Night Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy) (6 page)

      
Jim knew what Lee said was justified. Incidents between the companies of Texians forming up to fight with Taylor and the Texas-born Mexican populace, the
Tejanos,
had grown alarmingly common.

      
Jim said, “I fought with Houston at San Jacinto to free Texas from an invading army. I am sure as hell not going to march into Mexico and become the foreign invader. But Mexico's government, such as it is, has declared war on the United States; and now Texas is a state. If they come here, I'll fight again.”

      
“But if they don't, you won't follow Taylor below the Rio Bravo,” Lee finished for his troubled friend.

      
“Rio Grande in Texas,” Jim corrected Lee. “No, I won't follow Taylor anywhere. He's no General Houston.”

      
Lee snorted in agreement. “History sure has played some dirty tricks on us,
mano
.”

* * * *

      
“I don't know why you persist in disliking the girl so, Charlee,” Jim said with irritation. “I know she's immature, but she's only seventeen.”

      
Charlee swung up on her little paint filly's back with surprising grace for one who was eight months' pregnant. “Immature,” she snorted. “Spoiled rotten is more like it. Lee treats her as if she were made of porcelain.”

      
Jim walked Polvo alongside his feisty wife's horse in a leisurely after-supper ride. Charlee insisted it helped her digestion. “You sure you're not just jealous of how he dotes on her, Cat Eyes? If you like, I could get you a covered buggy like hers; and you could use a screen so the eyes of the vulgar couldn't gaze on that delectable little belly,” he teased.

      
“Speaking of vulgarity,
Don Diego
, you're pushing the outer limits,” Charlee replied with as much dignity as her expanded midsection allowed. “I might just get the vapors from being in such a delicate condition and tell you to go sleep in the guest bedroom tonight.”

      
Jim laughed. “And deprive yourself? That'd be cutting off your pretty little nose to spite your face. As I recall, the day before Will was born you attacked me—”

      
Charlee reached over to swat playfully at her tall husband, who continued undaunted, “We were on a picnic, right out in front of God and everybody.”

      
“We were not!” she shot back in mock anger. “We were in a very secluded copse of willows down by the creek and nobody saw us...well, maybe the cat and the horses,” she amended as her husband laughed fondly.

      
“I'm afraid it's just Lee's Hispanic gallantry, all polished up while he was under the civilizing influence of his uncle, away from Texas riffraff like us. He's only twenty-two, Charlee, and being a new husband and prospective father is a lot of responsibility to take on.”

      
“Yeah, and considering her ideas about marriage, it sure isn't going to get any easier,” Charlee replied darkly.

      
“Not wanting to appear in public while she's pregnant isn't an unforgivable sin, Cat Eyes,” Jim remonstrated.

      
Charlee sighed. “That's silly, but if she wants to molder for nine months, that's her problem. It's the other that's unfair to Lee.”

      
“You're not making sense,” Jim countered.

      
Charlee sighed. “I don't guess I'm violating the sanctity of the confessional if I tell you about our conversation when she told me she was expecting—actually, I told her, after she asked a bunch of very euphemistic questions. Then, she was overjoyed.”

      
“Well, that seems natural enough. She does love Lee in her own shy way.”

      
“She loves him all right, as long as she doesn't have to make love with him. Her first question to me after she was sure she was pregnant was how soon she could tell Lee it wasn't safe for her to ‘submit’ to him.”

      
Jim burst out laughing, then sobered. “Come to think of it, that isn't really very funny, is it? I can just imagine what you told her,” he added with a glint of devilment in his cougar eyes.

      
“I was the soul of tact and patience,” Charlee replied primly, “but I don't think I convinced her. She's so young and full of claptrap and aristocratic pretensions, I'm afraid she's never going to make Lee the kind of wife he deserves.”

      
“Well, if sheer devotion and youthful romance have any value, I wouldn't sell their chances short,” Jim consoled her, hoping that it was only Charlee’s inherent dislike of the snobbery she'd encountered from some of San Antonio's best Hispanic families that had shaped her judgment of Dulcia.

