Deep Purple (12 page)

"But these women, the young ones, will serve the men's other needs. And these aren't the gentlemen
—the Jeremys and Lionels and Sherrods—you're accustomed to, Cate." He paced the room with his hands clasped behind his back, sounding for all the world like a tirading teacher. "These men are trained killers, adventurers, mercenaries. Some of them wouldn’t think twice about violating a woman.”

She blanched but said defiantly, "I can
take care of myself. Just let me go as far as Hermosillo with you. I’m sure I can find work among some of the Confederate families who have taken refuge there."

He whirled and faced her, hands braced on hips. "And if the French overrun the state?”

“As an American citizen I can claim neutrality," she pointed out coolly.

“
Dammit, Cate, you can’t go. It’s too—”

“
Law, I’ve got to go!” she pleaded. “I’ve no money left to support myself and nowhere else to go.”

“
Why can’t you just be satisfied with getting married like the well-brought-up young woman you are? Wasn’t that what you told me you wanted? I’d imagined by now that Jeremy—”

"Jeremy
’s dead,” she said in a monotone. "I killed him.”

Law
’s head jerked up. "You what?”

“
The night of the New Year’s Eve
baile
—he tried to . . . to rape me. I accidentally stabbed him with his saber.” Just saying it scrambled chills up her spine and popped goose bumps on her her flesh.

“
Santa Maria de Jesus
!” Law breathed. “I left that night for Santa Fe and just got back. That must’ve been what Loco was trying to finish telling me when I stormed over here.”

Sensing her advantage, she pressed, "Then you'll let me go?”

He rubbed his beard-stubbled jaw. “Somehow, Cate, you manage to get around me.”

She threw her arms about his waist. “
Oh, Law, thank you!”

Immediately he disengaged her arms. “
I’m warning you now, don’t you come near me, Cate. After you, I’ve had enough of virgins to last me a lifetime. Give me a warm, willing woman and a jug of wine and you can forget the promises of heaven.” He turned to go, but at the doorway he looked over his shoulder. “That nightcap—it’s the God-awfullest thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on. Be sure to take it with you—it'll keep my men away.” He crimped a half smile. “And save their lives.”

CHA
PTER 16

C
atherine surveyed the plaza by the shafting bars of dawn’s light. Men of all ages and nationalities were everywhere, on horseback and on foot, dressed in the remnants of Union blues and Confederate grays, in serapes and tattered blue-tail coats. Some of the Mexicans wore no shoes. Their feet were as tough and gnarled as the bark of an old tree. The men were armed to the teeth with sabers, unwieldy blunderbusses, navy revolvers, derringers, horse pistols, and knives. A motlier bunch she had never seen.

She told herself that the journey would be no worse than that last month she had spent traveling with Governor Goodwin and the New Mexico soldiers. But this time there were no carriages or comfortable ambulances, just the commissary train, consisting
of nine twelve-mule wagons loaded with forage, arms, kegs of ammunition, and camp equipment. Behind the wagons, the pack mules stood drowsily beneath their weighted loads.

That early in the morning, before the desert sun fully rose, the air was sharp. She
buttoned her riding jacket and picked up her bundled belongings. Plagued by doubts, she nevertheless crossed the plaza to where Tranquilino stood before the line of pack mules, pad and pen in hand. She would not turn back now.

I had hoped you would change
your mind,” Tranquilino said, his breath steaming with frost.

She looked past him to see Law riding toward them. Like the other men, he was heavily armed
—the brace of pistols at his hips and the knife sheathed at his waist. Beneath the floppy sombrero his eyes were hidden, but his mouth was a rigid line in the jutting jaw. “Apparently you're not the only one,” she told Tranquilino dryly.

Law reined in the h
orse. “These other women,” he began without preamble, pointing to the dozen or so women wrapped in woolen
rebozos
who were scattered about the plaza, “they're seasoned
soldaderas
-—and they’re fighting for something they believe in. Neither of which applies to you, Cate.”

So, he had had time to repent of his leniency. She planted her fists on her hips. “
You can't tell me three-quarters of the men here volunteered because they believe in the Juarez cause.”

"No, they believe in rape and murder and plunder.”

Tranquilino turned away in embarrassment, presumably to check a supply wagon.

“
I’ll leave you behind at the nearest pueblo if you can’t keep up with the expedition,” Law continued.

“
You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asked the man slouched in the saddle.

“
There’s nothing I’d like better.”

Her lips curled upward. “
Why, Law Davalos, I think you’re afraid of me!”

