Kelsey watched the two of them check their saddles. “Don’t dawdle, girl,” Cord snapped like a stem father. Kelsey scrambled to where she’d left her tack and began saddling her mount.
“They are going to spot us soon as we come out of this draw,” Cord said. “Maybe sooner, and from damned close. When we hit the main trail, get your head down and ride.”
Cord led them down the draw toward the open swale of the main trail. A couple miles north, the way they were heading, it narrowed as it entered the steeper mountain cuts. There was the first goal.
They edged around a layered shale outcrop, and there they were, Ryker and his gang, barely two hundred yards back, clustered behind the bronze-chested Mr. Earl. Cord registered two impressions: the surprise on Ryker’s face, and the shrewd appraising gaze of Mr. Earl, like a predator assessing its prey. The low sun made his tinted eyeglasses sparkle like rubies.
Then Cord was raking the bay and the big animal responded, driving hard into a low-ground-drumming run. Within seconds gunfire erupted behind them. Cord risked a look back: Chi and Kelsey were hard on his trail, and beyond them Cord got a glimpse of Ryker’s men sighting rifles. Ryker shouted and threw up a hand, but one of the Payne cousins broke loose and came after them anyway at a loping gallop.
Chi’s mare lurched as its left forefoot caught a rabbit hole. The horse caught itself, staggered, and went down and over in a long rolling fall, legs kicking madly. Horse and rider disappeared for a moment in a chalky cloud of alkaline dust before Chi rolled clear.
Cord jerked back, setting up his bay in the dust, the horse spinning before responding to spurs, and plunging back the way they had come. Chi made her knees before Cord reached her, shaky but nothing broken. The mare was also whole and on its feet now, but Chi remained on hands and knees, her head hanging down. Cord drew his Colt and fired two shots in Ryker’s direction without aiming, then sprang to the ground, grabbed Chi by the arm.
She looked up at him dimly.
“Goddamn it. Get up!”
The Payne cousin with heroic notions was fifty yards away and closing hard and fast. Ryker hollered behind him.
The Payne cousin fired his rifle one-handed and the slug plowed into the ground a yard to one side. Cord jerked Chi to her feet, dragged her to the mare, gathered up the reins, and got her left foot in the stirrup.
The Payne boy levered the Winchester, flipping it by the handle. The hooves of his horse pounded loudly on the alkali as he raised to fire again. Cord let go of Chi and aimed the Colt with both hands, standing splayed-legged and steady.
But the rifle shot came from behind him, and the Payne boy jerked and hunched awkwardly over his horse’s neck. He swayed one way and then the other as the horse plunged toward Cord, and then he came out of the saddle, flipped loose-limbed in the dirt, and rolled to a stop almost at Cord’s feet. Cord danced back as the man’s heart pumped a last great fountain through the hole in his chest. Blood bubbled in the dirt.
Cord grabbed up the Winchester, then boosted Chi into the saddle, grabbed up the reins, and pressed them into her hands. Pearl and the other two were firing all around them. Cord vaulted on the bay and whacked the rump of Chi’s mare with the butt of the rifle. The mare jumped forward and Chi came around. Cord raced after her and Kelsey swung around to join them, her Winchester across her saddle. They raced up the narrowing cut, out of range and then around a bend and out of Ryker’s sight.
Cord reined up and they waited a couple of minutes. Ryker did not follow. He was holding, sticking to his plan. Probably standing over the Payne boy’s corpse right now, telling the other two cousins that here was what happened when you did not follow orders, went off half-cocked...
“Everyone okay?” But then Cord saw the smear of blood on Chi’s handsome face.
“Nada,” Chi said angrily. She pushed back her sombrero and wiped at her temple with the edge of her serape. There wasn’t much blood, only a scratch that Cord could see. “Damn those pig bastards.” She hated being the one who fell, even if it was not her fault. At least she was not really hurt; Cord felt deep relief.
Kelsey was not doing as well. She was trembling so violently she could not fit her rifle into its scabbard. Chi shook cobwebs out of her head and sidled her mare next to Kelsey, he took the rifle and seated it in the sheath, then held the girl’s hand. Kelsey began to sob.
