Harvest of Fury (36 page)

Taking the knife from its sheath, she was wondering how to best use it when a shadow fell across her. Swooping down, “swift for all her bulk, Talitha snatched away the knife, then gave Cat a resounding slap that made her ears ring.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“I—I—” Impossible to “meet the blue blaze of Talitha's eyes. “James. Cinco.”

“Cinco's dead. James is Apache.” Talitha's words stung like whips. “What are you? A coward?”

Mutely, Cat hugged her knees. “It's too much for you?” Talitha flamed on. “You can't stand it? Then you've a lot of gall to kill yourself on your mother's grave. She was brave.”

“I'm not brave.” Cat's voice frayed. She had to battle for control before she could go on. “I just love James. Now he's killed Cinco and he'll kill lots more and I—I'm going to have his baby.”

“A baby?”

Cat nodded.

“Does he know?”

With a shake of her head Cat said, “I was going to tell him when he stopped on his way to Camp Grant. I wanted to go with him. But he needed to try to get more Apaches to come in. He—he said when he'd done what he could, he'd come to me and we'd get married.”

Talitha, heavy with child, sank down by Cat, and at that moment something stirred deep inside Cat, a movement in her vitals.

Her baby? Almost half its time in the blind womb gone. A girl or a boy? With the look of James?

“Oh, my God,” Talitha breathed. She was trembling and tears ran down her face. “James! James!”

Aghast, for she'd never seen Talitha so close to losing control, Cat put her arms around the older woman. “Tally! Please Tally!”

With great effort Talitha steadied, but the pain in her eyes was like a piercing cry. “I've always known he might turn wholly Apache. After what he's seen, I can't bear to think what he'll do now. He won't care whether he lives or dies. Sooner or later, Cat, he
will
die.”

“No!” Cat wailed, covering her ears.

Inexorably, Talitha caught her hands, made her listen. “If you love James, Cat, have his baby. Our James, my brother, your lover, is dead, but you can see to it that something of him lives on.”

“Yes. I can do that.” Desolated, Cat saw the years stretch before her, years when James, if he lived, would kill her people and be hunted in turn; but though she sickened and trembled, she made a vowing. “I
will
do that.”

Talitha put her arms around her, and they wept.

Marc was gone for several weeks, restoring the children ransomed at San Xavier to their people, bargaining for others in Tucson, though few of those were given up since the families who'd taken them in felt it a duty to rear them as Christians and redeem them from savagery.

The territorial papers, as well as the Western press in general, strongly supported the massacre as self-defense, insisting that Camp Grant Indians had been guilty of raids and murders the army would do nothing to avenge. The Eastern press published a letter Lieutenant Whitman had written to another officer which gave details of the bloody attack. Horrified Easterners demanded that something be done. President Grant called it “pure murder” and promised a thorough investigation. More to the point of settling Arizona's problems, at Governor Safford's urging Grant had arranged for Gen. Stoneman's transfer and replaced him with Gen. George Crook in June.

Crook had a reputation as a firm, just soldier who believed the Indians had to be subdued before they'd live in peace. Arizonans looked forward to his coming even as they mourned the death of courageous young Lt. Howard Cushing, killed along with four of his command in a fight with Cochise and a large band of Chiricahuas near Bear Spring in the Whetstone Mountains to the east.

Reluctantly, Marc added that Eskiminzin and his surviving people had tried to rebuild their
ranchería
near Camp Grant, but a patrol of soldiers from Fort Apache had ridden into the cañon and blundered into the Apaches. Panicked, the cavalrymen opened fire, and though none of his band was killed, Eskiminzin had told Whitman that the whites had twice broken the peace and that he was taking his people into the mountains.

Just before Marc left Tucson, he'd heard that Eskiminzin had eaten supper with a white friend, Charles McKinney, who had a farm on the San Pedro. They talked, drank coffee and smoked. Then Eskiminzin thanked his friend, drew a pistol and shot McKinney through the head.

“Why?” shuddered Talitha. “Why his friend?”

Somberly, Marc said, “To show that between white and Apache there can now be no peace or trust.”

