Comes the Hunter (A Geo W. Proctor Classic Western) Page 2

  Around the Guadalupes grass was as sparse as water. Clay ran only two hundred head of cattle over the two sections he called the Sweet Water Creek Ranch. Those beeves were constantly shifted from one parcel of land to another to prevent overgrazing.

  This was the desert; Clay had never deluded himself that it was anything else. He kept his stock, both cattle and horses, at a level the land could support. Nor did he keep any goats or sheep as did some of his Mexican neighbors. Both animals grazed too close to the ground, often eating all the way to the roots of fragile grass plants.

  It was this respect for this unforgiving land that kept Clay from grazing the Bowl except in the spring when the grass was young and hardy enough to recover from the mares and foals and in the fall before the first killing frost, after the grass had gone to seed. One full season of grazing, even a few horses or steers, might transform the lush Bowl into desolate rock and sand like the terrain that now encircled El Paso.

  Clay could not ignore a tug of regret when he thought of the massive herds run by Texas ranchers on the grass-rich plains far to the east. He had watched many of the dirt-poor hands he had ridden the Chisholm Trail with after the war become rich almost overnight. They would drive a herd up from Mexico, stake a claim to a portion of the grasslands, fatten the steers, then drive them north to the railhead in Kansas to sell to the eastern meat packers.

  That life might have been his—money, a big home with furniture brought west from places like New Orleans and St. Louis, and fine clothes for his wife and children. Such a life also would have carried a price. He would have had to give up this land.

  The hint of amusement upturned the corners of Clay’s mouth. At times it seemed damned foolish to place any value on land that most sane men would refuse even if it were given to them. But it was here that his parents had settled, his father more interested in prospecting the mountains for gold than ranching. And it was here his mother had died, giving birth to the only child she was to bring into the world. Buried beside her now was a husband who was killed twenty years ago by an Apache war chief named Red Shirt. Clay had been the same age as Martin when he had dug that second grave with his own hands.

  Alone and scared, Clay had done the only thing he knew to do. He accepted the one thing his father had left him as a legacy—the land—dug in, and survived.

  More than just survived, he admitted with a touch of pride. He had made a life for himself and his family. Although many of the fineries found to the east were missing, he was working on correcting that. His horses were starting to pay off.

  Clay’s slight smile widened when he remembered the two men who had traveled all the way from Corpus Christi and Jefferson last fall. Each purchased one gelding, saddle-broke and trained for cutting cattle—at a price of two hundred dollars a horse. That totaled four hundred dollars! Some dirt farmers in prosperous East Texas could not claim such a handsome profit off cash crops like cotton.

  Those two men promised to be back this year—with friends. And there was Señor Diaz in El Paso who had already promised to buy three horses as soon as they were broken and trained. It had taken time, but Clay’s reputation as a horseman was slowly spreading. If all went as planned this year, he would have the money to travel east to buy a blooded stud. A good stallion would breed speed into sturdy cowponies known for their endurance.

  “Pa.”

  Martin’s voice intruded into Clay’s plans for the future.

  “Pa”—Martin turned in the saddle to look back at his father—“I also saw Indian sign back among the trees.”

  “Apache or Comanche?” Clay asked.

  Indian sign had been rare since the attack on Manzanita Spring a year ago in 1869. Clay had tracked for the army that day when they had come upon a Lipan Apache band only a few miles from where Martin and he now rode. The fighting had been fast and furious. When it was over, the few Lipans who survived escaped into the Guadalupes.

  The newspapers, especially those that came west from Jefferson and Austin hailed the battle as the final defeat of the Apaches in Texas. Clay was not as certain as those writers. Apaches still wandered across the border from the New Mexico Territory. Although they were few in number, there remained the possibility one or more bands might decide to return to the lands that had been their home long before white men first came to this portion of Texas.

  “Couldn’t tell.” Martin shook his head. “Only saw what was left of a small fire. Looked to be at least a week old. Couldn’t have been big enough for more than one or two braves.”

