This time there was sunlight, brightly filtering through the curtains, warm where it touched Cord’s skin. Cord looked around, and there was Chi, real as the world could ever be.
She had pulled the chair over near to the desk so she could lean back against the wall. Her chin was tipped forward to her chest, so the brim of her sombrero concealed her face, and her hands were hidden under her serape. As always, she wore the black leather britches tucked into the high tooled uppers of her black boots. The two long black braids of hair trailed down over her shoulders, shining against the serape’s rough wool.
She could have been dozing, but she stirred as soon as his gaze touched her. The front legs of the chair touched down on the flooring, and she raised her head to show him her handsome brown face lit with a smile, like daylight breaking over the horizon. “Not dead, eh?” she said.
He thought he should perhaps be angry. The last time they’d been face-to-face she’d spit some hard bad news at him; now she was playing jokes as if that behavior had never been. But the truth of it was, the anger was simply not there. He was just damned pleased to see her. Here she was, with him once more, and Cord was relieved as a cub.
“¿Como está?” she asked.
“Asi asi. ”
“Good enough.” Chi tipped back her hat brim. “You feel like eating something?”
Soon as she suggested it, Cord was suddenly and ravenously hungry. He took that as a good sign; he had always associated appetite with health and healing. “Fine idea.” No one had dressed him, and he stayed where he was. “How long have I been out?”
“Two nights and day, la médica told me.” Chi gave him a critical once-over. “It looks as if she fixed you up all right.”
Cord showed her his bandaged right hand. “Más o menos.” He wondered how she’d found him, and why she’d come looking in the first place, but there was time for all of that, now she was here. The thought of food was making him salivate. “My clothes in that wardrobe?” It embarrassed him somewhat to be naked with her there, even if he were covered with a sheet and blanket.
Chi jutted her chin in the direction of the wardrobe. “Take a look.” She was getting a big kick out of this.
“Right.” Cord stayed where he was. “You want to kind of get out of here?”
“No,” Chi said. “I want to watch.”
“Well you can’t,” Cord said.
“Too bad.” Chi stood, stretched languorously, and went to the door. “I kind of had my heart set on it. That’s what I was hanging around for.” She opened the door. “Actually,” she added. “I peeked under the covers while you were sleeping.” And out she went, leaving Cord to gape at the closed door.
Cord got out of the bed carefully. The ache in his head was dull and distant and had more to do with hunger and opium hangover than injury, he decided. The bandage had been removed to give the head wound air, and in the mirror he saw that it was healing nicely. He could walk normally without the sprained ankle giving him more than a twinge. As for the rope bum, it was just livid enough to remind him that soon as he got some food and answers, he might have to see some people.
That brought him to the most worrisome problem: the gun hand, still mittened up in gauze. He went to the wardrobe, thinking how you took blessings like two good hands for granted until you lost them. His clothing was neatly folded on a shelf in the closet—union suit, socks, britches, shirt, vest, hat—and surprisingly, his belt and holster, with his gun where it belonged. Resting atop the pile was the tobacco pouch Chi had run off with back in Livingston.
Cord dressed awkwardly, working around the bandaged hand. When he was finished, he stood there regarding himself in the mirror, getting back into the man he was. After a time he removed his Stetson again, stared at the cut as he fingered the little ridge of puckered skin. His hand was tender beneath the dressing. These stigmata bothered him in a practical sense, but there was more to it: he blanched to see the visible marks of his infirmity, the mortal weakness he wished to deny. Only lately, deep in himself, Cord had begun to give credence to an old suspicion that he was simply not as tough—physically or mentally—as he had been in the old hell-bent-for-trouble outlaw days. No one was, in this new world where cancer could ambush you sure as guns.
Not that guns weren’t a concern as well. Should he need to use his Colt—and likely he would, if he stayed long in this basin—he would have to go at it left-handed. Cord slipped his holster off the belt and repositioned it on the opposite side, then stood before the three-quarters-length mirror and took a try at drawing left-handed.
