"No," Anne said slowly. "Not the way you mean. I guess it hurt that he didn't care more, but I didn't either, really. I wanted a different life, but I didn't want to go to Chicago."

Anne's Aunt Clara was Edward Wells' sister, and from Anne's description Cord formed a picture of a woman every bit as rigid and self-serving as Edward himself. Clara Wainwright was the childless widow of a federal judge. Like her brother, she had brightened her own future through a careful marriage and was now a woman of considerable influence in her own right. For Anne, life in Chicago had been far worse than life in Mason.

"There was nothing to do," Anne told him. "She has servants to do everything. There were all these silly teas and lunches and dinners where you just talked about nothing for hours. I was afraid I'd lose my mind and start screaming right in the middle of some formal dinner.

"I think Aunt Clara finally realized how terrible it was for me because when I first asked about going back to school she wouldn't hear of it, but in the end she did let me go.

The University of Illinois allows women now, you know. She actually let me go, let me attend some cla.s.ses there, and that's where I met Richard Tyler."

Cord listened intently to this part of Anne's story, the part he most wanted to hear.

The son of a prominent Chicago banker, Richard was guaranteed a position in the bank when he finished school. Anne's description made Richard sound like a better looking, more educated version of Elroy Turrell.

He was, she admitted, like her own family in that he cared very much what other people thought, but he told her he respected her quick mind and independent ways. With the university courses giving her something with which to occupy her mind, and Richard providing an agreeable escort to dances, dinners, and other social events on weekends, life began to be quite pleasant.

"He asked me to marry him only months after we first started seeing each other. I was sure it would be a good life. Aunt Clara approved, and the whole family was delighted.

We knew we couldn't marry until Richard finished school and established himself at the bank, but we were willing to wait."

Did she sound wistful, Cord wondered.

"Right from the beginning we had minor differences," Anne continued, "but everyone does, don't they? And I knew it was my fault. It was always the same kind of problem I had with my own family."

"Like what?" Cord asked.

"Well, like the dress," Anne whispered. "You said you liked it, but it was only here where no one saw me, except Ephraim and Martha, but we didn't know they were going to stop by."

"What are you talking about?"

"Christmas. The red dress I wore Christmas."

"Yeah, I remember. It's pretty."

"I had it made for a special occasion in Chicago, and Richard made me take it off."

"I thought he was a gentleman," Cord said.

Anne pinched his arm. "You know what I mean. He made me go back and change it - for this drab gray one that Aunt Clara picked for me - he said that red was too bold a color."

"Sounds like you had another little gray man there. Surprised you and Pratt never got to courting," Cord said.

"He wasn't like Yellow-Belly Pratt," Anne snapped. "He wasn't gray and he wasn't little!" Then she said more slowly, "I was used to it then. To always being the one who was wrong, the cause of all the trouble."

Cord ignored her lukewarm defense of her old beau. "So he was gray and gutless and he never touched you."

"He touched me. We kissed and we held hands sometimes. It was proper. Do you think I should have been with him in that way?"

"h.e.l.l, no. He's probably not capable."

"He's married now. They have children."

"Must be Catholic."

"What makes you say that?"

"Virgin births."

"Do you want to hear this, or do you want to make belittling remarks?"

"Talk."

So Anne told him about the quarrel that ended it forever with Richard Tyler. They had attended a small dinner party of school friends, among them a friend of Richard's Anne particularly disliked. Daniel drank to excess. Sober he was rude. Drunk he was ugly. He had cornered Anne alone once and forced a disgusting, liquor-laden kiss on her.

Only mildly tipsy that night, Daniel started lecturing everyone on one subject after another. He pompously quoted one of the great philosophers, except he attributed the quotation to the wrong man. Unable to resist a small revenge, Anne tartly pointed out the mistake. The whole company had a huge laugh at Daniel's expense, but Richard saw nothing even vaguely humorous in the incident. She listened to a diatribe all the way home.

"He said maybe educating women was a mistake after all. He didn't even care when I told him I did it because Daniel forced that kiss on me. He didn't care! He said I had to promise never to contradict any of his men friends again. Ever. We had a terrible argument."

"So that was the end?" Cord asked.

"No. Maybe. Maybe it was already the end, but he went to Aunt Clara, and she said I couldn't go back to the university until I apologized and gave Richard his promise. It was sneaky and conniving and - and a betrayal. That's what made me break the engagement. I wrote him a letter. Aunt Clara was furious and of course when Father found out he was worse - beyond fury."

Edward Wells took the first train to Chicago but was unable to repair the damage. He might have been able to coerce Anne into relenting, but Richard was as unwilling to resume the engagement as Anne, and Edward had no leverage over Richard Tyler.

