Lake of Fire (59 page)

A white man with thinning hair sat on the front bench with bowed shoulders.

Cord set his bag in the anteroom and removed his hat. He helped Laura with her coat and hung it on a peg, then put his beside it.

Joseph looked toward them.

“I’m sorry to intrude at such a time,” Cord said slowly. “I’m looking for a man named Bitter Waters.”

“Who seeks Bitter Waters?” Joseph asked.

“My name is William Cordon Sutton. Once, long ago, Bitter Waters taught me something of family.”

“You are not Nez Perce,” Joseph said.

“Am I not?” Cord walked down the church aisle,
reaching into his pocket. Carefully he drew out a glistening piece of black obsidian and offered it on his open palm.

Recognition dawned on Joseph’s features. “You are Blue Eyes, the brave young man who found his
wayakin
during the dark days of our flight for freedom.”

Cord nodded.

“I believe Bitter Waters has gone to the sweat lodge, but he will want to see Blue Eyes.” Joseph looked at the older white man, who rose.

“I’m Superintendent Stillwell.” They shook hands. “I will go and find Bitter Waters.”

When he had gone, Joseph stepped away from the coffin. “Let us sit someplace.”

He led Cord and Laura to a small room at the side of the chapel. There, he motioned them toward scarred wooden chairs with bright clean cushions, stepped into the church kitchen, and returned with mugs of steaming coffee. “You must get warm after your travels in this weather.”

Smiling at Laura, he removed his elegant hat and set it aside. “I wear this for our festivals to remind the People of their heritage. In New York, three years ago, I walked through the lobby of the Astor Hotel in full buckskins. They laughed and called me savage, thinking I did not understand.”

Cord had read in the papers about Joseph’s trip to the East, accompanied by Buffalo Bill. He sipped coffee and, putting an arm around the back of Laura’s chair, settled in to listen.

“My father, Tuekakas, sent for me when he was dying,” Joseph said. “He told me, ‘Always remember that I never sold our country. You, my son, must never forget that.’”

Cord felt as though he were tumbling back into the past. He wondered what Joseph thought of his running away to the white world with miner Cappy Parsons.

“You are fortunate to have been far away when we surrendered at Bear Paw in Montana. We were taken by flatboat down the Yellowstone and Missouri to Fort Linden. There we were welcomed by the town and assured by General Howard’s men that we would be returned to our homes.” Joseph’s direct dark eyes came to rest on Cord’s. “General Sheridan ordered us loaded onto freight cars and taken to Fort Leavenworth. One hundred of our four hundred survivors died there of malaria and other sickness.”

“If I had been with you then,” Cord told him, “I would not have spent so many years without knowing what is left of my blood family.”

“We try to keep tradition alive,” Joseph said. “I have a house of wood that the government built for me. It is drafty and too far from the church and school, so I live in my tipi.”

“You keep tradition,” Cord observed, “but the children learn English and study at the white man’s school.”

“The old ways are passing,” Joseph replied in a resigned voice. “When I traveled to New York and saw its wonders, I knew we must prepare the youth to live in that world.”

Cord felt the wall between his two worlds crumbling. He could honor both his heritages, as he had when he and Laura had exchanged vows in the Mormon Tabernacle last week, and then had come here.

“The Colville Reservation will never be our home,” Joseph went on. “We will put Kamiah into the earth here, but someday it is my hope that she, and all of us, may sleep in the valley of the Wallowa.”

“Kamiah?” Cord’s heart began a slow thudding. “If that is indeed the Kamiah I knew, then I must tell you a good woman has been lost.”

The church door opened to admit a blast of cold wind and Bitter Waters. His hair was wet. “I came as soon as I rinsed my sweat in the waters of the stream.” Over his arm, he carried a soft-looking hide. “I also stopped by to get this.”

Laura gave a muffled exclamation at the sight of the intricate artwork on the hide. Men with bows hunted deer and elk from the backs of fine sleek horses. “It’s beautiful.”

Cord swallowed. “Believe it or not, that belonged to my mother.”

Laura smoothed her hand over a painting of a tall young man offering a stringer of salmon to a slender, dark-haired girl. “How did it come to be here?”

Cord put a fingertip carefully to a patch of beads. “I last saw it in my uncle’s tipi the morning Cappy took me away. It was painted for Sarah by her suitor, Tarpas Illipt, the one who died in the creek at Big Hole.”

“Did you tell me why they never married?” Laura
asked.

“The young man’s father forbade the match, because she was half-white.”

Bitter Waters shook his head. “There has been much trouble in our family, people taking sides and staring across a line drawn in the sand.”

He looked toward his wife’s coffin. “She would have raised you as her own.” His eyes shone with tears. “You have come too late for Kamiah, Blue Eyes, but …”

Bitter Waters went to Laura and reverently placed the marriage blanket around her shoulders. “It is not too late for me to welcome the newest member of our family.”

C
ord awakened when the first rose finger of dawn lighted the spire of the Grand Teton. Outside the wide glass window of his and Laura’s bedroom, a lone elk bugled. Stretching his neck out long, the bull shook his head, shaggy with the thick coat of late winter. Several inches of fresh snow had fallen during the night, piling cleanly on top of the already-deep drifts against the cabin’s wall.

Last night, the dream had come again. The soldiers had walked him between Fort Yellowstone’s stables and centered him against a whitewashed wall.

Once he’d heard his mother say that if you dreamed you died, you would. Each time Cord awakened in a cold sweat, he wondered if the firing squad might still have the power to kill him. But he believed with each day he was safe and happy, these dreams would pass, as the nightmares of his parents’ deaths had ceased to visit him.

