A Lady Bought with Rifles (34 page)

“You fools,” he shouted, knocking one backward and trying to dodge the other. “Help me kill him and we'll run for it!”

The heavy butt of the whip struck him on the side of the head. He staggered and the second man tripped him over one foot while felling him with a heavy blow at the back of the neck. The lash descended.

He surfaced in humid fog, brain exploding when he moved his head. The pain was so great that he fainted. When he roused again, something cool yet stinging was being applied to his lacerations.

“Be still a little moment,” came a woman's voice. It was Luisa, one of the cooks. The woman sighed. “He will kill you, you know. It happened once before with a young very beautiful man who would not be Don Enrique's toy. He was whipped every day and in a month he was dead.”

“Maybe I can kill him first.”

“You will not get the chance. He is a coward, that one. Bodyguards in his house, wherever he goes.”

I was stupid, Trace thought. Should have pretended to accept his proposition, then strangled him when he wasn't expecting it.

Luisa bound the aloe vera poultice on with an old shirt, helped Trace slip into his. She brought him a drink in a gourd, washed his face with a sour-smelling clout. But her kindness was better for Trace than the most medically perfect care. In spite of this brutal life, she had stayed human; in their common misery, she comforted him. Now she handed him a lump of dough.

“You had better go back to the field if you can. Otherwise the
capataz
will fetch you.”

Trace pushed to his feet, leaned for a moment against the wall of the big stone sleeping room. His body had a strange light boneless feeling, as if he were nothing but waves of pain.

Luisa's anxious pitying face took shape in the mists. “God help you,
norteño
.”

“You have.” He tried to smile but knew it was an uncontrolled twitching of muscles. “Thank you, Luisa.”

One step. Two. He paused, sucking the pain through him, breathing with it after a moment. He would get to the field in order to live. He would live in order to kill the
administrador
. Trace no longer dreamed the fantastic—getting away, loving Miranda. He had become a slave in hell; there was no way back to the land of the living.

Somehow, with the help of Tomás and Rosalio, Trace cut his two thousand spiky leaves. The
capataz
regarded him with jeering awe. “If I had your chance! But he likes handsome ones. You're not so handsome now, gringo.” The foreman didn't use his cane on Trace that day, which suggested that even an insensitive brute shrank from adding more punishment to what was coming to Trace.

If they whip me in the morning, I will die, Trace thought.

Don Enrique waited three days, till the wounds were scabbed and cracked with every motion till night gave them a chance to crust over again. On the fourth morning at roll call, Trace was called out.

No way to get at Don Enrique, who was flanked by his men. No weapon in reach. The
mayordomos
were coming forward to rip his shirt off. Trace motioned them back.

How did you show pride while being whipped? No way. But by keeping as much control of the torture as he could, he felt more a man, less a cowering object, though he felt sick at what was coming. He took off his shirt, held out his wrists to the big Chinese, who stooped to lift him.

Before he shut his eyes, he saw Don Enrique's elegant finger signal.

Lío said he was delirious for two days. On the third morning, the fever broke and he walked to roll call with an unsteady gait. As soon as Don Enrique's searching gaze fell on him, Trace knew he had made a lethal mistake, for the manager barked out his name.

For a moment Trace's legs refused to move. A murmur ran through the laborers. Then, as Trace took the first step, Lío strode past him to confront the manager.

“Let me take his whipping, señor.”

“Lío, no!” cried Trace, moving forward.

Don Enrique glanced from one to the other, a bitter smile curving his lips. “Such love!” he derided. “Well, you were whipped together once. We can oblige you again.”

Springing forward, Lío grasped the manager's head, snapped it sideways, and kicked Don Enrique as he collapsed. It was done in seconds. Lío was overwhelmed an eye's blink later by overseers and guards, but the
administrador
stared unseeing, and his neck was jackknifed on his shoulder.

Lío was lucky. A machete had almost severed his head as he went down. Dead quick and clean.

Trace looked around in wild hope that the slaves might be swelling across the clearing, to slaughter their oppressors, but they seemed paralyzed with shock. And the chief
mayordomo
took over so quickly that he must have rehearsed a similar emergency in his mind.

