Harvest of Fury (24 page)

Jordan regarded her quizzically. “You think horses—and people—should be pushed to their limits?”

She hadn't thought of it that way and floundered a bit. “It makes them stronger if they are. And it seems a shame to do only part of what's possible.”

The young man's frown vanished. His hazel eyes laughed down at her. “Don't feel sorry for Sangre yet, Caterina! I've got a notion you'll drive man or horse either one to the end of his tether!”

That was the sort of remark that would have made her angry if he hadn't just joined in giving her the most splendid horse in all Arizona and Sonora. Now she only laughed and hurried into the house. She was disheveled from the ride, but she couldn't keep the others any longer from their meal.

Horrors! There was Lieutenant Frazier lounging in the front door, talking with Marc and the twins. Too late to retreat. Gray eyes lighting, he came forward, bowed gallantly, and wished her happy birthday.

“I brought you a small gift.” He presented a tissue-wrapped object. Was it accident that his fingers brushed hers? “I hope it's not presumptuous of me to stop by at such a family occasion.”

Talitha would already have invited him to supper. Annoyed though she was at being caught with windblown hair and a dress the worse for berry picking and her ride, Cat could scarcely do otherwise than say, “We're always glad to have guests, Lieutenant.”

He obviously expected her to open his gift. Unwrapping it, she found a book by an author who was new to her, Mark Twain. “This
Innocents Abroad
is his first book,” the lieutenant said. “But his story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' made him famous two years ago. I had asked my sister to procure a copy of Miss Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
, but the bookseller was out of that and recommended this. I hope you won't find the way Twain pokes fun at Europe's treasures and traditions too offensive.”

“It sounds like tremendous fun,” Cat assured him.
How could such a dashing-looking cavalry officer sound such a prig?
“Thank you, and please thank your sister.”

He managed to sit next to her, but if he'd had any hope of semiprivate conversation, it had to vanish when Jordan took the seat directly opposite.

“Well, Lieutenant,” he said amiably, “have you chased any Apaches lately?”

“We're always scouting,” Frazier replied somewhat defensively. “But we never seem to encounter the devils. They fade into the ground. Tom Gardner, who sells the camp produce, has been attacked so often that soldiers are detailed to guard his place, but we can't station men everywhere. By the time we get word of a raid, the redskins are gone.”

Talitha shook her bright head. At twenty-nine, quietly glowing with the love she and Marc had for each other, she was in the full bloom of strong, proud beauty. The birth of blond little Shea three years ago had made her figure richer, softening a slight angularity, just as Marc's cherishing had eased the sternness brought by too heavy and too early burdens. Dear Tally, she deserved her joys. If only James would come back.…

That thought hurt so much that Cat refused to dwell on it and concentrated on what Talitha was saying. “Poor Larcena! Her brother, Jim, was ambushed and killed last year. Now it's her father and favorite brother. Shea and I went to see her after she survived that lancing the Apaches gave her in 1860.”

When the lieutenant raised his eyebrows, Talitha explained how newly wed Larcena, one of the Pennington daughters, had been abducted along with a little Mexican girl, lanced eleven times, shoved down a ravine, and stoned. Left for dead in the snow, she at last roused enough to drag homeward. After sixteen days with only a little grass to eat and some spilled flour she found at a lumber camp, she crawled to a lumbering road and was rescued.

With a certain shock, Cat realized that nearly everyone at the table had survived disasters that might boggle this young officer's mind, though they all accepted them matter-of-factly. Marc, Belen, and the twins had fought through wars; Talitha had seen her relatives killed and burned by Apaches, watched her captive mother die, been forced to fill Socorro's place, to lose Santiago and Shea.

And James?
Cat flinched from the memory. Every vaquero had lost kin to Apaches or bandits. Sewa was orphaned. So, for that matter, were Cat and her brothers, but the love of Talitha and the ranch folk had kept them from feeling alone.

