He sprang lithely to his feet, and for a fearful moment she thought he meant to leave her there at the rancho. But he only took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Well, if you’re set on this adventuring, you might as well do it in style.”
She trailed behind him as he strode across the courtyard. Somewhere a cock crowed. She picked her way among the recumbent men who stirred with the first shafts of sunlight. A mangy dog nipped at her heels, and she hurried to catch up with Law, who leaned now against an adobe corral where a herd of maybe fifteen horses pranced and snorted in the brisk morning air, their breath steaming. “I'm buying them from Don Ynigo for a remuda—replacement horses for the expedition. Pick yourself one."
She grinned up into the rawhide countenance. “If you think I'm going to say demurely that nice women don’t accept gifts, you’re wrong." She feigned a theatrical grimace. "One more day riding in the cramped wagon, and I think I would almost settle for walking."
"Then make your choice, Cate." He chuckled and added, "But don’t consider this gesture that of a courting man.”
She settled on a steely blue mustang stud, a descendant of the Arab-Barb horses bred in Spain and brought into the Southwest by Coronado’s conquistadores in 1540. It was a superbly built steed with a deep broad chest, small ears, and a silver mane and tail.
The mustang, Sonora (Catherine thought the name most appropriate for the animal's unfettered spirit), was indeed a big improvement over Loco’s wagon. Catherine cantered along now in front of the wagons, thereby escaping much of the dust thrown up, but not too far ahead to mingle with the advance guard of soldiers. With the threat of Slovel eradicated, she was able to relax and enjoy herself. And for some reason, she could not pinpoint why, she was content—no, even happy—for the first time in what seemed like years.
Perhaps it was the adventurer in her. But she felt so alive—the air there, unpolluted by civilization, was invigorating; the views, breathtaking colors shading narrow green valleys and orange-red canyons and deep purple mountains; the people, for the most part men and women enjoying the adventure as much as she, laughing in the day and dancing and singing by the campfires at night. It was almost impossible to conceive that these same people would leave her at Hermosillo and continue on to face possible death, to inflict certain death to others.
It was difficult to think the roguishly likable Law capable of destroying another human being, but she had witnessed his quick, efficient method of killing. The hands had wielded the knife proficiently, just as proficiently as they dealt the horsehide cards in the poker game that broke out that evening after camp was called.
From her bedroll spread beneath the wagon she watched those slender brown hands riffle through the cards with consummate skill. Visions of those hands making love to her arose to pique her imagination. She remembered the way the fingers had slipped sensuously through her hair the night of San Juan de Bautista and the afternoon beneath the Joshua tree when for a brief moment one brown hand had cupped her derriere. Her heart had slammed against her ribcage with the memory of the unexpected pleasure he had engendered.
Did those same brown hands make love to some woman in camp each night before he finally came to her much later? Perhaps the very seductive Filomena? The idea perturbed Catherine. With a huffy tug at her blankets, she rolled over in her bedroll, determined to sleep. When at last Law came to her, pulling her within the curve of his long frame, she drowsily wished he would tease her with kisses as he had done that morning.
Yet morning light brought only a vague memory of his warmth and nothing more. The blankets beside her were empty. At a far campfire he squatted, with Tranquilino, drinking a cup of coffee. With an inward sigh she retrieved Law’s blankets and rolled them with hers in the tight bundle that would fit behind a saddle. She reflected ruefully that she had become an adept soldadera in all ways but one, and that she would not be.
The creek that trickled through the camp provided only enough water to fill the canteens and water the animals, and she had to be content with washing her face. How dirty and sweaty she felt. She sorely regretted the bath she had missed at the rancho. She hoped the expedition would reach the villa of Magdalena that evening. A bed and a bath. How splendid they sounded!
As it turned out, Law gave orders for the brigade to camp outside the villa. He and Tranquilino intended to scout the village alone first. While there was some grumbling from the men, who were anxious to make forays on the cantinas and sample the delights of the dark-eyed women, the camp was grudgingly pitched on a broad plateau cut by the Rio de Los Alisos.
