Sixteen was grown up and she hadn’t expected big presents, or many of them, but when breakfast passed and dinner with only smiled “Happy birthdays,” Cat began to feel a bit subdued. It wasn’t that a present had to be expensive, imported from San Francisco or the East. But not to get anything …
Chiding her disappointment, she spent the afternoon gathering hackberries and squawberries with Sewa, Talitha, and Paulita. She was washing the stickiness of squawberries off her hands when Sewa called. “Come out to the corral, Cati! Jordan has something to show you.”
Jordan? This younger half brother of Talitha’s father was twenty-five but he seemed much older. Coming out from Iowa three years ago, he’d first worked on his brother’s ranch on the Verde River in central Arizona, had decided he’d like to see more of the territory before he settled, and had come to work at the Socorro a little over a year ago.
Beyond the fact that he wasn’t a Mormon like Jared Scott, Cat knew little about him. He spoke even less than Miguel, though he took in everything that was said. More than once Cat had broken off in confusion when, in the midst of some rash or joking declaration, she’d found his contemplative hazel eyes watching her, his mouth curved in faint amusement.
At such times she felt younger than Sewa and smarted at what she took for patronizing indulgence. He wasn’t that much older! Now, surrounded by the vaqueros, their families, the twins, and Marc and Talitha, Jordan held the reins of a glorious blood-bay gelding, smoothing his neck, talking to him gently. It was a marvel to the ranch folk that an Iowa farm boy was so skillful with horses. He must have bartered with someone, perhaps one of the officers at the camp, for Cat had never seen this horse, or one of his exact coloring, a rich brown-red so dark it was almost black, on the ranch.
“What a beauty!” She spoke softly to the gelding. Only when he seemed to accept her did she smooth his muzzle, pat his strong-muscled neck. “Where’d you get him, Jordan?”
“Bought him from a Kentuckian who needed a stake for prospecting. How do you like him?”
“He’s marvelous!” She flushed, then glanced quickly from beneath her lashes to see if Jordan had that odious smile. He didn’t; he was truly laughing and for once looked as young as he was, sun turning his brown hair almost red. “What are you going to call him?”
“Sangre might be good. It means fire and spirit as well as blood.”
Her eyes widened as she noticed the saddle. The horn was inlaid with silver, and so were the rigging buttons and rings. The bullnose tapaderos fastened to the stirrups were tooled in a rose design to match the work on the skirts. The headstall of the bridle was silver-mounted, and silver conchos flashed as Jordan put the reins in Cat’s hands.
“He’s from all of us. The saddle and bridle are from Marc, Talitha, and your brothers. Happy sixteenth birthday, Caterina.”
“Happy birthday!” the others chorused.
Cat’s chest tightened. And she’d thought they’d overlooked her birthday! “He’s too beautiful!” Tears stung the corners of her eyes. “And the saddle! It’s too much!”
“I thought so.” Patrick grinned, tweaking a lock of her hair. “But then Miguel pointed out that you’ve never had a new saddle and your present hand-me-down’s close to falling apart.”
Miguel nodded. “It’s time you turned Mancha out to grass. She’s as old as you are!”
Cat ignored their teasing. “Sangre!” she whispered, caressing him. “Beautiful blood-bay caballo!”
“Get your guitar, Chuey!” called Patrick. “She’s going to make up a song to him!”
“I’ve worked him with a blanket,” Jordan said. “He won’t shy at your skirts. And he handles light, seems to read your mind. Of course, he’s used to English words. Cluck and he starts. Whoa and he stops.”
Cat glanced at Talitha and Anita. “May I? Just a short ride?”
Anita chuckled. “Didn’t I know you’d have to have your gallop? Supper will wait—but not too long.”
Besides her beloved Mancha, Cat had ridden dozens of horses, but she was awed by Sangre. “Please love me,” she murmured in his ear. “You deserve the best rider in the world, un vaquero muy grande, but I’ll be very good to you!”
