Cord 7 Read online

  Chi was not amused. They were in as bad a tight as they’d ever seen, caught afoot in the middle of a city, halfway lost and with no good plan, and every man in town digging his Army hogleg six-shooter out from under his old uniform to come gunning for them.

  Right then it got worse. A dozen armed men came around the end of the alleyway. The smoking Colt in Cord’s hand was as useless as tits on a bull. Kill a couple of citizens and he and Chi were done, no matter how this started. Enos Ryker would laugh while they kicked barefooted at the air. Someone spotted them and the animal mob cry went up. The gunning was a few seconds away, with them trapped like cut-out ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.

  “Vamos!” Chi barked, and fled, her serape flapping and her dark braids flying out from under her sombrero. Cord raced after her. They flipped over a chest-high board fence. Slugs thwacked into the planks. They ran across vacant lots and down narrow unpaved side streets. Cord held his gun butt to keep the heavy revolver from bouncing out. Getting away was the only chance; for that they would need good horses, and theirs were the best. Chi led the way; Cord hoped her fine-tempered instinct for direction worked in the city.

  They zigzagged three or four blocks and the mob’s lunatic cry grew fainter. They went around the corner of a canvas-walled storage shed and vaulted a two-rail fence. Half a dozen milling saddle horses stared at them incuriously. Cord drew his Colt and they edged through the back door of the livery barn.

  The liveryman was a middle-aged Negro. He looked at Cord’s gun and shook his head, like a man sorely tired. From the direction of downtown came faint confused shouting and occasional gunfire. Cord wondered if they had taken to shooting themselves.

  “Don’t you tell me,” the liveryman said in a soft hush-puppy drawl. “I don’t need to know nothing. I mind my business.”

  Cord put away his gun. Chi watched the street from the shadow of the front door. The liveryman smiled and nodded at Cord, then went to bring their horses, moving with maddening leisure. Cord paced the hard-packed dirt floor, hating this. There were times when you had to run, but recognizing them made it no more palatable.

  Another black man came huffing through the front door, one strap of his overalls flapping. Cord eased back into the dimness but did not draw. “Ruffy!” The newcomer was in his twenties, with nubby short-cropped steel-gray hair. “Ruffy, they done robbed the First National Surety Bank.”

  “I mind my business.” The liveryman’s soft voice came from somewhere back among the stalls.

  “Them two desperadoes that come to town.” The younger man pulled a folded newspaper from the bib of his coveralls. “Them two that was writ up.”

  Chi came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. She let him see her gun but kept it pointed at the ground. Cord stepped out in front of him. “Them two right here,” the young Negro said weakly.

  “Give that paper here, amigo” Chi said mildly. They needed no more enemies in this town. “Better help the viejo saddle our horse. We’re in some hurry.”

  “Yes you are,” the young man said.

  The newspaper was that morning’s Casper Star Tribune. By the light spilling in at the doorway, they read the small item in the lower left-hand corner of the front page.

  A WARNING TO THE CITIZENRY

  From such an unimpeachable source as U.S. Federal Marshal Enos K. Ryker, recently operating out of our city, we have news of the imminent arrival of two famous road agents, the brigands known as Cord and Chi.

  Drawing upon the full resources of the Government, Marshal Ryker has determined that the two outlaws will have arrived as this issue of the Star Tribune is published. The good Marshal points out that although the two are no longer fugitives from the law, their prior depredations will be a matter of serious regard to law-abiding citizens with the sense to take care. The people of Casper are advised by Marshal Ryker to mind their shops, homes, and personal belongings, if they do not wish to suffer....

  “He didn’t miss a goddamned trick,” Cord muttered. “Not only gets us to his town, but makes sure everyone knows we are here.”

  “I hate this,” Chi said darkly. “Scheming, plotting fakery—worse than back-shooting, dirtier...”

  “Wasn’t you, was it?” The younger man came forward, staring intently up at them. “I was there; I saw ‘em. I got a good eye.” He laughed softly. “They was dressed like you, but their faces was pale and young.” The man nodded to Chi. “Surely wasn’t you, dark lady.”

