Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) (9 page)

They both shouted in surprise and Molly gestured wildly. “My new red dress! She’s ruined my dress! Why, I ought to wipe up the floor with you, you little-! ”

“I hope you’ve got some help,” Cayenne smiled a little too sweetly, setting the pail down. “Because, honey, you’re gonna need it!”

Maverick scrambled out of the tub, dripping across the floor as he grabbed for a towel to wrap around his lean body. “Cayenne’s right, Molly, I’d think twice about layin’ into her if I was you. Texas gals are tough—”

“So are gals from Missouri!” Molly faced Cayenne in the wet scarlet dress, looking like a slightly bedraggled and enraged Rhode Island red hen.

Maverick pushed between them. “Here! Here! Stop this! Now let’s try to talk this out sensibly. ..”

Cayenne glared at him with eyes as cold as green emeralds. “You’re fired!” she snapped. “I’ll go to Texas by myself ! ”

“Texas?” Molly wailed. “Handsome, you was going to Texas with her after I loaned you my bathtub? You was cleaning up for her?”

Cayenne pulled out of Maverick’s grasp and confronted her. “Honey, you can have him! If I ever see him again, that’s one day too soon!”

And with that, she spun on her heel, marching out of the room and down the stairs. The men didn’t meet her glare as she stormed out of the Red Garter like the Texans taking San Jacinto!

As she marched over to her horse, Maverick leaned out of the upstairs window. “By damn, baby, you can’t cross Texas alone! Wait ’til I get my clothes. . . .”

“You just watch me!” she snapped in a fury, swinging up in the saddle. It was hard to straddle the mare with a dress on but she didn’t care if her legs did show. She’d meant to get a sidesaddle or change into boy’s pants before they started their journey. She felt too angry to care as she urged the startled mare into a lope, leaving Wichita behind. She had a little compass in her saddlebags, which would be of some help, and she had a rifle and some food. But most of the gear would be on a packhorse Maverick would have brought along.

She headed southwest at a walk, and the farther she got from town, the more she regretted her peppery temper.

“My stars! He deserved more than just a sloshing,” she said aloud to quiet her fears, her doubts. But that didn’t alter the facts that now she was out here on these endless plains all alone with nothing but the wind and dozens of dead, reeking buffalo carcasses around her.

Buck. That big buffalo hunter was out here some place, too,
she thought with sudden alarm. But of course the southern plains were endless. The chance she’d cross his trail was small. Still . . .

She reined up. Maybe she should go back to town, try to hire someone else to help her get through hostile territory. Cayenne bit her lip, wiping at the perspiration on her freckled face as the midday sun beat down on her. Somehow she didn’t have any confidence in any other
hombre
but that damned half-breed. He was all man, supremely confident in his ability to handle anything he came up against.

The hot wind smelled like dry dust, like the drought that had shriveled the Southern Plains for months now. A drop of perspiration ran down her breast and she blotted it with the blue gingham of her dress, remembering Maverick’s mouth hot and moist on her nipples. She thought of him with both longing and regret. The strange, tortured cowboy had been her very first man and she would never, never forget him. But to him she’d been only another conquest.

Strawberry craned her head around and whinnied. Frightened, Cayenne turned in her saddle to look behind her. Way off toward Wichita, small dots moved on the horizon. Who could it be? That filthy buffalo hunter? An Indian? Strawberry nickered again as the rider came on fast, leading a loaded packhorse behind him.

Cayenne felt a surge of both fury and relief. The expert way he rode, the size of the man, and the big gray stallion identified him long before the man galloped close enough for her to recognize his dark face. Maverick Durango.

“By damn, if it isn’t the little horse thief,” he sneered as he galloped up beside her.

She blinked. “Horse thief?”

Maverick nodded toward the brand on Strawberry’s rump. “I believe that is a Triple D mark, isn’t it?”

Cayenne gasped. Horse stealing was a hanging offense anywhere in the West. “You’re bluffin’!”

He grinned slowly. “Am I?”

She watched the big half-breed, her emotions a mixture of relief and anger. He looked so stern, so forbidding riding that stallion that reminded her of a ghost, a spectre. She just kept riding.

