Chapter Text
John had never been a believer in precognition. Any time someone claimed they had “a feeling” that something bad was going to happen, he rolled his eyes at the idiocy of the claim. In his experience, you either knew something was about to happen because the signs were there, or you didn’t know at all and got blindsided. Annalee’s death had blindsided him in just such a way. He’d had no earthly idea when he kissed her goodnight that it would be the last time he ever saw her alive.
Victoria’s kidnapping hit him out of nowhere just the same way. He hadn’t even realised that she had left the house till Buck and Sam caught him on the side porch to ask.
Buck wore a slightly worried expression as he called to his brother. “John, is Victoria home? Is she all right?”
John, more interested in the whetstone he’d come out to look for, thought nothing of the question. “Yeah, she’s fine. She’s in the house.” At least that was where she’d been the last time he saw her, and he had no reason to think otherwise.
“That’s good. We just found her horse. That old mare, old Irene? She spooked, I guess.”
John felt a trace of concern. He looked over at Vaquero, who had spent been out here dipping candles all morning. “Vaquero, did Mrs. Cannon ride out of here?”
“Si, Señor, with Manolito.”
“Where’d they ride to?”
“They rode to the old chapel, Señor. She wanted to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. For a special favour.”
He gave them a look that was clearly supposed to be of some import, but any significance was lost on John and Buck. They both smiled and put it down to “one of those Catholic things”. They’d been raised Presbyterian, by the sort of parents who took the boys to church whenever they had time and the weather was good enough to get into town on a Sunday. Christians, certainly, but the Cannons had never been particularly churchy folk.
Victoria’s devout Catholicism was a mystery to her husband. She believed in saints, and had a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary – at least that’s what John thought she meant by the Virgin of Guadalupe – and he sometimes caught her praying with her string of wooden beads before bed. She never bothered to explain and he never bothered to ask. Once a month when the priest from the mission was due for his visit she and her brother, or occasionally one of the hands if Manolito was unavailable, would make the twenty mile journey to the nearest chapel. There she worshipped in the company of assorted Arizona Mexicans, converted Indians, and Irish miners.
“Oh,” John said. “Well, I guess Manolito was just skylarking. They’re probably both on foot by now. I hope they’re pretty tired.” That’d be what they both deserved for pulling a stunt like this, riding off without telling anyone.
Buck smiled. “John, just in case, you want me to round up some of the boys?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Sam and I’ll ride over to the chapel.” He was slightly concerned in spite of himself. Oh, there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be perfectly fine of course, especially this close to winter, but he of all people could be forgiven for being a touch overprotective towards a beloved wife.
***
The man looked up at them with a deeply worried look on his face. “Thank God you are here, Señor,” he said. “You are the lady’s husband, yes?”
Mano was just starting to regain consciousness. John took off his brown leather vest and folded it up to use as a pillow under his brother-in-law’s head while he examined the wound. They were lucky; the wound was bleeding heavily, but the bullet had barely creased his skull. He would live.
Sam, meanwhile, took the old caretaker over to a bench in the shade and sat him down gently, trying to get something sensible out of him. He kept babbling about the men who had been there, who had taken Victoria. He had offered them the money he had been saving for a chapel bell, but they had refused. The man with the hook hadn’t been interested in money. “They took the beautiful lady in the wagon…”
John’s expression was somber. This was serious. Even for a kidnapping this was serious. If they were after ransom, they wouldn’t say no to any additional money that came their way.
He had to get after them immediately. If he were to save his wife there was no time to lose.
He ordered Sam to stay behind with Mano. “You take care of him. When the boys get here you have ’em follow those wagon tracks. I’ll go ahead. If the tracks run out, I’ll mark a trail.”
As he rode out, he pondered the caretaker’s description of the man with the hook. It just added to the sense of unreality he was already feeling. He remembered the stories their father used to tell Buck when he was a little boy, about murderous pirates whose missing hands had been replaced by gleaming steel hooks. John supposed he’d tried to tell him, too, when he was younger, but John had never been much of a one for stories.
But this was no fairy story, no pirate sailing the high seas. This was a real man who, for whatever reason, had taken Victoria. This was a man John was going to hunt down and kill.