White with rage, Edward brought his daughter home in disgrace, not speaking a single word to her from Chicago to Mason. The next year was absolute h.e.l.l.

"He raged at me over every meal and every other time he saw me. He finally wore down, but he never really got over it. After that everyone just accepted that I was a spinster because I was - difficult - and that was that. Until George Detrick started the trouble all over."

Cord listened to Anne's story with wonder. He had always a.s.sumed that women like Anne Wells lived charmed lives, cherished, treasured, and protected by loving families, enjoying their lives of leisure and ease. He had watched her explore her own strengths and courage in those first weeks here with him and thought of her as having escaped a cage, but he had thought it was a comfortable, gilded cage, not a true prison.

He finally began to understand that a woman of this much strength and spirit might find the life she had led restrictive and boring. He was not ready to accept that his own life suited her perfectly.

CHAPTER 15.

ANNE WAS FILLED WITH ENVY as Cord described a childhood as different from hers as night from day.

The Bennett clan was a fun-loving, rowdy lot. He barely remembered his mother, and for the years Cord knew him his father was a vague sh.e.l.l of a man. Frank and Ephraim, so much older, had together acted as father, and his sister Hannah and Martha had divided the role of mother. Cord and his sister Marie were inseparable as children.

Ephraim's oldest children were the same age as their half-Indian cousins, and so in those days there were usually half a dozen young Bennetts tumbling all over the ranch.

The summers were filled with swimming in the creeks, horseback riding, games, and roughhousing. Winters there were sleigh rides, snow forts, s...o...b..ll fights, and other sorts of good times. They all worked too, of course. The family worked as hard as it played, but it was all part of the whole.

"After that trouble at school, the whole family just set themselves to teaching us at home," Cord said. "It was probably a better education. Eph and Frank both went to college back East. Eph stuck it out and got the degree, and Frank did two years, even though he hated it."

The few ugly episodes of prejudice that occurred during those early years failed to make a lasting impression on either Cord or Marie. The Bennett family kept the children in their midst, protecting them too well until what the whole family came to call "the Hatch business."

Cord's voice stopped in the darkness, and Anne waited long enough to wonder if he'd fallen asleep before prompting him. "So what happened? Why did you attack him?"

"I tried to kill him. If no one had gotten there for another couple of minutes, I would have."

Marie was thirteen and Cord fifteen that night. She had begged and wheedled until the family agreed to let them come along to a social in town. Marie was wildly excited, by the dance, by her new grown up dress, and by everything to do with the outing.

Cord was not particularly impressed by the confining clothes but was mildly interested in events and pleased with his sister's happy bubbling. The two of them were instructed to sit at the side out of the way. Watching the women in their best finery satisfied Marie for a while, but soon she wanted to be somewhere else.

"If we were on the other side we could hear the music better and see the ladies'

dresses up close from near the punch bowl."

"Walk across that floor, and we'll be back at Eph's house in five minutes and you know it. You can see from here." Cord had no urge to see anyone's dress better.

"We wouldn't have to walk across the floor. We could go out the door right here and come in on the other side. They'd never notice."

"Don't blame me when you're getting tucked into bed early. I'm staying here."

"Coward."

Name calling wouldn't move him, and Marie knew it, but she always gave it a try.

She was only gone a short while before he decided that her chattering company was better than none and followed her. Unable to find his sister, Cord started searching the surrounding area with increasing concern, unwilling to go to Frank or Ephraim and call attention to their disobedience.

"I found her because of the sound. It didn't sound like her, it was like a kitten mewling, but somehow I knew it was her and it was bad. The moon was bright enough when I got close I could see her - and him."

Marie was sprawled semi-conscious near a group of low bushes, her beloved new dress torn to the waist, skirts pushed up and underclothes ripped off. Jack Hatch, the worst of the town's bullies, knelt between her parted thighs, engorged organ jutting obscenely in the moonlight, just starting to lower himself over the thirteen-year-old girl.

"When people talk about seeing red you think it's just a way to say angry, but it's not, it really happens like that," Cord said. "I can't even remember parts of it. I was in that jail cell before things started seeming real again. The rest is red-colored and I'm not sure what really happened and what only happened inside my head."

Sounds of the fight attracted attention, and it was Noah Reynolds who choked Cord off Jack Hatch, but not before Jack lost consciousness and stopped breathing. Patrick Andrews, the town's doctor at the time, was able to thump on Jack enough to get his heart and lungs going again, but he had been as close to dead as a man can get and come back.

