Mariana's Knight
Page 1
MARIANA’S KNIGHT
LEGENDS OF THE DESERT, BOOK 1
MARIANA’S KNIGHT
THE REVENGE OF HENRY FOUNTAIN
* * *
W. MICHAEL FARMER
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Copyright © 2017 by W. Michael Farmer
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the King James Bible.
Map of “A Knight’s Country” was created by the Author.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Farmer, W. Michael, 1944– author.
Title: Mariana’s knight : the revenge of Henry Fountain / W. Michael Farmer.
Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star Publishing, [2017] | Series: Legends of the desert ; 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058124 (print) | LCCN 2017005913 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432833923 (hardcover) | ISBN 1432833928 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781432836900 (ebook) | ISBN 1432836900 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432833886 (ebook) | ISBN 143283388X (ebook)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3388-6 eISBN-10: 1-43283388-X
Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Revenge—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Westerns. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Western stories.
Classification: LCC PS3606.A725 M37 2017 (print) | LCC PS3606.A725 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058124
First Edition. First Printing: May 2017
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3388-6 ISBN-10: 1-43283388-X
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Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 21 20 19 18 17
To Corky, My Wife and Best Friend
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Melissa Starr’s editing was a guiding light for this book. Her insightful comments kept the focus of the story where it needed to be and I owe her much for a job well done. Bruce Kennedy provided many helpful comments and enlightening information from his historical research on the time and place of this story. Jann Arrington Walcott’s encouragement and insightful comments were an inspiration for the original Hombrecito manuscripts. When I return to New Mexico to do further research on its land and history, Pat and Mike Alexander open their home to me. They are a constant source of encouragement. I thank these friends and colleagues without whom this book would not have been possible.
A Knight’s Country
PREFATORY NOTE
“The pursuit of truth, not facts, is the business of fiction.”
—Oakley Hall, author of Warlock
Mariana’s Knight is a novel. The characters of Yellow Boy, Rufus Pike, Henry Fountain (after age eight), Jack Stone, Red Tally, Charlie Bentene, and Sarah Darcy are fictional. The Fountain family members, Oliver Lee, Pat Garrett, and most of the characters and events leading up to the disappearance of Albert and Henry Fountain in the desert near White Sands, New Mexico Territory, are true historical figures.
What actually happened to Albert and Henry Fountain and who was responsible for their apparent murders have been fiercely debated for nearly a hundred and twenty years. Those who knew the truth went to their graves without telling the story, or if they did, historians have not heard or believed it. Logic dictates that eight-year-old Henry Fountain died with his father, but life, filled with unexpected events and inconsistencies, is not logical. What if Henry survived? This story assumes Henry’s survival and is constructed from actual and fictional events to create a myth for what devotees of western legends might wish had been.
The story of Henry Fountain’s survival was first published in 2005 as Hombrecito’s War, which was a Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist for Best First Novel and a 2007 New Mexico Book Award Finalist for Best Historical Fiction. Mariana’s Knight retells Henry’s story from a different perspective to make it more accessible to a wider audience. It is the first in a series of historical novels that are developed around true events in the southwest that became legends as the generation that settled in the New Mexico and Arizona territories, beginning about 1880, began their lives in a hard, brutal land, survived against all odds, and lived until the mid-twentieth century.
W. Michael Farmer
Smithfield, Virginia
15 August 2015
PROLOGUE
History records that my father, Albert Fountain, and I vanished one cold, dreary afternoon in the Tularosa Basin near White Sands, New Mexico Territory, the first of February in 1896. I am told experienced lawmen, Mescalero Apache trackers and ranch hands who rode the Tularosa Basin range every day searched for weeks for some sign of us. They found nothing.
My father, an attorney, politician, and newspaper publisher had many enemies. Near the top of the list was a widely respected rancher, Oliver Lee in the Tularosa Basin country, who battled with him often over range justice and politics. Lee lived by an unwritten Texas range code that oft times clashed with New Mexico Territory law my father vigorously enforced. Lee was a Democrat, my father a Republican, and dirty tricks were common on both sides in rough-and-tumble New Mexico politics.
On the day we disappeared, we were returning from Lincoln, New Mexico Territory. My father had just obtained thirty-two grand jury indictments of small ranchers, itinerant cowboys, and known bandits for cattle rustling. Included among them were indictments for Oliver Lee and a few of his friends, making them logical suspects for our supposed murders. Within a month after we disappeared, Pat Garrett, raising race horses in Texas, and famous for killing Billy the Kid in 1881, was brought out of retirement to solve the case by territorial governor William (Poker Bill) T. Thornton.
