Cord 8

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  For the first time in years, Cord and Chi aren’t wanted by the law. So, saddled up with Chi’s recent poker winnings, they light out for a life of genteel ranching on a spread Cord had always been fixing to acquire. But they hit a detour in Paradise Valley, where the notorious Eudora Craven has holed up with her two mean-tempered sons against a band of hard riders hell-bent on settling blood for blood. Hiding out with Eudora and her boys is Arrowsmith, a dying gunslinger who long ago had saved Chi’s life—and now was calling in the debt. Can a woman go with the wrong side, but for the right reason? Chi makes the tough choice, with all the authority she needs to back it up—a sharpshooting partner named Cord.

  CORD 8: PARADISE VALLEY

  By Owen Rountree

  First Published by Ballantine Books in 1986

  First Digital Edition: May 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.

  One

  When the clerk cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbed like a toy boat on a duck pond. Cord glanced up at him blankly, then went back to his reading.

  The arch-shaped stencil on the front window of the store read:

  H. Munro, Stationers

  Beside the window was a bookshelf topped by a sign designed to catch customers’ eyes soon as they came in:

  True Tales of Those Who Wrested Cody Country from the Grip of Savage Wilderness.

  The romances occupied the top shelf, most by the fabulist Ned Buntline. A few bore the by-line of Maxwell Prentiss, a more base hagiographer whose trail had once crossed Cord’s. These dime novels from the houses of Street and Smith and of Beadle and Adams were cheaply printed on rough-trimmed newsprint and bound between yellow paper covers and always had two titles, such as Buffalo Bill’s First Trail; or, Will Cody, The Pony Express Rider and Buffalo Bill’s Last Victory; or, Dove Eye, the Lodge Queen. Cord spotted one he’d read: Buffalo Bill in Pittsburgh; or, The Anarchist’s Daughter.

  The lower shelf was reserved for writers tooting their own horns. John Charles Fremont’s memoirs sat beside the late Colonel Custer’s My Life on the Plains. Cord was most interested in what Mr. Cody had to say.

  The clerk cleared his throat again. Cord gave him a pleasant smile. “If you want to trot over to the druggist for a pastille, I’ll watch the store,” Cord offered. “You sound like you could use a demulcent.” The clerk snorted through his nose.

  Cord turned a page. The book was The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide: An Autobiography, and Cord was reading of the killing of the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hand. That was back in the summer of 1876 and probably really happened—‘the first scalp for Custer,’ Cody called it. My, but he was a convivial romancer, Cord thought. There was something oddly fascinating about a man unafraid to turn his own real life into the stuff of tall tales. A scout and guide and genuine adventurer, and now, in his middle years, the most renowned spieler in all the West.

  Cody was an alchemist, Cord decided; he had learned how to make gold out of bullshit. Well, there were worse ways to get rich. Cord had tried several of them

  The clerk tried a harrumphing noise. He was about twenty, with straw-colored hair parted down the middle and slicked to his skull, limp as wet hay. He wore a white shirt with a celluloid collar and four-in-hand tie, braces and arm garters, and one ink-stained white glove on his right hand. The son of someone named Munro, Cord guessed, doomed to relive his father’s droning shopkeeper’s life.

  The store had a pressed-tin ceiling, and its big mullioned glass windows faced out on a wide, busy city street. On the high shelves behind the counter were reams of snowy paper, squat bottles of dark thick ink, envelopes and pens and pencils and paper fasteners, calendars and notebooks and blank ledgers, every essential of commerce and industry. On a table in the center of the showroom, where you’d encounter it no matter what you’d come for, were three shiny new typewriters, each with a sheet of the pure white paper placed neatly under the rubber roller.

  Cord was seeking ways to kill some time without resorting to day-drinking, and bookshelf browsing seemed safe enough. Cord paged back a couple of chapters, and there was Colonel Cody at Summit Springs, killing more Cheyenne with panache and great good humor. The clerk made another throaty noise.

  Cord sighed and shut the blue-covered book on his forefinger. “See here,” he said to the clerk. “How can a man read with all this noise?”

