Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family)

by Georgina Gentry

  “That doesn’t concern you now, does it?” Her anger had given way to a sense of relief that he rode by her side. But she was too proud to let him know how frightened, how uncertain she’d been.

  “Cayenne, I’ve never had to answer to any woman and I’m not about to start now!”

  “I didn’t ask for an explanation,” she said frostily. “After all, I was raised on a ranch; I know a stallion will mount any eager mare that sidles up to him.”

  “Dammit, I just took a bath in her tub.”

  She didn’t answer, keeping her eyes on the flat prairie ahead of her.

  “Are we going to ride clear to Texas with you not speaking to me?”

  “You don’t have to ride to Texas. I didn’t ask you to come along. You’re sticking to me like a burr in a pony mane.”

  “And I intend to,” he answered grimly. “I told you I’d get you home. After all, it cost you enough!”

  She felt the blood rise to her face. “No gentleman would bring that up.”

  “No lady would seduce a man in exchange for his accompanying her.”

  “Seduce? Seduce?” She looked at him, unable to keep the anger from her voice. “I’d call it rape, you—you—!” She tried to think of some terrible insult. “You Yankee, you!”

  “I think it’s going to be a long trip,” he said coldly, and he didn’t smile.

  Cayenne felt too much fury to say anything else. She had a feeling if it went much further, she would take her quirt to the stony-faced man, and if she did, there’d be hell to pay. And yet, she felt relief that he’d shown up. She glanced over at him, his strong hands on the reins, the big Colt he wore. They rode southwest through the heat for at least two hours, neither saying anything.

  It was Maverick who finally broke the silence. “Haven’t you got a hat?” he snapped. “With that sheer fabric, those short sleeves, you’re gonna get sunburned.”

  “That’s hardly your concern, cowboy.”

  They rode for another hour in silence.

  Finally Maverick asked peevishly, “Are we going all the way to Texas without your saying a word to me?”

  “Probably,” she answered coolly.

  “Well then, you ornery little vixen, I can be as stubborn as you are!” His voice trailed off in sullen silence.

  That’s what you think, she thought, but she said nothing.

  So they rode through the hot afternoon. Except for an occasional rabbit and the buzzards swooping down to feast off the rank buffalo carcasses, they saw no movement. But once when they stopped to rest the horses, Maverick examined the ground, looking at tracks.

  “Unshod ponies,” he muttered, and said no more.

  Cayenne wet her handkerchief from her canteen, dabbing her face and her pony’s muzzle. The damp cloth felt cold against her sunburned face and she winced.

  “Here, baby, take my hat.” He held it out to her.

  She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of realizing how sunburned she was. “No thanks. I’m just fine, really”

  “Suit yourself, Cee Cee,” he shrugged. “Remember, I offered—

  “Don’t put yourself out on my account,” she snapped. Had he always seemed so arrogant, so confident? And to think she’d been stupid enough to let this Yankee-lovin’ range bum charm her out of her virginity. She gritted her teeth with grim satisfaction. She didn’t even feel guilty that Bill Slade and his men would gun Maverick down when he finally reached the Lazy M.

  She glared at him as they mounted up. “If the Rangers hadn’t been broken up, I’d have asked them for help instead of you.”

  Maverick grinned. “Oh, hasn’t someone told you? In the last several months, Governor Coke has managed to throw out the carpetbagger government. First thing he did in April was reactivate the Texas Rangers.

  She’d outwitted herself. “How was I to know that? I’ve been in Kansas since late March.”

  “What kind of help?”

  She stuttered, unused to lying. “Why—why, help getting home, that’s all.” She hadn’t needed the half breed in her plans after all, Cayenne thought grimly as they struck out southwest again. She could have called on the Rangers to help. No, she couldn’t either, she remembered. If it had been that simple, the letter wouldn’t have come to her. Papa could have called in the Rangers himself. Just what hold did Slade have on the gentle preacher? It was too bad the tiny community of McBride didn’t even have a sheriff. The quiet, religious people had never needed one before. But the letter hinted something might be going to happen, maybe in a few weeks. What were Slade and his men up to and why was Papa so hesitant to call in the authorities?

