This front room was a library: three writing desks, deep leather reading chairs, and green-shaded lamps. And books, books climbing shelves on all four walls, reaching for the ceiling, more books than a man could read in ten lifetimes, every damned one of them bound in rich leather. This man must own half the books in Montana.
“What do you think, sir?”
What was there to say? “It’s the damnedest house I ever saw,” Cord said, and it was the truth.
Bliss took it for a compliment and stood beaming, as if he and Cord had never encountered one another before; as if Cord had not witnessed the hanging of Wee Bill Blewin, as if his right hand were as any man’s. The man was crazy as the doctor had said, and true craziness made Cord very uncomfortable. His hand itched under the bandages.
“Savor it all,” Bliss said, and he led them up the wide curving central stairway, through bedroom after bedroom, each decorated in a different scheme of colors and each with its private bath with walls tiled with delicately veined porcelain. The tubs were of stiffened rubber, and thick wolfskin mats were strewn about the floors.
Below stairs Bliss ushered them into his wine cellar, cool and dry even in this unnatural spring weather. Ceiling-high racks, their feet settled into the clean white gravel floor, held hundreds of bottles of sherries, burgundies, and champagnes, resting side-angled in their pigeonholes.
“We have wine with every meal,” Bliss said. “Fine wine from France.”
“Imagine that,” Chi murmured. She was not really impressed, but neither was she being ironical. For her, madness held fascination; Cord suspected she thought it somehow divine.
“I prefer to live as they do in Europe,” Bliss said. “My people will see how rich life can be, and aspire to better themselves.” He smiled fondly, as if these were sensible notions.
Upstairs, the hardwood floors of a music room glowed warmly in the light from huge windows. There were two pianos—for Christ sake, Cord thought, two goddamned pianos? And a harp, taller than most men, with music open on a stand before it. One end of the room was an atelier where someone had been painting with watercolors. At least there was a half-finished picture on an easel and a bowl of wax fruit on the windowsill. Could all of this be merely an elaborate setting for a drama that took place mostly in the mind of Mallory Bliss? “You play the harp?” Cord asked.
“Oh, no,” said Bliss, as if this were a reasonable question. “With these fingers?” He showed them thick callused hands. “Are you a music lover?”
“Not actually,” Cord said. “It’s just that someone damn near played the harp for me the other night.”
Bliss frowned thoughtfully, as if such a mention was a minor faux pas at this time, like a fart at a formal dinner. “Come,” he said generously, the gracious host willing to overlook. He ushered them on through a servant’s door and they emerged in the kitchen. A chef in a tall white hat spun around a bit awkwardly and stood at attention. He held a chopping knife, and Cord smelled whiskey on his breath. “Carry on, Beaumont,” Bliss said. The chef looked relieved. He threw open cabinets to show off his pantry: neat rows of cans with the distinctive label of Park & Tilford, capers and plovers’ eggs, queen olives, canned truffles, mushrooms and meringues.
“Is all well, Beaumont?” Bliss said.
“Huh?” The chef wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his white jacket. “Sure.” As Bliss led the way out, the chef gave Cord an odd wink.
They ended up back in the library, with its smoking stands, decanters of liquor on an oak sideboard, and everywhere the books. Chi settled herself into a chair, crossed her legs, and folded her hands on her knees. She looked as if she could get used to this sort of luxury quite quickly.
Through the translucent linen curtains of the front window, Cord saw the knot of cowhands around F. X. Connaught, pleading their discontent. Their mouths moved like those of players in a dumb show; no sound penetrated this room, no sound nor any barnyard dust or smell. Bliss had properly isolated himself from all the earthy doings that had put him where he was.
Cord turned from the window. “I would say they are fixing to walk out on you,” he said to Bliss. “Hope you got a good plan.”
Bliss said, “Sir?” and put on a bemused look. But then he went past Cord and pulled heavy brocade drapes across the window, shutting out the sight of mutiny and the brightness of the day. Cord wandered away while Bliss fussed with the drapes. Beside the biggest thickest reading chair in the corner, a volume rested on the table, a red ribbon marking Bliss’s place. Cord picked it up and read the title embossed in the leather of its cover: Little Dorrit, by Dickens. Cord had read it.
