THE DRASTIC DRAGON
OF DRACO, TEXAS
or
V. Lovelace's Guide to the Wild “West”
by
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
THE DRASTIC DRACON OF DRACO. TEXAS,
Original Copyright © June, 1986 by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Published by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Smashwords Edition
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All rights reserved
Copyright © September, 2010, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Cover Art Copyright © 2010, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Gypsy Shadow Publishing
Manchaca, TX
www.gypsyshadow.com
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DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is for the people who gave me a love for western story telling—Grandma Gladys Scarborough, my Dad, Don Scarborough, and my friend, Allen Damron. Also for the memory of my cowboy Grandpa E.W. Scarborough, Great Uncle Hap Scarborough, who roamed Oklahoma with Quanah Parker’s kids, Great Aunt Virginia, who loved beadwork and Navajo silver, and Great Uncle Noah Piersee on my mother’s side, who introduced me to Marty Robbins and Zane Grey.
In addition I have to thank about half of the folk music and fantasy-loving element in Texas for their help in researching this book. Allen Damron, Mack Partain, Art Eatman, Bennie and Danna Garcia, Rittie Ward, Tom Knowles, Warren Norwood, Lillian Stewart Carl, Sue D’Artez and Tim and Marian Henderson for rides, lectures, inspiration, reference material, and in Bennie Garcia’s case, a family tree of Spanish names. Also particular thanks to Elena (Wuggins) Damron for playing dragon real estate lady and helping me find various places in the Big Bend where my characters would feel at home. Grateful acknowledgment to the Third Annual Cookie Chill-Off staff at Terlingua, Texas, and Uncle Joe, the Panhandle Plains Museum, and the staff at the Lajitas Museum and Desert Gardens. Anyone wanting the real folklore of the Big Bend should consult, among others, the writings of J. Frank Dobie, whose Tongues of the Monte was of tremendous assistance, and those of W. D. Smithers, to whom I am indebted for the contents and results of Mariquilla’s burn cure, though to the best of my knowledge Mr. Smithers never had the opportunity to test the concoction to the extent that my characters did. Folk tales of the Big Bend were gleaned from several accounts, including Tales of the Big Bend by Elton Miles. Thanks also to Professor John Whitehead and Professor Carol Gold of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for their assistance in researching the lives of western women. And last but not least, many thanks to Lillian Hassler, Robin Russell, and Jerry Steen for taking the time to listen to the story in progress.
Chapter 1
Paladins of the Prairie may very well exist on the prairie, but they have clearly drawn the line at carrying the Code of the West into the Texas desert. I know for a fact that muleskinners bear no resemblance whatsoever to either Saint George or to any of those other gallant knights who traipsed about rescuing damsels in distress. When I was abducted by wild Indians and subsequently menaced by a dragon, none of the fifty teamsters with whom I was traveling lifted a finger to rescue me.
Of course, forty-nine of them weren’t aware I needed rescuing, since the wagon in which I was riding had bogged down behind the others just before midday siesta and of course the mules had to be rested before we were dislodged and reunited with the rest of the train.
Not that my traveling companions were being intentionally neglectful. They were simply more accustomed to dealing with mules than with ladies. Had it occurred to them that I might be in some danger, one of them would undoubtedly have insisted that I join a wagon further up the trail in a more protected position. But, as usual, they were so intent upon their own routine they forgot me. I believe that they did so not so much because I am unmemorable as because my presence presented them with something of a dilemma. A frontiersman curses in front of a lady only at peril to his life and immortal soul. Unfortunately, cursing is an absolute requirement in the practice of the mule-skinning profession.
Since my objective was to sample the true flavor of the Wild West, I willingly accommodated myself to this benign neglect. Though but three days away from the cavalry outpost, I had already grown accustomed to the teamsters’ priorities. First animals, then equipment, and then people were tended to. When I inquired of Mr. Jones, the driver of my wagon, what might be a human ailment sufficiently severe to halt the caravan, he gave the various personal insects inhabiting his chin whiskers an affectionate scratch and replied, “Oh, I don’t know, ma’am. Indians—though there ain’t been that many bad raids since the menfolk got back from the War. But if there was, we’d stop, I reckon. Indians steal mules. And mebbe a panther”—(he said “painter”)—“that’d be bad for the mules too. But strictly human—I don’t know, a bullet in the belly maybe, ‘specially if a fella was bleedin’ real messy.”
I remained skeptical about the negligibility of the dangers of the despoblado, the great Texas desert. The cavalry wives at Fort Davis were also less blasé than the muleskinners, especially regarding Indians. The tenth night I stayed at the fort, a minor earthquake shook the ground. While the men ran to their soldierly duties and the comfort of their horses, the women clustered together in one room and talked of how the earthquake had to be a sign from God that no decent person should live out here among the heathen, after which the conversation degenerated into morbidly grisly and graphic descriptions of past Indian raids.
Current style dictates that I should claim I was gathering wildflowers or something equally genteelly frivolous when the Indians captured me. Nonsense. I had awakened from my siesta half-melted despite the shade of the wagon above me, nauseated by the stench of mules and Mr. Jones and, by now, myself, begrimed and annoyed to have to stray from my nest even as far as the closest cactus large enough to provide a modest concealment.
I scanned the ground for snakes, not wildflowers, of which there are none in the middle of the desert in late September. Finishing my necessary errand behind the only sort of greenery around—the prickly kind—I stood, adjusted my skirts, and was about to return to the wagon when I saw the Indians.
