Lake of Fire (5 page)

Laura hefted the pistol’s gleaming weight. She checked that it was loaded and raised it, clasped in two hands. From the corner of her eye, she saw him watch her pull back the hammer.

It took four clicks, that some said spelled, “C-O-L-T.”

She sighted along the barrel, drew in her breath, let out half …

Held it … and squeezed the trigger.

The gun kicked and stung her palms. A chunk of her driftwood target went flying, and the sound of the shot came back twice, echoing in a canyon on the far side of the lake.

“You can shoot … Laura.” His look was speculative.

She lifted her chin and smiled. Cord set his jaw. “It doesn’t mean you have the guts to kill anything.”

The cold came down fast after sunset. Clouds scudded past the high crest where snow blew in arching veils. Laura helped Cord gather firewood, piling the twisted lodgepole logs. The way he’d spoken of killing made her uneasy; it reminded her of the bottomless cold in his eyes when he sighted at the outlaw and pulled the Colt’s trigger.

The next time they arrived back at the woodpile together, she ventured, “That man this morning, had he gotten to a surgeon he might have lived.”

In the lowering darkness, Cord turned on her. “You know anything about how a gut-shot man dies?”

She swallowed and shook her head.

“First, infection sets in from the shit inside him,” he said with a harshness that sounded deliberate. “Then fever, shakes, unimaginable agony from the putrefying wound … it takes days.”

Laura shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

Cord went on, “We were a half-day’s ride north of Jackson and the sawbones there doesn’t have a modern operating room. He’d have given him whiskey and morphine, but the outcome would have been the same.” The anger went out of his voice. “What I did
this morning was the humane thing.”

She sighed. True or not, hadn’t she planned on shooting the man herself when she tried to go for Angus’s gun? When the outlaw had fingered her mother’s cameo, hadn’t she wished she held the Colt? The memory of the kindly driver’s blood on the snow made her believe she could have pulled the trigger.

She gave a tight nod and went for more wood, taking the private opportunity to relieve herself in the forest. Upon planning this trip, she had never expected to end up a “sage brusher,” what folks called people who camped wild.

When she came back, Cord had lit the fire. Pine logs snapped and crackled. While he cooked beans in a pot and added jerky, she was glad he hadn’t expected her to cook. No working girl would be unable to boil water, as she was, though she could plan a menu for a hundred.

After they ate, Laura perched on a boulder. The fresh aroma of evergreen and an undercurrent of spice hung on the air the way light lingered in the sky. How different this frigid land was from Chicago. Back home, summer brought the fecund aroma of algae and other water plants off Lake Michigan. Here at Jenny Lake, the chill air on her back and the fire’s warmth reminded her more of October than June.

She turned to Cord. “What’s it like here in the winter?”

“Cold.” His voice conveyed the depth and breadth that cold could reach. “The lakes are frozen. Elk and moose
come down from the high country by the thousands. The wind blows and blows, and the snow is a weightless dry powder that doesn’t even stick to your clothes.”

He looked up at the peaks. “For weeks on end, you can’t see the summits because they’re shrouded in clouds. When you catch a glimpse of the high country, it’s blinding white. Dante here,” he gestured toward his stallion, “spends stormy weeks in the sod barn.”

Odd that a cowboy would be well spoken; he must have had a good teacher in some mountain school house.

“It sounds very difficult,” she replied.

“It’s beautiful.” His husky voice bespoke his love for the high country.

“Do you think it will snow again tonight?” She huddled closer to the fire and surveyed the clouds against the blacker sky.

“No.” Cord’s breath came out smoky. “The air is dry, and I don’t smell a hint of snow.”

Laura knew what he meant. She’d tried to describe the biting aroma in the wind to her cousin Constance and hadn’t been able to make her understand. Of course, Constance, with her delicate airs, tended to stay inside when it threatened snow in Chicago.

Cord threw more wood onto the fire, his shadow looming on a boulder. Then he pulled a bedroll from the items he’d been drying. Made of waterproof tan duck with a sheepskin lining, it carried the label of Sears and Roebuck. He went back for blankets. “This is all we have for bedding; we’ll have to share.”

She hoped the firelight hid her flushed cheeks.

Cord stirred the fire once more and lay down. She waited until he breathed with the even tempo of sleep before she climbed atop her side of the still-damp bedroll and pulled up the blankets. Keeping her coat on, she turned her back to him.

After a while, the fire burned down. Hard diamonds of stars appeared, except for where the bulk of mountain blotted out the sky. Beyond the clearing where they slept, the blackness seemed absolute. Minute by minute, the night grew colder, tempting her to move closer to Cord.

But Aunt Fanny had cautioned her and Constance that even a simple thing might drive a man to take liberties.

Though Laura hugged herself, she continued to shiver. If this was June in Wyoming, she wondered how Cord could possibly love the winter here.

Unless he was as hard as the land.

