In the scene below, Don Miguel Navarro has completed a cooling, restful swim in pond after a tiring day on his vast rancho. He joins his land manager for the ride back to the hacienda.
“I am not anxious to return to the house. Let’s take it at a
walk,” Miguel said.
Stalking Elk nodded.
Riding side by side, they traveled in silence for a time,
and then the older man, who had worked for Miguel’s father, spoke, his voice
tinged with disgust. “I caught Señorita Valdez trying to
peek, Jefe. I sent her away.”
Stalking Elk always called him Jefe—chief—rather
than don.
“Ah, Señorita Rosita
Valdez,” Miguel replied.
Shaking his head, he sighed at the thought of the hot,
turbulent méjicano. Peeking was so like her. Inwardly he smiled,
but it was a dry smile. Even when he was younger, and free, he hadn’t sampled
what Rosita had hinted he could have. Although he admitted he’d come close
once, in the days after his parents, aunt and uncle had been massacred in a
raid by marauding Indians three years earlier. Led by a rogue Paiute warrior
named Red Hawk, the group of outcast Indians and whites had swept down through
the mountain pass to the north, stealing cattle and horses, slaughtering men
and women in their path.
Miguel had been in El Pueblo, and the shock of
returning to find his parents dead had cloaked his mind in a miasma of anger,
pain, and helplessness. The burden of running the ranch had settled with sudden
heaviness on his young shoulders, and he had almost, but not quite, yielded to
Rosita’s charms.
