Mazatzals, remembering a long time ago when he lived with the Indians.
'They don't never call
Now Jack understood the little sack filled with blue grains he had taken from the neck of the Apache killed in the first fight at the Agua Fria, the sack he later hung on the broken lance of the dead man.
'The men folk,' Uncle Roscoe went on, 'are good sewers, do all the sewing for the family. But an Apache is scared to death of his mother-in-law.' He chuckled. 'He won't talk to her or face her if he can help it. I've seen 'em walk a mile out of their way just to sashay around a mother-in-law!'
Cornelia Newton-Barrett's mother, Jack remembered, was also somewhat of an ogress.
'They love to play cards, gamble, run footraces. Mostly they're happy. But when someone dies they set the whole village afire— they live mostly in brush huts—and move away. They don't want to be reminded.'
Jack looked toward the graves, amulets swinging in the wind. He had thought of the Apaches as murderous beasts; certainly they had tried to kill him. It was unsettling to view them as human beings; family men, people who doted on mescal candy and feared a mother-in-law and were in their own way religious.
'They eat horses, too,' Jack was reminded, and looked where old Bonyparts grazed, along with a lame ox and some horses left at the Rancho Terco station under the terms of his recent agreement with Tully and Ochoa. There was a spring wagon, also, that was being towed to Prescott when an axle broke. Eggleston, at a crude forge, was making repairs.
'Horses and mules is a special treat,' Uncle Roscoe agreed. 'They eat sunflower seeds, too, and wild potatoes and berries and rabbits and whatever else comes to hand. They grow a little corn, when folks leaves 'em alone. But now most of 'em has been herded onto the reservations. The rest is being chased from pillar to post. No, times are a-changing for them, 1 guess—' For a moment the old man seemed to doze, then opened his rheumy eyes. 'And for the rest of us old geezers, too, like me and Ike Coogan.'
Times were changing the fastest along the Agua Fria. Rancho Terco was a natural site for a stage stop; midway between Phoenix and the new capital, it began to grow like the tent towns in the gold country of California twenty-five years earlier. Prescott furnished fresh vegetables, lumber, beef cattle, and excellent beer from a new brewery. Phoenix supplied wheat, barley, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, mutton, and wool. It was also an important distribution point where goods and supplies unloaded from the steamers of the Colorado Steam Navigation Company at Yuma could be shipped by wagon to Florence, Tucson, Prescott, and the many mining camps and Army posts.
The merchants of the Territory—Fish and Collingwood, Lord and Williams, Leopoldo Carrillo, Zeckendorf, Tully and Ochoa— maintained fleets of freight wagons that weekly plied the rutted roads with bolts of gingham, lard and sides of bacon, saddles from St. Louis, kegs of bourbon, rum, and brandy, cartridges for the Army, patent medicines. Sometimes the cargo even included barrels of oysters and clams shipped all the way from San Francisco in ice renewed at the new ice-making factory in Yuma. Temporarily balked by the Apache rebellion, the economy now boomed again. But still Agustin sat stubbornly atop the Mazatzals, a brooding threat the Army could not eradicate. From time to time he reminded the Territory of his presence by quick, stinging raids along the river, Jack Drumm's Union Jack carried aloft as a totem.
Though Jack had not yet heard from his brother Andrew, enough money was coming in to keep Rancho Terco viable. Cora, beans, and winter melons flourished under Charlie's care; Eggleston discovered pan-size fish in the river; Uncle Roscoe, recovering from his stroke, found a bed of wild potatoes. 'Dee-lishus!' he cackled. 'All you got to do is fry 'em, peel and all, with a little wild onion!' Roscoe found the wild onions, also, and they feasted on fresh new potatoes. But the mealy taste made Jack think of Clarendon Hall. He and Andrew used to filch potatoes from the kitchen to roast at their secret hiding place in the depths of the forest behind the house. Unwillingly, he found himself thinking also of Cornelia Newton-Barrett. What must she think of him? When last he wrote Andrew he had neglected even to mention Cornelia in his letter, to speak of his intention toward her, his anticipation of seeing her soon. Guilty, he found a stub of candle and started to write:
I think of you so often and of the times we were together.
He struck that out; it was not true. Really, he had not thought of Cornelia for a long time. Starting again, he wrote:
Do you remember the time we were alone together in the great hall, sitting by the fire? The hour was well after midnight, and the house very still. You—
The pen, corroded from disuse, scratched into the paper and blotted. He tore up the letter and started another, but found himself staring moodily into the flame of the candle. Cornelia had been in nightclothes; a filmy gown that shimmered in the firelight lay lightly on her thigh yet molded itself silkily to the rounding curve of flesh. Cornelia's hair was long and blond, falling around her shoulders in cascading ringlets that—that—
Eyes half closed, he frowned. Cornelia's hair was blond, certainly, but in his vision something had changed. He narrowed his eyes further, insistent on retaining the misty image. This woman's hair was red, a titian red that caught the flames, made a halo around her pale face with its blue eyes. Blue eyes? Cornelia's eyes were brown, a melting brown like those of a good setter, but the eyes in his dream were blue—remarkable cerulean blue, soft lashes overarched by delicate brows.
'Phoebe!' he blurted. 'Phoebe Larkin!'
Wadding up the half-finished letter, he threw it angrily from him. How dare she? Phoebe, he meant—not Cornelia. Reaching for the pen, he tried another start. That did not work out either.
Ashamed and repentant, he stalked out and sat for a long time in the moonlight, smoking one of Fish and Collingwood's 'stogies,' as they were called—five cents apiece, and hardly of Cuban quality. His thoughts were confused. Relieved of the glow from the treacherous candle, his eyes finally became accustomed to the dark. In the gloaming he could just make out the great purple bulk of the Mazatzals. The wound on his cheek itched, and he scratched it gently. Agustin was up there, in the Mazatzals. From the corner of his eye he saw a spark of light on the mountain; it glimmered briefly, then disappeared. Agustin? An Apache campfire? He did not know. But somewhere, sometime, he and Agustin would meet again; he knew it in his bones, in his being, in the wound on his cheek and the newer one in his shoulder.
Early one morning, leaving the defense of the ranch to Eggleston, Uncle Roscoe, and the Papago, Jack Drumm hitched Bonyparts to the repaired spring wagon and drove to Prescott for supplies. Not only for supplies was the trip necessary, but he remembered Jake the teamster's comment about the land along the river as potentially valuable property. He did not know the procedures involved but intended to visit the Land Office and make inquiry.
It was a December day, breezy, the desert wind soft and warm. Wrens trilled in the cactus, a few of the ocotillo retained red-tipped branches from bloom of the previous summer, and the sky teemed with snowy caravels of cloud. Jack had a good baritone voice. He began to sing an old ballad he remembered from his father. It was called 'The Girdle'; a hymn to a lady's belt. Lord Fifield, in his early days, had been somewhat of a rover. Basking in the sunshine while Bonyparts plodded ahead toward distant Prescott, Jack recalled the final words:
A narrow compass, and yet there dwelt All that's good and all that's fair. Give me but what this ribbon bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round!
Feeling content, he lolled on the seat. For the first time in a long while he had a feeling of satisfaction, of accomplishment. In that assurance he allowed his thoughts to wander. Phoebe Larkin's waist had a narrow compass, indeed. Her hips were full and rich, nipped at the waist by a circumference that must be no more than twenty-odd inches.
