MY HOME for my son,” Don Pedro said stoically. “So be it, Gomez.”
“It was as though I were dealing with el diablo himself,” Gomez said. “It was not an agreement between two human beings, señor.”
“Nevertheless, it will be honored.” Don Pedro rose from the high-backed armchair in the candlelit room and moved slowly to the writing table. He has aged, Gomez thought. The Don walks slowly, almost hesitantly, and he is not ramrod stiff. Off to one side sat Doña Isabel, saying nothing in this moment of crisis, holding a simple black rosary in her deceptively fragile-looking hands. By her very silence she communicated strength, and Gomez, who had asked himself over the years who possessed the greater fortitude of these two aristocrats, now thought he knew.
“It will not be necessary to leave my son in Simon Agry’s hands another forty-eight hours,” Don Pedro said, setting himself down at the table with a piece of his official paper and pen. “The so-called deed in the vaults at Mexicali is a royal grant. It is not transferable.”
“Then Agry cannot hold title?” Gomez asked hopefully.
“He will have this signed paper from me,” Don Pedro said, “that will relinquish my claims in his favor. It will be binding on me and my heirs, but I cannot answer for the federal government. I am certain that Simon Agry will find the ways and means.”
“Sí,” Gomez said worriedly. “He may even use any opposition as an excuse to call the American army. Our country has been invaded for less cause.”
“The war is over, Gomez. If our two nationalities cannot live side by side, at least the two governments have had enough of the fighting.”
There was only the scratching of the pen on parchment then, as Don Pedro wrote the necessary legal terms. He signed his name very deliberately and added the date.
“Let Ramon take some men and go to Agrytown,” he said. “You have ridden far too long this one day.”
Gomez shook his iron-gray head stubbornly. “It is my duty, señor. This one time I must insist.”
“As you will. And, Gomez — you realize that this is your last mission as major-domo. We are no longer patrón and vaquero. El Rancho del Rey is gone.”
Gomez realized that. He had considered the thing so thoroughly that now it was an accepted fact.
“Gomez,” Doña Isabel said softly, “you had better leave. I am anxious to see Juan again.”
Gomez left the hacienda, signaled to the waiting Ramon and two riders, and all four went back along the road to the border.
• • •
Maria del Cuervo heard the urgent sound of the departing horses and sat upright in the bathtub.
“Felice! See what it is!”
The Indian servant had been standing with a warm towel. Now she ran to the window.
“It is Gomez and Ramon, señorita. And two vaqueros. They go like the wind.”
“Something important is happening,” Maria said. The girl had been told nothing about her brother. She had asked for Juan as soon as the doctor had left this morning, asked for him to verify whether she had dreamed a brief conversation with him or whether it had actually occurred. But she was told Juan was on spring roundup, and though that was a reasonable explanation there was the air of secrecy in Tia Rosa’s voice that made her anxious. The entire household was under a strain, for that matter, and it was not wholly connected with what had befallen her.
The doctor, for instance, declared in a very strong voice that she was not injured, that she was strong as a tiger. Her own deep relief, though, had been only partially mirrored in the faces of her parents. Her father and mother had stayed on in the room, reassuring her that everything was going to be all right, strengthening her morale. But when they were gone it came to her that not once had she been asked about Roy Agry. Was it of no importance, then? Maria knew better. So it had to be the other reason. They hadn’t asked the name of her attacker because they already knew.
And the comings and goings of Gomez. All through the day he had arrived at the hacienda and departed, always with a clouded face, always with an air of doom.
Felice told her as much as she knew, as much as she could learn herself and from the other servants. Gomez, for instance, had discovered her body — but there was some sort of mystery about that, too….
Maria’s eyes had widened.
“You mean — it may have been some other man who came upon me? One of the vaqueros?”
“Señorita,” Felice said, “it is the account of the thing that the segundo found you. But my brother Amaya, who rode with the searchers, told me of another man who was carrying you in his arms.”
“What man?”
“A stranger to my brother, señorita. Amaya describes him as formidable.”
Maria shivered. “Formidable?”
“A giant, Amaya says.”
“But Amaya is so small.”
“Even so, Amaya says he had a fierce look on him.”
“But if he — if this stranger rescued me, carried me in his arms … How was I dressed, Felice?” she asked quickly.
Felice shook her head, following her mistress’s thinking with a female understanding. “I was not there, señorita.”
“I am sure it was Tio Café who found me,” Maria announced resolutely. “That is the way of it.”
“I am sure, also,” Felice agreed.
“And of the other, the one who attacked me? What do they ask about him?”
“Nothing, señorita.”
“Nothing? Doesn’t my father or my brother care?”
“Of course they care. But the man is known to them. The son of Señor Simon.”
“How? How could they know?”
The Indian shrugged her shoulders. “It is just that they know,” she explained.
Now Maria had the added puzzle of Gomez rushing from the ranch with three others. Something important was happening, something that was being kept from her. She stood up and stepped from the tub, a flawless figure of a girl with her father’s angular face and straight shoulders. She was raven-haired, olive-skinned and surprisingly curved and firm-breasted. Felice wrapped her in the big towel and she stood braced while the Indian’s powerful hands dried her vigorously.
She remembered again how she had fought against the insane brutality of Roy Agry. As she had resisted him until he had been forced to beat her unconscious. And today, with the resilience that was her mother’s heritage, she bore no more spiritual scar from the incident that when the rattlesnake had attacked her as a child of ten. Gomez — her Tio Café — had been there that time, too, to slit open the wound on her forearm and suck the venom out of the bloodstream.
That had given her a respect for rattlesnakes, and a healthy caution. But she was not afraid to ride among them. Nor was she afraid to ride among men, either. She would just be on guard, that was all. If a Roy Agry met her on the trail she would not treat him with the complete trust that she had. The next man who tried to force her into the brush would find a stiletto in his ribs.
With that thought in her active mind, Maria dressed in one of the dozens of frilly, feminine gowns from her wardrobe. At supper tonight she must try to make her parents more cheerful.