Cord 6, p.8
Cord 6, page 8
“This here is my old pards, Cord and Chi,” Pell was telling the attentive crowd. “Maybe you heard of them?”
Cord flinched from old outlaw habit; he did not like hearing his name tossed out like that. “They are going to lend a strong hand—with a gun in it,” Pell said.
Cord caught movement from the corner of his eye. Mert the bartender slipped through the back door.
“If you men throw in with us,” Pell went on, “we will stop Raines. Count on that. We will arm ourselves in the morning, all of us who have staked claims, and ride to their defense. We can flush out Krugar and Culley and their rowdies and run them out of the country or eradicate them.”
“Hold on.” A dark-faced miner at the bar stepped forward. “I want my claim back, but I don’t know about murder.”
“A lot of us do. Smithers. Jackson. Brotherton.” Pell’s glare stabbed from man to man. “You had partners killed on your own digs—so did I. What if it was you who got blown up, buried under a couple of thousand tons of rock? Wouldn’t you want to rest in your grave knowing your partner was doing something about it? Raines may have you pissing in your boot, but I like to think Bill Cross would have done something if it was me. We got to make a stand, all of us.”
A murmur of reaction crossed the crowd. Pell was getting to them.
“We know them mountains,” Pell exhorted. “Them mountains belong to us.”
“Pell’s right,” someone called out, and then the saloon door kicked open.
It was Culley, flanked by his two main boys. They looked a little out-of-breath, liked they’d come in a hurry. The sidemen held mean little sawed-off double-barreled shotguns, pointing at the floor but ready to work.
Krugar came in and sidled past them.
Pell was right: His skin was pale as alabaster. He was an ugly little man, no more than a half-foot taller than Pell. His sleek dark hair was cut high on the sides so nothing but razor stubble showed below the brim of his derby hat. He wore a pin-striped suit and high-laced shoes, and his face was pinched into a permanent scowl. Cord knew this type, men who loathed themselves and vented their anger on everyone else.
Krugar took his time looking the place over, saving their table for last. He stared at Cord, long enough for Cord to consider drawing down on the little man right now, save everybody a headache. Cord broke the staring; that kind of childish bullying contest annoyed him. He noticed Mert reenter through the back door and made a mental note: Have a serious word with the barkeep regarding manners.
Krugar drank his fill of the silence his presence commanded. “Get out of town,” he said finally. His voice was deep, guttural, and vaguely foreign in accent. It echoed in the big room. .
“All of you good people, get out of town before you are hurt or killed,” Krugar said. “This little man and his hired guns will lead you to your graves.”
“I’m not here to make threats,” Krugar said. “I am here to explain the facts. You talk about real law when real law does not exist. There is no law except the law of power. Money is that power, and the law of this land. Mr. Raines, in Denver, has the money and the law and the power, and we are an extension of that power. He gives us money, and we enforce his will.” Krugar smiled at them all. “There will be a man here tomorrow morning. You will sell.” He turned and left the room, and Culley and his boys backed out after him, leaving no sound except the scuffling of feet.
“That fixes it,” Pell shouted into the void. “We’re not backing off now, not after that bastard Krugar comes in and insults us to the teeth.”
But whatever lead rope Pell had almost gotten over their heads was broken. He had lost them.
Miners called out:
“They got fifty men, is what I hear.”
“You’re talking war, Pell. I ain’t ready for none of that.”
“They can pick us off one by one, any time they please.”
“Like shooting gophers in the hole.”
Pell raised his thick hands. “QUIET!” The hubbub stuttered to quiet. “We got to call him on it.” Pell was pleading now. “We got to call their bluff.”
The Cornishman shuffled forward, still worrying at his hat brim. “I worked the tin mines in my country for five years before I come here, right after your war among yourselves.”
The Cousin Jack spoke softly and picked words carefully. “I worked nearly twenty more years for the big companies on the Comstock to get up my stake. I’ve made some strikes and sold out, perhaps not dearly enough. I’m about where I began.” There were murmurs of agreement from the other men.
“Master Pell, you say a man must fight for what is his,” the Cousin Jack went on. “That may be right for you, mate. For me, there are more strikes to be made, over the next crest or the one after that, and not a one worth dying for.”
The Cornishman had spoken for all of them, and no one had anything to add. He turned and went out, and some followed. Others turned to their drinking and were careful not to recognize Pell again.
“Just us five,” Pell said brightly. “That’s all right—less folk to worry over. We’ll ride at dawn.”
