Harvest of Fury (40 page)

“Rest while we bring our teams down and get ready,” Jared advised the weary young officer. “Where is Fierro?”

“About twenty miles up the Verde, in a cave beneath that big cliff that's shaped like an eagle with its wings spread,” said the soldier, sliding off his sweating mount and thanking Michael, who led the horses off for watering and graze. “If we can leave within two hours, we'll be there by night. That's when we have to watch closest, in case he tries to slip away.”

“Well, I guess we can take over that chore for you,” said Jared. Turning to the valley men, he asked for a dozen volunteers. The others would stay to guard the settlement. In a few minutes the selection was made. Once again Jordan was the leader.

Cat heard it all through a burning haze. James trapped, perhaps wounded, maybe even dead by now? And if he lived, Jordan constrained to be in charge of the force that would kill or starve him out.

The men were already hurrying, some to bring tools and teams from the forest, others to see to their rifles and other preparations. Jared came to Cat.

“I'm sorry, Katie. If there's a way to save him alive, I will. If he'll surrender—”

“He won't.”

Jordan gave her a long look of pain and love and pity. Then he strode off toward the mountain for his team.

Cat didn't follow. An hour or two till the group started? If she left right now, she could get there before Jordan's men did. Perhaps she could persuade James to give up. Probably she couldn't; but she could help him if he was hurt, take him food. Be with him at the end, whatever it was.

Sangre, seldom ridden now, pastured across the river, not on this side with the commonly used stock. She couldn't carry a saddle to him, but she could take a bridle, a blanket, and one of the leather surcingles the children sometimes used to hold a blanket on when they didn't have a saddle. She hated to leave without a word to Jordan or the others, but they mustn't guess what she was doing. She felt no disloyalty to them. She wasn't going to help Fierro fight; only to live if that might be, or, failing that, to die. At the house she hastily got jerky, nuts, and dried fruit, then started for the stable.

Not to see Michael—Her heart leaped as she met him coming out of the shed where he'd been rubbing down the horses, giving them some grain.

She gave him a quick hug, which he squirmingly resisted, and a quicker kiss on his brown cheek. “Michael, I just have to go for a ride, and I'm taking Sangre. I don't want anyone stopping me with Indian scares, so, unless you're asked, don't say anything about it till suppertime.”

His brows rushed together. “Won't you be back by then?”

Her heart wrenched. But he was surrounded by love, by good people who cared for him. He didn't need her the way James did.

“I don't know when I'll be back,” she said, pretending to be cross. “Goodness, Michael, don't be so grouchy! Have you got any food down your sick fawn today?”

“Guess I'd better try again,” he said, and, his mind turned to one of his “patients,” he hurried away, bright hair brushed by her fingers. She looked after him for just a second, then moved into the stable.

Sangre came at her whistle, lipped the handful of grain she'd brought him. He was sixteen now, but in excellent condition. Cat didn't have time to ride as often as she'd have liked, but when she did, he gave her all she asked.

The blanket was far less comfortable than a saddle, but at least the surcingle kept it from slipping. They were shielded from the settlement by the thick growth of trees along the river, and Cat, while they were on level land, nudged the bay into a lope. When the valley narrowed again, she had to keep close to the river, where trees and rocks made progress slow.

As she rode, speaking now and then to Sangre, who kept one ear pricked back to her as he always had, she remembered James as a boy of fourteen when he first came back from the Apaches, how she'd missed him when he returned to them, how strange he'd seemed when he came back, and how her love had grown. She remembered his little house and smiled to recall her happiness in buying things for it, pretending it was theirs.… They'd never had a place together, only two nights on serapes spread on straw matting.

Still, they had a son, straight and quick and kind, with healing in his hands.

She thought of her brothers then, and wished she could see their children, and Marc and Talitha's Judith, and Shea, who must be fifteen now, and the children of her old ranch playmates. Faces of those she'd loved passed before her. Anita, her milk-mother; Carmencita; the vaqueros, especially dear, barrel-chested Belen; Talitha, who'd been both sister and mother. And she remembered her tall, flame-haired father, with the brands marking his cheek, one given in hate, one accepted out of love.

