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  EVERY STOP SPELLS DANGER!

  Cord and Chi are no longer wanted anywhere—they’ve settled their old scores with the law. But it isn’t long before Cord’s in a Utah jail on the lying word of a wicked woman. And Chi’s got to bust him out.

  At last their lucky card turns up, as they ride the trail to a Colorado silver strike. Too bad a tough widow and her companion killers are blocking their path to fortune with handfuls of steel and a wagonload of dynamite!

  CORD 6: KING OF COLORADO

  By Owen Rountree

  First Published by Ballantine Books in 1984

  First Digital Edition: November 2019

  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

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the authors.

  Chapter One

  This was no ramshackle saloon-room tribunal with a boisterous gallery of hard-drinking itinerant cowhands calling for swift and expedient justice so that whiskey sales might be resumed. Here was an imposing hall of civilized justice, and no nonsense would be brooked.

  It was midafternoon of a day early in October, and bright thin desert sunlight slanted in through high clean windows, casting unwavering fingers across the polished hardwood of the bench. It was up three steps on a platform so the judge could look down on everyone else. The high ceiling was ornate pressed tin painted a subdued buff color, and there were no cobwebs in the corners. On the side walls in baroquely carved dark oak frames were oil portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Smith. A fourth portrait, this one of Brigham Young, hung high on the wall behind the bench. In the picture Young wore a black four-in-hand necktie, and his hair was curled up in an elaborate wave. The artist had some deftness—or perhaps Cord was on edge. Brigham Young’s eyes were deep and dark and intense and seemed to be focused on Cord.

  Cord bit his lip and rubbed a thumbnail over his unshaven jaw. He could smell himself, an odor that was not solely the result of six days without a bath. He reeked of exposed nerves and a fear bred by uncompromised entrapment and inevitable condemnation. He stank in his own nostrils and wanted to laugh — though there was nothing funny within miles.

  The judge was an astonishingly old wattle-necked man with alert accusing eyes and no more hair than a turkey buzzard. He held his gavel at the ready, both ends of its mallet head rounded and worn down from frequent use. The judge ruled absolutely over this place of order and lawfulness. His name was Orvis Mason Watt.

  A bailiff in a heavy blue whipcord police uniform with gold trim at the cuffs and shoulders stood stiffly at parade rest beside the witness box. Directly below the bench, where the judge could not see him, a young blond man kept the transcript in a leather-bound book. He had long delicate fingers, and Cord watched the economical grace with which they turned pages and dipped pen in ink and danced across the lined record sheets.

  The jury sat to the right of the courtroom in ordered rows of six each, behind a railing polished smooth as a bar rail. Eight were women; all wore proper practical cotton dresses buttoned to the throat, as if that were the uniform of the day. The youngest was near forty and the oldest over sixty. The four men wore dark suits and stiff collars and looked to be on leave from the bank and anxious that business was being prudently conducted in their absence. Every one of the twelve people picked to judge Cord’s fate had angular, plain-featured faces, and it gave the appearance of distant kinship. In fact their expressions reflected not so much common ancestors as similarly rigid lifetimes of stern views and somber reflections.

  Judge Orvis Mason Watt said, “Call Miss Ellen Landy.” There was a low murmur from the spectators, and Cord half turned where he sat at counsel table. Behind the rail were a dozen rows of pine benches, plain and sturdy as church pews. There was not an empty space, and men stood along the back wall two deep, hats in hands. Two deputies flanked the door at the end of the aisle bisecting the gallery. The crowd was a mix of ranch people in their worn but brushed church outfits, and men and matrons from the town who always dressed this way since no dirt was raised in their daily commerce. But all of them were bound by an instinctive understanding that here was serious trouble in a serious place, this rock-built town of Zion tucked into the southeastern corner of Utah. They had fled here from upstate New York and Saint Joseph, Missouri, to escape the outrage that invariably pursued pious gentlefolk. On the occasions when the Lord tested their orthodoxy by allowing evil to find them, they knew what to do.

  Cord turned back. Judge Watt raised his gavel and the murmur died. The Landy woman held out a gloved hand palm down, and the bailiff assisted her into the witness box. She raised her right hand and put her left on the Book of Mormon the bailiff offered, and repeated the oath after him. She did not look at Cord until she sat, and then she showed him an expression of bland disinterest, as if he did not have much to do with what was going on here.

  Again Cord found himself stifling a laugh, for no reason beyond craziness. The reek of his fear sickened him, and laughter was a way of breaking free. But he was on trial for his life, and the laughter would not come. It would not work anyway, not here.

  “I beg your forgiveness, Miss Landy.” The prosecuting attorney’s name was Mordecai Kimball; each time he began to speak, his eyes gleamed with enchantment at the orotund sound of his own voice. Kimball was ruddy-faced and broad-shouldered, he had a long mane of silvery hair, and orated in an old-fashioned bombastic manner that drew the crowd’s hushed attention. If Judge Watt had appointed him as prosecutor, Kimball stood to be the best lawyer in Zion.

  “To ask you to recount the sordid details of your debasement, Miss Landy,” Kimball boomed, “is to compound its tragedy.” The crowd held its collective breath against disappointment. “We pity you, and we respect the propriety of our community and the potentially deleterious effect of your story upon it.”

