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  PARRIS*AFTON*BONDS

  DUST*DEVIL

  Published by Parris Afton, Inc. at Kindle

  Copyright 2013 by Parris Afton, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away.

  FOR WILMA BONDS AND RITA CLAY ESTRADA, WHO MADE THIS POSSIBLE

  AND KATE DUFFY AND KAREN SOLEMN, EDITORS WHO HAD FAITH

  Special thanks to Senator and Mrs. Bill Lee who opened their home to me; to Muriel Johnson who shared the story of her hunted years in the Philippines with me; to Sam Fritcher; Deborah Adyt, David Alcoze and to my brother Jack Wilkes, whose technical advice aided me greatly; and to the real Sin-they

  It was long ago—perhaps 25,000 years ago. The hide- clad young man fingered the edge of his stone-tipped throwing spear as he looked out over the valley from his vantage point in the Sandia Mountains. To the north, he could see a plateau cut by streams into mesas. He wondered if game might be plentiful in those canyons. Perhaps he would go and see...

  On one of the quiet mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, above the silent canyons with their remains of ancient cities, an atomic scientist looks out from his laboratory in Los Alamos and sees in the distance the Sandia Mountains. For a moment, he wonders about that daring man who first settled in New Mexico...

  Tourism and Travel Division New Mexico Commerce and Industry

  From the desert I come to thee,

  On a stallion shod with fire;

  And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire.

  Under thy window I stand,

  And the midnight hears my cry:

  I love thee, I love but thee,

  With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold,

  And the stars are old,

  And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.

  Bayard Taylor

  "Bedouin Song”

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Santa Fe, New Mexico ~ January 1, 1946

  The black eyes betrayed none of the cynicism the man felt as his keen gaze swept over the flood of dignitaries and the state’s most powerful businessmen, gathered along with the press and the more curious citizens of Santa Fe to honor him as he took the oath of office.

  He saw in some of the faces both the envy of his position . . . and the distaste for what he was. And he permitted a hard smile to briefly curl his long lips.

  His glance fell on the brittle old woman who, confined in the wheelchair, occupied the center front row of those assembled to hear his Inaugural Address. Her back was ramrod straight; her turquoise eyes — clear as the New Mexico skies — were alert in the seamed face. Her seamed lips parted slightly, as if acknowledging the triumph in his smile.

  The man’s dark head canted almost imperceptibly, then his gaze brushed beyond her, searching the sea of faces for that one particular face. But nowhere did he see her laughing eyes. Always those laughing eyes . . . .

  "Ladies and gentlemen . . . fellow New Mexicans,” he began. His voice came clearly, deep and powerful, with the same assurance that bespoke his every movement. Each person there felt the electric quality that flowed under the man’s cold reserve, and sensed, too, that fierceness and passion for danger the man had inherited from his ancestors.

  "I gratefully accept the trust and responsibility the people of our state have given me on this first day of 1946. It is a time for more than one first, for more than one celebration. Within the past year the world has witnessed the cataclysmic explosion of the first atomic bomb — here in the Jornado del Muerto of New Mexico.

  "Within the past year the most influential woman in our state celebrated her centennial birthday.” He paused and introduced the venerable woman seated in the wheelchair, and she nodded her head curtly in response to the thunderous applause.

  There existed another celebration, another first that the new governor could mention, but in that moment of victory he would not brandish it before those present.

  Only the old woman in the first row knew to what extent the man’s victory reached. And as he spoke to the assembly of the future that awaited the Enchanted Land of New Mexico, the old woman’s mind looked not to the future but wandered in the past . . . reviewing in the record of her memory what she had done over eighty-six years to bring about this day of victory . . . and what she had done in loving.

  CHAPTER 2

  May 10, 1857

  Meerut, India

  A small child’s shrill cry sliced through the night. It was a cry that chilled through to the bone in spite of the evening’s sultriness.