Years back Cord had taken some serious gunfighter lessons from a legendary shootist named J.W. Baron. Cord had run across Baron in Abilene, Kansas, at the end of what turned out to be Cord’s last cattle drive up from south Texas. Baron counseled ambidextrousness. It was a contingency you might never in your life use, but in the case of some difficulty with your regular gun arm, it could save your life. Survival had been J.W. Baron’s specialty—until he’d been back-shot in the barnyard of a northern Nevada ranch. Cord was there when it happened.
But Cord had learned to shoot at least ninety-five percent as good with his left as his right and kept up the practice for years, until not so long ago, easing off when he and Chi became regular citizens. Still, there in front of the mirror, the move wasn’t too bad after a couple of tries: smooth, if a little slow. He might even be able to hit something, if he had to. If he had the time.
Chi was leaning against the hallway wall when Cord came out, her arms folded under her serape. The door opposite opened on an examining room. “You doing okay?” Chi asked.
“Huh?” He was surprised by her solicitousness.
“I would have hated it, riding all this way to find you dead.” But it didn’t come out as lightly as she meant to make it.
“Looks like you got lucky.” He was always edgy when he was not sure of her mood. “How about that breakfast?” He looked back out the window at the sunshine. “It is morning, right?”
But she stayed where she was, studying the floor. “What I said. The last time I saw you.”
Her discomfiture discomfited him; the habit of avoiding intimate revelations, though changing, was still a deep part of him, an instinctive protective response.
“All this talk about land buying and stock growing and settling in like bears for a forever winter.” Chi looked up at him. “I felt like I was being treed, and I got … dismayed.”
“Dismayed,” Cord echoed. “Panicked is more like it.”
“Listen, Cord,” Chi said firmly. “I am not used to being scared. I never could afford the luxury. I found myself backed up into that cave you’ve been trying to carve for me, and I wanted daylight, and quick. I thought I couldn’t breathe.” She shook her head, impatient with herself. “Maybe I was too quick with my claws.”
Cord worried the edge of the bandage around his right hand. Both of them worked hard to make the lives they wished, but she had to work harder. A lot of it had to do with her being a woman.
Long ago Chi had stepped outside society’s preconceptions of women’s ways, and it cost her. A lot of women regarded her as if she were deformed; too many men saw her as a character in their perverse fantasies. And when those sort of people tried to mold her into their idea of how she should be, she had damned little patience for any of it. Who could blame her?
Maybe that was how she had come to see Cord lately, since he’d been blathering on about settling in, and living easy on some piece of Montana bottomland: another meddler trying to manipulate her. Maybe she thought he was casting her in the make-believe story of his own safe-assed future. But then again, she was here, wasn’t she?
Cord looked up and Chi was grinning tentatively, as if waiting for him to make the next move. Damned if he knew what; trying to figure out the right thing to say was making him sweaty.
“Think you can try putting up with me again?” Chi asked.
“Got to,” Cord muttered. “You’re all I got.” He meant to make it sound like a joke, but it came out serious to his ears. He thought of something to do. “I got to go kill a snake,” he said and turned for the back door.
Chi put her hand on his arm. He stopped.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Chi said firmly, almost with irritation. “That’s all.”
To Cord’s disquietude was added astonishment: in all their time together he had never known her to apologize, to him or anybody. How the hell was her mind running these days? Cord wondered on it in slippery' bewilderment and then gave it up. She was complex in ways he could only compare to a cut diamond, glittering here and then there, always clear at the center and always changing with the light.
One thing was certain: If they ever did make a settled man-and-woman life together, it would rarely be routine.
“Try not to do it again,” Cord said, kind of gruff and mostly interested in getting away.
Cord passed the open door of Fiona Cobb’s bedroom. The hall ended at a sitting room facing the front of the house. Cord turned the other way, passed through a kitchen, and went out to the backyard.
A hot blast of wind hit him in the face as he stepped out; the weather had taken an odd turn in the time he’d been out, the air much too warm and dry for this time of the year. Cord faced into the breeze and headed for the privy, wading through a few chickens pecking in the patch turned for a kitchen garden. An irrigation ditch had been cut to run along one side and the back line of Fiona Cobb’s lot; Cord looked upstream and saw a tall windmill above roofs of town buildings in the north. On the far side of the ditch was a line of cottonwood saplings, the beginning of a windbreak.
Way off west toward the divide, the snow line had already moved halfway up the mountains. But against the north side of the little privy building, a bank of dirty old snow remained, drifted high as a man’s waist.
