Paloma and the Horse Traders (35 page)

He could think of nothing to say to that. He
leaned over and kissed Graci’s cheek. “I think you’re a fine
woman,” he told her, and meant it. No point in telling her that he
had started to plan, himself.

They faced the dust cloud that all too soon
materialized into horsemen. As Claudio wiped his eyes and readied
his bow and arrow, he squinted to improve his aim, and saw what
looked like a wagon. Three men were bouncing along on the wagon
seat, as someone suspiciously like Rogelio rode the off horse of
the team pulling the wagon. He put down the bow and told Graci to
sheathe her knife.

She stared at him, her hand still tight around
the knife handle.

“
No, I mean it,” he told her. “Take
a good look.”

She did, and he heard her relieved
laughter.

Calm now, Claudio felt his racing heart slow
down.
Oye
, too much of this terror was going to turn him old
before his time.

Lorenzo Diaz slowed his horse, waving his
sombrero to dispel some of the dust he had raised. “What are you
doing here?” he hollered.

“
I could ask the same of you,”
Claudio said. He stared at the wagon as Rogelio came closer, then
slowed the horses, grinning like the fool he was. Claudio looked at
the men on the wagon seat, took in their bound hands and legs tied
together. If one had fallen off, all would have tumbled to the
ground.

His mouth open, Claudio looked at the long
boxes in the wagon bed, and smaller metal boxes.

“
You found the Frenchmen,” he said.
“They
do
have weapons.”

Lorenzo nodded. He patted his chest. “Paloma
tells me I will be a hero.”

“
Paloma?” Claudio asked.
“
Paloma?”

“
She told me to do the right thing
and help Marco.”

“
And you actually
listened
to
her? You didn’t just grab the guns and run to the nearest shady
dealer? Lorenzo!”

Lorenzo leaned forward, his eyes bright, his
face dusty, but his smile unmistakable in its kindness. “Claudio,
Claudio, you should listen to women sometimes. I’ve never been a
hero before and Paloma thinks I will be good at it.”

In
which Lorenzo is surprisingly righteous

L
orenzo wouldn’t hear of
stopping for a brief parlay. “We have work to do, lad. Paloma made
me swear an oath to be a righteous man and think of others.”

He prodded his horse into motion and Rogelio
did the same with the wagon. His head crammed with a thousand
questions, Claudio rode beside the horse trader.

There wasn’t any glow of sanctity about the
dirty fellow that Claudio could see, but Lorenzo assured him that
every man should go about doing good, now and then. “That’s what
Paloma told me.” He dipped his head, and Claudio stared at the
spectacle of a shy Lorenzo. “Sancha even mentioned it.”

Now he understood. Sancha. “Lorenzo, you amaze
me,” Claudio said. He knew his amazement would pass, and probably
Lorenzo’s sudden righteousness, too, but here they were and Lorenzo
was in a great hurry to find Marco. He turned to Graciela, whose
amazement mirrored his own.

“
Are we close to the Ute camp?
Perhaps they have seen Marco.”

She nodded, and pointed with her lips like an
Indian. “That small range to the south of the big Blanca,” she
said. “There is a pass. You’ll see.”

He did see. They rode steadily on. He heard one
of the trussed up men arguing with the other in a language he did
not know. It wasn’t French. Soon the three men were shouting at
each other. He heard some familiar words—why was it that curses on
other tongues were so easily learned?—and suddenly knew this was
English.

“
They’re not French,” he said to
Lorenzo as they pounded along.

“
Two of them are,” the horse trader
replied. “They came down from the north.”

“
The
north
? You can’t be
serious,” Claudio said.

Lorenzo just glared at him, and Claudio knew
something had changed. Only weeks ago, any contradiction would have
earned him a slap across the face. Claudio wondered if he could
credit Sancha with this transformation of a brutal, sour, dishonest
man. Lorenzo had mentioned Paloma; perhaps she was the author of
this good behavior. He glanced back at the arguing prisoners. Maybe
all three could take some credit.