I cannot report that I was instantly terrified. My first instinct was to shoo them away. There were only three of them, riding around our disabled wagon, poking through the canvas, and pawing through the contents. Earlier in my journeys I had encountered several members of the pacified tribes around Tombstone and Santa Fe, folk with a distressing penchant for examining other people’s property and begging a portion of it, when possible. My brain was still so befuddled with sleep and heat that I failed to make the distinction between those curiosity-seekers and the three painted, armed, and mounted warriors before me.
Therefore, I felt less alarm than vexation at Mr. Jones for being remiss about guarding his cargo. I fancied he was still enjoying his afternoon nap beneath the wagon. Though several hours past noon, the day was still far too hot to travel. At least for civilized folk. The Indians didn’t seem to mind, having adjusted themselves to the climate by wearing very little but scraps of skin, beads, and eagle feathers.
While I was fuming over Mr. Jones’s supposed laziness and contemplating native haberdashery, one of the braves rounded the wagon and spotted me. Those who fancy that Indians have no sense of humor should have seen the delighted grin on his face as he galloped his horse straight toward me. I had never heard of Indians killing victims by simply trampling them, but evidence seemed immediately forthcoming.
I would like to testify that it is not necessarily one’s life that flashes before one when death seems imminent. I saw nothing of my previous pallid existence. Neither my childhood nor the most stimulating of the duties I performed while ensuring that our newspaper functioned when my father did not intruded on my consciousness at that time. What I saw were the gruesome mental pictures my fertile brain had conceived while the cavalry wives were scaring each other silly with the histories of literally hair-raising Indian savagery.
I stood frozen for a moment, then flung myself down to one side, twisting to avoid a nasty patch of Spanish dagger. The grinning savage scooped me up beside him, clasping his hand over my mouth so that I could not scream and alert the wagons in the mule train preceding us.
My middle did not take kindly to being scooped. The air went out of me and my limbs flailed so that I bore some resemblance to a landed fish as I was hauled onto the horse. I squirmed in my captor’s grasp enough to straddle the animal, backwards, as it turned out, my seat facing the horse’s neck, my face buried in the Indian’s breathtaking chest, which reeked of rancid something or other and dead something else besides the natural odor of a very active man on a very warm day.
My new position amused the Indian further, for he now could gag and strangle me at the same time simply by holding my face against him with the crook of one arm. Only my eyes were free to stare across his shoulder as he and his fellows plundered the packs, extracted as many as they could carry of the whiskey bottles comprising a large portion of our cargo, and galloped back into the desert. As I was spirited away I saw the craven Mr. Jones, who had saved his own neck by feigning his absence while huddled between the wagon wheels. Now he peered out from beneath the wagon, his mouth working silently. I almost forgave him, knowing that I probably would have hidden too. As soon as we were far enough away that he could run to the other wagons, I prayed that he would engineer my rescue in time to save me from death and whatever it was that was supposed to be worse.
Meanwhile, of course, I had this splendid opportunity to apply my ability as a trained journalist and learn all I could of Indian ways.
Sad to say, the only Indian ways I was able to observe from my unusual vantage point were entirely too similar to the white men’s ways with which I was already more familiar than I wished to be. My captors broke the necks of the whiskey bottles on convenient boulders and proceeded to get very drunk.
My riding companion prodded me in what he seemed to feel was a jocular manner, and sloshed whiskey over my head. As he made laughing comments to his fellows in what must have been a highly slurred version of his native language, the cowardly part of me was grateful for two things. One was that my hair is of a nondescript dark brown of no particular beauty or luxuriance. The other was that I am not versed in the Indian languages. The little bit of Chinese that our printer, Wy Mi, imparted with his native myths of fox women and wind dragons and the wee bit of Gaelic sung to me by my father while in his cups is the sum of my linguistic expertise. I could not understand a single word that passed between my captors but I had the clearest impression that I would not like what was being said. This was no time for an interview.
The drunker my captor became, the funnier he seemed to consider his antics, and he refined them a bit, carefully smothering me in his armpit before pulling my head back by the hair and pouring whiskey across my face, then repeating the process. Although I am as a rule a teetotaler, I used part of my gasping breath to lick in the whiskey, reckoning it would make the experiences to come easier to endure by dulling the sharp edge of my perception.
The other braves began remonstrating with him about wasting the whiskey, I suppose, and rode in close to pinch and pull at me. For the first half-hour or so I listened for hoof beats behind us, but heard none. After that, we passed by means of a shallow cavern hidden behind some brush through what looked like a sheer cliff face. I stopped listening and tried to remember what James Fenimore Cooper had written of the noble savage. My captors did not look especially noble. They were squat, with round faces, eyes a little glazed, and mouths wet and slack from drink. When they looked at each other their expressions were little more fearsome than those of any group of drunken miners just in from the creeks. When they looked at me, they seemed to be doing their best to scare the wits out of me. They did an excellent job, but I couldn’t think what would be the best way to respond. Some stories indicated that because Indians prized courage, they would prolong tormenting a cowardly prisoner just to hear him (or, lamentably, her) scream. Other stories claimed that because Indians prized courage, they would increase the nastiness of the torture until the prisoner, no matter how stalwart, did finally scream. As I was rather short of breath at the moment, I decided to save my screams for later.
Sunset is no gradual affair in the despoblado. One moment the sun was hovering on the horizon, the next it sank with an almost audible clunk behind the mountains. The thumbnail moon rose just as quickly, popping up ahead of us. Its light was frequently obscured by flying tatters of clouds, so we rode in relative darkness down the steeply winding pass, hugging a cliffside beneath a rocky overhang. Seven out of ten whiskey bottles were now emptied and tossed aside. So much for wily trail covering. If those fool muleskinners ever got past that false wall and failed to follow this trail, they should move to Philadelphia and take up garbage collecting.
