Trilby

Trilby was somewhat placated. She noticed that Thorn Vance wasn’t among the worshipers. No, Mr. Vance didn’t come to church since his wife’s death, one of the women offered. Pity, too, she added, when his little girl could certainly use the benefit of the gospel.

Trilby murmured suitably. But she was relieved that Curt had apparently made an attempt to put an end to the nasty gossip. She only hoped it would stop. She was certain that she’d never forgive Thorn Vance as long as she lived for what he’d said and done to her.

Days went by without Thorn stopping by, and she actually began to relax and try to put the incident into perspective. Best of all, a cable arrived from Louisiana. Richard and his brother and sister and cousin would leave the following week for Blackwater Springs. Trilby let out a whoop that could be heard halfway down the block and danced a jig on the way back to the runabout.

“Good news, I assume?” Her father chuckled.

“Yes! Oh, Father, he’s coming, he’s actually coming!”

“It’s good to see you smile again, daughter,” he said gently. He pressed her hand warmly. “It will be worth the trouble to have you happy.”

“I can hardly wait!”

“I am not surprised.”

He drove her back home. There was a celebration that night for Trilby’s good fortune. Then, just as they began to prepare for bed, loud gunshots echoed through the desert, accompanied by the sound of bellowing, stampeding cattle.

Jack and Teddy rushed into their clothing and out onto the front porch. Old Mosby Torrance was already there, tall and stiff-necked, his watery blue eyes blazing out of a face like honed leather.

“Ten of them,” he panted, having run from the bunkhouse. “Vasquez and Moreno saw them. Mexicans, they think, after the cattle.”

“We’ll give chase,” Jack said coldly. “I’ll have Mary fetch some rations. Roust the men and I’ll break out some extra ammunition for the rifles.”

“No sooner said than done, boss. I’ll get my Winchester—”

“Oh, not you, Torrance,” Jack said abruptly, staring at him as if he thought the old Texas Ranger was off his bean. “No, you have to look after the women. You, too, Teddy,” he told his son, who looked shocked. “This isn’t a job for either of you. I’ll get my guns.”

Torrance looked violent. Teddy moved forward. “It’s okay, Mr. Torrance,” he said miserably. “I guess we’re both out of it.”

The old man swallowed. “Damnedest thing about getting old, boy,” he said huskily, “is that everybody thinks you’re no account anymore.”

“I think you’re magnificent, sir!”

Torrance felt the sting go out of Jack’s words as he looked down into the hero-worshiping face of the youngster. He had a son of his own somewhere. But his wife had died of pneumonia one winter while he was out chasing outlaws; he didn’t know where the boy had been sent. By the time he got home, it was all over and his only child had vanished without a trace. He’d searched, but to no avail. He looked at Teddy and hoped that his child was as sturdy and brave as this one.

“Can you shoot?” he asked Teddy.

“I sure can,” Teddy replied. He grimaced as he glanced after his father. “He doesn’t think so, though. Gosh, Mr. Torrance, nobody thinks we’re any good for a fight, do they?”

“I reckon not. Well, I’ll go get my gun anyway, in case they make a play for the house. You can help me keep watch outside.” He glared toward the hall. “I don’t guess he’ll mind that.”

“Not if we don’t tell him,” Teddy said, and grinned conspiratorially.

Torrance chuckled. Teddy really was one hell of a boy.

He went back to the bunkhouse and took out his nickleplated, mother-of-pearl-handled .44 Colt revolver. The gun had been in a lot of battles with him over the years. It was still a respectable weapon, despite the .45 that most everyone carried these days. Like himself, the gun was out of place in a century that boasted machines that went as fast as a horse on the land and in the air. He was like a prehistoric man, he sometimes thought. Someone who’d lost the world he belonged in, and who couldn’t quite fit into the new one.

It was a different story just after the Civil War when he became a Texas Ranger and wrote his own history as he went. Along with men like Bigfoot Wallace, he was a legend among Texas peacemakers. He’d backed down outlaws and gunfighters; he’d once backed down a whole damned lynch mob after a prisoner. But none of that was known out here, and nobody cared what he’d been fifty years ago.

Maybe he should be grateful that he even had a job, he supposed. Not that Jack Lang had had much choice about hiring him. He was foreman until Lang had inherited the place. Now he was the cattle foreman. Lang was his own boss.