“
You bet your grammar book I am. There’s nothing worse than a woman hell-bent on marriage.”

“
Ohhh!”

He straightened in the saddle. A few men turned ar
ound to stare. “I’m sorry, Cate,” he said in a lower voice. “But it just goes to prove I’m right. You don’t belong on this expedition. We’re not gentlemen, none of us. Go back to the States, Cate.”

She shook her quirt up at him. “
I’m going into Mexico with you, you hear me? After we reach Hermosillo, you’re rid of me—and, thank God, I’m rid of you, you—you bastard!”

Well, there was another first, she thought ruefully as Law wheeled his sorrel away to disappear among the milling soldiers of fortune. It was t
he first time she had ever used such unladylike language. Her mother would have washed her mouth out with lye soap, and Margaret—her dear sister would have swooned had she heard her.

The situation became progressively worse when Catherine realized she woul
d not have her own mount but would have to ride in one of the wagons like the rest of the women. Buckle up, old girl, she told herself as she crossed to the wagon to which Tranquilino had assigned her. You’re as tough as the next woman.

She passed an old w
oman smoking a cheroot as she strapped a canvas tarpaulin over a pack mule’s saddlebag. Well, maybe not quite as tough.

Catherine
’s day brightened considerably when she reached her wagon and found that Loco was its muleskinner. “Lorenzo cannot lose you?” he asked with a sly wink.

She laughed. “
No. And you, either?”

The old Indian's shaggy white hair swayed about his mummified face as he shook his head. “
No, Lorenzo cannot lose me. I fed him and played with him when he was a baby. And I shall no doubt bury him with this madness of his, this foolish
patriota
."

By midmorning the Arizona Colonizing Expedition had left behind the crumbling presidio walls of the Old Pueblo and the desert floor and was making its way south, gradually ascending the Santa Cruz Valley
. They passed the San Xavier Mission—a large white lime-plastered edifice with bell towers and domes that dominated the emptiness around it. It was a splendid monument to civilization—the last that Catherine would see for some time; for upon leaving the mission behind, the expedition passed ranch after ranch that had been devastated by the Indians.

No white man's life was secure beyond Tucson
’s twelve-foot- high walls. Between San Xavier and Tubac the road was marked with the graves of unfortunate settlers. Wheat fields with torn-down fences; houses burned, the walls lying in rubble. A deathlike silence fell on the expedition as it moved through the Santa Cruz Valley, a land of waist-high winter grass and scrub-covered hills that were strangely calm and beautiful in their desolation.

To the left rose the nine-thousand-foot peaks of the Santa Rita range
—cold, piney, spectacular in the snappy, sunny wake of winter. To the right, the shoulders of the Tumacacori and Atascoca hills. And the mountains way ahead to the left. Loco told her, were the high and rugged Mexican Sierra Madres that picked up at the ragged end of the Rockies.

Law called camp that evening at the deserted Rhodes ranch, which was knee-deep with weeds and grass. All around, adobe walls crumbled t
o ruin with fallen-in roofs. Doors and windows had been carried away by Mexican vandals when the garrison at Fort Buchanan had departed at the beginning of the Civil War.

She fell easily into working with Filomena, a pretty woman about the same age as she.
  Filomena’s husband had been working Sylvester Mowery's Patagonia mine four years earlier when he and three others were ambushed by Cochise’s Apaches. The woman, with her sloping eyes and bright carmine lips, obviously could have had many men from which to choose a second husband. Yet she had elected to keep her widow's status.

Together the two women assisted Loco in the cooking. Elsewhere, under Law's direction, other campfires sprang up in the twilight. As Catherine stirred the coarse cornmeal and flour
in a chipped earthenware dish, she studied Law, easily detecting him from the others by his extraordinary height.

As much as she hated admitting it, she had underestimated the man, labeled him an aimless rogue; yet now he moved among the men with purposefu
l strides and occasional words of camaraderie. The men seemed to accept his leadership easily, though at twenty-two he was much younger than most of them.

Imagine, an agent for Juarez! She wondered how much Juarez was paying him. She remembered Jeremy
’s telling her that General Custer had been offered by Carvajao, Juarez’s representative in the United States, the astronomical sum of sixteen thousand dollars in gold to command the Mexican forces.

More than thirty men served themselves from Loco
’s campfire, among them Tranquilino and Law, who was off again as soon as his tin plate had emptied. Later one of the men broke out a Jew’s harp, and song and laughter soon dispelled the atmosphere of gloom about the deserted ranch. As the fires flickered lower, the men began to turn in. Catherine and Filomena laid out their bedrolls inside a crumbling adobe hut. The fractured walls smelled strongly of urine, but at least the partially thatched roof sheltered them from the brunt of the cold.

