Cactus Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy) (45 page)

      
“Let me go! My father'll kill you,” she shrieked.

      
“Her father's been detained, but I guess I'll have to kill you for him if you don't do like the little girl says,” Lee said as he cocked his Wilkinson over-and-under at the apparent ringleader's belly.

      
Melanie quickly squirmed out of one malodorous man's grasp. “You do well to call this poor Indian a drunkard. You all reek of cheap whiskey!” she spat as she knelt by the prone body.

      
“Why you strangers butt'n in ta save a Krank, anyways?” one of the other sailors questioned peevishly.

      
Lee thought it a more than fair question. The tame Karankawa indeed had the appearance of a derelict who would doubtless cut a man's throat for the price of a shot of whiskey. “I'm just trying to get my friend's daughter out of harm's way. He's a real mean fellow and I've sort of been put in charge of her safekeeping until he arrives.”

      
“Why did you beat him?” Melanie glared at the tallest fellow.

      
“Little lady, he's a Krank—oh, I can tell you're not Texian—a Karankawa, a cannibal. They eat little gals like you.”

      
Melanie paled as she looked over to Lee.

      
He nodded in agreement. “Yep, the coastal tribes have been known to have a barbecue now and then.”

      
“But he's dressed in white man's clothes. And he's alone and unarmed, an old man,” she argued despite the repugnance of their accusations.

      
“He stole my watch, sneak thief Injun,” the thinner of the two young sailors said. “Check his pockets. No tame Injun ever had a silver watch. It was my pappy's.”

      
Lee walked up to the body, his gun never wavering from the four drunken sailors as he knelt and checked the inert form sprawled in the sand. Sure enough, he swore to himself, the Krank had a small silver watch in his right back pocket.

      
“This it?” he asked the sailor.

      
Melanie grabbed it out of his hand and opened it. “There's no engraving, nothing to prove it belongs to him rather than the Indian.”

      
Lee gritted his teeth and swore. “You want to get us both killed?” he hissed beneath his breath. “No Krank begging drinks in waterfront bars ever owned a silver watch.”

      
“That's still no reason to beat him to death for petty theft...if it was theft. We should take him to the police and let them settle it,” she finished with a dare in her voice.

      
Lee shook the old Krank, who was beginning to stir. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath reeked of whiskey. “I'll be the arbiter in this game, since I'm the one holding the ace.” He turned the gun so the afternoon sun glinted on its barrel. “You keep the watch, we take the Krank to the sheriff to sleep it off in the lock up. Agreed?”

      
At their shuffling, muttering agreement, Lee tossed the young sailor the watch and motioned for them to amble up the beach.

* * * *

      
“Quit sulking, Melanie. Your supper is getting cold,” Lee said impatiently as he cut into his thick steak.

      
“I'm not sulking. I just don't have an appetite. I'll bet that poor Karan...”—she stumbled over the unfamiliar name—“that poor Indian isn't getting steak for supper!”

      
“He's not out slitting someone's throat for a pocket watch either,” he snapped testily. “Damn lot of trouble over nothing. Those charming fellows on the beach could have brained us along with that stinking savage.”

      
Melanie sat very still, her big golden eyes boring into his curly black head until he felt her stare and looked up to meet it. Her face was chalky and her voice vibrated with a child's righteous anger. “You don't like Indians, do you, Lee?” The gaze never wavered but her voice did.

      
“My ancestors colonized Texas a hundred and twenty-five years ago.
Tejanos
and Indians just naturally never got along. Yes, I hate the butchering, torturing fiends! There, does that satisfy you?” He threw down his napkin like a gauntlet, heartily sick of a child debating a situation about which she was so abysmally ignorant.

      
“Yes. It does. You really shouldn't be sitting at the same table with one of us ‘butchering, torturing fiends'—should you, then? I'm descended from Cherokee on my mother's side—oh, and that's not all—my mother's side also included Africans. You see, I'm Lily Duval's daughter! Deborah Fleming is my father's Yankee wife, and Adam is his legitimate son. I'm just a...” She summoned up her courage and went on, “mongrel bastard—that's what that awful man in New Orleans called me!” By this time the tears were overflowing her golden eyes. Wiping them away with her tiny balled-up fists, she leapt up and dashed headlong from the hotel dining room.