  “Go tell the rest of them,” Chi said.

  The black man showed missing front teeth. “You gonna need more than one nigger’s word to save your brown ass from them mopers.” He cocked his head, and Cord noted the mob noise was louder and closer. He felt a chill at the base of his neck.

  The liveryman led the horses out. The blankets and saddles were on loose, and Cord’s travel pouch was under the man’s arm. In it were matches, a little tobacco, a handful of coffee, a few other necessaries for the road, nothing valuable but all real handy on the trail—when they overnighted in a new town it stayed with the horse, against the sudden need for urgent departure. Cord tied it behind his saddle, then threw up a stirrup and tightened his cinch. “What happened back there?” he grunted.

  “Them robbers come charging into that Surety Bank. There is shooting and yelling before they come out, carrying moneybags. I watched from ’cross the street. They killed a deputy town marshal from horseback ‘fore they rode out, shot him dead through the heart. I saw that man fall bleeding with my own eyes.”

  Murdering a lawman was the worst thing you could do. Other lawmen would never let you rest except in the grave.

  Cord felt like puking. Someone must have picked up their trail; the mob was getting closer.

  “What you gonna do?” the black man asked.

  Chi checked her cinch, then vaulted into the saddle. “Right now,” she said, gathering up reins, “we are going to ride.”

  Cord jerked the bay’s head around, ducked his head under the low doorway’s lintel, and almost rode down the mob’s vanguard.

  There must have been a hundred of them, townspeople, ranch hands, drifters, and loafers, roaring with excitement and blood lust, a surging baying horde that had nothing to do with order, justice, or even vengeance. They wanted to see someone die, and here were killer bank robbers, materialized in their midst as if delivered by the hand of the Lord. Cord’s bay gelding snorted and pranced. Cord thumped the animal, pulled on the reins. Both barrels of a shotgun went off and a chorus of men cried out in pain. Heavy pistols waved in the air, and some idiot cracked a bullwhip above his head. Wild shots echoed between the buildings, and Chi’s mare half reared and kicked someone in the chest. She plunged into the crowd and Cord followed in her wake, and then they were hunched low and galloping down a side street, away from the flying lead and screaming lunacy the good people of Casper flung at their backs.

  Eight

  Cord handed the brass spyglass to Chi.

  “I need spectacles,” Cord said. “I’m seeing Indians.”

  Chi twisted the glass into focus. Her eyesight was keener than his. “Where the hell did he come from?”

  “From nowhere. Doesn’t matter. He’s here.”

  “Right on our ass.” Chi handed the glass back, and Cord squinted through it again. He lay on his belly at the edge of the rimrock along the top of a little table butte, a dozen miles out on the prairies west of Casper. They had circled to the higher ground to rest their horses a little and maybe get an idea of what sort of folk might be after them. Now they knew: about the worst sort possible.

  The six riders shimmering in the spyglass lens were a couple of miles back over the endless expanse of open grassy plain, riding easily as if this were some sportsmen’s jaunt. Ryker took off his dome-crowned hat and wiped at his forehead with a gray rag, his shaved pate gleaming like brass in the afternoon sun. Bernard Pearl rode at his side, still dressed in his clownish too-tight city clothes. Three other gunmen rode in a rank behind them,
surly-faced characters with rifles scabbarded alongside their saddles. Five gunhands against two, and Cord and Chi’s Winchesters back in the Continental Hotel with the rest of their belongings.

  The Indian did not carry a gun, according to barroom rumor. But he read track like no other man in the West.

  He called himself Mr. Earl, and was got up like a Wild West Show caricature. He was tall, dark, well-built, with a handsome chiseled face, but his costume was purely outlandish. Over a calico breech cloth he wore open buckskin leggings tucked into high leather boots with folded-over fringed tops and uppers etched with beadwork in strange patterns that had nothing to do with any tribe Cord had ever encountered. A serge vest that had once been part of a business suit was draped over his hard bare chest. His black silk top hat was half crushed so it nodded off to one side at a crazy angle, and his long ebony braids were tied into loops with beaded rawhide thongs. As Cord watched, the Indian reined up and leaned down in the saddle, peered intently at the ground through round wire-rimmed spectacles with red-tinted lenses.