Something sharp struck my knee. I jumped, suddenly afraid the other braves had now resorted to knives. But they were nowhere near me. They rode ahead of us, slightly swaying on the naked backs of their horses as the shoeless hooves quietly plopped on the sand between the boulders. More sharp things fell then, spattering all of us, and above us something trembled, rumbling. Another earthquake, I thought, as first dirt and small rocks, then larger stones showered down. My brave dug his moccasined heels into his horse’s flanks and we sprinted the others trying to outrun the slide struck him. My captor stopped and clung against the wall. Overhead, something else roared. Not rocks this time. Something with a voice that was at once a cry, a howl, and a hiss. An animal, but what animal? A panther? Perhaps the rocks magnified the sound, but even accounting for that, it had to be a very large panther.
A very large fire-breathing panther with wings, I thought, stupidly trying to assemble my first surmise with the new information that rapidly assembled as a great winged shape outlined in glowing mist swooped toward us. Eyes as big as croquet balls burned no less brightly than the bloom of intense green fire licking toward us from its gaping maw.
I screamed, but I was the only one facing the apparition. My captors had their faces inward, toward the cliff. When I shrieked, the brave who held me turned and stared straight into the monster’s unblinking eyes. The vein in his throat throbbed against the top of my head for exactly three heartbeats before the green fire flared upward like a shooting star reversing its course and the dragon vanished over the rim of the cliff wall. A final spattering of stones curtained its flight.
My captor’s arms hung slackly around me as his companions trotted cautiously out onto the trail. One of them prodded a dark heap with his rifle barrel. Something glistened briefly, and against the dark gray night a paler gray wisp of smoke wafted, bearing the stench of burned, rotten meat.
The brave holding me called to his brethren, his voice a weak but urgent grunt. They stared silently back at him, their eyes reflecting the sickle moon and flickering from me to each other. He in turn stared from them to me with what I can only describe as horrified awe and attempted to slide backward on the horse in an effort to put as much distance between us as possible. The horse pranced sideways, sniffing skittishly at the putrid odor pervading the night. In its prancing it stumbled into the thing the beast had thrown down before us like a gauntlet, the dismembered midsection of an animal of some sort—a steer or a horse—the front legs and head, the back legs and tail missing, the raw ends streaming half-bleeding, half-cauterized mess on each side. The stumbling pony screamed and reared, scrambled away from the carrion. My companion, his grip loosened by drink and terror, slipped and would have unseated us both had I not caught him.
One of his fellows grabbed our mount’s mane and urged the horse forward until we were well past the smoking carcass. Beyond sight and smell of it, and with many glances back in its direction, the two of them wrestled me down from the pony and thrust me up behind their friend, tying my wrists around his chest and to the horse’s neck. They took one last drink from the whiskey bottles, then deliberately threw them away. With a jerk on the rope, the shorter and calmer of the two warriors tugged us forward. Once on flat ground again, he pulled us behind them at a dead run.
I clung for dear life to the warrior and the horse, slippery with our mutual perspiration. Now I feared my ultimate fate far less desperately than I feared to lose my grip and fall dangling between the hooves, to tear my head and upper body on the cacti flashing past us at such an alarming speed. Exhaustion soon pierced my limbs with jabbing pains. My whole skull throbbed with the bounce and pound of hoof beats. The horse’s ragged breath blended with the wind of its passing into one continuous roar. Tears flew from my burning eyes and my mind grew numb as the part of me that thought, felt, and feared was outdistanced by the headlong dash of my body. The arroyos yawning and contracting beneath me, the thorned arms of cacti outstretched, and all the perils of the treacherous trail snaking through the jagged hills blurred into random dapples, solid shadow, blinding moonlight, and, gloriously, a thousand points of light that I saw were the stars glittering just beyond my wingtips.
The roaring subsides into sweet peace as the layers of desert horizon stretch deep purple to black. Far below, three of the animals the Spaniards introduced to this desolate northern corner of our domain crawl across the desert floor, falling behind us as they run with their human burdens to do our bidding. Now the inhabitants will realize that the pattern of their lives needs order, their violence constructive direction. We disapprove of random raiding. Our own raids at this time are deliberate and necessary. Our sleep has been long and we are weak. Also, we have a mission, a prayer to answer at the behest of the supplicant who has awakened us from our long sleep. We are not normally a glutton but from time immemorial there has been but one way to demonstrate to the presumptuous kings of earth the error of their ways, and that is to eat them out of castle and kingdom.
I revived from my shock-induced dream hungry enough to eat a horse, or a whole herd of them. The one upon which I was riding walked a few halting steps inside a huge cottonwood gate and stopped on the packed earthen floor of a corral surrounded by a vast adobe compound. A grizzled man in a sombrero and proper trousers loped forward, motioning to two armed Mexican men who pointed rifles at the Indians. Then the grizzled man and the Indians argued while my poor mount sank slowly and exhaustedly to its knees, dumping the brave to whom I was bound forward over its neck. I too began to fall, but I never quite felt myself land. I am grateful that only strangers witnessed that ignominious entrance into the heart of the wild west, that Papa was not there to see his daughter, the dauntless would-be frontierswoman, swoon. He would have died laughing.
