SHE
left the general store and saw them across the dust-filled ruts of the main
street, lounging on the porch under the faded sign that said BLACK JACK SALOON:
cattleman Lyte Grumman, his mooncalf son Chet, and two of their rough ranch-hands.
All warmth seemed to drain from her cheeks. For a moment she just gaped.
They were the very last people she wanted to see in Ciudad del Rio. It had
been a mistake to come into town, since, until now, the bunch had likely
assumed she’d vamoosed many weeks ago with Dick, who’d taken off Grumman
a worthwhile chunk of his Slash C herd – a thousand head of Texas longhorns.
A note for the cattle had been put on the table after Grumman had run out
of chips at poker in the gaming parlour above the Black Jack’s bar-room.
She clasped to the silken curves of her bosom the latest Eastern ladies’
journals she’d been tempted to come into town to collect – these now oh-so
dangerously alluring purchases with pictures of the fall fashions – and averted her face.
She tripped hurriedly, head down, along the plank walk in her shiny, shell-cordovan
shoes with the rounded toes, metal eyelets and inch-and-a-half heels. But
it was too late.
‘Hey!’ a voice exclaimed. ‘Ain’t that the smart bitch who was in cahoots with Redvers?’
She didn’t look back but could see the accusing, pointing finger in her mind’s
eye. She heard the swift mumble of oaths and confirmations, the shuffling
motion of heavy feet that preceded a shift into pursuit.
‘Miss Faith!’ they called after her.
One request came in the familiarly beseeching tones of Chet Grumman. ‘Faith – wait!’
Lyte Grumman himself joined the baying of his hounds – growly, dictatorial.
‘Hold up, damn you, missy! We want words.’
Tucking the Eastern papers under her arm, Faith lifted her full skirt clear
of her trim ankles, showing the lacy edge of a fine white petticoat, and
broke into a run. She skipped off the end of the plank walk and kept right
on going.
Her nimbleness and abandon of decorum availed her little.
The heavy-footed Slash C pack, led by its boss, Grumman, pounded closer.
On the town’s boundary was its oldest building, an adobe mission church completed
in the 1770s, more than a hundred years before. She swung into its grounds
blindly, between open wrought-iron gates under an ornate archway in lime-washed
walls.
To the left was a sunbaked graveyard, a proliferation of mounds, markers
and jumbled headstones, some older even than the church, severely weathered,
leaning and crumbling. She darted behind one of the newer stones with its
inscription still legible: THOMAS D. HARTNETT. Born 5 Jan 1834. Died 23 Mar
1877.
Her breath was coming now in short gasps, the result of exertion, fright, or both.
But running and hiding got her nowhere at all. The cemetery was no sanctuary.
Grumman’s men quickly spotted and came after her at their ease. She shrank
back.
‘You don’t have any call to bother me!’ she cried. ‘Keep away from me!’
One of the Slash C riders, Kurt Schwimmer, a big bulky man with mean eyes
and a grim mouth, approached purposefully and fastened a hard hand
on her shoulder.
‘Gal, you got some tellin’ to do!’
She felt huge revulsion at his touch.
‘L-leave me be! Go away! G-get out of here!’ she stammered.
Chet Grumman came up, his eyes shining and his loose, full lips wet. He was
a slimly built young man, a mite above average height, fair-haired and with
swanky style that showed weakness of character and, Faith suspected, was
also a mask for a streak of viciousness.
‘Faith, my pretty,’ he said, ‘Pa doesn’t want to – uh – make trouble for
you, but it’s crazy to deny him what he wants to know. He figures to get
back the
dinero owing for his beeves.’
She bit her lip. She wasn’t Chet’s ‘pretty’. She’d made that perfectly obvious
on past, less uncivilized occasions when he’d pressed his suit. But he was
plainly still crazy about her – correction, about wanting to have relations
with her – and it gave her one small advantage to play on.
‘Chet, I can’t help your father,’ she said, sighing. ‘I don’t know where
Dick is. Maybe I could let you persuade me not to care where he is. . . .’
