Off to the east on the near slope of A little fold in the contour of the basin floor, a herd of twenty or so cows and calves grazed at peace amid a flock of four or five dozen white-tailed prairie deer. The cattle Cord and Chi passed watched incuriously as the deer, almost dainty in their quick graceful movements, flitted among the stolid oblivious cattle. The calf and the young lion and the fading together, Cord thought, remembering Isaiah. But where was the little child who would lead them. No one in this valley but mad old men ...
The hot dry wind coming from the mountains off west was constant, mechanical, and a little alarming; here was the sort of wind that wicked water from the creeks and stock tanks, raised clouds of topsoil, and swept the sky clear of rain clouds, a wind that could send the flames of a careless campfire over the grass with the speed of an express train. If this strange spring wind kept up through much of the summer, it could do a job of devastation that would put Stringer and his bunch to shame.
The wind had spun the blades of the tall windmill as Cord and Chi rode beneath it, and it continued to pluck at them as they headed north on the stage road. An hour further on, a wide track forked off northwest, toward the windbreak sheltering the headquarter of Bliss Ranch. Most of another hour of riding had brought them here to where they could make out individual structures behind the row of tall cottonwood.
Cord reined up and peered up that way, pretending to be taking a cautious look-see. Actually, there were things he wished to get off his mind before this business passed into its next stage. Chi’s mood had improved since Livingston, but far as he was concerned, it still had a ways to go. “You pushed things pretty hard, back in that saloon,” Cord said.
“Piss on it,” Chi said. “Two less night riders to concern ourselves with. Isn’t that what we are doing here?”
“Not entirely,” Cord explained patiently. “We are doing what we have to.”
“Which is?”
“I’m still working on figuring that out.” But that was only partially true, and she knew it. He did not have to explain that this Stringer had to be killed, face-to-face in a fair fight, if possible, but killed for certain. Ten years on the outlaw trail had taught this much at least: This sort of conflict never healed itself but festered and putrefied. Stringer knew the rules as well—knew at least that there were men like Cord who lived by them—so Stringer would force the fight anyway, knowing it inevitable, preferring to take the advantage of his force. If he didn’t simply attempt a bushwhack ...
“The longer we ride, the more baggage we seem to pick up.” Chi could have been reading his thoughts, and maybe she could … “If there’s any unfinished business in with it, figure on it jumping out to bite you every time you try to unpack.”
“Well, sure,” Cord said. “Once we get that place of ours, I don’t want to be wondering every time there is a knock on the door if it is someone looking for trouble, someone we forgot to kill. Hell on the appetite.”
Chi smiled tentatively. Cord had guessed lucky: it was the right tone to take with her right now.
“But this finishes it,” Cord went on more firmly. “I am done with this nomad life. It is a long odds proposition, and I have already won my share. I am cashing in my checks.”
“Some people are magnets for trouble,” Chi said. “Maybe trouble is in your nature, and you will never get away from it no matter how far you ride.”
Cord stared across at the ranch. “I could be killed today,” Cord said. “I don’t expect it to happen, but I hate the possibility. The fastest gun in the world—and I’m not him, even right-handed—is no match for a bullet in the back of the head.”
“Hey, querido.”
Cord looked at her.
“I won’t let anybody shoot you in the back.”
“I appreciate that,” Cord said, “but it could be that you are somewhere out of range—like the other night when I almost got hanged.”
Chi looked away, and Cord knew this was his chance. “I tell you now, Chi: When this is over, I am done.” Cord drew a deep breath. “I am taking my share of what we got put away, and I am retiring. I want you to be with me, now and always, but I am done no matter what.” Done and buried alive if you leave me, he thought, tried to say it, and could not quite get it out.
But she knew that, because she was regarding him with no outrage, her handsome dark eyes shaded by the wide brim of her sombrero. She said his name sweetly, and Cord waited for her to go on.
But then her eyes shifted and she was looking past him. Cord let out breath he had not realized he was holding and turned in his saddle.
