River to Cross, A

by Yvonne Harris

  Still, she had to admit he was attractive in a muscular sort of way, not pretty like some men she knew. In fact, most women would declare Jake Nelson handsome, if they liked the physical type, that is. She, however, preferred brains over brawn any day.

  “Señora?” Ricardo called up to her.

  She turned and looked down at him.

  “Jake said to expect him back in three days, five at the most. And though he didn’t say what for, he said to tell you he was not sorry.”

  Of course he wasn’t, she thought. Why should he be? He was probably having a great laugh at her expense. If she kissed him back, it was only out of gratitude for getting her away from the Mexicans. That’s all.

  She thanked Ricardo and continued up the stairs to her room and flung herself onto the bed. So, big bad Jake wasn’t sorry for kissing her, was he?

  The rat.

  She threw her arm over her eyes and let out a long sigh. Well, she certainly was.

  She pulled the pillow over her face.

  If she wasn’t, she ought to be. Her throat tightened.

  Please, God. I don’t want to be hurt again.

  Lying in her bedroom in the Romero house, a soft breeze billowed the white lace curtain hanging over the small window. A shiver rippled down her spine as she reflected back to when her husband was alive. Jake Nelson and Carl Evans had been cut from the same piece of cloth—both towheads, both Texans, both living on the edge of danger and loving it. Like Carl, Jake exuded that same cocky confidence that came from risking his neck and surviving.

  She’d met Carl Evans four years earlier in Washington, on the steps of the Capitol where her senator father worked. The steely-nerved Cavalry Lieutenant Carl Evans from Fort Myer, Virginia, had just given a talk to enlistment officers that Fourth of July in 1882. She’d been hurrying down the steps to hail a carriage when her heel went out from under her and she fell into him, knocking the books and papers out of his hand.

  Embarrassed, she’d gone down on her knees to gather up the papers from the steps before they blew away.

  “I’m so sorry,” she’d mumbled to the pair of uniformed knees stooping beside her, then looked up into a pair of vivid blue eyes and a smile that could melt a snowball half a block away.

  “I’m not,” the lieutenant said, grinning.

  In between one breath and the next, practical, levelheaded Elizabeth Madison fell in love. Completely. With all her heart. That day, she and Carl slipped off together, riding streetcars, hopping off to explore, and holding hands and kissing when no one was looking. One snowy December morning five months later, she married him. In the spring she moved west with him to Fort Quitman, Texas, when his unit was reassigned.

  They’d been like a couple of kids playing house, living on post. Her cooking, cleaning, and running to meet him, and Carl coming through the door, laughing, swinging her around, so full of life he crackled.

  She breathed a painful, fractured sigh. Like autumn leaves, other pictures scattered across her mind: the sad, sorrowful train ride to Dallas seven months later to take him home, his family, her family, the sea of dress uniforms, the regal bronze casket draped in red, white, and blue.

  Taps.

  Elizabeth rolled over in the bed and gazed at the white lace curtain, hanging now limp and still, an icy little hole where her heart had been.

  Jake had been in San Jose the year before, and the village looked as if it hadn’t changed at all since then. Time appeared to have stopped here long ago. White mud and stone houses filled the narrow streets with stepped sidewalks. Iron balconies with pots of flowers overhung steep streets that, only two generations earlier, had echoed with the hoofbeats of the Church’s inquisitors.

  All streets led to the village square, a paved area featuring a fountain at the center, and an arcade that bordered three of its sides—a roofed walkway jutting out from the buildings, which provided relief to shoppers against the wind and storms and the searing sun. Grateful to get away from the fierceness of the hot, dry wind, Jake strolled along the arcade, peering into the store windows as he passed.

  Wooden buildings with signs and storefronts crowded together. He saw the same tired bank, the stage stop, and two saloons. Beyond were the pool halls and more stores. And between the bank and another pool hall was the Western Union Telegraph Office.

