by Anita Mills
Sucking in a deep breath, Amanda regained control of herself. “I should rather keep my cares to myself,” she declared, sniffing back the last of her tears.
“If John were alive today, he could not have found a better man. And—”
“I know,” the girl cut in wearily. “I’m not getting any younger, and as you have pointed out, pretty soon there will only be Mr. Kelly.”
“Exactly.”
But as she said it, Amanda could almost see the portrait of her and Patrick Donnelly surrounded by well-scrubbed children, the perfect Irish Catholic family sitting in the pews every Sunday, and she shuddered, if she married the dominating Mr. Donnelly, she’d never be allowed another original thought. No, there was too much of Big John in her for that.
“Tell him …” She hesitated for a moment, then decided. “No, I shall tell him myself and be done with it.” Clasping her hands together for courage, she dared to meet her aunt’s gaze. “I hope Patrick Donnelly becomes mayor of Boston one day, but I’m afraid I won’t be here to see it happen.” As she heard her own words, she drew a certain courage from them. “I own the Ybarra-Ross, Aunt Kate, and I think now that Mama is dead, Big John would wish me to go home. One of us ought to be there, and I’m the only one left.”
“But—”
“Oh, I know I must sound ungrateful, but I cannot quite see Mr. Donnelly riding a horse across West Texas. He would have to sweat, you see, and I am not at all sure he is capable of doing it.”
“Amanda Mary Ross, you cannot be serious!”
“I’m going back to Texas, Aunt Kate.”
“To a place where only heathen Comanches and wild animals can live!”
“I know. But it is mine,” Amanda answered simply.
“Whatever are you going to tell Mr. Donnelly?” her aunt wailed.
“That I’m going home.”
“Maria.” Ramon shook her shoulder gently, trying to wake her. “Maria, we are nearly to the station.”
At first, she’d been so lost in her dreams that she didn’t respond to the name. Maria was someone else. She was Amanda Mary—even the sisters at school had called her that. Not Amanda. Amanda Mary, for her second name was for the Virgin. She turned her head against the hard leather of the stagecoach seat and tried to remember, but the dream did not return.
“Maria, you need to eat.”
“Not Maria,” she mumbled sleepily. “Amanda.”
“Tía Isabella called you Maria,” he insisted. “Always Maria.”
Reluctantly, she sat up and leaned forward, stretching an arm still numbed by sleep, clasping her hands in an effort to ease her cramped shoulders. Yawning, she asked, “Where are we, anyway?”
“We are stopping to eat and change horses.” He looked out the window briefly, then added, “Please do not be too friendly to anyone here, Maria. Only very rough people run stagecoach stations in this part of Texas.”
“I don’t suppose it matters where we are,” she decided wearily.
“If nothing happens to slow us down, we will be sleeping at Fort Stockton tonight,” he promised.
If nothing happens. It seemed like nearly everything that could possibly happen had already befallen them. The only other misery she could think of just now would be Indians attacking the coach. And with only a driver, one lone guard, and Ramon left to defend it, that prospect was altogether daunting.
She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking she felt as though she’d been traveling for months rather than weeks. Oh, how she wished she’d never consented to taking the old Panhandle Route, or whatever it was called, no matter how much Ramon had insisted it was safer for a “lady of means.” Given what she’d encountered since leaving the comforts of her aunt’s house, she had to wonder now how those possessed of less fortune managed the journey at all.
After the six days by train from Boston through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi to New Orleans, there had been the steamer crossing to Galveston, then the eighteen-dollar-a-head ride in a hot, airless railroad car crowded with sweat-soaked cowboys playing California Jack with packs of dirty, greasy cards. The only thing worse than their disgraceful cursing had been their tendency to spit tobacco juice onto the floor until she’d had to lift her full skirt and petticoats to walk down the narrow aisle lest she soil her clothes with the nasty stuff. Finally, she’d complained to the conductor, who declared stoutly that he was not about to take his life in his hands by confronting them over so minor a matter.
