Cord 9 Page 7

  Carlisle returned with a tray of four plates and dealt them out. Cord in his hunger was fairly overwhelmed: there were fried eggs, hot sliced beef with gravy, fried potatoes, canned peaches shiny with syrup, and thick slabs of coarse-grained wheat bread lathered with butter. Carlisle set the tray on a nearby table and joined them.

  Cord tried the coffee. It was hot and dark and wonderful.

  “What’s your fee?” he asked the doctor, digging into his eating. “Never mind,” he went on with his mouth full, “send your bill to Mallory Bliss. It was his night riders who tried to hang me.”

  That touched a sore nerve. Fiona Cobb held her laced coffee halfway to her mouth, and Carlisle pursed his lips in a tight thin line.

  “Your argument might not be with Bliss,” Carlisle said carefully.

  “He’ll do until someone else comes along.” With each bite, Cord was feeling better. His left hand worked a fork pretty handily, it turned out.

  “I was happy to minister to you, Mr. Cord,” Fiona Cobb said. She watched her plate, as if her eggs were watching back. “There is no charge.” She looked at Carlisle.

  “We’ve been talking,” Carlisle said.

  “Bet you have.” Cord folded a buttered slice of bread in half and stuck it in his mouth.

  “I wish to solicit your help,” Fiona Cobb said. She looked from Cord to Chi to include her, but Chi seemed totally involved in her breakfast, as if she were not listening.

  “You?” Cord asked.

  “Us,” Fiona Cobb emended. “We want to speak with you about a favor.”

  “More of a job, actually,” Carlisle said. “There is money in it,” he added, as if that cinched the deal.

  Cord mopped up the last of his eggs with the last of his beef and stared down at his empty dish. “Guess I’m ahead of the rest of you.” He gestured with his fork at Carlisle’s plate. “You going to finish those eggs?”

  Carlisle frowned. He took his napkin from his lap and placed it on the table, pushed his chair back. Fiona Cobb concentrated on eating, while Carlisle took Cord’s plate to the kitchen and said nothing when he came back with seconds on everything and set the refilled plate before Cord. “You make a swell breakfast,” Cord said. “I will say that.” He hunkered down to some more serious eating.

  But just as Cord lifted a forkful of beef and egg to his mouth, footsteps sounded on the plank walkway out front of the cafe. Cord put down the fork, adjusted his chair around and a little away from the table. Chi went on with her absorbed eating. The cafe door swung open to the morning, and a newcomer paused in the doorway, so anyone who wished could get a good look at him in full daylight. Cord sat chewing his beef, wondering if this should be cause for alarm and deciding not.

  The fellow in the doorway was compact, wiry, a very fit fifty or so years old. Cord sensed toughness: not the gun hand sort, but rather the true thing derived from a lifetime at work on the land. He wore a slouch hat, checkered California pants, and was giving a thick cud of tobacco a real workout with a jaw square as a bookshelf. He stepped inside, closed the door against the flies, and stood studying them with a clear eye.

  “Meet Mr. F. X. Connaught.” Carlisle smiled. “F. X., you probably know these two.”

  “F. X. is foreman to Mallory Bliss,” Fiona Cobb said.

  “Good for you,” Cord said to Connaught. “What’s your beef?”

  Connaught kept his expression neutral.

  “One thing more,” Fiona Cobb said quickly. “You should know that F. X. was the one who brought you to me the night before last.”

  Cord turned in his chair. “You just remembered that?”

  Fiona Cobb reddened slightly. “I didn’t want to … trouble you while you were ill.”

  “You didn’t want to be mouthing off,” Cord suggested, “until you knew how mad I was, and at whom.”

  “St. Jerome writes that ‘the scars of others should teach us caution,’ ” Carlisle said.

  “Do give it a rest, Richard,” Fiona Cobb snapped.

  “Cord,” Chi said.

  “Huh?” He looked her way.

  Chi pointed with her butter knife. “Your breakfast is getting cold.”

  Cord gawped at her. She smiled sweetly and went back to her eating. “Well, I don’t like people standing around when I eat.” Cord regarded Connaught. “You weren’t with those lynchers the other night by any chance?”

