Bandit's Embrace (The Durango Family) (23 page)

The face he turned toward her was troubled. “I—I don’t honestly know.”

“Does she know about you? Know you aren’t the heir?”

He didn’t answer.

“You really think you’ll be able to pull this off?” she asked softly. “Step into that boy’s shoes? Suppose he comes riding in someday and wants everything that belongs to him, including her?”

She couldn’t read his expression. “That’s the least of my worries.”

“You dismiss that idea pretty lightly.”

Bandit shrugged. “If he hasn’t come back in sixteen years, he won’t ever. Nobody says it, but everyone thinks the little boy was killed right after he was kidnapped.”

She wondered about that for a long moment, imagined a little boy lying dead somewhere in an unmarked grave. So many mysteries. So many secrets to hide. She had some of her own. Two deaths because of her loose tongue.

He flipped the coin over and over. “What kinda odds you think a gambler would give on a saddle tramp like me finding a girl like Aimée, walkin’ into a deal like this?”

“Not an icicle’s chance in hell, Handsome.” Mona smiled at him, loving him even though she could never have him. How many women married one man, then spent the rest of their lives dreaming of the true love who got away? It would be worse for her. She would have to see him all the time, know that every night he made love to another woman.

“I even got a daddy out of it.” His voice broke a little. “And old Falcon is just the kind of dad I would have chosen, just as this family is like the one I always dreamed of belonging to. So,
sí,
if that little violet-eyed beauty will have me, I’m gonna marry her, take the Falcon family as my own, and raise a dozen kids for that old man to bounce on his knee.”

Mona bit her lip to keep the tears from coming, thinking of the life that lay ahead of her, in bed with that fat old fool, sneaking around to meet Romeros, always worried someone would find out about the murder. “I’m happy for you, Handsome, really happy. How ’bout one last kiss for old times’ sake?”

“Well. . . .” He came into her outstretched arms, kissed her gently on the cheek. “Try to make old Durango happy, Mona, he seems like a good guy.”

“Kiss me like you used to kiss me in Gun Powder, all those times in Miss Fancy’s place before I went back to New Orleans. One last time, Handsome, a memory to do me the rest of my life.”

“Mona, Mona, I’m sorry things have gone so badly for you,” he murmured, “but thank you for what you did one long-ago night for a lonely, grieving boy.”

And he kissed her the way she remembered, his mouth coming down to dominate hers as she clung to him breathlessly, loving him, wanting him. That first time, she’d taught him about love. But years later at Miss Fancy’s in San Antone when he was a grown, virile man, he’d opened doors of pleasure to her she’d never known existed. The student had become an expert teacher.

For a long moment, she clung to him, loving him, wanting him as she had never craved another man.

Then he unclasped her arms from around his neck, looked down at her. “You okay?”

“Now why wouldn’t I be?” She forced herself to be bright and snappy, the way all men liked their whores. “I’m gonna be just fine, Bandit. Don’t worry about me. I’ve learned to roll with the punches.”

“I just thought you looked a little shaken—”

“Who, me?” she scoffed. “Naw, I’m just great. Now run along home before someone sees us together.”

“No hard feelings?”

How could there be when she loved him so very much? “Of course not, Handsome. We’ll pretend today never happened. I’m used to compromising, being a realist.”

He crossed to the door, turned with his hand on the knob, looked back at her. She smiled and shrugged in her best, brassy way. “Go on, Bandit. See you later.”

He went out and she stood listening to the echo of his boots in the hall and then the sound of the big pinto cantering away.

With a tired sigh, she walked over to the sideboard, green silk skirts swishing in the silence. Fine crystal, elegant clothes, money, social position, she had it all now, or soon would have.

Her hand trembled as she poured a sherry, gulped it down, savored the taste. Better be careful, you’ll end up just like Lidah, she cautioned herself. No, Mona wasn’t going to be a helpless victim, she was going to do a little compromising and be a victor.

And what had she won? She’d be in love with one man, married to another, and the unwilling mistress of a third. But she was now a lady—a
real
lady—and that was what she had always dreamed of.

Then why did this dream seem like such a nightmare? She’d trade all the money, the social position, to run away with Bandit if he’d ask her. But now she knew he never would. Mona slumped down on the burgundy horsehair sofa and wept for a love that could never be.