A long blanket-wrapped bundle had been laid atop the snow pile, and more snow packed up along its sides. Cord worked loose a flap of the wool and looked into the gray face of Wee Bill Blewin.
His mouth was open and his cheek was smeared with soot, and the closed lids of his eyes were coated with frost. Cord stared down into the face for a long moment before he turned away. A body stored for keeping in a doctor-woman’s snowbank. To hell with all of them. This would work out. Chi was back, over her drunk and her mad, and she wouldn’t let him get into anything too blockheaded.
He found Chi waiting in the front yard. From that vantage this was a pretty little place, with a white picket fence surrounding grass spring-green from the ditch water. A pole rising from the gatepost supported a shingle: FIONA COBB, M.D.
“We will walk,” Chi announced. Cord held the gate for her and she said, “Gracias,” almost gaily.
But Cord, though he was hungry and feeling himself once more, and relieved that they were teamed up again, was not nearly as gay. The hanging and burning of Wee Bill Blewin was haunting him—dead is dead, but somehow in this case it was more horrible for the method.
Maybe he was simply irritated beyond distraction. Cord was not so quick to think vengeance as in earlier days, but there were some varieties of trashy carryings-on he would not abide. He could not afford to, not if he wished to ever again think anything of himself. “All right,” he said to Chi. “Lead on. Likely you already know your way around.”
For the moment this town looked calm as daisies. Fiona Cobb’s surgery was on a side street that formed the stubby southerly foot of an L with the main business district. Vacant lots lined the rest of her street; this residential fringe of Enterprise had been surveyed and platted, but there were no signs of residents besides Dr. Cobb and Richard Carlisle, here or anywhere else in town.
“How’d you know I was here?” Cord said.
“I saw your horse, so I made inquiries.”
“My horse?”
“In the livery corral,” Chi said with some impatience. Cord thought he saw a touch of color high up on her cheek. “I got your note,” she said, “once I’d sobered up. I guess I know you well enough to track you down.”
“You know what happened?” Cord asked her.
“I’ve got an idea.” Chi smiled. “From the looks of you, you ran into some trouble. Unless you got drunk and rode over a cliff.”
“I might have to see to business here before we ride on,” Cord said carefully, trying the notion out on her.
“Well, sure,” Chi said, as if it were already decided. “I’ll be siding you.” She flashed him a quick grin. “That ranch in the Bitter Root will wait for us.”
Cord was about to make a remark, but then they turned onto the main street.
Bliss Basin was open range in every direction, broken only by a few rolling hills one way, a meandering line of cottonwoods marking a creek another way, the whole great bowl rimmed by mountains. In the center of this unspoiled wilderness sat Enterprise, like a seat of permanence and modem refinements.
The stage road here became the town’s main street, one good-sized block long. Everything was neat and spruce and looked to have been built recently. By whom? Cord wondered, and why? This Enterprise looked to have amenities and ambitions. Yet there was not a soul in sight.
To Cord’s right as they walked on down the street, a good-sized two-story building was identified by a nicely painted sign as the Enterprise House. A café and a saloon occupied either side of the first floor; the second story was topped by a squared false front, while a balcony fronted the curtained windows of a couple of hotel rooms. Here was home, Cord thought. It seemed like half his life had been spent in such rooms.
Past an alley was the mercantile, a one-story building with two plate-glass windows. In a high-roofed open-fronted storage shed behind it, heavy rolling stock farming equipment was on display: two giant iron-wheeled Case steam tractors getting a bit rusty in the remnants of drifted snow, a half-dozen horse-drawn mowing machines with their five-foot sickle bars pointing to the roof, a dozen of those fine new dump hay rakes. Cord wished he had been here to see the Case tractors arrive; someone had to have driven them overland from the railhead, hundreds of miles at two or three miles in an hour. It must have taken weeks.
Some new tack, harness and the like, was draped over a rack at the back of the shed. Everything was left out in the open; there must have been damned little crime in this town. Beyond the mercantile sat a livery bam. Cord’s gelding and Chi’s mare were in the corral out back.
