The Arrow Keeper’s Song (14 page)

“Ask me again when we are safely aboard the Dutch freighter and looking over our shoulders at the harbor as we head out to sea.”

Joanna nodded, respecting his candor. They had been intimate, but even that seemed in another life. Surrounded by fear and death, they had clung to one another for sanity's sake. Thinking back, Joanna had no regrets, but no desire to continue what had probably been a mistake.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the pounding of hooves and the ghostly arrival of the guerrillas out of the darkness. Joanna stepped into a patch of moonlight. The rebels would be on edge and apt to open fire at shadows. It took a couple of minutes for the horsemen to make their way up the hillside to the abandoned settlement. Joanna looked for and spied the telltale shock of white hair that identified Antonio Celestial. The rebel leader rode in the lead, as was his habit. Joanna could not help but feel a thrill of excitement. Their cause had become hers. Over the months she had earned the respect of men such as these by her acts of courage and selflessness. Joanna Cooper could probe a bullet wound, set a fracture, and deliver a baby under the most primitive conditions.

She counted the riders as they hailed her and circled their horses in the clearing among the
bohíos
.

“Galagos … Montenez …?” she asked.

Celestial shook his head. Then he leaned upon the pommel of his saddle. “You continually surprise me,
querida
. I thought you would be having tea with Captain Schrader by now.” His voice was soft and tense, his lips drawn in a thin line. He grimaced as he straightened in the saddle and sat erect. A dark-haired, thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Mateo walked his mount forward. Twin bandoliers crisscrossed his wiry frame.

“Jefe
, you are hurt. Miss Joanna, he has been wounded.”

Joanna hurried forward and reached up to help Celestial down from his mount, but the former schoolmaster waved her aside.

“Be still. Enough of your chattering, Mateo. One of those damn Spaniards clubbed me with his rifle, struck me across the back.”

“You need attention,” Bernard Marmillon spoke up, arriving at Joanna's side. “There could be damage to the spine.”

“Attention …? Captain Zuloaga will be only too happy to oblige if he finds me here.” Celestial winced, sucked in his breath, and readied himself for the ride that lay ahead. “You have been a help to us, the both of you. We owe you a debt we can never repay,” he said in a gravelly voice.

A groan escaped Felipe as two of his companions dismounted, lashed him to the saddle, then leaped astride their own mounts. Joanna looked from the wounded man to Celestial, and then to Mateo, dear young Mateo, her favorite. A child with the face of an innocent and the hands of a killer. He had witnessed his parents' execution at the hands of the Lion Brigade and spent the last six months exacting a terrible vengeance upon every unwary Spanish trooper he could find.

“I can't do it,” Joanna said.

“What are you talking about?” Bernard asked in a worried tone.

“Mateo, unhitch the horse from the carriage,” Joanna ordered. “I am going with you.”

“Si
. With pleasure,” Mateo said with a grin. The youth rode across the hilltop to the carriage and immediately began to free the mare from the harness. When the buckles caught, he used a knife to cut the animal from its leather trappings.

“Wait. Have you completely taken leave of your senses? Joanna …!” Bernard stood aghast, arms extended, an expression of disbelief on his face. He looked up at Celestial. “Talk some sense into her. Forbid it.”

“I don't think so. We need her,” said Celestial, brushing his white mane back from his brown features.

Bernard Marmillon angrily scowled, then glared malevolently at this man who had become the leader of the Cuban resistance around Santiago, a teacher and poet who had been a thorn in the side of Captain Zuloaga for almost two years. “Then you go to hell,” said the physician.

“Not until the last Spaniard is driven from my homeland,” said Celestial. “After that, well, let the devil have his due.”

Mateo returned to the circle, riding the mare bareback and leading his own mount. He had taken the liberty of removing Joanna's medical satchel and a carpetbag from the carriage and had hung them from the saddle.

“I think you will do better with my horse,” the youth said.

Joanna nodded her thanks, then turned to Bernard and placed a hand on his arm. He pulled away.

“It's no more than an hour's walk to the waterfront. I'm sorry. Have a safe trip back to the States, and if you see my parents, tell them … tell them …”

“Riders coming!” one of the guerrillas said, hurrying to re-join his companions. The man's announcement sent a ripple of tension flowing through the remaining rebels.