But it was difficult to infuse her change of tune with any conviction. It
would take a different kind of woman in a different place to achieve the
intended, subtle air of challenging suggestion. And the simple fact was that
any thought of male attention, let alone under circumstances like these,
filled her with panic. It always did; it was how she was.
Lyte Grumman lumbered up. His cruel laugh was a blood-chilling sound. He
had skin the texture and colour of an old potato and his muddy eyes were
cold and unwinking.
‘We got you hard and fast, bitch! You’ll do some singing. No one to hear ’cept us and the dead! No one to stop us—’
That was when, the panic rising, she yanked free of Schwimmer’s grasp, ripping
the shoulder of her dress. She tried to throw herself past Grumman and his
son, and when Grumman grabbed hold of her, she struck at his face with long,
neatly manicured nails. She brought up a knee.
But Grumman laughed again and turned a treetrunk thigh to absorb what might
have been a painful, crippling blow. He was a powerful man and held her effortlessly.
Sobbing with fury and horror, she squirmed under his hands. ‘Stop detaining me!’
Chet said excitedly, ‘Honey, you’ll get yourself hurt!’
Grumman said, ‘Hell, she’s a wildcat!’
Schwimmer said, ‘No never-mind, Chet’s lovin’ watchin’ it. He likes a gal
with some spirit. Jest means thar’ll be fun gettin’ her to spill what she
knows!’
Chet’s eyes were indeed gleaming.
Hotly, Faith fought, her hair coming unpinned and spilling to her shoulders.
But Grumman dragged her further into the extensive burial ground, away from
the church and the road.
‘No knowing what can happen to a gal who gets lost in a graveyard,’ he mocked.
‘But mebbe we won’t do it here. Better go get the buckboard, Nolan, and bring
it round the back boundary. We’ll take her along with us.’
Chet put clammy hands on her to help his father, and Schwimmer trailed along behind.
Faith started to scream.
*
San Antonio had grown since Joshua Dillard had last visited. He had come
by train and stagecoach nigh on 900 miles from Denver to find the South-western
city prospering as a cattle, distribution, mercantile and military centre
serving the Border region and the South-west. Its population had swelled,
they said, to 20,000. It was the southern hub and supplier of the cattle
trail drives; an important wool market had developed with the importation
of merino sheep to the adjacent Hill Country.
Yet to Joshua it was still the hard, unlovely place where, as an operative
of the famous Allan Pinkerton Detective Agency, he’d learned that thief-taking
and wife-taking didn’t mix.
It was in this town, on one day of sickening bloodshed years before, that
the Wilder gang had come calling on the home he’d provided for a sparkling-eyed,
peachy-cheeked bride with spun-gold hair. The outlaws, full of malice toward
a ‘Pink’, had done more than wreck the place. They’d snuffed out the warming
flame of his wife’s beautiful young life and forever changed the course of
his own.
The loss had turned his heart to stone.
Obsessed with a hatred of lawbreakers which inclined him to irrationality
and illegality in his actions, he’d been obliged to resign his Pinkerton
job less he should embarrass the agency.
In the cold, lonely years that followed, he’d grown lean and very hard from
an assortment of shrewdly chosen labours as a freelance troubleshooter. Most
of these had ended in blood and turmoil, yet never quite his own death. And
seldom with financial reward.
Thus the recent Bennett case in Colorado had proved an exception. A grateful
mining millionaire had pressed a handsome sum of money on Joshua
for saving him, his wife and his sister from an insane outlaw’s revenge.
Joshua had decided to take the unusual opportunity to visit his wife’s grave
and indulge, for once, in the poignant memories he would never completely
shrug off.
It was summertime and the mercury in the thermometer at the renowned Menger
Hotel, a two-floor cut-stone building which featured an abundance of classical
detail, was nudging the hundred-degrees mark. San Antonio, Joshua remembered,
was hot and alternately dry or humid depending on prevailing winds. And the
cuisine offered in the hotel’s Colonial Dining Room included mango ice-cream,
among other tempting specialities like wild game and snapper soup made from
turtles caught in the San Antonio River.
