Ghost Warrior (20 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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She found his tether line. With fingers light as a moth's feelers, she followed it to the saddle and the sleeping form. It disappeared under Hairy Foot's blanket, tied, no doubt, to his wrist.
His saddlebags lay next to him. She probed them with her fingers. When she found the cloth-wrapped far-seeing glass she eased it out of the bag. She stuck it into the back of her
belt under the blanket she wore like a poncho.
She crouched next to the sleeping figure and stared down at him. In the full moon's light, Hairy Foot's face in repose looked young and untroubled, although Lozen knew that he had had his share of troubles. He didn't appear to be the powerful
di-yin
that the warriors believed him. He was appealing in his defenselessness, not a powerful magician who repelled arrows and bullets as though they were horseflies.
She thought him handsome for a Pale Eyes. She couldn't see colors at night, but she knew his hair was the yellow of the sacred pollen. He had a strong mouth and a straight nose. His eyelashes were as pale as the moonlight. A snowflake drifted down onto them. Another landed on his brow, then several more fell onto his hair. Lozen felt an urge to brush them off, as she would do for a sleeping child.
What foolishness. The men would think her stupid if they could see her. But then, she would probably never have another chance to see a white man so close, at least not a live one.
She could cut the line without waking him, but this was more of a challenge. She took a deep breath. Whatever happened, the spirits would take care of her. Even if every Bluecoat in the fort arrived on the run, shooting as they came, she could escape them. She knew that for a certainty.
She lifted the edge of the blanket so slowly it seemed not to move at all. She folded it gently back on itself, exposing his wrist and the rope. She laid her slender fingertips on the knot, feeling the ridges and valleys, the intertwinings. It was a simple knot. She concentrated her attention on it.
She had teased out the first end of it when she felt a prickling at the nape of her neck. She glanced up and saw him staring at her. She dropped the knot, and—still at a crouch—she ran into the shadows under the wagon, then out the other side and away, dodging under the bellies of the sleeping mules.
Rafe lay still, frozen not by fear but by disbelief. Had she been real or a dream? He could still see her glossy black hair as it fell forward, embracing her oval face like a fanned pair
of raven's wings. The moon had left a trail of light like quicksilver along her arched nose, full lips, and high-set cheekbones. He realized that his wrist still tingled from the feather-light touch of her fingers. He put a hand on the knot and found it half untied. She had been real, all right.
She must have known better than to try to untie the line from Red's halter. She must have sensed that he wouldn't stand still for it. Actually, Rafe would like to see her try to ride Red, but not tonight.
He remembered the Apaches talking about her in connection with his telescope. For some reason they had given it to her, before all the men had had a chance to look into it. That had struck him as odd at the time. He groped for the saddlebag. The telescope was gone.
FIDDLING AROUND WHILE THE PACKARD BURNS
O
thers might prefer the bustle of Santa Fe, but Rafe liked the village of Socorro, the adobe oasis at the northern end of the Jornada del Muerto. In English,
soccoro
meant “aid,” or “relief,” and Rafe was always relieved to reach it alive after a passage through the Horn. He usually went to the cantina called La Paloma. The Dove.
Mexicans made up most of The Dove's clientele, which also suited him. The farmers and muleteers, the shopkeepers, wood-hewers and artisans drank there. They got into their share of squabbles as the evening progressed, and they took aboard so much liquid cargo that they sloshed when they tottered outside to relieve themselves.
All in all, though, the Dove—like Soccoro itself—basked in a sense of contentment. Its people went about their business and their pleasure with the self-assurance that came from living in the place where they were “bred and buttered,” as Absalom used to say. Maybe that was what attracted him, since a sense of belonging had always eluded him.
Tonight The Dove was crowded with more Americans than usual. Rafe sat in a corner at a table with one of the few chairs that could claim a back. He conferred with a bottle of the local brew witched from the agave plants that covered the desert for miles around. Between sips he watched the women who, with trays held high, slipped among the tables crowded close together.
The women were heartbreakingly beautiful. They all enchanted him, even the brazen ones whom he suspected would cheerfully lay him out with a stool and pick his pockets. He was always astonished that women persisted in being so
completely unlike men, in spite of eons of association. Women's coexistence with men seemed to him the pairing of meadowlarks and tanyard dogs.
When Milagro, his favorite, glanced his way, he held up his empty glass. She crossed the smoky room with the slow sway of her hips that inspired him to drain the glasses faster so he could watch her amble toward him and away again. He especially liked watching her walk away. She was, as her name proclaimed, a miracle.
