Contents

  Dedication

  Quotation

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  The Apache Series

  Copyright

  About Piccadilly Publishing

  This one is for Gaye Tardy— one of the ladiest ladies I ever met.

  “Almighty God, who at the beginning did create

  our first parents, Adam and Eve, and did sanctify

  and join them together in marriage; Pour upon

  you the riches of his grace, sanctify and bless you,

  that ye may please him both in body and soul,

  and live together in holy love unto your lives’ end.

  Amen.”

  —From “The Form for the Solemnization

  of Matrimony.”

  Prologue

  IN THE PREVIOUS book in the series—Blood Wedding—the lone Mimbreños Apache, Cuchillo Oro, met the thirty-two-year-old widow, Gaye Turner. Their meeting was in the Arizona Territory near the settlement of Montclair.

  When the Indian is accused of rape she saves him by claiming that they are married.

  Gaye has been left two thousand acres of land by her late father. The spread is less than a day’s ride from the Mexican border, near San Piedro, close to the Little Red River.

  The local town is called Harlan Springs and before the arrival of Cuchillo and his “bride” it has been terrorized by a brood of border curs and backshooters who have taken possession of Gaye Turner’s spread and run it towards ruin.

  Angered by the rape of his woman the Apache wreaks a savage revenge on the evil Lorker family, clearing them away from the land like a purging fire.

  The future looks bright, even though there is still a cloud hovering on the furthest horizon.

  Before meeting Cuchillo the woman had run in with a red-headed man named Richard Oakley who had fallen in love with her. At the town of Hope Rising, Oakley, his brother and a couple of other men tried to remove the Apache from the scene. But Cuchillo is too good. He kills one of the hands and butchers Jericho Oakley. He also cripples the older brother with a devastating kick to the groin.

  When they leave Hope Rising the diminutive lawman, Sheriff Charles Mordred Spikes, has jailed Oakley and his scar-faced ramrod, O’Connor. But he has warned Gaye Turner that he won’t be able to hold them for all that long.

  The widow and the warrior are finding genuine love and passion for each other. They can work the land and they have earned the respect of the folks of Harlan Springs.

  But the sunshine is still dimmed for them by the knowledge of that far-off cloud.

  Chapter One

  SPRING HAD COME to Harlan Springs.

  Not that it made a whole lot of difference to the baking cauldron around the Mexican border. The weather was hot, closing in on the hundred-degree mark, with a cloudless blue sky ranging clear across the land.

  “Sure looks good, husband.”

  Cuchillo paused and straightened, easing the ache in his back with both hands. He was stripped to the waist, sweat dappling his heavily-muscled chest, trickling down across the flat stomach. He was bare-footed for the work of farming.

  “It looks better than before.”

  Gaye Turner smiled at him. “The bottom of a year-old privy would have looked better than the way those damned Lorkers left our land.”

  “It is true,” he replied, solemnly.

  “Want some cool buttermilk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please,” she prompted.

  “Why must I say that when it is you who ask me first if I wish to drink?”

  The white woman shook her head. “I guess there are just some things that I’ll never be able to teach you, my dearest.”

  “Should I come in the house for the drink?”

  She walked across the furrows and rested her hand on his arm, smiling still. Cuchillo looked down at her, wondering for the thousandth time since he met her last summer what he had done to please the gods so that they had given him such a wonderful squaw.

  Gaye was a handsome woman. For the laboring in the fields she had tied her long, light brown hair back at the nape of her neck, covering her head from the heat with a pale blue cotton bonnet from Cyrus Regan’s store. Her dress was tight across the bodice, showing the clear outline of her firm breasts. With nobody around to see she had also pinned up her skirt to make the working easier, fastening it so that it hung above her knees, giving the Apache tantalizing glimpses of her thighs; thighs that he loved to touch.

  She was so close that he could smell the freshness of her sweat. Suddenly he wanted her with a desire so pressing that he nearly threw her down in the worked earth and tore off his breeches.

  Gaye sensed it, letting her hand drop from his arm so that it casually brushed across the front of his body.

  “Husband!” she exclaimed at what her fingers touched, pretending to be shocked.

  “I wish to love you,” he said, laying his arm across her shoulders. He felt Gaye’s strength through the fingers of his crippled right hand. She was one of the most powerful women he’d ever met, and he treated her with grudging respect. Knowing that she was capable of knocking him on his butt if he stepped out of line with her.

  “And I wish to love you, too, Cuchillo.”

  “There is work still that we should do.”

  “Oh, let it fly off! We’ve worked long over the last few months, and we deserve some rest now and again.”

  “We rest on Sundays,” he replied.

  “Yes, we do. But the Good Lord won’t mind if we go in for a half hour to cherish each other.”

  The Sunday working had been a running sore for several weeks between them. The Apache had felt it a fearful waste of time to lose a whole day for a religion that he didn’t even begin to understand.

  But Gaye had understood the importance of building up their respectability with the good people of the nearby township. Cuchillo, as an Apache, was an automatic candidate for any lynching party that anyone cared to raise. But his marriage to Gaye Turner gave him a rudimentary protection. And the courage and ruthless aggression of the Indian against the hated Lorker tribe had also helped to stake him to a hatful of goodwill.

