Adam Steele 34, page 2
‘It’s that kind of a day for you, I reckon, lady,’ Steele answered evenly. ‘Just one bloody thing after another.’
Chapter Two
THE MEXICAN WOMAN kept her head turned away from the Virginian as he approached her. And vented a gasp when the dead Apache who had fallen across her leg was dragged clear. Then she began to weep softly as Steele drew the knife from the boot sheath again and cut the ropes that held her wrists and ankles to the stakes.
He said nothing as he freed her, his attention constantly focused on the task that occupied him. Then, as he rose from crouching beside her he offered:
‘There you go, lady. You need anything from me to do what you have to?’
‘Señor, I would very much like to have privacy,’ she answered, struggling to quell her tears.
‘You have it,’ he told her and moved to where he had set down what he had salvaged from the dead horse. Stood in an easy attitude beside the heap of gear, gazing south from the camp at the base of the rise: his back toward the woman and everything she needed. And for a long time all that disturbed the silence of the desert was the occasional suppressed sob from the woman as she continued to lay where she had been a captive: needing to recover some kind of composure before she felt able to move.
But when she was at length able to will herself to rise from the ground, she went quickly about her business – at the waterhole and then close to the burros hobbled beside the cottonwood. No longer weeping, but breathing noisily as if from hard exertion. And now and then she uttered a groan of anguish. This while Adam Steele stood stoically on the fringe of the camp, as unmoving and as silent as the natural features of the desert over which he gazed.
He was aware that the woman often looked toward him and was conscious of the change that came over her as time went by – that at first she was nervous he might turn around too early and discover her in some embarrassing chore, but soon she began to eye him in an appraising manner and was quite obviously curious about him.
What she saw was a man who, at first glance, looked not at all capable of carrying out the rescue that he had only minutes ago undertaken. He was about forty years of age and stood in the region of five and a half feet tall. His build was slight and he was not strikingly handsome. His clothing looked to have been made in a rush from garments originally intended to fit a much bigger man.
‘Gracias, señor,’ she said. ‘I am all finished now.’
He stooped to pick up his gear before he turned to face her and replied: ‘I’ll need to have one of the burros to replace my horse.’
She was standing at the side of the waterhole, wearing the same black shirt but a different pair of pants. She had washed her face and was now finger combing her hair. The wan smile she had started to build was abruptly wiped out by the coldness of his tone and the matching grimness of his expression. And as he moved around the other side of the waterhole from where she stood to get the animals, she was struck by how wrong she had been to consider that he had reacted out of character in the way he dealt with the Apache braves.
She had been correct about his age and his height. But his build was lean rather than slight and he had considerable strength compacted in his body. He was not overly good looking because there was a mark of cruelty, difficult to define, in his face. A face of regular features with coal black eyes and a skin that was darkly stained by exposure to the elements and patterned with countless lines. His hair was almost entirely grey and only in the long sideburns that reached almost to his jawline was there an occasional trace of the red it once had been. He looked not to have shaved for two or three days, but usually was clean-shaven.
He was dressed in an old and stained black Stetson, a once white shirt, grey pants and black riding boots without spurs. He had no coat nor vest and neither did he wear a gunbelt: and as she watched him load his gear on to one of the burros, the woman vented a grunt of discovery.
‘You say something, lady?’ Steele asked.
‘My name, it is Rosa Canales.’
‘Adam Steele. It’s nice to know you.’
‘You must realize how glad I am to know you, Señor Steele.’
He looked appraisingly at her now, as he completed loading the burro by thrusting his rifle into his bedroll. And saw that his first impression of her build had been correct: she was perhaps an inch taller than he was and had a fine figure. And a firm one, as befitted a woman who – now that she had cleaned the dirt from her face – he could see was in her early twenties. Both the tone of her skin and the shape of her features revealed her Hispanic bloodline. In different circumstances she would come close to being beautiful, Steele guessed. This afternoon, the effects of her recent ordeal made her look drained and even haggard.
‘I reckon so.’
‘I have not even expressed my thanks for setting me free.’
‘It was nothing.’
‘To me it was everything, Señor Steele. It is words that are nothing after such a thing has been done. But they are all I can offer for now. If you will help me further, though, I can promise you a large reward.’
‘The burro is fine, Miss Canales.’
She had started to look more at ease during the exchange. But now she became strained by nervous tension again and there was misery in her voice when she said: ‘Of course, señor. You have your own business to attend to.’
She nodded her head slowly as she spoke and then Steele shook his head when he answered:
‘Whatever my business is, it can wait until I take you some place you’ll be safe, Miss Canales. All I said is that I don’t want anything for my trouble except the burro.’
He crouched to unfasten the hobbles on the forelegs of both animals. Then swung easily up into the saddle of the one laden with his gear.
‘Some place? You have such a place in mind, Señor Steele?’
‘I’m a stranger here. I reckoned you weren’t and so—’
She strode fast from the waterhole to halt in front of the mounted Virginian. For a moment seemed not to know how to get started on what she needed to say, but then took a deep breath and spoke in a rush.
