Dust Devil (36 page)

“If I had my pistol,” she gritted.

Her mother said in a voice that had the dull edge of a blade in its tone, “No.  Vengeance belongs to me.”

CHAPTER 39

The Springfield rested in its usual place in the gun cabinet. In the house’s darkness it was barely visible, only the blue-black gleam of the long barrel. Nevertheless, Rosemary had no trouble in locating and removing it from its place. The smooth stock felt cool against her hands, the parquet floor cold beneath her bare feet.

The heavy front door gave way with a squeak that made her breath catch. She waited. No one stirred in the sleeping house. Outside in the brisk air of the late autumn night only the dust squeezing between her toes was warm. She moved quietly toward the center of the branding corral. Lario was still there, staked out for the morrow’s buzzards, but only for torture. She knew Stephen had no intention of letting Lario die.

Lario’s pallor shone in the cloud-streaked night. Yet his senses were alert as ever. He had known she was there, his eyes watching her as she knelt over his prone figure. "Lario,” she whispered. Her voice coughed out in a croak. Her hand smoothed back the damp hair from his forehead, and she felt the tears at his temples.

His tears were for her, she knew. But she would not let herself cry. Not then.

"You know what I want, Turquoise Woman?” he whispered thickly between swollen lips.

She nodded.

"Then do it quickly.”

She bent and kissed the feverish lips. And she was crying anyway. "Good-bye, my beloved.”

Swiftly, before she lost her courage, she moved off to stand in the shadow of the nearest shed, a tack house. The rifle barrel came up. Its sight fixed on the dark form on the ground. The trigger pulled back smoothly. An ear-shattering blast. The recoil of the rifle. Once more, another shot that caused the body to jerk with the impact.

Rosemary quickly crossed to the house, fading into the shadows of the hollyhock that laced one wall. She waited, hidden, for what seemed like eternal seconds. Already, men,
shrugging into their pants, came running from the bunk-houses.

And at last Stephen stumbled out the front door. His long-johns gleamed starkly white against the night’s darkness. Rosemary put the rifle to her cheek and fired at his back. He was lifted up, as if caught in the whirl of a dust devil, spun, and dropped at the bottom of the veranda steps.

Calmly she moved out of entwining shrubbery, walked past his twitching body into the house, and replaced the rifle. She heard Consuela collide with one of the house servants in the hall, a muttered oath in Spanish, her daughter at the top of the stairs calling, "Mama?”

"I’m here, Stephanie. What happened? I heard a gunshot.” They surged past her now out onto the veranda. Stephanie came to her side, and they followed the others.

"
Dios mio
!” Consuela backed away and saw Rosemary at the door. "
Por favor, Senora
,
no mira
!” She took her
patrona’
s arm gently. "Go back inside.
El Patron
— he has been shot.”

"Then I need to be with him,” Rosemary said and shrugged off Consuela’s restraining arm. "Send Ignacio for a doctor at once.”

She followed two cowhands as they lifted the sagging body and brought it inside. "This way,” she said, leading them toward Stephen’s room.

She stood on one side of the bed as they laid Stephen down. His eyes were open. They moved toward her. And she saw the incredible amount of agony
— and hate — imprisoned behind them. But the coarse features never changed.

"I fear he is
paralitico
—paralyzed, Senora,” Consuela said.

Rosemary’s gaze flickered over to meet the cook’s rheumy eyes. She knows. And she says nothing.
She knelt at the side of her husband. Her hand took his limp one. "I will wait . . . and pray . . . until a doctor can be brought.”

The men turned to go, shuffling out in single file past Stephanie who watched apathetically from the doorway. One turned back, Pedro. "
Patrona
, the Navajo outside — ” He faltered with pained embarrassment. "He has been shot, also.
Esta muerto
.”

"Bury him,”
she said curtly. "Beneath the cottonwood.”

