For a moment the chaotic, smoke-streaked battle hung in doubt, then Otilio’s horsemen crashed onto the scene, their rifles firing. Two of the Texans fell, and then a muleskinner was cut down. The two men who were left standing raised their arms in surrender.
Don Manuel, who up until then hadn’t fired a shot, gunned them both.
When the bullet crashed into his chest, Don Manuel swayed in the saddle and looked around him, his eyes searching to find the man he knew had killed him.
Ten yards away, hazy behind snow and smoke, Otilio lowered a rifle from his shoulder, his eyes fixed on the don.
The old man saw a slight smile on the vaquero’s lips, before he fell slowly from the saddle. He groaned when his small body hit the ground, a puzzled expression on his suddenly pale face.
Otilio rode toward the old man, but drew rein when a woman rolled from under the wagon. With her skirts hiked up, she ran at him, the pepperbox revolver in her hand spitting fire in the murk. He worked his Winchester with one hand, pushing it out in front of him. He shot the woman between her huge breasts and she tumbled to earth in a flurry of white petticoats, like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.
Without another glance at the woman, Otilio sought Don Manuel again. Finding him, he cursed under his breath. Two vaqueros kneeled beside the old man. One looked up at him and yelled, “He’s still alive!”
Fear spiking at his belly, Otilio walked his horse to the vaqueros. “What happened?”
“One of the gringos shot him. The patron is badly wounded, but he is still breathing.”
Otilio gritted his teeth. Of all the bad luck—a center chest shot should have dispatched Don Manuel quickly, but the old man was tough as a sow’s snout.
A vaquero, bleeding from a flesh wound on his left cheek, stepped to Otilio. “We lost eight men, and three are wounded, Otilio. Two of those won’t live out the night.”
Otilio totaled up the butcher’s bill. Excluding Don Manuel, ten of the hacienda’s men were dead or dying. It had been a great victory. Eight Texans were killed, but only six of them were pistoleros, the men who mattered. Another great victory like this one and the Hacienda Ortero would cease to exist.
“Carry Don Manuel into one of the wagons and our dead and wounded into the other,” Otilio said. “We will return to the hacienda.”
“Our women will wail tonight.” A vaquero shook his head. “So many dead.”
Otilio said nothing, his mind on more important matters. Surely a bumpy ride in a wagon would kill the old man. He crossed himself and prayed that it would be the case.
“He still lives, Otilio,” Aracela said. “It seems you have failed me a second time.”
“No man can survive a bullet in the middle of the chest.”
“My father did.”
“He has the luck of the devil,” Otilio said.
They stood in the shadowed hallway outside her father’s bedroom door. The hacienda was quiet as death, except for the soft sobs of the servant women who’d gathered in the kitchen to drink wine and grieve for their patron.
“Leave me, Otilio,” Aracela said.
“Has he talked?”
“Yes, he asked for his priest.”
“He might say what happened. A man tells much to his confessor.”
“I haven’t sent for the priest. Not yet.” She stepped to the door, then turned. “How many enemies did you kill, Otilio?”
The man was taken aback. “None. I had another, more urgent task to carry out.”
Aracela’s face hardened. “You disappoint me, in so many ways. Now, get out of my sight.” She hesitated, then added, “But stay close.”
She waited until Otilio left, then opened the bedroom door and slipped inside with no more sound than an errant breeze. Her father lay in a bed of snowy silk, his gray head propped up on a feather pillow. Aracela looked down at him , her eyes unfeeling and calculating.
Earlier the doctor had said the bullet in Don Miguel’s chest was too deep to remove. He’d added a medical man’s hollow platitude, “It’s now in the hands of God.”
Aracela smiled. Don Manuel’s fate was not in the hands of God, but in her own hands. She’d already banished the servants from the bedroom, because there was always the possibility he’d rave in his fever. She touched his forehead lightly. He was burning. The fever would kill him . . . eventually.
But suppose that prattling prelate Father Diego heard the news and forced his way into the bedroom? What then?
“Aracela . . . is that you, my child?”
