“Be ready,” Chi said, and broke for a quick dash through the shadows to make the rear of the bunkhouse. She tipped her sombrero back so it hung from its neck thong, eased up to peer through a dusty window.
She was looking into a dim dormitory with accommodations for maybe a dozen men to sleep and snort in a row of close-set beds along either side. Gear hung from thick tenpenny nails driven into the log walls.
An entry way at the far end of this room opened into the lighted bull pen in the front half of the building. Four men were playing cards at a rickety table, passing around a bottle. Chi took in a few ill-used chairs, part of a shelf strewn with books and magazines, and through the open front door the shapes of the two men on the porch. Everyone seemed at ease for now—everyone except Stringer.
He lay on one of the bunks in this near room, in britches, suspenders, union suit and bare feet. On an upended crate beside him sat a bottle of whiskey, two-thirds full, and a coal-oil lamp.
In its yellow light, Chi could see that Stringer’s coarse features were not improved by the beating Cord had administered. His nose was shattered, bent over onto one cheek, and his lips were puffed and caked with blood. One eye was blackened, and a cut ran from above it across his high forehead to his balding pate. Sheeny sat in a chair nearby, feeding him from the bottle.
Stringer gathered himself, half sat up on his elbows, and screamed again, cursing out his rage into the night. The cardplayers exchanged significant glances and went on betting and tossing chips; this raving must have gone on long enough for them to have become inured. Stringer yowled like a leg-snared coyote. One of the cardplayers pointed to his own temple, rolled his eyes, and rotated his finger. Could be, Chi thought, listening to the echo of Stringer’s wounded cry; Cord had pounded him hard enough to knock him crazy.
Sheeny held the bottle of booze and Stringer gurgled down an inch. Or could be he was just drunk. Whatever, right now he was a man two or three cartridges short of a full magazine.
Stringer shoved aside the bottle. He swung his legs off the bunk, so Sheeny had to push his chair back out of the way or be kicked. Sitting up, Stringer seemed to come a ways back toward himself. “Where’s Bronson and Turk?” he growled. Before the black man could answer, Stringer hollered out the men’s names. At the card table in the front room, a man stopped in the middle of the deal, looked at the other players quizzically.
The blonde and the stocky man came in from the porch. Stringer was pulling on his boots.
“We’re riding,” Stringer said to the floor. His voice was ominous with unnatural anger. “Bronson!” he shouted again.
“Right here,” the blonde said. He shot a glance at Turk. “I’ll tell the men to be saddled before sunup.”
“You tell the men to be saddled in fifteen minutes. Someone see to my horse.”
“It don’t make any sense,” Turk muttered. The men in the front room had gathered near the entryway, peering into the dimness.
“Shut up!” Stringer stood and looked at the others. “Any man says any damned thing to me is dead, any damned thing at all. Who disbelieves me?”
“No question,” Bronson said blandly.
Chi watched from the shadow of the window.
“Where is my damned gun, Sheeny?” Stringer said. Sheeny lifted Stringer’s gun belt from a nail, held it for Stringer to step into.
Stringer worked the buckle. “Bastard killed my kid brother,” Stringer said, staring awfully at Bronson and Turk as if accusing one of them of the deed. “Shot him down like a he was a snake. He’s a back-shooting son of a bitch.”
“That’s him,” Bronson said.
“Never could have touched Luke or me in a fair fight,” Stringer went on, his tone puerile. “Fair fight, he’d be twice dead already.”
“What you said,” Bronson answered, like the chorus in a Greek play.
“He wants to fight dirty, we will show him how it is done,” Stringer said. “We are going into that Enterprise town—all of us,” he snapped at the men in the entry way. “We are going to roust Mr. Gunfighter Cord out of his bed, and we are going to strip him down, and once that is done, I am going to start doing him.”
“Then there is the woman,” Turk said, with broad insinuation.
Chi made a mental note of this moron.
“She has got to watch,” Stringer said. “After that, do what you want. I got no use for her.”