  Two old men in caps sat on a bench by a store window and nodded as he walked past them. A widow, dressed in lifelong black, hurried across the square, shaking her finger at boys playing pelota against the side of the church at the end of the square.

  Next to a meat market with a crate of live chickens in the window, he found a café. He ducked inside and took a table facing the door so he could watch for Gus. He hadn’t eaten since early that morning and was famished. The lunch he’d planned to eat at the Romero house had never happened.

  Because after he kissed Elizabeth, he ran.

  Ran like a horse with its tail on fire. That kiss—and his unexpected reaction to it—had shaken him. He was at a loss to explain how he felt. Or why.

  He snapped his head around at the faint scuff of a shoe alongside him, startled he hadn’t heard the person approach. He tensed and glanced up to see the café owner, a tray in hand, waiting to take his order. Disturbed at his inattention, Jake quickly read the list of that day’s offering of food, scrawled on a slate hanging on the wall. He gave his order in crisp Mexican Spanish.

  As the man disappeared through a curtain of clicking glass beads, Jake wondered if he’d been wrong to wave off Ricardo’s suggestion of a bodyguard. Yet, deep down, Jake knew he was right. Another man tagging along would have made them all suspect.

  The café owner returned and set in front of him a small crusty loaf of bread, a bowl of spicy chicken broth with onions and hominy, and a dish of plump black olives.

  Slowly the knot in his belly loosened. The spicy broth warmed him and helped him relax. He tried to force his thoughts in another direction.

  It had been a couple of hours since he’d left Elizabeth, and he still couldn’t get her out of his mind. He could kick himself for kissing her.

  Still tense from that good-bye, he blew out a breath of air. Shaking his head slightly, he broke off a chunk of bread and wondered what he’d missed. Her words said one thing, her eyes another. And her kiss said something he still couldn’t quite believe.

  He soon finished the soup and then began picking at the olives.

  A muscle ticked in his cheek.

  She didn’t mean it.

  She couldn’t mean it.

  But what if she did?

  He didn’t understand it. For some reason, women were very friendly toward Texas Rangers and hung all over them at bars and gambling tables. Every town was the same that way. Just knowing they were Rangers drew women, when it should have warned them away. Rangers were lousy husband material, himself included.

  Permanent relationships and Jake Nelson: the two didn’t mix. In the last decade, he’d told a lot of women good-bye. The Army made that easy. Ten long years had passed and he hadn’t allowed himself to get attached to any girl. Safer that way, although homecomings sometimes gave him a twinge.

  When they returned from an operation, his fellow Rangers were met with squealing hugs and kisses from their wives and children, families jumping up and down with excitement.

  But nobody was there to meet him.

  And yet women were a fixture in his life, one pretty girl after another parading through his world. Women he soon forgot. Several times he pretended he cared, hoping somehow it might turn out to be true. It never did. Now, when it looked as though a relationship was heading in a serious direction, he ran the other way, broke it off before anyone got hurt.

  Before he got hurt.

  He didn’t want to be pressured into something he wasn’t ready for, might never be ready for again.

  Like marriage.

  There was a time, long ago, when he thought he was ready, thought he’d met the perfect girl, Audrey Simmons, who
worked as a seamstress, a respected position. He bought her a ring and started making plans to build a life together, a real family.

  But then one night his superiors at headquarters miscalculated and sent him and a sixty-man command to attack an Apache camp of hundreds, armed with bows and rifles and waiting for them.

  The soldiers were quickly outnumbered and outflanked, forced into a three-hour fighting retreat. He lost six men that night, including his best friend. His horse was shot from under him, and Jake took a bullet in the upper arm trying to find another mount. Running, jumping, he caught the bridle of a dead soldier’s horse and threw himself into the saddle.

  Knowing the men were watching, he raised his rifle over his head, waved for them to follow, then took off at a gallop. Standing in the stirrups, he let out a shout that was heard for half a mile. The men followed him, riding hard and yelling like banshees.

  Jake was strong for them. He had to be.