      
Lee sat stunned through her whole tense, painful speech, frozen to his chair. It took him a moment to collect himself sufficiently to drop some money on the table for the bill and chase after her.

      
He cursed himself for not having recognized sooner the truth of the situation. How stupid of him! He recalled Melanie's evasive answers about her mother, who had not been a wife to a very young Creole man but his quadroon or octoroon mistress! He groaned. Why had the girl come to Texas? Did Deborah even know about the result of Fleming's illicit affair? Was Fleming really coming to Galveston to meet the child?

      
Visions of him explaining to Slade about how he came to have a vicious-tempered, disaster-prone twelve-year-old in tow flashed through his mind. He resolved he was not taking her back with him. He would put her on a boat to New Orleans! Then another thought occurred to him. What if her mother was dead? Melanie had told him that her grandmother and aunt in St. Louis had been killed in an accident but had never talked about any family in New Orleans, except to mention the stepfather, Francois, whom she heartily detested.

      
By the next evening, they had worked out an armed truce. After she had locked herself in her room all day Sunday, Melanie's healthy young body was starved into submission. When Lee made a handsome apology, she reluctantly agreed to eat dinner with him that night. By the time they had finished dessert, her youthful curiosity got the better of her and she asked, “Do all the white people in Texas hate Indians like you?”

      
Feeling some things were simply too painful and private to discuss ever again, especially with a snippy, spoiled child, he evaded the question. “Let's just say
Tejanos
and Texians have good reason to mistrust most Indians.”

      
“As much as Texians mistrust
Tejanos
?” She remembered the sailor's slur against Lee's Hispanic ancestry.

      
At least he'd steered her away from talking about Indians. “It goes both ways.
Tejanos
have good reason to dislike Anglos, too. This land was settled by the Spanish long before the Americans reached the Mississippi,” he said with more than a touch of arrogance.

      
Melanie sensed the pride in his ancestry that his every word and movement conveyed. Wanting desperately to take him down a notch, she searched for a way to do so, dredging up her tutor's sketchy lessons in recent history. “But the Anglos whipped the Mexicans, and now Texas is a republic modeled after the United States, isn't it?”

      
Ignoring her supercilious manner, Lee nodded and countered,“Yes, the dictator Santa Anna was defeated by General Houston's army, which included a lot of
Tejanos.
Lorenzo Zavala was the first vice president of Texas. Juan Seguin was one of Houston's most trusted colonels. Jim Slade fought with Houston at San Jacinto, and he's a Sandoval on his mother's side. Anglos don't have a monopoly on opposing dictators, Melanie.”

      
“Your boss was there but you weren't, were you?” Melanie hated to lose a good argument.

      
“Considering I was eleven years old at the time of the Revolution, Will Slade would have locked me in the horse barn if I'd tried to go with Jim,” he said in dismissal.

      
Her little face puckered in sheer frustration. “Well, I'd have gone, even if I am a girl, and even if I was only eleven years old! I'm not afraid of anyone, Lee Velasquez!”

      
He let out a snort of disgust. “You sure don't have the sense to stay out of dangerous situations where a spoiled child can get a man killed, not to mention herself. When you grow up, Melanie, maybe you'll learn not to tilt at windmills.” He looked at her skeptically. “Then again, probably not.”

      
“What do windmills have to do with courage?” she blurted out before she saw the smug amusement in his expression. Without being able to recall anything specific, she knew she should have paid more attention to her tutors back in St. Louis.
Just you wait, Leandro Angel Velasquez, just you wait. Someday...

      
He only laughed at the pugnacious set of her little chin.