“What about this one?” Mateo asked, gesturing toward Bernard with the business end of his revolver. “He has been to our camp in the mountains.”

“He has helped us in the past,” Celestial firmly replied. “The American will not be harmed. Besides, to betray us would be to betray Joanna as well. I do not think he would wish her blood on his hands.” The rebel leader clapped Bernard on the shoulder and pointed toward one of the deserted huts. “I suggest you hide until the Spaniards have passed.” He did not wait to see if the physician followed his advice but walked his mount past Bernard. The remaining horsemen followed him into the night. Only Joanna lingered, and for a moment Bernard entertained the notion she might be reconsidering her choice. Then the moonlight fell across her features and revealed the exhilaration that literally left her trembling.

“Once long ago, at Christmas, the last Christmas I was home, I stood on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain on a cold and misty evening and struggled with my thoughts, wondering if what I was about to do was really and truly … right. I was trying to find my way and feeling so terribly uncertain. Then I heard the strangest thing. Drums. Indian drums. And a distant, keening wail, like someone singing. Or chanting.” She chuckled softly. “I swear I heard them, so faintly, like the voices of spirits. What did tribal drums have to do with Cuba? Don't ask me. But the strangest thing … listening to them helped me decide. I knew, deep in my heart, that I had to do this. I had to come to Cuba.” Her gaze became centered, and she looked at the man who had worked at her side throughout those dangerous days. “I cannot abandon these people any more than Celestial and Mateo and the others can cease struggling and dying for their cause.” She settled herself in the saddle, her eyes shrouded in shadow. “I just wanted you to understand.”

“I understand you are quite mad,” he said.

“Then God help me,” Joanna replied, looking west to the black mountains that had become the stronghold of the revolution. She was drawn to the danger and had never felt more alive in all her life. “For I love it so.”

PART TWO

W
AY OF A
G
HOST

CHAPTER TWELVE

Indian Territory, April 2, 1898

H
E WAS A CHILD OF THE WIND FOLLOWING A FENCE LINE THAT
hemmed in the boundary of an overgrazed pasture on the outskirts of Tulsa. He was a ghost riding through a combustion of electricity and thunder where the ground rumbled underfoot and lightning scored the gunmetal-gray sky and split the heavens with its savage glare. The pummeling rain that glistened on the surface of his slicker had come too late to save this hardscrabble farm he had found. The drought of the previous summer had driven off the homestead's former tenant; nothing remained but a weathered farmhouse, the fire-scarred skeleton of a barn, and a broken windmill that creaked with every sudden gust and pumped its black air, dry as dust, out of the bowels of the earth.

The horseman rode into the mudslick yard and “hello-ed” the farmhouse out of habit, then dismounted and started toward the water trough, though the roan balked and fought his lead. A flutter of starlings erupted from the porch and lost themselves in the downpour as the man took a moment to study the trough, which the spring storms were attempting to refill. He heard the distinctive warning familiar to any plainsman and retreated a step as a rattlesnake, disturbed from its rest by the approaching human, darted its head out from beneath the trough. The reptile, coiled and ready to strike, was a chilling sight. The line rider used his bandanna for a hobble, then left his skittish mount in the yard and walked around the trough to the porch. He tore up a length of one-by-four from the flooring and used this makeshift club to harass the snake until the rattler abandoned the sheltering trough. The rattlesnake left an undulating track in the mud as it headed off toward the barn. With the menacing reptile safely retired, the rider freed his mount's forelegs; the roan cautiously approached the trough, dipped its nose into the few inches of rainwater lining the bottom, and slaked its thirst.

