“I think it’s safe to talk here,” Ham said, “and it may be a little while before our friend gets back. Maeve, how long ago – When did the man who wore this ring come, and what did you tell him?”
“He came three months ago,” Maeve responded, “and I told him Chaco had a shipment he was sending to Brazanos. Four wagons.”
“And they caught him? Why? How did they know?” Ham asked.
“I don’t know. Chaco didn’t suspect me at all. I have no idea. I’ve been trying and trying to think how --”
“You didn’t say anything? You didn’t let anything slip?”
“Stop that!” Maeve cried. “If Chaco knew that man was a spy because of something I did wrong, he’d have my fingers for trophies too, wouldn’t he?”
Ham shut his mouth tightly and looked at her hands as if he were imagining that. Suddenly he took one of her hands and kissed all her fingers. Then he let go very quickly. Maeve stared at him in astonishment. Ham was looking away across the desert at a rider approaching. A tall, white-haired man pulled up beside the cart. He was very strong for his apparent age and darkened by a life in the sun, still very handsome and blue-eyed, familiar somehow to Maeve. But she didn’t stop to wonder who he was.
“Leche y miel,” Maeve said to the man as she held out the ring. “Agua vivale. Milk and honey. Living water.”
“For the abundance of milk that they shall give he shall eat butter: Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good,” the man said in English. “If thou knewest the gift of God, thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water. May I ask who you are and what you want here?” He addressed himself to Maeve because Ham kept his head down under his oversized sombrero and looked exactly like an unimportant driver.
“My name is Maeve J-Collinswood,” Maeve said. She looked over at Ham, who didn’t react. She couldn’t bring herself to use her sham married name before this man, apparently the leader of these people who set such store by serving God and sacrificing themselves for right. “I’m trying to help a young man who was captured by one of Ampudia’s lieutenants in Avecita,” Maeve answered. “There was another man from your group who’s already been killed. Both of them knew to come to the cantina I ran. I dressed as a Mexican woman and called myself Vienta.” Maeve felt Ham start beside her but didn’t know why. “They always said something about living waters and milk and honey so I would know who they were.”
The man’s whole body went rigid. He looked searchingly at Maeve. “What else did they talk to you about – I mean, besides the information they wanted?”
“They talked very strangely about God,” Maeve replied. “They said a person could know he was forgiven for his sins by repenting and believing in Christ. I never heard anything like it before.”
“ Send your driver home,” the man said, after hesitating only a moment. “You will come with me to my home. I’ll get a buggy.”
“I’d like to ride along, if I may, Mr. Duvall,” Ham said suddenly, removing his hat and trying to straighten his untidy hair. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Hamilton Jessup, Dan Costain’s friend.”
The man stared at Ham. “I do remember you,” he said sternly. “But I don’t think – “
“Mr. Duvall, I could spend hours trying to explain myself, apologize,” Ham said nervously, “but if I know what’s going on here, and I think I finally do, Dan Costain’s been tortured and murdered, and your youngest son’s about to share his fate. We’re here to try to stop that. I think I can help. Dan and I worked together in the army. He trusted me, and I hope you will too.”
“I know he trusted you,” Mr. Duvall said slowly. “I just – It’s hard – “
“I’m not proud of what I did at Dan’s wedding, sir, but right now I need you to understand that I am a believer now, because of Dan’s testimony. I know that’s important to you and your group. And I have information you need, and your son has information, too, I think, and we’ve got to work together to get him out of Chaco’s hands, for his sake, and for Texas.”
The man studied Ham, and then returned his gaze to Maeve. “My name is Jedediah Duvall. We live on a ranch not far from town. Will you follow me? Both of you.”
Duvall rode off and Ham whipped up the horse. He glanced sideways at Maeve.
“The man Chaco tortured,” Maeve said uncertainly, “he was your friend?” Ham nodded, not trusting himself to speak. “The one you lost because of me? Oh, Ham, this ring. You made it for him.” Ham nodded again. “I swear, I swear I didn’t do anything to help Chaco discover him.”
