Dust Devil (15 page)

Ignacio kept a percussion cap rifle in the crook of one arm and a dangerous-looking Green River knife at his belt. Stephen was taking no chances. "Don’t leave Jamie alone for a minute,” were his last words as he grabbed up his son and tossed him in the air. The boy caught his breath but did not cry. At three Jamie was learning what his father expected of him.

Inez and Jamie sat in the wagon bed, alternately playing and dozing under the warm spring sunshine. She and Rita took turns holding Stephanie on the front seat, with one or the other holding a yellow frilly parasol against the sun’s bright glare. The April sun was unusually warm and Rosemary discarded her gray traveling jacket and fancy straw bonnet with its yellow muslin roses.

She had outmaneuvered her friend so that Rita was forced to sit in the middle next to Ignacio. Each time a breeze rose, Rita would wrinkle her nose at the odor
and roll her eyes at Rosemary, and both women would try desperately not to burst out in laughter.

Late afternoon brought the first in a series of events that would
alter her life drastically. The wagon passed through a cluster of ramshackle cabins and adobes with peeling gypsum whitewash. These were the outskirts of Las Vegas, the last stop on the old Santa Fe Trail. It was in that bustling city of twenty-three saloons that General Kearny declared the Territory of New Mexico a possession of the United States.

Excitement filled the two older children when Rita told them there was only a half-hour or so left before they reached Las Vegas and boarded their first stagecoach. But their shouts and laughter were suddenly cut off as the wagon topped a rocky rise to encounter a staggering line of Indians, mostly women and children.

The women looked old beyond their years, the children emaciated, and the few men — the mighty warriors that Rosemary had often heard spoken about—wore the vacuous look of beasts of burden. Their buckskin britches and calico shirts and blouses were worn through in spots, and their faces, dull and apathetic, were coated with dust. Rosemary glanced quickly along the line to see if any of the Indians could be Lario, because for some reason his presence seemed stronger than ever. But she did not find his face among the vacant ones trodding before her.

Five mounted soldiers in blue flanked the group of twenty- five or thirty Indians and prodded them as they would cattle with their rifle stocks, urging them forward with demeaning shouts. But the people were only able to shuffle along at a weary gait.

As the wagon drew near, a young soldier who seemed to be in command ordered the Indians off to the side of the road to allow the wagon to pass. She commanded Ignacio to halt. Before the
vaquero
or Rita could prevent her, she sprang from the seat with Stephanie balanced precariously at her hip. "These Indians, Sergeant, where did they come from?”

The sergeant seemed as surprised as she herself was at her outburst. He tilted the brim of his cavalry hat back, saying, "Fort Defiance, ma’am
— in the Arizona Territory. We’re taking them to the Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner.”

"
Mother of God, they’ve walked the whole way?” She was shocked, and her gaze switched back to the people who stood waiting dully for the sergeant’s command to move on. One thin mother slumped down where she stood to suckle her baby at a shriveled breast.

"Ma’am,” he said, trying to explain, "these people are nomads. They’re used to walking. Why, the bucks can outdistance a horse.”

"I don’t notice you walking. Are you admitting to inferiority?”

The man drew a deep breath, but when he looked at her she saw the shame in his troubled eyes. "Ma’am, I am disobeying orders as it is. General Carleton issued orders that every—”

"I know,” she said. She remembered the previous year when she had first visited Fort Sumner and seen the barren, desolate Pecos prairie that was to be the reservation— and she remembered not really believing Grant’s words to Lario . . . that every man, woman, and child resisting the move to the Bosque Redondo would be killed.

The sergeant nodded his head toward one Indian, a wrinkled, bony old man with matted long white hair who wore chains at his wrists. "That’s Chief Manuelito’s father-in-law. Twice he tried to drive a knife into my men—and he would not move even after we subdued him. I had to threaten to take his grandson’s life—the papoose nursing there—to get the old man to accede.”