  Connaught made no response, but Cord knew Connaught had not been among the night riders. The sort of man who ran in an animal pack wouldn’t likely have the sand to come in to face him alone, especially not now that Cord’s name and repute seemed to have spread across the basin. And there was Chi’s unconcern: her instinct stood for a lot. “Well, sit and take some coffee or eggs or something,” Cord said.

  The little dour black Irishman thought about it; likely he had not gotten this old in this country without exercising considerable caution. “Coffee,” he decided, and drew a chair over.

  “Wonderful,” Cord said, and went back to his eating. Carlisle fetched a cup for Connaught and filled it and his own and Chi’s. Chi pushed her empty plate aside, reached across the table, and took Cord’s makings from his shirt pocket.

  “You keep stealing that,” Cord said mildly.

  “Borrowing,” Chi corrected. “That’s why I ran you down, so you wouldn’t remember me as the tobacco-thieving sort.”

  Fiona Cobb and Carlisle paid attention to their whiskey and coffee and took care not to interrupt the banter. Having made their overture to Cord and Chi, the doctor and the librarian seemed suddenly leery of them. Connaught was silent and at apparent ease, satisfied to watch Chi’s skilled fingers build cigarettes.

  Cord wiped his plate clean with the last of his bread. “Now then,” he said to Connaught. “How did you happen to end up my ambulance driver?”

  “I follow the order of Mr. Bliss,” Connaught said, deadpan.

  “All the time?”

  Connaught drank some coffee. Here was a man for whom words had worth, and not the sort to give them away gratis.

  “Okay,” Cord said. “Where did you encounter my remains?”

  “At the home place.” Connaught watched Cord take the lit cigarette Chi offered. “There Mr. Bliss asked me to fetch you to the doctor.”

  “How did I get hurt?”

  “Mr. Bliss said you fell from your horse.”

  Cord leaned across the table toward Connaught. “Sure I did,” he said unpleasantly. “But first I hit myself over the head, stuck my hand in the campfire, and tried to hang myself.”

  Emotion flickered across Connaught’s dour face. He knew the true facts right enough, Cord decided, and his loyalty to Bliss was tempered by some disapproval.

  “Looks to me like lots of odd accidents happen around here,” Cord went on harshly. “Just the other while ago I found a burned-up dead man in the snowbank out back of the surgery.”

  “I brought him in last night,” Chi said. “It was too dark for burying.” Chi blew a smoke ring and said, “I got a look at him, though,” watching Cord in a way he suddenly disliked.

  “Someone we once knew,” he said evenly.

  “Could be,” Chi agreed.

  From the corner of his eye, Cord caught a glimpse of Fiona Cobb watching curiously. She had caught the significance in Chi’s tone. Cord wasn’t much interested in what she thought, but he liked less that quick turn toward the dark in the look Chi held steady on him. Recognizing Wee Bill Blewin had recalled for her another man, and a bad time long before. Cord had been at the center of some mean trouble and had good reason subsequently to want to forget it. Right now she would not let him, and he even thought for a moment she meant to rehash it for everyone there and now.

  But then Chi unpinned Cord from her gaze. “Anyway,” she said to Connaught, “they left him where he fell, by a burned-out shack, a while before I came by from the looks of him. If anyone else was there first, they didn’t get involved.”

  “There is little traffic through he
re,” Connaught said. “A stage each month or so. We get few strangers.”

  “Seeing how you treat them,” Cord said, “I’m not surprised.”

  “Give Bliss Basin a pass this season,” Carlisle said. “The word is out.”

  “Guess that boy out back of the doctor’s didn’t hear,” Cord snapped. “I suppose that’s just what happens in these parts. People turn up dead and charred, so you put ’em somewhere out of the sun and go on about your business.”

  Fiona Cobb stared whitely at Cord. “You must understand—”

  “You understand,” Cord interrupted. “A man was murdered by a mob of cowards. That has got my goat—you figure out why. I know who was behind it, and I’m going to do something about it.” He looked around at them. “Someone tell me I can’t.”

  “We see how it is,” Carlisle began.

  “Not you,” Cord said. “Not in a million years.”

