Bandera's Bride

After she nodded, the man handed her ticket back, then lightly touched her arm. “I’ll keep a special eye out for you. Fine family, those people of yours. I’ve met your uncle, the legislator, on one or two occasions.”

“How nice,” she replied while thinking that her uncle Randolph would likely be the first to disown her in light of her condition.

“You give him my regards when next you see him, will you?”

“Indeed I will, Captain.”

“Is that your man with your luggage?” he asked, angling his head toward Haley, who was just then waging a losing battle with a small steamer trunk, a suitcase, and two carpetbags.

The captain gestured to one of his crewmen, a muscular man. “See that Miss Russell’s luggage makes it to her stateroom, will you?”

Then, after the captain turned to greet other passengers, Emily walked back to bid farewell to Haley.

He stood, gazing forlornly at the ground, the worn toe of one boot lodged between two cobblestones.

“Well, I guess it’s time for you to get on board,” he said. Then he looked up and gave her a wide but toothless grin. “I kinda wish I was going with you, Miss Emily. Out West, you know. Where things is all brand-new.”

“Brand-new,” she echoed, despite the lump in her throat, suddenly feeling far sorrier for Haley than she did for herself. “Well, come along then,” she said, surprising herself by how much she meant it. “Come west with me where things are indeed all brand-new.”

Haley toed the cobblestones again. “It’s tempting, Miss Emily. But there’s my ma back in Russell County, you know. She’s doing poorly, and I think she’d just plain up and die if I left her.”

Emily was so touched by the man’s loyalty to his mother that her eyes brimmed with tears. You’re a lucky woman, Sally Gates, she thought, and your bastard boy turned out to be your blessing, didn’t he? I hope I’m just as fortunate.

“Haley, I know I was only supposed to pay you six bits for the ride.” Emily dug in her reticule as she spoke. “But, here. I want you to take this.” She pressed a five-dollar gold piece in his hand.

“Aw, Miss Emily. That’s too much.”

The Memphis Zephyr’s steam whistle gave three long, shrieking blasts, nearly deafening Emily.

“I said that’s way too much,” Haley shouted.

“I must run or I’ll miss my boat.” She bunched up her skirts and began to hasten toward the gangplank, then called back over her shoulder. “You keep that, Haley. Buy something nice for your mama.”

“That’s awful nice of you, Miss Emily. You have a safe trip now and you enjoy all them brand-new things out West, you hear? When you come home, I hope you’ll tell me all about ’em.”

“I’ll do that, Haley,” she lied, trying to smile through her tears and waving from the deck while the steamboat’s gangplank rose as if it, too, were waving a long and last goodbye to Mississippi and everyone in it.

Chapter Two

John Bandera was tired to the marrow of his bones. He was just back from Abilene after a hellacious late spring drive that had lost him two good men and at least two hundred head of cattle. The longhorns that had managed to survive the trip had jittered themselves to skin and bones, so instead of collecting the usual fifty bucks a head at the end of the trail, John had considered himself damned lucky to get thirty. He’d paid his men their wages, then seen to their bail when necessary, and finally settled up the considerable damages they’d wrought at four different saloons before setting out on his own, solitary, hard ride back to south Texas.

It was good to be home, he thought, as he lifted a worn and dusty boot up onto the porch rail and angled his chair onto its back legs. Dios. It was pure heaven to be home. Maybe he’d rename the ranch. Pure Heaven, maybe. Or simply Home.

He’d hated it six years ago when Price had insisted they name their newly acquired property The Crippled B. John had still been hobbling around on crutches then after breaking his leg in Arizona. He remembered his partner’s mysterious and drunken grin when he’d slurred, “It’s the perfect name, amigo. Don’t you see? It’ll keep them guessing which one of us it means.”

“B for Bandera,” John had muttered. “The crippled one.”

“Is it?” Price had replied. “It might just be B for bastard.”

Now, sitting on the porch the two of them had built, John thought that Price probably had been right about the ranch’s name after all. It had only taken a few months for John’s busted leg to heal, but his partner had indeed turned out to be a crippled bastard who came to despise the ranch and the ranching along with just about everything and everyone else in Texas, and whose only friend turned out to be the whiskey bottle forever in his grasp.

