A Heart So Wild (22 page)

T
HE kitchen was brightly lit, empty except for Sawtooth, who sat at the table with a tall glass of milk and a piece of cherry pie. When the back door opened and Maggie slipped inside, he didn't move. He knew by the footsteps who it was. Her expression was anxious.

Sawtooth sat back in his chair and surveyed her.

“You gonna tell him?”

Maggie stood looking down at him. “You knew. Weren't you thinking about telling him?”

“Nope. I was waitin' to see what you'd do. Besides”—Sawtooth grinned—“the boy made me swear I'd forget I seen him. He was real persuasive about it. You know how he can be.”

Maggie folded her arms, staring at the door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house. “Is he still up?”

“Reckon so.” Sawtooth nodded. “It's early. How's the little lady?”

“I put her to bed. Did you know she's Dr. Harte's daughter?”

“That right? Well, that relieves my mind on one score. Least now I know she'll be stickin' around a while, if not out here, then in town.”

“I'm not so sure.” Maggie sighed. “The lass was awfully shook up to hear that her father had married. That is a very unhappy young lady, Sawtooth.”

“That'll change, soon as Kane comes back.”

“You think he will?”

Sawtooth nodded. “I ain't never seen him give a damn about anything, Maggie, but I seen it tonight. That gal's mighty important to him. You must think so too, or you wouldn't be thinkin' about tellin' Fletcher.”

“That isn't my reason,” Maggie said softly, sadly. “If that was all there was to it, I wouldn't take the chance of stirring him up when he might wind up disappointed. But I learned from Miss Harte that four years ago in Kansas a band of Comanches were massacred by white men, and since then, the lad has been seeking the murderers in vengeance.”

“Goddamn,” Sawtooth whispered. “Then Meara's dead.”

“It seems so,” Maggie replied. “Murdered. And Fletcher has a right to know.”

 

Loud voices woke Courtney, getting louder as they neared the cottage. Then the cottage door burst open and Courtney sat up in alarm, holding the covers up over her chemise. One hell of a big man was standing in the doorway. Behind him was Maggie, who shoved him aside and came into the room. She eyed Courtney carefully, then turned to the man.

“See what you have done?” Maggie said loudly, and with a good deal of exasperation. “You've frightened the poor lass! This could have waited until morning.”

The man came farther into the room now and gently but firmly set Maggie out of his way. His eyes were on Courtney, his expression a mask of determination.

He was tall and brawny, with massive shoulders and chest, and thick arms. He had expressive brown eyes and dark brown hair with a streak of gray smack in the center above his brows. A thick mustache was dotted with gray. He would be a handsome man, thought Courtney, if he didn't look so forbidding.

Courtney sat up straighter on the sofa. This was a one-bedroom cottage and she had refused to put Maggie out of her bed.

“Who are you, mister?” she demanded.

Her directness threw him. He even glanced at Maggie as if to ask, Is this your poor frightened lass? He seemed the kind of man who had long been used to people jumping to obey him. Was this the owner of the Bar M?

“I'm Fletcher Straton, Miss Harte,” he confirmed, his voice gruff. “I understand you know my son, Kane, quite well.”

“No I do not,” Courtney retorted. “And if that's the reason you barged in here—”

“You know him as Chandos.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I don't believe you. He mentioned you by name. If you were his father, he would have said so, and he didn't.”

“Kane hasn't called me Father since Meara took him away,” Fletcher replied. “That's his mother—Meara, a stubborn black-haired Irish lass who hasn't got a forgiving bone in her body. He's got her eyes. That's how I knew him when he showed up here ten years after I had given them both up for dead.”

Stunned, Courtney glanced at Maggie for confirmation.

“It's true, lass,” Maggie said softly. “And I wouldn't have betrayed your confidence except that he has a right to know.” Her gaze went to her hands. “Fletcher, you didn't give me a chance to finish what I had to tell you, before you rushed over here to see Miss Harte. There is no easy way to tell this. I'm afraid Meara is dead, along with the Comanches she lived with. From what Miss Harte has told me, it appears that when Kane left here, he returned to find them all massacred, and he's been hunting down the whites who did it ever since.”