A half mile or more off west across the prairie, a lone figure sat a dark horse. Cord could not make out the rider at that distance, but Chi could always out see him, and when he turned back and saw her expression, Cord knew another joker had been dealt into this hand, from a deck from which plenty enough had already come.
It wasn’t one of Stringer’s men; they did not ride alone. Suddenly Cord got a hunch that bloomed into something like certainty. The missing character in this drama who was bound to show up—and what perfect goddamned timing. Chi said nothing, and the moment they had shared was broken. She thumped her mare and rode on. Cord followed, swearing to himself.
Up ahead a high arch of gnarled scrub logs woven together formed a gate over the road, with a shingle hanging from rawhide thongs proclaiming this Bliss Ranch. No one challenged them as they rode beneath it.
And into as fine a spread as Cord had ever seen, one that would make any stockman sick with yearning. It was an oasis, a sprawling patch of spring green, maybe two thousand acres of irrigated hay land. Long straight-arrow ditches ran in from the river to the north, filling stock tanks dug here and there, and a line of troughs along the yard.
Sitting a little uphill, the ranch house was built of heavy logs that must have been skidded in at least a dozen miles from the high timber country in the Little Belt Mountains. It was a huge sprawling affair, with junipers planted low around the walls and deep verandah porches. The shingle-roofed bunkhouse was over on the other side of the clean yard by a blacksmithery. Set to one side was a log stable for upward of thirty horses. Between the bunkhouse and stable fifty feet of rail fencing formed a stockade, divided up into a couple of horse-breaking and -working corrals. Surrounding the compound was the triple windbreak, tall cottonwood lined with willow and Lombardy poplar.
Cord’s offhand guess was that this place would run somewhere in excess of five thousand head of mother cows, with a fair herd of horses. A dozen or so head of fine-looking saddle stock ran in a willow-lined pasture by a tank, solid strong animals, dark bay and high in the back. Cord could envy the man who owned this place, but still he wondered how greed could drive you when you already had the world.
Chi reined up abruptly, and Cord came up beside her. A bunch of shouting men were mobbed up in the ranch yard, and Cord felt a momentary jolt of alarm: he’d assumed that this bright spring daylight would be enough to keep Stringer’s bunch out of sight, or at least out of action. Then Cord spotted F. X. Connaught, Bliss’s dour foreman, leaning back against a wagon box facing the half circle of men, holding both hands up palm out for silence.
Cord and Chi rode on into the yard. The dozen or so men around Connaught wore chaps and worn boots, except for one older man with thin white hair wearing an apron: a cowhand crew and their cook, looked to be. Connaught called, “Silence! Every man will get to speak his piece by and by.” It was some sort of meeting.
Off to one side, near another bunkhouse backed up to the corral and watching with some amusement, lounged the one-armed man Pincus and the light-skinned Negro called Sheeny. As Cord and Chi rode up, another cowhand called out, “The man cooked up his own trouble, and now he gits to eat the mess hisself.” Other men muttered agreement.
Pincus and Sheeny straightened up at the sight of Cord and Chi. Pincus said something to the Negro, and Sheeny eased off to where a saddled horse was tethered to a corral rail. He mounted up and rode away to the north.
“Figure we know where he’s heading,” Cord muttered. “That’s all right,” Chi said. “It’s about time everyone got acquainted.”
The white-haired cook wrung his hands. “Are you with us, F. X.?” he asked. “Will you represent our grievances to the man?”
But Connaught was looking over at Cord and Chi. He lowered his hands. One by one, the men turned and fell silent at the sight of the tall gunman and the dark woman, death and dreams materialized in their midst.
Their heads turned to follow as Cord and Chi rode up to the corral. Pincus came up as they dismounted and tethered their horses. “You are in our territory now,” he said. “You like to take chances.”
“Not me.” Chi stepped out from between the horses. “I like sure things. Like if you don’t step aside and shut your mouth right now, I’m going to hurt you. Bet on that for a sure thing, pendejo.”
It must have reminded Pincus of the bad news Chi had conjured in the saloon. “See to you later.” But he backed away, careful not to look toward the cowhands.