***
The caretaker had said there were four men. Four horses, in addition to the one they’d hitched to Victoria’s buggy. Why the change? Just to send her horse home to get his attention? They certainly weren’t going to any lengths to disguise their trail. They could have surely found someone to deliver a ransom note to him. Then again, he’d already ruled out ransom. Why, then? Revenge? Someone who had a vengeance against either Don Sebastian or himself? But if—
No, he chided himself. Too much time to think, riding by himself. Their reasons didn’t matter, not in the slightest. All that mattered was getting to them before his wife was harmed. Her life, her safety, that was the only important thing.
John rode deeper into the mountains, into unfamiliar territory. This wasn’t Geronimo’s territory, and he didn’t think it was the place Cochise wintered with his people, but he couldn’t rule out some of the other chiefs. He kept a wary eye out. With any luck, Victoria’s captors would do the same.
He rode beneath the limbs of a massive dead tree, its branches curving all the way to the ground in a graceful arc. There he left his horse, dismounting to check out the nearby ravine.
At first he saw nothing. Then, turning, his eye caught a glimpse of something that might be—
Oh, Lord, no. He could see the wheel of a wagon down there.
“Oh, no,” he moaned. “Victoria!”
The thought that the wreck could have been at the bottom of that ravine for years never even entered his mind. It was too far away to see clearly, but even so he knew that it was the little rig he’d bought from Ed Henderson just for her use. John scurried down into the ravine, making his way over the boulders as quickly as he dared, hoping against hope that he would find her alive at the bottom.
He checked out the wreckage. Definitely recent, definitely Victoria’s wagon, but there was no sign at all of Victoria. No sign of anyone, dead or alive. Well, that was better than he feared. She was presumably still alive, then. If she was alive, then he would find her. He would save her, somehow or other, because the alternative was unthinkable.
Once he was able to breathe again, to think a little more clearly, he noticed there was no sign of a horse, either. The kidnappers had unhitched it before pushing the wagon over the edge of the rocks. That might be a good sign. No, that was a good sign. Either they were trying to hide the wagon so they’d be more difficult to follow, or he was meant to find it. It had to be the latter, it just had to be. Up to now, they hadn’t even bothered trying to disguise their trail. They wanted him to follow.
Most likely they were somewhere nearby, watching his every move. John looked up to the edge of the ravine, scanning the horizon in the direction from which he’d just come. Where were they, then?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, a voice echoed out of nowhere, the sound seeming to come from every direction at once. “She’s up here, Cannon!”
John drew his gun, looking all around.
“You want her dead, Cannon?” the voice called again. “Use your gun and that’s what she’ll be.”
So they were definitely watching him. He called his wife’s name. “Victoria!”
Instantly, a shot rang out. John’s heart seemed to stop until he heard her voice calling him.
“John!” Just the one word, just his name echoing crazily around the ravine.
Hurriedly, he made his way back up over the boulders. Underneath the sloping limbs of the old tree, his horse lay dead. Ah. So that was the shot he’d heard. John spared no thought for the gelding itself, took no time even to be glad that his best horse had come up lame last night and so was spared this one’s fate.
He checked his gun, grabbed the rifle and canteen off the saddle and slung them over his shoulders. He looked all around him, trying to figure out which direction he should go. They’d be watching him, obviously. Sure enough, as he began to climb a rifle shot whizzed past his shoulder.
“I’m here,” he yelled. “You come and get me.”
No one came after him, and there were no more shots fired. He kept climbing in the direction the rifle shot had come from.
It was surprisingly hot for the season and the altitude, and John was sweating profusely. He had his shirt open, and though the air blowing underneath the coarsely woven fabric was a blessed relief, it was only a secondary effect. As he climbed, he tore off strips of fabric from the bottom of his shirt, tying them around branches or anything else that would keep them visible for Buck and the others when they came.
Breathing hard, John sat down on a rock to take a moment’s rest. He’d been climbing now for at least a couple of hours. He wanted nothing more than to keep going, but he knew it wouldn’t do Victoria any good if he collapsed right there on the trail. He lifted the canteen to his lips. Before he could take a sip, someone up above shot it out of his hands and it went spinning away down the slope, spilling every drop of the precious water.
He scrambled for the shelter of an overhanging boulder, scanning the terrain carefully. Seeing no one, he shouldered his rifle and ventured out to get a better look. Nothing. No one took a pot shot at him, no one called to him. What were they up to? What did they want from him?