Camp broke with
the dawn, and the brigade prepared for the march again with all the noise accompanying such an expedition. The mules brayed as they were repacked for the trek, and the horses whinnied and neighed as tin cups and canteens and haversacks of hardtack clattered and bobbed on their flanks. Law rode down the line of men, stopping to speak or point out something before he came to a halt next to the wagon she rode in with Loco.

She still half expected him to tell her to fall out of line, but his glance merely flick
ered over her attire—the durable riding habit and sturdy Wellington boots that she had heretofore deemed quite serviceable. “At least you thought to wear a hat,” he said, casting a derisive glance at the tall black hat and veil trailing behind like some knightly banner.

With narrowed eyes she watched him ride away and vowed she would make him eat his words about old maids. Before he dumped her in Hermosillo she would . . . what? Oh, the injustice in being a woman!

The journey proceeded smoothly, passing near the abandoned ruins of the royal presidio of Tubac, its mud-brick walls exposed by the peeling pale-cream stucco plaster. Below Tubac the Santa Cruz River bent eastward, meandering through hill country that jutted between two stretches of forbidding desert. From there the river began its gradual climb to the Pajarito Mountains, originally called Pimeria Alta by the Spanish explorers.

Law called a halt in the Nogales Pass, named for the walnut trees nurtured there. It was a small, chiseled canyon marked by
an unshapely pile of stones which was a monument erected by Colonel Emory in 1855 after the Gadsden Purchase set the new boundary.

As the women began to prepare the dinner, a festive atmosphere settled on the camp. Singing could be heard at every fire, an
d from somewhere floated the strum of a guitar. Filomena explained that the men were jubilant because they had passed from under the authority of the United States. “These men—not all of them fight for patriotism.” Her hand swept the camp of wagons and pup tents with contempt. "Some fight for the money and mostly the land that Juarez has promised them when the French are driven from Mexico.”

Catherine noticed she said “
when." Filomena and the others seemed so positive, already celebrating as if a battle had been fought and won.

When it came time to serve the men from the kettle of stew, an American with a cadaverous face presented himself before Catherine, plate in hand. He said nothing as she ladled out the brown juice and bits of meat, but she could feel h
is colorless eyes sliding over her. The man reminded her of a slug, and she shivered, relieved when he had moved on and someone else took his place.

Each of the bearded and dusty men who appeared before her and Filomena looked over the two women with specu
lative gazes, yet the one American had managed to disconcert Catherine. There was something unhealthy about him that hung around him like a funeral wreath. She voiced her opinion of him to Filomena as the two women settled against a wagon wheel to eat.

“
Do not let the looks these men give worry you. The soldiers, like this Slovel man you speak of, they are only waiting to see which man the unattached women will choose. It is the way of nature, no?”

“
And you, have you picked a man?” Catherine asked, somewhat shocked that such a delicate matter was carried out so simply and unashamedly.

Filomena smiled smugly. “
Si
, but he does not know it yet.”

After the two women cleaned and put away the utensils, Filomena disappeared toward one of the larger campfires. Cathe
rine's eyes searched among the men and women for a tall figure, certain that the pretty woman had gone to seek out Law.

“
You’re the little lady teacher, aren’t you?” a gravelly voice asked at Catherine's side. Startled, her glance ricocheted from the far campfire upward to the American, Slovel, who stood next to her, seeming to have slid out of the darkness.

She shrugged and turned from him to set the cast-iron skillet in the mess chest. “
I suppose I am the woman to whom you are referring,” she said with a studied casualness. She hoped by ignoring the man she would put him off, but he closed in on her.

“
They say you don’t have a man in Tucson to protect you— that you came along with us to find one.”

She turned on the man. “
What they say is wrong,” she said coldly. “Did they also tell you I killed the last man who tried to ‘protect’ me?”

“
Maybe he wasn’t the right man,” Slovel said. He caught her wrist and pulled her to him. “You gotta have a man, missy.”

“
Don’t touch me,” she gritted, trying not to show her uneasiness. Her free hand came up to shove him away.

Slovel caught them both in one big paw and held her against him, a perplexed frown creasing his sloping forehead. “
I’ll give you a chance to make up your mind, but I’m letting you know I mean to be the man. I’m a hell of a lot more than those other buggers. You’ll be safe with me, missy.”