The Valiant Women (10 page)

Santiago had begun to get about a little with the aid of a stick. Several times Shea had seen him out by the crosses of the burial arroyo, but instead of being bowed, his head was thrown back as he gazed at the distant mountains. If he were praying, his prayers were mighty different from those of Socorro.

“I should tell you one thing,” he said one morning as they breakfasted on corn gruel and a rabbit he'd brought down with an arrow. “Once we're settled at the Socorro, I must leave you for a time, but I'll find you some Papagos for help.”

“May I inquire what's your pressing business?” Shea asked.

“I must find those scalp hunters.”

“But there's no telling where they are by now!”

Santiago's lips pulled back from his white teeth. “I shall hunt for scalpers and kill any I track down till I finally get the right bunch. It won't be a waste of time. To kill any bounty hunter is a good thing.”

“What if one kills you?”

The yellow eyes lighted. “So long as he's the last of them, I'll die blessed!”

Socorro put a pleading hand on his arm. “Santiago,
por favor
—”

“Do not, lady,” he told her. “Do not ask me what I cannot do, for in all things but this I will serve you.”

Shea remembered his father and killing the farmer so long ago. He understood the young man's bitter resolve, but it was one thing to kill a single murderer, another to tackle a half-dozen heavily armed and savage men.

“I'd go with you,” he said slowly, “if it weren't for Socorro. Don't try it alone, lad. There must be other men who'd like a crack at them.”

“I will not wait!” Santiago screamed as if something had snapped deep inside him.

They stared, shocked. Recovering himself though he still breathed heavily and kept his hands clenched, Santiago whispered, “The vaqueros were my friends. For Don Antonio I had respect. Doña Ana, his wife, ignored me as much as possible, but their son Carlos—he followed me everywhere. Seven years old and already good with the rope, not afraid of any bull or horse. What a man he'd have been! And there was his sister, Elena, only five, who tried to do everything he did—all of my friends, their wives and babies—”

Blindly reaching for his stick, Santiago rose and hobbled outside. Socorro followed. For once, Shea wasn't jealous.

The boy was right. He had to avenge his people. And he, Shea, would go with him in a second if there were some way of leaving Socorro in safety.

Maybe she could stay at one of those presidios, Tubac or Tucson.
We'll see
, Shea thought, and sighed.

He was sick of killing and of death. All he wanted was to settle down and make a life with Socorro. Here in the Province of Sonora in the autumn of 1847, that might be an unattainable dream. But at least they had water and food and an ally who knew the country.

Knew
it? Opata, Apache, Tarahumare, Spaniard—hell, he
was
the country!

Shea heard him talking to Socorro now, unleashing pent-up grief, desolation and fury. That would help. Sighing, Shea took his bow and cowskin quiver and went out to hunt.

PART II

SOCORRO

VI

A week later they left the ranch. According to Santiago, who kept a calendar by knotting a strip of rawhide, it was,
mas o menos
, the middle of November. They needed serapes at night but the sun still heated the day, though not in the parching manner of summer or early autumn.

Cristiano, a gaunt wary old warrior of many scars, led the mixed herd of two hundred. There were a few bulls, some steers for beef, but mostly there were young cows Santiago had selected for breeding good cattle.

Looking at the pack mules was, for Socorro, like seeing a moving storehouse. Each of the six carried two
aparejos
which held up to seventy-five pounds apiece of corn, whole or ground, beans, dried squash, chilis, jerky and wheat. These hung from two loops of rawhide fastened to the packsaddle.

On top of these and the saddle frame were piled the movable things that would be of inestimable value: the iron kettles, utensils, baskets and earthenware, tools, rawhide and tanned leather, usable clothing, the luxurious down pillows from the big bed, and serapes covering each load and lashed down securely to the saddle. One mule carried things they'd need on the way: food, the ax, hammer, shoes for the mules and horses and nails to fasten them.

In the leather pouch at her waist, Socorro carried a great treasure. Two needles, carefully stuck through a bit of cotton, a pair of scissors and real thread! Her father's most elegant gifts had never delighted her so.

