The Promise of Jenny Jones

by Maggie Osborne

  This suspicion upset her badly. All her life she had been fussed over, petted, loved. Without a doubt, she knew that she had been the center of her mother's life. She was her aunt Tete's favorite. Until tonight, she had unquestioningly believed that she was loved and adored by all her cousins.

  That she might not be loved by all the people in her life was a new and frightening thought that shocked her deeply.

  Brushing a tear from her cheek, she closed her eyes tightly and wished the day's exhaustion would carry her into slumber. But as her thoughts quieted, she became aware of low, tense voices rising and falling around the campfire.

  "We know what has to be done," she heard Jorje say. The harshness underlying his voice sharpened her attention. "Since the snakes didn't solve our problem, I say we do it ourselves."

  "For the love of God. She's just a child!" This was Favre, who had shot the snake before it struck, who had danced with Graciela on her last name day.

  "Not so loud."

  "Luis and Emil have decided a certain person has to die," Favre said, speaking so quietly that Graciela had to strain to hear. "So let them kill her."

  "And let them inherit all of Don Antonio's money?" Tito said sharply. "Is that what you want?"

  Graciela's breath stopped and gathered around a pounding heart. They were speaking of her grandfather Antonio. And herself. Jenny had been right. Her cousins wanted her dead.

  The idea of this was too devastating, too enormous and unthinkable to comprehend. Stiff with fear and fresh shock, she lay in the darkness, gripping her blankets and shaking.

  "You're fools if you think we'll ever see a centavo of Don Antonio's wealth." Carlos rose to his feet, silhouetted by the dying flames. He waved his arms in an angry gesture. "Already Luis and Chulo are planning their journey to NorteAmericato tell Don Antonio that his daughter and granddaughter are dead. Who do you think Don Antonio's new heirs will be? You're loco if you think Luis and Chulo will remember to mention us."

  Jorje also stood. "That's why I say we take care of this problem." He cast a glance over his shoulder toward Graciela's bedroll. "And we insist that one of us goes with Luis and Chulo,then they can't cut us out. We found her. If we"—he shot another glance over his shoulder—"dispose of this problem, then we have Luis and Chulo right here." He pounded a fist in the palm of his hand.

  "She'sa Barrancas ," Favre snarled. "Like you. Like me. You would kill a member of your own family? I spit on all of you."

  In the sudden silence, Graciela heard the thunder of her heart knocking against her ribs. A torrent of tears streamed down her cheeks, and the hands gripping her blankets shook like dry twigs. Panic and fear squeezed her chest accompanied by an ache that she was too young to recognize as the pain of betrayal.

  What could she do? There was nowhere to run, no place to hide. Wiping frantically at the tears wetting her face, she tried to think of a way to escape, but no answers came.

  "Help me," she whispered, curling her fingers around the locket pinned to her chest. She could not have said to whom she addressed the urgent plea. To God? To the tiny portrait of her mother? Or did she hope that Jenny would find her again as she had inDurango?

  When dawn tinted the sky with streaks of pink and blue, sherose reluctantly and silently, her eyes dull and bruised from lack of sleep. Now she, too, held herself distant and withdrawn. Now she refused to meet her cousins' eyes for fear they would glimpse how profoundly frightened she was.

  "Time to vamoose," Jorje announced after they had eaten and packed the saddlebags. He extended his arms to lift her onto his horse, but Graciela shook her head.

  "I want to ride with Favre," she whispered.

  "As you wish," Cousin Jorje agreed with a shrug. He gave Favre a long, narrowed look before he mounted his horse.

  With a flourish, Favre bowed before her, then lifted her onto his saddle and swung up behind her. Graciela longed to thank him for his words on her behalf, but she feared admitting she'd overhead part of their conversation. She could almost hear Jenny saying: protect your backside, give nothing away.

  When they stopped atmiddayto seek shelter from the blazing sun, Graciela shaded her eyes and anxiously scanned the rolling, empty horizon. Buzzards circled a cluster of cacti to the north, and she spotted a hawk diving through wavy shimmers of heat floating near the ground, but she saw no riders.

  "Are you worried that the red-haired witch is following?" Cousin Jorje asked,handing her a goatskin filled with water.

