“Oh? Don Francisco was married before?”
Ogilvee’s wheezy laugh turned into a coughing bout. “Don Francisco never was unmarried,” he said when he regained his breath. “When he married Dona Dominica, he already had a wife.”
Catherine’s brows rose. “A bigamist?”
“No, madam. Not in the territory, anyway. A Mormon!” He laughed and slapped his knee at the irony. “The old rascal was an elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints when he set eyes on the delectable widow. Can’t say the citizens of Tucson were too happy about the wedding. The men lost out on a chance for a wife who would delight the eye and a land grant that would fatten a bank account. And the women—well, you can imagine how indignant those old crows were at the thought of a man’s having two wives. Can’t ever help but wonder how the two women felt about sharing their husband.”
Catherine’s lips curled in a private smile as she joined in the old man’s curiosity.
The stage did not arrive in Tucson, or Stujukshon as the Papago Indians had called their village for hundreds of years, until after six in the morning, but there was just enough of dawn’s light for Catherine to realize that Tucson was not the paradise Don Francisco had depicted.
Hogs wallowed in the nearby Santa Cruz River. Behind the old presidio’s crumbling adobe walls were hidden brown one-story houses that looked like little mud boxes, cheerless but for the scarlet riastros of chilies that graced the adobe walls. Garbage littered the narrow dirt streets, and to her amazement a dead burro lay in the middle of the main winding thoroughfare—the Camino Real, the last lap of the Kings Highway from Mexico City. In the Plaza de la Mesilla she saw people sleeping out on the open ground.
“Are there no rooms to be had?” she asked the lawyer with growing concern as the coach halted before what her instincts told her had to be one of the West’s notorious saloons.
Ogilvee chuckled. “Nary a hostelry—unless one considers the outhouses the people seek on particularly cold nights. But most of the time, madam, it's too hot to sleep indoors even if Tucson did have a hotel. They call it a Tucson Bed—you lay on your stomach and cover yourself with your back!” He slapped his knee again, laughing at his drollery.
"I’m surprised people bother to sleep,” she said, eyeing the many brightly lit establishments that rimmed the plaza. From inside the coach she could hear the army mules braying in the corrals and mixing with the loud music and laughter coming from the cantina. Even at that time of the morning the cantina doors swung constantly with the entrance of miners anxious to spend their nuggets and hidalgos reckless with their Mexican 'dobe dollars.
When the Mexican town of Tucson came into the New Mexico Territory with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, it was known as the Old Pueblo, but to Catherine the plaza about the Meyer Street Saloon in no way resembled a sleepy little pueblo.
"Anyone going to meet you, madam?” Ogilvee asked.
“Yes,” she said, looking uncertainly past the doors into the smoke-congested room. "But I don’t think they expected me to arrive this late.”
He grunted. “I promised the guv’nor I’d see you through. Let’s see what we can do.”
He led her into the saloon, his hand protectively at her elbow. For a brief second she paused as her senses were assaulted—by the thick, acrid smoke of cigars and tallow candles, by the noisy men packing pistols at their hips, and by sights she had only dimly imagined in her musings.
Games of chance were in full swing with the tables of monte and faro crowded by tense throngs of gamblers. At a bar that she would have sworn was a block long men lounged in tipsy conversation. Beneath an immense gilded mirror a bartender served drinks to a pompous old madam and a stripling.
The surveyor general ushered her over to the bar. The strangeness of the place with so many men pressing about her made the pulse at the hollow of her throat beat a little quicker. The surveyor general had warned her that Tucson was a resort of horse thieves, murderers, and vagrant politicians. “Men who are no longer permitted to live in California or Texas find the Tucson climate congenial to their health, madam.” She was beginning to think that Ogilvee knew what he was talking about.
“I don’t suppose you have a place the lady could stay?” Ogilvee asked the bartender. “Just for a few hours?”
The squat Mexican rounded his eyes as he glanced at Catherine. Wordlessly he shook his head. “You are making the joke, senor? A lady—here?”
