Harvest of Fury (2 page)

Meeting John Irwin's worried gaze, Talitha sighed. “There's no safe place in Arizona, New Mexico, or nothern Mexico, John.”

“There's Santa Fe. The troops would escort you there.”

With a pang, she remembered that little adobe village high in the mountains. That was where the Mormon Battalion had left its weaker members and most of the women and children. Talitha's mother, uncles, and grandfather had started out to follow the battalion at a slower pace. Talitha still blanked out the way her uncles and grandfather had looked, full of arrows, bound to their wagon wheels and burned, when she and her mother were taken captive.

Judith had died of fever brought on by James's difficult birth. One of Juh's other wives grudgingly nursed James for a few months. After that, Talitha kept him alive by feeding him piñon nuts, finely ground and mixed with water and honey. He'd been less than a year old when Shea had ransomed him by proving to Juh his bravery, taking a second brand on his cheek to go with the one the army had given him.

Talitha had worshiped Shea since that day, though after his beloved Socorro died his grief and resultant drinking had deepened her love with compassion. Only the night before he left to join the Confederate forces mustering in Texas had he at last permitted himself to treat Talitha as a woman. That one sweet night, ever to be treasured! He'd promised to marry her when he came back, start a fresh new life with her.

A thrill at once of rapture and of loss ran through Talitha as she straightened. She must be here when he came, hold the ranch for him and these children.

Meeting the young captain's eyes, she smiled and shook her head. “Santa Fe's where I started, John. I'm not going back. None of us have kin in the East, anyone who could be trusted to take care of the children. Even with the danger, they're better here with me.”

“We're not children, Miguel and me!” snorted Patrick.

Cat, still rocking Sewa, took James's brown hand and pressed her soft cheek to it. “James loves us, Captain Irwin. He's part Apache. He won't let them hurt us.”

Dropping to one knee beside her, James laughed. Great closeness had grown up between the two of them since his return, a closeness which made Talitha, who'd mothered them both, feel shut out.

Talitha had longed for years to have James back, but in those seven years he'd changed from the brother she'd kept alive among Juh's hostile wives to an Apache youth inured to hardship, almost old enough to go on his first raid when he would act as a servant to the older men and his family would pray that he'd bring back many horses and cattle. Only when he played with Cat and Sewa could Talitha see flashes of the little brother who'd so loved Chacho, his princely black cat who had gotten hydrophobia and given it to Shea. It was in taking Shea to a Tarahumare hermit for curing that Socorro had gone into premature labor and hemorrhaged to death. Guilty because he'd lied to protect his stricken cat, James had gone with Mangus from Socorro's grave.

Irwin's jaw squared. “Even Tucson would be safer than this. By God, if this territory were under martial law, I'd pack you up there whether you liked it or not!”

Talitha stiffened. “How fortunate for our friendship that you can't!” Her mind had been grappling with the formidable situation, though, and she added persuasively, “It would be wise to bring the El Charco people to the main ranch, to provide more protection for all. I'll give them the alternative of going deep enough into Mexico to get away from Apaches; but if they stay, that'll give us four more men—five, if Güero comes.”

“I don't like Güero,” Patrick said. “He's mean to horses.”

Talitha didn't like Pedro Sanchez's older son, either, the way his green eyes seemed to burn through her clothing, but she shrugged and said, “Gracious, John, that gives us more good shots than the presidio at Tubac often used to have when they were supposed to protect the whole Santa Cruz Valley!”

He slammed his fist into his palm. “Damn it, Talitha, don't you understand? It's going back to the way it was when the ranch started, maybe even worse.”

“Sylvester Mowry's Patagonia mine is like a fortress,” she reminded him. “Pete Kitchen has his ranch so well fortified that the Apaches don't try to take his house anymore; they just run off stock and kill his pigs.”

“And men, when they catch them.”

There was no answer to that. Irwin stifled a growl of frustration. “You'll at least move the El Charco vaqueros up here?”

Talitha laughed. “I'll surely invite them, most heartily.” She crossed the room and put her hand in the captain's. “It's kind of you to worry about us, John. I hate to see you go. Especially when—” She bit her lip.