“For Christ’s sake,” Cord muttered.
“You hold your tongue, Cord!” Chi snapped.
“No time for this,” Cord said.
Kelsey snuffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “I’m good enough.”
“She killed a man,” Chi said. “You think about your first time.”
Or the last time, Cord thought. The girl was confronting something new here, something always new and never pleasant.
Chi stroked Kelsey’s hand. “Mi hermana,” she murmured. Chi released Kelsey’s hand, turned her horse, and squared herself in the saddle.
“All right, Mr. Cord,” she said. “The ladies are ready to ride.”
Fifteen
“We are going north,” Kelsey said.
Cord sat his horse and studied her. “No, we’re not,” he said evenly.
Kelsey looked at him, perplexed and childlike. She had calmed herself, come to terms for now with the killing of Ryker’s man. They were ten miles further on now, at a crossroads amid the piney forested slopes up Bridger Creek into the boot of the Big Horn range. The morning sun was high in the sky.
“We are not going anywhere, hija,” Chi explained. “Not until you tell us what we will find at the end of trail.”
The dead Payne boy’s Winchester was lashed on behind Cord’s saddle. He retied the knots, watching the girl. “There is a place called Thermopolis,” Kelsey said.
“Grecos?” Chi wondered. “A hot city of Greeks.”
“What are you talking about?” Cord stared at her.
“Thermopolis,” Chi said. “In Greek that means a hot city.”
Cord could not have been more mystified had she been speaking Greek. “How do you know that?”
“My father sent me to convent school, in Mexico City, when I was a muchacha and didn’t know any better.”
“I never knew that.”
“Lots you don’t know, Mr. Cord,” Chi said smugly.
“That’s for damned sure,” Cord muttered.
“Tell me about this hot city,” Chi said to Kelsey.
“There’s springs there. Sulphur water, pouring out of the rocks day and night. You can smell it a mile away, like a million rotten eggs.”
“And why do we go there?”
“My partner is waiting. That’s the place we’re supposed to meet in case of trouble, like I told you about. Fifty miles—we can make it by nightfall.”
“If we do,” Cord said, “the horses are done. They will be down for days.”
“Don’t matter. There is no farther to go. That is the end, one way or the other.”
Killing a man had put steel in her spine. It worked that way with some people.
“Half dozen years back,” Kelsey continued, “an old outlaw named Buskirk rode in and bought the springs from the Arapaho for two hundred dollars cash money.”
“What for?”
“He turned it into a spa.”
“A what?” Cord was bewildered: Chi speaking Greek, and now this
“He built a hotel and a bathhouse. Folk come from all over, Baltimore, places like that, to soak in that sulphur water and drink it with their suppers.”
“Why?”
“How would I know?” Kelsey said impatiently. “But they pay money for it, and Buskirk must figure that’s better than a sharp kick in the ass. Anyway, my partner knows him from the old days, and as those eastern folks don’t arrive until the snow is clear gone from the passes, we made an arrangement.” Kelsey jerked her horse toward the right-hand road. “We are wasting time.”
“Looks like it,” Chi said laconically. She pointed back the way they’d c
ome.
And there they were, Ryker and his bully boys, coming into sight where the trail snaked up the Bridger Creek drainage, two and a half, three miles back.
“Who are those boys with him?” Cord asked. The way this was heading, it was best to have all the puzzle pieces laid out before him.
“Deputies.” Kelsey laughed humorlessly. “Ryker swore them in not long after he came to Wyoming. Caught them rustling cows through Hole-in-the-Wall and offered them a deal. Probably told them it was a safer way to go, but it wasn’t, not for one of them anyway.” Her laugh was too shrill. A kid trying to show how tough she could be, Cord thought, and God bless her.
“The one I killed was Boone,” Kelsey said. “Bye, bye, Boone.” She brought herself up short. “Cousins named Payne, just folks with guns. Like us.”
“You’d best hope you are wrong, girl.” Cord took a last look, then spun his bay. “Let’s move.”
A few minutes later he came up beside Chi, in the lead. “How do you like being on the run again?”
“Not so much,” Chi said. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“No more,” Cord agreed. “Not after this.”
