Lake of Fire (7 page)

Cord shouted, leaping to his feet and waving his arms.

The wolf flinched, but only for an instant. The rest of his pack appeared; at least ten animals surrounded Cord.

He fumbled on the ground for a stick, a rock. There was nothing, and his wild heartbeat threatened to burst his chest, until his hand closed over an angular sharp stone.

Drawing his arm back, he threw the rock as hard as he could.

With a sharp
“kiyah,”
the wolf leapt from the rocks and disappeared.

Cord picked up another missile. Although one of the animals had slunk away, the others paused, watching warily.

He shied another stone at the nearest predator and missed. Crouching, he picked up another.

Like smoke, the pack seemed to evaporate into the night.

Only then did Cord feel the sharp edge of the stone he clutched and look down to see what he held. Black and glassy, and glowing like a diamond, the obsidian
reflected the light of the full moon.

Laura watched Cord close his fingers almost reverently, as if the simple stone were a thing of great value, and stow it in his trouser pocket. Then he turned away and poured steaming liquid into speckled tin cups. He handed one to her, his rough fingers brushing hers.

Sitting on twisted logs close to the fire, they drank the strong hot coffee. Cord said nothing more, but as they shared dried apples and jerky, he kept glancing at her.

Aunt Fanny said not paying attention would discourage a man. A widow for over twenty years and determined to love no one else, when Fanny’s still-black hair and buxom figure attracted unwanted attention, she kept men firmly at bay.

Laura found her gaze wandering back to Cord and looked away with a little jerk.

“If I didn’t hurt you last night,” Cord said evenly, “I’m probably not going to.”

Laura started, wondering if he read minds. “Probably,” she repeated, and kept her head averted, pretending to study the gray shapes of the mountains.

Cord exhaled in a way that might have been amusement.

She gave him a sharp look. He returned it.

Eyes that challenged looked out from a face whose lines made him look older than Laura thought he
really was. Perhaps he was thirty, but living in the mountains seemed to have toughened him.

Without finishing his coffee, Cord stood and threw the last of it into the fire. With a sigh, Laura watched the hissing rise of steam and got to her feet, as well. The morning was more blue than gray now, and as she stretched her aching back, a rose finger of light touched the highest spire of the mountain peak. It reminded her how far she had traveled since yesterday’s sunrise.

Cord kicked at the burning brands, scattering the fire over the rounded rocks and gray sand of the beach. “I guess I should be glad you’re just going to Yellowstone to work,” he announced. “What if I’d rescued one of those spoiled rich girls who are good for nothing?”

In a broad willow bottom at the base of the squaretopped peak Cord pointed out as Mount Moran, he reined Dante in and called a halt for the night. Though the summer sun was still above the western range of the Tetons, he estimated aloud that it was around nine o’clock.

Then he turned to Laura in a matter-of-fact manner. “Seems to me it’s your turn to cook.”

She asked herself how difficult it could be to soak and boil some beans and add jerky to season them. Cord had surely never sampled the kind of delicacies that routinely graced the table at Fielding House.

With the sun sinking fast, he unlimbered his rifle and sat upon a boulder to clean it. Laura assumed he was doing routine maintenance until he rose, placed the weapon over his shoulder, and began walking through the marshy flats like a stalking cat.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Hunting.”

“What?”

“Birds.”

She knew a little about bird hunting from listening to man talk in Chicago drawing rooms, most notably that it was accomplished with a shotgun, not a rifle.

A moment later, the distinct flapping of wings accompanied a flock of plump birds bursting into the sky. Cord threw his rifle against his shoulder; sound cracked. He pumped the lever to chamber another round and fired again.

A pair of feathered bodies dropped to earth.

Cord turned to her with white teeth flashing. “Ptarmigan.”

He strode out twenty paces, bent, and retrieved the birds. Then came back to her with the same confident walk and held out the game.

She recoiled at the bright ruby blood drops on the multicolored feathers.

“Aren’t you going to cook?” The limp masses hung from his strong fingers.

“Perhaps,” she ventured, “you could clean them.”

A vertical line appeared between his black brows.

She drew in a breath and reached for the birds, her
hand closing over the scaly legs. “I’ll need a knife.”

