The Wildest Heart (8 page)

“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 you 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!”

“You'd be better off sticking to your original simile,” Mr. Bragg had told me dryly. “A Greek tragedy.”

As I had listened to him, I found myself imagining how it must have been. My father, a lonely, bitter man. Rake turned scholar. Almost a recluse, until the fates, and his own sense of justice, had saddled him with the guardianship of a sullen young killer, part Indian, and unable to read or write. But in spite of all this, my father must have managed to win Luke Cord's respect. He had even neglected his journals for a while, to turn teacher, and during this time the partners had not been on speaking terms. Todd Shannon had called my father a traitor and a turncoat and bitterly resented what he termed was his “softhearted interference.”

It might all have turned out differently. The wild, dangerous streak in Luke Cord might have been subdued or channeled in other directions if not for Flo. Flo Shannon, she had been then. The same young woman that Corinne had so disliked.

She had been only fifteen years old then. Blonde, full-figured, and an inveterate flirt, with half the young men in the territory, including the SD cowboys, vying for her attention. But with all of them to pick from, she had deliberately chosen to practice her wiles on the one man who was forbidden to her, Lucas Cord. Part Indian, ex-outlaw, a man who had killed grown men, he was far older than his actual years in worldly experience.

Who could understand what had prompted the girl? Perhaps she had not realized that she was flirting with a man, hardly one of the callow, calf-eyed youths she was used to playing with. And in this case, Flo Shannon had found herself playing with fire.

Even Mr. Bragg had admitted, grudgingly, that no one was sure of what had really taken place the day that everything came to a head.

It appeared that Flo used to play her suitors one against the other, and had developed a habit of promising to meet a certain young man in a certain place, and then not show up; pleading some excuse afterwards. Her stepfather was a busy and somewhat remote man, and her mother was dead. Flo had her own horses and was allowed to ride whenever she pleased, her constant absences from home merely shrugged at.

“They used to meet in an abandoned line shack. No one knew for sure how long it had been going on, although Flo swore afterwards it was the first time that there had been anything but talk and a few kisses between them. They might have gotten away with it too, if some of her other admirers hadn't started to become suspicious about the way she'd suddenly started to put them off. Seems that a bunch of them, all SD hands, got to comparing notes one night, and the next time Flo went out riding they followed her.”

“And then?”

Mr. Bragg raised his shoulders in a kind of shrug, and I had the impression that he was disgruntled because for once he could not quote me facts.

“There were six of them. They saw the horses tethered outside the cabin, and they said they heard Flo screaming. Certainly, and this much I know for sure, she was hysterical afterwards.”

My imagination made it easy for me to picture the scene that must have followed. Flo Shannon, weeping with fear and hysteria, the six SD cowboys, in spite of their anger, must have been unable to keep their eyes off her half-naked body. Rape was an ugly word anywhere, and especially when the woman involved was white, and the man half Indian.

The cowboys had become careless, or perhaps they had not expected that Luke Cord, still on parole, would be carrying a forbidden gun. He had killed two of Flo's rescuers before making his escape, but then, instead of riding into the hills, Luke had done something that surprised everyone. He had gone instead to Guy Dangerfield. My father had persuaded him to give himself up, riding into town with him himself and staying in town to make sure there would be no lynching.

“If Todd Shannon had had his way, there wouldn't have been a trial,” Mr. Bragg said grimly. “But your pa stood up to him. I guess he was about the only man who wasn't afraid of Shannon, even when Todd got in a rage. I wasn't present when they met, but your pa sent for me afterwards, to keep an eye on things, he said. There were two of us Pinkerton men, and we organized a twenty-four-hour watch on the jail. That's how I first got to know Luke Cord.”

I interrupted him then, my curiosity getting the better of me. “What was he like? And why did my father continue to believe in him?” I wondered, even as I spoke, if it had been because of Elena, if my father had continued to love her.