Her mother she could not remember, but she felt oddly close to her now.

She let Sangre drink when he was thirsty but didn't stop till, in late afternoon, she was challenged by a scout, who brought her to the commanding captain. The scout said Fierro was still in the cave across the river. She told the captain she'd known Fierro as a boy, that he'd been her foster brother.

“If I can talk to him, perhaps he'll surrender,” she said.

The captain, a brawny, sandy-haired man, stared at her curiously. “And what does your husband think of this, Mrs. Scott?”

“He doesn't know I came. Naturally, I'm very anxious that he and my foster brother don't fight each other.”

“I don't know …” The captain deliberated, rubbing his mustache. “Truth to tell, Mrs. Scott, I don't want Fierro to surrender. We've just buried thirteen good men he and his renegades killed.”

“But you don't have time to wait him out,” Cat reminded. “You want my husband to do that—and I have to keep them from hurting each other.”

A lieutenant cleared his throat. “Why don't you let her try, sir? We have to get to Fort Apache, but it still doesn't look good for the army to leave civilians to smoke out a savage they couldn't kill or capture.”

Abruptly deciding, the captain frowned at Cat. “You're not taking him ammunition?”

“No,” she said truthfully. Before she'd gotten close to where she expected soldiers, she'd fastened the packets of jerky, nuts, and dried fruit around her waist beneath her skirts.

He shrugged. “All right. Guess it can't hurt to try, though why you'd own up to having a foster brother like that beats me! Sure he won't fire on you?”

“I'll call to him.” She stroked Sangre, held his muzzle close to her a moment. “Will someone look after my horse?”

A trooper took the reins. Dryly, the captain said, “You'll excuse me if I don't escort you to the river?”

Cat laughed. “By all means, Captain.”

“Good luck,” he said.

As she approached the bank, she shouted. “James! It's Cat! I'm coming across!”

“Caterina?”

“Yes.”

“Don't! Stay where you are.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“Talk's no use.”

“I'm coming.”

“Stay there or I'll shoot!”

She didn't believe him; and if he would shoot, nothing mattered any longer anyhow. Her love was in danger. Kilting up her skirts, she threaded a way over boulders and drifted logs, wading shallows till at last she climbed up a spill of great rocks on the opposite side. The cave was above and beyond it, the top of the jagged hole visible.

As she made her way up the rocks, she saw several bodies—Apaches, sprawled where they had fallen. Animals had been at them and they were beginning to smell.

The cave had been used as a shelter, for the natural boulders fallen in front of it had been filled in with more rocks so that a breastwork about four feet high shielded almost the whole mouth. One man could hold off attackers for a long time here, since they'd have to scramble, exposed, up the rocks from the river.

As she approached the opening James raised up and drew her behind the rough wall. “
Gídí!
Are you crazy?”

He had a scalp wound and a grazed shoulder, but no hurts that looked serious. Unfastening the food, she handed it to him. “James, isn't there some way you can slip out of here? The soldiers have to leave, but they've got Jordan to bring Scott Valley men to wait you out.”

“Jordan?”

“Yes. He—he has to, James.”

“I know,
gídí
.” He took her in his arms. After a moment he said slowly, “There's no way out. They have sentries posted on the cliff above and men along the river. There's a drip from the rocks so I have water; but the captain's right—they can starve me out.”

“You—you could surrender.” Gripping his arms, she pleaded, “James, after a while you could slip off the reservation, go live somewhere on the Socorro—”

“No,
gídí
. I've been Fierro too long.” He sighed. “But I won't try to kill the man who raised my son, who's taken care of you. Go back to camp. Then I'll make a break for it, before your husband comes.”

“But they'll kill you!”

“Unless they're very bad shots, which soldiers often are. I'm done in any case, little one. It's only a matter of how long and who kills me.”

“I won't leave you.”

He kissed her. She pressed against him as if to be part of his flesh, lost in him. Flame coursed between them, wild, consuming, the defiance of love facing death.

