For several days they slept in the woods. Selah had packed their saddlebags with provisions and some of Matt’s belongings. After that Matt judged it safe to stop at inns or houses.
At the first inn they learned that Lincoln, as expected, had won the election. After they were settled in the inn’s one private room that night, a small loft reached by climbing up a ladder, Matt took Rachel’s hand. It was the first time he had touched her except by way of necessity. Her blood began racing, sending her nerves tingling.
“Rachel, you’re young, healthy and of a nature to be happy when woes don’t blight you. You’ll forget all this much quicker if you start a new life without me. Tante Estelle’s money would keep you till you found a position or I could leave you with army friends at one of the Western forts.”
She tried to free her hands but he held them tight, so she searched his face in the dim light while she fought the lump in her throat. “Do you want to be rid of me?”
“That’s not it.”
“Then what is?” she demanded. “Do—do you hate me, Matt?’
He pulled her against him. She thought he would kiss her but instead he buried his face in her hair, rocking back and forth despairingly. “I love you, Rachel, but I don’t know what can come of it. After what’s happened, can we ever be happy together?”
“Happy or not, I’m staying with you unless you ask me to leave.”
He still would not kiss her, but that night she woke to find his arms around her. Tempted to arouse him in his sleep, she started to stroke him, then turned away. She would not play that kind of trick, though instinct told her that loving could cleanse a lot of wounds. When he made love to her—if he ever did—he must choose to.
When the two riders crossed the Colorado, they came into grazing lands of mesquite grass watered by occasional springs and creeks. Wild turkey gobbled in live oak thickets and deer fed in the glades, but Rachel begged Matthew not to shoot the graceful deer unless they had no other food. They found honey in a hollow hickory tree by the Guadalupe River, and this gave them a wonderful taste of sweetness, though they left honey enough behind for the bees.
Not long after, they gazed down on the valley of San Antonio, where the old city of sun-dried adobe wound along the river watering many canals which nourished garden patches, flowers and trees. The town was laid out in streets that intersected at right angles toward the town center of two plazas surrounded by flat-roofed stone houses, with the church and public buildings in the middle.
Twenty-four years ago the Alamo had fallen, and hundreds of Santa Anna’s dead soldiers had been dumped into the river. The Texan corpses had been burned. Now the city was peaceful and Rachel gazed longingly at glimpses of green leaves behind high walls and barred gates.
“Matthew—Is—is this far enough?”
“No!” His lips had been tighter than his fingers on the reins. “But we’ll be married here. Whatever else, we’ll do that!”
They’d been wed by a rheumy white-haired Presbyterian minister who didn’t ask where they came from, only where they were going. When he heard their way lay west into new country, his tired eyes lit up and he hurried out to his kitchen, returning with some kernels of corn, which he put into Rachel’s hand as if they were gold.
“This is San Jacinto corn!” he told them proudly. “When you get to your settling place, plant it!”
He laughed to tell them how Santa Anna had vowed to Sam Houston that he would lead a great army back to victory, wiping out his defeat at San Jacinto. Houston had showed him an ear of corn, said it had been his ration for four days, and did Santa Anna think an army could whip men who would die following a general who had only corn to gnaw on?
“Then we called to Sam to give us the corn so we could plant it and name it after him,” the minister went on, eyes misting as they shone. “But Sam, he said to call it San Jacinto corn and plant it everywhere in honor of that battle where we won our freedom.”
“We’ll plant it,” Rachel promised.
They had thanked him and gone to buy necessities; grain for the horses, tamales stuffed with chicken, a meal of cabrito, or young kid, a hatchet, salt and cornmeal.
Though they were haunted by each other’s company, it was a shared and naked dread, a feeling they did not have to conceal. But when they spoke with people, they themselves seemed unreal. This was so painful they did not linger in town but paid their money to pleasant, joking people and rode away, past the river echoing with the sounds of women and children bathing.
