Lake of Fire (49 page)

There was open space ahead, he realized. In fifty feet, he was out of the forest. A sliver of rising moon and the Milky Way illuminated that here the cliff edge that had bounded the chasm gave way to the vast field of jumbled rocks they had seen from below. The talus pile continued up perhaps a thousand feet and intersected one of the great rock spines leading up several thousand more feet to the top of Nez Perce Peak.

“The horses can’t do this.” Laura patted White Bird’s neck with a hand that was a paler shade of gray than the night.

Cord ran his hands over Dante’s coat. In addition to the bloody furrow left by a soldier’s bullet, new wounds seeped from his frightened plunging against the trees. The big horse whimpered, a thin tentative sound.

Putting his arms around Dante’s neck, Cord closed his eyes. He remembered his first sight of the colt, all spindly legs and foam-flecked coat. Born on a crisp autumn morning, Dante had staggered valiantly to his feet beneath his mother in half the time it normally took a newborn.

“What are we going to do?” Laura asked.

Cord looked back the way they’d come. Torchlight winked through the forest behind them, drawing closer.

He pressed his cheek to Dante’s velvet nose. He sensed even in the night that Dante watched him with keen intelligence.

“We’ll have to leave the horses,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
“The soldiers will find them and take care of them.”

“But …” She looked back.

The Army of the United States pursued as relentlessly as they had in 1877.

Laura smoothed her hand along White Bird’s shoulder. Cord thought she was crying, as she slid off White Bird and faced the wall of rock.

Staggering beneath her bone-numbing exhaustion, Laura pulled herself up onto another boulder on the seemingly endless climb. She could barely see Cord above her, a dark silhouette against a bank of clouds streaming over the ridge from the east.

Her entire being focused onto the next rock, where she would place her hands and feet, and whether she would be able to drag her weight up. Her throat was parched, and her heart pounded fiercely.

After leaving Dante and White Bird at the edge of the boulder field, Laura and Cord had come no more than halfway up the talus pile, headed for the spine of the ridge.

“The other side is covered in forest and the going will be easier.” He reached back and helped Laura up onto the next ledge. She felt the sticky wetness of blood between their clasped palms; the sharp volcanic rocks had sliced open both their hands.

She wanted to tell him she couldn’t climb another
foot, that he must go on and leave her to save himself, as they’d left the horses.

“This is a good sheltered place to stop until dawn,” he said. “We’ve both got to rest or we’ll never make it to the top.”

“What about the soldiers?”

“They must have lost our trail again,” Cord said. A study of the rock pile they’d scaled did not show anyone climbing after them.

Laura looked around. They were in the lee of the wind, but since they had stopped climbing, she could already feel the night air chilling her sweat-dampened skin. Cord had his sheepskin coat, while she wore nothing but her dress, torn and ripped from the climb. If only there’d been time to check Danny’s camp for blankets, water, or food.

Below in the canyon, Laura could see the light of the bonfire. For a moment, she thought she smelled smoke, but it must be her imagination.

Cord seated himself in a sheltered hollow. “Come

sit.”

Laura hugged herself, staring back the way they had come. “I hope White Bird and Dante …”

“Don’t think about it,” Cord ordered. “You’re shaking with cold, and in a little while I will be, too, unless you get down here and share some body heat.”

A nasty gust eddied onto the ledge, and she gave up on what was behind them. When she came to shelter with him, he slid his coat off and wrapped it around them both.

Impossible to think that only a few weeks ago Chicago had been her world: petty jealousies between her and her cousin, worrying what her aunt thought about her wardrobe, daydreaming of getting out from under her father’s thumb.

Cord’s embrace tightened, and he winced.

“Your arm hurts?” She wished she had clean warm water, fresh bandages.

He stroked her hair, gently touching the sore place where Danny had pulled some out.

Laura studied the moon, intermittently visible behind a bank of low scudding clouds continuing to sweep over the eastern ridge in waves. The flat sheen of Yellowstone Lake lay far below to the west, cool waters masking the surface of the volcano beneath.

In the Lamar Valley, the fires the soldiers had smothered sent up pale smoke.

Cord pointed. “The campfires of the People cast their glow into the cloudy skies as we moved through these mountains. Horses dragged travois loaded with precious possessions, painted hides, silver jewelry, and ceremonial breastplates …” He trailed off, seemingly lost in memory.

As Laura watched the sky, she detected the faintest crimson in the east. “It can’t be morning.”

“It isn’t. Rest while you can.”

The wind began to strengthen, its moan rising as it crested the ridge above. While night wore on, it gusted so strongly she and Cord heard the crack of trees breaking above. The leaves and pine straw in
their hollow swirled and took flight.

Lightning split the sky at intervals, but there was no rain in this dry, cold front. In fact, the nagging smoke smell grew stronger, making her recall what Hank had said last evening about a new forest fire on Nez Perce Peak.

With their backs against rough rock, Cord and Laura huddled in each other’s arms, her head against his chest. Hours passed; neither slept.

Sometime before dawn, Cord bent his head and whispered, “We’ll get through this.”

Without food or water, and with miles of backcountry ahead, Laura wondered if they might not be forced to give themselves up to survive.

But Feddors and his men had already taken shots at Cord. Would the captain, who acted irrational, if not outright crazy, allow Cord … or her … to be taken alive?