Kilting her skirts, she mounted as decorously as possible. He turned at the shift of her weight and the pressure of her legs, appearing not to need even a touch of the rein on his neck, and paced springingly along the trail down to the creek, one ear and eye watching ahead, the others directed toward her to pick up her intentions. Because of the way a horse’s eyes set, he can see in all directions and each eye works independently. Belen said it was nature’s way of protecting him from enemies coming up from behind.
When they were a little used to each other, she rose slightly, leaning a bit forward. He skimmed into a smooth lope that ate the distance. Oh, to ride like this, on such a horse, wind stinging his mane against her face! There was no finer, better way to be sixteen.
“Ah, mi caballo!” she called to him, laughing joyously. “We’ll travel many miles together, many years!” She thought to herself that she must have been crazy that morning to wonder whom she was going to marry. Who wanted to trade such freedom for keeping house for a man?
Reluctantly turning home, Cat insisted on rubbing Sangre down herself and giving him grain in a nosebag. Sighing happily, she watched him lie down in the dust and roll vigorously before he rose and trotted off.
Jordan and Belen, who’d apparently waited for her, smiled at her praises for Sangre and walked with her to the house, where they all washed at the bench outside before entering the big kitchen.
“I’m glad you like the horse,” Jordan said, handing her a clean corner of the coarse towel. “He’s been well trained but has all his spirit.”
Cat nodded somewhat ruefully. “He’s much too wonderful for me.”
“What do you mean?” Jordan frowned.
She had to think a moment. “I won’t need all the things he can do—won’t use him till he really has to try, the way a vaquero would.”
Jordan regarded her quizzically. “You think horses—and people—should be pushed to their limits?”
She hadn’t thought of it that way and floundered a bit. “It makes them stronger if they are. And it seems a shame to do only part of what’s possible.”
The young man’s frown vanished. His hazel eyes laughed down at her. “Don’t feel sorry for Sangre yet, Caterina! I’ve got a notion you’ll drive man or horse either one to the end of his tether!”
That was the sort of remark that would have made her angry if he hadn’t just joined in giving her the most splendid horse in all Arizona and Sonora. Now she only laughed and hurried into the house. She was disheveled from the ride, but she couldn’t keep the others any longer from their meal.
Horrors! There was Lieutenant Frazier lounging in the front door, talking with Marc and the twins. Too late to retreat. Gray eyes lighting, he came forward, bowed gallantly, and wished her happy birthday.
“I brought you a small gift.” He presented a tissue-wrapped object. Was it accident that his fingers brushed hers? “I hope it’s not presumptuous of me to stop by at such a family occasion.”
Talitha would already have invited him to supper. Annoyed though she was at being caught with windblown hair and a dress the worse for berry picking and her ride, Cat could scarcely do otherwise than say, “We’re always glad to have guests, Lieutenant.”
He obviously expected her to open his gift. Unwrapping it, she found a book by an author who was new to her, Mark Twain. “This Innocents Abroad is his first book,” the lieutenant said. “But his story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ made him famous two years ago. I had asked my sister to procure a copy of Miss Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, but the bookseller was out of that and recommended this. I hope you won’t find the way Twain pokes fun at Europe’s treasures and traditions too offensive.”
“It sounds like tremendous fun,” Cat assured him. How could such a dashing-looki
ng cavalry officer sound such a prig? “Thank you, and please thank your sister.”
He managed to sit next to her, but if he’d had any hope of semiprivate conversation, it had to vanish when Jordan took the seat directly opposite.
“Well, Lieutenant,” he said amiably, “have you chased any Apaches lately?”
“We’re always scouting,” Frazier replied somewhat defensively. “But we never seem to encounter the devils. They fade into the ground. Tom Gardner, who sells the camp produce, has been attacked so often that soldiers are detailed to guard his place, but we can’t station men everywhere. By the time we get word of a raid, the redskins are gone.”