Then she remembered him sitting in the soapy water, that whore with the long black hair running her hands familiarly over his broad back.
How dare he follow her?
Cayenne slapped the mare with the reins, loping off to the southwest.

“Cayenne! ” He took in after her, the big gray slowly gaining on her. “Cayenne!” .

She didn’t look at him even when she heard him overtake her.

“By damn, baby, look at me when I talk to you!”

She lifted her head high and kept riding.

He rode along beside her. “I believe when you set a course for yourself, you’re as stubborn as a snapping turtle ! ”

“Then you should remember,” she answered coldly without looking over at him. “It’s an old Texas legend that snapping turtles don’t let go ’til they hear it thunder.”

“I ought to paddle your butt!” he said.

“Don’t be crude,” she said, chin high, not looking at him. She couldn’t remember ever being this angry before. “You loaned me this horse, remember? Go back to Wichita! I’ll find someone else along the way to ride with me!”

“What you’ll find is some war party, some gang of filthy buffalo hunters, Reb! Either one would keep you as a playpretty—”

“That doesn’t concern you now, does it?” Her anger had given way to a sense of relief that he rode by her side. But she was too proud to let him know how frightened, how uncertain she’d been.

“Cayenne, I’ve never had to answer to any woman and I’m not about to start now!”

“I didn’t ask for an explanation,” she said frostily. “After all, I was raised on a ranch; I know a stallion will mount any eager mare that sidles up to him.”

“Dammit, I just took a bath in her tub.”

She didn’t answer, keeping her eyes on the flat prairie ahead of her.

“Are we going to ride clear to Texas with you not speaking to me?”

“You don’t have to ride to Texas. I didn’t ask you to come along. You’re sticking to me like a burr in a pony mane.”

“And I intend to,” he answered grimly. “I told you I’d get you home. After all, it cost you enough!”

She felt the blood rise to her face. “No gentleman would bring that up.”

“No lady would seduce a man in exchange for his accompanying her.”

“Seduce? Seduce?” She looked at him, unable to keep the anger from her voice. “I’d call it rape, you—you—!” She tried to think of some terrible insult. “You Yankee, you!”

“I think it’s going to be a long trip,” he said coldly, and he didn’t smile.

Cayenne felt too much fury to say anything else. She had a feeling if it went much further, she would take her quirt to the stony-faced man, and if she did, there’d be hell to pay. And yet, she felt relief that he’d shown up. She glanced over at him, his strong hands on the reins, the big Colt he wore. They rode southwest through the heat for at least two hours, neither saying anything.

It was Maverick who finally broke the silence. “Haven’t you got a hat?” he snapped. “With that sheer fabric, those short sleeves, you’re gonna get sunburned.”

“That’s hardly your concern, cowboy.”

They rode for another hour in silence.

Finally Maverick asked peevishly, “Are we going all the way to Texas without your saying a word to me?”

“Probably,” she answered coolly.

“Well then, you ornery little vixen, I can be as stubborn as you are!” His voice trailed off in sullen silence.

That’s what you think,
she thought, but she said nothing.

So they rode through the hot afternoon. Except for an occasional rabbit and the buzzards swooping down to feast off the rank buffalo carcasses, they saw no movement. But once when they stopped to rest the horses, Maverick examined the ground, looking at tracks.

“Unshod ponies,” he muttered, and said no more.

Cayenne wet her handkerchief from her canteen, dabbing her face and her pony’s muzzle. The damp cloth felt cold against her sunburned face and she winced.

“Here, baby, take my hat.” He held it out to her.

She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of realizing how sunburned she was. “No thanks. I’m just fine, really”

“Suit yourself, Cee Cee,” he shrugged. “Remember, I offered—

“Don’t put yourself out on my account,” she snapped. Had he always seemed so arrogant, so confident? And to think she’d been stupid enough to let this Yankee-lovin’ range bum charm her out of her virginity. She gritted her teeth with grim satisfaction. She didn’t even feel guilty that Bill Slade and his men would gun Maverick down when he finally reached the Lazy M.

