Cord opened his eyes slowly and carefully so he would not jar himself or irritate what felt at that moment like a terribly fragile world. He was lying on his back, naked between clean cotton sheets; their touch was cool and slightly abrasive against his bare skin. He felt the weight of a light blanket atop him, and his head was cushioned deep in a feather-stuffed pillow.
Around him was neatness, order, and the trappings of genteel living. This bedroom was decorated carefully as a stage set. The bed had a head-and-foot piece of brass, a good firmly ticked mattress, and sat high off the waxed-and-polished hardwood floor. A subdued brown hemp oval throw rug covered the center of the floor.
Across the room, on the wall to one side of the door, was a three-quarter-length mirror. Cord tried to shift to a position where he could see into it. The movement was not without pain.
His head ached beyond reach of the worst hangover, with a deep insistent pulsing throb that was enough to freeze him, propped on one elbow and balanced carefully against motion. Concentrating on himself in that position, eyes half-closed, he became aware that his right hand was wrapped in swathing. He opened his eyes again in a hurry.
It looked like he was wearing a mitten on his gun hand. Here was a new and disturbing experience, unprecedented in twenty years of mortal dependence on the assurance that a gun, and the skill and willingness to use it, was a thought away.
Cord stilled himself with effort. A fireplace was set into the wall to his left, with a tall, freestanding oak wardrobe standing alongside. To his right was a flattop desk with three drawers down one side and a straight-backed chair, and above the desk a white cabinet on which someone had taken some care to paint, freehand, a knobbed staff with wings at its top and two snakes twined around its shaft—a caduceus, a physician’s symbol.
Two oil paintings hung to either side of the desk, landscapes in simple wooden frames. Each treated the same yellow-brown sweep of plains grass, with sharp-peaked mountains rising into the sky beyond, country like the basin.
Windows draped in lace curtaining flanked the bed. On a night table to Cord’s left sat a reading lamp, a water glass and pitcher, and his watch. A second chair sat close by, facing the bed. His gun and clothes were nowhere evident.
Cord got himself painfully to a sitting position. The watch was stopped at 10:03. Cord turned it over and found a deep dent in the back of the case. The stem spun loosely between his fingers, and when he shook it, the works rattled. That figured.
Using the chair, Cord made it to his feet, grunting. His ankle was sprained, and he lurched to one side as he made for the wardrobe. He managed to get there without falling on his face. Inside he found only his boots and hat. He touched absently at his head and got another shock. Cord went to the mirror. An egg-sized patch of hair above his temple had been shaved down to the scalp and bandaged.
Cord stared at his naked body in the glass, the dressings on his hand and head—and around his neck, a rope bum, nothing deeply marked, just a ragged reddening, but enough to remind him of what had happened. With all his cuts and bruises and bandages, he looked like a newspaper caricature. But it was not so funny.
He was in strange territory, his weapons missing, and worst of all, he was debilitated in frightening ways. If someone were to come after him, he had nothing with which to defend himself and could not run. He tried the door. It was not locked.
He stood for a time with his hand on the knob, but he was beginning to sway unsteadily. The pain in his head was awful. He climbed back onto the bed. He was not going anywhere, not just yet.
Cord eased back and tried to absolutely clear his mind. Think nothing, he thought, and the ache will go away. What the hell can they do to you? The door latch clicked, and the door began to ease open, as if someone was concerned about waking him, just looking in.
Or slipping into position for a clean shot.
Cord lay quiet. What could he do?
The door swung full open and a handsome woman stood looking at him. Cord was pleased to be looking back. This woman was about Cord’s age, tall and healthy-looking, with very dark hair done up on her head, dark eyes, and cleanly delineated features. Something in her face or expression struck Cord as smart, or skeptical, or merely amused—anyway, here was a woman who would brook no nonsense, but she might be willing to listen to sense. She wore a cardigan sweater over a dress and had good sturdy hips and a fine rise of breast. The earpieces of a stethoscope were hooked around her neck, connected by rubber tubing to the transmitter piece, which sat in the pocket of the sweater. “Where’s my revolver?” Cord demanded.
“Whom do you wish to shoot?” the woman asked coolly.
Some sons of bitches who tried to hang me dead, Cord almost said. But it seemed best to keep quiet until he got a sense of the wind’s direction in these parts and who sided with which.
“Why don’t you start over?” the woman said wryly. “Try this: ‘Where am I?’ ”
“Enterprise, is my guess,” Cord said, thinking out loud. It was the only town within fifty miles of where he’d been dropped, according to that barroom map that had set him out on this jaunt. “How did I get here?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said blandly. “I found you on my door stoop, like a basket of kittens no one wanted.” She came over and sat in the chair beside the bed. “This is the surgery.”
