Lake of Fire (3 page)

“Halloo!” Cord called, his voice coming back in an echo. The wind stirred the squat willow bushes and wild roses.

All was silent. A whitewashed cabin near the boat looked deserted.

Cupping his large hands, Cord shouted again for the ferry operator. There was no answering hail. “Menor said you couldn’t work it from this side,” he explained. “It keeps people from crossing without paying their twenty-five cents.”

“Now what?” Laura asked in her little-boy voice.

With a look at the river, Cord concluded, “We’ll have to ford.”

“What?” Floating snags of trees demonstrated the current’s power.

“Not here.” His tone made her feel stupid.

He turned Dante upstream to a place where the river spread a hundred yards wide, separated into three channels by gravel bars. “He ought to be able to carry
us both across this.”

Knee-deep, then belly-deep, the horse followed Cord’s urging into the rush. Dante’s feet left bottom, and the river poured into Laura’s boots and climbed her calves.

A few strong strokes, and the horse trotted up onto the first bar. Water streamed from his flanks. Though the second channel flowed deeper and wider, Dante took it easily. Laura almost relaxed, but the farthest stream appeared the swiftest and deepest.

She took a grip on her precious journal, making sure it rested in her coat pocket.

Dante waded in and began to swim gamely, but the current caught him. He stretched his neck and pulled harder, swept downriver faster than he could move across. Laura watched the far bank recede, feeling the water’s cold transmitted through her bones so her pelvis ached.

The horse’s head surged up. Kicking frantically, he began to founder.

Water came up around Laura’s waist, and she began to shudder. Try as she might to hold fast, she found her hands free of the solid strap of Cord’s belt. Her fingers brushed the hem of his sheepskin coat; a fleeting touch, and the Snake River seized her.

Wet clothing dragged Laura under, intense cold numbing her from head to toe. She kept her lips pressed together and forced her eyes open. Ahead, she made out a blurred tangle, but before she could fend off, she slammed into something solid. The air she’d
been holding in expelled with a whoosh.

As she was scraped along through a twisted jumble of jammed logs, a thick trunk caught her across the middle.

All her muscles clenched, and she hung motionless, while the swift current pressed her against the log. Seconds passed like hours, and she fought the rising urge, first a sly whisper, that perhaps she might be able to breathe underwater. It gave way to a raging scream in her chest.

Then slowly, she felt her head and shoulders pushed forward until she tumbled free. Upside down, water seeping up her nose, she looked for the light and couldn’t see her way.

Something seized her leg.

In a rage, she reached to tear at whatever held her. Slippery evergreen branches, covered in algae, bent in her hands. Her eyes were still open in the rushing water, but sparks of light like diamonds began to break up her vision.

Once more, with waning strength, she reached to break the branches.

Free again, she exhaled the last air in her lungs and followed her bubbles. When her head broke the surface, light exploded into her eyes.

She opened her mouth to breathe, but her chest muscles had seized in the cold. Flailing, she felt her boots brush bottom.

Though the shore was just there, the rounded cobbles gave no purchase and she fell back into the current.
The numbing cold was almost benign, the temptation to lie back and let herself float insinuated itself into consciousness.

“No!” She spat water. She hadn’t watched Angus and the outlaw die just to lose her own life.

Arms and legs slapping, Laura fought her way into an eddy close to the bank. She grabbed an eroded ball of tree roots.

For a long moment she lay gasping, with cold water pouring over her legs. Her brain as empty as her reservoir of energy, she was loath to move … but oddly, what made her was the man who had rescued her at the coach.

What if he needed help?

Step by painful step, she staggered up the cut bank of the Snake River. Hand over hand, she grasped the pungent pale sage to pull herself up. At the top, she fell to her knees.

River water rushed from her mouth. Though she was shivering, sweat peppered her face. Doubled over with her forehead touching the ground, and her wet hair hanging in strings around her shoulders; streaks of bright light seemed to stab at her. Helplessly, she retched.

Clamping her tongue between her teeth, she forced herself to breathe evenly, in and out through her nose. The richness of earth dampened by melting snow rose, redolent of dung and the decaying leaves of last season.

