Commanche Vengeance Read online

  Comanche

  Vengeance

  by Richard Jessup

  A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK

  Fawcett Books, Greenwich, Conn.

  COMANCHE VENGEANCE

  © 1957 CBS Publications, The Consumer Publishing Division of CBS, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

  CHAPTER ONE

  The morning was bright and hard when Adam Phelps opened the door to his sturdy cabin near the outer rim of the Texas Brazos. His stomach filled with cornbread and sowbelly, coffee that was black and hot and sweet. He knocked out his pipe and let his eye travel along the line of rail fencing that separated the yard from the outer range. There were three outhouses. A chicken coop and pen, shed for the horses and a milking shed for Elvira and Nancy, their two milking Jerseys.

  His eyes were soft and friendly. The great eastern sun had risen again and there it was. Paint it up a little bit, he thought, and it would be a picture from a book. As far as his eye could see there were oceans of grass. Beyond a slight rise to the west Adam Phelps knew there were forty-five head of the finest cattle, grazing contentedly.

  “Git going, Adam,” a warm voice said from inside the house. “It’s be just like you to stand there all day dreaming about how pretty it is.” Mrs. Phelps came to stand in back of her husband and look out on the scene. “And I can’t say that I’d blame you at all.” She sighed. “Git now!” she said, giving her husband a mock shove into the yard.

  Adam turned and grinned at his wife. “Woman, stop manhandling me. Remember who I am. Captain Adam Phelps, Georgia Fourteenth Cavalry.” He came to attention and saluted.

  “Git on with you,” Sarah Phelps said. “And mind, don’t you go riding out over that northern trace. You know well as I do that old One Nest took them steers— and you ain’t going to find nothing but trouble if you go looking for ’em.”

  The friendly light in Adam’s eyes hardened. His teeth clamped together. “You tend to the children, ma’am, and I’ll handle the running of our spread.”

  “Promise me,” Sarah said. She matched her husband’s hardness.

  Adam Phelps turned on his heel and strode to the shed. Sarah watched him as he saddled up the roan, and with a wave and grin trotted to the front gate.

  She stood a long time watching the rider move straight across the grass until he was lost in the wild green of the Brazos headwaters. She sighed and turned back to her house and the problems of the day.

  A six-year-old girl, tall, like her mother, with yellow hair and bright blue eyes, was playing with a rag doll. “Time to go see if the chickens have done anything, Little Sue,” Sarah said to her daughter. And then turning to a three and a half year old boy, she patted him on the shoulder. “Hurry now, Buster, git your breakfast down. I want you to help me make the butter today.”

  Sarah turned to the hand pump and primed it carefully with half a bucket of water, then with a vigorous action began pumping the water up. The rusty clanking of the handle on the socket filled the two-room house with sound. The water came up and Sarah dragged the butter chum over and began to fill it up.

  “Git going now, Little Sue,” she said. She took a bar of lye soap and dropped it into the churn, and with a brush made of boar hair began scrubbing out the butter maker. “Go on, now, Sue, girl,” she said. “Don’t want the hens to think they can sit on them eggs.”

  Reluctantly the girl moved toward the door, taking her doll with her. “Just leave that doll right here,” Sarah Phelps said, elbow-deep in the strong water. “You can’t collect eggs with a doll in one hand and a basket in the other.”

  “I’ll go, Mama,” Buster said. “Can I help Little Sue?”

  “All right, go ahead,” Sarah said.

  The two children left the house together and Sarah Phelps bent to the task of cleaning out the butter churn.

  Sarah thought about the day as she scrubbed the inside of the wooden churn; it was like many others since they had packed up and left Savannah, traveling west. “We’ll just keep going, Sarah, until we find the right place,” Adam had told her. “The right place will speak to us. High or low, green or brown, dry or wet, Sarah Phelps, the right place will rise right up and tell us. 'This is your resting place.’ That’s where we’ll light.”

  Sarah stopped scrubbing momentarily and looked out the window. The grass was high, and it looked as if there might be a good soft winter instead of the blistering cold of the last three. And there were now forty-five head of cattle instead of the six they had brought with them. Another day, she thought, returning to her scrubbing, of waiting for Adam to come home, of waiting for the night and waiting for the morning and waiting for the winter and waiting for the spring and the summer. But deep in her soul, the scars of the Georgia ruin of their home by Sherman’s raiders was slowly being eased away by this new life.

  She was a tall woman, nearing thirty, and her hands were nearly as tough as her husband’s. But she still kept herself up. She did that for herself mostly, but she also knew that she did it for Adam. She loved to watch his eyes roam over her when the children were in bed and the light was burning low. She knew that there was little enough in his life and the least she could do was keep herself looking up for him. But she would never in this world let him know that!

  The scrubbing was over. She began dipping the water out of the churn and pouring it out of the sluice Adam had built to drain off water from the pump basin. Another day, she thought, and the children are growing up fine.

