Cord 9

by Owen Rountree

  Cord struggled to his knees, steadied his left wrist on his bandaged right mitt this time, and shot Sheeny in the neck as he came up for another shot. Sheeny fell backward with his mouth open wide, a look of great surprise dissolving on his face.

  Cord scrambled out of the open street. Four dead, the battle over except for Stringer. Cord’s head suddenly pounded. His mouth tasted of ashes and bile, and his stomach was tossing. Cord squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment. The fight had rushed his hangover, and he was sick of blood and killing.

  “Stringer!” he shouted.

  Chi stood across the street before the bank, her rifle up, listening. Cord opened his eyes and peered down to where Oakley had been dropped.

  Oakley was gone.

  “Show yourself,” Cord hollered.

  “Look here,” Stringer called.

  The breeze swept the last of the haze aside, and there at the southern end of the street stood the big broad-shouldered bulk of Stringer, his back to Fiona Cobb’s house. He held Nick Oakley up in front of him. A splotch of blood the size of a hand soaked the left shoulder of Oakley’s shirt, but he was wide-eyed conscious. Stringer held the muzzle of his gun against Nick Oakley’s head.

  “Now let’s have a look at you, you dirty son,” Stringer shouted. His nose was a swollen tuberous mass, and a trickle of blood ran down one side of his face from the cut on his forehead, opened somehow in the present fight. His voice edged toward madness.

  “No!” Oakley hollered. The effort causing him to roll his head with pain. “Stay where you are. I’m done anyway.”-

  No you are not, Cord thought, not this time. Cord looked across at Chi.

  She frowned and shook her head. Everyone was out of ideas.

  Cord rose. He stepped out into the street, holding his gun pointed at the ground. “Wait,” Chi said softly. But there was no waiting. Stringer would shoot Oakley down, no question about it, and take his chances with them. He was that far gone, and the only chance was however many seconds cooperation bought them against the hope of some break, some miracle Cord moved down the street toward them.

  “Drop it,” Stringer ordered. “You, too, lady.”

  Cord took a few more steps. Stringer rammed the barrel of his gun into Oakley’s temple. Oakley cried out. Behind Cord, Chi’s rifle thudded to the ground.

  “That’s right,” Stringer said. “Now you, Cord, right this second.”

  Cord dropped his gun to the mud of the street.

  “Come closer, you bastard.”

  Cord advanced down the street, a step, another, another. Oakley came around and moaned, “You dumb farmer.”

  Cord kept coming.

  “Right there is good.” Stringer was liking this a lot.

  Cord stopped five or six feet short of Stringer.

  Stringer smiled crazily. He lowered the gun from Oakley’s head, lined it on Cord’s middle. Cord tensed, concentrated, tried to divine the moment of pressure of Stringer’s finger on the trigger.

  Behind Stringer, a gun exploded.

  Stringer let go of Oakley, spun and crouched. Oakley fell away from him. Past Stringer, Cord caught a glimpse of Carlisle flopping flat to the ground as Stringer shot over his head.

  Cord launched himself at Stringer.

  Cord half fell on Stringer’s back, rode him down to the muddy dirt. Cord grabbed for Stringer’s gun wrist as Stringer bucked and twisted, rolled over. He was supine under Cord now, and Cord had Stringer’s hand pinned.

  But the man was maniacally strong. Stringer struggled to get his gun into play, bucking and kicking. His heavy-toed boot grazed Cord’s shin, bringing a jolt of pain.

  Cord cranked Stringer’s wrist. Stringer bellowed and held on to the pistol. His face was inches from Cord’s, blood all over one cheek, his eyes burning in their blackened sockets, his swollen lips bubbling spittle.

  Cord butted Stringer under the chin. Stringer’s teeth clacked together, but it was like butting a rock.

  Yet it must have hurt Stringer as well, because as Cord lifted his head, pressing his body down on Stringer’s, Cord saw the man’s face screw up with pain. Cord gave one mighty wrench and snatched away Stringer’s gun.

  Stringer’s eyes flashed. Cord jammed the gun into his side and pulled the trigger.

  The big man stiffened and convulsed. Cord rode him like a twitching animal.

  Stringer gave a mighty heave and threw Cord over on his back. Then Stringer was atop him, and both his hands were around Cord’s throat.

