Lake of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  Gooseflesh prickled her arms, and she peered through the rising light, thinking how she might warn Cord without sounding an alarm. She could try to whisper.

  The apparition resolved itself into a large boulder.

  Her stomach tense, she lay back. Cord was on guard, and he apparently had excellent instincts: knowing from just the scent that a grizzly approached, hearing the click of a gun being cocked, and somehow divining that the outlaw spied on her while she was bathing, even as he was in another pool.

  Studying his profile, she had to admit that beneath his rough beard and thick hair he was a handsome man. And last night, when he had turned away from her, the expression in his eyes had been something she recognized. She’d seen the same look of lust … or longing on men’s faces before and elucidated the encounters in her journal.

  Only two months ago in the soft Chicago spring, the warm breeze had sighed through the gazebo on a long green lawn sloping to Lake Michigan. Just Laura and Joseph Kane, heir to the Kane Mercantile Fortune … Laura’s father would have loved it. Though she had opened her mouth to Joseph’s and run her hands across his broad shoulders and through the gold of his hair, she’d felt nothing more than a peculiar woodenness.

  Aunt Fanny had told her a lady need not necessarily expect to enjoy the act of love, but the restless stirrings Laura sometimes felt had led her to expect more, although she could not say exactly what it was that made her spurn Joseph’s offer of marriage.

  Perhaps it was the same spirit of wanting more that had induced her to travel alone by stage through the wilder parts of the West, something her father did not yet know. Had she known what that decision meant, would she make it again?

  She closed her eyes against the coming of morning.

  Cord stared down the boulder near the edge of the woods for the fortieth time. His eyes were scratchy, and he had to concentrate to keep them open.

  A few minutes ago, he’d thought Laura lifted her head and looked around, but maybe it had been another figment of his overactive imagination. If the outlaw from the stage was shadowing them because they’d seen his face, why had he passed up a dozen or more opportunities to kill them?

  Here Cord was, inside the national park, with his Winchester at the ready when it was against regulation for him to be carrying weapons that hadn’t been sealed by army inspectors.

  He looked again toward the bedroll. Laura appeared to be sleeping.

  At times she seemed a dirty transient on her way to do menial labor in the park. But then he would reconsider: those clothes she’d left behind had cost a pretty penny. And what was that remark about reading The Divine Comedy?

  He had, in fact, named a new colt Dante because the rambunctious fellow had been a perfect little hellion.

  As dawn began to brighten, Cord rose from his cramped position and stretched his legs. Keeping his rifle close, he stirred up the fire’s embers, added wood, and put water on to boil.

  Laura opened her eyes to the welcome smell of coffee and exhaled a puff of white. Rolling over, she stretched her arms above her head and found her gaze meeting Cord’s across the morning campfire.

  He poured coffee into the mug she had used before and brought it to her. She pushed back the covers and sat up to take her drink. Sipping the strong black liquid, she studied him over the rim.

  He smiled. Though he often appeared content, she sensed sadness in him, some empty place needing to be filled.

  Or she could be wrong. Perhaps, in spite of his claim to soap making, he did have a woman somewhere in a mountain cabin. Maybe he loved this woman, who was more like him than Laura would ever be.

  At midday, beneath a sky of almost-impossible blue, they came to West Thumb Geyser Basin. Moored alongshore, a stern-wheeled paddleboat stood two stories tall, painted a gaudy red and black. The forward and upper decks were open-air, with a large rear cabin. Gilded metal flames decorated the rims of the smokestacks, and gold letters a foot high proclaimed the boat to be the Alexandra. Passengers from a nearby stagecoach climbed the planks laid from the dock to the lower deck.

  Cord shifted his weight behind Laura on the saddle and brought Dante to a halt at the edge of Yellowstone Lake. Framed against the snowcapped Absarokas to the east, cobalt water stretched away to the horizon. A warm wind frothed the surface into waves that flung themselves onto the rocky shore.