Chapter 2
Even before I opened my eyes, the condition of my backside assisted me in sorting reality from dream. The part about riding a horse all night strapped to an unconscious Indian, which should certainly have been a nightmare, was decidedly real, as the evidence of my stinging saddle sores clearly testified. The part about flying through the air in control of all I (we?) surveyed had been nothing but a sanity-saving figment of my imagination. Regarding the part about seeing a dragon, my saddle sores were stubbornly silent and my mind skipped skittishly past. Perhaps I had absorbed more whiskey through my skin than I realized. Perhaps I had been in a state of shock. Yes. Almost certainly I had been. Never mind that I distinctly recalled every detail of seeing the winged fire-breathing creature and that I have a very good memory. The unlikelihood of my having done so at that time seemed to preclude the possibility that I had. So I ignored the whole matter and began reorienting myself. It was a daunting process. Lying on my side with my limbs scissored into the only comfortable position I could find, I reflected sadly that my new career as a chronicler of the romance of the western frontier did not seem to be beginning auspiciously.
I could not honestly say, however, as do the characters in some popular novels, that had I but known of the dangers awaiting me I would have arranged my affairs any differently. I knew well when I embarked upon my flight from San Francisco that the raw wildernesses lying between California and the Mississippi River were filled with natural and manmade catastrophes, bloodthirsty savages, and uncouth desperados.
My father’s financée, Mrs. Higgenbotham, was very fond of telling me of the hardships and horrors of her trip west with the late Mr. Higgenbotham and never tired of pointing out that only her stern adherence to Virtue and her Moral Standards had seen her through. “Pelagia,” she would say, “I see from that smirk on your face that you doubt me, but when Mr. Harper and I are married you shall learn the value of Christian charity and moral virtue or you’ll find yourself out on the streets, my girl.” Mr. Higgenbotham apparently had been less virtuous and moral than his wife since he failed to survive their journey. He had, however, been very wealthy, thus the widow Hig’s attraction for my father, who had for some years been on the verge of drinking away our livelihood.
Papa did it charmingly enough that Mrs. Higgenbotham had thus far failed to discern the source of the moral deterioration she sniffed around our newspaper office. She assumed that source was I, and took it upon herself to correct my sinful ways. To this end she regaled me with cautionary tales plucked from her own bitter experiences—all of which had been caused by the carelessness and moral turpitude of others. The more she talked, the more she inflamed my desire to be punished for my sins by having a few adventures myself. Whatever Mrs. Hig was against, I was pretty sure I’d find agreeable.
The journalism trade was getting less attractive all the time as her presence around the office became more pervasive. I took to closeting myself with penny dreadfuls and decided I could write one just as well as Mr. Buntline and all I needed were a few lurid experiences to fill in where my imagination failed me.
Thus when at last I set out, I expected, even hoped, to encounter hostile Indians, prairie fires, runaway horses, stampeding cattle, bandits, perhaps a touch of cholera, which I would, of course, survive while valiantly nursing others through. On a more mundane level not nearly so attractive as wild Indians but nonetheless necessary to attain the requisite amount of local color, I anticipated meeting a few reptiles. I had in mind loathsome lizards and hissing snakes, which I would endure bravely. Encountering something on the scale (if you’ll pardon the expression) of the creature of the night before was far beyond the bounds of even Mrs. Higgenbotham’s cautionary tales. I firmly directed my mind away from that topic, disciplining myself to adhere to the journalist’s litany of the “where, when, why, who, how,” and most of all the “what” that had brought me to this desolate country.
I was born of originally poor but honest parents, but as soon as my mother died, when I was about six years of age, that all changed. My father began drinking, which contributed little to his character but much to the floridity of his prose and thus to the popularity of the newspaper he and my mother had published together. No longer bound by my stolid Cornish mother’s ethics and her inhibiting adherence to truth that had formerly cramped his literary style, Father found new freedom to express his natural Irish aptitude for embellishment of lackluster facts and events.
Little wonder, then, that I had less taste for straight reporting and more of a mind to try my hand at the sensational frontier chronicles that had made Mr. Buntline rich and famous. That sort of story was not so very different, after all, from my father’s heavily varnished truth. And I had always loved tales of distant places and strange customs.
I spent hours listening to the printer, Wy Mi, telling of his homeland and the stories people told there. I picked up a few words in the Chinese tongue in this fashion, since Wy Mi, seldom soberer than my father, tended to forget himself when especially deep in story or bottle. He frequently attempted to deliver his homilies on proper attitudes in dealing with pesky girl-children (he favored exposure to the elements at birth) in his native tongue.
I received my education in female matters from another source. My father’s seemingly unceasing supply of what may be loosely referred to as lady companions often assumed the appearance of motherliness toward me to impress my parent. The few of these female persons who were actually ladies were my least favorites. They prodded me into church, attempted to wean me from the mug from which I preferred to drink my tea and replace that sturdy vessel with dainty china cups whose handles were not large enough to accommodate one’s pinky finger. They sometimes went so far as to try to dress me in the prevailing confining fashion. Overall, I much preferred Papa’s more flamboyant friends. The incomparable Sasha Divine, a star of the local opera house, was a particular idol of mine. She wore a lot of curls and a great many jewels, furs, and ruffles and her sweetness and light were so fleeting that I felt no need to take serious notice of them. Her example provided me with the only practical instruction I received from any of my father’s conquests. She served as my inspiration when I needed to cajole, persuade, bully, flatter, and dicker with the rugged males to be found in abundance in the wild frontier. Dealing with them was essential if I was to go where I wished and acquire other necessary services for personal survival and comfort. Though I did not possess Sasha’s beauty, my imitation of her graces stood me in far better stead than my own oft-lamented straightforwardness, which had seldom been successful at winning me more than grudging cooperation. With great interest I studied Sasha’s manipulative techniques, with great glee I employed them, and with great amazement I observed how often even the most transparent ruses enjoyed the most astounding success.