Chapter Nineteen

      
All the way back to San Antonio, Lee alternately worried about the tense triangle between Jim, Sina, and Charlee, and tried to put Rafe Fleming's sullen brat of a daughter from his mind. Never had he been so overjoyed to see anyone as when the dangerous-looking Creole had walked purposefully across the hotel lobby to confront him.

      
Mercifully, he was able to explain the series of fiascoes with Melanie while she was still upstairs pouting in her room. After Rafe repaid Lee the money he'd put out to ransom the worrisome chit from First Mate Phillips, he collected his horses and left posthaste.
Let her father make my goodbyes
, he had decided on the spot, fondly wishing never to lay eyes on her again. Given the distance between San Antonio and Renacimiento, he hoped for the best.

      
Of course, considering that Charlee and Deborah were such close friends, there was the possibility Lee might run afoul of Deborah's stepdaughter again. He winced and turned his thoughts to Charlee and Jim. What would get those two blind hardheads to see what he, Asa, and Weevils knew was the only answer. But what were they to do with Tomasina? Such a tangle! At least the brood mares were beauties. Slade would have two females to be pleased with, Lee thought wryly.

      
As he rode toward San Antonio, Lee thought of several ideas for getting Jim and Charlee together.

* * * *

      
Slade was considering that very same problem back in San Antonio as he waited for Kennedy to arrive and claim his gold. Tomasina was recuperating nicely, under house arrest. Her health was much better than her disposition, he mused wryly. Now free of his deadly ex-fiancée, Slade focused on Charlee. He resolved to go to her boardinghouse and tell her of his plans that very night. It wouldn't be
her
boardinghouse much longer! Whistling, he swung into the saddle and kicked Polvo into a brisk canter.

      
Jim walked up the steps of the boardinghouse and waved good evening to Mr. Schwartz and Miss Clemson, who were sedately sipping lemonade on the porch. Schwartz puffed on his pipe and waved back. Miss Clemson smiled sweetly at young Mr. Slade, with avid curiosity brightening her eyes.

      
As he entered the front door, Slade heard Charlee’ s voice down the hall informing Sadie that the new cook would be arriving in the morning.

      
“Sounds like you've got a regular going concern set up here. Too bad you're going to have to sell it so soon,” he said innocently.

      
Charlee whirled around to face him, unconsciously wiping her wet hands on her apron front. She had just finished doing dishes and was hot and sweaty, dressed in her oldest work dress, a faded yellow print. Damn!

      
Narrowing her eyes, she asked belligerently, “Just what do you mean, I'm going to have to sell my boardinghouse?”

      
He looked down at her, noticing the way the sheer cotton dress hugged her small waist and curved around those delectable little breasts. She was all in yellow like a daffodil, with spitting green cat eyes and wispy tendrils of hair spilling onto the perspiring sheen of her forehead. “You know good and well what I mean,” he said with a touch of arrogance, bemused, wanting to grab her right in the middle of the kitchen and make love to her. “You can't run a business here and live at Bluebonnet.”

      
“And just why should I live at Bluebonnet?” She stood very still, daring him to deny that he was going to stay with Tomasina.

      
“We'll be going back to the ranch in a few days,” he said impatiently, planning to whisk her off to Padre Juan for a quick wedding before any more mischief befell them.

      
“And wouldn't it get rather crowded,” she shot back scathingly, “with me in the kitchen and your ladylove in the parlor!”

      
He clenched his fists in absolute fury, fighting down the urge to turn her over his knee and paddle those petite buttocks until they were good and pink. “Sina is not my ladylove and I am
not
taking her to the ranch. I meant—”

      
“Then what are you going to do with the murdering bitch?” she interrupted. “She killed my brother and her own husband. Markham deserved to die for it; so does she.”

      
“Markham was a professional killer, a spy, and Comanchero, a foreigner. Sina is an Aguilar. Her family settled Texas two generations ago. They're people of honor. She can't be dragged out and hung like some common horse thief. I have plans to deal with her.” He finished rather lamely, realizing he was caught between an old obligation to Simon Aguilar and a new one to Sam Houston, and he could not explain either to Charlee's satisfaction.