  Cord tried to cock the revolver, and his thumb slipped off the scored surface of the hammer. He dug in, got the hammer pulled back, fired again. The report was muffled by Stringer’s flesh.

  Stringer screamed and squeezed harder. Cord felt the hard muscle of his windpipe collapsing. He fired again, worked the hammer, pulled the trigger a fourth time.

  The gun clicked empty.

  Cord let it go, grabbed at Stringer’s fingers. It was like trying to open a bear trap. Stars burst before Cord’s eyes, burst and went out.

  Through the enshrouding blackness he saw Chi somewhere up above him, her hands high over her head and in them a rifle barrel. She swung, and the rifle’s stock slammed against the back of Stringer’s head, and the wood shattered, broke loose and cartwheeled away.

  Stringer’s entire body bowed and trembled terribly. He gasped, spraying a fine mist of blood in Cord’s face. Then his limbs went limp, though his fingers stayed wrapped right around Cord’s neck.

  Cord clawed at them, choking under Stringer’s suffocating dead weight. Chi’s face was near to his, and then Carlisle beside her—the weight came off him.

  Cord rolled away, came up against Oakley. Oakley groaned with pain, and Cord jerked away. “All I had was the rifle,” Carlisle was explaining to someone. “I was afraid the bullet would have gone through and got Oakley. I hoped the noise would break up the action …”

  “Yeah,” Cord said. “Good work.”

  Fiona Cobb was kneeling beside him. “See to Oakley,” Cord said. Talking hurt. “I am okay.”

  But then he was not. His nostrils were choked with smells—smoke and blood and Stringer’s awful stink. Cord pulled away, rolled over on his stomach, got to hands and knees. He wiped at his face and saw the gore on his palm. He could not have gotten to his feet had it meant life itself, and when he tried to crawl, he got only a few steps before he was sick.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chi paused with her hand on the doorknob and regarded Cord. “You don’t look too bad.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cord agreed. “Hose me off and dress me in clean clothes, I’m a real prize.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  Cord flexed the fingers of his right hand. The swathing had come off, replaced with small patches of plaster. The blisters were scabbed over, and nothing hurt. “You ready?”

  “For what?”

  Cord shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

  Chi laughed gaily. “Let’s take a ride. It’s a nice day for a long ride.”

  “It will be,” Cord agreed. “Soon as we get out of this place.”

  On the other side of the door, Nick Oakley called, “What’s everybody so goddamned cheerful about?”

  Chi opened the door. Oakley lay in the sickbed where Cord had awakened one long day ago. “This and that,” Chi said to him. “Not being dead.”

  “You figure I am going to make it, eh?” Oakley said. His left shoulder was bandaged, and his arm was in a sling.

  “We are all fine today,” Chi assured him. She reached down and squeezed Oakley’s hand. Cord didn’t mind too much. She did look quite fine today—or maybe it was that all of life looked good, after the fight of only a half-dozen or so hours earlier.

  “What about Bliss?” Oakley contradicted.

  Chi sobered a bit. “Don’t know. Carlisle will ride out there later on.”

  “If he made it,” Oakley said, “he’d better keep away from me.”

  “Now, now,” Cord chided. “He left something fo
r you to remember him by.” Cord dropped a thick packet of currency on the bed beside Oakley.

  Oakley stared at the money.

  “We got paid in advance,” Chi told him. “You earned a share.”

  “That so?”

  “Put it to good use,” Chi said. “You aren’t going to die, chico.”

  “Never?”

  “Not from that shoulder. La médica took out the bullet and fixed you up.” Chi hesitated. “You knew you weren’t hurt bad.”

  Oakley shrugged. “That bastard was crazier than a drunken snake. I figured I was gone one way or the other—no point taking you with me.”

  Oakley studied Cord for a long moment. “I guess I would have been right, if you hadn’t faced him down. Anyway, I noticed when you walked in that I’m not nursing any old grudges today.”

  Truth to tell, Cord liked hearing that. He’d never been too proud of the business in Denver. But apologizing was so damned hard, harder sometimes than facing guns. At least he’d thought so

  “This is adios,” Chi said to Oakley.

  “See you again, maybe,” Oakley said neutrally.

