Wind Runner left the tepee. Maverick waited, listening to the soft sound of the moccasins walking away before he moved swiftly to untie Cayenne and pull her into his embrace. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry! I had to do all that! I was afraid they might suspect us if I treated you gently!”
He kissed her bruised face and she hesitated only a moment before she threw her arms around his neck, weeping warm, salty tears against his naked chest. “I—I didn’t understand . . . thought you had decided to become a Comanche again!”
“Never!” he whispered. “I’d like to send every one of them into a wandering hell!” He took the rawhide and looped it over his gun belt. That was his own special vengeance against those who had hurt, humiliated, and tortured his mother.
He propped her up, gently washed her face, and fed her the roasted, crispy meat.
“Maverick,” she said with a sigh as she lay back, “what will happen tomorrow?”
He leaned on his elbow, looking down at her in the flickering light of the little fire. “Don’t you know tomorrow never comes?” He tried to sound light, bantering as he reached out and touched the tip of her freckled nose. “Let me do the worrying for both of us, okay? And trust me, baby, whatever happens, trust me. Whatever I do, go along with it without question.”
She snuggled into the safety of his embrace. “I will, Maverick, I will. I guess I know now that you must love me, too; that you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.
Except kill your father, he thought, but he only kissed her closed eyes while she sighed with exhaustion. “Little Reb, it’s been a long day. Go to sleep now and I’ll keep watch. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“You promise, cross your heart and hope to die?” Her eyes flickered open sleepily and she suddenly looked very young, very innocent. He felt old, discouraged. He didn’t have much faith in anything himself. His revenge was a flame that slowly consumed him, burning him out from the inside. But it didn’t matter; nothing mattered but that he fulfill the vow.
Cross your heart and hope to die. How many, many times had Annie said that to her little boy as she taught him about the white civilization? She had promised Joe a son, she said, stroking Eagle’s Flight’s black hair. And she’d gotten him one. Joe wouldn’t mind that he’d not fathered the son she’d promised. No, Joe would take Eagle’s Flight as his very own and they’d all live happily ever after. Annie said that among the whites, the very best stories ended that way, just as they began, “Once upon a time . . .”
But Joe hadn’t come for either of them, although they waited and waited. The years passed. The little boy grew tall and strong while his mother grew thinner and more bowed with cruelty and hard work. Perhaps things might have been different if his father, Blood Arrow, had not been killed on a raid before the boy’s birth. As it was, he and his mother were mistreated and ridiculed by the aunts and jealous cousins, by his father’s brothers.
“Just a little while longer,” Annie would sigh as they crouched together, hiding when things got too bad. “Joe will come for both of us, you’ll see. We’ll go back to the white world and we’ll fit in there.”
“Tell me, Mother,” he would beg, “tell me how it will be. Tell me how it was.”
Annie smiled and patted the top of his head. “Once upon a time there was a big redheaded man and he loved me so very, very much!”
“Will he love me, Mother? Will he really love me?” It was important to the fatherless boy.
Annie smiled. Her smile lit up her plain little face and made her big gray eyes crinkle at the corners. “Of course he will love you as I do, dear, because you are the son I promised him! We’ll all sit down at a long dining table with lots of friends and relatives, and there’ll be plates and knives and forks.”
He considered a long moment. “What’s a fork?”
She looked at him a little sadly. “I must teach you even more if you are going to be able to live in the white world, my son.” She hugged him to her. “That’s how white people eat. And on that long table, there’ll be lots of food, chocolate cake like Joe likes and fried chicken.”
Her own stomach rumbled and he thought how hungry they both were. Often in the cold winter, there was not enough food and babies died. White hunters were slowly killing off the game, pushing the Indians farther and farther out on to the desolate Staked Plains, the wilderness of west Texas.
He looked up at her. “And will you be at that table, Mother? Will you stay by my side forever?”
