The ambient rotten egg smell was inside too, but Cord scented a richer aroma cutting through it. “Would that be coffee?”
The whiskered man appeared out of the dining room’s dimness, carrying his lantern and pewter pot. He shined the light in Cord’s face as if searching for an honest man. “I know you!” he declared. The old man had a high voice and a broad accent with a residue of Scotch-Irish left in it. “Never mind that,” he said. “Have your coffee, son.”
Buskirk set the lantern on the bar and blew it out, found a cup and poured for Cord. The coffee was hot and thick and strong, the way Cord made it himself. Chi sprawled in one of the heavy chairs, her eyes half closed and her cup ignored in her hands. She spotted Cord and smiled weakly. Kelsey leaned against the front desk taking quick shallow sips of the dark brew and looking more impatient than tired.
The old man tapped Cord on the shoulder. He splashed a dollop of bourbon into Cord’s coffee. Cord smiled weakly. The coffee and whiskey tasted like heaven.
Buskirk was looking him over again. The one-time outlaw was somewhere beyond fifty, a head shorter than Cord, wiry except for a hint of gut over the waistband of his baggy corduroy britches, which were held up by suspenders over a plaid woolen shirt. His thin hair bristled like straw around a bald circle on the crown of his pate, and his black-flecked gray whiskers covered his collar. The dozen or so teeth he had left were long and yellow-brown.
“You need another.” Buskirk pointed to Cord’s cup, took it behind the bar, and refilled it with equal parts of coffee and bourbon. Kelsey stood at the front window staring into the rain and darkness, and Chi had put her cup down and looked to be dozing. A pitch-knot exploded and sparks leaped up the chimney. Chi stirred and murmured something in Spanish.
Buskirk gave Cord his cup, then stood back and went on staring at him. “I know you,” he said again.
“Is that right?” Cord drank.
“You’re Elegant John Odum out of Burns, Oregon.”
This jasper was serving up wonderful coffee laced with whiskey, and his hotel was warm and clean and dry. ‘‘Whatever you say,” Cord told him.
Buskirk laughed, showing his colorful teeth. “You ain’t Elegant John Odum. Nothing elegant about you.”
At the window, Kelsey said, “Where is he, Mr. Buskirk?”
Buskirk ignored her. “But I do know you, son, just the same, so you listen up. You too, lady.” Chi opened her eyes and turned her head a little.
“I’ve been a hooligan and a roughneck in my day,” Buskirk said. “I have been a scapegrace and a scalawag, no denying it. I ain’t ashamed...” Buskirk grinned shrewdly. “I’ve made my peace with the Lord.”
“Good for you.”
“I know which way the trail runs, Mr. Cord.”
The old man was a trifle ringy, Cord decided, but likely not clear crazy.
“So here is the drill: you have the hospitality of my house, but you got to promise that you ain’t going to bust things up. This is my place.”
Nothing crazy about that. Old Man Buskirk had found a hutch where he could live out his last days in serenity, catering to fools in the summer and taking their money legally, hunkering down in warmth and comfort and isolation through the dark months. This is where I live, the old man was saying. Do not tread on my toes, and do not screw up this good deal of mine.
“How do you stand the stink?”
“You get used to it, son. Get used to most anything, when you’re old as me. I go down to Casper, Cheyenne, where all them people are tight up together—I can smell them all right. That is what I call a stink.”
“Please, Mr. Buskirk.” Kelsey spoke softly but urgently. “Where is he?”
Buskirk stared at her absently, as if he wasn’t sure whom she was talking about. He blinked. “Patrolling. Getting the lay of the land. Taking precautions.” Before Cord could cipher where this new tack headed, Buskirk nodded over his shoulder and said, “There he be.”
Boot heels rapped on the porch floor boards and lantern light flickered in the window then winked out. The door opened and a young man entered. A slouch hat was pulled low over his face against the rain, the brim bent down.
Kelsey went to him and put her hand on his arm. The young man peered at her from under the hat brim. He wore a shapeless rubberized poncho. He pulled away from her and went to the fire, stood with his back to all of them, as if unaware, or reluctant to acknowledge, that he was not alone. He shook the loose folds of the poncho and droplets of water sizzled. He slapped his hat against his thigh, replaced it atop thinning sandy hair, and held his hands out to the warmth of crackling flames.