The buildings on the west side of the street were even more solid and permanent-looking. The one at the south end had two main chambers, the near one of wood, the far one built of gray-brown granite blocks mortared with cement. The near part was topped by a small steeple with an open top containing a bell: a church, Cord thought, until he noted behind it a run of seesaws and swings, neatly painted and maintained. It was a school. Meaning there had to be children in these parts, which in turn meant there were families. Well, maybe, Cord thought, though he was beginning to wonder where they lived.
The schoolhouse was attached to the granite building, which was fronted by its own entrance up three stone steps. Carved in the lintel, a solid slab of granite, was the legend, in heavy Roman letters: ENTERPRISE FREE LIBRARY. Cord recalled Richard Carlisle, calling himself the librarian; at the time Cord had figured it for a stupid joke. Further on up the street was a square one-story building constructed of red brick, whose sign identified it as the Territorial Bank of Enterprise.
Beyond the last buildings, where the street again became a rough range road, stood the windmill Cord had spotted from Fiona Cobb’s backyard. The road split to pass it on either side; the windmill towered over the town like a sentinel. It was a good hundred feet high, with a ladder climbing one side of the enclosed framework. The wheel at its top was many-veined and a good ten feet across and spinning now in the warm morning breeze from the mountains off west. The two ditches branched off through head gates from the holding tank at the windmill’s foot.
Beside it was parked an excavator ditch-digging machine. Cord had heard of them but never seen one up close, with its metal cups running on an endless chain. Cord marked it up. Before he left this town he was going to have a close look at this machine. Could be something he’d want to own one day not so distant.
Still, there was something distinctly eerie about this fine modem empty town in the middle of nowhere. Some years back, at the opera house in Leadville, Colorado, Cord had seen a performance of The Flying Dutchman, and this Enterprise reminded him of the shade of Wagner’s Captain Vanderdecken, condemned to round the Cape of Good Hope forever—alone, and to no point.
Then, standing there in the middle of this town gone ghost too soon, Cord spotted smoke rising from the cafe’s chimney and shook off his musings. He followed Chi up on the boardwalk and under the painted sign, blinking for a moment as his eyes dilated in the cool dimness.
Here was a neat, clean, little place, the sort of establishment whose appointments suggested that breakfasting would be a pleasant pastime. The wooden floor was swept clean around half a dozen matching rectangular tables with two or four or six chairs, arranged about a cold cast-iron furnace stove. In the back corner a door connected with the saloon, and nearby a half-counter service window separated the kitchen from the dining area. Cord heard the sizzle of cooking coming from that precinct, and the aroma of coffee and food sharpened his hunger.
Fiona Cobb looked up and said, ‘‘Join me, please.” She sat alone at one of the tables and seemed genuinely pleased to see Cord, her patient, up and hale. The table was spread with a tablecloth and set with white cups and saucers decorated with graceful scrolling, with carefully laid silver flat-ware to either side. Fiona Cobb nodded civilly, even pleasantly, to Chi. Cord noted it as a courteous gesture and wondered dimly what had already passed between the two women and if they had discovered some things they had in common.
Richard Carlisle came from the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a mostly full bottle of whiskey. “Back from the dead, I see,” he said to Cord. Cord didn’t rise to the gibe; he was tired of that sort of scratching match. What he wanted was food. Carlisle set the pot and the bottle on the table and returned to the kitchen.
Fiona Cobb poured coffee all around. “How do you feel?” While she asked, she put a dollop of whiskey into her cup and the one at Carlisle’s place, the move unselfconscious, as if first-thing-in-the-morning drinking was a normal and unremarkable routine for the two of them.
“I’m okay,” Cord said. He gestured with his bandaged hand. “This bothers me.”
“Time heals all wounds,” Fiona Cobb said.
“Then we shouldn’t ought to need doctors,” Cord said.
She laughed. “Too late for you now, Cord,” she said. “You’ve already had my treatment.”
Carlisle returned with a tray of four plates and dealt them out. Cord in his hunger was fairly overwhelmed: there were fried eggs, hot sliced beef with gravy, fried potatoes, canned peaches shiny with syrup, and thick slabs of coarse-grained wheat bread lathered with butter. Carlisle set the tray on a nearby table and joined them.
Cord tried the coffee. It was hot and dark and wonderful.
