Cord 7 Read online

  A man-and-woman outlaw team hold up a bank in Colorado - and the law blames Cord and Chi. To clear their names, the two hard riders hunt down their bandit look-alikes.

  Before the dust settles and the smoke clears, Cord and Chi will team up with their quarry and face down a notorious Pinkerton agent turned killer.

  The final showdown will take place outside Yellowstone, where the water will get plenty hot for Cord.

  CORD 7: GUNSMOKE RIVER

  By Owen Rountree

  First Published by Ballantine Books in 1984

  First Digital Edition: February 2020

  Copyright © 1984, 2019 by William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Cover Painting by Gordon Crabb

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the authors.

  For Matt Hansen

  One

  “Did you ever wish we had stayed in Montana?” Cord asked abruptly. It was a perfect, bright spring day, made for drowsing in the saddle and drifting with whatever daydreams came to mind, and neither of them had spoken for maybe ten minutes.

  “Nope,” Chi said. She did not look his way.

  “I’m thinking of the timbered mountain country west of the Divide.” They were a couple hours north of Trinidad on the broad road to Denver. It ran through immaculate farmlands, models of order and husbandry, the drill rows of spring grain sprouting fragile lines of light green, and all the farmstead buildings freshly painted a brilliant white. Way off to the left, piney forest climbed toward the spine of the Colorado Rockies, the steep ridge line of the Continental Divide draped in snow against a pale clean sky. “Something like this,” Cord said.

  “Montana,” Chi repeated. At least she was paying attention.

  “You know ... remember that town on the Clark’s Fork of the Columbia—”

  “New Willard,” she interrupted. “Stupid name. We robbed the Equitable Bank, and you ran out on me.”

  “Hey now.” Cord turned in the saddle, but she was smiling, her dark handsome face tranquil in the sunshine’s warmth. Her flat-brimmed sombrero hung at the back of her neck from the rawhide thong chin strap, and two thick braids of shining black hair curled out from under it, the ends fastened with elaborate delicate silver clips studded with bits of turquoise. She wore her serape back over her shoulders, and her black leather britches were tucked into the high tops of her hand-tooled boots. Her large-roweled Spanish spurs clicked musically. Fine enough, Cord decided, this pretty day and the woman.

  “There was a posse after us, and I had the money,” he said. “And you’re better on horseback than me, lighter anyway, so I figured you could lead them on a chase while I saw to the goods.”

  “You’ve always got a plan. You’re the brains of this outfit.”

  “It worked out, though. You found me.”

  “For supuesto.” Chi laughed. “Lucky me.”

  “I was talking about Montana,” Cord said stiffly.

  “Another plan? Tell me a tale, querido.”

  On the far side of a perfectly square field, a young man in coveralls was harrowing newly tilled ground, working a fine dappled gray team. One of the stocky draft animals tossed its head and snorted. The young man waved and Cord waved back. He could not really feature farming as a way of life, but owning a piece of land, that appealed

  “There’s country south of New Willard,” Cord said, “down the Bitterroot Valley. It’s upriver really, but people say down ... it’s warmer, that’s why, I guess. There’s no prettier place for ranching.”

  “Ranching?” Chi pretended astonishment, as if he had suggested they both enroll in Harvard College to study Romans and Greeks. But she knew where this was heading.

  “Well it is. Prettiest place in the West, bar none. Mountains to either side, the Bitterroots and the Sapphires, snowy halfway through summer and creeks coming down every draw so all that bottomland, ten miles wide some places—it’s always green.”

  “Always?” Chi echoed solemnly.

  “Right there they got Heaven,” Cord insisted. “The people who get to live there, own some land.”

  Chi reined up. “What talk. Do you hear yourself?”

  “Sure I do.” Cord shook his head. She knew what he was leading to, maybe even wanted to hear it, but she never made it easy for him to say. “I been doing some thinking.”

