Harvest of Fury Read Free Page A

cones and lava flows to a ranch where they found only Santiago left alive after a scalp hunters’ raid.
    When Santiago was able to travel, they’d taken two hundred cattle, loaded mules with whatever they could salvage, and started for an abandoned ranch which Santiago remembered from driving cattle to sell in the presidios of Tubac and Tucson. On the way they’d found Tjúni, intent on avenging the scalp hunters’ slaughter of her family and village.
    A chill always shot down Talitha’s spine when she remembered the Place of Skulls. That was where Tjúni and Socorro, picking berries, had come upon the scalpers raping and killing the women of Mangus’s camp. Tjúni had brought down three men with arrows, Socorro killed one, but the fifth escaped.
    Judah Frost. Talitha still had nightmares about him, with his silver hair and ice-crystal gaze. She’d been thirteen when he caught her bathing in a hot spring not far below the Place of Skulls. He’d said then he meant to have her when she grew up. Through the years, as he was welcome at the ranch and became Shea’s partner in freighting and mining, Talitha had felt stalked by a giant cat, unable to tell that Frost was one of the scalpers because he was an expert shot who’d surely have killed either Shea or Santiago had they challenged him.
    He had killed Santiago only last year, when Santiago returned from years of slave labor in a Mexican mine where Frost had sold him while telling the O’Sheas that their friend had married a wealthy Mexican widow and had stayed in Mexico to manage her holdings. Freed by Yaquis rebelling against the government, Santiago had been nursed and loved by a Yaqui girl he had married when he learned she was with child. He’d come back to confront Frost, who’d shot him, wounded Shea, and taken Talitha hostage. Before he released her near Pete Kitchen’s ranch, he’d done what he’d intended since that first day they met.
    She’d thought she’d never be clean of that, but Marc Revier’s tender loving had cleansed her. Marc, the Freiburg-trained engineer, who’d taught her to read and write, brought her books, waited for her to grow up. She thought of him with pain and loss, for she loved him in her own way.
    â€œHe’s god to you,” Marc had said bitterly of Shea. She had refused to marry Marc a year ago. Was he still at the Tecolote mine south of Yuma Crossing?
    At least Frost was dead. Shea and the pursuers had found his horse dead and a man’s corpse dangling head downward over a fire that had split the skill and charred the face past recognition. Talitha forced the thought of him from her, assessing with a practiced eye the cattle grazing along a dry wash or streambed that would become a torrent when the rains started, as they should within a few weeks.
    In spite of the weeks of dry heat, the cattle were holding flesh well. Over the years the scrubs had been butchered or sold, the best kept for breeding. The starting herd of “black” Spanish cattle, not necessarily black, had been mixed with curly-haired, beefier animals from Texas and some heifers acquired from an Illinois drover headed for California.
    That spring the vaqueros had collected about five hundred senales , the bits of ear cut off while earmarking and branding. For each calf there were probably four older animals, which meant the ranch was running close to twenty-five hundred head.
    Not all of these carried the S brand and belonged to the O’Sheas. At the beginning, before there was money to pay the vaqueros, each was allowed to mark every twentieth cow for himself. Shea, marveling at this vast country, so rich with opportunity in spite of its dangers, had wanted those who worked with him to share his good fortune.
    Living at El Charco, fifteen miles south of the main ranch, the Sanchezes, who worked for Shea, had, in effect, possessed their own small kingdom. Would Pedro