Lake of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  The sharp accent on the last syllable made Cord jump as though someone had fired one of the weapons. He swallowed and tried to calm the pounding of his heart.

  Reveille had not yet sounded. The neat red-roofed buildings of Officers’ Row lay silent in the crisp morning air. They crossed between the canteen and the long barracks, the smoky smell of woodstoves, frying bacon, and baking biscuits wafting from the canteen’s kitchen. Enlisted men milled on the barracks porch and in the yard, clearly roused by the early shooting.

  Cord wondered if any of the armed soldiers had a wife waiting at home, with whom they could awaken every morning, the way he wanted to wake with the sweet warm weight of Laura beside him.

  The rising sun caught him in the eyes, while the steady cadence moved them past the first of the stables. The ground before the long red-roofed building was ruined where the footsteps of men and horses’ hooves allowed nothing to grow. Cord heard the soldiers’ boots fall on hollow ground, as if the very bowels of hell lay beneath Yellowstone.

  Where was this hearing he was supposed to have? He expected reasonable men like Lieutenant Stafford would be there, that he’d have a chance to tell his side of the story. Even during the long night in his cell, staring out through the bars at the slowing revolving stars, he’d held on to the fierce belief that his innocence could not fail to shield him.

  Cord had always wondered how a condemned man managed to meet the hangman without dissolving into a shivering mass of what was once human. Looking at the youthful soldiers carrying their rifles, it did not occur to him to beg for a mercy that was not theirs to offer.

  Sergeant Larry Nevers heard shots from the direction of Fort Yellowstone while his horse galloped the road down through The Hoodoos. The great jumbled blocks of limestone, fallen from an earlier, more massive series of hot-spring deposits overlooking Mammoth Valley, were a sign that he was only a short distance from his destination.

  He’d ridden through the night, stopping only at Norris for the arranged fresh horse because something told him Cord Sutton needed help.

  Hank Falls knocked on the door of Alexandra’s room in the vacant house awaiting the arrival of the new Yellowstone superintendent. “Alex,” he called.

  After the terrible night, he’d lain down only an hour ago, but with the dawn he’d been disturbed by shooting somewhere behind the house. It forced him to admit he was wide awake, and he pushed his tall frame to a sitting position on the side of the bed. Studying the planes of his face in a shaving stand on the dresser, his mind flooded with images of his brother, a thin ascetic mirror Hank would never gaze into again.

  “Alexandra!” Hank tried the knob.

  It opened easily to reveal his sister, asleep with her golden hair spread over the pillow the way it had when she was a little girl. She looked so innocent when she slept.

  Hank left her and turned toward the stairs. He went down, through the hall and kitchen, and out the rear onto the high back porch. Behind the identical duplex next door, Lieutenant Stafford’s wife stood looking toward the barrack and stables.

  “What’s going on?” he called.

  “That shooting,” she said, her eyes concerned.

  “Practice?” Hank suggested, but even as he spoke, he remembered that it was against the cavalry’s regulations to target shoot in the park.

  “Maybe it’s something to do with the Fourth, but the celebration’s not till later.” She frowned. “The only crimes the garrison deals with are poaching and defacing the formations …”

  And burning the Alexandra.

  Hank took the wooden stairs down from the porch three at a time. He hurried behind the large double barracks, where soldiers had gathered between the fort shop and the stables.

  Looking around, he spied Lieutenant Stafford entering the near stable, followed at about ten paces by Laura, wearing Alexandra’s dress.

  “John!” Laura called, as he went in the side door of the long building. “Wait.”

  He turned. “I told you to stay with Katharine.”

  “Did you think I would?” she challenged.

  “I suppose not.” Even in the gray light inside the stable, she saw that he might have been amused.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I got a look at what’s happening. Cord’s being taken under armed guard to the place behind the stable where Feddors whipped the poacher. As there’s been no hearing, I don’t know if Feddors plans a trumped-up story of Cord attempting escape, or the like, and plans to whip him before holding a hearing … or if he’s lost all concern for losing his commission and hopes to order an execution.”