Old Cougar sat his favorite sorrel war pony, looking down at the sleeping camp of the whites. The dawn threw a pink light on the eastern hills. He raised his arm, signaling the warriors to make ready.

Cedar choppers. His lip curled with disdain. Even the
tejanos
sneered at these poor, Gypsylike people. The tents looked ragged, the sleepy mules ribs showed plainly through their matted coats.

The Kickapoo chief to his right scratched his war-painted face and muttered. “We waste our time. These makers of charcoal have nothing worth taking.”

Cougar grunted in agreement. “Maybe so. But it is enough for the Kickapoo to wreck vengeance against the tejanos in exchange for Dove Creek, is it not?”

The Kickapoo chief Chequamkako nodded. “We were not on war terms with the Texans until they attacked us as we passed through, going down to Mexico.”

Cougar nodded. The name of the chief’s tribe meant: “He who moves about, standing now here, now there.”

He knew the Kickapoo had drifted from Kansas down into Mexico for many years without trouble. But during that time the gray-coated soldiers fought the blue-coated ones, the Texans had attacked a Kickapoo camp on Dove Creek and there had been much death on each side. The Kickapoo had been fighting Texans ever since.

Cougar said, “The white camp looks poor, but perhaps there will be a gun or two, maybe a pretty woman for the brothels of Remolino. Anyway we owe the tejanos vengeance, and our young men grow restless if we do not let them raid.”

“I don’t see your grandson anywhere.” Chequamkako, all painted for war, shifted his weight on the bay.

Cougar’s heart twisted in his scarred chest. He knew he was being chided, yet the boy was so dear to him. “The boy is all I have left of my whole family,” he said. “Later he will take my place as chief, lead our people again in our old lands to the north.”

The Lipan on the black horse at Cougar’s other side snorted. “Until you allow him to lead war parties, he’ll lack knowledge to carry on the fight against the bluecoats.”

“The next raid,” Cougar said with a sigh, clutching his lance. Last night, that vision had come to him again in his sleep. What did it mean? He wished he could ask Mangas, but the great chief had been murdered while a prisoner ten years ago. Cougar and a few of his people had fled Arizona after the Camp Grant Massacre of Apaches in 1871.

Now the sun showed its rim, reflecting off his armor. Along the perimeter of the cedar-studded hills, the warriors of the three tribes sat their horses, waiting for his signal. What poor trophies lay below them. The wear parties had almost cleaned out anything worth taking along the border, and now they had ridden into the southern edge of the hill country.

He shook back his free-flowing, white hair, remembering the many times he had fought his enemies, the Comanche; the times he and his old comrade, Cochise, had fought the blue coats. More and more, he lived in the past, remembered past battles, past triumphs.

The Lipan cleared his throat by way of reminder, and Cougar felt shamed. Perhaps he was too old to lead anymore. Perhaps he should sit by the fire and stare into the flames. Someday maybe he would do that. But today he was alive, the blood pumping through his stout heart. Today he was a warrior.

With a shrill cry, he brought his arm down and kneed his sorrel pony, charging down the rocky limestone hill along with the others. Around him, the cedar groves came alive with painted, shrieking braves, ponies decorated with coup stripes and war paint. The coming sun reflected off the spear points, the arrow tips. Cougar took a deep breath of the cedar scent, felt his heart beat strongly under the armor. Today he was alive. Today he was a warrior and the taste of battle lay sweet on his tongue.

White men stumbled half-dressed from the ragged tents, grabbing for old rifles. Women screamed, ran in circles, blind with panic. Somewhere a lean hound barked, and thin mules pulled their picket pins, braying loudly as they galloped from the camp.

Acrid gun smoke drifted as rifles cracked, the sharp sounds echoing and reechoing through the hills. A warrior’s shout of challenge ricocheted off the rocks. Horses neighed and plunged, women shrieked and ran. A brave cried out, clasped his hands to his brown chest, attempting vainly to stem the blood pumping out between his fingers. His eyes were wide with surprise as he slipped from his paint horse, went down beneath its drumming hooves.