She smiled with her full, red lips and regarded him from somewhere far behind her sad eyes. “Another, Senor Rafael?”
“Yes, please, Senorita Milagro.”
She swayed off, with his attention trailing after her like a hungry puppy. He jumped when someone cleared his throat in his ear. He turned to look up into a broad face with bulging red cheeks, a turned-up nose, and fox-colored side-whiskers. The man leaned down to make himself heard over the noise, and his face loomed too close. Rafe pushed his chair away from it.
“Would you be Mr. Rafe Collins?” the whiskers said.
“Not if I had my druthers.” Rafe realized that he was already having trouble focusing—and the evening was young yet.
The man threw back his head and laughed so loudly that people turned to stare. “Oh, I see. You wouldn't be Rafe Collins if you had another option. Very good.” He extended a hand the shape and size of a small shovel, and Rafe took it. It was calloused and strong. “My name is Ezekiel Smith. People call me Zeke.” He pulled a stool from a nearby table. “Is it all right with you if I set?”
Rafe nodded.
“I'm looking for drivers.”
“What's your cargo?”
Zeke winked. “Two legged cattle.”
“People?”
“Passengers, mail, and a little freight.”
“My wagon won't accommodate passengers.”
“We won't be needing your wagon.” Zeke raised a hand, and Milagro headed his way with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. “Have you heard of John Butterfield?”
“The same John Butterfield who thinks he can run a stage line from St. Louis to San Francisco?”
Zeke's eyes took on an evangelistic glow. “It will be one of the great achievements of the age.” He made a grand sweep with his arm, and Rafe rescued the tequila bottle just before he knocked it off the table.
“Think of it. A stage line that spans the continent twice a week. We'll cover almost two thousand and five hundred miles in twenty-five days, traveling a route of stage stations located twenty miles apart.” Zeke's eyes glowed. “Two hundred and fifty coaches are being built as we speak. And tank wagons and stage stations with corrals and smithies. We're hiring drivers, conductors, station keepers, blacksmiths, mechanics, hostlers, herders, wainwrights, wheelwrights. Only the best. Butterfield insists on it. His motto is, “The mail must go through.' When we finish, there will be two thousand men and two hundred stations along the line.”
Rafe shook his head, surprised yet again at how mankind's follies could surprise him. “Did anyone mention to Mr. Butterfield how happy he will make the Apaches?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, he will provide them with a reliable source of plunder.”
“Oh, yes—that.” Zeke dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Chief Cochise himself has agreed to supply wood for the station at Doubtful Pass.”
“He did?” Rafe was more than astonished, he was “dumbfoundered,” as Absalom used to say.
“I've talked with the chief. I believe him to be a man of his word.”
Rafe sat back in his chair. He wasn't considering the job. He was thinking of John Butterfield and men like him. Men who dreamed large. Men who weren't content with a single old Packard wagon and a span of mules. He had a moment's regret that his own horizons were limited to those encircling
the vastness of New Mexico and Arizona Territory.
“I thank you for the offer.”
“Then you accept?”
“I decline.”
“But why, man? Did I mention that the pay is good?”
“No, thank you.”
“You must have a reason.”
“I don't reckon I want to work for any man.”
“I see.” Ezekiel Smith rose with a sigh. “If you change your mind, I'll be staying at Dona Margarita's on the plaza.”
Rafe nodded and watched him stride toward the door. Dreaming a thing and making it a reality were quite different. Rafe didn't know about Butterfield, but he suspected if any man could build stage stations in the middle of Apache country he would be Ezekiel Smith.
Rafe went back to his conference with the tequila bottle while American voices rose steadily from the other side of the room. Through the haze of tobacco smoke, he made out several miners and a few lieutenants from the United States Army. Rafe could tell by the miners' drawl that most of them came from the South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas, maybe. He deduced by the lieutenants' stubborn reliance on reason that they were recent West Point graduates.
“What do you mean I have to pay to send a letter?” The miner was outraged.
“The government says so.” The lieutenant settled back in his chair and crossed his arms on his stomach, probably to bring attention to the brass buttons that were his badge of authority here.
“What the hell kind of newfangled notion is that?” a second miner put in. “Person at t'other end always pays fer the letter.”
“Not anymore.”
“When did this happen?”
“Three years ago.”
“It's tyranny!”
The lieutenant tried to explain. “People refuse to accept
their letters, and the post office loses money. Has to return them to the sender at government expense.”
“I ain't never re-fused a letter in my lifetime,” said a third miner.
“Jesus, Rufus, you ain't never got a letter in your lifetime.”
