Lake of Fire (8 page)

She took a half step back from Cord, but she wasn’t afraid of him anymore. His eyes reminded her of the highest part of the sky at midday, with a midnight blue ring around the iris. He had shed his sheepskin coat, and his denim shirt lay open at the neck, revealing a pulse in the hollow of his throat.

Behind them, Dante shied. In the same instant, Laura caught the stench of decay.

“There.” Cord pointed to some mounds of flesh and fur at the base of a tree.

The carcasses lay piled, their arrangement assuring there had been no accident. Deer; she knew them from the woods north of Chicago, and elk, which she had seen only in books. But the massive antlers she expected upon their heads were absent; empty sockets crawling with green flies all that remained of former

glory.

“Poachers.” His hand near his holstered Colt, Cord scanned the woods, then returned his focus to the fallen.

“But why?”

He bent and pulled back the dead animal’s lip to show a gap in the jaw where the eyeteeth had been removed. “Elk ivory. It makes into jewelry and trade goods.”

What kind of person would kill a magnificent animal for such a small prize? The tall blond man who had ridden away from the stagecoach leaped to mind. Might a person who would kill Angus Spiner and get virtually nothing but her pistol and her mother’s cameo also commit such an atrocity?

She surveyed the area again, noting that Cord was also edgy. “Do you suppose that outlaw … ?”

He spat onto the pine straw underfoot. “If not him, then the same kind of scum.”

Suddenly, Laura’s nostrils were assailed with a new
odor that was far viler than the dead before them, like a mixture of rancid grease and vomit. She gagged. Cord whirled away. “Bear!”

She didn’t see one. Lodgepole grew thick to the canyon’s edge, and none of the trees were thick enough to hide a large animal. But Cord must have recognized the stench, and the poachers’ leavings were excellent bait for large predators.

As she ran behind Dante, he caught the scent and whinnied. She looked underneath his belly and saw Cord about ten feet away with his back to her, his Colt drawn.

A low growling and the bear lumbered into her line of view. Big and shaggy, the grizzly padded toward Cord on broad paws studded with claws at least four inches long.

Dante reared. The grizzly took a look at the horse and appeared to decide the man was more interesting.

Cord raised the Colt and fired into the air.

Rather than retreat, the grizzly lumbered toward him.

He fired again, this time into the animal.

It didn’t even flinch, but came on. Before Cord could get off another shot, a swipe of paw sent the Colt tumbling.

Cord dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, his arms over his head. “Mount up, Laura!” he shouted. “Ride!”

Dante danced and plunged. Laura reached for the reins, but the stallion rolled his eyes and tossed his
head. As she struggled with the horse, her hand fell onto Cord’s 1886 Winchester, sheathed in its scabbard behind the saddle.

Laura pulled the long gun free and ran out from behind Dante.

The grizzly swiped a paw at Cord’s back, covered by thin cotton.

“Over here!” Laura screamed.

The bear looked at her, and then pulled up onto its hind legs to a height of at least seven feet. Clearly a huge male, he opened his mouth with a curl of snout and roared.

Raising the rifle to her shoulder, she fired. The gun kicked viciously, and her thumb caught her nose. Nearly blinded by instant, painful tears, she jacked another round into the chamber and fired again.

The bear fell to all fours and lumbered toward her, covering ground at an astonishing pace. She fought the impulse to drop the Winchester and flee. She’d heard a bear could outrun the fastest horse.

“Shoot him again!” Cord leaped to his feet and scrambled for his Colt.

Laura lined up the sights and wavered; she might kill Cord with a wild shot. While she hesitated, the bear rushed her.

Cord darted left.

She stood her ground, firing. The grizzly hit like a train, throwing the rifle up into the air and her onto her back. A vile greasy smell filled her head as she was crushed by dead weight.

With the air knocked out of her, she heard a shout.

“Dante!”

A rough shambling of hooves, more commands. “Back. No, go again.”