Catherine knew she could have performed a meager sort of ablution at the river, but she had so been looking forward to the hot bath that she gathered her courage and approached Law. Crouched beneath a shady sycamore tree, he was studying a wrinkled map with Tranquilino and two Americans. She stood off to one side, waiting for the discussion to end. At last, the four men rose and exchanged a few words more before separating.
Then, though his back had been to her, Law rotated and crossed the intervening yards toward her, as if he had known all along of her presence. He halted before her and hooked his thumbs in his belt. “You wanted something, Cate?”
The frown on his face unsettled her. Did he resent her disruption? "I want to go into Magdalena with you. I want to take a bath, a real bath, Law.” She felt so strange, petitioning him for such a favor. Perhaps it was because he seemed a stranger to her, no longer the lazy, aimless stepson of Don Francisco but the fierce leader of mercenaries.
“Do you realize French agents may be there?” he asked impatiently. “That they might decide to shoot first and ask questions later?”
“All the more reason why you should take me,” she pointed out. “With my obviously Anglo looks and your fairness, we’d be taken as an American husband and wife. Who would question us?”
She waited while he considered. “All right, get your horse.”
Delighted, she whirled to collect her horse and gear.
“And Cate—”
She turned around. “Yes?”
He smiled. "Don't get any ideas about the husband-and-wife act.”
She squinched her eyes at him and stalked away, his soft laughter following her.
La Villa de Magdalena was a picturesque villa situated on the Rio Concepcion where the river broke into the open Sonoran desert. Magdalena was famous, for Padre Kino, now buried there. The missionary explorer had proved that California was not actually an island, as the Spanish had believed.
The houses, chiefly of adobe, though Catherine did note some of brick, were all stuccoed and whitewashed. Many were colored yellow. They were strung out here and there and, closer to the plaza, grouped in clusters. She half expected Law to make for the nearest cantina, but he halted his sorrel before a tienda. The small store appeared empty but for the flies that swarmed about the beef strung from the timbers outside.
He looped his reins about the hitching post and came around to her side. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said, looking up at her. ‘‘Try to keep your mouth shut. Don’t speak to anyone. Got it?”
“Got it.” She frowned, annoyed by his authoritative command. Five years ago she could have been in a classroom rapping the scoundrel’s knuckles with a ruler.
Looking around at the villa’s indolence—the men who dozed on benches beneath the porticos, the lean flea-bitten curs that slunk through the sunbaked streets—she felt her hopes sink that she would find a place to rent a bathtub. True, Tucson was a slightly primitive pueblo without the Union’s military depot to lend it an American flavor. But the Villa de Magdalena looked even less civilized than Tucson, if that were possible.
When Law came out of the tienda, his face set in stern lines, she knew there would be no bath. “What is it?”
He swung up into the saddle and looked across at her. “The French—under a Colonel Garnier—took Hermosillo the day before yesterday, Cate. Even now Governor Pesquiera and our republican troops are retreating to
the capital, Ures.”
A cold sweat broke out on her temples. “What will this mean?”
For the first time the lazy drawl was clipped. “It means my men will now assume guerrilla warfare tactics. It means we’ll go into the mountains surrounding Ures. It means we can’t take you into Hermosillo.”
“I’ll go by myself. I’ll explain—”
“Bastada! Enough! Garcia—the storekeeper—his niece, not even yet thirteen, was raped, her mother and father murdered. The Frenchman, Colonel Garnier, is sparing no one who supports the Juaristas. Do you think the Frenchmen will spare you? To them a woman is a woman. It doesn’t matter her nationality.”
The sun was beating down on her, but her skin crawled with chill bumps as she considered her alternative—traveling back to Tucson alone. And that was out of the question. A woman alone crossing the countryside was exposed to as many dangers as she was riding into a besieged city.
Her gaze locked with Law’s before she hung her head, beaten. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “I know I let myself in for this.”
