The Valiant Women (33 page)

Over thirty thousand dollars!

Will Thomas, for all his sensible talk, had caught gold fever and, with his Texans, had stayed in California, as had Güero. “I'll ride to El Charco tomorrow and let his mother know.” Santiago's black brows knitted. “For my part, I hope he stays. If Will Thomas hadn't kept his men in check, they'd have killed that fair-haired swaggerer, or at least have mauled him.”

“You rode all the way back
alone?
” Socorro demanded fearfully.

“I'm alive, my lady.” His golden eyes smiled, lingering as if starved for sight of her. He came down from the saddle, gracefully in spite of his damaged leg, and handed Talitha the basket. “Besides, I wasn't really alone. This soft creature snuggled in my blankets at night and purred most of the day.”

A cat! Talitha sucked in her breath, tingling with astonished joy. She'd had a kitten, back in Nauvoo, but it had vanished during the flight across the river. Thinking back now, she realized that she hadn't seen a cat since leaving Fort Leavenworth.

This cat was gray and yellow and black and white, almost as if she'd been pieced from the skins of her most distant ancestors. Around her golden eyes was a black pirate's patch, and the other eye was green. She appraised Talitha lazily, stretched, yawned and sprang lightly from the basket, strolling soft-pawed and stately into the house as if to see if it was good enough for her. Within a moment, a startled squeal indicated that she'd already taken up the ancient vocation of cats, catching rodents.

“What's her name?” Talitha asked.

“I've called her Chusma—that means ‘ragtag.' But she's yours, little Tally. Call her as you will.”

“Chusma's all right,” Talitha said after some thought. “It sounds like ‘choose me'! Oh, Santiago! I love her! And so will James and Patrick and Miguel—”

“And all of us!” added Socorro. “I'm sorry for the little mice with their bright eyes and soft fur, but it's been terrible to have them always in our grain.”

“That's how lots of people feel in California,” Santiago laughed. “Anyone with cats to sell can get sixteen to a hundred dollars. I paid twenty dollars for this one and thought her a bargain.”

Chusma still rubbed often against Santiago's legs, but she slept in the bend behind Talitha's knees. If Talitha wasn't up early enough to suit her, Chusma tugged at her hair, first gently, then with more claw, or swatted her briskly on the cheek. If Talitha, trying to escape these summonings, pulled the cover over her head, Chusma could usually insinuate a paw inside, or, failing that, would
stomp
up and down on her till Talitha surrendered.

The cat's increased girth was attributed to all the mice and rats she devoured, but one night she didn't curl up by Talitha and frantic searching didn't locate her. James cried for his fascinating new playmate and Talitha, after comforting him, sobbed herself to sleep.

Had a mean old coyote or javelina, wolf, fox, wildcat or even bear made off with Chusma? It couldn't be! Not after Santiago brought her all the way from California! Talitha hunted and called and hoped all the next day but there was no trace of the familiar patchwork or pointed ears, no meowing or plaintive rubbing at the ankles. Talitha's heart seemed to swell with heaviness, and when Shea tried to comfort her, she dodged away as soon as possible.

No one loved Chusma as she had. They couldn't understand.

Then, the fourth day after her disappearance, Chusma came noiselessly in as they were having supper, something black dangling limply from her mouth.

“A—a kitten!” shrieked Talitha.

Recovering, Socorro got to her feet. “She must want to bring them in from wherever she hid to have them. Come, Tally, let's make her a bed.”

Chusma accepted their efforts, part of an old blanket nestled among the grain baskets, and within the quarter hour, she was nursing her striving, mewing offspring, grooming them with her rough pink tongue.

“A black, a white and gray, and one that looks like her!” Talitha crooned, kneeling by them, but not venturing to touch the tiny things with their closed eyes and sealed-looking ears. “No, James! She won't like you to play with them yet. Just watch. But isn't it lucky? There's one for you and one for each twin.”

James's blue eyes glinted in his round dark face. He squatted on his heels and, fascinated, watched the kittens. “James get the black one?” he inquired hopefully.

“If he's the one you want. Patrick and Miguel aren't old enough to play with kitties yet.”

