Daughter of Fortune Read Free Page B

Carmen’s bloody blond scalp
on his head and pranced around while the other men laughed.
    Dead men lay everywhere, some of them hacked to
pieces, their body parts flung along the riverbank. The heads
stared with sightless eyes and open mouths at the same blue sky
Maria had awakened to. Other freighters had been scalped but left
in one piece, their bodies scattered at random. They lay in
grotesque poses like overgrown dolls, tossed by a child in a
rage.
    Maria tried to look away from the fly-covered,
bloated corpses, but she could not. With dreadful obsession, she
stared at the hunks of skin and bones that only hours before had
been fathers, husbands and brothers, looking forward to the
completion of a tedious journey.
    When she finally forced herself to avert her gaze,
she looked around to get her bearings. She was lying under the
trees in a small gully, the merest incline. By sitting up slightly,
she could see the Indians through a skimpy cover of bush and tall
grass. Anyone approaching the grove from behind would spot her
immediately. She must move farther into the bushes.
    Maria slowly pulled her legs up under her dress,
grateful for once that her poverty had allowed only dull brown
wool, instead of the brightness of Carmen de Sosa’s sea-green silks
that were now warming the Indian by the fire. The color of the wool
blended with the dry winter grass around her. She pulled herself
into a compact ball and started inching toward the bushes.
    A flash of light caught her eye as she began to
move. It was the mirror. With a sudden stab at her insides, she
remembered how she had tossed the mirror outside the circle of
trees. As it glittered at her in the morning light, she knew that
sooner or later one of the Indians would notice the gleam and come
closer to investigate. She would be discovered.
    She had to get the mirror. Slowly she turned and
crawled to the edge of the bushes. The Indians were not looking in
her direction, but if she leaned out far enough to snatch the
mirror, they would notice.
    For the first time, she cried, her face in the dirt
until the soil under her cheek turned to mud. She dug her fingers
into the ground, running the loose dirt through her fingers. Then
it came to her. By tossing the dirt beyond the bushes, a pinch at a
time, she could cover the mirror until its betraying reflection was
buried.
    The first handful only camouflaged the tiniest
corner of the mirror. Cursing her vanity of yesterday, Maria
grabbed another fistful of dirt. She scraped the dirt off the
surface of the ground, fearing that the darker earth underneath
would attract attention. When she had a dry handful, she tossed it
gently toward the mirror.
    For an hour Maria threw dirt on the small mirror.
Whenever one of the Indians glanced her way, she froze, her face in
the earth, her arm outstretched and still. As she lay there she
imagined footsteps behind her and waited silently, almost
gratefully, for the arrow biting deep into her back, the hands on
her waist, the knife on her hair.
    By the time the sun was high over the rim of the
Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the mirror’s sparkling eye was covered.
Maria’s arm ached from the slow and steady motion of hundreds of
tiny particles of dirt thrown. Her muscles throbbed with a life of
their own as she lay in the shade of the bushes and rubbed her arm,
watching the Indians.
    They showed no disposition to leave their kingdom of
burned wagons, dead animals and men. They crouched by their fire
silent and watchful.
    Her eyes never leaving them, Maria slowly pulled her
legs up under her dress and inched toward the tall underbrush. She
eased her way among the sheltering foliage and curled up in a tight
ball. The chill of the late February morning penetrated her body
and she shook until she feared her teeth would rattle and reveal
her hiding place. Or was it simply the chill of fear? Yesterday on
the wagon she had not been cold.
    Her mind was curiously devoid of thought. For the
first time in her