Then one morning, without a warning or a farewell—fond or otherwise—both the bottle and Price McDaniel had simply disappeared. He’d sent a wire a few months later, asking John to send him two thousand dollars in care of a woman in Denver, no doubt for one last, lethal binge. The check had been cashed, but there hadn’t been another word from Price McDaniel. For all John knew, his partner was dead.

In the three years since Price’s disappearance, John Bandera had done the work of two men—maybe even three or four—expanding The Crippled B and turning it into one of the best ranches in south Texas.

Now, though, after this grueling drive to Abilene, it was time to rest, just for a while, during the last blaze of August heat, before the autumn work began. Maybe he’d even spend a week in Brownsville or Corpus Christi, he thought. A long, slow, sleepy week in a big brass bed with rumpled sheets and a tawny señorita might be what he needed to ease not just his body, but his mind, as well. His heart, however, was another matter.

He sighed, squinting into the bright distance at nothing in particular, refusing to think about that, unwilling to tap into that constant, bitter ache that was forever just beneath the surface, resisting even the thought of her name. Almost. But not quite.

Emmy. Dios, how he loved her! How he missed her wonderful letters. He’d ridden back from Kansas hoping, almost praying, that she’d written to him one more time in spite of the fact that he’d told her not to. She hadn’t written, though.

A distant swirl of dust claimed his attention. From the main house, which was built on what passed for a hill in this flat country, it was possible to see several miles in every direction. And now, near the crossing at Sweetwater Creek, John could just make out the dark silhouette of a mud wagon hitched to a pair of horses.

Damn, he thought. He’d hoped to have the house to himself for a few days, but now it looked as if his housekeeper, Señora Fuentes, and her daughter, Lupe, were coming back earlier than expected from their sojourn in Nuevo Leon.

“Damn,” he muttered out loud, then hauled his weary bones out of his chair to retrieve the spyglass he kept on a table just inside the front door. The last thing he needed at the moment was a resumption of young and buxom Lupe’s relentless onslaught on his senses. He never would have hired the Mexican widow last year if he’d known that the bargain included the señora’s seventeen-year-old, hot-blooded daughter.

He swore again, lifting the spyglass and fitting it to his eye, prepared to see the gray head of his housekeeper and Lupe’s raven waves through the open sides of the wagon. But he wasn’t prepared—never in a million years—for the sudden sight of golden curls, catching the late afternoon light like sunflowers, jouncing as the mud wagon hit every bump and rut in its path.

John’s heart stood absolutely still and his mouth went as dry as ash. Every nerve in his body snapped to attention as if he had just caught sight of a band of renegade Comanches riding in to pick off some of his cattle and maybe take a life or two in the process.

He swore as he ripped the telescope away, then rubbed his eye and blinked hard. Maybe he still had trail dust clogging his sight. Madre de Dios, let it be that. Please, let it be that. Or maybe he was so exhausted that his longtime fantasy lover had appeared before him like a blond mirage. Or maybe, more likely, he was so long lovesick that he’d finally and utterly and irretrievably lost his mind.

His hand was shaking so hard when he lifted the glass to his eye again that he was forced to raise his other hand to steady it. He scanned the landscape, sighted the wagon once again, and focused on the woman in it.

Emmy!

Damn her. Damn her to hell and back. Damn every sweet, pale yellow hair on her beautiful head. Even a mile away, he imagined he could see the bright sky-blue of her eyes, and while he was at it, he damned those, too.

Then John Bandera cursed himself and wished that he was dead. His love was coming to him, and his life was ruined.

Emily’s heart was racing far faster than the matched pair of grays pulling the mud wagon. She felt as if she’d been traveling for three long years, yet it had been a mere three days since she’d boarded the steamboat in Vicksburg then transferred to a larger boat in New Orleans for her passage along the Gulf coast to Corpus Christi.

All the way her emotions had been a wild mixture of hope and fear, of bright anticipation and dark dread. But now, nearing The Crippled B Ranch, a calmness unlike any she had ever experienced seemed to settle over her. It wasn’t so much that she knew how things would turn out, but that—no matter how events transpired—she was certain now that she had done the right thing in coming here.

