Dust Devil (25 page)

She stiffened. "Ain’t going to.”

Cody sighed. "Look, kid, I gotta get on to those mossbacks. It’s either the liniment or hole up in bed for a week.”

Wiping her dirty nose across her sleeve, she weighed the alternative and concluded that the burden of her mother’s disapproval was the worse of the two.

With unladylike groans she painfully dropped her britches and shrugged out of the faded red cotton shirt. She stretched out on her stomach, resting her head on folded arms.

As Cody worked at the muscles at the back of her calves and thighs and massaged her back and her arms, the liniment penetrated into her body, warming her. Drowsily she thought of Wayne and how she would yet make him acknowledge she was as capable as any boy, though why she should care she could not imagine.

Finally the pleasure of Cody’s sure hands massaging away the aches lulled her into sleep.
  But it wasn’t Wayne she dreamed about.

CHAPTER 27

Philadelphia

May, 1880

Stephanie posed in front of the gilt-framed mirror and readjusted the ruchings of her brown and tan plaid silk dress over her bustle, then tilted the beribboned and beflowered bonnet at a saucy angle over her right brow.

"Of course, I’ve kissed him,” she told the three girls who sat on her bed and watched her in breathless silence. "Every summer when I go back, Wayne’s there to meet me at the Las Vegas depot and take me home to Cambria.”

She saw the three pairs of wide eyes in the mirror, waiting. "And
. . . and we kiss. We kiss a lot.”

"Stephanie!” Lottie breathed in horrified delight. Her plump hand crept up to rest at her neck. "What would your father say?”

She reached for the daguerreotype stuck in the rim of the oval mirror. Her brother had given her the picture the previous summer before she had returned to Mrs. Goddard’s Women’s Academy for the fall session. She held the well-worn cardboard frame between her fingers, but there was no need to look at the picture. She could envision it with her eyes closed. The two young men, Jamie sitting on the university’s low wall, his face wistful, his dark looks a perfect foil for Wayne’s fairness — and Wayne lounging next to her brother, all his father’s arrogance evident in his own brooding good looks.

"My father doesn’t mind. He spends most of his time in Santa Fe. So, he doesn’t really know how wild Wayne is about me.”

She jammed the daguerreotype in her reticule. Maybe, just maybe, Wayne would really be at the train depot this time. And she could not help but wish that things could have been as they were when she was a child, when Wayne came to spend the summers at Cambria. He was always taunting her, spurring her into one misadventure after another. She remembered wryly the summer he had challenged her into riding Malcreado. Cody had kept her secret, and she had told Jamie and Wayne that she had ridden the stallion . . . but not what had become of it. She suspected her mother somehow found out, for that fall her mother packed her off to finishing school, saying, "’Tis time you learned to be a lady, my pet.”

Along with Wayne’s taunts and mockery there had been the companionship of the three of them
— she, Wayne, and Jamie. The laughter and fun of their childhood had created a camaraderie she badly missed as she grew into a young lady. Now, when she thought of Wayne as a polished lawyer, she feared she might still seem the gawky tomboy despite the fact she had spent eight years at Mrs. Goddard’s academy acquiring both an education and gracious deportment.

Stephanie turned to face the three spellbound schoolgirls. "Besides,” she declared, "I’m eighteen now. Old enough to get married.”

"Oh, Lottie,” Betty Jo squeaked, "can you imagine being married to someone like Wayne Raffin?” Her little face with the round mouth and button eyes screwed up in a gesture of ecstasy. "It — it’d be like marrying Adonis!”

"I don’t believe you, Stephanie Rhodes!” Priscilla said. Her hair, like Stephanie’s, was red but a washed-out shade
— not the vibrant hue of blazing fire, and it was kinky. "Why, I bet Wayne Raffin’s never once looked your way. There’s no more truth to you marrying him than there is to your yams about rattlesnakes swallowing their babies and Cambria being the size of Rhode Island. You’re just a liar, Stephanie Rhodes!”

