Lake of Fire (29 page)

Harding raised his weapon, but before he could get off a round, Bitter Waters shot him through the heart.

“It is war,” he declared.

Laura pressed her fist to her mouth, for she knew what came next from accounts of the struggle … displacement, battlefields, and death. It was easy to miss the human side when reading the dry prose with which history was often related.

But whether the government of the United States dealt with the Navajo, Apache, or the Nez Perce, the record was all the same. Ever since white men had first set foot on the soil of North America, they had broken every treaty made with those who dwelled there before they arrived.

Heedless of anyone seeing, she went to Cord. “I didn’t know.”

Bitter Waters bowed his head and turned away before his listeners realized he was leaving. He walked to the tipi, threw back the flap, and disappeared inside.

The skin fell back into place.

Cord shook Laura off and strode forward. She gathered her wits and moved, circling behind the tent to head off Bitter Waters if he sneaked out the back.

It didn’t take long. No sooner had she left the circle of firelight and entered the forest than she saw a man emerge from the tipi’s rear.

“Hold, sir,” she said.

Bitter Waters looked surprised, but stopped with a swing of his braids. “My story is complete. For this night.”

“There is a man who needs to speak with you. About other parts of your story.”

Bitter Waters held her gaze and nodded. “Though the two of you stand apart, you are the woman of Blue Eyes.”

Cord stepped around the side of the tipi, too late not to have heard the last words.

Bitter Waters studied the two of them with what looked like compassion. “Sarah stood thusly with Franklin Sutton before she went away with him.”

Beneath the older man’s scrutiny, Cord was proud to have Laura by his side. But the last thing he wanted was for her to stay and be caught up in his old hurts.

He bent his head and spoke to her quietly, “Let my uncle and me speak together privately.”

Her eyes flashed reluctance.

“Please,” he said, “go now.”

Without a word, she turned her back.

Only after her rapid footsteps retreated toward the hotel could Cord let the mention of his parents churn up the pain. “Sarah stood with my father before you drove her from her People. Before you came in the night and murdered her and her husband.”

Bitter Waters shook his head. “I am sure a six-year-old boy might not remember the details, but your father’s gun misfired. Your mother died in a terrible accident. And it was not I who threw the blade at
Franklin’s chest.”

Cord believed he spoke truth, for that was the way the nightmare ran each time it came upon him in the darkest part of the night.

“Do you recall what happened next?” Bitter Waters asked.

The house had burned, but somehow that did not seem to be the answer.

His uncle went on, “I took you up onto my saddle and wrapped you in the betrothal hide Tarpas made for Sarah—which she still kept. Your mother lived between two worlds, as Seeyakoon did when she loved a white man and bore a half-breed daughter.”

“As I do,” Cord ground out. “When I escaped from the tribe in Yellowstone,” he noted his uncle’s flinch, “a white man adopted me …”

The lines beside Bitter Waters’s mouth deepened. “I had taken you in as blood of my blood. You are of the Nimiipuu, the People.”

When Cord had heard those words from him as a six-year-old, he’d denied the tribe. This evening, after facing his uncle for the first time in so many years, it was no longer so simple. He bore the scar of the Mormon boy’s knife, the brand of “savage.” But he carried his
wayakin
of obsidian with him always, as though some part of him did believe.

“I can no longer deny my ties to two worlds, old uncle,” he said. “The trouble is that, like my mother, I belong in neither of them.”

“Until you accept them both, that shall remain true.”

Bitter Waters seemed to evaporate into darkness.

All was still beside the lake, while Cord walked the shore. The hotel lights shined like a beacon.

Two worlds
.

When he had conceived the concept for Excalibur, to renovate a decaying warehouse and create a first-class hotel not far from where the Mormon Temple had been under construction for years, his adopted father, Aaron, had invited him into his library. They had sat among the shelves of well-worn books, everything from Cord’s childhood favorites of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales
and Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
, to the family Bible.

Being in that room always reminded Cord of what had happened years ago, after the older boys attacked him in the schoolyard.

He’d been lying on the ground, bleeding. Carey loomed over him with an ugly smile, tossing his knife from one hand to another. Then Aaron, blond like Carey, with the most unusual whiskey-colored eyes—no way he would ever be mistaken for Cord’s blood father—arrived.

Aaron wasn’t as big as Carey, but he came up behind and grabbed him and Levi and knocked their heads together. Then he looked down at Cord and put out his hand to help him to his feet. “Come home, son.”

