Comanche Rose Read online

  On top of it, a young couple stared from an oval frame. He thought he recognized the fellow in the field, but it was the woman's face that drew him. Despite the artificiality of holding that pose, she didn't look like so many folks when they had their pictures taken. She stood beside the man, her hand on his shoulder, smiling as though she meant it. There was a liveliness in those eyes that the camera hadn't missed. He picked it up, turning it over. On the back somebody had written a date in neat script.

  "I found their Bible," Rios murmured. Opening it, he read, "'Married—August 27, 1865, in Austin, Anne Elizabeth Allison to Ethan Wayne Bryce.'"

  Hap was holding their wedding picture. Feeling as though he'd been spying, he carefully placed it back on the piano, then stepped back. She was a pretty woman, a real pretty woman—and the damned Comanches had her.

  Looking at the opposite page, Rios scanned it. "Here— it says they had two kids, Susannah Elizabeth and Joseph Ethan. Looks like one would be four, the other not yet one. Guess that's it. Nothing else written down, anyway."

  "It's enough. With Gretchen Halser, that makes four captives those sons of bitches have—and there's at least six bodies they've left behind. I'm not going to wait. Those that want to, come on. Those that don't—well, I guess you'll bury Bryce." Jamming his soaked hat on his head, he turned his back on them.

  "Ain't nothing but mud out there," somebody muttered.

  "Fred, let me take your horse. I've got to give Lucy a rest.

  "If you ain't back afore I leave, I'm taking her," Jackson threatened.

  Tying his wide-brimmed hat on, Rios tried to catch up to his captain. "What do you want the rest of 'em to do? Go for help?"

  "They can go to hell for all I care!" Hap snapped.

  "They'll probably head back to San Angelo," the Mexican decided, swinging up on Jackson's horse.

  "Thanks." Hap caught the saddle horn and stepped into the stirrup. Pulling his tired body up, he eased his sore rear back into the saddle. "Reckon I owe you."

  The San Saba was already high, lapping at a stand of cottonwoods several feet out from its banks. Reining in, Hap stared grimly at it, weighing his chances of crossing it. Then he thought of the young German girl, and of the pretty blond woman with two little kids, and he knew he had to try.

  "Better wait to see if I make it," he told Rios over his shoulder. Edging the big roan gelding closer to the swirling water, he leaned forward and patted its neck. "Easy, Red. Take it real easy."

  The animal sidestepped skittishly, but he pulled it up short and tried again, guiding the horse with his knees. This time the roan plunged in and strained to swim against the heavy current. Cottonwood limbs torn from the bank butted Hap's leg and bobbed beside Old Red's outstretched neck. As strong as the animal was, they were being carried downriver. Hap coaxed and shouted, but the horse couldn't fight the current. Finally, at a bend in the river, he slid from the saddle into the swift water, then caught an exposed tree root and hung on. Free now, the big roan managed to catch a footing in the sand and lunge out of the water. With one last do-or-die effort, Hap pulled himself up the gnarled root far enough to brace his boots, then climb to safety. Exhausted, he collapsed on the wet ground and lay there, catching his breath. When he managed to sit up, he couldn't even see where he'd left Romero Rios.

  Remounting, he walked Old Red along the water's edge for more than a mile, looking for tracks. The mud was smooth, swept clean by the water. Still determined, he rode away from the river at an angle, then came back, zigging and zagging repeatedly until he'd covered just about every place he figured the war party could have crossed. All trace of them had been washed out, making it impossible to know whether they'd gone due north or cut northwest. Either way they'd be headed for the Staked Plains, and once they got up there, there were a thousand places they could hide. And without Clay along, he'd never find them.

  The defeat was a bitter one. He'd pushed himself hard, giving up food and sleep, racing an enemy with every resource he could summon, and he'd lost. The damned Comanches had a young girl, a pretty widow, and two little kids, and despite his promise to Mrs. Halser, he wasn't going to get any of them back. Disgusted, he turned back, encountering an equally dispirited Romero Rios.

  "Took everything I had to get Fred's horse into the water," Rios explained. "By the time I got across, all I could do was look for where you came out. When I found your tracks went east, I went west, thinking at least we'd be looking at something different."

  "Anything?"