Cord kept half an eye on them. Could be they’d figure Cord and Chi as reinforcements for Stringer’s bunch before anyone got a chance to explain differently. Cord didn’t want any extra trouble; these men were innocent bystanders, and let them stay that way.
The cook said, “What the hell?”
Connaught looked past Cord and Chi. “Be at ease, lads,” he said.
Cord turned. Mallory Bliss stood out on the porch of the big house. Beside Cord, Chi said, “Our man,” and indeed it could have been no one else.
Bliss stood rigid, taking it all in, the hot breeze whipping his long black hair. He should have looked imposing, but Cord thought he looked rather lost. He was dressed impeccably in stovepipe pants, white shirt and collar, and a black vest. He wore no gun but carried his broad saber, leaning on it as a cane. Everyone stared back at him, as if his next word would name their fates.
“Sir!” Bliss boomed. He pointed the saber at Cord like a wand, stared at him for a long beat before turning to Chi, the moves practiced and theatrical. But he seemed to find Chi not exactly as written in the script in his mind, for he regarded her with widening eyes and nostrils. “And madam,” he added, with a little bow of the head, lowering the sword. “Will you come into my home?”
Behind Bliss, posed there on his verandah porch, the logs were sided over with gray clapboard, and bright red shutters hung to either side of wide French-paned windows. Two intertwined rails of elk and deer antlers flanked the porch steps, gray monuments to the passage of time.
“You ever see anything like that before?” Cord said out of the side of his mouth.
“Not outside an opera house,” Chi admitted.
Bliss stepped aside and made a great ceremonial gesture of welcome with his sword, bowing slightly at the waist and indicating the yawning ornate hardwood front door. The steps between the horn banisters were a half-dozen huge logs sawn in half, and the porch was floored with straight-grain tongue-and-groove cedar planks. All the wood was gleaming with clean varnish thick as melted candy. Bliss had read of the lives of rich men in his books and created this in the image of that dream. The upkeep must be endless, Cord imagined. He followed Chi up on the porch.
“Please enter,” Bliss said. He leaned on the sword when he walked and swayed a bit. Cord had only seen him horseback before and wondered now in what war battle he’d been hamstrung.
But then there were more immediate items at which to wonder. The castle of Mallory Bliss was luxurious in the overstuffed horsehide manner of some English country house, perhaps slightly distorted by the imagination of the man who built it but tasteful nonetheless and graced with everything wonderful that money could buy in this age and world. Cord saw teardrop crystal chandeliers, Empire furniture, oriental rugs like museum hangings strewn carelessly over the hardwood floor.
This front room was a library: three writing desks, deep leather reading chairs, and green-shaded lamps. And books, books climbing shelves on all four walls, reaching for the ceiling, more books than a man could read in ten lifetimes, every damned one of them bound in rich leather. This man must own half the books in Montana.
“What do you think, sir?”
What was there to say? “It’s the damnedest house I ever saw,” Cord said, and it was the truth.
Bliss took it for a compliment and stood beaming, as if he and Cord had never encountered one another before; as if Cord had not witnessed the hanging of Wee Bill Blewin, as if his right hand were as any man’s. The man was crazy as the doctor had said, and true craziness made Cord very uncomfortable. His hand itched under the bandages.
“Savor it all,” Bliss said, and he led them up the wide curving central stairway, through bedroom after bedroom, each decorated in a different scheme of colors and each with its private bath with walls tiled with delicately veined porcelain. The tubs were of stiffened rubber, and thick wolfskin mats were strewn about the floors.
Below stairs Bliss ushered them into his wine cellar, cool and dry even in this unnatural spring weather. Ceiling-high racks, their feet settled into the clean white gravel floor, held hundreds of bottles of sherries, burgundies, and champagnes, resting side-angled in their pigeonholes.
“We have wine with every meal,” Bliss said. “Fine wine from France.”
“Imagine that,” Chi murmured. She was not really impressed, but neither was she being ironical. For her, madness held fascination; Cord suspected she thought it somehow divine.
“I prefer to live as they do in Europe,” Bliss said. “My people will see how rich life can be, and aspire to better themselves.” He smiled fondly, as if these were sensible notions.