  The clerk came around the counter. “The Carnegie library is on Eighth Street, sir. This is a retail establishment.”

  “You can’t expect a man to buy without a look.” Cord grinned. “It’s not natural—it’d be like wearing a blindfold to a whorehouse.”

  The clerk’s eyes widened, and his Adam’s apple quivered like an aspic on a dining car sideboard.

  “Fact is,” Cord said, “I am thinking of writing a book myself—tell the true story of the real West.”

  The clerk wrinkled his nose. “Well, sir, you surely have an authentic odor to you.”

  Cord pointed a finger. “You watch yourself, boy. Show some respect to your elders.” But Cord was having fun.

  The clerk plucked the book from Cord’s hands and checked it over, as if for fleas. Cord looked around for some new object of mischief, and lit on the typewriters. “If I am going to write my life story,” Cord said, “I ought to have the latest gear.”

  The clerk looked on with an expression of much-tried patience as Cord advanced on the writing machines. Cord paid no attention. He picked out his name, searching the rows of keys for the right letters. “There isn’t much sense to how they arrange the characters, is there?” Cord said, watching the levers crisply strike the paper and retract. “I surely wouldn’t know,” the clerk muttered.

  Cord stepped back to admire his work and spotted the label atop the machine:

  E. Remington and Sons, Ilion, New York.

  “Look at this,” Cord said. “The same folks who make guns.”

  “Oh,” the clerk said coolly. “Has Remington gone into the weaponry business?”

  Cord was losing his enthusiasm for this game; the boy was too damned hard to josh. Cord gestured at the book the clerk still held. “How much is that Buffalo Bill?”

  “One dollar twenty-five.”

  “Too dear,” Cord said, and went out into the sunshine blessing this spring day in Cody, Wyoming.

  This was no dusty boardwalk settlement clinging to the far edge of the frontier, but a town of substance, hell-bent for permanence, progress, and respect. If Cody took a backward glance, it was through rose-colored glasses and with nostalgia and romantification.

  The sidewalk on which Cord stood was paved with cobblestones and money; everything here was spic-and- span and up-to-date. The hostelries stood five and six stories high and were built of brick and stone to last forever. Their dining room menus promised New York cut steaks in the style of Delmonico’s Restaurant, and upstairs, at either end of each corridor, were washrooms with hot and cold tap water and flush commodes. The local telephone exchange boasted
eighty-three subscribers, and the main rail line at Billings was less than two hours away via the new Northern Pacific spur line north. At the Opera House, world-famous actors played Shakespeare and melodrama beneath the largest proscenium in the Rockies outside of Denver.

  It was spring and the tourists were here already, come to drink deep of the thrill of the epic West. Everyone Cord encountered seemed to be having a swell time, and he hated to be the grumbling spoilsport, but Cord could not shake the feeling that all this made sport of his life, and the stage on which he played it out. The words that came to mind were ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ and ‘eastern’ and ‘nonsense.’

  Everywhere around him, history and artifice were muddled up with commerce. Instead of hansom cabs, visitors engaged cunning miniature one-horse buckboards. The photography studio provided costumes and props, buckskin and bonnets and bullwhips, and boasted that they used only the new Kodak ‘American film.’ Every morning, wagons embarked on three-day excursions to Yellowstone National Park, fifty miles west; the tour operator promised a genuine wilderness experience, including cabin accommodations, camp cookery, and a one-hour horseback ride.

  Canopied souvenir stands on every street corner sold cheap cowhand hats and boots, Indian arrowheads chipped from the bottoms of bottles, chunks of quartz veined with iron pyrite, and clothing embroidered with clever messages. Cord found a blouse that read SEÑORITA on the back, and he imagined presenting it to Chi. It might amuse her; on the other hand, she might throw a terrible fit. Cord passed on by. The last thing he needed now was trouble with Chi.