  After the hospital at Fort Richardson patched them up, they gave the wounded a few days’ leave. Jake left at once. He wanted Audrey, his fiancée. Rubbed raw inside and hurting, he needed to talk to her, to hold her.

  To be held.

  He rode all night to get to her, trotting into the yard of her little house just outside town before sunup. The flat calm that always followed a firefight had long since disappeared, replaced by muscle tremors and a wound-too-tight feeling. That too would pass, he knew, as soon as he wrapped his arms around her.

  Knowing she’d be up soon to go to work for the dressmaker, he quietly entered the kitchen through the back door and went to the stove to put on a pot of coffee. Everything took longer with his arm in a sling. When the coffee was ready, he poured himself a cup and sipped slowly.

  A few minutes later, he looked up when her bedroom door opened and Audrey came out, dressed for work.

  Her eyes widened.

  Jake jumped up so fast he knocked his chair over.

  Right behind her walked a barefooted marine, buttoning his shirt.

  Jake was so taken aback by the sight, he thought he’d die right then.

  A loud argument followed. The marine grabbed the rest of his clothes and lit out for the door. It wasn’t the first time, Audrey admitted. There’d been others—men in his own company, men who reported to him, men who had respected him.

  Hearing her confession, his jaw dropped. Inside him, something was running away, tunneling deeper, trying to hide. He sank into a chair and bit down the anger burning a hole in his gut.

  She accused him of not loving her—not enough anyway. “Your men are more important to you than I am,” she said.

  “They have to be!” he shouted. “My job is to keep them alive.”

  “Then I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to be an Army wife.” She pulled off her engagement ring and dropped it on the table.

  He scooped the ring up and thrust it into his pocket. “You won’t be! Not mine, anyway.”

  At that moment, like blowing out a candle, he stopped loving her.

  Outside, mounted on his horse again, he dragged his good hand down his face, surprised to find his cheeks wet. He swallowed hard.

  Officers don’t cry.

  He pulled out a handkerchief and dried his eyes.

  Last month, before Elizabeth was kidnapped, Jake and Colonel Gordon had spent a couple of hours relaxing and talking, discussing Texas and the Army. Tieless, shirt unbuttoned at the neck, Colonel Gordon slouched in an armchair, chewing on a cigar. Jake sat in a chair opposite the colonel, his boots propped on a footstool. He yawned and grunted sleepily.

  Gordon smiled. All that casualness and good humor was deceptive. In truth, Jake Nelson was cool and remote, difficult to get close to. The profile Gordon had worked up on him revealed a man who hated to lose, who hated being second best in anything.

  Jake took no unnecessary chances with his men and refused to budge until all the pieces of an operation were in place. Then there was no holding him back. Not everyone liked him, but when it came to his judgment of things, the men trusted Jake fully and would follow him anywhere. He was a leader.

  And that was exactly why the Frontier Battalion had gone after him three years before. And why Colonel Gordon was about to do the same.

  That afternoon, Gordon and a committee from Defense Intelligence had selected Nelson for an assignment. Gordon was looking for a new Executive Officer qualified to head up the Fourth Cavalry Regiment. He knew Jake well, knew that Jake would want hard information to come to a decision. Any convincing to be done must come from within himself.

  Gordon stood and walked to the window. He looked out and gestured to the wide parade ground below. “I know you’ve heard the rumors about what’s ahead for this fort. They’re not rumors,” he said quietly. “They’re enlarging Fort Bliss beyond anything we’ve heard. We are going to be one of the biggest installations in the country. We’re fine now, but in a few months things are going to break wide open. We will have more men, horses, and equipment than we can handle. I’d like for you to come work with me. I need a good XO. Your time with the Texas Rangers is almost up. Can we persuade you to come back to the U.S. Army and help run this battalion?”

  Hands in his pockets, the colonel turned around and faced Jake. “Incidentally, that’s Major if you accept.”

  The spring bell over the front door jangled. Jake looked up as Gus walked in. He saw Jake and chuckled. “You look ready to shoot someone,” he said.