She pressed her palms to the ground, anchoring herself until the maelstrom passed.

After what felt like a long time, she lifted her head.

The mist had burned away to reveal the mountains. They lifted their proud heads, as though the granite mass strained to reach the sky. If she could stand, just there, on the highest peak with wind whipping around her, this valley would surely seem green and warm, the raging Snake subdued to a lazy-looking, sluggish stream.

Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, Laura got to her feet and stood unsteadily.

On instinct, she reached for her pocket, where she expected the wet weight of her ruined journal. Laura wrote her deepest thoughts down daily, had done so ever since those terrible days after Violet died. Volumes of Laura’s life rested in a plain and dusty carton in the Fielding House attic, labeled as “canning jars” so her father would not be tempted to read her true thoughts. This latest book chronicled her decision to undertake this trip alone, along with the wonders of prairie and mountain vistas. Last night, she’d curled up in the coach and written by candlelight, describing the crystalline snowflakes sticking to the windows.

It couldn’t be lost, but an exploratory hand in her wet pocket encountered only slivers of bark and gritty sand.

She looked around the lonely valley of the Snake. If Cord had been swept away, she’d have to make her way back to Menor’s Ferry and hope someone came along before she got too hungry.

But there he was, a hundred yards upstream on the
steep inner bank, scanning the river. She almost called out, but realized her hair hung around her shoulders.

To her surprise, her leather hat still dangled from a rawhide cord around her neck. She’d bought it from a stable boy at Fielding House, not wanting to go west with a hat that looked new. Hastily, she pulled her hair up and covered it.

Wending her way through sage that exuded aromatic scent each time she brushed gray-green leaves, she worked her way along the high bank. When she approached Cord, he raked his gaze from her slender, shivering shoulders to her squishing boots. In five swift strides, he climbed up fifteen feet to join her on the terrace. His coat and pants were drenched and dripping.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’ll make it.” She crossed her arms to hide her breasts beneath sopping flannel. “You acted like you knew what you were doing. I should have waited for the stage scouts.”

His nostrils flared.

“Why did we have to cross here?” she challenged through chattering teeth.

“It saves a day’s travel. I thought you needed to get to Yellowstone.”

“I do.”

“So do I.” The hard note in his voice said he was having second thoughts about her slowing him down. His gaze dropped to her body and his tone softened, so she feared he knew her sex. “You’re quaking like
an aspen.”

She hugged herself harder to hide her female curves.

Cord nodded toward Dante, standing with his neck stretched to sniff a tuft of coarse grass. “Let me give you something dry to wear.”

Looking around at the thigh-high scrub, she imagined taking off her shirt beneath his scrutiny. She pointed to the saddlebags hanging sodden. “There is nothing dry.”

Cord began to gather gnarled branches of dead sage. Still shaking, she moved to help. He knelt to brush aside the last of the melting snow from a clearing and used a flint to strike and kindle a small smoky fire.

The blaze established, he rummaged in a leather pack and withdrew a pewter flask. When he unscrewed the cap, drank, and passed it to her, the familiar smell of bourbon her father sipped along with his cigars rose to her nostrils.

She had never tried it neat, only in Christmas eggnog and punches. Trembling as she was, she lifted the flask to her lips and drank after Cord, though Aunt Fanny would not have approved.

It burned and sent a trail of warmth through her middle.

Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she handed the spirits back.

As they hunkered down to get warm and dry, she gauged Cord—six foot two, no less, with broad shoulders and tapered hips. His brimmed leather hat showed signs of wear, as did his sheepskin jacket and
boots. His hands were nut-brown, his nails clean.

Laura watched with interest as he reached for his rifle, opened the lever action, and shook out the water. Then he pursed his lips and blew down the barrel, sending water droplets flying. From his pack, he removed a rag that looked and smelled of oil. “Got to get out the river muck and hope my bullet pouch is waterproof.” He ran the cloth down the barrel using a string with a small metal weight to pull it through.

“What takes you to Yellowstone?” He set the weapon aside and focused on her.