  "A little," Graciela said, not looking at him.

  He laughed and puffed out his chest. "They won't follow." When he said "they" she remembered that Uncle Ty had joined Jenny. "Us," he said, thrusting forward four raised fingers. "Them." Two fingers lifted on the other hand, and he laughed again.

  Slowly, Graciela nodded. Her heart sank beneath the weight of his words. Before she stepped into the shade, she again searched the horizon, lingering on the dips and rises.

  Her cousins smoked or dozed beneath the shade of their sombreros. Occasionally they spoke in low voices among themselves. Made drowsy by the heat and a lack of sleep, Graciela found a spot near a low bush and had drifted into a light, restless slumber when two hands closed around her throat.

  Her eyes flew open and she struggled to sit up, grabbing at the fingers circling her neck.

  "It would be so easy," Carlos murmured near her ear.

  His fingers tightened steadily, pressing into her flesh and Graciela choked, fighting to draw a full breath. Black dots spun in front of her eyes and her lungs burned before a blur flashed across the side of her vision.

  Favre's body crashed into Carlos, knocking him away from her. She toppled backward and lay where she had fallen, gasping for air. When she could breathe again, she sat up, swallowing gingerly, and stared at the two men rolling and fighting in the desert dirt. Jorje and Tito stood across from her, also watching, hands on the pistols at their hips.

  Graciela didn't know what happened because she turned away, her stomach churning, and she didn't look at the fighting men again until she heard a gunshot. When she dared to look, Favre lay in the dust, his bloody face unrecognizable. Carlos sprawled on his back, Favre's knife buried to the hilt in his chest.

  Gasping, choking on horror and tears, Graciela doubled over and vomited in a clump of low cacti.

  Jorje swore as Tito checked both men,then looked up shaking his head. He snarled something at Graciela, but her ears still rang from the shot and she didn't hear.

  She was too frightened to look at him or Jorje, and her throat made no sound when she tried to speak. She darted one last horrified glance at the blood soaking into Favre's poncho, then she ran a few steps onto the desert and stood with her back to the camp, shaking as if the hot breeze were a gale.

  She felt as she had when she was ill, hot and cold at the same time. Her teeth chattered. These were not the laughing cousins who had danced with her and teased her at the hacienda. She didn't know these men; they might have been strangers. Gingerly she touched the bruises beginning to appear where Carlos's fingers had circled her throat, and she swallowed the dark taste of bile and fear.

  Without Favre, she was at the mercy of Tito and Jorje. Sooner or later they would kill her. She sensed this. She knew this .

  Deeply frightened, she scanned the empty land baking in themiddayheat Jenny had promised, she told herself, and Jenny never broke a promise. Jenny would come and save her. She had to believe this. Jenny must be out there. Somewhere.

  When she turned dragging footsteps back to the campsite, Jorje and Tito were hacking shallow graves out of the hard desert floor. She clung to thoughts of Jenny whenever she noticed Tito or Jorje studying her with hooded, speculative eyes.

  She prayed that Jenny would arrive while she was still alive.

  * * *

  "There!"

  Ty followed Jenny's pointing finger, nodded, and they both urged their horses forward and down into the next dry gulch. Jumping to the ground, they crawled up the far side
of the arroyo, and Ty wrestled a spyglass out of its case.

  He spotted them at once, resting in the thin shade of some stunted scrub oaks. Silently, he handed over the glass. "She's unharmed."

  "So far," Jenny muttered. Stretching out on her stomach, she propped one elbow in the dirt and steadied the glass. A minute later her forehead dropped against her arm. "Thank God!" Lifting the spyglass again, she peered intently. "I only see two men." She returned the glass to Ty.

  "But four horses," he said. "The other two are somewhere nearby."

  Ty slid down the incline and lifted a canteen from his saddle. After a long swallow, he wet his throat and face. The temperature must be near one hundred degrees. His shirt was soaked with sweat. Not speaking, he watched Jenny break twigs from the scrub oak andconstruct a shaded area by draping her saddle blanket over the twigs, which she had driven into the ground.

  Sensing that an offer to assist would offend her, he waited and watched her try and fail until the shelter was constructed. The view wasn't unpleasant. Sweat molded her trousers around shapely buttocks, and her wet shirt outlined two handfuls of breast.

