Cherish

by Catherine Anderson

  Still scouring the opposite hillside, Race could almost feel eyeballs staring back at him. He had a good mind to get the Sam Hill out of there. The poor souls in the camp below were beyond his help, and if he hung around to bury them, he’d be as easy to pick off as a bottle on a post. A smart man would go back to the herd, recruit some men for a burial detail, and return here tomorrow.

  But since when had he ever claimed to be smart? The smell of blood would draw predators, and by morning, there wouldn’t be much left of the bodies. There were womenfolk down there amongst the dead, and by the looks of them, they’d suffered shame enough already. He couldn’t just ride off and leave them to become carrion for the coyotes or vultures. There were also the two surviving oxen to consider. Still trapped in the traces, the beasts would wander off before morning in search of water, pulling what was left of a sorry-looking wagon behind them. Sooner or later, a wheel would get hung up, stopping the wagon as surely as if it were hitched to a Mormon brake, and they’d die a slow death. If he turned them loose, at least they’d have a fighting chance.

  Race saw a black-tailed prairie dog frozen stock still in front of its burrow, tiny hands held to its mouth like a nervous woman biting her fingernails. Prairie dogs had a knack for sensing danger. This one’s paralytic terror wasn’t an encouraging sign.

  Setting his mouth in a grim line, Race touched his boot heels to Dusty’s flanks. The horse sidestepped and chuffed nervously, reluctant to descend the slope.

  “It’s okay, pardner,” Race said in a voice gone oddly thick.

  As Race nudged Dusty down the embankment, the muscles across his shoulders snapped taut. If the no-account skunks were out there somewhere, they were taking their own sweet time to say how-de-do.

  Even as he scoured the brush, Race kept jerking his gaze back to the ruined wagons. His strongest feeling of a presence seemed to be coming at him from that direction. Could it be that someone was still alive down there? Not likely. Leastwise not anyone in his range of vision. He knew dead when he saw it.

  Still, there were six men in the clearing and only five women. That left an odd man out. Maybe the sixth man’s wife had hidden and was now afraid to show herself.

  As he drew closer, Race saw that all but one wagon had been nearly dismantled, the tops ripped off the driver seats, attached tool chests and storage bins pried loose from the beds and torn completely apart. Shifting his gaze to the one wagon still intact, he wondered why it hadn’t received the same treatment. Not enough time, maybe? Judging by the way his hair was standing up, Race decided his arrival might have surprised the killers. They could have spotted him in the distance and skedaddled only a few minutes before Race got there.

  He scanned the opposite slope for any sign of stirred up dust. At one point along the ridge, the air looked a mite murky, the way it would if a group of men had fled over on horseback. Whirlwinds were common out here, though.

  He returned his gaze to the encampment. Going by the havoc wreaked on those wagons, the killers had been searching for something. Only what in blazes might it have been? Folks like these wouldn’t have been carrying cash or valuables. Mixed in with the stuff thrown from their wagons were farming implements, telling Race that the dead men had probably been clod busters. He had yet to meet a rich clod buster.

  Keeping one eye on the hillside, Race guided Dusty to the center of camp. As he swung from the saddle, one of the oxen began to bawl, the forlorn sound slicing through the silence. Glancing down, he saw that the heel of his riding boot was planted on the spine of a small black book with gold lettering. Several other books exactly like it lay scattered around, the covers of a few closed, some open, their ribbon markers and pages fluttering forlornly in a sudden gust of wind. Race couldn’t be sure because he’d never learned to read, but it looked to him as if the sky had clouded up and rained Bibles.

  Had these folks been religious zealots? That would explain all the black clothing and why none of the dead men had a weapon on or near his body. Cheek turners. Race had run across a few in his day—men who allowed others to spit on them, praising the Lord while they were at it. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never get his lasso tossed over that kind of thinking.