Marc turned the subject to the new governor, Anson P. K. Safford, of whom he thought highly. “He served two terms in the California legislature and was chairman of the committee on education. He's proved himself a public-spirited man who intends to stay in the West, unlike our first two governors, Goodwin and McCormick, who came and went, using their appointments as steppingstones.”

“He sounds rash.” Jordan grinned. “Didn't he just marry, in July, a girl he met in April in San Francisco?”

Talitha smiled at this uncle who was several years her junior. “He waited till he was thirty-nine, which isn't very impulsive. Maybe he makes up his mind quickly when he sees what he wants.”

“Maybe.” Jordan's hazel eyes touched Cat. This time he had that curious little half-smile on his lips. She immediately turned to the lieutenant and asked if he wanted more tamales.

He took one, thanked her, and said respectfully to Marc, “I'm glad you have a good opinion of Governor Safford, sir. Your experience in the legislature must have given you insight into the kind of administrator the territory needs.”

“Safford wants to start educating Arizona's children, all of them. He knows well enough that something has to be done about the Apaches, but he's shocked that there's only one public school in the state, at Prescott.”

“But, dear,” frowned Talitha, “in that very first legislature didn't you set aside money for public schools?”

“Indeed we did.” Marc chuckled. There was considerable gray in his brown hair, but his frank blue eyes were young. “There we sat in a two-room cabin made of pine logs so new they still wept pitch. There hadn't been time to chink the walls and the wind kept us well ventilated even with all the hot air we filled the place with. An early storm drove us out completely and we adjourned to the governor's mansion to do our lawmaking. A far cry from the last political body I attended, the 1848 Prussian constituent assembly in Berlin.”

He went on to tell how the nine-member Council and eighteen-member House of Representatives had fittingly enough elected Charles Poston as their first delegate to the United States Congress, for without his tireless endeayors there still might not be any Arizona Territory. They'd instructed, Poston to besiege Congress for mail service and money to pay and equip volunteer Indian fighters, and then they got around to education.

“In the end,” Marc concluded, “we elected a Board of Regents for the university we hope to have someday, gave two hundred and fifty dollars to the mission school at San Xavier, and granted two hundred and fifty dollars each to the county-seat towns of Prescott, La Paz, and Mohave for schools, provided the towns raised matching amounts. Tucson could have had five hundred dollars by making instruction in the English language part of the curriculum. Only Prescott matched the money.”

Cat sniffed. “Why, that means Talitha's given more money for schools than the legislature!”

As Judah Frost's widow and only traceable beneficiary, Talitha had inherited his businesses. She had cleared his considerable debts by selling his shares in several freighting companies. Not wanting to profit from the estate of the man she'd hated, she turned some of the proceeds from the Tecolote mine, which Marc administered, over to San Xavier's school and used the rest for a school and infirmary at Tecolote as well as pensions for aged or disabled miners and their families. Part of the profit from the San Patricio was spent in similar ways.

Suddenly, Jordan, though pleasant in manner, seemed bound to harass Lieutenant Frazier. “I can't understand, sir, why the Apaches are worse than ever when there are so many forts and camps. You'll have to forgive me if I can't see that the army does much but escort government officials and their own supplies.”

Frazier colored to the roots of his fair hair. “To control over thirty thousand Indians there are fewer than three thousand troops in Arizona, Scott. They're scattered among nine posts so separated by distance and rough country that it's almost impossible for one post to come to the aid of another. Sickness has been a problem, too. Camp Crittenden seems to be healthier than most, but often there are more men sick with intermittent fever at Camp Wallen than are fit for duty.”

Marc interposed mildly, “There may have been some failures of common sense over at Camp Wallen. I understand that the men and officers complained constantly of sleeping in their ‘A' tents till General McDowell reminded them of General Order 80 which instructs men to make their own shelters out of what's at hand. That was when the commanding officers got a Mexican herder to show them how to make adobes. Is it true, Lieutenant, that Wallen's being abandoned?”

Frazier nodded. “Next month.” He brooded a moment, then swung on Jordan and counterattacked. “There'd be long faces among the civilians, sir, if we didn't escort the paymasters! Why, the territory lives by supplying the army! If it weren't for government contracts and sales, where would your freighters and merchants and farmers be?”