“Well sir,” Bliss said. “Tell me how you find my home.”
Cord put the book down. “Must keep you busy,” he said. “Just trying to remember what you’ve got.”
“I have my people,” Bliss said. “They are paid to remember.”
“Servants,” Cord suggested.
“Of course. My wine steward and butler, my laundress and seamstress.”
Chi sat in her chair, smiling sweetly at this nonsense. That old kitchen hand, with the smell of whiskey and the chuck wagon still on him.
“Where are these serving people?” Cord demanded. “Everyone got the day off?”
“They will be here soon enough,” Bliss said serenely. “A Dutchman is coming to plant my gardens.”
Cord threw up his hands. “What the hell are we doing here?” he said to Chi.
“Won’t you take a drink?” Bliss sounded a trifle anxious now.
“You want to go?” Chi asked Cord.
“Yeah,” Cord said. “Hell, I don’t know.”
“A drink, sir,” Bliss said.
Cord whirled around and advanced two steps on Bliss. “Why the hell would I drink with you?” He shook his swathed hand under Bliss’s nose. “This remind you of anything, you pixilated son of a bitch?”
Bliss squinted at the hand. “Will it be all right?”
“Yeah. That doesn’t make me any happier about wearing this mitten. I am accustomed to having this hand available for certain activities.”
“I have thanked God you were not hurt worse.” Bliss went to the oak sideboard. “I will not abide the abuse of innocent men.”
Cord snorted. “I got some bad news for you, mister.”
“Nor will I abide crime and thievery in my basin,” Bliss went on. “Here rustlers receive their reward.”
“Rustlers, strangers, anyone you happen on,” Cord snapped. “That boy, Wee Bill Blewin—what was your big hurry? You could have made inquiries, see if he was telling anything like the truth. You could at least give a passing nod to something like law.”
“Law and justice sometimes ride different sides of the trail,” Bliss pontificated.
“Well, it beats me how in the hell you can set yourself up as judge, jury, and head hangman. Someone is going to fix your wagon real soon now.”
“You?” Bliss said softly.
Cord laughed. He looked at Chi, serenely observing from her comfortable seat. “I hope it’s true what they say about God watching over madmen,” he said to her. “This bedlamite is going to need divine help.”
Bliss gasped. Cord turned on him, prepared to toss a few choice words his way and get the hell out of there. But Bliss’s expression stopped Cord in his tracks. He looked stricken; the creases in his craggy weathered face quivered with some deep emotion. “Please,” he said raggedly. ‘Take a drink and give me the chance to explain myself.”
“Might as well,” Chi said. Cord scowled at her, and she smiled back. “But make it a light one for my partner,” she said to Bliss. “We don’t want to get him started this early in the day.”
Mallory Bliss’s story began on the long six-month trail from west Texas north across the great open desert, and at first it was merely the usual tale of cattle-driving horrors: screaming animals swept away in melt-off swollen rivers, days of rain turning the world into a muddy hell, forever in the saddle with no sleep to speak
of, and so on. Cord had trail-handed himself for more than one season, his first years away from home and out on his own driving cows to the Kansas railheads, and he freely agreed with Bliss: It was a miserable way to make a few dollars. Cord had hated it enough to turn outlaw.
Still, he didn’t know what hard times in olden days had to do with anything. Chi, though, was paying attention, as if Bliss really had something to say. So she liked old loco men; maybe that was why she stuck with him, Cord thought wryly.
“We cut our way through fences when we had to,” Bliss was saying. “Even back then so much of the free country was overrun. Nesters took claim to the best bottomland, then tried to charge for watering your animals. Some planted a crop right across the trail, traditional road that had been so long before them. They would wait in hiding for the cattle to muck through, then come out cussing and waving a shotgun and yelling for damages. We paid them damned little attention, I assure you.”
