Wicked Wyoming Nights (42 page)

Eliza was such a soft-hearted creature her sympathy would have been engaged even if she hadn’t liked Cord at all. But she still loved him, and she was finding it more and more difficult to remember why she had been so angry with him. When she ran into him outside the bank just this past week, she forgot completely. His mind was so completely taken up with something else he nearly walked past without seeing her. She was used to having to fend off Cord’s attentions, and to have him practically ignore her knocked another prop from under her anger. Now there was a stranger downstairs waiting to listen to her sing, and she was less sure than ever what she was running from.

The agent was seated near the front of the empty room when Eliza came down. “I’m not going to let you say a word to him until he hears you sing,” Lucy whispered. “He is even sharper than I remembered, and unless you surprise him out of his britches, he won’t offer you enough to keep a bird alive.” She glanced at the agent, and her eyes crinkled merrily.

“It seems that just looking at you has sparked his interest. Now give him your best. Don’t let him catch his breath until your name’s on that contract.”

Eliza had already picked out the songs she intended to sing, but now she wondered if the simple, folk-like songs that appealed to the cowboys and soldiers were quite the right thing for a big-city theatrical agent. She was so nervous she had to take a deep breath before she could start.

She hadn’t reached the end of the first verse when Cord walked in and sat down near the middle of the room. Her body was shaken by such a jolt of electricity she almost forgot her words, but she recovered quickly, and was pleased to see that the agent didn’t seem to notice her stumble.

Even a casual observer could have noticed the single minded intensity with which Cord listened to Eliza, but not the closest scrutiny yielded a clue to his thoughts. Eliza had often inveighed against the stone-like impassiveness of his countenance, and that quality was never more in evidence than now. She wondered what he was doing in town, why he had picked this morning to come to the saloon. She had been careful to choose the time when Croley and her uncle went over their business affairs with Sanford Burton. She didn’t want them to know she was thinking about leaving, but it wouldn’t hurt Cord Stedman to know. It would show him she hadn’t forgiven him and didn’t need to depend on him or anyone else anymore.

But just as she started the second song, Iris came in. Never once turning in Eliza’s direction, she scanned the room swiftly until she found Cord, then moved quickly to his side. Eliza watched with gathering indignation as Iris began to whisper to Cord. Now they had their heads together, and even from a distance Eliza could tell he was no longer listening to her.

For the first time in her life, instead of being self-effacing and slinking off to hide her hurt, Eliza was eager to fight back. The accompanist had already begun the introduction to the third song, but Eliza stopped him and directed him to play a song they had been working on mostly for fun. She wasn’t sure she could remember it, much less sing it without a mistake, but Iris still held Cord’s attention and she was determined to get it back.

The song was full of runs, trills, and high notes. It had been fun to learn in spite of the wry faces Susan made. Susan didn’t care for what she called
opera
singing, but she admitted that when Eliza sang it, it didn’t sound half bad.

The agent thought it sounded a lot better than that. He sat up in his chair when Eliza performed the opening runs flawlessly, and leaned forward eagerly as she successfully executed one difficult passage after another, but Cord continued to ignore her, and Eliza redoubled her efforts, taking the last chorus even faster. The cadenza was coming up, one Eliza had never been able to sing to her satisfaction, and she needed all her concentration to get through it, but to her horror Cord and Iris got up and started toward the door. Desperation and anger caused Eliza’s adrenaline to flow more than ever; she tore into the cadenza, sang every flying note with a deft but true tone, and finished with a high note that astounded even Lucy. It brought the agent to his feet, but Cord didn’t hear it. He was already gone.

Eliza tried to concentrate on what the agent was saying, but all she saw was Cord leaving with Iris. Lucy made one outrageous demand after another in her name, and the agent granted them almost without argument; Eliza’s total lack of interest had unnerved him. He was used to people willing to do anything to attract his attention, yet this backwoods Jenny Lind seemed more interested in a couple of locals than the fact she could be singing in New York a year from now.

This girl was a sure thing. Her beauty and voice would place her in a class by herself, but she also possessed a quality of undemanding innocence that made her irresistible. She might even become a favorite of the ladies for she was not the type to steal their husbands or wear costumes designed to show more of her body than her talent.

“Miss Smallwood, I really must know what you think of my offer before I can draw up the contracts,” said the agent.

“What do you think, Lucy?” Eliza asked, unable to remember anything the man had said.

“I’m not saying you can’t get more money once the right people see what you can do, but you won’t get a better contract now.”

“Well, if you really think I should.”

“What else do you want, Miss Smallwood? Just name it and you can have it,” the agent added.

“I don’t know that I want anything else—“

“Yes she does,” interrupted Lucy. “She needs a room to herself. She doesn’t want everybody tramping in while she’s getting ready and using up her stuff the minute her back’s turned.”

“All the major theaters have private rooms.”

“And she wants the best spot, the one next to closing.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“Yes, you are. You know if people are coming to see Miss Eliza, they’ll put her anywhere on the program she wants to be.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll see she gets the best spot. Anything else?” he asked, feeling wrung out.

“Not just yet. You get those papers drawn up by one of your fancy lawyers, one who fixes it so you can’t sneak out of paying her what you promised.”

“My lawyer is the best—”

“Then we’ll get
our
lawyer to give it a going-over. I don’t trust you Easterners. I lived in New York too long to do a fool thing like that.”

Eliza didn’t know if Buffalo even had a lawyer, but she couldn’t generate any interest in the contract. Why had Cord walked out? He couldn’t have fallen in love with Iris, not when only last week he’d made it obvious he still wanted to marry her. Even Ella said Cord was hers for the asking.

But somehow that didn’t make Eliza feel any more secure. For the first time she had exerted herself to attract a man, and she had failed miserably; he had walked out on her. Surely he wouldn’t have done that if he still loved her.