Sixteen
“How much further?” Cord asked.
“Use your nose, querido,” Chi suggested.
At first Cord scented only musty night and trail dust. It was two hours past full dark; the trip had taken longer than they’d reckoned. As they climbed toward the headwaters of Bridger Creek, the creek became a little rill between steep-sloped banks. Patches of old com snow covered shaded sections of the trail, and the quarter mile on either side of the pass was drifted three feet deep in places, the snow stiff and crusty. The horses’ hooves cut through the frozen top and the going became aggravatingly slow. By the time they came down the far side and cut the South Fork of the Kirby, most of the daytime was lost. Twilight edged toward night as they rode out onto the enormous plain of the Big Horn Basin.
The sun splashed streaks of red and yellow and purple. The moon came up within minutes, peering between coagulating slathers of gray cloud. A gusty breeze, driving chill air down from the eastern slope of the Continental Divide, a hundred miles toward the lost sunset, blew in their faces and a thunderstorm swept through the Basin ahead of them. They rode in darkness through the sweetish stink of wet sage, on to Big Horn River.
The clouds closed in as they turned upriver and it began to drizzle. Heads down, they rode south another five miles, toward what the map called Wedding of the Waters, where the river climbed and narrowed into the impassable Wind River Canyon. Cord drew another deep breath through his nose and caught a faint acrid chemical whiff. “About time,” he muttered. He led them up toward a little ridge. The sharp stink of the sulphur springs grew more pungent and the roar of the water became louder, too quickly to be the canyon rapids.
“We made it,” Kelsey called through the rain. “Over that last rise.”
“Wonderful.” Cord was light-headed from lack of sleep and the tension of being run like a coyote caught killing sheep. Rainwater dribbled from his hat brim and down inside his shirt. He’d been holding his neck muscles tight; he rolled his shoulders and shook out his arms. One last rise.
This was no sane occupation for a grown man. How long had he been riding into these places in the night, too weary to worry about who was waiting? But no one forced you to sit down at the table, so there was no point grousing about the cards you got dealt. One thing, though: Once they were out of this mess there was going to be some serious rethinking. For him and Chi. For them.
“There she sits.”
Cord looked up, startled by Kelsey’s voice close beside him. Thermopolis had snuck up on him.
They were on the rim of a semicircle of hillside cradling a half bowl of bench several hundred feet across. It opened to the west, where it was cut abruptly by the fifty-foot-deep river gorge. The east slope of the bowl was a series of six terrace steps, and from this porous volcanic rock the hot sulphur water gushed. This was no trickle spring, but a scalding, cascading waterfall that erupted full-blown out of nowhere, as much water as in a good-sized river. Slimy yellow sulphur deposits frosted the terraces in vast frozen undulating sheets and graceful swirls.
The terraces were maybe fifty yards wide, and fell about the same distance from the top stair step to where the 135-degree water plunged in long sheets over the lip of the canyon to the chill snow-packed flow of Big Horn River. Mushrooming clouds of steam billowed up into the night, and the rain hissed like a field of grasshoppers as it slanted into the hot terraces. Cord had never seen any landscape as alien or surreal, even up in Yellowstone Park or Colter’s Hell; something unworldly was happening here, something that drew him into deep and vaguely uncomfortable timelessness. And that damned smell, thick enough to gag a hog...
“Follow me,” Kelsey said happily.
The trail switch-backed down the north face of the bowl to its bottom, where a plank walkway crossed the bottom terrace. The tired gelding snorted and rolled its eyes, spooked by the stink and the rolling clouds of obscuring steam. Cord kept the reins taut and his own eyes straight ahead; he liked this no better than the horse. To the right, as they reached the end of the planks, a narrow suspension bridge swayed above the river canyon in the stiff breeze. An aversion to heights had dogged Cord since he was a boy, and the notion of crossing the narrow vertiginous span, swinging wide as the pendulum in a grandfather clock, made his guts lurch.
This Buskirk character had made himself a nice enough little nest in which to pass his last years. At the upriver end, an aqueduct ran down along the side of the terraces to a large pavilion, the bathhouse. At each shelf a sluice gate admitted the spring water. None was open now, and the pine-tarred wooden flume was empty save for a trickle of rainwater. Behind the bathhouse there was a small barn with an attached corral.
