Lake of Fire (34 page)

“Something like that.”

Didn’t Edgar know Danny was a notorious criminal? He appeared genuinely unaware, even looked relieved at having unburdened himself of what he knew.

“If you went to get the papers in March,” Cord
mused, “why did you wait so long to give them to me?”

“Danny only let me have them after we all got here. I had to put two and two together to realize they were the same papers.”

“Did you see Danny today?”

Edgar frowned. “I skipped the excursion because he wanted to meet this morning. Then he showed up early and left, something about going up to the canyon.”

“The canyon?”

Cord’s heart began to thud. He’d considered the outlaw when Forrest was shot, but had been unable to imagine a motive. Maybe it made sense that a bad seed like Danny, who apparently thrived on violence, had grown impatient for victory. If railroad management wasn’t ready to award the hotel contract to Cord, then Danny would shoot Hank’s financial backing out from under him.

“Where do you suppose Danny is?” Cord spoke as casually as he could.

“You’re not going to turn him in?” Edgar still sounded innocent. “Impersonating his brother isn’t a crime.”

“Is he staying in the old cabin?”

_{“I
.
.
.”}

“This is serious. This afternoon Forrest Fielding was shot in the canyon.” Edgar blanched.

“Tell me where Danny can be found, and maybe you won’t be charged.” Cord watched confusion war with loyalty to the friend who liked Edgar’s brand of booze.

“Do you really think … ?” His brown eyes looked uncertain.

Cord lowered his voice. “Danny attacked the stagecoach Laura Fielding was on. I saw him there.” Edgar gripped his drink.

“He’s dangerous.” Cord leaned forward. “He’s using you.”

Silence fell.

It ended when the string quartet began to play Bach with sprightly journeys up and down the scale. Edgar tipped up his glass and swallowed the last of the melting ice and liquor.

“I don’t know where he and Alexandra are,” Edgar said flatly, “but he’s been sleeping in the cabin.”

“All right. I’ll get Manfred Resnick.”

Cord left Edgar and found Resnick in the card room. There was no trouble convincing him to lay down his hand.

When they returned to the porch, only a moment later, Edgar was gone.

A fingernail moon was close to setting when Cord and Resnick approached the soldier station. Electric lights shined within the log structure.

Resnick knocked, and Cord dreaded another confrontation with Captain Feddors.

To his relief, he recognized the private who opened the door. The fellow appeared barely old enough to
enlist from the smooth look of his cheeks, though perhaps it went with having pale red hair.

“Good evening, Groesbeck,” the Pinkerton man boomed. “I have urgent business with your captain.”

Groesbeck brought his blade-thin body to attention. “I’m sorry, sir, but the captain has gone over to the Wylie Camp. Something about an Indian stirring up trouble.”

Cord’s chest clutched. He followed Resnick toward the camp where lamp-lit tents studded the hillside. The campfire blazed; Bitter Waters had just been introduced.

A scan of the crowd for Feddors found him at the side of the audience, scowling, surrounded by at least five soldiers.

Bitter Waters came forward. This evening, as on the first night, he wore traditional native attire, a breastplate of bones arrayed over his bare chest. Cord placed himself between the captain and his uncle.

Resnick leaned in close. “Think there’ll be trouble?”

“I hope not.”

Bitter Waters raised his arms and began his chant. Gooseflesh rose on Cord’s arms at his memory of the tribe on the trail, people on horseback and on foot, along with pack animals, strung out over several miles.

His opening complete, Bitter Waters looked into Cord’s eyes and began to speak in his precise accent.

“They say we made the news even in New York City and Washington, D.C., our eight hundred, with our two thousand horses. We went to war against
the United States during
hillal
, the season of melting snow and rising waters. At the Battle of White Bird, we won a great victory, routing the soldiers without losses. Traveling toward the land of the Crow in Wyoming, or on to Canada if some chiefs had their way, we camped at a place called Big Hole Creek in southern Montana. Chief Looking Glass decided we would cut poles, put up tipis, and stay over a day. My friend Tarpas Illipt and I rode to the mountains and hunted for game. When we returned that evening, spirits were high. Young boys noisy at their games by the creek, the warriors singing until very late …

“We believed there would be no more fighting.”

Long past midnight, Bitter Waters surveyed the dark shapes of tipis along the stream and listened to his friend.

“In my dream …” Tarpas squinted into the moonless dark of the August night. “I was once again with your sister, Sarah.”

She was like a dream to Bitter Waters, as well, her shining dark head and laughing eyes fading into shades of memory. “Sarah has been gone for over seven snows,” he cautioned. “My mother, Seeyakoon, told you before she died, Tarpas, it is past time for you to take a wife.”

“Tonight, it was as if Sarah and I had never parted.” Tarpas’s chocolate hair looked nearly black in the starlight
glow. “We lay together in my tipi … until I saw the Bluecoats storm us.”

Two horses splashed through the shallows of the meandering creek. A sudden chill cooled the night wind, and the dogs in camp began a frenzied barking.

“What’s going on up there?” Tarpas eyed the dark woods on the hill.

Bitter Waters noted the faint shapes of spooked horses, neighing restlessly amid the clatter of hooves. “We are all nervous, even though the army is far behind us.”

“I am always alert during darkness.” Tarpas crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed his upper arms. “You know the sun is my guardian spirit, and I cannot be felled in a battle pitched during daylight.”

