LEGEND

by Jude Deveraux

  Kady owned the video of that movie and had played it hundreds of times. At each viewing her imagination went wild as she thought of what she would cook if she had no constraints of money and “pleasing the public.”

  I would first have to make an inventory, she thought. I’d have to see what was here and what I could buy. Maybe I can’t go to Denver, but others could go for me. Then I’d have to dig pits, make outdoor ovens, and start pickling vegetables. I’d need help in picking mushrooms and salad greens and herbs. And I’d need—

  By the time she got to the last thought, she was at the desk and making notes. “I’ll invite the whole town,” she said aloud. “For three days they will eat at Cole Jordan’s expense.” She bit the end of the pencil. “If you’ll eat it, I’ll cook it,” she wrote, then marked that out. “I won’t cook anything cute or endangered,” she wrote. “No turtles, raccoons, mountain lions. And no bugs!”

  Grabbing the notepad, she left the library and headed for the kitchen. But as her mind raced, so did her feet, and she entered the kitchen in a rush. Manuel and his wife, Dolores, were slowly chopping vegetables for the evening’s enchiladas. “Do you two know where I can hire people who know these mountains and can gather mushrooms for me? And people who can help with butchering and fish cleaning?”

  Manuel and his wife looked at each other; then Manuel spoke. “In our town of Socorro there are such people.”

  “How many people live there?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  Kady smiled. “Can I hire them all?”

  Manuel seemed to have been rendered speechless, but Dolores spoke up. “For what? No one will kill Señor Jordan for you.”

  “Perhaps Juan would,” Manuel said matter-of-factly.

  “Is this what you want?” Dolores asked, looking at Kady hard.

  Kady blinked for a moment, considering this possibility, then shook her head. “No, I don’t want to kill Cole, even though he deserves it. I want to put on a feast. A feast such as no one has ever before dreamed of. I want to experiment; I want to create new recipes and eventually write a cookbook. I want to try every dish I’ve ever contemplated and see what it tastes like. I want to wrap fish in paper, salt, clay, and in wet leaves. I want to marinate meat in herbs that no one has ever tried before. I want to make mistakes and have some triumphs. I want . . . I want . . .” She smiled as she looked at the two old people, their faces unreadable. “I want freedom.”

  At that she could see Manuel did not understand and that he was about to tell her she could not leave the ranch. “I want to spend Cole Jordan’s money. Lots of it. Will you two help me?”

  “Gladly,” Manuel said, grinning.

  “All right, then, come with me and let’s start planning this thing. Oh, and send someone to fetch all the inhabitants of Socorro. Tell them I’m paying everyone ten dollars an hour.”

  At that Manuel had to catch his wife to keep her from swooning. Kady wasn’t sure, but she figured the average wage in 1873 was a dollar or so a week, so ten dollars an hour was more than they could comprehend.

  “And the babies?” Dolores gasped, her husband’s arms around her.

  “Bring them and I’ll pay them as taste testers. I’d love to write a baby-food cookbook. Come on, time is wasting.”

  In a state of bewilderment, Manuel and his wife followed Kady into the library.

  Chapter 13

  AS COLE JORDAN RODE INTO LEGEND, COLORADO, HE WAS sure that in the ten days he had been away, it had become a ghost town. His first thought was that Harwood’s men had returned and slaughtered everyone, but if that had happened, there would be evidence of such murder. As he looked into the windows of the hotel and saw no one, he thought maybe everyone had gone through the rock with Kady. But that couldn’t have happened because he’d given orders he knew no one would dare disobey.

  If not violence, then maybe smallpox had wiped them out. Or maybe . . .

  He couldn’t think of any more things that could have happened to everyone, but the eerie feeling of the empty town was making him nervous. Something horrible had happened; it must have. But he could see no signs of disaster, no burned-out buildings, no one walking about with tragic faces.

  There was just a deserted town and no clues as to what had happened to everyone.

