Lake of Fire (38 page)

Laura swallowed.

… my position as vice-president of the Fielding Bank
.

In an even tone, she read the opening lines aloud.

And continued, “I am joining Fred Whitehouse at First Illinois. I feel that I should also inform you that the accounts of Ramsey Tool and Die and Sears Roebuck will be changing banks along with me.”

“Sears,” Forrest muttered. “I’d never thought of them leaving.”

Stop
.

Laura raised her eyes to her father’s stricken face. Though she had not wanted Karl to come courting, he’d been a major asset to the Fielding Bank.

She went to the bedside. “Whom else can I send

for?”

He shook his head. “Someone’s got to manage the accounts we still have. With Karl gone, I don’t know who I’d choose to come out here.”

“There must be somebody.”

Forrest’s face changed from the color of chalk to a pinker hue. “There isn’t. And if you’d paid attention to Karl, kept him in the family, I wouldn’t be in
this fix.”

Laura felt as though all her blood was rushing to her head. “Don’t even think of blaming me for your business and your personal failures. You’ve treated me like a serf all these years, and I imagine you did the same to Karl and all the other promising young managers you’ve had trouble holding on to.”

“Daughter, you know I …”

“I know you’re an impossible tyrant!”

Hank pulled out his pocket watch and pressed the lever with his thumb. “This is all charming, but time is running out with the railroad. Hopkins Chandler wants to meet after lunch to decide where we go from here.”

“Does he think Fielding Bank will withdraw because Dad’s injured?”

Hank’s nearly colorless eyebrows came together. “He very well may. The railroad can decide at any time not to sell their Yellowstone property at all.”

Forrest tried to rise, but grimaced. “I can’t get up.”

“Laura will have to help me,” Hank said.

“No!”

“I want you with me in the meeting today,” Hank went on as if she had not spoken.

“Shall I define the word
no
for you?”

She turned to the window and spied Cord riding into the woods astride Dante. Man and horse moved in accord as though they had become a single creature. The thought of sitting with Hank on the opposite side of the table from him made her queasy.

“I have something to say that will be of great interest to you.” Hank gave a low chuckle and followed her gaze out the window.

“What could possibly interest me? I don’t know a thing about the deal.”

While Cord and Dante disappeared behind a steam cloud rising from a fumarole, Hank finished, “It’s not about the deal; it’s about Sutton.”

Cord took Dante on his morning ride, reflecting.

He’d known his share of women.

Those from the less affluent side of Salt Lake didn’t care about rumors, just hoped for a Cinderella story that might send some of the Bryce fortune their way. He’d met others while traveling the continent, like the sophisticated Frenchwoman he enjoyed until he found out she was cheating on a husband. And the Tuscan daughter at a vineyard where he lodged for a month. That one had boosted his ego, making love with him in the hayloft and in the stone chambers of eleventh-century ruins.

His discovery of Laura exceeded it all.

He’d spoken the truth about wanting her at his ranch. To have her in his bed, in his life …

To have her accept his heritage where society did

not.

Cord turned Dante’s head and rode to the administration office of the tent camp. He dismounted and
looped Dante’s reins over the wooden rail out front.

Inside, the candy-striped tent resembled a conventional office, with metal desks scattered over the raised-board flooring. This early in the morning, the only person about was a thin-lipped man in his midtwenties with a receding hairline. He kept his head down over a stack of paper until Cord cleared his throat.

“Help ya?”

“I’m looking for Bitter Waters, who does the campfire program in the evenings.” Cord made his voice impersonal.

“Popular fellow this mornin’. Soldiers from the Lake Station in here lookin’ for him, too.”

Cord looked over his shoulder through the open tent flap. “How long ago?”

The Wylie man pulled out a cheap steel pocket watch. “Fifteen minutes?”

“What did you tell them?”

“He’s been usin’ the tents what ain’t rented for the night, movin’ from one to anuther.”

“Which one is he in?” Cord tried to keep his impatience hidden.

“He come in last night and looked at the list to see what was open. There was at least twenty. I dunno which he took.”

Cord turned away. It wasn’t fair that Bitter Waters had to live like a vagabond in order to deliver his story of the Nez Perce War.

Outside, Cord stood before Dante and stroked his face; the big head lowered to sniff his pockets. “You
had oats this morning.”

Still smoothing his stallion’s nose absently, he studied the array of tents on the hillside. All was quiet, as it lacked a few minutes till seven. Breakfast and the eight o’clock coach departures would bring out a crowd.

Suddenly, his hand froze in the act of petting Dante. Between the tents, in full uniform, marched Captain Feddors with a trio of soldiers Cord didn’t know.

“Spread out and cover the main paths to the dining hall, the bathing tent, and the privies,” Feddors ordered. “The old Injun will come out of his sleeping tent for one of nature’s calls.”

Before he could be recognized, Cord loosed the reins from the hitch rail, stepped around, and placed Dante between him and Feddors. He walked as slowly as possible away from the tent camp toward the lake.

As the sunlight grew stronger and the night chill began to dissipate, the dewy cobwebs brought back a fragment of memory. Of his uncle saying sunrise was his
wayakin
, that he rose at first light each day to absorb the wisdom of his guardian spirit before the damp burned off the grass.

High in the Absarokas, when the Nez Perce were fleeing, Cord had wakened at first light with a start. The canvas wall of Bitter Waters’s and Kamiah’s improvised shelter stretched over his head. His legs and feet were freezing where he had slid out of the tent on the slope during the night.

“Boy!” a deep voice hissed. “Blue Eyes!”

He twisted and stared across at the buffalo robes where Bitter Waters and his wife slept. They were empty.

“I knew with them eyes you had to be white,” the voice behind the drape went on.