***
Suddenly, he stopped walking and sniffed the air. Was he imagining things?
No. No, he wasn’t. The unmistakable smell of coffee filled the air. He followed the scent back to a small clearing in the rocks. There he found an abandoned campfire, on which sat a pot of coffee and a pan of beans. A half-eaten plateful of the beans sat on the ground, as if hastily abandoned. Perhaps the food had been left by a sentry, run off to tell his boss John was coming.
He was slightly suspicious – after all, they could have poisoned the food and deliberately left it for him – but he had no choice but to take the risk. Breakfast was many hours ago, and it had been quite some time since he last had a sip of water. The sweat had wicked away most of the moisture from his body and he was beginning to sway on his feet. He poured coffee into the waiting cup and took a sip, but immediately spat it back out on the ground.
“Salt,” he growled. “Salt!”
He tasted the beans. Sure enough, same result: salted beyond toleration. In disgust, he threw the spoon back down in the pan. John was so hungry and thirsty by this point he was tempted to choke it all down in spite of the taste, but he knew better than that. The excess salt would just get rid of his body’s little remaining moisture that much faster.
He caught the glint off a pair of binoculars and looked up. They were right up there, watching him.
He heard Victoria call to him. “John! Go back, John!”
She said nothing else, and he knew her captors must have shut her up. Dragged her away, covered her mouth, put a gun to her head. Something horrible. Something no woman should ever have to go through, especially not her. He had been beyond emotion for a while now, just concentrating on moving forwards, but this sent the heat of rage through him. He got up and grabbed his rifle.
“I’ll kill you!” he shouted. “Whoever you are.”
***
Just before he managed to doze off, he heard footsteps approach. John’s revolver was already in his hand and levelled at the intruder’s head.
The man he’d heard about, the man with the hook for a hand, stood over him and said, “You’re holding up fairly well.”
“I’ll do. Where’s my wife?”
The man knelt by him, regarding him steadily. The light of the full moon illuminated the unfamiliar face of a heavyset man with a moustache. There was a large, puckered scar underneath his left eye, which he emphasised by habitually rubbing the area with the side of the blunt steel hook. “Don’t you remember me, Captain Cannon?” he asked.
Captain Cannon? John was appalled. He hadn’t been called that since the day he left the army. Captain John Cannon of the United States Cavalry had little enough to do with John Cannon of the High Chaparral.
“I remember you well enough,” the man continued. “Take a good look, sir. Don’t tell me you can’t remember Petersburg. I left my hand there. You cut it off. You took away my arm.”
John wasn’t going to play his game. Whether or not they’d fought one another at Petersburg was of no importance now. Now, in the present, Victoria was all that mattered. “You’ve got my wife. Where is she?”
A second man, leaning against a tree in the shadows, spoke up reassuringly. “Your wife’s all right, Mr. Cannon.”
John wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but he felt a certain relief at the words anyway. As long as she was alive, he could still save her.
The man with the hook snapped at him angrily. “Stay out of this. Nobody shares any part of this but me.”
“Take it easy, Finn,” the younger man said, trying to sooth him.
“I’m not Finn!” he shouted. “I’m Captain Finley Carr, Army of Northern Virginia. Now do you remember me, sir?”
John didn’t. He remembered the faces and the names of his friends and comrades, not the men he had killed. Not the men he had left maimed, with their blood splattered on their grey uniforms. Not this man nor any other of them. He had blocked their faces out of his mind the day he headed back to Kansas, tamping down their memories violently; he’d never be able to sleep if he hadn’t.
“The war ended for me at Appomattox,” he said carefully.
“For you?”
“For all of us. For Lee, for Grant, for every mother’s son who fought on either side. My own brother, Buck, fought for the Confederacy. It wasn’t easy for any of us. Winner, loser, Buck, or me.” Buck had been notably less successful in putting the war behind him than John had, but he knew he wasn’t plagued with it every moment of his life the way this man clearly was.
Carr’s bitterness was clear in his voice as he pointed out, “You did all right.”
He wasn’t about to let him think he’d come out with no losses. And he wasn’t about to let him get away from the only thing which was really important right now. “I came out here to forget the things that you wanna remember. I brought a gentle woman with me. I buried her. But I won’t bury another one, Carr. Where is she?”