  Jake forced a laugh and pulled out the chair next to him. “Not at all. Sit down. You get us a place to stay tonight?”

  “Around the corner in a boardinghouse, second floor.”

  “Learn anything yet?”

  Gus nodded and looked around. Except for two young people buying candy, the café was empty now. “About an hour after I left you and Fred this morning, a Mexican major with a scarred face went pounding by me at a dead run on the road to San Jose, same road you came in on.”

  “That would’ve been Major Chavez,” Jake said. “What else?”

  “He turned back, stopped and asked if I’d seen anyone. I said I’d seen only one man with two cows. When I told him that, he just nodded, waved, and raced off toward San Jose again. I figured he’d already seen the same man I did.”

  “I also saw the man with the cows on the way here. Was one of those cows mostly black with a big white spot on its hind end?”

  Gus nodded. “Almost the whole leg was white.”

  Frowning, Jake leaned back in his chair and ran two fingers across his mouth. Facts were adding up. “The man we saw with the cows is probably a sentry for the Mexicans,” he said. “My guess is the Army’s keeping tabs on who is going to and from San Jose right now. That tells us somebody important is either here or coming here—a stroke of luck for us.”

  Finished with his meal, Jake tossed two coins onto the table and stood up to leave. He looked back over his shoulder at the owner. “Gracias, señor,” he said, and followed Gus outside.

  In serapes and sombreros, sashes knotted about their waists, Jake and Gus roamed San Jose, shopped the stores, and had a horse re-shod, sizing up the town and its inhabitants. They wore their trouser legs out over their boots to look more like vaqueros, Mexican cowboys who sometimes rode barefoot. Knee-high boots laced over pant legs was an American look, a Ranger look. Jake and Gus were both fluent in Mexican Spanish, and Jake could color his words anytime he chose with the peculiar Chihuahuan accent.

  While looking around the livery stable, two columns of soldiers passed quickly through town, their eyes straight ahead. In the middle were six horses with loaded saddles, roped together in single-file. Each saddle mound was tied to the horse and carefully covered with a blanket.

  Jake looked at Gus. It wasn’t hard to figure out what those blankets covered.

  On a secret scouting assignment over the border last year, they’d surprised a Mexican patrol and lost three Rangers in a nighttime shootout. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave them there without risking a
war. He called the mission off and ran for the border, along with the fallen Rangers tied across the saddles of their own horses. And he swore those horses knew. Not one of them raised their heads the whole trip back.

  This column seemed headed for a small Mexican outpost five miles from San Jose.

  A heavyset man whose blue uniform jacket bristled with medals rode in the second group, following the advance patrol clearing the way through town.

  Jake said softly to Gus, “Recognize him?”

  Gus nodded, his face tight. “Diego. I’ve seen him before. His men are well trained and loyal. Most are afraid of him and who he knows.”

  “And look who’s with him.”

  “Major Chavez himself.”

  “The two of them together locks it up. Two positive identifications—yours and mine. That’s good enough,” Jake said, and watched the last of the column turn south out of San Jose. “Let’s stay tonight and see what else we learn. Then tomorrow we’ll get our lady friend and head home—fast, before they start looking for us.”

  Early the next morning, Elizabeth answered a tap on the door. Smiling, Maria stood in the hall with a cup of coffee, looking as if she’d been up for hours.

  “The boys are off at school and Ricardo is working in the barn. How about we go into town? I’ll introduce you to the priest and show you around their orphanage. I teach there three mornings a week, and today is one of my days.”

  Two hours later, shielding her eyes, Elizabeth gazed at a walled compound of buildings climbing a hillside. Except for an ancient bell tower dominating the corner overlooking the village, it might have been a fortress. It seemed completely out of place in this quiet Mexican countryside.

  San Miguel was a small community in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. From a distance, the whitewashed mud houses looked swept together against the mountain, their tile roofs touching. A sandstone church with a modest cross stood at one end of a large arcaded square; the school the two Romero boys attended, at the other.