The Touch of Fire by Linda Howard
“That’s what I thought. So I went to Florida to see exactly what it was Tench had buried. The train stations were watched; I had to go by horse, but I had the advantage of knowing where I was going. They just knew the general area.”
“It wasn’t the money, was it?” she asked slowly. His pale, frosty eyes met hers, waiting. “It was the papers.”
He nodded. He seemed very remote to her, his mind gone back four years in time. “It was the papers.”
“You found where Tench had buried them?”
“Yes. Everything was wrapped in oilcloth.”
She waited, not saying anything. Rafe was looking at the horizon again. “The government papers,” he said deliberately, “were documentation of Commodore Vanderbilt’s financial aid to the Confederacy.”
Annie went cold. Those papers were documentation of nothing less than the treason of the wealthiest man, or at least one of the wealthiest men, in the nation.
“Railroads are the backbone of an army,” Rafe was continuing, still in that calm, remote voice. “The longer the war lasted, the more profits the railroads made and the more important they were. Vanderbilt made a fortune during the war. President Davis’s personal papers included a diary in which he speculated about Vanderbilt’s motives and the results of prolonging a war that he already had accepted was a losing effort. Davis knew the war was lost but with Vanderbilt’s money he was deliberately prolonging it anyway.”
“Vanderbilt knew about the documentation,” she whispered.
“Obviously. No government would destroy that kind of evidence when it could be used later, regardless of the outcome of the war. Certainly Vanderbilt never would have destroyed anything that gave him that much influence over anything.”
“He must have thought it had disappeared during Mr. Davis’s escape, or even that Mr. Davis himself had destroyed it.”
“When President Davis was captured and imprisoned, he was . . .” Rafe paused, frowning as he searched for the correct description.”. . . subjected to torture, both mental and physical. Perhaps it was encouraged to find out if President Davis knew where those papers were. Perhaps not. If the president hadn’t used them as a leverage to get himself out of prison, it was likely he didn’t have them. Vanderbilt must have felt safe in assuming them lost forever.”
“Until Tench mentioned the papers he had in the hearing of Mr. Winslow, who was an employee of Vanderbilt.”
“And someone, obviously, who knew the importance of the papers.”
“Someone who could have also participated in the treason, and been implicated.”
“Yes.”
She stared around them at the glorious spring day. The horses were contentedly cropping the tender new grass, and the world felt fresh. A sense of unreality jarred her. “What did you do with the papers?”
“I sent the silver to Tench’s family, anonymously. The papers are in a bank vault in New Orleans.”
She jumped to her feet. “Why haven’t you used those papers to clear your name?” she yelled, suddenly furious. “Why haven’t you turned them over to the government so Vanderbilt can be punished? My God, the lives he cost—”
“I know.” He turned to face her. She fell silent at the bleakness of his face. “My brother died at Cold Harbor in June of ’64. My father died in March of’65, defending Richmond.”
There was no way to tell how long the war would have lasted without Vanderbilt’s aid; perhaps the battles at Cold Harbor would still have been fought, but almost certainly it wouldn’t have dragged on until April of ’65, and his father would still be alive. It had cost him his family.
“All the more reason to make him pay,” she finally said.
“I was killing mad at first; I couldn’t think. They had picked up my trail in Florida and weren’t far behind. I put the papers in the bank vault under a false name and ran. I’ve been running ever since.”
“In God’s name, why? Why haven’t you used them to clear your name?”
“Because they wouldn’t. I’m wanted for Tench’s murder. I can’t prove that Tench was killed because of the papers; I can’t prove that I didn’t do it.”
“But Vanderbilt is obviously behind it. He’s the one who had put such a large bounty on your head. At the very least you can use those papers to force him to cancel the bounty and . .. and maybe use his influence to have the murder charge dropped.”
“Blackmail. I thought of it. I tried, a couple of times, but I needed help. I’ve been hunted without letup; I couldn’t get back to New Orleans. The people I told,” he said slowly, “were all killed.”
“So you stopped trying.” She stared at him with dry, burning eyes. Her chest was hurting. He had been forced to run like a wild animal for four years. What he was saying was that it wasn’t only bounty hunters and lawmen after him; Vanderbilt must have a private army searching for him too, perhaps using the bounty hunters and following close behind to eliminate anyone who they thought Rafe might have talked to. It was hideous. She didn’t know how he had survived. Yes, she did. Most men would have been caught and killed a long time ago, but Rafe wasn’t most men. He had been one of Mosby’s rangers, trained in stealth and evasion. He was tough and smart and cold-minded.
He gave evidence of that now when he turned and said emotionlessly, “We need to be moving.”
The pace he set was as fast as he could maintain and still be reasonably careful about their tracks. He wanted to put more distance between them and Silver Mesa, where it was possible that anyone who happened to see them would recognize Annie. He could have traveled faster had he been alone; he had to carefully watch both Annie and her gelding, for neither of them was used to the long hours of travel. His bay was hard and muscled from years on the trail, but the gelding had had only occasional use, and it would take time to build up his stamina.