He stuck the gun in its gunbelt and picked up his Remington, checking the action before he strode back out the door. He was tall and lithe. Except for his white hair, he looked much the same as he had when he was in his thirties, his step sure and firm on the wooden floor of the porch, his carriage erect and proud. What a hell of a shame, he thought, with faint amusement, that a man had to go and get old. There had been a time when he was sure he was going to be young forever.

Jack Lang came out the door buckling on his gun belt with fingers that just barely managed it. He was dressed in an exaggerated Western style, with woolly shotgun chaps and leather wristbands, new boots with heavy rowels on the spurs, and a pair of pearl-handled six-guns that looked like something out of a dime novel.

The Easterner always dressed like that when they went out to hunt rustlers. They never found any, because Lang didn’t trust the Apache boy who scouted for them, and he didn’t believe that anyone could track a man through a stream.

Torrance shook his head. Somebody ought to tell that dude that woolly shotgun chaps were suited to Northern winters and were worn by Montana and Wyoming cowboys, not Arizona ones. Those heavy rowels were Mexican—no self-respecting, civilized man would think of using them on his horse. The pistols were pretty, but they’d never been fired. And those wristbands would come in handy for a roper, but Jack Lang couldn’t throw a rope.

Torrance kept his thoughts to himself, though, and just nodded when the boss told him to watch the women. He could track as well as that Mexican, Vasquez, whom Lang had given scouting chores to. Better. And he could still outshoot any one of Lang’s other cowboys. He knew Mexicans because he’d trailed so many of them in his Ranger days. But Lang would never know that, because he didn’t think a man Torrance’s age was fit for cowboy work.

He sighed more wistfully than he knew when the outfit rode off without him. Teddy came to stand beside him.

“It’s all right, Mr. Torrance,” Teddy said. “I know that you could do a better job of it than any one of Dad’s men. Even if he doesn’t.”

Torrance looked down at him with pure delight. “You’re a wonder, Teddy.”

“So are you, Mr. Torrance.”

Inside, Trilby watched the men ride away and worried. One of the hands had mentioned going by Los Santos to pick up Thorn Vance. Her father had argued with the man, and Trilby knew why he didn’t want Thorn involved. But then she’d heard the telephone being rung, and her father muttering because it took the operator so long to wake up and put his call through.

He had the operator ring Los Santos and presumably spoke to Thorn, quite curtly. There was a pause, and her father muttered his agreement to stop by Los Santos on his way after the bandits. She hoped Thorn wouldn’t lead her vulnerable father into any gunplay. Jack Lang posed very well, but he knew next to nothing about violent men….

When the makeshift posse got to Los Santos, Thorn was already waiting for them. His rifle was in its sheath and he was wearing a sidearm, a black-handled Colt .45 that had belonged to his great-uncle.

He’d had to browbeat Jack Lang into letting him join the party. The Easterner had been hell-bent on going alone with his few men, and Thorn had a sudden mental image of the older man lying dead in the Arizona dust.

His conscience had burned him raw over his assumptions about Trilby. He’d done enough damage to her reputation that he hadn’t felt right about going back over to the Lang place. He knew Jack and the rest of the family despised him for what he’d said to Trilby, although, miraculously, she seemed not to have told anyone what really happened during that ride on the desert. It was better than he deserved, he admitted. Now at least he could help keep her father alive. Perhaps that would atone a little for his actions.

Samantha had been asleep, and he hadn’t woken her. The child was so withdrawn and quiet lately that he worried about her. She was thin and pale as well, not a healthy child in any way. He wished that his emotions weren’t locked in steel so that he could communicate with her on some level. But since Sally’s death, Samantha had drawn into her own mind. He didn’t know how to reach her anymore.

He watched Jack Lang ride up, his expression preoccupied.

Jack, in turn, studied the Westerner, feeling suddenly overdressed and out of place. Thorn looked grim, Jack thought, and even under the circumstances, he was able to appreciate how very Western and dangerous the other man looked in his jeans and blue-checked Western shirt and red bandanna. He had on wristbands, as Jack did, but Vance’s were scarred and worn dark with age. His boots had small rowels on the spurs and he was wearing wide, bat-wing leather chaps. His hat wasn’t a new one like Jack’s. It was weather-beaten and warped, but it suited him somehow. A rope was looped over his saddle horn and he was carrying the usual saddle roll that most of his men’s gear sported. A colorful Mexican poncho was thrown over one broad shoulder and he was smoking a cigarette with lazy disinterest. For a man going to war, he looked magnificently unaffected.