“You have two choices, Captain. Either hand me that gun and come with me, or shoot me here and go up there and collect what’s left of your wife.”
John hesitated, thinking it over. Carr meant to kill him, that much was obvious. Probably Victoria as well. But going with him now was the only chance he had to save her. He clicked the safety back on and handed over the gun. Carr took it with his right hand and hung it from his hook, dangling it in front of John tauntingly.
“We’re gonna do it all over again,” he said. “Petersburg. Only this time you’re gonna be the one that’ll run. Now if you please, sir.”
John got to his feet.
***
At the sound of his voice, Victoria ran out of one of the tents. The guard grabbed her, shoving her roughly back inside. Automatically, John rushed forward, but Carr held a pistol to the back of his head. “If you do that, Captain,” he said softly, “she won’t last this night.”
John stopped immediately, and allowed himself to be led over to a cage they’d fashioned from timbers and locked inside it. During the night he tried to sleep, but found it almost impossible. He was too worried about what would happen to them in the morning. When he did doze off for a few minutes, someone would come along and poke him with the nose of a rifle to wake him up.
In the morning he was ignored completely. Carr’s men moved about the camp without looking at him. Whenever one of them passed by the cage he would demand his wife, water, and food, in that order.
The young man who had been with Carr last night finally approached the cage and undid the padlock. “Finn says you can see your wife now,” he told him. “Ten minutes, Finn says.”
His way of speaking of Carr, both familiar and childishly admiring, confirmed John’s suspicions that this was his younger brother. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine Buck speaking that way of him, and he wouldn’t have wanted him to. “You always do everything Finn says, boy?”
“My name’s Stacy, not ‘boy’, Captain Cannon,” he said, with the first display of gumption he’d seen from him. He opened the door of the cage and leaned in. In a tone that was almost apologetic he said, “I don’t like this any more than you do, Captain, but it’s the way it’s gotta be. You see what Finn’s become, but I remember him like he was before. Now, you want to see your missus or not?”
John nodded. “I want to see her.”
As they approached Victoria’s tent, the same skinny, ugly guard who had manhandled her last night stood up to block his way.
“Let him be, Jube,” ordered Stacy.
Victoria ran out of the tent and into his arms, crying his name over and over. John pulled her into his embrace. “Victoria…”
After a moment, she pulled away from him, crying. She grasped his shirt collar in her hands and twisted it. “They killed Manolito,” she sobbed.
“No, no,” he hastened to reassure her. “He’s hurt, but he’s all right.”
She gulped. “He’s all right? Oh, dios mio,” she said, hugging him again. “I watched them bring you in. I couldn’t call to you. They said that…” She broke down, unable to continue. John held her close, fingers caressing her shoulders.
He looked over her shoulder at Stacy, standing barely three feet away. The guard was only a few feet away as well, staring at them. “Did Finn say anything against privacy, here?” he demanded.
Stacy nodded. “We’ll be out of earshot. Let’s go,” he told the ugly guard, who clearly didn’t want to miss anything.
Victoria caressed her husband’s face. “You must hate me,” she said tearfully.
It was the worst possible thing she could have said to him, bringing back all the guilt he’d ever felt about the first few months of their marriage. Bringing back every hurtful thing he’d ever said or did to her during those awful months. In spite of what she must have thought, he’d only ever come close to hating her once. Just one time, and that was for the unpardonable sin of loving him, and for making him come close to loving her long before he was ready. If they got out of this alive, he was going to find some way to make sure she never doubted his love for her again.
He looked deep into her eyes, the expression on his face never more earnest than it was now. “I never loved you more,” he insisted. He embraced her again, pressing his dry, cracking lips against her cheek.
“I keep thinking it’s all a nightmare and I’ll wake up and we’ll be back home. It’s going to end for us here, up in this mountain.”
“No,” said John. “He gave me his word. No harm will come to you.”
He hadn’t meant to, but he’d put a slight emphasis on the word you. She caught the emphasis and took his meaning immediately. She twisted her hands in the collar of his shirt again, coming close to hysteria for the first time.
“But what touches you touches me!” cried Victoria. “If you die, I die!”