He wished he knew how close Atwater was, and if any other bounty hunters were in the area. He figured he could bet on the latter; Trahern was too well known for his presence to go unnoticed, and the other vultures would flock around him hoping to get the prey. It would be safer to avoid meeting anyone on the trail for several days, at least.
He tried to shake off his morose mood, but it had settled on his shoulders like a blanket. It had been years since he’d told anyone about Tench and the Confederate papers, years since he’d even let himself think about it that much. All of his attention had been on staying alive, not rehashing the events that had made him an outlaw. He was a little surprised by the intensity of the sense of betrayal he felt even now. He had met Jefferson Davis several times in Richmond and had been impressed, as was almost everyone who had ever met the man, by his almost otherworldly combination of intelligence and integrity. Rafe hadn’t believed in slavery, his family hadn’t owned any slaves, but he had firmly believed in the concept of states’ rights over the authority of a central government and in the protection of his home, Virginia. Mr. Davis had made him feel as the American Revolutionists must have felt a century earlier, as if he were involved in a greater purpose, that of creating a new and sovereign nation. It had been a kick in the teeth to discover that Mr. Davis had given up the cause as lost and yet had still accepted money to keep the war going so a rich man could become even richer.
How many people had died during the last year of the war? Thousands, including the two who had meant the most to him, his father and his brother. It was more than betrayal, it was murder.
Annie’s questions, as she tried to understand all the ramifications, had brought it all back to him. In the beginning he had compulsively reexamined every detail, every possibility, in an effort to find some way of stopping Vanderbilt. He hadn’t been able to think of one.
Turning the papers over to the authorities would result in Vanderbilt’s arrest—or maybe not; the man was enormously rich—but it wouldn’t get the murder charges dropped. Rafe would have revenge, but he had to be alive to enjoy it. Revenge didn’t do a dead man a whole hell of a lot of good.
Annie had
That was when he had tried enlisting other people to help him implement the plan. After two of his old friends had been killed, he had given it up. It was obvious Vanderbilt would stop at nothing. But now things had changed; he had Annie to think of. If it would allow them to live in peace, he was willing to try again, if only they could find someone they could trust and who had the means of implementing the threat. It had to be someone whose murder couldn’t easily be passed off, someone with authority. The trouble was that not many outlaws knew people like that.
He glanced at Annie, her posture determinedly erect despite her obvious fatigue. He realized that he was thinking in terms of us now rather than him. All of his decisions affected her now.
Right before sunset he signaled a stop and made a small smokeless fire; after they had eaten, he put out the fire and destroyed all sign of it, then they rode another couple of miles in the rapidly deepening twilight to make camp for the night. He estimated they were still too close to Silver Mesa to relax, so they crawled between the blankets completely dressed. He didn’t even remove his boots, nor Annie her shoes. He sighed, remembering the nights in the cabin when they had slept naked.
She turned into his arms, winding her own arms around his muscled neck. “Where in Mexico are we going?” she asked sleepily.
He’d been thinking about that too, and it was a difficult question. “Maybe Juarez,” he said. Getting there would be the problem. They would have to go through desert and Apaches to get there. On the other hand, it would make anyone on their trail think twice about following them.
CHAPTER
13
“Why haven’t you just changed your name and disappeared?” she asked one day about a week after they had left the cabin. She thought it had been a week, but she wasn’t certain. Out here, surrounded by nothing but the sheer majesty of the land, she had lost track of such mundane, human things as names on a calendar.
“I’ve changed my name several times,” he replied. “And grown a beard.”
“Then how would anyone know you?”
He shrugged. “I rode with Mosby. There were a lot of photographs taken of the ranger companies, so anyone with money would have been able to come up with some of those and find out what I look like. In some of them I had a beard, because it isn’t always convenient to shave. For whatever reason, I seem to be easily recognized.”
His eyes, she thought. No one, having once seen those pale, crystalline eyes, would ever forget them. Changing his name and growing a beard wouldn’t change his eyes.
He had shot a small deer and they had spent two days at the same camp while he smoked the tender meat. Annie was grateful for the respite; though she knew he had set the pace as slow as he had dared, she had been in agony for the first few days. The soreness in her muscles had eased as she became accustomed to the long hours in the saddle, but spending two entire days without having to even get on a horse had been pure luxury.
Their camp was under an overhang of rock, about ten feet deep and just high enough at the opening for him to stand erect. The farther south they had gone the more sparse the vegetation had become, but there was still some timber to provide cover, and grass for the horses. A jumble of boulders at the mouth of the overhang kept their fire from being visible, and there was a small stream nearby. Lying in Rafe’s arms with the semblance of a roof overhead, she felt almost as secure as she had in the cabin.