  At the first cry the twelve-year-old girl sprang up from the hiding place in the carriage house, but one hand of the children’s amah clamped over her mouth, pulling her back into the shadows. And so the girl had to watch in agonizing horror as the Indian troops spilled out of the bungalow into the torch-lit courtyard . . . and as her parents were hauled in front of one vine-covered wall and executed, their bodies crumpling before the bright spurt of gunfire like puppets whose strings have been cut.

  And she had to watch as her two-year-old brother’s doll-like body was tossed from the sharp point of one Indian soldier’s lance to another, though the child was killed immediately after the first thrust and spared further pain.

  Not so for the young girl. She carried the pain of the Sepoy Rebellion inside her like a parasitic worm. It lived and writhed and ate. It would take a journey that would span half the globe and the range of her emotions to bring about her catharsis.

  CHAPTER 3

  June 3, 1860

  Territory of New Mexico

  It is in this magnificent land, my dear Rosemary, along the banks of the Pecos, whose fresh water flows as sweetly as Erin’s Shannon, that you shall rule my domain with myself. Imagine here among the people of color, the Indians and Spanish, our sons shall establish a glorious dynasty greater than the Stuarts or Tudors ever dreamed!

  Rosemary Gallagher had cause to recall Stephen’s letter more than once during her journey to Santa Fe. From the Overland Stage’s window her critical eye swept first over the endless stretch of shoulder-high grass that rolled across the Llano Estacado like waves on the ocean, then later over the barren expanse of alkaline desert . . . not a house nor a single tree, not even a small hill to interrupt the level horizon; not a sound to break the overpowering silence.

  She had grown up on a continent bursting at the seams with people. Now she began to entertain private doubts about whether she would be able to love this raw, untamed land and its lonely wilderness. During the crossing on the Cunard from Ireland to Galveston, a sister of the St. Cecilia Order had told Rosemary of her experience in the missions of the Southwest — and how the oppression could drive a woman, isolated by her race and sex, to the verge of madness.

  Had not Stephen hinted she would be one of the few white women in the Territory? In his letters he had mentioned the washerwoman at Fort Marcy and Hilda Goldman, his partner’s wife in his Santa Fe Trading Post. And there was the Governor's wife and daughter. But there lived not one white woman on the five million three hundred acres which comprised the DeVega Land Grant, known as Cambria since Stephen Rhodes acquired it — in the year of Rosemary’s birth, 1845.

  For the tenth time Rosemary reached for the lace handkerchief in her sleeve cuff and wiped at the dust that caked her face and the back of her neck. Canvas covers were dropped over the stage’s window now to keep out the dust, but the heat and the smell of the three unwashed passengers were even worse. Still, life in India had inured her to some hardships, which obviously was not the case with one of the passengers, a stocky, well-to-do Chihuahu
a merchant.

  At every chance he complained of the miserable food of hard biscuits and dried beef, which were eaten quickly at intermittent way stations, and the lice in the bed ticking at night.

  Rosemary bore these discomforts with determined patience. But what seemed almost unbearable to her was the unending proximity with the third passenger, the Indian, Lario . . . the contact of their shoulders when the stage hit a rock or his hand at her elbow when she descended from the high step of the Concord coach. When their gazes chanced to cross, it was as if he were able to look past her eyes into her mind, to read there both her fear and her contempt for him.

  Stephen had written that once she reached San Antonio, the last outpost before the West began, he would send his trusted foreman to escort her to Santa Fe. But Rosemary had never expected an Indian.

  It had been three years since she had even let herself think about Indians. But the three years had not dimmed the memory of the Sepoy Rebellion. Only in the last five months, since Rosemary had accepted Stephen Rhodes’s letter proposing marriage, had she permitted herself to speculate on life with him in the Indian country of the New Mexico Territory.

