Magee hesitated a long beat—and went for it, tried to draw on her. She beat him by a lot and put a clean shot right through his pump. Blood splattered the wall behind him.
Chi watched Magee’s body ooze down the wall. “Maybe not,” she said.
It could have ended there—should have, if the boy had sense. But then the moment was gone, and he was proving he had none at all, pulling his gun and giving out a hard grunt. Cord beat him left-handed and shot him from the side. Luke screamed and spun away and went down.
“That’s enough,” Carlisle ordered. He was covering Sheeny and Pincus with his rifle. They kept their hands carefully clear of their weapons.
“Doesn’t have to be over yet,” Chi spat at Sheeny and Pincus. “We can have lots more fun at your expense.” She looked mad enough to chew nails.
“It is, though,” Pincus said quickly. “Over and done.”
“Not quite.” Chi went up to Pincus, her gun on him all the while. “There is one more piece of old business. Who leads the night riders? Who was so itchy to kill my partner?”
“Mallory Bliss,” Pincus said. “Everybody knows that.”
Chi placed her gun muzzle against his one elbow.
“A man called Stringer,” Pincus said.
“Big wide man?” Cord asked. “Rides a black horse with three white stockings, and wears fighting boots like that boy?”
“That’s him.”
“You tell him that we have got some things to settle,” Cord said.
Pincus glanced at Luke’s bleeding body. “You’ve got that right, pal,” Pincus said. “You just killed his kid brother.”
But Cord had already guessed that part. “Take your trash and give us some peace.”
“I got a feeling you are going to see us again,” Pincus said malevolently.
“Better bring an army,” Cord snapped. He never felt good after a fight. “Now do what I say.”
Pincus and Sheeny came forward, got the corpses under the arms, and started to drag them out.
“Hold it,” Chi said. She bent and pulled the two hundred dollars from Luke’s shirt pocket, watching the two men, challenging someone to object. “Now it is all right,” she said.
Everything hung silently while Pincus and Sheeny drug their drinking cronies out the door. Cord watched through the window as they loaded the bodies over their saddles and tied them on.
Chi turned away from the door, her expression composed. Cord was annoyed. He’d already told her clearly that he meant to do something about the men who tried to hang him, but here she had nearly taken the play away from him. Instead of deliberation, she had acted with something near to craziness.
“Well, now,” She put her gun away under her serape, gazing back at him. “Maybe one more drink for the road.”
Cord stared at her. The oddest hunch crossed his mind: For some reason unexpressed but likely having to do with whatever was eating at her, had she chosen to challenge their mortality? Cord felt hot: Where was her right to draw him into her quick mad life-and-death games?
“All right?” she said lightly, and moved past. Well, it had turned out all right, that he must admit. Then he realized the rest of it. She had turned away from the boy Luke, put her back to him and left her protection to Cord’s weak left hand, because she knew: as always, one-handed or no, Cord would be ready, and able, to cover her. The old instincts and cues of partnership remained intact. What happened in Livingston was behind them.
She was correct after all: they still worked together pretty damned effectively. What else did she know, Cord wondered …
He jammed his Colt back into the holster and turned back to the bar. Carlisle let the hammer down on the rifle. “For a librarian,” Cord said, “you are pretty damned fast with a long gun.”
Carlisle lay the weapon on the bar and looked as if he would say something. Instead, he merely shook his head. His face was a little paste-colored.
“If you have any other colorful secrets,” Chi said, “now is the time to lay them out.”
“You gonna shoot me in the elbow if I don’t talk?” Carlisle snapped. But his voice sounded reedy, and all of a sudden he crossed his arms and lay his head down on the bar top.
“Richard!” Fiona Cobb said with concern. She filled a shot glass with whiskey and pressed it into Carlisle’s hand. He raised his head and sucked it down. Fiona Cobb poured a refill.
Carlisle straightened, holding the glass. “We are done,” he said in a voice thick with despair. He gestured with the glass. “To happier trails,” he said miserably, and drank the whiskey.
