Nan Ryan by The Princess Goes West

Author:The Princess Goes West [West, The Princess Goes]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-10-23T04:15:22+00:00

22

On a low, sunbaked mesa, in the Tularosa valley’s wide corridor, an Apache warrior sat unmoving on his dancing, snorting mustang. Directly behind him, a dozen mounted Apache braves were silent. Totally silent.

None dared speak. None dared ride up alongside the young, sulking chief. Their volatile leader was in a black mood, had been in a black mood for weeks. Each long hot day that passed without a drop of rain made him grow more gloomy, more menacing.

The chief prided himself on his ability to make rain. He bragged how he had only to lift his arms to the skies and call for the rain to fall. A great downpour would follow. It always had.

However, to his great despair, he had, for long months now, been unable to make it rain. No matter how many times he stood under the cloudless skies and called for a cloudburst, nothing happened. Not a sprinkle fell on the dust-dry desert. Not a single dark cloud billowed up in the summer sky. Precious water holes were drying up, and there was no longer any gama grass for the horses.

His braves dared not mention his failure to bring the rain. To do so would risk his wrath. Nor did they dare mention what they knew was bothering him as much, if not more, than his inability to bring the rain.

They knew, too well, the danger this hot-blooded chief posed when he had been too long without that most favored prize that meant more to him than any other pleasurable diversion. More than stealing horses. More than burning out pesky settlers. More even than scalping blue-coated soldiers or the hated Tejanos diablos.

It was common knowledge that the big bronzed warrior, though married to three young, comely Apache, relished nothing quite so much as raiding a remote farmer or rancher’s spread and finding a young white woman. A pretty white woman. He had no taste for sturdy, raw-boned, sunburned wives whose hard life showed on their plain, wrinkled faces. He shunned homely, calico-clad matrons with big, billowy breasts and spreading behinds. He paid no attention to any woman, pretty or plain, whose hair was dark like his own.

Discriminating in his taste, he searched ceaselessly for just the right woman. Young, but not a child. She had to be fully grown, totally mature, preferably between the ages of eighteen and thirty.

He, himself, had passed his twenty-fourth winter.

The sulking young Apache who sat astride his dancing mustang upon that barren New Mexico mesa was called Chief Thunderfoot.

Chief Thunderfoot was proud that his name struck cold fear in the hearts of all the despised white-eyes. His reputation grew with every surprise raid he led and every successful stage holdup and every white man’s scalp he added to his war lance.

And, with each white beauty he claimed for his own personal prize.

Chief Thunderfoot was at the height of his physical prowess. His strength and endurance were legendary. He could run on tireless legs for twenty or thirty miles. He could snap a strong man’s neck with one quick twist of his huge bronzed hands.

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