Lake of Fire Read online

  The kid shoved small fists into the pockets of a brown woolen coat and looked away toward a stream running to join the torrent of the Snake. He looked even younger than Cord had thought, not old enough to shave. A glint of tears shone in hazel-flecked green eyes.

  “Name’s Cord,” he offered.

  The youngster bit his lower lip with even white teeth. Something in his manner suggested a city child; no doubt, he had never seen anyone die. For that matter, Cord had never killed a man.

  How he wished he could turn back the clock to when he’d risen in the predawn darkness, eager to embark on his journey.

  With another appraisal of the frightened boy, Cord put two fingers to his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle. A vague movement in the willow bottoms became his well-muscled black stallion trotting into the clearing. “There, Dante.” He stroked the horse’s flank.

  Cord needed to be on his way, but he turned back to the kid studying the snow. Without warning, the child dove on a black velvet pouch beside the steel-rimmed wheel. Trembling fingers shook out tissue paper that floated to earth, and he went onto his knees and pushed piles of snow aside with cold-reddened hands.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A cameo on a gold chain. My mother’s.”

  “All this belongs to your mother?” Cord gestured at the scattered clothing. “Is she here?” He hoped there wasn’t another body.

  The kid shook his head and kept searching. Relieved, Cord knelt and sifted snow alongside. He lifted a blue-green ball gown trimmed in black lace and shoved aside a gold satin wrapper. After a few minutes, he realized the pendant might be beneath the body of the outlaw he’d killed. He’d never realized a gut-shot man would smell like a deer or elk carcass, a rank, sweetish stench.

  Cord pushed to his feet. Reaching down, he touched the kid on a slumped shoulder.

  “I have to go,” he began. “As we shouldn’t steal the stage horses, and mine can’t carry you and your mother’s bags, I’ll have to leave you.”

  “No!” The boy’s tone went shrill. “There might be more of them.” He looked at the man Cord had shot in the head and then away.

  “The stage company scouts will find you soon.”

  The last thing Cord needed was a greenhorn to slow him down. If he waited or took the kid back miles to the small town of Jackson, he’d be late for his appointment in Yellowstone. The deal waiting in the park promised to be the most important thing he’d ever done.

  The child in the snow looked up and, for the first time, met his eyes. “I need to get to Yellowstone.”

  Cord saw himself at age six, ragged, homeless, dependent on charity. They could ride for Menor’s Ferry; he’d speak to Bill Menor, who was a friend. He’d leave the kid there and report the outlaw.

  Before he could speak, something in the way the youngster moved, rising lithely to stand before him, set off alarms. Cord’s eyes narrowed, and he studied the smooth jaw. The whisper of suspicion grew stronger when he looked at long-lashed eyes and the generous curve of smooth lips.

  This was surely no boy, but a young woman. A lady of wealth, from the look of her belongings spread in the snow.

  “Please.” Her voice was not a beggar’s.

  Of all the times to play Good Samaritan, this was the worst. But there was something appealing about traveling with this spunky and mysterious female. Her green gaze was wary while she awaited his verdict.

  “I’ll take you to Yellowstone,” Cord agreed.

  For the first hour riding on a folded blanket behind Dante’s saddle, Laura sat numbly, aware of nothing but the impossible fact she had survived.

  Then, with the rising sunlight, she began to notice her surroundings. Her skin prickled in the chill air; her ears tuned to the scrabble of the black stallion’s hooves in the cobbled bottomland. With her nostrils flaring at the pungent mix of sage, horse, and male perspiration, she realized she also stank from the sweat of fear.

  It flashed her back to the stream bank, counting the seconds she had to live before her tracks were found. Cringing in anticipation of bullets tearing into her flesh, heart racing, breath cut off when Cord covered her mouth and nose. The sharp concussion of the Colt going off still had her ears ringing.

  Tears welled so quickly she couldn’t blink them back. She stifled a sob, and her chest felt as though it would explode. Shoulders shaking, she pressed her lips together.

