Cord 1, page 9
“Simple enough,” Cord said. “When they did some quick counting and found out what a haul they had, Paco led them up into the high mountains pronto. In a couple of days they had made it up into the North Park of the Colorado Rockies, and by that time they figured it was safe as it was going to get. Still, they were crying nervous, Brocius told me, halfways expecting Federal troops to charge out of the aspens at any minute, walking around with their nerves on hair-trigger. But they were out of fresh horses, and not wanting to steal any and give away their trail. So while they were holing up and trying to stay warm next to a too-small fire and worrying it out, the hired man, our Mr. Brocius, lit out with the loot.”
There was something admirable about the simplicity of the act—if Brocius’s story held any truth at all. But trying to weigh the truth in it, the truth in all these tales and counterclaims, a lifetime of it—so it seemed at that moment to Cord—was tiring. He rubbed at his eyes. He had been on short rations of sleep for too many days of running and fighting anyway, and this was wearying business. That was another thing to guard against as the years passed, the temptation to yield to that weariness, the urge to let down just a bit, just for a time.
“He poisoned them,” Cord told Chi. “He was carrying belladonna, deadly nightshade, they call it. Don’t ask me why. When he told me the story, Brocius claimed it was just one of his tools, something he carried because it might come in handy. Anyway, they were tired and rode-out and sitting down to make their medicine, talking about what they were going to do with their shares and so on, and Brocius came up with a bottle of whiskey. They passed it around and no one turned it down, not even Paco. Five minutes later, Paco scratching at his gun as he went under, they were all sleeping like children. Brocius scattered the horses, all but two, and rode out, him on one horse and the Federal payroll on the other, and left them for dead.”
“He should have made sure.”
“Could be he thought the poison would do it,” Cord said. “Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to shoot sleeping men.” Cord studied the floor. “You’re right though. He should have killed them.
“What he did was vanish. Changed his looks for one thing. Gained some weight, grew a mustache and beard, and started dressing altogether different. And aged. It was handy worrying about Paco, he said, because it did age him, his hair starting to turn and the lines coming out in his face. He tried to think of himself as somebody else. Said he used to sit around and make up a whole history of himself as some other man, from a childhood right on up. And try to live like he was that new person.
“What it was, finally,” Cord said, “was that Brocius had never known the all-night fear before … three o’clock in the morning in some town and staring out the hotel room window down some empty street, and you don’t know anybody, but you can’t stop your hands from shaking, nor your mind from churning … that was some of it. No sleep, but when you’ve done your drinking.”
Very slowly, Chi smoothed her serape over her knees, and then she stood and came across the jail cell the two steps that separated her from Cord, where he sat on the floor. Cord looked up at her and took her hand, but then he let go. She just brushed the back of it against his cheek, then turned abruptly away.
“Well,” she said to the wall. “We know that one.”
“Once in a while,” Cord said. “But you got to admire his guts, to make himself over and get all this started, all the while his hands shaking and him trying to not remember who he had ever been.”
“How you feeling?” Chi said.
“We’ll see.”
When she turned back to face him, her face was blank.
“We could just ride out of here.”
“You know we could not,” Cord said. “First time you let yourself give in and ride away, figuring it doesn’t mean that much. But from then on you’re nothing but a dirt farmer, and no heart for even that.”
“Then you get me out of here.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“You tell me,” Chi said. “I want to hear it from you.”
“Stop it,” Cord said. “You stop this right now.”
Instead her hand slashed across Cord’s face. His head snapped back but otherwise he did not move, except to turn his head slowly to meet her eyes again.
“You don’t own me,” Chi said.
“No,” Cord said. “Nobody does.”
Cord pulled himself to his feet and called out through the bars. His face stung and felt hot and flushed, but he did not touch a hand to it. The marshal came hobbling down the hall, a stooped man with a graying mustache and watery evasive eyes. He unlocked the cell door and stood back to let Cord pass.
