by Linda Jacobs
A bearded young man lay on the porch, clutching a sheaf of sheet music in his hand. Quenton read at the top of the crushed score that it was by Mozart. Fresh blood stained the worn wooden boards.
“Shot by the Nez Perce,” Scott told Quenton. Richard Dietrich was a music teacher from Helena who had studied in Germany. With two bullets through him, he wasn’t even cold yet.
Feddors raised his pistol and pointed it at Bitter Waters.
Cord’s throat threatened to close, but he managed, “This man had nothing to do with Richard Dietrich’s death.” He hoped that was true.
Before he finished his sentence, something like recognition spread over Feddors’s mean features. “Sergeant Nevers,” the captain said, “Ah believe ah have figured something out. Our Mr. Sutton’s Indian blood is not Crow, Bannock, or Shoshone.” He showed his yellowed teeth. “He’s a fuckin’ Nez Perce!”
Cord’s two worlds collided. His fate was sealed, as it had been since his birth.
“That’s right,” he said evenly. “This man you are threatening is my uncle.”
“That so?” Feddors’s pistol did not waver.
“Yes.” The second time, it came out easier.
“Captain Feddors!” said a voice from the forest. Cord didn’t dare take his eyes off the Colt to see who had arrived.
“Lieutenant Stafford.” Feddors solved the problem. “You’re not needed heah.”
From the corner of his eye, Cord saw Stafford dismount, Colt in hand. “Sir, as your second-in-command, I must back you and Sergeant Nevers up.” He looked at Bitter Waters astride Dante. “What is this man’s offense?”
“His offense?” The captain’s aim did not waver. “This man has been inciting the tourists about the Nez Perce War. Getting things stirred up all over again.”
“Bitter Waters is kin to me,” Cord broke in. “He has spoken the truth of history.”
Stafford’s solemn gray eyes flicked over Cord, his commanding officer, and back to Bitter Waters. “Let him leave the park in peace. He will agree not to return.”
To Cord’s surprise, his uncle inclined his head in answer.
Feddors glared at Bitter Waters a little longer, then shrugged. He holstered his pistol with what Cord believed to be pretended indifference.
“Go on,” Stafford directed.
Bitter Waters rode away with slow dignity. Several times, Dante looked back over his shoulder as if bewildered at being given away.
Stafford looked at Feddors. “There is a telephone message for you at the station, sir.”
Cord took the opportunity to walk, not ride, away.
What had he been thinking to entrust Dante to the man he’d always blamed for his parents’ death? He knew so little about Bitter Waters.
Except what the heart could discern.
His mother, Sarah, had always had a lilt in her voice when she spoke of her childhood family. Her older brother had taught her to call in waterfowl; to play games with a ball and stick; to dig clay from the creek bank, form it into shapes, and let it bake in the sun. Only when Franklin Sutton came and loved her had the trouble began; a story with so many rights and wrongs that Bitter Waters declared would take many suns to tell.
With an ache in his chest, Cord recalled the way Dante had trembled when he handed over the reins. He saw the intelligent brown eyes with their long black lashes, and recalled the contrast between the velvet nose and the few longer, coarse hairs when he stroked his muzzle. He counted the hours till noon and prayed Bitter Waters stuck around.
In preparation, Cord circled around the Wylie Camp and located Bitter Waters’s tethered Appaloosa. At his approach, the animal tossed his head, pawed, and snorted.
“Shh, shh,” he murmured. “You’re a good boy.” He should have taken the time to find out his name. To be sure he had the right horse, he checked the brand and found the rising sun.
Within minutes, Cord was leading him down to the lake for a drink. He walked him, then retethered him to the staked rope. Offering his hand, he let it be sniffed, and promised to return later in the day with
Bitter Waters.
Between now and then so many things would be decided.