“That Oakley?”
“He’s run out, if he’s smart. If not, we’ll make him wish he had.”
Behind her, Chi heard Oakley mutter, “Damn,” soft and ominous.
She spun around, staying low and her gun ready, to see one of Stringer’s men stopped short halfway to the outhouse and facing Oakley. Chi had the dead drop on the night rider from the side, but she hesitated a beat, knowing that the sound of the first shot would be the starting signal for mayhem.
The night rider slapped for this gun. Oakley’s was already out, and no more time for hesitation. Oakley fired.
Chi turned back to the window before the night rider hit the dirt. She broke a greasy pane of glass with her gun barrel, squeezed the trigger.
Stringer, facing her direction, could move fast, drunk or hurt or no. He twisted out of her line, grabbed up the lamp, and flung it at the window. His aim was high: The lamp hit the lintel and shattered. A tiny drop of hot oil seared Chi’s cheek as she ducked away.
Oakley was in the corral. Chi raced toward him, ducking and dodging in anticipation of gunfire from the bunkhouse window, but none came. As she vaulted the fence rail, she caught a glimpse of angry flames licking out the rear window, sparks popping as wisps of bark on the cabin’s logs ignited. Around front, men were shouting, Stringer’s bellow overlaying the gathering chaos. A few random shots split the night. Stringer screamed, “Get the bitch.”
Chi pushed in among the animals, wide-awake now and skitterish from the noise and fire, rearing and snorting and whinnying. Oakley jerked up the gate latch, swung it wide. A spotted gray horse swung around, its flank knocking Chi away. She grabbed at its halter, swung up bareback.
Oakley caught a horse and clambered atop it, screaming at the other animals, whipping with his hat and the halter reins. A knot of men came around from the direction of the bunkhouse, and Chi threw a shot their way. Someone hollered like he was hit. The gray tried to buck, but she jerked it back to attention.
Up ahead, animals broke for the open corral gate. Chi hurrahed, heading the rest that way. By then the horses had pretty much gotten the head of where running space lay, and they streamed for the gap in the fence, knocking against the posts on either side. A rail fell to the ground. Hooves pounded the hard-packed dirt of the yard, and dust rose in the hot wind.
The dry logs of the bunkhouse were burning by now, flames shooting twenty feet into the night. Stringer screamed, “Stop them horses!” A few men raced toward them, waving their arms and firing into the air, but they were moments too late. The horses were running hard and panicked.
Chi lay low on the gray’s neck and fired twice at the knot of shapes silhouetted against the raging fire. Ahead of her, Oakley got off a shot and someone cried out above the general roar of noise. Chi aimed more carefully, picked a standing target as the gray came last through the corral gate.
Chi fired, and at that moment the gray reared and plunged sideways. Her shot went high and wide, and she just managed to grab for the animal’s mane. She slid feet-first to the ground but held the horse, jerking its head as she vaulted onto his back once more. The horse half reared again, and there in the darkness and dust, in front of and below her, Chi saw one of the men, his pistol in both hands and throwing flame as he fired.
Chi shot him in the chest, and as the man went backward, the gray bolted, trampling over his body before plunging away into the night. Chi threw a last shot toward the flaming bunkhouse as she raked the gray from shoulder to flank, laying out flat and shouting in the animal’s ear. Out ahead Oakley had pulled up and was giving her cover fire. P
ast him, horses fled in various directions, bounding and plunging over the starlit range.
“Let’s go,” Chi hollered as she came past.
Oakley jerked his horse around and followed at a dead gallop. A few shots pursued, and then the firing stopped. They were out of range of gunfire, but they could still hear Stringer’s roaring curses, rolling across the prairie like spring thunder.
A half mile out, the shadow of a gully creased the plain. They reined up, fast walked the horses down into the cover of the little dry wash. Theirs were tethered in a copse of chokecherry bushes. They left the gray and the horse Oakley had ridden and walked their saddled animals down the draw a ways.