The landscape, flat and coarse with mesquite trees and prickly pear, was exactly as Price had described it in letter after letter. Every inch of the place was surprisingly familiar, as if Emily had seen it all before. The mesquites were indeed like the sheer green lace he’d described and the sky truly did extend from east to west with hardly a cloud to mar it. Wildflowers bloomed in profusion the way he had claimed, and they did indeed combine in a huge and extraordinary carpet of reds and blues and yellows.

The grazing cattle lifted their long-horned heads when her wagon passed, gazed at her placidly, then returned to their assorted feasts. She’d seen scores of antelopes and deer, and had even glimpsed a wild boar snuffling around the twisted roots of a mesquite bush.

Everything seemed familiar because Price had taken such pains to paint wonderful, vivid pictures for her in his letters. At least he hadn’t misled her in that regard. Emily felt almost as if she’d been here before. Everything was just as she’d expected.

Except the heat. It was ungodly. Hellacious. Price had written that it was hot here, but he hadn’t said that a body could very nearly melt as hers had been doing all day. Of course, Price never wore petticoats nor a corset that even lightly laced felt more like hot iron bands encircling her rib cage.

The man who was slouching up front driving the ramshackle mud wagon wore a wide-brimmed hat to shade himself, but even so his plaid shirt was soaked through with perspiration. Emily didn’t feel all that much sympathy for him, however, since he’d charged her an outrageous sum to take her the thirty-five miles from Corpus Christi to The Crippled B. He hadn’t said more than three or four gruff words to her since departing the coastal town, and Emily had found herself longing for the cozy chatter of Haley Gates and wondering a little sadly what he was doing right now back in Mississippi. Home seemed so far behind her. And ahead? She hadn’t the faintest idea.

For a moment then, for a frightened heartbeat, her courage failed her. This southern part of Texas, this land of new beginnings was dangerous, a harsh place with thorns on its lacy trees and four-foot-wide horns on its cows. Mississippi seemed civilized, even gentle, in comparison. Safe, too. Perhaps she should have stayed home in spite of the coming scandal. At least people there knew her and cared about her, if only enough to gossip.

This driver was the first real Texan she had met, and not only was he sullen, but he didn’t seem too familiar with the territory, either. When she pointed out landmarks that Price had mentioned—the Culley ranch with its twisted fences or a particularly lovely grove of live oaks—the driver would just shrug and mumble that they’d soon be getting there.

And now they were. They were here. Emily’s heart fairly clanged in her chest when the horses’ hooves rattled the boards that spanned Sweetwater Creek. Unlike the green and rippling creeks back home, this one was just a narrow river of dust right now as it waited for the winter rains. Her mouth went as dry as the creek.

Then, suddenly, catching sight of Price’s house atop a rise in the distance, Emily forgot to be afraid. The sun was setting behind the two-story frame structure with the covered front porch, setting it off like a little jewel against a background of brilliant reds and pinks and oranges. It was exactly as she had pictured it. No. It was better…

…because, standing on the front porch, she could see a man with a spyglass trained in her direction. Was it Price? Oh, please, she prayed. Let it be Price. Let him call me Emmy. Don’t let him turn me away. Don’t let him turn us away.

Señora Fuentes’s chickens squawked and scattered when the mud wagon clattered into the yard. In the corral, the horses came to the near rail to sniff the changing currents in the air and to investigate the newcomers. But none was so curious as John Bandera as he stood leaning against a porch rail, arms crossed over his chest and his right leg cocked in a casual pose that belied the turmoil in his gut and the panic in his brain.

He had decided to lie. If he knew anything, he knew that much. He would tell the woman—his beloved Emmy—that Price was still away in Abilene, that his return was uncertain. Beyond that, he hadn’t the slightest notion what he’d say or do.

But the lie was a good enough place to start. It was the only place. Later, when he was able to think more clearly, he would figure out how to construct a tangled web around it. Right now all he could do was stare stupefied at the woman in the back of the wagon.

She was here! She was real! He couldn’t quite believe it.

She was his treasured carte de visite come to lovely life. Her hair was more golden, more glorious than he’d ever thought to imagine. Her eyes were round and deep and beautiful as cornflowers. Her skin was as pale and luminous as dawn.