Still, charm can do only so much to improve what are essentially limited circumstances.
The sooty and deafening train ride from San Francisco was soothing compared to the bone-jarring mail coach I commandeered in Santa Fe. Santa Fe was my original destination, and I wandered around for a day or two hoping to run into Kit Carson or at least hear from someone who had news of Billy the Kid. I was disappointed, however, and felt increasingly restless as I strolled through the colorful but well-populated plaza. Though more isolated than San Francisco, Santa Fe seemed to me far more civilized than what I had in mind. It had already been written of exhaustively. I wanted territory of my own. Something new and original, more desolate and dangerous than anything described by others. The luck of the Irish, or perhaps the Cornish, was with me. On my third day at the hotel, just when I was despairing over theí inroads the cost of my lodgings was making in my research fund, I overheard the desk clerk commiserating with the driver of a mail coach. The men were discussing the rugged trip the driver was about to embark upon to deliver the mail to a cavalry post in what the men referred to as the despoblado.
“Ought to just let the Indians have it,” the mail driver grumbled. “Nothin’ but snakes, rocks, and grease-wood out there anyway.”
“S,” the clerk agreed. “As you say, nothing but those things and the Indians and bandidos. Unless you count the comancheros. My uncle, he used to be a comanchero in the old days, but now he says the new ones, since the wars, are worse than the Indians and the bandits combined. Comanche over in Tejas stole my cousin’s wife’s sister, you know? Our whole family ate our tortillas with no frijoles for a year to ransom her from the comancheros. Otherwise, they would have let the Indians keep her. And then, my cousin says she is not much good now anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I know what you mean. It’s a shame when those bastards get rich off other folks’ grief. Still, I suppose a man’s gotta make a livin’, and out there when it’s too dry to run cattle, tradin’ with the Indians beats farmin’ cactus. And havin’ a few of ‘em out there like that Drake character at least gives the mule trains a fifty-fifty chance of makin’ it through to San Antone.”
That was my cue. The despoblado sounded exciting enough and wild enough to provide me with an entire series of thrillers. I would have an exclusive. I began to wonder whether one of my father’s competitors wouldn’t pay dearly to run a serial. “Excuse me, sir,” I said with just a hint of tremor in my voice. “Did you say San Antonio? I am trying desperately to find my way there. It’s my mother, you see. She’s very ill . . . ”
By the time we arrived at Fort Davis any fears I had entertained that some other author would infringe upon my exclusive right to explore my chosen territory evaporated, both literally and figuratively. No one else was likely to brave the appalling heat. And the country was so sparsely settled that the most imaginative writer would have difficulty finding someone to tell a story about. The landscape is stark as a beggar’s plate, although I suppose if one is in a positive and charitable frame of mind, it could be described as dramatic. Bare mountains fold up from the desert floor, shading from tawniness to gray and mauve at the skyline. Hills bulge out of nowhere, their slopes strewn with great boulders. Cliffs built of thin slices of stacked rock permit passage into sheltering canyons. The dust and sand give way suddenly to arroyos deep enough to hide livestock. The gray-gold land with its yucca and barrel cactus, its greasewood and prickly pear, has a whiskery appearance, like a man gone three days without a shave.
The two weeks I spent at the cavalry post waiting for the mule train to San Antonio were interminable. I told the commanding officer about my ailing mother and added that I intended to find a teaching position to support us both while I cared for her. I was hoping for some offer of employment, writing letters home for the troops, perhaps. I reckoned without taking into account the impact of my newfound feminine charm, much enhanced by the scarcity of other females.
Immediately several of the single cavalry personnel attempted to persuade me to remain, with un-alluring offers of marriage. I received other sorts of proposals from a few of the married personnel as well. So for three weeks I dodged suitors, studied cacti, doodled in my notebook, and listened to the talk of the half-dozen wives in residence. The women wore a pinched and put-upon look as uniform as the blue suits of their husbands. Though at least two of them were younger than I was, they were careworn and nervous and yelled at their children a great deal, trying to prevent the poor little things from various enterprises devised by childish minds to make life more interesting.
Initially, the ladies had been friendly and curious about my trip, but when my imagination eventually failed to provide me with suitable story about my fictional past, I lapsed into silence and soon they reverted to talking among themselves. Their conversations consisted mainly of babies and shortages and a hushed sprinkling of atrocity stories.
It was unclear to me who they considered to be responsible for the most atrocities in their lives, the Indians or the army. Or perhaps the commanding officer’s lady, when she wasn’t present. I welcomed the frightening diversion of the earthquake for I feared I would succumb to madness before the mule train at last arrived.
I was beginning to wonder now if it hadn’t been too late after all. Certainly I was not the self I had imagined myself to be when I left San Francisco. I was a total failure as an Indian captive. I had not fought bravely when captured, nor resisted even mild torment with any degree of spunk. Furthermore, upon finding myself spared all but inconvenience by a fictional hero’s standards, I dreamed up outlandish creatures more suitable to opium hallucinations than to proper western adventures. Now I, the heroine who had so intrepidly set forth to learn all she could of this allegedly thrilling country, was loathing the thought of opening my eyes to see what fate held in store for me. Partly my reluctance was to move any part of my person, since that portion that had been intimately connected with the horse burned me ferociously.