  Laura swallowed. “Wouldn’t he end up in prison?”

  “If the evidence holds in Cord’s favor.”

  “Cord would still be dead,” Laura pointed out.

  John turned and started walking up the aisle between stalls.

  She started to follow and stopped. That enormous black head, bending over the gate to sniff at her …

  “Dante!” She ran her hands over his face, and he nickered softly. “John, wait. This is Cord’s horse.” Stretching her neck over the next gate was White Bird.

  He looked back. “We found him with the palomino and the gray near Danny Falls’s camp. Arden Groesbeck and the others led them down when they brought Danny.” He shifted his weight, seeming impatient.

  “What are we doing in the stable?” she asked.

  Sergeant Nevers galloped his lathered horse into the Fort Yellowstone yard and slid off, landing on the run. There was a crowd of men, and there was Cord Sutton being marched by a group of soldiers carrying rifles.

  He saw Arden Groesbeck and hurried to him.

  “Just got in …” he gasped for breath. “What’s going on?”

  Arden shook his head. “Not sure.”

  Larry spied Captain Feddors waiting in the space between the two long stables, in the spot where he’d tethered the poacher to whip him.

  The armed squad swept Cord past the long stable. Ahead, he saw the beige wall at the end of the other stable coming toward him in slow motion. My God, did Feddors intend standing him against that wall and ordering him shot? He fought a wave of nausea by biting down hard, until the warm salt taste of blood swam in his mouth.

  Looking at the forested peak of Sepulcher Mountain to the west, Cord longed for home in Jackson’s Hole, to ride Dante again through the pungent sage. To watch the sun place its rosy finger upon the peak of the Grand Teton, spreading down until the mountain’s full majesty was bathed in lemon morning light.

  Close at hand, to his right, came a sudden deafening report.

  The soldiers escorting Cord stopped and swiveled their heads, looking for the source of what had to be gunfire.

  Kablam, again.

  Cord’s guards dissolved into a milling crowd, pointing their weapons in different directions.

  The third shot clearly came from inside the stable, along with shrill whinnies and thumping as horses reared and plunged. Cord watched in disbelief as a small door in the long wall of stable swung open. Not three feet away, a hand beckoned, a swift urgent movement.

  His sense of inevitability shattered, Cord ducked through the cavalry’s confusion and into the relative darkness of the stable. Behind him, someone slammed the stable door and rammed a wooden bar in place.

  “Sutton!” A man unlocked Cord’s handcuffs and slipped them off.

  Cord flexed his wrists.

  He recognized Lieutenant John Stafford, urging him toward a large horse standing calmly despite the pandemonium of the others.

  Vaulting onto the animal bareback, Cord found instinct overcoming the slow way he felt his mind working. There must not have been time to saddle the horse, but he gathered the reins in his lacerated hands.

  He looked to down to see Stafford holding a Cavalry Model .45. The officer glanced up at the light leaking through three bullet holes in the stable roof. “I’ll see no one follows you. Get out of the park and meet me at sunset where the G
ardner joins the Yellowstone.”

  At the far end of the stable, the big door opened to admit a rectangle of morning light. Beyond, he saw an expanse of packed earth that ended in scrub and some trees on the rim of the drop-off into Gardner Canyon.

  Soldiers pounded on the door Cord had come through, the bar jiggling. He heard shouts from the other side.

  “Go!” Stafford ordered. Finding his seat, Cord suddenly recognized the familiar shape of the horse beneath him.

  “Go, boy,” he echoed.

  Dante sprang forward powerfully. Cord marveled his stallion’s wounds had been superficial enough to permit his essential strength to prevail.

  They surged toward the light at the end of the stable. A swelling feeling rose in Cord’s chest as he recognized Laura holding the door.

  Out into the stable yard, he steered Dante toward the lip of the drop into Gardner Canyon. He’d seen on the way up that it was a steep hill, treacherous going for a horse, but not by any means a cliff edge. Dante’s hooves pounded the bare turf as he swept out from behind the stable and across the open ground of the fort.

  A chorus of cries rose behind, men shouting.