The hotel building on the other side of the wagon track running up from the suspension bridge was three stories high, nothing fancy but sturdy enough. A roof to keep out the rain and a fire at least, maybe even some coffee, thought Cord. Coffee would be fine. At first it looked dark as the cavernous bathhouse, but as they came off the boardwalk Cord caught the glimmer of a lantern behind a window next to the front door. Kelsey hollered, “Hello, the hotel!” No one answered. “Mr. Buskirk—you in there, old man?”
“Let’s get out of this damned rain,” Chi muttered. Kelsey swung down and stomped up on the porch. The front door opened and lantern light silhouetted the figure of a man with thick flowering whiskers.
“That you, girl?” The old man stepped out and raised the lantern. “Who is that with you? Never mind. Come in here.”
Chi watched slump-shouldered from the saddle, and Cord, back to thinking coffee, realized suddenly that she was as tired as he was. Over the years he had come to think of her stamina as infinite; there were times, more than one, when there were guns behind them and they’d been forced to spend most of three or four days in the saddle. He would turn mush-minded with fatigue, while she sat straight and graceful and stoic through rain, dust, and a butt-busting eternity of riding.
“You go on.” Cord leaned over, took her reins, and flipped them forward over the mare’s head. “I’ll see to the animals.”
She smiled wearily. “You doing all right, querido,” But she did not protest. “Gracias.” She pulled the Waltman farmer’s Henry rifle from her scabbard and slid out of the saddle.
“What do you think?” Cord blustered. “Sure I’m all right.” He was not accustomed to her going soft on him. But then he had maybe saved her life that day, and she was not accustomed to that. Both of them were acting out of nature, but nothing wrong with that either. That damned Boone Payne, firing his rifle and trying to ride them down... Cord gathered up the reins of Kelsey’s horse and rode around along the wagon track.
Two other animals were stalled inside the small livery barn. They snorted when Cord flung open the door, as if they had not seen much company through the winter. Co
rd found a lantern on a peg inside the door jamb and a dry lucifer inside his coat pocket. A dozen laying hens were roosting toward the back part of the barn and the air was thick with the sweet smell of slightly fermented hay. The horses’ eyes were wild and spooky in the flickering light of the coal-oil wick. Cord flopped up a stirrup and undid each cinch, dragged the saddles off and rested each on the pole rack, working mechanically and ignoring the ache in his shoulders and lower back. With each horse in a stall, he climbed the ladder to the overhead hay loft and pitched down a few forkfuls, breathing the dust and grunting. Below again, he raised the lantern and checked once more, aware he was tired enough to forget little things if he did not take care. But everything appeared satisfactory, and he walked around through the rain to the front of the hotel.
The shingle over the porch’s canopy read “Thermopolis House.” The front room, a sort of lounge, was decorated in a fantastic Western style for the diversion of the summer guests from back east. Above the writing desk were mounted the heads of two deer and a giant sorrowful moose; a fat varnished cutthroat trout on a platter-shaped board hung near the door. The chandelier was a refinished buggy wheel, and here and there were potted cacti. The substantial chair? and couches were built of grainy dark wood and covered with a thick coat of shellac that reflected the gleam of brass cuspidors.
Inside the six-foot firebox of a big stone-masonry fireplace, a newly built fire was crackling and sending flames up into the flue. Opposite, an archway opened into a dim dining room where neatly set wooden tables awaited diners. In front of a pigeonhole rack in the corner, a big leather-bound register book faced out on the counter of the check in desk, and next to it a stairway climbed to the rooms on the upper floors.
The most striking piece of woodworking in the place was the ornate bar fronting the other corner. The Long Bar, they called it. It was the type that was shipped around the Horn to California in gold rush days. When the boom was over, a lot of these old bars made their way inland by rail, shipped in numbered sections. This one was carved dark oak with a brilliant brass rail, topped with a single plank three inches thick, with an inlaid gutter. Neat rows of bottles and precise pyramids of glasses sat before a polished mirror on the back shelf. Everything was orderly and in good repair; here was the house of a person who took care.
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