The Pride of Hannah Wade Read Free Page A

sideburns, slovenly dressed in baggy pants secured by dark suspenders over the faded red of his long johns. He was one of the early settlers of the area, drawn by the stories of Apache gold and then held by the money, to be made selling supplies to miners, soldiers, and Apaches. Long ago he’d married a squaw from one of the Mimbres bands so he could have a foot in both camps, the white man’s and the red. But he was never fully accepted in either; whites looked askance at a squaw man, and the Apache never forgot the white man’s greed.
    “’Lo, Captain.” The locals called him “Apache Jack” Reynolds. As he approached Cutter, he showed a measure of discomfort, a nervous tic twitching the skin along the corner of his upper lip. “Sorry about that little incident. Hope it didn’t scare the ladies much. They were just some of my wi—Little Dove’s relatives come to visit.” He checked the impulse to identify theheavy, plodding Apache woman as his wife, craving the respectability of his own kind and deprived of it by their prejudices against his copper-skinned wife, no longer the maiden he’d once desired. “They’re comin’ back, like most of their kind, they get nervous when the army’s around.” He laughed, weakly trying to make a joke out of it while explaining the parting comment in case Cutter understood Spanish.
    “Relatives.” Cutter somehow doubted that. “I thought I recognized Juh. Who was the one that called to you?”
    Beads of sweat broke out across the trader’s forehead. He couldn’t be sure whether the question was a trap and Cutter already knew the warrior’s identity. He mopped his brow with a soiled bandanna and tried to hide his unease.
    “Lutero.” It was a tight, forced smile he offered with the name; then, in defense, he added, “You know how tangled these Apache relations get sometimes. I mean, even Cochise was related to Mangas Coloradas and that war shaman Geronimo.”
    Lutero. Cutter matched the name to the scar-cheeked image in his mind and filed it away. Such pieces of information were maybe important and maybe not. But it might be worth remembering that he had seen an Apache, believed to be Juh, in the area with a handful of warriors, among them a brave called Lutero. Maybe a raiding party? Blood always ran fast in the spring. It had been bold of them to show themselves to Cutter and the escorting troopers. There was no doubt in his mind that their little group had been thorougly scouted before Juh and his band had ridden in.
    “Is there anything I can do for you, Captain?” The inquiry had an edge to it; the questioning had put Apache Jack on the defensive and turned him slightly belligerent.
    A mule snorted, ridding its nostrils of accumulated dust. “We’d like to water the team if you can spare it,” Cutter replied.
    “The well’s there to the side. Ya can draw what ya need.” The white trader gestured in the general direction of the desert well.
    “Sergeant,” Cutter, knowing Hooker had overheard the conversation, left the business of watering the mules to him.
    “Grover!” Sergeant John T. Hooker called to one of the troopers, a strapping, ebony-rimmed man named Angst Grover who was a six-year veteran with the Ninth.
    “Yo!” he responded to the summons, and moved quickly toward his sergeant.
    “Get some water from the well for these mules,” Hooker ordered.
    As the trooper drew abreast of Cutter, the trader pushed his chest out and adopted a surly stance. “You’re welcome to water your animals, but I ain’t got none to spare for them niggers of yours.” A victim of prejudice himself, Apache Jack was still quick to turn the tables and look down on those he considered inferior.
    Neither Private Grover nor Sergeant Hooker blinked an eye at the discriminatory remark. They were used to such bigotry, encountering it wherever they were stationed. A and C companies of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment had been assigned to Fort Bayard in southwestern New