She looked over at the old Indian. Impassiveness etched the brown, aged face, but in the cavernous eyes lurked agony and sadness. "Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill him,” she said softly and looked up to see the surprise on the sergeant’s face . . . a surprise that slid into blankness as he suddenly toppled from his horse. She saw the brightly plumed arrow buried between the young man’s shoulder blades at the same moment the hideous screams, like those of a panther, exploded about them.

Instinctively she whirled, with Stephanie gathered to her breast, and began to run back toward the wagon. But even as fiercely painted warriors plunged down out of the wooded hills, Ignacio snapped the whip over the team’s rumps, and the horses jerked forward in galloping terror.
She heard Jamie shout, "Mama! Mama!” in his little boy’s high- pitched voice.

The Indians did not bother to stop the fleeing wagon but swiftly dispatched the remaining four soldiers. The fight was
over as quickly as it had begun. And she found herself standing among the former prisoners, the only white person.

As the warriors began removing the soldiers’ boots and rounding up the horses, strange harsh words of joy and relief broke about her, yet she could only hear the trip-hammer beat of her heart. She knew she could face death, perhaps not as bravely as the stoic Indian. Under torture she might die screaming until there was no voice left. But then death came to everyone.

What she could not endure would be to watch the death of her daughter. The mental torture of seeing those savages kill her baby would be as great as a knife-blade cutting out her own still-beating heart.

She clutched the child tightly to her as one brave in a military shirt and slouch cap bounded from his pony and advanced on her. No, dear God, no! she wanted to scream but found the words locked in her throat. She clutched the child tightly to her and began to back away.

The brave tore the baby from her grasp. Rosemary’s scream was wrenched from her lungs as he clasped the baby’s small, pudgy ankles in one hand and began swinging his trophy. She lunged forward, but hands grabbed her from behind, and she squeezed her eyes shut with another guttural scream that surely burst her own eardrums and burst her lungs. She could not watch Stephanie’s tiny head bashed against the rocks. She struggled, kicking and biting at the hands that held her
.
■

A harsh command ripped through the air. All movement ceased. Rosemary’s teeth clenched in the effort to force her eyes open. Her daughter still hung suspended by her ankles, crying. Then
she noted the familiar chestnut Arab before her—and its swarthy rider. Lario.

His dark gaze swung on her, with an impact like the blow of a tomahawk. Unlike the warriors clad in the breechcloth and knee-high moccasins, he wore buckskin pants and a collarless blue velveteen shirt. But the red flannel bandana about his forehead was the same as those worn by the others. "You are as foolish as ever, Senora. Why did you not stay with your party?”

His dark eyes flickered to the brave who held Stephanie, then to the older Indian who rode at his side. The man’s face was massive with a heavy high-bridged nose and deep furrows confining the wide lips. From under the blue turban wisps of bone-white hair could be seen. Lario addressed the older man as "Manuelito,” and the Indian shook his head negatively to whatever it was Lario had asked him.

"They are angry, they want revenge,” Lario told her, his eyes on the child. "I don’t know what I can do to
— ”

"She’s your daughter, Lario!”
she screamed.

Lario’s gaze slashed back to
her. It searched her face for the truth. His Navajo words, so foreign to her, were directed at the brave holding Stephanie, waiting. The still-wailing infant was passed up to Lario. She thought his face looked as Solomon’s must have when he judged the rights of the two opposing mothers for the child.

Lario noted the red hair, the same shade as
her own, not Stephen’s. He saw the caramel skin, as dusky as dawn’s first pink streaks. Then his gaze halted on the black eyes—deep, deep black. Almond-shaped eyes of the Navajo people. His piercing gaze met and held that of Rosemary’s. After what seemed an eternity of slow-ticking minutes to her, he said, "You tell the truth.”

She
released her breath, as Lario first spoke softly to the Indians the soldiers had captured, then rapped out a command to his own men. When he looked back to her, his eyes were as cold as the frozen snow on the Sangre de Cristos’ peaks. "You are to be released unharmed. The town of Las Vegas is not far. But the child goes with me.”

