Free Heaven Is a Long Way Off by Win Blevins Page B

brigade leader can’t do that. The company comes ahead of the personal.”
    Sam nodded. He looked the captain straight in the eye. “Not with me.”
    Coy whimpered.
    â€œGo on then,” said Jedediah, his tone edgy.
    Sam and Hannibal were gone within the hour.

Five
    A S THEY RODE to Monterey, Sam thought, I need to get my daughter to her country, Crow country.
    To the music of Paladin’s hoofs he walked through the dark door of memory and looked at the unbearable past. Meadowlark died of childbed fever. Sam had a daughter and no wife. He buried her at the mission in Monterey. After the friars had said their words, he spaded the dirt back onto her coffin, thunk after thunk after thunk.
    Then the handsome son of Don Joaquin Montalban arrived, asking for Señorita Julia Rubio. With a cunning smile, he extended his false invitation. Would she care to visit an old family friend at their rancho?
    Julia understood what was going on. These old family friends were in league with her father, who had spread word that his runaway daughter was to be found and returned. So she answered firmly: “My husband and I will gladly receive the don this evening at the mission.”
    The young don looked contemptuously at the Indian who presumed to be the husband of the beautiful youngest daughter of the great Rubio family of Rancho Malibu. He looked at their rough fur trapper companion, Sam Morgan. “Not possible,” he said. Then he gave his bodyguards orders to seize the señorita.
    In the fight the young don died, two of his three bodyguards died, and his carriage driver fled.
    Now Sam looked at Coy, trotting beside Paladin. He was envious. “You don’t remember,” he said to the coyote. At least not in the haunting way that I do.
    Sam ran the pictures through his mind over and over—the surprise of the bodyguard when Sam’s belt buckle turned into a knife. The slash of glinting blade, the kick of foot, the spout of blood, the fall and roll, the lifetime of events that spun themselves out across a minute or two.
    The deaths.
    His indifference, his utter indifference to everything.
    And now Don Joaquin or other agents of Julia’s father had kidnapped Julia. And her husband, Flat Dog. And Esperanza.
    All Sam wanted to know was whether they were dead or alive.
    He had advanced beyond indifference. Revenge bubbled in his throat like lava.
    Â 
    F ROM THE SUMMIT of the Santa Lucia Mountains the Pacific stretched before them to a horizon where sea misted into sky. Sam’s dad’s voice sounded in his mind— Forever.
    Monterey Bay itself was a small dollop of ocean cupped by pincers of land on the north and south. Near the southern pincer lay the presidio, the arm of the Mexican government, and farther south the mission, the arm of the church. The presidio was a stockade a couple of hundred yards long. Originally, all secular intruders into this Indian land had lived within the fort. Now buildings leaned against the outside of the stockade, and a town was springing up nearby, a few adobe homes forming a plaza, and other adobes and thatched huts on the hills above. Compared to the mission, all of it was rough and tumble, dirty, and crowded.
    The mission where Meadowlark died, far from her home…
    Where my daughter was born, far from home.
    Sam jerked himself back to the present. He looked at Coy and touched his spurs to Paladin.
    He had ridden for three and a half days chewing on one question: Are they alive? Has Montalban killed them? He didn’t speak of it to Hannibal. They rode in silence. But he obsessed about it. Sometimes he told himself he knew: Flat Dog had been murdered, mother and baby spared.
    Two brothers. Blue Medicine Horse went with me to the Sioux villages and got killed. Flat Dog went with me to California and got killed.
    He did not let himself think consciously of Meadowlark. The family will despise me.
    Walking Paladin down this slope, he felt a