But then his shoulders hunched and tensed, as if he had resolved to delay inevitable confrontation no longer. The young man turned, and he was not so young, with a worn drawn gaunt face that testified to some rough worrisome times since Cord and Chi had seen him last.
Chi sat up straight in the chair and shot Cord a look. But Cord had recognized him too: the missing piece in this jigsaw puzzle. This hollow-cheeked man was the same boy who had run them down for Enos Ryker the first time, five years ago near Grand Island, Nebraska.
Kelsey’s partner was Kyle Greer.
Chapter Seventeen
Cord sat like a gentleman before the fire in one of the armchairs, sipping his third cup of coffee
and bourbon. “Good,” he murmured.
“You bet your ass, son.” Buskirk showed him the bottle. “Private stock, lookee here.”
Sure enough, the label featured a lithographic rendering of sulphur terraces, steam rising into the sunshine, and beneath:
OLD VICKSBURG BOURBON WHISKEY
Bottled from Special Reserves For the Express Enjoyment of the Clients,
Thermopolis House,
Abraham Buskirk, Prop.
“Abraham?” Cord asked lazily.
“Don’t be making fun, sonny. The turistas think they are being treated mighty special, and they will pay extra to feel like big shots. Money in the bank for me.” He gave Cord a shrewd look. “Big city bank, with triple-thick rock walls, time-lock vaults, and Pinkerton guards. A bank where a feller like you came in, they’d shoot you on looks alone. Ain’t one of those crackerboxes you and the lady are used to, so don’t be getting ideas.”
“You do go on, viejo,” Chi said sleepily.
“Hell yes I do,” Buskirk exclaimed. “Ain’t talked to no one in three months, except for Tommy Two-Head and his son Buck Knife, come calling every other Sunday night to drink my whiskey and cheat at pinochle, and most all they speak is Arapaho.”
Cord sat with his drink and a cigarette, only his second of the long day, out of his wet coat, his britches steaming and mostly dry, content as a cat for right now. Cord had never been in a place quite like this Thermopolis House. He’d heard of such resort spas springing up here and there in the years since the northwestern corner of the Territory had been turned into a National Park. The West was becoming increasingly more like a circus: come and see the great wilderness, from a comfortable box seat. Parks and hostelries, glib-talking guides and lots of black-powder smoke and blank cartridges. It was as if Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had become the world, so the real thing must imitate the show. The notion did not make Cord glum as it once might have, merely thoughtful. And here was Abraham Buskirk, selling magic water that sluiced the aches and pains away, and telling somewhat true tales of his desperado days. Cord smiled: good for the old thief. He had discovered the secret of evading death by gun shot or a lifetime wasting in jail: become an innkeeper.
Chi sat on the other side of the fireplace. Her serape hung with his coat over the hearth, and she looked fine and womanly in her wool shirt and dark leather britches and long intricate braids. In contrast, Kelsey looked like a boy waiting to grow up. She sipped black coffee at the desk, in canvas farmer pants held aloft by braces over a dirty cotton union suit. She had narrow shoulders and tiny breasts, sexless as a child’s.
Buskirk stood behind the bar, the proper host. “There is o
ne thing,” he announced.
Cord sighed and turned his head.
“I got me an arrangement with Missy here and her beau, but you two has got to pay the freight. Regular rates, one night in advance.”
“How much?” Cord said wearily. He expected to be gouged. Buskirk knew who they were, maybe why they were on the run and hunkering in. The old man might have been shooting with damp powder, but he was not dumb.
Buskirk gave the ceiling a shrewd look, as if he were ciphering columns of figures in his head. “Ten dollars,” he announced. “Per night, each person. Meals included, whiskey extra, and you two have already run up a two-dollar tab in that department.”
“Here, Viejo,” Chi fished bills from the pocket of her britches, peeled off a hundred.
Buskirk frowned at the banknote. “I’ll fetch your change.”