“What’s your fee?” he asked the doctor, digging into his eating. “Never mind,” he went on with his mouth full, “send your bill to Mallory Bliss. It was his night riders who tried to hang me.”
That touched a sore nerve. Fiona Cobb held her laced coffee halfway to her mouth, and Carlisle pursed his lips in a tight thin line.
“Your argument might not be with Bliss,” Carlisle said carefully.
“He’ll do until someone else comes along.” With each bite, Cord was feeling better. His left hand worked a fork pretty handily, it turned out.
“I was happy to minister to you, Mr. Cord,” Fiona Cobb said. She watched her plate, as if her eggs were watching back. “There is no charge.” She looked at Carlisle.
“We’ve been talking,” Carlisle said.
“Bet you have.” Cord folded a buttered slice of bread in half and stuck it in his mouth.
“I wish to solicit your help,” Fiona Cobb said. She looked from Cord to Chi to include her, but Chi seemed totally involved in her breakfast, as if she were not listening.
“You?” Cord asked.
“Us,” Fiona Cobb emended. “We want to speak with you about a favor.”
“More of a job, actually,” Carlisle said. “There is money in it,” he added, as if that cinched the deal.
Cord mopped up the last of his eggs with the last of his beef and stared down at his empty dish. “Guess I’m ahead of the rest of you.” He gestured with his fork at Carlisle’s plate. “You going to finish those eggs?”
Carlisle frowned. He took his napkin from his lap and placed it on the table, pushed his chair back. Fiona Cobb concentrated on eating, while Carlisle took Cord’s plate to the kitchen and said nothing when he came back with seconds on everything and set the refilled plate before Cord. “You make a swell breakfast,” Cord said. “I will say that.” He hunkered down to some more serious eating.
But just as Cord lifted a forkful of beef and egg to his mouth, footsteps sounded on the plank walkway out front of the cafe. Cord put down the fork, adjusted his chair around and a little away from the table. Chi went on with her absorbed eating. The cafe door swung open to the morning, and a newcomer paused in the doorway, so anyone who wished could get a good look at him in full daylight. Cord sat chewing his beef, wondering if this should be cause for alarm and deciding not.
The fellow in the doorway was compact, wiry, a very fit fifty or so years old. Cord sensed toughness: not the gun hand sort, but rather the true thing derived from a lifetime at work on the land. He wore a slouch hat, checkered California pants, and was giving a thick cud of tobacco a real workout with a jaw square as a bookshelf. He stepped inside, closed the door against the flies, and stood studying them with a clear eye.
“Meet Mr. F. X. Connaught.” Carlisle smiled. “F. X., you probably know these two.”
“F. X. is foreman to Mallory Bliss,” Fiona Cobb said.
“Good for you,” Cord said to Connaught. “What’s your beef?”
Connaught kept his expression neutral.
“One thing more,” Fiona Cobb said quickly. “You should know that F. X. was the one who brought you to me the night before last.”
Cord turned in his chair. “You just remembered that?”
Fiona Cobb reddened slightly. “I didn’t want to … trouble you while you were ill.”
“You didn’t want to be mouthing off,” Cord suggested, “until you knew how mad I was, and at whom.”
“St. Jerome writes that ‘the scars of others should teach us caution,’ ” Carlisle said.
“Do give it a rest, Richard,” Fiona Cobb snapped.
“Cord,” Chi said.
“Huh?” He looked her way.
Chi pointed with her butter knife. “Your breakfast is getting cold.”
Cord gawped at her. She smiled sweetly and went back to her eating. “Well, I don’t like people standing around when I eat.” Cord regarded Connaught. “You weren’t with those lynchers the other night by any chance?”
Connaught made no response, but Cord knew Connaught had not been among the night riders. The sort of man who ran in an animal pack wouldn’t likely have the sand to come in to face him alone, especially not now that Cord’s name and repute seemed to have spread across the basin. And there was Chi’s unconcern: her instinct stood for a lot. “Well, sit and take some coffee or eggs or something,” Cord said.
The little dour black Irishman thought about it; likely he had not gotten this old in this country without exercising considerable caution. “Coffee,” he decided, and drew a chair over.
