one of the advance riders reined in, lifting his hand. He rode forward, around a hill, to return and call to Reina.

  “Some dead Yaquis are ahead, señorita!. The soldiers must have caught them only today, for they are not yet stinking. Let us swing to the plain and avoid them. It’s not a sight for ladies.”

  Reina flashed me a hard smile. “Oh, but it is!” she said. “My sister needs to understand the country, get rid of her English softness. Come!” She urged her black on.

  “Señorita!” protested the man, but she rode ahead and he had to follow.

  So did I, partly because someone might be alive and needing help, mostly to prove my nerve to Reina. But I hadn’t counted on what we saw as we rounded the hill.

  Men lay with cut throats swarmed over by flies. Vultures lurched heavily away from the corpses, flapped awkwardly into the air. But what made me turn my head and gag was three women hanging naked from a large mesquite, feet nearly touching the ground. Their purple tongues protruded from hideously contorted faces. Milk had curdled and crusted on their breasts, where it had oozed from their nipples. At the base of the tree three tiny bodies had been carelessly tossed, apparently after being swung against the tree to crush in the soft little skulls.

  “Oh, no!” I heard myself wailing, and could not stop. “Oh, no, no, no.…”

  “I told you this was not good, señorita,” said the lead vaquero reprovingly.

  Sweat dewed Reina’s face, but she said, “Six men. They must not all have been married, or perhaps their women had not cubbed and could be sent to plantations.”

  I wiped my mouth and rose to where I couldn’t see the women and babies. “Bury them, at least,” I begged of the men. They glanced at Reina. She shrugged.

  “Do what you will,” she told them.

  The lead vaquero spat. “Your pardon, señorita, but Yaquis cut off the soles of my father’s feet, made him run barefoot through the desert till he fell and died of sunstroke.”

  “They impaled my sister on a cactus,” said another man.

  “They have had their chance to be Mexican,” said the third horseman. “But all they have done for over a hundred years is rebel and raid. Let these carcasses stay here to teach the rest a lesson.”

  I turned to the youngest and last man, slender and lithe, not long out of boyhood. “Por favor,” I pleadedr “I will pay you well.”

  He hesitated only a moment. “Ride on,” he told his friends.

  “You will bury these dogs for money?” demanded the chief.

  “I will bury them.”

  “Hard work for offal,” said the leader, shrugging. The others started on. I paused by the young vaquero.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “Truly, I will pay you.”

  “You already have,” he said, loosening the machete at the back of his saddle. “Consuelo and I are betrothed.”

  So I rode on, sickened, weak with horror. I couldn’t doubt that the vaqueros had suffered in the ways they had mentioned. I was beginning to understand how the very name Yaqui brought fear to Mexicans. But those women, those babies …

  Perhaps Court Sanders was right. A whirlwind must be rising to sweep away such terrors.

  7

  Except for meals,
I saw little of Reina for the rest of the week. I was haunted by the bodies of the women dangling like ripe bloated fruit, and there was no one I could talk to about it, not even Court with his cynically detached intelligence. When I cuddled Sewa, I knew she had seen her family and neighbors die a similar death, and I marveled that she hadn’t gone mad or into complete and utter hatred of strangers.

  She was getting stronger every day. It wouldn’t be too long before she could try Emilio’s boot foot. She was becoming something of a pet with those of Las Coronas who had occasion to pass often through the patio, and Ku was growing plump from tidbits he received for croaking accompaniment to the flute. Enrique, the young vaquero who had buried the Yaquis, sent word through Consuelo that he was gentling an exceptionally sweet-tempered burra for Sewa to ride.

  “For me?” she repeated when Consuelo told her, for she had rudimentary Spanish by now.

  “For you, little flower-bird,” promised Consuelo, laughing at the child’s delight. “And my Uncle Emilio is making a leather nest with high sides in which your Ku may ride.”

  But after Consuelo had gone about her work, Sewa’s joyful excitement faded. “La señorita will permit?” She was speaking of Reina, who, though she ignored Sewa, managed to exude a withering hostility on the rare occasions she came in sight.