The final straw on that leg of the journey had been a break in the tracks near someplace called Eagle Lake, where they’d all been emptied out to spend the night in makeshift tents. The punchers, as the cowboys were called, had drunk heavily, sang loudly, and punctuated their verses with gunfire until every last one of them finally sank into a snoring stupor. When at last dawn broke, she wandered outside to discover that the place had neither eagles nor a lake to recommend it.
Taken by wagons into Columbus, Texas, they’d spent the next night in a ramshackle place where the only thing worse than the mosquitoes was the bedbugs. There, seeing the light beneath her door, Ramon had mistakenly thought her frightened and had wanted to share the room with her—“for your protection, Maria.” Of course, she’d declined, snapping that if she couldn’t have any comfort, she still preferred to have a decent reputation.
By the time the rails were repaired, she was tired, cranky, and completely disgusted with her overly attentive step-cousin. And she had still faced that final leg of public conveyance, a cramped stagecoach with yet another ugly assortment of men of low degree. And now, even though the last unkempt fellow had gotten off one stop earlier, the air within the passenger compartment smelled of stale smoke, whiskey, and the lingering odor of male sweat. Everything combined, it was enough to make her think longingly of Boston—and almost fondly of the conceited Patrick Donnelly. At least he neither swore nor spat, and he was far too fastidious to allow himself to perspire.
Thinking she suffered excessively from the heat, Ramon picked up his folded newspaper and fanned her, cooling the damp tendrils of hair that clung to her forehead. “You are all right, Maria?” he asked solicitously.
“I had forgotten how big Texas is—and how hot it is in July,” she muttered. “I don’t remember it being this unbearable at Ybarra-Ross.”
He shrugged. “Ah, Maria, there are days when food can be cooked on rocks without a fire. But once you become used to it again, you will not mind the weather, I swear it.” He dropped the paper and reached to possess her hands, saying earnestly, “It will be different now, for you are the mistress of Ybarra, Maria, and everyone will take care of you. You will have nothing to do but be the beautiful senora, while Papa and I tend to the ranchero.”
She pulled her hands away. “I just want to get there,” she said shortly. But she wanted to scream at him that it was the Ybarra-Ross, that her name was Amanda, not Maria. But it would do no good. She’d already said it a hundred times and more, and still he persisted. “I have no interest in being a beautiful senora, Ramon,” she added tersely. “I am more like Big John than like my mother, I assure you.”
He looked hurt. “I have offended you, Maria,” he said softly.
She was hot, tired, and cross, and she knew it. “No,” she said, “It is the heat more than anything.”
“Maria …” He leaned forward, and as his dark eyes met hers, he took her hands again. “I know you will say it is too soon, but perhaps I too am like Big John Ross was with Tía Isabella.” He placed one of her hands against his chest. “I look at you, and I feel something here.”
“You are hungry,” she muttered, once again retrieving her fingers from his damp clasp.
“No … no, you mistake me. I am full with—”
She cut him off quickly. “Perhaps a bromide might settle your stomach. I am sure if you asked the proprietor here—”
For a moment he was perplexed, then he reddened. “It is not that,” he said quickly
. “Ever since my eyes have seen you, I—”
Deciding he was beyond being deterred, she leaned across the seat and wrenched the door open. “Well, whatever ails you, I expect you will feel better when you are out in the air,” she declared briskly.
“You are not like your mother at all,” he said, sighing. “She had the Spanish soul.”
“I’m afraid I don’t remember that either, but then I was still a child when last I saw her.” As the station attendant placed the small step on the ground, she took advantage of it. Looking back at the chagrined Ramon, she gave him a thin smile. “Since you will wish to walk about to settle your stomach, I shall go on inside and order something to eat. I hope they will have something better than beans and a fried tortilla, for I am sick of them.”
With that she twitched her blue twilled silk walking skirt into place, smoothed the frilled jabot at the neck of her white cotton waist, and readjusted the basque points of her perfectly tailored jacket, pulling them down at her hips. Tucking a loose tendril of auburn hair behind her ear, she started toward the door of the bullet-pocked station.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned!” the station man said loudly. “Now if that ain’t a sight—whoooeee!” His words ended in a whistle.