  “Yes you have. Never thought I’d hear you put ‘pretty’ and ‘farming’ in the same line of talk.” She knew about his growing-up days on a hardscrabble quarter-section southeast Texas homestead, how he had fled from that life as soon as he was old enough and able.

  “I’m not talking farming.” Cord made a sour face. “I’m talking about running cows in fine country, thickest, richest grass you ever saw and water all year, and looking up from whatever to see those mountains. We call that ranching.”

  “Uh huh”—Chi nodded—“and there’s winter. Forty below sorts out the riffraff. Snow all the time and cows to feed every day, and you got to stay and do it.”

  Cord watched the young farmer turn the team, talking to the grays as he worked the reins. Cord thumped the ribs of his bay gelding and they rode on. “You can hire a man or two who’ll work the winter for you, say you have business south. You got land of your own, and cattle. You’re a gentleman.”

  Chi laughed and Cord felt himself color. He was puffing a little hard maybe, but what the hell... “People change.”

  “January in Montana, there’s a change all right. I could be in Nogales, sitting in the sun and drinking tequila and listening to folk talk my proper language. You aren’t the only one moving on in years.” The idea turned her serious. “Maybe I’m getting spoiled. You think I’m spoiled, Cord?”

  It was his turn to laugh. She frowned. “Something funny?”

  “Maybe we’re both getting spoiled. We been running easy these days.”

  That was a good feeling. First off, no law to speak of was seriously interested in their whereabouts. A Federal mix-up about a job they had nothing to do with had been straightened out not long ago, about the same time they’d maneuvered an amnesty out of the venal Governor of Idaho Territory, a fat pig named William Deane Majors. That had cleared the smoke on a Pocatello bank job. Then, just that month, the statute of limitations had run out on the bank job in the town with the stupid name, New Willard. Maybe that’s what had started Cord thinking about Montana, and the Bitterroot Valley.

  Another thing, for the first time in ten years of partnering, they had a real bankroll, come by honestly, and more legitimate money maybe on the way. A week earlier they’d been visiting their dwarf friend Pell at his mine near New Jerusalem in the San Juan Mountains north of Durango. Pell reported that the shaft would be producing again by July. One third of the profits were Cord and Chi’s, for throwing in with Pell in the proud little man’s battle against the Denver capitalist who was trying to take over the district. So far the dwarf had delivered $10,000 into their account in the National Bank of Tucson, and most of it was still there, awaiting possibilities.

  “Two viejos,” Chi said. “Settled down on a pretty plot of land with our cows and our hired man, like rich folk. Is that about right?”

  “See there.” Cord pointed up the trail.

  “Que?”
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  “There’s Montana, about seven hundred and fifty miles that way. Well hell, we’re already heading in the right direction.”

  Chi began to laugh again, shaking her head and clutching at her gut, and Cord started laughing too, couldn’t stop himself. Chi reached over and touched a warm hand to his knee, and they went on laughing. There was not a thing wrong, and there was the joke.

  “We’ll take a look,” Cord announced.

  “¿Si, como no?” Chi answered gaily.

  Nearby, a woman screamed.

  It was a shrill ugly noise, full of hurt. The shriek cut off for a moment then began again, coming at Cord as out of a dark place in a bad dream.

  “There.” Chi pointed, then spurred her horse. The road here ran along a bench above a glacial swale where a stream swollen with runoff ran muddy amid willows. Up ahead the main road swung right with the bench while a wagon trace turned down toward the creek. The woman’s scream came from there. Cord raced after Chi.

  From the lip of the bench’s cutbank the wagon track switchbacked down to some small rancher’s fenced-off creek-edge grassland, triple-strand barbed wire enclosing fifty or so head of white-faced Herefords, new calves nuzzling the paps of the cows. Across the meadow, the corner of a small neat frame house peeked out from the willows along the water. The track passed through a rail gate, and a Wells, Fargo Concord coach was parked nearby.

