Cord 7 Page 3

  Cord nudged the door. He regarded the man, who took another tentative bird-step and stood worrying with nervous fingers at a derby hat.

  “Who asks?” Cord glanced at Chi and got no help. She was leaning back against the red, velvet-covered wall, her arms somewhere under her serape.

  “The name is Pearl. Bernard Pearl.” He automatically offered his hand again and immediately pulled it back, as if afraid Cord might give him the flowers. He clenched and unclenched his fingers.

  “Here,” Cord said, in what amounted to an angry tone. He shoved the flowers at Chi. She stared for a long moment, then accepted the bouquet without meeting Cord’s eyes. She might have been fighting laughter, or preparing to whip the blossoms alongside his head.

  Bernard Pearl stood maybe four inches above five feet and looked like he would dress out around a hundred pounds. He was anemically thin, as if his bones were fine as a robin’s. He was dressed like a comic character in one of Dickens’s newspaper serials. His stovepipe trousers ended three inches above knobby ankles encased in sagging gray-white hose and low-cut shoes with laces knotted in several places where they had broken. His vest was tight enough to outline ribs, and the sleeves of his waistcoat were too short and drew attention to his long-fingered womanish hands. Under the coat he wore a wrinkled cardboard shirt-front, a high stiff celluloid collar, and a bow tie so red it reflected pale color onto his hollow pocked cheeks. His black hair was parted in the middle and slicked down with greasy pomade, hard and flat as patent leather. The clothing needed a brushing, and there was a soup stain on the shirt-front.

  “What is this?” Cord asked Chi. She shrugged. She had her nose down closer to the flowers, like she might be sniffing them.

  “I hear you folks are riding north.”

  Cord looked at Pearl. “Where did you hear that?”

  Pearl smiled. His teeth were etched with black rot. “I read that story in the News, about how you did them road agents, saved that girl from a fate worse than death, like the man says. Story said you were leaving town soon as you collected your due. I thought maybe you’re heading for Wyoming.”

  “He talked at me for five minutes,” Chi said into the flowers. “Never said anything I could make sense of.” She held them in both hands against her breast.

  Pearl squared his shoulders resolutely, as if contemplating a naked jump into a snowdrift. “Listen here. I got to get to Casper, see. You came in from the south, and you ain’t heading west over the mountains, not this early in the season, so you are going to either Kansas or Wyoming. Well nobody would go to Kansas, not unless his mother dropped him on the head when he was a baby.” Pearl gave Cord a manly, conspiratorial wink. Cord scowled and Pearl lost a measure of self-assurance. “So maybe not. No hard feelings, right?” Pearl put his derby hat on his head, tapped the crown in a careless dapper way, and headed for the doorway.

  Cord took his arm and Pearl jumped about a foot in the air. “Don’t get your back hair up.” Cord laughed. “Not that you could, with all that goose grease.” Close up Cord could smell the little man’s foul breath, flavored with a whiff of stale beer. “You drunk or crazy?” Cord asked.

  “I don’t wish to travel alone,” Pearl said stiffly. “I have sufficient reason. I’m carrying valuables, what you might call goods.” Pearl gave Cord another insincerely fraternal smile. “I hate the idea of taking chances.”

  Chi turned away from the window. “What did you steal, Señor Perla?”

  “How’s that?” Pearl drew himself up. “Oh I get it, a joke. Haw haw.”

  Pearl reached inside his too-small waistcoat. Cord stiffened and put his hand on the butt of his Colt .45 Peacemaker. Strangers’ hidden hands were once in a while the prelude to terrible trouble. But Pearl came out with an untidy wad of greenbacks. He began smoothing the wrinkled bills, turning them right side up, wetting a greasy thumb and counting. “One hundred, two hundred, three...” He looked up when he got to $1,000 and waved the money at Chi. “You two are riding through Casper, or at least it’s not so far out of your way, that’s how I figure it. You let me ride along, I pay you a grand. You couldn’t make easier money if you printed it yourself.”

  “All of a sudden everyone wants to give us money,” Chi said. “Por nada.”

  “That’s right.” Pearl smiled like a missionary whose preaching had suddenly reached some dusky heathen. “Nothing at all.”

