Harvest of Fury (14 page)

With a wrenching of his guts, he remembered her sweetness that last wild night, her soft warmth that changed to tremulous ecstasy, the passionate tenderness he'd never dreamed he could feel again after Socorro.

Not that it was the same. Socorro had been his soul. But Talitha was a rare woman.

Scarred in heart and body, twice her age, he didn't deserve her love, but he hadn't been able to make her see that. He'd begun to think maybe he could make a new life with her, since she was set on it. But he knew he'd be using her flame, drawing on her youth and spirit. Maybe it was best he wouldn't be going home. He had a letter for her in his pocket. Should have given it to Rip. Too late to think of that now. She'd mourn him, of course she would, but she'd turn to someone like Marc Revier or John Irwin, a man who could love her with all his soul and heart, worship her with his body, as Shea had done with Socorro.

The soldier was almost deadweight now. Shea tried to talk to him, but his mouth was so dry his tongue seemed to fill it. Thirsty. So thirsty. But not yet like that time in the desert, when he'd torn off his clothes and scratched with broken fingernails at rock shadows, thinking they were water. His spirit had left his tormented body, hovered over the pitiful wreck that kept crawling, though the blood was so thick it didn't even ooze from the gashes and cuts, and the skin was baked to the bones like shrunken rawhide.

Funny. This boy looked a lot like Michael. Michael, his twin, who'd died in the desert. “Come on, lad,” Shea urged. “One step at a time. Come on, now.”

But the boy wasn't moving his feet at all. Shea got him over his shoulders and staggered onward. The other men were out of sight. Good man, Rip. Keep 'em moving. Get them back to Texas. But I've got to stop a minute. Got to rest.

He was lowering the kid to the ground when fire stabbed through his shoulder. An arrowhead thrust out beneath his collarbone.

Impatient, were they!

Rolling the boy behind a ledge, Shea didn't take time to struggle with the arrow. Sighting at the red of what he thought was a headcloth behind a clump of brush, he fired his revolver. The headcloth seemed to drop. He fired at a moving branch, got off his other shots, loaded the Sharps, and waited.

Nothing. But even if he'd got that one, there were surely others. He had a little more fight in him than they'd expected. Rather than get hurt, they'd wait him out.

That damned arrow … He broke out in sweat, nauseated from the pain. He got out his knife, trying to cut off the head. There was an explosion between his shoulders, tearing through him. Blood bubbled in his throat. In his last conscious motion, he shielded the boy with his body.

The sun fragmented into darkness. Then it was light again, shining and luminous. He heard a voice that for years he'd heard only in dreams and looked up to see Socorro.

Young, beautiful, smiling, she was coming toward him, hands outstretched, holding a flagon. “Redhead burro!” she scolded. “I thought you'd never come!”

She offered the water, cool and crystal. He leaned his head against her breast and drank.

PART III

The Silver Man

1862–1863

VIII

Judah Frost stayed only a few days at Rancho del Socorro. He behaved with circumspection to Talitha in front of others but commanded her to give him pleasure in his bed at night. Since this was Shea's bed, in his room, at first Talitha thought she couldn't bear it; but as she lay waking that first night, shamed and hopeless, she seemed to feel Shea's presence, a strengthening comfort, not a reproach. That sense persisted, gave her endurance. It was as if Shea somehow knew what she was doing for him and was supporting her with his love.

It turned out that Frost didn't need her struggles to arm him to take her. He could become brutally potent by watching her in the lamplight as he caressed her, brushing her nipples to a point with his hands, making her move involuntarily; or he would whisper obscenities, or make her fondle him.

He was a skilled womanizer. After his rape of her over a year ago, Marc's loving had healed that ugliness, taught her delight—and there had been Shea. No matter how she hated Frost, her roused and hungry body began to respond to him in spite of her outraged mind and heart.

“Soon you're going to fly apart,” he murmured, stroking her throat, smiling as she quivered when he teased her breasts with teeth and tongue. “I'll feel it when you do, like a fountain of glowing rosy sparks. It's bound to happen, sweet. Why don't you let it?”