“
There is something
wrong.”

Lorenzo and Claudio both looked at Graciela.
“Name me something right about this fools’ trail we are traveling,”
Lorenzo snapped.

“
I mean it,” Graci fired back. “Rain
Cloud and his warriors should have noticed us by now,” she said.
“We are so close to the pass, and they are not here.”

“
They’ve just moved somewhere else,”
Claudio said.

She shook her head with some vigor, and gave
him that stare that women so easily mastered, the one that
asked
, Just how foolish are men?

“
We gather chokecherries here. This
is the time and the place. Something is wrong.”

“
Should we turn away from the
pass?”

She gave him the second stare women mastered to
perfection. This one asked,
Do I have to think for you, too?
She rode ahead of them both, leaving Claudio to wonder just how men
and women ever got close enough to mate, produce babies, and
continue mankind.

* * *

“
There isn’t much more we can do
here,
nami
,” Toshua said to Marco. “Those who are going to
die have died, the restless spirits have settled down, and Great
Owl is still out there somewhere.”

Marco nodded and wondered how to convey even a
tenth of his unease to a man who felt no fear.
Have I become a
coward?
he asked himself, even as he knew the answer. He had
become a husband and a father, and he did not relish taking
chances. Only his duty to distant King Carlos—and more important, a
promise to Governor de Anza—kept him from bolting home.

He looked around the Ute camp, tidier now, but
eerie in the absence of many children and young women. In an orgy
of grief, the survivors had burned the brush shelters that hadn’t
already been destroyed by the Comanches. With tears and wailing
that kept the hair on Marco’s neck and arms erect, they had washed
the desecrated bodies of the older women and the babies too young
to serve any Comanche purpose beyond mutilation and violation, then
wrapped them in shrouds.

Silent, Marco and Joaquim had helped take the
shrouded corpses into the mountains, carrying the dead to rocky
places. Toshua’s aid—Comanche aid—had been politely but firmly
refused by Rain Cloud. They dug a deep hole and placed the bodies
within, piling back the earth and stacking rocks.

The bereft men stood in long silence. Some
chopped off their braids. All wore the sleepy-eyed expression so
familiar to Marco, the one that said,
I cannot close my eyes
without seeing my dear ones
. The Utes were exhausted in mind
and body, and some were weak from letting their own blood when they
really wanted to kill Comanches.

They had ridden back in more silence. The air
hummed with their silence, even the birds paying respect and the
wind holding back any rustling of the quaking aspen, already
starting to turn yellow.

But they rode with warriors, who were never
fools. Farther down the trail at the spot where the pass could be
seen, several men gestured to each other and spoke in low tones.
Marco rode closer. “What do you see?” he asked in Ute.

He looked where the warrior pointed. Winding
their way up the mountain was a strange sight: a wagon in the lead.
No, there was a white man in front, followed by more familiar
people—one a relative he hadn’t thought to see again.
I swear
I’ll thrash that rascal for making Paloma cry
, he vowed to
himself.

“
Dios mio
!” he exclaimed.
“Joaquim, it is Claudio and Graciela, and I don’t believe this, but
also that rascal Lorenzo.”

His Ute was fair, but not up to complexities,
so he signed to the warrior in the lead, the one already nocking
arrow to bow. “Friends, and something more,” he said, in case his
signing wasn’t as good as it used to be.

With a highly skeptical look, the Ute rested
his bow and arrow on his lap. “I am willing to kill anyone right
now,” he told Marco.

“
Not these. At least, not now,”
Marco said, understanding him perfectly.

They arrived in camp just before Claudio came
in, guiding his horse with his knees and holding both hands up in
surrender. Graciela rode beside him. Marco watched the expectation
on her face turn to worry. She dismounted slowly and walked to Rain
Cloud, who held out his arms to her. He wrapped her in his embrace
and they swayed from side to side as he tried to explain what he
could not explain. Whatever greeting she had anticipated after four
years a captive of the Comanche turned to less than dust as she
mourned in the ruin of the Ute village.