  The last months of the winter had helped to consolidate their reputation as a loving married couple who worked hard and helped out others. But both Gaye and Cuchillo knew well enough how fragile that reputation could be in a frontier town in Apache country.

  Which was why she had insisted that they did no work on Sundays. Then she would put on her best gown and Cuchillo would tie his hair up and wear a clean shirt and they would ride in their buckboard to join the rest of Harlan Springs in a prayer meeting. There was no church so they gathered in a large empty shed out the back of the Widow Hendrick’s dress-maker’s shop.

  The mouthing of unreal words to the wheezing of a battered harmonium presented the tall Apache with yet another example of the odd and inexplicable ways of the whites.

  But he had grown to love his wife and so he did what he could to please her.

  He had finally managed to stop her using her nails to rip and tear at his naked back when they made love. But she still moaned as she neared her climax, throwing her head back, eyes squeezed shut, teeth bared.

  Afterwards she padded naked into the small kitchen and poured a couple of mugs of buttermilk from the crock by the back door. Their first chore when they finally moved into the house had been to remove all trace of the Lorkers. Walls and floors had been scoured, but there were still places where spilled blood showed black against the clean wood.

  Cuchillo lay back on the bed, a single sheet pulled across his loins, watching his woman. He could feel his breathing returning slowly to normal after their snatched half hour of passion. From the bed he could see out of the window, across a fair part of their two thousand acres.

  They had been able to use an occasional drifter for a lot of the heavier work, but it had still left he and Gaye laboring dawn to dusk, trying to knock the poor land into shape. Now it was showing the first signs of dividends. There were already vegetables, and the first greening of a crop. With what little remained of her money, Gaye had purchased a few head of cattle, adding them to the scrawny specimens that they’d won off the dead Lorkers. There were a trio of horses and a few brindled hogs that seemed to have no virtues and a limitless variety of vices.

  “You’re a bad influence on me, Mr. Golden Knife,” grinned Gaye, handing him the drink. Sitting by him on the bed, she absently slapped at an insect that was bothering her.

  “I was taught by John Hedges that all of work and nothing of play makes a man dull. Dull? Is that the word?”

  “Yes, dearest, it is. And it’s quite right. When Papa left me this land, I had never thought how much work it would involve.”

  “Once it is all done then we must find other men to work for us.”

  “Can we not manage?”

  “No.” He shook his head, firmly. “There are many bandits close by. Mexicans. They will not harm us when we are poor. When we are not, then they will come like buzzards to a carcass.”

  “We can defeat them.”

  Cuchillo was puzzled. “How?”

  Gaye smiled. “I declare that there are times when we plain and simple don’t comprehend each other at all.” But she patted him on the leg to ease the sting from her words.

  “I am sorry,” he said, knowing that his apology always pleased her. Though she was bound to protest.

  “Cuchillo Oro! You are the limit! I must have reminded you of the words of Captain Nathan Brittles at least one hundred times.”

  “Perhaps one hundred and one, my dear,” the Apache replied gravely.

  They repeated the saying together. “Never apologize—it’s a sign of weakness.”

  It was later that night, with a full moon serene over the desert around them, that Gaye Turner raised again the subject of their relationship.

  “Cuchillo, my sweetheart,” she whispered, rolling over towards his side of the bed, her knees poking him in the small of the back.

  “What?” he murmured. She had jerked him from sleep, and from a dream that hadn’t plagued him for many long months. A dream that had once filled every night with its vivid horror.

  His first wife, long-dead Chipeta, and his butchered child. The tiny, helpless baby, Troubled Night. Both dying as a result of the arrogance and hatred of the white Cavalry officer, Cyrus Pinner. So many years back, now. It had been Pinner who had smiled as he had mutilated the right hand of Cuchillo Oro, all over the golden knife that had given the Mimbreños warrior his name.

  Their feud had become a legend all across the frontier, particularly in the Territory of Arizona where the blue-belly pony soldiers most often operated.

  But Pinner too was with his god, if he had ever had one, and the dreams had stopped.

  But recently Cuchillo had been thinking of his past more often.

  And now the dream was back.

  It took different forms, but it was always basically the same.

  Cuchillo was helpless, watching from the slitted windows of a high tower. Sometimes surrounded by a ditch of bright flames. And Chipeta stood below him, cradling the bundle of their son. The young woman was balanced on a crumbling pile of golden rock, on the edge of an immeasurable abyss that vomited sulfurous fumes.

  And Pinner was there.

  Holding a musket. A flintlock, with ornate silver filigree work along the barrel. He smiled up at the watching Cuchillo, bringing the musket to his shoulder. Aiming and firing at Chipeta.

  Instead of a bullet, it was a white dove that erupted from the muzzle of the gun, flying slowly towards the Indian girl.

  Landing on her shoulder.

  Screaming and the shoulder ripping apart in a welter of crimson blood and torn shards of splintered bone.