  “There has been a serious rustling problem in this basin,” Fiona Cobb said.

  “You people got rustlers on the brain,” Cord said. “You are seeing rustlers behind every tree.”

  “The point is that we are with you.” Carlisle tried again. “That’s what we want to talk to you about.”

  “Not yet,” Cord said firmly. He put down his coffee cup. Chi’s expression had unclouded. “Let’s see to Wee Bill,” Cord said to her. He had been out of action for a few days, but now he was back in business. He stood.

  Chi nodded. “Good idea.”

  “I’ll come along.” Connaught rose. “That boy deserves some Christian rites, commending him to God’s arms.”

  Cord was taken by surprise. “I can’t see where it will do him any harm,” Cord said. “At least not now.”

  Chapter Five

  Cord straightened up to stretch the muscles of his back and catch his breath. From this little grassy hump in the prairie, now eternal home to Wee Bill’s clay-mound grave, Cord could see a good part of the basin. Off to the south a half mile or so down the gentle slope, the windmill rose to mark the town of Enterprise. The other way, maybe ten miles north, a dark blot on the sea of grass, was the windbreak closing in the headquarters of Bliss Ranch. As far again past the big house, at the foot of the mountains at the bowl’s northwest rim, a line of trees marked the course of the little river that drained down from the high country and out through the North Gap, the other gateway of the otherwise-intact bowl. Cord wiped his fore-head on the back of his shirt-sleeve. The day was ascending steadily toward real heat, despite the denial of the old snow on the north face slopes.

  Cord bent to his work again, grooming the mound over the hole that held the corpse of Wee Bill Blewin, shaping the dense soil symmetrically and precisely and trying not to think about how many other men he had buried. The breeze from the west had stiffened, dry and hot; this was a wind for late July, Cord thought, not springtime. Connaught’s horse looked up from where it was grazing nearby and snorted. The three of them had come out here on foot to do their burying, the body in its blanket slung over Connaught’s saddle.

  Cord stepped back, examined his work critically, and was satisfied. “If you’ve got to say something over him,” he said, “now is the time.”

  F. X. Connaught stood by the grave with head bowed for a long moment of silence, then began to recite biblical verses having to do with death. Cord hunkered on his haunches off to the side and smoked, feeling less than comfortable with this. Formal religion had made him uncomfortable since his Lutheran youth, and funerals struck him as morbid brooding that came too late.

  Connaught replaced his hat on his head finally and went out to his horse. “I bear this message,” he said, picking up the bridle reins. “Mr. Bliss wishes to see you.”

  “He is going to see me all right,” Cord said. “We have got things to work out.”

  Connaught turned to mount up.

  “Alto,” Chi said. Connaught turned. “Are you a part of what goes on in this basin?”

  Connaught regarded her. “In my way,” he said. He looked off toward the ranch headquarters. “I have been with him near twenty years,” he said. “When we met up, he was gathering west Texas range stock no one else wanted. Rib-scrawny cows on the hoof weren’t worth two dollars, and we lived in dugouts and soddies and never ate nor drank anything that wasn’t two parts dust.”

  Connaught looked back to Cord and Chi. “Mallory Bliss persevered, and then he prospered, as the Book promises a man will. Seven years ago this spring, with Texas closing in on him and his cattle, he started north. Late in the summer, when the first snows had already fallen in the mountains, he came into this place when there was, in that day, nothing but a garden of grass and that windmill, like to beckoning him in to make this country his own.”

  “Well, he did,” Connaught said, “and now he is afraid others will try to seize it. He will do most anything to keep what is his.”

  “Including lynching,” Cord said.

  “ ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ ” Connaught quoted. “You cannot begrudge the man his ambition.”

  “Yeah,” Cord said, “but there are other things I personally hold against your Mallory Bliss.”

  “He is not a bad man.”

  “People keep telling me that,” Cord said. “Why is it I have so much trouble buying into the idea?”

  Connaught seemed to think about that for a moment, as if the question were not rhetorical. “I will tell him to expect you.”

  “You do that,” Cord said.