Cougar aimed his lance, threw it. It caught a white man in the chest, pinned him against a tree. The man struggled like a speared rabbit, but the blood didn’t show on the red underwear he wore. Cougar dismounted, reached for his bow. Around him, Apaches vaulted from their horses. His people had never fought well from horseback like the Comanche and Cheyenne, nor did they use tomahawks, preferring instead their knives, their sturdy mulberry wood bows.

Under the metal breastplate, he felt sweat running in the coming heat of the day as he put an arrow to his bow, pulled back. Aiee! Today he was a young man again, riding on his first war party, never mind that the locks hanging free around his bent shoulders were white as the snow on the mountains of his own country.

He let the arrow fly, caught a running gringo in the back, saw him fall, reached for another arrow. Apaches cared little for scalping like some of their plains brothers. The kill, the victory was what they lusted for.

A young white woman, only partially dressed, ran toward them, went to her knees, begging in her strange language for mercy.
Mercy
. The trio of white men who had tortured his son and pregnant daughter-in-law to death had shown no mercy. Still, he hesitated, listening to the words. Not the language of the
Texans
or the Mexicans. An old memory stirred deep, a memory he’d locked away, forgotten.

Even as he opened his mouth to save the woman, warn the others away, a thrown lance caught her right through her naked breast. She pawed at the shaft sticking from the pale flesh, looked up at him with disbelief for a long moment. Then she pitched forward on her face, breaking off the lance.

Somewhere in the camp, he heard an old woman screaming, knew she begged for mercy as the braves raped her.
Mercy
. His grandson had said his mother begged for mercy, not for herself but for her young son, for her unborn child. The three gringos had laughed, raped her while the child watched. Then they had left the little family for dead.

The scent of smoke came to his nostrils as the warriors finished their killing, fired everything they did not want. Scarlet flames leaped above the ragged tents. An occasional shot still echoed as a warrior found a wounded white man, finished him off. All around him, Indians yelled triumphantly, dancing around the prone bodies, wrapping themselves in the strange clothes they had found. A brave dashed by in a leather vest, another had a woman’s plaid shawl about his shoulders.

The Kickapoo chief strode over, dragging a frail old white woman. “What shall I do with this one? She will not live to carry back to camp.”

Cougar peered at her. Blood ran from her mouth, and a scarlet froth bubbled up when she breathed. The Kickapoo was right, the scrawny old hag was almost dead already.

“Well, Ndolkah?”

Cougar hardened his heart, thinking of his own family. He had lost everyone but the boy. “Kill her; she’s worthless.”

As he spoke, a light kindled in the woman’s pale blue eyes; she reached out a shaking hand.
“Ndolkah, skii” ni nzhqq,”
she whispered in Apache.

I love you
. How did she know those words? There was something strangely familiar about the old woman. He knelt, took her in his arms. “What is it, white woman? Why do you reach out to me?”

Once. she might have been a beauty, maybe forty years ago or more when the gray hair had been golden as a palomino’s mane, before the pale blue eyes had turned rheumy. Her reaching hand caught his necklace, clenched it in her palm with a smile of triumph. “Ndolkah.”

He stared at her, recognizing her. Had he aged so much himself? Life is, after all, only the total of a man’s experiences, or what he remembers of them—the battles he has fought, the
tiswin
he has drunk, the women he has loved.

In a man’s mind he can lie to himself, be forever younger than he is. But here was his own mortality staring back at him, her teeth gapped, her face wrinkled with the years that had passed.

He took her hand in his, nodded and swallowed hard, indicating that he recognized her, remembered that raid. Had it been fifty years or only forty? He closed his eyes. With the dust and smoke swirling around him, with the smell of gunpowder, he was once again running after the woman—and she was young, running ahead of him to escape capture, her long, blond hair flying out behind her. . . .

It had been a long time since he had put a necklace of cougar claws and teeth around the neck of a beautiful white girl and said,
Skii ni” nzhgg
. I love you.

“. . . Cougar,” the old crone gasped again, bringing him back to the present. He was an old warrior now, as she was old, and he hated her for destroying his memory of the young, proud beauty she had been almost half a century ago.

He grasped the dying woman’s shoulders. “Was there a child?” he demanded in broken English. “I have to know! Was there a child?” Somewhere a grown son might carry his bloodline, a young grandson might be searching for him. It magnified in importance because Sun Shield was all the family he had.

