Dust Devil (2 page)

In spite
of his physical beauty, there was a rawhide leanness about him, a hard masculinity stamped into the powerful cast of his features that made her uneasy in his presence. She recalled the first time she had met him, outside the Menger Hotel in San Antonio five days earlier. She would never forget nor forgive her first moment of panic.  She had known that old stifling feeling of terror that attacked her at the sight of an Indian but had fought it off as she asked stiffly, "Are you the foreman for the Cambria Ranch?”

She was tall for a woman, but he was still much taller
— tall even for a Navajo, so that she had to tilt her head to look into a pair of eyes as black as a raven’s wings. She had seen in their depths the dawning of skeptical recognition.

He had reached into his shirt pocket and produced a tintype, holding it out to her. "Yes, I am Lario Santiago, the
caporal
of the Cambria,” he said in softly accented English. "And you are the
Seňorit
a Gallagher?” A faint cool smile had touched the full lips, softening the hawk like nose and the high slash of the cheekbones.

Rosemary had grimaced. "Aye, that I am!” She did not need to look at the picture she had sent Stephen to see the wide mouth,
the large unblinking eyes, the heavy hair severely bound in a small knot at the back of her head. How fortunate, she thought, that the sepia tintype had no color as an oil portrait did. The riotous red hair and eyes that were neither green nor blue might have made even a determined man like Stephen Rhodes change his mind about marriage.

At fifteen, having transversed the Asian continent from Karachi to Singapore, she had already acquired more maturity than someone twice her age. However, she could not yet perceive, as had her aunt and others likewise observant, the striking beauty, waiting like a budding rose to unfold— nor the passion that would be the rose’s thorn.

CHAPTER
4

At Fort Fillmore, where Rosemary and Lario transferred to the Santa Fe Mail Stage, they were joined by a white-bearded Methodist circuit rider and a cavalry officer of the First United States Dragoons who was under orders to proceed to Fort Union, just north of Cambria.

Carefully keeping his curved saber out of the way of her full skirts, the lieutenant took the seat next to the minister. Lario he ignored, as Lario did him. But the girl the soldier could not keep his eyes from, although she was certainly no
t what he would call appealing, with the odd-colored eyes and the too-wide mouth. Yet there was something about her — perhaps it was the generous lower lip that hinted at sensuality. Or perhaps he was intrigued by the tiny pox pit which a quirk of nature had placed above her left cheekbone like some beauty mark. Hell, the soldier thought, he’d been too long in that womanless country.

Rosemary’s reserve thawed upon learning that Grant Raffin knew of the Cambria Ranch. "Hasn’t everyone heard of Cambria Castle?” he asked with a beguiling smile. "In the six months I’ve been stationed out here Cambria’s all I’ve heard about. It’s Latin for Wales, isn’t it?”

So, Rosemary thought, not everyone in the Territory was illiterate, as her uncle had led her to believe. She had been told that not one woman in a thousand, if there were that many in the Territory, even knew how to write her own name. "Aye, it is. Stephen is Welsh. But he has refused to tell me anything about Cambria. He writes that he wants to surprise me, but I can tell he’s very proud of the ranch.” She leaned forward, her great eyes shining with excitement. "What’s it like?”

Grant removed his plumed hat which was looped on the right side and displayed yellow-brown hair lighter than his mustache and side whiskers. With the back of his sleeve he brushed away the perspiration that had formed beneath the hat’s headband, saying, "Stephen Rhodes should be proud. Cambria’s like a territory unto itself, with its own towns and missions and stores. But the Castle
— I’ve never seen it, only heard talk about it.”

Disappointed, Rosemary sat back. Even her dreams now were of Cambria. It never occurred to her to ask Lario, nor did her
fiancé’s
caporal
volunteer the information. Instead he trained his dark eyes on the rugged terrain outside. The few times their gazes caught she found herself fidgeting, although she told herself there was no reason for it. He extended a natural courtesy to her at the prescribed times, while the remainder of the time he seemed to totally disregard her, finding more to interest him in the limitless stretch of sand dunes and lava beds.