Jack had to bite back angry words. He hadn’t really spoken to Thorn since his conversation with Curt Vance. It was difficult to have to deal with a man who’d been instrumental in very nearly ruining his daughter’s reputation.

“Ready to go?” Thorn drawled when Jack reached him. “I can add ten men to the party.”

“I’m sure we have enough,” Jack replied stiffly. “I brought six.”

Six men, plus himself and Vance, to hunt down a party of bandits. Thorn could have chuckled at the man’s innocence. The Mexican revolutionaries probably boasted fifty men. Fighting across the border was growing stronger by the day as the resistance to Díaz’s rule mounted. Several different small bands of insurrectionists were raiding local stock from the northern Sonoran province of Mexico—and they weren’t averse to taking local cattle over the border to sell as well as feed hungry men. Of course, they didn’t exactly pay for the local cattle they took. Things in Mexico were definitely building to war, Thorn thought privately, and he was worried more by the day about the grim possibility of American intervention if fighting migrated over the border. Intervention would mean war with Mexico, and no one wanted that.

“I’d feel more comfortable with my men along,” Thorn said. He looked straight at Jack as he spoke and he didn’t blink. The look was as vivid as a curse.

“As you wish, of course,” Jack said austerely. He hadn’t mentioned Trilby, and neither had Thorn. But both men were having trouble acting naturally.

Thorn had heard about Jack’s visit to his cousin and what had been said. He and Curt had argued for the first time in memory. But at last, Curl had convinced him that his shadowy paramour was not Trilby. The revelation had left Thorn confused and brutally ashamed. He’d savaged Trilby, all because Sally had accused her. But why had Sally lied? That was the only piece of the puzzle he couldn’t fit in.

However, there was no time for it now. Thorn put his hand to his mouth and let out a fierce, piercing whistle. Immediately ten mounted men rode out and joined the small party.

They looked a lot like their boss, Jack thought. Most of them wore weather-beaten clothing and they were armed to the teeth. One or two of them looked absolutely roguish. There were two Apaches in the group; one short, aging one and another who was tall and well built with oddly intelligent black eyes. He looked positively grim.

“You’re not taking the Indians?” Jack asked under his breath.

Thorn mentally counted to ten. “Naki and Tiza are my trackers,” he told Lang. “The best in my outfit. I can’t even find the signs they can.”

“Look here, I don’t trust Indians,” Jack snapped. “The stories I’ve heard about them…”

“I don’t imagine you’ve heard that in the old days some whites kept the Apaches as slaves?” he asked quietly. “Or that soldiers often attacked Indian villages and killed women and children?”

Lang cleared his throat. “Well…”

“I’ll vouch for my men. All of my men,” Thorn said quietly. “Let’s ride.”

“Yes, of course.” Jack raised his arm and motioned for his men to follow. He tried to fall in alongside Vance, but the man put his spurs gently to his horse’s flank and went like the wind. Jack Lang knew for a fact that he couldn’t have managed to even stay on the horse at the speed Vance was going. He fell back, riding with his own group as Vance and his men outdistanced them. Jack refused to let himself ask who was leading the party. It was apparent that Vance was.

Despite the faint color breaking over the mountains, it was mostly dark. But the Apaches dismounted from time to time and stared around at things like boulders and stony ground. Lang was certain no man could track over rock, but the Apaches were able to. They led the men across the broad, white river that separated Jack’s land from Vance’s, and off to the west of Douglas.

“Vance, this is near the border. Damned near the border,” Jack said, voicing his concern. “We can’t go over into Mexico without permission.”

Thorn leaned his wrists over his pommel and gazed at Jack Lang. “Listen, there’s no question that the raiders have crossed the border. We only needed to know where, not if. They’ll be down below Agua Prieta, and we can find them if we’re quick. If we wait until we get permission, you’ll lose half your herd. Besides that, we can’t risk the army coming down here after us.”

“But, man, if we’re caught…”

“We won’t be.” He signaled to his men and rode forward at a quick clip.

