Chapter 14

“I was still with the horses,” Thrush Tsosie said. “We’d put them in the first car after the tender, and I overheard Mister Sanchez explain the situation to the conductor.” She was seated on one of the bunks in the caboose assigned to Malik’s train crew. The special train had returned to Micah Spring and backed down the wye, allowing the livestock express to be on its way, minus some of the Rangers’ Angus calves. The special was now northbound, first to Dorado Springs, to drop off the Sonora County contingent, including Thrush. As they approached Dorado Springs, Peng and all the men, including two of the train crew, were crowded into the caboose. Thrush continued her story. “I wanted to help, but I knew you’d never let me come along, so I just stayed with the horses in the stock car. After we got to Micah Spring, when everyone was fussing around the made-up hot box, I slipped out the other side and began making my way toward the rear of the train. I reckon no one was in a position to see me. It was easy to get the drop on that man in the last car. I knew the shotgun would put out the lamp flame.”

“True enough,” Andy said, “but it could’ve --”

His brother cut him off. “No, Andy, no buts about it. Thrush saved my life. And she did it while you were dawdling, stretched out in the soft grass by the creek, relaxing. No, little brother, it was the ladies who pulled my fat from the fire, no doubt about it.” He stood up from the bunk where he had been sitting and went first to Thrush, offering a sincere thanks and a kiss on the cheek. She blushed, even visible through her mixed Negro-Navajo dusky skin tone. Then he went to Peng, gathered her in his arms, and gave her a long kiss on the lips.

Andy asked, “Does that mean you’re more grateful to Yan, then Thrush?”

“Of course not,” his brother replied. “It’s simply that Miss Peng is a railroad employee and she has that bonus in her employment contract.”

The brakeman, Jimmy McGillycuddy, Jr., quipped, “If that’s the bonus, you’d best not count on me next time things go south.” That got some guffaws, especially from Rafael Delgado, the conductor. Even Malik laughed at that one.

In the midst of the levity, however, Peng maintained a somber expression. In a voice just loud enough for all to hear, she, said, “No, Master, I deserve no thanks. I put you at greater risk because of my pride.” Malik looked at her quizzically. She said, “I put everyone at greater risk. I should not have been the one to confront those men. As a woman, my voice did not command the authority that a man’s voice would. They would have likely responded more appropriately to a command to disarm coming from your brother or one of the sheriffs. I put myself in that role to demonstrate my leadership over men. I regret my action and I beg forgiveness for that terrible, prideful error.”

The silence that prevailed was a damper on what had been a growing celebratory mood. Finally, Andy said, “Yan, they’d likely have disregarded with any of us.”

However, Malik said, “We will deal with this later, Peng. For the present, go sit at the conductor’s desk.” There were actually two desks for the conductor’s use, one at each end of the caboose, on opposite sides of the crew car. Most conductor’s utilized whichever desk was facing forward, where they could observe the train through a purposely-placed window.

After Peng went to the rear-facing desk, Andy took his brother aside. “Emil, perhaps she --”

But Malik cut him off, shaking his head, saying, sotto vocé,, “No, Andy, she’s exactly right. Even more, she is an expert in those types of tactics and she is also well aware of the human tendencies that can foul up a good plan. She knew better and she went ahead in spite of it.”

“But there was no harm.” Andy insisted.

Malik said, “All three of those men are dead.”

By this point, Thrush and the others had entered into quiet conversations, purposely turning their attention away from the two brothers.

Malik, after glancing around, said to his brother, “She is asking to be disciplined. It will help her deal with the burden of guilt she has assumed. Much as I would like to take her in my arms and tell her that everything is fine, it is not how she sees the world. It would not comfort her but would make her feel more isolated and despondent.” He shrugged, turning his hands out in a gesture suggesting helplessness.

“Then what will you do?”

Malik looked at him with a grim expression, then sighed and said, “I still have the cat o’ nine tails that Pa took off that slave overseer.”

“What?” Andy exclaimed, and a couple of the men looked their way, briefly, then went back to their own conversations. Andy, less vehemently, asked, “You plan to whip her with a cat?”