* * * *

      
“Oh, Gertrudis, I am so lonely for Leandro,” Dulcia practically wailed to her friend, the eldest daughter of the Sandoval family, at whose lavish
estancia
she stayed while Lee was gone hunting a last elusive bunch of wild mustangs.

      
Knowing that San Antonio was a recruiting point for western militiamen who were forming very irregular companies of volunteers to ‘‘whip the greasers,” Lee had feared leaving his wife alone with a handful of elderly servants at El Sueño Grande. Since she had disdained to stay with Charlee and had made friends with Jim's cousins, the Sandovals, Lee had left her in Don José and Doña Esperanza's safekeeping.

      
However, after two weeks of embroidery and gossip, Dulcia was restless. Her morning sickness had finally abated and she showed only the slightest evidence of being pregnant. Suddenly, after months of melancholy and crying spells, she wanted to see her husband. Lee's gentle charm and humor could lighten her flagging spirits.

      
Gertrudis, a pretty, flighty young woman of eighteen, engaged to a neighboring rancher's son, was instantly sympathetic. “I know how difficult it must be, dear Dulcia, but in order to build his ranch, Leandro must chase the mustangs. My father did it and so did my Cousin James' father.”

      
Dulcia still found it difficult to accept the fact that Jim Slade's mother had been a Sandoval, part of this proper and elegant family. “I know gentlemen work here in Texas, but must it be at such wild and dangerous things? Oh, Gertrudis, I wish to be there when he returns. Don't you see, if I am here, he will wait and work those dreadful wild beasts before he comes for me. He said two weeks. It is that and past already. I know if he isn't at the ranch, he will be by the time I return home. I could have the servants prepare his favorite foods and have the house readied for him if I left today. Ask your mother to see if your father would give me an escort home. It isn't that far. Please?”

      
Caught up in the romantic spirit, Gertrudis made one of her characteristic snap decisions. “Oh, posh, Mama and Papa will never agree to let you leave without Leandro's permission; but I could get Rosario and Lorenzo to escort us. They are very capable and very devoted to me. We'll have you at Great Dream Ranch for Leandro' s homecoming by tonight!”

      
True to her word, Gertrudis got her father's vaqueros to hitch up Dulcia's rig; and the two women sneaked out immediately after the midday meal while the family was taking siesta. With their armed escort, they set out for El Sueño Grande.

* * * *

      
“When yew git done with her, I want me a piece,” the burly man called Griggs sang out to his companion, who was methodically cutting the clothing from a cowering Angelina, the Velasquez cook.

      
“She be a mite old fer ya, Griggs, but since I had ta kill th' younger one, I reckon I'll share.”

      
As the cowering old woman pressed her body against the cool masonry of the sala wall, Jake Sears continued to undress her with his bowie knife, oblivious to the carnage around him.

      
In route to San Antonio from the open range to the northwest, Griggs and Sears planned to join one of the Texas volunteer companies they'd heard were forming to fight the hated Mexicans. When blind chance brought them to El Sueño Grande, they had seen what looked to be a prosperous little ranch owned by
Tejanos
. Few vaqueros were around, but two women worked in the yard around an open oven, baking bread beneath the canopy of a towering cottonwood.

      
The old man at the corral had been an easy target, and even the two armed vaqueros they had encountered had fallen quickly to the Patterson Colts of the two seasoned rangers. By the time they had entered the house, they found Angelina and Serafina hiding in the armoire in the master bedroom. The younger housemaid had found one of Lee's old rifles and had fired it ineffectually, grazing Sears and infuriating him. He retaliated by shooting her at point-blank range with his Colt.

      
They dragged Angelina, the graying old cook, out from the armoire and headed with their prize to search for food and liquor. Breaking into Lee's walnut bookcase, Sears searched for whiskey while Griggs raided the kitchen, bringing back a freshly baked loaf of bread and a haunch of cold beef. Finally, after destroying half the house, the marauders were satisfied they had found all the loot these greasers owned—a paltry few pieces of gold jewelry and plate, an antique pocket watch, and several bottles of old Spanish Madeira.