“Get to work!” he ordered. “Hurry, dogs!”

Capataces
and lesser
mayordomos
brandished their canes, herding the laborers to the fields. Trace stood dazed, looking at his friend—dead in his place. Don Enrique's bodyguards were carrying him away.

“Bury that Yaqui,” ordered the
mayordomo
. His hard eyes ran over Trace. ‘Then work in the drying yard till you're well.” He slanted a triumphant smile after the manager's corpse. “Slaves are for working. I don't beat them to death for my entertainment.”

He spat on the bloody ground and walked away.

It tormented Trace that Lío had died for him. When he closed his eyes he saw his friend's almost-severed head. Lío had always believed he'd go home again, home to win back the Eight Sacred Pueblos. Now his body would rot in the steamy rank soil of Yucatán.

“He managed to kill that abomination of an
administrador
,” pointed out Rosalio. “He died like a warrior. It was a good death,
norteño
. Do not brood so much.”

“He should not have died for me.”

“Who can say that? It is the will of God.”

“God?” mocked Trace.

“Indeed.” Rosalio scratched his ear; looking more than ever like a sad-faced monkey. “God willed that Lío should die here rather than in our sierra. Perhaps He wills that you take Lío's place.”

“How can I? I'm not Yaqui.”

“Nor was it Lío who was called out for a whipping a few mornings ago.”

Trace fell silent. And though part of him rebelled against trying to fight another man's battle, the idea had the power of offering a way to pay his debt to Lío. It was plain, too, that Lío's men, especially Tomás and Rosalio, who had driven themselves to help Trace fulfill his stints, expected him to assume Lío's responsibilities. For a while, at least, these would fit with Trace's personal aims, so he stopped wrestling with the commitment. There was no doubt that Lío had saved his life; and after this advanced education in governmental graft and cruelty, Trace burned to fight Díaz's tyranny. No one had suffered more from it than the Yaquis. He might as well throw in with them.

But Miranda? He couldn't expect her to live in hiding, become outlawed to stay with him. He could see her sometimes. Yaqui warfare was the sporadic, guerrilla-style. But what was that to offer a woman?

Then he would come back to the monotonous work of the drying yard, spreading the hairlike fiber, gathering it when it was dry, stuffing it into bales. He had lofty aims for a slave who still carried weals from his last beating. But he was sure he would escape. He had Lío's life to fulfill now as well as his own.

Studying the chances of escape always led to one unsolvable problem: help after getting off the plantation, food, safe shelter, a change of clothes so that one's appearance didn't immediately suggest a runaway. So little, really. And yet so much.

Trace, as his strength returned, became obsessed with breaking free. An overseer came by the drying yard at frequent intervals, but since the men working there were sick, it wasn't necessary to watch them so closely. The workers changed from day to day, some dying, some returning to the fields; so it would be easier to disappear unnoticed during this time.

But then what? He knew nothing of the region, had no money, friends, or place of refuge, and even if he half-starved he couldn't save more than a few days' supply of sour cornmeal dough before it grew inedible and the other food, beans and spoiled fish, wouldn't keep at all. As Trace spread the wet green fiber, collected it when it was dried yellow, he pretended to be weaker than he was, trying desperately to think of some way to avoid being picked up or dying of exposure if he did manage to slip away.

When the laborers Had to relieve themselves, they stepped outside the drying yard near the corrals. Trace was fastening his loose once-white trousers when a voice called softly.

“Señor! Don Trace!”

A trap? Didn't seem likely with Don Enrique gone, along with his thirst for vengeance. He replied in a low tone, “Who is it?”

“Sewa.” Before he could take that in, the girl went on breathlessly. She was hidden in a broken-down mule car that stood with a jumble of wagons, carts, and old machinery. “Domingo and I have food and clothes and money. When you can, come this way and go straight through the brush till you reach an overgrown ditch. I'll wait for you there.”

Sewa! Domingo! How in the hell had those two youngsters got down there? A warm rush of hope surged through Trace; Miranda must have sent them. That had to be it! Which meant she was still alive.…

No time to sort it out now; he'd better get back before the wandering foreman noticed he was gone overlong. “I'll meet you as soon as I can,” he whispered. “God bless you, Sewa.”