While the minister slept, his whiskers flying with each snoring breath, Grant answered Rosemary’s questions about his home in Washington, D.C., and regaled her with the milder scandals of its political society.

"My father, a judge, was such a rake my mother wouldn’t hear of me going into politics,” Grant concluded with a depreciative smile. "So I wound up at Virginia Military Institute.”

"And you plan to make a career of it?” Rosemary prompted.

As best he could in the cramped coach, Grant stretched out long legs clad in shiny half-boots. "Not if I can help it. The military will never make you rich.”

"Oh?” Rosemary appraised the handsome soldier, marking him with maybe twenty-five years. It would be so easy, she thought, to succumb to his charm, to fall in love with him. But his type, she told herself, was often here one day, gone the next. Yet Stephen, his kind would be as permanent as the rocky mountains in the distance. "Is wealth what you want most from life?”

Grant’s distinctly etched brows arched. "Isn’t that what you want, Miss Gallagher?” Before she could reply, he laughed, saying, "I know I don’t want a military career. I suppose politics is in my blood. And out here there’s the opportunity to make a name in politics.”

At four that afternoon the burly driver and his bewhiskered shotgun messenger halted to dine and graze the horses at Robledo, the last way station before the
Jornado del Muerto
, the Journey of Death. That evening the stage would leave the fertile green valley of the Rio Grande River and begin the long stretch of nearly one hundred and fifty miles across the desert.

The evening was wondrously clear, and in the soft atmo
sphere of New Mexico’s southern latitude the stars shone with great brilliancy. Moonlight traced the
Sierra Caballo
’s serrated peaks and outlined the tall soap-weeds that grew upon the
Jornado
. A profound hush lay on the desert so that the only noise to be heard was the clatter of the horses’ hooves and the rumbling sound of the wheels upon the hard alkaline road.

As the night deepened, Grant and the minister dozed. 
Rosemary struggled hard not to fall asleep and was aghast when she was jolted awake the instant her head touched Lario’s shoulder.  A quick sidewise glance at him showed her only his moonlit profile – and the mirthless twitch in his lips. Sometime after dawn a rest was permitted, and the horses were watered. She stretched her legs, walking over the deadly glitter of the gypsum bed that was snow white but bone dry.

"Better keep close to the coach,” Grant cautioned as he caught up with her. Beneath his mustache he flashed an irresistible smile. "You wouldn’t want to lose your hair to Indians.” One gloved hand came up to touch a wayward tendril. "I’ll bet your hair is lovely hanging loose,” he said in a husky voice.

Rosemary’s gaze went past Grant’s face to Lario, who had climbed on the stage’s roof to scan the land. His Sharp’s carbine cradled in one arm, his gaze rested on her. Did he think she was flirting with Grant Raffin? No doubt he’d go straight to Stephen and report everything she did. She tossed her head, and for a brief moment the calm blue-green eyes danced with mischievous flirtation. "Ah now, Lieutenant Raffin, only Stephen will be knowing that.”

Grant’s eyes, as dark blue as his dress uniform, narrowed,
as if uncertain of what they had seen. “Ahh, you have spirit?”

She shrugged.  “I have
crossed an ocean and half a continent on my own.”

“I wonder
if Stephen Rhodes realizes the value of his mail-order bride?”  Before she could think of a suitable reply, he said, “But then it would seem Stephen Rhodes is a man who knows about worth – and a man worth knowing.”

The stage resumed its journey, but a tension seemed to hang in the coach’s air as heavy as the morning mist over the desert floor. Even Grant seemed preoccupied. He caught
her watching as he checked his Navy Colt, spinning the chamber. He nodded toward Lario.  "It appears your guardian expects us to see Apaches before the day is out.”

The vinegarish minister paled at the mention of Apaches. Tugging nervously at his long beard, his glance slid to Lario. "And what’s to prevent his kind from turning on us?” he asked with a jerk of his head toward the Indian.

