The Bride Series (Omnibus Edition)

by Bittner, Rosanne

  Rachael frowned, blowing her nose once more. “Why on earth did you go riding off with Jason Brown? He’s an Indian hater, Josh, and you know it. Of course he’s going to show you the worst. I never liked him much, and neither did Father.”

  “Well, maybe now that you’re older, you’ll change your mind. Jason asks about you all the time, Rachael. He never forgot you. And he’s a good man, a capable man and a good Ranger.”

  Rachael turned, looking at the gravestone again. “I don’t want to think about him right now, Josh. I just want to think about Father. Do you mind leaving me here alone for a while?”

  Joshua put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently. “Sure. I’m sorry you had to come back to this, Rachael. I reckon you have a lot to think about right now. I’ll be up at the house.” He patted her shoulder and left.

  Rachael gazed at her parents’ graves, as tears stung her eyes.

  “I did it, Mother. I’m a teacher now, just like you always dreamed and planned for me. I know how much importance you put on a formal education. Now I have one, and I’ll be teaching other children.”

  A hawk drifted overhead. Rachael glanced up at a wide, blue white sky. She wondered if she was crazy to come back to Texas, to leave the comfortable, convenient lifestyle she had enjoyed back East. But she had missed her family; wanted to see them all again. More than that, Austin was a city that was growing fast, and it was rumored that as soon as Texas became a state, which was expected to happen within the year, the town would become its capital. There were a lot of children in the Austin area who needed schooling.

  Rachael had kept in touch with Lacy Reed, a friend of the family who owned a boardinghouse in town. It was Lacy who had written Rachael to tell her Austin had built a school and that another teacher would be needed. They had already hired a male teacher, but he spent a lot of time riding a circuit around Austin, visiting outlying ranches and teaching children who could not get to the school in town.

  To Rachael’s surprise and delight, those in charge of setting up an educational system for Austin’s youth had approved of allowing her to come there to teach. Rachael didn’t know if it was because she was from Austin, or if it was a matter of desperate need. She knew only that she was being given a chance to teach. She realized there were plenty of other places in this desolate land where teachers were needed, but since this position was close to her family Rachael was more than happy to take the job.

  She bent down, touching the earth over her father’s grave. New grass had begun to grow there, but the dirt was so dry Rachael wondered how the little blades had managed to take hold.

  “I’ll do a good job,” she promised her parents quietly. “I’ll make you proud of me.” She sighed deeply. “I loved you so much, Father. I’m so sorry I didn’t get back in time to see you again.”

  She broke into new tears. The wide, quiet land around her only enhanced her own lonely need to see Joe Rivers just once more. But that would never be. She breathed deeply to regain her composure, reminding herself life must go on and she had a job to do now. She would spend some time with her brothers, then get back to Austin and get to work. School would soon close for the summer, but there would be time to get to know the children before the next school season opened.

  She rose, wiping at her eyes and looking toward a corral where Luke and Matt were trying to rope a mustang from amid its wild friends. She could not get over how her younger brothers had grown. Joshua was right. Three years could make quite a difference.

  She turned back to the graves. “I love you both.” She walked toward the house then. It stood there as she had always remembered it—a moderate, white frame house that Emma Rivers had strived to always keep tidy in spite of the Texas dust. Rachael had tried to do the same after her mother’s death, until she had left for St. Louis at sixteen. Joshua stood on the slightly sagging front porch, watching her approach. Rachael could feel only pride at how her handsome brother had grown and matured. This was the first time in her life she had seen him as a man instead of as a boy.

  She moved up the creaking wooden steps, facing her brother. “I’d stay here and keep house and cook for you and the boys, Josh, but I have to be near Austin.”

  Joshua nodded. “That’s for sure, and it’s fine with me, Rachael. The horses and cattle are enough attraction for them renegades. One look at you and they’d kill us all to get to you. You’re better off in town.”