She moved her head in angry denial, but as he laughed and took her slowly, sensually, pausing to make her feel to the utmost the pulsing hardness within her, she knew despairingly that it was only a matter of time till that urgency building inside her had to explode.

“I know,” he taunted softly. “You'd rather I fell on you with the finesse of a starving wolf on meat. Then you could loathe me with complete integrity, righteously count yourself my victim. But that's not how I want you, Talitha. You're going to belong to me. First your body, then your soul.”

She shut her eyes against the shine of him, silver eyes, silver hair, and again she thought him a fallen angel, radiantly evil, a servant of death.

The evening he'd escorted her home, Frost had waited till all the vaqueros were at the supper table. Then he'd told them, in his excellent Spanish, that only his protection could save the ranch from confiscation. “Those of you who bear me a grudge from the past,” he said, with a limpid glance at the tight-lipped Belen, “had better put it aside for the sake of your
patrón
and his children. It's true I killed Santiago, but he would have killed me if I hadn't, and there are two sides to what befell him in Sonora. He accompanied me there with the intent of murdering me, and I simply acted before he could.”

“Shooting a man is one thing,” growled Belen. “But you carried off Señorita Scott.” Only Shea and Marc knew Frost had done more than that.

“It saved more killing, didn't it?” returned Frost easily. “The
señorita
was my hostage, but, as I promised, I let her go. Ask her and she'll tell you that only I can keep Don Patricio from losing all he has.”

Inquiring eyes swung to Talitha: Belen's angry, Pedro's troubled, Carmencita's bewildered, the vaqueros' confused. Amazingly, it was James whose gaze locked with Frost's.

“You killed my godfather,” he said. “If my sister asks it, I will not kill you now. But I will someday.”

Frost only laughed. “You're the Apache cub. Thanks for the warning. But perhaps you'll relent and spare your brother-in-law.”

“Brother-in-law?” choked James.

Belen half rose. “What's this,
madama?
”

“It's the bargain.” Talitha kept her voice even, but she looked at Carmencita, not her brother or Belen. “Unless I marry Mr. Frost, Shea's name will be given to the Union commander as a Southern sympathizer whose land should be forfeited.” She shook her head at a sudden gleam in Chuey's eyes. “No, Chuey. If Frost is killed, he's arranged for someone else to turn Shea in. I'll marry him, and we'll keep the ranch for Shea. I implore you all not to worry about me. I know what I'm doing.”

Frost smiled into the hostile heavy silence, the averted faces, James's undisguised hatred, the fascinated stares of the twins and Caterina.

After he had possessed Talitha that night, he lay on his back and said amusedly, “My visits here will be diverting, love. Seldom have I felt such concentrated waves of enmity, especially from your young brother! Most gratifying to know they can't do a thing without ruining my old partner, whom they love as much as they detest me.”

“Don't poke fun at James.”

“How can I resist? He glares at me with those lapis-lazuli eyes in that Apache face and I want to teach him what he is.”

“He's my brother. If you hurt him—”

He closed her mouth with his.

Güero's horse had come in during the night. His brothers, Chuey and Natividad, followed its tracks to where it had been left along the mountain. They hadn't been able to track him over the rocks, but coyotes had been at work, and as they circled the area Chuey found a gnawed arm. They soon discovered what was left of the rest. They brought it home wrapped in a serape and put it in the ground, not allowing their distraught mother to look.

The burial was at El Charco. “When times are better, we'll be going back there to live,” said Carmencita. “I want to be able to visit my son's grave. Ay, who did it? Apaches or robbers, may God destroy them!”

Frost accompanied Talitha to the Sanchez home and listened with a smooth face while Pedro said the prayers he could remember and Carmencita sobbed in Talitha's arms. Anita and Juana wept, too, but Talitha suspected it was for their mother's grief more than for their brother.

“You might have had the decency not to come to the burial,” Talitha told Frost later. “I'm surprised you weren't struck dead when you held Carmencita's hand and told her all those consoling things about his waiting in heaven!”

“They did console her. And you're a fine hypocrite yourself, Tally, going to the funeral of a man who damn near raped you!”

“I'd be delighted to attend yours.”