Suddenly Eliza realized she was falling back into her old habits of self-doubt, and she gave herself a mental scolding. Cord
did
love her, and he must have had some perfectly good reason for leaving. But if she
had
waited too long and he
had
given up hoping she would change her mind, well, then she could still carry on. There were plenty of other men in the world—maybe not any she could love as much as Cord, but there had to be hundreds of handsome, rich, kind, loving men in a place like New York; she could find a dozen within six months.

But she had a growing suspicion that once she found the paragons, her treacherous heart wouldn’t rest until it found a way to make them seem inferior to that stiff-necked cowboy.

Chapter 31

The first rumor raced through Buffalo with the speed of a galloping horse. The Cattlemen’s Association had blackballed Cord Stedman again, and this time they’d taken pains to see the news was carried to every ranch in Wyoming. It meant Cord wouldn’t be able to participate in the Association’s roundup or buy unbranded maverick calves at ten dollars a head. No one expected it to bother him—he’d been blackballed before and survived—but it did remove any lingering suspicion that Cord was friendly with the hated organization the absentee landlords had set up to preserve their stranglehold on the Wyoming cattle industry. Now when he rode by a homestead, he was more likely to be met with a friendly greeting and an invitation to step inside for a cup of coffee. He never did, but instead of his refusal being viewed with resentment and suspicion, it now showed he was a man with too much on his mind to waste time talking.

The second rumor swept through the entire state faster than a prairie fire in a high wind: The small ranchers had joined together to hold a roundup of their own a month before the Association’s scheduled roundup, and Cord Stedman was going to lead it. At stake was the ownership of uncounted thousands of mavericks, unbranded calves worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the confrontation everyone had long feared now seemed unavoidable. The Association couldn’t possibly let such a challenge to its authority go unanswered, but no one in Buffalo or Cheyenne doubted Cord would be as good as his word; he and his men had a reputation for carrying the fight to the enemy instead of waiting for it to be brought to them.

Sanford Burton tried to reason with Cord, and then to apply financial pressure, even going so far as to say, when it was clear Cord wasn’t going to change his mind, that he would squeeze the smaller ranchers and Cord could blame himself if they went under. The only result was that two days later Cord withdrew his money from Burton’s bank, opened his own Northern Wyoming National Bank, and installed Sam Haughton as his cashier; before the end of the week he had talked fifty people into bringing their business to him, including the substantial account of Bayliss Hardware and Dry Goods.

“I can’t think of a more harebrained thing to do,” Ella told Cord, “but I don’t see not supporting you against that grasping pinch-penny. Besides, I’ve been looking for a way to keep Jessica Burton from pestering the life out of me for nigh on ten years, and I’m willing to bet next month’s receipts this has done the trick.”

Ella’s money was safe. Jessica did not speak to Ella, or anyone else who took their money out of her husband’s bank. As for her intention to marry Melissa to Cord Stedman, Jessica would have preferred Melissa die an old maid rather than live a rich and happy life as the wife of a man she termed the greatest criminal west of the Mississippi. Ira and Croley were loud in their determination to stay with Burton, but the real blow came when the Army transferred its accounts. Sam offered to handle the payroll himself rather than have the Army cart the money out to the fort to pay the men and then bring it back to town to deposit. Burton had never agreed to do that because he said the soldiers’ pay was quickly spent or sent back East, but Sam managed to see that enough of it stayed in his vaults to make a tidy profit.

But this upheaval only served to draw the lines more firmly: the larger ranchers, the merchants who had a common interest in serving them, and the town’s
respectable
citizens sticking with Burton; the smaller ranchers, disgruntled merchants, farmers and homesteaders, plain cowboys, common soldiers, and Lavinia’s girls changing to Cord. In a matter of days the antagonism was visible on the streets as citizens who had always greeted each other with friendly words either passed in silence or backed up their differing opinions with their fists. Sheriff Hooker had all he could do to see no one carried firearms within the town limits. He said if they wanted to kill each other outside his jurisdiction that was the U.S. marshal’s business, but people were quietly building up their arsenals feeling that something—no one was quite sure what—was about to happen.

The only person who was unconditionally delighted was Susan Haughton. She had a new baby, a new house in town, and a husband who in a few short months had gone from a starving farmer to a respectable bank clerk who might possibly become a bank president some day. She knew if Eliza married Cord, the two of them could combine their efforts and become the most influential women within a hundred miles.

But Eliza wasn’t enjoying it. Cord had come up to her the day after her audition, and still stinging from the humiliation of his walking out on her, she’d amazed both Cord and herself by turning her back and walking away from him.

She had regretted it immediately, but her pride wouldn’t let her turn back, so she had proceeded on to the saloon, where Iris had completed her misery.

“I wanted to catch you before you saw Cord,” Iris had said with unfeigned concern. “I doubt he’ll tell you himself, but his mother just died and he’s bound to be feeling it. I only came to know about it because we grew up in the same county and I wrote my mother that I’d met him out here. She wrote back to say his mother had died. I told him the day you were singing for that agent. I hadn’t expected him to take it so hard. Not when she’d run away before he was six.”

Eliza had wished the earth would open up and swallow her. She’d been barely able to mutter some reply before scurrying to her room. The first fit of temper she’d shown in her life, the
only
time she’d ever attempted to strike back when someone had hurt her, and she’d had to walk away from Cord when he needed her. She’d felt utterly crushed.

Unbeknownst to her, the last of her resistance had crumbled, and had Cord walked into the room at that moment she would have thrown herself into his arms and never remembered that only a few months before she had called him a cruel and heartless monster. Her heart had ached for his grief and the cruelty of her conduct. It received a further wrench the next day.