The aging madam whom Catherine had seen with the young cowboy turned to face her, and Catherine could see up close how the rouge clogged the woman’s wrinkles. “There’s the bath at the back, Emilio,” she told the bartender. Then to Catherine, “For a small fee that you pay the darky attendant, dearie, you can even rent a bathtub.”
Catherine could think of nothing she would like better than a bath and change of clothes before meeting with her prospective employer. She thanked the surveyor general for everything and, after her trunk was safely ensconced behind the bar, made her way down the saloon’s narrow, dark hallway with her carpetbag in hand. The farther she proceeded, the murkier and sleazier the hall became. And when a man staggered through the doorway of a room on the right, she jumped.
She literally had to force her footsteps past the man, who stood so tall his curly yellow-brown hair brushed the low ceiling. He lounged in the doorway now, one arm thrown casually around the flashing-eyed Spanish beauty in paint and finery. His free hand caressed the woman’s neck in a sensuous gesture that brought a blush to Catherine’s face.
She was well aware of the physical aspects of the male body through her work at the hospital, but of man’s baser needs she was totally ignorant. She quickened her steps around the amorous couple only to find a hand suddenly at her wrist. Her bowed head jerked up to encounter dark, slumberous eyes in a beard-stubbled, mustached face. The disgusting fumes of alcohol and a woman’s cheap cologne washed over her.
“Hey!” the slurred voice demanded, “You that spinster teacher I’m supposed to haul back to Cristo Rey?” The eyes blinked in an effort to focus, and she shrank as far away as the young man’s grip permitted. “Coward—-no, Howard, that’s it, isn’t it!” He executed a clumsy half-bow. “Be with you in a minute, Miss Coward—er. Miss Howard.”
“Please, there’s no hurry," she managed to reply and sped down the hall toward the bathroom with the couple’s intimate laughter echoing in her ears.
CHAPTER 3
“Sorry 'bout this morning, ma’am,” Lorenzo Davalos said, keeping his gaze trained on the greasewood-stunted terrain that was crisscrossed by wagon tracks.
Catherine lifted one dubious brow, wondering if the man was sorry for his drunken behavior before her that morning or the aftereffects of the carousing night. She could almost believe Don Francisco’s stepson was referring to the latter, for his bloodshot eyes looked out of a bronzed face made a temporary pasty-white. She had to smile despite her vexation with the young man. “It must be a magnificent hangover.”
The man, whom she estimated to be about five years younger than she, maybe twenty-one or so, winced as the buckboard he drove jarred over lava rock. “Murderous is more like it.”
After the two-day journey on the stage and no sleep, she decided she probably felt little better than her escort, certainly as stiff as the giant saguaro cacti that stood against the rim of mountains—the Santa Ritas, Dragoons, and Huachucas, names that made a beautiful litany.
She realized she no doubt looked every inch the spinsterish schoolmarm the young man had so ungallantly labeled her . . . the starched white linen waist and somber navy-blue alpaca jacket and skirt, the bland little bonnet that perched like some drab wren on her tightly bound hair.
However, Lorenzo Davalos looked none too appealing either. For a man of so few years, he appeared to already be squint-eyed and saddle-hardened. Muffled in a serape that petty much hid his long wiry figure, he hunched over the wagon’s lines, saying as little as possible. A sweat-stained sombrero with a snake
of silver bullion about its crown slouched low on his head, shading lazy eyes the color of molasses in a rough-cut face that resembled a relief map. An aristocratic nose—the one redeemable feature about the disreputable-looking man—jutted over the drooping mustache.
With his butter-colored hair that curled riotously beneath the sombrero it was almost impossible for her to accept that he was a Mexican of pure Spanish lineage—and heir to the much coveted Cristo Rey.
“Don’t have too much to recommend me to a proper Easterner, do I?” he said, flicking her an amused glance.
He had caught her studying him! She blushed and quickly looked away. “I suppose I am more accustomed to a different mode of people, but then that is why I came west.”
“Why?” he asked between teeth clamped on a noxious cigarette butt as his eyes squinted against the glare of the late afternoon sun. “Why did you come west?”
