CHAPTER 2
Nine days earlier
The colt looked up, perked its ears, and snorted.
Snorted? John McMasters figured the stubborn bay was laughing at him. Slowly, he swung down from the dun he rode and easily removed the lariat. It was July, but high up on the Mogollon Rim, the air felt cool and dark clouds threatened rain later in the afternoon. In Arizona, they called that time of year “monsoon season,” and McMasters wanted to get home with the runaway colt before there came a soaking, hard, cold rain. maybe some hail. He remembered Old Jake Willis. Caught in a monsoon two summers back, he and his horse had been killed by a lightning strike.
“Easy, boy,” McMasters said to the colt. He ground-reined his dun, and his boots clopped on the hard-rock surface as he approached the edge of the rim.
The colt took a step back and McMasters stopped. He had come too far to watch his colt tumble over the edge of the rim. Behind was the vast empty. Only a few pines poked above the rim, growing from the side of the hill or maybe a ridge outcropping. If the colt fell to the ridge, McMasters would have no way of getting it up—not even if he had plenty of help. If the colt missed the ridge, it was a long, long way down to nothing but more pine trees and rocks.
Two ravens flew past, fighting hard against the wind that picked up with fury. McMasters raised his left hand to pull down his hat tighter on his head. He looked back at his saddle, knowing what he would find. Nothing. Not even a bedroll. He should have brought along a slicker, but when he had discovered that James, his son, had left the corral open that morning, he didn’t think he would still be looking for the runaway colt far away from his ranch and high up on the Mogollon in the afternoon.
He could smell rain. Worse, he could feel the electricity in the air.
The colt whinnied, but did not move away from the rim’s edge.
McMasters took another step. Slowly. Another. He began to sing.
The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star;
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
The colt stared. The wind turned into a roar. McMasters raised his voice.
We are springing to the call with a million freemen more,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And we’ll fill our vacant ranks of our brothers gone before,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
He reached the colt, let it smell his scent, and rubbed the bay’s neck, widening the loop of the lariat and still singing.
The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star;
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
Slowly, carefully, he brought the lariat’s loop over the colt’s head, and let out a sigh of relief. He took a moment to stare at the view. The pines bent to the wind, but beyond that he saw those pine-covered hills, the deep, verdant valley, and beyond that more mountains. It was almost the last thing John McMasters ever saw.
The young colt pulled back, and its rear hooves slipped on the flat rocks. Squealing, the animal started backwards over the cliff. McMasters pulled hard on the rope and leaned back with all his might. The lariat burned through his gloves as the colt kicked and lunged. Somehow, the animal regained its footing on the rock and ran forward. By then, McMasters was on his knees, the leather chaps protecting him. He came up, keeping a tight grip on the lariat, and stopped the colt from running.
Heart racing, sweating profusely, McMasters stepped again toward the horse. He shot a glance at his own horse, relieved to see the dun staring at him with a bemused look.
“That wasn’t so damned funny.”
He sang again, “Yankee Doodle Dandy” but his voice cracked from the fear. It took awhile for his nerves to calm and his hands to stop shaking. Had the bay gone over the rim, McMasters knew he would have gone over with it. He would have been too damned stubborn to let go of the lariat.
When the colt seemed calm, McMasters turned back to look at the view and shook his head.
Years of experience and memories of Old Jake Willis should have reminded him not to tarry. The Mogollon might be a beautiful place, but it could turn deadly in a heartbeat.
“Come on, boy,” he told the colt, “let’s go home.” He kept singing, though softer as he guided the runaway toward the dun.
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
Keeping a tight hold on the end of the lariat, McMasters swung into the saddle, gave the dun a kick, and led the bay colt away from the rim’s edge. Hooves clapped against the stone until they reached the softer dirt, churned by wagon wheels and shod horses over the years, and took the trail that went down the Mogollon and into Payson. Before he reached Payson, however, he would be home.
Maybe, he thought, I might even beat the monsoon home.
Thunder cracked. Both the dun and the bay jumped, but McMasters kept his seat in the creaking saddle. Even more important, he kept his grip on the lead rope. He started to sing the next verse of “The Battle Cry of Freedom” . . . if he could remember it.
Soon it felt as though he were riding through the waterfall at Tonto Bridge . . . and quickly felt more like Niagara Falls.
Numbingly cold rain stung more like hailstones than raindrops, and might indeed turn into hail before he ever reached his horse ranch. Sometimes the summer storms blew out quickly. Other times, they turned roads into mud bogs and could leave a man with a bad case of pneumonia . . . or fried to a crisp by lightning.
John McMasters kept riding down the trail, pulling the colt behind him. He jerked down the brim of his hat, but that did not keep him dry. Hell, the monsoon had already soaked his clothes. The wet saddle rubbed against his wet pants.
“Happy birthday,” McMasters said with resigned bitterness, “to me.”
* * *
“My God, John, get out of those wet clothes—now!” Bea practically jerked him inside their two-story home.
Dripping wet, even though the monsoon had stopped thirty minutes before he reached the ranch, McMasters turned toward the potbelly stove with the coffee pot that looked so inviting, but his wife pushed him away and toward the bedroom.