Jack hesitated, but in a minute, he followed.

They trailed the Mexicans to a valley just below the San Bernadino Valley, careful to keep plenty of distance between them and the U.S. Army troops that were bivouacked there along the border. The bandits were so confident that they’d settled down to a nice, leisurely breakfast with one of Jack Lang’s steers being butchered as the main course.

There were only six of them. That convinced Thorn that they were only renegades, not part of any Maderista forces. These men were acting on their own, he was pretty sure, but they didn’t look quite smart enough to be acting without guidance. He wanted to know whom they were working for.

He signaled to his men, forgetting that it was Jack Lang’s party, and rode into the camp, unfurling his lasso at the same time. He threw a loop over the man who looked like the leader and jerked him down. The others had drawn their weapons, but finding themselves outnumbered and outgunned, they quickly threw up their hands, crying out in garbled Spanish.

A rapid monologue of Spanish exploded from Thorn, who stepped gracefully out of the saddle to hog-tie the leader. But as he began to question the man, one of the Apaches, the tall one, approached him and, with a cold look at Jack Lang, began to speak in his own tongue.

“We’re not alone here.”

“Speak English,” Thorn snapped.

“Not in front of him,” Naki replied, indicating Jack Lang. “I’ve heard what he’s been saying. If he insults me once more I’ll tie him bare-legged to a cactus. You tell him that,” he added, with a cold scowl in Jack Lang’s direction that made the older man look uncomfortable.

“Will you tell me what you found out?”

“When you tell this stage cowboy that he’s headed for a stake and some firewood, I will.”

Thorn glared at him. “It was the Iroquois in the Northeast, not the Apaches, who burned people at the stake!”

Naki glowered as he eyed Jack. “Are you sure?”

“Damn it!”

“Oh, very well! There are about a hundred Federales headed this way.”

“Why didn’t you say so?!” He turned in the saddle. “Federales,” Thorn said sharply. “We’ll have to clear out. Get those cattle moving!” he called to his men.

They fired into the air to stampede the milling cattle, and Thorn quickly threw his roped quarry across his own saddle before he mounted and lit out for the border.

“Don’t spare the horses!” he called to Jack Lang. “We can’t let ourselves be caught on this side of the border!”

“As I said myself before we sashayed down here,” Jack muttered to himself, but not so that Thorn could hear him.

They made it across the border just minutes ahead of the Mexican soldiers, cattle and all. In the ensuing rout, all but the Mexican thrown across Vance’s saddle managed to escape while the cowboys tried to salvage the cattle. They did lose a few head in the process, but not enough to make any great difference in Jack Lang’s fortunes.

With Thorn in the lead, they rode hell-for-leather for Blackwater Springs Ranch. Trilby heard them come up and ran to the window. Jack Lang and Thorn were just riding up to the front of the house. She was so relieved to see her father that she instinctively ran out onto the porch.

Thorn saw her just as he tossed the trussed Mexican to the ground and loosened his rope, leaving the freed man lying there. He looked utterly ruthless as he turned to her.

“Get in the house and stay there,” he said, with icy command.

She began to disobey just as the Mexican looked at her and laughed. He said something in Spanish to Thorn.

It was obviously something insulting, and about her, because Thorn went for him on the spot. The Mexican pulled a knife, which Thorn was too furious to notice. But Naki saw it. As the smaller man raised it to strike, Naki’s hand flashed down to the big hunting knife he carried in a sheath on his belt. He whipped it out and flung it, handle first, with frightening speed and accuracy, knocking the Mexican’s knife right out of his hand.

“I say!” Jack Lang exclaimed from where he was sitting beside Naki.

The Apache slipped out of the saddle gracefully and retrieved his knife. Thorn and the Mexican were mixing it up roughly now, knocking each other about with little care for which bystanders they knocked over.

“Heathen savages,” Naki remarked as he swung back into his saddle.

Jack Lang stared at him incredulously, diverted from the fight.

“That!” Naki emphasized, waving one arm toward Thorn. “God in heaven, man, don’t you even care that they’re in danger of bashing each other’s brains out? I thought you white people were civilized!” He managed to sound disgusted and superior.

“You speak English!” Jack gasped.