Matt had chosen the stage road that ran four hundred and fifty miles from San Antonio to El Paso, the last half of the way through desert and bare mountains. He explained that a few garrisons had been built along this route in the ’50’s to protect travelers and discourage Indian forays but that Comanches still ranged over western Texas and made an annual raid into Mexico during the autumn Comanche Moon. In spite of deserts and Indians, the Butterfield Overland Mail had carried passengers and mail for several years now from Saint Louis and Memphis as far west as San Francisco, stopping off at the isolated Texas forts.
Rachel and Matt followed the Nueces through cedar- and oak-covered hills where clear water sparkled over limestone outcroppings and frothed over shallows. When they and their horses grew tired, they camped to let the big gray stallion and dainty chestnut mare graze in the deep grass along the river while they rested and feasted on wild turkey or trout with bread Rachel made in the frying pan.
During the last part of their three-hundred-mile journey, Rachel had been openly asking Matt if they had come far enough. On the second morning of their Nueces camp, she breathed in air sweet as that of East Texas but with a wilder tang of cedar, plum, buckthorn, mallow and mustang grapes.
“We might,” she ventured, “build a cabin here.”
Matt seemed not to hear, and Rachel dared not speak again. But that afternoon when he saw a herd of whitetail deer in the glade, he would have shot one had not Rachel gasped and caught his arm.
Their eyes stabbed into each other’s. Rachel moved back from him as if burned. Matt went pale. As the frightened deer bounded off with their white tails signaling danger, Matthew stared at Rachel. “No,” he said. “We can’t stay here!”
He caught up Lady and Storm, and they moved on that very afternoon.
The country ascended, thick with deer and rabbits, still ridged with limestone, but with fewer cedar, oak and elm. Rough-leafed hackberry trees with warty trunks and twisted shapes grew in ledges of stone, sending feeder roots into tiny crevices, until the roots, though constricted and gnawed by the rock, gradually split it. Less hardy trees would die before winning their battle with the limestone, but their seeds would start other trees growing in the fissures, letting moisture seep in, till the giant slabs finally crumbled into soil where gentler trees and plants could feed.
“See how that tree’s pushed up the rock!” Rachel called to Matt.
At first she had been no more able to talk than he, but as their journey lengthened, the midnight of her despair was seared with flashes of fear for this man she loved, this man she had not met till she was already married to his brother. On this plateau four hundred miles from home her heart cried out to him, though she spoke only of hackberry and limestone. Somehow they must start speaking naturally again, look at each other without the crippling dread that gripped her now. Somehow they had to live. Somewhere they had to stop running! Matt looked at the stunted, fiercely rooted tree which had pried up the huge rock slab. A hint of a smile softened his long mouth.
“That’s a boulder-breaking tree, a pioneer. Too busy sucking water and food from around the rocks to worry about whether its roots get scarred or if its limbs are pretty.”
Six days out of San Antonio, they reached Fort Lancaster, located on a ledge of limestone above a pretty little creek which flowed through stands of pecan and oak. The quarters were built of limestone, and Rachel saw two officers’ ladies chatting while their children played nearby. She halted her mare and gaz
ed at the women who seemed so at home and gay in this wilderness. Even the bare parade ground seemed to create a sense of purpose.
This was wild new country, dangerous, yet beginning to be settled. Surely she and Matt could start fresh here and have human company though they were far from home.
Rachel looked at him, reading his feelings in the down-bending of his mouth, and though she was disappointed, she urged Lady after him.
“Would you like to stay?” he demanded, turning in the saddle. “I’m sure some of the officers I knew are still here.”
“Could you stay?”
“No.”
“Then neither can I.”
Out of sight of the fort, they camped on the creek, and Matthew caught and broiled a delicious bass, but Rachel had no appetite. Were those ladies at the Fort the last white women she might ever see?
They crossed the Pecos into a different world. The frequent springs and waterfalls ceased. They were in prime Comanche country now and lit no fire at night or where the smoke could curl up and be seen from a distance. It was lonesome plains and desert hills with rabbits and antelope below hunted by high-wheeling hawks and eagles dropping from a dazzling sky.