  Pockets of muttering formed among the spectators. Judge Watt slammed his gavel down. “I will have silence.” He had a raspy voice, like a burlap sack of feed dragged across a hard-packed barnyard.

  Mordecai Kimball looked over the crowd to prolong the moment. “We pity you, Miss Landy,” he said again. “But justice demands you rehearse your story once more.”

  The crowd stirred again, but this time the old judge took no notice. He leaned to his left for a clear view of Ellen Landy over the lip of his bench, studying her with the quick bright eyes of a boy poring over a pilfered copy of The Police Gazette. All twelve jurors swayed forward in their chairs in perfect tandem, like cancan dancers in a San Francisco bawdy house.

  Ellen Landy was fair and in her mid-twenties, not yet a spinster, but would no doubt become one after a few years of unpleasant gossip and sidelong looks from the townswomen. She was blandly attractive in a blue-eyed cornflower sort of way despite slightly bucked front teeth. She wore black and was reasonably composed in the face of the anticipation rising from the spectators like heat shimmering on a desert horizon.

  Ellen Landy wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and smiled tentatively at the judge, who unconsciously nodded encouragement. “I was in the barn,” she said and stopped. She looked at prosecutor Kimball, as if imploring him to release her from thi
s ordeal.

  “Go on,” Kimball said, trying for compassion but sounding mostly puffy.

  “Our barn,” Ellen Landy repeated. “Where we store the hay and my father’s tack and gear. Where we keep all sorts of valuable property.”

  Ellen Landy covered her mouth with her left hand and looked again at Cord without appearing to see him. “I thought he wanted to steal something,” she said in Cord’s direction, “and he did.” She looked up at Mordecai Kimball. “He stole it all.”

  “HANG THE HEATHEN!” An old man stood in the last row of benches, waving his flat-brimmed stovepipe hat. “STRETCH HIM!”

  Ellen Landy snapped erect in her seat, and Judge Orvis Mason Watt banged his gavel three times and rasped, “Silence!” Cord wondered how much of the judge’s outrage stemmed from the violation of courtroom decorum and how much from annoyance at the interruption of the fascinating story the woman was unfolding.

  “We must have order in these chambers,” the judge hissed. He waited for the crowd’s murmurings to evaporate. “I share the community’s sympathies regarding this young woman and her tormentor. But you must sit in silence until justice is served.”

  Cord felt a hand on his shoulder through the limp dirty woolen blouse he’d been wearing for too many days. The man beside him at the counsel table got to his feet. His name was Robert Chapman, and he was charged by the court with defending Cord; Utah in its way was one of the more civilized precincts of the West and not a place to hang a man except according to law. Chapman seemed to be doing his duty, but near as Cord could tell so far he had no real friends in this place.

  “Your Honor, I must object.” Chapman’s hand rested on Cord’s shoulder.

  “To what?”

  “To this allegation that my client was bound on thievery.”

  “Sustained. He’s not being tried for theft.”

  Robert Chapman squeezed Cord’s shoulder and eased back into his chair. Chapman was dressed as lawyers will, formal enough for this court, though he did not look so much a part of it as Mordecai Kimball or the wattle-necked Judge Watt.

  Kimball frowned at Chapman before turning back to Ellen Landy. “What happened in the barn, Miss Landy? Speak freely. There will be no more outbursts.”

  “I was carrying a lantern. It was after dark. He found me there.” Ellen Landy gazed up at the judge plaintively.

  The judge did not move a whit; he did not even blink.

  “He smiled,” Ellen Landy said. “He smiled and he took me. He would have killed me.”

  Robert Chapman squeezed Cord’s shoulder again and stood. “Your honor, I must again raise an objection.”

  Judge Watt looked at him blankly for a moment, then pursed his parchment-dry lips. “Sustained,” he said impatiently. “He’s not being tried for killing either.” Chapman smiled when he eased back into his chair, and Cord sensed that at least the attorney was no enemy. That was something.

  “He took you,” Kimball echoed, putting a slight twist on the verb.

  Ellen Landy drew two breaths, deep enough to make her breasts rise under the somber black dress. The rest of her statement came out in a rush. “He carried me down to the floor, onto the straw where it is tromped into the manure, where the animals live. The pain was terrible. I was no longer conscious when my father found us and saved my life.”

  Chapman stood quickly this time, but the old man with the stovepipe hat was already ranting, and Chapman had to shout his objection. A man in another corner hollered, “HANG THE ANTICHRIST!” Other men took up the cry, and in a moment it was a chant, a rhythmic basso rumble underscored by the soprano obbligato of their women, as horrified as if Cord had truly ravished every one of them.

  Judge Watt’s gavel was beating an unheeded tattoo. The bailiff screamed, “ORDER!” So loudly it left him red-faced. He had his pistol out. Gunfire, Cord thought: That is just what we need now.

  “Silence,” the judge rasped wearily when he could be heard. “Mold your minds to justice. And put away that weapon, Fergy,” he told the bailiff. The bailiff looked at the gun sheepishly, as if wondering where it had come from.