  Cayenne looked over at the grim half-breed riding beside her. How ironic it was she’d had to ask a Comanche for help when it was the Comanche who’d tortured her gentle papa. Joe McBride was not only a hero but much loved in the community for what had happened eight months ago.

  Damned Comanche! She swallowed hard, looking over at the man who rode beside her. If he and Papa weren’t a contrast! Maverick believed in “an eye for an eye” while her kindly, religious father preached “vengeance is mine says the Lord” and about turning the other cheek. Papa had been the man brave enough to carry the ransom out to that war party when they took some of the women and children hostage at a church picnic. They’d turned the captives loose but kept Papa to torture. Only the arrival of that chief, Quanah Parker, at the last minute had kept the war party from killing him.

  Maverick held up his hand to halt. “There’s something on the horizon ahead, not sure what.”

  Cayenne stood in her stirrups, shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun. “Where? I don’t see anything. You must have eyes like a hawk.”

  He smiled wryly. “Among the Comanche, if you don’t keep all your senses alert, you don’t live to grow up. I’ll ride out, see what it is. Stay here, Cee Cee.”

  She started to protest that he was not the ramrod here, that she would not be ordered around by him, but then decided against it. Maverick seemed as much at home on these hostile plains as any big lobo wolf. He rode forward until he was only a small figure on the great, barren horizon with the sun setting orange and gold behind him. She almost seemed to see a silver-gray lobo loping silently through the tall grass. A lobo mates for life. The fact came to her and she was annoyed with herself for the thought.

  The wind picked up, whining a little, and she remembered how many times she’d heard the lonely call of a solitary lobo. Suppose he rode off and left her? Cayenne felt both isolated and alone, with only the sound of the constant wind ruffling the dry grass as she watched him disappear over the horizon.

  She almost called out to him, then remembered how keen an Indian’s senses were, how her call might carry on the wind if there were a war party anywhere nearby. Cayenne ran the tip of her tongue over her dusty lips, feeling the sting of perspiration on her sunburned face. The wind shifted and she smelled the stink of dead buffalo, hundreds of them. No wonder the plains tribes had taken the warpath. She almost cried out with relief when she saw Maverick suddenly reappear on the horizon, waving her forward.

  Cayenne loped the mare through the grass to where Maverick sat his mount, staring up at some kind of crude platform built into the air. A dead paint horse lay beneath the platform, crude symbols and red handprints painted on its shoulders and flanks.

  She frowned, staring upward. “What in God’s name is that? What happened to that horse?”

  Dust Devil whinnied, stamping his feet, ears forward inquiringly. Maverick patted the gray’s neck. “Whoa, boy, take it easy.” He looked up at the platform, over at Cayenne. “It’s a Cheyenne burial—a chief, judging from the finery and the quality of the horse. I saw unshod tracks early this afternoon.”

  There was something eerie about the scene, she thought, although she didn’t believe in ghosts, in spirits. But still there was something about the black silhouette against the orange and pink sunset that made her nervous. “How do you know he’s Cheyenne?”

&
nbsp; Maverick dismounted, pointing to the arrow embedded in the dead pony. “See the striped feathers? Cheyenne favor those. Some say that’s why the Cheyenne are called the ’striped people’ in sign language.” Maverick made a gesture of drawing his right forefinger across his left. “Besides, Comanche and Kiowa bury their dead in the ground.”

  “Why would they kill a fine horse like that?” she asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does to an Indian,” Maverick said flatly, his dark face betraying no emotion. “I’d say the warrior died in battle, needed his best pony to carry him up the Milky Way, the road to heaven the Cheyenne call Ekutsihimmiyo, the Hanging Road to the Sky.”

  “What battle?” None of this made any sense to her and she was exhausted and hungry.

  Maverick looked off at the horizon and it was a long time before he answered. “I think somewhere out there, we’re gonna find the ruins of a ranch and whatever’s left of the poor devils who lived there. God help them!”

