“Shut up, captive,” he snapped, reaching over and grabbing the roan’s reins looped over her saddle horn. To try to run now would mean her death.
It was too late for anything as the war party thundered up, surrounding them.
Maverick raised his hand in a traditional gesture of greeting and spoke in Comanche. “I am much relieved to see you.” He leaned on the saddle horn easily, smiling even though his lips seemed too tense to bend into that curve. “I need a place to rest until I continue toward the camp of the Quahadis.”
The warriors visibly relaxed as they heard the familiar sound of their own language. “What band are you? Where do you go? Who is this white woman?”
Maverick looked them over, almost sighing with relief when he realized he knew none of them. There was even one Kiowa and a Cheyenne riding with the party.
“I am Pecos,” he lied glibly, “brother to the great Quanah. He has loaned me his fine horse for my raid, and we are supposed to meet to the west.”
Now he faced smiles, nodding heads. “Ah, yes, the great Quanah! We heard about the horse!”
The braves laughed and joked with Maverick and each other. All seemed to know the daring tale of the bold young half-breed stealing “Bad Hand” Mackenzie’s favorite pacer.
The ugly leader had a hooked nose and red war stripes painted across his dark face. His pinto mustang was also painted for war. “I am Wind Runner and we welcome you, Pecos! I see you wear a Tejanos’ pistol.” He looked Cayenne up and down. “The Texan must have fought hard to keep her silence since she is indeed a prize!”
Maverick shrugged. “I killed him. Do you not see his hair hanging from my bridle? I took her on that raid and got separated from the others. The flame-haired one is a gift for my big brother.”
The Comanche laughed. “Since it is a custom of our people to let brothers share each other’s women, have you enjoyed her?”
For a moment, he did not think he would be able to answer because of the horrible images that the man’s words brought to his mind. He was a small, helpless boy again, covering his ears to her weeping while his dead father’s four brothers enjoyed Annie. “Of course! Would I give my brother a gift I had not checked for quality?”
The men laughed and made rude jokes. Now the leader motioned, “Come with us. Many of our people along with the Cheyenne and some of the Kiowa are gathered in the great canyon a few miles ride to the south.”
Palo Duro canyon, that great chasm on the west Texas plains that white men didn’t seem to know existed. It should have occurred to Maverick that the warring Indians would gather there. It was also a good place to meet the Comancheros who brought the guns.
He nodded assent. They all wheeled their ponies and Maverick fell in beside the war party leader, visiting easily in the tongue he had not spoken in the ten years since he had escaped the Comanche as a boy of fourteen. He didn’t look back at the trussed Cayenne while he held onto the roan’s reins. To show any concern for her welfare might give the lie away.
Maverick looked at Wind Runner, then back at the Kiowa with his traditional hair style—braided but on the right side, cut short and hanging about the right ear. “The Kiowa ride with us now? I thought they were still discussing whether to take the peace trail.”
The other made a noise of contempt. “You know the Kiowas! They talk a subject to death in council before they make a move, not like the Comanche who love to take action!”
Maverick grunted in agreement. “They have finished this season’s sun dance then?” Any Indian would know the Kiowas were too superstitious to start any action until they had completed the strong medicine of the yearly sun dance.
“Yes, a few days ago. Were you there for our people’s own first sun dance?”
Maverick snorted in disdain as they rode forward. He wanted to look back and give Cayenne some gesture of reassurance, knowing how frightened she must be, but he dared not. “Since when do Comanche copy the Kiowa and Cheyenne?”
Wind Runner shook his head. “The Nerm have become as frightened children, not knowing which way to turn now that all our medicine seems bad. We thought we would try the magic of that ceremony. The Cheyenne have joined this war and the Kiowa force is growing every day. Soon there will be thousands of us gathering in and we’ll spread out, drive all the white men from our buffalo plains. Then things will be as they were before.”
“Nothing can be as it was before,” Maverick answered. “Somehow we must adjust to the changes or be destroyed.”
