by Tess LeSue
Tom pinched the bridge of his nose. Why did everything always have to become a circus with this woman?
20
“THEY’RE HEADED FOR Hueco del Diablo.” Black Horse was grim when he delivered the news. He was the older of the boys and had proven to be worth his weight in gold. He was Serrano, Taaqtam in his language, and this was Serrano land; Black Horse knew it well enough to be a fine guide. More importantly, he knew it well enough to keep them out of the Dons’ way. The other two were as foreign as Tom was here; the girl, Two Moon, was Cahuilla from farther south, and Spear Fisher, the one who spoke no white languages, was Miwok and a long way from home.
They were three days out from de Gato, rattling along after the Georges’ trail. There was no sign of pursuers yet, but Tom kept watch over his shoulder, knowing they would appear eventually. He wasn’t lucky enough to have shaken them completely.
“Hueco del Diablo? How do you know?” Tension made him short. But hell. Hueco del Diablo. Of all the goddamn places.
“What else is this way?” Black Horse said matter-of-factly.
Nothing. That’s what. Tom winced to think of Winnie being led into that hellhole. The poor kid. He only hoped they could reach her before she was put on the slave market.
“What is it?” Sister Emma called as she trotted up.
“Good luck telling her this one,” Black Horse said under his breath, giving Tom a pitying look as he rode ahead.
Tom winced. He didn’t relish telling Sister Emma that Winnie was headed for the most infamous black market in all the territories.
“You found something?” she asked hopefully. She pulled her mare up. Her face was pinched, and she had circles under her eyes the color of bruises. Guilt was gnawing away at her something fierce, and it made her hot-tempered and difficult.
“No.” He tried to be patient, he really did. He wanted to be the kind of man who was patient. He’d always thought of himself as the solid sort. But the truth was, the thought of that little girl out here with those two animals unmanned him. He veered between white-hot rage and sucking black despair. It made him as hot-tempered and difficult as Sister Emma was. The upshot of which was that they were often at each other’s throats.
“We haven’t found anything,” he told her. “But we think we know where they’re going.” He nudged his horse into a trot. He’d rather they were still moving while they had this conversation.
“Where?” she demanded, following. “Goddamn it, Slater, would you stop being so high-handed and talk to me?”
Fine. She wanted him to talk, he’d damn well talk. But she wasn’t going to like it. “There’s a place called Hueco del Diablo.” He couldn’t look at her as he told her. The expression on her face would be his undoing. He only hoped she’d get mad rather than cry. He could handle anger, but tears would be the end of him. He’d be liable to goddamn well cry too, the state he was in. They hadn’t slept, they were living on hardtack, they were sunburned and high strung and played out: it wasn’t a good place to be, considering the mess they were about to head into.
“The Devil’s Hollow,” he translated for her.
“That don’t sound good.”
“It’s not.” He bit the bullet. “It’s a slave market, Sister.”
He expected her to erupt; he expected shouting and cursing and threats of violence. But what he got was silence.
“It ain’t anything legal,” he continued. “It’s informal and unlawful and dangerous as all get-out. It’s run in a cut in the rock that ain’t big enough to be a canyon but is plenty big enough to hide them from view. They mostly trade in Indian kids, selling them to the Dons for labor.”
“You ain’t serious.” The tone in her voice was one he hadn’t heard before.
He looked over. Hell. She looked like she might just faint right off the horse. He reached over and took her reins and put a steadying hand on her back. “Drink some water,” he said. “Come on, honey. You look like that habit is cooking you alive.”
Her hands were shaking as she uncorked her waterskin and took a mouthful.
“Please tell me you ain’t serious.” Her voice was as shaky as her hands.
“The trail is leading straight to it.” He realized he was rubbing circles on her back. He stopped and gave her a matter-of-fact pat instead. “They don’t just trade in kids,” he said, pressing on but bracing himself for her reaction. How on earth did you tell a nun about this kind of thing? “They also trade in women.”
“Women?”
“White women, Mexican women, Indian women: any woman unlucky enough to find herself hauled to Hueco del Diablo. There’s a roaring trade in women in these parts.”
“Fuck.”
He’d heard her swear before, but not like this. She let loose with a string of the filthiest curses he’d ever heard. All of them aimed at the Georges.
At least while she was swearing, she didn’t look like she was going to faint. And the shaking was subsiding. The more vigorously she cursed, the less she shook.
“I reckon they’ve earned that,” he said dryly. His hand had started up rubbing circles on her back again.
“How far off?”
“Another two days.” Now it was time to broach another difficult subject. “So we got the rest of today to work out where to put you and the others, while the boys and I go to Devil’s Hollow.”
Now the eruption came. “What in hell do you mean where to put me? I ain’t being put anywhere. I’m coming with you.”
“Didn’t you listen to a word I just said? They trade in women, goddamn it, and last time I looked, you were a woman.”
“I’m a nun.”
“You think they’ll care about that? Have you looked in the mirror lately? You’re about the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen. You think they won’t notice that? It takes all of four seconds to rip a black dress off a nun and make her a woman again!”