  "No. Only sign I found was yours. Everything else's been washed out."

  "Yeah. It's like they reached the San Saba and vanished," Hap admitted wearily. Squaring his shoulders, he sighed. "Guess that's it, isn't it?" His expression sober, he added, "Sometimes, no matter what a man does, he comes up short, but knowing he tried doesn't make it any easier."

  "No. What are you going to do now, Captain?"

  Hap stared at the flooding river for a long moment, then decided. "If I can get back across, I'm going to see that the Bryce fellow gets a decent burial. Then I'll file a report before heading down to Laredo to meet Clay."

  "If we don't get some sleep, we won't make it."

  "Yeah. Reckon I'm going to have nightmares tonight, thinking about that wife in the picture. Her and the Halser girl."

  CHAPTER 2

  Indian Territory November 12, 1873

  Cold, weak, and hungry, Annie Bryce lay shivering between vermin-infested buffalo robes, listening to the wind beating the hide walls of the tipi, wondering how much longer she could last with no food and no fire. Her stomach was so empty that it felt as though some wild creature gnawed at her insides.

  It had been a full two days since Bull Calf had brought in one scrawny rabbit to feed himself, two wives, three children, and Annie. Sun in the Morning had gamely boiled it, adding small pieces of yep, dried grass, and God only knew what else to make a thin, tasteless soup. By the time somebody left a bowl outside for Annie, there hadn't been a single piece of meat left in it.

  But last night had been the worst since she'd been with Bull Calf's band. She'd lain awake in her old, discarded tipi, listening to the hungry wailing of the children coming from the other one, hearing the pitiful attempts of Sun in the Morning and Little Hand to comfort them. Remembering her own little son, Annie had wrapped her arms around herself and wept also.

  This morning, after coming back empty-handed, an angry Bull Calf had stood outside her tipi. He'd been lured off the Llano to starve, he ranted, drawn by the promise of winter rations—of "plenty good meat, smoke, and blankets." But when he'd tried to collect his band's share, the agent had refused to issue anything until the Indians gave up every white captive they held. And when the Comanche chief had declared he had none, he'd been accused of lying. If anyone was lying, Bull Calf insisted, it was the "Jesus man" at the agency. And now the band couldn't go back to Texas, either, because they'd had to eat most of the horses, and if they stole animals from Fort Sill, the soldiers would come after them.

  He ended up telling her through the flap that he could no longer feed her. He wanted her to walk to the Indian agency by herself and tell somebody named Haworth that he'd never held her against her will, that he'd actually saved her life. Then, recalling that she couldn't talk, he'd given vent to his frustration, raising his arms and cursing the spirits who'd guided this crazy, useless woman into his life. Now his act of mercy was going to bring the wrath of the bluecoats down on him.

  She'd been stunned by his outburst. Isolated from the others in the camp, she'd had no idea where she was, that she was so close to her own people. But the discovery was a bitter one, for she no longer had the strength to gather firewood, let alone try to walk miles in a storm. For three years she'd endured, doing whatever she had to just to stay alive, sustained only by the hope of being reunited with Susannah, of somehow taking her little girl home with her to the farm on the San Saba. Now she was going to die within miles of help, and she'd never know for sure what had h
appened to her daughter.

  Nearly every night of those three years, Annie had relived the horror of Two Trees dragging her into the brush-filled ravine, of his naked, foul-smelling body brutally invading hers, while Susannah screamed for her. She still remembered pulling her bloody dress down and crawling up from that hell pit to the awful discovery that the war party had divided, and her daughter was gone—Two Trees had traded the child to a Quahadi for a stolen horse he'd admired. Since that time Annie'd clung to the notion that because the unknown warrior had paid for Susannah, he hadn't mistreated her, that her daughter was still alive somewhere in the vast Comancheria.

  Hap Walker was afraid he wasn't going to make it. The temperature had dropped steadily since early morning, and the bitter, howling wind whipped his raw face. Shivering, he turned up the collar of his buffalo hide coat and leaned forward, hunching his shoulders over the saddle horn. By the looks of the heavy gray sky, a big norther was blowing down from Kansas, and when the full brunt of it hit, God deliver anybody fool enough to get caught out in the open.