Lario’s stony gaze flickered over the three passengers, surely not missing her repulsion mixed with fright. "Right now there are only the Apache out there for you to worry about,” he said in carefully measured words. "And they are the Navajo’s sworn enemy.”

Her
own nerves grew more taut as the minutes passed. At about noon the excited shouts of the driver ripped through the coach’s silence, and the next moment she spotted Indians, in sight and out again, as they rode single file over the sand hills two miles distant.

At the same time the stage’s speed increased, careening around the
trail’s curve. Lario threw open the door and, gripping his carbine, hauled himself atop the stage’s roof. The minister jumped back from the window as if he had seen the Angel of Death. "Do something, Lieutenant!” he choked.

Grant leveled his Colt out the stage’s window. "I can’t do a damn thing
— pardon me, ma’am — until they get within range, Reverend. Now why don’t you try praying?”

Then, to Grant’s astonishment,
she grabbed at his pistol, crying, "No!”

"What in tarnation do you think you’re doing!” he yelled as he wrestled with her for the pistol. "Watch it, it’ll go off!”

She stopped struggling but did not relinquish the gun. Her lower lip quivered. "I hate the Indian more than you could ever know—but I hate killing worse. Maybe they don’t mean any harm, maybe it won’t be necessary to shoot.”

His
dark-blue eyes rolled up in despair, and he eased the pistol from her grasp. "And maybe they will, then what will—”

At that moment shots interrupted whatever
he was about to say, and the messenger shouted down, "Hold your fire!”

Grant edged his head out the window and drew it in quickly again, this time smiling. "A caravan of Mexican freighters are coming this way.
Looks as though they’ve scared off our visitors.”

From the stage’s far side legs appeared, and Lario slipped agilely through the door’s window. He slid into the seat
beside her and a few minutes later closed his eyes, as if prepared to sleep despite the previous excitement and the raucous shouts of the caravan’s bullwhackers and mule-skinners that now passed by.

As the stage drew nearer to Santa Fe, it passed more and more traffic
— mule trains, ox carts, covered wagons, and near-naked Indians leading burros almost hidden under heavy loads. At last, late that afternoon, gauzy clouds lifted their fogbank to reveal the camellian Sangre de Cristo mountains whose foothills curved like two arms about the Villa de Santa Fe de San Francisco, and she felt the thrill of anticipation course through her.

From the distance the adobe buildings with their flat roofs looked like little mud boxes. Upon closer inspection the town appeared no better. "This godforsaken village is the capital of the Territory?” the reverend muttered to no one in particular.

Her gaze took in the drab, squat adobe houses that, along with an occasional cornfield, haphazardly lined the irregular pattern of dusty streets and found the city no worse than the squalor of Delhi. Indeed, the surrounding landscape possessed a savage beauty that appealed to her Oriental-developed values.

Peeping out of the doorways were many women whose faces were besmeared with crimson clay, giving them the appearance of wearing masks. In response to the startled look on
her face, Grant’s lips widened in suppressed amusement. "It’s the juice of the alegria plant,” he explained. "The women protect their skin from the sun this way.”

The lathered horses eventually plodded to a halt in the plaza before the only hotel in Santa Fe, the Exchange Hotel, more commonly known as La Fonda. A two-story adobe building with a covered walkway running its length, it took up an entire block. Beneath this
portales
a crowd had gathered to greet the mail coach’s arrival.

Anxiously,
she searched the throng of people. She saw soldiers on leave from Ft. Marcy, vaqueros in leather chaps, a few grubby prospectors down out of the Cerrillos Hills, and here and there a well-dressed civilian in frock coat and top hat. A wry smile touched her lips when she realized she had no idea of what Stephen looked like.

"Rhodes has hair the color of the sunset—much like yours,” Lario said.

She turned from the window to see the Indian’s sulphur black eyes crinkle with humor, and for a moment she wondered if the Navajo could read her mind as easily as he read the puma tracks he had pointed out near a bone-dry creek where the stage had halted with a warped wheel.  In the coach’s shadows, his mouth was surprisingly sensual.