“She won’t accept a bogus punishment. I’ve tried going easy on her. She sneers at me, then begs for the punishment she deserves. She says that, if I love her, I will give her what she needs, not what I would prefer.” He shook his head and looked at the floor. “It was a feature of accepting her pledge of devotion than I had not counted on.”

Looking uncomfortable, Andy asked, “How, uh, many?”

“How many strokes? I hope I can keep it to ten. This has only come up once before, that time when I tried to go easy on her and she called me on it.” He shook his head and explained, “She had interfered while I was dealing with a recalcitrant employee. He spoke threateningly and she had stepped in and knocked him flat. That time, I was able to limit it to five hard strokes. This time...”

They were met at Dorado Springs by Thrush’s anxious father, Sargent Tsosie, as well as two younger brothers, nineteen-year-old Jay (short for Piñon Jay), and sixteen-year-old Martin (Sargent had a penchant for birds when naming his children). Martin was the youngest of the Tsosie brothers’ -- Sargent’s and Scout’s -- fifteen children, nine of whom still survived. Two other of the children, seventeen-year-old Longspur and twenty-one-year-old Willow (Scout had preferred the names of flora for his offspring), had remained at the ranch to look after the chores along with their step-mother and aunt, Tilly.

Sargent’s and Scout’s families were oddly blended. Their first wives, women of their Navajo tribe, and four of their young children, had died, following the “Long March” to Bosque Redondo. The two oldest children, Mockingbird and Bean Pod, later called Cowboy, survived that ordeal, and escaped with their fathers. The brothers had later married two escaped slaves, Rebekah and Tilly, who happened to be sisters. Between them, the Tsosie brothers produced fourteen children. Then, after both Rebekah and Scout died, Tilly and Sargent married and produced one more, Martin.

Only four years earlier, two of the children, Sargent’s oldest nephew, Cowboy, and youngest niece, Aspen, had been killed under ominously similar circumstances to those that had just occurred. So, when Thrush came down off the steps of the caboose, the near-crushing embrace with which Sargent met her was wholly understandable.

Malik wrapped his arms around both of them. He said, quietly, “Uncle, one of the Tsosies has saved my life, again.” After adding his own pressure to the embrace, he stepped away and turned to Ulney, Long Hand, Stream-In-Winter, and Red Salt, shaking each of their hands in turn with a two-handed grip, but no further words. Then he stepped up onto the caboose platform and said to the conductor, “At your convenience, Mister Delgado.”

Delgado leaned out on the opposite side, gave the up-and-down “move forward” signal to the engineer, Erik Olsen With two short tugs on the whistle cord, he put the special in motion, and it pulled smoothly away from the depot.

After Delgado went into the crew car, Andy joined his brother on the back platform, watching as both Sargent and Thrush waved farewell in the distance. He said, “The hot powder from her shot could have just as easily ignited that hay.”

“I know,” Malik replied. “But it didn’t. And the lamp certainly would have.”

“Do you think she realized that?”

Malik turned to look at Andy. “Realized what? That hot cartridge powder can ignite fires? She’s a Tsosie. What do you think?”

“So, she calculated the risk?”

“The entire operation was a calculated risk, wouldn’t you say?”

After a few seconds. Andy said, “I reckon so.” Then he asked, “How’s your head?”

Malik reached to the back of his head, where it had bounced against the ladder’s rung for nearly two hours. “The headache has receded some, but it will be a few days before that tenderness eases off. Drinking all that water seemed to help.” After a moment, he said, “I did learn that, if someone invokes my family’s safety, I throw caution to the winds.” He shook his head, winced, then held it still while he looked toward the receding town. “In the middle of the night, some stranger bangs on the door, and I go rushing out into an ambush -- what a dolt. Hopefully, it’s a lesson learned.”

Andy, still grim, said, “What about Yan?”

“I’ll deal with her tonight.”