  “Reina probably won’t even know,” I told Sewa, and diverted her into a chess game Emilio had improvised from scraps of wood and leather. Our board was of toughened hide with the squares marked by a hot iron. The queens wore suede skirts and the knights were vaqueros with tiny horsehair lariats. I wished Miss Mattison, with whom I had spent many vacation hours playing chess, could see this array.

  There had been no word or news of Trace. My persistent hope that he’d had to leave unexpectedly and would send an explanation had to be forgotten. Reina began to plan our trip to Hermosillo, and though it would have been simpler for me to get away from her there, I knew she wouldn’t let Sewa come along. I didn’t want to leave the child for several weeks, so the answer seemed to be to get to the railroad thirty miles away. There, at the Switch, Sewa and I could take the train to Hermosillo and—

  And what? The money I had wouldn’t keep us long, and my hunting, employment, if indeed there was anything I could do worth money, would surely come to Reina’s ears if she decided to track me down. I thought longingly of the help Trace had offered, then tightened my lips and put back my shoulders. A little thought must have convinced him that he’d better not offend Reina. I wouldn’t ask him to make good his word.

  No, the only possible solution I could think of was leaving the train at Mina Rara, for I knew it stopped near there, and hoping Court Sanders would shelter us till it was safe to go to Hermosillo. He could send my income there and Reina need never know what had happened.

  Would he help?

  I thought he might. He wasn’t intimidated by my sister.

  And that wild way he’d behaved that night in the courtyard? Was he truly set on having me or had his threat-promises been a passing impulse sprung by my thwarting his rape of Consuelo? Remembering her bared breasts, her terror, and his indifference to it, I thought with a wave of panic that I must be mad to even dream of seeking refuge with such a man. Even though I was his employer, isolated as the mine must be, I would be very much at his mercy, a quality I doubted he possessed.

  But what was the alternative? Trace had vanished, and Reina was bound to look for me at Cruz’s. I had no money to live on and must soon or late arrange with Court to receive my income from the mine.

  Perhaps going to him would put him on his honor. I might be able to keep him on best behavior—and he’d said he could play the conventional courting game—by not dashing his hopes outright while I was at the mine. Sparring with such a formidable opponent frightened me, though. I suspected he’d known and enjoyed many women, most with more worldly wisdom and poise than I would ever have. But he evidently placed great store in innocence. If I could keep my nerve, my very lack of sophistication might be my best safeguard.

  Besides, Court was a practical man. He valued money and power. Apart from vague hints of future favors I didn’t intend to give, I could make honest promises I would fulfill. If he would help Sewa and me, I would gladly give him the principal interest in the mine.

  With that for a reward, surely he’d befriend us!

  But if he wouldn’t? What if he persisted in making love to me? I shrugged that threat aside. It was the only feasible way to get money and evade Reina till I came of age. Though she had done no more overt menacing, I could never feel safe under the same roof with her, and I suspected that an unfortunate accident might leave her sole heir to Mina Rara as well as the ranch.

  So Enrique or Emilio would bring the little burra, called Ratoncita because of her soft mouse color, leave her outside the patio, and carry Sewa out to place her in the saddle while I put Ku in his leather nest before mounting my own horse. We rode near the corrals and orchards while Sewa learned to use the reins. She used her soft voice also, talking constantly to this wonderful new friend who had, I learned, “such elegant long lovely ears.”

  We were coming back from such an excursion late one afternoon when Reina strolled out of the shade by the stables. “I must apologize for letting you become so desperate for a ride that you jog along beside a burra and Yaqui brat,” she said. “I had thought you needed time to forget the unpleasantness we found at the mountain boundary. But if you are bold again, please join me in the morning and we’ll have a more interesting excursion.”

  I didn’t want to arouse her enmity. I was sure she would strike in time, but docility on my part should lull her into feeling there was no hurry. I agreed to meet her after breakfast, left our mounts to Enrique, and helped Sewa hop across the patio to the shade of the big tree.

