Harvest of Fury by Jeanne Williams

chances of getting a message to him in case of a raid were pitifully slight. “Give Doña Rosa and her nieces my love.”
    â€œI’ll do that.” He sighed gustily. “They’d enjoy a visit from you, but I reckon we’re still years away from when folks can go see each other for the plain fun of it.”
    Patrick had fetched his ewe-necked but serviceable horse. Donning his serape in spite of the heat, Kitchen snugged down his sombrero, waved, and jogged off westward, toward abandoned Tubac and often-despoiled Tumacácori, though he’d swing south at Calabazas, also deserted, heading for his ranch on Potrero Creek.
    â€œHe doesn’t look all that wild and deadly,” grumbled Patrick.
    â€œWe aren’t bandits,” Talitha reminded him. “Come on, now, let’s see if we can’t finish Carmencita’s walls today.”
    As she helped lift and stack the heavy bricks she wondered if Shea was with Baylor, if there was any chance of his being sent nearer home with some detachment. He’d been gone over two months. She couldn’t even be sure that he was alive, that he’d ever reached a Confederate post to volunteer. The only way he could get a letter to her was through a traveler, and travelers along the Sonoita were going to be mighty few.
    I won’t even think he might be dead , Talitha told herself. He has to be alive. Has to come back to me — to all of us . She recoiled from the very thought of a world without Shea, and her desolation at it made her really understand for the first time Shea’s agony at losing Socorro, and why he had tried to blunt it with drink and Tjúni.
    Come back, love, and I’ll make you happy . Talitha vowed it across the miles, willing him to hear, to believe. But she felt no response.
    Tubac abandoned, and Fort Buchanan. San Patricio destroyed. Shea gone, then John Irwin, then Marc Revier. In all that region south of Tucson, which was seventy miles away, only, besides the Socorro, Pete Kitchen’s ranch and Sylvester Mowry’s Patagonia mine were left.
    In spite of her brave words to Kitchen, this isolation was altogether different from that of her childhood. Then, like Cat now, she’d trusted the grown-ups. Shea, Socorro, and Santiago had borne the weight of decisions, of risking other people’s lives. It was that responsibility more than physical labor that exhausted Talitha. Of course, after what she and Belen had found at the San Patricio, she’d given the vaqueros another chance to leave. They’d all stubbornly chosen to hold on.
    â€œWe weren’t harassed during the siege of Tubac,” Chuey pointed out, riding squealing little Tomás on his foot while braiding a new rawhide rope for six-year-old Ramón. “It must be that Mangus’s protection still carries authority. Besides, madama, ” he added fatalistically, “there’s no safe place in all this region to ranch. But we are vaqueros; what would become of us, huddling in town?”
    So August turned to September. The new adobes, roofed by mesquite rafters covered with bear grass, wheat straw, and adobe, replaced the old ramadas, making a solid enclosure around the small courtyard with the well and granaries, the pomegranate and peach trees.
    Red-streaked mesquite beans dried on the roofs to be stored in the round adobe granaries. Talitha, the twins, James, Paulita, and Cat made forays along the mountain slopes and draws, returning with squaw-berries, hackberries, chokecherries, wild currants, grapes, and acorns which, ground, made a tasty flour. The ranch had irrigated fields of melons, beans, corn, and wheat, but Talitha had been taught by Socorro and Tjúni to garner wild foods in their seasons.
    Because of rushed work on the houses they’d missed jojoba nuts that summer, but November’s harvest of the planted fields would signal time to gather black walnuts along the creek and go into the