To find a husband? To live? One simply did not confess such preposterous reasons. “Why, I suppose like everyone else who comes to the territory, Mr. Davalos—for adventure.”
The young man’s laughter was short. His gaze now appraised her, swiftly and, she was sure, accurately. Once again color flooded her face, for she knew he had stripped her bare with those eyes that did not seem to miss a thing just as surely as if he had actually removed her clothing piece by piece. And he had no doubt found her lacking—certainly in comparison to the voluptuous woman whose charms he had most likely sampled the night before.
“You’ll find it different out here, all right, ma’am. Can’t say as how adventuresome you might call it. Lucy, my sister-in-law, finds the territory . . . ‘crude and boring,’ I think she puts it.”
Was he challenging her? “I’m quite flexible, Mr. Davalos. I assure you I will adjust.”
He only nodded his head, and she had the suspicion he doubted her. When he returned his attention to the mules, she felt like a pinned butterfly suddenly released—or moth, to be more appropriate, she thought dryly.
She tried to concentrate on the route they were taking, but there seemed to be no clearly defined road. The first and only landmark she noted after leaving Tucson was the abandoned Butterfield Overland Stage station at a place Lorenzo Davalos called Cienega Springs. The station’s adobe walls were in ruins and the exposed ceiling timbers had been charred and scorched by flaming arrows.
They stopped long enough at the springs to water the mules. Her escort knelt before the brackish-looking water and dipped his sombrero into it. Rising, he came to stand over her. “Want some?”
She saw the sparkle in the brown eyes and knew once again he was testing her mettle. She took the proffered dirt-stained sombrero. "Most certainly, Mr. Davalos.”
“Law,” he said, smiling wickedly. “Call me Law. Lawrence or Lorenzo is too much of a mouthful.”
“Law,” she said, trying the name of her lips. "I can’t say that I have ever heard of a more inappropriate name.”
A full, genuine laugh tumbled out of the raffish-looking young man. She felt him studying her as she sipped the water, which was surprisingly cool and sweet, from the sombrero’s crown. “You know, Miss Howard, you’re not so bad for a bluestocking,” he said in what was almost a compliment.
The respite over, she once again joined Law at the wagon, avoiding his proffered hand to help her mount. “As you will,” he chuckled.
He turned due south then, following the Cienega Wash through the lava-chopped Empire foothills. It was difficult for Catherine to imagine that somewhere in the craggy, barren black hills beyond lay the lush pastoral valley of Cristo Rey. But then she had learned that beneath the clear bright-white sky distances could be deceptive.
Just as deceptive as the tranquility of the late afternoon, for she had heard too many tales from Ogilvee of the fierce warriors, the Chiricahua Apaches, who terrorized the area. She found it inconceivable that citizens actually did walk around armed twenty- hour hours a day against the Indians. Yet slung low on Law’s hips were a brace of Navy Colts, and balanced against the wooden seat was a lethal-looking carbine rifle.
After a while she discovered that the quiet of the landscape was deceptive also. For with the man obviously disinclined to conversation, she began to pick up sounds peculiar to the area— the sighing of the heated breeze through the eroded bajadas and the rustle of the horse-high chaparral as a black chuckwalla lizard scampered beneath its thorny branches for shelter. And once there came the deadly rattle of the diamondback when the wagon’s mules passed too closely.
Then, almost abruptly it seemed, there was a dramatic shift in scenery, from bone-dry cholla wasteland to a sea of knee-high sacaton grass, brown and withered from the shortened winter days. Gradually, as the wash deepened, thickly wooded forests of willow and cottonwoods rose to border it. Mountains, the Whetstones on the left and the Santa Ritas on the right, marched closer now.
When the road suddenly emerged from a narrow shady pass, the sun poured down upon the far reaches of a gigantic basin undulating with hills and enclosed by a ring of lofty peaks. This circular basin with its grassy meadows and oak-clad slopes that concealed canyon after canyon contained the core of Cristo Rey’s fifty thousand acres.