  Perhaps she had been foolhardy and impetuous. But after living in the household of her aunt and uncle for two years, she knew that despite their love she could not have remained another month in their home any more than she could have accepted the suitors who besieged her uncle for her hand before she could even celebrate her fifteenth birthday. But she was a young woman grown, a woman who wanted her own home now.

  Tall and gangling, with large eyes that made her thin, angular face seem vulnerable, Rosemary had been a wallflower in comparison with other young ladies her age — until it became known that an ample dowry would likely be provided by her uncle. She was not deceived by the sudden interest shown by the available men of Waterford, Ireland, only derisive.

  No, not for her the oily smooth words of love from some suitor who within the first year of marriage would court his mistresses with the same impassioned speech. A man with great imagination and the audacity to reach for his goals attracted Rosemary much more.

  It had been Stephen’s letters to her uncle, his business partner in a sheep venture, that had first caught her own imagination. The power behind the words, even the bold scrawl of the handwriting, indicated here was an enterprising man — not a dandyish fop of Queen Victoria’s parlors — who had envisioned an empire and had claimed it while the land was still a part of Mexico.

  And so she had begun the correspondence with Stephen that had ended with his marriage proposal; for there in the New Mexico Territory, where women were scarce, Stephen wanted a fit mate, an Anglo woman. "A companion I can share everything with,” he had written.

  Though not a word of love had been written in all of his correspondence, it mattered not to Rosemary. For in exchange he offered her a home. For the first time in all her life of moving about with her father’s East India Company and then living with her relatives after her family’s death, she would have what she desired most in the world.

  A permanent home of her own.

  A home —good Lord, Stephen was offering her a kingdom! And though her aunt, fearful of the girl’s gentle nature, advised Rosemary to give more thought to what the perils of life would be in that primitive territory, Rosemary had not hesitated. Never again would she be homeless.

  But at what price, she wondered, as she looked across at the swarthy Navajo with whom she shared the coach. Sitting across from her now, his sharp gaze fastened on her as if he had seen her sudden shudder of repulsion. Uncomfortable, she shifted under his unwavering stare and would have sworn she saw an amusement lurking in the masked eyes, almost hidden by his long dark lashes.

  He might not share the same ancestral link as the hideous, leprous Indians who begged along India’s dirty streets, but he was no less loathsome to her. Still, he was not quite the wild savage her uncle had depicted upon his return from his business trip to Santa Fe — the painted face and long straggly hair.

  The Indian before her wore his dark hair tied at the nape of his neck in a knot, or chongo, with a red flannel bandana about his forehead. And instead of only a breechcloth, he was clad in a double-breasted, nut-brown linsey shirt, fringed buckskin trousers, and a silver concho belt that accentuated the narrow hips and flat stomach.

  In spite of his physical beauty, there was a rawhide leanness about him, a hard masculinity stamped into the powerful cast of his features that made her uneasy in his presence. She recalled the first time she had met him, outside the Menger Hotel in San Antonio five days earlier. She would never forget nor forgive her first moment of panic. She had known that old stifling feeling of terror that attacked her at the sight of an Indian but had fought it off as she asked stiffly, "Are you the foreman for the Cambria Ranch?”

  She was tall for a woman, but he was still much taller — tall even for a Navajo, so that she had to tilt her head to look into a pair of eyes as black as a raven’s wings. She had seen in their depths the dawning of skeptical recognition.

  He had reached into his shirt pocket and produced a tintype, holding it out to her. "Yes, I am Lario Santiago, the caporal of the Cambria,” he said in softly accented English. "And you are the Seňorita Gallagher?” A faint cool smile had touched the full lips, softening the hawk like nose and the high slash of the cheekbones.

  Rosemary had grimaced. "Aye, that I am!” She did not need to look at the picture she had sent Stephen to see the wide mouth, the large unblinking eyes, the heavy hair severely bound in a small knot at the back of her head. How fortunate, she thought, that the sepia tintype had no color as an oil portrait did. The riotous red hair and eyes that were neither green nor blue might have made even a determined man like Stephen Rhodes change his mind about marriage.

