Lake of Fire Read online

  Once their clothes were dry, they remounted Dante and headed north along the base of the mountains. She gazed at the rugged cirques and boulder fields adorning the heights. Even from the bottom of the valley, she could see long, linear tracks of avalanche on the glaciers.

  Rather than dwell on what had happened this day, she tried to focus on her journey’s end, when she would meet her father at the Lake Hotel. His efforts at matchmaking usually fell flat, as he pressed her toward the sons of the wealthy who turned out to be largely indolent, or introduced her to young men he considered worthy to be his successor in the Fielding Bank.

  Perhaps, because she would rather have been the one groomed to succeed him, she had run through a string of suitors and declined them all. If she must accept the shackles of the nineteenth century, hers would be nothing less than a love match.

  She was well along toward being labeled a spinster.

  Fortunately, her father’s latest business partner, Hank Falls, sounded different from the men of the Midwest. He had not only built the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone, but he managed it for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Notwithstanding rumors of opposition from a rival buyer, with the help of Fielding Bank, Hank hoped to own the hotel.

  Laura smiled, imagining Hank with Cord’s understanding of this rough country, yet with a grace and wit a mountain man must lack.

  Gradually, the rhythm of the horse became hypnotic, and the sun’s warmth lulled. Though she fought it, her eyelids grew heavier, until she drifted into a somnolent haze.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JUNE 20

  You say she’s one hell of a gal,” Hank Falls chuckled, “but can she cook?” He shook his head at Forrest Fielding’s latest attempt to interest him in his daughter, Laura.

  “She makes biscuits like lead.” Forrest furrowed his broad brow. “But she organizes the house and sees the servants lay a feast at every meal.”

  Hank’s gaze went to the drifts of steam wafting from Old Faithful. The geyser topped a rise at the head of a grassy valley, set in among ridges studded with dense, lodgepole pine forest. The evergreen hills looked dark, in contrast to June’s pale shoots beside the Firehole River. All traces of the snow that had blanketed Yellowstone the previous night were gone.

  Forrest warmed to his topic. “My Laura will make someone a wonderful wife.”

  “Providing the fortunate gentleman can afford a cook,” Hank agreed jovially.

  Forrest pulled his gold hunting case watch from the pocket of his black suit and opened the lid, embossed with a leaping stag. “The geyser is late,” he announced, causing a murmur to spread through the clutch of perhaps twenty waiting tourists.

  Though Hank had met Forrest only a few days before, when the stout and balding owner of the Fielding Bank in Chicago had clambered awkwardly from the stagecoach, they’d been in correspondence for months. However, until today Hank hadn’t realized that having the bank behind him came with the pressure to pay court to the owner’s daughter.

  Forrest had mentioned Laura several times over a lunch of tinned beef, biscuits, and beer at a trestle table in Larry Matthews’s Lunch Station near Norris. And while everyone was washing their pocket handkerchiefs in a geyser pool after the meal, he pointed out how Laura’s exacting standards with the servants ensured the linens at Fielding House were always white and crisp.

  Forrest looked up at Hank, who towered over his five foot seven. “How old are you, thirty-five?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, I’m sure you know how to manage a woman, but Laura needs a firm hand.”

  Hank suppressed a smile.

  “You must promise me,” Forrest insisted, “if it ever comes to a contest of wills between you, you’ll be sure to make Laura see things your way.”

  “Mr. Falls.” Hank found a gloved hand light on his arm.

  Turning, he recognized one of the guests at the Lake Hotel, a woman on the ripe side of forty. The hem of her crimson velvet gown was rimed with soil from riding the stagecoach around the Grand Loop Road, in spite of the dusters provided by the touring company.

  “Mrs. Giles.” Hank put on his hotel-manager’s manner and made a gallant bow.

  “Esther.” Her coiffure of black hair hung awry, and she reached to secure her Spanish comb studded with glass rubies. As women often did, she appeared to inventory him, from blond hair and narrow but handsome face, down his spare frame clad in tailored gray wool, all the way to stylish leather boots.