Was it her fate to die in this rough land? Each attempt at breath refused to lift her lungs against the weight pressing her into the earth.

“Dante. Pull.”

The sharp tone cut into her fading consciousness. If this were her end, how much better here than in some Chicago drawing room where every move and word was measured?

Then, as though no time had passed, or a thousand years, Laura opened her eyes and looked into sun radiating through the trees. It reminded her of a painting her mother had pointed out in her white leather Bible when Laura was small. Had the sky been any different back when Baby Moses floated in the bulrushes beneath rays of shining light?

Something touched her arm. “God, Laura …”

Cord knelt beside her on the litter of pine needles, his bronzed face pinched looking. Dante stood nearby, a slack rope hanging from his saddle. The bear lay a yard away with the same boneless look Laura had seen in Angus, the outlaw, and the poachers’ victims.

“Are you hurt?” Cord gestured at the mess of blood on the front of her flannel shirt.

Besides a lingering dizziness, she felt no pain. “Must be the bear’s.”

“You killed him.” Cord grinned.

“Did he hurt you?” she asked.

“I’m going to be black and blue where he swiped at me.” He rose, went to Dante, and retrieved his pewter flask of bourbon. Once more, as she had beside the raging Snake, she lifted it to her lips and drank. Cord twisted the top back into place without taking a sip.

His eyes sought hers. “I’m sorry for insulting your nerve.”

Laura found herself smiling. After twenty-six sheltered years as her father’s daughter, she felt a sudden fierce joy at being filthy, at smelling of bear.

And at simply being alive.

C
ord didn’t return her smile, but looked around the canyon rim with a listening air. Although the bear threat had been neutralized, not a bird sang or a chipmunk chattered in the still afternoon.

Even so, Cord put out a hand as though he had heard something and was waiting to learn what it was. Something disturbing in his expression made her quietly accept his hand to help her up.

Putting a finger to his lips, he kept his Colt in one hand and picked up the fallen Winchester. Still scanning the area with a wary eye, he reloaded his rifle, mounted Dante, and pulled Laura up to the saddle in front of him.

Riding hard, they pressed on to the north. Jolted against Cord, she managed to ask over her shoulder, “Do you think there was another bear?”

“One of the two-legged variety.”

Hours later, they forded the Lewis River in a
broad meadow above the head of the canyon. Turning east from the river valley, they began climbing the northern base of what Cord called the Red Mountains. There, the steeper slope forced them to slow their headlong rush.

With the danger seeming to be behind them, she had time to think. No one in her family, not her father, not his sister, Fanny, and not Laura’s delicate cousin Constance, would believe she had raised the Winchester and fired into the approaching bulk of bear. They wouldn’t recognize her, riding this stallion in her boy’s clothing, a sense of pride swelling her chest beneath the stain of bear blood. Even Cord had apologized for thinking she didn’t have nerve.

They climbed higher, first encountering snowy patches, and then rode into a blanket covering the ground, deep and soft. It was last winter’s snowcap, not yet melted in the divide at the headwaters of a rushing creek. A few yards downstream, the heat had melted the snow, and she saw the pool of the hot springs.

“Witch Creek,” Cord said, “named for the boiling cauldrons on its banks.” Pointing up the steep slope, he showed Laura the steam rising from at least fifty craters. “The early explorers named this Factory Hill. All that smoke made it look like a New England manufacturing town.”

She wondered if they were safe this close to the hissing vents, but risk was part of the fascination.

“We’ll make camp here,” Cord declared.

It seemed a hundred years since she’d awakened
this morning. The long ride, the wasted carcasses left by poachers, the bear … how she longed to collapse into a dreamless slumber.

But that wasn’t possible, for Cord was unpacking gear, letting Dante out to graze, laying a fire, and placing his deadly Colt upon the nearest rock where it was in ready reach. She helped as she could, pulling out the cooking pot and mess kit, and filling his canteen with water from the rushing stream up current from the vents.