“Wonderful,” Cord said, and went back to his eating. Carlisle fetched a cup for Connaught and filled it and his own and Chi’s. Chi pushed her empty plate aside, reached across the table, and took Cord’s makings from his shirt pocket.
“You keep stealing that,” Cord said mildly.
“Borrowing,” Chi corrected. “That’s why I ran you down, so you wouldn’t remember me as the tobacco-thieving sort.”
Fiona Cobb and Carlisle paid attention to their whiskey and coffee and took care not to interrupt the banter. Having made their overture to Cord and Chi, the doctor and the librarian seemed suddenly leery of them. Connaught was silent and at apparent ease, satisfied to watch Chi’s skilled fingers build cigarettes.
Cord wiped his plate clean with the last of his bread. “Now then,” he said to Connaught. “How did you happen to end up my ambulance driver?”
“I follow the order of Mr. Bliss,” Connaught said, deadpan.
“All the time?”
Connaught drank some coffee. Here was a man for whom words had worth, and not the sort to give them away gratis.
“Okay,” Cord said. “Where did you encounter my remains?”
“At the home place.” Connaught watched Cord take the lit cigarette Chi offered. “There Mr. Bliss asked me to fetch you to the doctor.”
“How did I get hurt?”
“Mr. Bliss said you fell from your horse.”
Cord leaned across the table toward Connaught. “Sure I did,” he said unpleasantly. “But first I hit myself over the head, stuck my hand in the campfire, and tried to hang myself.”
Emotion flickered across Connaught’s dour face. He knew the true facts right enough, Cord decided, and his loyalty to Bliss was tempered by some disapproval.
“Looks to me like lots of odd accidents happen around here,” Cord went on harshly. “Just the other while ago I found a burned-up dead man in the snowbank out back of the surgery.”
“I brought him in last night,” Chi said. “It was too dark for burying.” Chi blew a smoke ring and said, “I got a look at him, though,” watching Cord in a way he suddenly disliked.
“Someone we once knew,” he said evenly.
“Could be,” Chi agreed.
From the corner of his eye, Cord caught a glimpse of Fiona Cobb watching curiously. She had caught the significance in Chi’s tone. Cord wasn’t much interested in what she thought, but he liked less that quick turn toward the dark in the look Chi held steady on him. Recognizing Wee Bill Blewin had recalled for her another man, and a bad time long before. Cord had been at the center of some mean trouble and had good reason subsequently to want to forget it. Right now she would not let him, and he even thought for a moment she meant to rehash it for everyone there and now.
But then Chi unpinned Cord from her gaze. “Anyway,” she said to Connaught, “they left him where he fell, by a burned-out shack, a while before I came by from the looks of him. If anyone else was there first, they didn’t get involved.”
“There is little traffic through here,” Connaught said. “A stage each month or so. We get few strangers.”
“Seeing how you treat them,” Cord said, “I’m not surprised.”
“Give Bliss Basin a pass this season,” Carlisle said. “The word is out.”
“Guess that boy out back of the doctor’s didn’t hear,” Cord snapped. “I suppose that’s just what happens in these parts. People turn up dead and charred, so you put ’em somewhere out of the sun and go on about your business.”
Fiona Cobb stared whitely at Cord. “You must understand—”
“You understand,” Cord interrupted. “A man was murdered by a mob of cowards. That has got my goat—you figure out why. I know who was behind it, and I’m going to do something about it.” He looked around at them. “Someone tell me I can’t.”
“We see how it is,” Carlisle began.
“Not you,” Cord said. “Not in a million years.”
“There has been a serious rustling problem in this basin,” Fiona Cobb said.
“You people got rustlers on the brain,” Cord said. “You are seeing rustlers behind every tree.”
“The point is that we are with you.” Carlisle tried again. “That’s what we want to talk to you about.”
“Not yet,” Cord said firmly. He put down his coffee cup. Chi’s expression had unclouded. “Let’s see to Wee Bill,” Cord said to her. He had been out of action for a few days, but now he was back in business. He stood.
Chi nodded. “Good idea.”
“I’ll come along.” Connaught rose. “That boy deserves some Christian rites, commending him to God’s arms.”
Cord was taken by surprise. “I can’t see where it will do him any harm,” Cord said. “At least not now.”