Chi’s eyes glowed with rage and impotence. Cord had taken two steps when he heard the cell door grate shut behind him, and then the curses started. Cord humped his back and felt a chill, as if a weapon were trained on him from behind.
Cord ignored the marshal’s “So long” and went outside. The gray sky was beginning to darken, and the first large cold drops of rain struck around him and splattered off the wide brim of his hat. It was late afternoon, maybe four o’clock, but it felt like evening had already begun to fall. Cord pulled the sheepskin coat around him and turned toward the hotel.
When he pushed through the swinging doors into the New Hopes Saloon, faces turned toward him and then quickly away, and for a moment the low murmur of conversation was broken by an uneasy silence. Then the voices took up again, this time low, droning, subdued, like an ominous minor chord.
The same ruddy-faced bartender was behind the mahogany. As Cord approached, the man tugged nervously at his cauliflower ear, memory of the day before written across his face.
“Bourbon,” Cord said. He took a five-dollar note from his pocket and smoothed it on the bar. The barkeep sat a clean shot-glass in front of Cord and next to it a bottle of bourbon with a printed label that proclaimed its Kentucky origin and even looked authentic. Cord filled the shot-glass to the rim, pouring carefully and with a steady hand.
“Bring me a glass of water,” Cord said, not looking up. “And leave the bottle.”
Cord seemed to almost draw himself together as if for an ordeal. Then he tossed the whiskey back. He sat the glass down carefully, then sipped almost daintily from the water. He stood motionless for a while, one foot on the brass bar-rail, staring straight ahead at nothing. Finally he stirred himself and refilled the shot glass, let it sit while he rolled a passable cigarette and got it lighted. He tossed back the second drink and this time did not fill the glass, but stood smoking and staring off at whatever it was he saw. All these motions were slow and careful, as if part of an old and practiced enactment.
Cord closed his eyes and let himself think about Chi.
Leaving her in that jail was a way of protecting her, it was true, and yet in so many ways she was better capable of protecting herself than he was. She would kill, when it came to that, without hesitation. She had saved his life, as he had possibly saved hers.
There were times when Cord pondered on what had bound their partnership for so long. Chi was good as the best, and quick and steady and full of nerve. There was that. He could depend on her for anything he could depend on a man for. But she was not a man, and there was always the complication of crossed and strange rules between them. The other rules, the usual ways of dealing with women, she would hardly ever acknowledge—not between them.
None of this hid the main thing: Paco would be in town before another nightfall, and the way she was tied up in the trouble between them could not be helped now, only dealt with the best way Cord knew how. Fences could be mended after it was over.
If anyone was left to mend them.
Cord thought: she is my only friend. He opened his eyes, tipped his head, and studied himself in the mirror over the back bar. A man come to this age with only one friend.
In the beginning, back down there in the Kansas trail towns for which Cord had forsaken the southeastern Texas of his Germanic immigrant upbringing for the final time when he was not yet twenty, there had been the hard companionship of men he rode with. For that time, it had been enough. There had been clear rules for freedom, and clear rules for friendship within that freedom, no strings but those of the moment. But now he was older, and he was riding with a woman, and all that implied.
The shot-glass of bourbon was beside his still right hand. Cord tossed it back and let his eyes fall shut again.
What, he wondered, did she think of him? In the heart of her best days, Chi was a woman. There were times they were apart, between jobs, sometimes for a month or more. He did not know where she took herself then, did not ask and she did not volunteer. He was pretty sure she had people somewhere.
Somewhere she had men as well, he assumed, but he did not let himself dwell on that topic.
Then, in that wonderful burst of clarity which came to him with the third or so shot of whiskey, Cord understood that he had never let himself think of this life between them any more than absolutely necessary. There had been times he had come close to touching her for true, but he had pulled back because of sure knowledge that all this would change when he did, and he did not trust the change. All he wanted was the freedom he’d found for the first time back there in Kansas, and Chi, clean and simple, and their life, and the hard friendship they had invented for one another.