In Waypoint that Thursday evening, in the kitchen of their Sundown Ridge home, Malik paused at the doorway that opened onto the cellar stairs. He pressed a button for the electric ceiling lamps that illuminated the stairway and the cellar beyond. Malik stood aside and Peng, barefoot and wearing only a nightshirt, descended the stairs. Malik followed, closing the door behind him.

In the cellar, with Peng following, he crossed the concrete floor to a cold pantry and opened that door, entered, then swung aside a shelf unit, revealing a set of steps leading four feet further down. There, he turned a switch and an electric lamp bulb illuminated a fifteen foot long passage which ended at a stout wooden door embraced by iron straps. It was part of a subterranean feature completed covertly by a Chinese crew under the guise of installing a storm cellar, added after the Kozlov construction workers had finished building the house.

Proceeding down the passage, he pulled open the heavy door, and entered a twelve-foot-square room, turning another switch to light the two electric ceiling fixtures. The room was lined on its perimeter with bench seats. In fact, the room could readily serve as a storm shelter, if one glossed over the fact that the fearful tornadoes of the Midwest were extremely rare in the desert Southwest, with storm cellars equally as rare.

On the subterranean room’s opposite wall, there was another heavy door. That door led to a continuation of the passage, thence to ladder up to a disguised exit in the tack room of the stable.

On this evening, however, Malik had stopped in the bench-lined room and turned to Peng. “Strip,” he ordered.

Peng loosed the buttons on the front of the nightshirt and let it drop from her shoulders. Whether intended or not, it was an erotic display, as her broad shoulders, heavy breasts, narrow waist, and muscular thighs came into view, her nipples hardening in the chill of the underground room.

Overhead, two manacles, spaced about three feet apart, were fastened to a thick ceiling joist by lag screws through short lengths of chain. Malik said, “Lock one around your wrist.”

Peng was just able to reach, closing the shackle around her left wrist. Then Malik took her other wrist and, causing her to stretch, fastened the other restraint. The shackles’ were locked by wing screws, unreachable by the person thus bound. She could grasp the chain, however, for added support.

Reaching to the top of the door jamb through which they had entered, Malik withdrew a two-foot length of thick, wooden dowel. A shackle was affixed to either end. He fastened this spreader bar to Peng’s ankles, thus causing her to support most of her weight on the balls of her feet.

Finally, from on top the same door frame, Malik took a four-foot long, leather-plaited whip of seven “tails” and the stubs of two others.

Those two had been torn away by his father, Valerian Malik, in eighteen forty-six, outside of Laredo. He had snatched the cat from the hand of an overseer who had been using it to beat a ten-year old slave girl. Valerian had given the man a taste of his own cruelty, losing the two tails in the demonstration.

Standing behind Peng’s back, Malik swung the cat quickly through the air, causing an ominous whistling hiss. She flinched.

He said, in a low voice, “Your arrogance, Peng, your need to assert both your gender and your race at a cost to other purposes, remains your biggest fault. This time, it put your Master at risk. That deserves at least a dozen lashes.” He immediately took a long swing and whipped the tails against one of the benches along the wall. The sharp crack caused her to cringe.

Then, without warning, he stood to one side and swung a strong blow toward her back, but offset, so that the tails hit on her left and wrapped around to cause red weals to raise across the left side of her back and flank, all the way around to her left breast. She gasped and choked off a cry.

“Or perhaps fifteen strokes,” he said, once more cracking the whip against the wood of a bench. Peng recoiled, giving a brief, startled moan.

Then, with restrained vehemence, Malik accused, “Your Master, Peng -- you risked your Master, the man to whom you are willingly pledged. Compounding your abysmal failure at your primary purpose, you risked a group of honest and courageous friends, people you had the audacity to pretend to lead. And three men died. Maybe they’d have died anyway, but we can be certain that they did die while you suspended better judgment in deference to your own conceits.”

Still behind her, he stepped to her other side and delivered a severe blow to the right side of her back, the supple leather tails this time extending onto her right breast, even so far as the nipple. She was unable to hold back a gasping yelp as the long lateral red stripes swelled quickly into welts around that side of her torso. “Or, better, twenty strokes,” he pronounced, again cracking the whip ends against a bench.