“It could be okay, Richard,” Fiona Cobb said urgently. “We still have them.” She waved in Chi’s direction without looking toward her.
“I don’t like being talked about that way,” Chi said. “Like I’m not here.”
“You’re right,” Fiona Cobb said quickly. “I am sorry.”
“That’s better.” But Chi looked a bit surprised at the apology from this lady.
“Run out if you must, Richard,” Fiona Cobb said. “It won’t be the first time.”
“For either of us.” Carlisle reached for the bottle.
Fiona Cobb snatched it back away from him. Carlisle blinked. The doctor set the bottle on the back bar. “To now we were not involved in any way with Stringer’s mob.” She turned to face the three of them. “Mallory is responsible for them.”
“No blood on your hands,” Cord said.
“Two of his men died in our place,” Fiona Cobb said. “We’ve taken a side—at least Stringer will see it that way. You don’t know him.”
“Maybe we do,” Chi said.
Fiona Cobb was not paying attention. “You are right, Richard. We must decide now whether to stay or go.” She looked up at Cord and Chi. “And so must you.”
“But bear this in mind,” Carlisle warned. “If you stay, you are in on the trouble. You got no choice at all.”
“I can’t stand being told to fight or run,” Chi said.
“Not that it hasn’t happened before,” Cord muttered.
“Well, if I’ve got to hear it,” Chi said, “I better be told the whys and wherefores. I want to know every damned thing.”
“Before we make any rash decisions.” Cord was still thinking about the late gunfight.
“Time for true talk,” Chi said.
“Yes,” Fiona Cobb said, as if that had not occurred to her. “Of course.”
Chapter Six
In most of the towns through which Cord’s wanderings had taken him over the years, a few books were set aside somewhere. Especially here on the northern plains, where winters were hard and dark and short on entertainment and escape, books were dear and shared. In the corner of a saloon or mercantile, perhaps in the county sheriff’s office, folks set up a lending library of a few dozen volumes of books for rent or to swap.
And Cord had seen true libraries as well, massive stone temples in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver. He knew there existed a wealth of words published between hard boards. But he would never have expected to find such a library here in the middle of 750 square miles of nothing but grass and cows.
The Enterprise Free Library had been constructed and stocked with care and bibliophilic devotion. Big glass windows let in the mid-morning sun to the three reading tables with matched chairs lined up along a wide middle aisle. To either side shelves rose toward the ceiling, filled with books whose spines and edges were free of dust. An oak countertop desk faced the double front doors. Behind it were shelved Webster’s Dictionary of the American Language and other dictionaries, in French and Spanish, an Encyclopedia Britannica; biographical collections, including Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; a King James Bible; and the works of Shakespeare.
Cord stood paging at an atlas of the world, thinking this library would be no more unlikely if discovered in the heart of farthest Africa. It was an eerie place, carefully provisioned wi
th everything but readers. It must have been an expensive and epic undertaking, freighting all these books up the Missouri or on the railroad, and then by wagon across the prairie, protecting the cargo from rain and dust. Cord closed the atlas and turned to Fiona Cobb and Richard Carlisle.
“Why?”
“Bliss likes to read,” Carlisle said, as if that explained everything.
“Speak up.” Chi came out of the shadows of a high shelf.
“Culture, knowledge, and high thought.” Carlisle spread his arms, palms up. “The common bedrock of order. And order,” Carlisle said, “is the one true ambition of Mallory Bliss.”
Carlisle ran a thumbnail along the cloth spines of a shelf of books. He turned, pinned in a shaft of sunbeam streaming down from one of the high windows. “Behold his beacon,” Carlisle said. “The shining light that will bring society to this wilderness.”
“What are you talking about?” Cord still felt irritable.
“It will not always be this way,” Fiona Cobb said.
“I hope to hell not,” Cord said, misunderstanding.
“Enterprise will be a true community someday. People will stream to this place and establish themselves.”
