Authors: Jennifer Blake
“This is the kind of cattle your father raises?”
Again Charro agreed, with a trace of pride. “As you can see, they are not animals that could be herded by a man on foot, like sheep. They are mean and crafty, they run like horses, and they range for miles every day as they graze. It's these cattle that made the charro, the horsemen of the Tejas country, for only a man on horseback can handle them. And as the grandees of Spain have always known, putting a man on horseback makes him different. It makes him lordly, gives him courage — and creates in him the determination to ride any horse that lives. We have a saying: 'To be a charro is to be a hero; to be a ranchero is to be a king!'“
“That explains why you're so lordly, then,” Pilar said, sending him a laughing glance.
“Am I?” A smile lighted his blue eyes as he turned his head to look at her, and in it was gratification at her personal notice.
“Only now and then,” she answered, relenting.
Vicente said to Charro, “According to what you say, your father's estancia must be fairly large.”
“Not really. His mercedes, his grant given at the king's mercy which he inherited from my grandfather, contains some twenty-square leagues. It stretches as far as the eye can see, but there are others that are larger.”
“The cattle are raised for the hides?”
“As you say, and for the tallow. The meat's a bit stringy, but tastes like something out of paradise when sliced thin and cooked with peppers and onions. I'd give half my life to have a plate of it before me right now.”
Pilar met his gaze with sympathy; she was also tired of their spartan diet. The thought came to them both at the same time. They blinked, then amusement rose into their faces. They turned their heads to stare at the herd.
“I feel such a fool,” Charro said. “I should have thought of it at once, instead of sitting here talking.”
“Will you wait for the others?” Pilar asked. The three of them had been riding ahead of everyone else. Refugio had left them to search their back trail and had not been seen for most of the morning. Doña Luisa had demanded a rest stop to attend the needs of nature, and asked Isabel to come with her a few yards of the trail to screen her from view. Baltasar and Enrique had remained behind on guard. It should not be long, however, before the others caught up. Charro reached to pick up the braided leather lariat he always had with him. Loosening the coils, he said, “I can have a cow butchered before they get here. Besides, we're downwind. The herd is a little curious about us, but not disturbed. If the others come riding up, they may get spooked, take off. The time is right.”
“I suppose you know what you're doing,” she said.
“Can I help?” Vicente asked with a shading of eagerness in his voice.
Charro replaced the rope and took his musket from its saddle scabbard. As he attended to the weapon's priming, he shook his head at the boy, saying, “Stay here with Pilar.”
The younger man obeyed, but watched with something close to envy as Charro nudged his horse into movement and rode at an oblique angle down the slope.
The bull watched him come, twitching his tail in a restive rhythm. A cow somewhat larger than the others also raised her head to eye the intruder. She snuffled, testing the wind. She did not seem unduly alarmed; still, she began to move. She made her way to the front of the herd, stopping between Charro and a calf that was separated from the others by a few feet of grass scattered with blue wildflowers.
Pilar, watching, hoped that Charro would not choose that cow and her calf. There was something indomitable, yet curiously vulnerable, about them there in the hot spring sunshine. Quite suddenly she was no longer so hungry for fresh meat.
Vicente's horse, the young roan stallion he had chosen in Natchitoches, had apparently never seen cattle before. It snorted and sidled, trying to rear. Pilar reined the mare she was riding to one side, out of the way. Vicente's roan whickered and fought the bit, plunging on stiff forelegs down into the flat valley as his rider clung to his back.
On the plain beyond the bull bellowed and lowered its head. The cattle were beginning to mill, shifting in circles. They watched Charro but did not seem to identify him as a danger. Charro had dropped his horse to a walk, sitting his saddle with his musket across his thighs. He was closing in. A few feet more and he swung down from the saddle. Leaving his mount on a ground tether, he crept forward through the tall, waving grass. He dropped to one knee, then lifted his weapon to his shoulder.
