The Wildest Heart

“Your—” and then the corner of Lucas’ mouth twitched in an unwilling grin. “Trust a woman to think of everything.”

Looking back, it seems incredible that we could sit there so calmly, talking of what might have happened, with our pursuers coming closer every minute. I think now that Lucas deliberately gave me time to digest the news he had just given me, and to become calm.

“Well—” he said at last, “I guess that leaves us with no choice. We head for the mountains.” But he still frowned.

Forty-Six

In how many ways is it possible to relive horror? Lucas told me later that he should have heeded the faint, uneasy feeling that persisted as we began the slow and tortuous ascent of the mountain that loomed almost directly in front of us. But he had me to worry about now, and the San Andres Mountains, where he would have preferred to hide out, if it came to that, lay across a stretch of comparatively flat desert that afforded little cover and no water at all. The Fra Cristobal Range was almost upon us, and if we could cross it, the Black Range, which Lucas called home, would soon loom up to the west.

There would be no time to rest today, except for very short periods. I knew that without having to be told. And our pursuers, although more than half a day’s journey behind us, would not rest either. Neither of us, unfortunately, could have guessed that an even worse danger lay ahead.

It was late evening when it happened, and I was almost dropping from sheer weariness. I remember glancing upward, at serrated peaks that had turned crimson in the last fierce rays of the sun, the shadows dark between them. Here, in the narrow gorge up which we rode, following some centuries-old Indian trail, it was already gloomy and menacing-looking. Lucas was riding a little ahead of me when I thought I noticed a sudden rigidity in the way he held himself.

I kneed my horse forward, and without turning his head he said quietly, “Don’t stop to argue with me. Get off your horse, quickly. Slip off its right side and stay still.” At the same time he brought up the rifle he held across his saddle horn with incredible speed.

Everything seemed to happen too fast—one detail merging into another. Rifle shots, deafening in the stillness, bouncing off rocky walls to assault the eardrums. I almost fell off the horse, barely remembering to hang onto its reins, and hardly felt the stinging, burning sensation in my arm as I did. A dark shape came tumbling down from some rocks to the left and above us, but I was too occupied with my plunging, rearing horse to even question what was happening yet.

I heard a wild, fearful yell, and a horse, riderless, went headlong up the canyon, drawing more fire from above. Suddenly, before I could scream his name, Lucas was beside me, pushing me back against the rocky wall so that I went stumbling to my knees. A shot ricocheted screamingly from just above my head. The horse I was still holding shuddered, and seemed to sink very slowly, folding into itself like a cardboard animal. And I was lying flat on my belly beside it, suddenly aware of a warm trickling down my arm, a gun thrust into my hand, while Lucas whispered urgently, “Lie just the way you are, an’ don’t move. But I want you to keep firing, up at those rocks. Take your time, but just keep firing often enough to keep him off guard. I’m goin’ up there after him.”

My mind was too numb with shock and disbelief for me to be able to utter a word, much less protest. It was suddenly darker than I had remembered only a few minutes earlier, and Lucas fired twice in quick succession, disappearing from my side while the acrid powersmoke still hung in the air.

I heard another, somehow perfunctory shot from somewhere above, and then, remembering what I had been told, my mind began to function mechanically. I must keep firing to give Lucas the cover he needed. I held the carbine balanced across the carcass of the dead horse, and keeping my head down, began to shoot, very carefully, at the place where I could see white puffs of smoke. I remember hoping that I wouldn’t have to reload. Already my arm, where a bullet had grazed me, was beginning to feel numb. I tried not to wonder where Lucas was—if he had reached cover before one of those shots had found him. Thank God for the fact that darkness falls so quickly here in the mountains… and remember to keep firing, Rowena, you can bandage your arm later, it’s only a scratch…

The carbine bucked against my shoulder, and the smell of burned powder was acrid in my nostrils. I tried to space out my shots, aiming carefully enough at that notch in the rocks above where I could see flashes so that he or they would think that Lucas was shooting. I had the advantage of being in deep shadow, but twice at least I heard bullets buzz within a few inches of my head like angry bees, ricocheting off the wall of rock at my back.

I hadn’t yet had time to feel frightened. It was only when, from somewhere above me, I heard a choking scream of terror, suddenly cut off short, that I suddenly began to tremble with sheer reaction, hardly realizing I was sobbing aloud until I felt the wetness of tears on my dust-streaked cheeks. What had happened up there? Who had screamed? There was no more firing now, and the silence seemed to press heavily against my ears and was all the more unnerving because it had followed on that terrible scream.

I think I almost screamed myself when, after what seemed like hours, I heard Lucas call softly from somewhere up ahead.

“Ro? Hold your fire. It’s all right now.”

And then he was holding me in his arms; and I was clinging to him as if I had to reassure myself of the reality of his presence, trying to fight back the shameful sobs that threatened to choke me.

“It all happened so suddenly that I still can’t believe—Lucas, no, I’m not crying because I am afraid! Only because—because I’m so happy you’re back and you’re safe!”

He tilted my chin up with one finger. “Who else but a fool woman would cry from gladness?” But in spite of the pretended harshness of his words, his voice was tender.

It was only later, after Lucas had washed out and bandaged the ugly bullet groove in my arm, that he told me what he had learned.

“There were only three of them, luckily for us. I got the first one, you saw him fall. An’ wounded the second bad enough so he was barely breathin’ by the time I got up there. But he talked before he died.”

As Lucas continued to talk, my mind became filled with a different kind of horror.

“Mark Shannon’s no fool, an’ so far, he’s been lucky as well. He sent some of his best men up ahead, while he followed our trail with Burris and Sonora an’ three Apache scouts he met up with at Fort Craig. Seems like they’d been visiting relatives at Warm Springs, an’ the colonel there suggested they might be glad to help track down an abducted wife—if he offered them enough money.”

Lucas’s voice was expressionless, but I drew my breath in sharply. “There’s more,” he said before I could speak. “Half the cavalry is out lookin’ for us too, but your husband’s given the men in his pay orders to stay one jump ahead of the soldiers—an’ to shoot first.”

It was dark by now. A clear, cool night with a scattering of stars spangling the velvety midnight blue of the sky. Lucas and I looked at each other, and he got up and began methodically to strip the horse of the gear it had carried. I think he wanted to give me time to digest the thought that Mark wanted me dead too.

And once I had realized this, I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. Not only did I know far too much about Mark’s plans, but worse, from his point of view, I had betrayed and publicly humiliated him. So now he had begun to hate me, I was sure, with the same unrelenting single-mindedness with which he had once loved and pursued me.

I put some of these thoughts into words later, when Lucas and I had started off again, slowed down by the fact that the bullet wound in my arm had weakened me.

“An’ there’s your money too,” he said quietly, and I was almost surprised that I had not thought of that first. The money, of course. If Mark couldn’t have me he’d have enough wealth to buy him the power he craved. And it was my money he was offering as the price for my death!

The thought seemed unreal. Everything seemed unreal during those hours when we seemed to walk endlessly, both of us strangely calm. The horses were gone, and the mule would only slow us down now. I knew, without having to be told, how far sounds could carry in the clear desert air. The shots would have been heard, of course, and now they would all be racing to cut us off. I must have been slightly light-headed from loss of blood and nervous reaction, for I remember thinking

with a kind of cynical amusement that it was a change to be the hunted instead of the hunter. Strange, that all those times in India, when I had gone on tiger shoots with my grandfather and his friend the maharajah, I had never once stopped to think of how the tiger might feel.