“You’ve clearly never tried to get one of these dresses off!” she snapped.
“Now ain’t the time to be funny.” He paused. “And thanks to you I have tried to get a damn dress off.”
“We’ll find somewhere to put Calla and Anna and Two Moon,” she said stubbornly, ignoring his comment, “but I’m coming with you.”
“No. You’re not.”
“Yes. I. Am.”
“We’re not discussing it.”
“No,” she agreed, kicking her animal into an out-and-out gallop, “we’re not.”
* * *
• • •
EMMA DIDN’T LIKE to admit it, but he was right. Not about much, but about the nun thing. A habit wouldn’t stop anyone from raping her or hurting her or selling her at auction. No lowlife who sold people like they were horses (worse than horses, she thought sourly) gave a damn about God. This ugly black thing wouldn’t protect her where they were going. It would only get in her way.
So the only thing to do was take it off.
Tom was going to have a conniption when he saw her. But he was going to have a conniption anyway. He and the boys had snuck off an hour after midnight, when they thought she was asleep. Two Moon was standing guard at the mouth of the cave, armed to the teeth. She let them go without protest but turned up the lantern the minute they’d ridden out of sight, filling the cave with light.
Their party had come to the scrubby ravine late in the day and had managed to back the wagon into one notch in the rock and set up camp in another. Tom had them move rocks and brush for a good two hours, screening the cave entrances. But Emma would be damned if she was being left behind in some dusty old cave. She wasn’t about to sit here, safe, while Tom risked his life.
Calla and Anna didn’t protest; in fact, Calla helped her get the nun gear off, and Anna packed her food and water.
“The little mite is going to need a woman,” Anna said grimly, “and you’ve been through it
yourself, so you’ll know how to help her. If . . . she needs you to.”
It. The great unsaid. They all feared that Winnie had been assaulted in some way. But there was still hope she hadn’t been. With any luck, they could rescue her before anything happened.
“You shoot those bastards,” Calla told her, passing her a hat.
Emma jammed it on her head. She was in her breeches and one of Tom’s shirts, which they’d stolen from the saddlebags he’d left behind. The hat was Anna’s. It was a broad-brimmed straw hat, her “gardening hat,” she called it. Emma didn’t have a simple hat of her own—her hats were all covered in feathers and bows and fancy silk flowers.
“Here.” Two Moon held out her rifle.
“You’ll need it,” Emma said shortly. “You have to keep these two safe.”
Two Moon held up her pistol. “I have others.”
“I got one too,” Anna held hers up.
“Me too.” Calla held hers up.
“Tom gave them to us.”
“Hell. Did he leave any guns for himself?”
“They have plenty. Black Horse took them from the ranch,” Two Moon said with a quick grin. “A whole bag full. He was going to sell them.”
Emma groaned. That was just about as bad as horse theft. Oh well. They might not even live to face the men coming after them from de Gato; there was no point in worrying about it now. And she figured Don Rey owed the three Indians more than a bunch of measly guns, for keeping them in “servitude” the way he had.
“Go get our girl,” Anna said, wishing her luck.
“I will.” She took the rifle. “And don’t you forget to feed my starter.”
It was a hot night, but that wasn’t why she was sweating. She was sweating because she wasn’t sure she could find Tom and the boys without getting lost. They only had a twenty-minute start on her, but a man could get a fair way in twenty minutes. She didn’t think they’d be going faster than a walk, not in the pitch-darkness, but she was going mighty slow herself. And she wasn’t entirely sure which way to go. East. That was about the long and the short of it.
Lucky it was a clear night and still. There wasn’t a lick of wind. Noise carried on a night like this, and after a while, she heard a horse whicker. Then a soft word or two. Then the sound of hooves.
Please, let it be them. She didn’t fancy spending the night following along after ghostly noises, only to find as dawn broke that she’d been following the wrong men.
She kept the rifle across her lap, ready to fire. The dark hours were long and grim. Her mind ran a well-worn track, imagining Winnie being snatched. If only Emma had gone up to check on her. If only one of them had stayed back from the dinner to keep watch over her. If only she’d seen the girl watching them from the gallery. If only Winnie had called out to her. If only.
Life was full of “if onlys,” Emma thought tiredly. A woman carried a passel of them with her, every hour of every day. If only Pa had been able to handle his liquor; if only Ma hadn’t died; if only Rory Baker had paid that goddamn hotel bill and not left her to the mercies of the inn keeper; if only Luke Slater had loved her like she’d thought she loved him; if only she’d never been a whore, had never been trussed up like a nun, had met Tom Slater simple like, woman to man . . .
“If onlys” were a heavy thing to carry with you. What’s done was done. She couldn’t take back the past. She couldn’t go back to the ranch and sweep Winnie up in her arms and carry her back to bed, scolding her for running about in her nightgown; she couldn’t tuck the little one up tight in bed and kiss her good night; she couldn’t do anything except cock her weapon and try to right the wrong.