Laura cast about for an answer, knowing her world could not be more different from his. On instinct, she decided to keep her family’s wealth a secret.

“Work.” She hoped the half truth came out naturally. She did work for her father; he would probably have her take care of his personal correspondence while they were in the park.

A skeptical look suggested Cord wondered about her so-called mother’s expensive things. She could make up a story about her mother working in the park, too, a hostess in a hotel dining room perhaps, but deception was best kept to a minimum.

“Work,” he repeated into the lengthening silence.

She wondered if he were passing through the park on his way to do ranch labor, perhaps in Montana.

Half an hour passed in uneasy silence until her stomach growled. Torn between delicacy and hoping Cord heard her audible hunger, she planted herself with her back to the flames, her legs spread the way
she imagined a boy might stand.

Cord rummaged among the things he’d spread out to dry. From a metal tin, he handed over some jerky.

At Fielding House on Lakeshore Drive, Giselle would just now be setting out breakfast on the walnut sideboard. Laura imagined biscuits hot from the oven, crisp bacon, and link sausage mingling their aromas with the tart smell of stewed apples.

She fingered the tough dried meat Cord gave her, thinking of the curling leather she had seen at the cobbler’s when Aunt Fanny took her to get her dancing slippers resoled. Laura had been eleven, big enough to carry the satin toe shoes in to the proprietor on her own and count the change before it disappeared into her aunt’s reticule. Old enough to know the things you counted on, those implacable finalities like family, were not as permanent as you imagined. She’d never expected her mother would die giving birth to a baby brother who lived for a day and a night.

How easily Laura might have been the one today to lie ruined while vultures spiraled.

She tried to take a bite of jerky, but her teeth slid off. Another effort managed to rip a small shred from the edge. When Cord offered his canteen, she took it and drank.

Once their clothes were dry, they remounted Dante and headed north along the base of the mountains. She gazed at the rugged cirques and boulder fields adorning the heights. Even from the bottom of the valley, she could see long, linear tracks of avalanche
on the glaciers.

Rather than dwell on what had happened this day, she tried to focus on her journey’s end, when she would meet her father at the Lake Hotel. His efforts at matchmaking usually fell flat, as he pressed her toward the sons of the wealthy who turned out to be largely indolent, or introduced her to young men he considered worthy to be his successor in the Fielding Bank.

Perhaps, because she would rather have been the one groomed to succeed him, she had run through a string of suitors and declined them all. If she must accept the shackles of the nineteenth century, hers would be nothing less than a love match.

She was well along toward being labeled a spinster.

Fortunately, her father’s latest business partner, Hank Falls, sounded different from the men of the Midwest. He had not only built the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone, but he managed it for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Notwithstanding rumors of opposition from a rival buyer, with the help of Fielding Bank, Hank hoped to own the hotel.

Laura smiled, imagining Hank with Cord’s understanding of this rough country, yet with a grace and wit a mountain man must lack.

Gradually, the rhythm of the horse became hypnotic, and the sun’s warmth lulled. Though she fought it, her eyelids grew heavier, until she drifted into a somnolent haze.

Y
ou say she’s one hell of a gal,” Hank Falls chuckled, “but can she cook?” He shook his head at Forrest Fielding’s latest attempt to interest him in his daughter, Laura.

“She makes biscuits like lead.” Forrest furrowed his broad brow. “But she organizes the house and sees the servants lay a feast at every meal.”

Hank’s gaze went to the drifts of steam wafting from Old Faithful. The geyser topped a rise at the head of a grassy valley, set in among ridges studded with dense, lodgepole pine forest. The evergreen hills looked dark, in contrast to June’s pale shoots beside the Firehole River. All traces of the snow that had blanketed Yellowstone the previous night were gone.

Forrest warmed to his topic. “My Laura will make someone a wonderful wife.”

“Providing the fortunate gentleman can afford a cook,” Hank agreed jovially.

Forrest pulled his gold hunting case watch from the pocket of his black suit and opened the lid, embossed with a leaping stag. “The geyser is late,” he announced, causing a murmur to spread through the clutch of perhaps twenty waiting tourists.