The tremulous whisper from the bed startled her, but she recovered quickly. “Yes, Father, I am here.”
Don Manuel’s lips were dry and cracked from the prairie cold, and his black eyes burned in shadowed sockets. “I won a fine victory today.”
Aracela didn’t try to keep the contempt out of her voice. “You lost half your vaqueros. It was hardly a fine victory.”
As though he hadn’t heard, he said in a paper-thin voice, “Otilio, who was a son to me, tried to kill me.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“But I will live to see him hang.” Don Manuel then proved he’d been listening to his daughter’s earlier criticism. “I needed more men, Aracela. I will hire more guns, many more.” He tried to raise his head from the pillow, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back again. “Aracela, you must get me well again. Next time I will finish Joel Whitney and his mercenaries once and for all.”
She smiled again. “You will cost us all we own, this hacienda, the Estancia, everything. There won’t be a next time, old man, at least not for you.”
“Aracela . . . why do you speak to me this way?” There were flecks of blood on his lips, and his face was ashen, the death shadows deepening.
“Because I want you to die. Your time is long over, and it’s time for you to step aside.”
Don Manuel looked frightened. “Send for my doctor, and the priest. And tell the servants I need them here.”
“I will send for them all, mi padre”—Aracela smiled at her father—“once you are dead.” She moved quickly. It was an easy matter to yank the pillow from under her father’s head and shove its feathery softness into his face.
He struggled, but his wound had weakened him. Aracela pushed harder, her face twisted in concentration as she smothered the old man. She felt his struggles weaken and pressed harder, growling like a she-wolf. But Don Manuel still fought for his life. His feeble struggles wormed him across the bed, and he managed to get his feet on the floor. But there it ended. He suddenly went limp and death rattled in his throat.
Aracela lifted the pillow and stared down at her father’s face. His lips were blue, his eyes wide and staring. His features wore an expression of horror, as though, in his last moments, he couldn’t believe the way of his dying.
The pillow in her hands, Aracela threw back her head, lips parted, her breath hissing between her teeth. She felt warm all over, like the afterglow of sex, only better. Much better. How wonderful it felt to kill. Suddenly she felt more alive than she’d ever been in her life.
Panting, her breasts heaving, she needed a man that very minute, to share her heat. She stepped to the door and whispered into the dark hallway, “Otilio, come.”
The man stepped inside, an uncertain smile on his lips.
“Lock the door.”
“Is he dead? Otilio said.
“He’s already making his excuses to the devil.” Aracela smiled.
Otilio turned the key in the lock and heard the woman say, “Do you still want me, Otilio?”
Unable to speak, the vaquero nodded.
Chapter Thirty-two
Luther Ironside was three miles north of the salt lakes and had begun a loop back to the west when he heard what sounded like distant gunfire. He drew rein on his tired horse, and lifted his nose to read the wind, but it told him nothing.
In the high, lonesome country, imagination can play tricks on a man, and Ironside was willing to let it go. �
�Hearing things,” he said aloud, as is the habit of men who ride forsaken trails. Yet, as the snow settled on his hat and shoulders, he realized he was denying the obvious. Yes, it had been guns firing, miles to the south.
All the Dromore riders were to the north, so they were not involved. It was raiding Apaches, then. Ironside shook his head. He reckoned that possibility at one chance in a hundred. Much more likely he’d heard a clash between Whitney’s Texans and Don Manuel’s vaqueros. Or had it been an attack on sheepherders?
He, Shawn, and Patrick had decided to split up. Shawn said they’d cover more ground that way and warn more herders about Whitney’s planned attack.
Ironside had scouted his part of the Estancia all day and hadn’t seen another living thing, let alone a Mexican herder. Cold, hungry, and wishing for coffee, sitting his horse in the middle of endless miles of open range, his opinion of Shawn’s plan was mighty low.
