The Valiant Women (6 page)

They found no water, though when they camped in a dry wash Shea dug at the lowest place in the sand till Socorro made him stop.

“You could bury me in that hole, Shea, and the sand isn't the least bit damp! Let it go. We still have the jug and deer bladder.” She added hopefully, “Pinacate
does
look closer, at last! All the days I walked alone it never seemed the tiniest bit nearer.”

He put the deer spike aside, took the venison and cakes she proffered, noticed that she was favoring her left foot.

“Have you got a blister?” he demanded.

She looked guilty. “I—it's nothing.”

“Let's see that foot.”

Reluctantly, she sat down and let him draw off the boot. “Well,” he said sternly, “you don't have a blister; now, you've got two broken ones! How you've managed to walk God knows and may He forgive me for not noticing! Saints above, girl, don't try to be brave about your feet! You need them to get you out of here!”

Her lip quivered. She hung her head. Ashamed of himself, Shea said gruffly, “Sorry,
chiquita
. But next time something goes wrong, tell me right away, will you?”

She nodded but added with a flash of fire, “And you, you also promise to say if you have pain!”

He smothered an earthy, masculine reply to that. She hadn't a notion of what she did to him. Now that she had to use her rebozo mostly as a food carrier, she couldn't drape the ends over the tears in her dress. It was taking unfair advantage, but God's whiskers! How could a man, however hard he tried, keep from seeing those sweet curvings, the budding tips of her breasts, the warm, graceful turn of waist and thigh?

Stop it, you ungrateful blackguard!
he told himself harshly. She had been martyred in her womanhood in a way as cruel as his death by thirst. She'd saved him from that. He damned well had to keep a curb bit on himself till it was time to coax back into blooming that female deepness of her that had been invaded, torn, left plundered.

So he said gravely, “Let's agree,
chiquita
, that if we're sick or hurt, we'll tell each other.” He grinned. “And I give you leave, if I get blisters, to use on me this cure I learned off a Mexican soldier!”

He'd noticed an agave on the side of the slope. Taking the knife, he went up to it and cut off part of one of the long, fleshy, barbed leaves.

“This will sting.”

He knelt by Socorro, wrapped bits of the leaf which he'd peeled and mashed over the blisters with a strip cut off his snakeskin. She bit her lip but didn't flinch. “Now,” he said, making her a footrest of heaped-up sand, “you keep off that foot tonight. Is the other one all right?”

“Yes, I swear it!” She tucked it hastily beneath her.

“I'll cobble you out some kind of open sandal to wear till those blisters heal,” he said.

Measuring deerhide to Socorro's slim, high-arched foot, he shaped a sandal with latchets of hide to tie around ankle and foot.

If only they'd find water tomorrow! That ranch couldn't be more than three or four days away. If Socorro could walk.

At their noon halt next day, she glanced up at him apologetically. “Shea. The other foot. I'm so sorry—”

“No, I'm sorry that you've got to hobble in these poor half-cured skins!” Making her sit down in the shade, he examined the shapely foot, the reddened spots forming in several places. “Let's try some agave and let the air at it. I'll make another sandal while we're resting.”

They traveled more slowly because Socorro had to pick her way with care, though Shea helped by walking in front. Along one drifted former streambed where big burrs grew thick, he, simply carried her. Her hair was soft on his lips and the feel of her against him was sweet torment. He was ready to put her down by the time they got through the burrs, though.

He still didn't have his strength back. He thought again of Michael, the thin line between life and death. Michael had borne the flogging, the red-hot iron; but three days' without water had finished him.
Socorro's praying for you, lad. Her prayers are better than mine
.

She shaded her eyes and pointed. “Shea! See those doves? Look! They've dropped out of sight!”

“Let's hope it's to water!”

It was. Walking toward the point where the birds had vanished, they descended into a broad sandy wash, followed it up between rock walls, climbing over boulders till they looked down at a rock hollow that must have been twelve feet across.

The grayish-brown, black-billed mourning doves were drinking. “Let them finish,” Socorro urged, touching Shea's arm. “They led us here!”