He had been considerate of her while she had been so sore, holding her at night without even mentioning making love, but during the two days they had spent in camp he had seemed to be making up for his temporary celibacy. As she cooked their supper over the small fire she watched him curing the deer hide. His dark hair had grown so long it curled down over his shirt collar, and he was so darkly tanned that she thought he could pass as one of the Apaches he had been telling her about. She loved him. It seemed to grow more powerful every day, crowding out everything else until it was difficult to remember how her life in Silver Mesa had been.
The bonds of the flesh. She had known from the beginning that if she allowed him to make love to her he would possess a part of her that she would never be able to reclaim, but not even instinct had prepared her for the strength of the ties. And perhaps his lovemaking had resulted in even more.
She stared pensively into the fire. Since she didn’t know the exact day of the month she wasn’t certain if her menstrual courses should have begun, but certainly it was almost time. It had been perhaps three weeks since Rafe had taken her from Silver Mesa, and her last course had ended a few days before that. She was fairly regular in her cycle, but not so regular that she could know to the day when it should begin.
She wasn’t certain how she would feel if she were indeed pregnant. Was it possible to be both terrified and happy at the same time? The thought of having his baby made her dizzy with delight, but a pregnant woman would slow him down. He would have to leave her somewhere when she became unable to travel, and she couldn’t bear the thought of that. Desperately she hoped that her body hadn’t proven immediately fertile.
She had taken a human life. It would be ironic justice if the bearing of another human life resulted in the loss of the man she loved. Sermons from her childhood boomed through her head, dire threats of divine retribution and the scales of fate.
Rafe looked up from the hide he was working and saw the desolation in her dark eyes as she stared blindly at the fire. He had hoped she would be able to forget the shock of Trahern’s death, but she hadn’t, not completely. For the most part, during the day while she was busy, she could put it out of her mind, but when it grew quiet he could see the sadness growing in her.
After the first time, during the war, he had always been able to accept the deaths he had caused. Reduced to the simplest terms, it had been his life or theirs, and that was still how he looked at it. He was a warrior. Annie wasn’t. The tenderness of her emotions, that deep wellspring of compassion, was part of what drew him to her. With bemused disbelief he remembered that when he had first seen her he had thought her to be thin, tired, and rather plain. He didn’t know how he could have been so blind, because when he looked at her now he saw a kind of beauty that took his breath. She was softness, and warmth, and an all-encompassing caring that wrapped around him with the tenderest of bonds. He saw intelligence and honor, and God, yes, a physical beauty that gave him an erection just from looking at her. Removing her clothes was like unwrapping a treasure that had been concealed under the drabbest of covers.
She would never be able to calmly dismiss the loss of human life. And he would never be able to watch her suffer without feeling the need to comfort. He just wasn’t certain he knew how.
“You saved my life,” he said into the silence. She looked up, a little startled, and he realized he hadn’t put it into words before.
“Actually, you’ve saved me twice. Once with your doctoring and then again from Trahern. He wasn’t going to even try to take me back alive.” He went back to working the deer hide. “Trahern once went after a seventeen-year-old kid who had a dead-or-alive bounty on him. The kid had killed the son of some rich man in San Francisco. When Trahern caught up with him, the kid was on his knees in the dirt begging Trahern not to kill him. He was crying, his nose running. He swore he wouldn’t try to escape, that he’d go back peacefully. Guess he’d heard Trahern’s reputation. It didn’t do him any good. Trahern shot him between the eyes.”
&n
After a moment he gave a brief nod and returned his attention to working the hide.
Annie stirred their supper. Rafe’s story had helped dispel her melancholy, though she knew part of her would never be the same. It couldn’t be.
Night fell in a silent explosion of color, the sky overhead changing from pink to gold to red to purple in a matter of minutes, then fading away and leaving only a hush behind, as if the world had caught its breath at the spectacle. Only the faintest remnant of light lingered in the sky when he took her to their blankets.
“Hello the camp! We’re friendly an’ sure would appreciate a cup of coffee if you got any to spare. We ran out a couple days ago. All right if we come in?”
They had just finished breakfast. Rafe was on his feet with his rifle in his hand before the first word had finished sounding. He motioned for Annie to stay where she was. The shout had come from a stand of piñon pine about a hundred and fifty yards away, far enough that the horses, grazing off to the left in a pocket that wasn’t visible from the trees, hadn’t warned him of anyone’s approach. He could see two men on horseback in the shadows under the pines. He looked at the fire. Only a thin haze was floating upward; someone either had to have damn sharp eyes to have spotted it, or they had to be deliberately looking. He suspected it was the latter.
“We’re out of coffee ourselves,” he shouted in reply. When no invitation to approach the camp was issued, anyone without an ulterior motive would ride on.
“We’d be glad to share a meal with you, if you’re low on food,” came the answering shout. “No coffee, of course, but we’d be right glad of the company.”