  Don’t think about it. Wait until you’re alone and can write it all down. Then you can fall apart.

  Pressing a fist to her mouth, she held her breath until the sharpest agony abated. Though the immediate danger seemed past, she had to keep her wits about her. Would Cord believe a young man sobbing like a girl?

  Laura wiped the tears from her cheeks and studied him. His profile might have been carved from brown sandstone, with a hawkish nose and a sculpted jaw his beard could not hide. High and prominent cheekbones might have belonged to an Indian, but she’d never heard of one with blue eyes and thick facial hair. Though the set of his jaw conveyed he was still angry at a boy who’d done nothing to defeat the outlaws, he seemed to have accepted her story about the valise of women’s things being taken to her … his … absent mother.

  Laura sighed. If only there had been a chance to know her own mother better.

  The rustle of skirts and the scent of lemon verbena had always preceded Violet Fielding into a room. On the hottest August day when the breeze off Lake Michigan died and flies droned, Violet’s hands always felt cool. During her life, Forrest Fielding’s rigid demeanor had been tempered by his wife’s unquenchable lightness of heart. When she died, he turned from merely wooden to stone. Pushing ten-year-old Laura into the role of hostess and supervisor at Fielding House, he had set exacting standards for everything.

  In the years since, she’d yearned to break free, but stayed with him because she had no better place to go. A woman’s options were limited: entering a convent, for which she had no vocation; becoming a nanny or companion, preposterous with the Fielding wealth; or getting married.

  With deft motions of his knees, Cord steered Dante several hundred feet down a pair of steep river terraces. In the innermost valley, the Snake River sparkled in the sun. Although it rushed smoothly past, boiling eddies revealed its turbid depth. Born in Yellowstone, the spring torrent flowed south forty miles from its headwaters.

  “Menor’s Ferry,” Cord said.

  A wooden frame on each riverbank supported a metal cable works strung across the flood. Tied to the far shore, a board platform topped two flimsy-looking pontoons. She couldn’t imagine Dante balancing on the raft and riding the current.

  “Halloo!” Cord called, his voice coming back in an echo. The wind stirred the squat willow bushes and wild roses.

  All was silent. A whitewashed cabin near the boat looked deserted.

  Cupping his large hands, Cord shouted again for the ferry operator. There was no answering hail. “Menor said you couldn’t work it from this side,” he explained. “It keeps people from crossing without paying their twenty-five cents.”

  “Now what?” Laura asked in her little-boy voice.

  With a look at the river, Cord concluded, “We’ll have to ford.”

  “What?” Floating snags of trees demonstrated the current’s power.

  “Not here.” His tone made her feel stupid.

  He turned Dante upstream to a place where the river spread a hundred yards wide, separated into three channels by gravel bars. “He ought to be able to carry us both across this.”

  Knee-deep, then belly-deep, the horse followed Cord’s urging into the rush. Dante’s feet left bottom, and the river poured into Laura’s boots and climbed her calves.

  A few strong strokes, and the horse trotted up onto the first bar. Water streamed from his flanks. Though the second channel flowed deeper and wider, Dante took it easily. Laura almost relaxed, but the farthest stream appeared the swiftest and deepest.

  She took a grip on her precious journal, mak
ing sure it rested in her coat pocket.

  Dante waded in and began to swim gamely, but the current caught him. He stretched his neck and pulled harder, swept downriver faster than he could move across. Laura watched the far bank recede, feeling the water’s cold transmitted through her bones so her pelvis ached.

  The horse’s head surged up. Kicking frantically, he began to founder.

  Water came up around Laura’s waist, and she began to shudder. Try as she might to hold fast, she found her hands free of the solid strap of Cord’s belt. Her fingers brushed the hem of his sheepskin coat; a fleeting touch, and the Snake River seized her.

  Wet clothing dragged Laura under, intense cold numbing her from head to toe. She kept her lips pressed together and forced her eyes open. Ahead, she made out a blurred tangle, but before she could fend off, she slammed into something solid. The air she’d been holding in expelled with a whoosh.