In the first week of June, Lt. Claybourne Frazier stopped at the Socorro about nooning. Stiffly refusing to eat with the family, he officially informed Talitha that her half brother James was reputed to be the raider known as Fierro who was swiftly making his name one of terror, blazoned by burning homes and wagons, red with the blood of his victims.

“If he stops here, Mrs. Revier, it is your duty to hold him and send for the military. Any other course will make you a traitor to your race.”

Talitha flushed angrily, but before she could reply Marc closed his hand protectively over hers and said coolly to the officer, “I think we know our duty, sir. It is presumptuous of you to take that tone with my wife.”

Frazier glanced at Cat. Tight-lipped, he said roughly, “The warning is for everyone, Mr. Revier.” Then, eyes dilating, he sucked in his breath and turned crimson to the roots of his pale blond hair. “Miss O'Shea, I didn't know that you had married.”

No one spoke for a startled moment. Cat felt as if everyone were staring at the slight rounding of her belly beneath the cotton dress. Except for Talitha no one knew, though it could only be a matter of weeks before her condition was obvious. Frazier must have noticed because he hadn't seen her for a long time and the thickening of her waist was immediately evident.

In the awkward silence Jordan said easily, “Miss O'Shea has been betrothed to me since her sixteenth birthday. We decided we'd waited long enough.”

“It only remains for me to wish you happy,” Frazier said. Bowing, he turned abruptly and strode out into the sun.

Jordan got up from his seat at the end of the bench, came to Cat, and dropped on one knee beside her, taking her hands, pressing them to his face.

“Katie,” he said huskily, “I've been waiting. I've always loved you. This may not be the right time, but still it is the time.”

PART V

The Maimed Hawk

1881

XIX

In Scott Valley, lush with grama grass, watered by the oak and sycamore-shaded East Verde River, corn stood high and tasseling in the fields that late summer of 1881. Cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, and melons ripened on trailing vines; there were rows of cabbage; peas and beans were hulled and drying; and potato plants were starting to wither as a sign that it was almost time to dig. Apple trees were weighted with fruit that grew rosier each day, and there were apricots, plums, pears, and cherries in the orchards cared for and shared by the Scott clan.

Shut out of fields and gardens by rock walls and post fences—for Jared would have none of the barbed wire coming into use—sheep, cattle, and horses grazed in bountiful pastures. There were stout pigpens and chicken coops, and Jared's pride, a pack of greyhounds, to keep off preying coyotes, raccoons, and foxes. They coursed down jackrabbits, too, a frequent food in Scott Valley, along with venison, wild turkey, and quail.

The houses and outbuildings were sheltered by great pines and immense spreading oaks. Each dwelling had a wellhouse where butter, milk, and cream kept cool in the hottest weather, immersed in rock water troughs. A few miles east, where the valley widened even more, Thomas Scott had a sawmill, and a grist mill below Jared's house served people for miles around. A mail rider traveled past on one of the good roads General Crook had made, and Mormon neighbors came to worship in the little steepled church Jared had built in the broadest part of the valley.

They also sent their children to the school Cat taught during the winter months. She still smiled to remember how Governor Safford, who had persuaded Jordan to start the school, had visited several times, mounted on one of his handsome mules, and ridden off after quizzing the pupils, his satisfaction evidenced by the lusty way he was singing “There's a Land That Is Fairer Than Day,” his favorite hymn. In a territory bedeviled by Apache and bandit raids, where most people were occupied with mere survival, Safford had stubbornly insisted that all children must be educated, and by the time he left office in 1877 Arizona was studded with schools he'd prodded and persuaded people into starting.

Cat enjoyed teaching. Ten of her fifteen scholars were Jordan's nephews and nieces, but they took no liberties because of the kinship. Michael, her son, found it a bit galling to be the schoolmarm's child, but hints that his love of reading made him a sissy brought such swift chastisement from his fists that few boys even much larger than he dared his wrath more than once.