He could go back to the jail. But that was whiskey talking. One more drink and the impulse would pass. Cord opened his eyes, refilled the shot glass, and raised it to his lips. But instead of drinking he held it there before him as he stared into the mirror.
Dallas was there behind him.
Cord felt the barrel of a revolver cut into his ribs. He finished his drink, tossing back the whiskey and then refilling the glass, his hand rock-steady. This time he raised the glass to Dallas’s reflection in a half-smiling toast. The expression on Dallas’s face did not change.
“See you got some fresh clothes,” Cord said, without any movement toward facing around to Dallas.
“This time I’ll kill you,” Dallas said. “Give me the slightest reason.”
“Not just now,” Cord said and he sipped again at the whiskey.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“How’s the shoulder?” Cord said. He was sitting on the bed in his hotel room, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees.
“It hurts all the time.”
“I’ll bet it does.”
“It’ll heal.”
“Can you shoot?”
“If needs be.”
Cord stared at the amber whiskey bottle in his hand, sat like that a moment with his head down. He took another shallow pull of the peppery liquor and offered the bottle to Dallas, who took it and drank more deeply.
Dallas sat in a wooden chair at the little table by the window, close enough so they could pass the bottle without trouble. Outside the cold spring rain came sheeting down into the muddy street, puddling in the wagon tracks and wallows.
The rain should have been the only noise in New Hopes on this weekday night, when the riders from the ranches along the Yellowstone were all out in their range shacks, or camped somewhere with yellow slickers spread over their bedrolls, feeding a damp fire and cursing the day they rode in. But instead riders had been coming in all evening. The hotel was full up and the saloon downstairs rang with the sounds of the tinny piano, wafting dimly up to Cord’s room along with the whoops and hollers of the drinkers and their women. Across the street, the door of the Dollar, the other saloon, burst open and a man came hurtling out to splash face down in the mud of the street. He lay there a long time before pulling himself upright and staggering off into the darkness. There was the sudden sound of gunfire from down the street, and then of laughter from somewhere below, and the cold rain did not let up either.
It was like the eve of some ancient and lurid holiday.
“Look,” Dallas said.
Cord stood at the window. Below, sitting stiffly erect in the saddle, the reins holding the head of his white stallion high, Brocius rode down the main street of New Hopes. He wore a full-brimmed white Stetson and a white duster already streaked with rain. As he walked his horse, Brocius looked slowly to his left and right, surveying the town as if he were an explorer just come upon a rumored city of mystery. Behind him rode the two hard lean cowboys who hung around his house, the three riders moving as if in formation.
“What’s happening?” Cord asked, his voice thick with whiskey.
“I don’t know.”
Dallas held the bottle in his left hand and his Colt in the other. He raised the bottle again, wincing at the pain from the wound the dwarf had given him, but drank steadily. Cord waited until he lowered the bottle.
“You’re not going to shoot anything,” Cord said.
Dallas looked down at his gun, like he was surprised to find it in his hand. “No,” he said. “Not right now, anyway.” His tone was oddly formal, and he holstered the Colt and drank again from the bottle to cover his discomfiture.
“But you shouldn’t have left me like that,” Dallas said. “Dammit. I had to steal clothes off a wash line. I staggered through most of the night, blood oozing from my shoulder and the chill puckering my skin, until I see the lights of a homesteader’s sod house. Then I have to wait there watching in that frosty high grass until the old man leaves with his dog, before I finally sneak down and scare some wife damned near out of her head. All the while I’m getting dressed she’s standing there shrieking and shrieking, and I’m expecting the old man to come back with the dog any minute. But he don’t, not until I’m full dressed in his clothes, which are about half a yard too short for me, and then he just stands there and laughs when he finds out what’s happened. Turns out he used to be a marshal working out of the Federal Court of Judge I. C. Parker down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and gave it up for farming. ‘Does my heart good,’ he kept saying, and then he’d start up laughing again. He finally patched up my shoulder and loaned me a horse. All the way back to town I thought about shooting you.”