“Would you, my sweet?” His eyes held hers. It was like gazing into ice frozen deep over dark waters. She went cold to the heart, though his kiss burned as he drew her into his arms.

When he left, saying he'd be back as soon as he'd tended to various pressing business matters, Talitha felt as if she'd been holding her breath and now could breathe again. She slept again in her own bed, and if it hadn't been for Carmencita's woe, she could have believed that everything that had happened from the moment Güero approached her at the hot spring till Frost rode away had been a nightmare.

As soon as she could, she rode to San Manuel, accompanied by the twins, Cat, and James. Tjúni's husband, a heavy, tall Papago with a broad, kindly face, spoke a little Spanish. An aged female relative was cooking for him and his brood. Cinco scampered about with his half brothers and sister, obviously accepted as one of them; but when he saw Cat, he stopped playing to watch her, then ran inside the mud-daubed house and returned with a willow whistle.

This he handed to Cat, smiling shyly. She jumped down from Mancha and kissed him, looking at Talitha over his head, for she was several inches the taller. “Can't we take him home, Tally? He
is
my brother!”

“That would not be a good thing, Caterina.” James spoke sternly. “Cinco may be half your brother in blood, but in soul he is Papago.”

Does he think I shouldn't have taken him away from the Apaches?
Talitha thought with indignation.
Why, those women of Juh's would have let him starve! And he was fine at the ranch, would have grown up white if only he hadn't felt to blame for Socorro's dying and gone off with that damned old Mangus!

Because she didn't like what he was saying, Cat stuck out her pointed tongue at James and looked beseechingly at Talitha, who shook her head.

“We can't just whisk him away, dear. But I'll tell his foster father that Cinco has a home with us if he ever wants it. Maybe when he's older he can visit us sometimes.”

Or perhaps when Shea came back he could make the acquaintance of this son Tjúni had resentfully kept from him. Not that Talitha blamed the Papago woman much for that. Tjúni must have loved Shea all those years he was married to Socorro. After her death, when he finally took Tjúni to his bed, it was no wonder she'd hoped he'd marry her, though she'd apparently undertaken that there'd be no children. And after Cinco was born, when Shea still refused to make her his wife, no wonder Tjúni had angrily departed with her child to her part of the ranch.

Thwarted, Cat glared for a moment at her brothers, Talitha, and James before her eye lit on Mancha. “James,” she said sweetly, “please, will you help Cinco up behind me? I'll take him for a little ride.”

James shrugged and did as she asked, glad enough to humor her. By the time they returned, Talitha and Tjúni's husband and his aunt had exhausted all they could say to each other. Saying good-bye with mutual relief, they shook hands gravely all around, and Cat kissed Cinco. As they rode off she kept turning to wave at him. Only when they passed out of view behind a slope did she glance triumphantly at Talitha.

“He loved riding Mancha. All they have in the village are burros.”

Talitha frowned. “So?”

“So he'll want to ride horses when he's older. He'll come to us and make
un gran vaquero
.”

“Cat,” said Talitha sternly, “you can't mother everyone, and you mustn't play with people as if they were your dolls.”

Cat tossed her shimmering black hair. “I haven't played with dolls for years, Tally!
Caray!
I'm almost nine!”

Laughing, she challenged James to a race, and as they dwindled to tiny dots against the mountains Talitha felt a chill. When James went back to the Apaches, it would break Cat's heart—and he would go back.

Apaches or bandits had thinned out the cattle on the eastern and southern ranges, but there was a good calf crop. It was to be hoped that the two thousand California volunteers, in addition to chasing out the Confederates, might bring some order and peace to the Santa Cruz region.

Meanwhile, the vaqueros, with Talitha and the boys, split as they had for the fall cow work, one group working near the ranch buildings in case of alarm, the other combing the remote areas, branding, earmarking, and castrating.

From now on through the hot months they'd have to keep a vigilant eye for screwworm, especially in the scrotums of newly castrated calves. Blowflies would lay their eggs in wounds, and within the day screwworms would be swarming in the injury. If such an infestation wasn't treated within a day or two, screwworms could burrow deeper and deeper into the flesh, feeding on the unlucky animal till it was terribly weakened or even dead.