  Located at the southwest corner of twenty-milelong Yellowstone Lake, the hot springs of Thumb filled pools of steaming water. Brilliantly colored algae streamed like long hair in the conduits that overflowed and ran down from the hot pools to the lake. Farther from shore, gentle eddies swirled, while strings of bubbles marked where additional springs mingled warm water with the cold lake. A few yards out, a pair of flat, travertine cones broke the surface of the clear, shallow water.

  Cord pointed to the larger of the two, which looked like a miniature volcano of pale gray sinter, three feet high. Steam escaped its mouth. “That’s Fishing Cone. You can catch a trout in the lake and cook it in boiling water without taking it off the line.” His smile crinkled the skin around his eyes.

  The boat’s steam whistle blew, a long, shrill call.

  “Hank Falls will charge too much, but he’s got the best boat on the lake.”

  She’d practically forgotten Hank.

  “You’d better hurry.” The vertical furrow between Cord’s brows became a deeper slash.

  It was time to return to being Miss Laura of Fielding House, to wearing sweeping skirts and sleeping alone in a bed with crisp, clean sheets. She got her balance to dismount.

  The whistle blew again.

  She moved to sling her leg across, but Cord reached forward and put a stilling hand on her thigh. “Why don’t we ride the rest of the way to the hotel?”

  Laura looked at the boat where the gangplank was being raised. There was money in her pocket for passage, bills that had been wet and dried several times on the trek, but still legal tender. There was time, if she hailed them, dismounted, and ran for it.

  Silently, she watched the plank secured on deck. Smoke poured from the stacks, and the Alexandra began to pull away from the bank.

  Cord turned Dante’s head away from the shore and urged him along the rock path, pointing out where spring deposits glowed in a hundred hues—emerald, olive, brick, orange, ochre—from mineral staining and more algae. Pools lay filled with the clearest turquoise water, as well as opaque concoctions of pink and gray mud.

  They left the geyser basin behind, riding not at the water’s edge where tree trunks felled by storms made passage tortuous, but farther back in the woods with a filtered view.

  “There was once a great volcano here. The lake fills its crater,” Cord observed.

  She’d seen obsidian here in the park and other once-molten rocks of the type called igneous but hadn’t expected him to know such things.

  “My father studied geology,” he went on. “He always carried a pick and bag for samples, on the lookout for color in every streambed.”

  “Gold?”

  “Mostly, a little silver. But his efforts at prospecting in Jackson’s Hole barely saw his family through the winters.”

  “Does he still … ?”

  Cord shook his head. “He died in 1877, along with my mother.”

  “I’m sorry … You must have been very young.”

  He cleared his throat. “Yellowstone once had grand volcanoes, with eruptions bigger than Mount Vesuvius when it buried Pompeii and Herculaneum.”

  That was easy to believe; the evidence was everywhere. Heat from within the earth escaped to warm the pools she and Cord had bathed in at Witch Creek, to boil the colorful mud pots at Thumb. Why, it was even possible that someday this land, which lay deceptively lovely beneath its mantle of evergreen, would again erupt into inferno.

  A few hours later, they rounded a point, and Laura spied a long yellow building across an arm of water.

  “The hotel,” Cord said unnecessarily, for she recognized the accommodation fro
m postcards.

  He drew rein and made a move to dismount. “We’ll rest a little while here.”

  Once on the ground, she strolled away to the base of a bluff where winter storm waves had undercut the lakeshore. Great festooned cross beds of sand stood out in sharp relief in the fifteen-foot-high cliff that headed the beach.

  She traced her fingers along a row of pebbles that must have once lain on the bottom of an ancient stream. Though she did not look at Cord, she was aware of him putting together a fishing rod, attaching a metal hook to a line, and digging into the sandy soil for a worm.

  Casting far out into the crystal shallows, he began reeling the line in, keeping his thumb close to the guard to apply more drag if necessary.

  Laura wandered a circuitous route and sat on a flat rock near Cord’s elbow. Far away, Hank Falls’s steamboat cut a white wake through blue water, and she was fiercely glad she wasn’t aboard.