Next to Jamie and the stillborn infant.
Her chin dropped to her chest, her lids shut tightly. The graves of the people she had loved were fast accumulating.

* * * * *

Stephanie noticed that Consuela had cleaned the Springfield in the gun cabinet. Other than that, there had been no  inquiry, no interest raised in the mysterious visitor who had killed Lario Santiago and sought to kill Stephen Rhodes. It was more or less presumed it was the work of avenging Indians, perhaps Geronimo’s renegades — maybe even Satana himself.

Only Stephen Rhodes knew the killer’s identity, and, of course, he was totally paralyzed.

In every face she read the sympathy for her, except in the faces of Ignacio and Julio when her mother fired them the next day. "I am accusing you two of theft,” her mother had told them, sitting in Stephen’s office, behind his desk. "It’s three days you have to ride clear of Cambria. After that I am instructing my hands to shoot you on sight.”

The two Mexicans looked shocked and angry, but they wasted no time in gathering their gear and leaving.

The word had spread rapidly after the doctor from Las Vegas had departed. El Patron will never walk! He cannot move a muscle! Imagine — not being able to speak! The women looked at Rosemary and thought — poor thing, to spend the rest of one’s days waiting on a bedridden husband. And the men, they looked and thought — how lonely her bed will be. Will she ever take someone to share it? And had her husband shared it? He was old, you know. How can such a woman exist without — and they would eye each other and wink in spite of their deep respect for the Anglo woman.

Stephanie never said anything. It was all she could do to force herself to come into Stephen’s room. To look at the dry skin, the shriveled body. The room smelled. And she thought it was not just from decay. Could hatred have a smell, for surely it seemed almost tangible in the air? Stephen Rhodes’s eyes burned when she entered, and she thought the intensity of their hatred would blister her skin.

She felt no pity, only revulsion. And she was ashamed of herself for the pleasure she took in his helplessness the few times she fed him, watching the food drool from the flaccid lips.

Only a week had passed since the shootings; yet it seemed already like a year. Eternity loomed before Stephanie’s mind. An eternity of rising, waiting out the hours of the day, and sleeping. To this she and her mother were condemned.

Even her anger at her mother was gone now, replaced by a great vacuum.

The urge to escape was so overpowering at that moment, to run
— anywhere — that she set the bowl of vegetable soup on the bedstand, ignoring the questioning in Stephen Rhodes’s eyes, and ran from the room out onto the veranda. Fresh, clean air. She had to have it. Her chest heaved as she sucked in the air in great gulps. She heard the sobs welling from deep in her chest, gurgling upward like the filling of a water keg.

Stop it! Get control of yourself. You’re a grown woman. No longer a child.

Weakly she leaned back against the veranda post, feeling now only a self-disgust. She felt unclean. Soiled. A dirty half- breed. Wasn’t that what people like her were called? What man would want her now? Not fastidious Wayne. She would have even been his mistress had he wanted her; but not now. He could only look at her with revulsion.

And Cody? Would he have still wanted her had he known about her Indian heritage? Was he alive, perhaps at his ranch now
. . . or were his bones slowly being bleached by the torturous New Mexican sun?

Through heavy lids her gaze swept the sun-beaten countryside. If intense longing could produce a mirage, it seemed to her that what her gaze encountered that moment had to be. She straightened to her feet, her hand shielding her eyes. But the mirage continued to move closer. Too many times
she had sat on the veranda steps as a child and watched the man ride toward her, his weather-stained hat slouched down over his eyes in just the same fashion.

"Cody!” she cried. She picked up her skirts and ran toward the approaching rider.

He dismounted and opened his arms as she threw herself against him. "Stephanie,” he rasped against her ear. His arms wrapped about her, though his hands were held awkwardly away from her body. It was when she pulled away to look at that wonderfully craggy face of his that she noticed the bandaged hands, the dirt-crusted strips no longer white. Her face paled.

"They did it then?” she whispered, taking one of his hands between the two of hers. "Stephen told me what he planned. It must have hurt terribly!”