  What in tarnation had happened here? Armed with nothing but courage and those little black books, had these poor fools walked out to meet their killers, never lifting a finger to defend themselves? Race had a feeling that was exactly what had happened. No wonder it had sounded as if someone were target practicing. These people hadn’t even tried to hide.

  Letting Dusty’s reins dangle free, Race slipped his Henry from the rifle boot, then turned and nearly tripped over a dead woman. Since entering the camp, he’d been trying not to look closely at the bodies, but that became difficult when he was damned near nose-to-nose with one.

  Middling-aged and plump, the woman had light blue eyes and gray hair, worn in a braided coronet at the crown of her head. She looked like somebody’s granny. Not exactly the type to drive a man wild with lust. But the torn state of her clothing along with the nasty red marks on her wrists and exposed thighs told a different story. She also had caked blood under her fingernails, a telltale sign that this particular cheek-turner had fought for her life toward the last.

  A trickle of crimson, only now beginning to congeal, ran in a jagged line from the corner of the woman’s lax mouth down the crease of her chin. She hadn’t been dead too long. Thirty minutes, maybe forty. If only he had heard the gunfire sooner, he might have gotten here in time to save her. He switched his rifle to his left hand and tightened his grip over the stock, his fingertips pressing hard against cool gunmetal. A choking sensation grabbed hold of his throat as he bent to close her sightless eyes and straighten her torn clothing. Too little, too late. But it made him feel better to restore what little he could of her dignity.

  What kind of animals did things like this? Race guessed he was fixing to find out. If he didn’t get shot in the back while digging these graves, he would have to go after them. He couldn’t let crimes like this go unpunished. Not if he hoped to sleep at night.

  A fatalistic calm settled over him. The long and short of it was, a man had to do what he had to do. Race’s conscience wouldn’t let him leave, and if he ended up dead for his trouble—well, maybe it was meant to be. Besides, he could just as easily get shot in the back trying to ride away.

  That being the case, he set his uneasiness aside, determined to take things as they came. Before disturbing the ground, he searched the area for any clues that might help him track the killers later.

  Assuming, of course, that he lived to see another sunrise.

  The hoofprints he found near the wagons indicated that the group was sixteen strong and riding shod horses. That ruled out Indians and comancheros. Indians rode only barefoot ponies, and a band of comancheros would have left a mishmash of tracks, some of their mounts shod and some not.

  Walking slowly, Race circled the area. Then he retraced his path and bent to examine the footprints of the men themselves. They had been wearing low-heeled riding boots like his own, and the spur cuts were shallow. The ornate Californio spurs preferred by Mexican vaqueros left deeper cuts than these, the shank marks curved and blurred by the drag of instep chains. Plainer, more practical spurs—the kind usually worn by Anglos—had left these marks.

  White men had done this. Race had been hoping to find evidence to the contrary, not because the atrocities committed here would have been any less horrible, but because it seemed particularly obscene when men did things like this to members of their own race, not out of hatred or to avenge, but for the sheer joy of killing.

  Following the hoofprints to the edge of the clearing, Race determined that the killers had indeed headed north over the rise after doing their dirty work. He stared in that direction for a moment, recalling the traces of dust he had seen there earlier. All the signs pointed to his having surprised them, curtailing their search before they could rip apart that last wagon.

  He burne
d to follow them. Right now, though, he had a more immediate concern—giving the dead a proper burial.

  To do that, he’d need a shovel. In hopes of finding one, he headed toward the closest wagon, which was lacking a wheel. Looking around, Race spotted it leaning against a nearby boulder. Two of the spokes were broken, and it appeared that the men had been trying to do repairs and had probably been interrupted by the killers. The broken wheel answered one question, at least, why the travelers had set up camp in a dry creek bed so far from water.

  As he drew up near the wagon’s front axle, he noticed a rifle in the boot at the opposite side of the dismantled driver’s seat. He stared at the well-varnished butt of the gun for a long, hard second. Why he felt surprised, he didn’t know. Even cheek turners would have to carry firearms in order to hunt for fresh meat along the trail. He just found it difficult to believe these people had made no attempt to save themselves when they’d had weapons within easy reach. These men could have fought back—could have defended their women—but they hadn’t.