Annie hesitated a long moment. “Forever is a long time, Son, but if I’m not there in body, I’ll be there in spirit. Do you understand?”
He didn’t really, but he nodded because he knew it would please her and he loved her so.
“And Son, even if I’m not here, I’ll live on forever because my blood flows through your veins as it will through your children’s, through your children’s children. As long as you don’t forget me, I’ll live forever in your heart.”
He did not like the way she talked, the sadness in her eyes. “We’ll get away, Mother,” he said eagerly, “we’ll run away and find this Joe McBride.”
Annie shook her head. “They watch us too closely,” she said, “and I don’t have the strength for it anyway.”
He hadn’t noticed until she said that how thin and drawn she looked. After that, he took to saving some of his food for her, lying and saying he was not hungry so she would eat it.
The years passed and he grew tall while she grew more thin and sad every day. “Joe will come for us, you’ll see,” she said, but her voice no longer held any conviction. The boy had grown hard and bitter, hating the white man who did not want him, did not want his mother.
Once he said to her, “Maybe he does not know you’re here, that you are alive.”
She looked at him sadly and turned away. “He knows. A few months after I was captured, another woman was taken. But no warrior decided to take her as his woman and she was to be ransomed.”
She paused a long moment, fingering the ragged old buckskin shift she wore. “She didn’t want to be sent back dressed in buckskin, afraid her family wouldn’t want her.”
“And?” the boy prompted.
“She was about my size,” Annie said, “even had hair the same chestnut color. I gave her the homespun dress I wore, traded with her so she wouldn’t have to go back to the settlement in buckskin. She swore she’d find Joe, tell him I was still alive, tell him now that my warrior was dead, his brothers might sell me cheaply.”
He knew without asking. There had been no answer. As Annie’s body swelled with her half-Comanche child, she had waited for the help the other captive would send. No ransom came.
The years passed and the half-breed boy grew big and muscular. His heart turned hard and bitter against the man called Joe McBride who did not want him for a son, did not want his mother.
Annie made excuses. “He’s trying hard to raise the money,” she said lamely, “although I would have thought old Mr. Adams, our neighbor, or even banker Ogle might have made him a loan.”
The boy said nothing.
“He’ll come,” Annie said as the months turned into years. “Maybe the girl had a hard time finding him, although I gave her good directions on how to get to our spread.”
But the half-grown boy called Eagle’s Flight no longer listened to her fairy tales about how the two of them would sit at the long table of the ranch house. He had long ago realized that the white man his mother loved would never come for either of them. The pair would spend the rest of their lives among the Indians, huddling together, hungry and cold while his mother taught him everything she thought he would need if he ever returned to civilization. She could read and write a little and she taught him as best she could, drawing in the dirt with a stick.
Sometimes when they were both miserable, she would tell him long stories about big white ranch houses with soft beds and great stone fireplaces with roaring logs. “Once upon a time . . .” she would begin, and he would ask, “Do all white stor
ies begin that way, Mother?”
“Only the very best ones,” Annie smiled, stroking his dark hair. “And, of course, they always end ’. . . and they lived happily ever after.’ ”
Happily ever after. Maverick blinked in the darkness of the tepee now as he lay next to the sleeping Cayenne, remembering. But Annie’s story had not ended that way. The man his mother loved never came to save them. So the son had made a vow on Annie’s dying body. I’ll get Joe. I promise I’ll get him, torture him slowly, cut his heart out and make him eat it as he dies for what has happened to you!
He had been fourteen winter counts old that night as he stood there looking down at Annie’s frail, work-worn body, the scarlet blood smearing her still form, his hands, his knife. . . .
Maverick sighed, running his fingers thoughtfully along the jagged white scar on his face, thinking of Annie, of Cayenne. How he wished this story could have a happy ending, but of course, it could not. If he survived and made it to the Lazy M, he must kill his beloved Cayenne’s father to fulfill the blood vow he had made ten years ago.