  “Is anyone here?” he shouted, but his voice echoed off the empty buildings and came back to him. Dismounting, he tied his horse up, then went into the mercantile, where he was further shocked. Two-thirds of the shelves were empty. Clothes still hung on the racks, and there were boots for sale, just as always, but the grocery part of the store was picked clean; not so much as a can was left. Even the “mystery” cans that had fallen into a river and had their labels washed off were gone. No barrels of crackers or pickles stood before the counter.

  Cole went back outside and started walking. The laundry was empty; the barber’s chairs had no customers; the freight depot had a wagon in front of it, loaded with ore, but there were no horses attached to it, no driver in the seat.

  The more he saw, the more anxious he became, and he started running. The livery stable had no horses; the boarding house was empty. No one was at the newspaper office or the telegraph office. The ice cream parlor had no people in it, nor did it have anything to eat. The icehouse out back had no milk or cream; in fact, even the ice was gone.

  He ran past the Jordan Line up to Paradise Lane, but he could see that the church and library were as empty as the rest of the town.

  “Kady,” he whispered, fear running through his body. Whatever had happened to the people of this town had also happened to Kady. Turning abruptly, he began to run down the street to get to his horse. He must save Kady!

  He was in such a blind panic that he ran into Ned Wallace without seeing him, sending them both flying, and the little beer barrel on Ned’s shoulder went crashing, its contents spilling on the boardwalk.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Ned yelled. “Kady needed that, and now what am I gonna to tell her? Damnation! but I don’t think there are any more full barrels.”

  Cole had fallen hard against the horse rail, and what with various injuries he had sustained over the last few days, it took him a moment to regain his awareness. By the time Cole’s head cleared, Ned had reentered the saloon.

  Cole threw open the swinging doors, but Ned was nowhere in sight. “What the hell is going on?” he bellowed. He received no answer, but he did hear noises in the back.

  There was a room on the back of the saloon that was usually packed full of bottles and barrels, but now every shelf was empty. A trapdoor he didn’t know existed was thrown up, and at the bottom Cole could see a light. He lost no time climbing down the ladder, where he saw Ned tossing about empty wooden crates, becoming more frustrated by the second.

  “That was the last one,” Ned said angrily. “Now what will Kady do? Today is pasta day, and she wanted to make a sauce with beer and cream. So how the hell is she gonna do that now?” Ned stopped ranting long enough to glare at Cole as though he’d committed some unforgivable sin.

  “I guess it will be up to me to tell her,” Ned said in disgust, then stepped past Cole to go up the ladder.

  Cole, too bewildered to move, stared at the ladder. “What the hell is ‘pasta’?” he said under his breath, then grabbed the lantern Ned had left behind and went up the ladder.

  He caught Ned just as he was leaving the back door of the saloon. “So help me, Wallace, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Ned said fiercely. “Make me miss pasta day? And the mesquite is ready today, and I’m in charge of candyin’ the violets, and Juan says the second risin’ of the brioche is my job, and—”

  He stopped because Cole had pinned him against a wall and was holding a knife to his throat. “You aren’t going anywhere. You’re going to sit down and tell me everything. Do you understand me? If you ever want to see this man Pasta again, you’ll do what I say.”

  Ned gave Cole a look of
disgust, then muttered something about pasta not being a person and Cole probably couldn’t tell puff pastry from strudel dough, but he went back into the empty saloon and sat down. Taking out his big pocket watch, he propped it open on the table. “Ten minutes; that’s all I can spare.”

  “You can spare all the time that’s needed. I want to know everything that’s going on, and to start, you can tell me where everyone is.”

  Ned started to rise. “Why don’t we just go out to Kady’s Place and you can see for yourself? That way we won’t waste any more of my time.”

  Cole had to count to ten before replying to that one. “And just where is ‘Kady’s Place’?”

  “The Jordan Ranch, you know, it’s—” Ned broke off as he seemed to realize for the first time to whom he was talking. Sitting back down, he drew a deep breath. “A few things have happened in the days you were away.”

  “You know, I figured that out about two minutes after I entered town. So now, why don’t you tell me just exactly what it is that has happened?” Cole thought that if Kady was in any danger, he wanted to know its exact nature so he could plan how to save her. In the time since he’d arrived in town, he’d prepared himself for anything, whether it was natural disasters, illness, massacres, or even the return of the plagues of Egypt. What he was not prepared for was the story that Ned Wallace began to tell him, reluctantly at first, but with increasing gusto as he watched Cole’s face, the eyes widening and the jaw dropping down further with every word Ned spoke.