  The grim images his words brought to mind made her shiver a little, remembering what the Indians had done to Papa. “How do you know that?” she demanded, shifting her weight in the saddle. “Maybe the settlers whipped the Indians, ran them off.”

  Maverick shook his head, remounting. “If they’d lost, if they were being chased, the war party wouldn’t have taken the time to go clear to the nearest creek for tree limbs to build this platform, do this elaborate ceremony. They would have just left him where he fell. The Cheyenne think it no shame to leave a fallen man where he’s died in battle.”

  Something about the scorn of his tone, the way his lip curled, made her ask without thinking, “The Comanche don’t leave their dead?”

  “No,” Maverick said. “I’ve seen Comanche warriors killed trying to go back to retrieve the bodies of the fallen.”

  Her curiosity got the better of her and she almost asked, but the hardness of his eyes, the grim set of his jaw discouraged her.

  “Remember that, Reb,” he said softly as they rode toward the sunset. “If you’re ever attacked by Comanches, it’s to your advantage to try to pick them off when they come riding back in for their dead.”

  His life among the Indians must hold terrible memories, she thought, still angry with him yet sympathetic to the sadness of his face. He reached up to touch the jagged white scar on his cheek and she wondered about it, about him. Such a strange, tortured man, she thought, watching his face, wondering what bedeviled him. Maverick Durango might have been adopted, raised by the Durangos, but he was little more than a savage himself. No white man would hang a trophy scalp from his bridle or mount a horse from the right side like an Indian.

  Dusk fell all lavender and purple, golden around the edges. Somewhere a quail called: Bob white! Bob, bob, white! Soon the sun would set and the wild life would come out in the cool of the darkness.

  Maverick glanced over at her. “We need to find a place to bed down.”

  She thought about the war party. “Will the Indians be roaming around after dark, maybe find us?”

  He shook his head. “Most Indians don’t raid at night, don’t like the idea of fighting in the darkness—except the Comanche. They love raiding beneath a full moon.”

  She remembered then. In Texas, a full moon wasn’t called a “harvest” moon, it was known as a “Comanche moon” because that tribe so often spread death and destruction on moonlit nights.

  It was dark before they saw the ranch with its few outbuildings, the house built of cut sod. They reined up at a distance.

  “Stay here,” Maverick ordered. “I’ll ride in alone.”

  “I don’t want to stay out here by myself,” she protested.

  He tipped his hat back and she saw the grimness of his face in the light of the rising moon. “Do as I tell you, Cayenne,” he commanded, and she knew why he was the leader of the trail drive. His confident, masculine tone indicated a capable man; a man who expected to lead a herd while the more docile followed. A stallion, she thought suddenly. He’s not a lobo, he’s a stallion.

  He gestured toward the ranch. “If it’s okay, I’ll signal. If you don’t hear me whistle in a few minutes, get the hell out of here and ride as hard and as fast as you can. Forget the packhorse.”

  “And leave you behind?” she protested.

  Maverick hesitated. “Baby,” he said finally, “if I’m riding into an ambush, there’s not anything you could do to help me anyway.”

  “I could, too,” she protested, gesturing toward her saddle gun. “My papa’s the best rifle shot in west Texas and he taught me!”

  “Do as I tell you!” he said sharply. “You got a pistol?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “Papa said handguns were for murder, not for hunting meat.”

  Maverick reached back and got a Colt from his saddlebags. “Here’s my extra.” He leaned over to put it in her hands.

  She looked down at it, puzzled. “I could pick off more of them with a rifle. . . ”

  “Cayenne,” he hesitated. “The pistol’s for you, in case—” His voice trailed off and she suddenly realized with horror what he hinted at.

  “You don’t mean—?”

  “Baby,” he said, and his voice was as grim as his face, “if I don’t get back, don’t let them take you alive. You hear me? If you’d ever seen the results of Indian torture—”

  “I’ve seen,” she closed her eyes, thinking of Papa’s scars, his poor hands and feet.

