.jpg)
The Furies
by Niven Busch
Chapter One
The spring-wagon was ready. It had been washed and greased; all three seats had been put in and the red spokes of the big wheels had a shine to them like sticks of candy.
Clay Jefford got in and took the reins and Dan climbed up on the seat beside him. Both looked down at their sister, Vance, waiting nearby to wave good-by. They did not want to leave her behind, for this was a ceremonial occasion; they were driving to the signal-stop to meet their father, who had been away for nearly two years. It seemed fitting that the whole family — or all that remained of it now since their mother's death — should take part in the welcome; they were puzzled by her decision to stay behind. "You're sure, now, you don't want to come?"
Clay's question was uttered in an offhand fashion yet there was a guarded supplication in it. Clay was a stickler for family etiquette and Vance's contrariness seemed a breach of this.
"He'll be askin' for you," Dan appended.
"Tell him I had to get things ready," Vance said. "Tell him I'll be ridin' out to meet him. I'll see you on the way back, sure enough."
Clay weighed the answer gravely, then accepted it.
"All right then, but mind you do it. I wouldn't want to tell him and not have you do it."
Vance pressed her lips together. She saw they did not wholly trust her words, and was all the more irritated because she knew she had deserved such distrust. In recent months, more than ever, she had lived a life apart from them and from the powerful daily drive of ranch activities. Nor had she always explained satisfactorily what she had substituted for these activities — where she had been or why — nor always kept her word about doing what was expected of her.
"I've said I would, haven't I? Don't you-all sit there fussin' at me. I've said I'm fixin' to ride out, and so I will. Just you get goin' now or you'll be late."
Vance raised her hand but neither of her brothers saw the farewell thus tardily submitted; the wagon fairly flew down the Headquarters street and out of the big gates.
With an expression of pleasure she looked after the disappearing wagon, already reduced to a dark blur relieved with glints where paint or harness buckle caught the April sunshine. I'd better get goin' myself, she thought, I've got things to do. She looked around hastily, wondering if she had spoken aloud, but if she had it did not matter, there was no one within earshot. She took a few quick steps across the yard, then once more stopped, tempted and hesitant, looking away eastward where the wagon was just swooping out of sight in a dip of the range.
From where she stood the ranch street, sheltered in a similar dip, spread out an uneven scattering of buildings, some plank, some adobe — three bunkhouses, various supply and tool houses, a studbarn, a blacksmith shop, a collection of corrals, a coolhouse for perishable foods — even a schoolhouse and a flagpole with an old brass cannon mounted in front of it. Such a Headquarters street was a tremendous one for any man's ranch. It denotes the Birdfoot as a property of the first importance — yet how immeasurably small and insignificant seemed this avenue of tamped adobe in comparison to the great country beyond. The Birdfoot spread was located in the northeastern section of New Mexico where it occupied portions of four counties — a rugged and lonely country, beautiful to look at on that April morning of the year 1889, just as it is today. Here, at Headquarters, a huge box-canyon reached the apex of its V, beset with lead-colored rocky walls on east and west. Northward, fifty miles away but apparently far nearer, mountains scribbled a grey line on the air while to the south and southeast an endless landscape unrolled to an elbow of the Canadian River.
Either Vance Jefford, at nineteen, was not old enough to have suffered the dark fate of Territorial women, as far as looks were concerned, or else she had been cast in a resistant mould. . . . But resistant was not at all a good word for her. The essential of her character was something else — a kind of independence or aloneness that did not come in any way from her age or the country she lived in, but from some climate of the mind which had set in around her early and given her a precocious maturity. In body she was a little above average height, well-formed and strong, with a delicate voluptuousness. Her features were regular although not particularly expressive; in her photographs (she'd had three taken, at different ages), she generally looked sulky or sleepy. Her eyes were a slaty grey and her eyebrows, in contrast to her light, ‘dobe-colored hair, were as black as if they had been painted on. Between these dark brows and the changeable, somewhat blazy grey-green eyes beneath them was a shadow made by many tiny blond brow hairs. When she smiled these areas of shadow disappeared, giving her a look of innocence, but when she was angry the eye shadows flattened her glance till it was like a cat's.