Six or seven years had passed since the image he treasured had been captured, and those years had added a sensuous fullness to her mouth that hadn’t been there before, as well as a healthy, feminine roundness to the rest of her. Emily Russell was more beautiful than John had ever dared dream, and for a minute he found himself wishing she had turned out ugly or deformed in a way that had been disguised in her photograph. He damned her again for being beautiful.

“Hey, you,” the driver called from his seat on the wagon. “This woman is looking for The Crippled B Ranch.”

“She’s found it,” John said, slowly straightening up and heading down the porch steps, his gaze fixed on Emily the way a compass fixes on north while he tried to maintain a neutral expression. It wasn’t easy, pretending he didn’t recognize the love of his life, ignoring the heartbeats that were about to hammer a hole right through the front of his shirt.

“Then you’re McDaniel?” the driver asked.

“No. I’m…”

“John Bandera,” Emily called happily, leaning out the mud wagon’s open window. “I’d know you anywhere, I believe, from Price’s description.”

When she extended a white gloved hand toward him, John felt his own hand drawn to hers like filings to a magnet.

“I’m Emily Russell,” she said. “From Russell County, Mississippi. Perhaps Price has mentioned me?”

John nodded. Then, suddenly aware that he had held her hand too long for a mere hello, he let go and stepped back.

“I know he isn’t expecting me.” She was looking around the ranch now, her blue eyes sparkling with delight.

“Price isn’t here.”

He might as well have said that Price was dead for the way the delight dulled in her eyes and the happiness drained from her expression.

She sat back. “Wh-where…?”

“In Abilene.”

“Abilene?” The way she said it the Kansas cow town sounded distant as a planet. “And when…?”

“I don’t expect him back for quite some time, Miss Russell.”

“I see.”

No, she didn’t see at all, Emily thought. Disappointment was fairly crushing her, squeezing her heart and turning her brain into a tight, aching knot. “I’ve come so far. Such a long way.” Her own voice sounded even farther away.

“You staying or going, lady?” the driver asked impatiently. “If you’re going back to Corpus, it’ll cost you triple, seeing as how it’s gonna be dark pretty soon.”

Emily didn’t answer. Staying? Going? She barely understood the meaning of the words, much less how they pertained to her. Dark? Was it? She felt numb all of a sudden, and dumb. For a moment she wondered if a sunstroke had robbed her of her ability to speak and to move.

The driver was angled around in his seat, staring at her, his eyes mere slits beneath his twisted brows. John Bandera was staring at her, too, but there was no reading his dark face. He might as well have been a cigar store Indian with rigid, wooden lips and deep, expressionless eyes.

“Well?” the driver snapped. “What’s it going to be, lady? You staying or going? I ain’t got all day.” He tapped a restless boot on the floorboards.

“She’s staying.”

Now, with a scowl carved deeply into his face, John Bandera reached for her valise, then the carpetbags and the big steamer trunk, and finally—not quite so roughly—for Emily herself.

“Come on,” he said, his big hands circling her waist, lifting her up and out and setting her down before she was even aware that she was moving.

“How much does she owe you?” he asked the driver.

“Already paid for the one-way trip,” the man replied.

“Fine.” Having said that, Bandera slapped the haunch of the horse closest to him. “So long, then,” he said, stepping back and drawing Emily with him as the wagon took off with such a lurch that the driver nearly pitched backward over his wooden seat.

They stood there a moment, the two of them, in the tan cloud of dust the horses had kicked up, watching the mud wagon bumping wildly away while the driver tried to hold on to his hat and the reins.

Go? Stay? Emily really hadn’t made up her mind yet, but here she was anyway. She wondered if the driver would hear her if she called him back.

But just then, without a word, Price’s scowling partner picked up her valise and wedged it under one arm before he collected her heavy trunk and both carpetbags. Still silent, he turned and headed toward the house with all of her worldly possessions.

Emily, obviously unwelcome, followed slowly in John Bandera’s wake.

“You’ll be comfortable in here. For now, anyway.” John dropped the carpetbags on Señora Fuentes’s quilt-covered bed. “My housekeeper and her daughter are off in Mexico for a while,” he said, then quickly corrected himself. “Our housekeeper, I mean.”