“Is that what you want?” Chi said.
“It’s what he wants,” Carlisle said with some awe, as if the pronoun referenced the Lord himself.
Fiona Cobb leaned back against the oak countertop and regarded them. “When Mallory came here, the country was empty, and his alone. That changed within a few years. The railroad drove past Miles City. Homesteaders were settling not too far away.”
“He was losing his grip,” Carlisle said.
Fiona Cobb related the story in a soft voice, and truth to tell, the library did provoke reverence. On the one hand, Bliss hated the idea of people claiming homestead right to even the smallest piece of “his” land. This basin, this great thirty-mile bowl of grass, demarked by the mountains rising on every side—it was his. He was here first, and he worked this land and made it productive, and no one would take it from him. On the other hand, to live as a gentleman, he must live among others. There was no civilization without society.
“So Mallory determined to mold a society to his own specifications,” Fiona Cobb said. “A benevolent fiefdom, his empire—in his image, by his whim. Finally, a couple of years ago, he was wealthy enough to go to work. The first step was to invent this town of Enterprise.”
“The petty bourgeoisie,” Carlisle said.
“Talk English,” Chi said.
“The merchant class,” Carlisle explained. “They would be his subjects. Around his market town, people would take up small parcels of land on which to live and work. He would even allow them to raise produce and chickens and hogs for themselves. The open range would be his alone.”
“Cockamamie plan,” Chi said.
“Someone should have told him,” Carlisle said mildly. “Too late now.”
But Cord was thinking that it all made an odd sort of sense, as much sense as this library anyway. He was starting to put the pieces together. “Your windmill,” he said to Fiona Cobb. “Your windmill and your water.”
Fiona Cobb nodded. “That dictated his townsite, of course. The water for his ranchstead is diverted from the river, and by late summer there is barely enough for his people and stock. I gave him his townsite.”
“And he gave you his town,” Chi said.
“The hotel, saloon, café and mercantile,” she confirmed. “In exchange for rights to my water.”
“And a lady doctor thrown into the bargain,” Cord said. “He had plenty of time to get used to the idea of a woman ministering to the ill. His third winter here, Mallory was gun shot in a hunting accident. I took out the bullet.”
“You never told me that,” Carlisle said. He shook his head. “Circles within circles.”
“He set me up in my surgery to serve the people when they come. In the meanwhile I patch up cowhands when necessary and see to his veterinary needs.”
“And one day last summer,” Chi said, “the stage driver tossed you a bartender.”
“I am a man of parts,” Carlisle said. “Some fair skill at bartending and cooking have carried me through sparse times. And I was a surveyor once, so when I arrived I got construction work until I'd ingratiated myself. Then, when Bliss learned I was a librarian and a schoolteacher to boot—”
“A schoolteacher?” Chi echoed.
Carlisle nodded happily. “I sold myself to Bliss as a graduate of Oberlin College of Ohio.”
“Are you?”
“Not exactly. I was a student there for six months, but there was some trouble with a professor’s daughter.”
“Picking on little girls,” Chi sneered.
“But I was a little boy,” Carlisle said coyly.
“Sometimes, Richard,” Fiona Cobb said, “you act as if you still are.”
Carlisle colored. “Be that as it may,” he went on quickly, “Bliss’s plan for attracting people of refinement included a schoolhouse, and there I was.”
Cord watched dust specks turn lazily in the sunlight. It was warm in the close building. “So far, Bliss has done a fine job putting together his dream town,” he observed. “He’s got a doctor whose patients are mostly horses and cows, a schoolteacher without pupils, a mercantile and hotel without customers, and our Mr. Carlisle here, scholar and rifleman.”
“There is one other thing he has got,” Chi pointed out. “Serious gun trouble, right around the corner.” She stood facing Fiona Cobb, arms akimbo. “Now you tell us: What is wrong with your man? How does he square his great plans with hanging strangers?”
Chi’s bluntness caught Fiona Cobb off-guard. “You can understand,” she said reasonably.