  Cord’s heart hammered.

  So close …

  A bullet whined past his ear.

  Larry Nevers watched in disbelief as Feddors fired a second shot from his Colt at Cord’s retreating back.

  Before Larry could move, Arden Groesbeck launched himself at the captain. Feddors must have detected it from the corner of his eye, for he sidestepped. Arden landed on his side in the dirt.

  “The prisoner is getting away!” Feddors shouted.

  Though several of the men with Krags hesitated, a few started to raise their weapons toward Cord and the black stallion.

  Lieutenant Stafford stepped out through the stable door into which Cord Sutton had disappeared. “No one shoots anyone here.”

  Though the squad looked relieved, Feddors lifted his Colt again. “If nobody else will apprehend an escaping criminal …”

  He fired again into the distance, but as far as Larry could tell, Sutton had escaped over the edge of the hill behind the fort.

  At his feet, Arden Groesbeck fumbled out his weapon. Before Larry could stop himself, he gasped, “Arden, no.”

  Feddors stepped forward smartly, placing his boot on top of Arden’s wrist. “You may not threaten your commanding officer.” It seemed to happen in exacting slow motion, as the captain raised his Colt and pointed it at the helpless private’s forehead.

  In the same instant, Larry Nevers and John Stafford drew their sidearms.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  JULY 4

  Hank cringed at the double tap that reverberated through the fort, especially after the other volleys. He hurried behind the large double barracks where a crowd gathered between the south and north stable buildings. When he drew closer to the milling soldiers, some with their suspenders dangling, many without blouses, he realized discipline had broken down. Though it was twenty past six, no one was sounding Boots and Saddles, and none of the men appeared to be getting ready for the morning inspection and drill—very strange for the Fourth of July, when he would have expected an extra effort at ceremony.

  Rather, the soldiers talked in excited tones, looking at something out of sight to Hank behind the end of the building.

  “Trying to escape,” he heard. Hank shouldered his way into the group and rounded the corner. With a shudder, he saw an army blanket drawn over a man lying on the ground. The drab wool was soaked with blood. “Who?” he managed.

  No one answered, but he saw Sergeant Nevers of the Lake Station staring down at the body with a sick look on his face.

  Hank approached and saw Lieutenant Stafford place his hand on Nevers’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said in a fatherly tone. “I think you saw that there are two bullets in him, one of them mine.”

  “Had it coming,” said Arden Groesbeck, also from Lake. “He’d have shot me, I swear, you shoulda seen the look in his eyes …”

  Hank couldn’t stand it. He stepped through the circle of men, knelt, and lifted the blanket with care to expose the dead man’s face. Broad forehead, sparse brown hair, and goatee … someone had closed Captain Feddors’s eyes.

  To Hank’s surprise, he felt relieved it wasn’t Cord Sutton.

  As soon as Laura realized Feddors was down, she ran across the hoof-beaten ground behind the paddock toward where Cord and Dante had disappeared from view. To get to the drop, she crashed through brush and small scrubby trees.

  At the edge, she was rewarded with the sight of Cord on Dante. The horse was side-footing his way down the last of the rocky slope above the highway. As Laura watched, they reached the route and galloped out of sight down Gardner Canyon.

  He was once more on the run, this time to freedom.

  When she turned back toward the stable, her elation vanished. A man was dead.

  A man who’d brought it on himself, but she felt the same sense of waste she had when she’d stood behind Cord and watched Frank Worth’s hungry eyes go vacant.

  Slowly, she walked back, skirting the crowd where she saw Hank talking with John Stafford and Larry Nevers. Thankfully, a blanket had been put over the man who’d allowed decades of hate to smolder inside him.

  If she and Cord were fortunate enough to make a life together, would he be able to put this experience behind him?

  Three hours later, Laura stood behind John Stafford’s house with him, Larry, and Hank. Silently, they watched a group of soldiers led by Arden Groesbeck and observed by Manfred Resnick load Captain Quenton Feddors into a wagon for his last journey … to the Fort Yellowstone cemetery. A wooden casket had been put together hastily in the fort’s shop, for the Fourth of July promised to be a scorcher and the body would soon become ripe.