  “Say someone catches up, though,” Cord said. “Say they are willing to use guns to get at what you’re carrying. You look at it that way, a thousand dollars is cheap protection.”

  “It ain’t that way. This is legal.” He tried a rat-faced grin. “Besides, I hear you two don’t have much compunctions about shooting, or the law.”

  “You didn’t hear the rest, Perla,” Chi said. “About how we don’t need your money, or how maybe we’ll just take it away from you, right now. All your chatter, and you left out the best parts.”

  “First off, what are you carrying?” Cord asked.

  Pearl shook his head and started a smart answer, but Cord cut him off. “You tell me. If we are even going to consider doing business, you speak—speak straight—when you’re spoken to.”

  “Don’t be that way.” This time Pearl moved more gingerly when he reached into his coat; he hadn’t missed Cord’s gun hand move. He extracted a clean sheaf of papers and unfolded it to show Cord the top sheet. It had an ornate calligraphic title and an official-looking seal. “I’m a confidential agent,” Pearl said confidentially. “I look into things.”

  “You ought to look into a new wardrobe,” Chi said.

  “You got a nasty mouth, lady.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Yeah,” Chi said. “I also got a mean streak about a mile wide, right at the moment. You want to say another thing, see what happens?”

  Chi put down her flowers on the oak sideboard and took two steps toward the little man. Pearl stood transfixed.

  “You want those filthy rotten teeth knocked down your throat?” Chi was slipping into the darkest hole in her nature.

  Cord said, “Chi!”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment. Still watching her, Cord said out of the side of his mouth, “Tell the rest. Make it clean and fast.”

  Pearl came back to himself. He refolded the legal papers. “I’m working for a lawyer in Casper, fellow named Meeker. You probably heard of him.”

  “I don’t hear from lawyers much.”

  “Maybe not.” Pearl risked a quick sideways look at Chi. “Anyway, this Meeker has a client, name of Cecil Beasman, and this Beasman has considerable ranching interests—maybe a couple of hundred thousand acres and half of it deeded, up on the Belle Fourche. So here it comes spring and Beasman is ready to turn out his cows—or have his people do it, since Beasman doesn’t much fancy quitting the Cheyenne Club in favor of the range these days—and some company of nesters files a legal suit, challenging Beasman’s rights to maybe six miles of river front bottomland.” Pearl shook his papers in Cord’s direction. “A week back, Meeker sends me down here on the train to see what I could dig up, which was plenty. I got these at the state archives going all the way back to Territorial days and covering land from here to California, Canada, Mexico, and the Mississippi. Old titles still good as gold, and soon as the Federal judge in Casper sees them the nesters are going to be standing outside their own bob-wire fences, surrounded by their furniture and wondering what happened.”

  “Maybe the law is on the side of them nesters.”

  “Haw, haw. You reading me the law, Mr. Cord?”

  “Finish up,” Cord snapped. Maybe it was funny, coming from someone who had run outside the law for so long, but he’d never stolen from a sodbuster nor anyone else except the bankers, whom he’d considered something of a thief like him. He’d sure as hell never let some big-city moneyman take his land away.

  “I’ll play along,” Pearl said. “The bottomland belongs to the nesters. Okay. But whether or not you ride me up to Casper, they are out on
their asses. Now then …” Pearl replaced the papers under his coat. “You want a thousand dollars or not? Like you figure, this Beasman has plenty of green cabbage, and a thousand less ain’t going to cramp his style. Every day them nesters insist on acting stubborn costs him lots more, plus some pride. So Lawyer Meeker wants these papers pronto, and I am authorized to pay you this money, which I picked up at Western Union this morning, after I read the fine press that kid Stark gave you.”

  Pearl was blathering along with too much confidence for Cord’s taste. “You came down on the train. Go back the same way.”

  “That’d be swell with me. I never have got on with horses. But there is no train, not for two weeks at least. There’s extra snow in the mountains this year and three trestle bridges washed out in the runoff in the week since I came down. Seems like fate to me. How about you?” Pearl grinned.

  The story was okay, the money easily made. Cord looked toward Chi, but she had picked up the flowers and was holding her silence at the window with her back to him.