“What the hell?” Chi muttered. The gully narrowed here just before its mouth, so she could not see over the range. But Oakley, a little ahead where the draw came out at the stage road, had remounted and sat staring back in the direction of Bliss’s ranch, his mouth agape.
Oakley’s face was lit by an eerie orange-red glow. She heard him mutter, “Holy Mother of God.”
Chi swung into the saddle, rode out beside Oakley and into the unnatural radiance.
The bunkhouse had been consumed quickly. It gave off more smoke than flame now, a collapsed pile of charred logs.
The firelight that washed across the prairie to them came from the big house, Bliss’s great elegant castle. The shell of the two-story structure was intact for the moment, but flames came from every window, licking, and grabbed for the darkness. As they watched, the big oaken front door buckled outward, fell from its hinges. From behind it, above the fire’s roar, came eerie atonal music as the strings of the harp and the pianos stretched and whined with the heat. The canopy over the front verandah crashed down, like a trapdoor swinging shut.
Then, for a long moment, the entire huge block of house seemed to sway in the hot wind, a bit this way and a bit that, the massive beams of its frame creaking enormously. When it went, it was like an implosion, the walls falling in on themselves like those of a card house, sparks mushrooming into the air to be swept downwind in a thick wave.
“Bliss?” Chi murmured to the wind. “Qué pasa?”
“For right now,” Oakley said, “let’s worry about us.”
Chapter Twelve
Something was wrong. Trouble had come into the air, like the sudden drop in barometric pressure foretokening a storm. Malevolent wraiths hovered all about. Cord opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling’s blank-ness, waited for the dream to fade. It would not.
Still drunk, he decided. He remembered where he was: on his back and fully dressed, except for his gun belt, atop the bedclothes in one of the rooms of the Enterprise Hotel, above the saloon. The curtains were open and starlight flooded in so he could see well enough around the room. There was nothing special beyond the usual furniture, nor anything menacing here, but neither was he drunk. Not absolutely brick-cold sober maybe, but sober enough to take care of business. It hadn’t been more than a couple hours past twilight when he’d plowed off to sir judging from how he felt, he’d passed a decent interval in the sack since. Cord wished his watch weren’t busted.
He was not drunk and he was not dreaming, and yet something was absolutely not right. His gun and belt were folded on the night table beside him. That was instinct stronger than the worst booze-up: Do not risk rolling over and shooting off your foot, but keep your weapon close to hand. Cord heard a faint crackle, like tissue paper wrinkling.
Cord sat up slowly, but he felt well enough, though he could not be completely sober, because the hangover was not yet upon him. He reached for the gun belt and froze with his hand upon it.
The starlight in the room was tinged the slightest shade of red-orange.
Cord rose and went to the window, mechanically strapping on the belt, working the buckle awkwardly with his left hand.
Miles off to the northwest, flames etched a thin line between the ground and the night sky. Cord gasped. He turned, threw the door back against the wail, hit the stairs running, thinking first of the horses and then of Fiona Cobb and Carlisle, thinking survival.
Out in the street, the hot wind blew the first fine flakes of soot into his face as he ran against it. The ash was gritty on his lips. Cord was halfway up the windmill’s ladder, fifty feet off the ground, before he remembered that heights made him dizzy. But this was high enough to see: The threat was worse than he had imagined, about as bad as it could be.
The vanguard edge of the fire, driven before the wind, was at least a mile wide and widening. Any hope that it would somehow miss the town was fond, outside of a miracle. It was coming, sure as hell, and compared to a range fire, hell was a temperate climate.
Cord backpedaled down the ladder, working his feet and good hand carefully. He was frightened, and there was no point in falling to his death. There would be plenty enough good ways to die on this black night.