L
aura did sleep, for Cord’s voice awakened her. “First light.”

It was hard to tell, but there did seem to be a barely perceptible brightening. Of course, the moon was overhead and perhaps that made a difference.

The wind picked up from higher on Nez Perce Peak, sorting what looked like mist into wispy trails. Across the canyon lay Little Saddle Mountain, another sharp peak ringed with treacherous blocks of talus. The air appeared clearer there.

Laura extricated herself from Cord’s arms and studied his beard-stubbled, bruised face. The fresh wound, where Constance had cut him with her ring, made a match for the ancient one. Getting to her feet, she scanned the long blocky slope of boulders that she and Cord had climbed in darkness.

At the base, two blue-jacketed army men were ascending on foot. The rifles slung over their shoulders
made her aware she and Cord were armed with only a single pistol.

Cord pushed to his feet. “I don’t like the look of

this.”

Thick fingers of a strange-looking fog billowed over the top of the ridge. With them came the strong stench of burning.

They began to climb. It seemed as though it might have been better not to rest, for Laura’s muscles had tightened like a leather bridle soaked with horse sweat. The cut flesh on her palms had stopped seeping, but as soon as she stretched for a handhold, the wounds reopened. Her thirst, which had abated somewhat during the cold night, returned to her parched throat.

From his pocket, Cord brought out a flake of obsidian, smaller and thinner than his
wayakin
. He took the narrow edge between finger and thumb and broke off a bit. “Put that under your tongue, and it’ll help your saliva come.” He put another piece into his mouth and pocketed the rest.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“Last night I found it right below my hands. Used it to cut loose.”

Laura felt the stone warm in her mouth. If his guardian spirit had sent another helper, perhaps they might get out of this.

Foot by foot, hour by hour, she and Cord narrowed the distance to the ridge. Though the soldiers came on behind, they heard no shouts to indicate they’d been spotted in the smoke haze that grew thicker as they
climbed. Rather, there was an ominous sound from the other side of the ridge, like one of the Chicago trains approaching the station.

“The wildfire must be right over there,” Laura finally admitted aloud. The quaver in her voice frightened her.

Cord started to touch her and stopped, looking at his torn palms. “We can probably get around it.” He pointed east. “You can’t see from here, but the Lamar circles back around and is only a few miles down there. We’ll be drinking from the river before the soldiers even think about getting up here.”

“I hope so. What will we do for food, since you can’t shoot anything without giving us away?”

“Tomorrow I’ll show you how to dig camas roots.”

“What are they?” She wrinkled her nose.

“They’re starchy and not very interesting, but we won’t starve,” Cord remembered. “The Nez Perce used them for everything from making mush to eating them raw.”

“I wish we had some now.” She smiled wanly.

As they pulled toward the top, the smoke billowing above them grew darker and thicker.

“Soon we’ll be slipping and sliding down a slope of pine needles, faster than we could run,” Cord proposed. “From the sound, the fire’s to the north, opposite of the way we want to go.”

Up over the last boulder and they found themselves on a knife-edge, overlooking a steep, northeast slope studded with pines. An ancient, twisted tree reached
gnarled limbs into the smoky morning sky. It seemed to grow from a cairn of boulders that men might have made; perhaps the Nez Perce had made a monument here during their passage.

But there was no time to wonder, with all the sense of accomplishment at scaling the slope, all the optimism Laura had based on the obsidian crashing.

A blast of heat hit them in the face.

The rumble became a roar. Great tongues of crimson-and-orange flame leaped voraciously upwards. Tall pines torched as the fire front threw off fireballs that rolled upward and then disappeared into the white-hot sky. Thick smoke rolled blackly off the two-hundred-foot wall of fire, sweeping across the slope toward them, faster than a horse could gallop.

Cord looked over his shoulder, back the way they had come. Feddors led Lieutenant Stafford, climbing more nimbly than Cord would have expected. Of course, the man was driven by his demons.

Thankfully, he wasn’t in rifle range yet.

Perhaps if Cord put up his hands, John Stafford would be able to influence Feddors to accept his surrender. That way, at least Laura would be spared.

He turned to her and saw she was gauging the speed of the inferno and the distance.

“No!” he cried.

She took off along the ridgetop heading up the
mountain. Away from the fire, but it was burning uphill.

“That’s no good!” Cord shouted. “Laura!” He realized she could not or would not hear him. He ran after her.

The terrain fell away so steeply on either side that the pines on the slope seemed to be growing on a vertical wall. A sudden wind shift brought the smoke sweeping up over them in a choking cloud.

The dragon’s roar grew ever louder, punctuated by the sharp snap of limbs exploding and the louder reports of tree trunks blowing apart.

Cord’s thigh muscles ached as he ran uphill after Laura. Catching her was harder than he’d thought, but from the terrified look of her face when she glanced back at the fire, she was running on pure adrenaline.

A sudden sharp whine near his ear. My God, Feddors was within range.

Cord found his own surge of pure terror, caught Laura’s hand, and plunged off the ridge onto the forested slope. Immediately they were knee-deep in a patch of coarse, icy snow.

He saw Laura’s ridiculously thin slippers sucked from her feet with the first two steps, but he dragged her on. They half-wallowed, half-fell down the sixty-degree incline.