With the knife wound on his cheek throbbing
with each heartbeat, with insults still ringing in his ears, Cord had gone with Aaron into the library. He’d watched the older man open the book of scripture, bound in Moroccan leather, and pull his fountain pen from its stand on his desk blotter.

In neat script, he inscribed the name “William Cordon Sutton” in the Bryce family Bible.

In their Mormon extended family, Aaron’s wife, Carolyn, tried to teach Cord to play the parlor organ. Uncle James held forth to instruct Cord in Latin and proper penmanship, and when Cord’s adopted sister, Evie, gave birth to a boy, she named him William Cordon. Aaron even seemed connected to the Jackson Hole ranch. It had been his influence, and that of the bishop of the Mormon Church, that had permitted Cord’s claim to the land to pass unchallenged.

But the conflicts at Excalibur between him and Thomas had made him ripe for Edgar Young’s approach, eager to go to St. Paul and Yellowstone. No, desperate to find a niche where he might control his destiny.

Desperate enough to try to pass for a man without Nez Perce blood.

Beside the lake, he sighed and felt the knots beneath his shoulder blades. How must Sarah have felt, leaving behind her village, her mother, her brother, to go with Franklin? And how did Cord feel this night, meeting his uncle again after over twenty years?

Dismayed that his past had caught up with him? Or, after hearing Bitter Waters tale, ashamed he had
denied his mother’s People?

Laura hurried back to the hotel, wondering why Cord had not wanted her to stay. Perhaps his uncle’s assertion that she was his woman had scared him off.

The more sinister explanation had to do with Constance. Cord had come to the table and asked her to go out with him. Laura had thought, no, hoped his intent had been to break off with her, but she didn’t know. In fact, though honor wouldn’t permit a gentleman to call a lady’s claim to betrothal a lie, there was darker potential.

He might not want to end being the recipient of Constance’s favors.

Halfway to the hotel, she remembered Danny Falls lurking about and moved faster.

Upon entering the festive lobby where music played, she saw Constance dancing with Norman Hagen. At least Laura wouldn’t have to deal with accusations about following Cord out of the dining room … until later.

Her father was in the game room, intent on the cards in his hand. Aunt Fanny was part of a group that included Lieutenant John Stafford.

Laura hurried toward the stairs. She didn’t care to run into anyone like Hank or Larry Nevers and socialize. She especially did not want to see Manfred Resnick and deal with more questions.

Once the door of her room closed behind her, she did not turn the light switch. She didn’t even look toward her bedside candle, but went to the window and opened it wide.

Somehow, being indoors heightened her awareness of the forest she had walked through. On the dark trail, she’d been closed to sensation, hurrying toward safety and light. Now, she inhaled the perfume of pine and appreciated the call of a wild duck. The bird sounded as if it was laughing.

She deserved to be laughed at. She had no idea who Cord really was, or what he stood for.

G
ood-looking animals,” Cord said, his breath making smoke in the chill morning sunlight. He looked over the team of four chestnut horses that would carry them to the canyon.

“Thank you, sir.” The stocky young driver wore the uniform of knee-length tan duster, brimmed hat, and dust kerchief. He raised the canvas cover on the wagon’s rear platform to check on the lunches. “Cord Sutton.”

“Burke Evans.” He offered a hand hard with calluses. “I chose this team because they pull together well and it’ll be comfortable for the ladies.”

Cord rubbed his hands together and stamped his brown leather boots against the early-morning chill. His head felt cold where his hair was damp from his hasty toilet. “Ah, yes. The ladies.”

“And does that make you a gentleman?”

Cord whirled to find Laura, slight and wiry in her
boy’s trousers and a white shirtwaist-style blouse beneath her brown wool coat. Seeing her in pants took him back to the time he’d spent alone with her in the forests south of Yellowstone Lake. Though he had not had a chance to clear things up with Constance, he smiled.

Laura’s lips did not bow in return.

There were too many folks around, drivers waiting alongside their wagons and guests speculating with interest about the day’s sightseeing.

“Come with me.” Cord indicated with a jerk of his head for her to walk with him.

“I don’t think we have anything to say.”

“Please.” If he couldn’t manage to set things straight with Constance, he’d at least let Laura know it was in the works.

“No.” But at the driver’s curious look, she seemed to change her mind. Squaring her narrow shoulders, she went with him down the length of yellow board wall and around the corner of the hotel.