‘Señor, I know that it does not look to be so, but I am a very rich woman. But the appearances, they can be very deceptive, no? As with you. Which I decide after watching you for a long time. My father, he is Don Benito Canales of De Raza Hacienda which is in Chihuahua, Mexico. And if you will escort me back to my home my father will richly reward you.’
Her dark eyes expressed a tacitly eloquent plea that he should agree to do as she asked.
‘Where abouts in Chihuahua, Miss Canales?’ Steele asked.
‘In the northern part, señor,’ she replied eagerly. ‘Close to the Rio Bravo. The Rio Grande is how you Americans call it. Some miles south of Ciudad Juarez, which is just across the border from El Paso in the state of Texas.’
She was like an over excited child, on tenterhooks while she waited for Steele to consider what she had told him: while her mind raced to search for further inducements to him. Then, when he gave a nod, she vented a gust of relieved laughter as she lunged forward and clambered up astride the other burro – as childlike in this as she had been while she waited for his response.
‘You live back that way,’ Steele told her with a jerk of his thumb to indicate the rise with the outcrop and dead horse on its ridge. Then he nodded toward the south, along the line of sign left by the two Apaches and their prisoner. ‘But they brought you from that way.’
The woman glanced across at the dead braves flanking the area where she had been staked out and was once more weak with remembered horror as she shuddered. Then she dragged her gaze back to the Virginian. Said:
‘I do not know what is to the far side of this hill, señor. To the south is a trail which I was riding when the savages took me. It is a trail that goes all the way to El Paso. Not an easy trail, perhaps, but I think it is maybe easier to ride than across the country from here.’ She looked up the steep slope and shrugged. ‘You came from there, though. Perhaps you know—’
‘South to the trail, Miss Canales. I’ve come from a lot of places. Right now from the north. Wherever a man’s coming from or going to, a trail makes the travelling easier.’
He heeled his burro forward and the woman was quick to start her mount and move the animal up alongside the other one; as if she was afraid to be too far away from her rescuer. And when they were riding side by side, she seemed to need to take time to control her emotions and organize her thinking again. Showing that she had consciously to make the effort, while Adam Steele remained in what to the woman looked to be a comfortable silence.
‘In the north, you had some trouble, señor!’ she said when the camp beside the waterhole was perhaps a half mile behind them.
‘Some,’ he allowed.
‘More than that, I think?’
‘Less than you were in, Miss Canales.’
‘We have far to go, señor. Why do you not call me Rosa? And I may call you Adam, perhaps?’
The Virginian shrugged.
‘I am a young woman away from her home and family for the first time. Not familiar with what is necessary to avoid such a thing happening to me. But you, señor … Adam, you dealt with my position in the manner of a man who has … who has had much experience of such things.’
‘Rosa?’
His tone added the query and she shot a sidelong glance at him.
‘Adam?’
‘You want to get to the point about me that’s bothering you?’
She was perplexed for a moment – not confused by what he said, but instead unsure of how to express herself. Until she shrugged and told him simply: ‘You do not look to be the kind of man who is capable of doing as you did. Do you understand what I say?’
Steele nodded and looked down at himself. Then showed a fleeting smile that was almost boyish as he growled: ‘The burro about puts the finishing touch, uh?’
‘I am sorry your horse is dead, Adam.’
‘It was the mare’s bad luck. On two counts. That I was riding her and I had to have the Indians facing me before I shot them. And that she took the bullet that was meant for me – and a thousand other times would have gone wide.’ When he spoke of the bullet being aimed to hit him, he raised his left hand and absently massaged an area of his upper right chest – as if he had a dull ache there. And, before he lowered his hand, he looked at it as if he expected to see something on it. For the few seconds it took for this to happen, he was lost in remembered events and was unaware that the Mexican woman was speaking to him until she raised her voice to say:
‘Adam?’
‘Yes?’
‘I said that if you do not wish to discuss your affairs, I understand.’
‘That’s good, Rosa,’ he told her, and knew that she was irritated with herself for allowing him an opportunity she had obviously not expected him to take.
It had happened up in the timbered country of northern California that he took the bullet in the upper right side of his chest after he had got himself tied up with a half-breed Indian. Half Apache, coincidentally. He had done a lot of riding with the bullet deep inside him, mortifying the flesh around it. But death by the hanging rope had been the main threat at the start. The lynch rope in a squalid mining town. Which he escaped, only to run the risk of dying from a combination of exposure and gangrene before he was discovered in the hollow that could well have been his final resting place. But those who found him and nursed him back along the road to health unwittingly delivered him into the hands of a close knit community where he was in danger of being tried for murder by due process of law and, if found guilty, hanged in the name of justice.
It was from this series of close calls with death that he had been riding when he smelled the brushwood smoke and followed his horse to the camp where Rosa Canales was in imminent danger of being used and abused by the Apache braves. The horse had been his. And the saddle and accoutrements, too. They were his own boots. And knife and rifle. All else had been taken from and off him after he was found in the hollow.
