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“When you see the kind of country we have to travel over, I think you’ll understand better,” he said quietly. I felt the words were a concession to his grandfather, who had risen early to see us off, and I turned away.
And so we traveled on foot, leading the horses more slowly than we had gone before, for we climbed upward.
The slopes of the Black Range became more thickly forested, the scent of piñon and alder sweet in the clear, cool air. The mountains seemed pristine, untouched; here were none of the ugly scars left by miners greedy for precious metals. It seemed as if nothing had ever dwelled here but the wild creatures whose natural habitat this was. I did not have to be told this was Apache country.
The men went ahead, their steps springy, easily breathing the thinning air as we climbed. They carried rifles but when they shot game for our evening meal they used their ancient weapon, the bow and arrow.
Had I really walked all day? A week ago it would have seemed impossible. And yet we had only stopped a few times to rest the horses, and to snatch a quick meal of the pemmican-like paste that Little Bird had gone to such pains to show me how to prepare.
When we made camp for the night the sun had barely dropped behind the nearest ridge. The men found a small cave, scooped out in the side of a towering cliff, which would provide both shelter and protection from any predators. There were no brush shelters erected tonight; only a scooped out hollow for a small, smokeless fire, and blankets spread out against the rocky walls. I had begun to imagine that Apache women were merely slaves to their husbands, but seeing the shy looks that were exchanged, and the whispered talk between husbands and wives, I began to see another side of their lives. The two young women and their men were like young lovers anywhere—not quite used to each other yet, still embarrassed to show their feelings in front of others.
As for myself, I felt as if I was acting a part. Rowena Dangerfield—Apache virgin. Shy, modest, self-effacing. Blushing bride-to-be. The thought made me grimace. You’re getting cynical, I warned myself; be careful! And indeed I would have to be careful if I ever wanted to be free again. I could dismiss Ramon Kordes easily. In spite of his bold Latin gallantry, he was a young man, and, I was sure, I could appeal to his sense of chivalry. No, it was not Ramon who made me frown thoughtfully into the darkness as I lay huddled in my blankets, trying to keep my teeth from chattering in the cold night air. It was the thought of his mother, the formidable Elena Kordes who had started a blood feud; the woman Todd Shannon hated and my father had loved. Ruthless, arrogant, designing; the kind of woman who had brought her sons up to hate as much as she did, and did not hesitate to use them as instruments of her revenge. What kind of a woman would I find when we arrived in the secret valley? Instinct told me that we would be adversaries, that I must not underestimate either her power or her determination. If Todd’s story was to be believed this was the same woman who, when she was a young girl, had had her own cousin and her cousin’s child killed so that she could take her cousin’s husband. The woman of whom even her own father had said, “She was a strong-willed woman with a mind.”
I turned uneasily, half-asleep. Tonight the men and the women slept separately, the men keeping watch in turns. The fire had been carefully extinguished, but I saw the dimly glowing red tip of a cigar, and smelled its odor, and knew which one of the men sat still and cross-legged just outside the small cave, his profile turned away from me.
Lucas Cord. The son who had made his mother’s revenge his own. Was he too thinking of her? Half-remembered phrases flashed through my mind.
“He always did worship his mother… he adored her.”
What kind of a man was he underneath all the savagery? What kind of woman was she to have produced such a son? I tried to imagine what she would look like after so many years. She would be older, of course, with wrinkles in her face, her black hair turned gray in streaks, no longer the young, passionately beautiful girl she had been. Imagination blended almost imperceptibly into half-dreamed images, and then everything vanishe
d as I slid into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Twenty
As it turned out, Elena Kordes was not in the least as I had pictured her. But our first meeting did not take place at once. I had not expected the valley to be so large that it would take us almost four hours to cross it.
It took us a journey of almost five days after we had left the ranchería to reach a place of awesome grandeur, a mountaintop that seemed to jut out over another mountaintop. We had done nothing but climb to get here, and I felt myself ready to drop with weariness, although I knew better than to utter a murmur of protest. Lucas Cord had driven us all, and even his own brother had grumbled at him that there was no need for such haste.
“The hunting here is good—why hurry? We will get there in the end!”
Julio, when he spoke to me, had begun to address me with exaggerated politeness, always prefixing his requests with the word nidee, little sister. Still, when he thought I wasn’t aware of it, I could feel his eyes upon me, making me feel vaguely uneasy.
Lucas, on the other hand, paid no attention to me unless he had to. He had dropped his old, sneering attitude, it was true, but this had been replaced by a kind of distance. He would thank me when I handed him his food, warn me when the terrain ahead of us became rough or perilous, but that was all. It was just as if the violent conflict between us had never been, and I found myself observing him, wondering what drove him.
All throughout our journey here he had seemed preoccupied. I noticed that he hardly spoke to anyone unless he was addressed, and he would sit by the fire when we made camp and stare away from the flame, into the distance. What was he thinking of?
Julio, sitting by me one night, followed the almost unconscious direction of my eyes and said softly, “My brother is a deep thinker, eh? Even for me, he is not an easy person to know.” His voice had turned almost sly. “But in this case I can guess what he is thinking of. There is a woman who waits for him on my mother’s rancho. She is young and lovely, the daughter of an old friend who died. I think she waits for Lucas to make up his mind.”
“I’m sorry to say so,” I said disdainfully, “but I cannot help feeling sorry for her!”
“You do not like my brother?” Was it my imagination, or did I fancy I heard a slight note of satisfaction in Julio’s voice? The next moment he shrugged, as if the matter was unimportant. “Perhaps it is better so for your sake, nidee.”
I did not ask him why he had said such a thing to me, not wanting the conversation to continue; and after a moment he stretched, yawning, and left me.
I stood with the others in the thin layer of snow that still lay on the ground here, and told myself vehemently that I could not possibly walk another step. What were we supposed to do now? Scale that unscalable cliff like mountain goats, and then think of a way to get around that jutting overhang that loomed menacingly over us?
Lucas Cord was looking upward also, and I thought I saw some strange blend of emotion in his face for the first time. There was the urgency I had sensed in him earlier, and something else. Despair? Frustration? It was hard to tell. Perhaps something had gone wrong; perhaps he couldn’t find the way into the hidden valley, with the snow still lying on the ground.
I saw Lucas take a coiled length of rawhide from the saddle of one of the horses and put it around his neck. Then, without another word, he flattened himself against the sheer, rocky cliff face, and seemed to walk right off one edge. I think I must have gasped, for I saw Julio look towards me.
“There is a path, nidee. Not much, but the mountain goats made it long ago. That was how Lucas found the way into the valley. Wait, and you will see how we will all find our way there soon.”
I thought we waited for an endless time, but it was probably no longer than fifteen minutes at the most. Julio and the three Apache braves talked together in casual tones. The women busied themselves with unpacking the horses, and in the end, feeling ashamed of my inactivity, I started to help them. The packs containing the silver were heavy. They reminded me of the way in which this same silver had been obtained. Stolen, and stained with the blood of those poor soldiers who had died trying to defend it.
I heard one of the women cry out and turned at almost the same time she did, to see the rope come snaking down.
There must have been some kind of cleft up there, between the huge, overhanging mountain edge and the rocky cliff I had dismissed as being unscalable.