  But that wasn't the worst of it. He was sick. After three days in the saddle, the pain in his leg was white-hot, throbbing with his pulse, and he was so damned lightheaded he was sick to his stomach. He felt worse now than when the Comanchero bullet had shattered his thigh last summer.

  He was a stubborn fool, he admitted it. When he'd heard the government was offering an emergency price of five and a half cents per pound for beef on the hoof, he should have sent Diego Vergara to make the deal, but he'd had too much pride for that. Instead, he'd convinced Amanda he could do the job better than Vergara because he knew Black Jack Davidson, the commanding officer at Fort Sill, personally. In truth, he didn't have much use for the old martinet.

  What he'd really wanted was to prove to himself as much as to her that he wasn't useless, that his life hadn't ended when the bum leg had forced him out of the Texas Rangers. After spending nearly half of his thirty-seven years fighting Indians and outlaws, he'd found retirement a bitter pill to swallow. He felt like an old warhorse put out to pasture before its time. After years of thinking he might like to farm or ranch, he'd discovered it was really rangering in his blood, after all. He knew now he wasn't cut out for anything else.

  He forced his thoughts to Clay, knowing he was going to be as mad as fire when he got home and found Hap gone. But Amanda had a knack for handling him, something Hap had never expected. Yeah, the wild, blue-eyed young'un he'd found fourteen years ago in that Comanche camp was taming down, married to the Ybarra heiress and studying law now.

  It was real funny how things turned out, he reflected. He'd never guessed when he stood between that kid and Barton, shouting, "Don't shoot! This one's white!" that the boy'd turn out to be like a younger brother to him. He remembered that day like yesterday.

  "Outta my way, Hap!" the lieutenant ordered.

  "He's white, I'm telling you!"

  "He's a damned savage!" Barton raised his rifle, drawing a bead on the boy. "For the last time, outta my way!"

  Before the older man could fire, Hap pushed the struggling kid behind him, trying to hold him there. "Then you better kill me with him. Otherwise, I'm reporting it," he declared. "And I'll say it was cold-blooded murder."

  "They've had him too long, Hap," Barton argued.

  "Maybe, maybe not. All I knows he's white," Hap maintained stubbornly. "You're gonna have to plug me first, Bill."

  And all the while he'd been trying to shield the kid, the little devil had been kicking his legs, trying to bring him down. But in the end it was Barton who wavered, lowering the gun, growling, "If he scalps anybody, I'm hanging you for it."

  The kid had given Hap one hell of a time, fighting him every inch of the way back to the ranger camp at San Saba. Hap's shoulder still bore the scar where the boy'd jumped him, then stabbed him with his own knife. He'd finally trussed the kid up like a wild animal and tied him over the side of a pack mule. The young'un raved in Comanche for two solid days before he finally lost his voice.

  And it wasn't over when they got in, either. While he was trying to locate some relations to take the boy, the kid must've escaped seven or eight times, determined to get back to what was left of his Comanche family. His Indian name was Nahahkoah, or Stands Alone, but after the second time he ran away, the rangers jokingly referred to him as "Long Gone," and it stuck until they discovered he was really Clayton McAlester, the lone survivor of a Comanche raid nine years before.

  It took some doing, but Hap found a maiden aunt in Chicago willing to take him. Grateful to see the kid go, the whole ranger company chipped in to make the train fare. The way Frank Kennedy put it, it was worth the money to be able to sleep with both his eyes closed again. They'd all gone down to the depot to watch Clay off, then got roaring drunk to celebrate afterward.

  Miss Jane McAlester the aunt's name was, Hap remembered. Lord, but what he would've given to be there when Clay stepped off that railroad car. When Hap wrote her, there hadn't been any good way to explain that the kid tore into his food with his bare hands, slept naked on the bare floor under his bed, and spoke Comanche a damned sight better than English. But that spinster woman must've been made of pretty stern stuff, for she kept her wild nephew four years, somehow managing to get him about half-civilized.

  After that he'd come back to Hap, and they'd enlisted in the Confederate Army and fought together in Hood's tough Texas Brigade. Then Clay'd followed Hap into the Texas State Police, and finally into the Texas Rangers when the state legislature reactivated them. He'd made a damned good ranger—he'd go after the toughest, meanest cusses ever born, and get 'em every time. About the only thing he wouldn't do was turn on the Comanches that raised him. Hap, on the other hand, went after them with a vengeance.