After a pause, he said, “The problem, Peng, is that even this desire of yours for punishment is part of that same insolent self-importance. Were I to deliver the penalty you crave, the penalty you actually deserve, it would flay your skin, not only risking infection, but handicapping your service to me for weeks. You are pitiful, Peng, lost in your foolish and self-indulgent illusions of superiority. You even believe your misdeeds are more profoundly grievous than those of others, so you accept a beating that will defeat the very purposes you swore to.”

He paused, shaking his head, though Peng could not see it. Then he said, “And so, you’ll receive but one more stroke.” With that, he struck viciously up between her legs, drawing an unrestrained shriek of pain from his concubine, followed by her sobs.

Without speaking further, he tied two of the tails about her neck so the grip end and the other tails of the cat dangled against her back. Then he turned and left the room, closing the door, and extinguishing the lights as he exited the passage, leaving her hanging in the chill and absolute darkness.

(Friday, February 27, 1891)

Saturday, February 28, 1891

After breakfast the next morning, Malik switched on the lights and descended into the cellar and made his way to the hidden room. He found Peng standing on the balls of her feet and blinking at the sudden light. The muscles of her legs, back, and arms quivered as she held herself upright with the aid of her grip on the chains. The swelling of the welts had receded into bruised red lines. There was additional bruising around her wrists, giving evidence that her upright stance had not been maintained throughout the night.

Reaching up, Malik loosened the screw of the left manacle, releasing her wrist. Then, without a word, he exited the room, leaving her to finish releasing herself.

Peng was at her desk at the law offices by seven minutes before eight o’clock.

An impromptu partners meeting developed that Saturday morning, as the others came in to question Malik about his misadventure. After a rehashing of the details of the events of the prior day, the queries turned from the events to the consideration of the perpetrators, themselves.

David Lewin finally said, “But they had no legitimate grounds for your arrest. Why do they persist?” At this point, Peng, who sat to Malik’s left, began taking notes.

Malik said, “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a matter of pride, at least among a certain contingent.”

“What?” Lewin asked. “Because of that business with Nestor and those Rangers?”

Malik shrugged. “That’s pretty much what my theory’s based on.”

“But the Rangers that were killed were shot by Nestor and another Ranger. No one else was even hurt,” Lewin persisted. “Beyond that, you were there in your capacity as a federal marshal, and they were outside their jurisdiction. I just don’t understand why they can’t see it.”

Malik shrugged. “Apparently, that’s not how the story’s being told in Texas. I reckon that Ranger squad’s misguided and unsuccessful adventuring, coupled with the treachery within the ranks, runs counter to the Ranger’s own mythology. They have to blame someone else and bring that scapegoat to answer for their sins.”

Lewin, shaking his head, blew a dismissive breath between compressed lips. “If that’s the case, then rational conversation is not the answer.”

Wil Bream said, “Judge Westcott sent them certified copies of the Ranger’s own statements, didn’t he?”

“Yep,” Malik replied. “To Nestor’s father, who was a federal judge, though he’s dead, now, and to the Texas Attorney General. And both Dixie Yeats and Raul have sent memorandum, on behalf of the railroad, to the Attorney General and the Major in command of the Rangers. There’s been no acknowledgment of any kind. They seem not to comprehend the facts of the matter.”

For a moment, the only sound was the soft scraping of Peng’s pencil as she caught up her shorthand notes.

Then Jonathan Nicholson said, “Maybe you’ve not been speaking the right language.”

Malik, with a rueful chuckle, said, “What do you mean, Jonathan? Do we need to write to them in Texican?”

“I mean, maybe we should be talking to them in coin-of-the-realm.”

Bream, with a spreading smile of appreciation, said, “You mean, sue the pants off ‘em?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. False arrest, kidnapping, assault, attempted murder, hell, let’s go after them for posse expenses, damage to railroad equipment, and the price of those cattle that ran off or had to be destroyed,” Nicholson said.