The next time Cord saw Laura, she would proudly and publicly accept him, or she would not. With the bullet out, her father would improve, or he would begin to develop the fever and infection that presaged decline and death. Edgar would show up beside Cord at the late-morning meeting with the railroad, or he would have fled in the night.
Hell, what was the use in even showing up at the meeting? Why not just wait till noon, get Dante back, and ride?
But, no. He wasn’t going to run as Feddors hoped. He’d stay, attend the meeting with his head high. Hopkins Chandler and Norman Hagen had a clear choice to make.
Hank had behaved deceitfully, hiding the evidence of his past mistakes. Cord had to plead his personal record, his integrity … and the fact that in the new century there was no reason not to do business with the adopted son of prominent Aaron Bryce. After all, he was still the man who had created Excalibur.
One who just happened to have a newfound pride in his native roots.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JUNE 28
Cord nearly choked on his lukewarm coffee when Laura entered the hotel meeting room at ten-thirty with Hank. Dressed almost gaily in emerald silk, she nonetheless had dark circles etched beneath her wide green eyes. Two spots of color stood out, high on her otherwise pale face.
Norman Hagen, who had been tapping the table and running his fingers through his bushy red beard, smiled kindly. “How is your father?”
“Until he is better, I will represent the bank in these discussions.” Norman nodded.
Cord started a slow burn. How could she waltz in here with Hank after what had happened between them last night?
“We’ll wait for Edgar a minute more,” Norman suggested, though Hopkins Chandler looked displeased.
Laura took a seat. Her bent head revealed the nape of her neck, with an escaped lock of hair. The tendril curled to just below her collarbone, where a shadow defined the delicate hollow beneath the bone.
Cord stared at her, and she suddenly seemed to find her fingernails fascinating.
Norman studied the wall clock and looked apologetic. “I guess we should begin without Edgar.”
Cord did not argue.
“Even with Forrest struck down …” Hank cast a challenging look at Cord, “the Fielding Bank will still partner with me in funding my purchase of the Lake
Hotel.”
“What do you say, Norm?” Cord ignored the implied accusation and used the familiar version of Norman’s name that he’d adopted this spring in St. Paul. He still hoped for a quick decision; perhaps Hopkins Chandler would leave the park before hearing any slurs against his heritage. “When do you anticipate making a decision?”
“Hold on,” Hank demanded. “I have new information that bears on Sutton’s eligibility to purchase the concession.”
A creeping cold took hold of Cord. Surely, Laura couldn’t have …
Hank rose. “The United States Government and the Northern Pacific have gone to a great deal of trouble to clear the Crow, Blackfoot, and Shoshone out of Yellowstone Park.”
Cord set his jaw.
Hank paused to light a cheroot, while anticipation deepened. Inhaling through pursed lips, he blew the smoke across the table into a cloud over Cord’s head.
“I have learned,” he announced smugly, “that William Cordon Sutton, despite his fancy name and blue eyes, is really a Nez Perce.”
Cord was on his feet, looking at Laura with a rage so palpable she felt as if he had struck her. His sleek hair gleamed in the light, and Laura thought that Sarah’s hair must have been like that, a blackbird’s wing glowing in the fire that had consumed her.
Laura fought the lump in the back of her throat and forced herself to look at him. “I didn’t …”
Hopkins Chandler’s expression was ugly, as he glanced at t
he railroad poster of the fallen red man. “If this is true … Mr. Sutton … ?”
Laura watched Cord draw himself up and make a formal bow. He addressed the room at large, “For the second time this morning, I am taken to task for the blood of my people.”
His angry gaze met Laura’s and held. “And for the second time, I must confess—no, announce with pride—that I am of the Nimiipuu, the People.”
Then he wasn’t looking at her anymore, but at Hopkins Chandler. “If that eliminates me from your consideration as a buyer, then there is nothing more to be said.”
He stalked from the table and left the room. The firmness with which he shut the door behind him was not quite a slam.