The firing had come from the south. Duran Mesa was in that direction. If nothing else, it might provide some kind of shelter for the night. Ironside made up his mind. He swung out of the saddle, the late afternoon light fading around him, and walked his mount in the direction of the mesa. It is the nature of things that men are more enduring than horses. Ironside spared his weary gray because if the horse foundered in that wilderness he was a dead man.
He walked across cold, aloof brush flats for an hour, wind and snow dogging his every step. By the time Duran Mesa came in sight through the crowding gloom of the waning day, he was pretty much used up, and his horse was in no better shape.
The cold had played hob with Ironside’s rheumatisms. His hips hurt and his knees hurt worse. The misty breath of frost cut into his lungs, and when he glanced at the sky it looked like an iron helm about to settle onto the hoary head of earth.
Everywhere he looked, the shadowed land glittered with ice, the sheen of death.
Ironside didn’t stumble onto the battlefield by accident. The gray gave him plenty of notice. The big horse lifted its head and whinnied, jerking back, its front hooves lifting off the ground. Ironside stopped, and his eyes searched into the distance. At first he thought the black shapes on the ground were upthrust eruptions of the cap rock, but as he got closer he realized they were bodies.
One cautious step at a time, Ironside led his uneasy horse forward. A prudent man, he slid his rifle from the boot and levered a round into the chamber. But there was no need for a Winchester. The patch of prairie was drenched with the blood of the dead, not the living.
The bodies were stiff, in the postures they’d taken as they died; forever frozen in place like the corpses of Civil War soldiers in a Mathew Brady photograph. Each face was covered in a mask of ice, and a few had rigid fingers curled around the handles of guns that were no longer there.
Ironside pieced it together. Judging by the horse tracks, the Texans had been surprised by a mounted force and wiped out to a man. At the end, the hired guns had made a desperate stand with two muleskinners and had been shot down. Judging by bloodstains on the grass, the fight had taken a heavy toll of both sides.
The gray’s hoof clinked on a whiskey bottle as Ironside led it toward the body of the woman. After getting shot in the chest she’d collapsed in a heap and died where she fell. Unlike the men, the woman’s face was not grotesque in death. All the lines etched by years of hard living had disappeared and had again given her the face of a young girl. Thinking about it, he figured he was witnessing one of God’s tender mercies. He’d got her set up right before He called her home.
Ironside smiled and looked down at the woman. “Well, Rosie, that’s what I hope He did, anyway.”
Ironside took one last look around through snow and a gray cobweb of mist. The wagons and the horses were gone. The Texans had been stripped of their guns, and a couple of their hand-stitched boots.
Joel Whitney had suffered a defeat here, but he would be unaware of it for a time to come.
Ironside led his horse toward Duran Mesa, but stopped after he stumbled over a small mound of dirt. It looked like a shallow hole had been chiseled out of the hard ground. He cleared a patch with the side of his boot and saw what looked like the top of a human head. He kneeled and dug out more dirt with his gloved hands. A face emerged, then another. Finally he uncovered three human heads, all of them Mexicans. Here were some of the herders he’d been supposed to warn.
Shivering from cold, he hoped, rather than fear, he buried the heads again. The Texans had collected three trophies. The fact that the victors of the battle had taken time to bury the heads suggested other Mexicans—and that could mean only Don Manuel and his vaqueros.
The old man was not going down without a fight, and that could be good news for Dromore. The herders would stay put if their patron kept a grip on his valley.
Luther Ironside camped that night in a stand of mixed juniper and piñon that backed up to a rock wall in the shadow of the mesa. Despite the snow, he found firewood enough to build a fire. He cooked a meal of bacon broiled on a stick, and a hunk of sourdough bread. Mrs. Hazel had packed a small pot and he melted snow for coffee that he laced liberally with Old Crow.
He smoked a cigar and looked out into the wind-tossed night, figuring his next move. His options were limited. He could look for Shawn and Patrick or head north and hook up with Jacob. Neither alternative appealed to him. The war was on in earnest, and he might be better off returning to Estancia, where he could keep in touch with the situation. Certainly it was better than wandering all over the wilderness searching for Mexican herders who were either dead or had skedaddled.