Two men rode up one noon, a ginger-haired white man whose red lips showed through his curling beard and whose yellow eyes strayed often to Rachel. He wore bandoliers, as did the Mexican with him.
“That real coffee?” he asked with a tight smile.
“Have a cup,” offered Matthew. He could do little else. When a traveler stopped at your camp, he immediately became your guest and was entitled to hospitality.
“Much obliged,” grinned the gingery one.
He climbed down, followed by his companion. Rachel poured coffee into her cup and Matthew’s and gave them to the strangers, who drank with gusto and showed no signs of leaving.
“I hope you’ll pardon us,” said Matthew, beginning to tighten the horses’ cinches. “We need to be moving on.”
“Oh, do ye?” asked the yellow-eyed man, and his gaze went over Rachel in a way that made her turn her back and busy herself with clearing up the food. “And where be ye headed in such a hurry?”
Matthew jerked his head west. “What’s in that direction?”
“Nothing or a lot, dependin’ on what you want,” drawled the stranger. “If you go due west, you’ll soon hit the Comanche trail. Runs from the Staked Plains down across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Leads through the Big Bend, and there in the Chisos the Comanches split up and half raid Chihuahua while the others steal everything they can carry or drive off from Durango. But if the Big Bend don’t tempt you, you can go on west by Fort Davis to the Guadalupes. El Capitan leans over the big salt lakes, then there’s El Paso, and then you can cross into New Mexico. Hell, stranger! You could keep goin’ if you wanted to till you got to Californy!”
“I reckon the Big Bend will do us,” Matt said.
The ruddy man squinted curiously. “Eagles nest there, and coyotes have their dens. Indians, rustlers, bandits, they all pass through, but none of ’em settle. There’s plenty of pronghorn and rattlesnakes, but it’s no place for people.”
“That’s fine. More room for cattle.”
“You’d be lucky to sell before they were stolen,” the stranger shrugged. “But supposing you did raise a herd, you could sell to the army posts, Fort Stockton or Fort Davis.”
He nudged his friend in the ribs. “You and me like elbow room, don’t we, Manuel, but there’s too much down there even for us!”
Manuel laughed and nodded. “No people. No one to rob.”
He brought his hand free from under his vest, holding a pistol. Red lips shining in the mat of his beard, the white man pulled a Walker Colt out of his belt.
“Stranger, you can travel lots faster alone. Get going.” He smiled toward Rachel. “We’ll take right good care of your lady. Rather not have to kill you and get her all upset.”
It all happened in a moment.
Matt launched himself at the gingery man. “Ride!” he shouted to Rachel.
She swung the frying pan into Manuel’s face but he knocked her aside and brought his gun crashing down on Matt’s head. Staggering to her feet, Rachel tried to fight them off Matt’s prostrate body, but the white brigand dragged her up by her hair, laughing as he roughly fondled her breasts.
“Spunky. We may keep you a while. But it’ll be more fun to break you in with your man watching. Manuel, stake him out.”
“Let him go!” Rachel cried. “I—I’ll do whatever you want, but please don’t hurt him!”
The man held her close to his foul-smelling body, playing greedily with her breasts. “Why, honey, you’ll do what we want anyway if you want to have a chance. Kick up a row and I’ll geld him.” He gave her a shove. “We’re hungry. Get our dinner.”
Matt was tied now, feet together, hands lashed to greasewood bushes. Sick with fear and knowing that their only hope was in her keeping calm and finding some chance to overcome their captors, Rachel began mixing corn bread. The coffee was boiling at the edge of the coals. Matt’s knife lay where he’d used it to cut up the rabbit they’d fried that noon. If one of the men would just leave camp! Surely they wouldn’t relieve themselves this near their food. But she couldn’t do much unless Matt was conscious. To her vast relief, he stirred but went still again when Manuel glanced toward him.
Had he immediately comprehended their situation or was he still senseless? The wolf-eyed man stretched lazily and sauntered off. Manuel squatted between Rachel and Matt and began to pick his teeth.