John’s blood ran cold. He had to disabuse her of that notion immediately. She was a woman much given to drama, but she meant it. She would willingly die for him, just as he would die for her. But he wouldn’t allow that to happen, no matter what.
“Don’t you say that, don’t you even think it,” he told her. “I didn’t crawl up this mountain on my belly to have that hate-twisted scut let the life out of me.”
It was time to do something about making sure that didn’t happen, or that Victoria wouldn’t be around to witness it if it did. He turned away from her while she was still stroking his cheek, and walked away as she called his name.
He strode over to Carr’s tent. “You! Carr.”
Carr stepped out to greet him. “Come in, Captain Cannon.” He stepped back and extended an arm in invitation.
John took one more look at Victoria before he stepped inside, committing her face to memory, just in case. She was gazing at him with her hands twisted in front of her mouth. “You let my wife go,” he said as Carr closed the tent flap behind them. “I’ll stay here and you can do what you want to, but you let her go, do you understand?”
Carr wasn’t in a mood to listen to him, much less bargain. “You’re in my command tent, Captain Cannon. I’ll choose the subjects here. And the subject is Five Forks. The last real battle of the war. Petersburg, Virginia, April 1st, eighteen and sixty-five.”
John turned away in disgust. “I’ve left that road behind me. I’ve buried my dead.”
“And my honour, Captain,” Carr spat back. “And with it my life. Now I want them back. I wanna see you run the way I did. I can’t sting your nostrils with the stench of the dead, can’t recall to your ears the screams of the wounded. But I can pin you down the way I was. I can run you ragged.”
John shook his head. “You can’t do much more to me than you’ve already done. I don’t mean anything physical. I mean the agony of uncertainty about my wife.”
His tormenter paid no attention to him. He was just staring blankly into space, caught up in his own memories and his twisted fantasies of revenge. “I’m gonna bend you, Captain. Then I’m gonna break you. If you don’t run, then you and your wife can go on home. But if you do run, and you will, why … a dead man has no future. You’re dismissed, Captain.”
***
During that long, nightmarish day and night, he had far too much time to think. Too much time … and not enough ability. His physical state had begun to deteriorate to the point where it was affecting his mental faculties. He was able to understand that that was part of Carr’s plan, though. If he was kept like this long enough, eventually he would break. Anyone would. Enough of this and he would welcome death.
To keep his mind focussed, he watched every move that was made in the camp, trying to keep track of who was where. Stacy was by his brother’s tent, Jube was guarding Victoria’s, someone was digging a pit of some sort, and he’d heard that one had gone out yesterday and hadn’t come back. So that left … five of them. No, four. No, wait, there had been four sets of tracks originally. He gave up trying to keep count; the mental arithmetic was proving to be beyond him right now.
If there was a man missing, with any luck maybe his men had him. He still couldn’t understand why they hadn’t shown up. Unless Carr’s missing man had changed the trail markers that John had left or something like that. Perhaps Buck and the others were wandering lost in the mountains. Or maybe with any luck they were biding their time, watching the camp even now. As day wore on into night, however, it seemed less and less likely.
His mind dwelt on what was to become of Victoria.
Carr had given him his word that he wouldn’t harm her as long as John didn’t resist, but who knew if he could be trusted or not. Assuming that madman did keep his word, what would happen to her if Carr got what he wanted? The likelihood of that was increasing by the hour. Would she go home to her father if she were left a widow? Would she marry again? More to the point, would that father of hers find some other man to try and force a marriage with? If he’d done it once, he was more than capable of trying it a second time. Knowing Victoria, though, she might refuse outright, and then spend the rest of her life alone. After all, she’d refused several suitors before him. Now that she knew what marriage was all about, she might not want to settle.
John snorted at his own arrogance. Settle. Oh, yes, he’d been such an ideal husband. So far, that dream of his that she’d admired so much had managed to get his first wife killed, and endangered his second wife countless times. What was it Don Sebastian had said to her, when he was trying to get her to come back with him? He didn’t think he’d found her a husband who couldn’t even protect her? Galling to realise he’d been right all along.