“I’d very much prefer that you keep your profane language to yourself,” she retorted, turning around. Realizing suddenly that he wasn’t looking at her at all, she bit back the rest of the acid setdown she’d been about to give him. Shading her eyes against the blazing sun, she followed his gaze curiously until she saw what he saw. Momentarily forgetting her own manners, she stared.
Crossing the dusty desert toward them, a solitary man rode, his shoulders hunched over his pommel, his right arm cradling a double-barreled shotgun. His face was as dark as the so-called tame Indians she’d encountered near Columbus, but the hair that fell over his shoulders had been bleached white-blond by the sun. Her gaze moved from a black frock coat to buckskin leggings and fringed moccasins. And if his dress were not ludicrous enough, he was too tall for the spotted pony he rode, so much so that his legs dangled within a foot of the ground. Behind him, led by a rope tied to the saddlehorn, a mule followed doggedly, bearing a man’s body tied over the packs with a rope.
“Good God, that’s McAlester, ain’t it, Sam?” someone said.
“Yeah, it’s him all right.”
One of the men unharnessing the tired team stopped to look, then shook his head. “Poor bastard must’ve been worth a lot,” he decided. “He usually don’t bother bringin’ ’em in.”
“Yeah.” The man called Sam straightened his shoulders. “Guess we ought to go inside—he ain’t a man as likes to be watched none.” But even as he said it, he didn’t move.
The rider stopped a scant ten feet from Amanda, and as he dismounted, shotgun in hand, she got a good look at him, and it was enough to give her heart pause. He had the strong, well-chiseled features of a Greco-Roman god, and a build that would have done an ancient sculptor proud. He was facing her, his coat open, showing two gunbelts crossed over a collarless white shirt unbuttoned several inches at the neck. But it was the eyes that sent a shiver through her. They were an icy blue, and they were utterly devoid of emotion. It was as though he didn’t know they all watched him.
Apparently, Sam shared her thoughts, for he muttered under his breath, “Damn, but he’s got them killer eyes.”
Without speaking to anybody, McAlester turned back to the mule and loosened the ropes. The macabre load slid to the ground like a sack of sand to lay facedown in the dirt. To her disgust, he turned it over with his foot.
“Get up,” he ordered curtly. When the body did not move, he kicked it in the ribs so hard that she could hear the air whoosh from a man’s lungs and she saw manacled hands come up defensively. What she’d first thought to be a dead man was in fact a prisoner. When the man in the frock coat kicked him again, she felt compelled to intervene.
“Mister McAlester,” she called out clearly, drawing herself up to her full five feet five inches, “it ought to be obvious to you that he cannot stand.”
Ignoring her, McAlester continued to regard his prisoner contemptuously while the fellow rolled over and retched. Finally, he reached down, grasped the man’s filthy shirt, and pulled him up by the back of it. When it appeared that the man couldn’t or wouldn’t walk, he gave him a shove toward the adobe building.
Amanda turned to the station man. “Did you see that?” she demanded indignantly.
“Yeah,” he grunted.
She stared incredulously. “Well, aren’t you doing to do something?”
“I ain’t no fool—no, ma’am.”
“But this is your station, isn’t it?”
“It ain’t none of my affair, and I ain’t about to make it any,” he said, spitting tobacco juice at her feet. “And if I was you, I’d just get myself something to eat, and I’d keep real quiet while I was eating it.”
His condescending tone angered her even more. “You, sir, may be a coward, but I assure you I am not.”
Ramon caught her by the arm. “You don’t know what you are doing, Maria—you must not say anything to him!”
Shaking her step-cousin off, she continued to face Sam. “If you stand here and let him continue to offer violence to one of God’s creatures again, I shall report you to your superiors,” she told him furiously.
He shrugged. “You do that, ma’am—they ain’t going to fault me none for it. That’s McAlester,” he added, as though that ought to explain everything. “You don’t want to make him mad, I can tell you.”
“It doesn’t make any difference who he is,” she retorted. “And I don’t care how angry I make him.”
