Harvest of Fury Read Free

grew in the courtyard were ripe, though the pomegranates were only faintly tinged with crimson. Talitha reached up for a peach she’d noticed earlier that day, rubbed the fuzz off on her skirt, and took a bite, savoring the mellow richness as juice filled her mouth.
    She loved this place—so painfully made by the courage, patience, work, and faith of its founders. It was home, where Shea, her love, would return. If she hoped to prove worthy of him, no matter how young, unsure, and frightened she was, she must somehow be as valiant and enduring as Socorro.
    But she had had Shea! Talitha wailed silently, then had to admit, to herself, Not at first she didn’t. Not when she was left alone in the desert with all her people dead. She was younger then than you are, so let’s have no excuses!
    Even so, trying to emulate Socorro seemed an impossible challenge. Sighing, Talitha savored the fruit and straightened her shoulders. With all her strength and will and devotion, she would hold this ranch. That was all she could do; she could do no less.
    When she said after breakfast next morning that she was going to El Charco and to San Manuel, the Papago enclave of Tjúni, the fourth of Rancho del Socorro’s partners, James said he’d go with her. At that the twins clamored to ride along. Cat, torn, finally decided that Anita was capable of looking after Sewa for the day, and the five began the ride southward. Patrick was on coal black Thunder. Miguel’s Lightning was a creamy gold. Caterina bobbed along on Mancha. James would never love another horse as he had his gray Tordillo, killed one hard winter to feed women and children among the Apaches, but he’d picked a tough, angular roan, Alacrán, or Scorpion, and they respected each other, moving as one.
    On the hill behind the ranch buildings were the crosses raised for Santiago and Socorro, and on the far side of the hill in a small grotto were buried the scalps of many Papagos and Mexicans whose hair had been taken by white scalp hunters hungry to collect the bounty that had been offered for Apache scalps by the government of Sonora, the most northwestern state of Mexico, of which the Gadsden Purchase, presently part of the territory of New Mexico, was a portion. Now that civil war had engulfed the country, Apaches might well reclaim the great expanse of mountains, plains, and river valleys.
    But not, if Talitha could prevent it, Rancho del Socorro. As Patrick, hair gilded by sun, rode close to Cat, laughingly calling some big-brotherly tease to her, Talitha thought they must look much as their parents had at the same ages. Patrick O’Shea, known as Shea, had left Ireland during the potato famine of 1845 with his twin, Michael, and joined the U.S. Army, which was preparing to go to war with Mexico. Coming to feel more sympathy with the Catholic Mexicans than with the overbearing sergeant who constantly harassed them, the brothers had swum the Rio Grande and joined the famed San Patricio Battalion, formed of deserters from the U.S. Army. The survivors of the battalion had been court-martialed by the conquering U.S. Many were hanged. Shea and Michael were branded and flogged but escaped, heading for California. Michael died of thirst in the desert, and Shea, a parched-leather skeleton whose gashes couldn’t even bleed and whose tongue was shriveled to a hard lump, had been brought back to life by Socorro.
    Socorro had been in desperate straits herself, though she’d found a life-giving natural cistern, or tinaja , in the desert rocks. She was traveling to California to marry her cousin when Areneños killed her father and her escort, plundered their wagon, and left her to die. The tinaja saved her, but such a gently reared girl would probably have died a slow death from exposure or hunger, or a swift one from more Areneños, if she hadn’t rescued Shea, who, when he had regained his strength, walked her out of the desolate cinder