“You have come to me,” he said. His voice was very deep in his throat. “Ussen has granted this last time. It can be no hurt to Jordan that a dead man loved his wife.”

“I was your woman first,” she whispered. “I have always been your woman.”

They lay in the soft dust of the cave, pouring into each their love and life and strength, and lay quietly awhile. Then James got to his feet.

“If Jordan will grant the favor, don't let them take my head into San Carlos. Stay in the cave till it's finished,
gídí
.”

“You may get to the top.”

He flashed a grin. “If I do, then I may live to be an old man down in Mexico.” He kissed her. “A strange custom, but I like it!”

Taking his rifle, he dodged out of the cave and started running. There was a shout from above.

James was firing. Bullets sang.

As James went down, Cat ran after him.
Jordan, forgive me!
she prayed.
Take care of Michael
. A great inpact spun her around, but she made a lunge. With her last strength she threw herself across his body.

PART VI

The Flames of Tomochic

1906–1917

XXI

It was early May of 1906, as Christina Revier Riordan walked along a sandy arroyo in the hills near Cananaea Mexico. She felt a wave of homesickness for Rancho del Socorro. In her heart it was still home, where she belonged. After two months of marriage to Fayte Riordan, she still felt a visitor in his home, a pampered mistress, not a wife. The house still ran exactly as it had before she came, which, she had to admit wryly, was perfectly well.

What was it her grandmother Talitha had murmured to her after the wedding in the
sala
, where four generations, beginning with Chris's great-grandparents, Shea and Socorro, had pledged themselves before the smiling dark little Guadalupana?

“
We marry strangers, dear, but grow into each other. Be patient and bright and loving, a lamp for your home, Christina
.”

Good advice. Chris had tried to follow it, but her throat swelled with longing as she remembered Talitha and her other grandparents, Patrick and Sewa. Marc had died a few years ago. Since then, her great-uncle Miguel had managed the family's mining and railroad interests. Patrick was in charge of the ranch, helped at the Sccorro by Diego, one of Natividad's grandsons, who had married Aunt Vi, Miguel and Juriana's daughter. El Charco, the southern part of the place, was run by Juan Vasquez, Pedro Sanchez's grandson.

Fascinating how it grew, the interwoven web of families and alliances. Aunt Judith, Marc and Talitha's daughter, had married a nephew of Jordan and Jared Scott and lived in a pleasant valley beneath the Mogollon Rim. Aunt Vi's brothers were both geologists, Marc operating out of Prescott, Christopher from Yuma. Chris's mother's brother, Sean, had married one of Tjúni's granddaughters and become a mining engineer in Mexico. It was while Chris had been left with them that—

The bright day went dark. Blackness shot with flames. Taking a deep breath, Chris invoked the sweet face of Teresita till the nightmare faded, till she could see again. Her heart stopped slamming and she drew in the sight of mountains in all directions, purple, blue and pink according to the light, with the Huachucas rising on the north side of the border.

That Austrian physician Sigmund Freud, whose works on dreams and nervous ills she had read, would have said her blindness after Tomochic was hysterical, that Teresita's curing had been hypnotic.

Perhaps. But both had been real.

Chris pushed the memory from her, concentrating on finishing her mental roll call of mingled Reviers, O'Sheas, and Scotts, and then smiled as she thought of Sant. Santiago Scott was some kind of cousin, the grandson of her great-aunt Caterina. The family all knew that Aunt Caterina's son, Michael, though reared as his own by Jordan Scott, was truly the child of Talitha's Apache half brother, James or Fierro, with whom Caterina had died.

Michael had studied medicine, married the daughter of an army officer, and in 1894 gone to serve the exiled Chiricahuas who had been moved that year to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after a wretched sojourn in Florida and Alabama.

Back in May of 1885, some Chiricahuas, never reconciled to leaving their old ranges, had broken out of the San Carlos reservation. Led by Nana, Geronimo, Nachez, Chihuahua, and Mangus, the son of the great Mangus, they swept through southwestern New Mexico into Sonora, burning ranches and murdering.