He thought about his ranch, too. What would happen to the High Chaparral? Blue wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility. As much as he loved his son, John wasn’t sure he’d be ready for a long, long time. He was young yet, barely twenty-one. An immature twenty-one at that. He needed time to grow up. He needed a steady hand to help him grow up. Possibly he just needed a better father, but that couldn’t be helped. Maybe he would—
John’s head dropped onto his chest and he slept, until one of Carr’s men noticed him and came to wake him once again.
***
He was allowed to see his wife once or twice, but not to hold her or talk to her. John was confined to the cage, while they forced Victoria to stay several yards away. He wondered if this was supposed to wear him down as well. After all, her presence gave him strength.
That night – the third night? he was losing count – he lost consciousness in fits and starts rather than slept. He didn’t have the strength to try to lie down, just collapsed against the bars of the cage. Once Carr himself came over to wake him, shaking his shoulder with the hook.
“You’re bone tired, aren’t you, Captain?”
“Leave me alone,” John mumbled exhaustedly. “Leave me alone.” His throat was so dry he could barely manage to form the words. He made a feeble grab at the hook but Carr withdrew it.
“You’re lucky, Captain. With me it was three days and three nights without sleep. That’s the way it was in that Petersburg trench. You’ll be in the trench tomorrow.”
Good, thought John. At least something would finally happen besides this slow campaign of attrition. He was ready to face whatever he had to, because at least it would be better than being locked up and starved, to die from dehydration.
He managed to get his addled brain to form a cohesive thought. It was harder to speak the words, but he forced them out somehow. “What are you gonna live on when you kill me? Who’ll be your whipping boy? I’ve got you all figured out, Carr. Most men live on things they love, like a woman, the land, work, but not you. You live on hate. And if I don’t know another thing about a man I can tell you this. It’s himself he can’t abide. Then he looks around for something to hate.”
“You know what it’s like to live with this?” asked Carr, sticking the hook back inside the prison. He held it against John’s face threateningly, right up against his eye.
John pushed it away with an exhausted chuckle. “I’ve seen a lot of empty sleeves in my time, Carr. But you’re the first steel hook. Why? Does it do something for you? Set you apart, is that it?”
“I’m gonna cut you up, Captain. I’m gonna make you beg me to kill you.”
***
Somehow, in spite of his overwhelming exhaustion, this gave John strength. He suddenly knew he wasn’t going to let Carr win. He couldn’t. He had to live for Victoria, and for Blue, and for Chaparral.
“I’m gonna kill you, Carr,” he promised, his voice stronger in spite of the raspy, dry throat. “You hear that?”
He must have slept again after that. John awoke to hear voices near his cage. Carr, now dressed in his full Confederate uniform, was talking to one of his men about the fact that they were being watched from somewhere nearby. Buck and the men had finally arrived.
Carr gave the order to bring Victoria out and to put her in plain sight with a pistol to the back of her head. “I know you people are out there,” he called. “One shot, one move, and John Cannon’s wife is a part of the past. You people hear me? I mean it.”
He turned to one of his men. “Bring out Captain Cannon,” he ordered.
John staggered as he came out of the cage, but his mind was clear again. A little sleep had worked wonders.
He squinted in the direction Carr had been looking, trying to make out the shadowy forms of his men. He knew they daren’t do anything right now, for fear of getting him and Victoria both killed, but at least they were there. That one little hope bolstered his resolve, gave him the strength to stand up and fight, to believe that they might have a chance after all. He only prayed that none of them jumped the gun or did anything else stupid.
Carr was busy setting the stage for his re-enactment. He picked up a sabre in his good right hand. Another lay on the ground in front of John. As he spoke, his face took on a faraway expression.
“It’s April the first, ’65. The dead and the dying are stretched out in front of you. Been waiting all night. The ground shakes under you – artillery shells rolling beneath you. You’re pinned down, Captain. Artillery stops. You hear the sound of hoofbeats. Riding down on you! You see a sabre flash. You feel it bite into your arm.”
John rolled his eyes in disgust at this self-indulgent nonsense. If the man wanted to kill him, he wished he would just get on with it.
Finally, Carr stopped his speech and looked at him. “Pick up the sabre, Captain Cannon. I was holding one that day.”
John bent to pick up the sword from the ground.
Carr headed for his horse. He held out his hand to take the reins from his brother, but Stacy just dropped them and walked away. He stood at the edge of the camp with his back turned towards the combatants.