Shame pried open one eye. Since it was the one pressed against the straw mattress, I saw very little, so I had to open the other as well. I lay on a proper bed in a small dim room with white walls and a built-in fireplace. A stiff hand-woven blanket of blue and brown stripes covered me to the waist. High overhead stretched a ceiling of cottonwood timbers with shingles layered in a chevron pattern across them. Very fancy. The window bore a lattice of wooden bars, which cast ominous shadows across my bed.
Before I could make any further discoveries the door banged open, a swath of pure hot sunlight blinding me so that I closed my eyes again. When I opened them, I was trapped in the keen scrutiny of a short Mexican woman wearing a gray-gilded black braid, silver hoop earrings, and a voluminous black-fringed shawl. Only the corn shuck cigar dangling from the corner of her mouth contradicted the impression her bearing and expression gave that she was a member of the not-so-minor nobility.
“Ah, so you live,” she announced, though I couldn’t tell whether or not she was pleased about it. “But you are dry from the desert, no? Drink.” She extended a netted gourd plugged with a small piece of corncob, which she removed. I obeyed her with alacrity.
“Bueno,” she said, and that was all, for I accidentally leaned back and touched the wall. The pain made my eyes swim and my gorge rise. She was as swift as a foreclosing banker in whipping forth a tin pail with which she intercepted my illness.
“Sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth and feeling more than a little mortified. She set the pail outside the door.
“De nada.”
“Pardon?”
“It is nothing.”
“Thank you so much. You’ve been so very kind. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
“Roll over,” she commanded.
“Eh?”
“Roll over. I have here a remedy for your incapacity to repay your debt, but you must roll over so I can apply it.”
She produced a small earthenware jar of rancid-smelling salve that I eyed dubiously. She puffed her cigar twice without lifting her hand to it or removing it from her mouth. I decided anyone who could do that was competent enough to tend my backside, so I rolled over.
“Since we’re on such personal terms already,” I said, lifting my skirt, “I suppose introductions are in order. I presume you’re the lady of the house?”
Her fingers stopped halfway between her jar and me, and she hastily removed the cigar from her mouth before she choked on it. “No, not I,” she answered, her voice still a bit hoarse from the smoke she had accidentally swallowed. “I am Mariquilla. I am the cook and curandera and am far more importante to el patron than my poor Doña Seferina ever was, for I am also his cigarrera.”
“His what?”
“I make his cigars. And you, señorita, what do you do? I suppose you are a fine lady who knows only a few embroidery stitches?”
Her fingers moved in smooth circular motions and everywhere they touched, the burning miraculously subsided.
“Hardly,” I answered, so relieved I was feeling quite relaxed and chatty. “I was never any good at sewing of any kind.”
“You cook then?” She sounded hopeful.
“No. Not much.” My father was far fonder of drinking than eating any day, and Wy Mi’s sister not only supplied laundry service but also sent over meals large enough for all of us. She’d begun the custom when I was too small to cook and continued to do so as I grew older and became too preoccupied with chasing stories and subscribers to learn.
“You must have a very rich husband,” she said.
“Not at all. I am a writer,” I informed her with all the dignity I could muster in such an undignified position. “I am composing a novel about the West. And I must say, you certainly have a wealth of material here. I saw something very strange I was wondering if you—”
“Ayi!” she said, sounding far more impressed than I expected or intended. She flipped my skirt back down with the reverence due my exalted person.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, no, señorita. But Don Francisco must meet you immediately. He asked that I heal you in order that you might work off your bond—”
“My bond?”
“St, señorita. For the three horses El Caballerango paid los inclios for you. An outrageous price.”
“Handling charges,” I told her. “The Indians ruined their mounts in their haste to rid themselves of me. After we saw the strange thing I mentioned.”
Her left eyebrow climbed toward her widow’s peak, and she took three deep puffs on her cigar. She looked as if she wanted to say more, but instead re-plugged her salve jar and buried it somewhere in the depths of her shawl. “More and more I think you are one el patron must speak with himself, señorita,” she said, and departed.
* * *
“Now, then, little lady, Mariquilla says you’re somethin’ pretty special,” the patron said as he entered my room. When both my eyes and his adjusted to the light, I could see from his expression that my appearance did not persuade him to share his cook’s opinion.
His appearance, on the other hand, certainly impressed me. He was the embodiment of the western hero I had imagined—tall, his stance easy and graceful, his voice deep and softened with an ear-caressing drawl. Like the man in the corral, he wore a wide Mexican sombrero which he pushed back until it hung against the back of his neck, secured by a thong. The eyes that assessed me were pale and surrounded by leathery tanned squint lines. A ring of golden sunlight haloed the crown of his sandy-blond hair, making him look for a moment like a particularly shrewd archangel trying to decide what to do with a troublesome sinner. A Mexican archangel, with flattened silver coins trimming his trousers.
“I . . . I beg your pardon?” I said rather stupidly. I was too preoccupied with memorizing the details of his entrance to be sure how to answer his opening remarks.
He stuck out his hand. “I just came to welcome you to Fort Draco. I’m Frank Drake. I own this place.”
“Drake?” I asked. “The comanchero Drake the men in Santa Fe were talking about?” What luck! A real live comanchero suited my purposes much better than an archangel.
“Indian trader, ma’am,” he corrected me stiffly.
“Oh, of course,” I said. “But . . . er . . . is that the same thing?”
“Some folks are too narrow-minded to see that all of us need to get along out here. They object to some of us doin’ business with our Indian brothers. They slap that name on us to make it sound like we’re just a little worse than the Comanche, when all we’re doin’ is makin’ a livin.”
“I do beg your pardon. But it sounded like such a romantic term to me that I immediately latched onto it and hoped to use it in my novel.”
