Lake of Fire (57 page)

John turned and started walking up the aisle between stalls.

She started to follow and stopped. That enormous black head, bending over the gate to sniff at her …

“Dante!” She ran her hands over his face, and he nickered softly. “John, wait. This is Cord’s horse.” Stretching her neck over the next gate was White Bird.

He looked back. “We found him with the palomino and the gray near Danny Falls’s camp. Arden Groesbeck and the others led them down when they brought Danny.” He shifted his weight, seeming impatient.

“What are we doing in the stable?” she asked.

Sergeant Nevers galloped his lathered horse into the Fort Yellowstone yard and slid off, landing on the run. There was a crowd of men, and there was Cord Sutton being marched by a group of soldiers carrying rifles.

He saw Arden Groesbeck and hurried to him.

“Just got in …” he gasped for breath. “What’s going on?”

Arden shook his head. “Not sure.”

Larry spied Captain Feddors waiting in the space between the two long stables, in the spot where he’d tethered the poacher to whip him.

The armed squad swept Cord past the long stable. Ahead, he saw the beige wall at the end of the other stable coming toward him in slow motion. My God, did Feddors intend standing him against that wall and ordering him shot? He fought a wave of nausea by biting down hard, until the warm salt taste of blood swam in his mouth.

Looking at the forested peak of Sepulcher Mountain to the west, Cord longed for home in Jackson’s Hole, to ride Dante again through the pungent sage. To watch the sun place its rosy finger upon the peak of the Grand Teton, spreading down until the mountain’s full majesty was bathed in lemon morning light.

Close at hand, to his right, came a sudden deafening report.

The soldiers escorting Cord stopped and swiveled their heads, looking for the source of what had to be gunfire.

Kablam
, again.

Cord’s guards dissolved into a milling crowd,
pointing their weapons in different directions.

The third shot clearly came from inside the stable, along with shrill whinnies and thumping as horses reared and plunged. Cord watched in disbelief as a small door in the long wall of stable swung open. Not three feet away, a hand beckoned, a swift urgent movement.

His sense of inevitability shattered, Cord ducked through the cavalry’s confusion and into the relative darkness of the stable. Behind him, someone slammed the stable door and rammed a wooden bar in place.

“Sutton!” A man unlocked Cord’s handcuffs and slipped them off.

Cord flexed his wrists.

He recognized Lieutenant John Stafford, urging him toward a large horse standing calmly despite the pandemonium of the others.

Vaulting onto the animal bareback, Cord found instinct overcoming the slow way he felt his mind working. There must not have been time to saddle the horse, but he gathered the reins in his lacerated hands.

He looked to down to see Stafford holding a Cavalry Model .45. The officer glanced up at the light leaking through three bullet holes in the stable roof. “I’ll see no one follows you. Get out of the park and meet me at sunset where the Gardner joins the Yellowstone.”

At the far end of the stable, the big door opened to admit a rectangle of morning light. Beyond, he saw an expanse of packed earth that ended in scrub and some trees on the rim of the drop-off into Gardner Canyon.

Soldiers pounded on the door Cord had come through, the bar jiggling. He heard shouts from the other side.

“Go!” Stafford ordered. Finding his seat, Cord suddenly recognized the familiar shape of the horse beneath him.

“Go, boy,” he echoed.

Dante sprang forward powerfully. Cord marveled his stallion’s wounds had been superficial enough to permit his essential strength to prevail.

They surged toward the light at the end of the stable. A swelling feeling rose in Cord’s chest as he recognized Laura holding the door.

Out into the stable yard, he steered Dante toward the lip of the drop into Gardner Canyon. He’d seen on the way up that it was a steep hill, treacherous going for a horse, but not by any means a cliff edge. Dante’s hooves pounded the bare turf as he swept out from behind the stable and across the open ground of the fort.

A chorus of cries rose behind, men shouting.

Cord’s heart hammered.

So close …

A bullet whined past his ear.

Larry Nevers watched in disbelief as Feddors fired a second shot from his Colt at Cord’s retreating back.