  “Probably just that. A couple Apache braves came over the mountains into the Bowl,” Clay said. “All the same, keep an eye peeled just in case.”

  “I’ll do that.” Martin’s right hand lightly brushed the stock of the carbine slung from his saddle.

  Clay looked down at his own rifle as though to make certain it remained securely looped about his saddle horn. He resisted the urge to check the six loads in his holstered Colt. The pistol’s cylinder always carried full loads, and the rancher kept a spare cylinder, also carrying six shots, tucked away in his saddlebags. It was far quicker to pop a fresh cylinder into a six-gun when there was a need than trying to reload each chamber.

  For an instant his gaze dropped to the pommel of a hunting knife sheathed on his belt. An uninvited shiver worked up his spine as memories he would have left forgotten wedged into his mind.

  With that very knife he had killed the Apache Red Shirt, extracting a bloody revenge for the death of his father. After burying his father beside his wife, Clay had tracked the young war chief for six months. And he had found him.

  Another shiver coursed through the rancher as he remembered the morning he had ridden into Red Shirt’s camp and brazenly challenged the Indian. By all rights, Clay realized, he should have died that day, his scalp tied to a lodge pole outside a wickiup. But the warriors who had followed Red Shirt for almost two years had grown weary of bloodshed. They had slowly abandoned the war chief, one by one leaving him to return to the bands from which they had come.

  Only six wickiups stood in the Apaches’ camp. The braves and squaws who awakened to find a foolish white boy waiting to greet them were too shocked to react to his presence. The same shock left Red Shirt’s chest swelled with overconfidence when that boy spat a challenge in his face. Clay had seen the gleam of certain victory when Red Shirt drew a hunting knife. The gleam flickered and died, replaced by disbelief when Clay ducked beneath the warrior’s first, wide, testing attack and drove his own blade into Red Shirt’s chest.

  As the war chief dropped to the ground, Clay turned, mounted his horse, and rode away. Had that camp been larger, even by only a few wickiups, Clay was now certain he would never have been able to leave. Some brave would have taken his life to avenge Red Shirt’s death.

  Instead, he later learned, the Apaches had given him a name that day—Fears-Not-Death. The story of Red Shirt’s death spread among the Apaches, and they left Clay Thorton alone. Only a white man protected by mighty medicine could do what he had done and ride away unmolested.

  Drawing a deep breath, Clay pursed his lips and exhaled in a sharp hiss. The past was past; nothing was gained by dwelling upon it. He did not convince himself. Although the Lipan Apaches had been driven from the region, Comanche raiding parties occasionally used Guadalupe Pass as they drove south to the Mexican border.

  Clay stared to the point of the small herd of mares and colts.

  Martin rode there, his head occasionally turning from side to side as he peered about the country through which they rode. With luck the Indian tales of Fears-Not-Death still protected them this day, and Martin would not have to dig a grave for his father as Clay had done twenty years ago.

  The thought came as a silent prayer both for Martin and himself.

  Chapter Three

  “Daddy!” Sarah ran from the open door of the stone ranch house as Clay and Martin herded the horses into a corral constructed of cedar posts.

  “Martin, close ’em up and make certain they’ve got plenty of water,” Clay called to his son. “They’ll be wanting it after two weeks in the Bowl. It’s a mite hotter and drier here.”

  The younger Thorton nodded to his father as Clay reined his buckskin around and tugged the horse to a halt. The rancher stepped from the saddle, squatted with his arms held wide, and swept his seven-year-old daughter into them. He hugged her close, savoring the tightness of her arms about his neck when she returned the embrace.

  “Daddy, I missed you.” She kissed his cheek.

  “I hope so.” Clay held the young girl in his arms when he stood and started toward the house and the slender woman who stood framed in its doorway. “The only good thing about a man having to be away is being missed. That’s why he comes back home. If he ain’t got someone missing him, he might as well just keep riding on to somewhere else.”