  Cord was toying with the idea of a drink when suddenly, right there on Sheridan Avenue in the noontime Wyoming sunlight, bat-winged saloon doors banged open and two men strode out to face each other in the middle of the oiled street. Immediately people gathered along both sidewalks, men in suits and collars and derby hats, women in sundresses and parasols, boys and girls in short pants and pinafores, all wearing too-bright half-grins that anticipated violence.

  The two men in the street were lean and sun-dark, hard quick-handed shootist types with heavy revolvers hanging low from their belts, their faces shaded by the wide brims of black hats. Facing off in the glaring daylight, each made a long slow posturing show of his dirty business. One wore black leather gloves, which he snugged up tight, one at a time. The other watched with sardonic disdain, flexing his long fingers.

  Cord found himself gawking like everyone else.

  The two men bent loose-kneed, facing each other from twenty yards. The crowd stopped breathing. It came then—the slap of hands against leather, twin explosions, black powder swirling in the heavy air—the man wearing black gloves staggered, went down on one knee, flopped limply on his back, and gurgled a death rattle. The other stared down pitilessly for a long, mean moment. He blew smoke from his gun muzzle, twirled it by its trigger guard, and eased it back into his tooled holster.

  A babe in arms wailed. Everyone else was clapping their hands and cheering lustily. The winner saluted the crowd with two fingers to his hat brim and stood smiling modestly, a handsome vital specimen glorying in his manly triumph, his ivory teeth gleaming in the light.

  Then the loser got himself picked up, dusted at his britches, and accepted his share of the applause with a sheepish grin. The children broke from the curbs, followed by the less reticent adults, and the two play-actors were surrounded by hands shoving writing pens and scraps of paper at them. A redheaded sharper in a checked bow tie and a straw boater stepped up on the front stoop of a nearby bank and raised a big megaphone to his lips. “Next show in one hour, folks,” he brayed. “Remember to pick up your official solid gold gunfighter memorial coins at any licensed memento outlet.”

  But Cord had lost interest in the shenanigans. Fifty feet down the street a man—he had likewise stopped to watch the show—was crossing over. He was dressed like the street-show shootists, but his leather vest was cracked and dusty, his bootheels turned, his gun worn high where you could get to it quickly, and his hat bent and broken and sweat-stained around the crown. He was short, and compact except for the beginning of a gut that told of too much time in the saddle and too little real work, drifting from trouble to trouble.

  Rafe Peltry. The name jumped to Cord’s mind. Cord unconsciously patted his own stomach—it was still hard and flat so far—and started after him. Rafe Peltry, a gut-shooter for hire in a minor way, the sort of craven nidget you hated to have at your back.

  Cord was halfway across the hard-packed street when something clutched at his hand. He stared down at a small boy in a Buster Brown short-pants kid’s suit.

  “Say, mister?” the kid squealed.

  Cord grimaced. The kid’s nose needed wiping.

  “Would you sign my holster with your name?” the kid asked. He thrust a kid-size holster fashioned of the thinnest scrap leather into Cord’s hand, along with a pencil.

  Cord looked around. The kid’s father stood off a little, worrying the brim of his fedora and smiling with tentative pride. Rafe Peltry was ambling off in the other direction.

  “My, but I like gunfighting,” the kid exclaimed. “Ain’t you in the show?”

  Not yours, Cord thought. I’m not your dancing monkey. He scowled down at the kid, who clapped his hands in delight. So there was nothing for it but to grab the pencil and holster, scrawl on it, shove it back into the kid’s hands, and get the hell after Peltry. The kid scampered away to show off his prize, and Cord heard the father say in a puzzled voice, “Wild Bill Hickok? … I thought he was dead ”

  Cord followed Rafe Peltry around the corner of Twelfth and down four blocks to Wyoming, where Peltry entered a saloon called the Deluxe. The name was the only fancy thing about the place.

  This was no place for a tourist, unless the tourist wanted to get dangerously Western. In this place drinkers stood up to a plain-topped utilitarian bar or sat at one of three tables with mismatched chairs amid bad lighting and a strictly local clientele. The bartender was a bald cauliflower-eared pug-ugly. Another time Cord might have felt to home. Here was the sort of joint where he had done a lifetime of drinking.