  The rest was old news, and not pretty.

  Up on the box a man was folded over a shotgun, his head between his knees and his canvas pants greasy with blood. The driver stood off to the side near the coach’s open door, dusty and looking more annoyed than frightened. Beside him stood a heavy, sweating man in a dark suit and high celluloid collar, his vest taut as a drumhead across his belly. His angular hatchet-faced wife, swathed from ankle to chin in a severe black dress, trembled like a dry leaf. The third passenger was a young redheaded sport in a straw boater, checkered jacket, and bow tie. All of them stared straight ahead at nothing, as if at the funeral of someone they did not know well.

  One road agent sat horseback at the head of the team of four, holding the animals in check. He had a rifle tucked under his arm. Another covered the passengers and driver with a sawed-off Remington shotgun.

  The third bandit was down off his horse near the gate, past the front of the coach where they could all see. He was wrestling with a blond woman in her early twenties. She could have been pretty if her features were not contorted with fear. She screamed and tried to strike the outlaw and hold down the skirts of her yellow dress and voluminous petticoats at the same time. The outlaw slapped at her ineffectually.

  The other two were darting quick glances, waiting their turns with the girl. The fat capitalist and his wife went on gazing stonily ahead, but the young man was poised forward with his weight on the balls of his feet, anticipating the chance to do something. At the fence’s gate, the road agent had the blond woman turn around and was trying to bend her over the top rail. The woman back-kicked him in the shin, and he grunted a curse.

  Cord’s first reaction was instinctive: He did nothing. A decade on the outlaw trail had imparted the habit of non-involvement in this sort of business. There was never any reward except trouble.

  Chi drew her Winchester from its saddle scabbard and dismounted in one fluid motion. She levered a .44 cartridge into the breech, lay out full-length on the edge of the bench, and fired, just that quick, without contemplation or hesitation. With a lifetime of these moments behind her, she moved as unconsciously as a dancer. She shot the attacking road agent high in the back. His spine shattered and he spun around and flopped against the terrified woman. She pushed him away in a blind panic. There was blood on her hands and on the front of the yellow dress.

  The rifleman at the head of the coach team swung around and looked for a target. Chi shot him out of the saddle. His neck snapped when he hit the ground, and the man with the shotgun was looking around in confusion. The redheaded kid climbed up his back, jerked the sawed-off double-barrel up hard against the man’s Adam’s apple, and rode him facedown into the grass. The man tried to gasp and passed out.

  The team of horses pranced sideways with a great rattling of harness chains. The driver jumped to the head and put his weight on their bridles.

  Chi was back in the saddle and spurring her mare into a hard dangerous plunge over the edge to the wagon track. Cord followed more carefully, feeling less than committed to all of this.

  The blond woman looked at the blood on her hands and screamed once more. She scrambled up over the fence rails and half fell on the other side. Her dress ripped. She got to her feet and ran, aimless and hysterical.

  Chi raked the mare with the big rowels. The horse gathered its haunches and flew over the gate, Chi high and forward in the saddle. Cows looked up stupidly and trotted out of the way.

  Cord drew up beside the stage. The kid in the boater was standing over the shotgunner, covering him with his own double-barrel. The man’s nose was broken but he was alive and making bubbly sounds. The fat capitalist and his bony wife were huddled together, looking primarily outraged now that the danger was past. “See to the guard on the box.” He was a man used to ordering others to do the unpleasant jobs, and having those orders followed.

  “Dead,” Cord said.

  “You must make certain.”

  “You make certain,” Cord snapped. “I’ve seen enough to know.” He had no longing to crawl up there on that box with the stiffening remains of somebody gone from the earth.

  “Don’t take that tone of voice with me, my man.”

  “I’m not your man,” Cord said savagely. You are riding along on a fine spring day and seconds later there is blood everywhere. “I’m starting to get ragged, mister, and when that happens I get crazy. You don’t want to mess with that—no telling what might happen.”