  “You ever ride through the Bitter Root Valley,” Chi said, “look around and see if we are there.” She looked at Cord and laughed. “I will bake a sour-apple pie, and you old boys can sit in the porch rockers, smoking pipes and lying about your hellion days.”

  “Old boys?” Cord echoed. Chi laughed again and led him by the hand out of there. Oakley chuckled at their backs, but Cord could stand that as well.

  They found Fiona Cobb and Carlisle out front, staring at what was left of the town. The ditch had been undammed and most of the water in the yard had settled into the scorched ground. The hot breeze was gone with the fire, and the day had dawned pleasant and cool. But the sun was rimmed in red, and without wind it would be days before the haze was all the way gone. Far off south in the mountains, the fire was still burning. The prairies were black in every direction.

  Fiona Cobb’s hand was cool and smooth when Cord shook it. “What are you two going to do?” Cord asked.

  “Like you said,” Carlisle laughed. “Pray for rain.” Everyone was a little giddy with life today.

  “We will stay,” Fiona Cobb said. “Perhaps we will rebuild.” She smiled. “On a smaller scale, I would say.”

  “We won’t be starting from scratch.” Carlisle shook his head. “You’ll like this part, Cord. The fire sucked right into that bank, gutted it like a dead buck. But the library is whole, only a little scorching on the front door. Fire must have jumped right over it. We didn’t lose a book.”

  Cord did like it. Hard to tell why; maybe he meant to become a serious book reader himself soon. Who could tell what would happen to a man with a settled life? “Time to go,” he said, and climbed into the saddle.

  “A moment,” Chi said. She pointed. A rider was coming toward the wreckage of Enterprise. Cord peered through the haze and made out F. X. Connaught.

  The little Irishman rode into the yard and looked from one of them to the other. “God’s wrath is an awesome sight,” he intoned.

  “Yeah,” Cord said. “We got to be going.”

  Connaught did not seem to hear. “We saw the fire, the men and I, as we neared the North Gap.” He peered out across the wasteland. “I knew that Stringer had driven most of Mr. Bliss’s stock into the breaks, and could not abide what would befall them. I appealed to my men.”

  Connaught closed his eyes as if praying. “We rode back, rounded them up, and stampeded them through the gap. There are B-brand cattle scattered over a hundred square miles of country between the gap and the Missouri, but alive.”

  “Bliss?”

  “May God preserve his soul.”

  No one else said anything. Cord cleared his throat significantly.

  “Mr. Connaught?” Fiona Cobb said gently.

  Connaught opened his eyes and looked down at her.

  “Will you take coffee?”

  “Coffee.” Connaught blinked. “Coffee would be fine.” He swung down from the saddle, but then he looked up to Cord and Chi. “Go with God.”

  “Good idea,” Cord said. He touched his finger to his hat brim and swung his horse away from there.

  Out from the town the effect of the fire was not so devastating or troubling. The country was black and sere, but the grass would come back before the summer was out. This sort of burning was an old habit with nature. Land was a legacy no man could destroy, or perhaps truly own, Cord thought.

  “Oh, my,” Chi said.

  Cord looked up from his reverie. To the west, maybe a hundred yards from the road, a couple of dozen blackened hummocks were scattered about the scorched earth. Cord felt a little jolt in his gut: the cows that had stampeded through town ahead of the fire storm, only to be caught here by the flames. Cord breathed through his mouth. Thank Christ there was no more wind.

  Something moved: coming up from behind a little knoll, a man on horseback, a big man with long matted hair, sitting slump-shouldered on a soot-smeared pale horse.

  It was Mallory Bliss, alone with his despair amid the excoriated corpses of his dream.

  “Ought to tell him,” Cord said slowly.

  “He knows,” Chi said gently. “Let him be.”

  A soft mournful sound drifted across the still air: Mallory Bliss was weeping.

  “Yeah,” Cord said, and headed the bay on south. On toward the Bitter Root Valley, and good news and greener pastures.

  Afterword

  On June 14, 1857, Granville Stuart and his older brother James, unsuccessful Sierra Nevada prospectors, left Yreka, California, for the home in West Liberty, Iowa, they had left five years earlier. There were nine other mounted men in the Stuart party and a half-dozen pack animals. Each rider had a muzzle-loading rifle, a Colt revolver, blankets, a change of underwear, and food for fifty or sixty days.