Compelling himself not to glance toward her hiding place, he went back to the yard and resumed the unending task. If he got away from here, he never wanted to see another piece of rope. But his blood hummed and pulsed as if coming alive again.

In spite of their agreement that anyone who got a break should take it, Trace felt sorry for leaving his friends, especially Tomás and Rosalio. But there might be a way of breaking them out later. What he'd like to do would be to free all the slaves, wreck the whole damned system, but that was work for a revolution.

After he'd talked with Sewa and Domingo and knew the situation at Mina Rara, he could decide what to do. He spread damp fiber while the foreman watched, but as soon as he was out of sight, Trace left the drying yard, hand to his belly as if wracked with dysentery. Squatting, he glanced about.

Not a soul around. Rising, he crept as far as he could in the cover of the wagons and equipment, then, doubling, he ran for the underbrush, dived into its cover, and lay on the ground, panting.

No commotion. No sound of pursuit or discovery. Keeping as straight a course as he could, he moved through heavy growth, breaking entangling vines, trying not to trip over exposed roots. He sighted the old ditch, probably some ancient canal, at the same instant that a small lithe figure rose with a taller gangly one behind it.

Trace hugged Sewa, almost sweeping her off her feet, gave Domingo the male
abrazo
. The young Yaqui didn't return the embrace and back-patting but produced a bundle.

“You had best change into these,” the boy said austerely. “And then let us get as far away as we can as fast as we can. We have food and sleeping mats hidden in an abandoned hut a few hours from here, and we can be in Mérida tomorrow night and catch a train.”

“A train?” frowned Trace, shedding his stained rags and longing for a bath. It seemed close to sacrilege to fit his dirty body into the well-cut dark-gray suit and white shirt. “Isn't that risky?”

“There is a razor in the hut,” said Domingo. “In these clothes you look like a well-to-do businessman or engineer.” His young straight mouth curled a trifle bitterly. “No one will molest a well-dressed American, even
if
he is traveling with two Indians.”

“Try the boots,” Sewa urged, crescent brows puckering her smooth brown skin. “We brought an extra pair of socks in case they are too big.”

“And if they're too little, we cut off a toe, eh?” teased Trace and then could have bitten his tongue, remembering that Sewa, poor pretty little girl, had lost her whole foot. But she seemed not to notice, though Domingo shot him a scowl.

Damned if that young tiger doesn't love the child! Trace thought, and smothered his amusement. Domingo was old enough to fight and die, old enough, at Mariposa, to be held accountable for a man's stint in the field. Sewa couldn't be more than thirteen, but she'd grow.

“Miranda?” Trace asked, caressing the name. “She sent you?”

Domingo blinked. Sewa's eyes grew even bigger and her chin trembled. “No. We have not seen her since she sent us to the mine before the battle.”

Trace stopped working his foot into a boot. “You haven't seen her? Is she alive?”

“Yes, señor, but Chepa—she's my friend who works in Señor Sanders' house—Chepa says that Miranda was hurt during the battle and Dr. Trent said it might be weeks before she woke up.”

“Did you see her?” Trace demanded, fear clutching at his heart. Sounded like concussion. And if she lived, her mind might be damaged. From the hurt look on Sewa's face, he knew he'd sounded accusing.

“Chepa sneaked me in to look at her,” the girl said with wistful sadness. “But I could not stay there. Major Ruiz and his soldiers are at Mina Rara. If they knew a lot of Yaquis had escaped, even though they are mostly women and children, the soldiers would have hounded them down.”

“Dr. Trent is a kind man,” Trace reassured himself. “He'll do all he can for her.”

“Of course.” Sewa nodded more brightly. “How are the boots?”

“Just fine,” Trace said, grinning, resolving to pull himself together. These kids had risked a lot for him and they still had a long way to go. He'd believe that Miranda was all right until he knew otherwise.

“Then let's go, señor!” Domingo took the lead. Trace put Sewa in the middle and they moved through, the thick scrubby growth on a trail that must have been worn by animals. A trail away from Mariposa. And to Miranda.