“When I'll fight for the Union, while Shea joins the rebels?” Irwin supplied gently. “I hate that, too, but that stubborn Irishman has it in his head that the Union's like England, always pushing weaker countries around.”

That was true. The brand of desertion on Shea's cheek had seared into his spirit, along with the death of his brother. He'd hated it when Americans had started coming into the Arizona country, though he'd become friendly with some of them, including this Irish-born young surgeon.

“Come see us as much as you can before you leave,” Talitha urged.

“I'll do that.” He bent to kiss Cat and Sewa, then shook hands with all three boys, who suddenly seemed taller and older, sobered and challenged by what lay ahead. Then, with a teasing grin, he swept Talitha close.

“If you're not afraid of Apaches, you shouldn't be afraid of me!”

He gave her a quick, light kiss, picked up his plumed hat, and went out into the warm July twilight.

Standing in the door, watching her brother and Shea's children follow the officer through the opening between the boys' quarters and the granaries, Talitha hugged Sewa close and in the baby's warm, soft sweetness found some comfort for her sad heart. She had to choose for all of them. If they suffered for it, were slaughtered as so many others had been—

But this had always been dangerous country. Shea had left them in that knowledge. It wasn't as if she were willfully plunging the children into this threat. The only other choice was to flee like refugees, abandoning these children's heritage, all their parents had worked for.

The peaches that grew in the courtyard were ripe, though the pomegranates were only faintly tinged with crimson. Talitha reached up for a peach she'd noticed earlier that day, rubbed the fuzz off on her skirt, and took a bite, savoring the mellow richness as juice filled her mouth.

She loved this place—so painfully made by the courage, patience, work, and faith of its founders. It was home, where Shea, her love, would return. If she hoped to prove worthy of him, no matter how young, unsure, and frightened she was, she must somehow be as valiant and enduring as Socorro.

But she had had Shea!
Talitha wailed silently, then had to admit, to herself,
Not at first she didn't. Not when she was left alone in the desert with all her people dead. She was younger then than you are, so let's have no excuses!

Even so, trying to emulate Socorro seemed an impossible challenge. Sighing, Talitha savored the fruit and straightened her shoulders. With all her strength and will and devotion, she would hold this ranch. That was all she could do; she could do no less.

When she said after breakfast next morning that she was going to El Charco and to San Manuel, the Papago enclave of Tjúni, the fourth of Rancho del Socorro's partners, James said he'd go with her. At that the twins clamored to ride along. Cat, torn, finally decided that Anita was capable of looking after Sewa for the day, and the five began the ride southward. Patrick was on coal black Thunder. Miguel's Lightning was a creamy gold. Caterina bobbed along on Mancha. James would never love another horse as he had his gray Tordillo, killed one hard winter to feed women and children among the Apaches, but he'd picked a tough, angular roan, Alacrán, or Scorpion, and they respected each other, moving as one.

On the hill behind the ranch buildings were the crosses raised for Santiago and Socorro, and on the far side of the hill in a small grotto were buried the scalps of many Papagos and Mexicans whose hair had been taken by white scalp hunters hungry to collect the bounty that had been offered for Apache scalps by the government of Sonora, the most northwestern state of Mexico, of which the Gadsden Purchase, presently part of the territory of New Mexico, was a portion. Now that civil war had engulfed the country, Apaches might well reclaim the great expanse of mountains, plains, and river valleys.

But not, if Talitha could prevent it, Rancho del Socorro. As Patrick, hair gilded by sun, rode close to Cat, laughingly calling some big-brotherly tease to her, Talitha thought they must look much as their parents had at the same ages. Patrick O'Shea, known as Shea, had left Ireland during the potato famine of 1845 with his twin, Michael, and joined the U.S. Army, which was preparing to go to war with Mexico. Coming to feel more sympathy with the Catholic Mexicans than with the overbearing sergeant who constantly harassed them, the brothers had swum the Rio Grande and joined the famed San Patricio Battalion, formed of deserters from the U.S. Army. The survivors of the battalion had been court-martialed by the conquering U.S. Many were hanged. Shea and Michael were branded and flogged but escaped, heading for California. Michael died of thirst in the desert, and Shea, a parched-leather skeleton whose gashes couldn't even bleed and whose tongue was shriveled to a hard lump, had been brought back to life by Socorro.

