by Judith Pella
The ranch came into sight. The big sprawling house, so quiet, so empty, so forbidding, filled the yard like a shadow. Laban dismounted. His horse made its own way to the stable while Laban turned toward the house. He knocked on the door; he never entered without observing the formalities of a guest. He would never be more than a guest in Caleb’s home.
Maria answered the door. “Ah, Señor Laban, it is you.”
It had been at least two weeks since Laban had last been to the house. “Buenos dias, Maria. I would like to see Señor Caleb.”
“Come in. I will tell him you are here.”
“By all means,” said Laban acidly. Maria did not notice his tone; over the years Caleb Stoner’s youngest son had come to have far more bile in his voice than levity.
The woman, grown rather more portly, with far more gray than black in her hair, waddled away. Laban remained in the entryway, hat in hand, waiting. Would the patron honor him with an audience? That would depend on the man’s mood. If he were in exceptionally good spirits, he would gladly receive his son for the prime opportunity he’d offer the old man for some choice browbeating. Caleb enjoyed nothing more than making others feel small. But more often than not, the patron was in a surly, morose mood; if he received his son then, Laban could expect nothing but the most harrowing experience.
Laban glanced around the entryway, seeming to see it for the first time. It was austere and cold, like the rest of the house, but the library table set against the wall was of black walnut and of sixteenth-century vintage. It was valuable, as were the antique brass sconces that flanked it on the wall. On an adjacent wall was an original Velasquez, a portrait of some Spanish grandee who most certainly must have winced at the blatant arrogance captured by the painter in his subject. No doubt this very trait had drawn Caleb to the painting—and had prompted him to pay a good deal more than he could afford for it.
Yes, there were pieces in this house worth a great deal, and someday they would belong to Laban. Someday he would be the patron, the master of the house. He would not have to wait at the door like a beggar, the son of a poor peon. It would all be his. But Laban’s patience was wearing thin, and perhaps even his cowardice would not be able to withstand the pressure.
Maria reappeared. The patron would see him. Laban wasn’t certain whether to accept that as good or bad news.
Caleb was in the drawing room. It did not bode well that he was here, for he seldom, if ever, entered this room. There, six years ago, his eldest and beloved son was murdered. Laban could not restrain an impulse to glance toward the spot where the body had been found on the floor behind the settee, near the french doors. A bloodstain still marked the carpet, stubbornly resisting all of Maria’s efforts to obliterate it.
Laban did not have to guess what kind of mood his father would be in now. Caleb only came here when he was feeling sorry for himself and particularly hateful toward the rest of the world, especially toward the son who had the audacity to live while the best son was sacrificed. Laban noted a framed daguerreotype of Leonard sitting slightly askew on a table. He shuddered inwardly and braced himself against the inevitable.
Father and son exchanged no greetings, barely even looking at each other. Laban remained standing, while Caleb sat on the settee, his long legs stretched out before him, but hardly at ease.
“What do you want?” asked Caleb, and the acerbic quality of his tone, almost more than anything else, poignantly emphasized the uncanny resemblance between the patron and his half-breed son.
“I wish to discuss the purchase of new horses,” said Laban. “I have heard of a woman in west Texas who has exceptional stock—”
“A woman!” Caleb barked a dry, humorless laugh. “That’ll be the day when I buy horses from a woman!”
“What matters is that we get good stock. Bradford’s are no longer dependable.”
“You wouldn’t know good horseflesh from a hole in the wall!”
Laban bit down hard on his lip and said nothing.
“Anyway, what makes you think we need more horses?” continued Caleb. “What we have ought to serve us for another season.”
“I only thought—”
“Thank God I’m still around! You’d run this place in the ground if given half a chance. Now, Leonard knew how to get the best out of his stock. He wasn’t crying for new animals every time I turned around.”
“Still, it is not too soon to contact this woman.”
“I will not do ranch business with a woman! It’s bad enough now with that greaser woman running the cantina so I have to buy my whiskey from her. And believe me, I’m going to run her out the first chance I get.”
“Good horses are good horses,” persisted Laban.
“And there are scores of other places to get them,” Caleb said with finality, adding ominously, “I forbid you to deal with anybody in west Texas, or even to go there!”
Laban shrugged. If that’s how the old man wanted it, fine. Caleb was only hurting himself. The Stoner outfit was big and prosperous, but it could have been phenomenal if Caleb had been less recalcitrant. But let it be, Laban told himself, as he had many times before. I have been patient, but I may not always be so. A man can take only so much before he breaks … or explodes.
His impatience made him think of the future, no matter how futile such longings were. Laban was a young man, only twenty-three years old. Caleb was old, and his bitter hatred made him older every day. If there was justice in the world, Laban did have a chance.
Ah, yes! All was not lost.
Someday …
70
The next several seasons were prosperous ones for the Wind Rider Ranch. Deborah acquired more land and was soon driving more than two thousand head of cattle to market with her own trail crew of hired hands, led usually by Slim, who had never lost his taste for the wandering life.