  Rachael blushed slightly, looking away. “I wish you’d sell this place and take jobs in town too, Josh. Father was probably right about the Indians having reasons for what they do. I can’t really say they’re wrong myself. But at the same time, I don’t want anything to happen to my brothers.”

  “Actually, it’s been pretty quiet here. A few renegades show up once in a while wanting some tobacco or some food. I don’t worry much about them anymore. We can take care of ourselves.”

  She faced him, smiling. “I’m not saying you aren’t capable, Josh, but I can’t help worrying. After all, you’re all I have now.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You did good on your own back East. And now you’re an independent woman with a job and all. Besides, you sure won’t have trouble finding a husband.”

  Rachael shook her head, folding her arms. “Don’t be so anxious to marry me off.”

  Joshua moved from where he leaned on a support post and put an arm around her shoulders. “Where will you be staying?”

  “With Lacy Reed.”

  Josh nodded. “Well, in spite of the danger, I hope you’ll stay a couple of days, at least. The house could use a woman’s touch.”

  Rachael laughed lightly, grateful for the diversion from her grief. “And you could stand to eat a woman’s cooking, right?”

  “That’s for sure.” Joshua stooped to pick up her bags.

  “Maybe I should stay longer, Josh. I didn’t expect to come home to a fresh grave. Maybe I shouldn’t leave you so soon.”

  “It’s okay. It’s best that you go, much as we’d all like you to stay. I’ll rest easier once you’re gone and I know I don’t have to worry about leaving you alone at the house while we go out in the fields. We’ll try to stay close while you’re here. In the meantime I’ll have to figure out a safe way to get you back to town.”

  Rachael opened the front screen. The hinges squeaked, just as they always had. The familiar sound reminded her of girlhood days, when she would run in and out of the door to play or do chores. After she stepped inside the house she immediately realized how right Joshua had been. The place definitely needed a woman’s touch. Dishes sat everywhere, some clean, some dirty. Clothes hung over chairs, and a vase of flowers long wilted sat on the table.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Joshua said. “We really can keep it pretty nice, but we’ve been awful busy lately—spring roundup and all, Rachael. If I had known you were coming—”

  “It’s all right. I understand. You go do what needs doing and I’ll make you and the boys a real good supper.”

  Joshua set down her baggage, sighing deeply, a trace of tears in his eyes as he looked her over once more. “I’m glad you’re back, Rachael.”

  Rachael smiled sadly. “I only wish I would have come back a couple of months sooner.”

  Joshua smiled through tears and quickly turned away. “I’d better get to helping Matt and Luke.” He left, and Rachael looked around the main room of the little frame house. She ran her hand along the wooden table Joe Rivers had made with his own hands. She glanced at the coat hooks near the door to see that his doeskin jacket still hung where it had always hung. Joshua probably didn’t have the heart to do anything with it. She walked up to it, touching the worn spot on one sleeve where his elbow had long ago wiped away the original light color of the pretty doeskin and had left a dark, shiny spot. Emma Rivers had made the jacket for her husband, using skins from deer Joe had shot for food. Rachael remembered how her mother patiently taught her how to properly dry and stretch the hide, how to smoke it to make it soft.


  It seemed so impossible Joe Rivers could be dead. Such men weren’t supposed to die. But Texas had a way of claiming most living things prematurely, even men as strong as her father. She rested her face against the jacket, breathing deeply of its scent of the outdoors, of wild things, of leather and skins. That was the kind of man Joe Rivers was.

  “Father,” she whispered, the tears coming again.

  Brand Selby peered from behind a boulder, his horse tied just below him on the other side of the ridge from which he watched the men below. Agony and indecision boiled inside the half-breed when he realized it was an old Comanche Indian man he saw hanging by the wrists from a cottonwood tree. The old man’s shirt had been stripped off, and a white man lashed into him over and over with a bull whip, while two more white men stood nearby doing nothing. Each crack of the whip made Brand flinch. How well he knew that sound. How well he knew the pain of the barbed end of that whip!