Laura wanted to go after him, but Norman leaned forward, both hands flat on the table. “I don’t see why,” he addressed his boss, “there couldn’t be a shift in policy. It is the twentieth century and Cord—that is, Sutton—is only one-quarter Nez Perce. His association with Aaron Bryce …”
“Yes,” Laura agreed.
“This is ridiculous.” Hank glared at her. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”
She got up. “I agreed to come, because Father asked me to. I am here to represent that if you should be chosen to buy the hotel, Fielding Bank will back you.” Her eyes met Norman’s and he nodded. “But I cannot deny I want Cord to win.”
Hopkins Chandler slammed his palm atop the table. “Everyone shut up!”
Everyone did.
“Hear this, and hear it good. This afternoon I am leaving for St. Paul and telling the home office that there is no one to whom I could recommend selling the hotel.”
Twenty minutes before noon, Cord waited and watched near Bitter Waters’s tethered Appaloosa. The blood was still raging through his veins.
He’d trusted Laura with his secrets. And only a few hours after they had parted from sharing everything that was right and good between a man and a woman, Hank had come to the table armed with all he needed to defeat him.
As the minutes ticked toward twelve, Cord scanned the woods for his uncle’s approach. If he’d bolted for the park boundary, Dante was many miles away. While there were people to whom horseflesh was simply that, Dante was …
A faint shush of moccasin on leaf, and Cord turned.
Bitter Waters stood with his weight balanced on both feet, a bag over his shoulder, and Dante’s reins light in his hand. A little boy’s impulse to run and throw his arms around his stallion’s neck seized Cord. “I fed your Appaloosa and watered him.”
The older man replied, “I had no feed, but Dante cropped sweet grass and drank from the lake while we waited for the hour.”
“That is all I might ask.”
This was wrong. There was so little time, there was no time, and they spoke in stilted tones.
Bitter Waters handed over Dante and walked to his mount. He bent and pulled up the metal stake and chain. “I thank you.”
Cord swallowed. “I … we are family.”
His uncle’s face softened. “That is what I have always hoped to hear from you. Speaking of family,” he gestured toward the hotel, “you will take the woman as wife?”
This morning, when he and Laura had left the stable, he might almost have considered it. Now, he shook his head. “She is set upon a different path.”
Bitter Waters stowed his tether and chain in his bag. He moved, lithe and quick for an older man, and mounted his horse bareback. “Something you must learn, Obsidian.”
Cord waited.
“Your wayakin is hard and tough, but also brittle and easy to break.”
Bitter Waters nudged his horse. “Always honor your people, the Nimiipuu, as well as your father’s, and as for the woman …”
He started to ride away, but looked back a last time. “You must find a way to change her path.”
Though the morning had dawned clear, rain was once again threatening when Cord approached the hotel porch. Intent on his mission of pounding on the door of Forrest Fielding’s suite, and camping out in the hall if no one answered, he almost walked past Laura as she exited the lobby.
“There you are.” He gripped her wrist.
“Let me go!”
He didn’t loosen his hold. “Not until I have some answers.”
The lake roiled beneath the overcast.
“What do you mean by spending the night with me and then coming into the meeting on Hank’s side?” Cord pressed.
A pair of elderly women fled the weather, their beetled brows telegraphing disapproval as they passed.
Laura jerked free. Cord stepped closer; she retreated until a porch post at her back stopped her. “What could I do? Father may be dying, and he begged me to help Hank.”
The wind rose; a few fat raindrops landed on the porch. Laura’s skirt billowed.
Cord took her by the shoulders, his thumbs framing the hollow at the base of her neck. “How you could have faked … ?”
He stopped at the sight of Constance running up the drive toward the hotel. One of her hands was raised to shield her silken hair.
Laura had her back to her cousin’s approach.
“Faked?”
Constance bounded up the stairs onto the porch, brushing raindrops from her face and her pretty cretonne dress, printed with pink flowers. Her blue eyes went wide at the sight of Cord apparently manhandling her cousin. “William! What are you doing?”
