A Breed of Men by Matt Chisholm

Author:Matt Chisholm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: wild west, cowboys, old west, peter watts, frontier fiction, piccadilly publishing, matt chisholm, storm family, mart storm, texas ranchers
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Twelve

Ever since she had set out on the trail of the escaped white man, Serafina had been a puzzled girl. She was simple, direct and hard. At the same time, in spite of being capable of savagery, there was a strong streak of kindness in her character. If she had courage, she was quite unaware of the fact.

Her life had been one of acute hardship. The daughter of a poverty-stricken peon family in Chihuahua, Mexico, she had been at the age of thirteen the means by which the son of the hacienda which owned her people was introduced to the subject of sex. The lord of the domain, seeing her comeliness, took her for a short while for his own pleasure. After that he had taken up with a third-rate actress from Mexico City and she had been sent back to her father.

The revolution had come. She couldn’t remember which one, there had been so many revolutions. But it had come and for the third or fourth time in her short life the peons had been freed. This revolution like the others was short-lived, but it brought ruin to the land. Where there had previously been hunger and debt, there was now starvation.

Serafina took up with a soldier. He was killed with a knife-blade in his kidneys during a drunken brawl and she had found another soldier. Or you could have called him a bandit and you wouldn’t have been far wrong. Next, she took up with a small-time trader who took her to El Paso, Texas, and she saw the land of the gringo. She was a whore for a little while in the house of a Greek madam, but this hurt her dignity and she drifted north with two bad men on the run from the law and didn’t like to be without feminine comforts on the trail, even thought it might be owl-hoot. There were endless places and men after that—Pueblo, a mining camp in Utah, another in the San Juan region, Denver, another mining camp. The faces of men became blurred, then she didn’t see them at all. She was occupied in keeping food in her belly. Her last stop had been the camp in the hills where the unlawful drifters, the hold-up men, road-agents and killers on the run came. There she ate regularly and the men didn’t treat her too badly, just beat her now and then in drunken fury because she was an Indian and they were white men.

Knowing that much, you would think that all her pity would be turned in upon herself. But humans are unpredictable and the female kind most of all. She pitied the white boy they had brought in prisoner. She knew that, leg-ironed as he was, barefooted and with nothing but her knife, he would be defenseless in the mountains. The gringos would hunt him and most likely they would kill him. Who could tell with gringos?

So she took out after him, not asking herself why.

And then the terrible black man had come on her and hunted her down.

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