He cuddled the flame-haired girl close to him an listened to the drums echoing through the canyon as the celebrating continued long into the night. In all the world, only old Don Diego de Durango, the man who had adopted Maverick, knew of his past, his vow. He hadn’t meant to tell even him, but one night in the Durango study, too much whiskey had made Maverick vulnerable and he’d told.
Maverick’s forehead wrinkled with thought. And yet, Cayenne said that the old Don had met her father a year ago. Knowing that Maverick was searching for that man, why hadn’t the old Don told him where to find Joe McBride? Why? If Joe McBride was as good a shot as everyone said, he had the advantage and the superior range with a rifle. He might even get Maverick before the half-breed could gun him down.
Cayenne sighed in her sleep, snuggling into his arms. Maverick kissed her hair gently. He could not have both love and vengeance, but he had sworn by duty first. A man cannot live without honor.
At least, Maverick decided now, he would not torture Joe McBride as he had always dreamed of. Out of love for the daughter, Joe would get a quick, merciful death, which was more than Annie Laurie had gotten. It was a long time before Maverick dropped off into a fitful sleep.
For the next several days, the couple rested in the Indian encampment that sprawled along the creek through the canyon. Maverick tried to make plans as he studied the sentries guarding the big horse herd, trying to figure out when the couple could possibly slip through the darkness, grab Dust Devil and Strawberry, and make a run for it. There were several trails out, none of them easy.
Well, he had a few days to rest up while he leisurely decided what to do, Maverick thought.
He was wrong. On the third day, shouts greeted riders approaching the camp down the narrow trail. As Maverick stood watching the war party approach, the fat, cruel squaw raised a glad cry and went running to meet them. “My son! My son!”
Maverick peered at them, Cayenne by his side. Was one of those warriors really wearing yellow satin sleeve garters? Where had he seen those before?
The long-armed leader wore a Turkey-red white man’s shirt. The sunlight reflected off a beaded necklace, off some kind of hair ornaments in the leader’s soot-black braids as the warriors rode in.
Cayenne laughed. “What’s that in his hair? Looks almost like a woman’s fancy combs!”
Maverick shook his head in puzzlement, staring at the leader, searching his memory as the group rode into the camp.
Wind Runner ran forward, yelling in Comanche, “Little Fox, how went the attack on the buffalo hunters?”
The man’s small, foxlike features grinned as he waved his lance to show the new scalps dangling there, his long arms raised in triumph. “I have white scalps to pay for my sister’s honor, for the slaughter of our buffalo!”
Maverick felt a chill go down his back as recognition slowly dawned on him. Adobe Walls. That warrior had been the one at Adobe Walls. Would the Comanche brave recognize him, too?
Chapter Eighteen
Maverick’s blood almost congealed as he recognized the Comanche leader riding in ahead of his war party. What in God’s name was going to happen if Little Fox recognized him from Adobe Walls? He and Cayenne couldn’t possibly make a run for it through a thousand Indians.
He looked over at her and saw the frightened recognition in her face, too. Many white women would have panicked, he thought with admiration as he watched the little redhead. She was scared spitless, he could tell by her eyes, but she only stood there. Her gaze came to his, and she nodded ever so slightly, trusting him to deal with the situation, trusting him to look after her.
The hook-nosed Wind Runner pushed forward as the war party dismounted, and he raised a hand in greeting. “Hoa! Little Fox, how goes the war against the hated whites?”
Little Fox’s face twisted in insane delight as he waved the lance. “You need ask?” He chortled in Comanche, “Do you not see the scalps I have brought back so that we might dance?”
Maverick stared at the various colored hair dangling from the staff, at the white man’s shirt Little Fox wore, at the yellow satin sleeve garters on the other warrior.
Wind Runner motioned to Maverick. “Little Fox, I forget to tell you we are honored to have our great chief’s brother, Pecos, ride into our camp. He is on his way to join Quanah on the Staked Plains.”