“I believe you,” Ham murmured. “I just – I wondered why I didn’t get any more letters. Now I know. I’ve always told Dan the truth about everything, and he was outraged over what we did. He said marriage was a holy union before God and we were defiling it. He wouldn’t see me anymore. He just wrote, and I never wrote back. I only saw him once in almost the last two years.”
“I’m so sorry,” Maeve whispered. “I think he was right, you know. We never considered what we were really doing. Maybe God is judging us for this.”
“But Maeve, I think I found a way to make it right,” Ham said. “To get forgiveness, I mean. Dan used to tell me all the time how to be forgiven for sin, how to have peace with God. We need to talk about it, but I think we’ve arrived.”
They pulled up in front of a ranch house in the midst of a sort of colony of smaller houses. Jedediah Duvall dismounted and approached the wagon. “So you are Vienta? Jude Morrow spoke of you as a woman of great courage and resourcefulness.”
“I don’t know that name, sir, but if he’s one of the men I met in Avecita, they’re the ones with courage,” Maeve said in a low voice. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to hear things, Mr. Duvall.”
“My daughter Jesse, who was married to Dan, lives out here with us now,” Duvall said. “I’m sure she’ll want to meet you.”
“Mr. Duvall, there isn’t time for socializing,” Maeve said desperately. “Your son could already be beyond help.”
“I understand, Miss Collinswood,” nodded Duvall. “Still, you have Daniel’s ring, and I’m sure Jesse will want it.”
Maeve glanced momentarily at Ham but he nodded his head. “Oh, of course, of course, how stupid of me,” Maeve said, yanking the ring off her finger. “You can give it to her. But we’ve got to plan how we’ll get your son out.”
“You mustn’t be afraid of talking to Jesse,” smiled Duvall. “We men are used to planning operations of this kind. I can see that you’re exhausted and in a great deal of pain. Jesse will take care of you. We’ll ask if we need to know anything.”
Jedediah turned to the house, but people were already coming out. A huge man, very much like the young man Maeve had seen in Avecita but older, came up to the cart.
“With your permission, ma’am, I’ll take you inside to Jesse,” he said. “I’m Matt Duvall. You met my little brother Zach. Zachary.” He looked over at Ham. “Hey, Jessup. Dan never stopped talking about you. He said we ought to tie up with you, but dad can be stubborn sometimes. Too stubborn. Come on, I’ll invite you in even if he can’t bring himself to.” Matt picked Maeve up as if she were no weight at all.
Maeve sank back in Matt Duvall’s massive arms. She looked at Ham as he climbed down from the wagon and took Angelita by the hand. Hermes hopped out of the back of the wagon and joined some other dogs at a large water dish. Maeve realized that she was still very tired, and also very much afraid of talking to Jesse Duvall Costain. Maeve forced herself to remember the man Daniel’s face, weatherbeaten, sprinkled with freckles, his hair corn yellow touched with red and his eyes green and friendly. He had been a big man like these Duvalls, strong, a little homely, some years older even than Matt. Maeve had liked him. It had taken all of her power to keep from breaking down in tears when she learned how he had died at Chaco’s hands. She saw again those ten freckled fingers arranged on her bar at the cant
ina, and Chaco pulling the ring off one of them. She suddenly realized there had been a wedding ring, too, but that Chaco had kept, probably selling for the gold. Of course Daniel Costain had a wife. She was Zachary Duvall’s sister, and Maeve dreaded meeting her. And she wondered very much what Ham was thinking, what his real connection with this family was, what had happened between them.
“Don’t try to be a stoic if they torture you, Zachary.”
The words his father had spoken came back to him as clearly as if he were right there beside Zachary in the stinking, dark, hot adobe brick and sand structure. He even swung his head around to check, and the rope that bound his wrists and hung him from a beam supporting roughly-arranged planks bit into his naked flesh like fire.
“What did you say, pa?” he asked in astonishment.