“Then it’s true? Mariquilla didn’t get it mixed up? You really do write books?” His grin was so delighted that had I been illiterate I would have been tempted to say ‘yes’ anyway. “Don’t that beat all. I sure am glad you said somethin’. I never would have taken you for a lady author.”
“Nevertheless, I am. I was researching a book on the American West in the style of Ned Buntline when the Indians captured me.”
“You know the celebrated Mr. Buntline?” he asked, and slapped his knee with his fist. “Why, I’ve read everything Mr. Buntline ever wrote. I s’pect I didn’t realize who you were because I don’t read all that many lady authors, though I have a fine library with books and rare papers from both sides of the border—”
“Perfectly all right, Mr. Drake. I didn’t realize who you are because I’ve read so little about men engaged in slave trade with the Indians—”
“Whoa there, little lady. You’ve got me wrong. ‘Course you haven’t read anything about men like me. For a start, there aren’t all that many. Besides that, Mr. Buntline, fine writer that he is, doesn’t seem to think a man is a hero unless he’s shootin’ off a gun or his mouth, neither of which is a good way to live very long around here. I am not a slave trader. I buy folks from the Indians, that’s true, just like I bought you, to save ‘em from what my redskin customers might dream up for ‘em. But as far as sellin’ anybody goes, the only thing I do is try to get in touch with their relatives and ask ‘em to reimburse me for the money I spent rescuin’ their kinfolks and a little extra to pay for the food and lodgin’ I provide while I’m waitin’ for my guests to get themselves collected. I’d do it all out of the goodness of my heart, you understand, but I’m a businessman and this spread takes a heap o’ wampum to run. As a matter of fact, if you’ll be so kind as to tell me who I have the pleasure and honor of addressin’ and where I might reach your folks, I’ll try to get you back to civilization as soon as possible.”
Not if I could help it, he wouldn’t. I had not traveled so far and endured so much to be shipped home again. And though Papa ordinarily would never have been able to ransom so much as a watch chain from a pawnshop, I was pretty sure Mrs. Hig would buy me back just to spite me.
“That’s very considerate of you, Mr. Drake,” I said with my best Sasha Divine flutter, “but this is civilization enough for me. Your explanation of your mission here among the heathen of the desert fascinates me. In fact, several aspects of this country are, shall we say, unusual enough to excite my interest.”
“Why, that’s mighty kind of you, Miss . . . ”
I feared that if I gave him my real name he’d find me out. And at any rate, it was high time I invented a nom de plume. I considered the most literary names I could think of, but I could hardly call myself Nathaniel Hawthorne or Fenimore Cooper. My mind harkened instead to another branch of the arts, the one particularly favored by my father. “Lovelace,” I said, giving the last name of one of Sasha Divine’s cronies. “Valentine Lovelace,” I added, because it sounded right.
He stuck out his hand again, but this time when I put mine in it, he raised it to his lips. “Miss Lovelace, darlin’, you have no idea what a pleasure it is to meet a fine lady like yourself. I do believe Providence must have sent you to us. You said it all just now when you were talkin’ about my mission here at Fort Draco, because, dear lady, I do feel I’m here for a purpose. I have been tryin’ and tryin’ to convince the army to build their main road right through here so that I can help the settlers as they travel west through this great land of ours, but I must tell you, the army is as prejudiced against me as those fellas you heard talkin’ in Santa Fe. They seem to think the Indians would all be peaceable as sheep if I didn’t sell ‘em a little hooch and a few huntin’ rifles. That just shows you what Washington knows about Indians. Most of them bluecoat boys never saw an Indian before they came out here. Why, if I didn’t sell the guns and whiskey, the redskins would have to get it from somewhere else, and where do you think that would be? Raidin’ and killin’ folks worse than they do now. Probably even overrun the fort. I try to run things so that everybody gets a little somethin’ they want. I have my home and business, the Indians get the goods they want, the Mexicans get jobs and doctorin’, and we none of us nose around in the other man’s business. I think I can truthfully say that Fort Draco does more than any other single thing in the entire despoblado to make peace for everybody. But do I get any thanks? They call me ‘comanchero.’ If they had any sense, they’d be callin’ me ‘governor.’”
“Perhaps your viewpoint has simply never been properly presented to the public before, Mr. Drake.”
“No perhaps about it, ma’am,” he said, and then dropped his crusading pose to wink at me conspiratorially. “I bet a famous lady writer like yourself could explain it to folks better than an old vaquero like me, now, ain’t that the truth?”
“My very thought, Mr. Drake!” I said. “And I can repay your kindness once I have obtained the proceeds from the book. I fear the Indians stole all the cash I had on me.” Letting the Indians take the blame seemed a good way to explain why a woman as successful as I pretended to be was too broke to pay her own ransom.
He grinned most attractively and patted my knee. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, honey. You just tell people about all the good work you see goin’ on here in that book of yours and you’ll have more than paid me back. I want you to feel free to use my library as if it were your own and to ask any questions your little heart desires.”
I could not resist such open magnanimity. My curiosity was too great, and besides, if I was to remain in this country I needed to ask. “Mr. Drake, I don’t want you to think my experience with the savages unhinged my reason, but I must ask you—are you by any chance raising dragons on your property?” I described to him the events of the previous night as I recalled them, though I declined to mention that at one point I had imagined myself to be flying.
Drake threw back his head and laughed until the tears rolled down his ruggedly handsome face. “Oh, Miss Valentine, you beat anythin’ I ever seen. You’re gonna fit right in here, gal. That’s the best whopper I’ve heard since I was up to Denver for the Trappers’ Rondyvoo when I was a boy. I can see now why you chose your profession instead of a husband and children like most women. You have got yourself one fine imagination.”