They pressed on, Bliss explained, he and Connaught, until they found this basin. He told how they lived in a tent the first winter and a soddy the second, caulking the cracks with packed snow. “We slept on mattresses stuffed with wild hay—Montana feathers, we called it,” Bliss said, gazing off into his memories. “We lived on wild game and canned goods. It was a good time for young men.”
“That’s dandy,” Cord said. “Get on with it, Bliss. What do you want from us?”
“I want you to understand,” Bliss boomed angrily. “I fought for every damned thing I ever had. Storms roared down from Canada, driving cattle across the open country and covering the feed with snow packed hard and dense as tar. Timber wolves killed our calves. And the Indians, they were hungry as wolves themselves with the buffalo gone, helping themselves to my stock. Now,” Bliss said, “we got the rustlers. Can you expect me to stand for it?”
“Anyone gets in your way, kill them dead,” Cord said sarcastically. “You got the right.”
“Good men and women are welcome here. Thieving trash will be purged.”
“Along with a few innocent men.”
“They are all guilty of something. Those kind are always guilty.” Bliss took a big swig of his drink. “When we came, this was savage wilderness. To tame it required savage methods.”
Bliss turned abruptly away. “That night,” he said in a low voice, “I had to give them Blewin, but I was able to save you. So you see: I have not lost all control. I will not surrender my domain to ruffians.” He reminded Cord of a child, bragging aloud about not fearing ghosts while passing the graveyard late at night.
“And that brings us to your good friend Mr. Stringer,” Cord said. “There is the sort of righteous fellow you are looking for to fill your town. You don’t mind him helping himself to your beef. Is that right?”
“We will rid ourselves of the rustlers, and after that Stringer will be unnecessary.”
“Glad to hear everything is crackerjack.” Cord put his glass on the sideboard. “We’ve had our drink and some swell palaver.” He glanced at Chi. “Guess we’ll be running along.”
Chi was watching Bliss. He ran his hand through his mane of dark hair and said nothing. “All right,” Chi said to him. “Bueno.” She stood.
Bliss leaned forward, his body quivering, as if he were standing on the brink of a great abyss and were being drawn by demonic force toward its depth. His face was contorted with something like pain. “Help me.” The words sounded strangled.
Cord suddenly hated the man—for what he had done to him, for drawing them in this way, for his madness. “Stringer means to take it all,” Cord spat. “He is going to steal everything you have, and not a damned thing you can do to stop him.”
“Cord!” Chi said reproachfully. “Stay or go, but stop abusing the viejo.”
“He tried to abuse me.”
“That’s done with, far as he goes. You know where to find your vengeance.”
Cord squared his shoulders and drew a breath. “All right,” he said to Bliss. “I can get over the part about nearly being hanged—could be you saved my life, if you don’t look it over too closely. But you and I are never going to see eye to eye. I believe the things a man does have consequences, and you must face them and deal with them. You think you are exempt from such responsibility.” Cord stared into Bliss’s mad eyes, striving for contact. “It’s a notion that is going to get you killed.”
“Yes …” Bliss rubbed his eyes with the tips of the fingers of both hands, as if changing his mask. “I have a proposition for you, sir,” he said, his voice almost controlled again.
“Everyone does,” Cord said. “What’s yours?”
“I offer you both employment, as stock detectives in this basin.”
“You got plenty enough detectives already,” Cord said. “They are likely riding your range right now, detecting which pilgrim to lynch next.”
“Talk straight,” Chi said from her chair.
“You have helped me to come to my decision,” Bliss said portentously. “I will dismiss Stringer and his men.”
“Pay them off,” Cord said, “and you figure they’ll ride right out of here, happy as clams?”
“There is no longer a place for Stringer in my scheme,” Bliss said. But maintaining the fiction of his control cost some effort.
“But us you can use.”
“Ten thousand dollars,” Bliss said.
“Twenty,” Cord said. “You can afford it.”
Bliss nodded slowly. “Twenty thousand dollars, for peace in my basin. That is fair.”
“Pay up.”
Bliss looked to Chi. Maybe her odd gentleness had given him to believe she was his ally. But she nodded her agreement with Cord.