“Iff'n I did, I sure as hell wouldn't refuse it.”
“If you did get one, you couldn't read it.”
“No matter. If someone took a notion to write me, I wouldn't say no to their efforts.”
The first miner got back to the real issue. “It's another way for the politicians to bleed honest citizens in order to pay for their highfalutin ways.”
Rafe almost laughed out loud. One could look a long time and not stumble across an honest citizen in New Mexico Territory. He'd have to search a lifetime to find one in Arizona, on the other side of Doubtful Pass, where, he was astonished to learn, Cochise would be hauling wood for white men. Wonders would never cease.
The aggrieved letter-writer expanded on his theme. “It's like that damned tariff. Why should we pay tariffs on Northern goods so the Yankee manufacturers can live high on the hog whilst we root in the mud? It's taxation without representation, that's whut it is. We'uns done alriddy fit that battle.”
Here it comes, Rafe thought. He took his bottle and shoved his chair farther back into the corner. He tilted it so he could lean against the wall and watch the fight that would surely erupt.
He had heard this argument before. Individual words cut through the general shouting. “Sovereignty of the states.” “The unrestrained will of the majority perpetrating injustice against the minority.” And the one Rafe heard most often, “Ain't no damned Yankees gonna tell us what to do with our darkies.”
Rafe stayed aloof until Shadrach Rogers walked through the door. Apparently San Francisco had spit him out again and he had landed here. The debate turned into a loud hum. Everyone else went out of focus. Rafe stood up and, concentrating
on each step, walked straight for him. He swung his left fist in a fast arc that ended at Rogers' ear. It got his attention, but it didn't knock him down.
With a curse at his own incompetence, Rafe grabbed him by the throat and threw him to the ground. Women screamed. Men started swinging at each other. Tables toppled. Bottles and stools took wing like startled birds.
Rafe saw only the bulge of Roger's boiled onion eyes. He heard only the gargle of him struggling to suck air past the fingers locked around his throat. Then Rafe felt a blow to the back of his head, and everything went black.
He woke up in heaven, or close to it. A woman's warm, naked body lay on top of him. He grunted, put his arms around her, and discovered he didn't have any clothes on either. He threw all his concentration into opening his eyes and ignoring the drumbeat of pain behind them. In the darkness he could only make out the pale curve of the wagon's new canvas cover arching over him. He heard a fiddle in the distance. Apparently the fight had ended at The Dove, and the dancing had begun.
Milagro murmured in his ear, sending a current of excitement the length and breadth of him. “How do you feel?”
“Like I've been through an ore crusher.”
She giggled and began kissing him slowly and lightly on his neck and shoulders and chest. She paused in her survey of his body to whisper with her lips brushing his. “I can make you feel better.”
Pain still crashed against the backs of his eyeballs, but Rafe began to feel better anyway. Part of him began to feel very good. He rolled over so that Milagro was under him and returned the kisses she had left on him.
He lost himself so completely in pain and passion that he almost didn't hear Red whinny, but he smelled the lantern oil. He raised up on his elbows.
He heard a splash against the canvas cover and saw the flare of a lucifer through the cloth. A whooshing sound followed it and men's laughter. The canvas burst into flames that lit the inside of the wagon.
“
iAy, Dios!
Milagro scrambled for the rear opening as the fire roared through the canvas and caught the dry wood of the wagon's bed.
Rafe grabbed the pouch with his book in it, a blanket, and his faded blue army pants. The heat intensified until he thought his brains would bake in his skull. He tried to push Milagro through the opening, but a rope tangled around her ankle and held her fast. A spark lit her hair and he threw the blanket over it. She screamed and clawed at it, trying to see, while he fumbled with the rope. He freed her, picked her up, and threw her out the back of the wagon. She landed on her feet, staggered forward, fell, and rolled clear. He jumped down after her.
He untied Red from the picket line and led him away from the inferno. At a distance, the night was chill. He draped the blanket around Milagro's shoulders, and she clutched it to her, shivering. He pulled on his trousers. With a grim fascination they stood under the glittering sweep of a night sky spangled with jewels, and watched the dancing flames devour everything except the metal fittings.
“Who would do this?” Milagro asked.
“I think I know who.”
Leading Red, Rafe walked with her to her small room facing the rear courtyard of La Paloma. Then he mounted and rode Red to a narrow street off the main plaza where Dona Margarita kept a boardinghouse. Maybe Zeke Smith was still awake. Maybe the job offer would still stand.
Tomorrow, Rafe thought, I will look for Shadrach Rogers.

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