The Wildest Heart by Rosemary Rogers Page B

really are.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œElena 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.”
    â€œBut why?”
    â€œHow should anyone know? Perhaps because they happened to be there when Ramon was born.”
    â€œAnd the other two, the older sons?”
    â€œAh, 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.
    â€œWhy 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.”
    â€œBut I thought their name was Kordes.”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œHe accepted this?”
    â€œThe 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