“I am trying,” he gritted, “to have a conversation with Laura.”
The weather whipped up off the lake in earnest, a tearing gust swept chill rain in under the overhang.
“Talk about this,” Constance challenged. “That ugly Captain Feddors keeps telling everyone you’re a Nez Perce.”
Let it all be in the open, then. “It’s true.”
He straightened and stepped away from Laura.
“Yes, it’s true,” Laura echoed. Cord couldn’t tell if she meant to support him or cut him down.
Constance’s chest heaved; she struggled to pull off the ring she’d agreed to keep. Clutching it, she raked the stone down Cord’s right cheek.
He sucked in his breath. The slash mirrored the scar on his left; he felt once more as though he’d been sliced with a knife.
But he refused to flinch, just raised a hand and touched the trail of blood.
“To think I trusted you.” Constance’s voice caught.
Laura ducked away, slammed the screen door open, and disappeared into the hotel.
“You low-down cad!” Constance held out the garnet in trembling fingers.
He made no move to take it.
“I was so happy when you gave this to me.” She laughed, a bitter note.
It sent him back painfully to St. Paul and a rose garden in spring; their mingled laughter had marked their retreat from the dinner party into the softness of evening. The perfume of roses had filled his head, along with the carnation scent he’d come to associate with her soft white skin.
On the porch, the rain came down harder, blowing in and splattering their shoes. He’d thought it was too good to be true the way she’d let him off the hook without a fight.
“You lied to me about who you are. You lied to everybody!”
Cord started to say he hadn’t lied, but he’d already concluded the sin of omission was as great as an outright falsehood. “I’m sorry for that, now.”
“Take it.” Constance offered the ring again. When he still did not accept it, she made a move to slip it into his pocket.
Cord wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, took the garnet, and laid it carefully on her palm. “All I can say is I’m sorry it couldn’t have turned out better.”
Constance ran until the breath burned in her chest, and she kept on running, heedless of the rain streaming down her face and soaking her pink-flowered dress.
Lightning split the sky, and she dodged, as if it would pick her out above the scrubby sage and meadow grass. The rain came down harder, silver sheets blowing sideways across the field. Almost to the shelter
of a copse of fir, she turned her ankle on a tuft of sod.
She went down, full length in a patch of wet earth.
The tears started again, welling up from that place they had begun the other day when William had kissed her savagely and then turned away. Thunder rolled through the meadow, and she opened her hand, looking down at the ring smeared with fresh earth.
What was worse, learning he cared for Laura and keeping her head up, or finding him to be a lying masquerader who’d tried to fool both her and her cousin?
She lay in the dirt, while the deluge began to let up. Though she knew she should rise, she didn’t have the spirit for it.
Suddenly, incongruously, a waft of smoke came to her on the wind.
Constance raised her head and looked into the copse.
Sheltering from the weather with a shoulder against a tree, Norman Hagen drew on his cigarette. He shielded the flame from the drips that made it through the needled canopy. Though not as wet as she was, his thick hair curled in the humid air.
“What are you doing out here in the rain?” she asked, knowing she looked a fright.
“I could ask you the same thing.” His cigarette made a crimson rose against the dark day.
As if continuing a conversation they had started the last time they were together, he smiled. “It’s done,
then?”
“The storm?”
“The storm is abating, but I was referring to your relationship with Cord Sutton. I take it you’re upset because you didn’t know about his background.”
Constance pushed herself up onto hands and knees and tried to brush dirt from her dress. She succeeded in smearing it into more mud. “Of course, I’m upset.
He didn’t …”
“He didn’t let a lot of people know, and I can’t say I disagree with him. Does it really matter so much to you that he’s Nez Perce?”
“Not so much that, but he should have told me if …”
“If you were the one for him, he might well have.”
He reached into the pocket of his brown vicuna jacket. “Smoke?” He extended a pack of Richmond Straight Cuts.