  “Can’t you do something … Hank?” Esther looked with bright blue eyes toward the unimpressive mound of sinter forming the cone of Old Faithful.

  Hank felt a secret amusement. Captain Feddors, of the Lake Soldier Station, had told him over a hand of poker that tourists often asked the park’s military custodians to make the geysers erupt, as though they were man-made fountains in an exposition. In fact, it was well known that some people, including soldiers, threw soap into the geysers for a lark to make them foam. Thankfully, enforcement of regulations protecting the formations had made that less common.

  “The geyser is a natural phenomenon,” Hank reassured Esther. “We will just have to wait.”

  Her hand pressed his arm a little more definitely.

  Breathing deeply, he drank in the sights he had loved ever since coming to the park twelve years ago. Afternoon light shone on the valley, where meandering streams and hot pools glowed in the clear air. Steam from hundreds of thermal features rose and floated away on the breeze.

  With a clatter of hooves, a stagecoach pulled up and began to discharge passengers. The Monida and Yellowstone ran regular tours, bringing guests to the tented camps and park hotels.

  Three men on bicycles pedaled up and dismounted, removing flat caps with short bills in front. Long socks with garters displayed their muscular calves below short riding breeches.

  Several soldiers in the uniform of dark blue blouses, light blue trousers, and peaked caps watched the new arrivals. One of their major duties was to prevent tourists from defacing the formations by writing or scratching their names into the travertine. Anyone caught was forced to eradicate all evidence of his vandalism and marched to Headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs for a hearing before the military superintendent. Swift expulsion from the park was certain to follow.

  Old Faithful spit suddenly, a gush of water no more than two feet high; a gasp spread through the watchers. When only steam roiled away from the geyser’s neck, the excitement subsided.

  Hank saw Forrest look around at the waiting crowd with appreciation. “After we buy the Lake Hotel, we ought to convince the government to let us build a new place here.”

  Hank agreed, with a disparaging look at the small plain hotel near Old Faithful. When he could manage Lake without the Northern Pacific’s penny-pinching, he would be able to turn around the losses they’d seen on the property, perhaps even expand within the park.

  Old Faithful sputtered again to a rising chorus.

  Hank smiled, for it would be at least a full minute before the geyser rose to its height.

  “I wish Laura were here,” Forrest said.

  Fielding was surely pushing that daughter of his. Hank reckoned she resembled her father, built like a fireplug, with a broad face that wore a constant look of assurance.

  “When we get back to the Lake Hotel, Laura should be waiting,” Hank told Forrest. The stage would bring her south from the Northern Pacific terminal in Cinnabar, Montana, only a few miles outside the northern park boundary.

  Old Faithful blasted again, a crest of white water blowing ten feet in the air. Then steam boiled beneath the earth and the geyser blew, fifty feet, a hundred. As the hissing rush became a roar, a blowing white veil blotted out the green hill behind.

  “That’s a regular stunner,” Esther said, adjusting her hair comb as a gust of wind hit.

  A little girl of perhaps four years, dressed in a striped green dress, escaped her mother. She rushed toward the fairyland of spray, her tousled brown curls streaked with gold in the sun.

/>   Hank shot out his long arm and pulled her back before she could go farther toward the torrent.

  “Laura looked like that when she was little,” Forrest said.

  Old Faithful reached its full height of almost two hundred feet, a drapery that whipped in the wind, like the little girl’s hair.

  Hank suddenly wished that Laura Fielding might truly be a prize.

  The three men overtaking the stage on horseback wore the blue of the United States Cavalry. Forrest leaned forward to look out the open window, braving the dust on the grade that wound down from Craig Pass to Yellowstone Lake.

  They had traveled nearly seventeen miles east over mountain roads and were approaching the West Thumb of the lake, where passengers had a choice. Those going to the Lake Hotel could stay with the coach for the final nineteen miles of sandy road, or transfer to the steamboat Hank Falls owned for a ride across the blue lake in the breeze. The driver had recommended the boat; Hank had confided to Forrest that he offered all the drivers, or “savages” as they were known locally, a little additional “tin” as incentive to add to his business.