The other warrior thought about it a minute as they rode through the cool night in silence. “No doubt you are right, but we do not know how to change so we must fight to keep things as they always were. No man worthy of the name stands by without taking action while his children starve. That is why the Kiowa have finally come.”
“Oh?”
Wind Runner nodded. “They were promised food and supplies, but the wagons never arrived. More white men’s lies!”
Maverick imagined Pat Hennessy tied upside down to his wagon wheel, screaming his life away while he was tortured. Unwittingly, the Cheyenne had taken the action that had finally brought the reluctant Kiowa into the plains war. “The Cheyennes to our north are coming to join us?”
“Yes. Many of their war parties are already raiding up through that area the whites call Kansas.” He snorted in disgust. “They give it a name as if it belonged to them! The buffalo plains belong to us and we shall retake them! Isa-tai has foretold it! Many of the warriors of our band, led by Little Fox, are even now at that place the white hunters gather to buy supplies, and when that is destroyed, we will sweep out across the plains like a prairie fire of death!”
Adobe Walls, Maverick thought, but he said nothing. He could not reveal his presence at that place by telling that the Indians had lost that fight.
It took them the rest of the night and all the next day to ride to the Palo Duro. During that time, he was forced to treat Cayenne as any warrior might treat a captive, so as not to arouse suspicion. He handled her roughly, slapped her when she tried to object, fed her and watered her last of all at the small muddy sinkholes they came to, even after the horses had drunk. Her wide, accusing eyes studied him with such a betrayed expression that he felt shame and could not look at her. He dare not treat her better, show her any consideration. She would be safer anyway if she thought he had gone back over to his father’s people, if she did not try to talk to him.
It was evening, with the sky all mauve and pink and purple as they rode to the bluff overlooking the giant Palo Duro. The colorful canyon was more than a hundred miles long and eight hundred feet deep in places, Maverick remembered. The Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River had cut through the soft soil to gorge it out and the river still twisted a crooked path through the bottom like a long snake writhing in its death throes. Probably no white man even knew it existed as a haven for the Indians here in the Texas Panhandle, Maverick thought.
Below the war party stood hundreds of tepees along the small stream. As Maverick looked down, he saw the orderly circle of the Cheyenne lodges among the sagebrush, the stunted, twisted junipers that had given the canyon its name. Palo Duro. Hard Wood, the Spanish had called it. The Kiowa tepees stood strung out along the water since that tribe only circled its lodges during the ceremony of the Sun Dance. People moved like ants below him. From the rim, he saw at least a thousand Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, maybe a few Arapahoe and renegade Kiowa-Apache gathered around campfires. Hundreds of horses munched contentedly on the rich grass.
Talk about riding into a hornet’s nest, Maverick thought with alarm. He grunted, “The canyon is a good place for the tribes to gather during this war. The white men will never find it!”
The hook-nosed one nodded in satisfaction. “The Comanchero, old Pedro, whom we have dealt with for years, is due in a few weeks to bring more guns and powder. We have been hitting the settlements for booty to pay for weapons.” He glanced back at the silent, weary Cayenne. “If your brother has no need
of this gift,” he said, “no doubt the fire-haired woman would bring much gold if sold for the Comancheros’ pleasure or some Mexican whorehouse below the border. We have often done that in the past.”
Maverick struggled to hold his temper, wanting to knock the brave from his paint horse for his suggestion. The thought of any man even caressing her arm, touching her face, almost drove him to a frenzy, but he must control his fury. “Maybe you are right,” he shrugged as if bored. “If the great Quanah doesn’t want her when I finally meet him out at the Staked Plains, I will try to get a high price for her from the Comancheros.”
The only way into the canyon from where they looked over the rim was a narrow, twisting path wide enough for only one horse at a time. The war party took it single file.
Immediately, as the war party rode through the Comanche camp toward the big council fire, they collected a crowd of curious Indians who followed them to the big center council fire.