“After you’ve dressed,” she ordered. “Do you need a hot bath?”
“I never want to feel water on me again,” he mumbled and settled into the chair.
“I said—”
“Let me get my boots off,” he told Bea. “Don’t want me tracking mud to the bedroom.”
Although the rain had stopped before he reached home, it had turned the yard from the corrals and barn to the nice home into a quagmire. He had already hung his chaps and his hat, both soaking wet, on a peg on the porch. Bea had to help him with the boots, so wet they felt like they had shrunk and sealed to his socks. The socks he somehow managed to pull off without his wife’s help.
At last he stood, shooting a glance at the coffee, but Bea gave him that look of a ranch foreman . . . or an Army major, and he slowly moved toward the door that led to the bedroom.
“I’ll get you a towel,” she said.
“I might need a quilt.”
“You touch Grandmother Albertine’s quilt and you’ll be sleeping in the barn, young man!”
“I’m not a young man anymore, Bea.” He pulled off his eyeglasses, left them on the table by the rocker near the fireplace, and pushed open the door to the bedroom.
“You’re only fifty,” she told him.
“Today, fifty feels like Methuselah.”
“I bet I can change that.”
McMasters turned to see that devilish twinkle in her eyes.
“Tonight.” She grinned. “Happy birthday, John.”
He stood inside the bedroom, staring at her.
She had turned forty years old in January, but—even had he been wearing his spectacles—still looked twenty . . . the age she had been when they had married on July 4, 1876. It was the best Independence Day he could recall since that day at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he and the rest of Company G, and all the rest of General Meade’s army, had stared across the mud and blood-soaked fields as the rain poured and they had realized that there would be no battle, that they would live another day, that no more men killed, and that Robert E. Lee would be taking his Rebs out of Pennsylvania.
Come to think on it, McMasters decided, July 4, 1863, hadn’t been much of a national holiday after all.
Hell, he thought, our twentieth anniversary passed two weeks earlier, and I forgot it. Have to make that up.
Flour coated her hands, and he smelled a cake baking. Usually that time of year, Bea would be using the summer kitchen outside, but the thunderstorm had stopped that. She wore a plain dress of green calico, which accented her emerald eyes, and an apron. A yellow scarf kept her blond hair up. Four kids later, she still looked slim, and maybe even more beautiful than when he had first laid eyes on her in Independence, Missouri. She had been butchering a pig then, and blood—not flour—stained her hands.
Every time he would remind her of that day, how he had walked into the butcher’s tent by mistake, he would laugh. Her—frantically trying to push the hair out of her eyes, leaving pig blood streaking her cheeks and forehead. Him—eyes bulging, mouth hanging open, trying to find the words of an apology, but only “You aren’t Ted Chambers” coming out of his mouth.
Bea never found his remembrance so funny. But the children always laughed, no matter how many times they had heard that story.
“Get out of those clothes, mister,” she said, stepping across the plank floor still wet from his clothes. She grabbed the knob to the door and pulled it shut. “And do not put them on our bed.”
The clothes came off, but not without a struggle. He found the towel by the washbasin and dried himself off as best as possible. Beyond the door and in the kitchen, he heard the noise of a spoon whipping something in a bowl, and his wife’s boots on the floor.
“You found the colt?” she called out.
“Finally. Where’s James?”
“Don’t be hard on him. You’ve left the gate open yourself a time or two.”
McMasters had not seen James, but he had not gone to the barn. Wet as he was, tired as he felt, he had unsaddled his horse, and left both the dun and the colt in the round pen. He would see to them once he was dry, and after he had downed at least a gallon of hot coffee.
“I’m not going to whip him.” He opened the armoire—burled ash with paneled doors inlaid with tulips of satinwood. Made in France, it had crossed the Atlantic in the 1790s when Bea’s great-grandparents had fled Paris during the French Revolution. McMasters never knew how they had managed to get that piece of furniture—the damned thing weighed nigh a ton—out of their home, into a wagon, and onto a ship. Let alone how it had survived New York City; Cincinnati, Ohio; Independence, Missouri; and every stop he and Bea had made before settling a few miles outside of Payson, Arizona Territory.
“Where’s Rosalee?” he asked as he opened a drawer to find a pair of cotton underwear.
“She went on a buggy ride with Dan.”
That would be Dan Kilpatrick. A deputy U.S. marshal who had found the courage three months earlier to come up to McMasters and ask for Rosalee’s hand in marriage.
McMasters had snapped, “That’s a bit forward, don’t you think! You want to marry a twelve-year-old! Why not, Eugénia? She’s only eight!” He smiled as he remembered Bea’s calm voice. “John . . . Rosalee is eighteen. And Eugénia, fourteen.”
He liked Kilpatrick. The young man, twenty-eight or thereabouts, came from good stock. He wasn’t sure how he felt about having a lawman for a son-in-law, but Payson was not as lawless as some towns. There had not been a killing in town in five or six years. The 20th Century would be welcomed in just a few more years, and peace seemed to be settling on Arizona Territory. Besides, Dan Kilpatrick did not always plan on wearing a star. He’d told McMasters that he wanted to read the law, hang his shingle in Payson. As a deputy marshal, that boy—twenty-eight was still a boy in McMasters’s mind, and Rosalee would never look or seem older than twelve—sure followed the law by the book. He’d make a fine solicitor. Probably even become attorney general for the territory.