“Maria!”
Sam looked her up and down, and a wide grin split his face. “You go right at it, little lady.”
“I’m not a little lady,” she snapped. “I am Amanda Ross—of the Ybarra-Ross.”
“Yeah? Well, that there’s one hell of a Texas Ranger,” he countered.
“Surely not,” she muttered.
As she turned to look again, the prisoner staggered, then fell to his knees. He raised his shackled hands in supplication when he saw her. “Por favor, señora,” he croaked through cracked, bleeding lips. When no one moved, he cried out in broken English, “In name of God—mercy, senora! Agua—”
The ranger pointed the shotgun barrel against the back of his prisoner’s neck, prodding him with it. This time the squat Mexican struggled to his feet unaided, and, with the ranger’s hand pushing him forward, he managed to stumble past her.
“Very well, I guess I’ll have to attend to the matter,” she declared purposefully.
“Don’t, Maria!” Grasping her shoulder, Ramon stopped her, then leaned to whisper, “That is the most feared man in all of Texas.”
“I don’t care what he did—he shouldn’t be beaten while in the state’s custody,” she retorted.
“Not the prisoner—the ranger, Maria. McAlester.” As though he thought he might still be overheard, he whispered still lower, “After the war, he was with the State Police, and now he is one of the rangers. He is afraid of nothing—nothing, I tell you. He is a killer.”
“Ramon, I can scarce hear you,” she complained peevishly. “And I don’t care so much as a snap of your fingers who he is. He has no right—”
“You must listen to me, Maria!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she retorted, “get some gumption, Ramon!”
“I tell you he is a very bad man, Maria—many times, he just kills the prisoners. But when reports are written, he always says they died while trying to escape. We have a name for it—la ley de fuga.”
Shaking free, she lifted her skirt hem out of the dust and started for the adobe building, but Ramon still tried to stop her. “Wait—promise me you will say nothing to make him angry,” he pleaded.
“Are you afraid for you or for me?” she gibed.
“You wound me, Maria.”<
br />
“Well, if you are so afraid of this McAlester, you stay out here, but I’m getting something to eat. After I give this McAlester a good piece of my mind,” she added.
“Maria!”
Ignoring her step-cousin, she went inside, then stood just past the open door as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. The ranger sat at a table, his back against the wall, his feet crossed out in front of him. The shotgun lay across his lap. His prisoner faced him, his head resting on his hands. An ugly bruise covered half the man’s swollen face, and congealed blood oozed thickly from a long gash down his cheek. Behind swollen slits, bloodshot eyes made a mute appeal to her.
She hesitated, then walked directly to where they sat. “It is Mr. McAlester, is it not?” she inquired coldly. Without waiting for him to acknowledge it, she plunged ahead. “I just want you to know that never before have I ever witnessed such a despicable display of brutality, and—”
“No!” Ramon shouted at her.
“And I will report—” He looked up, and his cold eyes nearly unnerved her. “Well, I just do not want you to think you can get away with this sort of thing,” she finished somewhat lamely. “It bespeaks of the barbarian rather than the peace officer, and certainly any gentleman of the least refinement would never condone—”
“You aren’t from Texas, are you?” he asked, abruptly interrupting her.
“I was born here, sir,” she answered stiffly. “But I cannot think that has anything to do with this. I know what I saw out there, and I shall, of course, inform the proper authority.”
His mouth curved slightly, but his eyes never warmed. “I guess that’d be me,” he said. “Unless you aim to write to Captain Walker—Hap Walker, that is—then you have to send it in care of the postmaster at San Angelo.”
“Was you wanting to eat, miss? Stage leaves in twenty minutes, and they ain’t waiting for nobody,” Sam reminded her somewhat hastily.
Glancing around her, she saw that everyone there watched her, and she knew if anyone was losing any face in the exchange between her and the ranger, it was she. Trying not to show her chagrin, she straightened her shoulders. “I’m afraid you have not heard the last of this, sir,” she informed McAlester haughtily. Turning away from him, she stalked toward another table.