Maverick sat his big horse with the arrogant manner expected of a man of important family. “I am Pecos, brother to the great Quanah who leads this new uprising,” he said, only glad that he saw none of his own clan among the faces. If his clan were here, they were camped at the far end of the canyon.
Important men of the tribe came out of their tepees as the word spread through the camp. Dogs barked and children laughed and played as the men came out to greet the returning war party. They surrounded Maverick, nodding in welcome. “Come sit. Eat. We know you must be weary.”
Maverick dismounted. “I stay but a little while,” he announced grandly. “I became separated from my group on a raid. I must meet the Quahadis far to the west, give my brother this gift.” He went around, jerked Cayenne from her horse by her long hair, and threw her down in the dirt by the fire.
The women laughed in delight, crowding around to stare and point at the captive.
Cayenne stumbled to her feet, her eyes glaring with defiance. They don’t call me Cayenne for nothing, Maverick remembered, enjoying her show of fire and spirit. If he could have a woman of his own, there was none more suited to him than this one. The children she would produce would do any man proud. He thought suddenly of her sire, admiring Joe McBride a little in spite of himself. Blood will tell, Texans always said, and Cayenne had to get that brave pride from somewhere.
One fat old squaw pushed forward, looking Cayenne over critically. “Yes, this is a nice gift.” She nodded, turning toward the other Comanche women who crowded around curiously. “I like to see men use their passion on captives; certainly the white men have treated ours badly enough!”
The other women nodded soberly at the old squaw’s remarks. Many of them had lost loved ones to the white man’s bullets and the old Comanche was obviously an honored woman of some importance. “My own daughter has been raped and killed by the buffalo hunters.” Her sad expression changed to one of hatred as she glared at the helpless Cayenne who stood with her hands still tied behind her. “My son grieves much over his beloved sister’s death and hunts the white men now as relentlessly as we might kill the great panther.”
The old squaw reached out suddenly and caught the front of Cayenne’s shirt, ripping it to the waist so that her beautiful, rounded breasts were visible to everyone.
Maverick had to control himself to keep from striking the old woman for her insolence. But Cayenne shook her hair back, her chin high with defiance, ignoring the sudden hungry looks of the men in the crowd.
Maverick looked around at the men eyeing her fine, soft breasts, her pink nipples. He must not appear too possessive, too jealous of her. “Enough!” He made a signal of dismissal to the old woman. “You must not bruise or harm the girl in any way so that she is not a suitable gift to the great chief.”
The woman nodded grudgingly, admitting the truth of his statement. “Perhaps the great chief will not want her, will turn her over to the women to torture. I could take that defiance out of her.”
Maverick glanced at the angry Cayenne. The only way anyone could break that feisty, proud little Texan would be to kill her, he thought with great admiration, and she’d go down rebellious and fighting. Rebel, he thought. Sweet little Rebel.
Wind Runner pressed forward. “Hush, old woman. Even your son, Little Fox, would see the waste in that! Ask him when he rides into our camp if it is not so. If Quanah doesn’t want her, his brother proposes to trade her to the Comancheros. With her beauty, we could get much gunpowder and weapons in exchange.”
There was a murmur of agreement through the crowd and one of the old chiefs came forward. “You must be tired, Pecos. We are honored to have the brother of Quanah in our camps. Later, we will have welcoming ceremonies and feasting.”
“I am very weary,” Maverick nodded. “Tomorrow, I would enjoy visiting, hearing how the uprising goes from this quarter, but tonight I need only food and a blanket.”
Wind Runner laughed. “We’ll see you are given a fine tepee, and of course, since your brother is not here, you can enjoy his woman as is the custom.”
His words made Maverick flinch, remembering . . .
The other peered at him anxiously. “Is Pecos ill?”
Maverick recovered himself from the agony of memories. “I am tired, as I said. Show me this tepee where I may rest.”
He grabbed Cayenne roughly by the shoulder, propelling the bound, half-naked girl ahead of him as the group followed curiously. When she stumbled and fell, he forced himself not to sweep her up in his arms. Instead, he put his moccasin on the back of her neck, pushing her face down into the dirt while the others laughed.