Upstairs, the hardwood floors of a music room glowed warmly in the light from huge windows. There were two pianos—for Christ sake, Cord thought, two goddamned pianos? And a harp, taller than most men, with music open on a stand before it. One end of the room was an atelier where someone had been painting with watercolors. At least there was a half-finished picture on an easel and a bowl of wax fruit on the windowsill. Could all of this be merely an elaborate setting for a drama that took place mostly in the mind of Mallory Bliss? “You play the harp?” Cord asked.
“Oh, no,” said Bliss, as if this were a reasonable question. “With these fingers?” He showed them thick callused hands. “Are you a music lover?”
“Not actually,” Cord said. “It’s just that someone damn near played the harp for me the other night.”
Bliss frowned thoughtfully, as if such a mention was a minor faux pas at this time, like a fart at a formal dinner. “Come,” he said generously, the gracious host willing to overlook. He ushered them on through a servant’s door and they emerged in the kitchen. A chef in a tall white hat spun around a bit awkwardly and stood at attention. He held a chopping knife, and Cord smelled whiskey on his breath. “Carry on, Beaumont,” Bliss said. The chef looked relieved. He threw open cabinets to show off his pantry: neat rows of cans with the distinctive label of Park & Tilford, capers and plovers’ eggs, queen olives, canned truffles, mushrooms and meringues.
“Is all well, Beaumont?” Bliss said.
“Huh?” The chef wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his white jacket. “Sure.” As Bliss led the way out, the chef gave Cord an odd wink.
They ended up back in the library, with its smoking stands, decanters of liquor on an oak sideboard, and everywhere the books. Chi settled herself into a chair, crossed her legs, and folded her hands on her knees. She looked as if she could get used to this sort of luxury quite quickly.
Through the translucent linen curtains of the front window, Cord saw the knot of cowhands around F. X. Connaught, pleading their discontent. Their mouths moved like those of players in a dumb show; no sound penetrated this room, no sound nor any barnyard dust or smell. Bliss had properly isolated himself from all the earthy doings that had put him where he was.
Cord turned from the window. “I would say they are fixing to walk out on you,” he said to Bliss. “Hope you got a good plan.”
Bliss said, “Sir?” and put on a bemused look. But then he went past Cord and pulled heavy brocade drapes across the window, shutting out the sight of mutiny and the brightness of the day. Cord wandered away while Bliss fussed with the drapes. Beside the biggest thickest reading chair in the corner, a volume rested on the table, a red ribbon marking Bliss’s place. Cord picked it up and read the title embossed in the leather of its cover: Little Dorrit, by Dickens. Cord had read it.
“Well sir,” Bliss said. “Tell me how you find my home.”
Cord put the book down. “Must keep you busy,” he said. “Just trying to remember what you’ve got.”
“I have my people,” Bliss said. “They are paid to remember.”
“Servants,” Cord suggested.
“Of course. My wine steward and butler, my laundress and seamstress.”
Chi sat in her chair, smiling sweetly at this nonsense. That old kitchen hand, with the smell of whiskey and the chuck wagon still on him.
“Where are these serving people?” Cord demanded. “Everyone got the day off?”
“They will be here soon enough,” Bliss said serenely. “A Dutchman is coming to plant my gardens.”
Cord threw up his hands. “What the hell are we doing here?” he said to Chi.
“Won’t you take a drink?” Bliss sounded a trifle anxious now.
“You want to go?” Chi asked Cord.
“Yeah,” Cord said. “Hell, I don’t know.”
“A drink, sir,” Bliss said.
Cord whirled around and advanced two steps on Bliss. “Why the hell would I drink with you?” He shook his swathed hand under Bliss’s nose. “This remind you of anything, you pixilated son of a bitch?”
Bliss squinted at the hand. “Will it be all right?”
“Yeah. That doesn’t make me any happier about wearing this mitten. I am accustomed to having this hand available for certain activities.”
“I have thanked God you were not hurt worse.” Bliss went to the oak sideboard. “I will not abide the abuse of innocent men.”
Cord snorted. “I got some bad news for you, mister.”