  “Stay alert,” he whispered, “and, baby, if I don’t get back—” He hesitated, and for a split second she thought he would reach across to touch her face with his uplifted hand. Then he frowned, made a gesture of dismissal, and turned to ride into the ranch yard at a walk.

  He disappeared into the darkness like the shadow of a ghostly pale horse. He was swallowed up by the black night like a spectre, a phantom.

  She waited obediently, the pistol cold and heavy in her hand. Could she use it on herself if there were no escape? She remembered Papa’s ordeal by fire and winced. Yes, she would rather do so than endure that agony. She wasn’t as brave, as religious as Joe McBride.

  Each slow second was ticked off by the pounding of her heart as she waited, tense and ready to flee. Clouds drifted across the moon and the flat, shadowy landscape seemed suddenly as black as the path to hell. Perspiration gathered in little beads on her palms and the roof of her mouth went so dry she couldn’t swallow. For a long moment, she thought she smelled blood on the wind blowing from the dark shadows of the buildings.

  Taking a deep breath, she wondered if fear and terror had their own smells? Of course they did, she thought. They smelled like cold sweat and warm blood.

  How long was she supposed to stay out here before she made a decision about what to do? He hadn’t told her that, not knowing what might be lying in wait for him in the sinister shadows of the ranch. Should she turn and ride back to Wichita? Cayenne imagined him dead or dying somewhere among the outbuildings of the ranch, savages even now sneaking up on her. The pack pony stamped his feet and she jumped at the sound.

  What should she do? Maybe he’d just forgotten to signal her or found something so terrible he’d forgotten all about her.

  He’d told her to wait but she couldn’t sit out here forever. She had to know what was happening. Cayenne urged the red roan forward, leading the packhorse. She rode at a walk into the ranch house yard. She thought she heard a sound and froze like a frightened baby deer, too afraid to move or even run. Another thought came to her. Suppose the warriors had grabbed him, killed him, or were holding a knife to his throat at this very moment while they watched her ride into the ranch?

  What should she do?

  The whistle floated on the still air like a ghostly refrain, very soft and low:

  . . . Maxwell’s braes are bonnie, where early falls the drew . . .

  She whistled back, almost faint with relief.

  . . . and that’s where Annie Laurie gave me her promise true . . .

  Maveric
k stepped around the corner of the barn, gesturing in the moonlight. Never had she been so glad to see anyone. She forgot about her anger, forgot everything but how big and strong and protective he looked.

  Quickly she slid from the roan and ran into his arms. “Oh, I’m glad to see you! They haven’t been here after all?”

  He held her very close, brushed the hair out of her eyes. “They’ve been here,” his voice was flat, devoid of emotion. “Don’t ask, baby,” he said. “Don’t ask.”

  A thousand questions came to her mind, but for the moment she was content to obey him, to seek the safety of his powerful embrace.

  “Cee Cee,” he said against her hair, “I’ve checked things out. It was that Cheyenne war party, all right. We’d better stay right here, go to ground like quail do when there’s danger. If we ride blindly into the dark, we might stumble right into their camp. See if you can rustle up some grub for us but don’t light a fire or any lamps.” He held her out at arm’s length.

  “What are you going to do?” She peered anxiously up at the outline of his rugged face.

  “Feed three tired horses if the warriors didn’t take the grain or burn it, put them out of sight in the barn.”

  “Are you sure we wouldn’t be better off to keep riding under cover of darkness?”

  He shook his head. “We’re both tired and the horses are, too. Besides, at daylight we’ve got to bury—”

  She waited for him to go on but he didn’t. Tears came to her eyes. “Oh, Maverick, how awful! Are there children?”

  “No, just a couple of cowhands. Probably two immigrants hoping to make a new life for themselves in the west, then go back east for wives.” His voice sounded angry. “Poor devils probably never shot a single buffalo, but because of the hunters, these two will never see another sunrise.”

  She looked up at him. “I used to think it was so simple, so black and white. I hated the Indians for their raiding and killing. ..”

  “The Indians are just fighting to stay alive,” Maverick said grimly. “But that doesn’t keep me from hating the Comanche. . . . ”