  “Doesn’t he have any family?” Laura asked.

  Manfred Resnick turned away from the wagon and joined them. “According to his service record, he’s alone in the world. Maybe if he’d had someone, things would have turned out differently.”

  Hank made a noise in his throat. He’d had a brother, and what good had it done him?

  Larry Nevers stepped up beside Laura and pressed something into her hand. “I looked around in the bushes near the Lake Hotel and found this.”

  She looked down at the familiar shape of the obsidian Cord had brought down from Nez Perce Peak as a child. “Thank you,” she murmured, rubbing her thumb over its smooth contour and placing it into her pocket with the cameo.

  “That the damned charm of Sutton’s? The one Feddors threw away?” Hank asked. He turned on John. “What kind of officer are you? Shooting Feddors when you thought he was going to kill young Groesbeck is one thing, but what were you thinking to let a prisoner go free?”

  It was all Laura could do not to hit Hank on his still-swollen nose.

  John nodded to Alexandra Falls, who appeared on the rear steps of the superintendent’s house. He spoke mildly, “Sutton is meeting me this evening …”

  Hank made an impatient gesture. “Let me tell you about Santa Claus. Sutton won’t stop running till he’s in Salt Lake hiding behind Aaron Bryce.”

  “He’ll meet John tonight,” Laura said hotly. “I know he will.”

  John continued, “As I was saying, as acting superintendent, I can then address any outstanding questions.”

  Alexandra approached and slipped her arm through Hank’s. Over her white dress with violet embroidery, she wore a cape of gray wool against the morning chill. “What questions?” she asked with wide-eyed innocence. “What are you talking about?”

  John smiled, as a man will at a pretty young girl with her blond hair burnished and caught up in a jeweled snood.

  Manfred Resnick spoke up. “I imagine John might have been about to say … there is still the matter of the burning of the Alexandra.”

  If Laura had not been looking directly at her, she would never have seen it. Just before Alexandra’s long lashes swept dow
n to cover her eyes, there was a quick hot blaze of malevolence. In addition, her hand upon her brother’s arm went tense for the time it apparently took her to notice and relax.

  “Yes,” she murmured, “my poor brother’s boat. This Sutton man must have done it.”

  Laura started to argue again that Danny had set the fire. But before she could open her mouth, she realized that on his deathbed, he’d told the truth about the stage attack and about Edgar Young. Why would he have held back this one confession?

  Alexandra kept her eyes cast down, toying with the ties on her cape.

  Laura gasped, taking in Alexandra’s dress, her accessories, and the dress she herself had been loaned.

  “No,” she said. “Neither Cord nor Danny burned the steamboat.”

  Hank looked at her in surprise. “I’m sure you’re not suggesting I torched it myself.”

  “No. Look at what you’re wearing, Hank, something borrowed, because all your clothes burned. Now look at your sister; she’s still got a wardrobe, enough to even loan me a dress.”

  Alexandra’s head came up and she glared at Laura.

  “She tried to kill you, Hank, because you threatened her favorite brother. But she miscalculated when she didn’t let her clothes go up in smoke.”

  “She’s crazy,” Alexandra said at Hank’s ear.

  Manfred Resnick put up a hand. “She’s right. A woman would notice such things, just as Pinkerton taught me to. Last night I phoned from the hotel to the soldier station at Lake, and I’ve gotten a return call—a valise filled with women’s clothing was stashed in the abandoned cabin where Danny was staying.”

  “I didn’t …” Alexandra began.

  “Women’s clothing that was predominately various shades of purple,” Manfred finished.

  “Alex?” Hank sounded bewildered.

  “I hate you!” she shrilled. “When you said you would kill Danny, I … splashed the kerosene … even spilled my perfumes …” She turned and started to run across the grounds of the fort, toward the hotel, where a clatter of hooves announced a stagecoach coming from the park interior.

  John Stafford and Manfred Resnick each caught Alexandra by an arm. “Hold on,” John said. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”