  As she was scraped along through a twisted jumble of jammed logs, a thick trunk caught her across the middle.

  All her muscles clenched, and she hung motionless, while the swift current pressed her against the log. Seconds passed like hours, and she fought the rising urge, first a sly whisper, that perhaps she might be able to breathe underwater. It gave way to a raging scream in her chest.

  Then slowly, she felt her head and shoulders pushed forward until she tumbled free. Upside down, water seeping up her nose, she looked for the light and couldn’t see her way.

  Something seized her leg.

  In a rage, she reached to tear at whatever held her. Slippery evergreen branches, covered in algae, bent in her hands. Her eyes were still open in the rushing water, but sparks of light like diamonds began to break up her vision.

  Once more, with waning strength, she reached to break the branches.

  Free again, she exhaled the last air in her lungs and followed her bubbles. When her head broke the surface, light exploded into her eyes.

  She opened her mouth to breathe, but her chest muscles had seized in the cold. Flailing, she felt her boots brush bottom.

  Though the shore was just there, the rounded cobbles gave no purchase and she fell back into the current. The numbing cold was almost benign, the temptation to lie back and let herself float insinuated itself into consciousness.

  “No!” She spat water. She hadn’t watched Angus and the outlaw die just to lose her own life.

  Arms and legs slapping, Laura fought her way into an eddy close to the bank. She grabbed an eroded ball of tree roots.

  For a long moment she lay gasping, with cold water pouring over her legs. Her brain as empty as her reservoir of energy, she was loath to move … but oddly, what made her was the man who had rescued her at the coach.

  What if he needed help?

  Step by painful step, she staggered up the cut bank of the Snake River. Hand over hand, she grasped the pungent pale sage to pull herself up. At the top, she fell to her knees.

  River water rushed from her mouth. Though she was shivering, sweat peppered her face. Doubled over with her forehead touching the ground, and her wet hair hanging in strings around her shoulders; streaks of bright light seemed to stab at her. Helplessly, she retched.

  Clamping her tongue between her teeth, she forced herself to breathe evenly, in and out through her nose. The richness of earth dampened by melting snow rose, redolent of dung and the decaying leaves of last season.

  She pressed her palms to the ground, anchoring herself until the maelstrom passed.

  After what felt like a long time, she lifted her head.

  The mist had burned away to reveal the mountains. They lifted their proud heads, as though the granite mass strained to reach the sky. If she could stand, just there, on the highest peak with wind whipping around her, this valley would surely seem green and warm, the raging Snake subdued to a lazy-looking, sluggish stream.

  Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, Laura got to her feet and stood unsteadily.

  On instinct, she reached for her pocket, where she expected the wet weight of her ruined journal. Laura wrote her deepest thoughts down daily, had done so ever since those terrible days after Violet died. Volumes of Laura’s life rested in a plain and dusty carton in the Fielding House attic, labeled as “canning jars” so her father would not be tempted to read her true thoughts. This latest book chronicled her decision to undertake this trip alone, along with the wonders of prairie and mountain vistas. Last night, she’d curled up in the coach and written by candlelight, describing the crystalline snowflakes sticking to the windows.

  It couldn’t be lost, but an exploratory hand in her wet pocket encountered only slivers of bark and gritty sand.

  She looked around the lonely valley of the Snake. If Cord had been swept away, she’d have to make her way back to Menor’s Ferry and hope someone came along before she got too hungry.

  But there he was, a hundred yards upstream on the steep inner bank, scanning the river. She almost called out, but realized her hair hung around her shoulders.

  To her surprise, her leather hat still dangled from a rawhide cord around her neck. She’d bought it from a stable boy at Fielding House, not wanting to go west with a hat that looked new. Hastily, she pulled her hair up and covered it.

  Wending her way through sage that exuded aromatic scent each time she brushed gray-green leaves, she worked her way along the high bank. When she approached Cord, he raked his gaze from her slender, shivering shoulders to her squishing boots. In five swift strides, he climbed up fifteen feet to join her on the terrace. His coat and pants were drenched and dripping.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’ll make it.” She crossed her arms to hide her breasts beneath sopping flannel. “You acted like you knew what you were doing. I should have waited for the stage scouts.”