While she worked, Laura became more aware of her filthy state. Her blood-encrusted shirtfront felt sticky against her chest, and though the evening chill was settling in, her scalp prickled from where she had perspired earlier.

“You look as though you could use a bath.” Cord’s gravelly voice made Laura jump.

“What bath?” She thought of her claw-footed tub in Chicago, with the option of water falling from above like rain, and pointed at steam rising from the nearby hot spring. “That would parboil me.”

Cord gestured at the woods. “There’s a pool over there that should satisfy any lady’s desire.”

A few minutes later, Laura smelled the faintly corrupt odor of sulfur beside the spring to which Cord escorted her. He handed her the rough shape of a bar of homemade lye soap. “Made this myself at my cabin.”

He walked away.

Laura looked around at the forest, wondering about bears and outlaws. She could call Cord back to
stand guard, but privacy won out.

Only a little steam rose from this clear water, blowing away and constantly renewing itself. Just as she felt that she would have an unobstructed view of the blue depths, a tantalizing veil blew back.

With the water inviting at her feet, she slipped the buttons of her blood-encrusted flannel shirt, took it off, and laid it on the terraced white rock that rimmed the pool. Beside it lay a clean blue cotton shirt Cord had offered.

Even with the bloody garment off, Laura had never felt this grubby. She smelled so bad that she offended herself. Her face felt grimy from where she had sweated in the midday sun, and she itched where her ivory silk camisole had been plastered against her back. Her hair was matted with dust.

She untied the delicate ribbons that held her camisole together in front and took off the rest of her clothes. The evening air felt cool on her skin. Easing her bare foot into the pool, she found it temperate and inviting. Wading in naked, she submerged to the top of her head.

She couldn’t help but compare this to bathing at Fielding House. There, her tub was in a small room without windows. In Yellowstone, sculling with her hands, she breathed the almost-impossible freedom of being nude in the open air.

She reached for the soap Cord said he had made and imagined him in a log room before a fireplace, stirring a kettle of lard and ashes. Did his soap making
mean there was no woman to do for him?

Though his bar of lye was harsher than the lavender-milled variety she was used to, she shampooed her hair and lathered her body. After sluicing the suds away, she washed her lingerie.

Once she and her underclothes were clean, Laura started to rise but decided to linger, floating on her back.

A moment later, she opened her eyes with the sensation that someone watched her. Surely Cord would not …

Heart pounding, she scanned the darkening woods.

A man stood on the hillside, not fifty feet from the pool. His hair hung lankly over his brow, but even in the dimness Laura saw that it was a lighter shade than her own brown. He wore a long coat over his tall form.

She scrambled up, sheeting water as she struggled through the thigh-deep pool. Her feet slipped on the algae-coated travertine.

Cord splashed water over his shoulders and took up a handful of sand to scrub his skin, having given Laura his only bar of soap. The pool in which he bathed wasn’t as warm as the one he’d offered her; nearly nonexistent tendrils of steam teased its surface.

He could be a gentleman when he wanted to.

In Salt Lake, where he was generally known as
part Indian, mothers drew their daughters aside and let them know he was not suitable marriage material. Having lived there since he was six, he’d given up believing he’d find a wife and start a family.

But in the spring, when he went to St. Paul to meet with the Northern Pacific Railroad, he’d been welcomed like a king in the city drawing rooms. No one had looked past his blue eyes and fine clothing to see a ragged breed.

Especially the curvaceous pale beauty, niece of one of the St. Paul city fathers, who had danced and taken the air with him and gazed on him with admiration. Passing for a man without Nez Perce blood was the sheerest folly, but he was trying it anyway. First, to be certain his business in Yellowstone was concluded without question, and second, to have a chance at seeing the lovely young woman again. Strangely, this was the first time he’d thought of her since he’d heard gunshots in yesterday’s dawn.