In 1899, a trial was held in the picturesque little mining town of Hillsboro, New Mexico Territory, at the base of the Black Range over seventy miles north of Las Cruces, where our family and their supporters lived. Lee and his friend James Gililland, charged with my murder, were supported by a large group of family and friends who came to Hillsboro from all over the territory. Another of my father’s enemies, Albert Fall, and three high-powered attorneys defended Lee and Gililland. After eighteen days, including several nights of testimony from a long line of witnesses, the case was given to the jury. The jury deliberated eight minutes and found Lee and Gililland not guilty. Thereafter, the countryside was divided into two factions that have never stopped arguing and literally fighting over the guilt or innocence of Oliver Lee in our supposed murders.
By 1950, only two men knew the true story of the murders and the hard, bloody retribution that followed. One was my Mescalero Apache mentor and adopted father, Yellow Boy, and the other was myself, Dr. Henry Grace, also once known as Henry
Fountain. In 1950, I persuaded Yellow Boy to tell me his life story and to let me write it down as he told it. Over many afternoons and weekends I wrote his oral history. At each session I read back to him what I had captured in the previous session and rewrote it until he said I had it right. His story has filled several journals.
When I finished Yellow Boy’s story and read it back to him as a complete piece following the “tracks of the Indah (white man) on paper,” he nodded, smiled, and looked at me with his shining, black obsidian eyes, and said, “Now, Hombrecito, you must make the tracks that tell your story. Others will want to know. It must not be lost. It will be told around the council fires for many harvests. All men, Indah or Indeh (Apaches) place a high value on courage.”
So it is that I have filled more journals with my own story, and here my story begins.
Dr. Henry Grace
Las Cruces, New Mexico
June 1951
CHAPTER 1
KNIGHTED
When I walked up to the parlor, my mama was dabbing her eyes, and I knew she had been crying again. My father stood puffing a cigar and looking out the window, his back to the door, as though trying to ignore her. We’d already had supper, and they had a warm fire crackling in the fireplace. The cedar-like smell of burning piñon wood mixed with the sharp, tingling smoke from the big Cuban cigar as the wind whipped and whistled around the corners of the house, made me glad I was inside. It was a harsh January night in 1896, the last evening my father was alive to enjoy time with us in that house, and the last time I would spend in that parlor again for many years.
I stood by the doorway until my mother saw me, smiled, and motioned for me to sit beside her. That night, she wore a cactus flower perfume that smelled wonderful and left the nicest trace of her in any room through which she passed. Her shiny, black hair was twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck, and her teeth were white pearls against her coffee-colored skin as she smiled at me and said, “Enrique, your father and I have been talking.” I immediately understood from the tone of her voice that this was to be a serious conversation.
“Your father has to go to Lincoln,” she said, and her hand shook a little as she raised her handkerchief to dab her eyes again. “He has to make a presentation to a grand jury to get indictments of men he believes have been stealing cattle from some ranchers he represents. He’s found evidence that can put the thieves in prison for many years, and some of them are well-known, prominent men. When word gets out about your father’s plans, there’s likely to be a lot of trouble. His life will be in danger.”
I nodded, narrowing my eyes to a serious squint, as if I were a grown man, and asked, “Is he afraid of those men?”
She took my hand and said, “No, Henry. I wish he were, but he’s not.” I felt a surge of pride in my father because that’s what I’d wanted to hear.
Mama squeezed my hand gently and said, “I’ve begged him to stay here, but he insists he must go if he’s to do his duty for his clients and keep his honor. He’s stubborn and full of pride. He’ll go, regardless of what I say.”
Mama sniffed, then held up an index finger, and said, “But I know how to protect him. Enrique, I want you to go with him. Your sister Maggie and I don’t believe anyone would attack a man traveling with a little boy.” I always liked it when she called me Enrique, which was my name in her native tongue. She usually reserved it for tender moments, when her love for me seemed to be at its strongest.
She paused for a moment, as if gauging my reaction. I felt a sense of pride, understanding she was asking me to do something brave. I knew I was just a spindly, half-Mexican kid, and some even said I looked sickly, but I was just tall and thin for my age, the last of twelve siblings. My brothers often played rough, adolescent games with me. Trying to survive around them made me a lot tougher than I looked.
Mama placed her hand on my shoulder and continued in a soft voice, “Your father has insisted that he go alone, but Maggie and I have been equally insistent that you go with him because, with you along, no harm will come to him. Tonight, he agreed that you could go with him, if you want to go. What do you say?” She smiled and squeezed my shoulder. Her deep, brown eyes were pools of kindness and understanding. I loved her so much that if she had asked me to jump into the parlor fire, I wouldn’t have hesitated.
I swelled up bigger than the bullfrogs I’d caught playing down by the Rio Grande. When they puffed up for a croak, they could be heard in El Paso. I sat up as straight as I could and said, “Yes’m. I’d sure like to go.”