  There was nothing outlandish about Mr. Earl when it came to man-tracking. The odds had shifted anew, against Cord and Chi. They might run but they could not hide, not from Mr. Earl. Whatever care they took, the Indian would read their sign like a map.

  “They say he gets five thousand dollars cash in advance,” Cord said, “and no refunds if he doesn’t find your man.”

  “You ever hear of that happening?”

  What Cord had heard was that Mr. Earl could track your soul to Hell. Instead of answering, he said, “Where would Ryker get five thousand dollars?” But then he knew. “Goddamn the man. It’s our money, out of that hotel safe.”

  “No it isn’t.” Chi had found something to grin about. “Guess I’ve strung you long enough.” She continued. “After we ran into Ryker, I got a hunch someone had best take care of business, be ready to move.” She reached under her serape and brought out their money, the $6,000 reward and Ryker’s $1,000. It was wrapped into a tight bundle with twine. “Also,” she said, “there is more in our name in that Tucson bank, so you can forget dying of a broken heart over money, and start concentrating on getting us out of this.”

  “Yeah,” Cord said. “I been worrying about money like they would never print anymore.” Cord shook his head. He looked up at her, and found her staring flatly, as if waiting for him to wake up.

  “So,” she asked, “where did he get the money?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “The bank job,” she said with exasperation. “You remember: the one we’ve been tagged with.”

  Cord got it then. “Ryker has got this pieced together like a Chinese puzzle. He picks a National bank for the target, so it’s a Federal crime—and him a U.S. marshal. He tells his two play actors to be certain to kill somebody—a lawman, it turns out—so there’s dead-or-alive money on our heads.”

  “That gives him leave to kill us at leisure,” Chi picked up. “He brings in the bodies, but he tells everyone there was no money on us. We must have buried it somewhere.”

  “Yeah. In his pocket.”

  “Him and the Indian.”

  “He’s crazy as a scorpion,” Cord said. He collapsed the spyglass and edged away from the rimrock. “They’re only about a half hour behind us. We’d best be horseback.”

  He had to be crazy, Cord decided as they headed down the backside of the butte and circled around to the trail, west toward the mountains. But crazy or not, Ryker had them where he wanted for the moment, quivering at the end of his fork. He had been chewing on a grudge as if it were the food of life, for five years, and now he saw his chance to get the sour taste out of his mouth

  Nine

  Back then Cord and Chi rode the great open West as if it were a set for a drama in which they were the featured players and everyone else was a supernumerary. As a consequence, they were wanted here and there, though it was rarely a matter of significant concern. Outlawry was easier in those days: you rode in, did your banking business, and rode back to nowhere. Now telegraph wires and railroad tracks went everywhere among cities and tens of thousands of people, all of them more or less devoted to a notion of societal order that viewed bank robbers dimly.

  Enos Ryker was a Pinkerton operative in those days. Cord hated Pinkertons, with their offices in every goddamn place, for lying sneaks and prevaricators and strike-breaking mobsters. They were no better than bounty hunters, and in those days there was $5,000 reward money on each of them for the robbery of a Wells, Fargo express office in Durango, Colorado. That was what got Ryker on their tail and set off this whole damned mess.

  As far as Cord was concerned, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was a criminal conspiracy operating with the tacit approval of the real authorities. “Corrupt as Judas,” he would say, and the worse of them was Enos Ryker. They heard stories a year before their trails ever crossed, saloon tales of how Ryker stepped all over the law on the way to his man, of how Ryker was so low he made Allan Pinkerton look like Honest Abe Lincoln.