It made no difference to his older brother. He mounted his horse and made a preliminary run at John, who got set to defend himself. Their sabres clashed time and again as Carr made several passes. After a particularly vicious slash at him, John was knocked off his feet. He lay flat on his back for an instant. He was breathing hard, but he wasn’t done. He heard Victoria crying his name.
Strangely enough, Carr seemed to have totally forgotten it. “Get on your feet, Captain Carr. You were on your feet.”
John stared at him. It was as if, in trying to reverse their roles in this macabre play-acting of his, he had somehow mentally reversed their identities as well.
“You’re Carr,” John reminded him. “Don’t you remember? You’re not trying to kill me, you’re trying to kill yourself.”
“Damn you, run!”
Carr rode down on him again and their sabres clashed once more. This time, though, John was able to successfully deflect his blow, sending Carr’s sword spinning out of his hand and into the dirt. He turned the horse and came after him on the other side, his left arm extended all the way, trying to cut him with the hook. John slashed at him, but failed to make contact.
Once more Carr turned the horse for another run, hook extended. This time, though, John was ready for him. Sabre held in both hands, he brought it down hard on the wooden base of the hook, slicing it clean off.
Up on his horse, Carr looked down at the remains of his prosthetic, incredulous.
“Kill her!” he wailed. “Kill ’em both! Kill her.”
As John looked on, horrified, Jube cocked his gun and aimed it squarely at Victoria’s head. In the instant before he had a chance to complete his gruesome task, a shot rang out and he fell.
Stacy Carr stood motionless, smoke coming off the barrel of the gun he’d just fired.
Seeing their opportunity, John’s men opened fire. Stacy ran to shield Victoria, while John jumped into the nearby trench. He held out his arms to lift Victoria down in there with him, ordering Stacy to join them. As the bullets flew all around them, John shielded his wife’s body with his own.
A bullet from somewhere hit Carr in the chest, knocking him off his horse.
After that, the fight was over as quickly as it began. Buck and the boys swarmed into the campsite, subduing Carr’s men, holding guns on them and checking inside the tent to make sure there were no others around.
In the trench, John comforted his sobbing wife. Holding her close to his chest he said, “There now, there.”
In front of their amazed eyes, Carr, using the last bit of life left in him, belly-crawled across the dirt to get to his hook. He held the detached segment against the remaining stump of the wood base as if trying to connect the two halves together again. His head fell, and he died face down in the dirt.
Slowly, Stacy climbed up out of the trench and stood over the body of his brother with an expression of unbearable sadness. In spite of everything Finley Carr had done, John could find it in his heart to feel sympathy for Stacy’s loss. He was a brother himself, after all. Buck hadn’t always walked the straight and narrow, either, but he knew very well that if something were to ever happen to him, he’d never quite be the same again.
John stepped out of the trench and reached out a hand to help Victoria up. They stood, arms wrapped around each other, silently respecting the man’s grief.
Eventually he looked up at them. “Finn was dying anyway, you know,” he said, in a voice that was hollow and lifeless. “What the doc called an ‘aneurysm’ in his brain. The doctor said he could go anytime, if he strained himself.”
“Was it because of…” John rubbed his finger across his left eye.
Stacy shrugged. “Might be. Might not be, either. Our pa had three strokes before the fourth one finally killed him. Could be it was a family thing. He wasn’t always like this, though, Capta—Mr. Cannon. I just wanted …” Shaking his head, he slowly walked off in the direction of his brother’s tent. In a moment he returned, carrying a thick woolen blanket which he used to cover the body.
Even if he had been physically up to the task, John wouldn’t have offered to help Stacy heft Finn’s body into the trench. Burying his dead was something the man clearly needed to do for himself.
***
It was Buck, good ole sneaky Buck, who came up with the very reasonable plan of letting John nap in the tent for just a little while, just while they got their prisoners and everything ready to go. Wouldn’t take more than a half hour, he’d said. Not more than an hour for sure. Clearly John’s mind was still not functioning at full capacity after his ordeal, because it sounded like a fine idea. Never suspected a thing.
It was nearly dark when he woke up. Ah, of course. They’d tricked him. Well, that might not be such a bad thing. After sleep and food and water he felt restored enough to actually realise how bad he felt.