At the present moment she was merely in a hurry. There was no time to lose if she was to do what she had to do and still ride out to meet her father, as she'd promised. Slowly at first, then with gathering purposefulness, she started down the ranch street.
Apart from the Headquarters street, standing by itself, a large adobe building sucked the morning light against its pink walls. It had been built as a hay barn by the Mexican grandee who had been the original tenant of the ranch; now it was used as a carriage-house, enclosing a shadowy collection of vehicles, some still serviceable, others long past use, but all neatly racked up, with their shafts raised and their wheels secured by blocks. There was even a hand-cart, a homemade affair built to be dragged or pushed between the rows of fruit trees in the family orchard; near this, shoved into a corner, towered a coach so old that no one knew to whom it had originally belonged. It was designed in the Spanish fashion, with transverse leather springs, a rounded top, and a leather boot behind; on its doors was some kind of faded armorial scroll like a tarnished banner, completely undecipherable. The wheels of the coach had long ago been taken off to be utilized for some more practical conveyance, but the old mounting-step (for the high doors could hardly be reached by the stretch of an ordinary person's leg) was in place; Vance climbed on it, opened the door, and got inside.
At once for some reason she began to breathe quite fast and audibly, as if she had been running; she felt ashamed of this sort of breathing and tried to control it.
In the coach it was pitch-dark but the air was warm, heated by the body of someone waiting there.
Nothing could be seen of this person but Vance seemed confident of his identity and even of the position in which he sat, cramped into a corner of the coach seat.
She put out her hand and touched him lightly.
"Are you going to be stupid?" she asked.
She spoke in Spanish and her voice managed to take the sting out of this age-old question which, in any language, is a provoking one.
The young man removed her hand from his leg. He seemed to be doing this as some sort of discipline.
"Listen who's talking about being stupid!"
He turned as he said this, his profile becoming visible against the coach window — an arrogant Spanish profile inherited from some conquistador ancestor. Faces with such profiles had, no doubt, been silhouetted on the window of this vehicle many years earlier, in the days of the Spanish occupation.
"I can't help it, Juanito," the girl said. "I've explained it to you so many times. This is the day now, it has come. They wanted me to go to the signal-stop but I kept my word; I came here to see you. In a minute I have to go. If you're going to be stupid the time will be wasted. And this is the last time."
Juan knew this. Yes, he knew it very well, but he could not accept it. He refused to make their farewell pleasant, even friendly. With a male's typical stubbornness he insisted on grappling with the main issue, just as if this issue were not already quite settled.
For several months now Juan had been employed around the Birdfoot headquarters ranch as a wrangler and general utility man, mainly because Malan Shafer, the strawboss, liked him. Also, Juan was good at putting a rein on green colts, broken to be ridden by the family. He was a tall lean fellow with a bony, sorrowful, good-natured face and a walk like a fighting chicken's; he was very gentle and intelligent with people or animals, at least with those he liked, and he liked Vance. When she had first told him they must part he could not readily believe that she meant what she said. He reasoned patiently with her.
"Si! He is coming home. But because he is coming home does not mean that we will be elsewhere. We will be here, we will feel the same." "We may feel the same, Juanito," Vance said, "but we will not be here, not altogether. That I promise you."
"Because he will be here, you think he will know?"
"I would know," Vance said.
"And you would feel ashamed?"
Vance thought this over. "I can't tell," she said. "I don't think so. I am not ashamed of anything. I have loved you a great deal, and I always will. Don't you believe that?"
"Of course," Juan said simply, his face brightening.
This time it was he who put a hand out but Vance lifted this hand firmly at the point of approach, and set it down on the seat.
"I am not going to see you anymore. You must believe that also."