“ You heard what I said.” His father’s blue eyes bored into his own. “Don’t think keeping silent under torture is some necessary badge of manliness or courage. Yell, scream, let it all out – if it’s possible, make it seem worse than it is. It’ll accomplish several things. First, they might get satisfaction just from hearing the noise. They probably won’t hurt you as much as if you don’t react. Keeping silent will just push them to display their so-called macho and you don’t want that.
“Second, you won’t waste energy trying to hold it in. That’s important, because you have to save your strength and keep yourself busy to keep from telling them anything. Third, if we’re anywhere close by trying to mount a rescue, we just might hear you.”
“Pa, you won’t come to rescue me, will you?” Zachary scoffed. He latched onto that because he didn’t want to think about the rest of what his father had said. He was excited to go on his first spying mission, carrying on a legacy that had started back when his grandfather was a young man in Louisiana. What to do if he were tortured was not the kind of thing he wanted to hear about.
“You never know,” his father had said, and he hadn’t smiled at all.
Zachary wondered when Chaco was going to get started. They had beaten him almost unconscious just so they could put him into a wagon with a sack over his head. The next thing he was aware of was being thrown down into this sand pit with adobe sides built up and timber planks for the ceiling. They hadn’t done anything to him. The heat had risen steadily so he knew the day was well on. When were they coming back?
“That’s part of it, stupid,” he told himself. “They let the dark and ropes and heat and time work on you, drive you nuts before they even start. I’m running out of hymns and Scriptures and sermon anecdotes. Oh, well, I guess I’ll just start over again.”
Chaco dropped to the ground right in front of him. Zachary got a glimpse of him, in the semi-darkness, decked with a whip thrown over his shoulder. He braced himself. Would it be too soon if he started screaming now, he wondered with a touch of black humor?
“So, Gringo, where is my Vienta?” Chaco asked, coming close to Zachary and coiling his whip around Zachary’s throat. He dug a finger under it and pressed it against his windpipe.
“Where’s – what?” Zachary was stunned.
“I saw you leave her house. My woman was there when you came. Now she is gone. Did you frighten her away, or did you pay her to go meet you somewhere?”
“You mean that – that lady from the cantina?” Zachary scrambled. Did Chaco suspect Vienta too? What was he talking about? “I stopped to ask for directions back to Señora Mendez’s place,” he improvised. “She wouldn’t give me the time of day. Made me shove off quick.”
He was babbling, but he had no idea what Chaco wanted. Chaco yanked the whip and Zachary gagged and the fire bit into his wrists again. He made a noise like a newborn lamb in a herd of strange ewes. He was an obedient son but it was awfully difficult to just give in like this. He felt rather than saw Chaco’s satisfaction with the noise.
“Come, come, my big strong gringo, I will not hurt you much if you tell me where Vienta is,” Chaco urged soothingly. “Perhaps you made a mistake. You see a pretty lady at the cantina, and you think she is free to anyone. She is not. She is my woman. Nobody touches her. If she did not tell you, I will remind her to be sure to say so next time a handsome stranger comes to town.”
Zachary didn’t consider himself a stupid fellow normally. He also could not believe that the reason he had been captured, beaten senseless and left tied up in this adobe frying pan for hours was not because he had been found out as a spy. He had been trained to deal with being discovered, caught, interrogated, and all of that. But how was he to handle a jealous boyfriend?
“Look, I didn’t do a thing to that woman,” he spluttered. “Are you crazy? I saw you with her. I knew she was spoken for. I told you, I was just asking directions. It was dark, and I couldn’t remember which house I was staying at.”
“You lie. If nothing happened, why is Vienta gone?”
Of all the things Zachary Duvall had ever imagined being accused of, a fornicator was not one of them. His life had been so sheltered, so constrained by the faith of his family, and the town where they lived so in conformity with those beliefs, no one would ever have imagined such a thing about him there.
“I have no idea where she might be,” Zachary said. He doubted Vienta had actually taken him up on his offer of sanctuary, and he hadn’t told her about Parmenos. She hadn’t been ready for any kind of commitment. Did she think Chaco had discovered her spying? Why would he? Had he really known that Zachary had gone into the house?
