For all my self-confidence, I found myself wondering how such a man would react to my sudden arrival on the scene. No doubt he would resent me, and, in a way, I could hardly blame him for it.
I had been aware, while I was thinking all this, of Mr. Bragg’s eyes upon me as he sat in silence chewing on the end of his cigar.
I caught his eye, and spoke aloud. “But, knowing all this, why did my father insist on leaving me his share in the ranch? He was a rich man without it, and certainly I don’t need more money than I find myself with now. He must have had a reason.”
“So you’ve asked yourself that too?” Elmer Bragg’s shrewd eyes seemed to twinkle approvingly at me for a moment. “Well, I did too. I asked Guy about it. ‘Why leave her trouble?’ I said. ‘Why insist she has to live in New Mexico for a whole year before she can inherit the ranch free and clear, in any case?’”
“So he did have a reason?”
“Your pa was a thinking man. After he came back from England, he was never quite the same again. And towards the end, he lived like a recluse. Reading. Writing in his journals. Yes, he had a reason for giving you a half-interest in the ranch. A challenge, he called it. ‘I think, Elmer—no, I feel that my daughter will grow up to be the kind of woman my mother was. Strong. Compassionate. I’m hoping, once she understands everything, that she’ll be the one to end this senseless feud.’ I’m an ex-lawman, Lady Rowena, and I’ve a good memory. Many’s the time I’ve had to depend upon it. That, and my instincts. Some instinct tells me you’re going to do what your pa wanted. You’ve already made up your mind to go to New Mexico, haven’t you?”
I could not help smiling at his air of assurance.
“It’s my turn to compliment you, Mr. Bragg. You’re a very discerning man. My father has left me enough money to satisfy all my material needs, but I think I’ve inherited some of his curiosity about people. Perhaps what I really need is a challenge of some kind. Yes, I think I will go to New Mexico, if only to discover what kind of man this Todd Shannon really is.”
“So it’s Todd Shannon who’s the challenge, Lady Rowena?” He saw my look and waved his hand impatiently. “Oh, come! Best get used to my rough manners and blunt speech. I’m going to help you, remember? Before you meet Todd Shannon, you have to understand him better. Tell me—” he paused to relight his cigar, “how much do you know of the rest of the story? I mean, what happened while your father was away in England, and after that.”
“That ridiculous feud started up again,” I said quickly, wondering what he was getting at.
“Ridiculous, you call it?” Elmer Bragg’s voice had hardened. “It’s hardly that, I’m afraid. If you’re determined to go to New Mexico, it’s something you’ll have to live with. Every moment of every day. Todd Shannon is a man who has hated a long time, and that hate has eaten into him. While your father lived, he prevented really bad trouble, because he had earned the respect of the Kordes clan too. But now he’s gone you’ll be the one caught in the middle, Lady Rowena. You, a little English gal who knows nothing of our Western ways. Gently brought up, too, from the look of you and your clothes. Maybe you’re intrigued by all the stories you’ve been hearing, but that’s not enough. Do you know what you’ll be getting into?”
“Mr. Bragg!” He had finally succeeded in making me angry, and I could not help letting some of my annoyance show. “I may not know exactly what I’m getting into, as you put it, but that is exactly why I have come to you. And, although I may not look it, the life I have led before I came here has not exactly been sheltered.” In a more controlled voice, I continued, “I was brought up in India, and we had our troubles there too. Not only from the wild hill tribes, but from the elements as well. And I have had the opportunity to study people, too. Perhaps there is more of my father in me than you think, Mr. Bragg, and you might as well learn that I can be stubborn!”
To my surprise, he had begun to chuckle, and pull at his moustache again. “So you have a temper as well! Good, good. I was beginning to wonder if you were all cool composure. But you know what, Lady Rowena? I think you’ll do. Yep! I think that maybe Todd Shannon will find he’s met his match in you!” His chuckle became a laugh. “By God, I’d like to see his face when he meets up with you and realizes he has no milk-and-water English miss to contend with, but a fighter! And you are that, aren’t you?”
It would be some time before I would meet Todd Shannon, and then under circumstances that were hardly conducive to his thinking of me as an adversary worthy of his notice. But in the meantime, I had made two friends in America, Corinne Davidson and Elmer Bragg, for our strange association had grown into a grudging kind of friendship by the time we parted again, he to go his way on some mysterious errand he would tell me nothing about, and I on my way to New Mexico to claim the rest of my inheritance.
Neither Corinne nor her aunt, Mrs. Shannon, approved of my determination to travel alone and unchaperoned.
“I do wish you would wait until my son gets here,” Katherine Shannon said in her quiet voice. “Mark would know what to do. And I’m sure my brother-in-law would never approve of my having let you travel alone, through that awful, Indian-infested country!”
“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!”
“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.
The Wildest Heart Page 8