  Selby’s grip tightened on the repeating rifle he held in his hand. He was tempted to use it on the three white men. It would be easy to hit all three of them from his perch above. But they were Texas Rangers. He didn’t have to be close to know that. All he needed was to hear the snap of that whip to know it was Ranger Jason Brown lashing at the old man. The whip was Brown’s specialty.

  Selby would gladly kill the man, but life was hard enough for a half-breed who stayed on the right side of the law. Killing three Texas Rangers would mean being on the run the rest of his life, or being hanged if he was caught. No Indian wanted to hang. Hanging meant choking off the soul so that it could not get out of the body, and a man could never enter the afterlife. Brand was Comanche enough to believe that hanging was a very bad way to die. When he died, he wanted his soul to be free to join his ancestors.

  Perhaps he could at least stop Jason Brown and the others below. Surely they were killing the old man. Brand prayed his own personal powers were strong, that his medicine was still good. As a younger man he had prayed and fasted for days in order to know the right way to lead his life. He still wore his medicine bag, which contained all his personal fetishes, those sacred items that made him strong and sure, including the clawed feet of a wolf that had given up its spirit to him after it attacked him. Brand had sunk his knife into the wolf, then properly honored the animal afterward, thanking its spirit as he cleaned the body. Now its skin made a fine warm neck wrap in cold weather; and its feet in his medicine bag meant Brand was blessed with the wise ferocity of the wolf spirit.

  He turned and went down the back slope to his spotted horse, easing onto the animal’s back with an Indian’s agility. Some folks said he was more Indian than white. Brand himself had never quite been able to decide which. He had simply lived his life according to what seemed right at the time. It seemed now that men like himself and even the full-bloods were going to have to choose the white man’s way in order to survive; but that did not have to mean giving up the Indian spirit.

  He supposed he could pass for a white man if he would cut his hair and dress differently, for he had the white man’s tall, slim-hipped build, broad shoulders and powerful arms. He had an Indian’s high cheekbones, but his skin was dark from the sun more than from natural coloring; and his eyes were green. He had not been able to bring himself to cut his hair. It was another one of those things Indian men just didn’t do. Somehow it seemed he would lose his power if he did such a thing. And when it came to dress, buckskin clothing and moccasins were so much more comfortable than white men’s itchy shirts and hard boots.

  He headed his gelding around rocks and boulders that hid him until he reached the sand below. Then he eased the animal around to where he was in sight of the white men. He raised his rifle and fired into the air, and Jason Brown stood still, his arm in midair.

  “Let him go!” Brand ordered in a deep, commanding voice. His white mother had taught him how to speak the white man’s tongue. As he rode closer, Jason Brown slowly lowered his arm. Selby recognized not only Brown, but also the two men with him, Jules Webber and Sam Greene.

  “You’re butting in where you don’t belong, breed,” the man told Brand.

  “You will kill him. He is just an old man,” Brand answered boldly, halting his horse a few feet behind the old Indian man. “Cut him down.”

  “Who are you to give orders to Texas Rangers, Selby?” Sam Greene asked with a sneer.

  “Shut up, Greene!” Jason growled, his dark eyes fixed on Brand Selby. “This scum of a breed here can be mean as hell when he wants to be, and you damned well know it.” Jason began rolling up the whip. “Cut the old man down.”

  Brand grinned softly. “You are a wise man, Jason Brown.”

  “Just patient. I’ll get you one way or another some day, Selby—or do I call you Running Wolf? You ever make up your mind which it is?”

  “Whatever name suits the moment,” Brand answered, his voice cool and unruffled.

  “Makes it easy for you, doesn’t it, breed?”

  Brand held Jason Brown’s eyes. “No. It makes life a living hell.” He turned his handsome green eyes to the old Indian man, who slumped to the ground as soon as he was cut down from the tree. “What did he do?”

  “You know him?” Brown asked.

  “He is Many Horses, and he is harmless. What has this big, bad Indian done that you must whip him to death?”

  “He stole a calf that belonged to some settlers not far from here. We found him hanging the meat to dry—roasting some of it.”