Talitha shook her bright head. At twenty-nine, quietly glowing with the love she and Marc had for each other, she was in the full bloom of strong, proud beauty. The birth of blond little Shea three years ago had made her figure richer, softening a slight angularity, just as Marc’s cherishing had eased the sternness brought by too heavy and too early burdens. Dear Tally, she deserved her joys. If only James would come back.…
That thought hurt so much that Cat refused to dwell on it and concentrated on what Talitha was saying. “Poor Larcena! Her brother, Jim, was ambushed and killed last year. Now it’s her father and favorite brother. Shea and I went to see her after she survived that lancing the Apaches gave her in 1860.”
When the lieutenant raised his eyebrows, Talitha explained how newly wed Larcena, one of the Pennington daughters, had been abducted along with a little Mexican girl, lanced eleven times, shoved down a ravine, and stoned. Left for dead in the snow, she at last roused enough to drag homeward. After sixteen days with only a little grass to eat and some spilled flour she found at a lumber camp, she crawled to a lumbering road and was rescued.
With a certain shock, Cat realized that nearly everyone at the table had survived disasters that might boggle this young officer’s mind, though they all accepted them matter-of-factly. Marc, Belen, and the twins had fought through wars; Talitha had seen her relatives killed and burned by Apaches, watched her captive mother die, been forced to fill Socorro’s place, to lose Santiago and Shea.
And James? Cat flinched from the memory. Every vaquero had lost kin to Apaches or bandits. Sewa was orphaned. So, for that matter, were Cat and her brothers, but the love of Talitha and the ranch folk had kept them from feeling alone.
Marc turned the subject to the new governor, Anson P. K. Safford, of whom he thought highly. “He served two terms in the California legislature and was chairman of the committee on education. He’s proved himself a public-spirited man who intends to stay in the West, unlike our first two governors, Goodwin and McCormick, who came and went, using their appointments as steppingstones.”
“He sounds rash.” Jordan grinned. “Didn’t he just marry, in July, a girl he met in April in San Francisco?”
Talitha smiled at this uncle who was several years her junior. “He waited till he was thirty-nine, which isn’t very impulsive. Maybe he makes up his mind quickly when he sees what he wants.”
“Maybe.” Jordan’s hazel eyes touched Cat. This time he had that curious little half-smile on his lips. She immediately turned to the lieutenant and asked if he wanted more tamales.
He took one, thanked her, and said respectfully to Marc, “I’m glad you have a good opinion of Governor Safford, sir. Your experience in the legislature must have given you insight into the kind of administrator the territory needs.”
“Safford wants to start educating Arizona’s children, all of them. He knows well enough that something has to be done about the Apaches, but he’s shocked that there’s only one public school in the state, at Prescott.”
“But, dear,” frowned Talitha, “in that very first legislature didn’t you set aside money for public schools?”
“Indeed we did.” Marc chuckled. There was considerable gray in his brown hair, but his frank blue eyes were young. “There we sat in a two-room cabin made of pine logs so new they still wept pitch. There hadn’t been time to chink the walls and the wind kept us well ventilated even with all the hot air we filled the place with. An early storm drove us out completely and we adjourned to the governor’s mansion to do our lawmaking. A far cry from the last political body I attended, the 1848 Prussian constituent assembly in Berlin.”
He went on to tell how the nine-member Council and eighteen-member House of Representatives had fittingly enough elected Charles Poston as their first delegate to the United States Congress, for without his tireless endeayors there still might not be any Arizona Territory. They’d instructed, Poston to besiege Congress for mail service and money to pay and equip volunteer Indian fighters, and then they got around to education.
“In the end,” Marc concluded, “we elected a Board of Regents for the university we hope to have someday, gave two hundred and fifty dollars to the mission school at San Xavier, and granted two hundred and fifty dollars each to the county-seat towns of Prescott, La Paz, and Mohave for schools, provided the towns raised matching amounts. Tucson could have had five hundred dollars by making instruction in the English language part of the curriculum. Only Prescott matched the money.”
Cat sniffed. “Why, that means Talitha’s given more money for schools than the legislature!”