“That they did,” Shea agreed. “Sure, we won't grudge them their drink.”

He was greatly relieved. If they'd had a dry camp, he'd intended to leave before dawn next morning, trying to find the first
tinaja
, but he'd hated the thought of leaving Socorro alone. A day-and-a-half's hard journey for a half-jug of water was a high price.

As they drew back to wait for the birds, Shea gave the nearly empty jug to Socorro. “Drink up, lady! We're going to stay here a few days while your feet heal! And maybe this dratted hide will get to where I can wear it!”

She laughed up at him and he knew she'd been just as worried as he was. “Let us pray,” she said as she handed him the water, “that I don't need any more sandals!”

Shea needed the rest almost as much as Socorro's blisters needed it, but he didn't idle. Saving their dried meat, they ate what he brought down with hurled stones; two rabbits and a big chuckwalla lizard. They cooked these over a fire fanned from another yucca drill. Socorro roasted some of the plump yucca fruit and flavored some water with crushed
tunas
.

“It's a feast!” Shea told her.

When she fed him a piece of the sweet yucca, he was sure that they'd never again taste anything so good. Though the meat
could
do with some salt. He grinned and reckoned that even in paradise the angels grumbled that their halos weren't bright enough.

Two days later they started on, having added two more gourds to their water supply. These, and the other gourds, were carried in slings of the new rabbit hides, and scraps of buckskin. The jerky was dry enough to be carried in the blue rebozo along with the other food.

Shea's buckskin garment was far from handsome. He'd shaped it to cover as much as possible of his body below the waist in order to ward off thorns and brush, so it reached variously from midthigh to midcalf, depending on where he'd taken the parts for Socorro's sandals.

The sandals were also stowed in the rebozo Shea carried. He'd padded the toes of her boots with the softest strips of rabbit fur and she had firm orders to call a halt if a blister started.

Pinacate increased steadily in size, a longish mountain with its highest elevation on the south. Shea began to suspect uneasily that to know a ranch lay beyond it was like knowing there was a water hole on this side. It could mean almost anywhere.

They reached the bottom of the rocky, scrub-grown peak that evening, camped in a silted wash and began the ascent next morning before dawn.

“Moses must have felt like this when he was fixing to pass out of the desert into the Promised Land,” Shea said as they paused for breath.

“I think the Promised Land was also a desert.”

“What?” He gazed at her in shock. “Then what's all that about milk and honey?”

“Bees make honey in the desert, very fine honey from mesquite, acacia and cactus flowers.” Her chin poked out stubbornly. “That milk must have come from goats because you don't hear much about cattle. The scriptures tell about shepherds, not vaqueros. It is
muy claro
that a country that uses mules and camels instead of horses
must
be desert!”

“But the Jordan River! The Dead Sea—”

“That tells you! It's full of salt. As for the Jordan,
pues
, don't you remember how Naaman, commander of the Syrian hosts, came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy?”

“Can't say that I do.” Getting to Mass and confession when his mother began to fear for his soul had been about the total of his religious education.

“When the prophet told Naaman to wash in the Jordan, he became furious! He said the rivers of Damascus were much cleaner and better. It took his servants a time to persuade him to bathe in the Jordan, even to cure his leprosy.”

“Did it?”

“Of course!”

“Then I'd call it a pretty good old river.”

She glared at him. “It wasn't the river at all, you redhead burro!”

Startled as if a hummingbird had suddenly attacked, Shea blinked, then covered a grin, delighted that she had a temper. It was a sign she was human, had passion that could be reached.

“Not the river?” he asked innocently. “What was it, then?”

“Faith!” she fairly shrieked at him. “Faith and humility!”

He could no longer control his laughter. Flushing, she stamped her foot, but after an indignant sputter, she laughed, too. They were still chuckling when they reached the top of the ridge and looked down and away.

The ranch lay just beyond them, but when they saw it, their smiles froze.