Deborah’s pride and joy, however, was her equestrian business. She continued to round up the wild mustangs and after breaking them, garnered a substantial profit in sales. With these profits, she purchased, from as far away as England, several animals with impeccable bloodlines, including a fine Arabian mare that she bred with Broken Wing’s gray, producing a magnificent black stallion. Her stable was well on its way to becoming famous in the West.
Those early years of the 1870s, however, continued to be marred by the frequency of Comanche raids in the area. The Wind Rider Ranch remained miraculously immune, and Deborah felt certain this was in answer to her prayer over the Indian graves. Yet few of her neighbors chose to follow her example, and some even began to look upon Deborah derisively for her pro-Indian sympathies. Most adhered to the basic Texas Indian policy: expulsion or extermination. And Deborah had no doubt there were many who preferred extermination over the first option.
There came a day, however, when Deborah’s sympathies were quite shaken. She had business in Fort Griffin, and Griff needed a new pair of boots. Accompanied by five-year-old Sky, they made the trip together.
A week or so earlier, the Cook girl had been rescued by the army after nearly three years in captivity by the Comanche. Deborah recalled when the child’s home had been raided and her family killed not long after Deborah’s arrival in Texas.
During her visit to the fort, Deborah went to pay her respects to Captain Ludlam and his wife, and while in their quarters she saw the girl cowering in a corner. She was twelve or thirteen years old now, emaciated, and looking uncannily like a starved wild animal. But this was not the most shocking aspect of the girl’s appearance. Her body was hideously scarred and mutilated; several fingers were missing on her hands, while her arms showed scars from old burns and cuts that plainly were not the marks of mourning like those on Deborah’s arms. However, it was her face that was most appalling and nearly brought an anguished gasp from Deborah. It had been ravaged so with burns that it was barely recognizable as human, and one eye was completely gouged out.
Captain Ludlam said, “My wife is making a patch for the eye.”
H
er voice thick with emotion, Deborah said, “This was done by the Comanche?”
“Yes, it was. And those are the scars we can see.”
“Why … ?”
“Because they are animals,” said the captain harshly.
Deborah could not believe this, yet she stumbled from the room confused and sick.
It was a most unfortunate coincidence that as she crossed the parade ground, she ran, almost literally, into Big Bill Yates. He immediately saw Deborah’s pallor and, judging by the direction from which she had come, surmised the cause of her dismay.
“So, you seen her, have you?” As usual, his question sounded more like a threat than an inquiry. She didn’t have to answer, for he went on without encouragement, in a belligerent tone. “If I ever catch any Injun, that’s just what I’m gonna do to them! I got me a little daughter and, by God, I’ll shoot her with my own hand before I’ll let any of them godforsaken savages near her! But I’ll kill plenty of them first!”
Deborah could not respond. She silently pushed past Yates and headed to the Sutler’s, where she had left Griff and Sky. She arrived there moments after another member of her family had an encounter with a member of the Yates family.
****
Eight-year-old Billy Yates, it seemed, was as narrow-minded and bigoted as his father. He was also showing signs of becoming just as big. He was ninety pounds of solid muscle, and several inches taller than most of his peers. This combined with a surly personality to make him already a formidable bully.
Sky, at five, was showing definite signs of having inherited his own father’s strong, lithe frame, but he was yet a child and still had many finely chiseled childish features. He was a head shorter than Billy and many pounds lighter, but this disparity in size in no way discouraged the young Yates boy from taunting and casting derision upon Sky. In fact, it was very likely an encouragement.
“Whew!” Billy wrinkled his nose distastefully as he approached Sky, who was leaning against a post in front of the store while Griff was inside shopping. “I thought for a minute I was downwind from a garbage heap. But it’s just that half-blooded redskin.”
Billy’s companions cheered him on. “Same thing, ain’t it?”
They howled and made sneering faces at Sky, who was turning red with fury.
“You better shut up,” Sky said.
“You gonna let him talk to you thataway, Billy?” said one of the other boys.
“Yeah,” said another, “he might scalp you in the night.”
“Let him try!” taunted Billy. “I’ll put him back on the reservation where scum like his kind belong.”
Without pausing to consider the hopelessness of the battle, Sky could take no more of the taunts, and he launched himself bodily at his persecutors with a fierce tenacity worthy of any Cheyenne warrior. Both boys fell into the dirt street and tussled furiously for some moments. With surprise on his side, Sky retained the upper hand for about two minutes, inflicting upon his enemy a bloody nose, a badly scraped elbow, and a bruised jaw. After that, sheer size gained the advantage, and in the closing moments of the battle Billy throttled his young adversary thoroughly.
Billy’s hulking frame, astride Sky, gave the smaller boy little room for movement. Sky struggled, lurching from side to side, flailing with his fists in an attempt to escape. But Billy Yates was too imposing. His fleshy paws, curled into fists, pummeled Sky’s face into a bruised and bloody mess. At one point, Sky managed to summon enough strength for a powerful lurch that threw his attacker off balance. He scrambled to his feet, and although good sense should have told Sky to take the opportunity and flee the scene of his own personal massacre, he instead launched another frontal attack. All he received for his heroic valor was another sound thrashing from Billy, who knocked Sky to the ground and began aiming vicious kicks at his defeated foe. The other boys joined in, and Sky could do nothing to defend himself but throw his arms over his face and curl up in a protective ball on the ground.