As Judah Frost’s widow and only traceable beneficiary, Talitha had inherited his businesses. She had cleared his considerable debts by selling his shares in several freighting companies. Not wanting to profit from the estate of the man she’d hated, she turned some of the proceeds from the Tecolote mine, which Marc administered, over to San Xavier’s school and used the rest for a school and infirmary at Tecolote as well as pensions for aged or disabled miners and their families. Part of the profit from the San Patricio was spent in similar ways.
Suddenly, Jordan, though pleasant in manner, seemed bound to harass Lieutenant Frazier. “I can’t understand, sir, why the Apaches are worse than ever when there are so many forts and camps. You’ll have to forgive me if I can’t see that the army does much but escort government officials and their own supplies.”
Frazier colored to the roots of his fair hair. “To control over thirty thousand Indians there are fewer than three thousand troops in Arizona, Scott. They’re scattered among nine posts so separated by distance and rough country that it’s almost impossible for one post to come to the aid of another. Sickness has been a problem, too. Camp Crittenden seems to be healthier than most, but often there are more men sick with intermittent fever at Camp Wallen than are fit for duty.”
Marc interposed mildly, “There may have been some failures of common sense over at Camp Wallen. I understand that the men and officers complained constantly of sleeping in their ‘A’ tents till General McDowell reminded them of General Order 80 which instructs men to make their own shelters out of what’s at hand. That was when the commanding officers got a Mexican herder to show them how to make adobes. Is it true, Lieutenant, that Wallen’s being abandoned?”
Frazier nodded. “Next month.” He brooded a moment, then swung on Jordan and counterattacked. “There’d be long faces among the civilians, sir, if we didn’t escort the paymasters! Why, the territory lives by supplying the army! If it weren’t for government contracts and sales, where would your freighters and merchants and farmers be?”
It was a fair thrust. Jordan chuckled. “It’s like my father used to say. We worked all summer to grow enough grain to feed the horses through the winter so they could plow for the grain next summer.”
Frazier was not to be mollified. “We get infantry when what we need is cavalry. And though we’re better off directed by the Department of California than that of New Mexico, what we really need is a Department of Arizona.”
“It’ll come,” Marc said. “Safford’s traveling to Washington at his own expense to plead the special problems of our territory. I think he’ll get at least part of what we need.” He smiled down the table at Cat. “This is no way to celebrate a sixteenth birthday, is it, chiquita? Chuey, Rodolfo, get your gu
itars and let’s have a baile!”
XIV
In spite of his limp, Marc danced with Talitha, and also with Cat, murmuring teasingly in her ear, “One thing that’s quite nice for a birthday is to have two handsome young men paying court.”
“Two?” she puzzled.
He glanced at Jordan, who was whirling a gasping, laughing Anita. “You mean you’ve never guessed?”
Unaccountably distressed, Cat shook her head. “Not Jordan. He thinks I’m a child.”
“Does he?” Marc smiled and surrendered her to the lieutenant.
He danced as well as Marc, who’d learned in Berlin and taught the vaqueros how to play a waltz, but Claybourne Frazier’s strong hand on her back, his fingers holding hers, gave her a strange, breathless feeling, as if something she both feared and desired were about to happen.
“Your uncle gibes me about Indians,” the lieutenant said with a harsh laugh. “But if he thinks anything he can say will stop me from coming to see you—” He broke off in confusion. “Forgive me, Miss O’Shea. That sounds presumptuous of me. But you can’t know how eagerly I’ve waited for your birthday. With your consent, I want to ask your stepfather if I may call on you.”
Cat gulped, stared, and swallowed again. Her confusion seemed to restore Frazier’s usual confidence. He drew her a little closer, laughing. “Is it such a shock? I’ll be bound everyone else guesses, including your vigilant uncle.”
“He’s not my uncle,” said Cat, recovering her breath. “And Marc isn’t my stepfather.” She explained the relationships of the household, to the lieutenant’s mounting astonishment.
“It’s all so … irregular! Mrs. Revier no blood relative of you and your brothers; Mr. Scott her uncle instead of her brother, no kin of yours in either case; and that pretty little Indian girl no kin to any of you!”
“She’s Santiago’s child. We couldn’t love her more.”
Harvest of Fury Page 18