  Rolling up the sleeves of the shirt Cord had given her, she lay back on the sun-warmed rock, propping herself on her arm to follow the hypnotic dance of man and fish. Each time Cord cast, he sent the bait flying toward a deep pool beside a fallen log. It might have been her imagination, but she believed she could see the shapes of fish in the shadows there.

  Suddenly the fishing pole jerked. Cord pulled up sharply on the tip. Laura leaped to her feet and stood close enough to see beads of sweat on his brow.

  As he worked, she watched the clear water for the first sighting. Flashing in the shallows, the fish was a deep spotted pink and green with a bright orange slash beneath his head.

  Cord waded into four inches of water and captured it. “Cutthroat trout,” he announced, holding the flapping fish between his hands. “Now you catch one.”

  “Me?” Laura laughed. “Catch a fish?” Something she’d never tried, though people fished all the time in Lake Michigan.

  Cord shook his head, the sun glinting on his ebony hair. “Lady, if you can shoot a bear, you can hook a trout.”

  He bent and dug around until he found another worm and offered it to her on his open palm. The shiny pink segments twisted and curled as the primitive animal sought escape to the soil.

  A few seconds passed.

  Cord nodded toward the pole lying on the sand. “Pick that up, find the hook, carefully, and thread this fellow onto it.”

  Laura’s lips set in a line. He was toying with her, and she shouldn’t care to impress him, not when she would never see him again after this afternoon.

  She reached for the pole.

  Hook in her left hand, she extended her right toward Cord’s outstretched palm and its wriggling burden. Was that a hint of merriment at the corners of his mouth?

  Before she could lose her nerve, Laura grabbed the moist worm, slammed the point of the hook through its narrow body—and into the pad of her thumb.

  “Ow!” Pain and a drop of blood’s welling were simultaneous.

  Cord’s chuckle, which had begun when she seized the worm, choked off as he took in her misfortune. “Let me have it.”

  “No.”

  Laura put her thumb to her mouth and sucked the salty blood. The puncture smarted but not as much as her pride. “Stand back,” she instructed. “I’m going to catch a fish.”

  Thirty minutes later, Laura lay in the sun and watched Cord through half-closed, sleepy eyes. The trout she had pulled in lay beside his, the larger of the two.

  “Just my luck,” he said, “to have rescued a woman who not only kills a bear but shows me up fishing.”

  With efficient sharp strokes of his knife, Cord sliced open the bellies of the fish and gutted them. A pair of gulls seemed to materialize from nowhere to quarrel over the entrails, strutting and pecking at one another.

  Cord gathered wood and built a bonfire on the sand. He cut a strong green sapling from the thicket behind the beach and skewered the trout on the stick. Sitting on his heels, he fed the fire larger sticks until it blazed hotly.

  Across the lake in the high mountains, a plume of smoke rose lazily in the afternoon light. “What is that?” Laura pointed.

  “Forest fire on Mount Doane. Some of the soldiers are probably trying to put it out. Bit early in the season, but last year’s snowpack was only half that of the year before.”

  “You know a lot about the park.”

  “Gustavus Doane is the military man who escorted the Washburn Expedition in 1870. His journal of their trip gave him the credit for naming Wonderland.” Looking at Laura, Cord cocked a brow. “Those of us who lived in these mountains before they were ‘discovered’ take issue with some people’s terms.”

  “You said your father was a geologist?”

  “Trained at some college in the east. I don’t know much about it. He never went back there after he married my mother.” Cord prodded the fish with a fork.

  “His family didn’t approve his choice of a wife?”

  Without answering, he removed the stick, beheaded and boned each trout, and served fillets on tin plates.

  Laura decided not to question him further and turned her attention to the meal. Tender and flaky, the pink fish reminded her of both salmon and trout.

  When they had eaten, Cord set the plates aside.

  Time was running out. He would douse the fire and kick sand over it, whistle up Dante from where he cropped grass, and they’d be on their way.

  Moving deliberately, Cord came and straddled the rock behind Laura. They’d been as close, closer, when sharing Dante’s saddle, but this was different. His hands slid gently over the tops of her shoulders.