It was a fair thrust. Jordan chuckled. “It's like my father used to say. We worked all summer to grow enough grain to feed the horses through the winter so they could plow for the grain next summer.”

Frazier was not to be mollified. “We get infantry when what we need is cavalry. And though we're better off directed by the Department of California than that of New Mexico, what we really need is a Department of Arizona.”

“It'll come,” Marc said. “Safford's traveling to Washington at his own expense to plead the special problems of our territory. I think he'll get at least part of what we need.” He smiled down the table at Cat. “This is no way to celebrate a sixteenth birthday, is it,
chiquita?
Chuey, Rodolfo, get your guitars and let's have a
baile!
”

XIV

In spite of his limp, Marc danced with Talitha, and also with Cat, murmuring teasingly in her ear, “One thing that's quite nice for a birthday is to have two handsome young men paying court.”

“Two?” she puzzled.

He glanced at Jordan, who was whirling a gasping, laughing Anita. “You mean you've never guessed?”

Unaccountably distressed, Cat shook her head. “Not Jordan. He thinks I'm a child.”

“Does he?” Marc smiled and surrendered her to the lieutenant.

He danced as well as Marc, who'd learned in Berlin and taught the vaqueros how to play a waltz, but Claybourne Frazier's strong hand on her back, his fingers holding hers, gave her a strange, breathless feeling, as if something she both feared and desired were about to happen.

“Your uncle gibes me about Indians,” the lieutenant said with a harsh laugh. “But if he thinks anything he can say will stop me from coming to see you—” He broke off in confusion. “Forgive me, Miss O'Shea. That sounds presumptuous of me. But you can't know how eagerly I've waited for your birthday. With your consent, I want to ask your stepfather if I may call on you.”

Cat gulped, stared, and swallowed again. Her confusion seemed to restore Frazier's usual confidence. He drew her a little closer, laughing. “Is it such a shock? I'll be bound everyone else guesses, including your vigilant uncle.”

“He's not my uncle,” said Cat, recovering her breath. “And Marc isn't my stepfather.” She explained the relationships of the household, to the lieutenant's mounting astonishment.

“It's all so … irregular! Mrs. Revier no blood relative of you and your brothers; Mr. Scott her uncle instead of her brother, no kin of yours in either case; and that pretty little Indian girl no kin to any of you!”

“She's Santiago's child. We couldn't love her more.”

Frazier glanced with awed admiration at Talitha. “A remarkable lady! So, when your mother died, she raised you, though she was only a girl herself?”

“She's been my mother and sister both. When she was only six and captive in an Apache camp, she mothered her baby half brother, fed him on piñon-honey gruel when Juh's wives would have let him starve.”

“Half brother?” The lieutenant's eyes narrowed.

“Her mother became Juh's wife. She died in childbirth.”

The lieutenant made a small whistling sound between his teeth. “Where is this half-breed brother?”

Cat stopped dancing. “Don't call him that!”

“I'm sorry.” The lieutenant passed his hand across his eyes. “It's just such a shock.” He smiled cajolingly and moved back into the lilting dance. “Where is Mrs. Revier's brother?”

“We don't know.” Cat bit her lips to stop their trembling and her eyes stung. If only James were here! She would give anything, yes, even Sangre, if James would come back. “He took some cattle to Mangus Coloradas, his foster father, a month or two before the chief was treacherously killed by soldiers early in 1863.”

Now it was the lieutenant's turn to stop in his tracks. “
Treacherously?
That old scoundrel!”

“The white men pretended to talk peace, but when they tricked Mangus into their camp, his guards tormented and killed him.” Cat wrested free of the officer, glaring at him with clenched fists. “Mangus was my parents' friend! My brothers slept in the cradleboard he gave them! And he took good care of James when he … went away for the first time.”

“Mangus was a bloodthirsty, murdering heathen!”

“You can't call him that under this roof!”

Frazier's jaw dropped. “Are you telling me to go?”