“Better wait until we check out,” Chi suggested. “My partner can tote up some kind of bar bill.”
“Just so he don’t wreck anything.” The hundred-dollar note found a home in Buskirk’s shirt pocket.
Nothing was going to be wrecked. There were times when Cord needed a snootful the night before some showdown, but this was not one.
Chi turned abruptly in her chair. Kyle Greer came out of the shadows on the staircase into the edge of the firelight near the bottom. He held a sawed-off shotgun by its grip, barrels pointed at the floor.
Time was not his friend. The boy Cord had run into five years earlier could not be older than twenty-five or -six now, but Kyle Greer was aged by something timeless, and likely painful. His sandy hair was streaked with dirty gray and thin enough to show freckled scalp beneath. His mustache wanted trimming, and its bushy line emphasized the gauntness of his concave cheeks and the hollow depths of his eye sockets. He looked like he slept badly and had nightmares.
He wore gabardine trousers and a faded patched shirt buttoned to the neck. He held his hat in one hand, toting it around as if he were afraid it might be stolen. Cord kept an eye on the shotgun in the other.
Greer had come in out of the rain and stared at them, as if trying to decide if it might be possible to pretend not to know who they were. He looked at Kelsey and snapped, “What goes on?” and, before she could answer, said, “Never mind,” in a curiously neutral tone. He had pushed past and gone upstairs without another look. That was maybe ten minutes ago.
Now he stood on the bottom step, mostly giving Cord the willies. There was something not right with this boy. Cord had been hoping that Kelsey’s partner would be an extra gun on their side, but now he wondered if Greer was going to make the trouble worse. He knew them all right, no amount of squirrelly twitching was going to change that.
“Nice gun, boy,” Cord said. He wondered if it was loaded. “Sawed-off, like Ryker’s. Is he your hero, boy? You want to be like him when you get grown?”
Greer looked at him, curiously untouched by the needling, as if he had heard the sound of someone talking but could not make out the words. Kelsey went to him and took his arm near the biceps in both her hands. He looked at her. “They are not supposed to be here.” His tone was more perplexed than accusatory.
“Might as well set down the scattergun, Kyle,” Buskirk said matter-of-factly. “You don’t need it just yet.”
“Like hell I don’t,” Greer said in his flat mechanical voice.
Buskirk came around the bar and stalked up to Greer. He clapped his hands sharply twice, an inch away from Greer’s nose. “Goddammit, boy, wake up.”
Greer blinked and took a deep breath, looked around the room again as if he expected to see some subtle transmutation in the nature of things. Buskirk carefully lifted the shotgun out of his hands and stashed it behind the front desk’s counter. Kelsey led Greer over to the bar and leaned him against it. With her he was at ease.
“He ain’t twenty-four carat,” Buskirk said to Cord. “Ain’t been since he teamed with Ryker. They make a hell of a pair, both of them crazy as seven Swedes.”
“They are going to help us, Kyle.” At the bar, Kelsey was talking to Greer in a low voice. “Maybe kill Ryker for us, let us take the money...”
“Which money was that?” Chi asked sharply.
“Please,” Kelsey pleaded, not for the money but for some little help with the job of humoring Kyle Greer.
“Jesus,” Cord breathed. The kid really was crazy, not addled like old Buskirk but genuinely. Generally speaking, the insane made Cord nervous. “Goddammit, that boy is worse than useless. We’re going to have to care for him like a baby. He’s been like this for five years?”
“Not so bad as he is now,” Buskirk said. “He started drifting after that run-in with you folks.”
“What do you know, Viejo?” Chi demanded.
“I know this,”’ Buskirk said mildly. “I know what happened after you left Ryker tied to a tree buck-naked.” Buskirk looked shrewdly at Chi and his eyes brightened. He slapped his knee in self-appreciation. “The boy here told me how he cut him down. I laughed,” Buskirk said. “Laughed right at him next time I was in Casper. He had to take it. I know things he don’t want known, so I don’t worry about Ryker. If he kills you, he won’t get so mad he comes after me for letting you hole up.”
“Bet you sleep easy,” Cord said.