The man's composure crumbled. The bleakest pain crossed his features, making him suddenly look much older. But control returned in a moment, and his expression hardened.

“Did Kane tell you his mother was dead?” he asked Courtney.

She would have liked to give him some hope. She wasn't sure why, but she wished she could. She wondered why. Her first impression was that he was a hard man. God sakes, even his son apparently didn't like him. But still…

“Chandos never once mentioned his mother to me,” she said truthfully. “I knew there was a massacre. I saw Chandos ride with the surviving Comanches after the massacre, when they attacked the farm I was staying at. Chandos spared my life that day, when nearly everyone else was killed. What he did to the farmer who had participated in the Indian slaughter was horrible. But if his mother was ra—killed, I can at least understand what drove him to do it.” She paused, then said carefully, “But if
you're asking me for proof that his mother is dead, I can't give you any. You'll have to ask Chandos.”

“Where is he?”

“I can't tell you that.”

“Can't—or won't?” he demanded.

Courtney's sympathy was vanishing under his belligerence. “Won't. I don't know you, Mr. Straton. But I do know that Chandos didn't want to see you. Considering that, why should I tell you where you can find him?”

“Loyal, aren't you?” he growled, not accustomed to being thwarted. “But let me remind you, young lady, whose roof you're sleeping under.”

“In that case, I'll leave!” Courtney snapped. She rose, dragging the blanket with her, for cover.

“Sit down, goddammit!”

“I will not!”

In the bristling silence, Maggie laughed softly. “I think you had better change your tactics, Fletcher. The lass has been in the company of your son for the past month. His defiance has rubbed off on her—at least where you're concerned.”

Fletcher scowled at Maggie. Courtney scowled at Maggie. With a dramatic sigh, Maggie stood up.

“I would think, Fletcher Straton, that an old codger like you would learn from his mistakes,” Maggie said sternly. “Haven't you been this route before? Haven't I heard you say a hundred times that if you had the chance you would do things differently? Well, you might get that chance, but from what I can see, you
will make the same mistakes again. You've already made a big one. Instead of asking the lass, explaining, telling her how much it would mean to you to hear about Kane, you bully her. Why should she talk to you at all? She is only spending the night here—under
my
roof, I might add. She's not dependent on you, Fletcher, so why should she talk to you at all? If it were me, I wouldn't.”

Having said her piece, Maggie walked out the cottage door. The ensuing silence in the little parlor was uncomfortable to say the least. Courtney sat down on the sofa again, beginning to feel embarrassed over losing her temper. After all, this
was
Chandos's father. And they each had knowledge of Chandos that the other wanted.

“I'm sorry,” she began, then smiled as Fletcher said the same words at the same time. “Perhaps we can start over, Mr. Straton. Would you tell me why Chandos wouldn't come near this place?”

“Chandos.” He grunted the name in distaste. “Goddamn, beg pardon, but that boy will use
any
name other than the one I gave him. While he was here, he wouldn't answer to Kane. You could call him anything, even ‘hey you,' and he'd at least look at you. But call him Kane and he ignored it.”

“Don't ask me to call him Kane,” Courtney said firmly. “To me he's Chandos, simply Chandos.”

“All right, all right,” Fletcher grumbled softly. “But don't ask me to call him Chandos, either.”

“I won't.” Courtney grinned.

“About what you asked,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting in it. “It's not surprising that Kane didn't want me to know he was near here. When he took off, four years ago, I sent my men out after him to bring him back. They never caught up with him, of course. He led them a merry chase for nearly three weeks, playing with them, I think, before he got tired of it and lost them.

“He's got no reason to think I wouldn't try to keep him here again. That's probably why he didn't want anyone to know he was close by.”

“Would you try to keep him here?”

“Goddamn, beg pardon, right I would,” Fletcher said obdurately. “But”—he hesitated, looking down at his large hands—“not in the same way. This time, I'd ask him to stay. I'd do my best to show him it'd be different, not like before.”

“How was it—before?”