After traveling across the raw creosote desert and then the jagged ugly lava hills for five hours—five hours of being impressed by nature’s dominance that made mere man seem inconsequential—Catherine was not prepared for her first sight of the Stronghold, nor was she ever able to forget it.
The fortress stood alone in the great basin, competing against the mountains for magnificence. Even at that distance the Stronghold was enormous. Surrounded by walls that bastioned a grassy rise, the house itself, an adobe built in the flat-roof Mexican territorial style, looked impregnable. Atop the roof tiny figures paced a parapet—guards, she later learned they were.
Clustered about the great house, like petals about a stem, were the corrals and outbuildings. Outside the big fortress walls a rancheria of adobe huts nestled among feathery tamarisk and black locusts that fanned out from the Cienega—from Catherine’s viewpoint, a thin blue thread that laced the grassy valley.
“After the disappointment of Tucson, I was half dreading the sight of Cristo Rey,” she said slowly. “But your stepfather’s description hasn’t disappointed me.”
“Cristo Rey isn’t the largest land grant in the territory,” Law answered, the reins slack in his hands as he paused to let Catherine survey the view. “But it’s the richest. It’s watered by two great rivers, the San Pedro and the Santa Cruz. And its soil is veined with gold and silver.”
She looked up into the young man’s face that was shadowed by the hat brim. “It sounds as if you love it—Cristo Rey.”
“No, ma’am. I leave that to my stepbrother. I just have great respect for the land.”
He flicked the reins, and the mules began the gradual, twisting descent down into the basin, passing herds of black-horned cattle—remnants, he explained to her, of the herds brought up from Mexico by the Jesuit missionary Father Kino. “But Sherrod’s trying to persuade the old man to bring in the white-faced Herefords.”
“Sherrod?”
“My stepbrother.”
Yes, now she recalled name.
“It’s his children you’ll be tutoring.”
“Oh, then you don’t have any?”
“Not that I am aware of, ma’am, seeing how I’m not hitched and all.” Had one comer of his mouth not tilted in a crooked smile, she would never have known he was toying with her. “We’re two of a kind, aren’t we, ma'am?”
“Misfits, Mr. Davalos?” she retorted, smiling.
“Law,” he reminded her.
The clanging of a bell reached them, and he informed her that the lookouts posted had marked their arrival. They passed orchards of pomegranate and peach trees now. “Incredible,” she murmured. “After the desert, all the vegetation seems a mirage.”
“It’s real enough. Sherrod’s peons put in too much backbreaking labor digging the acequias
—irrigation ditches,” he translated in a deep lazy drawl that she decided was most pleasant and so did not bother to correct his misconception that she knew no Spanish.
As the wagon bumped down the rutted road through the rancheria, terra-cotta children halted their play in the dirt before curtained doorways and scrawny chickens scurried from the wagon’s wheels. A leather-aproned Mexican stepped out of the smithy, and a wizened brown woman looked up from her washboard to watch the wagon’s progress. The men in the fields who carried rifles slung on their plow handles halted their work as the wagon passed by.
Law drove the mules between the fortress’s two great wooden doors, and Catherine inspected the place where she would live for a year. The dusty yard was bustling with men practicing with firearms – Indian drills. Law told her – and vaqueros working about the nearer of several adobe corrals.
Up close the adobe building was even more formidable, and the rifle-toting guards circling the roofs perimeter intensified the imagery of a bastion. Near the large, hand-carved door a cast-iron bell hung from a wooden frame. Unpainted, the house stood alone with no veranda, no large windows to adorn it—unless the small wood-spindled apertures could be counted as such. Yet there was about the great house, she decided, an aura of strength. It imparted the illusion of having triumphed over the elements, over man and nature.
Could it triumph over the ravages of time and loneliness?
CHAPTER 4
At the same time a Mexican youth ran forward to take the reins Law tossed him, a woman appeared in the doorway of the house, then turned back to call out to someone inside. “Lucy,” Law informed Catherine. “She’s been anxious to talk with a real Easterner. You’ll meet the rest of the clan soon enough.”
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