“Damned straight. Here is the rest: that time five years back, Ryker made the boy here steal him some clothes off a farmhouse washline in the middle of the night. Then Ryker gave Kyle a choice.”
Greer had retreated back into some hideout on the far side of his mind. He stared at the floor.
“Kyle could spend the rest of his days behind bars,” Buskirk said, “or he could do whatever damned thing Ryker told him.”
“Bad as jail,” Chi said.
“Sure, but the kid didn’t know that—not until it drove him batshit—and then he didn’t hardly know his name.” Buskirk cackled.
“What did Ryker tell him to do?”
“Dirty things,” Kelsey blurted. “Men got shot in the back.” She took a step forward. “You’d do the same. You’d kill to stay out of jail.”
Cord shook his head sadly.
“I didn’t have to be part of this,” Kelsey said, “but I did it. I would do anything for Kyle.” She went on quickly. “Two years back he rode into Basin. I was sixteen and hated the idea of spilling my life like wash water. I watched my father try to run fifty cows on a dry-land section and drink himself to death at the same time, and my mother watching him. He was all the time grabbing at me. He’d whale me with his belt.” Kelsey shuddered.
“Hermana.” Chi looked entranced and touched by the story.
“Anyway,” Kelsey said briskly. “Kyle rode through town and I saw him coming out of a saloon. We started talking…” She had gone coy. “We got on all right, and I talked him into taking me with him. Kyle never had no experience except with sporting women, and I never had no man. So it was like starting fresh for both of us.”
No one spoke, which seemed to bother the girl, as if she expected a response, like reassurance. “I thought I could change him if I loved him hard.” Kelsey went to Kyle Greer and turned. “Maybe I can,” she said, like a dare.
Kyle Greer came to life, unglued himself from the bar, and straightened. He looked at each of them, ending with Kelsey. There is a boy with a short attention span, Cord thought. Greer yawned elaborately, crooked and straightened both arms. “We’d better catch some shut-eye,” he said. Kelsey took his hand and led him up the stairs.
Chi stood. “What room are they in?” she asked Buskirk. “I don’t want to walk in on the middle of any of that.”
“Take the one at the end of the corridor, two flights up,” Buskirk suggested. “Finest suite in the house, little lady.”
Chi was too tired to trade any more wisecracks. She waved vaguely at Cord and went after Greer and the girl.
Cord got up and put his cup on the bar. Buskirk refilled it without asking, but went easy on the bourbon this time. Last one tonight, Cord decided.
&nb
sp; “What say?” Buskirk sounded in the mood for conversation.
Cord shook his head meaninglessly. Men would die the next morning, and no point in riding it into the ground.
Buskirk cleared his throat. “I got to go up to the Indian camp tomorrow. Last I heard they was west of Kirby. Hope they ain’t moved since.”
Buskirk picked up Cord’s cup and inhaled with gusto. “My but that smells like sweet dreams.” He shook his head. “Me and Buck Knife, who is the chief now that his pa Tommy Two-Head is retired, we got to sign a contract for the coming tourist season. His Arapaho are my meat hunters, bring me buffalo from up near the Park. Tougher than a boot, but them dudes cannot get enough.”
Buskirk stared into the cup. “What I’m saying is, I am out of this fight. I am gone before sunup.”
“It’s always good to be horseback when the sun appears,” Cord agreed.^
“The thing is, I am too old for this.” He poked a finger at Cord. “You remember, no busting up my place. This resort spa is the home I never had.”
Cord finished his drink. “You got any guns, old man?” Buskirk gave Cord his shrewd speculative look. “Sure,” he said. “You got any plans?”
Eighteen
Cord lay in the chill darkness of a second floor bedroom, smoking a ramshackle cigarette he had built himself, and thinking—could not stop himself—thinking how lucky he was. Not trapped like Kelsey, not off in never-never land like Kyle Greer. Soon as this mess was over he was heading for his first chance at land of his own, and Chi was even making odd noises like she could think of nothing better. If that wasn’t luck...
He’d had luck much of his life, Cord decided. He’d been strong enough to survive the sort of searching that had addled Kyle Greer, and strength was a sort of luck: the luck of being born with quick hands and good intuition.
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