  “I wouldn’t like that,” Sarah answered. “I don’t even like it when you have to be gone overnight.”

  “You can add my don’t likes to that, too.” Elizabeth Thorton stepped from the door and into the sun. A welcoming grin spread over her delicate oval face.

  Clay’s gaze took in his wife as he placed Sarah on the ground. Elizabeth stood a hairsbreadth shorter than her husband. Her hair, the jet black of a raven’s wing, had only a few random strands of gray intertwined here and there. The blueness of her eyes was as bright and deep as it had been when he had first seen her working as a clerk in her father’s dry goods store in San Antonio. Sixteen years later, Clay found himself wanting her as much as he had that long-ago summer morning—if not more.

  “I wasn’t expecting you two back till late this evening. I haven’t put anything on the stove.” She reached his side and kissed his cheek.

  The smell of flour
and yeast hung about her, belying her words. Elizabeth had been baking bread. Beneath those comforting aromas of the kitchen wafted the hint of the lilac soap Clay had purchased for his wife the last time he had ridden into El Paso.

  “That ain’t the kind of a kiss a man expects to welcome him home.” Clay slipped an arm around Elizabeth’s waist and eased her to him.

  Her lips met his willingly for an instant, then in a heartbeat, she pushed away. “Clayton Morgan Thorton, that’s no way to be acting in front of the children.”

  He grinned. The hint of a smile on her lips and sparkle in her eyes spoke more than her words. The kiss pleased her as much as it had him. “It’s only the way I feel.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “It wasn’t your feelings I was asking about. It was your stomach. I’ve got some biscuits left from breakfast and some bacon if you’re hungry.”

  “Martin’s apt to be wanting something, but a cool drink to wash away some of the dust in my mouth and throat would do me fine.” Clay tightened his arm around her, noting Elizabeth made no attempt to pull away.

  “Sarah, you run along to the kitchen and fetch those biscuits and bacon. Take them to your brother,” Elizabeth ordered their daughter, “while I pour your father some water.”

  Under the watchful eyes of her father, the seven-year-old trotted off to a ten-foot-by-ten-foot stone structure attached to the ranch house by a breezeway. “She’s going to be a handsome woman, Elizabeth. Each day she looks more and more like you.”

  “It’s a good thing.” Elizabeth’s arm went around Clay’s waist once they entered the house. “We wouldn’t want a young woman looking like you, would we?”

  “And what’s wrong with my looks? I can think of several—”

  She muffled the rest of his words with a long kiss that left them clinging to each other. She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “Sometimes I feel like it has to be a sin for a woman to care for a man the way I care for you.”

  He nuzzled her hair and lightly kissed it. “There’s nothing sinful about what we got. It’s good—only good.”

  Her head lifted, and her gaze met his. “It is good, isn’t it? Even after all these years together.”

  “Still good.” He tenderly kissed her lips. “But there ain’t no reason to be talking like we was all old and gray. It hasn’t been all that many years.”

  “Hasn’t it?” She turned him around and pointed outside where Sarah stood at Martin’s side while her brother wolfed down a biscuit sandwich. “Those are our children out yonder, Clay. That’s a son who’s a growed man and a daughter who’ll be looking for a husband in less years than you want to imagine.”

  A sudden somber tone to his wife’s voice caught Clay by surprise. Her eyes shifted to the floor, and she eased away from him to retrieve a pitcher of water on the table when he looked at her.

  “Is there something wrong, Elizabeth?” He looked back at his children.

  There was no way to deny they were growing—and their parents slowly aging. Clay shook his head. In his mind, his thoughts, he still felt as young as the day he had brought Elizabeth to their home. Yet there was no ignoring a receding hairline and the few strands of hair that barely covered a balding spot at the back of his head. Nor could he overlook a stomach once taut and firm that now threatened to sag toward a middle-aged paunch.

  “Nothing more than what usually bothers me when you’re gone. I just get on the pensive side—start thinking about things.” Elizabeth handed him a fired red-clay cup colorfully painted with Mexican designs.