This was useless speculation. Perhaps Vienta had fled, fearing discovery. But she had left Zachary in a real nightmare. He could hardly tell Chaco what he wanted to know. He couldn’t confess to an interlude with Vienta because there hadn’t been one. He really didn’t know why she would have gone away, or where she might be. Oh, the taint of this sin of a woman thinking that being a spy required bedding her source. It reached very far. It might reach out a hand and pluck Zachary Duvall clean out of this world. Chaco slowly uncoiled his whip.
“I do not believe you,” Chaco said softly.
“Now let me have a look at your feet.” Jesse Costain pushed Maeve back onto the wicker settee where Matt had placed her. Angelita hovered nearby, anxiously watching. Jesse was a tall, slender, still-beautiful woman in her late thirties, with Zachary’s dark hair and blue eyes. Maeve could not help crying out as her swollen feet came in contact with Jesse’s hands. Jesse stared in horror, but only for a moment.
“Beulah, we’ll need Mammy’s salve,” Jesse said sharply. “Run and get a pan of warm water and some rags.” The round-faced black maid hovering nearby vanished and returned a moment later. Jesse bathed her feet and applied salve. Beulah brought clean, soft cloths and together they bound up Maeve’s feet.
“You could have been lame for life,” Jesse scolded. What were you thinking of? What did you do to yourself to get them in this state?”
“I ran all night barefoot in the dark through a Mexican desert,” Maeve sighed. “And it’s all been for nothing. Don’t you people care that Zachary could already be dead?”
“If he is, there’s no hurry, is there?” Jesse said reasonably. “Absent from the body, present with the Lord. I’m sure that’s how it would be with my brother, as I was sure of my husband. If he isn’t dead, running down there with no organization or planning won’t help him, because we won’t succeed. Look at these cuts and bruises on your legs. The men have said you were so hard, so flippant about everything. They still think you might be responsible for Dan’s betrayal. Are you trying to make up for that?”
“I don’t want the same thing to happen to Zachary Duvall that happened to Daniel Costain,” Maeve said in a low voice.
Jesse had the ring on her thumb – Daniel’s ring. She stopped applying ointment to Maeve’s other injuries and looked at the ring.
“Thank you for bringing me back my husband’s ring,” Jesse said softly. “I always wanted to help with the operations, but my father doesn’t like women to be put in danger or to have to take a chance on
compromising our-”
“Virtue?” Maeve said coldly. “Yes, these men of yours have high principles. They have condemned what I do often enough.”
“Now, I know you’re just being bitter,” Jesse said. “The Duvalls and the men they take into their organization aren’t afraid to call sin what it is, but they love sinners. You’re mistaking their intention, or intentionally making them what they aren’t.”
Maeve didn’t reply, but she knew that what Jesse said was true. She had imagined people of this type scorning her as a harlot, but instead they had been compassionate and very concerned for her soul. Where she had expected to find help and understanding, at Nathaniel Grover’s, she had often found mockery and insincerity. Since Ham had told her his thoughts about Grover she had recalled so many things that hadn’t made sense to her before but now seemed to clearly point to Grover’s untrustworthiness.
“So, will they even tell us their plans, or will they just ride off and leave us womenfolk barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?” Maeve quipped.
“Well, you’re barefoot, all right, and I was pregnant until very recently,” Jesse said, smiling, “but – “
“Mrs. Jesse, this young man don’t want anybody but you just now,” said a tiny, spare, serene-looking black woman as she brought a wailing bundle into the sun room where Jesse and Maeve sat. “I tell you that lady was hurtin’ powerful, didn’t I? Nobody listens to Mammy.” She handed the carrot-topped baby to Jesse, who threw a shawl over her shoulders and calmly began to nurse the child.
“We always, always listen to you, Mammy,” Jesse laughed. “You’re our sage advisor. Yes, the lady was hurting. I want you to have a good look at her later, when she gets in a hot tub. Mammy’s all kinds of nurses, Miss Collinswood,” Jesse explained. “Except that she spoils my little Zachary Daniel infamously, she’s a jewel.”
Chasing the Texas Wind Page 10