Before Larry could move, Arden Groesbeck launched himself at the captain. Feddors must have
detected it from the corner of his eye, for he sidestepped. Arden landed on his side in the dirt.

“The prisoner is getting away!” Feddors shouted.

Though several of the men with Krags hesitated, a few started to raise their weapons toward Cord and the black stallion.

Lieutenant Stafford stepped out through the stable door into which Cord Sutton had disappeared. “No one shoots anyone here.”

Though the squad looked relieved, Feddors lifted his Colt again. “If nobody else will apprehend an escaping criminal …”

He fired again into the distance, but as far as Larry could tell, Sutton had escaped over the edge of the hill behind the fort.

At his feet, Arden Groesbeck fumbled out his weapon. Before Larry could stop himself, he gasped, “Arden, no.”

Feddors stepped forward smartly, placing his boot on top of Arden’s wrist. “You may not threaten your commanding officer.” It seemed to happen in exacting slow motion, as the captain raised his Colt and pointed it at the helpless private’s forehead.

In the same instant, Larry Nevers and John Stafford drew their sidearms.

H
ank cringed at the double tap that reverberated through the fort, especially after the other volleys. He hurried behind the large double barracks where a crowd gathered between the south and north stable buildings. When he drew closer to the milling soldiers, some with their suspenders dangling, many without blouses, he realized discipline had broken down. Though it was twenty past six, no one was sounding Boots and Saddles, and none of the men appeared to be getting ready for the morning inspection and drill—very strange for the Fourth of July, when he would have expected an extra effort at ceremony.

Rather, the soldiers talked in excited tones, looking at something out of sight to Hank behind the end of the building.

“Trying to escape,” he heard. Hank shouldered his way into the group and rounded the corner. With a shudder, he saw an army
blanket drawn over a man lying on the ground. The drab wool was soaked with blood. “Who?” he managed.

No one answered, but he saw Sergeant Nevers of the Lake Station staring down at the body with a sick look on his face.

Hank approached and saw Lieutenant Stafford place his hand on Nevers’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said in a fatherly tone. “I think you saw that there are two bullets in him, one of them mine.”

“Had it coming,” said Arden Groesbeck, also from Lake. “He’d have shot me, I swear, you shoulda seen the look in his eyes …”

Hank couldn’t stand it. He stepped through the circle of men, knelt, and lifted the blanket with care to expose the dead man’s face. Broad forehead, sparse brown hair, and goatee … someone had closed Captain Feddors’s eyes.

To Hank’s surprise, he felt relieved it wasn’t Cord Sutton.

As soon as Laura realized Feddors was down, she ran across the hoof-beaten ground behind the paddock toward where Cord and Dante had disappeared from view. To get to the drop, she crashed through brush and small scrubby trees.

At the edge, she was rewarded with the sight of Cord on Dante. The horse was side-footing his way
down the last of the rocky slope above the highway. As Laura watched, they reached the route and galloped out of sight down Gardner Canyon.

He was once more on the run, this time to freedom.

When she turned back toward the stable, her elation vanished. A man was dead.

A man who’d brought it on himself, but she felt the same sense of waste she had when she’d stood behind Cord and watched Frank Worth’s hungry eyes go vacant.

Slowly, she walked back, skirting the crowd where she saw Hank talking with John Stafford and Larry Nevers. Thankfully, a blanket had been put over the man who’d allowed decades of hate to smolder inside him.

If she and Cord were fortunate enough to make a life together, would he be able to put this experience behind him?

Three hours later, Laura stood behind John Stafford’s house with him, Larry, and Hank. Silently, they watched a group of soldiers led by Arden Groesbeck and observed by Manfred Resnick load Captain Quenton Feddors into a wagon for his last journey … to the Fort Yellowstone cemetery. A wooden casket had been put together hastily in the fort’s shop, for the Fourth of July promised to be a scorcher and the body would soon become ripe.

“Doesn’t he have any family?” Laura asked.

Manfred Resnick turned away from the wagon and joined them. “According to his service record, he’s alone in the world. Maybe if he’d had someone, things would have turned out differently.”