“Let’s go back to camp,” he said. A muscle flexed beneath the ridge of one high cheekbone, then he wheeled the horse around.
The expedition’s festive spirit evaporated when Law returned with the news. At once preparations began for battle. Beside the campfires that night were no card games or drinking. Men cleaned their guns, sharpened their knives. The women talked in low, concerned whispers.
Filomena. pounding the cornmeal dough into a flat circle, talked quietly of the times she and her husband had fought off both the Apaches and the Mexican bandidos who raided their small rancho and burned the milpas, the corn fields—horrors that she never got used to—-and the final battle when the Apaches caught her husband and three others unaware at the shaft of the mine. His sudden death at the point of a lance. Then the onslaught of the cabin, the baby’s brains dashed—her own body violated.
The woman raised her gaze to meet Catherine's. “So now I no longer have anything to lose . . . except . . .” Her gaze slid across the camp to fix on the two men who walked among the remuda. stopping every so often to run a hand over the flanks of one horse, pat the muzzle of another. One of them, a blond, was much taller than the other.
In spite of the deep sympathy Catherine felt for the young widow who had suffered so much, a streak of jealousy zigzagged through her. Why, she chided herself, should she care if Filomena was in love with Law?
And she knew it was because she was drawn to the rogue also. It did her no good to tell herself he was a mercenary, that he had sold his mother's jewelry for guns! It galled her to admit it, but she was succumbing to Law as easily as some frivolous woman to the vapors.
Yet, watching him move among the horses, she had to admit there was a strength of purpose as resilient as his knife, as indomitable as the Stronghold. He was as committed to Mexico as Sherrod was to Cristo Rey. It would never do to let herself become involved with Law, for he could offer her nothing.
Yet that night, as each previous night, her body betrayed her as he came to her, lying next to her. The pulse at her temples beat erratically, her breath came in short shallow gasps, and she could only stifle the urge to turn to him, to ask him to kiss her.
CHAPTER 19
Civilization’s wagon road fell behind, and the sanctuary of canyon upon canyon loomed before the brigade, which had forsaken the pueblos and villas to follow the Rio San Miguel south to Ures. Catherine tried to estimate how many days the brigade had been on the march, how many days since a bath and a change of clothes, but she had lost all track of time. How ludicrous she must appear—the elegant riding habit and top hat, now more gray than black, hanging in tatters on her like castoffs on a scarecrow.
She let Sonora pick his way along the narrow path that skirted the outcrops of black rock while her thoughts dwelled on her predicament—an American woman riding with a band of guerrillas on their way to battle a French army!
“You’ll be left behind outside Ures with the other women,” Law had told her the night before as he lay next to her but not touching her. “You’ll be as safe there as anywhere. After the battle—if all goes well—it will be arranged for you to travel to Guaymas. If the American consul there hasn’t abandoned his post, he can see that you are safely put aboard an American vessel.”
He rolled over and looked down at her then. In the darkness, the gold of his hair and mustache was the only light. “There is a derringer in my saddlebag, Cate. If we don’t return to camp, if we lose—you are to use it. Do you understand?”
At first she did not, and he caught her chin between thumb and forefinger. “I don’t think you are a weak woman, Cate. I think you will survive no matter what might be done to your honor. But the Yaquis, who ride with the French—they can make death most unpleasant. The weapon is to be used against yourself only as a last resort,” he said with a gentle sadness before releasing her.
She lifted her gaze now, trying to find among the line of soldiers ascending the trail into the mountain heights Law’s lean figure. There was a strength about him that reassured her. She could not imagine that he would not return from the battle with the French.
The evening was already blanketing the land, more rapidly there in the mountains, and it was impossible now to separate Law from the line of soldiers that was only a snakelike shadow crawling up the narrow pass ahead. By the time camp was called, a blackness had settled on the mountains, and below the lights in the windows of Ures twinkled as if there were no thought of the French army that would soon descend on the capital of Sonora like Attila's hordes.