Cord rose and threw back the canvas to discover Cappy Parsons, the miner the tribe had kidnapped to guide them through the mountains.

“It was my tough luck to have been grabbed.” Cappy belched. “I was looking for gold south of Cooke City when I wandered into the park. Ran into them Nez Perce, and they held me prisoner along with those other tourists they picked up by the Firehole River.” He gestured for Cord to crawl out of the tipi. “I’m getting out of here. Thought I’d take you back to decent folk where you belong.”

Even at the age of six, Cord’s face had grown hot while his silence lied for him.

“I got nothing for a kid, but in a few days’ ride we’ll find people with wimmen and milk cows.”

When they found settlers, Cappy Parsons wandered on, leaving Cord to make his random way from settlement to settlement until he wound up in Salt Lake City. There a Mormon charity led him to the attention of Aaron Bryce.

If Bitter Waters and Kamiah had not risen before dawn, Cord’s life might have been very different.

He mounted Dante and nudged him forward, seeking a place where the lakeshore faced the rising sun.

It didn’t take long. On a promontory, dressed in his dark suit, Bitter Waters raised his arms to the morning sky. The only obvious difference between him and someone like Hopkins Chandler was his braids.

The lake was a mirror, the morning sky an almost impossible blue, rain-washed from the storm. The sun, above the horizon, transformed from lemon to diamond bright, blinding … There might have been two suns, one in the sky, the other mirrored in smooth water.

Cord reined Dante in, dismounted, and ordered him to stand. He walked through the trees toward his uncle, putting his feet down with care, the way the man he approached had taught him ensured silence.

About ten yards from the bank, Cord stopped. He listened and heard Bitter Waters murmuring what must have been a morning prayer. Something in the timbre of his voice made Cord touch the obsidian in his pocket.

It transported him back to early morning near his parents’ cabin, watching his mother go onto her knees and plunge her hands into a lively foot-tall cascade of falling water.

The waterfall represented her guardian spirit, she had told him. When he was older, he would spend time in the wilderness finding his own. Her message, so oft repeated, had been the reason he had taken his pilgrimage seriously when Bitter Waters set him upon it.

Why, then, for all these years, had he used his obsidian as a sort of lucky piece, something to worry with his hands when his mind was seeking solutions?

This morning, he gripped the stone and felt as though its warmth came, not from his skin, but from its being born of fire. His throat thickened the way it did when he heard the national anthem, or when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang the hymns of Christmas. Within him mingled the blood of mighty traditions.

Bitter Waters turned. “There you are,” he said as though he had known Cord was behind him all along.

Cord resisted the urge to wipe his brimming eyes.

His uncle noticed, as his sharp regard had taken in all the nuances of a six-year-old’s emotion. “You have questions.” He moved to sit on a thick and twisted silver log and gestured for his nephew to rest beside him.

Cord looked over his shoulder in the direction of the Wylie Camp. “I came to warn you at last night’s campfire. The captain running the park is looking for you, says you’re a troublemaker with your stories.”

Bitter Waters smiled. “So my story … my truth, has pinched.”

With another glance back the way he had come, Cord moved toward the log. “I saw them this morning searching the Wylie Camp.”

“Then they will find me. And I will move on, back to the reservation at Nespelem in the state of Washington.”

“This fellow Captain Feddors is a real hard case. He could hurt you.”

His uncle nodded and patted the log. “Then sit,
for we may not have much time. I would tell you the rest of my story.”

Cord folded down, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked out over the water. A little breeze kicked up and ruined the perfect, mirrored surface.

“I would tell you of Camas Meadows, where our rear scouts watched as General Howard and the soldiers made camp in an area we knew well. Chiefs Ollokot and Toohoolhoolzote plotted a night raid to steal their horses.”

Cord shifted on the log so he could watch Bitter Waters’s face.

“Later in the day, there was a skirmish. No Nez Perce were killed. I do not know about the men of the United States.”

How strange to hear what Cord thought of as his country named as enemy.

“I heard we managed to make off with only mules, but I had already gone on my own pilgrimage. I took two men and crossed Teton Pass to find Sarah and her son …”

This time, Cord did not burst into a diatribe about his uncle killing his parents.

“I took you in as my son. One morning in Yellowstone when I was at prayers and Kamiah was building the cooking fire, you disappeared … the white miner was gone, also.”

“I went with him on my own.” Cord did not let his gaze waver.

“To the life of a white man. The story I told, I
wish it could speak to your soul.”

“I heard you.” Cord’s heart came close to softening, but … “Tell me about your driving my mother from her home.”

Bitter Waters lips set. “That would take many suns. Know that it is a story with many rights and many wrongs.”

The back of Cord’s neck prickled. The crackle of a pinecone was faint; he saw that Bitter Waters had heard before him. First, the cone, then small limbs snapping, and hoofbeats approached from along the shore.

“They are coming for me.”

“I won’t let them …”

The look Bitter Waters gave Cord told him he had no recourse against a soldier’s gun.

Cord put two fingers to his mouth and whistled, aware that it would erase any doubt as to their location. From behind, he heard the quick thuds of Dante’s hooves.

“Take my horse.” He rose and snagged the reins, putting a soothing hand on Dante’s withers. “There, boy.”

Bitter Waters was on his feet. “I … not your fine animal.”

“Take him and get out of here,” Cord instructed. “Where is your horse?”

“Tethered in the meadow back of the Wylie Camp. A fine Appaloosa with the brand of a rising sun.”

“Hey!” called a male voice.

“Yiiii!” Another spoke to his mount.

His uncle gripped his sleeve. “I will hide in the woods as long as you need and trade for my horse.”

Cord swallowed. He didn’t know if he could trust Bitter Waters not to bolt right away, taking Dante, the finest horse and one of the best friends he’d ever had.