  Ned wasn’t a very good storyteller, as he tended to start in the middle of a story, go in one direction, then backtrack and go in another. Rather like he was trying to draw a spider, Cole thought as he tried to piece together what Ned was telling him.

  It seemed that Kady had decided to occupy herself during her husband’s absence by cooking for the whole town. When Cole first heard this, he’d smiled indulgently, but as the story expanded, he heard things that he didn’t like.

  “She kissed who?” Cole asked.

  “Hog’s Breath Howie,” Ned said, by now having lit a pipe and drawing deeply on the stem.

  Cole was aghast. “But he offered two hundred dollars to any of Les’s girls who’d kiss him, and none of them would do it. That man’s breath has been known to fell horses.”

  “It didn’t seem to bother Kady, not when he pulled the tarp off that wagon and she saw them pots and pans.”

  It seemed that three days after Cole left town, Kady had hired five drivers with wagons to go to Denver to buy cooking things for her. “Things nobody had ever heard of,” Ned said, sounding as though Kady was buying ingredients for a witch’s brew. “But of course we all know what they are now,” he said smugly. He paused long enough to make sure he had Cole’s attention. “She wanted things like semolina and olive oil and star anise.”

  Cole leaned closer to Ned, his eyes narrowed. “You want to tell me why my wife was kissing Hog’s Breath Howie?”

  “I’m gettin’ to it; don’t rush me.” Ned took another long draw on his pipe. Having the owner of the town at his mercy was a dream come true. “Kady gave instructions to the drivers that they were to bring back all kinds of food that they had never heard of. If they saw an Italian family or Chinese or any other color or religion, whatever, the driver was to pay very high prices for—”

  “Why high prices?” Cole interrupted.

  “Kady said that the national economy would be helped if you shared your wealth with other people rather than hoarding it,” Ned said, eyes twinkling.

  “Go on,” Cole said solemnly.

  “Kady told the drivers they were to buy any food that sounded strange, anything they’d never heard of. She also gave each man a list of things that she wanted in quantity, like olive oil and great barrels of flour. Did you know that brown flour with the bran still on it is better for you than white flour?”

  Cole glared at him.

  “All right, just be patient, will you? Kady gave the job of findin’ some decent cookware to Hog’s Breath, and you shoulda seen him! A couple of us tried to warn Kady that ol’ Hoggie wasn’t to be trusted, but she wouldn’t listen. She put a bag of gold in his hand and told him she was dependin’ on him. We all thought Hoggie was gonna melt, and we were sure we’d never see him again.”

  Ned took another deep draw. “But he fooled all of us. The next day he came back with an incredible story. Seems some man in Denver decided he wanted to open a French restaurant, so he hired three French chefs straight from Paris, France, and they arrived with crates full of copper pots.” Ned gave Cole a serious look. “Copper conducts heat quicker and more evenly than any other metal except silver. Did you know that?”

  “Get on with it,” Cole said with no humor in his voice.

  “The chefs arrived with all their equipment—Kady calls it a batterie de cuisine—but two days later them cooks deserted to go prospectin’, leavin’ all the pots and pans behind. Hog’s Breath bought the lot of ’em, and when he showed up at the ranch with a wagonload of saucepans and molds and au gratin dishes, Kady was so overwhelmed, she kissed him. On the mouth.”

  At this Ned waited for Cole’s reaction to what he thought was a wonderful story, but Cole didn’t give any indication that he’d heard. “Who is Juan?” is all Cole asked.

  “Barela,” Ned said in a tone of false innocence. “You musta heard of him.”

  For a moment all Cole could do was blink; then he rose, making motions to check all the knives on his body as he moved. Juan Barela was a killer, would kill a man as soon as look at him. No one knew for sure exactly how much violence he was responsible for, but then no one was stupid enough to ride up to Socorro and investigate, in spite of the huge reward on the man’s head.