My tentativeness on the subject disappeared, replaced by somewhat unreasonable indignation. I believe it was the slur on my marital status rather than his understandable doubts about my already compromised veracity that triggered my pique. “Oh? I suppose it was my imagination that impressed the Indians too, despite the fact that they spoke no English, I spoke no Indian, and we were not exactly on storytelling terms. Really, Mr. Drake! I assure you, my powers of observation are most acute. I know what I saw and heard. The streak of fire, the horribly mutilated animal, and that fearsome roar were unmistakable.”
“Now, now, no need to get huffy. I apologize for laughin’ at you, honey, but you’re new out here. I bet I can tell you what you saw.”
“Pray do.”
“Well, you see, we’ve had us a dry spell lately and there’s no water on the back range. The Rio’s been gettin’ lower faster than anyone can ever recollect. When things get like this, one of the more agreeable chores the vaqueros get stuck with is burnin’ prickles off the prickly pear so’s my cows can eat ‘em without gettin’ a mouthful of thorns. I’ll lay you odds we’ll have one of the boys in here in a day or two laughin’ about how he spooked them Indians by lightin’ his torch and hollerin’, tryin’ to scare them away from you. Worked, too, didn’t it?”
Exhaustion overwhelmed me suddenly, muddling everything. Perhaps Drake was right and both the Indians and I had been tricked. The explanation did not jibe with my memory of the incident, but I could hardly risk my host thinking I was insane, as he might have. “Very well,” I said, “you’re probably right about the fire and the roar. But judging from that carcass, your vaqueros must have some peculiar dietary habits.”
“You can judge that for yourself real soon, darlin’,” he said. “Ledbetter heard from the Comanche that they took you from the mule train. It should be here in a day or so, and when it comes, we’ll be havin’ a little play-party and a dance, what we call a baile around here.”
“But, Mr. Drake, if your water supply is low, won’t a party be a strain on your resources?”
He laughed again. I began to feel he’d keep me around for amusement, if nothing else. “Shoot, Miss Valentine, you are really somethin’. Water a problem? At a baile? No, ma’am. Only time water comes into the deal is when the animals go to the river to wet their whistles, and they’d have to do that whether we had a party or not. Otherwise, there’s no problem. Nobody drinks water at a fandango.”
I slept clear through the evening and into the night, dreamed and half-wakened only to sleep again throughout the rest of that day. My dreams were confused, full of images like those of the previous night of the earth gliding past beneath me, and also of mutilated animal bodies, flashes of light flaring suddenly in front of my face, hundreds of pairs of terrified animal eyes dancing before me like fireflies. Hills and mountains became towers and pyramids, the desert blossomed into a lush pastureland, certain cliffsides thinned to transparency and I clearly saw caches of precious gems within. Sometimes when I woke, I saw, or thought I saw, faces at my window.
One in particular seemed to actually pull me from my dreams on several occasions. I tried to speak, but before I roused sufficiently to do so, she vanished. I remembered her in the twilight wakefulness between dreams. Something about the shape of her face, the stormy play of expression across its surface, a fey, feline quality in its beauty, made me think of Wy Mi’s fox women or perhaps a Mexican version of one of the Little People. I knew that I urgently wished to communicate with her, but when I finally truly awakened, I couldn’t imagine why. No one was at the window. My blanket was tangled around my legs and my hair and clothing were soaked with perspiration. I had rubbed and sweated most of my salve off and my sores burned again. I rolled to my side and stood painfully, still half-caught by my dreams. I wondered briefly if it was possible that I turned into a dragon when I slept. But as my brain cleared, I realized that that was unlikely, since the room would in that case surely be in much worse shape than it was. Also, if I were to credit any of my perceptions about the dragon, I had to allow that I had definitely seen it from the outside. It was all too confusing, and the longer I stood there, the more thoughts of food and a bath prevailed over my dreams.
I smelled coffee brewing and bacon frying and heard voices and movement nearby. Holding onto the wall, I ventured as far as the door, which I pushed open. I dared go no further, for my clothing had been torn beyond the boundaries of decency.
The rising sun probed only one corner of the patio—the rest was still shrouded in shadow. A valkyrie of a woman in a faded checked dress and a stained white apron strode forth from a doorway on the far side. I hailed her.
“Howdy,” she greeted me. “How you feelin’?” She was as dark as Mariquilla, but her hair was yellow blond where it was not gray. She stood probably an inch or two taller than Drake. Her arms looked strong enough to fell an ox.
“Better, thanks,” I said.
“Still walk like you got a corncob up your rear, but I reckon a few saddle sores never killed anybody.”
“I was hoping I might beat the mules to the bathwater and perhaps wash my hair,” I said. “Mr. Drake informed me there was to be a party after the mule train arrives. I would think they should be here sometime today.”
“You figured that pretty handy. Dolores is boilin’ up some yucca suds for hair-washin’ this very minute. You can be second in line after Widow Jenkins, if you like, you bein’ the honored guest and all. Boss gave orders. Says you’re special.” Her expression let me know she was doing the Christian thing and giving me the benefit of the doubt.
“Mr. Drake is too kind,” I replied.
The valkyrie stifled a good-natured snort and pumped my hand so hard I almost fell off my shaky feet. “I’m Hulda Ledbetter. Mrs. E. F. I’m housekeeper. E.F. is Mr. Drake’s head wrangler. He told me about having to untie you from a drunk Indian and pull you off a dead horse. Matter of fact, you smell a mite of strong spirits yourself.”