James spent most of his waking hours during the next few weeks with the cat and her family. He fetched fresh water for Chusma and brought her tidbits. It enthralled him to watch the kittens gain their legs and wobble about.

Chusma relaxed her first nervous protectiveness after about a week and watched benignly but with vigilance as the kittens explored James as part of their territory, scrambling over his legs and into his lap. She seemed to accept him as a suitable nurse for her offspring because she soon resumed her hunting forays, shaking the kittens from her as she rose.

After a patrol of the storehouse and an hour's stalking about the yard and buildings, she returned to her brood, tail gently swaying instead of twitching as it had been when she sprang up to flee.

James didn't drag the kittens about or handle them roughly, but held them if they wanted to sleep. Once Talitha heard him crooning an Apache lullaby she'd taught him, cuddling the black one against his small hard belly.

“What are you calling him?” she asked.

“Muchacho. ‘Boy,' like James.”

That was shortened to Chacho. As soon as he was weaned, he started sleeping with James though the two little females slept as close to their mother as she'd now allow, which was at Talitha's feet.

Chacho developed into a large cat, princely of carriage, green of eye, and aloof from all humankind except James. The gray and white cat vanished that autumn, prey of some bigger predator, but on the day of the Roof Feast in 1850, Chacho and his sister Niña had produced two kittens, one black and white, the other multicolored. The twins were as intrigued with them as James had been with the first litter and each claimed one as his personal pet.

James was above all that. He had his incomparable Chacho, and besides, since his third birthday, Santiago had begun his tutelage as a vaquero.

Viejo, grizzled now with age, shoulder still bearing the scars of the lion, was James's first mount. He progressed to Ladorada who, because of her training and nature, was extremely gentle, though spirited. On his fourth birthday, celebrated in mid-July since Talitha didn't know the exact date, Shea gave him Azul's and Castaña's colt, a steel gray so dark he was almost black, three years old now, and gradually tamed by Shea and Talitha.

James had to climb into the saddle from the side of the corral, and he took his falls, but Santiago was very pleased with his godson. He roped corral posts, the
vegas
protruding from the walls, three stumps, wheelbarrow handles, and eventually cast his rope on Chusma. Talitha rushed out in time to save the spitting, scratching cat from strangling, and, arms and hands tracked with blood, put her small brother over her knee and gave him his first spanking.

He was so scared by what he'd almost done to Chusma that he didn't struggle or cry out. When, shaking, Talitha set him on his feet, he gazed at her with his deep blue eyes, so strange in the Indian face, and blinked back a fat tear, patting her cruelly marked hands.

“James sorry. Tally, James so glad you get Chusma loose!”

“So am I.” Sighing, she pulled him against her. “I love you, honey! But your rope's not a plaything. Save it for calves and horses, and don't practice with anything alive unless Santiago or someone's around.”

He frowned. “I wish I could practice on something that moves.”

“Well, you can try to catch me sometimes,” Talitha suggested. “Just let the loop fall, though. Don't jerk it tight!”

Shea, coming upon this game, pronounced it too dangerous, but he did rig up a moving target, a post secured in a broad slab of wood, that could be jerked about by a rope. James would work at lassoing this as long as he could get someone to move the target, and he was soon amazingly accurate.

The twins liked to pull the target, but they usually got tangled up in rope or ran too fast or barely scooted it at all, so most of James's practice time they watched and laughed and, in their not quite two-year-old patois, they promised each other that next year Santiago would give them ropes, too.

Patrick and Miguel couldn't have looked more different and still have come from the same parents, much less be twins. Patrick's red curls had darkened slightly. His blue eyes were like a summer sky, not the stormy shade of James's. Miguel was taller and thinner with dark lashes, his skin was golden, and his black hair was straight and silky. They trotted worshipfully after James and he was usually indulgent of them, though he seemed fonder of Chacho and his horse, Tordillo, than he was of anyone except Talitha and Santiago.

Shea and Socorro were kind to him, but he called them by their names and somehow never turned to them as parents, perhaps because he was used to Talitha, perhaps because the twins were born before he'd been long at the O'Sheas' and had necessarily absorbed most of Socorro's time and Shea's attention.

