Lake of Fire (2 page)

She should be home safe in bed, just thinking of shaking off slumber. Instead, she lay on a blanket of snow, shivering so hard her teeth chattered. Here, she could cower and wait for the outlaws to follow her trail, or she could try to save herself.

Pulling her wide-brimmed hat down over her knot of hair, Laura crawled to the lip of the ravine and peeped over. The outlaw’s palomino, his reins looped over the saddle horn, side-gaited away from the coach to within fifteen feet of her.

No good. Though she was an excellent horsewoman, the men would see her mount up and shoot her down.

Angus’s gun lay in the snow beside the coach wheel. If she could get it, she knew how to use it. Against her father’s orders, she’d persuaded the coachman at Fielding
House to teach her to shoot bottles and cans on the Lake Michigan shore. Her own weapon, a tiny brassframed, four-barrel pepperbox, bought without Father knowing, was in her valise.

Another faint shushing to her left, but she ignored it, dug in her elbows, and pulled forward. Scanning the hummocky bottomland, she planned her path to stay behind the coach until the last moment. Then grab Angus’s gun and stand for a clear shot.

Two shots.

The lead outlaw, apparently confident he and his partner were alone, jerked his mask down from his nose and mouth. Angular planes of jaw were revealed, along with deep creases from his nostrils down to the sharp chin. He opened the stage’s boot, dragged Laura’s luggage out onto the ground, and unlatched her valise. She cringed as her clothes came out in a ragged pile. And again when he bent and retrieved her pistol with a chilling smile.

Something grasped her ankle; her heart began to race. A jerk and she was dragged back down the slope.

Breath gathered in her throat, but a large hand choked off her scream. She kicked out and tried to bite the callused palm.

“Quiet, boy.” A rough male whisper.

Damp seeped through the trousers Laura had purchased from the Marshall Field’s men’s department for the trip. At the time, she’d kept it secret from Father and Aunt Fanny, but figured people on the Union Pacific train and the stage would be less likely to
bother a boy. With her captor’s weight lowering onto her body, she felt fortunate to be mistaken for a male.

She twisted her head, and a man’s hard face filled her vision. With untamed black hair and a ragged beard, he had eyes of glacial blue. Wearing a thick sheepskin coat and trousers matching the willows’ bark, his weight pressed her to the cold earth.

Her chest heaved. Scrabbling through the snow and down into the dirt, she grabbed fistfuls in an effort to gain traction.

“Want to get us killed?” His hand clamped down harder, obstructing her nostrils.

She continued to struggle until reason won out. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t with the outlaws.

Though she forced herself to go limp, he held his grip a moment longer. “Will you be quiet?”

She gave a jerk of a nod.

He released her and rolled away. She took a ragged gulp of air, trying not to gasp out loud.

“Where’s your piece?” he whispered with a furtive glance up the bank. His gloved hand drew his own pistol and held it before her eyes. Thick-barreled and heavy, it bore a grip of creamy bone, with “Colt” lettered on the side.

He inched his way up the embankment to peer over the edge, and a fine trace of lines appeared at the corners of his eyes. Laura crawled up beside him.

Behind the coach, both outlaws rooted through the mess of her belongings. Thankfully, her leatherbound journal was secure in her coat pocket, but she
despaired for her fine cameo, sharp white on black onyx, one of the few things she had left from her mother. Dirty fingers parted the carefully packed tissue paper, and she wished she held the Colt.

“Lookit,” said the plaid-coated one and pointed to her tracks.

The leader pocketed her pistol and drew a large handgun from a holster beneath his coat. His partner brought up his rifle.

Less than a foot from Laura, the Colt roared. Her left ear twanged and commenced a piercing ring.

Plaid-coat was down, blood spreading from his stomach.

The man beside her fired again.

The leader’s gun cartwheeled into the snow. With a single glance at his bleeding partner, he rushed for his palomino and leaped to the saddle. The chestnut spooked and ran, hoofbeats accelerating until both horses and the single rider disappeared into the brush.

The man with the Colt leaped up and dodged through the trees. Laura scrambled to her feet and followed, staggering through a snowdrift to keep up.

When they reached the coach, his sharp blue eyes took in the driver’s limp form. Angus’s head lay turned away as if he were sleeping; the pool of blood had melted a patch of snow beneath his temple.

Crumpled amid the scattered clothing, Plaid-coat didn’t look hungry anymore. His face was slack and his eyes muddy. Keening like a child, he tried to press his intestines back inside.

“Gut shot,” Laura’s rescuer murmured with a shake of his head. She watched him raise his Colt in a hand that trembled, so slightly she wondered if she imagined it.

The blast reverberated through the vast cold wilderness.

Cord Sutton lowered his gun, his pulse pounding as though he had run a long way. Though the outlaw richly deserved to die, killing a man still made him sick inside.

He turned on the boy, who sagged against the coach wheel, face pale with shock. “What were you thinking? Hiding in the woods while they killed the driver …” Cord spat into the snow.

The kid shoved small fists into the pockets of a brown woolen coat and looked away toward a stream running to join the torrent of the Snake. He looked even younger than Cord had thought, not old enough to shave. A glint of tears shone in hazel-flecked green eyes.

“Name’s Cord,” he offered.

The youngster bit his lower lip with even white teeth. Something in his manner suggested a city child; no doubt, he had never seen anyone die. For that matter, Cord had never killed a man.