“Where’s the doctor?” Cord asked.
“I’m the doctor. My name is Fiona Cobb.”
Cord was pretty sure she was having him on, but his head hurt too much to make an issue of it.
“Give me your hand, Mr. Cord.”
Cord gave her a questioning look. “You know me?” Fiona Cobb shook her head no. “Not before last night.”
“See here,” Cord said. “Who brought me to this place?”
She sobered, pursed her lips. She seemed about to answer, but then she shook her head slightly instead, as if to discourage him from pursuing the subject.
Cord did feel a little weary for this game at the moment. He settled for, “Where are my clothes?”
“Being washed. Don’t worry, it won’t do them any permanent damage.” She leaned forward in the chair. “Give me your hand.”
Cord did it. She cradled his hand in her lap palm up and began to unwrap the bandage. Cord felt the warmth of her thighs through the material of her dress and became aware of her odor. He thought at first it was medicine and then recognized it for whiskey. There was whiskey on this woman’s breath. Cord wondered if the doctor knew his nurse was nipping at the medicinal alcohol.
“How does your head feel?” she asked as she unraveled gauze wrapping.
“It hurts.”
She glanced up at him. “I’ll bet it does.”
Cord stared with dismay when the last of the dressing came off his hand. His palm and the insides of his fingers were flannel-red and raw, and covered with open blisters.
Fiona Cobb frowned. Cord closed his eyes so he would not have to look at his damaged hand and saw the big dark man named Bliss cutting the rope with his saber and then the flaming beam falling toward him. As he passed out he must have pushed it aside, his hand closing over the glowing char. He imagined the odor.
Fiona Cobb went to the cabinet decorated with the caduceus and returned with a roll of fresh bandages and a jar of some sort of ointment. The sight of his half-cooked hand was making Cord nauseous. “How long?” he croaked.
She rubbed cool ointment into his palm. “A day or two,” she said. “It’s a deep burn, and it will surely become infected if it is not kept medicated and bandaged until the sores scab over.”
“Where’s the doctor?” Cord demanded,
“I’m the doctor.” She finished her bandaging. “So if it does become infected, I’ll be the one to cut it off.”
“Jesus,” Cord said. “That’s not a pretty thing to say.”
“What else hurts?” Fiona Cobb said briskly.
“Twisted my ankle,” Cord said. She pulled back the blanket and sheet in one long swift motion and leaned forward in the chair to probe at the joint with careful fingers.
“Minor sprain. Good as new in a day or two.”
Fiona Cobb pulled the bedclothes back up over him. Her smile was a foot from his, and he felt her cool fingers trace the faint line of rope burn around his throat. That was how they were when the door opened.
The man who came through it was about Cord’s age, though his hair was fine and beginning to thin. He wore dark britches, shoes, a dark vest over a white shirt, no collar or hat. He shut the door, leaned back against the mirror with his arms folded across his chest, gave Cord the once-over, and nodded. He looked a little smart-assed for Cord’s mood, as if he were checking out a new rooster in the barnyard and deciding that the threat was minimal.
Fiona Cobb drew back her hand and sat up straight. She turned and looked at the man blankly.
“Are you the doctor?” Cord asked.
The man nodded in Fiona Cobb’s direction. “She’s the doctor,” he said. “I’m the librarian.”
All rightee, Cord thought. That made about as much sense as any of this.
Fiona Cobb got up from the chair and went back to the cabinet. “This is Richard Carlisle,” she said. She replaced the ointment and got out a bottle of whiskey. “Richard, meet Mr. Cord.” She gestured with the bottle.
“I know who you are,” Carlisle said to Cord.
“Everyone does,” Cord snapped. “People bandy my name all over the damned place.”
“Your reputation precedes you,” Carlisle suggested.
“Tell me something new.” Cord winced with the pain of sitting up in bed. “What is going on in this basin?”
“You mean,” Richard Carlisle said, “why weren’t you killed?”
Fiona Cobb took two water tumblers from a desk drawer and poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into each. She carried one over to Carlisle, who was watching Cord with a sort of superior smirk.
Cord scowled back. This hombre seemed to know some things, and Cord figured the woman did as well. The doctor; imagine that.
“Last night,” Cord said, “I saw a mob lynch a man.”
“A rustler,” Carlisle said.
“He said he wasn’t.”