She glared at him as they mounted up. “If the Rangers hadn’t been broken up, I’d have asked them for help instead of you.”

Maverick grinned. “Oh, hasn’t someone told you? In the last several months, Governor Coke has managed to throw out the carpetbagger government. First thing he did in April was reactivate the Texas Rangers.

She’d outwitted herself. “How was I to know that? I’ve been in Kansas since late March.”

“What kind of help?”

She stuttered, unused to lying. “Why—why, help getting home, that’s all.”
She hadn’t needed the half breed in her plans after all,
Cayenne thought grimly as they struck out southwest again. She could have called on the Rangers to help. No, she couldn’t either, she remembered. If it had been that simple, the letter wouldn’t have come to her. Papa could have called in the Rangers himself. Just what hold did Slade have on the gentle preacher? It was too bad the tiny community of McBride didn’t even have a sheriff. The quiet, religious people had never needed one before. But the letter hinted something might be going to happen, maybe in a few weeks. What were Slade and his men up to and why was Papa so hesitant to call in the authorities?

Cayenne looked over at the grim half-breed riding beside her. How ironic it was she’d had to ask a Comanche for help when it was the Comanche who’d tortured her gentle papa. Joe McBride was not only a hero but much loved in the community for what had happened eight months ago.

Damned Comanche! She swallowed hard, looking over at the man who rode beside her. If he and Papa weren’t a contrast! Maverick believed in “an eye for an eye” while her kindly, religious father preached “vengeance is mine says the Lord” and about turning the other cheek. Papa had been the man brave enough to carry the ransom out to that war party when they took some of the women and children hostage at a church picnic. They’d turned the captives loose but kept Papa to torture. Only the arrival of that chief, Quanah Parker, at the last minute had kept the war party from killing him.

Maverick held up his hand to halt. “There’s something on the horizon ahead, not sure what.”

Cayenne stood in her stirrups, shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun. “Where? I don’t see anything. You must have eyes like a hawk.”

He smiled wryly. “Among the Comanche, if you don’t keep all your senses alert, you don’t live to grow up. I’ll ride out, see what it is. Stay here, Cee Cee.”

She started to protest that he was not the ramrod here, that she would not be ordered around by him, but then decided against it. Maverick seemed as much at home on these hostile plains as any big lobo wolf. He rode forward until he was only a small figure on the great, barren horizon with the sun setting orange and gold behind him. She almost seemed to see a silver-gray lobo loping silently through the tall grass.
A lobo mates for life.
The fact came to her and she was annoyed with herself for the thought.

The wind picked up, whining a little, and she remembered how many times she’d heard the lonely call of a solitary lobo. Suppose he rode off and left her? Cayenne felt both isolated and alone, with only the sound of the constant wind ruffling the dry grass as she watched him disappear over the horizon.

She almost called out to him, then remembered how keen an Indian’s senses were, how her call might carry on the wind if there were a war party anywhere nearby. Cayenne ran the tip of her tongue over her dusty lips, feeling the sting of perspiration on her sunburned face. The wind shifted and she smelled the stink of dead buffalo, hundreds of them. No wonder the plains tribes had taken the warpath. She almost cried out with relief when she saw Maverick suddenly reappear on the horizon, waving her forward.

Cayenne loped the mare through the grass to where Maverick sat his mount, staring up at some kind of crude platform built into the air. A dead paint horse lay beneath the platform, crude symbols and red handprints painted on its shoulders and flanks.

She frowned, staring upward. “What in God’s name is that? What happened to that horse?”

Dust Devil whinnied, stamping his feet, ears forward inquiringly. Maverick patted the gray’s neck. “Whoa, boy, take it easy.” He looked up at the platform, over at Cayenne. “It’s a Cheyenne burial—a chief, judging from the finery and the quality of the horse. I saw unshod tracks early this afternoon.”

There was something eerie about the scene,
she thought, although she didn’t believe in ghosts, in spirits. But still there was something about the black silhouette against the orange and pink sunset that made her nervous. “How do you know he’s Cheyenne?”