How he wished he could turn back the clock to when he’d risen in the predawn darkness, eager to embark on his journey.

With another appraisal of the frightened boy, Cord put two fingers to his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle. A vague movement in the willow bottoms became his well-muscled black stallion trotting into the clearing. “There, Dante.” He stroked the horse’s flank.

Cord needed to be on his way, but he turned back to the kid studying the snow. Without warning, the child dove on a black velvet pouch beside the steel-rimmed wheel. Trembling fingers shook out tissue paper that floated to earth, and he went onto his knees and pushed piles of snow aside with cold-reddened hands.

“What are you looking for?”

“A cameo on a gold chain. My mother’s.”

“All this belongs to your mother?” Cord gestured at the scattered clothing. “Is she here?” He hoped there wasn’t another body.

The kid shook his head and kept searching. Relieved, Cord knelt and sifted snow alongside. He lifted a blue-green ball gown trimmed in black lace and shoved aside a gold satin wrapper. After a few minutes, he realized the pendant might be beneath the body of the outlaw he’d killed. He’d never realized a gut-shot man would smell like a deer or elk carcass, a rank, sweetish stench.

Cord pushed to his feet. Reaching down, he touched the kid on a slumped shoulder.

“I have to go,” he began. “As we shouldn’t steal the stage horses, and mine can’t carry you and your mother’s bags, I’ll have to leave you.”

“No!” The boy’s tone went shrill. “There might be more of them.” He looked at the man Cord had shot in the head and then away.

“The stage company scouts will find you soon.”

The last thing Cord needed was a greenhorn to slow him down. If he waited or took the kid back miles to the small town of Jackson, he’d be late for his appointment in Yellowstone. The deal waiting in the park promised to be the most important thing he’d ever done.

The child in the snow looked up and, for the first time, met his eyes. “I need to get to Yellowstone.”

Cord saw himself at age six, ragged, homeless, dependent on charity. They could ride for Menor’s Ferry; he’d speak to Bill Menor, who was a friend. He’d leave the kid there and report the outlaw.

Before he could speak, something in the way the youngster moved, rising lithely to stand before him, set off alarms. Cord’s eyes narrowed, and he studied the smooth jaw. The whisper of suspicion grew stronger when he looked at long-lashed eyes and the generous curve of smooth lips.

This was surely no boy, but a young woman. A lady of wealth, from the look of her belongings spread in the snow.

“Please.” Her voice was not a beggar’s.

Of all the times to play Good Samaritan, this was the worst. But there was something appealing about traveling with this spunky and mysterious female. Her green gaze was wary while she awaited his verdict.

“I’ll take you to Yellowstone,” Cord agreed.

For the first hour riding on a folded blanket behind Dante’s saddle, Laura sat numbly, aware of nothing but the impossible fact she had survived.

Then, with the rising sunlight, she began to notice her surroundings. Her skin prickled in the chill air; her ears tuned to the scrabble of the black stallion’s hooves in the cobbled bottomland. With her nostrils flaring at the pungent mix of sage, horse, and male perspiration, she realized she also stank from the sweat of fear.

It flashed her back to the stream bank, counting the seconds she had to live before her tracks were found. Cringing in anticipation of bullets tearing into her flesh, heart racing, breath cut off when Cord covered her mouth and nose. The sharp concussion of the Colt going off still had her ears ringing.

Tears welled so quickly she couldn’t blink them back. She stifled a sob, and her chest felt as though it would explode. Shoulders shaking, she pressed her lips together.

Don’t think about it. Wait until you’re alone and can write it all down. Then you can fall apart
.

Pressing a fist to her mouth, she held her breath until the sharpest agony abated. Though the immediate danger seemed past, she had to keep her wits about her. Would Cord believe a young man sobbing like a girl?

Laura wiped the tears from her cheeks and studied
him. His profile might have been carved from brown sandstone, with a hawkish nose and a sculpted jaw his beard could not hide. High and prominent cheekbones might have belonged to an Indian, but she’d never heard of one with blue eyes and thick facial hair. Though the set of his jaw conveyed he was still angry at a boy who’d done nothing to defeat the outlaws, he seemed to have accepted her story about the valise of women’s things being taken to her … his … absent mother.

Laura sighed. If only there had been a chance to know her own mother better.

The rustle of skirts and the scent of lemon verbena had always preceded Violet Fielding into a room. On the hottest August day when the breeze off Lake Michigan died and flies droned, Violet’s hands always felt cool. During her life, Forrest Fielding’s rigid demeanor had been tempered by his wife’s unquenchable lightness of heart. When she died, he turned from merely wooden to stone. Pushing ten-year-old Laura into the role of hostess and supervisor at Fielding House, he had set exacting standards for everything.

In the years since, she’d yearned to break free, but stayed with him because she had no better place to go. A woman’s options were limited: entering a convent, for which she had no vocation; becoming a nanny or companion, preposterous with the Fielding wealth; or getting married.

With deft motions of his knees, Cord steered Dante several hundred feet down a pair of steep river
terraces. In the innermost valley, the Snake River sparkled in the sun. Although it rushed smoothly past, boiling eddies revealed its turbid depth. Born in Yellowstone, the spring torrent flowed south forty miles from its headwaters.

“Menor’s Ferry,” Cord said.

A wooden frame on each riverbank supported a metal cable works strung across the flood. Tied to the far shore, a board platform topped two flimsy-looking pontoons. She couldn’t imagine Dante balancing on the raft and riding the current.