It was astounding what less than two months in the wilderness could do to a person. Before she left Alamos Socorro would have indignantly rejected the notion that she'd be glad to have the shoes and garments of a dead woman, but she'd felt no compunction at appropriating anything that could be worn or used for patching.

She did, though, take Doña Ana's few treasures and bury them near the cross: a small carved chest of jewelry, tucked away where the scalpers had missed it, combs for the hair, a cobweb mantilla, a fragile blown-glass vase, as well as a wooden doll and several small carved animals that must have been the children's. She'd tried to do this secretly, but Shea had seen her and strolled up, red-gold eyebrows meeting in a puzzled frown above his straight long nose.

The brand on his cheek had faded to dull red and no longer puckered, but he'd wear it to the grave. In spite of that, with his gold-flamed hair and eyes the color of storm, he had an imperious male beauty that weakened Socorro each time she looked at him, made the deepest parts of her go soft with longing.

Yet when he looked at her in that certain, heart-stopping way, she was terrified. She had wept in his arms. He had held her kindly. But she knew instinctively, in spite of all his assurances, that she must not always expect him to play the comforting brother.

But he
was
kind. He had suffered much. It was a fresh shock each time she saw him to think of the leathery skeleton he had been, peeled-back lips baked in a snarl, the horrid bloodless wounds.

This strong handsome man, who was learning the ways of the country so swiftly that even scapegrace Santiago respected him, was very much her creation, almost as much as if he'd been her child. She'd given him life. Her love for him was mixed with tenderness, pride and awe.

If only—in imagination, his touch changed to the grasping cruel fingers that had held her by legs and arms while each
Areneño
—

No! No! She could never endure that again, the tearing invasion of her body. Fear blotted out the sweetness of the fantasy's beginning. There, by the edge of the mass grave, she closed her eyes a moment, stilled her panic till she could look at Shea and see him, his beloved face, banish the nightmare.

He was still frowning at the things she was placing in the small hole by the cross. “Why are you doing that, lass? You might as well have them. They can't do Doña Ana any good.”

“Perhaps she'll know. It's so terrible, Shea, the way she died, her children—”

He hadn't argued, then, but had helped her fill in the hole and knelt beside her for a while. She knew he prayed for his brother though he must have the intercession of a mother long since in heaven.

Socorro prayed for her father, Enrique, Michael O'Shea and the folk of the rancho. And she prayed for herself, for Shea and Santiago, that they might survive without becoming as hard as this country and as cruel.

In spite of the horror of the massacre, leaving the house and fireplace filled Socorro with desolation. She couldn't see that leaving a place recently decimated by scalp hunters for one abandoned over twenty years ago because of Apache attacks was much of an improvement, and she had grown used to it here.

Still, she had felt almost the same way when she and Shea left the
tinaja
where she'd found water in her extremity and had nursed him back to life.

In gathering the few last things that morning, she'd hesitated at the little shrine. Guadalupe would be such a comfort. Yet it seemed sacrilege to take her from this house. After a last prayer, Socorro continued with her packing, was tucking necessaries into an
aparejo
when Santiago brought her the gilt and blue wooden image.

“It's mine more than anybody's now,” he said. “We must have her in our new home.” He smiled, the young sweetness of his boyish mouth contrasting with those
tigre
eyes that sometimes were frightening, though to her he was unfailingly gentle and courteous. “She'll be Our Lady of Socorro.”

It would be carping to point out that the madonna had recently smiled calmly, blindly down on rape and murder. Socorro suspected that Santiago gave not a gypsy's damn for shrines. But she herself wanted the Guadalupe very much so she didn't protest as he wrapped the figure carefully in an old shirt and tucked her carefully between two serapes.

Now, as they rode away, past the corrals and along the dry riverbed toward the northeast, Socorro looked back once at the house, hoped that people would live in it again, safely, that corn would be ground in the
metate
by more skillful hands than hers, laughter would sound by the fireplace and children be made in the great canopied bed.