  Swallowing images as hot as the scorching air, he joined her beneath the shade she had created and gave her the canteen.

  "We take them at night," he said. Her throat arched when she tilted her head back to drink, offering a long clean line that he wanted to explore with his fingertips.

  Jenny nodded and wiped a hand across her lips. "Has to be tonight. They'll reach the railroad tracks tomorrow."

  "Are you thinking dead? Or are you thinking incapacitated?"

  She scowled then whipped out her dictionary. A minute later she said, "I'm thinking incapacitate, like in tied-up and their horses run off. Unless they give us no choice, then we kill them." Slapping shut thedictionary, she pushed it into her back pocket. "Incapacitate. That's a good word."

  "So far we agree." Ty jerked open his collar. The air hung hot and motionless at the bottom of the arroyo. Nothing stirred. Sitting this close to her, he could feel the heat rolling off of her, could smell the pork rinds drawing out any infection beneath the bandage on her arm. He mopped his face and throat. "Want me to take a look at your wound?"

  "I checked it this morning. It's coming along." She shifted, brushed some small rocks out from under her,leaned against the saddle at her back. "Don'tworry, I'll hold my own tonight."

  "I'm not worried." But of course he was. Two against four weren't the preferred odds, especially as one of the two was one-handed.

  As if she'd read his mind, she slipped out of the sling. Grinding her teeth, she extended her arm, winced, folded it back near her breasts,then extended it again.

  "Stop looking at my chest, damn it."

  "I'm looking at your arm."

  "No, you aren't."

  "All right, I'm not."

  "So stop it."

  She stared until he lifted his gaze to her eyes, then she extended her arm again, working out the stiffness. It had to hurt like hell.

  Since he'd grasped how she thought by now, Ty knew they wouldn't risk leaving the arroyo until aftermidnight. A long sweaty afternoon stretched before them and most of the night.

  "We aren't going to sleep tonight, so you should try to catch some shut-eye now," she said, working her arm.

  "Can't. Too damned hot." He considered kicking off his boots, then decided the effort required more energy than he was willing to waste. But he stretched out, propped his head against his saddle, and lit a cigar. When he noticed Jenny inhaling the smoke, he offered it to her, not really surprised when she took the cigar with a sigh of pleasure. He lit another for himself.

  "How come you're so dead set against satisfying a hankering?" he asked when she paused to rest her arm against her thigh and enjoy the cigar.

  "I told you. I gave it a try, and I didn't like it. More important, I sure as hell don't want to get pregnant." She exhaled a perfect smoke ring, watched it widen and slowly dissipate. "Who's going to hire on a pregnant woman or one with an infant hanging around her neck? I figure the worst thing that could happen to me would be to get myself knocked up."

  "There are ways to make sure a woman doesn't get pregnant." He released his own smoke ring and sent it wobbling into the still air.

  "Yeah, and if those ways were always successful, there would be a whole lot less people in this world." She tossed him a look of contempt. "You said you aren't the marrying kind, Sanders. You're the walking-away kind. You use women to ease your hankering and thenit's adiós. Well thanks for offering to use me, I'm fricking flattered, but I'm plain not in the mood to be used and abandoned. Too damned bad we didn't hitch up during one of those times when I was yearning to be used and kicked away." Leaning to one side, she spit in the dirt, cutting her eyes toward him to make sure he hadn't missed the gesture.

  Ty stared at the horse blanket over his head, searching for a defense. "That's one way of looking atit," he said finally.

  "That's the only way I'm ever going to look at it. I'm never going to throw myself on some son of a bitch and beg him to use me, get me pregnant, and then walk away. No hankering is worth the consequences."

  "My brother didn't abandon Marguarita after he got her pregnant," he said, studying the faded pattern zigzagging across the horse blanket.

  "You aren't your brother," she snapped, working her arm again. "And he's nothing to hold up as an example if you ask me. He married Marguarita but he was never a husband to her or a father to the kid. He let his wife be sent away in disgrace rather than give up his precious inheritance."

  She spoke around the cigar gripped between her teeth, looking down at her arm. Sweat trickled along her hairline. Ty watched her and decided he liked a woman who appreciated a good cigar. Occasionally his mother smoked, on her birthday and after the annual branding.