  Cheek turners. He’d never been able to understand them, and he sure as hell hadn’t admired them. In fact, until now, he’d always considered them cowards. Now he realized he couldn’t have been more wrong. It took a rare kind of courage to die for your convictions, especially when you had a gun handy.

  The next wagon in the circle had been parked at an angle almost perpendicular to the one in front of and behind it. As Race circled a pair of oxen that lay dead in the traces, he came upon an open, camel-back trunk, the lid blocking his view of what lay on the other side. As he stepped around it, he caught a glimpse of someone in his side vision. Not a dead someone either.

  Instincts honed to a sharp edge by years of guarding his back, he whirled, dropped into a half-crouch, and jacked a cartridge into the chamber of his Henry, ready to shoot the first thing that moved. A girl? She knelt only a few feet away from him, looking for all the world as if she were praying.

  Incredulous, Race stared at her. Golden hair that shone like a ten dollar gold piece. Sky-blue eyes. A face so perfect that a man expected to see its equal only in dreams. He blinked, convinced he was conjuring her up. But when his vision cleared, she was still there.

  Over the past years, Race had covered nearly every trail in this godforsaken territory, and seeing a pretty female was an uncommon occurrence. So uncommon, in fact, that one step up from ugly started to look damned good to a man after a few months. This girl looked a whole lot better than damned good.

  And she was definitely real, he decided. He had a vivid imagination, but not this vivid. He sometimes dreamed of women with golden tresses. What man who saw mostly black-haired, dark-skinned females didn’t? But the images he conjured were always perfect in every way—golden hair falling in a cloud of curls over a naked body, with pink-tipped breasts peeking out at him through the silken strands. This girl’s hair was so curly it bordered on unruly. It was also badly mussed, with stubborn corkscrew tendrils popping loose from the braided coronet atop her head, the wisps catching what remained of the sunlight and shimmering like gold filigree. Race had never yet dreamed up a woman whose hair needed combing.

  Then there was her dress, a relentless black and so modestly fashioned, it covered her from chin to toe. When he dreamed up a female, he dreamed her up naked—or damned close to it—and what little he did let her wear wasn’t funereal black, no how, no way. And—no small point, this—he liked females with some meat on their bones. This girl was slightly built—fragile, almost—with a skinny little neck, narrow shoulders, and breasts on the smallish side.

  Oh, she was beautiful. No question about that. But she was too pure and sweet-looking for his taste, not to mention way too young. Some men might cotton to robbing the cradle, but Race Spencer wasn’t one of them.

  She was staring fixedly at the sprawled body of an older woman who lay near her. “Miss?”

  She didn’t turn at the sound of his voice or acknowledge his presence in any way. Did she even realize he was there? Her stillness was starting to alarm him. Tension clawed his backbone. Was she deaf? Gone loco? She looked it, all stiff the way she was, her head tipped slightly to one side, as if she’d been about to ask a question and lost her train of thought sort of sudden-like. Even the set of her soft mouth hinted at that—lips slightly parted, as if she were about to speak. He had to look sharp to even be certain she was breathing.

  “Miss?” he said again, this time more loudly.

  Again, no response. Race stepped toward her, his heart catching at the mix of emotions he saw reflected in her unchanging expression—stunned disbelief, dawning horror, and an awful, paralyzing fear. It was as if she were caught in the throes of a bad dream—frozen stiff by the terror. Only this was no nightmare, and there would be no shaking her awake. Like a fist plowing into his midriff, realization struck.

  This girl was in shock.

  Race scanned the clearing again, his guts clenching. None of these poor people had met with easy deaths, especially not the women, and judging by the state this girl was in, she must have seen it all happen. Sweet Jesus. His first impulse was to gather her into his arms and try to reassure her. Anything to take that look out of her eyes. But he knew better. No sudden moves. A soothing tone of voice. If she was aware of him on any level, she’d be scared to death.

