Free Deep Purple by Parris Afton Bonds Page A

Russian princess fleeing persecution. But the simple fact is that between my father, who was a schoolmaster, and the Excelsior Finishing School for Young Women, I received an excellent education. Some time ago my mother became ill, and between caring for her and my younger sister and working at the local hospital, too many years have slipped away.”
    “ But what brought you out here?”
    “ The search for excitement, I suppose.”
    A muscle twitched in his jaw. “ And Lucy wants the East, where she thinks all the excitement is! I keep telling her that everything worthwhile is here—at Cristo Rey.”
    Cathe rine sighed. “At this moment the East is filled with destruction and death. There is nothing beautiful about the pall of smoke that hangs over the cities. There are no glorious sunrises or sunsets like what I see above the Whetstones when I wake or the Santa Ritas before I go to bed.”
    “ Why can’t Lucy understand that?” he asked tersely. “Why can’t she love the beauty of Cristo Rey as you do? I thought she—”
    He broke off, and Catherine sensed the embarrassment in his voice. “ I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”
    She shifted uneasily on the wooden seat. The moon had moved past the Stronghold ’s earthen roof so that the compound lay in total shadow. But she had the strangest feeling of being watched.
    “ Catherine,” Sherrod said softly, “thank you for listening to me tonight. I needed to talk.” He paused. “I value your friendship very much.”
    She was not even aware of the hand that took hers or the way his arm encircled her waist when they returned to their separate rooms. Her thoughts were still back at the compound remembering the tiny spark of light she had seen in the distant shadows . . . and the noxious odor of Sonoran tobacco that had drifted on the air.

 
    CHAPTER 9
     
    T hrough the escape of her daily riding, Catherine was beginning to know the countryside. The twisted mesquite grove that heralded Coyote Wash—an arroyo that would run rabid with flash floods in the monsoon months; the red sandstone boulders that indicated the trickle of water seeping at their base; and the miniature canyons that opened fold on fold, like a desert flower, ever exposing some exotic landscape to delight her aesthetic taste. For her the land possessed incredible lights and shades . . . intensely sharp colors not to be seen anywhere else.
    But now the July heat stole a litt le of the pleasure from riding. The parched land was a fiery furnace. Blue-green mirages shimmered against the horizon. Life itself seemed stilled, the wind wilting, waiting for those first fleecy clouds to mantle the brooding bulwark of the Huachucas. Still, she loved it, despite the perspiration that soaked her armpits and dampened her thighs where they rubbed against the sidesaddle’s sweaty leather. The blistering summer played its part in the Southwest’s timeless magic show.
    It was these hours she lived for. She cared not where the mount took her and was only half aware of the trail it followed as it picked its way along a rocky bed bordered by the waxy- leafed creosote and the green-barked paloverde. But when it halted suddenly, its small ears erect and the muscles in its barrel twitching, she came alert. Something out of the ordinary moved beyond the range of her own senses. She did not know which she feared worse—the screech of the Mexican jaguar that occasionally roamed the area or the sight of a string of Indians riding toward her.
    The long seconds she sat on the roan, straining her eyes and ears, seemed more like minutes. She began to believe she was at tributing more caution than the situation warranted when a voice behind and slightly above her said, “Aren't you a little far from the Stronghold, Miss Howard?”
    She jerked around in the saddle. “ Law!” she gasped, recognizing at once the man crouched on one knee on the bank’s high rim. Above the black, dust-coated trousers his lean,