  Screaming.

  Chipeta falling.

  The child, spinning from her hands and disappearing from sight.

  Pinner laughing.

  Laughing.

  Gaye had pulled him from that and he was grateful to her. Turning to face her and take her hand in his, kissing her softly on the palm. Hoping that she wouldn’t sense his shaking.

  “Are you well, dearest?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were … were sighing a great deal and clenching your teeth together as if you wished to break your own jaw.”

  Cuchillo had told Gaye all about his past life. Not, perhaps, all. But sufficient for her to know about Pinner.

  “I was dreaming.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of … It doesn’t matter. What do you want, Gaye? Are you ill?”

  “No. I was thinking about us.”

  “Us?”

  “Our marriage.”

  “We are not truly married.”

  “Folk hereabouts learn that and we’re on the next rail out of town, well-coated in tar with a light sprinkling of feathers.”

  “Yes.” He considered the possibility. “I can see you speak rightly.”

  “So. So, I was thinking of a way around it.”

  “How? They do not know.”

  She snuggled closer to him. “I love you, husband. And I do think of you as being my real legal husband. But I figure we should do it properly. Just in case of trouble one day.”

  “Trouble?” He was still not properly awake and he found it difficult to see where the conversation was leading them.

  “Suppose … suppose we wanted to have children, Cuchillo.”

  “If we are to have babies, then we will have them. It is the way.”

  “But they’d be … bastards.”

  “Oh …”

  Cuchillo realized that this would be a great stigma for his woman. The concept of legitimacy wasn’t important to the Apaches, where the ideals of the tribe came before individuals. A child born to a mother who had no warrior with her would not be an outcast. It would simply be accepted by everyone like any other child.

  “I would truly like to be properly and legally married to you, Cuchillo Oro.”

  He smiled at her, the expression easing away some of the hard lines of tension that made him look so much older than his years.

  “I would truly like to be married to you, also, Gaye.”

  The Apache had made the promise and he would keep to it.

  When the time came.

  But in all his years around the Southwest he had only seen traveling preachers on a couple of occasions. And the chances of one visiting Harlan Springs in the next few years seemed very remote.

  Very remote indeed.

  Chapter Two

  “JESUS SAVES YOU, and the Devil waits to snatch you down to his flames!!”

  Cuchillo heard the voice before he could see the speaker. He’d ridden into the township to stock up on coffee and beans, driving the rickety buckboard that they’d found in one of the tumbledown barns. Clicking the horse along through the spring sunshine, resting his boots up and relaxing.

  There was a small crowd visible outside the town’s sole saloon. Called The Tahoe Driver it was named after its founder. A tall, mustached wagoner from California. Now it was run by Cyrus Regan’s younger brother, Nazareth.

  Nazareth had only arrived in Harlan Springs after the massacre of the Lorker family and he had taken an instant dislike to Cuchillo. But he was a natural-born coward and he never pushed his luck further than he thought safe. He might have slept less well at nights if he had known the extent of the Apache’s hatred for him and the way that the big warrior held himself in control simply to avoid prejudicing their position with the other whites.

  “Yes, my friends … Satan waits. Have no doubts on that score. Every sip of liquor you take … every time you look at a blessed woman with wickedness in your inner hearts … every time you cheat or lie or fornicate or drink or—”

  “Seems like there’s not a lot left to life, Reverend,” called out someone, earning himself a round of laughter. Laughter that died as quickly as it had been born.

  “You may mock, my poor friend. You may all laugh, but will you laugh when you take that last long trail? There are no friends on that trail. No waterholes. No food or sustenance. It is the last trail alone, friends. It is the trail that we must all ride one day.”

  Cuchillo reined in the horse and tethered it to the post outside The Tahoe Driver, ignoring Nazareth Regan who was leaning on a broom in the open doorway of the saloon.

  The voice of the preacher was loud and hoarse, as though he’d spent too many years of his life bellowing against the wind.

  “Beelzebub awaits us all. Can you look him in the eyes and have a quiet conscience? Or will you go down with him to his dominions? I come among you as a man of peace to aid you in your struggle.”

  Cuchillo walked around the corner where the man stood, on a broken barrel, surrounded by fifteen or twenty men and women. Most of them Cuchillo recognized, though there were a couple of drifters that he hadn’t seen before. Casual labor was always interesting to him and Gaye, but it was the preacher who took his eye.

  For someone who claimed so loudly to be a man of peace, the Apache thought that he’d seldom seen anyone looking so warlike.

  The man was in his early fifties, tall and skinny. The sort of man that John Hedges used to say looked like he had to run around in a downpour just to get himself wet. He stood something over six feet and probably weighed in around one hundred pounds. He was dressed in a dusty black frockcoat, tugged back so that it showed a pair of Dragoon Colts, in worn holsters. There was a butcher’s knife tucked in the middle of the gun belt and as he waved his arms to emphasize his arguments the Indian noticed he also sported a .41 caliber derringer in a shoulder rig. The bizarre spectacle was finished off with a battered top hat with a turkey feather perched precariously on one side.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10