Students at Scott Valley learned some things that were probably not taught in any other school in all Arizona. Besides the standard spelling, arithmetic, grammar, geography, and reading, Cat taught how Papagos lived in the desert, harvesting mesquite beans and saguaro fruits; of the Yaquis' holy pueblos and valiant fighters; of Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain and its later war with the United States when her father, an Irishman, had changed sides to fight for Mexico. And she told them all she knew of the Apaches.

Of Ussen, the supreme god, who, as a rain shower, had given White Painted Woman a child, Born of Waters, who had grown up to kill terrible monsters and teach his people the right way to live; of the way a boy sought power on the mountain and became a warrior by serving humbly on four raids; of how girls were initiated into womanhood with rites binding them to White Painted Woman and celebrating the awesome ability to bring forth new life.

She told how Mangus Coloradas had given her brothers a twin cradleboard and how that great chief had died by treachery. One gangling fourteen-year-old had sniffed at that and raised his chapped red paw.

“Miz Cat, my daddy says we'd ought to kill every savage in the territory. Says crooked contractors make fortunes feeding them and the army and the reservation just gives 'em a place to rest and draw rations till they're ready to break away again.”

Cat decided that if the students could hear that sort of talk, they could hear about the Camp Grant massacre, and she told them. That night, several outraged parents descended on Jared and her. As head of the school board, he calmly told them he agreed with everything his sister-in-law was doing, and anyone who didn't like it could try whipping him. No one felt that lucky, and Cat continued with her unorthodox curriculum.

Jared, still vigorous and hearty at sixty, red hair faintly seasoned with gray, was Talitha's father, an officer in the Mormon Battalion who'd settled on the Verde twenty years ago and taken a second wife who'd given him three sons before dying of ague. Besides Jordan, two of Jared's other half brothers had built homes along the Verde and had growing families. All the clan except for Jordan were Mormons, and life in the little settlement had a strong dedication to work, sobriety, and high morals.

Jared could shoe a horse, build a house, dig a well, plow the straightest furrow beneath the Mogollon Rim; and on winter evenings while the women sewed, knitted and, mended, he told stories about the white temple at Nauvoo, the forced search for lands to the west, how he'd marched with the Mormon Battalion through Arizona while it was still part of Mexico, his adventures in the California gold fields.

And there had been plenty of excitement since then, here on the Verde. A wrestle with a bear whose claws had indelibly scarred his back and sides; the epic of Mormon settlements spreading down from Utah to cluster in the Arizona Strip and thrust down the valley of the Little Colorado, renowned as being “too thin to plow but too thick to drink.” In the past few years settlements had been started on the San Pedro, the Gila, and the Salt. Mesa, laid out in 1878 on the same plan as Salt Lake City, would someday have a temple, but till then couples who wanted the solemn rites that bound them through eternity traveled to the nearest temple at St. George, Utah, armed with “recommends” from the local bishop that they had been living according to the laws of the church.

Benjamin, Jared's eldest son, had just returned with his dainty little bride, Ruth, from such a wedding trip, which had taken a month each way. They spoke with awe of Grand Falls, higher than Niagara, spilling down lava flows, primeval ancient eruptions from the San Francisco Peaks; looming walls of ancient Indian fortresses, friendly Hopi and Navajo farmers tilling their fields, deserts where water had to be doled carefully from barrels and the few springs were bitter; the harrowing ascent and descent of Lee's Backbone, horses straining to keep from plunging into the cañon; towering cliffs and the high, pine-scented Kaibab forest, until at last, glimpsed across fertile fields and the surrounding settlement, gleamed the spired white temple.

Twenty-year-old Benjamin was like a younger brother to Cat, who'd kept house for Jared's womanless family since Jordan had brought her to the Verde ten years ago. She was also fond of fair-haired little Ruth, who, for all her butterfly looks, could milk and chum, make cheese and soap, bake crusty bread, and sew much finer and neater stitches than Cat's. Still, when they glowingly talked about their honeymoon trip, Cat, with a pang, would avoid Jordan's eyes.

She had tried to be a good wife to him. She had been, in all the things that could be willed, in outward behavior. But she couldn't pretend passion in his arms, response to his loving, be it tender or desperate.

“Can't you forget him?” he had breathed one time.