  She threw the last of the water out of the churn and began pumping in fresh water to rinse it out. The children had been gone a long time. She stopped and walked to the door. “Sue! Little Sue!”

  Silence, except for the slight rustle of the winds over the grass and around the yard. She wiped her hands on her apron and pushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead. She stepped into the yard and walked toward the chicken coop. “Little Sue! Answer me!”

  Something gripped her heart. It was as if a voice had suddenly encased the organ and would not let it continue to beat. She began to hasten her steps. “Buster—Little Sue! Answer me. I’ll whip you children if there’s any foolishness going on. Answer me!”

  She was across the yard now. She was near the edge of the coop when she screamed. On the ground, at the edge of the little greasewood thatch hut, she saw the relaxed hand of her son, white and still.

  She made the corner of the coop in one leap and stopped in horror. Her children were sprawled on the ground, Buster’s red skull already half covered with flies. Little Sue was bent double, backwards. Comanche arrows were buried in both their bodies.

  Sarah Phelps felt herself falling and reached out to hang on to the coop, but she never made it. She fainted dead away, falling a few feet from the body of her scalped three-year-old son.

  Sarah opened her eyes. She stared into the blue sky and heard the distant pounding of hoofbeats. There had been such a bad dream. “Adam—” she said softly, “I had a terrible dream.”

  She felt the hard ground under her and then heard the clucking of the chickens. She screamed, her eyes wide open, she let out a blood-curdling cry that filled her ears and obliterated every sound and the thing that she knew to be real.

  She fought with herself to turn her head. She bit her tongue, lying there, staring at the sky, watching a hawk circle, and felt the front teeth sink into her tongue, but the pain was not enough to take away the thought, the fact that she knew was true and she finally turned her head.

  Sarah Phelps fainted again.

  When Sarah awake
ned the second time, she moved at once. She got up and took the bodies of her children in her arms and carried them into the house.

  Everything was the same. The churn was there, half filled with rinse water, the dishes left from the sour-belly breakfast. She began to cry, softly, the tears streaming down her face, as she took each body and tenderly began to take out the arrows.

  She stopped often, closed her eyes and gritted her teeth so hard the pain shot up into her temples, but she carried on. She removed the children s clothes and washed them carefully, tenderly. Not once did she speak. She did not look around her. After a long while, she stopped crying.

  She took Little Sue’s best dress out of the chest and slipped it over the child’s body. Then she put Buster’s little sailor suit on him that had been made from an old suit of clothes worn out by Adam. When she finished, she looked around her and saw that it was growing dark.

  The chickens were making noises and there was a low moaning from the cowshed where the Jersey cows demanded attention. There were the usual sighing breezes from the winds over the grass, and the cries or the hawks.

  Sarah heard none of these things. She moved to the table, sat down on the hard bench holding a hand of each child, and waited for Adam.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The roan did not come back for two days. Sarah had not moved. The horse stood at the gate of the door-yard and waited, pawing the earth and crying, but Sarah did not move. She sat, still holding the hands of her children, staring into nothingness and the vacuum of hell. There was hardly any sign of her breathing.

  The chickens had long ago flown over the edges of the coop fence and scattered around the outer fields of grass. The Jerseys had broken loose and bawled around the yard and they also broke out of the fence and buried their faces in the grass.

  Sarah Phelps moved at last. She got up with the stiffness of two days’ sitting and moved, unaware of her own body, out to the gate where the roan waited. It was night and the stars were high, but they seemed like Christmas tree ornaments and close enough to touch. She opened the gate and looked at the saddle. Blood had dried on the cantle and flap. She patted the roan on the nose and led it into the enclosure, removed the saddle and sat in the door with the heavy Western saddle across her lap, smoothing and smoothing out the blood of her husband.

  She looked up at the roan. “Why didn’t they kill me, too,” she said softly. The animal jerked up at the strange sound of a voice after so many days of silence, and then returned to the grass.

  Sarah dug the two little graves for Little Sue and Buster with care. She dug deep and had to use a ramp to get in and out of the graves. When she could no longer throw dirt out of the hole, she went into the house and took the bodies of her children and wrapped them in the best blankets she had, returned to the graves, and buried them.

  When it was over, she dropped the shovel and turned back to the house. She did not make the bed. She fell across the doorstep and slept for the rest of that night and all the next day and deep into the next night.

  When she awoke, she got up and pumped water into a pot and made herself a cup of strong tea. She ate a little bread and drank a little whisky from the crock taken from the earthen cellar.

  The whisky made her a little ill and dizzy, but she expected that. She drank more coffee and took another long drink of the whisky. Then, with her sewing scissors, she cut off her long black hair until it was just off the neck. She let the hair lay where it fell on the floor, and stripped off her clothes.

  Naked, she took another drink of whisky from the crock and then turned to the chest, where she pulled out a pair of trousers that had been too small for her husband and that she had been saving for Buster. She slipped them on and put on a thick shirt A thick winter jumper Adam had used for the winter was thrown to the table. She stuffed the legs of the pants into the tops of her flat-heeled boots and took another drink from the crock.