“That would be Mrs. Fuentes,” she said, standing in the doorway. “Price has written me about her. About her chickens and her garden and her daughter, Lupe.” She laughed softly. “Why, I almost feel as if I’ve met them both.”

Still with his back to her, John closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Dios. This wasn’t going to work. His brain was already dizzy from trying to keep things straight and his tongue was tangling around every word he spoke.

He should have sent her away. He should have paid the damned driver his triple fare and had him take the woman back to Corpus Christi. He should have said, “Price McDaniel’s gone, lady. Long gone. Chances are good he’s dead. Your trip was for naught. Adios.” That, after all, was the truth.

“It was kind of you to let me stay, Mr. Bandera.”

She was right behind him now, so close that if he turned he could take her in his arms the way he’d longed to do, ached to do, year after year, night after night after night.

When he did turn, she stepped back, obviously uncomfortable, perhaps even afraid. He was a stranger, after all. He wasn’t Price.

“You’re probably hungry, Miss Russell,” he said. “I’ll fix us something to eat.”

“That would be wonderful.” She was pulling off her gloves now, one dainty finger at a time. “I wish you’d call me Emily. I feel as if I’ve known you long enough and well enough, Mr. Bandera, to call you by your Christian name. May I? John?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

She tossed her gloves on the bed. “Good.” Then she started plucking the pins from her prim little hat. “You’ll think this strange perhaps, John,” she said, “but this place, The Crippled B, feels more like my home in many ways than Mississippi ever did.”

John didn’t respond. He was already on his way out of the room, hurrying, fleeing, before his Emmy pulled the last pin loose and uncovered all those glorious golden curls.

Exhausted as she was, Emily lay awake for a long time that night in the housekeeper’s narrow bed with its starched muslin sheets and ancient, threadbare quilt. She tried with all her might to think about Price, but her mind kept returning to John Bandera. What a peculiar man he was, and not in the least as Price had described him.

She recalled one particular letter in which Price had referred to his partner as a mongrel. Emily had written back, asking for details. “His mother was a Comanche,” Price had replied. “As for his father, I assume the man was white, light-eyed, and quite tall—as John is over six feet—and the culprit was probably fleet of foot since he didn’t stick around to even witness the birth of his child.”

“Bandera’s a man of few words,” another letter had said. Having met John now, Emily thought that was an exaggeration. He was a man of fewer than few words. It was her impression this evening that speech was almost painful for him and that he was grateful for their frequent lapses into silence, and then thoroughly relieved when it came time to say good-night.

A very peculiar man. And at the same time an extraordinarily handsome man whose features seemed to blend the very best of his diverse bloodlines. His long, dark Indian hair had the merest suggestion of curl, a gift of his father no doubt, along with the amber light that glowed in his dark eyes. His features weren’t finely sculpted the way Price’s were, but rather ruggedly chiseled from brow to jaw.

He was as different from Price as night from day, and yet there had been a time or two during their meal when John had somehow reminded her of Price, not in looks but in his speech. Not that there was so much of that, but once or twice he’d used a word or turned a phrase that sounded uncannily like Price. It probably shouldn’t have surprised her, though, since the two of them had been together—in the Army and now at The Crippled B—for eight years or so. It only made sense that they would pick up each other’s habits, mannerisms, and patterns of speech.

She fell asleep finally, wondering what Price’s voice sounded like and if it was as deep as John Bandera’s and if the Mississippian she loved so well had acquired the subtle Spanish accent that made the sound of his partner’s voice so sensuous and exotic.

He may have been a man of few words, but those few were certainly like music.

Chapter Three

The Crippled B’s beautiful, but uninvited guest slept late the following morning, for which John was grateful since it gave him some additional and very necessary time to get not only his house in order, but his mind as well.

The night before, after Emily had gone to bed, John had gathered up all of her letters, along with her photograph in its hammered tin frame, then locked them away in the safe where he kept the deeds to all his property and the cash he kept on hand to meet the monthly payroll.

Right now there wasn’t anybody to pay, thank God, or to tell Emily Russell that they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Price McDaniel in three years. John decided that he didn’t have much cause to worry about Señora Fuentes or her daughter, Lupe, since neither one of them spoke more than one or two words of English.