Renegade Man

RENEGADE
MAN

by

Parris
Afton Bonds

Published
by Parris Afton, Inc.

Copyright 2012
by Parris Afton, Inc.

All Rights
Reserved

Cover artwork by
DigitalDonna.com

Kindle Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only.  This ebook may not be re-sold or given away.

For
Rita Clay Estrada.

Like
gold, which is always in the purest state, a friendship’s luster never dims.

You
are that noble metal.

With
special thanks to David Berry of Homestead Mining Company,

 Silver
City, New Mexico,

and

Dave
McCracken of The New 49er’s Happy Camp, California

Chapter
1

Rita-lou was
back in town, and Silver City, New Mexico, hadn’t had so much to talk about
since Geronimo’s warriors raided the settlement a hundred years before.

Livingston, the
old-timer who owned the grocery store, peered at her over his dust-spotted,
wire-rimmed bifocals, then glanced down at her Texas driver’s license.
Livingston had been old as long as she could remember. Old when she’d worn
pigtails and gone shoeless. Old when she’d run away from Silver City twenty
years ago.

“Ya ain’t by any
chance that Randall girl, are ya? Rita-lou Randall?”

She could have
purchased her supplies at the new Furr’s Supermarket, but instead she had come
here, to Livingston’s Food & Mercantile—and despite the oscillating fan on
the linoleum-topped counter, the store was as hot as the Chino smelter fourteen
miles down the way. She tugged a chilled beer can from a six-pack she had
bought and popped its tab. “One and the same, Mr. Livingston.”

His shaggy gray
brows rose behind his bifocals. “Well, I’ll be—”

“Certainly not
damned, Mr. Livingston. Indian Hills Baptist Church would never permit that.”

She took a sip
of the cooling light beer and smiled kindly at the old man over the rim of the
aluminum can. After all, he had offered her candy once, the last day of school.
She had hung back near the screen door, watching the other second-graders grab
their free licorice sticks and jawbreakers from fishbowl jars. The rest of the
kids had been poor, but she had been even poorer. Dirt-poor, in the literal
sense of the word. And too proud to accept the tempting, sticky sweets.

The old man
chuckled. “Still spitting like a cat, ain’t ya?”

She leveled a
steady gaze at him. “I believe it was an alley cat back then, Mr. Livingston.”

His heavy brows
rose again. “You always did have a tough outer crust and a mouth that wouldn’t
quit.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and sighed. “I’ll be here through the
summer, and I’d like to set up an account with you. I can provide all the
credit cards and references you need.”

“Humph! Don’t
need nothing.” He began packing her provisions in sacks. “You didn’t steal as a
kid, so I don’t guess you’re gonna start now, are ya?”

The small glow
of unexpected pleasure she felt at his backhanded compliment surprised her. She
lifted the two heavy sacks. “Mr. Livingston, I’m getting ready to commit the
biggest robbery in history. I’ll make our Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy look
like a pair of sidewalk Santa Clauses.”

The old man’s
faded eyes widened, and she winked. “You might call it grave robbery.”

He chuckled
again, and as she turned to leave he said, “Yup, tough outer crust, but a
marshmallow inside.”

Outside, she ran
into Mrs. McLeod. The wealthy old widow had long been the town gossip. She
stepped back, shook her cane at Rita-lou and sniffed. “Watch where you’re
going, you young hooli—well, for pity’s sake, aren’t you May Randall’s kid?”
Her rheumy eyes took in Rita-lou’s faded denim shirt tucked into white shorts,
and the exposed length of her tanned legs. “Still wild as the wind, I declare!”

“That I am, Mrs.
McLeod.” She stepped aside for the gnarled little woman, who had somehow been
the first to spread the news that fifteen-year-old Rita-lou Randall was “in the
family way.”

As Rita-lou
watched Mrs. McLeod hobble away, her dark brows knitted together. Coming home
was going to be more difficult than she had anticipated. She had thought the
hurting was over, that she didn’t care anymore, but she did. And that made her
mad.

With her mouth
set in a determined line, she stored the grocery sacks in her battered green
Chevy, then started its clanking engine. She had given her Lexus to her son in
trade for his old Chevy clunker when he’d gone off to college, because she
hadn’t wanted to worry about him breaking down somewhere out in Death Valley,
much less on one of L.A.’s congested freeways. Trace had teasingly complained
that she was overly protective. Maybe she was. After all, hadn’t she left home
alone at fifteen? Left this grassy valley dotted with juniper and yucca for the
cement and freeways and smog of Houston—an even worse kind of isolation.

She turned onto
the bridge that crossed over Main Street Gulch. Actually, Main Street had been
obliterated in July of 1895, after two days of rain had caused a flood to race
down it, tossing boulders as big as houses against anything that stood in the
water’s way. When the twelve-foot torrent had passed, stunned citizens saw,
instead of a street, a chasm running through their town, with halves of houses
hanging over the edge. Eventually bridges were built across the abyss to rejoin
the two parts of town. Later, the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression
days had created a lush park within the fifty-five-foot-deep ditch, still
called Main Street to this day.

When she reached
Kingsley Street a bitter taste crept into her mouth. The closed trap of her
memory sprang open to let in all sorts of forgotten images, and the street,
named for the powerful and influential ranching family whose roots reached back
to territorial days, certainly didn’t evoke the happiest ones.

Kingsley Street
was like the main streets of hundreds of small towns across America. Twenty
years ago it had been in a state of gradual deterioration, but in the last few
years the chamber of commerce had revitalized it. Physical improvements to the
downtown’s historic buildings had been limited to restoring the character of
the architecture of silver-boom days. Spanish Colonial, Victorian and
Italianate residences and commercial buildings crowded shoulder-to- shoulder
with art galleries along the narrow, brick- paved thoroughfare.