The shot shattered the still morning air. A cow bellowed and dropped to her knees, then keeled slowly to the ground. The herd surged forward, the cows bounding and leaping, bellowing as they ran a few yards up the shallow valley toward Pilar and Vicente, before slowing down and milling to a walk. The great bull trotted after them, then stopped and threw up his head. He pawed the ground and bawled out his rage.
The explosion of the shot sent Vicente's roan into paroxysms of wild terror. The horse reared straight up, then came down on its front legs with its heels flying skyward. Vicente sailed over the horse's ears. He landed with a thud, rolling in the grass in a sprawl of arms and legs. He lay still.
Pilar cried out in concern as she swung down from her own horse. The mare danced at the end of her reins, her eyes blaring with nervousness as she tried to follow the roan that was galloping away back down the trail. Pilar spoke to the mare in soothing tones, dragging her toward Vicente. She went down on her knees beside him. Refugio's brother shuddered, then began to rock back and forth in agony. There was a twisted grimace on his features, and he was pale beneath the new tan of his face.
“What is it?” Pilar asked in urgent tones. “Where are you hurt?”
Vicente gave a sudden, wheezing gasp, then began to breathe in heaves. He stopped writhing. “Breath — knocked — out of me,” he managed.
Relief brought a low laugh from Pilar's own throat. She reach out her hand to help Vicente sit up. “Are you sure that's all?”
“I think — so. Feel stupid — getting thrown.”
Pilar opened her mouth to reassure him, but was cut short by a shout. It was Charro. He was sprinting toward his horse, yelling as he ran. At first she thought it was the joy of triumph that moved him, then she saw it was fear.
The great long-horned bull was charging. It was charging, but not at Charro. Something about the rearing of Vicente's horse, or Pilar's being on foot, or perhaps even the flapping of her skirts in the wind, had attracted the enraged animal's attention. Now it was lumbering straight at them. Its hoofs made a dull thundering on the ground, throwing up clods of dirt and bits of grass and blue wildflowers behind it. Its horns shone in the sun, glinting at the needle-sharp tips. The muscles in its powerful shoulders bunched and rippled. It snorted with distended nostrils, and there was death in its blaring eyes.
Pilar jumped to her feet and caught Vicente's arm to drag him upright. She whirled to her mare, but the horse sidled, neighing in terror. It took both Pilar and Vicente to hold her steady. She motioned to him to go first. Vicente, recovering at speed under the impetus of necessity, pulled himself into the saddle, then reached down to Pilar. She looked over her shoulder as she was hauled up to the pillion. The bull was so close she could see the brindle hairs of his forelock. She had barely caught Vicente's waist when he swung the mare around and kicked her into a gallop back toward the crest of the rise.
It was too late. The bull slammed into the belly of the mare. The horse screamed. The jarring impact broke Pilar's grasp and sent her hurtling to the ground. She lay for a stunned instant with her cheek pillowed on stinging grass, then she whipped over, scrambling to her knees.
The mare was shrieking as the grunting bull harried her. The smell of blood was in the air, pouring from a gored place in the horse's side. Vicente was still in the saddle, trying to avoid the bull, trying to lead the maddened animal away from where Pilar lay. He threw her a frightened glance. “Run!” he yelled. “Run!”
“No, don't run!” Charro shouted as his horse bore down on her at a hard gallop. He was swinging his braided rope above his head so that an open loop was forming, growing larger. “Don't run! Don't move!”
There was nowhere to run, no shelter that she might reach before the bull could catch her. Pilar stood still, while vivid in her mind was the memory of that moment when she had felt the bull's long horn plunge into the soft belly of the mare like a thick, sharp spear.
Charro's rope whipped through the air. The wide loop settled over the bull's horns and was jerked tight around its neck. Charro gave the rope a swift turn about the horn of his Tejas saddle as his horse jolted to a halt and sat back on its haunches. Vicente, free of the bull, rode the stumbling mare a short distance away, where she crumpled slowly forward and fell onto her side. Vicente jumped free, then whirled to face Charro.