“Nor will I abide crime and thievery in my basin,” Bliss went on. “Here rustlers receive their reward.”
“Rustlers, strangers, anyone you happen on,” Cord snapped. “That boy, Wee Bill Blewin—what was your big hurry? You could have made inquiries, see if he was telling anything like the truth. You could at least give a passing nod to something like law.”
“Law and justice sometimes ride different sides of the trail,” Bliss pontificated.
“Well, it beats me how in the hell you can set yourself up as judge, jury, and head hangman. Someone is going to fix your wagon real soon now.”
“You?” Bliss said softly.
Cord laughed. He looked at Chi, serenely observing from her comfortable seat. “I hope it’s true what they say about God watching over madmen,” he said to her. “This bedlamite is going to need divine help.”
Bliss gasped. Cord turned on him, prepared to toss a few choice words his way and get the hell out of there. But Bliss’s expression stopped Cord in his tracks. He looked stricken; the creases in his craggy weathered face quivered with some deep emotion. “Please,” he said raggedly. ‘Take a drink and give me the chance to explain myself.”
“Might as well,” Chi said. Cord scowled at her, and she smiled back. “But make it a light one for my partner,” she said to Bliss. “We don’t want to get him started this early in the day.”
Mallory Bliss’s story began on the long six-month trail from west Texas north across the great open desert, and at first it was merely the usual tale of cattle-driving horrors: screaming animals swept away in melt-off swollen rivers, days of rain turning the world into a muddy hell, forever in the saddle with no sleep to speak of, and so on. Cord had trail-handed himself for more than one season, his first years away from home and out on his own driving cows to the Kansas railheads, and he freely agreed with Bliss: It was a miserable way to make a few dollars. Cord had hated it enough to turn outlaw.
Still, he didn’t know what hard times in olden days had to do with anything. Chi, though, was paying attention, as if Bliss really had something to say. So she liked old loco men; maybe that was why she stuck with him, Cord thought wryly.
“We cut our way through fences when we had to,” Bliss was saying. “Even back then so much of the free country was overrun. Nesters took claim to the best bottomland, then tried to charge for watering your animals. Some planted a crop right across the trail, traditional road that had been so long before them. They would wait in hiding for the cattle to muck through, then come out cussing and waving a shotgun and yelling for damages. We paid them damned little attention, I assure you.”
They pressed on, Bliss explained, he and Connaught, until they found this basin. He told how they lived in a tent the first winter and a soddy the second, caulking the cracks with packed snow. “We slept on mattresses stuffed with wild hay—Montana feathers, we called it,” Bliss said, gazing off into his memories. “We lived on wild game and canned goods. It was a good time for young men.”
“That’s dandy,” Cord said. “Get on with it, Bliss. What do you want from us?”
“I want you to understand,” Bliss boomed angrily. “I fought for every damned thing I ever had. Storms roared down from Canada, driving cattle across the open country and covering the feed with snow packed hard and dense as tar. Timber wolves killed our calves. And the Indians, they were hungry as wolves themselves with the buffalo gone, helping themselves to my stock. Now,” Bliss said, “we got the rustlers. Can you expect me to stand for it?”
“Anyone gets in your way, kill them dead,” Cord said sarcastically. “You got the right.”
“Good men and women are welcome here. Thieving trash will be purged.”
“Along with a few innocent men.”
“They are all guilty of something. Those kind are always guilty.” Bliss took a big swig of his drink. “When we came, this was savage wilderness. To tame it required savage methods.”
Bliss turned abruptly away. “That night,” he said in a low voice, “I had to give them Blewin, but I was able to save you. So you see: I have not lost all control. I will not surrender my domain to ruffians.” He reminded Cord of a child, bragging aloud about not fearing ghosts while passing the graveyard late at night.
“And that brings us to your good friend Mr. Stringer,” Cord said. “There is the sort of righteous fellow you are looking for to fill your town. You don’t mind him helping himself to your beef. Is that right?”
“We will rid ourselves of the rustlers, and after that Stringer will be unnecessary.”