Victoria sat curled up on the ground next to his cot, head resting near his hand. For a long moment he lay there on his side, just watching her. All that time he’d doubted that he would ever wake up next to her again, but here she was. He had a strong sense of just how fortunate he was, not only because they were both still alive, but because she was a part of his life in the first place. Single-handedly, she had brought him through the worst experience of his life, an ordeal that made the last three days seem a picnic in comparison. And no matter how awful he had been to her, no matter how cruel or distant, she had somehow always emerged still thinking he was worth it. For whatever reason, he had a young woman who loved him more than anything in the world, certainly more than he deserved, and she was the greatest blessing a man could have.
John reached out and stroked her tangled hair. At his touch, she raised her head and blinked sleepily at him, then smiled and took his hand, holding it against her cheek.
“Are you feeling better, my husband?”
“Well enough,” he said. “Victoria, what are you doing on the ground?”
She lowered her eyes in embarrassment. “I was watching you sleep,” she admitted.
He tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t quite manage it. It was just such a completely Victoria thing to say. Of course, he’d watched her often when he had a hard time sleeping, but he would never be caught dead admitting it. For just an instant she gave him an angry pout, but she quickly forgave him and started to laugh herself. She got to her knees and put her arms around his neck, and he pulled her up beside him. They sat hugging each other until Buck came up to ask if they wanted something to eat.
***
Before they turned in for the night they sat together for a while, John’s arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“John?” she said quietly.
“Yes?”
“I’m very sorry for causing all of this.”
John turned and grasped her by the shoulders, turning her to face him. “Victoria,” he said in a stern voice, “you caused none of this. You heard what Stacy said. They’d been keeping watch on us for days. They would have grabbed you next time you stepped foot off the ranch no matter where you were going. I don’t blame you for anything, you understand that?”
Victoria nodded, and he relaxed his grip on her. He said, “I do think I have the right to know what in the world you were doing sneaking off to church in the middle of a Tuesday morning for.”
“I wanted to make a novena,” she said. “A special prayer.”
“That much I got from Vaquero.” It never occurred to him that inquiring into the specifics of her prayers might not actually be any of his business.
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “St. Rita and St. Anne have not answered my prayers so far. I was hoping to pray for intercession from the Virgin of Guadalupe.”
“I, uh, don’t know what that means.”
“It means I have been praying for a child to bless our marriage. So far there is nothing. I hoped the Lady would take pity on me.”
John was absolutely floored. He knew she wanted children, of course, but he’d had no idea of the urgency she was feeling. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he managed to find the words. “Well. I see. I think we have plenty of time yet,” he pointed out. “After all, we’ve only been married a year and a bit. And you’re not yet thirty.”
“I know that, but I will be soon. And I’ve been wanting this for such a long time, John. When you and I first married, I hoped for a baby to bring us closer together. And now that our marriage is for love and not for the sake of a political alliance, now I want a child even more, to make our happiness complete.”
He found it hard to speak over the lump in his throat. “I’d like that,” he told her. He patted her hand gently, and rubbed his thumb along the underside of her wrist. “I’d like that very much. Tell you what, Victoria. In a few days, once we get these prisoners taken care of, and see what shape the ranch is in after four days away, I’ll take you to that church myself and you can make all the prayers and light all the candles you want. All right?”
Even in the dim light inside their tent he had no trouble making out the glow of happiness in her eyes. “Oh, yes, my husband,” she said, pulling him into her embrace. “That would be wonderful!”
***
He probably wouldn’t be more than mildly disappointed if those prayers of hers went sadly unanswered, but he had to admit the idea of children was very appealing. Oh, it might be less than practical to start a second family at fifty, but John figured he had plenty of good years ahead of him. Another chance to be a father, to do it right this time. He couldn’t stop picturing the ranch house with several black-haired Cannon children running around. Boys who would grow up to help Blue run the whole Chaparral empire their father left them, girls who would have all their mother’s beauty and fire, every last one of them proof positive that this ill-advised second marriage he’d been conned into was the best bad choice any man had ever made.
He didn’t – couldn’t – know what the future would hold for them; whether or not there would be children, or whether the High Chaparral would bring them poverty or prosperity. But he did know that as long as he had Victoria at his side, he could just about handle anything.
The End