  On July 27, when the party was near the present site of Malad City in southern Idaho, Granville became gravely ill. The men perceived he would recover slowly, if ever, and there was an amicable split up. The others rode on while James, once a physician’s driver, remained to put what he had observed to work. Ill for seven weeks and certain as everyone else that he was a goner, Granville nevertheless recovered.

  By then it was too late to proceed; before they could reach South Pass, snow would close out the route. The brothers could neither retrace their steps nor winter where they were, not without supplies and shelter.

  Salt Lake City, a few days’ ride south, was the most handy refuge. Unfortunately, during Stuart’s convalescence, Utah Territory had become a war zone. When Brigham Young declared martial law and independence from the U.S., President Buchanan overreacted by sending in federal troops to crush the revolt. Young saw his bet and raised when his “Destroying Angels,” for the nonce allied with indigenous Indians, massacred 120 gentile emigrants. In Utah, the Stuarts logically feared, they were odds on to be executed for spies.

  During the forced layover, the Stuarts had become friends with a one-time mountain man named Jake Meeks. Meeks was now a road rancher, trading his grass-fat cows for Mormon Trail emigrants’ foot-sore oxen, one for two. In winter Meeks grazed his stock in the clement valley of the Beaverhead River, two hundred miles north, and he invited the Stuarts to come along.

  The historian seeking drama in true life could attach great significance to October 10, 1857, the date the Stuarts crossed the divide and looked down at Montana for the first time. Stuart does when sixty years later he describes his descent into the Beaverhead. In his recollection, the bunch grass turns thick as carpeting and the weather warm and bright, and the antelope run in packs of twenty.

  But on that day, it did not occur to Granville Stuart that he and his brother would make their homes for the rest of their days in Montana or that he would become the single most influential figure in the development of the society and economics of the future state. In the autumn of 1857, Stuart was concerned only with blizzards and crazed Mormons, and keep
ing his ass out of the road of both.

  In the twinings of a peripatetic career, Granville Stuart sought his fortune as prospector, miner, mercantilist, writer, gunsmith, blacksmith, butcher, sawyer, horse trader, real estate speculator, banker, rancher, and diplomat. Paradoxically, perplexingly, in not one of these pursuits was he ever able to turn a real profit.

  Stuart’s peers consistently elected him to public office, suggesting he was neither incompetent nor lazy. Stuart was variously president of the Deer Lodge Town Committee; chair of the Deer Lodge County Commissioners; a trustee of school districts, Montana’s first college, and the territorial prison; and a five-term member of the territorial legislature.

  Within a few years of his arrival in Montana, Stuart attracted respect as a historian, librarian, bibliophile, conservationist, artist, and vigilante. In one year, 1871, a Stuart essay was published in the New York Times', he was appointed statistical correspondent to the Smithsonian Institution; and in answer to a query, he informed a no-doubt disappointed freak-show impresario named P. T. Bamum that Flathead Indians did not in fact have flat heads.

  Yet as Paul C. Phillips, editor of Stuart’s autobiography, writes, Stuart and his brother James

  broke the sod but others reaped the harvest. They gave to the world knowledge of the gold resources of Montana but they themselves panned but little of the precious metal They were the first merchants of the gold mining era but others garnered the profits. And finally when Granville Stuart embarked in a business that brought him wealth, conditions beyond his control overwhelmed him with financial ruin.

  For one thing, Stuart was too generous to succeed in business. He habitually extended credit with reckless disregard for the customer’s ability to repay, while his own creditors were less charitable.

  For another, Stuart did seem to have more than his share of hard luck. As an example: in 1865, when Montana was seven months old, Stuart published the first book on the new territory, Montana as It Is, brought out by C. S. Westcott of New York. It contains a history of the gold strikes, topological descriptions, a vocabulary of Snake and the Chinook patois, ethnological comments on the Indians of Montana, travel routes, and anecdotes. Of the 1,500 copies printed, 1,100 were destroyed within weeks in a warehouse fire back east. Of the remainder, 100 were sent to Stuart on a bull wagon and were seriously water damaged during the trip. Stuart claimed the remaining 300 were stolen by acting territorial governor James Tufts and sold for his profit.