  Ned grabbed Cole’s arm and motioned for him to sit back down. “You don’t have to worry. Kady has him eatin’ out of her hand. And I mean that for gospel truth. Juan’s running the whole show, keepin’ order over all the workers and the people comin’ to eat. And he’s doin’ a great job, ’cause he’s only had to shoot a couple of people.”

  “Shoot—” Cole said then started to rise again.

  “It was only ol’ Lindstrum,” Ned explained, making Cole sit back down. There wasn’t a man who’d ever met Lindstrum who didn’t want to shoot him. If a heavenly angel came to Lindstrum, he’d find something to complain about.

  “Lindstrum wouldn’t eat his field-green salad, said it was no more than a bunch of weeds, so Juan shot him. Just a little bit along the top of his arm; then Dolores wrapped a bandanna around it, and Lindstrum ate his greens.”

  “I see,” Cole said. “And what did my wife say to having a man shot for not eating his salad?”

  “Kady told Juan not to shoot anyone else, but then she said from the looks of the man’s teeth maybe someone should have made him eat his greens a long time ago. She and Juan are the best of friends.”

  When he spoke, Cole’s voice was very quiet. “My wife is friends with the most notorious killer in the country? A man who strikes fear in the hearts of everyone who hears his name?”

  “Kady says that Juan is just trying to support the whole town of Socorro and all his children. His methods are bad, but his motives are good.” At this Ned paused and smiled dreamily. “Kady sure is a wonder. On that first day Juan came down from the mountain with the others from Socorro. None of us ever thought we’d see him, but he said even he was willin’ to hunt mushrooms if it paid ten dollars an hour so he—”

  “What!?” Cole gasped. “Ten dollars for one hour?”

  “That’s what Kady is payin’ everyone who helps her,” Ned said, trying but not succeeding to suppress his smile. He’d been trying to buy the saloon from Cole for six years, but Cole wouldn’t consider selling or even going into a partnership. “You wanta hear about Juan or not?”

  “Yeah, tell me,” Cole growled. “But, wait a minute, are you sure there’s no whiskey in this place? I truly do need a drink.”

  “Not a drop,” Ned said cheerfully. “K
ady needs everything. Anyway, about Juan. He showed up—first time anyone on the right side of the law had seen him in ten years—and we all kept lookin’ at him cause it was like lookin’ at a legend. I must say he is one fine-lookin’ man. Kady calls him a ‘hunk.’”

  “Go on!” Cole snapped.

  “That first day the whole town of Socorro came down out of the mountains, and in the back of a wagon there was this little boy that was the spittin’ image of Juan, so Kady congratulated Juan on havin’ such a beautiful son. Then some old man with a nose like a potato started sputterin’ and said the boy was his. Kady apologized, but after she helped the fifth child out of the wagon that looked just like Juan, she started laughin’ and looked at Juan, and he started laughin’ too.”

  Cole leaned across the table. “Why don’t you just tell me the facts? Is Kady all right?”

  “More than all right, I’d say. Oh, lordy, but that woman can make people work! She’s had us diggin’ pits and constructin’ spits. She’s got the blacksmith rollin’ puff pastry and Les’s girls have been pullin’ strudel dough. You know, don’t you, that that stuff has to be stretched until you can read a newspaper through it?” Ned stopped long enough to chuckle. “You know, there ain’t nothin’ that girl can’t cook. She give a couple of hunters a list of things they couldn’t bring back, like mountain lions and such, so ol’ Ernie got the bright idea of bringin’ her back a bag full of rattlers. He thought it would be a great joke.”

  “You allowed someone to give my wife rattlesnakes?” Cole said through clenched teeth.

  “Don’t worry; Juan shot their heads off, then Kady cleaned ’em in a flash, marinated the meat in milk for half a day, then fried ’em. They was right good eatin’, if I do say so myself.”

  “You ate rattlesnake?”

  Ned leaned forward, his face very serious. “Hell, I’ve eaten snails.” When he’d given Cole time to absorb this, he said, “Kady mixes ’em with garlic and wild parsley, and they ain’t half bad.”