  “Things?” Clay drank deeply, enjoying the coolness that washed the desert dust from his throat. “What things?”

  His wife gave her head an uncertain shake. “All sorts of things, like the thoughts women have when they are girls.”

  His brow creased, unsure of what she spoke.

  “I guess a man doesn’t have those kind of thoughts.” She smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in that expression. “When a girl’s young with what beauty she’ll ever have, she worries more than just about finding a man to love and who’ll return that love. She worries about how she’ll keep his interest when the years start to leech away her youth.”

  He drained the last of the water and set the cup aside. Taking her hands, he met her eyes with his gaze. “Elizabeth—”

  “Clay”—her hands squeezed his—“it’s just that what I’ve had with you is good, and I get to wondering if it’s the same for you. More than you just feeling tied down and having to take care of a family.”

  “Far more.” He wished for words, fancy words like those he read in books. Words never came easy for him, especially when he wanted to describe the feelings that moved within his breast. “Elizabeth, I wouldn’t want to have it any way but the way we’ve had it together. A man—this man—couldn’t ask for more.”

  He drew her close, enfolding her in his arms. Her mouth lifted to his, and he kissed her, trying to focus all the feeling he held for this woman who was his life in that kiss. His desire stirred as it had for sixteen years whenever they kissed.

  Apparently Elizabeth felt the rise of his passion. She arched a questioning eyebrow when their lips parted. “Clay Morgan Thorton, I’ve got the thought that you’ve got more than just a little spooning on your mind.”

  He smiled and nodded toward a door on the left of the ranch house’s main room that led to their bedroom. “It would be like old times, Elizabeth, back when there was nothing more important than our loving.”

  A pleased smile answered his, and her blue eyes shifted to the bedroom door. Reluctantly she shook her head. “That was a long time ago, before we had two children who might come bounding into the house at any moment. And before you had cattle and horses to attend.”

  “The stock can wait, and we can shut the front door to keep Martin and Sarah out,” he suggested.

  Again she shook her head. “There’s a time and a place for everything, but this ain’t the time for what’s on your mind. Go on with you. You’ve got your chores, and I’ve got mine.”

  Clay shrugged and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Reckon you’re right. But it would have been a nice way to spend the afternoon.” Elizabeth lovingly kissed his cheek. “And what would the stage do this evening when it came rolling in?”

  “When you’re right, you’re right. Best be about my chores.” Clay abandoned his attempts at an amorous afternoon.

  Since the end of the war a man named Shiner had run a stage line between Santa Fe in the New Mexico Territory and El Paso. The Sweet Water Creek Ranch served as one of the few way stations in the long stretch of arid terrain between Albuquerque and the stage’s final destination. The line only ran one coach a week. For keeping a fresh team of horses ready and waiting and for the meal Elizabeth prepared for the passengers, Clay collected ten dollars a stage. The hard cash was often all he saw in the long months between the sale of his steers or a horse.

  Drawing his hat brim down against the sun, Clay stepped outside. He made a mental note that when time permitted he would add a covered porch to the front of the house. Three years had passed since his last addition to their home—Sarah’s room built at the back of the house beside the room he had constructed for Martin.

  A porch, a real porch, he realized, would require wood, cut and milled boards. Flat rocks piled atop each other and mortared together with adobe, the main building material for the ranch house, would not do for a covered porch. Those boards would cost greenbacks, unless he could find a merchant needing a horse broke in trade.

  “Pa?” Martin called to his father. “Is it all right if I cut Misty and her colt out from the others? I’d like to keep ’em in the pen beside the barn the next couple days until we take ’em to pasture.”

  For a moment Clay considered admonishing his son for over-pampering the Appaloosas, but let it slide. Martin’s displayed pride in his own stock was a good sign that he was maturing. “Do what you like, but don’t take all day with it. Stage comes in this evening, and it’ll be needing a team of eight ready for the harness.”