Carlisle nodded thoughtfully, as if this added a new, theoretical dimension to the discussion. Dr. Fiona Cobb stood with one arm across her chest and the other holding her whiskey just below her chin, looking from Carlisle to her patient. “The circumstantial evidence was against him,” Carlisle said. “And stealing stock is a hanging offense in this basin.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Cord looked to Fiona Cobb but got only a neutral blank stare back. “Listen closely: Not so long ago, somewhere near to here, a bunch of masked night-riding hoodlums hanged a man dead. Is that within the law in these parts?”
“Not within the letter,” Fiona Cobb said to her whiskey, “but within the spirit.”
“We do not need law,” Carlisle said. “We have Mallory Bliss.”
“I knew the man they hanged,” Cord said.
Fiona Cobb laughed abruptly and went to the window. But Carlisle was frowning. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but I wouldn’t go abroad mourning your old friend out loud.”
“He was no friend,” Cord said. “His name was Wee Bill Blewin, and he was something of a bad hand in some ways. He has stolen plenty enough in his days, including horses and cows, could be. Maybe he’s killed men, though I doubt it. But for what he was accused of last night by that mass of renegades,” Cord said, “could be they hanged an innocent man.”
“Figure his accumulated sins caught up with him,” Carlisle said, “and thank your stars you did not share his fate.” Arguing had turned up the pounding in Cord’s head. “How about a taste of that whiskey, Carlisle?”
Carlisle shook his head no. “It might run counter to doctor’s orders, Mr. Cord. We can’t take chances in your delicate condition.”
“You ever hear of civility?” Cord snapped.
Carlisle shrugged and sucked at his drink.
Fiona Cobb was filling a third glass. “It would be best if you accepted our situation. We must live here.” She turned to face Cord. “There is no trouble in Basin County.”
“There will be,” Cord snarled. “Soon as I get well enough, I’m going to make some. Just for the exercise.”
Fiona Cobb handed Cord the glass. “You are delirious,” she said. “So be careful what you say.”
Cord was too hurt and tired to deal with this nonsense right now. “That’s right,” he said. “I am crazy as six Swedes.” He took a big slug from the glass and gagged. Its contents, though alcoholic, were definitely not whiskey. “What is this?”
“Laudanum,” Fiona Cobb said.
“Laudanum!” Cord echoed. “That will curdle your brains.”
The doctor laughed. “Then you have nothing to worry about, Mr. Cord.”
It did seem to help with the pain. Cord drank again.
“He will be fit as a fiddle now,” Carlisle said.
“Get out of here, Richard,” Fiona Cobb said, watching Cord drink.
“Wait a minute.” Maybe it was the laudanum, but Cord had a hunch. He looked past the door. “You know who brought me in here.”
Carlisle shrugged. “Someone found you on the trail. Think of him as an anonymous benefactor.”
Cord shook his head. “I don’t like owing someone I don’t know. I am going to find some things out.”
“You’ve already spent more luck than most men get,” Carlisle said seriously. “Soon as you are well, ride on.”
“Let men handle me that way and walk on away?” Cord said with rich scorn. “When pigs fly,” he spit.
“Go now, Richard,” Fiona Cobb said more gently. Carlisle gave Cord a different, more thoughtful look, then did as he was told.
Cord watched him go. “Mallory Bliss.” Cord spat out the name and felt himself going goofy. “Fix his wagon.” Fiona Cobb sat in the chair beside his bed and watched him placidly, sipping at her drink. His face felt strange and he had the notion he was grinning oafishly. ‘Tear his ears off and feed them to the hogs,” he said thickly.
“Good idea.”
“Make him bellycrawl and eat dirt.”
“Whatever you say.” She placed her palm on his forehead. “Take a break, Mr. Cord,” she said softly. “Go away for a while.”
She went on murmuring, and her hand felt cool and dry. Cord drifted down to laudanum sleep and for a few moments saw Chi smiling at him in the sunlight with willows somewhere behind her, before he was altogether gone.
Two days back, riding north along the Yellowstone and out of Paradise Valley, Cord and Chi had reached the little Montana railroad town of Livingston. There was where it had properly begun, in the midafternoon of a fine bright day.
Cord pressed for getting a bite to eat and pushing on for Bozeman. They had a half-dozen hours of daylight left, he argued, and they could camp on the trail. He’d feel best after they’d laid some distance between them and recent trouble.
There had been killing in Paradise Valley, of the particularly mean and pointless sort that Cord found monstrously unsettling of late. Ironically, the best man in the whole mix-up had died of natural causes—if you could call something like cancer natural. To Cord, the notion of cells running wild and eating your body from the inside out was about as natural as a two-headed calf.