  “Wait a minute,” Ellen Landy said.

  The judge aimed his gavel at her, along with a thin-lipped smile.

  “No one has asked me,” Ellen Landy said. “They should ask me.”

  “What?” The judge whispered.

  “Who did it?” She stood suddenly. It was late evening, and a shaft of the sunlight illuminated her hard face so it shone like metal. “He did it!” She pointed at Cord. “He is the monster.”

  Judge Watt raised his gavel in anticipation of another outbreak, but Ellen Landy held the spectators in thrall once more. The judge challenged them with a glower and put the gavel down.

  “That’s enough,” Ellen Landy said, and took the rail of the witness box gate with both hands, swaying as if about to faint.

  “More than enough.” The judge smiled a smile undiluted with kindness.

  Ellen Landy swung open the gate.

  “But we must go on,” Judge Watt said. “Sit down.”

  Ellen Landy looked uncertain. She sat down.

  “Mr. Robert Chapman,” the judge announced, “has through no fault of his own been appointed counsel to the defendant and must examine you according to the responsibilities of his position. You may question the witness, Mr. Chapman. Do your duty.”

  Chapman stood for a moment regarding Ellen Landy before advancing on her. “Miss Landy,” he began, “why did you go to the barn on the evening in question?”

  “I was seeing to my horse.”

  “You had been riding?”

  “I had driven here. To town.”

  “Alone?”

  “With my father.”

  “But you returned alone,” Chapman suggested.

  “I had accomplished what I had come for, and my father and my brothers remained behind on business.”

  “While you were in town, did you speak to Mr. Cord, the defendant?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did you see Mr. Cord?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain you had no contact with Mr. Cord that afternoon here in Zion?”

  “No!” She shot a look at the jury.

  “Do you deny ...”

  Mordecai Kimball was rising to object, but the judge beat him to it. “Proceed, Mr. Chapman. The witness has testified to the court’s satisfaction that she had no contact with your client.”

  But then Ellen Landy continued unbidden. “He may have seen me,” she said calmly. “He could have trailed me like a dog, but I never saw him, not until he came into our barn …” She looked up at Chapman, stricken. “How can you...” She covered her face with her hands and began to sob, her shoulders heaving.

  Judge Watt looked up quickly, ready to quell once again the crowd’s rising outrage, but it was Mordecai Kimball who boomed, “SILENCE!” This time. Kimball faced the spectators. “Judge Watt will clear the courtroom, and justifiably, if you do not comport yourselves as you must. This is a communal matter, and we all bear witness.”

  Kimball smiled, a reasoned leader of a reasoned community. “You must understand: This trial will be taken away from us, moved to Colorado or New Mexico or Lord knows where. We do not want that. This is our business, and we must keep it in our town and see to our justice. There must be no more displays.”

  The judge gaveled a last time. “Thank you, Mr. Kimball.” He looked over the people of Zion. “Go home. Go home and pray for yourselves and return with order in your souls. This court stands in recess until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” He rose abruptly; standing, he seemed swathed in yards of black robe.

  The moment he passed through the door behind the bench and closed it, the spectators erupted once more, like children released into the schoolyard at recess on the first bright spring day. Men shouted vilification and raised their fists, and some began to press toward the railing separating them from Cord. One time, years ago in Newton, Kansas, Cord had seen a ba
rroom mob swarm over a card cheat and kill him with fists and boots, and now he felt pure chill terror. But then the two deputies who had flanked the door were at his side, hustling him through the exit Judge Watt had taken. Hands plucked at Cord’s hair and clothing and resisted the door as the deputies pushed it shut.

  Cord drew a ragged breath and turned. Judge Orvis Mason Watt blocked his way, looking up and wrinkling his nose at Cord’s stink. Cord’s goose was cooked, no doubt about that. The ancient little judge’s green sunken eyes were hard as those of a house cat waiting to feed.

  Chapter Two

  The jail cell was on the third floor of the courthouse. The walls were cut-granite blocks and the bars tempered steel, and the locked door faced onto a hallway which terminated in a second locked door of sheet steel with a book-sized window, beyond which was the jailer’s office and a third locked door. It was up-to-date and unbreachable, and it provided Cord with no hope of escape, not without help.

  Help was a long wall off, or maybe gone for good.

  The cell’s window faced west, and while Cord watched the sky turn red and the sun go down on the tableland mountains, a crowd gathered in the alley below. The townsmen were quiet in the twilight, but they came to more violent life with the anonymity provided by full dark. Torches were lighted, and the dim ranting speeches of men who stood on packing crates and demanded his death began to drift up to Cord. He thought again of the stink that fear brought and hated it, though he spent long minutes drawing it in, one deep breath after another. He blanked his mind to the smell of fear and to the nonsense of the mob, and imagined the flickering of a calm camp-light fire and the smell of coffee.

  And to hell with these bastards, he thought and laughed aloud. But his laughter sounded weak and hollow and cut with the tremolo of nervousness. He touched the cold stone wall and swore. He could not stand being closed in like this, not for much longer, and though he did not fear dying, he was terrified by the notion of dying pointlessly and foolishly, of being overwhelmed and impotent.