Paloma and the Horse Traders

by Carla Kelly

  “Child of a Comanche?”

  It sounded stupid and naïve when he said it, and he could have kicked himself. But that wasn’t necessary, because Graciela Tafoya kicked him.

  “What other baby could it be?” she hissed. “She was not the first, but she is the only one who lived!”

  He did the only thing he could do, which was hold her tight as she sobbed. Claudio thought she might pull away, but she burrowed into him like a small animal. Thank God he was too smart to wonder out loud why a Comanche captive would want such a child. He held her close, remembering a horrible day when Lorenzo and Paco had been hired to return a Spanish captive to her people on a rancho near Tesuque.

  She had run to them with a child in her arms, which Lorenzo had wrenched from her and tossed back to the gathering of sullen Apaches, prisoners themselves now, courtesy of Governor Mendinueta. She had screamed for the child and sobbed all the way to Tesuque. When they passed through the village only six months later, he learned she had been dead for weeks, her heart broken, or so her Spanish family said. Lorenzo just shook his head. Claudio had nightmares, new nightmares piled onto old ones, until he never wanted to close his eyes.

  “We’ll see what we can do, Graci,” he said and his words sounded so lame.

  “That sounds like no,” she said quietly. “I am tired of hearing no.”

  She turned around, her back to him again. He did the same, wondering why Paloma had allowed him to roam around off the Double Cross, since he obviously had no brains and no heart. When this is done, I swear I will go back to my horse traders, he thought. The notion gave him no comfort.

  At some point in the long night, perhaps triggered by Graciela’s revelation, he had the nightmare he so dreaded, the one where he saw the torn body of his mother, clutching his unborn baby brother. Usually the dream morphed into the sight of that baby thrown by Lorenzo, end over end so slowly, back to the Apache prisoners, as its mother screamed and tried to reach for it with abnormally long arms. Instead, the sight of his mother was blocked from his vision as a young Paloma walked in front of him. He called to her, and she kept walking, unhearing and unseeing, until she was out of sight on what he knew was the road to El Paso.

  It seemed so real that he called again, wanting her to turn around and wait for him, as he buried his mother with a teaspoon. She walked on and eventually disappeared, as the dream turned into the more familiar terror, with the Comanche captive and her long arms.

  And then it was over. He lay there in a sweat, someone’s cool hand over his eyes, pressing down. “Graci?” he whispered.

  “Who else would be here?” she whispered back. “I’m not very happy with you right now, but no one needs to cry out like that. Go to sleep.”

  He did as she said, and remembered nothing more until morning. When he woke up, Graciela was kneeling by the cold campfire, slicing bits of cactus into smaller bits, somehow making it look like more. She hummed as she sliced, and he marveled at the resiliency of women. He took a deep breath and another, enjoying the silence. There was no Lorenzo to curse at Rogelio and thrash him for being slow, or childlike, or in the way. This was better.

  “I don’t think men understand women and babies,” Graciela said, with her back still to him. “Let us leave it at that.”

  A coward, where delicacy and tact might be called for, Claudio was happy to agree.

  They started into another morning on the wide plain, and he could have kicked himself again for leaving the shelter of the mountains. They should have started out during the night. The moon was nearly full now, and they could have traveled in more safety than in this broad sunlight.

  “Graci, let’s wait,” he said, when they had hardly begun their day’s journey.

  She had ridden ahead of him, probably grateful to distance herself from an idiot. She looked back at him, then beyond him, and gasped. He turned around in surprise, and watched in horror at a cloud of dust in the distance.

  The air was calm, so he could not say it was wind blowing dust. It’s over, he thought.

  “Di … di …didn’t you say that Rain Cloud’s men were hunting buffalo?” he asked.

  “It’s not buffalo.” She edged her horse closer, whatever quarrel she had against him gone, at least for now. Or maybe for always, if the dust cloud turned into Comanches.

  “There is nothing we can do,” he said calmly. He pulled an arrow from his quiver, surprised how steady his hand was. “I’ll shoot as long as I can.”