IV

Corrals, a rambling adobe house with smaller ones close by, several
ramadas
, open shelters for working in the shade where one could catch a breeze. There was a well by some watering troughs with a cluster of trees scattered along an old riverbed.

What Shea didn't want to see were the bodies.

Socorro gasped and caught his arm. He led her over to a shallow cave, made her sit down. “Stay here. I'll see if anyone's alive.” He doubted it from the way buzzards, ravens and coyotes had been feeding.

Leaving everything but the jug and knife with Socorro, he went warily down the slope. As he neared a corral, made by stacking rough lengths of wood between uprights, a coyote trotted into the brush and several ravens scolded as they rose heavily.

What must have been two men sprawled there, eyes pecked out, faces with a strange melted look because the scalps were gone. Shea swallowed the hot scalding in his throat, walked on, watching for any movement. The corpses stank. Must have happened yesterday; much longer than that and the wild scavengers would've left nothing but bones.

Four more men lay between the corrals and houses, so mutilated that he couldn't tell how they'd died. No arrows sticking out of them, though. Buzzards flopped only a little way off, bald red heads grotesquely small on hulking bodies with wingspans almost as much as Shea's six foot two.

The big house was where the real carnage was. Apparently the attackers had surprised the six men outside, but eight more men, three women and a half-dozen children, from a babe to ones of ten or eleven years, had taken refuge in the house.

They'd fought for their lives. A few still gripped the makeshift weapons they'd snatched up, a hunk of wood, an iron ladle, part of a broken yoke. Such real weapons as they'd had must have been looted by their murderers.

All were scalped, even a baby that had held to its mother's breast as she tried to protect it. The skirts of all the women, from a toothless aged one to a girl so young she had no breasts, were rucked up about their hips.

Shea leaned against the lintel. He'd seen battlefields, but nothing like this. Birds and beasts had feasted here, too, but he could see that several of the men had been shot. And weren't Apaches said to usually take children, often women, into captivity?

Dazed, he made the women's clothes as decent as possible and put the baby's head beneath its mother's arm so its wound didn't show.

He had to get these people buried, a huge task in itself. He didn't want Socorro to see that. As for the Promised Land—if this was any sample, they'd be better off at one of their
tinajas!
Except, sometime, the
Areneños
would turn up.

Stepping out the open back door, he found two more children, evidently caught as they tried to run in from play or chores. They were so chewed up that he couldn't tell whether they were boys or girls, they were just thin and brown and little.

Faint at the sight and stench, he circled the buildings and corrals. The remains of a butchered cow lay by the trough which was dry. Cattle were crowding up, evidently hoping for water.

Going over to the well, he lowered the big rawhide bucket by its rawhide rope which passed over a pulley. It must have held over ten gallons, weighing close to a hundred pounds, so it didn't take too long to water the stock enough to hold them till he could finish the job. Had to get back to Socorro, tell her to wait while he took care of the bodies.

She wasn't in the shallow cave. Shea's heart plunged. Then he saw her down the slope quite a distance, not far from the most outlying corral, kneeling by something obscured by the brush which had kept him from seeing her as he climbed.

He ran toward her. She glanced about imploringly. He could see now that she was giving water to a man, supporting his head and shoulders.

The man's left thigh looked to be half-shot away. It teemed with maggots; good thing, ugly' as they were. Cleaned out rotten flesh better than any surgeon.

He choked on the water, struggled feebly, moaning. “Out of his head, poor devil,” said Shea, dropping on one knee to examine the wound. “Looks like a musket ball passed through, tore a big hole on its way out. Don't think it touched the joint.”

“He has fever. If we could get him into some shade—” Her eyes widened as she remembered. “Is anyone else alive?”

“No.”

“Apache?”

He shrugged. “No arrows. But everyone was scalped.”

She shuddered and held the man closer against her. Young, good-looking vaquero, little more than a boy. And he'd kept his hair. “How'd you find him?” Shea demanded.

That small chin thrust out in a way he was beginning to recognize. “When you were gone so long, I got worried and started down to work my way around the corrals in case you were in trouble.”