“I thought Dan was picking up prisoners at Verde.”
“He did,” Bea said. “Got back sooner than expected. Wanted to see his fiancée before he takes that trash to Yuma. You can’t blame him for that.”
“I hope,” McMasters called through the closed door as he found a pair of socks, “that that buggy has a top. That was a regular turd float.”
“Watch your language,” Bea told him. “And before you ask, Eugénia and Nate are at Lilly’s.”
Lilly was the daughter of their neighbors, Ned and Jane Lynch. Ned ran a sawmill. He had served in the First Texas, Hood’s brigade, but unlike a lot of former Confederates, had never held a grudge that McMasters had, as Lynch liked to say, “worn the blue.”
“Actually,” McMasters would reply to that with a grin, “my uniform was green.”
“And you ain’t even Irish,” Lynch would say.
“Scotch-Irish,” McMasters would say.
“Then that calls for a drink.” And Ned Lynch would find a jug or bottle.
“They’ll be back, though,” Bea said. “I told them all that today’s a special day.”
Eugénia and Nate were the youngest, fourteen and ten years old, respectively. Eugénia was the spitting image of Bea, but God had cursed Nate with his father’s features, the poor kid.
“There’s nothing special about this day.” McMasters finished dressing—duck trousers with canvas suspenders, a blue pullover cotton shirt with colorful flower prints, battered bandanna, and brown Wellington boots. Nothing special. Just another day in the life of John McMasters.
The front door opened, and McMasters heard someone step inside. Bea lowered her voice, whispering something, while he crossed the bedroom to the dressing table near the four-poster bed. He found the brush and worked on his hair, looking at his bronzed face in the mirror. He guessed that the newcomer would be James, and Bea was reassuring him that his father would hold no grudge, that the colt had been found, but that he must remember to make sure that gate is closed.
James was sixteen, looked more like Bea, thank the Good Lord, except he had thick, dark hair. McMasters frowned. Well, his hair had once been darker than the ace of spades, but it appeared a whole lot grayer. Not completely, but certainly more salt than pepper.
His eyes looked to the left of the mirror, and he smiled at the tintype taken on his wedding day. Bea hadn’t changed. He sure had. He looked to the right and frowned. Bea made him keep the medal framed and insisted that it hang on the wall. From bottom to top, a richly engraved five-point star hung from the talons of an American eagle. Above the eagle was a ribbon made of red and white vertical stripes and a wide horizontal blue stripe that was affixed to a highly polished pin. They had compromised, however, when they’d moved to the horse ranch near Payson, and had kept it on display but in the bedroom. Not where any visitor might see it.
Two years ago, he had found Nate staring at the medal. Turning around, flushing when his father entered the room, Nate had mumbled something that McMasters could not catch.
“I’m sorry,” his youngest son had finally said.
“No apology needed,” McMasters had said.
The scene replayed in McMaster’s head.
* * *
“Ben Ford says no one in Payson, maybe no one in the whole territory, has one of these.” Ned gestured at the medal.
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“But Ben Ford says they don’t give these out to anyone. That you’re a bona fide hero.”
&nbs
p; McMasters felt his stomach go tight, and he had to block out those memories. At least the nightmares had stopped, for the most part, twelve or thirteen years earlier.
“The bona fide heroes, son,” he said gently, “were the ones who didn’t come home from that war. Three hundred thousand or more. Maybe four hundred thousand. Maybe even more. Those are the ones who deserve that. Not me.”
“You never talk about it,” Nate said. “Ben Ford’s pa . . . he talks about the war all the time, Ben says. He served in the Second Wisconsin Infantry. So he hails from Wisconsin, same as you. Ben’s pa, I mean.”
McMasters nodded. “Brave unit. They were in a lot of the same fights we were in.”
“But Ben Ford’s pa talks about it all the time. You never say nothing about the war.”
McMasters put his hand on his son’s shoulder, pulled him away from the wall, and led him out of the bedroom. “I’ve spent thirty years trying to forget about it.”
* * *
Staring at the medal, McMasters heard the roar of musketry, smelled the stink of gunpowder, felt the Sharps rifle slamming against his shoulder. He wished he had insisted more, that Bea would have listened to him, and that he could have put the medal in a trunk. But, no, Bea was too proud of her husband, and McMasters loved her too much to disappoint her.
He shook his head, hoping the nightmares would not return. With a sigh, he turned away from the Medal of Honor they had pinned on his uniform thirty-one years ago, crossed the room, and opened the bedroom door.
CHAPTER 3
“Surprise!”
The curse died on John McMasters’s lips, as his heart started beating again.
Eugénia ran to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. Dan Kilpatrick, still wearing a yellow slicker over his Sunday-go-to-meetings, grinned, and pulled Rosalee closer to him. James beamed with joy. Nate blew on a whistle McMasters had carved for him two winters back. Bea held a cake with five candles burning atop it.
Remington 1894 Page 2