But Joshua dallied less than a day sampling the Menger luxuries, albeit the
hotel had the reputation of being the finest west of the Mississippi. The
morning after his arrival in the city, he went early to a livery established
by another German immigrant on South Alamo Street. Here, he dickered for
a big sorrel mare to carry him the last forty-odd miles of his journey of
remembrance.
The grave of his wife was in the cemetery of the mission at Ciudad del Rio, the small town which had been her birthplace.
The sorrel had the stamina and the reaching stride to eat up the miles without
churning a rider’s mid-section. Ciudad del Rio was reached in the late afternoon,
after resting up in the shade of an oak grove around midday when the heat
was at its peak. Joshua felt well satisfied with his bargain purchase of
the horse.
Ciudad del Rio was no San Antonio but it was a thriving cattle town and ranching
centre in its own right, a sprawl of board and adobe. It offered most of
the usual conveniences. The essential commercial premises, including a bank,
a hotel, a livery barn, a big general store and a saloon, the Black Jack,
were on the main street or bordering a wide plaza where the buildings had
thick adobe walls, mostly limewashed. Down the several cross streets, Joshua
glimpsed the weathered buildings of a feed barn, a bakery, a small café,
a barber shop and a dressmaker’s.
He didn’t waste any time in town but hied himself to the old mission grounds
and the sprawling cemetery, not suspecting that events there would take a swift, unexpected turn.
He left the sorrel tied at the gate. The burial ground, even in the last
of the warm daylight, was forlorn and bleak as such places are inclined to
be. He picked his way through the tombs, the headstones; the cheaper, wooden
markers with crude, pokerwork inscriptions; the mounds marked and unmarked,
weed-grown or carefully maintained.
By a quirk of history or design of the mission’s long departed founders,
the older parts of the graveyard were situated furthest from the church and
the road. His wife’s family had been among the earliest Anglo-American arrivals,
and it was in this remote section that he relocated her headstone.
A few of the nearby graves had flowers; others had mussel shells and stones
from the local creek as decoration. His wife’s grave was unadorned. Its rock
headstone was already covered with spots of lichen and a thin growth of moss.
Joshua was contemplating how he might remedy this dereliction brought about
by the almost drifting pattern of his life throughout the Frontier West when,
bursting upon his thoughts, came the violent interruption of a woman’s screams.
His immediate thoughts condemned the disrespect such a racket showed to a
hallowed place. An angry oath formed on his lips. Who had the right to bring
squalid conflicts here? He supposed, reasonably enough, that some assignation
in the privacy of the graveyard hadn’t panned out quite how the female player
had wanted. She’d changed her mind maybe, prompting a cheated swain into
rough assertion of his demands.
But Joshua’s cuss words died before they could be uttered.
A party of four lurched into his sight between the graves and the untrimmed
junipers that had been allowed to take a dense hold in the far-flung reaches
of the burial ground. Joshua saw one woman, dressed like a lady but dishevelled,
and three men in range garb. Two of the men had hold of the woman. Her screams
were more distress than indignation.
The odds in the uneven struggle were more than Joshua could stomach. A man
with his history lived by a code. At his innocent wife’s graveside, the inner
voice of it spoke especially loud.
‘Save me!’ the girl cried, providing the last straw.
‘Hold up, you sons of bitches!’ Joshua roared.
‘Hell, who are you, mister?’ the man behind said. ‘Keep your sticky beak outa Mr Grumman’s business!’
He also went to draw a gun from his belt holster.
Joshua beat him to it. He dragged out a .45 Colt Peacemaker of his own. The
gun was well worn and scarred by a crack in the blackened right grip, but
it was in top working order.
Its bark was followed by a scream from the foolhardy aggressor, who was thrown
heavily against a tombstone, dropping his weapon. His right arm dangled and
blood spilled quickly from a spreading crimson blotch on his sleeve to drip
from his fingers into the dust.
Swearing, the men holding the girl reacted by pure instinct. They let her go and grabbed for their guns.