  Her face was set and brave. She took her knife from its sheath, and turned to him. “It’s funny. I started to make some plans, even while I was tending Señora Mondragón’s little ones. Maybe it’s better not to have plans.”

  He could think of nothing to say to that. He leaned over and kissed Graci’s cheek. “I think you’re a fine woman,” he told her, and meant it. No point in telling her that he had started to plan, himself.

  They faced the dust cloud that all too soon materialized into horsemen. As Claudio wiped his eyes and readied his bow and arrow, he squinted to improve his aim, and saw what looked like a wagon. Three men were bouncing along on the wagon seat, as someone suspiciously like Rogelio rode the off horse of the team pulling the wagon. He put down the bow and told Graci to sheathe her knife.

  She stared at him, her hand still tight around the knife handle.

  “No, I mean it,” he told her. “Take a good look.”

  She did, and he heard her relieved laughter.

  Calm now, Claudio felt his racing heart slow down. Oye, too much of this terror was going to turn him old before his time.

  Lorenzo Diaz slowed his horse, waving his sombrero to dispel some of the dust he had raised. “What are you doing here?” he hollered.

  “I could ask the same of you,” Claudio said. He stared at the wagon as Rogelio came closer, then slowed the horses, grinning like the fool he was. Claudio looked at the men on the wagon seat, took in their bound hands and legs tied together. If one had fallen off, all would have tumbled to the ground.

  His mouth open, Claudio looked at the long boxes in the wagon bed, and smaller metal boxes.

  “You found the Frenchmen,” he said. “They do have weapons.”

  Lorenzo nodded. He patted his chest. “Paloma tells me I will be a hero.”

  “Paloma?” Claudio asked. “Paloma?”

  “She told me to do the right thing and help Marco.”

  “And you actually listened to her? You didn’t just grab the guns and run to the nearest shady dealer? Lorenzo!”

  Lorenzo leaned forward, his eyes bright, his face dusty, but his smile unmistakable in its kindness. “Claudio, Claudio, you should listen to women sometimes. I’ve never been a hero before and Paloma thinks I will be good at it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In which Lorenzo is surprisingly righteous

  Lorenzo wouldn’t hear of stopping for a brief parlay. “We have work to do, lad. Paloma made me swear an oath to be a righteous man and think of others.”

  He prodded his horse into motion and Rogelio did the same with the wagon. His head crammed with a thousand questions, Claudio rode beside the horse trader.

  There wasn’t any glow of sanctity about the dirty fellow that Claudio could see, but Lorenzo assured him that every man should go about doing good, now and then. “That’s what Paloma told me.” He dipped his head, and Claudio stared at the spectacle of a shy Lorenzo. “Sancha even mentioned it.”

  Now he understood. Sancha. “Lorenzo, you amaze me,” Claudio said. He knew his amazement would pass, and probably Lorenzo’s sudden righteousness, too, but here they were and Lorenzo was in a great hurry to find Marco. He turned to Graciela, whose amazement mirrored his own.

  “Are we close to the Ute camp? Perhaps they have seen Marco.”

  She nodded, and pointed with her lips like an Indian. “That small range to the south of the big Blanca,” she said. “There is a pass. You’ll see.”

  He did see. They rode steadily on. He heard one of t
he trussed up men arguing with the other in a language he did not know. It wasn’t French. Soon the three men were shouting at each other. He heard some familiar words—why was it that curses on other tongues were so easily learned?—and suddenly knew this was English.

  “They’re not French,” he said to Lorenzo as they pounded along.

  “Two of them are,” the horse trader replied. “They came down from the north.”

  “The north? You can’t be serious,” Claudio said.

  Lorenzo just glared at him, and Claudio knew something had changed. Only weeks ago, any contradiction would have earned him a slap across the face. Claudio wondered if he could credit Sancha with this transformation of a brutal, sour, dishonest man. Lorenzo had mentioned Paloma; perhaps she was the author of this good behavior. He glanced back at the arguing prisoners. Maybe all three could take some credit.

  “There is something wrong.”

  Lorenzo and Claudio both looked at Graciela. “Name me something right about this fools’ trail we are traveling,” Lorenzo snapped.