  They had been camped along the North Platte River somewhere in the sandhill country of the Nebraska panhandle. It was late August, and most of the oppressive humidity had gone out of the season. A garishly pretty sunset flared in the western sky, over where they’d find the Rockies. Cord and Chi were drifting south and west toward California for the winter, but not in any hurry and open to suggestion.

  “Open to most anything,” Cord would say, reflecting on those lost happy days. “Riding and hunting up something to happen.” It wasn’t only the money; in those days he’d been mainly seeking adventure.

  There on the North Platte, Cord was building a fire of deadfall cottonwood limbs when a stranger came out of the brush down toward the water. He had his hands up by his shoulders and Chi’s Colt in his back.

  “Lookee here, Cord.” She sounded halfway amused, halfway indignant. “This hombre was spying on me.”

  The stranger was about twenty years old. He had sandy hair and a bushy mustache, wore trail clothing and a broken-brimmed slouch hat. There was an empty holster on his hip and a Remington Frontier .44 in Chi’s other hand. Chi tossed it and Cord caught it by the butt. Remington was going after the Peacemaker trade with this new pistol, but Cord had found the balance not to his taste. The kid looked harmless enough.

  “You some kind of pervert, boy?” Cord demanded sternly.

  “No,” the kid said, “I am some kind of bank robber.”

  “Is that so?” Out of the corner of his eye, Cord saw Chi try to hide a smile. “Put your hands down,” Cord told the kid. “Take some coffee. I figure you are too smart to try anything bare-handed.” He cocked his head in Chi’s direction. “Don’t know what she figures. She likes to shoot the balls off smart-mouthed boys for sport.”

  The kid’s name turned out to be Kyle Greer. Kyle Greer knew a bank ripe for robbing, but not a damned thing about how to go about the job.

  “You never robbed a bank before?” Chi made an expression of dismay.

  “Ain’t never robbed nothing,” Greer admitted sullenly. Then he told them about the brand new First Republic Bank in Grand Island, only in business a month and modem as they come, with time-locked, triple-walled steel vaults, silent telegraphic alarm system, two trained guards on duty all the time, everything secure as the U.S. Treasury.

  “Only a fool would go up against something like that,” Chi said.

  The Agrarian Exchange Bank had been the only one in town, but naturally, all the big farmers and ranchers had transferred their accounts to the First Republic when it opened. With the loss in deposits, the Agrarian Exchange was struggling to stay in business. Among other economies, it had let the guard go. Not only that, but all the experienced tellers had taken better paying jobs at the First Republic. Their replacements were greenhorns, likely to turn blue and faint at the merest demand that cash-drawer contents be handed across the counter right now, before someone got shot to death. “Now there is the kind of bank to crack,” Kyle Green said
.

  “Sure, and what for?” Chi said. “All the money is gone.”

  “Not all.” Kyle Greer chuckled like a man who knew secrets. “Not nearly.” The First Republic Bank would not receive its Federal charter for another two months. “U.S. government red tape,” Greer said. “Here’s more red tape,” he went on. “According to Federal regulations, when military payrolls have to be held secure, they got to be deposited in a chartered bank. The payroll for the post at Fort Phil Kearney comes in to Grand Island by express car the first of each month. The escort from the Fort arrives the next day or the next to pick up the money. Meantime, guess where it abides?”

  “The first of each month,” Chi mused. “What day is it?”

  “How would I know?” Cord said.

  “I’d say it was the twenty-ninth,” Greer drawled.

  This sort of thing—some stranger tipping you to a surefire job they were aching to give away, gratis—this had happened before. But Cord liked the kid, and thought Chi felt the same. “How do you know all this, boy?”

  “Starting two years ago and ending a week back,” Greer said, “I was apprenticed to the head cashier.”

  Sipping at their coffee there by the North Platte, Kyle Greer told a story of growing up on his family’s dry-land wheat farm to the south, land that never delivered much beyond blisters, sore backs, and enough food to keep from starving. One day his father was digging one of the endless series of wells which went dry soon as they were sunk, and the walls caved in on him. “Took us most of a day to dig him out,” Greer said. “He was drowned in dirt.”