  At fifteen, having transversed the Asian continent from Karachi to Singapore, she had already acquired more maturity than someone twice her age. However, she could not yet perceive, as had her aunt and others likewise observant, the striking beauty, waiting like a budding rose to unfold— nor the passion that would be the rose’s thorn.

  CHAPTER 4

  At Fort Fillmore, where Rosemary and Lario transferred to the Santa Fe Mail Stage, they were joined by a white-bearded Methodist circuit rider and a cavalry officer of the First United States Dragoons who was under orders to proceed to Fort Union, just north of Cambria.

  Carefully keeping his curved saber out of the way of her full skirts, the lieutenant took the seat next to the minister. Lario he ignored, as Lario did him. But the girl the soldier could not keep his eyes from, although she was certainly not what he would call appealing, with the odd-colored eyes and the too-wide mouth. Yet there was something about her — perhaps it was the generous lower lip that hinted at sensuality. Or perhaps he was intrigued by the tiny pox pit which a quirk of nature had placed above her left cheekbone like some beauty mark. Hell, the soldier thought, he’d been too long in that womanless country.

  Rosemary’s reserve thawed upon learning that Grant Raffin knew of the Cambria Ranch. "Hasn’t everyone heard of Cambria Castle?” he asked with a beguiling smile. "In the six months I’ve been stationed out here Cambria’s all I’ve heard about. It’s Latin for Wales, isn’t it?”

  So, Rosemary thought, not everyone in the Territory was illiterate, as her uncle had led her to believe. She had been told that not one woman in a thousand, if there were that many in the Territory, even knew how to write her own name. "Aye, it is. Stephen is Welsh. But he has refused to tell me anything about Cambria. He writes that he wants to surprise me, but I can tell he’s very proud of the ranch.” She leaned forward, her great eyes shining with excitement. "What’s it like?”

  Grant removed his plumed hat which was looped on the right side and displayed yellow-brown hair lighter than his mustache and side whiskers. With the back of his sleeve he brushed away the perspiration that had formed beneath the hat’s headband, saying, "Stephen Rhodes should be proud. Cambria’s like a
territory unto itself, with its own towns and missions and stores. But the Castle — I’ve never seen it, only heard talk about it.”

  Disappointed, Rosemary sat back. Even her dreams now were of Cambria. It never occurred to her to ask Lario, nor did her fiancé’s caporal volunteer the information. Instead he trained his dark eyes on the rugged terrain outside. The few times their gazes caught she found herself fidgeting, although she told herself there was no reason for it. He extended a natural courtesy to her at the prescribed times, while the remainder of the time he seemed to totally disregard her, finding more to interest him in the limitless stretch of sand dunes and lava beds.

  While the minister slept, his whiskers flying with each snoring breath, Grant answered Rosemary’s questions about his home in Washington, D.C., and regaled her with the milder scandals of its political society.

  "My father, a judge, was such a rake my mother wouldn’t hear of me going into politics,” Grant concluded with a depreciative smile. "So I wound up at Virginia Military Institute.”

  "And you plan to make a career of it?” Rosemary prompted.

  As best he could in the cramped coach, Grant stretched out long legs clad in shiny half-boots. "Not if I can help it. The military will never make you rich.”

  "Oh?” Rosemary appraised the handsome soldier, marking him with maybe twenty-five years. It would be so easy, she thought, to succumb to his charm, to fall in love with him. But his type, she told herself, was often here one day, gone the next. Yet Stephen, his kind would be as permanent as the rocky mountains in the distance. "Is wealth what you want most from life?”

  Grant’s distinctly etched brows arched. "Isn’t that what you want, Miss Gallagher?” Before she could reply, he laughed, saying, "I know I don’t want a military career. I suppose politics is in my blood. And out here there’s the opportunity to make a name in politics.”