Which was little enough when compared with what this man had had taken from him many years earlier. For Adam Steele had been born the only son of one of the richest plantation owners in the state of Virginia, and enjoyed the privileges of wealth and position as he grew to young manhood, working to learn all there was to know about the business he had no reason to expect he would not one day inherit. But then came the brutal War Between the States which, as it did in many instances, opened a rift between the Steele father and son. For Adam left home to fight for the Confederacy while Ben gave covert assistance to the Union.
For the four years of bloody conflict, Adam Steele rode as a cavalry lieutenant and underwent many changes of attitude toward his father. And when the uneasy peace came, both men were unscathed physically and felt emotionally prepared to forget their differences and start anew. But it was not to be. Ben Steele died on the same night as Abraham Lincoln. In the same city and just as wastefully – was lynched from a beam in a bar room as part of a conspiracy by fanatics not willing to accept defeat for the Southern Cause.
On that same night, Adam Steele killed for the first time without the protection of a uniform: before he took the body of his father home to bury. But home no longer existed, except in terms of acres of land scorched by the burning of the cotton and tobacco crops, with – at the center – the blackened skeleton of the big house that had also been put to the torch.
All that was saved was the Colt Hartford rifle with the engraved gold plate screwed to the right side of the rosewood stock, the inscription reading:
To Benjamin P. Steele,
with gratitude – Abraham Lincoln.
After he buried the corpse of his father, Adam Steele set off with this rifle to track down and kill every man who had a hand in the lynching. But he was too single-minded in his determination to exact vengeance: and the innocent as well as the guilty died during the opening days of the violent peace.
In war, it is expected and accepted that the innocent suffer sometimes, but in times of peace the law must be upheld. And so it was that Adam Steele became wanted for murder and could not return to claim what remained of his birthright and build upon it some semblance of what it once had been. Instead, he was forced to head west beyond the frontier, where the only law that mattered was that which dictated what man must do to survive. There were very many variations of this law, but the basic premise was that the fittest man survived at the expense of those who fell short – fitness in a physical sense not often a primary requirement.
Since the first violent trail had come to an end with the death of the men who lynched Ben Steele – and the cold blooded murder of the deputy sheriff who had been Adam Steele’s best friend – the exiled Virginian had traveled countless miles in search of the unattainable and for the first few years had been unwilling to admit that he was clutching at straws. Back in those days it had been his ambition to find some spot west of the Mississippi where he might put down fresh roots and create something akin to his pre-war life in Virginia. And while he searched he attempted as opportunity allowed to maintain certain of the standards that had been effortlessly taken for granted during his early years.
He dressed as elegantly as money allowed, in city style apparel that often got him called a dude. He sacrificed to afford good food when the occasion offered. He was very fastidious about bathing and shaving even under the most primitive of conditions. And the women he went with had to match up to the mark where he considered they became ladies.
But that period of sustained effort to maintain former standards had ended long ago: when he was finally forced to face up to the facts of his life in the wake of losing everything that at one time he thought had made it worth living. Realized he was destined to be a rootless drifter who had to take what he needed as it became available, to compromise if it did not measure up to his precise requirements – and be prepared to lose it to the dictates of a compassionless fate.
‘Adam?’ Rosa Canales said softly and rather tentatively, as if she was nervous about breaking the lengthy silence – anxious about how he would respond to having his concentration disturbed.
‘Something, Rosa?’ the Virginian replied evenly, not so deeply immersed in past events as before. And his dark eyes when they glanced at her held an expression of mild interest in what she had it in mind to say. In much the same way as he had been maintaining a constant survey over their surroundings as they trekked southward astride the slow moving burros.
‘You and I, we are much alike, I think.’
‘How so?’ he countered as he took up his apparently casual watch in every direction again – his gaze merely raking over her as a component part of what lay to the west. She and her mount the only living things seen to move on his right. While to the north, more than a mile behind them by now, a once high flying bird spiraled downward and glided gracefully to a precise landing. Showed itself definitely to be a buzzard rather than an eagle as it began to feast ravenously on the naked and near naked corpses of the two Apaches.
‘I have told you of my father and his wealth. And you see me like this.’ She looked down at herself and then gestured with both hands to stress dismay with her dirty and disheveled appearance. ‘I think you, too, have known better times, Adam.’
‘Better and worse, Rosa. But a man has to take the rough with the smooth, I reckon.’ He smiled after voicing the trite old saw which he had not used in a very long time – maybe not since the rough times had begun to outnumber the smooth?
He did not elaborate and was again at ease with the silence which she found taxing as they rode across terrain that he seemed to think a deal more interesting than she was. And sometimes, he knew, she came close to venting an ill-tempered outburst against his constraint. But always she swallowed her irritation with him as she recalled what she owed him: or at least he assumed this was the reason why she took such obvious pains to curb her emotions.