No passersby made any attempt to stop the melee, and a few even paused to cheer on the white boys. Finally a sergeant happened along and stepped into the fray, grabbing both Sky and Billy by their collars and giving them a good shake and verbal harangue.
Griff didn’t hear the ruckus until it was well advanced. He started to come to Sky’s rescue just as the sergeant came along. Griff was about to step outside and take charge of Sky, when he happened to scan the crowd. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ducked back into the store and waited until everyone had cleared away before coming back out.
By the time Deborah arrived Griff had cleaned away the worst evidence of the fight. But he couldn’t hide it entirely. Deborah was ready for her own confrontation with Mr. Yates, but Griff discouraged her.
“Let’s just get outta town, Deborah,” he said, “before there’s any more trouble.”
“I never knew you to shy away from a little trouble, Griff.”
“I got good reason. Someday I’ll thrash both them Yates varmints myself, but now ain’t the right time. Let’s get—now!”
He was too determined to allow for argument, so Deborah complied. Besides, she was still too distraught over the other events of the day to be able to trust herself in a confrontation. It would be best for her to speak with Yates when she could be calm and collected.
It did not improve her frayed emotions when, as she and Griff and her son drove out of the fort in the wagon, Sky looked up at her with a resolute gaze that looked more than ever like Broken Wing.
“Nahkoa,” he said, “I’m gonna be a warrior like my father. I’ll fight the whites. And I’ll win!”
Questions plagued Deborah all the way home. The brilliant sun in the wide, blue sky; the broad, grassy plains, and the lonely mesquite failed to thrill her as they usually did. Suddenly the prairie she loved appeared dark and depraved. What kind of land was this, that little children must suffer so? Or, that humans, both white and red, were reduced to acting like animals? She had believed that the Indian people needed only to be treated with fairness and respect for peace to become a reality in this country. Was she blind and naive? Were they but savages and, as she had heard one man say, “untamable and treacherous as rattlesnakes”?
But even as the questions formed in her distraught mind, she felt like a betrayer. She loved the Indian people. Her experience with Broken Wing’s Cheyenne had given her reason to feel no other way. He had been the most civilized, noble man she had ever known, as were scores of other Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Sioux she had come to know during her sojourn with the Indians. She realized there were treacherous, untrustworthy Indians, just as there were whites. Intellectually, she knew it had nothing to do with race, but rather everything to do with the condition of a person’s heart. Proof of this was the fact that she had for years been spared from further raids by the Indians. She did not doubt that her simple act of humanity, of respect, had in this way been acknowledged by the Comanche. Was it possible that the same Indians who had tortured the little Cook girl had also responded with humanity toward Deborah? She did not know the answer. She only knew that she must not allow herself to be deluded by the prevalent attitudes around her. And she especially must not allow such hatreds to be formed in the hearts of her children. She must remain faithful to the urgings of her heart, the urgings that told her all men were equal in God’s eyes. He did not see race or color; and she must do the same, judging men by standards other than externals.
71
Griff also experienced mental distress after that visit to the fort, although his was of a far different nature than Deborah’s. Not one to easily succumb to such mental exercise, Griff allowed it to plague his mind for only one day. He thought about it and ruminated over it all the next day while working out on the range, but by the time he rode into the ranch compound, he’d had his fill of introspection and was ready for action.
While he and Longjim were alone in the stable unsaddling their horses, he vented his pent-up anxieties, though he did so in a low, careful
tone.
“Longjim, I gotta tell you something. I been chewing it over since yesterday and don’t figure I better keep it to myself no more.”
“You been acting skittish all day, Griff,” said Longjim. “I ain’t seen you take on so … since we was being tracked by that gang and their Crow Injun. What in blazes is it?”
“Something I seen at the fort yesterday.”
“Yeah, what? A spook, or something?”
“Close enough.” Griff paused, looked all around to make sure they were truly alone, then went on. “I seen a fellow I ain’t seen for eight years, and woulda been happy if it had been eighty years. Markus Pollard.”
Longjim looked blank for a long moment, finding nothing familiar about the name Griff dropped like a stick of dynamite. Then it hit him and he gasped. “You sure it was him, Griff?”
“He was eight years older and looking pretty down-and-out, but I’m sure. It was Pollard all right.”
“After all these years, it don’t seem possible.”
“Texas ain’t as big a state as we’d like to believe.”
“He see you?”
“Heck no! I ain’t loony.”
“But no one’s interested in us no more, Griff. Why, if they started arresting everyone who’s run afoul of the law in Texas, they’d have half the state in chains.”
“It ain’t us I’m worried about.”
“Aw, they ain’t gonna go after Deborah after all this time.”
“Murder’s murder, Longjim. They ain’t never gonna forget about that, especially Caleb Stoner. And he’s more powerful today then he ever was.”
