head with a smile, sipped the last of his tea, and turned back toward Annie.
“The Reverend Sergeant Major is a man, Annie, and men are—”
“Idiots,” her mother said.
They all laughed.
“Well, I am not idiot enough to argue with your mother, Annie, so I will agree with her. When the Reverend Primrose returns with the others we shall continue on to our destination. Perhaps we are delayed by the evils that men do, but let the boys be boys. There is not much left for them until we reach Arizona Territory. Do not frown too much at this delay. It is, I feel, needed.”
Her father’s face told Annie that he wasn’t speaking entirely truthfully. He was just trying to make things seem better than they were. That was her father’s way.
“You didn’t want to go with them?” her mother asked and chuckled at her good humor.
“I might have, Mother,” he said with a smile, and rose to collect the dishes. Most men would leave washing dishes to the women, but Walter liked to do things, liked to stay busy. He wasn’t one to waste time playing cards or drinking intoxicating spirits when he could be accomplishing something, like going to Arizona Territory to start a new life, or going around a place like Five Scalps to avoid unnecessary delay, or even washing the supper dishes.
She helped him because she loved her father. Her mother came to help, too.
This is the way a family should be, Annie thought.
When she prayed that night before going to sleep, she thanked God for that greatest of gifts.
CHAPTER FIVE
Matt McCulloch leaped away from the slashing knife again with yet another curse, and the momentum carried the Indian back toward the rocks. That gave McCulloch enough time to look at his belly. A scratch. He had cut himself worse shaving, although he had never been drunk enough to cut his stomach shaving. Hell, he wasn’t Sean Keegan. McCulloch rarely got drunk. But getting into fights? Well, that seemed to occupy a lot of his time—as a horse trader and as a Texas Ranger back in the day.
The Apache turned, but stood with his back against the rocky wall. His right hand still held the blade of the deer-handled knife, a mean looking weapon. The blade had probably been taken from an old horse soldier’s saber, cut down to something a kid could use quite handily.
McCulloch figured that this Indian was a kid, no more than sixteen years old, though guessing an Indian’s age often could be as risky as guessing a woman’s.
A few facts became obvious. The boy was Comanche, not Apache. Remembering his late wife, his dead sons, and his missing daughter, had his opponent been Apache, McCulloch would have drawn his Colt and blown the kid’s head off. It wasn’t that McCulloch had any love for the Comanche—they could be as fearsome, as ruthless, and as hard to kill as any Apache—but this one was just a kid. And he was wounded.
His left arm hung broken, raked with the claws from that bear he had managed to kill. He was sweating hard. The boy panted like he had just run all the way from the Rio Grande and needed time to catch his breath. McCulloch could wait in a Mexican standoff and hope the boy would finally pass out.
Those eyes were like obsidian, staring briefly at McCulloch, then at the Winchester lying in the dirt between them, then back at McCulloch, and then at the belted Colt holstered on the white man’s right hip. Never did the Indian’s eyes focus on one particular spot for too long. His eyes moved like most Indians moved—like the wind.
As the boy’s breathing slowed to some sort of normalcy, McCulloch figured he had little time before that deadly blade came slashing He wasn’t too worried. If things got desperate, all he had to do was draw the revolver and punch a hole through the kid’s middle. But he tried something different.
He spoke a short warning in Comanche. “No. Me friend.”
That being his entire Comanche vocabulary, “Let me help,” came out in English. He could turn to sign language easy enough, but the blackness in that boy’s eyes told him that he needed to keep both of his hands free. He pressed them down a little like he was training a puppy to stay down. Stay down, don’t jump.
Don’t rip out my intestines with that damned pig-sticker you have.
The black eyes of the Comanche brave hardened, moved again from McCulloch to the rifle to McCulloch to the holstered revolver, and finally the Indian lunged. He had lost a lot more blood than McCulloch figured. Although the kid’s first move was sudden and with lethal intensity, by the time he stepped over McCulloch’s Winchester, he was practically falling. The knife passed easily as McCulloch moved to his right, and the Indian boy staggered over. Falling headfirst, the knife plunged into the grasslands. He moved his left arm in an attempt to push himself up and screamed from pure agony. It looked like a bad break. The boy tried with his right hand, but collapsed, shuddered, and lay still.
For a moment, McCulloch thought the boy was dead, but after gathering his Winchester and laying it behind him—out of the young warrior’s reach—McCulloch gently rolled the boy over. He looked at the knife, buried almost to the hilt, but left it untouched. It was out of the kid’s reach, at least from his right hand. His left arm remained useless and the boy would have to reach over his body to grab the deer-horn handle. If he ever woke up, that is.
Kneeling over the unconscious brave, McCulloch studied the kid. No moccasins, no shield. Just that knife and a heavy woolen breechcloth covering the rest of his nakedness. His hair hung loose and long, but not in braids wrapped in otter skins or tied with ribbons, and there was no headband, not even a single feather of honor. McCulloch lifted the broken arm gently and laid it across the boy’s dehydrated stomach. Now that his own heart wasn’t racing and his only instincts were about staying alive, he thought the boy looked like he was half-starved. McCulloch untied his bandana and wrapped it over the boy’s deeply scratched forearm. He tightened it just enough to stop the bleeding for the time being. Cleaning it would have to wait. Most likely, his best bet would be to walk till he fetched his horse, then return and care for the kid.
Or he could just let the boy die. Hell, the kid was a Comanche. If the tables had been turned, McCulloch had a pretty good idea that he’d already be dead and scalped. He looked at the knife. That was no Indian knife, nothing a brave or boy would have traded with some Comanchero. The blade was, to McCulloch’s horror, fairly rusted over. Quickly, the old Ranger turned his attention to his own wound, but saw that the blood had already congealed and wasn’t deep at all. He had just been cut slightly. But that rusty blade made him stand up long enough to pull the flask out of his hip pocket, and poor rye whiskey over the wound, just enough to cleanse it some. He knelt beside the unconscious Indian and did the same over his scratches. The kid jerked, moaned, screamed, and spoke in short bursts of the Comanche tongue, before shuddering and sinking into an even deeper sleep.
McCulloch looked at the knife again, understanding at last that the boy had likely found the blade, somehow managed to break it apart, and fashion it into a knife, using the antler from a dead deer. The starving teenager had been alone, trying to survive.
“Vision quest,” McCulloch said aloud, looking at the kid.
It certainly made sense. A Comanche boy, maybe thirteen to sixteen years old, before he could become a warrior, would have to leave his village on his own in search of his vision, to learn what was his power, and earn the name he would carry into manhood. McCulloch was no expert on Comanches, but he had been in Texas long enough to know a lot about them. It paid to know