That man was named Arrow smith, and long ago, back beyond the ten years that Cord and Chi had been together, she and Arrowsmith had been partners. Cord knew the old man’s death had shaken Chi deeply and took it as the reason she had been so moody and touchy and silent. Cord had mellowed some over the years and could be patient with her.
So he had time to think on the trail and found himself wondering whether he was turning irresolute, keeping his peace and abiding just to keep her gentle. He decided to believe instead that he was merely practicing the art of getting along, of balancing outlaw inclinations against citizeny aspirations. He had to learn some new tricks if there were a chance of them settling together.
Whatever the reasons, Cord kept his trap shut and let her have her head for the nonce. Their goal was the Bitter Root Valley a couple hundred miles west and across the divide. They’d been heading for that country for some time now, and this was the closest they’d managed to get, so Cord was anxious that no moodiness or any trouble slow or detour them. He was entertaining notions of joining the squirearchy.
For a good long time it had been hard enough to get Chi to even consider the idea of turning their money into ranch land. Then the introduction of each successive step in his daydream met renewed resistance, most lately the details of the two of them together in a radically new sort of partnership. But over time his running on forced her to consider. She still hadn’t given him any good ideas about her feelings on coming into his bed, but other things she said indicated she had come to accept that their back roads were vanishing into settlements.
So these days he worked on convincing her that owning acreage was the only route to real freedom. Without their own land there was no telling what awful ways they might be forced to go to ground.
Anyway, there in Livingston, Cord was for a quick supper and moving on, but Chi said no, she was going to do some drinking. They ended at a hole-in-the-wall saloon called the Bijou, a few doors up a side street near the railroad switchyards. It was a dirty, ill-lit place with a trestle bar, three tables, one filthy window, and a revolving clientele of brake-men and engineers coming off the day shift or bracing for the night shift.
Cord had been hoping for a beefsteak, fried potatoes, and a sliced tomato broiled with cheese, but he settled for a cold ham sandwich and a hard-boiled egg. Chi started right in on a bottle of tequila.
At first she wouldn’t talk at all, just stared sourly into her drink while Cord toyed with a bottle of beer. For near the first time he could remember, she was drunk in a hurry. “We don’t get out of here, we’re going to lose another day,” Cord said when he noticed.
“Another day in ‘our home country,’ ” Chi said sarcastically. “The wonderful Bitter Root Valley with Goodman Cord, the hacendado.” She sipped at her tequila. “And what shall I be, Cord? Your woman? Your ranch wife?”
“Hey, now,” Cord murmured, making the sort of meaningless soothing sounds he’d use on a jumpy horse. Only thing was, Chi, like this, was worse than any skittish animal. She was more like a mine tunnel full of gas, and everyone around lighting up smokes.
“Will I wear an apron?” Chi went on in that sour voice, “and cut my hair short?” She toyed unconsciously with one of her dark waist-length braids, twining it around her fingers. “How will I look to you in a bonnet and a crinoline dress and flour all over my hands? Is that my part in your fine dream, Cord?”
“What’s eating you?”
“You are, querido.” Her tone had turned real nasty. “You and your pipe dreams, and your airs about turning into something you will never be.”
“How’s that?” Cord tried to keep his voice neutral.
“Mr. Cord,” Chi said in a low mocking voice. “You can’t change what you are, Mr. Cord. All the money you can ever steal, all the land you can fence, you’ll still be the same as you were born.”
“Which is?”
Chi leaned forward and smiled sweetly. “Texas dirt trash.”
Cord snapped back as if slapped—and yet somehow, some way, he managed to keep a rein on himself. “We will talk some other time.”
“Fine,” Chi said amiably. “But I won’t be any different, and neither will you.”
Cord might have learned some new tricks about keeping his temper, but he would not stand for this mean bullyragging, not in this life, so he excused himself. He wandered the town until dark. In other days he might have gotten drunk or into some other kind of childishness. But right now he just didn’t feel like it, and finally there was nothing for it but to go to bed.
There he lay open-eyed and thought, what if she was right? Or worse, what if she simply could not manage the idea of bedding with only one man? It did not take much of that sort of musing to convince him that on this night there would be no sleep without whiskey, so he dressed and went down to the lobby. Across the street he could see Chi knocking back the tequila inside the Bijou Saloon. He did not want to face her again right then, so he gave the desk cleric a dollar to go get him a pint jug.