“Yes, but it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. Mixed metaphors, double negatives, alliteration…”

He turned his horse and rode off, still muttering to himself. He could barely contain his laughter as Jack Lang sat with his mouth open, gaping after him.

Thorn and the Mexican were drenched in sweat and covered with dust and blood. Thorn was tall, but the Mexican was broader, and his pride had been damaged by the indignity of his treatment.

But Thorn eventually beat him into a dazed submission and, dragging him up, began to question him in curt Spanish. The man answered reluctantly, but he did finally answer. Thorn let him go with a shove.

“Give him a horse,” he told Jack Lang. “I’ll reimburse you.”

“We’re letting him go?” Jack gasped. “But he should be arrested, tried for his crime!”

“I said, let him go,” Thorn told the older man in a way that defied protest.

Jack motioned to one of his men and sent him after a suitable mount. Trilby had gone back into the house at the beginning of the unpleasantness, but she was hopelessly drawn to the window as she heard the sickening thuds abate. What she saw made her run for the back porch, where she was violently sick.

While she was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping hot, sweet tea to calm her nerves, Thorn came in with her father. He was bare-headed, his face cut and badly bleeding, like his knuckles.

“Can you do something for Vance, Trilby?” her father asked curtly. “Your mother is in the bedroom and she won’t come out.”

Trilby didn’t blame her. “Of course,” she said, bucking up. She could hardly contain her nausea. The smell of blood was overwhelming. She got a pan and went to the sink, adding a clean cloth to the water she pumped into it. She sat down at the table beside a weary Thorn and slowly began to clean his cuts. She didn’t look into his eyes. In fact, he didn’t lift them; he acted oddly subdued. Perhaps, she thought bitterly, he was in pain. She had to fight the urge to leave the room and let him stay that way, but her soft heart outweighed her outrage for the moment.

“I don’t understand why you wanted the Mexican turned loose,” Jack said irritably.

“Keeping him would cause his men to come after him,” Thorn explained, wincing when Trilby wiped his cut cheek. “Some Mexicans are like Apaches when they want revenge.”

Jack was beginning to get the picture. “I see.”

“I doubt it, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. They make a habit of raiding north of the border for cattle and selling them to a big landowner in the southern province of Sonora. I told them if I caught them on this side of the border again, I’d have a little talk with their benefactor. I don’t think we’ll see them again anytime soon. But there are other raiders. This isn’t the end of it.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” He grimaced as he saw Thorn’s face. The man had helped him, despite the damage he’d done. “You look terrible.”

“Fighting isn’t pretty. Is it, Trilby?” he asked her, with a glint in his dark eyes as he suddenly looked up, full at her.

She averted her eyes. “No.” She had to choke the word out. “What did he say that made you attack him?”

“I’ll never tell you that,” he said solemnly. “He did it to provoke me, hoping he could catch me off-guard and put that knife into my belly.”

“Your Indian friend,” Jack said uneasily. “He’s not what I expected.”

“He’s not what anyone expects,” Thorn replied. “Thank God for his skill with a knife. I’d have been gutted but for him.”

“How fortunate for you that you weren’t,” Trilby said. Her eyes looked into his. “Am I to understand that you were actually defending me?” she asked, with quiet hauteur.

He caught his temper as it started to flare. When he spoke, his deep voice was soft. “Yes. No murderous bandit should be allowed to talk that way about a decent woman,” he said shortly.

She dipped the bloodstained cloth back in the water, noticing how pinkish the once clear water had become. She lifted it back to Thorn’s face. “But then, I’m not a decent woman, according to you,” she replied bitterly.

He caught her wrist tightly. His eyes were frankly apologetic. “Curt told me the truth. I’m sorry. More sorry than you realize.”

“Don’t ruin your image, Mr. Vance,” she said as she tugged her hand out of his grasp and continued her ministrations. “I hardly think apologies are part of your repertoire.”

Her father was hovering nearby. Thorn wished him in Montezuma. He needed to see Trilby alone, to see if he could mend the distance he’d put between them. She acted as if she despised him and he’d given her good reason. Even a blind man should have realized that her innocence was no pretense.

“Your man, the Apache,” Jack persisted. “He speaks English.”

“Does he, really?” Thorn asked, managing to look surprised.

Jack cleared his throat and walked out.

His absence gave Thorn the opportunity he’d wanted to patch things up with Trilby, if he could.