  “I mean it,” Graci fired back. “Rain Cloud and his warriors should have noticed us by now,” she said. “We are so close to the pass, and they are not here.”

  “They’ve just moved somewhere else,” Claudio said.

  She shook her head with some vigor, and gave him that stare that women so easily mastered, the one that asked, Just how foolish are men?

  “We gather chokecherries here. This is the time and the place. Something is wrong.”

  “Should we turn away from the pass?”

  She gave him the second stare women mastered to perfection. This one asked, Do I have to think for you, too? She rode ahead of them both, leaving Claudio to wonder just how men and women ever got close enough to mate, produce babies, and continue mankind.

  * * *

  “There isn’t much more we can do here, nami,” Toshua said to Marco. “Those who are going to die have died, the restless spirits have settled down, and Great Owl is still out there somewhere.”

  Marco nodded and wondered how to convey even a tenth of his unease to a man who felt no fear. Have I become a coward? he asked himself, even as he knew the answer. He had become a husband and a father, and he did not relish taking chances. Only his duty to distant King Carlos—and more important, a promise to Governor de Anza—kept him from bolting home.

  He looked around the Ute camp, tidier now, but eerie in the absence of many children and young women. In an orgy of grief, the survivors had burned the brush shelters that hadn’t already been destroyed by the Comanches. With tears and wailing that kept the hair on Marco’s neck and arms erect, they had washed the desecrated bodies of the older women and the babies too young to serve any Comanche purpose beyond mutilation and violation, then wrapped them in shrouds.

  Silent, Marco and Joaquim had helped take the shrouded corpses into the mountains, carrying the dead to rocky places. Toshua’s aid—Comanche aid—had been politely but firmly refused by Rain Cloud. They dug a deep hole and placed the bodies within, piling back the earth and stacking rocks.

  The bereft men stood in long silence. Some chopped off their braids. All wore the sleepy-eyed expression so familiar to Marco, the one that said, I cannot close my eyes without seeing my dear ones. The Utes were exhausted in mind and body, and some were weak from letting their own blood when they really wanted to kill Comanches.

  They had ridden back in more silence. The air hummed with their silence, even the birds paying respect and the wind holding back any rustling of the quaking aspen, already starting to turn yellow.

  But they rode with warriors, who were never fools. Farther down the trail at the spot where the pass could be seen, several men gestured to each other and spoke in low tones. Marco rode closer. “What do you see?” he asked in Ute.

  He looked where the warrior pointed. Winding their way up the mountain was a strange sight: a wagon in the lead. No, there was a white man in front, followed by more familiar people—one a relative he hadn’t thought to see again. I swear I’ll thrash that rascal for making Paloma cry, he vowed to himself.

  “Dios mio!” he exclaimed. “Joaquim, it is Claudio and Graciela, and I don’t believe this, but also that rascal Lorenzo.”

  His Ute was fair, but not up to complexities, so he signed to the warrior in the lead, the one already nocking arrow to bow. “Friends, and something more,” he said, in case his signing wasn’t as good as it used to be.

  With a highly skeptical look, the Ute rested his bow and arrow on his lap. “I am willing to kill anyone right now,” he told Marco.

  “Not these. At least, not now,” Marco said, understanding him perfectly.

  They arrived in camp just before Claudio came in, guiding his horse with his knees and holding both hands up in surrender. Graciela rode beside him. Marco watched the expectation on her face turn to worry. She dismounted slowly and walked to Rain Cloud, who held out his arms to her. He wrapped her in his embrace and they swayed from side to side as he tried to explain what he could not explain. Whatever greeting she had anticipated after four years a captive of the Comanche turned to less than dust as she mourned in the ruin of the Ute village.

  Marco watched Lorenzo, whose face registered no shock at the obvious signs of a successful Comanche raid on a peaceful village. Lorenzo Diaz, damn his soul, had lived too long on the frontier.

  On the other hand, Rogelio stared in shock and disbelief. His lips even started to quiver. The three men tightly bound on the wagon seat seemed to draw together even closer. Marco looked at the wagon, with its load of long boxes, and shorter boxes and powder kegs. The rumor was true. The French were ready to do business and further disrupt the frontier.