Marco watched Lorenzo, whose face registered no
shock at the obvious signs of a successful Comanche raid on a
peaceful village. Lorenzo Diaz, damn his soul, had lived too long
on the frontier.

On the other hand, Rogelio stared in shock and
disbelief. His lips even started to quiver. The three men tightly
bound on the wagon seat seemed to draw together even closer. Marco
looked at the wagon, with its load of long boxes, and shorter boxes
and powder kegs. The rumor was true. The French were ready to do
business and further disrupt the frontier.

Marco nearly turned to the warrior with the bow
and arrow in his lap and ordered him to start shooting. Why in
heaven’s name were the French interested in poor, wracked New
Mexico? Wasn’t life hard enough already? Why did the battles of
wars begun in distant lands have to be fought here?
I will never
understand kings
, he thought.

“
Señor Mondragón?”

Marco looked up from his tight fists to
Lorenzo, who held out a folded sheet of paper to him.

“
Read this, señor,” the old
scoundrel urged. “Your wife ….”

Marco snatched the paper, his heart hammering
in his throat.
Please, please, nothing wrong there
, he asked
God. He scanned Paloma’s familiar handwriting. As all good wives
did, here on the edge of Comanchería, she assured him first that
all was well. His breathing slowed and he continued, reading of the
two Frenchman and one Englishman that Lorenzo had actually
apprehended farther north and then brought to the Double Cross,
along with cases of firearms.

He couldn’t help smiling as he continued. “I am
certain we have Sancha to credit for Lorenzo’s sudden honesty,” he
read. “Did you ever think Sancha would blush? Not I.”

He kept reading, barely mindful that the others
had dismounted and dragged the prisoners from the wagon seat. “They
came from far, far to the north, a place called the Mandan
Villages. They are intent on stirring up trouble, which besides
good food, the French are famous for,” Paloma had
written.

He smiled again, wondering if she had made them
bathe. Ah, this woman of his! He read her conclusion, which
professed her love and worry in equal parts, and then other
sentences she had added in even smaller print at the bottom. The
smile left his face.

“
How they got here alive, they would
not say,” Paloma continued. “How they plan to leave, no comment.
You have Toshua, and he has ways to loosen tongues, so you must
find out more. Something terrible is going on.”

Paloma had added a note on the back: “My love,
I think one of us had better learn some English. I fear there will
be more of these people.”

In
which Marco deals with scoundrels and retains his honor

“
W
ere they
going to use these guns against us?” Rain Cloud asked Marco, after
he dismounted. “Should we just kill them now?”

The Ute chief had spoken in Spanish. Marco
heard one of the prisoners suck in his breath. He looked at the
other Frenchman and what must be the Englishman, who appeared
puzzled, nothing more.

“
How many languages do we need
here?” Marco asked Rain Cloud.

He knew Rain Cloud would not fail him. After
all, a wounded man doesn’t lie beside another wounded man without
learning a few home truths. Rain Cloud gave him a slow wink, one
the prisoners could not see, and appeared to consider the question.
Marco felt some gratification to see sweat break out on two
foreheads. The Englishman appeared clueless.

“
My
Spanish is good enough,
and we only need one Frenchman who speaks Spanish,” Rain Cloud
said. “I don’t care about the Englishman. I have met a few
Englishmen. I do not like them, or Americans, either, if such he
is. Two of these prisoners are expendable. That one and that
one.”

The Frenchman who spoke Spanish translated this
into French for his fellows, who quickly looked as stricken as he
did.

“
I have no use for men like you, who
would deal in death and leave our children and wives at the mercy
of Comanche renegades,” Marco said to the two expendables who had
dropped to their knees. “Tell them that.”