“Luke Cord? Even then, when he was a young man, it was difficult to know what he was thinking. An' he never did say much to me. I remember he spent most of the time in that Socorro jail just sittin', or staring out the window. Didn't act scared, although he knew damned well that most of the folks in the territory were out for his blood. A sullen, bitter young man. And even in those days it was hard to think of him as no more'n a boy. He seemed more Injun than white, the way he kept things inside hisself; never lettin' too much show on the surface. Even at the trial…”

Mr. Bragg had been at the trial, and so had my father. In his anxiety to make sure that Luke Cord had a fair trial, my father had insisted that a federal judge be brought in all the way from Taos. He had even paid handsomely for the services of a clever attorney from San Francisco. Of all the protagonists, only Flo Shannon had not been present. Her stepfather had packed her off to school in Boston, but her sworn, witnessed deposition had been read at the trial, sealing Luke Cord's fate.

“She said she hadn't understood what kind of man he was. She liked to flirt, an' she liked to think there wasn't a man she couldn't have at her feet. Well, she'd been forbidden to ride over to the Dangerfield house as long as he was there, but they met accidentally one day when her horse had lost a shoe. She admitted he intrigued her, because he was different from the other young men she was used to. He didn't pay her much mind, treated her like she was a kid. At first, that is. Later, well, she swore she hadn't led him on. Said she'd grown frightened by the way he acted around her, that she'd tried to end it, but he forced her to meet him one more time, by tellin' her he'd see her pa found out if she didn't. And then, she said, he'd called her names, told her she was a tease an' was asking for it, and tried to force himself on her. And then, luckily for her, but not for them, those cowboys bust in the cabin.”

Lucas Cord, surly-faced and tight-lipped, had denied that Flo had screamed for help. “Only time she got scared and started to scream was when those cowboys came bustin' in.”

“Then you deny that you tried to force your attentions on this innocent young girl? You dare to try and blame her?” the prosecutor had thundered.

“Not tryin' to pin the blame anywhere. That's your job, ain't it? I guess she said what she felt she had to say.”

He had refused to say more about his association with Flo Shannon, and the attorney for the defense had quickly objected that his client was being tried for murder, not for rape.

Luke said that he had killed the men only in self-defense. They had boasted that they were going to beat him to death and make the girl watch. Two of them had held his arms while the others began to use their fists on him.

“And in spite of that you managed to get free? And pulled your hidden gun?”

The judge himself had asked the question, leaning forward in his dark robes.

“I let them think I'd passed out,” Luke Cord's eyes, coldly defiant in his bruised face, had met those of the judge boldly. “An' I wasn't carryin' a gun. Took Charlie Dales's gun off him.”

The prosecutor had jumped to his feet, face scornful, finger pointing.

“Are we to understand that in spite of being beaten half-unconscious you managed to steal a man's gun from him, kill two men with it, and wound two others?”

And Luke Cord, some of the leashed anger in him showing through his tightly controlled guard, had said bitingly, “I ain't beggin' you to believe nothin'! I'm tellin' what happened.”

Mr. Bragg's voice, as he told me the story, held almost a grudging respect.

“Wouldn't budge from his story, no matter how they tried to get under his skin with all the taunts and the innuendos about his being part Indian, out to prove somethin' with a white woman. He all but told them to their faces they'd have to take his story or leave it, though I think he knew by then that the crowd in the courtroom was out for blood. They'd been hoping he'd show up scared and begging for his life, and they didn't like his attitude. Only thing saved him from a hangrope, I think, was that your pa was so well thought of in the territory, and although he didn't flaunt his powerful connections and his wealth like Todd Shannon, he did have a reputation for bein' both fair and honest. God knows both commodities are only too rare in New Mexico!”

“So?”

“Your pa was a friend of the territorial governor, and the judge didn't exactly want to go up against him, 'specially when he gave evidence that Luke Cord could have gotten away if he'd wanted to, that he'd given himself up willingly, to prove his innocence. But you see, Lady Rowena, there were those other killings, too, and Todd Shannon sitting there glowering. The jury came back with a guilty verdict. They were all local men, farmers and ranchers and merchants, none of them daring to go against Todd Shannon, even if they'd wanted to. Luke Cord is half Apache, brought up by them, and not a man but didn't hate the Injuns.