  His nostrils flared.

  “Why did we have to cross here?” she challenged through chattering teeth.

  “It saves a day’s travel. I thought you needed to get to Yellowstone.”

  “I do.”

  “So do I.” The hard note in his voice said he was having second thoughts about her slowing him down. His gaze dropped to her body and his tone softened, so she feared he knew her sex. “You’re quaking like an aspen.”

  She hugged herself harder to hide her female curves.

  Cord nodded toward Dante, standing with his neck stretched to sniff a tuft of coarse grass. “Let me give you something dry to wear.”

  Looking around at the thigh-high scrub, she imagined taking off her shirt beneath his scrutiny. She pointed to the saddlebags hanging sodden. “There is nothing dry.”

  Cord began to gather gnarled branches of dead sage. Still shaking, she moved to help. He knelt to brush aside the last of the melting snow from a clearing and used a flint to strike and kindle a small smoky fire.

  The blaze established, he rummaged in a leather pack and withdrew a pewter flask. When he unscrewed the cap, drank, and passed it to her, the familiar smell of bourbon her father sipped along with his cigars rose to her nostrils.

  She had never tried it neat, only in Christmas eggnog and punches. Trembling as she was, she lifted the flask to her lips and drank after Cord, though Aunt Fanny would not have approved.

  It burned and sent a trail of warmth through her middle.

  Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she handed the spirits back.

  As they hunkered down to get warm and dry, she gauged Cord—six foot two, no less, with broad shoulders and tapered hips. His brimmed leather hat showed signs of wear, as did his sheepskin jacket and boots. His hands were nut-brown, his nails clean.

  Laura watched with interest as he reached for his rifle, opened the lever action, and shook out the water. Then he pursed his lips and blew down the barrel, sending water droplets flying. From his pack, he removed a rag that looked and smelled of oil. “Got to get out the river muck and hope my bullet pouch is waterproof.” He ran the cloth down the barrel using a string with a small metal
weight to pull it through.

  “What takes you to Yellowstone?” He set the weapon aside and focused on her.

  Laura cast about for an answer, knowing her world could not be more different from his. On instinct, she decided to keep her family’s wealth a secret.

  “Work.” She hoped the half truth came out naturally. She did work for her father; he would probably have her take care of his personal correspondence while they were in the park.

  A skeptical look suggested Cord wondered about her so-called mother’s expensive things. She could make up a story about her mother working in the park, too, a hostess in a hotel dining room perhaps, but deception was best kept to a minimum.

  “Work,” he repeated into the lengthening silence.

  She wondered if he were passing through the park on his way to do ranch labor, perhaps in Montana.

  Half an hour passed in uneasy silence until her stomach growled. Torn between delicacy and hoping Cord heard her audible hunger, she planted herself with her back to the flames, her legs spread the way she imagined a boy might stand.

  Cord rummaged among the things he’d spread out to dry. From a metal tin, he handed over some jerky.

  At Fielding House on Lakeshore Drive, Giselle would just now be setting out breakfast on the walnut sideboard. Laura imagined biscuits hot from the oven, crisp bacon, and link sausage mingling their aromas with the tart smell of stewed apples.

  She fingered the tough dried meat Cord gave her, thinking of the curling leather she had seen at the cobbler’s when Aunt Fanny took her to get her dancing slippers resoled. Laura had been eleven, big enough to carry the satin toe shoes in to the proprietor on her own and count the change before it disappeared into her aunt’s reticule. Old enough to know the things you counted on, those implacable finalities like family, were not as permanent as you imagined. She’d never expected her mother would die giving birth to a baby brother who lived for a day and a night.

  How easily Laura might have been the one today to lie ruined while vultures spiraled.

  She tried to take a bite of jerky, but her teeth slid off. Another effort managed to rip a small shred from the edge. When Cord offered his canteen, she took it and drank.