“I made one mistake after another,” Fletcher admitted ruefully. “I see them all now. I started by treating him like a boy when, to the Comanche, eighteen is a man already. He was eighteen when he returned here. The next dumb thing I did was, I tried to make him forget everything he'd learned from the Comanche, the very things that came natural to him after being with them for so long. I let him rile me, time and again. I couldn't accept that he didn't want what I had to give him.”

“You said you thought he was dead for ten years. Was he living with the Comanche all that time?”

“Yes, with his mother. She ran off from me,
you see. Oh, I can't blame her for leaving. I wasn't exactly the most faithful of husbands. But she didn't have to take the boy with her. She knew how much he meant to me.”

“You can't expect a mother to abandon her child.”

“No, but there are other ways of separating when two people don't get along. I would have given her anything she wanted. I would have set her up anywhere she wanted. All I would have asked was to have Kane half the time. Instead, she disappeared. I never did understand how she managed it, until Kane showed up. Then I knew where they'd hidden all those years.

“Oh, at first it wasn't hiding. What happened was, they were captured by Kiowas and sold to the Comanches. Some young Comanche buck bought them both. He married Meara, and adopted Kane.” He shook his head.

“The way Kane rode in here on that pinto of his, bold as you please, looking every inch an Indian in buckskin and with those long goddamn, beg pardon, braids that he refused to cut, it's a wonder one of my men didn't shoot him.”

Courtney could just imagine young Chandos riding into the Bar M looking like that, and facing a bunch of white strangers. Unlike her, he would have been unafraid, defiant even. And what must his father have felt? A son returned to him as a savage? She could see where there would be trouble.

Suddenly she recalled Chandos's dream.

“Did he call you…ah, ‘old man,' Mr. Straton?”

He grunted. “That's the only thing he'd call me. Did he tell you that?”

“No. He was bitten by a snake while we were on the trail,” she explained. Remembering more, irritation came back. “The stubborn fool wouldn't even call me to ask for help. We'd had a disagreement, you see…Well, anyway, he had bad dreams that night when he was fighting the poison, and he did a lot of talking in his sleep. One of the things he said—” She stopped, not wanting to repeat Chandos's exact words. “Well, he was against your cutting his hair. Did you actually try to?”

Fletcher began fidgeting. “That was my biggest mistake, the one that drove him off. We'd had another argument, one of hundreds, and I was furious enough to order my men to corral him and hack off those cursed braids of his. It was a hellofa fight. Kane wounded three of the boys with his knife before Sawtooth shot the knife out of his hand. That's who taught him to shoot, Sawtooth. Kane wouldn't wear a gun while he was here, though, just that knife. It drove me crazy the way he refused to act, goddammit, beg pardon, refused to act white! He wouldn't wear anything 'cept them buckskins, and sometimes a vest. When it got cold, maybe he'd wear a jacket. But that's all. Wouldn't put on a shirt, though I bought him dozens. I think he did it just to rile me.”

“But why? Didn't he want to be here?”

“That's just it.” There was a long, drawn-out sigh, full of regret. “When Kane came here, I thought he was here to stay. I thought he'd wanted to come. That's why I could never understand the hostility he showed, right from the
start. He kept to himself, even ate his meals alone, 'cept when he was working out on the range. And there wasn't a day that he didn't bring in meat for the table, even if he had to get up before dawn to do his hunting. He wouldn't even accept my goddamn, beg pardon, food without replacing it.”

“Please, Mr. Straton,” Courtney broke in. “You don't have to keep begging my pardon for a word I've picked up myself—thanks to your son.”

“Did you?” For the first time, he smiled. “When he first showed up, he never swore at all, 'cept in Comanche. I'm glad to know he learned
something
around here.”

Courtney rolled her eyes. God sakes, what a thing to be proud of!

“You were saying?”

“Yes, well, like I said, he kept to himself, wouldn't get to know the men, let alone me. You couldn't have a conversation with him unless you carried the whole thing yourself. I can't remember him ever once speaking to anyone first. And yet I know damn well he was full of questions, 'cause I could see it in his eyes. But he had the damnedest patience. He would wait until his questions got answered without his having to ask. You see, he wanted to learn anything and everything we could teach him. And he did. After a year, there wasn't anything he couldn't do on this ranch. That was another reason I thought he was here by choice.”