Cody nodded. A grim smile settled on his face. “You might say that when I pulled free from the embedded nails. But not much more than what Juan Jesus and Dick are undergoing right now.”

S
he raised a questioning brow, and he said, "I never made it to Las Vegas. After I got free, it took me two days to catch up with them, and when I did I wasn’t in too good a shape, but the Spencer carbine — it made me more nearly equal. I didn’t kill them, but their miserable souls were hanging by threads when I left them — staked out on the Alkali Flats.”

The words "staked out” reminded
her. "Cody, things have happened since you left.”

"Fill me in,” he said, putting his arm about her shoulders as they walked toward the house.

By the time they reached the veranda she had related the shooting of Lario and her father’s subsequent shooting and resulting paralysis. "And no one knows who's responsible?” he asked.

Pedro’s approach saved her from answering. While the young man and two more wranglers hear
tily pounded Cody on the back, she waited aside, listening as Cody lightly shrugged off their concern for his hands by explaining they had been rope-burned. She wondered if she should reveal the discovery of her real father to Cody. But she was afraid that would open an avenue to other questions that might easily lead to the identity of Lario’s murderer — of which she was not entirely certain herself.

That night, after the few visitors who had drifted through Cambria left the dinner table, Cody told
her mother, "I want to take Stephanie back with me to Loving’s Bend. We’ve got to start somewhere on our own. And here, working for Cambria . . . ” he looked down into the dark liquid in his coffee cup, "here there’d always be talk I married Stephanie for Cambria.” He looked up, and his somber eyes met those of Rosemary’s. "I hope you understand.”

Her mother
was silent as her fingertip traced the curve of her coffee cup. "I don’t know how I shall be getting along without you after all these years, Cody. You be like a younger brother. But I shall manage. Pedro's experienced enough to take your place now. With time,” she smiled and shrugged her delicately rounded shoulders, "perhaps we shall make it.”

"What about Stephen?” Cody asked. It was the first time the name had been mentioned except when Cody first offered his condolences.

Her mother took a sip from her cup, waiting for the warming tea to go down, as if buying time. "Stephen’s helplessness should not keep Stephanie from the happiness she deserves. And I shall be happy here at Cambria. It’s what I want.” She turned to her daughter. "What I want to know — is this what you want? Running away never solves anything.”

Stephanie glanced at Cody, but nothing in his face mirrored any anxiety he might have felt about her feelings for Wayne.  She knew Cody was
calmly waited for her to deny that love.

At last
she smiled at him. "It’s what I want.”

* * * * *

It was supposed to be a small, simple wedding that took place two weeks later in Cambria’s old adobe chapel. But it seemed that every breathing soul in the northeastern part of the Territory had turned out for the wedding, so that when Cody, dressed handsomely in a black frockcoat, and Stephanie, gowned in her mother’s rose-satin wedding dress, exited arm in arm from the chapel there was a sea of faces to greet them. Stephanie laughed, turning her radiant face up to Cody’s. "It
was
a simple ceremony,” she said.

Father Felipe had ridden all the way from Las Vegas on his prized cream-colored mule to officiate at the wedding. Later, after he removed his vestments and put away his sacred vessels, he came in to join the friends Rosemary had invited to share in the celebration. Rita, a wealthy widow now, was among them. Rosemary looked forward to the evening’s end when she and Rita could talk over a glass of wine, as they had in the old times.

Rita was now quite plump, and her blue-black hair was streaked with gray. Still, with the lines of laughter dimpling her skin and the twinkling eyes that always looked for the positive in everything, it was an arresting face. Yes, the two of them would have much to talk about . . . except for the subject of Wayne and Inez. Rosemary longed to ask if Inez was happy and sincerely hoped her godchild was, though she had her private doubts. It was, of course, best for everyone concerned that Wayne had sent his apologies expressing his and Inez’s disappointment at not being able to attend.