“Humiliation is a lesson captives are forced to learn,” he said, remembering his Annie. But he hid his bitter anger as he reached down and jerked Cayenne roughly to her feet.
She looked at him as if he had betrayed her, and she said, “Maverick, why—?”
He hit her then, clipping her across the face so as to stop her words. It broke his heart to do it, but if she gave his disguise away, they would both end up being roasted over a slow fire and all the men would rape her and use her cruelly before they tortured her to death.
Cayenne’s head snapped back and she stumbled from the force of his blow. When she looked at him again, blood ran from the corner of her soft, sweet mouth and a terrible fire of fury blazed in the bright green eyes.
Maverick yawned casually to the others. “I think I must break this captive as we do a wild mustang, so she’ll be a dutiful slave for my brother’s needs.”
The fat old squaw laughed with delight, smiling with admiration. “Even though you carry white blood, Pecos, you are a true Comanche at heart.”
That he could never be, Maverick thought, remembering Annie. His mother had extracted her own vengeance on Blood Arrow’s people by talking to her son endlessly about the white civilization she hoped someday would reclaim him. In his heart, in his soul, he was as white as Annie’s Kentucky ancestors.
He grabbed Cayenne, roughly pushing her ahead of him as they walked to the fine tepee on the edge of the settlement. Wind Runner pulled back the flap, bowing Maverick inside. “This is my very own which I offer Pecos.”
Maverick thanked him in Comanche, pushed Cayenne inside, and followed her. But even as he started to breathe a sigh of relief, the warrior followed him in, pointing out the nice features of the tepee, the small fire of scented mesquite crackling in the center. Because the man watched him, he threw Cayenne down on the ground, tying her hands above her head to one of the tepee poles. She lay there on her back, her fine globular breasts visible in the torn shirt.
“Maverick, why—?”
He put his moccasin across her mouth. “Shut up, slave!” he ordered. “It will do you no good to call for some white man who is dead in our raid!”
Wind Runner grunted with satisfaction. “She needs to be humiliated, raped into submission if she is to bear many sons for the great Quanah.” He looked at Maverick quizzically.
This was a test, Maverick thought, wondering if the brave suspected he
was white in his heart after all.
“You are right, Wind Runner. She needs to be humiliated, taught her place so she will be broken in spirit, serve a warrior’s needs without fighting, without struggling.” As my poor mother did, he thought.
He jerked off his loincloth and stood looking down at her. The first flicker of fear showed in her eyes, thinking she had been betrayed by a man she loved; a man she trusted with her life. Maverick fell on her, handling her fine breasts roughly. When she tried to protest, he hit her across the mouth, then kissed her to hush her, tasting her blood as he rammed his tongue between her lips.
While the other warrior watched, Maverick raped her brutally, bruising her soft white thighs as he took her, ramming into her velvet softness that any other time would have been wet with desire for him. But she was dry with fear and he forced himself inside her with difficulty, as a stallion takes an inexperienced filly.
I’m sorry, baby, he thought. I must do this to you! I don’t dare treat you well, rouse any suspicions. Later he would beg her pardon, fall on his knees asking forgiveness for hurting her, humiliating her. But now it was only important that he save both their lives.
When he finished raping her, he wiped himself off on her torn shirt with a gesture of contempt, leaving her lying silent and frightened, staring up at him with her hands still tied above her head.
The other man stroked his own erection. “Would I had a brother with a woman like that to share!” He went to the tepee opening and turned. “You have food and a soft white woman to enjoy through this long night. Tomorrow, we will gather around the fires, discuss the war plans with the old chiefs. We are eager to hear of the great Quanah’s plans, what he intends to do next!”
Maverick nodded curtly. “Of course, tomorrow,” he said in Comanche. That gave him all night to think of some logical words the Comanche might believe. At that time, his and Cayenne’s lives would be on the line again. But he’d worry about that later.
Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) Page 31