  “Step outside,” Cord told Pearl. “Wait in the hall. Bide your time.”

  When the door closed behind Pearl, Cord said, “It sounds like found money to me.”

  “You’ve got money on the brain,” Chi said. “Give you a sniff at property, you go for it like a goat to pansies.”

  “Where did you hear that? That sounds like stage comedy.”

  “Might be,” Chi said. “I heard it from you.” She laughed and lowered her head to sniff the flowers. “Here’s something funny—so far, the last three days stink worse than Pearl.”

  Cord looked at her, utterly bewildered. Chi laughed again. Cord watched her put the flowers in the pewter water pitcher that sat on the oak sideboard. “All right,” he said weakly.

  “Five days from now we ditch him in Casper. Couple of weeks after that we are in Montana with an extra five hundred each. Okay?”

  “Bueno. We’ll buy another thousand dollars’ worth of land.” She brushed a hand over the bouquet in the pitcher. “And raise flowers.”

  “You listen ...”

  Chi shook her head ruefully. “Bring in Señor Perla,” she said. “We got to get moving. Some other hombre is looking at our little rancho right this minute.”

  Four

  They crossed the railroad tracks south of Casper a couple of hours after sunup on the fifth day and rode past the stockyards where the cattle jostled haunch to jowl waiting for their train east. “Was I right?” Bernard Pearl said. “Was that the easiest thousand anybody ever made?”

  Cord turned in the saddle. Pearl jerked up on his reins, and his horse took a few contrary meandering steps before dropping its head and nuzzling the cinders along the tracks. Pearl spread one arm in a gesture that took in the lopsided barns, the tangle of rail threading through switches, the odor of curing manure on the spring air, all the fine attractions of the railroad end of any Western town. “Here we are,” Pearl said proudly, as if the credit were his.

  But truth to tell, the ride had been simple as eating cake, and except for Pearl’s bitching and the stink of his body, pleasant as could be reasonably hoped. It felt good to ride at ease across the open greening prairie, not worrying a damn who came along, waving at the stages and buckboards and local farmer traffic, swapping a pleasant word with passing horsemen, at least those who did not give Cord and Chi a wide knowledgeable berth. Even that didn’t feel so bad: Being known was a sight better than being wanted.

  In more than a decade of the outlaw life they’d developed habits of caution, and generally avoided places like Casper, big enough to have organized peace officers and notions of order. Now they could ride any trail, walk into the public house of their choosing, offer a true name without worrying about facing a circle of shotgun muzzles with a posse on the other end. Cord wondered how long it would last. Maybe forever, he decided. Maybe he would grow old on his ranch, get fat as his stock, bet on race horses, and write his memoirs.

  “Like stealing,” Bernard Pearl said, and handed Cord $500, the second payment on their deal. Pearl wore a watery smile and seemed a little edgy, as if he wanted to get rid of them quickly as he could without being obvious.

  Cord took the money and held out half to Chi. She grinned and shook her head. “You hold on to it, Cord. You’re the money man in this medicine show.” She waggled a finger at him. “Only don’t get any ideas of running out on me.”

  Cord folded the fifty-dollar bills into a small square and tucked it in his watch pocket. “You sure you can get to Lawyer Meeker’s by yourself, Mr. Pearl? You are not going to fall into a hole on the way, or get set upon by road agents?”

  “Haw, haw. You got your money and had your joke. I’ll say so long now. I got things to do.”

  “You ought to start with a bath, Little Stinker,” Chi said.

  Pearl looked at the ground and shook his head, as if he were sorely offended but too polite to make an issue of it.

  “Wheew,” Chi breathed. She pinched at her nose. “Pearl, you are a darling.” She laughed at him. She had no use for toady men such as Pearl, except as targets for her occasionally hammer-handed jokes.

  Pearl met her look for a moment before he wilted again. He kicked his tame horse to a trot in the direction of town. “Little Mouse-man,” Chi called after him. She looked at Cord. “What’s your pleasure, querido?”

  “Tell you what. I been sleeping out for the better part of a week, so tonight I’m going to put up indoors. In Denver I heard about this Continental Hotel, brand-new and first-rate.”