Putting his arm around Laura’s waist, Cord savored her softness. He remembered waking alone so many nights. He’d watched the sunrise on the mountains, the bright gold of aspens seeming to mock him, and the winter desolation that had matched the loneliness inside a man between worlds.

This morning, he felt only contentment as he watched the rosy glow spread down the mountains, while bluish shadows lay deep in the valley.

Cord blew warm breath on Laura’s neck. Before he could draw her closer, she tossed back the covers and went to the window, a silhouette against the brightening world. He followed and bent to kiss her.

“Come,” he murmured, attempting to draw her back to bed. She looked delicious naked, save for her mother’s cameo on a braided chain.

Over her shoulder, he saw Dante come from behind the barn and pause to allow White Bird to catch up. “You might say White Bird went AWOL from the army,” Cord chuckled.

“I can’t wait until she foals.” Laura’s lips curved into a smile, and she took his left hand, looking down at their matching gold wedding bands.

Reaching to the bed, Laura wrapped the softness of Sarah’s marriage blanket around her. Cord went to the woodstove and lit the fire he’d laid last night. He clattered the stove lid back into place and joined her again at the window, waiting for the fire to overcome the chill air sheeting off the glass.

Drawing Laura against his side, he felt something
different about her, a lushness and languor. A certain fullness that caused him to dream …

In just a few years, their son might push his way with chubby hands through the summer-fragrant sage between the ranch house and the Snake River, playing in the same yard where Franklin Sutton and Sarah had watched over Cord.

Rose illumination turned lemon as the Tetons shifted and blurred beneath the constantly changing light. Just when Cord thought they remained the same, the wind would come up on the high peaks, blowing a veil of powder down another canyon.

I
have tried to recapture the experience of Yellowstone at the turn of the twentieth century, the stage tours, hotels, tent camps, feeding garbage to the bears …

I was surprised to discover that the Lake Hotel had phones and electricity in 1900, while Mammoth, seemingly closer to civilization, still lacked power. And there was a bar in the Lake Hotel despite the prohibition of alcohol in the rest of the park.

It is true that the Lake Hotel did have maintenance problems, and the Northern Pacific decided to unload it around the turn of the century. There were rival buyers, and the sale was postponed until 1901. Otherwise, I have written a complete work of fiction around that event. My apologies to the descendants of whomever might have been interim Yellowstone Superintendent in the summer of 1900, as I was unable to unearth a name and I did not intend to paint
a real man a villain. The harsh treatment of poachers and tourists who defaced the geological formations is rooted in fact—there is an historic report of a poacher being force marched to Mammoth and horsewhipped. There were also a number of stagecoach robberies in the park.

As for the flight of the Nez Perce, the chiefs and generals, the victims Richard Dietrich and George Cowan, Lieutenant Hugh Scott, and Superintendent Stillwell are real history and personages. My other characters are fictitious.

I have remained wherever possible true to fact and some of the characters act out events reported by history. Meetings between the Nez Perce and the U.S. Army at Lapwai, along with the Battle of Big Hole, have been recreated through recorded eyewitness accounts.

There are various versions of the route the Nez Perce took through Yellowstone and some apparent controversy surrounding it. Some say the tribe split into two groups, and that one went through the Absarokas where I have placed my story.

Though there were summer wildfires in 1900, they were not on Nez Perce Peak for an excellent reason. While there is a Nez Perce Creek named for the incidents of 1877, I have planted a fictional mountain in the eastern ranges of the park. This youthful volcano played an “active” role in my previous books,
Summer of Fire
and
Rain of Fire
.

It is 1988, and Yellowstone Park is on fire.

Among the thousands of summer warriors battling to save America’s crown jewel, is single mother Clare Chance. Having just watched her best friend, a fellow Texas firefighter, die in a roof collapse, she has fled to Montana to try and put the memory behind her. She’s not the only one fighting personal demons as well as the fiery dragon threatening to consume the park.

There’s Chris Deering, a Vietnam veteran helicopter pilot, seeking his next adrenaline high and a good time that doesn’t include his wife, and Ranger Steve Haywood, a man scarred by the loss of his wife and baby in a plane crash. They rally ‘round Clare when tragedy strikes yet again, and she loses a young soldier to a firestorm.

Three flawed, wounded people; one horrific blaze. Its tentacles are encircling the park, coming ever closer, threatening to cut them off. The landmark Old Faithful Inn and Park Headquarters at Mammoth are under siege, and now there’s a helicopter down, missing, somewhere in the path of the conflagration. And Clare’s daughter is on it …

ISBN#1932815295 / ISBN#9781932815290
Gold Imprint
US $6.99 / CDN $9.99
www.readlindajacobs.com

T
he world’s largest volcano does not reside beneath Hawaii’s mountains, or in Washington state, but Yellowstone National Park. Past eruptions have darkened our continent and covered it with a blanket of ash that smothered both plant and animal life. Now the supervolcano, with its earthquakes and geysers, is monitored on a daily basis for signs of the beast reawakening.

As a terrified child, geologist Kyle Stone watched her family die in the 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake near Yellowstone. Fighting a lifetime of fears, she is one of the scientists with a finger on Yellowstone’s pulse. When a new hot spring appears overnight in the park and a noted naturalist is scalded to death, Kyle mounts an expedition into the Yellowstone backcountry to unravel the mystery. Accompanying her are Ranger Wyatt Ellison, former student and friend, and Dr. Nicholas Darden, volcanologist and former lover. More than just a volcano is heating up.