  For an instant, she thought of pulling away, but the decorum she’d learned in Chicago felt as far away as the city itself. The sun made diamond facets on the lake, shining in her eyes until the beauty made her ache with mingled joy and sadness.

  Cord drew her closer, and she thought he might have murmured her name. The afternoon breeze calmed and turned Thumb into a mirror. His arms came around her, and they watched the play of ripples lapping the sand.

  “Why did you ride away from the steamboat?” she asked.

  “Fishing,” he replied solemnly. “Fishing!”

  “You’re fishing.” Cord turned her to him, put a hand beneath her chin, and tilted her face up. “You want to hear me say I wasn’t ready to give you up yet.”

  For the rest of her life, Laura promised, she would remember this, that little halting space between knowing Cord was going to touch her and feeling his lips, warm against her temple.

  “You want to hear me say how beautiful you were when I saw you rising naked out of the pool like Venus.”

  Cord couldn’t decide whether her indrawn gasp was one of innocence or the calculated art of a practiced harlot. They’d been through so much in such a short time, cheated death and shared the incomparable beauty of his land.

  He told himself it didn’t matter who they were or where they went tomorrow. He wanted to take her down with him on his sheepskin bedroll, to keep her with him all of another night and another, to watch warm cherry light flicker over the smooth-looking skin he’d seen at the pool last evening.

  The soft cotton of his shirt enveloped her, a powerful intimacy that made him want to protect her, from outlaws and anyone else who might challenge his claim.

  She clung to his shoulders, and Cord heard what might have been a sob catch in her throat. The little breathy sound reminded him of another who had whispered his name on St. Paul’s spring air.

  One who waited for him at the Lake Hotel.

  Laura had never wanted anything more than to have Cord teach her what happened between a man and a woman, but she felt him hesitate again, the way he had last night.

  More of that mystery boiling beneath his surface. She drew back and watched his expression alter, the proud ascetic planes turning harder.

  “Cord …” Her voice came out trembling and husky; she’d never heard it that way. The sun slipped behind a cloud, and the shade in the pine-smelling woods deepened.

  He closed
his eyes, as though they stung. For a fleeting instant, Laura thought his emotion might have been pain.

  Reaching a tentative hand, she touched his denimclad thigh.

  He jerked his leg away, though he still touched her shoulders.

  Laura looked at the silent forest and the still mirror of lake. The two of them alone for days, her nerves on edge from the savagery of the outlaws and being in the backwoods. Had she imagined he wanted her?

  Her woman’s instinct believed he did, but he would never beg or steal a kiss the way her Chicago suitors had. No, Cord would be hopeless at drawingroom games. Not for him the niceties of courtship; with him it would be all or nothing.

  Well, at least she knew the answer to the questions cascading through her. There was nothing for them, no meeting place for a mountain man and the mistress of Fielding House.

  And though he had been the one to pull back, she could at least hold her head up the way Aunt Fanny said a woman must.

  “Let us go, then,” Laura said in a low voice.

  Cord took his hands from her as if his palms had been burned, rose, and stalked away. Like a nightmare in which her arms and legs were too heavy to move, she sat where she was and watched him go to Dante. The sun reappeared from behind the clouds, slanting through the pines.

  She heard Cord speak gently to his horse. The contrast was more terrible when he spoke to her in a distant tone. “It’s an hour to the Lake Hotel. I’ll have you there by dark.”

  Cord guided Dante toward the shoulder of the well-traveled road along the lakeshore, while Laura held on behind him with her hands at his waist. His rigid posture made her feel as though he were made of wood.

  Across royal blue water, the Lake Hotel stood on a promontory. Three stories high, its yellow made a bright contrast to the forest.

  Though their last moments together were slipping away like the sun from the afternoon sky, Cord’s eyes remained on the wheeling gulls. “Not much farther.”

  With a drumming of horses’ hooves, a group of blue-coated cavalrymen overtook and passed them at a gallop, casting a cursory glance in their direction. Fishermen walked up the shoulder of the road carrying rods and buckets. The youngest of their group, a boy of perhaps six, had the honor of carrying their stringer of trout.