She was crying. It came on sudden, like a plains storm. One minute she wasn’t, and then she was. And it was a big cry, the sort you only suffered once a year or so, when you couldn’t get out of the way of the mudslide. She cried for Winnie out there alone, suffering God only knew what; she cried for herself and all those years of being poked; she cried for the whole sorry, sweaty indignity and pain of it all. The helplessness. The hopelessness. The never-ending smallness of it all.
Did men know what it did to a person to be treated like that?
They did. She knew they did. They didn’t know it the way a woman knew it, they didn’t picture it happening to them, but they knew it just the same. They knew what they were doing was a violence. They knew they were stomping on something, stomping and stomping until a body was barely a body anymore. But that was the thing. They liked stomping.
Not all of them. But enough of them to make it count.
Emma cried for the big, ugly truth of it. The pettiness of it and the pointlessness of it. She cried until she was swollen up and her head throbbed fit to burst. She cried until she couldn’t cry no more.
And then she wiped herself down and faced the pale wash of a new day. Three riders emerged in silhouette against the pink-gray horizon. One of them was Tom Slater. She’d know those shoulders anywhere. She took a big drink of water and a deep breath of air. She’d had her cry. Now it was time to get down to business.
21
HE PITCHED A fit, just as she expected, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.
“You’re impossible!” he said finally, when he realized nothing he said was changing her mind.
“I am,” she agreed. “And you’d best get it through your thick head, so we don’t have to go through this nonsense again.”
He lapsed into a sullen silence for a good long while. He looked tired. Could a man lose weight in just a few days? Because he looked thin too. When this whole sorry affair was done, she’d be sure to whip up a batch of biscuits for him. She had some jars of jelly in her luggage somewhere. She could bake him some jelly tarts. Maybe a cake too. Something with a fair whack of sugar in it to cheer him up. It would cheer Winnie up as well. Emma would be more than happy to cook cakes day and night if it would offer them even the smallest measure of comfort.
“How are we going about this, then?” she asked once she’d decided he’d been sullen long enough.
The look he gave her showed he wasn’t done yet. She ignored it.
“Are we storming in, guns blazing? Or are we going to be sneaky about it, and act like we’re here to buy some slaves, and then shoot them when they’re not looking?”
He gave her an appalled look. “Neither.”
“You could pretend that you’re here to sell me.”
“No.”
“Or them.” She nodded at the boys.
“No.”
“Well, we cain’t pretend to sell you,” she said, exasperated. “No one wants an ornery ole white man.”
“We ain’t pretending to sell, or buy, anyone.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And that’s exactly why I wanted you to stay back at the cave,” he muttered.
“Are we going to steal in by the dead of night and slit their throats?”
He was pinching the bridge of his nose again. He only did that when his temper was sore.
“Well, what in hell are we going to do?”
“We’re going to take stock.”
“We’re what?”
“We’re going to find out the lay of the land before we go charging in with any harebrained plans.”
“None of my plans are harebrained,” she said, offended.
“Pretend to sell you,” he muttered under his breath.
“That’s a fine plan,” she protested. “It would work perfectly.”
“Until someone bought you.”
“You wouldn’t actually sell me.”
“No? So when they offered me money, I’d just say ‘Whoops, sorry, changed my mind’?”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, it sounds stupid when you say it like that, but of course that’s not how you’d do it. You wouldn’t get anywhere near that far. You’d see W
innie, and then the boys would snatch her and we’d all run away.”
“That’s a much better plan.” He sounded disgusted.
“Better than taking stock.”
“That’s not the plan. That’s the bit before we make the plan—the bit you seem to always leave out.”
“Because it wastes time.”
“A stitch in time,” he said, sounding as pious as Calla when she was acting all nunnish. Although at least he was looking feistier now, which was good to see. Arguing pepped him up no end. Which was fine with her; she was happy to argue if that’s what he wanted. It was kind of fun, in its way. Like playing catch.
“What do you know about stitching?” she carped, feeling zestier by the minute. “I bet you ain’t stitched a thing in your life. I bet a man like you has no end of women offering to stitch things for him. If anyone knows about stitching time, it’s me, and I’m telling you, taking stock ain’t stitching anything but trouble.”
They managed to keep tossing the ball back and forth for the rest of the day. By the time they camped, they were both in better spirits, although Black Horse and Spear Fisher were looking the worse for wear.
“You two are like a couple of bucks running head-to-head,” Black Horse grumbled in his heavily accented English. It turned out he knew more English than he’d let on; the more he relaxed around them, the more he spoke. Complained anyway. He certainly seemed to like complaining about her to Tom. But he quit complaining quick enough when she served him his dinner. “This is good,” he said. “How’d you manage this with salt beef?”
“I can manage anything,” Emma said, not without smugness. “Cooking is what I do best.” Outside of the bedroom anyway.
Tom ate his usual big helpings. She made sure to give him extra big ladlefuls, to combat his weight loss.
“Spear Fisher says his sisters were sold at Hueco del Diablo. He would like the chance to avenge them.” Black Horse ran a finger around the rim of his bowl, to capture the last traces of dinner. “But his people are farmers more than warriors, so it’s good you are with us.” His gaze was sly as it darted over to Tom. “No one can stand against you, can they, White Wolf?”