Her
black eyes narrowed until they looked like two small obsidian rocks. She ached to jump on the prim Priscilla Broadbent like a tarantula on a toad. "I could tell you tales about the Indians, Miss Smart-aleck, that’d make your hair straight as a toothpick!” Her fingers uncurled from their fists, and she relaxed, secure at least in her knowledge of the wild New Mexican frontier. And secure in the knowledge that she would be leaving the academy for the last time, never to return.

She crossed to the doorway and picked up the two calfskin suitcases and her reticule. She faced the three girls. "If you don’t believe anything I’ve told you, Priscilla,” she said smiling, "you’re welcome to visit Cambria any time you wish. I’ll even send you our wedding invitation.”

The boast had been foolish, she knew. Yet later, as she squirmed on the train’s uncomfortable seat, she realized she had meant it. She would wed Wayne Raffin. And Priscilla Broadbent would receive the first invitation. Just how Stephanie would accomplish the feat, she did not know. She was half afraid he would not come back this time from Virginia where he and Jamie were reading law.

The heat in the car was unbearable, and the coal dust and smoke blew through the car’s open windows. Still,
she was able to follow the sweep of the terrain as the train took her further into her beloved Southwest. After the train chugged over the steep Raton Pass and down into the high plains of the New Mexico Territory she watched the mustang ponies as they raced alongside the train, their manes and tails flying. Occasionally she sighted a buffalo, but their herds of fifteen thousand were depleted mightily from almost a decade before when she could remember taking three days to ride through one herd. Thinking back, she estimated there must have been between two and three million in that one bunch.

S
he had forgotten how much she missed the wide expanse of prairie, like a sea of grass, and the limitless sky that was bluer, clearer, than any she had seen in the East . . . but most of all she missed the mulberry blue mountains. There was something about their majestic heights that she found reassuring. She remembered them dimly from her childhood, remembered moving about in their maze of canyons from one Indian camp to another.

Once she had questioned her mother about those years they had spent with the Indians, but it seemed to her that her mother had been reticent, telling her merely of their abduction and their final return to Cambria three years later. Stephanie could only reason that those years of captivity brought back agonizing memories her mother did not wish to recall.

No more than she herself wished to, she thought, as her glance strayed across the aisle to the fat squaw with the irritatingly stupid face. Her memories of the Indians were ones of flies and dirt and fleas. Her association with the Indians had been one thing she had been too ashamed to speak of when she entertained the girls at the academy with stories of the wild West.

Off to the train’s left
she could make out the dark basalt foothills called Wagon Mound, a formation that closely resembled a covered wagon pulled by a team of horses — or was it mules, she was never quite sure. But she did know that once Wagon Mound came in sight it would be only a little while longer before the train pulled into the Las Vegas depot and she saw her family again. And maybe Wayne.

As the train chugged to a halt before the frame depot with its nine-stall roundhouse for servicing the locomotives, Wayne Raffin’s imposing figure was nowhere to be seen. Did she really expect him to be there?

She joined the other passengers in the car’s aisle. She was careful to keep her skirts, extended by wire hoops, from touching the old squaw who trod off in the direction of the Fred Harvey Diner where girls worked as waitresses — though with the short supply of women they did not remain long but soon married.

Then Stephanie saw her mother. The locomotive’s steam surged about her skirts, making her look like some celestial figure. With her were Inez and Rita, who was a little plumper than the previous summer but still wearing the exotic look possessed by all Mexican women. Every summer the Rhodes and Sanchez families reunited in Las Vegas where Inez attended Our Lady of Sorrows Convent school and Jamie and Stephanie disembarked from trains arriving from the East. And from Las Vegas the two families usually journeyed on to Cambria to spend several weeks filling everyone in on the nine-months’ gap away from home.

Stephanie hugged Inez first. "You haven’t changed,” she told her friend. "Only taller — and still just as pretty.”