Long after midnight, Cord drifted in and out of sleep. The woman beside him had threatened to shoot him if he touched her, but perhaps that had been bravado. The clothes he’d seen spread on the snow had either been a rich woman’s or those of one who made her living on her back.

What would a wealthy woman be doing disguised as a boy on the Yellowstone stage?

Cord shoved back the covers, sat up, and pulled on his boots. Laura stirred briefly, then settled, while he shrugged on his coat and rose. Picking his way with care through the rocks, and stepping over deadfall, he walked down to the dark shore.

He needed to keep his focus on his business in Yellowstone. It could fall through for a number of reasons, if another party tried to bid things up … or if anyone discovered the truth about him.

He stared out at the blacker peaks on the far side of the water. As he had put aside thoughts of Laura, he now refused to delve into his past.

Yet, when he returned to his bedroll and settled into slumber, he found no respite from his roots.

Outside his parents’ cabin, six-year-old Cord heard the wolves, a large pack calling each other home across the night. The wind whistled through the crack beneath the cabin door, and the draft ruffled his hair.

Rolling over in his flannel nightshirt, he removed a loose chink of mud from between the logs over his bed. Outside, a wash of moonlight turned sage to silver and the gray granite spires of the Tetons to pearl. The wolves howled again, closer.

Across the cabin, Cord’s mother, Sarah, sat up in bed, one slender hand at her throat. Even in the dim light, her hair shone like a silken curtain. “Franklin!” she hissed at her husband. “Wake up.”

Cord’s father reached beside their bed for his Remington.

Knowing he was on alert made Cord feel better, for Franklin Sutton was a man who made other men look small. The child of a French Canadian mother and a Maine woodsman, he had a big glossy head of hair and a thick black beard.

A prickle of fear went down Cord’s spine as one of the wolves howled again, just outside.

Sarah had told Cord the Nez Perce revered the wolf, believing it to be an awesome spirit with the power to change the seasons.

Sarah shuddered, too, but oddly enough, Cord saw her run a finger over the brightly painted elk hide draped over the foot of his parents’ bed. She’d told him magical stories, of how her young man of the Nez Perce had come courting with stringers of freshly caught salmon, wreaths woven from mountain daisies, and finally the betrothal gift of the hide he’d painted himself. That was long ago, she had told him, before Cord’s father came and took her to live with him while he prospected the Teton wilderness for gold.

Turning to Franklin, Sarah went into his arms, and Cord saw his father’s large hand stroke his mother’s hair.

The front door of the cabin crashed back against the wall; a tall man stood silhouetted against the silver moonlight. He wore a breastplate of bones over a flannel shirt and trousers. Braids lay over his shoulders, and his hair swept up in a startling dark wing from his
broad forehead.

Two shorter men crowded into the doorway behind the first one.

“Stop!” Franklin shouted, pointing his rifle at the man in the lead.

Sarah gasped, “Bitter Waters.”

Cord had seen her older half brother when he and his parents had traveled to the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, named for its winding waters … where Sarah had been raised … seen him from a distance. Bitter Waters had refused to receive his sister and her husband and son who were not of the People.

Yet, in the middle of the night, wearing the striped paint of war, Bitter Waters turned to Sarah. “Two moons ago, I stood helpless and watched our mother, Seeyakoon, die.”

Cord sucked in his breath. In his mother’s beloved valley, surrounded by snowcapped peaks less rugged than the Tetons, his grandmother had shown Cord her special touch with animals, from the smallest scurrying pika to the wild yearling horses being broken from the Nez Perce’s breeding herd. How beautiful Seeyakoon had been, with her supple white deerskin dresses and black hair softly blurring to gray.

“We have been driven off our land,” Bitter Waters said. “Burned the white man’s Bible and seek a new life.” He spoke of war as he if were about to spit from the bad taste in his mouth.

“Then go to your new life,” Sarah returned, “and leave my family in peace.”

“The army pursues and kills us at every turn. We need everyone in whose veins flows the blood of the People to stand with us. Leave this white man, bring your child, and come.” He reached toward his trouser pocket.

“Don’t move!” Franklin warned.

Bitter Waters shrugged and drew out a muchfolded and grimy piece of paper. “Tarpas Illipt wrote this for you, Sarah, when Colonel Gibbon laid siege to us at Big Hole last moon.”

Sarah did not reach to take the offered letter, but she seemed to hesitate, glancing at the painted blanket. Bitter Waters’s moccasins made no sound on the earthen floor as he moved toward her.

Cord’s father raised his weapon and placed his cheek against the stock. He growled, “Get out,” and reached to chamber a round.

“No!” Sarah leaped in front of her brother.

Cord would never forget the shock that transformed his father’s face as the hammer connected and the Remington slam fired without a finger on the trigger. The explosion of sound filled the low log house.

Sarah clutched her side and brought her hand away, dark with blood. She muttered something in Nez Perce that Cord did not understand.

One of the two warriors with Bitter Waters reached to his belt. A blade flashed in the firelight.

Arcing through the air, it struck flesh, a dull slicing thud.