Juan shook his head. Logic of this kind was beyond him; his upbringing had not conditioned him for moral niceties.
The Herreras were a wild clan who had taken to the mountains after losing a suit over a land claim in the days of Spanish rule. Like many of the families living on the Birdfoot range, they were squatters — but with a difference; they were not of peon descent, like the inhabitants of the pueblecitos on the south division; the Herreras were landed people, savage and proud. They had never entirely given up their claim to a vast heritage and they counted themselves the equals of any man and the superiors of the American settlers who had dribbled into the Territory on the heels of General Kearney's busy little army and the rawhiders who smoked in later, after the Civil War.
Juan's job as wrangler had given him social prestige plus twenty dollars a month; all he had needed for complete happiness was a girl. The delights which Vance had given him had seemed quite unretractable and the prospect of losing them depressed Juan beyond measure. His pride was hurt, his emotions squeezed as in a vise. And why was he losing all this? For a woman's whim. It seemed truly like madness, that love should be denied because a parent returned home.
Miserably, he tested this wretched situation for some ray of hope. He could not find any. For several seconds he sat in a mute state of resentment and suspension, his anger slowly gathering. Finally, he turned round on the seat, he took Vance in his arms, but she was ready for this move; she combated it, not by struggling, but by making her body stiff. The treacherous longing she had felt a moment earlier was gone now, she would not give in to it.
"It's no use, Juanito."
"It was some use before."
"I mean what I said. I didn't come here for that."
"Then for what?"
"To make you understand once and for all. And to say good-by."
"If you have another man I'll cut a hole in his belly and stick his head through it."
The light coming through the coach window touched Juan's eyes, glaring with anger.
"Have you lost so much faith in yourself, you think I could love another?" Still perturbed, Juan thought this over. Then he put out a hand and touched her face, so near to his. Tentatively, almost timidly, he brushed his thumb across her lips.
"No."
"Well, then . . ."
"But I believe you have gone out of your mind."
"Maybe I have."
She wanted to add something more, much more — to express a little of what she had come to say. She felt she owed this to Juan. It was really for this that she had made the appointment to meet him once more in the coach-house though ‘all that' was supposed to be at an end since they had officially parted the day before.
"Juan . . ." she began, and then again fell silent. The words would not come. She had thought them all out but now they were lost; there was no way she could make him or anybody understand the feelings she had built around her father's homecoming — feelings so powerful and unalterable that from them she had drawn the strength to break off this love affair.
It was too bad, but that was how it was. They could not part as friends. Not as real friends but as former lovers who would soon be strangers. She had wanted it to be different but there was nothing, now, that could be done about it. Very well. Her hands moved quickly over the pale coppery pad of her hair, making sure Juan had not mussed it when he was behaving like a fool. She disliked him now because he had not made it possible for her to seem generous, faithful, and friendly in this last good-by.
If not really a fool, he was certainly a child. He could not understand.
"I have to go," she said, and with these words a curtain came down in her mind. She pitied people (her own mother had been one of them) who could never get through with anything but perpetually went back to it, fumbling over it with their regrets. Such people could never start their lives afresh.
For her something was starting fresh. It was starting today, right now. Her nerves tightened with expectancy.
"Stay a little."
"I cannot, Juanito. I told you, I am going to ride to El Mirador and meet the wagon. Will you saddle Conchita for me?"
"Si. For you, anything."
She seldom asked favors in connection with horses; she could have cut the little mare out of the remuda and saddled up as proficiently as Juan. She was demanding this attention as a sort of test, to see whether Juan was going to sulk. Clearly, the technique of parting after a love affair was known to her intuitively, though she had never before had to use it.
"I have to go and dress."
"Fine. Go ahead."
Not satisfied with his tone she peered into his face with a quick animal suspiciousness. She took one of his hands and held it for a little between both of hers, giving it a placatory squeeze; then she got out of the coach and went quickly out of the wagon-house, threading an intricate path between the dusty vehicles with their erected shafts.