A solemn quiet hovered over the camp, as there were only a few hours left before the men were to move down into the pueblo at dawn. The soldiers talked lowly among themselves or with their women, who seemed to keep within a close perimeter of their men while they moved about their chores. The specter of death circled over the camp like a vulture.
As Catherine helped Loco dice the chilies, the onions, and the dried beef, she waited to see what Filomena would do. When a little later the woman wiped her hands on her skirts and left the mess wagon, Catherine’s heart sank like a stone in water. She knew then that she wanted Law regardless of silly things like propriety and respectability. Perhaps she had wanted him since that first kiss the night of the fiesta of San Juan de Bautista, perhaps as far back as the first time she saw him there in the Meyer Street Saloon.
As she watched Filomena pick her way among the men, her hopes lifted. Then her hopes soared, for it was Tranquilino the woman approached, taking his hand and moving into the shadows. So, it had been Tranquilino all along!
But where then was Law?
At her side, Loco said, as he continued to dice the chilies, "Lorenzo is a lonely man. He carries the burden of the Juarista cause on his shoulders. I think he is alone now, with his thoughts. Perhaps there, on that bluff.”
“I believe you have read my thoughts,” she said, dimples forming at each side of her mouth.
A drooping lid closed in a wink. "There is no need. Your eyes mirror everything, señorita.”
She paused only once—at the wagon to search among the supplies. Yes, there it was—a bottle of Rosé Chasselas from California. Her skirts caught on the low-lying cholla and the sharp lava rocks, but she scarcely heeded nature’s impediments. She was going to the man who held her soul fast in his grip. She did not know if one would call it love. What she felt for Lorenzo Davalos was certainly not the comfortable, quiet relationship one came to expect in a marriage.
She was well aware of Law’s deficiencies, that he had none of Sherrod’s stability. She knew that if it were not for the war with the French, it would be something else. Too soon he would become restless in the confines of civilization and move on—and she knew she would go with him, for she could not stop loving him ... if this wild calling of the heart was love.
By the time she reached the summit of the bluff, by the time she saw that tall, rangy shadow and the honey-colored
hair in the bright moonlight, she knew that it did not matter what one labeled the feeling, whether it lasted but a night or through the unwinding of the years. For that moment it was real, and to deny it would be to lose something very precious.
He turned and watched her make her way over the last few yards. A cigarette stub was clamped between his teeth. His wary gaze dropped from her face to the bottle she held in her hands. She held forth the bottle, saying with a tentative smile, “You once said that all you needed was a jug of wine and a warm, willing woman and you could forget the promises of heaven. Will we do?”
He cocked a brow and removed the cigarette from his lips. “What about the ring on your finger and babe in your arms?”
She stamped her foot in frustration. “Must you make it so difficult for me? I’m trying to tell you that I want you, Law Davalos!”
“More than your want of a husband and children?” he pressed.
Her eyes glistened. “More than that,” she whispered.
He ground out the cigarette with his boot heel. "I don’t understand.”
“In Baltimore—it seems like eons ago—I was foolish enough to think time was important. I thought my time was slipping away faster than that of other people's. I had goals, and I thought I had to hurry to fulfill them. Now I know there is only the present. I was foolish, but I'm learning. Show me, Law. Show me everything.”
He looked at her for one long heart-pounding moment. What if he refused her?
He he took the bottle from her and set it down. Catching her about the waist, he raised her off the ground so that her face was even with his. He kissed her lightly, tenderly. “I’ve underestimated you, Cate,” he said quietly. He sat her on her feet again and began to work at the buttons of her blouse. Her skirt fell about her feet. The corset had long since gone, and there was only the chemise to cover her nudity.
When he began to divest himself of his dust-caked clothing with a naturalness foreign to her, she turned her head away despite the urgency that gripped her. “Open your eyes,” he mumbled as he tugged the serape over his head. "There’s nothing worse than a woman who insists on turning down the lamps so she won’t have to face reality.”
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