The bull was kicking and huffing and bellowing, fighting the rope while foam dripped from its mouth. The braided rope flapped and snapped taut again and again, twisting with the strain. Charro could not hold the animal for long, that much was plain. What was needed was another horseman, another rope.
The horseman came over the rise, riding fast, leading Vicente's young stallion behind him. It was Refugio. He took in the scene at a glance and swept forward, already loosening the lariat at his own saddle horn.
In that moment the braided rope holding the bull snapped. The end flew back, wrapping around the head of Charro's mount. The horse reared with forefeet pawing the air. The bull staggered back as it was released, then gathered itself and wheeled away from the rearing horse and thundering hoofs of the approaching horseman. Lowering his head, the animal pawed the ground once, twice, then charged straight at Pilar.
Refugio loosed the reins of Vicente's young stallion and swerved away from his brother in the same smooth movement. Riding low, already reaching, he raced toward Pilar.
Man and beast, shoulder to shoulder, they bore down on her as in some fabled contest of right and wrong, carrying with them power and fury. Pilar watched them come and steeled herself to motionlessness while the sun caught gold gleams from the loosened tendrils of her hair and the wind fluttered her skirts like signal flags. The smell of trampled earth and grass, horses and blood, was in the air, and the pure blue of the wildflowers flowed at her feet. Behind her the cows bawled and shifted this way and that. Somewhere, as if from far away, she could hear Charro shouting, his voice cracking with strain.
Then Refugio was there. His arm caught her at the ribs with a grip of iron. She felt the tug as a horn ripped her skirt, then she was hoisted upward. She clung with her fingers clenched in the folds of Refugio's shirt and her face buried against his shoulder. He held her that way for a breathless instant before, merciless in his strength, he dragged her across the saddle in front of him. Controlling his mount with hard hands and rigid thigh muscles, he sent the horse wheeling around, leaping back the way he had come. They were joined by Charro and Vicente, and the four of them hurled themselves up the slope. At the top they looked back. The bull, still trailing the rope, had not stopped running. Gathering his cows, he was harrying them down the plain.
They drew up, letting the horses blow. “You could only have been more welcome just then, my friend,” Charro said, “if you had been Jude, saint of lost causes himself. It was miraculous.”
There was an edge of what might have been resentment or embarrassment to Charro's voice. Refugio's features stilled as he registered it, yet his voice was even as he answered. “There was no miracle. I was riding after you when I found Vicente's horse. Unless Vicente had become a pilgrim, doing penance on foot, it meant trouble.”
“I was thrown,” Vicente explained, “though it was no great matter. But I don't think Pilar's mare can live. Someone should go back and — and put her out of her pain.”
“Someone?” Refugio's gaze was unsympathetic as it rested on his brother.
Vicente's face paled, but he said, “You were speaking of penances, I think? Yes, I will do it.”
“I'll come with you,” Charro said shortly. “I have to fetch our beef anyway.”
They swung their mounts and rode back down toward the plain. Refugio did not move, but held his horse still in the middle of the track. Turning her head to look at him, Pilar found that he was staring sightlessly after his brother and his friend. His face was rigid, the skin drawn tightly over the bones so they stood out in relief. The veins rose in ropelike blue-gray prominence across his hand where he held the reins, though his grasp upon her was now as gentle and cradling as a grandmother holding a newborn.
A shiver ran over her, followed by another, and another. They were beyond her control, the direct result of delayed fear. She closed her eyes for a long instant.
When she opened them again, Refugio was looking down at her. His eyes were shadowed and his mouth held the suggestion of a smile. “The wrong gallant again,” he said.
“I'm not complaining.”
“No, you would never be so impolite.”
“Or so insulting.”
“You can't insult me, my love; it's an impossibility.”
“I could thank you,” she said.
“Oh, yes, any way you please.”
“But you wouldn't care.”
“Do you want me to care?” His voice carried soft doubt.