Bandera's Bride. Mary McBride
wagon seat canted leftward, pressing her—shoulder to thigh—against John for a moment before he shifted away.
“You ready?” he asked.
For what? Emily thought suddenly before she nodded an enthusiastic yes.
“Vamanos,” John said, and his big, dark hands gently flicked the reins.
By three that afternoon the sun was still beating down on them like a white-hot hammer. To the west, mirages pooled in the distance under miles of dry mesquite. To the south, however, the sky had been darkening ominously for the past hour and now it was taking on a sickly greenish cast that John didn’t like one bit.
Emily wasn’t faring too well in this heat, in his opinion, even though she kept protesting that she was used to it back home in Mississippi. They’d stopped for a bit to eat at noon, but after a single hard-boiled egg she’d begun to look queasy. When she excused herself and disappeared around a live oak, John was fairly sure he heard that hard-boiled egg coming right back up.
Now, with what looked to be a good-sized storm moving toward them, he cursed himself once more for bringing her along. He should have kept a weather eye on the sky instead of a lover’s eye on her. He should have considered her comfort instead of his own misguided desire to be close to her. She wasn’t some sturdy, rawboned farm girl, used to scorching heat and hardships. She was, as Price had said, a gardenia. And even though John had never seen one of those, he could well imagine their pale delicacy after seeing Emily.
He wrenched his gaze from the approaching storm to look at her now, and her eyes met his as frankly as they always did, while her mouth curved into a lovely and contented smile.
“I’m so enjoying this, John. It’s hard to believe we’ve been traveling for over five hours and we’re still on your land.” Her smile grew even lovelier and warmer. “You and Price have done very well for yourselves.”
“I guess,” he said. “It’s not so hard, though, when one partner’s all money and the other’s all muscle.”
She gave him an odd look then, and John immediately realized he was quoting directly from a letter he had written her several years ago. A letter Price had written her.
“That’s what Price always said, anyway,” he added quickly. “What he says, I mean.”
Damnation! He was digging himself in deeper every time he opened his mouth. There was so much he couldn’t say that he couldn’t even begin to remember it all.
“Price loves this place,” she said. “Maybe he didn’t at first, but I’ve gotten the impression over the years that The Crippled B truly has come to be his home. I suspect it’s the same for you.”
“Do you?”
She nodded. “I’ve been watching you today. Watching the way your eyes fairly drink in the landscape. The way you smile at the young calves chasing after their mothers and at the deer when they disappear into the brush. I saw the worry in your eyes when you pointed out those coyote tracks a few miles back.”
Now she tilted a little grin at him and wagged a finger. “You can’t fool me, John Bandera.”
“No?”
“No. You love this place every bit as much as Price does.”
“Maybe,” he said, remembering how his missing partner came to hate the dust that settled over everything and the relentless heat and, toward the end, even the sight of a longhorn. Price had even started talking about going back to Mississippi—the lesser of two evils, he had claimed—before he suddenly took off for parts unknown and no doubt just as evil once he arrived.
Emily closed her parasol now, for the sun had been obliterated by thick, churning clouds. A gust of wind tugged at her hair ribbon. “One thing Price mentioned that he especially loves here is being able to see weather coming in. He says…Oh, how did he describe it? That it’s a little like watching a herd of buffalo stampeding across the sky.” Her gaze lifted. “He’s right. I can see it for myself. It does look like a great wild herd of buffalo.”
Green buffalo, John thought. Fierce ones, too, and coming on fast. He and Emily were about to be trampled by their thundering hooves. He thought briefly of whipping the horse and trying to outrun the storm, but he realized it was no use. Though he’d only been in one twister before, years ago in Indian Territory, he’d learned only too well that you didn’t run from these wind devils. You hid.
The roiling clouds were beginning to dip all around them now and the wind was starting to pick up dust and dead leaves and dry sticks. The pressure in his ears shifted suddenly, and just then a bolt of lightning split the sky to the south, then another, and another.
He pulled the wagon up, and at the same time did a quick and desperate reckoning of the terrain. The dry, narrow bed of an arroyo lay just a hundred feet or so to the left. They could make it—maybe—if they ran.
Chapter Four
“Maybe we should crawl under the wagon,” Emily called out to him over the fury of the rising wind.
“Too dangerous,” John called back.
He was quickly undoing the reins he’d tethered to the tailgate in order to free his wild-eyed, panicky saddle horse. There wasn’t going to be time to unhitch the luckless gelding up front. Then, when the first hailstones pounded down on his shoulders and the brim of his hat, he realized there was barely time to make it to the creek bed.
Emily was a tangle of windblown skirts trying frantically and unsuccessfully to climb down from the wagon seat, when he reached her.
“Here. Come on.”
With one swift and not-so-gentle motion, John wrenched her down onto the ground, then propelled her in the direction of the creek.
The whole world had gone a wet and queasy green around them with long, skittish bolts of blue lightning striking ever closer and the resultant thunderclaps almost deafening them now. Hailstones, big as babies’ fists, bounced around them as they ran, and turned the ground beneath them treacherously slick.
Emily’s face was pale and her eyes were huge with terror as she stumbled along beside him. Dios! She had every right to be terrified. He suspected his own dark face went a few shades paler when he glimpsed the caroming, twisting, screaming cloud that was riding down on them.
Once they reached the arroyo, John didn’t stand on ceremony. He pushed Emily facedown in the shallow ditch, then immediately threw himself on top of her, trying his best to hunch his shoulders and arms over her head, to create whatever barrier he could between the woman and the storm. He twisted his fingers in some exposed roots and held on for all he was worth.
The tornado sounded like a locomotive at full throttle when it blasted by. John couldn’t tell exactly how close it was, but its winds pulled at his shirttail and pant legs as if they meant to strip him naked or even to the bone.
All the while, the hard, frozen rain was battering him relentlessly. Some of the hailstones felt more like boulders or cannonballs when they slammed into him, so he tried to flatten himself even more to keep Emily out of the line of fire.
“It’s all right, Emily,” he whispered close to her ear. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”
His words were as much to reassure himself as they were to comfort her, for John wasn’t sure how long he could keep from being ripped away by the fierce winds or withstand the heavy onslaught of the hail or even keep his own weight from crushing the delicate body pressed into the ditch beneath him.
It had probably been two dozen years since he’d been inside a church, more than that since he last confessed his sins to a padre, but now the words of the Ave Maria came back to him and he whispered them again and again, adding a prayer of his own.
Santa Maria, por favor, do not let us perish here. Or take me, if you must take someone, but let this woman live.
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