  Cord shouldered his shovel and wiped his face again, watching Connaught ride off north toward the ranch. Chi appeared beside him. Get it over with, he thought. Remind me of that old business if you got to, but get it done.

  But it turned out that her concern was not the past after all. “What now?”

  “What do you figure?”

  “Forgive and forget, maybe.” But then she had to put in the needle. “Ride on to our sweet Bitter Root ranch.”

  “You are still feeling some edgy.”

  “I guess I just wonder,” Chi said. “You never know. We might get out there sitting in one place and not like what we find. We might not even like each other.”

  The notion shook Cord, but he could see what she was talking about. “Homebodies,” he said, smiling a little.

  “We could turn out to be people we don’t even know. Maybe it’s too late for change, you some farmer and me some farmer’s woman—that’s a big bite to swallow whole.” Chi looked at him ruefully, like she was sorry but couldn’t explain it better.

  “What do you want?” Cord demanded. “You want to die with your boots on, like in the dime books?”

  “Maybe that is the only way,” she said.

  “Oh, hell,” Cord said. “We both know better than that stuff. We’ve seen plenty of dying with your boots on. Nothing good about it.” Cord turned into the hot wind. “Pretty soon the idea of gunfighters is going to be a bad joke. There’ll be no place left for people like me and you.”

  “All right, then,” Chi said. “If we are going to change, might as well do it all at once. Quit it cold.”

  Cord touched at the rope burn around his neck. “The thing is, I’d get to seeing this mark, and after a time I’d start waking up in the middle of the night from dreams of being hanged. Unless I get it fixed right now.”

  “Well, Mr. Cord,” Chi smiled slyly, “maybe you are not so ready to change as you think.”

  “Soon as this is over.

  “Certainly,” Chi said solemnly. “Por supuesto.”

  Cord took a last drag on his smoke, spit into his palm, and put it out there. These handmade cigarettes would generally go out when dropped, but there was no sense in taking chances, not in this odd intemperate spring heat. “Let’s get it done with,” Cord said. The hot wind poured down toward the enisled town, swirling the blades of the tall windmill into a gray blur.

  The café was empty, the table cleared, and the door locked, but the Enterprise Saloon was open for business now, if there wer
e any business to be had in this basin. Cord followed Chi through the bat wings into its dimness.

  The barroom, like the cafe, was neat and plain and mainly unpopulated. The tables were bare-topped but mostly free of scratches and cigarette bums, new as everything else man-made in these parts. Carlisle presided here as he had in the cafe that morning, stationed behind one end of the simple bar that ran along the back wall of the room, facing his only customer, Doctor Fiona Cobb.

  The two of them were bent over coffee cups, heads down and close together. A whiskey bottle, about two-thirds full, sat between them and just to the side; it occurred to Cord that were this business to come to a fighting head, the doctor and the librarian would not be much use. But then he remembered he was not sure which side they were on anyway.

  “Come on in,” Carlisle said. “Take a drink on the management.” Fiona Cobb did not look around at them.

  “Where is everyone?” Chi said.

  “They just left,” Carlisle rejoined. But Cord’s attention was on the other end of the bar. A five-gallon jug of heavy clear glass stood there, the sort in which vitriol was sometimes stocked. Its wide mouth was stoppered with a cork in which airholes had been bored, and something was moving inside. Cord bent to see better, squinting through the glass’s distortion, his nose a couple of inches away.

  The thing inside uncoiled itself, and Cord realized he was looking at a live rattlesnake—a split second before it struck at him. Cord yelped, “Holy Jesus!” and jerked away as the snake’s twin fangs pinged against the inside of the thick glass. The back of Cord’s legs hit a chair and he sat down heavily, almost toppled over. “What the hell?” he bleated. His heart was thumping. He hated snakes.

  Carlisle was laughing. “It amuses the customers.”

  “Not this one.” Cord got shakily to his feet. Chi was watching him with a serious, sympathetic face except for her eyes, which were laughing gaily. “We playing tricks or talking business?” Cord asked gruffly.

  “We heard tricks are your business,” Carlisle said.

  “I’ll show you a trick or two,” Cord warned, “if you don’t start getting down to cases. You were going to tell me about a job.”