  Now the irony of the situation wasn't lost on him. While Clay was reading law in Austin, it was Hap who was riding north to sell beef to feed Clay's Indians. And he did so with real misgivings. Ybarra beef might see the savages through the winter, keeping them alive so they could raid Texas after the spring thaw. But it was the government peace policy, not his, and the Indian Bureau had hired a bunch of damned Quakers to implement it.

  The soft-headed Quakers thought they could love Comanches into submission, but they actually made things worse by turning a blind eye when so-called peaceful agency Indians took to the war trail. If they'd take away every horse and every gun before they issued any food or clothes, they could put a stop to a lot of it, but they didn't. Instead, afraid of offending their red-skinned pets, they'd declined the army guard sent from Fort Sill, a few miles away.

  He sucked in his breath, trying to stay awake, and noticed suddenly there was something more than sleet in the air. Smoke. He was still some distance from the agency, he knew that much. Reining in, he leaned over his pommel, squinting his eyes, trying to make out the trail ahead of him. And what he saw made his blood run cold.

  Fifteen, maybe twenty tipis right in his path. If they saw him, they'd probably come after him, and he was in no shape to make a run for it. They'd be sure to recognize him, then all hell'd break loose. Yeah, they'd have a real party with him, and they'd make it last awhile.

  They even had a name for him, he knew that, too. Too Many Bullets, a tribute to the sixteen-shot Henry rifle he'd carried ever since the war. He'd probably killed fifty or sixty Comanches with it. Yeah, the squaws would be sharpening their knives, all right.

  He didn't dare run. He'd just have to go in real peaceful-like and brazen it out. Clay always said it was a rule among Comanches that they had to welcome anybody, even a worst enemy, if he came in peace. Hap didn't much like the notion, but he was about to put that rule to a real test.

  "Well, Red," he murmured, nudging the big roan horse with his left knee, "I reckon we're going in real quiet-like." Straightening his shoulders, he rested his hand on the saddle sheath holding the Henry, then eased the animal into a slow, deliberate walk. Now if he could only keep the damned Indians from knowing how sick he was, ma
ybe he'd have a chance of getting to the agency.

  Bull Calf was huddled morosely over his fire, trying to ignore the fretful whimpering of Little Coyote, his two-year-old son, and the reproachful looks cast his way by Little Hand, the child's mother. Across from him, Sun in the Morning, his younger wife, boiled dead grass and mesquite bark in water. Goaded, he rose and reached for his rifle. Despite the bitter cold he was going to have to find something to feed them, even if he had to steal a cow from the agency. If the soldiers came for him, it'd at least be for something he'd done.

  While Bull Calf was still loading the gun, a boy burst into his tipi, exclaiming breathlessly, "Tejano!"

  Rifle in hand, the Comanche chief stepped outside to watch the lone rider coming through the swirling snow. The white man wore a battered leather hat pulled low, a heavy hide coat, buckskin pants, and scarred brown boots. As the gap closed between them, the war chief's jaw tensed with recognition.

  Tondehwahkah. He'd faced the Tejano and five other men from ambush once, and it had been enough to make Bull Calf remember him forever. When the brief battle ended, every ranger was still alive, but nine Comanches lay dead, and four more had been wounded so badly that Bull Calf had abandoned the war trail and retreated to the safety of the Llano.

  Despite the defeat, Bull Calf had lost no face, for Tondehwahkah's deadly aim was so well-known across the Comancheria that Coyote Droppings, medicine man of the Quahadis, made medicine bags against the ranger's power. But they hadn't worked, and after a number of braves had died wearing them, nobody believed in them anymore. Tondehwahkah's medicine had proven greater than that of his enemies.

  Behind Bull Calf, Fat Elk emerged from his lodge, waving his gun defiantly. Grabbing the man's arm, the chief forced it down, telling him tersely he couldn't kill the ranger on the reservation without bringing the soldiers. Disappointed, the other Indian muttered that Bull Calf was turning into an old woman unfit to lead warriors. But even as he said it, others shouted him down.