‘Run!’ Joshua yelled to the frightened girl. ‘Get out of the way!’
Joshua himself lunged for the cover of his wife’s headstone. Lead whined
off the side of it, scattering rock chips and grey dust. He came up on to
one knee, sighted swiftly over its top and squeezed trigger again.
The shot went close and the men who’d held the girl – one about fifty, the
other in his twenties – scattered in different directions.
Joshua wasn’t looking for a fight. He also took the chance to run, starting
back toward the church, the road and his new sorrel horse – the direction
taken by the girl.
But it was then that a fourth man came on the scene, shouting at the fleeing
pair, asking what in the devil’s name was going on and where did they want
the goddamned buckboard now.
‘The bastard winged Kurt. Stop him, Nolan!’ rapped the older, heavy-set man who was presumably ‘Mr Grumman’.
Not knowing what he was stumbling into, Nolan had broken four-square into
the open. Seeing Joshua, he, too, belatedly palmed up his six-gun, pointing
the muzzle toward the stranger.
Joshua’s Peacemaker thundered. Flame, smoke and lead spewed from the barrel.
The impact of the .45 slug sent Nolan reeling. He tripped on the kerbstone
of a grave and went down across its covering of sharp-edged shells with a
shriek.
Triumphant but mightily puzzled, Joshua streaked for the gates. By the time
Grumman and the younger man gave chase, he was beyond effective pistol-shot
range, though it bothered him when he caught up with the girl his intervention
had saved.
She was hovering inside the mission grounds, either out of uncertainty about
where she should head, or to see what had become of her rescuer.
He felt frustrated. ‘I just gave you a chance to get away. Do you want them to catch you again?’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘No – oh heavens, no! I’m full of gratitude.
Lyte and Chet Grumman will have no mercy. But what should I do?’
He turned, revolver poised, and it pleased him to see Grumman and the younger
man – a son maybe? – check, fearful as they came close to within range. He
made a rapid decision.
‘We’ll have to go double,’ he told the girl, nodding toward the patient sorrel
hitched at the gates. ‘Are you willing to ride astride?’
She looked apprehensively at the big horse and swallowed.
‘I’m not a farm sort of girl,’ she said, ‘but I’ll try anything to escape those brutes.’
She had enough familiarity with what was expected to reach up for the saddle
horn and cantle and put a neatly shoed left foot into the stirrup.
Joshua place his hands on her hips to give a helping, hurrying lift. She
seemed to flinch some at his touch, as though she found it distasteful. The
expensive, silky stuff of her dress slipped on the layers of what was beneath
and Joshua held the harder, acutely aware of the shape and firmness of the
outer bones of her pelvis.
‘Oh, my! Ohh. . . !’
She gave a further gasp and swung her right leg frantically over the saddle.
Despite the urgency of the moment, Joshua observed it was a very graceful
leg, well proportioned and shaped. Seated, but still unable to settle safely
in the saddle, she was obliged to hike her skirts above the knee, uncovering
ankles and calves and affording fleeting glimpses of more.
Joshua sensed her displeasure and saw the fire on her cheeks, but then he
was unhitching the sorrel and flinging himself up on to the cantle behind
her. He reached around her for the reins, coming into contact with a stiff
back and firm buttocks.
Grumman was bellowing at them to stop. Any moment, Joshua expected to feel
the wind, and possibly the paralysing impact, of a bullet. But fortunately,
it seemed the girl was of value to them alive, not dead, and no shots came.
He dug his heels into the sorrel’s sides and plunged the horse, untroubled
by the double burden, into headlong flight. The landmark of the church, with
its red-shingled roof and shimmering white bell-tower, quickly couldn’t be
seen for the dust behind them.
‘Relax and lean back or we’ll spill!’ Joshua commanded his unhappy companion.
The wind whipped the girl’s trailing hair about his face. Like it or not,
she became nestled against him, hotness and softness and roundness pressed
close between the muscular hardness of his thighs. He felt the thunder of
her heartbeats.
What, Joshua wondered, have I gotten myself into this time?