  The cavalry hailed the stage driver, and he brought the coach to a halt with a jingle of harness. A final jolt and the springs bottomed out.

  The lead horseman dismounted. Forrest reckoned the red-faced, sweating officer at no more than half his fifty-seven years.

  “Gentlemen, I am Sergeant Larry Nevers.” He nodded to the woman holding the child Hank had rescued at the geyser. A look of apprehension clouded the youngster’s eyes as he advanced toward the coach window. “I’m looking for a Mr. Fielding.”

  “Right here.” Forrest opened the coach door. With care, he let himself down from the high step into dust that rose in twin puffs, laying another layer onto his boots.

  Nevers turned and walked to the side of the Grand Loop Road, removing his black worsted gloves as he went. Forrest followed, and the two men looked out over the tops of the pine forest. A mile away and a few hundred feet below, wind etched a herringbone pattern into the cobalt surface of Yellowstone Lake.

  With a grave look, Nevers adjusted his thicklensed glasses that were slipping down his nose. “I’m afraid, sir, that the stagecoach carrying your daughter was attacked in Jackson’s Hole.”

  “My God.” The sun had receded behind clouds, and the wind whipped up cold in the late afternoon. “She was supposed to be on the train to the north entrance.”

  Forrest found that his hand rested heavily on young Nevers’s arm. He remembered the waiting silence, a spare last second when he’d stood in the doorway of Violet’s bedroom. Her dark hair, still damp with the sweat of childbirth, spilled over the pillow. The doctor’s ponderous bulk hid the crimson bloom, leaving Forrest the length of the flowered carpet to live in the time before his wife died.

  Please, God, not his daughter, too.

  Blood pounding at his temples, he managed to speak. “Is Laura dead?”

  “The scouts found the coach, with the driver and another man dead,” Nevers answered in a low voice. “Your daughter’s valise was there. She wasn’t.”

  At the unmistakable press of feminine flesh against his back, a slow smile curved Cord’s lips. This young woman was obviously clever and scared to death he would press his advantage.

  She wasn’t off base. He knew men in Jackson’s Hole who would have thrown her on her back and then left her.

  Though that was not his way, he couldn’t help wondering what she would look like in one of those lacy gowns left behind at the coach. She was slim hipped, but her wet clothes hadn’t hidden the curve of the breasts moving against him with the rhythm of Dante’s hooves. He turned, as though to look back the way they had come, and stole a peek.

  She was asleep. At his motion, her head lolled awkwardly on his shoulder blade. He shouldn’t be surprised after what she’d been through, but he was somewhat astonished at his reaction to her innocent touch.

  The journey would no doubt be easier if he continued the charade that she was male, but it was several days’ ride to the Lake Hotel.

  He didn’t believe he could keep up the pretense.

  Laura came awake to find her arms around Cord’s chest.

  She jerked away. “Where are we?”

  “Jenny Lake.” His voice might have been tinged with emotion.

  Afternoon shadows lengthened across a perfect jewel of tarn, lapping gently at its graveled shore. Evergreen, paler aspen, and a profusion of wildflowers grew down to a beach crisscrossed by gnarled ghosts of trees. Mirrored in the water, a craggy peak was haloed by the setting sun.

  Holding Dante’s reins slack, Cord looked over his shoulder. His sleek black hair shifted over his collar. “Those were your clothes at the coach, girl.”

  She pressed her lips together.

  Sliding to the ground, he dragged her down after him. To her chagrin, her hat fell off and revealed tousled hair her mother once said matched the color of brown sugar taffy.

  Cord grabbed her hand and turned it over, looking at the rough spots on her palm. “This morning, when I helped a young boy onto Dante, I thought at least he didn’t have a woman’s hands.”

  Incensed that her penchant for riding and tending her Chicago rose garden without gloves had left obvious signs, she flashed, “A gentleman would never admit he noticed.”

  The lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled, and his laugh came out hearty. “Got a name?” His gaze raked her body in a too-familiar way.