Cord nodded solemnly and reached for the bottle. There was no telling how funny Dallas thought it was now.
“Actually,” Dallas said, “I’m lying. I stole the horse and a saddle after he patched me up. Circled right around to that man’s barn and robbed him. Coming back for you was all I had on my mind. There was never any question I would. You knew that.”
“Pretty much did.”
“On the way in,” Dallas said, “I saw Paco.”
So this was the way it would all come together, Cord thought. He looked up quickly and for a moment the thickness left his voice. “Did they see you?”
“No, but I knew who they were, and all at once some things came dear, or at least started to make some kind of half-witted sense. Like you and Brocius and Paco, and Brocius calling me in, all of us in this same little town at once.
“So now you tell me what it is, what’s going on, what you all have going together.” The Colt was level and steady on Cord’s midsection. “You tell me right now, quick and straight, no lying. Or I’ll do it, I’ll kill you, and not worry about it afterwards.”
“Sure,” Cord said, and he pulled from the bottle again.
The dim light of the kerosene lamp projected their elongated shadows on the walls of the small hotel room. A thin trail of sooty black smoke climbed lazily toward the ceiling. Cord had been talking for half an hour without a break, except for an occasional sip at the whiskey, his voice quiet and nearly toneless while he told Dallas most of the real reasons all this was happening.
“Revenge,” Dallas said. “That’s what Paco is mainly looking for. No wonder Brocius is scared. He should be.”
Cord nodded.
“So Brocius hired you to fight for him,” Dallas went on. His voice grew sharper. “Where can the man’s pride be? Seems like he could fight for himself, if nothing else.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Brocius has anyway twice that many years,” Cord said. “Maybe they seem more precious to him.”
“What about you?” Dallas demanded. “Making his excuses for him. Maybe, with Paco coming in, you’re all getting old.”
Cord let a smile come onto his face. He gazed back at the younger man.
“I surely could go down dead tomorrow,” Cord said, “and there’s nothing about the idea I like. But this is not the first night like this I’ve lived through, and tomorrow isn’t the first day. I might be thinking about it, I might be afraid, but I’m not shaking and I won’t hesitate.” He held up the bottle and sighted through it to the light. The whiskey was beyond half-gone. He took another pull.
“It’s a feeling,” Cord said, “like the whiskey is, different from real. That’s how it is being afraid. It’s there all right, but once you learn to get along with it, it doesn’t matter. It scratches at the door and comes in, but if you don’t say howdy it’ll just go off in the corner and curl up and watch. It’s like an old hound, always staying just behind you and knowing enough not to get in your way.”
Dallas looked at Cord with something like awe. “You’re drunk,” he said, like this was a discovery.
“Well,” Cord said. “Yes.”
There was more gunfire from the street. Down below four or five men were shouting curses, and by the time Cord got to the window they were rolling and grappling in the mud, gouging at eyes and tearing hair. A horseman came by at full gallop, the hooves of his horse splattering in the goop, narrowly missing two of the brawlers. The rain pounded down remorselessly.
“I don’t understand it,” Dallas said. “It’s like this whole goddamned town has gone off crazy.”
“Seems like it,” Cord said absently. His eyes had stopped focusing on the scene in the street, and he seemed all at once to be drawn to thinking about something else.
“Look,” Dallas said. “There is that goddamned dwarf!”
“Where?”
Cord scanned the street again. For a moment he couldn’t see anyone, but then, over Dallas’s pointing finger, he saw the small figure of Pell, leaning against a post under the marquee of the hardware store, a few doors down from the Dollar, half-hidden by the sheeting rain and the canopy’s shadow. The dwarf was watching the goings-on in the mud, an expression of satisfaction on his face, like all this could be his doing.