“Glad to hear everything is crackerjack.” Cord put his glass on the sideboard. “We’ve had our drink and some swell palaver.” He glanced at Chi. “Guess we’ll be running along.”
Chi was watching Bliss. He ran his hand through his mane of dark hair and said nothing. “All right,” Chi said to him. “Bueno.” She stood.
Bliss leaned forward, his body quivering, as if he were standing on the brink of a great abyss and were being drawn by demonic force toward its depth. His face was contorted with something like pain. “Help me.” The words sounded strangled.
Cord suddenly hated the man—for what he had done to him, for drawing them in this way, for his madness. “Stringer means to take it all,” Cord spat. “He is going to steal everything you have, and not a damned thing you can do to stop him.”
“Cord!” Chi said reproachfully. “Stay or go, but stop abusing the viejo.”
“He tried to abuse me.”
“That’s done with, far as he goes. You know where to find your vengeance.”
Cord squared his shoulders and drew a breath. “All right,” he said to Bliss. “I can get over the part about nearly being hanged—could be you saved my life, if you don’t look it over too closely. But you and I are never going to see eye to eye. I believe the things a man does have consequences, and you must face them and deal with them. You think you are exempt from such responsibility.” Cord stared into Bliss’s mad eyes, striving for contact. “It’s a notion that is going to get you killed.”
“Yes …” Bliss rubbed his eyes with the tips of the fingers of both hands, as if changing his mask. “I have a proposition for you, sir,” he said, his voice almost controlled again.
“Everyone does,” Cord said. “What’s yours?”
“I offer you both employment, as stock detectives in this basin.”
“You got plenty enough detectives already,” Cord said. “They are likely riding your range right now, detecting which pilgrim to lynch next.”
“Talk straight,” Chi said from her chair.
“You have helped me to come to my decision,” Bliss said portentously. “I will dismiss Stringer and his men.”
“Pay them off,” Cord said, “and you figure they’ll ride right out of here, happy as clams?”
“There is no longer a place for Stringer in my scheme,” Bliss said. But maintaining the fiction of his control cost some effort.
“But us you can use.”
“Ten thousand dollars,” Bliss said.
“Twenty,” Cord said. “You can afford it.”
Bliss nodded slowly. “Twenty thousand dollars, for peace in my basin. That is fair.”
“Pay up.”
Bliss looked to Chi. Maybe her odd gentleness had given him to believe she was his ally. But she nodded her agreement with Cord.
Bliss removed a half-dozen books from a shelf to reveal a wall safe. He spun the dial, carefully blocking their view with his body. Inside were stacks of currency. Bliss counted out a considerable pile, shut the same, whirled the dial. When he turned, the money was clutched tightly to the front of his vest. “How can I be sure?”
“Don’t dare ask that question,” Cord snapped. “Hand it over.”
Bliss did as he was told.
“You buy gun folk like they were yard goods and expect trust and loyalty?” Cord gave the money to Chi. It disappeared under her serape. “We could ride out of here this day, take this money and whatever more you’ve got, and not a damned thing you could do about it. You are too deep into trouble, and without us and plenty of luck to boot, you will never get out.”
Chi stood. “You done?”
“Almost.” Cord stabbed a finger at Bliss. “Remember one thing more, old man,” he went on. “You brought the trouble to this basin, you and your greed and your bad dreams of being Caesar. So from here on, you be damned careful what you say to me. You can trust me all right—trust me to hurt you badly if you do another thing I don’t like.”
Bliss gaped at Cord. Likely no one had talked to him this way for some years.
“Anything you’d care to add?” Cord said over his shoulder.
“Looks like you covered it,” Chi said mildly. Bliss stood there, his lips slightly parted.
Cord said, “Adios,” and opened the front door. The sounds of men talking drifted back in. “The only thing that I hate is the siding,” he said in a low voice. “A dozen or so guns against two.”
“Maybe three,” Chi said.
“Huh?” Cord said. “You got something to tell me?”
But she was not listening to him. Cord peered across the yard in the direction she was looking and thought, Well, hell. “Never mind,” he said aloud. “It can wait.”