  The breeze ruffled the golden curls that had escaped her braid. Studying her, Race noticed scratches on her chin, a bruise along her cheekbone, and a scrape at her temple. Had she taken a tumble? There were streaks of dirt on her skirt and a rent in the shoulder seam of her dress, all of which could have happened in a fall.

  Race just hoped she wasn’t badly hurt. Draped from chin to toe in multiple layers of cloth as she was, it was difficult for him to tell if she’d sustained any injuries from the neck down. He sank to one knee in front of her. Slowly—very slowly—he set his Henry aside, just in case seeing it might frighten her.

  “Sweetheart, are you bad hurt anyplace?”

  No response. As he gazed into her eyes, the naked pain he saw reflected there got to him as nothing else ever had. Shattered innocence. Until today, this girl had probably never seen the dark side of humanity.

  Gently he cupped a hand to her cheek. Considering the warmth of the evening, her skin felt awfully cool. Almost chilled. That worried him. Was this type of shock similar to the shock men suffered from a serious physical injury?

  Tracing her cheekbone with his thumb, he whispered, “It’ll be all right now, honey.” His throat felt as though he’d swallowed flour paste. Anger surged through him. An awful, helpless anger. If he ever got his hands on those bastards, he’d kill them. “You don’t gotta be afraid of me. You hear? I heard the shootin’, and I came to help. Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you now. Understand?”

  If she heard him, she gave no sign of it. But he felt better for having said it.

  Her skin felt like satin. And that face. Like the rest of her, it was small and delicately made, every angle and plane perfect. She was older than he’d first thought. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Not a girl, after all, but a woman fully grown. It was the sweetness of her countenance that had made him think she was younger. His experience with women ran more to prostitutes, and no matter how young they were, none ever looked sweet. Hard as nails, more like, with eyes gone glassy from too much drink and a contempt for men that ran bone-deep.

  By contrast, this girl put him in mind of the angels he’d seen painted on church ceilings down in Mexico. A wounded angel. The thought came from out of nowhere. He didn’t even believe in angels, and if, by chance, they did exist and one of them tumbled from heaven, he felt pretty damned sure God wouldn’t choose Race Spencer to rescue her.

  “If this ain’t a hell of a note, I don’t know what is,” he said softly.

  The dark gold of aged honey and tipped with platinum, her eyelashes fluttered, making him wonder if she was reacting to the sound of his voice. Maybe she was starting to come out of it. Almost afraid to breathe, he watched her, a
lert for the slightest change in her expression. Then she resumed staring again, apparently unaware of him and everything else around her.

  He shifted his gaze to the corpse lying beside her. Like the other women, this one had been sorely abused before she died, the only difference being that her throat had been slit, an Arkansas grin curving from ear to ear under her small chin. Her black dress and gray underclothing were torn, her sprawled legs exposed, caked with dry blood, and bearing the marks of a man’s brutal grip.

  It took Race a moment to notice that the dead woman’s gray hair was streaked with gold, the sheen dulled by the passage of years, but not so much he couldn’t tell that she’d once been a blonde. He threw a startled glance at the girl. There was no mistaking the resemblance—the same fragile build, the same delicate features and ivory skin. Mother and daughter?

  Jesus-God, no.

  A strange feeling came over Race in that moment—an almost frightening sense that powers beyond his understanding had led him here to this arroyo. Loco. He didn’t normally let foolish notions overtake him, and thinking that he’d been destined to find this girl was about as foolish as a notion could get. It was like saying that fine silk and burlap went well together.

  “Honey?” he whispered, gently taking hold of her hand. “I’m gonna go get a wagon ready to roll so I can get you out of here. I’ll only be a few feet away, so don’t go gettin’ scared at bein’ left all alone. I’ll keep an eye on you the whole time, and you’ll be all right. Understand? Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”