He whirled his mount, and
she broke free. Her hands latched onto the horse’s bridle. "No!” she shouted as the horse danced about in confusion. "I won’t let you!”

Lario tried to shove her from him but was hampered by the child held in his arms. Something hit
her head from behind, and she fell to the ground, dazed. For a few moments she lay there. Her vision was blurred, like the heat waves rising off the earth. She blinked her eyes. Her vision began to clear. The Indians, led by Lario and his braves, were already at least a quarter of a mile away, moving to the southwest, away from the wagon-rutted road.

She
pushed herself to her feet. "No!” she screamed. "Wait!” Tears streamed down her face.

Las Vegas and safety
— and Jamie.

B
ut abandon Stephanie?

She began moving, sometimes trotting, sometimes stumbling on her cumbersome skirts, toward the southwest.

CHAPTER
17

Beneath the scanty shade of a white-flowered saguaro cactus Rosemary paused to rest. Her breath sounded ragged in her ears against the utter quiet of the empty country about her. Only an occasional greasewood bush, its rank, olive-green stems waving high yellow or orange blooms, added relief to the desolation. Immediately before her glided the shadow of a swooping hawk.

And far ahead moved the dark forms,
gradually outdistancing her. How long had she been walking? All night and part of another day? A frosty rocking-chair moon had illuminated the band of Indians during the long night, but now the sun, glaring like a twenty-dollar gold piece in the sky, hurt her eyes, and she had to squint to follow their receding figures. Didn’t they ever stop to rest or eat, and what did they find to eat in that godforsaken wilderness?

The sole of one kid dress boot had worn through, and the heel of the other had snapped off. Her feet were a mass of bubbling blisters. The hem of her gray serge skirt was frayed by the pebbled floor of the plateau and torn in several places by the low-growing cholla cactus. Realizing that the skirt deterred her progress as much as her blistered feet, Rosemary ripped away the material below her knees where her high-top boots ended.

She drew a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. Stepping out from the lonely, protective shade of the saguaro, she forced one foot in front of another, concentrating not on the shapes she followed but only on each yard of ochre-hued sand directly in front of her. She would not allow herself the luxury of weakness, of fainting. Not with Stephanie stolen from her arms. She had experienced Lario’s underlying gentleness, but it did not stop the talons of anger and fear for Stephanie that clutched at her heart. How would he feed the baby? The one nursing mother she had seen had not enough milk for her own infant.

First one foot, and then the other, Rosemary repeated to herself in a drone, keeping her eyes on terrain that was slowly changing to a rough and stony landscape. The shadow that fell across the narrowed range of her vision did not at first seep into her dulled senses. But as the shadow moved steadily
With her own shadow, so grew her perception that she was not alone. With an effort she turned her face upward, but the blinding sun hid the face of the phantom who rode at her side. A mirage? Determined not to succumb to collapse, she continued walking, a procession of stumbling steps, and focused her gaze once more directly before her. But the shadow followed along beside her.

As the afternoon wore on, her condition deteriorated. Her hair
fell from its chignon to hang in lank strands about her shoulders. Perspiration soaked her dress. The skin of her face was burnt a bright pink. Her feet were raw flesh. She tottered, stopped, moved forward again. But now the mass of figures had disappeared from her sight.

"Are you ready to go back?” the voice at her side asked.

"No!” she croaked. Was she talking to herself; had she already lost her reason? No matter. Nothing mattered but that she continue moving. And Stephanie.

After a while she stumbled over a rock and pitched forward. The gritty sand abraded her face, and she lay there. She knew she could not get up again.

Arms encircled her, lifted her. She was once more cradled in Lario’s arms. A dream, she told herself—a recurring memory of the first time Lario had found her when she had run away from Stephen. But she said in a raspy voice irritated by its dryness, "If you take me back to Las Vegas, I’ll just turn around and follow you again.”