  It surprised him to suddenly realize that Ellen Sanders would take to Jenny like shine on a nickel. Like Jenny, his mother defied convention by wearing men's trousers around the ranch, she enjoyed a drop now and then, and she didn't put on female airs. She, too, would have said "pregnant" rather than search for a polite or vague euphemism.

  "Would you walk away from three thousand acres of primeCalifornialand?" he asked, half-wishing she'd stop moving her arm. Sweat stood on her brow, and she'd bitten into the cigar.

  "The point is not what I would do," she said, stopping to exhale a stream of smoke into the motionless air. "The point is,Robert chose his inheritance instead of Marguarita and the kid."

  Ty laughed without amusement. "You'd understand if you'd known my father."

  "What about your father?"

  "Three things. No one said no to Cal Sanders. Second, he didn't want me to inherit his ranch. And he would have done whatever he had to do to keep Robert from running after a Mexican wife. It wasn't only the threat of disinheritance. He would have destroyed Robert, and Robert knew it. No one crossed Cal Sanders without paying a heavy price."

  She wiped a sleeve over her forehead and started working her arm again. "How come your father didn't want you to inherit the main ranch?"

  "Maybe because I told him I didn't want it." That was the only way he'd known to hit back at Cal Sanders, by rejecting the one thing his father cared about. "Seems to me that we've strayed a far piece from the subject at hand. Which is, what are we going to do about this mutual hankering?" Raising a hand, he touched his fingertips lightly to her cheek.

  "We're going to forget aboutit," she said, jerking her head away from his touch. "We're going to incapacitate it." A grim smile touched her lips. "I like to use new words."

  "I noticed."

  She frowned at her arm,then slipped the sling back on. "Don't want to overdo." Leaning back, she rested against her saddle. "There was a woman inEl Pasowho let me borrow her books. When I had a steady team, I could read while I was hauling. If you can read, you don't ever have to be lonely, and I can read," she finished proudly, watching him.

  "Very admirable." Ty settled his head against his saddle
and tilted his hat brim over his eyes so he wasn't tempted to stare at her breasts.

  "The thing is," he said, speaking around his cigar, "my hankering isn't incapacitated." Looking down, he could see the spot where her thighs met. A damp stain outlined a V at her crotch like an arrow pointing to heaven. A stirring occurred inhis own trousers, and he closed his eyes.

  She sat up abruptly and lifted his hat brim so she could stare down at him. "Is there something wrong with your ears? How many times do I have to say this? You andme can hanker till the moon falls out of the sky, but nothing is going to come of it. Now, that's how it fricking is, Sanders, so you just make up your mind to it. I might have to raise one kid, and I don't know how in the hell I'm going to do that. I sure don't want two kids dragging me down. So you just forget any hankering thoughts."

  She slammed his hat down on his face hard enough to knock the cigar out of his mouth. Sitting up, he slapped at the sparks on his shirt, found the cigar, and flipped it out from under their makeshift lean-to.

  "You're starting to irritate me," he said, fighting to hold his voice level. "I keep telling you that Robert is going to raise Graciela himself. But you keep hearing that it's your job and yours alone. I'm telling you for the tenth time, Robert is alive and well and he wants his damned daughter."

  She had a way of leaning into him to make apoint, thrusting her face forward until their noses almost touched. At the moment, being so close made him want to grab her and cover her mouth with punishing kisses until he felt the fight drain out of her stubborn bones, until he felt her slip trembling into surrender.

  "The kid is half-Barrancas."

  "You think that's going to surprise Robert? Robert's been in love with Marguarita Barrancas since we were all children. I'm the brother with the Barrancas problem, not him." His mouth twisted in disgust. "Right now, he's trying to put an end to the animosity between our two families."

  They had argued about old man Barrancas before Ty left forMexico. Robert didn't want Marguarita caught between her husband and her father. He wanted to end hostilities that had existed for twenty-five years. Ty strongly disagreed. Too much water had flowed beneath this particular bridge. There were too many stolen cattle, too many property skirmishes, too many wounded men and harsh exchanges on both sides of an ongoing dispute. Ty wasn't willing to forgive and forget, and he didn't understand how Robert could even consider it.