Cord hit the ground and ran for the livery. He’d seen two prairie fires in his life and vividly remembered the horrors of each. One had flared in south Texas, on open range grazed by the first ranch he ever worked as a kid away from home. This was nubbly scrub country with not so much to burn but little water either, and though the flames were smaller, they were no easier to stop. The ranch boss ordered steers slaughtered and their carcasses dragged between two mounted men, ropes binding the legs of the dead beeves front and back and looped around saddle horns. One cowhand rode before the flames, the other on the burned-out side, in a galloping attempt to smother the fire. Cord could smell the burning cow flesh in his memory.
In the livery he found his bay and two other horses, Carlisle’s and Fiona Cobb’s, stalled side by side. They had not yet caught scent of the fire. Cord dragged tack from hooks, went to work fast as his hand and a half would allow.
Two seasons after the Texas conflagration, the drive Cord was riding with, ten men and twelve hundred beeves, came through the aftermath of a great fire in far southern Kansas. There was no way around; the few pilgrims they came upon, fleeing with what belongings they had saved, reported the ground was black for fifty miles in either direction. Immediately when the cows crossed the river separating grass from ash, their hooves churned up clouds of soot, dense enough to blot out the sun’s color though not its heat. The grit covered men’s skins and animals’ hides, until the riders were black as fifty-dollar poker chips. Despite the neckerchief over his mouth, Cord’s lungs filled with the ash, and it ground into his nose and mouth and eyes, and his tears turned the dirt to mud that glued his lids shut.
They knew from past drives that there was another creek some good way ahead and nothing they could do for that either except pray that the wind did not shift. But it did, and when the parched cows caught scent of the water, they took off as if they were whipped. They ran for miles, burning off meat in a mad stampede that could not be headed, thousands of dollars of beef weight evaporated into thick stinking air.
Cord tightened the cinch of the bay’s saddle and mounted up, leading the other two horses. He ducked under the livery’s double door and rode into the street. The glow to the northwest was brighter; it would be. He did not know what he meant to do with the horses, but they’d die for certain in the livery, screaming and kicking down their stalls. They might make it, though, if he did, if he could figure out some island of refuge.
Cord swore aloud. Even if somehow the fire passed them by, there would still be Stringer and his gang. Cord did not expect that the fire had gotten them; more likely Stringer started it, in some mad fit. He would wait it out and come in behind, picking through the ashes for Cord’s bones and guns, ready in case he’d survived.
All right, he decided, first things first. Cord led the horses down the street and around the corner, halloing Fiona Cobb’s house as it hove into view.
They must have been heavy sleepers; Cord had to pound on the front door for a full minute before Carlisle swung it open. “What the hell?” he sputtered. He wore a union suit and an angry countenance. “You are still drunk.”
Carlisle saw the horses then, saddled and grazing in Fiona Cobb’s dooryard. He stepped out to the path, looked off where Cord was pointing.
Carlisle gasped.
Fiona Cobb appeared in the doorway behind Carlisle. Light from the hallway behind her made her long white nightgown diaphanous, and Cord could trace the curves of her figure beneath it. Her hair was down, and in the fire-tinged starlight she looked lovely. “Come in,” she stammered.
“I’d like that,” Cord said. “But right now I don’t have time.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Carlisle said.
Cord shook his head. “You can’t outrun a fire that size. It’s faster than any animal, faster even than the wind that’s pushing it.”
“It must consume a vast amount of oxygen,” Fiona Cobb said, thinking aloud. “It would create a vacuum before it and rush in to fill it.”
“What do we do?” Carlisle asked.
“I got one good idea,” Cord said. He looked around, checking his recollection. It could work. The yard around the house, surrounded on two sides and part of a third by the ditch, lay low as the surrounding ground, maybe lower in spots … “Get some britches on, Carlisle.”
“What?”
“Just do it,” Cord barked.
Fiona Cobb stepped aside to let Carlisle back in. “How can I help?” She sounded solid enough; Cord hoped she would not break when the flames charged down on them.
“Picket those horses to the porch. Get a rope on them if you can, strong as you got.” Cord pointed back toward the windmill. “That tank full up?”
“We keep it that way.”
Cord 9 Page 15