Maverick took a deep breath and nodded a greeting. Any second, the other would sound the alarm and he and Cayenne would be tonight’s entertainment as the pair were slowly tortured to death. “I’m sorry that I missed the fight,” he said in Comanche to Little Fox. “But I have been raiding the Tejanos south of here.” He pointed toward Cayenne. “Most of my warriors have been killed, but I captured a great prize to give as a gift to my brother.”
Some of the warriors guffawed obscenely. Little Fox stared at Maverick a long moment and Maverick held his breath, awaiting the recognition. He hoped the braves could not see the pounding of his heart in his great naked chest.
But Little Fox only grunted and nodded a greeting. “Your own raid seems to be a success,” he said in Comanche. “Your brother will no doubt be pleased to get such a prize.” He glanced up at the setting sun. “And now, let us have feasting and dancing long into the night to celebrate my strong puha, my medicine!”
Maverick was so relieved the other did not recognize him that he almost collapsed, but he only said, “Of course! I am eager to sit and hear your tales of this war journey!”
He left Cayenne inside the tepee as night came on, dressed himself in all the stolen finery of the warrior he had killed, and went to sit in the big campfire circle to eat and smoke and listen to Little Fox brag about the raid on Adobe Walls.
“We killed many,” Little Fox boasted. “We taught those hunters a lesson they will not soon forget!”
Maverick, sitting cross-legged in a place of honor, looked around at Little Fox’s men and saw them avert their eyes guiltily. It was not honorable for warriors to lie in such a manner. “Tell us the details of how it happened.”
Little Fox told the story of Adobe Walls as if the Indians had overrun the place, killing every man. His warriors said nothing but their expression showed doubt in their own wisdom of having ridden with such a man.
The drums and the dancing began, the new scalps hanging in a place of honor near the fire. Maverick looked at them, especially the woman’s hair that hung so long and black and magnificent. Why did it seem familiar to him?
Little Fox went on with his bragging. “. . . and then after we left this fortress of the hunters, we chanced on another party of buffalo hunters to the north. We surrounded them and held them there until they used up their ammunition.”
One of the others laughed and nodded. “Some of them managed to kill themselves before we could take them prisoner, but not all.” He stroked the yellow satin sleeve garters he wore.
Little Fox fingered his own Turkey-red shirt. “Not all
,” he grinned with satisfaction at the memory. “After we took these things from them, we staked them out naked in the hot sun, cut off their man-hoods, and stuffed them into their mouths so they could not scream!”
Maverick had to control himself to keep from wincing in disgust.
The one with the yellow sleeve garters laughed. “Then we cut off their ears, drove wooden stakes through their bellies, and propped their heads up so the pair could watch themselves die. It takes a long, long time to die that way.”
Little Fox fingered the beaded necklace he wore and Maverick searched his mind, wondering why that also looked familiar to him.
The leader said, “My sister’s death is finally paid for.” When he looked up, directly into Maverick’s eyes, Maverick saw the insanity there. “These hunters were the ones who raped and killed my sister, so I wreaked terrible revenge, but I want even more!”
Buck. With sudden clarity, Maverick remembered the grizzled buffalo hunter in the Turkey-red shirt and beaded Indian necklace, his partner, Clint. It was a horrible way to die, even though it was a just, terrible vengeance, Maverick thought.
Little Fox seemed to be studying him thoughtfully. “And you say you are Pecos, our great leader’s brother?”
What was it about the way he looked at Maverick? Could it be Maverick’s imagination that there was hint of a smile in the other’s dark, small features, as if he knew a secret joke?
Maverick nodded. “I go to join Quanah to the west, take him the white woman as a gift from my raid.”
The others nodded and grunted in approval at the gift, but Little Fox smiled ever so slightly. “No need for that,” he said. “The great warrior was with us on our raid and told us to meet him back here at the canyon in thirty sun’s time.” He looked up at the moon. “Quanah is now raiding across the great plains even as we have been doing.”
Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) Page 32