  Brand looked down at the old man, then slowly dismounted, keeping an eye on the three white men. He walked closer to Many Horses, keeping his repeating rifle in his right hand. He bent his knees to get closer to the old man, rolling him onto his back and saying something to him in the Comanche tongue. The old man answered in a voice choked with pain. Brand looked up at Jason Brown.

  “At his village the People are starving. He was going to take the dried and smoked meat to his daughter and her children. His son-in-law is dead and can no longer provide for his woman. The man had no brothers who would take her in.” He rose. “I know the spring hunt was not good for the Comanche. It probably seemed to the old man that the white settlers had so many cattle, they would surely not miss one small one.”

  “Well, he figured wrong,” Jason scowled. “You know the punishment for stealing cattle, Selby. The old man is lucky we just whipped him instead of hanging him.”

  Brand thought Jason Brown could be a very handsome man if his spirit were not so ugly. Jason was a few inches shorter than Brand, but well built, with dark hair and eyes, and a finely etched face that would look better if the man would just smile more. But Jason Brown seldom smiled, and what Brand hated most about the man was that he was an Indian-hater, with no really valid reason other than believing the white race was somehow superior to the red man. In Brand’s estimation, it was very much the other way around.

  “And you are lucky I have never told everything I know about you, Brown,” Brand answered, his voice low and menacing, his grip tightening on the rifle.

  “Take him, Jase,” one of the others said. “He won’t shoot back. He don’t dare shoot at Texas Rangers.”

  Jason had already paled slightly at Brand’s remark. He kept his dark eyes on Brand. “Never underestimate this stinking half-breed,” he answered. The man nervously fidgeted with the handle of his whip. “You aren’t a scout anymore, Selby. We could kill you right here and claim you were in on the rustling.”

  “You could. But one of you would die before I went down, maybe two of you. You want to guess who’d be first to take a bullet?”

  Their eyes held challengingly, Jason nearly shaking with rage then, the color coming back into his face, only too much color now. “You sonofabitch!”

  “You have no reason to harm me,” Brand said calmly, enjoying the frustrated look in Jason Brown’s eyes. “You wish that you could, but I am not one of your renegades, Brown. You can’t even threaten me because I could destroy your career as a Ranger. Now I have even more on y
ou—whipping a defenseless old man. The least you could have done was arrest him and take him in for a judge to decide his punishment; or you could have had him taken to Indian Territory. Rangers have rules, Brown, laws to be followed. You have a way of breaking those laws. If you aren’t careful, it’s you the Rangers will be hunting.”

  “When it comes to Indians, there is no law! It’s each man for himself!”

  “Not when you belong to the Rangers. You’re a disgrace to that badge you wear. You were hired by civilized people who expect you to act civilized. Texas is struggling for law and order, especially with statehood just around the corner. I’m not your typical ignorant Indian, Brown. I know what’s going on, and lynch mobs and mindless killings are supposed to end!”

  “All Texans hate the Comanche! They won’t give a damn about this old man!”

  “Won’t they? Leave right now, Brown, or I’ll take this old man into town and show people the kind of justice you deal out.”

  Brown gripped his whip. “And what do I tell the settlers who lost the calf?”

  “I’ll pay for it myself at Ranger headquarters in Austin. I have enough.”

  “Do you now?” Brown sneered the words and backed up to his horse, looping the whip around his saddle horn. “And where did you get the money? Steal it?”

  Brand straightened more. “I earned it working for a rancher over on the Brazos.”

  “Who the hell would hire a breed?”

  Brand controlled his ire. “People who look at man as he is. I proved my worth and got paid for it.”

  Brown slowly mounted his horse. “Guess that explains why I haven’t seen you around lately. That’s just fine with me. You can go back to your Indian-loving boss.”

  “I’ve quit the job—saved up enough to get a little piece of my own land—bought a few horses from the man I used to work for. I was on my way to pick them up when I came across the familiar sound of your whip.”