Bliss removed a half-dozen books from a shelf to reveal a wall safe. He spun the dial, carefully blocking their view with his body. Inside were stacks of currency. Bliss counted out a considerable pile, shut the same, whirled the dial. When he turned, the money was clutched tightly to the front of his vest. “How can I be sure?”
“Don’t dare ask that question,” Cord snapped. “Hand it over.”
Bliss did as he was told.
“You buy gun folk like they were yard goods and expect trust and loyalty?” Cord gave the money to Chi. It disappeared under her serape. “We could ride out of here this day, take this money and whatever more you’ve got, and not a damned thing you could do about it. You are too deep into trouble, and without us and plenty of luck to boot, you will never get out.”
Chi stood. “You done?”
“Almost.” Cord stabbed a finger at Bliss. “Remember one thing more, old man,” he went on. “You brought the trouble to this basin, you and your greed and your bad dreams of being Caesar. So from here on, you be damned careful what you say to me. You can trust me all right—trust me to hurt you badly if you do another thing I don’t like.”
Bliss gaped at Cord. Likely no one had talked to him this way for some years.
“Anything you’d care to add?” Cord said over his shoulder.
“Looks like you covered it,” Chi said mildly. Bliss stood there, his lips slightly parted.
Cord said, “Adios,” and opened the front door. The sounds of men talking drifted back in. “The only thing that I hate is the siding,” he said in a low voice. “A dozen or so guns against two.”
“Maybe three,” Chi said.
“Huh?” Cord said. “You got something to tell me?”
But she was not listening to him. Cord peered across the yard in the direction she was looking and thought, Well, hell. “Never mind,” he said aloud. “It can wait.”
Chapter Eight
The clot of movement out across the prairie past the windbreak resolved itself into men on horseback, more than a few. “We could beat them on out of here,” Cord said on the porch, half thinking aloud. “Pick our own spot later on.”
“It wouldn’t look good,” Chi said.
Cord wondered if she were kidding. But she looked serious enough, and so they stayed where they were.<
br />
The cowhand meeting was finished. Over in front of the bunkhouse, men were tightening cinches, strapping on saddlebags and rifle scabbards, tying down bedrolls. They were leaving for good, and who could blame them? Dust raced before the approaching riders, driven by the hot wind.
Connaught stepped up on the porch. “They have asked for their time, every man of them,” Connaught told Cord and Chi. “I could not dissuade them.”
“Why should you, viejo?” Chi asked.
Connaught peered over his shoulders at the riders on the plain. “There was a day when I would have gone to Hell for that man.”
Cord counted eight riders in the bunch.
“I risked my life time and again for him,” Connaught said. “But always against nature, never guns. And this as well: He has changed in ways I cannot countenance. All our early days, we wished only to use the land the way God meant. Now he must rule.”
Cord could hear hooves drumming the sod, saw Sheeny’s brown face among others as the horsemen circled around toward a break in the trees.
“This basin will explode,” Connaught said. “The fuse has been lit, and only a fool would keep his seat atop the powder keg. We are finished.” He shook his head. “I’d best go tell him.”
“Buena suerte, viejo,” Chi said.
“Thank you,” Connaught said. “Luck to you, too, lady.”
Horses came thundering into the yard; they had been ridden hard. Stringer wasn’t hard to pick out, in the blocky fighting boots with the steel-lined toes. He was biggest and rode at the head of the bunch, and when he raised his hands they lined up behind him, Sheeny and the other six. Dust swirled around their horses’ legs before settling.
“Riding on, boys?” Stringer shouted at the cowhands. They stood frozen where they’d been. “Good idea—we got no need for you.” His tone went mean and bullying. “Get moving!” he shouted.
Stringer stared blackly at the cowhands all the time they got themselves horseback, turned their animals, and rode out in a ragged line. He waited until they were gone before turning slowly to Cord and Chi, as if he had been sure they’d stay put until he was ready to deal with them. Cord was thinking odds again and groping for ideas. The only one that came readily to mind was to let Stringer make the first play. He had most of the guns. Stringer folded his hands over his saddle horn and smirked for a good long time.
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