That Estancia promised a soft bed and hot meals didn’t enter into Ironside’s thinking. At least that’s what he told himself.
Chapter Thirty-three
The body of Don Manuel Antonio Ortero was carried to the hacienda chapel, where he lay in state. His body was covered with the banner of his Spanish ancestors and four huge wax candles burned at each corner of his bier.
Great was the grief of the village women. The don had sired children with most of them, and some were already mourning dead vaqueros. The chapel pews were filled with kneeling, black-clad peons, their rosaries clicking against the polished oak of the pew in front.
Donna Aracela, the new mistress of the Hacienda Ortero and all the lands pertaining thereto, sat in her reserved box as befitted her rank. She wept bitterly, her sable garments as somber as those of the peasant women. So moved was Father Diego by her tears that he sat beside her, put his arm around her, and assured her Don Manuel was already in Heaven, drinking deeply from the cup of salvation.
Aracela smiled gratefully, dabbing a scrap of lace handkerchief to her red eyes. “God bless you, Padre.”
Father Diego, touched deeply, declared that she was the most dutiful daughter a man could ever wish for, and surely she was her father’s choice, and God’s, to become the new patron of the Hacienda Ortero.
Finally, the elderly priest, a sensitive man, left her to mourn alone in an odor of sanctity.
Aracela was most grateful. How to get in touch with that son of a bitch Joel Whitney was preying on her mind, and she needed time to think.
The chapel smelled of damp peasants and the wax candles that cast shifting shadows over her father’s body. She wriggled uncomfortably in her pew. The kneeling was hard on her knees. It was still snowing outside and icy drafts sharked at her from every nook and cranny of the old building. It was freezing cold, and she badly wanted one of her furs, but that would not be seemly.
She sighed. It sounded like a sigh of great sadness and she hoped it would impress the peons.
Now, about Whitney.
When he heard about the deaths of so many of his men, and of the loss of his wagons and mules, she thought he might return to Estancia sooner than he’d planned, looking to replace his dead gun hands. Just in case, she’d station Otilio—he was a useless bastardo anyway—in the town with instructions to tell her if and when the man arrived.
If everything went as she ho
ped—an invitation to dinner, a quiet seduction perhaps, and an offer of an alliance—she would help the gringo rid the Estancia of sheep and sheepherders for a percentage of the profits to be made by opening the valley up to settlers . . . and, with luck, the railroad.
When all was settled, Mr. Whitney would meet with a terrible accident and, as his partner, all of his money would fall to her.
It was a wonderful plan, and Aracela smiled into her handkerchief. How nicely things had fallen into place. She hadn’t appreciated it at the time, but the death of her brother at Whitney’s hands had been a blessing. The gringo had removed a major obstacle in her path, and then Otilio had helped her remove the other.
Aracela heard the priest’s droning voice and her heart sank. He was beginning a mass for the dead, the first of many, no doubt.
Aiiii, more hours of crushing boredom.
With the priest’s jabbering in her ear, Aracela let her thoughts drift to Jacob O’Brien. She no longer needed the man. She was now patron of the hacienda and the need for a son had suddenly become less urgent. Why share her power with anyone, including an heir? Besides, murder was so much easier than marriage.
Donna Aracela stared at her father’s body, making sure everyone in the chapel saw her tear-reddened eyes and mournful expression. She felt a little thrill of delight. Everything was planned and promised to go well. Her gaze fixed on her father’s gray face and she thought, Why the hell didn’t I kill you a lot sooner?
Chapter Thirty-four
Joel Whitney was in a foul mood. He and his men had scouted the entire day and found plenty of sheep, but no herders. Charlie Packett, the one they called the Memphis Kid, had been riding wide of the main column and had shot an old man and a boy, who turned out to be a couple of raggedy-assed Apaches. After a day in the saddle and nothing to show for it, Whitney was cold, frustrated, and had a raging toothache.
He and his men were camped in a narrow, treed valley about a mile west of Rattlesnake Draw. Around him stretched a wild, inhospitable land that offered nothing.
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