Tom Sandcrane took a moment to survey the homestead through the miniature rivulet pouring from the creased brim of his hat. There wasn't much to see. Vandals and the cruel blast of a previous storm had knocked down whole sections of a weathered fence that haphazardly surrounded a fallow garden where even the armadillos no longer cared to root for food. Pools of muddy water dotted the pasture, and bunch-grass was already beginning to sprout out of the thirsty sod. The pasture would have a good growth this year, but not a single cow remained to lead into the meadow. The main house, framed by a pair of emaciated live oaks, stood stark and empty-looking among the weeds, the front door creaking in the wind, opening and closing, as if inviting him to enter. The windows were partly shuttered, but Tom didn't need to peer inside; he could imagine the interior. Something spare and bleak and desolate. A place of grit and spiderwebs where the wind moaned as it blew through the cracks in the walls and down the remains of a soot-choked chimney, the top of which leaned at a precarious angle and threatened to collapse.

However bleak, the farmhouse offered protection from the fury of the elements spawned by a midspring cold front. The cold swept out of the Staked Plains like a herd of the buffalo that had once roamed the prairie in the days before the
ve-ho-e
, the white men, did, crisscrossing the land with fences, these spider men who tangled the free range in webs of barbed steel.

Tulsa, only a couple of miles to the northeast, wasn't going anywhere. Why endure the punishing downpour? Tom briefly considered sheltering the horse in what was left of the barn's interior, a caved-in, charred structure overgrown with weeds. But then he'd have to deal with the rattler again, so instead he decided to leave the reptile in peace and tethered the roan to a porch rail. The gelding turned his rump to the wind as Tom untied the saddlebags and coffeepot, slid the Winchester from the saddle boot, and ventured inside.

Sandcrane's imagination hadn't been far wrong. The place was empty and cheerless, and mice had left their tracks in the dust and debris littering the floor, but surprisingly enough, some previous traveler had been so kind as to leave a pile of mesquite wood close to the hearth. Tom lost no time in stacking the wood in the fireplace, and before long he was standing with his backside to a cheerful blaze and drying the seat of his britches. He opened a burlap bag containing a blue enamel pot and a tin of Arbuckle's coffee. He filled the pot with water from his canteen, tossed in the last of his coffee, and set it near the flames. There were a couple of scraps of jerky gathering lint at the bottom of the bag and a few hard biscuits left over from breakfast. Hunger was his only seasoning, and he quickly made a meal of what he had. He might find more substantial fare in Tulsa. A stall full of hay and a bait of oats for the roan wouldn't hurt either.

Tom Sandcrane had been drifting aimlessly since the day he had ridden out of Cross Timbers. Allyn Benedict's schemes had taken all the purpose out of him. Tom was angry at the Indian agent and angrier at himself, knowing both pride and his own infatuation with Emmiline Benedict had caused him to betray his people, however inadvertently. The reservation's real wealth and power would go to Benedict and the oil companies. He should have seen it coming. Benedict's trickery had cost Tom his dignity and set him adrift from the tribe. He could never have faced the tribal elders or the other Cheyenne once they realized the oil-rich lands had already been claimed right out from under them. Without family, without a sense of belonging, apart from his own heritage, Tom Sandcrane had indeed become like a ghost, wandering from place to place, never a part of anything, never feeling he belonged.

For six months Tom had taken whatever jobs had come his way. He'd broken horses in Lubbock and ridden fenceline on a spread over by Dumas in the Texas panhandle. Quitting the Dumas job after a quarrel with the range boss, he chose an easterly trail, while keeping on the Texas side of the Red River. Prize money at a Christmas rodeo in Sherman had provided him pocket money for a spell, but eventually it too played out. The headline on a two-week-old copy of the Tulsa
Territorial Register
left on the bar of the Red River Belle Saloon in Sherman, Texas, had given the fiddle-footed young wanderer a direction.

Two days ago Tom had headed up the Texas Road, forded the Red River, and entered the Indian Territory, once the lands of the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Cherokee. Here, too, the reservations had been abolished and the territory opened to homesteaders.

There were rumors that Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory would one day be combined to form a state. In the event of such a grand occurrence Tom had no doubt but that Allyn Benedict was standing in the wings, ready and willing to perform in the political arena. It could happen. But young Sandcrane no longer cared one way or the other. This ghost, harboring no allegiance to what had been or would be, was caught between the past and the future and condemned to haunt the present. The wind no longer called him by name. Spectral warriors astride painted chargers rode on the periphery of his vision but refused to reveal themselves no matter how quickly he looked, which made their presence all the more infuriating.