  Marco nearly turned to the warrior with the bow and arrow in his lap and ordered him to start shooting. Why in heaven’s name were the French interested in poor, wracked New Mexico? Wasn’t life hard enough already? Why did the battles of wars begun in distant lands have to be fought here? I will never understand kings, he thought.

  “Señor Mondragón?”

  Marco looked up from his tight fists to Lorenzo, who held out a folded sheet of paper to him.

  “Read this, señor,” the old scoundrel urged. “Your wife ….”

  Marco snatched the paper, his heart hammering in his throat. Please, please, nothing wrong there, he asked God. He scanned Paloma’s familiar handwriting. As all good wives did, here on the edge of Comanchería, she assured him first that all was well. His breathing slowed and he continued, reading of the two Frenchman and one Englishman that Lorenzo had actually apprehended farther north and then brought to the Double Cross, along with cases of firearms.

  He couldn’t help smiling as he continued. “I am certain we have Sancha to credit for Lorenzo’s sudden honesty,” he read. “Did you ever think Sancha would blush? Not I.”

  He kept reading, barely mindful that the others had dismounted and dragged the prisoners from the wagon seat. “They came from far, far to the north, a place called the Mandan Villages. They are intent on stirring up trouble, which besides good food, the French are famous for,” Paloma had written.

  He smiled again, wondering if she had made them bathe. Ah, this woman of his! He read her conclusion, which professed her love and worry in equal parts, and then other sentences she had added in even smaller print at the bottom. The smile left his face.

  “How they got here alive, they would not say,” Paloma continued. “How they plan to leave, no comment. You have Toshua, and he has ways to loosen tongues, so you must find out more. Something terrible is going on.”

  Paloma had added a note on the back: “My love, I think one of us had better learn some English. I fear there will be more of these people.”

  Chapter Thirty

  In which Marco deals with scoundrels and retains his honor

  “Were they going to use these guns against us?” Rain Cloud asked Marco, after he dismounted. “Should we just kill them now?”

  The Ute chief had s
poken in Spanish. Marco heard one of the prisoners suck in his breath. He looked at the other Frenchman and what must be the Englishman, who appeared puzzled, nothing more.

  “How many languages do we need here?” Marco asked Rain Cloud.

  He knew Rain Cloud would not fail him. After all, a wounded man doesn’t lie beside another wounded man without learning a few home truths. Rain Cloud gave him a slow wink, one the prisoners could not see, and appeared to consider the question. Marco felt some gratification to see sweat break out on two foreheads. The Englishman appeared clueless.

  “My Spanish is good enough, and we only need one Frenchman who speaks Spanish,” Rain Cloud said. “I don’t care about the Englishman. I have met a few Englishmen. I do not like them, or Americans, either, if such he is. Two of these prisoners are expendable. That one and that one.”

  The Frenchman who spoke Spanish translated this into French for his fellows, who quickly looked as stricken as he did.

  “I have no use for men like you, who would deal in death and leave our children and wives at the mercy of Comanche renegades,” Marco said to the two expendables who had dropped to their knees. “Tell them that.”

  “I think they already know.” The Frenchman bowed. “I am Jean Baptiste LeCroix, a trader like these, um, gentlemen of yours.” He indicated Lorenzo and Rogelio, who watched with some interest.

  “They’re wretched worms, much like you,” Marco said. He could almost feel Lorenzo bristle, but the trader wisely said nothing.

  Perhaps Jean Baptiste LeCroix thought to ingratiate himself with Marco, the man with the power. Who knew what a Frenchman thought?

  “What about this one?” he asked, pointing to Claudio. “Is he a wretched worm, too? And this woman, unless you all take turns with her?”

  Big mistake, Marco thought, and moved out of the way. Fool. You should have left it alone. As Marco expected, Rain Cloud whipped out his knife and filleted a strip of skin from Jean Baptiste, who screamed and clutched his arm. The chief gathered Graciela close. As Marco did not expect, Claudio stepped forward, grasped the dangling, bloody strip and ripped it off the rest of the way, to the prisoner’s further anguish.