Cord reached to his hip, pulled a horn-handled hunting knife from a sheath, and offered it to her.

With the birds dangling from one hand, she took the knife in the other. Even as she did, she knew her best intent wouldn’t pluck, gut, and prepare these birds in a proper manner. Every piece of meat she’d ever seen had been cut at the butchers, or by one of the servants. She didn’t have the first idea where to make incisions without slashing into intestines and exposing her and Cord to the foulest of diseases.

“I’m sorry,” she admitted. “I don’t know what to do.”

He jerked birds and knife from her. “You’re not a tart, you’re not a cook, but you can shoot.” Blue eyes bored into hers. “Well, so can I, lady. What good do you do us?”

Upon awakening the next morning, Laura lay beside Cord on his spread-out sheepskin, a stone poking the small of her back. Even at dawn, this day promised to be warmer than the one before, as insects were already crawling on the long blades of river-bottom grass.

Forty-eight hours since she’d risen to a summer snowfall and watched men die. The memory, sharp and vivid, of Cord leveling his Colt at the outlaws, still had the power to make her breath come shallow.

Laura turned onto her side and looked at him. With his eyes closed, black lashes trembling with each
inhalation, he once more looked vulnerable, something she knew he was not.

No, he was hard-edged and completely at home in this country that had a way of suspending the rules she’d chafed at in Chicago. Thinking of it in those terms, she almost wished she were the kind of woman who felt at ease in the wilderness. Despite the looming night shadows, no matter the yipping cry of coyotes, she breathed the cleanest air she’d ever known and gazed into the clearest sky.

Cord stirred and his eyes opened, their focus unerringly on hers. A small shock seemed to go through him; his pupils dilated. They studied one another across ten inches of bedding, the warm gust of his breath upon her cheek.

Should he choose to force his will upon her hundred-pound frame, she would be at his mercy.

He threw back the covers and heaved his big body up to crawl out the opposite side.

This morning there was no bonfire, no coffee. Laura went to the river’s edge among the willows, dropped her dirty trousers, and managed to relieve herself without splashing her boots. She knelt on the bank, dipped up water to drink, and cupped handfuls onto her face.

When she came back, Cord had rolled the bedding into a tight bundle. Without a glance at her, he whistled to Dante and saddled him.

“We can’t both ride all the time or we’ll wear him out,” he said. “I’ll walk this morning.”

She refused his offer of a hand and mounted without assistance. Gathering the reins before he could try to lead the horse, she earned a look of grudging respect.

Though it shouldn’t matter, it helped make up for his telling her she was good for nothing.

As they set out north toward Yellowstone, Cord walked ahead through the green willow bottoms. After a few miles, they began to climb into a dense and darker forest. In places, the trees grew so close together that the horse had to be turned back to find a wider path.

In early afternoon, they came upon the brink of a steep-walled canyon.

Cord stepped to the edge while Laura dismounted. The verge overlooked vertical black lava walls studded with pines wherever there was enough soil for growth.

“Is that the Snake?” She pointed to the mesmerizing silver ribbon of river below.

“The Lewis. It feeds into the Snake.”

Lewis Canyon … They’d managed by traveling cross-country to enter Yellowstone without passing the military station at the south entrance.

Cord paced along the precipice. Being in the park was both a relief and a worry. The fewer checkpoints he had to go through, the less likely someone would detect he was part Nez Perce. Part was as good as all for some, and he’d seen everything, from the sly rapier of ostracism to the blunt bludgeon of assault. The
farther he got without running into anyone, the less likely he’d be interrogated about the dead men at the stagecoach.

On the other hand, when he arrived at Lake, he’d be questioned about not checking his weapons at the park boundary.

He took off his hat and ran his hand through his matted hair. Usually fastidious in his grooming, after their dunking in the river he’d let things go. It would make it easier later for him to turn into someone Laura wouldn’t recognize.

Staring down hundreds of feet at the river, he thought he heard a twig snap in the thick stand of trees. He looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing save the straight trunks of lodgepole and the soft brown duff underfoot.

It was peaceful here, with the wind sweeping up over the canyon rim and a raven soaring on the drafts. The midday sun shone through the branches, making a checkered shade that shifted and moved across Laura’s face.