  After a cooling drink, I changed her bandage and was glad to see that the stump was nearly healed. “I think you could try your boot,” I told her. “Would you like to?”

  “Yes,” she said with a kind of sighing and I knew that using the boot sealed the reality of her maiming. A person may be sick, unable to walk, for many reasons, but there is only one reason to use an artificial foot. I brought out the contrivance and slipped it on, settling it gently in place, crossing and recrossing the broad rawhide straps till they reached the knee. Sewa gazed at it with an unreadable expression, finally gave it a tentative small shake.

  “Look!” she cried when the boot moved. “It works!”

  Scrambling off the bench, she swung herself erect, unsupported for the first time since the amputation. The boot was turned to one side and she moved her hands to maintain balance, but she was standing.

  She threw herself into my arms and I learned that Yaquis can cry, for she did. So did I.

  We moved about the patio for ten minutes or so, Sewa using my arm to steady herself. Her stump was long enough to direct and control the boot fairly well once she grew used to this new way of walking, but Emilio’s device was infinitely better than a crutch. In fact, with a matching boot on the other foot and long skirts, Sewa wouldn’t look crippled. She’d have to move deliberately and might need a stick on uneven ground or for steps, but this was far more than I could have dreamed the night Cruz took off the gangrened foot.

  “Let’s stop now,” I said. “It wouldn’t be good to make your foot sore.”

  Sewa let me guide her to the bench, but her eyes glistened. “I can walk!” she breathed. Leaning toward Ku, she whispered, “Oh, Ku, I can walk!” She made a sound of contrition, glanced woefully tip at me. “But Ku—cannot walk or fly! He is too little for a boot?”

  “I’m afraid so. But you can carry him. Perhaps we can make a perch to fit on your shoulder. And he already has his own saddle nest.” I laughed, trying to cheer her. “Not many birds have that I bet he has the only one in all Mexico, maybe even the world.”

  “The world?” Sewa wrinkled her brow, but after I’d explained the best I could, she gathered her pet to her and told him that
he was a peerless fowl who would ride on her shoulder as the holy saints were borne on litters. Any common old bird had wings and legs; but how many had a leather nest swung at a saddle horn? Or someone to play the flute?

  For the first time I felt really hopeful that Sewa, after all, could grow up to lead a busy, happy life. I must see that she rode and walked every day now so she would be ready soon for our attempt at freedom.

  We rode far to the east next morning, along cattle trails through thick mesquite growth, through dense canebrakes along the river courses. Since this was a comparatively safe area, only two vaqueros rode with us.

  Reina, as usual, had her rifle along and kept shooting at birds, rabbits, javelina, and in one case, a mule deer. “Your luck’s not so good today,” I couldn’t help saying when she missed the deer, for I would have hated to see the graceful creature dead.

  “It is luck,” she retorted. “I usually kill what I aim at.” As if chagrined, she stopped her almost wild firing. I slowly began to relax and enjoy the ride. There were rare clouds today and a cooling breeze.

  Glancing ahead at Reina’s shining hair, I thought wistfully of how different everything could have been if she had liked me, sternly checked such useless imaginings. The sooner I was away from Las Coronas, the home to which I could not belong, and Reina, who would not be a sister, the better for us both.

  We stopped for lunch under a giant ironwood gripping the eroding sides of a dry wash. The horses, enjoying their loosened girths, moved about lipping the high grass that grew along this low stretch. This was the rainy season, but so far I hadn’t experienced the violent thunderstorms everyone kept predicting.

  Reina called for the horses. As I was halfway up, the saddle turned, dashing me downward. My foot hung in the stirrup. The reins slipped from my, fingers. The horse, frightened, began to run. Trying to kick my foot free, I caught at a sapling and held with all my might, though my ankle felt as if it would break off. Then my foot slipped free. I snapped back against the arching tree, thoroughly scuffed and scratched, breathless from the pain of the wrenched ankle—but alive.