  “That all you do these days, snoop around for new hotels? You going to write a guide about the finest hostelries of the West?”

  “Got to give all this a try,” Cord insisted. “Might not live forever. We’ll have a drink, kick some ideas around.” Chi looked at him speculatively. “You aren’t thinking about getting started, are you?”

  “Fancy hotel man like me?” Cord was all wide-eyed innocence. “My bad days are behind me. I drink like a gentleman now, snifter or two of apricot brandy, to flavor my smoke.”

  “You are going soft as a spinster. Here is what I get for a partner, some vieja.”

  “I’m no old woman where it counts,” Cord said. But Chi only laughed; she was as happy as he’d ever seen her. She seemed comfortable enough with ideas about settling and landowning and Montana, enough so Cord could see a glimmer of possibility that the end of this owl-hoot life might not be so far uptrail.

  They left their horses in the livery stable a few buildings up the street from the stockyards and walked the three blocks to the Continental. Casper was the second largest settlement in Wyoming after Cheyenne, and like Denver, it was turning into a city, with stone buildings and as many mercantile shops as saloons. But no flower sellers, not out here on the high Wyoming plateau where the wind blew every day and hide hunters had roamed only thirty years before.

  Not so many months ago, Cord would have wished for two things: some drink and a fast ride out. But these days, he anticipated each sunrise as a herald of opportunity. Soon they would ride north toward Yellowstone National Park—join in with the tourists, Cord thought, watch the ground bubble—and then into Montana. For now, he’d take the simple pleasure of walking the streets without wondering who was watching, who might recognize them and rush off to find the police.

  Folks did look them over: the tall dark gunman with his creased leather saddlebags slung over his shoulder, and the handsome exotic woman with the serape and high black boots and dark radiant face. They cut a figure. Women in bonnets put their heads together and muttered out of the corners of their thin lips while sneaking little glances. Schoolchildren gaped with honest awe and pointed stubby fingers at Cord and Chi, as if they had stepped animate from the newsprint pages of the latest yellowback dime novel from Beadle & Adams. “Acting like the carnival’s coming,” Cord muttered.

  “You’re the carnival, Cord.” Chi laughed.

  The Continental looked first-class, a three-story Georgian brick es
tablishment with a colonnaded facade, although the white paint of the columns was already beginning to chip where the constant wind sandblasted it. It made Cord think of Kentucky, and Kentucky made him think of Jim Beam bourbon.

  “Hold up.” Chi pointed down Center. Across the street and a half block down was a two-story brick townhouse fronted by a cobblestone sidewalk with a cement curb. Above a carved oak door, a shingle announced the chambers of: “ROCKWELL A. MEEKER, ATTY-AT-LAW.”

  Pearl’s boss.

  “Well?” Cord said.

  “No sé. Except that I didn’t like the smell of that Pearl. I want to see...” She was off down the street before Cord could ask what. He followed her, holding his urge to get his face washed and a glass of bourbon.

  “Look at the windows,” Chi said when he caught up. Cord saw it then: the two upstairs and one downstairs were shuttered tight, though all along the street other shop windows and doors stood open to the mild breezy day. Not far away, the courthouse bell began to toll noon. A young man, bareheaded with short neatly combed hair and quick efficient motions, exited the Meeker chambers and locked the oak door, then rattled the knob. He was too green to be the high-powered barrister Pearl described. When Chi crossed the street and he saw her bearing down on him, he raised his eyebrows but stood his ground.

  Chi said something and the young man replied. She asked a question and he frowned, and then shook his head no. Chi nodded thanks. The young man smiled and went off to his lunch.

  Chi looked thoughtful when she crossed the street. “Meeker’s clerk.” She cocked her head at the departing young man. “That little Perla cabrón,” she added unexpectedly.

  “How’s that?”

  “Didn’t he tell us that the lawyer sent him to Denver ten days ago?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Meeker is taking the grand tour of Europe. He left after Christmas and returns in another month.”

  “Maybe Meeker sent a wire,” Cord said slowly, thinking aloud. “Maybe the case doesn’t come up until he gets back.” Maybe anything, he thought, long as it didn’t involve them. “Maybe Perla is a lying son of a pig.”