Setting the fry pan bread on rocks by the coals, Rachel used her skirts to shield her from Manuel. Lifting the coffee pot, swinging about in the same instant, she sent the scalding liquid over her guard. Screeching, he clawed at his face. She grabbed Matt’s knife, calling his name as she slashed the thongs binding his hands, hacked at those on his feet.
He was conscious, thank God. Manuel was lurching toward them and the other brigand was running back, firing his pistol. Matt kicked Manuel off his feet, reached for his heavy Colt, and aimed from a kneeling position that braced his arm. He did this as the advancing bandit’s first shot struck Manuel and the second hissed close to Rachel.
Matt didn’t miss.
The man’s rusty hair vanished in blood along with the top of his face. He reeled, his hands flailing the air, then pitched forward. He kicked feebly and was still.
Matt went to stare down at Manuel. “You’re gut-shot. Shall I finish you?”
Sweat beaded the dark face. “Gracias, señor.”
“Ride ahead,” Matt told Rachel. “I’ll bring our gear.”
She tightened Lady’s cinch and mounted, avoiding the sprawled body, beginning to shake now the danger was past. In a few minutes she heard a shot and winced.
Awful men. Better dead so they couldn’t prey on others. But—terrible, unbelievable, that life could end so quickly. When Matt caught up to her she was crying.
“Rachel!” He rode alongside and grasped her bridle. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, sobbing harder. Weeping for Harry and Etienne, for all who had met sudden violent death.
Matt swung off Storm. He looped the horses’ reins to a mesquite, spread his cloak and lifted Rachel down.
It was the first time he had taken her since that day she overtook him on the road, the day Harry died. She wanted him to be slow and loving, smile at her in the daylight, and let the grief and guilt and sadness heal. But he took her in haste and though she cried out, opening to him, he would not stay in her after his wild fierce crescendo.
For some minutes, he lay drained, but when she hesitantly touched his face, he got to his feet, straightened his clothes and helped her up and into the saddle.
VII
The swelling rounded hills picked up colors of sun and sky, stretching on in a nothingness of grass bleached gold.
For the first time, fear of the wild land gripped Rachel, so that she halted Lady, stroking her mane, and peered into
the glittering distances, as alien to her, after cypress swamps, moss-grown giant trees, and rich black planting soil, as any foreign desert could have been.
“Matthew! Where—where are we going?”
He stared west for a few minutes, the sun glare causing the corners of his eyes to wrinkle. An eagle spiraled toward the sun, climbing till he was a tiny speck. Matt turned in his saddle.
“The Big Bend! We’ll swing south before long.”
Where only eagles nest and coyotes den?
But at least there was a river. Trees would grow there, a garden, fruit …
Rachel spoke to her mare, rode up beside Matthew but he did not look at her, and all that day they said nothing they did not have to, while the weight on her heart crushed heavier.
Had killing the robbers brought back memories of Harry’s death? Would they never be free of it? To grieve a while, to suffer, that was bound to be, but were their lives to be haunted forever, their love poisoned at its roots? Rachel stared at the broad shoulders of the man in front of her, almost hating him because he could not master his guilt but instead set it between them.
How could she forget? How could she even live, if he refused to hold her in his arms and cherish her? How long could she go on like this, riding dry-mouthed under the hostile sun in a wilderness she could not have imagined, with the back of the man she had loved always turned against her?
At twilight, Matt raised his arm and pointed where a white track stretched beyond the limit of vision, dimmed into hills and shadows.
“That’s the Comanche Trail.”
He rode forward and she let her mare keep pace so they took the road at the same time. It was a strange, savage trail, worn by horses and cattle and mules, littered by their bones. Probably, Rachel thought, bones of captives bleached with those of animals, for this was country where Indians drank the blood of their horses when all else failed, or desperate white men drank their own urine, which drove them even madder with thirst.
Matt and Rachel kept to the trail as it wound into palisades of fiery rock, mountains topped by bleak stone citadels, stretches of spiny knife-edged plants, and dozens of wind-twisted, water-seeking plants that clung to life in defiance of the arid, rocky terrain.
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