  It was nearly dawn when Sarah had finished packing her blanket roll. And the last of the whisky in the crock was gone. She felt around the inner lining of the chest and pulled out a small leather sack of gold coins. She shoved them into her pocket without opening it. She knew there were eighteen double eagles.

  With the sun breaking over the eastern hump of the Brazos, Sarah pulled out the heavy Colt and belt that had been her father’s, and strapped it on. The weight was uncomfortable, but she did not appear to notice it. From over the fireplace she took a carbine and shoved a double box of shells into the blanket roll.

  The last thing she took before moving out of the house was the small three-sided picture of her husband, her mother and father. They had not had a chance to have pictures taken of their children.

  She called the roan, saddled it and slipped the carbine into the leather on the flap. She swung into the saddle and looked around at the buildings, her eyes, dead and flat. She got off the pony, went back into the house, studied it a moment and went to the fireplace. She took the flint and struck a light to shavings and in a moment, the fire was glowing. She took a burning stick and went around the room setting fire to anything that would catch and then walked outside to the coop, cowshed and horse stalls. She called to the roan, slipped into the saddle. She rode into the grass, stopped and watched the buildings burn. They burned for nearly two hours, high, billowing flames that leaped into the bright morning sun, and men slowly grew smaller and smaller until the buildings were gone and there was nothing left but charred remains.

  She whipped the roan around and loped across the grass toward the traces where she knew she would find the body of her husband.

  “I’m sorry, Adam,” she said softly, standing bareheaded over the freshly dug grave. “I would blow my brains out now and lie down with you—if—” She did not continue.

  She dropped to one knee and closed her eyes. She prayed silently. She remounted the roan and stood for a moment, looking down at the grave. “Goodby, Adam Phelps. I loved you.”

  She whipped the pony around, lashed it hard on the rump and rode high and fast into the west, along the traces where she knew the Comanche had taken the herd of cattle.

  Sarah rode until nightfall, stopped beside a stream in the upper watershed of the Brazos. She did not make a fire. She took the saddle off the roan and staked him out near the water and lay down on her blanket and closed her eyes. She did not think about Adam Phelps or her son and daughter. That had been shoved out of her mind. She began to think about everything she had ever heard about the Comanche and their habits and ways.

  She went to sleep finally with the image of Chief One Nest in her mind. A deep-eyed, heavy-nosed Indian with stringy black hair that fell loosely in a fan on his shoulders. A tall Indian with huge hands and a green cast to his eyes.

  Sarah had seen him once. When he came to ask for food, slyly using the pretext of begging to look them over. Adam had been generous and given him a steer for his lodge, and the Indian had ridden away leading the steer without thanking them.

  She remembered stories about Comanche and their ways, different from the other plains Indians in one outstanding feature. They moved constantly—that she had heard in her semiannual visits with Adam to the post down the Brazos. They loved women, she remembered. The braves were particularly demanding on their women. They were merciless and they were never to be trusted. Different from the Apache, who had a fierce pride and would face his foe over a blade. And they were different from the Cheyenne to the north, who were resilient, warlike, and with even more pride than the Apache, and the finest horsemen in the world. But the Comanche, unlike the Apache and the Cheyenne, could not be trusted when he gave his word.

  On and on, she thought back to the difference in the Comanche and the others, remembering small details of gossip and bulling she had heard while shopping in the post grocery store, and the stories that Adam told her.

  Piece by piece she put together a pattern of their behavior and their likes and dislikes. She saw the one image of the chief of this tribe; One Nest, who had slain her husb
and, scalped a three-year-old boy and violated a six-year-old girl.

  But she did not sleep, deeply, or for very long. Throughout the night she woke up and jerked into a sitting position to stare around her in the darkness before she remembered where she was, who she was and what she was doing there.

  Then, when she remembered, she would push the images of what had happened out of her mind and return to thoughts of a long-haired Indian, tall, with a green shading to his eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sarah searched the traces in the watershed for three days. She backtracked, crisscrossing her own trail, often studying hoofprints only to discover that they were those of her own roan. She left the headwater’s region and turned back toward the post along the Brazos banks. It was near the end of a week after her leaving that she found a cattle trail Her heart leaped with sudden fury. She jerked the roan around and began following the trail that was bending toward the post She could not believe that the Indian would dare take the stolen cattle anywhere near the settlement but the tracks were plain and clear. She spurred her roan, and on the flat level land, raced after the tracks of more than fifty cattle. And there were the unmistakable ruts of a dragging travois. Indians, all right.

  Late that night, Sarah rode into the post, still following the trail of cattle and travois ruts. Near the edge of town she found a pen full of the bawling steers. She got off the roan, slipped through the fence and started to examine the brand of the nearest animal.

  “Just get right out of there, mister!” a voice commanded behind Sarah.

  Sarah straightened up, turned slowly and faced a burly man with a beard and overhanging stomach above the cinch of his gunbelt. “Where’d you git these cattle?” she demanded.