      
They ate, forcing Angelina to serve them, and then proceeded to get raucously drunk on the wine, as they turned their attention to the quaking old woman.

      
“Please, señor. I am sixty years old,” she pleaded in heavily accented English. I am
Tejana
, not
Mejicana
”

      
Sears smiled evilly, showing a wide space where several teeth were rotted away. “I liked th' youngun's gumption better. Called me
rinche
and spit in my face. Course, it shore wuz a shame ta blow sech a piece of female flesh ta smithereens, even if she wuz a greaser.”

      
“Hey, Jake, look see whut we got us comin' up. Quieten her real quick.”

      
Hearing the sound of horses' hooves and the creak of a buggy, Sears complied with one well-placed blow from his meaty fist to Angelina's jaw. Scratching his greasy buckskins, he grinned at Griggs as he grabbed his Colt and ambled toward the window.

      
“Good thing them other three's layin' down near th' corral where our callers cain't see ‘em,” Griggs whispered hoarsely.

      
A vaquero was helping two young and very pretty Mexican women from the buggy while another horseman sat watching unconcernedly on his mount…

* * * *

      
The minute he crested the rise and looked down on the ranch, Lee knew something was wrong. Neither old Juan nor the two younger vaqueros were visible around the area of the corral. The house was deathly quiet as he cantered his big blue roan toward it. A sick, still feeling began to tighten his gut, transmitting itself to the newly broken stallion. “Easy, Sangre,” he whispered to the dancing horse, tightening his hand on the reins as they rounded the bend of the creek and crossed to the front of the house.

      
As soon as he saw Dulcia's rig standing unattended, he reached for the Patterson Colt in his sash, cursing the time he had spent helping his men put the newest mustangs in the far breaking corral. Then he saw Rosario Mendez, the Sandovals' head stable man, lying on the ground with a bullet through his head.

      
Silently, he dismounted.
Dulcia! Dulcia!
his mind hammered out; but his throat was silent, closed off with fear and anguish as he moved toward the front door.

      
Not a sound could be heard but the beating of his own heart as it pounded in his chest. He knew with a dreadful certainty what he would find in the house. Another of the Sandovals' vaqueros lay just inside the door, alongside Gertrudis Sandoval. Both were dead. Obviously, the poor girl had been savaged by her tormentor before he shot her. The
sala
was a wreckage of broken crockery and splintered bookcases, with Uncle Alfonso's precious volumes scattered across the floor. Chairs were smashed and overturned. Empty Madeira bottles and meat bones littered the large table across from the
sala
in the dining room.

      
Clenching the Colt in his hand, Lee stilled his trembling. Dulcia wasn't here. Apparently, neither were the marauders who had killed Gertrudis and the Sandoval men and pillaged his home. But why was Dulcia's rig outside? He forced himself to turn toward the bedrooms. Angelina wasn't in the kitchen. A cursory glance through the door told him that. He found the young maid, Serafina, in the women's bedroom, crumpled on the floor. Only one place remained where he had not looked—the master bedroom at the end of the hall.

      
His feet dragged as if he were moving through quicksand. Even the most monstrous nightmares from his scarred childhood did not prepare him for what he found. Dulcia was alone in the big room, lying across their bed, the clothing torn from her body. Lee collapsed by the side of the bed and cradled her broken body in his arms, his gun thrown heedlessly on the floor. No one was alive in this house.

      
When the rapist had finished his bestial act, he had cut her throat. The pillows and bedding were stained a dark reddish brown.

      
Cradling his wife's head with its matted chestnut curls, Lee squeezed his eyes shut as acid tears forced their way past the lids, burning paths down his cheeks. “Oh, Dulcia, my sweet, innocent one, why did I bring you here—to die just like my mother? Like Josefina.” He ran his hand over her soft, bruised body, resting it on the slightly swelling mound of her abdomen. With a ripping twist deep in his guts he imagined what being exposed like this must have done to one so modest and shy that she begged her own husband to douse the candles before he undressed her.