  The only jarring note was the Buffalo Bills—two tall men in buckskins, flowing blond wigs, waxed handlebar mustaches, and perfect pointed goatees, holding up one end of the bar, relaxing with mugs of lager beer after a long dry day of pretending.

  Rafe Peltry was settling in with a schooner of beer and a shot glass at the opposite end. While Cord watched over the swinging doors, Peltry poured and downed a shot from an unlabeled bottle. It made Peltry suck in his breath. He poured another as Cord pushed inside.

  Cord came up behind him and said, “Hey there, Rafe.”

  Peltry spun. He came up to Cord’s nose.

  Cord took the glass from Peltry’s fingers and tossed back the shot. He didn’t need the drink, and if he had he could afford better than this gut-burning swill, and most likely he was acting like a cocky rooster, and what the hell? This was Rafe Peltry, and Cord was enjoying himself.

  Peltry snapped his teeth together a couple of times. Cord grabbed his gun-hand wrist to keep him docile while he plucked Peltry’s gun from its high holster and stuck it in the front of his own belt. They stood like that for a bit, Peltry glaring and Cord grinning. Cord eased Peltry around, took his elbow and the bottle, and walked Peltry over to a table away from the bar.

  The old pug bartender nodded, as if this had been performed with acceptable discretion according to the standards of his public house.

  Cord pushed Peltry into a chair, not gently. Cord drew Peltry’s revolver from his belt and laid it in front of the opposite chair before sitting. He placed the bottle in the middle of the table.

  “Why do you want to be this way?” Peltry said.

  Cord nudged the revolver around with one finger, so the barrel faced Peltry.

  Peltry chewed his lower lip. “Lemme have a drink.”

  “Sure,” Cord said.

  Peltry grabbed the bottle by the neck and tilted it back
. His throat pulsed.

  Cord picked up Peltry’s gun, thumbed back the stiff hammer, and pulled the trigger, firing up so as not to kill some poor dude passing by in the alley. The bottle exploded, and whiskey and broken glass washed over Peltry’s face.

  Peltry screamed with fear and surprise. One of the Buffalo Bills dropped his beer mug, and the bartender came around the end of the bar, carrying a bung starter.

  “You crazy bastard,” Peltry whined, brushing glass out of his eyes.

  Cord showed the bartender a twenty-dollar gold piece. “Sorry,” Cord said. “I didn’t know it was loaded.”

  The bartender shouldered the bung starter like a sergeant-at-arms. “Don’t do it again,” he said, and took the coin back to the bar.

  “What the hell,” Peltry sputtered.

  “You are asking?” Cord was genuinely surprised at Peltry’s brass. “You forgotten that Texas bank?”

  “I been in lots of banks,” Peltry muttered. “I need another bottle.”

  “That snake piss will kill you,” Cord said. “Unless I do it first.”

  The bank that had Cord’s dander up was the object of a lesser sort of holdup, a dozen years and more ago. It was the first season after Cord gave up cowhanding for the outlaw life, and the gang he was bunched with had robbed the Second Stockman’s Bank in a town north of Palo Duro Canyon called Four Horses, on a black-gray June day with the sharp stink of ozone in the air and the winds funneling down from the clouds to the flat Texas badlands horizon.

  There were three of them. Peltry was the kid, sixteen and frightened—of the company of his elders, the notions of jail or dying, being short—so he was always waving his gun around as if he could bully away fear.

  They took orders from a one-time Confederate captain named Ransome Crews, because he had seen and done more than the two of them together. Ransome Crews led them through the heavy doors of the bank a minute before three that afternoon. The sky was dark as dusk under the gravid clouds, and Cord went on past Crews and around the end of the counter and put his gun on the two tellers. There were no customers, and no other employees present; they had learned the day before that the bank president was having an attack of the ague and was home in bed. Peltry followed Cord around the counter’s end. His gun was in his hand, and he stopped to stare at the tellers. One was old and one was young, and the young one wore a checkered bow tie. For some reason, Cord remembered the bow tie.