At fifteen, Cord ended up in jail, charged with attempted murder.

"That's when all this devil talk started. They couldn't believe I had Hatch down like that because he was so much bigger. Fact is I got a h.e.l.l of a jump on him because he was busy with Marie, and Eph and Frank always used to make me mind by grabbing me by the scruff of the neck or whatever was handy. They never thought about how they were teaching me to deal with them. Wasn't too long after that before Frank and Eph had to get together to do much with me. When I got to full size the both of them couldn't win a fight with me. Eph's too civilized.

"I was in jail ten days while the family went half-crazy trying to make sure there was no trial because they knew the town would be happy to throw their half-breed b.a.s.t.a.r.d in jail for life. Pa sold cattle for half what he should have got. Eph and Martha mortgaged their house. Frank and Judith gave up everything they'd saved. Hannah's husband was already drinking pretty bad, but they came up with some cash too somehow. They paid the Hatches off. So those sons of b.i.t.c.hes left town with more money than they'd ever dreamed about because Jack almost raped Marie."

"I never heard about any of that," Anne said. "Why wasn't he charged for attacking a little girl?"

"Because she was Indian, and Indians don't count. She was never the same after that.

You remember how she looks?"

"Oh, yes, she's beautiful," Anne said.

"Beautiful and with light skin," Cord said. "So she made up her mind she was going to get far enough away no one would know about her and she was going to be white. And that's what she did."

"Was that part of the reason she married that Denver man?" Anne asked.

"Howlett. Paul Howlett. That was the only reason. She barely knew him and he was twice her age. Nothing was ever the same," Cord said bitterly. "Marie wasn't the same.

The family wasn't the same. They almost bankrupted themselves over it. Pa died before they recovered financially. And I wasn't the same either."

"Because you almost killed a man?" Anne whispered.

"No, because while I was in his jail Noah told me things my family should have long before that, about what it means to be half-Indian in a white man's world. I guess Marie figured it out for herself in one way. Some of it I knew really, but the way he put it, put it all together - they should have told us both from the time we were little. I know why they didn't, but they should have."

"They loved you."

"They still should have told us."

From that time, Cord felt more and more a stranger in his own family. Marie was no longer the sister who had been his best friend. Martha and Eph were living in town.

Frank's wife, Judith, had always been a little uneasy around her husband's half-brother, and now Judith's fear blossomed into hysteria. She was afraid to be alone with him. She didn't like him around her children. While the boys were bad enough, when the fourth and last child, born when Cord was seventeen, was a girl, Judith's fear became uncontrollable. He was not allowed near the baby, never touched her, never held her.

At eighteen, heartsick and unable to endure any more, he started fixing up the buildings here on the original part of the ranch and moved off by himself.

A year later, Marie realized her ambition of making a new life. Cord tried to talk her out of marrying Howlett from the day of her engagement until the day of her wedding.

"Is she happy?" Anne asked.

"Don't know. Haven't seen her since she left. Frank and Eph visit her sometimes, but I'd give her story the lie, wouldn't I?"

"You mean she doesn't want to see you? Do you write?"

"Nope. She wouldn't even speak to me at the end. What I know is what I hear from Martha mostly. She raised Howlett's children from a first marriage. Never had any of her own. That could give her away too if she had a baby that looked like her own mother - or me."

Marie was gone. The last of the barns and outbuildings on this part of the ranch and every piece of equipment that had been stored in them were repaired, and Cord was beginning to feel restless anyway, when a man he barely knew stopped him on the street in Mason one day.

"Hear tell they're trying Jack Hatch for murder in Salt Lake City next week. They even got a witness. You going to go see him hang?"

Suddenly it seemed like attending the hanging would be the thing to do, seeing the end to something that had done so much damage to him and to his family.

Cord left Frank a note saying only that he was going away, packed, and left. After Salt Lake, there was no reason to head home, and he kept moving west, into Nevada, Oregon, then south through California, across Arizona and New Mexico Territories and into Texas.

In the border country of Texas he found a whole people of mixed blood, people who accepted him as easily as they did most other things in their lives. He worked for good wages breaking horses for one of the big ranches in the area and settled in, even living for almost a year with a round, brown, laughing woman named Rosa.

"Was she beautiful?" Anne asked.

"No. Pretty maybe. Maybe not even that, maybe just - happy, full of laughter."

Cord spoke only a few words of Spanish, and Rosa spoke no English. They lived together without really knowing each other. He gave her extra cash every month in addition to paying all their bills.

When he found she was not spending the money on herself but giving it to family, she expected him to be angry. He wasn't. He just gave her twice as much. Her whole family lived well.