Socorro had been in desperate straits herself, though she'd found a life-giving natural cistern, or
tinaja
, in the desert rocks. She was traveling to California to marry her cousin when Areneños killed her father and her escort, plundered their wagon, and left her to die. The
tinaja
saved her, but such a gently reared girl would probably have died a slow death from exposure or hunger, or a swift one from more Areneños, if she hadn't rescued Shea, who, when he had regained his strength, walked her out of the desolate cinder cones and lava flows to a ranch where they found only Santiago left alive after a scalp hunters' raid.

When Santiago was able to travel, they'd taken two hundred cattle, loaded mules with whatever they could salvage, and started for an abandoned ranch which Santiago remembered from driving cattle to sell in the presidios of Tubac and Tucson. On the way they'd found Tjúni, intent on avenging the scalp hunters' slaughter of her family and village.

A chill always shot down Talitha's spine when she remembered the Place of Skulls. That was where Tjúni and Socorro, picking berries, had come upon the scalpers raping and killing the women of Mangus's camp. Tjúni had brought down three men with arrows, Socorro killed one, but the fifth escaped.

Judah Frost. Talitha still had nightmares about him, with his silver hair and ice-crystal gaze. She'd been thirteen when he caught her bathing in a hot spring not far below the Place of Skulls. He'd said then he meant to have her when she grew up. Through the years, as he was welcome at the ranch and became Shea's partner in freighting and mining, Talitha had felt stalked by a giant cat, unable to tell that Frost was one of the scalpers because he was an expert shot who'd surely have killed either Shea or Santiago had they challenged him.

He
had
killed Santiago only last year, when Santiago returned from years of slave labor in a Mexican mine where Frost had sold him while telling the O'Sheas that their friend had married a wealthy Mexican widow and had stayed in Mexico to manage her holdings. Freed by Yaquis rebelling against the government, Santiago had been nursed and loved by a Yaqui girl he had married when he learned she was with child. He'd come back to confront Frost, who'd shot him, wounded Shea, and taken Talitha hostage. Before he released her near Pete Kitchen's ranch, he'd done what he'd intended since that first day they met.

She'd thought she'd never be clean of that, but Marc Revier's tender loving had cleansed her. Marc, the Freiburg-trained engineer, who'd taught her to read and write, brought her books, waited for her to grow up. She thought of him with pain and loss, for she loved him in her own way.

“He's god to you,” Marc had said bitterly of Shea. She had refused to marry Marc a year ago. Was he still at the Tecolote mine south of Yuma Crossing?

At least Frost was dead. Shea and the pursuers had found his horse dead and a man's corpse dangling head downward over a fire that had split the skill and charred the face past recognition. Talitha forced the thought of him from her, assessing with a practiced eye the cattle grazing along a dry wash or streambed that would become a torrent when the rains started, as they should within a few weeks.

In spite of the weeks of dry heat, the cattle were holding flesh well. Over the years the scrubs had been butchered or sold, the best kept for breeding. The starting herd of “black” Spanish cattle, not necessarily black, had been mixed with curly-haired, beefier animals from Texas and some heifers acquired from an Illinois drover headed for California.

That spring the vaqueros had collected about five hundred
senales
, the bits of ear cut off while earmarking and branding. For each calf there were probably four older animals, which meant the ranch was running close to twenty-five hundred head.

Not all of these carried the S brand and belonged to the O'Sheas. At the beginning, before there was money to pay the vaqueros, each was allowed to mark every twentieth cow for himself. Shea, marveling at this vast country, so rich with opportunity in spite of its dangers, had wanted those who worked with him to share his good fortune.

Living at El Charco, fifteen miles south of the main ranch, the Sanchezes, who worked for Shea, had, in effect, possessed their own small kingdom. Would Pedro consent to leave it, move to the Socorro? Once before, when he was a boy, Apaches had driven him from this place. Pedro, now fifty, might well decide that this country would never be safe, take his herd and family, and depart with the aim of going far enough south to be out of the way of Apache raids.