The desk clerk was a thin young bald man with a perpetual sneer, as if anyone who would stay in his hotel were beneath his social notice. When he came back with the bottle, his sneer had transmogrified into a smarmy grin. “Your lady friend is over there,” he told Cord. “Having herself a time.”
Cord stared at him. “All night long I have wanted to hit someone,” he said. “Say one word more, and you are it.”
Upstairs in bed, Cord sipped the whiskey and waited, but he did not hear her come back to the room next to his. For a long time he lay thinking angry thoughts, but by and by he fell away into fitful sleep and vague anxious dreams.
The next morning Cord stood awhile in the hallway outside Chi’s door, considering the pluses and minuses of knocking. Ultimately he decided that waking her was dangerous. She was probably hung over.
Cord was not really hungry, but he killed some time in a café, drinking coffee and reading a two-day-old newspaper, hoping she would come along in a more cheerful humor, but trying mostly not to think about her. When he could not hold himself longer, he went back to the hotel. The clerk watched him come in, as if expecting this.
“Has she come down?” Cord asked.
“Who would that be?”
Cord pointed a finger at him. “Nope,” the clerk said quickly, but then he got his lick in anyway. “She never went up.”
Cord nearly lost his temper. “Tell it,” he snapped.
“She checked out last night,” the clerk said. “Somewhere around midnight. Had the boy fetch her gear and horse from the livery.”
“How’d she seem?”
“Drunker than any woman I ever saw,” the clerk said.
“She say anything?”
“Yeah,” the clerk said. “ ‘Adios’.”
Cord went up to his room. He rolled a cigarette and rested back on the bed, wondering if she had left him for good and for true. By the end of the cigarette, Cord knew such pondering would get him nowhere but crazy. Without thinking about it, he was off the bed and packing his bags, doing what he always did in times of uncertainty and trouble, moving on, out into the country.
He would circle up to the grazing prairies between the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, take a look around. Maybe drink a cup of coffee with the big cattlemen and learn a thing or two about the ways of empire building.
Cord told the clerk he would return in one week. Meanwhile he would leave a note, in case the woman came looking for him.
“Think she will?” the clerk asked.
But Cord was tired of the man and busy pondering what to write. He dated the stationery and scrawled, “Gone north to see how the real cattle barons operate. Maybe they can teach me to wipe the horseshit off my boots before stepping on the carpet.” She might think it funny, if she saw it.
Cord sealed the envelope with wax and gave it and five dollars to the clerk. “You aren’t much in my eyes,” he said to the clerk, “but I will wager you are man enough not to take money and then not do a thing.”
“You are the trusting sort, mister.”
“Uh-uh,” Cord contradicted. “I am coming back, and I will know if you played me false. Guess what will happen then?”
The clerk stopped smiling. “Set your mind to ease, mister”
“Why, thank you,” Cord said broadly, “I’ll do that.”
A half hour later, Cord was riding north up the Shields River, feeling better already. As the territory opened up and the settlements fell behind him, calm euphoria took over. Cord felt fine, and went on feeling fine all that day, right up until the time when some sons .of bitches tried hanging him dead.
The room was dark the next time Cord awoke, dark except for the rectangle of the open door, and there she was: her familiar silhouette framed there and backlit by yellow light from the hallway, the drape of her serape and the flat line of her sombrero. The other woman, the doctor, stood behind, holding a lantern wicked down low. But deep shadows shrouded the bed where he lay, the darkness a palpable weight upon him. His face was glazed with feverish sweat.
He tried to form his lips into the syllable of her name, but they were fat and rubbery and would not work. Cord stared across the vastness of the room and remembered the laudanum. His tongue filled his mouth. The women were talking: Cord could not make out the words, but their tones were low and soothing. He could sink back into sleep’s embrace and be safe. Cord felt like a child and liked the feeling fine.
Then her face, half-lit by the lantern, hovered above him. She said his name in a low soft voice. “Drunk again, querido?" she asked. Her voice was musical and teasing.
Cord opened his mouth and someone put a bottle to his lips. Cord gagged down another draught of the laudanum.
A cool hand touched a cloth to his forehead and swabbed away sweat. Cord suddenly shook with night chills, but it broke him loose from the laudanum’s grip for a moment and he made out her face clearly before it moved up and away.
“Hey,” Cord said thickly. “¿Qué pasa?”
She said something. Her tone was sweet and narcotic like the laudanum and started to take him away again. He closed his fat clumsy lips and dropped his heavy eyelids.
He thought she kissed him on the forehead just as he drifted back into sleep. It was a nice idea anyway, and he carried it with him when he redescended into laudanum peace.