Comanche Gold by Richard Dawes Page A

stopped stroking his stomach. “What’s your
secret?”
    “There’s no secret.” Tucson smiled up at her.
“I’m just who I am.”
    “But you talk differently,” she pursued. “And
you have strange ideas.”
    Tucson glanced away and watched the sunlight
play over the water in the pool, then he turned back. Catherine was
peering earnestly down at him, waiting for an answer.
    “I met a man once, when I was still a
teenager,” he said, speaking slowly. “I had been tracking a band of
renegade Apaches down into Mexico, and I was lying on a ridge
looking down into their camp through binoculars when he sneaked up
behind me and stuck a gun in my back.”
    “Someone was able to sneak up on the Tucson
Kid?” Catherine gasped, poking his side with her finger. “I would
never have believed such a thing if you hadn’t told me
yourself.”
    “Well, don’t let it get around,” Tucson
laughed. “It’s not something I’m proud of. Anyway,” he continued,
“he was something of a wise man—at least the Apaches thought so.
Although he was a white man, they respected him and let him stay
with them. Sometimes, during times of trouble, they'd go to him for
advice.” He stopped talking as he thought back. “He told me that he
had been waiting for me to come to him, and that he had some things
he wanted to teach me.”
    “Then he was a wise man,” Catherine
interposed.
    “He belonged to an ancient warrior
tradition,” Tucson went on. “He told me that his tradition went
back thousands of years—into the misty dawn of time, I think was
how he put it—and that he was the last of the line. It was his
responsibility to find a successor before he died, and he had
chosen me.”
    “If the Apaches accepted him,” Catherine
queried, “wasn’t his tradition the same as theirs?”
    “It wasn’t identical to the Apache way. For
one thing, the Apaches are matriarchal, but the two traditions were
close enough so that they were more or less compatible. So, once I
swore not to reveal the location of the Apache camp, and promised
not to track them until they crossed the border into the States,
they let me come down and stay with him as often as I liked.
Sometimes, I stayed with him for months at a time.”
    “Is that where you got some of your unusual
ideas?” she asked.
    “After he initiated me into his tradition,”
Tucson answered, “he taught me a complete system of knowledge. I
didn’t understand much of it at the time,” he confessed. “But he
told me that he had embedded the teachings into the deeper layers
of my mind, and they would stay with me. He assured me that over
the years I would understand the things he’d taught me more and
more.”
    “Did you find that to be true?”
    Tucson nodded. “Certain things have gotten
clearer to me as I’ve spent time chewing on them.”
    “That explains a lot,” Catherine commented,
as she lay back down and rested her head on his shoulder. “You were
very lucky to meet such a man.”
    “I know,” Tucson agreed. “He set my feet
firmly on the Warrior’s Way. It’s the path I follow, and the path
I’ll go on following until the end.”
     

 
    Chapter
Seven
     
    Tucson and Catherine got back to Howling Wolf
just before sundown. While she went inside to help Mirah prepare
supper, Tucson led the two horses to the corral behind the boarding
house. He removed the saddles and bridles then pitched plenty of
hay into the trough so that they, and the two buggy horses
Catherine kept on hand, could feed.
    After washing his face and hands, it was time
for supper.
    The other boarders were just sitting down at
the table when Tucson entered the dining room. They stopped what
they were doing in mid-movement, their bodies frozen in awkward
positions and their faces distorted from vain attempts to seem
natural.
    Only Catherine Murry was genuinely natural
and relaxed. She sat in her usual place at the head of the table,
beaming a warm smile up at him. Tom McMannus dropped into