A becoming blush tinted Inez’s tea-rose complexion. "And you, Stephanie, still blaze as brightly as the sun.”

She laughed. "Then why haven’t we been besieged by suitors if we’re such great catches!” She turned to Rita. "Tiarita, have you been keeping my mother busy in naughty things?”

Rita hugged Stephanie, saying, "
Si, chiquita
. Lately I’ve been trying to teach her to smoke
punche
.” The woman laughed and rolled her eyes. "But even such a mild tobacco makes
tu
mama cough!”

Stephanie saved the last greeting for her mother. She thought she might find some sign of age to make her seem more of a
— a mother. But the woman stood before her, her eyes shimmering with abiding love, and Stephanie knew that her mother was more special than other women — and knew she would always envy her mother for her qualities.

Beneath her mother’s cool, ladylike reserve, Stephanie had sometimes caught glimpses of Rita’s impishness and impulsiveness and Inez’s sweet, loving disposition. But the way she unobtrusively ran Cambria in Stephen’s absence told of Rosemary’s durability.

She would never age like other women, Stephanie thought. The blue-green eyes were still as bright and sparkling, the cinnamon red hair held no trace of gray, and her figure curved like that of a young girl’s. Stephanie calculated her mother’s age and realized that her mother was nearly thirty-six years old, a terribly old age it seemed to her. She also noted as they stepped out onto Railroad Avenue that the men stopped to stare, and more than half the glances, she grudgingly conceded, were directed at her mother.

Rita hailed one of the six-passenger rockaways as Rosemary explained they were not going directly to Cambria but would stay in Las Vegas several days. "Your father has invested in a two-hundred-and-seventy-room hotel, the Montezuma
, that was just completed last winter. ’Tis six miles out of town, but Rita and I thought it would be fun to try the curative baths at the hot springs there before your father and Jiraldo come to take us back to Cambria.”

Normally Stephanie would have been eager to visit in Las Vegas, to see the changes and meet old friends. But now she did not even bother to glance at the new flimsy frame buildings they passed, barely even heard Rita chattering. It was beginning to dawn on her that this time she was
returning to the New Mexican wilderness for good. Once she left Las Vegas it would be her last touch with civilization, except for the occasional visits exchanged with the Sanchezes and the few brief shopping trips into Santa Fe.

And she would never have the chance to try her wiles on Wayne.

There would be only Jamie to while away her loneliness. Jamie, who accepted her mercurial moods. And for the first time she noted his absence. He usually arrived from Richmond a day or two earlier than she. "Mama, where is Jamie?” "The classes were a month late in. letting out. He and Wayne should be arriving tomorrow or the next day.”

Rosemary smiled fondly at her daughter. "I thought you
and Inez deserved a holiday, and the Montezuma seemed just the place. I even brought a bathing suit for you.”

Stephanie tried to keep her voice casual. "And Wayne
— will he be going on through to Santa Fe or staying at the Montezuma also?”

Rosemary’s discerning glance fell on her daughter. "I don’t know. 1 suppose we c
ould ask him to stay over for a day or so.”

Shrugging carelessly in an effort to contain her joy,
she turned to Inez and asked, "Will you be returning to Our Lady of Sorrows or is this your last year also?”

Inez smiled. "Not if mother has her way. She would keep me in the convent forever if it would prevent me from getting married.”

"Men — bah!” Rita said, waving her fan in dismissal. "They bring only trouble. And besides,
hija
, there is no man your father would have you marry. He would keep you a virgin,
no es verdad
?”

A becoming blush suffused Inez’s dusky skin, but Stephanie, watching her friend, suspected there was more to Inez’s discomposure than was apparent. She glanced to see if her mother had intercepted the flustered look on Inez’s face and was startled to see her mother frowning at a letter she held in her gloved hand. "What is it, mama?”

Rosemary quickly folded the letter and put it with the rest of the mail she had picked up at the Las Vegas post office before meeting the train. "Nothing, dear. Only some items your father asked me to take care of.”