She gasped something in her foreign tongue, reached again for his necklace. Blood flowed from her lips and her hand was a wrinkled, dirty claw. She was trying to tell him something about the necklace, but he couldn’t understand.

“I should have stolen you that day,” he said softly. “I always regretted that I didn’t.”

The old woman smiled. Her eyes told him that she regretted it, too. “A daughter,” she gasped in English. “Cougar. . .”

“The necklace. What happened to the necklace? Did you say there was a child?” He grasped her bony shoulders, shaking her, demanding she tell what he wanted to know. “Answer, old woman!” He shook her limp form. “Tell me!”

The Kickapoo chief strode over, frowned. “Can’t you see she is dead? And such an old crone would be worthless anyway. Take her hair. We are ready to leave.”

Cougar ran his hand through her hair, remembering when the gray strands were golden silk. “The Apache care little for scalps.” He stood, turned away. “Besides, who would want the hair of an ugly old woman? Let us ride out!”

Around him dust and smoke still swirled, the scent of blood and fire hung heavy on the dawn air. He hurt deep inside as if wounded. Whatever she knew had died with her.

The war party mounted up. Cougar didn’t look back as they drove the captured mules out ahead of them, toward the Rio Grande. Behind them, the camp burned, throwing a telltale tower of smoke into a sky that was as blue as the woman’s eyes.

Ringo leaned against the cantina bar at the stage station, gulped the mescal from the smudged glass. “Another one,
comprende?
” he shouted over the music and laughter, motioning with a shaky hand.

Big ’Un frowned, scratched himself under the old blue Union jacket. “Christ! Ringo, you already had five!”

“I swear! Who elected you my mother?” Ringo snapped. He reached for a sack of tobacco, but his hands shook so badly, he had difficulty rolling a cigarette. A gunfighter, he thought as he lit the smoke, to think I used to call myself a gunfighter. With these hands, I can hardly get a drink to my lips without spilling it.

Pettigrew pulled out his gold watch. “Nagnab it, Ringo,” he drawled, stroking his tangled beard, “we gonna stay here all night and drink?”

Ringo didn’t answer. Running his tongue over his cracked lips, he was already tasting the next drink in his imagination. A Mexican girl, beautiful and full breasted, brought his mescal, smiled at him invitingly. He grabbed the glass and gulped the liquor down, waiting for the pleasing warmth to move down his throat to his belly. The girl didn’t interest him. It was his secret that it had been at least a year since he’d been able to perform with a woman. Liquor had done that to him. But drink meant more to him than women.

Big ‘Un spat tobacco juice on the floor, whittled a stick with his bayonet. “Did you ever see a nicer pair?” He nudged Ringo. “Now there’s something worth stayin’ a little longer for.”

Ringo grunted, signaled through the smoky light for another drink.

“Damn Yankee!” Pettigrew put the watch back in his faded Confederate jacket that would no longer button over his paunch. “You think that girl would be interested in a big grizzly bear like you?”

“Better’n sawed-off runt, you Rebel pore white trash!” Big ’Un paused with the bayonet aimed at Pettigrew.

Automatically, Ringo moved between them. “I swear! Will you two never stop? The war’s over! I’ll bet if I did let you two fight, I couldn’t melt you and pour you over each other!”

“That’s what you think! ” Pettigrew bristled like a small feisty dog. He put one grimy hand on the big, rusty butcher knife in his belt.

“Any time, Reb, any time!” Big ’Un glowered at the smaller man.

“Stop it, you two. We need to get some information if we’re gonna find that sonovabitch that stole the payroll.” Ringo signaled the girl again and gestured. The three of them moved to a scarred table in a shadowy corner of the cantina. When the girl brought the drinks, Ringo gestured her to the fourth seat.

“Ah
señorita
, we would like you to join us,” he said in border Spanish, giving her his best smile. Once, a long time ago, women had thought him handsome. Now he was acutely aware that his hair had grayed, that he could not service this girl if he tried.

The
señorita
sat down, poured herself a drink, leaned over so that her big breasts showed above her low-cut blouse. “It is not often we have
americanos
here.”

The Reb and the Yank leaned forward like two eager stallions, but Ringo frowned at them, turned his attention back to the girl. “And when was the last time an
americano
came through here?”