However it was, Talitha was worried. She longed for James to love Shea as a father, to appreciate what he'd done for him. Now that James was outside most of the time, Santiago's shadow, she seldom had a chance to carry out her promise to her mother and tell James about the Scotts and their religion.

On the rare occasions when she told him about Nauvoo and the temple, Joseph Smith's martyrdom and Winter Quarters, about the Battalion's march westward and their mother's captivity among the Indians, he listened, so long as she kept it simple, with the interest he paid to any story, but he didn't seem to connect any of it with himself. In a desperate attempt to reach him, to make him know what he owed Shea, Talitha one day told him what she never had before: that the crescent brand on Shea's face had been the price of James's release.

As James stared with widened, troubled eyes, Talitha wondered if she'd made a mistake. But James needed to know it sometime. “You remember the great big Apache who brought the cradleboard for the twins?” she probed. “That was Mangus. He held the iron to Shea's cheek.”

“Why?”

Talitha had never explained his parentage. Maybe now was the time, so it wouldn't be a sudden shock when he was older. But, feeling as she did about Juh, it was hard to explain the truth. She loved James better than anyone in the world, yet he was, in blood, the son of the Apache who'd helped kill her uncle and grandfather, who'd held their mother in bondage.

Struggling to master the grief and rage that still flooded her at that memory, Talitha captured her brother's warm brown hand and held it between hers.

“Shea was branded to prove he was brave enough to have you in his keeping. Because you—we—sort of belonged to an Apache called Juh.” The dark blue eyes stared into hers, puzzled, questioning, and Talitha saw there was no way to tell the story of the brand without telling James of his origins. Catching her breath in a gulp, she said flatly, “Juh's your father.”

James's smooth brow wrinkled. “Like Shea is Patrick's and Miguel's?”

It's not the same, it should never have happened!
“He's your blood father,” Talitha said carefully. From the expression on James's pondering face, she wished desperately she'd never begun the revelation. Santiago could have done it better; perhaps even Shea or Socorro.

“Shea won't give Patrick or Miguel away?” James asked. “Not even if someone was branded for them?”

“No. But Socorro and Shea belong together.” Talitha drew James to her and hugged him. “Our mother didn't belong with Juh, you see. She belonged with my father.”

“Then why wasn't he with her?”

“He had to go to California with the soldiers.”

“He's not my father?”

“No, dear.”

“Then I wouldn't belong with him even if our mother did. I remember the big Apache. I wish he were my father. Is Juh like him?”

“No. Anyway, James, I took care of you after mother died and I'm your sister, that's certain! You belong with me!”

James didn't argue with that, but he seemed to be thinking cautiously about all of this. “Will my real father come see me some day?”

“Yes.” Talitha swallowed, glad James couldn't know that she prayed every day for this not to happen. “When you're older, Juh may want you to go with him. We had to promise that in order to keep you while you were little.”

“So he didn't give me away for good.” James sounded much relieved.

“You won't want to be an Apache, James! And when he knows that, Juh will let you come back to us.” Talitha cried out her hope, holding her brother close. His body was warm and sturdily sweet in her arms, but he didn't speak again.

Each fall the mine manager, Don Elizario Carvajal, bastard of Narciso Cantú, big and bearlike except for his thin waxed mustache and bleak eyes, came to the ranch, heavily escorted, to pay the agreed half of mine profits after the
Mimbreño
tenth was deducted.

He also brought news garnered from messages from his father and the men of the
conductas
. There had been a plague of cholera in Sonora last year. Over a thousand people died in a month in the province of Altar alone. But that was over now. A new plague was approaching. The Yanquis.

Since the end of the war, Mexico had been trying to strengthen its northern frontier and keep it from slipping into American hands. In 1848 Sonora had decreed that military soldier-colonists would take the place of garrisons at Bavispe, Fronteras, Santa Cruz, Tucson and Altar, and though most of these were more on paper than actual, a Captain Gomez from Fronteras had settled in Tubac with a small group of soldiers and civilians and was hoping to build it to a point where it could withstand both Apaches and U.S. soldiers.