  The sport in the boater barked an abrupt laugh. Cord kept looking at the fat man. “Excuse yourself.” This sort of bullying was pointless, and Cord wished he hadn’t started it. But dammit, Chi had killed two men, with good reason probably, but still... Killing didn’t sit well with him on such a day or any day.

  “I ... I beg your pardon, sir.” Even stammering, the businessman sounded haughty.

  The jaunty kid in the boater was watching Cord curiously. Cord looked away, toward the snowy mountains. He wished trouble on no one these days, but these people did not belong out here. They should have stayed in their city, huddled together against rough play such as this.

  The blond woman made the edge of the swollen creek before Chi caught her. She was into the water and Chi plunged after, the mare’s hooves throwing up clots of mud.

  The woman sunk to her knees in the brown water. Chi climbed down, dropped the mare’s reins. The blond hid her face with her hands and began to sob, and Chi stood for several moments staring down at her. Then Chi pulled her to her feet and said some soft thing in her ear. The woman looked at her and nodded. Chi walked her up on the bank, her arm around the woman’s shoulder. Chi sat beside her on the grass, rocking and crooning.

  “Inevitable.” The hatchet-faced woman had a voice like a saw cutting metal. “An unattached woman has no business on the highway.”

  Cord pointed the finger of his gun hand at her. “Keep your bad news to yourself, lady.” Her mouth flew open like a window shade and she turned to her husband, but he’d retired from this fray.

  “She said she was a seamstress.” The redheaded kid spoke absently, as if he were thinking of something else as he looked up at Cord. “Came here from Elmira, New York, three months back, but she couldn’t find a situation and neither could her husband, except up at the mines around Cripple Creek. A week ago him and six other waddies were killed in a cave-in, she told me. She’s on her way to Denver to stay with his second cousin. Some fine beginning in our West, don’t you think? Say, I know you.”

  “How’s that?” The quick turn took Cord by surprise.

  “Sure I do,” the young man said. “Yo
u are Mr. Cord, the gunman, and that woman yonder is Miss Chi.” He turned. “Hold the firestick, friend.” He tossed the shotgun underhanded to the startled fat man. The weapon terrified him, as if it were a live snake. The fat man scrambled three steps backward and nearly fell. The gun hit the ground and for some reason did not discharge.

  The young man took a small pad and a pencil from the inside pocket of his checkered jacket. He wet the tip of the pencil on his tongue and smiled at Cord in a professional way, like a dentist holding pliers behind his back. “What brings you and your partner to Colorado, Mr. Cord?”

  “Who the hell are you, boy?”

  “Sorry.” He dug into his jacket pocket again and came out with a business card. “Pete Stark, Rocky Mountain News. I been down at the Springs, covering the dedication of the city hall. Hot item. But damn, look at the story I got now.”

  “What story?”

  “Yours. A fancy-handed gunslinger riding our local trails.”

  “You keep me out of your stories.” But Cord had the unpleasant feeling his bluster wouldn’t work so well with the kid. Too cocky. Maybe if he put a bullet about four inches above the boater...

  “Can’t,” Pete Stark said airily. “You’re news, Mr. Cord.” Chi was leading her horse toward them, her arm around the shoulders of the girl. Chi removed the rails in the gate and then replaced them after maneuvering the girl through. The girl stared at the body of the man who had touched her, until Chi turned her head away. The girl was wet and muddy. Her face was chalk-white and her hair tangled, and she was trembling. She looked driven from any notion that the world might make sense, and why not? A widow one day, and now splattered with a dead man’s blood.

  Chi was trembling too, with rage. Cord watched her help the woman inside the stage. The others were also staring. There was something mesmeric about the young widow, weeping and ruined, and the gunwoman Chi, so willing to kill.

  Chi came out of the stage. “See to her,” she ordered the hatchet-faced woman. The woman covered her mouth with the back of her hand, then did as she was told.