Kingsley Street
had long been considered the demarcation line between the good and bad sides of
Silver City, originally called La Cienega de San Vicente. Residents north of
Kingsley Street had been regarded as being on the side of the angels, while
those to the south, perched on Chihuahua Hill, had been regarded as the
shifty-eyed, great unwashed. Self- professed nonpartisans had been regarded
with suspicion by both sides.

Chap had been
one of those few nonpartisans. Chap, the sensitive white knight of her youth. A
sense of sadness momentarily overrode her bitterness. She had thought she had
gotten over the handsome Kingsley scion. Shows what digging up the past gets
you, she thought, then had to smile at her unintentional pun, one of her
anthropology prof’s favorites.

As if she
enjoyed inflicting emotional pain on herself, she abruptly turned off Kingsley,
the last strip of greenery between historic downtown and barren Chihuahua Hill,
and started up steep Bayard Street. Named for the old fort that had guarded
ranchers and prospectors against attacks by the Apaches, Bayard Street had been
the boundary of Silver City’s red-light district.

Involuntarily
she glanced in her rearview mirror to see the North Addition district rising on
the hill north of downtown. North Addition was made up chiefly of elaborate
homes from the early 1900s, built by people like William Randolph Hearst’s
parents, who had amassed the fortune for his great newspaper empire from gold
gleaned from the ground in Pinos Altos, six miles outside Silver City.
Successful artists and health- seekers, attracted to the area’s many hot
springs, now occupied the old residences. The three-story Kingsley mansion rose
in their midst, its grandeur still overshadowing them.

Her mother had
worked there as a cook. And she herself as an upstairs maid. Briefly.

Wistful
melancholia tripped the light fantastic through her heart in an ever-increasing
whirl, and she heard an inner voice emphatically whispering, “Pay the piper and
stop this dance!”

Resolutely she
turned her attention back to Chihuahua Hill. It was less squalid than when she
and her mother and Grandpops had lived there. Stone houses held together by
mortar, as well as flat-roofed territorial homes with exposed vigas, were all
that remained. The tar-paper-and-corrugated-tin shacks, like the one she had
grown up in, had vanished for the most part. The railroad tracks had passed
through here, which had meant she was definitely from the wrong side of the
tracks in the eyes of Silver City’s respectable citizens.

Respectability.

She hadn’t
realized the power the word possessed. Its power had drawn her back to the
small mining town in the foothills of the Gila Mountains, deny it though she
might. She had learned early in life that it did little good to lie to oneself.
She was what she was: a thirty-five-year-old widow, the mother of a college
freshman, and a doctoral candidate in anthropology. Not bad for a tenth-grade
dropout who had gotten an equivalency diploma instead of the real thing.

She had
convinced Greenwald Research to give her a foundation grant to finance her work
because she strongly suspected she would find proof of a prehi¬toric man
predating New Mexico’s Folsom Man. However, she could honestly admit that she
wasn’t sweating out a broiling summer at Renegade Creek merely for the
international fame such a find would bring her.

A discovery of
that magnitude would not bring a monetary reward, but that was no longer a
priority for her since her husband had left her debt-free, at least, if not
luxuriously situated. What the discovery of Renegade Man would do for her was
something intangible: it would force Silver City to change its poor opinion of
her. It would earn the citizens’ unwilling respect.

That was a
thought she relished. After all these years, their respect was vitally
important to her, if only because she wanted to avoid having any negative
reflections cast on her son—ever. Trace should never have to pay for her
mistakes.

Of course, there
was also the satisfaction that she would feel, because such a discovery would
be an achievement she had earned on her own, after letting Robert try to do
everything for her during the twelve years of their marriage.

Her dark brown
eyes, almost black, smiled back at her in the rearview mirror. If staking out
an archaeological site on Split P grazing lands enraged mean-hearted C. B.
Kingsley, why, that would be even better!

Heading east out
of Silver City, beyond the Chino smelter’s twin smokestacks, she passed the
legendary Santa Rita copper mine, for which she was named. Well, for that and
for her father, a Mexican migrant worker by the name of Luis. Apparently he had
worked in the Silver City area just long enough to cultivate the fields and her
mother.

Rita-lou entered
the Mimbres River Valley. Here the Mimbreno Indians, members of the prehistoric
Mo gollon culture, had produced a pottery of finely painted geometric and
natural designs that was world- famous. And here, along a tributary of the
Mimbres River, she hoped to find her thirty-five-thousand-year- old Renegade
Man.

It wasn’t even
nine, and already the June morning was heating up. She rolled down the window,
letting the fresh air whip her shoulder-length hair. The color of sawdust,
Grandpops used to say. Fresh air! She slowed down to a leisurely pace and
inhaled deeply. After smelling Houston’s exhaust fumes for twenty years, her
nostrils took a positive delight in distinguishing the meadow scents: new-mown hay,
a vegetable garden on the right and an apple orchard just ahead.

Funny how smells
could trigger memories. Her first memory of Chap was of him catching her when
she slipped from the apple tree she had been plundering. A Kingsley apple tree.
The whole lower Mimbres Valley had belonged to the Kingsleys. It had been the
headquarters of the once-famous Split P ranch. In 1884 the Split P had been
described as the largest ranch in the world. Now C. B. Kingsley—everyone called
him Cattle Baron Kingsley behind his back— possessed only the grazing rights to
this part of the valley.

When she reached
a cluster of beehives, she swung off onto a bumpy dirt road that tested the
springs of the old Chevy. Unlike the upper Mimbres Valley, a mountainous
wilderness that was part of a national forest bigger than Connecticut and New
Jersey combined, the lower valley was grassy, and its low hills were peppered
primarily with pinon, cottonwood and scrub oak.