Bitter Waters inhaled the calming smell of freshly cut green lodgepoles. “As my
wayakin
is the sunrise, I am also jumpy during the night.”

Though it was still dark, plumes of smoke arose from a few morning cooking fires, while the smell of meat mingled with the nutty aroma of camas porridge.

Tarpas stirred up the fire before his tipi, ruining Bitter Waters’s night vision. He saw his friend sit and write something by firelight; before he was through, a faint slate hue began to color the eastern horizon.

“I do not know how or when this letter to Sarah might be delivered,” Tarpas told him, “but I have been thinking of her more often since a Bannock scout reported her with the man Sutton and a child in Jackson’s Hole this spring.”

Fifty feet from him and Tarpas, Bitter Waters made out Chief Joseph’s younger wife outside their tipi carrying a load of firewood. She was as slender as a girl, bending to pick up another stick.

The unmistakable crack of a rifle split the still air, reverberating through the clustered tipis. Blood bloomed on the breast of her white cloth blouse; piled sticks tumbled to earth, and she slumped on top of them.

Bitter Waters saw the Bluecoat who had killed her, splashing through the creek into the heart of camp. He could not have been much older than she, his cleanshaven face fearful beneath his brimmed cap.

Tarpas seized his Henry repeating rifle from inside his tipi and turned to face the intruder. He shot, and the soldier fell into the water.

Men and women appeared from inside their lodges in various stages of undress, some towing sleepy and bewildered children. Dark shapes rushed down the hill and into the meadow where the Nez Perce had pitched their tipis. More shots rang out.

An older man stumped past carrying an ax, calling out that he’d lent his rifle to his sixteen-year-old nephew. “Bold Heart,” he shouted, but the boy was not in sight.

An elderly man, older than Chief Toohoolhoolzote’s seventy snows, sat in front of his tipi, a lazy curl rising from his pipe into the still morning air. A soldier approached and shot him through the chest; a faint smoke swirled up from the dark bullet hole.

Bitter Waters tried to shake off his feeling of unreality
and looked around the battlefield. Despite the din of shooting and shouting, he heard the thin wail of an infant cradled in his mother’s lifeless arms.

Tarpas said Sarah had a child …

A sharp shot and the baby’s cries truncated.

Sarah … but there was no time to let sentiment sting his eyes. Not when the leaves of the nearby willows were shredded and cut by bullets, not when he and Tarpas had to throw themselves to the earth while the barrage passed.

A soldier pulled aside the flaps of a tipi and a boy of eight or nine fired a pistol, hitting the man in the shoulder. The soldier emptied his Colt into the tent, killing all five children inside.

Tarpas gripped Bitter Waters’s arm and gave a keening war cry. Nearly thirty of the young warriors converged on their position as they struggled up from the ground.

“Hold them off,” Bitter Waters ordered three of White Bird’s band, while he surveyed their weapons, less than twenty rifles and a few pistols.

Reaching to his belt, Tarpas passed his own handgun to the nearest man who was armed only with a knife. “These soldiers cannot be better than those we defeated at White Bird Canyon! Are we going to let them kill our women and children?”

Shouting in a manner that made thirty men sound like seventy, the Nez Perce rallied, their guns making flashes in the dawn. In the creek bottom, men fought hand to hand, using rifles and stout willow branches
as clubs.

Bitter Waters saw a sour-faced soldier of the United States scoop out a shallow hole and lie down in it to hide from stray bullets. A woman of the People, already hit and bleeding, took up her dead husband’s weapon and fired, killing two of her enemy. Out of ammunition, Tarpas threw down his rifle and drew his knife.

The sky lightened from colorless to bearing the first hint of blue.

Bitter Waters paused beside the stream to catch his breath. All around, it seemed suddenly silent, as the hide tipis brightened in the rising morning light. Behind the hills, he could see the glow that would become sunrise.

The last sense of unreality evaporated when Bitter Waters saw his wife, Kamiah, part the thick reeds of the creek bottom and wend her cautious way downstream away from the battle. The water came up past her knees, darkening her dress and dragging at her. He clamped his teeth against the urge to call out and draw shooting at either of them.

Ahead of her, a clump of willow jerked. Bitter Waters could not ascribe the erratic movement to wind, even had there been a breeze. A soldier rose in her path, lips drawn back to show his teeth beneath a blond handlebar mustache. His gun pointed true at her breast.

Five snows since Bitter Waters took her to wife. And only since they had gone to war had she revealed
the new life within her. His wife and child … as Sarah was wife and had a child. Should he survive this day, he would find his sister and bring her back to the tribe.

Staring at the soldier who threatened his wife, Bitter Waters prepared to shoot. Before he could move, Tarpas was there, leaping from the brush on the opposite side of Big Hole Creek.

“Here!” Tarpas cried in Nez Perce. “I am here!” Brandishing only a blade, he raced through the water, long legs pumping.

Two guns fired, almost simultaneously.

Bitter Waters lowered his smoking weapon and ran, sweeping Kamiah under his arm and dragging her away.

The soldier’s blouse soaked and darkened; his body floated away downstream.

Splashing through the shallow water, Bitter Waters released his wife and dropped to his knees beside Tarpas. A seeping cloud of red stained the clear creek, while the sun crept over the mountain’s shoulder.