Smiling, she reached into a knitting basket at her feet and handed me an ivory horse head watch fob. “This was your grandfather’s,” she said. “Your grandmother gave it to him because he was her caballero—her knight and her protector. Now, my son, you can be the knight for me, Mariana Pérez de Ovante Fountain, protecting your father. I’m very proud of you. Keep it with you, and remember you’re my caballero.”
I took it and turned it in my hands, examining it from every angle, before saying, “I will, Mama. Don’t you worry.”
My father turned, casting a baleful eye on me, half-serious, half-humorous. His mouth was a tight, straight line. I could tell he wasn’t happy about my decision, but in my excitement, I plunged forward and shared my first great idea for the trip. I said, “Daddy, since I’m gonna be ridin’ shotgun with you—”
Before I could finish, he held up his palm and said, “Whoa, stop right there, little man. You’re just along for the ride. You’ll get to visit the town of Lincoln for a while. It’s bad enough folks are liable to think I’m hiding behind a little boy, but it’s downright idiotic for a boy to think he can protect me with a damn gun. Do you understand?” He ground out the words between clenched teeth, obviously straining to maintain his self-control, and I could sense his fury below the surface. I realized he was frustrated by the iron will of my mother, and this made him speak more directly than usual. I also knew it was very rare for her not to go along with what he wanted. He just didn’t have much practice in dealing with her when she insisted on getting her way.
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled, looking at the floor, and then I thought of something that would justify our taking and my shooting his rifle. “I was just gonna ask if we could do some target shooting on the way. Maybe we’ll see a bear or mountain lion when we cross the mountains, and we can get us a hide for Mama’s floor.”
I knew how to handle the ’73 Winchester carbine standing in his gun rack. He and my brothers had taught me to shoot cans and bottles when they went out for target practice in the desert or in the big arroyo east of town. He had even let me shoot his Schofield pistol a few times, but I liked the rifle best because I couldn’t hit much with his pistol. It was too heavy and hard to cock. I couldn’t shoot it accurately, even holding it with two hands.
“Well,” Daddy said, as a grin started to grow under his mustache. “Yeah, we could do that, Henry, but you’ll be responsible for that rifle if we shoot it, so I’ll expect you to clean it. We’ll keep it in a scabbard under the buggy seat.” He walked over, tousled my hair with his big hand, and said, “I’ve got some business to take care of first thing in the morning, so we’ll leave at noon and camp in San Agustin Pass before rolling on to Tularosa the next day. I’ll carry your clothes in my valise, and we’ll use the buggy with Sergeant and Buck rather than ride saddle horses because I’ve got to carry a trunk full of grand jury papers, too.”
Sergeant and Buck were a big black and a big white, high-stepping horses Daddy had bought from a farm in Tennessee. They could really cover ground and had more endurance than any horses I’d seen before or since that trip. With our light wagon, I knew they could go like the wind for miles.
CHAPTER 2
STRANDED ON SAN AGUSTIN PASS
My father was never late. He said if you were late to a meeting it was an insult, so we were ready to go right at noon the next day. The sky was bright blue with lots of puffy, white clouds sailing across it, but the wind was cold and gusty. I sh
ivered as I climbed up on a buggy wheel to hug Mama and kiss her goodbye.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” I said. “I’ll take real good care of Daddy. Nobody’s gonna get us.” She managed to smile and nodded. Then Daddy held her close and whispered something in her ear. She smiled again, but her eyes were near tears as she and Marta, our cook, handed us a basket and stuffed a big, heavy blanket with a dog-head pattern over our laps. On Mama’s orders, Marta had fixed us a big basket supper and a bag lunch for the following day.
I was wrapped in a red wool Mackinaw that had belonged to one of my brothers when he was ten or twelve, and it was about three sizes too big for me. Daddy wore his army overcoat with the collar pulled up high around his neck and his campaign hat pulled down tight on his head. We also carried a buffalo robe, just in case the blanket wasn’t warm enough. He looked over at me and asked, “Warm enough, son?” I grinned and nodded.
Just before we left, he said, “Mother, my ears are about to freeze off. Do you have anything I can wear to keep them warm?”
She thought for a second and then held up her wait-a-minute finger. Without a word, she ran into the house. Returning in a couple of minutes, she brought him a rebozo, her favorite head shawl, to tie around his head. “Now don’t you lose that, Albert,” she said, her teeth chattering through an I’ll-be-brave smile, her lower lip trembling.
Daddy smiled and hugged her good-bye once more. “Don’t worry, Mother, I won’t lose it. We ought to be back around the first week in February. If you need anything, call on the boys to get it for you or to help you. If there’s an emergency, send me a telegram. We’ll be staying at Mrs. Darcy’s boardinghouse in Lincoln.” She nodded, crossing her arms and shivering in the wind.