The Wildest Heart

“But I’m quite determined to do so,” I said gently but firmly. “Please, Mrs. Shannon, I beg you not to worry yourself on my account. I’m quite used to traveling by myself, and I’m sure that there will be other people traveling with me, so that I will never be totally alone.”

Corinne, however, was more outspoken than her aunt, and especially when she discovered how I meant to travel. “Rowena, I think you’re out of your mind!” she said frankly, when I told her of my plan. “You’re rich enough to travel in style, which is what I should do if I were you. I really cannot imagine why you should want to disguise yourself in those perfectly horrible, ugly clothes! And besides,” she added, “my Uncle Todd despises plain women! I’ve heard him say so a dozen times at least. Oh, and I was so hoping that you would be the one woman to give him a set-down! He’s such an arrogant, overbearing man—exactly the type you cannot abide. I’ve often thought that he imagines women were put on earth purely to serve men. To be their playthings. I remember how sorry I used to feel for Flo. She’s his stepdaughter, you know. But of, course, that was before I knew her!”

Corinne wrinkled up her nose, diverted, for the moment, from her purpose. “I was prepared to like her when Uncle Todd packed her back here to school, you know. I’d hear them all whisper about the terrible scandal, and I really did feel sorry for her, knowing how stern Uncle Todd can be. We used to ask her out to tea, and Aunt Katherine would have her spend weekends with her.”

“And—” I prompted, more to get Corinne’s mind off my plans than from any real curiosity.

“And I discovered what she was like!” Corinne’s pretty face became flushed with emotion. “You can’t imagine what a snob she is! And a flirt. I swear, all she could think about was men, and all she could talk about was how rich Uncle Todd is, and how she had her own horses to ride, and all the men in the territory were mad for her. I could almost feel sorry for that poor young Indian boy who was almost hanged because of her. And then she met Derek Jeffords, who is much older than she is, and because he’s so rich, even Uncle Todd approved. Or maybe he was just anxious to get her married off. Anyhow, she married poor Mr. Jeffords, and she led him a dance from the very beginning. That was when we all started feeling sorry for Mr. Jeffords instead. She never loved him. I don’t think she’s loved anyone but herself, ever! She went after Mark too, for a while, and then, all of a sudden, she decided she was going back to New Mexico, to visit her pa, she said. I don’t know what she told Uncle Todd, but he let her stay. So you’ll have her to contend with too. And Flo doesn’t like competition!”

“Well, if I travel in my ‘disguise,’ as you call it, she could hardly consider me competition, could she?” I objected reasonably, but Corinne was not to be mollified.

“But I want you to go as yourself!” she wailed. “I want yo

u to show her up! And I want Uncle Todd to like you. It will be so much easier for you if you can win him over!”

“I don’t intend to try to win Todd Shannon over. He’ll have to accept me as I am, or as I appear to be. You must understand, Corinne, that I have a reason for doing what I plan. I want to discover people as they really are. Let Todd Shannon and his daughter see me as a dowdy, inconspicuous female. There was a time when I was exactly that. Perhaps, if they don’t take too much notice of me, I’ll see them as they really are.”

“I still think you’re making a mistake,” Corinne said, but she did not sound as convinced as she had some moments ago.

In any case I had already made up my mind, and Elmer Bragg had set out on some errand of his own, telling me that he would meet me in New Mexico.

“I’ll let you handle those first meetings yourself,” he’d told me. “I got my own fish to fry. Just a notion, of course, but it might work out. We’ll see.”

I’d had to be content with that from him, but in the meantime, I was making my own plans. On the long journey to New Mexico I had plenty of time to think about the rest of the story Mr. Bragg had related to me.

“Elena and Alejandro Kordes had three sons. Two of them were raised by the Apaches, because Elena wanted to travel with Alejandro and his comancheros. Liked the free, wandering life, I guess. But they left the third boy, Ramon, with the Jesuit fathers in Mexico City.”

“But why?”

“How should anyone know? Perhaps because they happened to be there when Ramon was born.”

“And the other two, the older sons?”

“Ah, that is how this feud stayed alive! Julio, the second son, was all Apache. Refused to leave the tribe, his grandfather’s people. He has an Apache wife now. He doesn’t care for the land the way the others do. Why should he? The Apaches are a nomadic people, warriors by profession. But Lucas, the oldest boy, was closest to his folks, I guess. To his ma, particularly. He went with them, and started to ride with the comancheros, just like his pa, when he was only twelve or thirteen. Killed a grown man when he was sixteen, outdrew a professional gunslinger.”

I remembered that I had leaned forward in my chair with a slight stirring of interest.

“Why didn’t they hang him?”

Mr. Bragg made a short, disgusted sound at my ignorance. “Heck, you have to remember this is the West. It was a fair fight, they said. Luke Cord, even then, was lightning fast with a gun.”

“But I thought their name was Kordes.”

“It was, still is, legally, but they anglicized the name later, when Alejandro laid claim to what he claimed were his lands. Don’t think that he really wanted any more trouble, but Elena had become the stronger of the two by then, and she hated Todd Shannon. Luke, well, he kind of took it up, on his family’s behalf. The law said Alejandro was an outlaw, but they made formal claim, all the same, on behalf of his heirs, they said. Case was thrown out of court, of course, although your pa spoke up on their behalf. And then Alejandro was found dead one day, killed from ambush on SD land. Bushwhacked, they call it in those parts. There were rumors, naturally. Some said that Todd Shannon had put a bounty on Alejandro’s hide. And then Luke, who can read sign like the injuns who raised him, took the law into his own hands. Rode into Las Cruces, and called out two SD men. He was only seventeen or so then, but like I’ve said, he was fast with a gun, and he killed them both.”

Mr. Bragg’s story had taken on special interest for me, because of my curiosity about my father. It seemed that my father had been in Las Cruces that day, and had witnessed the gun battle. And he had gone against his own partner by championing Luke Cord, by giving evidence in court, stating that it had been a fair gunfight. Was it because this Lucas Cord was Elena’s son? And had my father continued to love the woman even then?

It might have gone badly for Luke Cord, who was half Indian and considered a renegade, if not for my father’s intervention. The judge had paroled Elena Kordes’s hotheaded young son to my father.

“He accepted this?”

“The Spaniards, and even some Indians, have an almost fanatical sense of honor,” Mr. Bragg had explained to me. “Luke Cord owed your father a debt, for they’d have lynched him for sure. He stayed with your pa.”

“And the rest of his family?”

“Stayed on in the secret valley in the mountains. Where they still hide out. Apache country, but of course the Apaches wouldn’t touch them because they’re kin.”

“It all sounds like something out of the pages of a novel!”