Her bow, like those of the men, was fastened from the saddle horn in a rawhide sling that also held the quiver of arrows, which now had feathers, for they'd collected every feather they found in what was left from hawk and eagle kills. She could hit targets most of the time now but shrank from hunting so she'd never sighted at a moving object, except the inflated cow stomach Shea had insisted that she aim at while he moved it along a branch with a rope.

She hoped she'd never have to kill anything, but it was excellent to know that she probably
could
. Santiago was a peerless marksman, but Shea grew more accurate daily and had brought in a number of rabbits and another ancient buck which had made a welcome change from jerky.

Also, each had a knife sheathed at the waist. Besides Socorro's, Santiago had found one overlooked by the scalpers. Then, from a broken saw found in the storeroom, he'd whetted an effective, vicious-looking blade and given it a bone handle.

“Damn near a Bowie!” Shea whistled. “Better not try to eat with that or you'll slit your gullet!”

Santiago regarded it admiringly. “Large, perhaps, but in a fight it will be a veritable sword.”

Socorro hoped there'd be no fights. She also hoped to dissuade Santiago from trying to find the scalp hunters. They'd surely kill him. Perhaps, at the least, she could get him to ask the presidio soldiers to mount an expedition he could accompany.

But first they had ten days' journey, trying to get these cattle through country where Apache might swoop down at any time, not to mention scalp hunters. Her spine chilled at the thought. She sat up stiffer in the saddle, shifting her weight, glad now that she'd let Shea bully her into wearing the trousers he'd thrust at her last week.

“Time you and your horse got used to each other,” he'd growled. “And don't make a fuss about these pants, my girl! We're not on a Sunday's decorous circling of the plaza. You're going to need good balance and control of your horse.”

She stared at the garment. “But it's a sin! An abomination!”

“It'll be a lot worse sin if you fall into the cactus or catch your skirts on a branch and get dragged!”

She eyed him rebelliously. His jaw hardened. “God's whiskers! I'll put them on you!” he began, then swallowed and attained calm with great effort. “Socorro, if we were being chased and those damned skirts caused Santiago and me to have to ride back for you so that we all got killed, would it be worth it? If you think so, wear your dresses.”

She gave him a shattered glance, ducked her head and went inside to change. Every day one of the men saddled Castaña, the pretty chestnut mare Santiago had chosen as the finest of the gentler horses, and accompanied Socorro on a ride. From the way her unused muscles ached after only a few hours, she knew that without this toughening she'd have been a very sorry case during the days of riding ahead of them.

Castaña might have been the gentlest of the horses, but that wasn't saying much. She, like all the others, had to be roped before she could be bridled and saddled and Socorro rode with vigilance, reins firmly held. Castaña skittered at any sound in the brush, and though Santiago explained this came from having been bitten by a rattlesnake, Socorro came to think it was an excuse for flightiness.

Santiago had a fiery black mustang he'd trained himself, and Shea rode a big roan. The other two horses followed along voluntarily. The men had decided they had all they could handle with the cattle and pack mules. If the horses came, fine; if they didn't, too bad. They had brought a couple of extra saddles and bridles on the pack mules, though, because if the ranch thrived more horses and vaqueros were going to be needed.

Flexing her toes in the stirrups Socorro threw back her head and breathed in air so clear that it seemed to sparkle.

Mountains marched all around them, barren and savage up close, like brooding Pinacate, but glowing in the distance, some purple, some misty heaven blue, some pinkish golden.

She laughed with sheer well-being, casting off her sadness at leaving the sheltering walls, turning her face toward the majestic vistas before them.

Shea, slightly behind her, urged the roan, Azul, forward. “I don't know why you're laughing, but I'm glad you are!” he called.

She dared take one hand from the reins for a second to make a wide sweeping motion. “It's just so grand and beautiful. Yes, I know it can kill! It almost killed us. But nowhere else can there be such sun, such air, such mountains.…”

“Such cholla, desert and rattlesnakes!” he teased.

She pulled a face at him, refused to be sobered. In her trousers, free of cumbersome skirts, riding a spirited horse into a new venture, she felt roused from a half-life limited by tradition and being a woman. She was proud that she could make decent tortillas now, but oh, this!