Maverick dismounted, pointing to the arrow embedded in the dead pony. “See the striped feathers? Cheyenne favor those. Some say that’s why the Cheyenne are called the ’striped people’ in sign language.” Maverick made a gesture of drawing his right forefinger across his left. “Besides, Comanche and Kiowa bury their dead in the ground.”

“Why would they kill a fine horse like that?” she asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does to an Indian,” Maverick said flatly, his dark face betraying no emotion. “I’d say the warrior died in battle, needed his best pony to carry him up the Milky Way, the road to heaven the Cheyenne call
Ekutsihimmiyo,
the Hanging Road to the Sky.”

“What battle?” None of this made any sense to her and she was exhausted and hungry.

Maverick looked off at the horizon and it was a long time before he answered. “I think somewhere out there, we’re gonna find the ruins of a ranch and whatever’s left of the poor devils who lived there. God help them!”

The grim images his words brought to mind made her shiver a little, remembering what the Indians had done to Papa. “How do you know that?” she demanded, shifting her weight in the saddle. “Maybe the settlers whipped the Indians, ran them off.”

Maverick shook his head, remounting. “If they’d lost, if they were being chased, the war party wouldn’t have taken the time to go clear to the nearest creek for tree limbs to build this platform, do this elaborate ceremony. They would have just left him where he fell. The Cheyenne think it no shame to leave a fallen man where he’s died in battle.”

Something about the scorn of his tone, the way his lip curled, made her ask without thinking, “The Comanche don’t leave their dead?”

“No,” Maverick said. “I’ve seen Comanche warriors killed trying to go back to retrieve the bodies of the fallen.”

Her curiosity got the better of her and she almost asked, but the hardness of his eyes, the grim set of his jaw discouraged her.

“Remember that, Reb,” he said softly as they rode toward the sunset. “If you’re ever attacked by Comanches, it’s to your advantage to try to pick them off when they come riding back in for their dead.”

His life among the Indians must hold terrible memories,
she thought, still angry with him yet sympathetic to the sadness of his face. He reached up to touch the jagged white scar on his cheek and she wondered about it, about him.
Such a strange, tortured man,
she thought, watching his face, wondering what bedeviled him. Maverick Durango might have been adopted, raised by the Durangos, but he was little more than a savage himself. No white man would hang a trophy scalp from his bridle or mount a horse from the right side like an Indian.

Dusk fell all lavender and purple, golden around the edges. Somewhere a quail called:
Bob white! Bob, bob, white!
Soon the sun would set and the wild life would come out in the cool of the darkness.

Maverick glanced over at her. “We need to find a place to bed down.”

She thought about the war party. “Will the Indians be roaming around after dark, maybe find us?”

He shook his head. “Most Indians don’t raid at night, don’t like the idea of fighting in the darkness—except the Comanche. They love raiding beneath a full moon.”

She remembered then. In Texas, a full moon wasn’t called a “harvest” moon, it was known as a “Comanche moon” because that tribe so often spread death and destruction on moonlit nights.

It was dark before they saw the ranch with its few outbuildings, the house built of cut sod. They reined up at a distance.

“Stay here,” Maverick ordered. “I’ll ride in alone.”

“I don’t want to stay out here by myself,” she protested.

He tipped his hat back and she saw the grimness of his face in the light of the rising moon. “Do as I tell you, Cayenne,” he commanded, and she knew why he was the leader of the trail drive. His confident, masculine tone indicated a capable man; a man who expected to lead a herd while the more docile followed.
A stallion,
she thought suddenly.
He’s
not a lobo, he’s a stallion
.

He gestured toward the ranch. “If it’s okay, I’ll signal. If you don’t hear me whistle in a few minutes, get the hell out of here and ride as hard and as fast as you can. Forget the packhorse.”

“And leave you behind?” she protested.

Maverick hesitated. “Baby,” he said finally, “if I’m riding into an ambush, there’s not anything you could do to help me anyway.”

“I could, too,” she protested, gesturing toward her saddle gun. “My papa’s the best rifle shot in west Texas and he taught me!”

“Do as I tell you!” he said sharply. “You got a pistol?”

“No,” she shook her head. “Papa said handguns were for murder, not for hunting meat.”