Malik said, “I can sue them personally, and we can have the partnership sue them for denial and disruption of service, as well as legal expenses for both suits.”

Nicholson, nodding, said, “And we get the railroad to file suit, on the same grounds and maybe for restraint of trade, too. Then find grounds to file a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission. The road can push at them through the ICC and through the courts. Then our firm can pursue litigation through the federal courts at the same time. Since we are the plaintiff, we should be able to get this on Judge Westcott’s docket.”

Malik said, “Raul’s on good terms with the federal district court in Kansas City. I think we should come at them from different courts, split their attention.”

Bream was scribbling on a legal pad. He looked up and said, “Then we shouldn’t go for pocket change. Let’s add defamation of character and loss of business good will.” He turned toward Nicholson, who had had the most experience working for a state government. “How much, do you reckon, Jonathan?”

“You need to put a dent in their budget. I’d say the package would have to exceed twenty-five thousand dollars before it would start to hurt.”

Lewin said, “If you give me the types of harm we can bring to the table, I can start collecting some estimates.”

Malik said, “Jonathan, David, why don’t the two of you accompany us to Wichita next month? You can work on a coordinated plan with Raul and Dixie. Bring your wives, if you want. I’ll have both of my coaches, so you’ll have bedrooms.”

Walking home, after closing the office, Peng placed herself two steps behind Malik, in a customary subservient position, though not a custom that Malik observed. There was ample room to walk two abreast on the paved sidewalk, and Peng usually walked beside him. Even having assumed a servant’s place, Peng remained in an alert status, continuously surveying the environs as they proceeded.

Once they had left the courthouse square and entered the residential neighborhood, Malik stopped and commanded, “Walk beside me, Qie.”

Peng complied, though still walking a half step behind his shoulder, on the side toward the street.

“Peng, I know that you are now likely of an attitude that you have to prove yourself. Your walking behind me is an example of that attitude, demonstrating to me that you know your place. That is patently absurd. We are not in China, nor do I have the viewpoint nor follow the customs of a zhu,” Pronounced “tchoo,” the term meant lord or master in Mandarin and was sometimes used by Peng to address Malik. “What’s worse, though,” he went on, “is that, if some situation of risk to me or the family were to develop, your attitude would lead you to take excessive risks in dealing with it. Your decades-long attempt to suppress your emotions, Peng, has led you to the point that you have suppressed your awareness of them, though they still arise and affect you. That was what led you into the situation at Micah Spring to begin with.”

By this point, they were in the park, beyond the opera house. Malik paused on the walkway and said, “I didn’t leave you hanging in the cellar so you could feel sorry for yourself, Peng. You were supposed to spend the time discovering something about yourself and putting it aright. Do you need another night hanging by your wrists in the dark?”

After a moment, she said, “It would not be my preference, Master.” The combined aristocratic British and Mandarin influences that accented Peng’s speech was a feature that Malik always found intriguing. And, sometimes, arousing.

He began walking again and she assumed a place next to him.

“Remember, early in our unacknowledged courtship, when you allowed yourself to be governed by your emotions in an attempt to suppress them? You insisted our mutual attraction had to be extinguished.” He looked at her to see if she understood his point. Her face was flushed at the memory he invoked. “This is the same thing. You have emotions, every human being does. It is part of being human. One might suppress them, but that does not eliminate them. It simply makes their influence more insidious. Your challenge is not to suppress the feelings, but instead to be fully aware of them and their influence on you.”

He stopped walking again, as they were about to leave the park. He turned to her and said, “The reason I know this is so is because I suffer from the same handicap, though my suppressive tendencies had less notable origins than yours.” He paused a moment, thoughtfully, then said, “Or maybe not.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that our feelings only become a real problem when we act unconsciously under their influence rather than using them to inform us about ourselves.”

She said, “I can see that, Master, and I can see that I have yet to fully accept what you say. However, this most recent episode assuredly makes your point. I will spend time in its consideration. I do apologize for my willfulness.”