“Not ever,” Chi said evenly.
“Mallory is not well.”
“Mr. Mallory Bliss,” Carlisle said, “is our Ahab, and order is his white whale. The trouble is, the old boy is nutty as Melville’s captain.”
“Well now,” Cord said with some exasperation. “That explains it all.”
Fiona Cobb turned abruptly. In the shadow of the bookshelf she ran her forefinger over spines, extracted a thick volume bound in black cloth. She handed it to Chi, and Cord read the title over her shoulder: Elements of Physiological Psychology, by George Trumbull Ladd.
“What the hell?” Cord was perplexed.
Chi tapped her temple with a forefinger. “Serious sorts of craziness.”
“I believe Mallory suffers from megalomania,” Fiona Cobb said. “A delusional mental disorder marked by feelings of personal omnipotence.”
“What in God’s name does that mean?” Cord asked.
“Mallory cannot distinguish right from wrong anymore,” Fiona Cobb said.
“Well, then everything is okay,” Cord said with heavy sarcasm. “Now that I know he is daft, I feel a lot better about him trying to stretch me.”
“He cannot stop himself,” Fiona Cobb said simply. “And he was misled.”
“I’ll tell the world,” Cord snapped. “Your man is living in his bad dreams.”
“Not entirely,” Carlisle said. “The rustler problem is real enough.”
“Too bad.”
Carlisle pursed his lips. “Ranchers all over this territory have been losing up to ten percent of their stock. Not the culls either, but fat cows right down the line. And in this big basin, with no law and few hands per the acre, Bliss was suffering bad as anyone.”
“A rich man,” Chi said. “Why should we care for him?”
She looked at Cord. “He should have been a banker in our earlier days. We would have known how to do him then.” Cord had to laugh.
“A few months ago,” Fiona Cobb said, “Mallory attended the annual meeting of the Stock Growers Association in Miles City. Rustling was on everyone’s mind, and some of the big ranchers were clamoring for vigilante action. Mallory took the other side; were they to resort to lawlessness, it would be broadcast in the Eastern papers.”
“And the proper citizens would never come to populate his empire,” Chi said.
“Some of the ranchers sensed Mallory’s true sentiments,” Fiona Cobb went on. “They came to him privately and promised to back him—surreptitiously, of course. He agreed to run a sort of vigilante pilot project in the basin.”
“But he was shrewd, our patriarch,” Carlisle said. “He couldn’t involve the cowhands that would stay on with him in later, more genteel years. He told his big cattlemen buddies that this was a job for professionals, men who knew what they were about. When it was done, they’d be paid off and sent on their way. No gunfighters wanted in our fine community,” Carlisle said sardonically. “Not after they’ve outlived their usefulness.” He looked from Cord to Chi. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“This was all his idea?” Chi asked. “He didn’t happen to ask your opinion before he brought a dozen hired killers into your home country?”
“Actually,” Carlisle said, “he didn’t. Believe it or don’t.”
“We learned of his plan two or three days before Stringer and his men rode in,” Fiona Cobb said. “I was at the ranch for calving—I have little else to do around here—and Mallory told me the whole story. I think he may have been seeking my approval.”
“And you gave it to him.”
“I thought he was wrong and told him so,” the doctor said with some heat. “I tried to persuade him to call his plan off.”
“You should have tried harder.”
“He was possessed. His zeal overcame his reason.”
“Sure enough,” Carlisle said. “Just a week ago, his nightriders killed an innocent man.”
“How’s that?” Cord was startled.
“Stringer and a couple of his riders came on a middle-aged geezer running four horses and two mules near the North Gap. They killed him for a rustler and took the animals. Bliss wasn’t with them. Anyway, late the next day a fellow rode into town looking for his father. He was supposed to meet him here—Enterprise was just a spot on the map to him—and help drive the stock to the railhead. He had a bill of sale for the six animals.”
“Kind of embarrassing for you,” Cord said. “Having to tell him what had happened.”
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