  “My name is Laura,” she said through gritted teeth. “And if you touch me, I will take your Colt, shove it down your throat, and pull the trigger.”

  He blinked. “You expect me to believe you can shoot?”

  “I can shoot.”

  Cord reached for the bone-handled gun at his hip and held it out. He pointed at a piece of driftwood on the lakeshore about fifty yards away. “Hit that, if you can.”

  Laura hefted the pistol’s gleaming weight. She checked that it was loaded and raised it, clasped in two hands. From the corner of her eye, she saw him watch her pull back the hammer.

  It took four clicks, that some said spelled, “C-O-L-T.”

  She sighted along the barrel, drew in her breath, let out half …

  Held it … and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun kicked and stung her palms. A chunk of her driftwood target went flying, and the sound of the shot came back twice, echoing in a canyon on the far side of the lake.

  “You can shoot … Laura.” His look was speculative.

  She lifted her chin and smiled. Cord set his jaw. “It doesn’t mean you have the guts to kill anything.”

  The cold came down fast after sunset. Clouds scudded past the high crest where snow blew in arching veils. Laura helped Cord gather firewood, piling the twisted lodgepole logs. The way he’d spoken of killing made her uneasy; it reminded her of the bottomless cold in his eyes when he sighted at the outlaw and pulled the Colt’s trigger.

  The next time they arrived back at the woodpile together, she ventured, “That man this morning, had he gotten to a surgeon he might have lived.”

  In the lowering darkness, Cord turned on her. “You know anything about how a gut-shot man dies?”

  She swallowed and shook her head.

  “First, infection sets in from the shit inside him,” he said with a harshness that sounded deliberate. “Then fever, shakes, unimaginable agony from the putrefying wound … it takes days.”

  Laura shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  Cord went on, “We were a half-day’s ride north of Jackson and the sawbones there doesn’t have a modern operating room. He’d have given him whiskey and morphine, but the outcome would have been the same.” The anger went out of his voice. “What I did this morning was the humane thing.”

  She sighed. True or not, hadn’t she planned on shooting the man herself when she tried to go for Angus’s gun? When the outlaw had fingered her mother’s cameo, hadn’t she wished she held the Colt? The memory of the kindly dri
ver’s blood on the snow made her believe she could have pulled the trigger.

  She gave a tight nod and went for more wood, taking the private opportunity to relieve herself in the forest. Upon planning this trip, she had never expected to end up a “sage brusher,” what folks called people who camped wild.

  When she came back, Cord had lit the fire. Pine logs snapped and crackled. While he cooked beans in a pot and added jerky, she was glad he hadn’t expected her to cook. No working girl would be unable to boil water, as she was, though she could plan a menu for a hundred.

  After they ate, Laura perched on a boulder. The fresh aroma of evergreen and an undercurrent of spice hung on the air the way light lingered in the sky. How different this frigid land was from Chicago. Back home, summer brought the fecund aroma of algae and other water plants off Lake Michigan. Here at Jenny Lake, the chill air on her back and the fire’s warmth reminded her more of October than June.

  She turned to Cord. “What’s it like here in the winter?”

  “Cold.” His voice conveyed the depth and breadth that cold could reach. “The lakes are frozen. Elk and moose come down from the high country by the thousands. The wind blows and blows, and the snow is a weightless dry powder that doesn’t even stick to your clothes.”

  He looked up at the peaks. “For weeks on end, you can’t see the summits because they’re shrouded in clouds. When you catch a glimpse of the high country, it’s blinding white. Dante here,” he gestured toward his stallion, “spends stormy weeks in the sod barn.”

  Odd that a cowboy would be well spoken; he must have had a good teacher in some mountain school house.

  “It sounds very difficult,” she replied.

  “It’s beautiful.” His husky voice bespoke his love for the high country.

  “Do you think it will snow again tonight?” She huddled closer to the fire and surveyed the clouds against the blacker sky.

  “No.” Cord’s breath came out smoky. “The air is dry, and I don’t smell a hint of snow.”