“You got a plan?” Cord asked.
“Yeah,” Pell said. “Keep my back to the rock and my powder dry. You got a better one?”
Cord felt cornered, led once more down a path not entirely of his choosing. He especially did not like the idea of the waiting, guarding that high-country mine and wondering every minute from which direction the first bullet would come.
He remembered the bartender. There was something sensible to see to. Men watched side-glance as Cord crossed to the end of the bar. He smiled at Mert and crooked a finger at him. The bartender returned a watery version of the smile and came over.
Cord grabbed a fistful of the man’s stiff white shirt and jerked his belly up against the bar. “You been talking out of school, barkeep.” School, barkeep.”
“I ain’t done noth...” His little cauliflowered ear was twitching, like a baby rosebud itching to bloom.
Cord slapped his face, forehand and back. “Nobody needs you anymore,” Cord said. “You’re done running to Krugar and Culley with your stories, like a tattletale schoolgirl, and we can fetch our own drinks. Say so long to the boys.”
The bartender flapped his lips but nothing came out. Cord shoved him into the backbar. Bottles teetered, and a full one rolled off the shelf and clunked off the bartender’s head, breaking on the floor. The bartender sat down splay-legged in the shattered glass and puddled booze.
“Sunup,” Cord began, but the bartender was out cold and beyond his threats. Chi was waiting at the door, and Cord nodded and followed her into the clear chill starry night.
Chapter Ten
Cord had been dreaming some vague dream of a fantastical facedown, but he knew in-
Stantly that the gun muzzle was real. It was cold and there was pressure behind it and it was laid up against Cord’s forehead.
“Not a move,” a raw voice muttered, and: “Let’s have light.”
A match flared and the coal oil lamp on the sideboard sputtered and flared. The man who had awakened him was a stranger. The other man, standing back near the window, was one of the two faceless gun-boys who were always backing Culley. The first man stepped back from the bed and gestured with his gun.
Cord rose from the bed in his union suit. When he reached for his britches, the gunman said, “Forget it. We ain’t got time. You’ll come along in your drawers.”
Cord damned himself for retiring without a gun in his hand; that sort of forgetfulness, which Cord blamed on going to bed sober, was deadly. Maybe Chi was right: He was going soft.
“We are going out and down the back stairs,” the gunman said. “There’s a wagon waiting. We don’t want to wake up the town, but we’ll shoot if you make us. All the same, far as we’re concerned. Nobody can touch us.”
For now they had the guns, but Cord figured he’d have to change that and fast. They were going to kill them pretty soon now, him and Chi.
Chi. Where was she?
The gunman herded Cord out to the hallway. In front of the next door a third member of the gang had the drop on Chi. She was dressed, her serape in place as always, but Cord saw her Peacemaker stuck in the man’s belt. Chi’s dark eyes brimmed with anger. She knew as well as he that once they allowed themselves to be hog-tied in the back of a buckboard, they were dead.
“Pigs,” Chi spat. “Sons of stinking shit.”
“Shut up.”
Chi took a step at him. “Bastards of Hell,” she challenged.
Cord turned his head far enough to make sure the man covering him was taking in this little play. He was. Fools and worse fools: They were his only salvation.
Cord rammed his elbow into the man’s gut, hard enough to rupture something. The man groaned and folded, and as he grabbed for his belly, Cord picked the Colt out of his hand. His partner swung his gun around, and Cord put the Colt into his ribs and pulled the trigger. The man fell away.
Chi caught her man along the jawline with her fist. He stumbled back but did not fall, lining his gun on her middle.
Chi swept back the skirt of her serape, and there was a double explosion of gunfire. The gunman spun half around and hit the far wall and went down.
Blood bubbled from the mouth of the man at Cord’s feet. He tried to draw breath, and his chest gave an awful rattle. But Cord was watching Chi. She held a little Remington over-and-under derringer with inlaid nacre grips.
“What the hell?” Cord started.
“Insurance.” Chi cracked the breech of the Remington, dumped the casings, and loaded fresh .22 caliber cartridges. “I’m getting cautious in my old age.” Chi stared around at the bodies crowding the narrow corridor, blood soaking into the runner and black powder smoke obscuring the light from the hanging lamps. “Old age!” She snorted. She gave him a look. “You’d better put on some clothes.” Cord had been standing slack-jawed, his union suit bagging around him.
As he went back to his room, Cord heard her call, “You people stay in your rooms. This is none of your trouble, not this time.” Her call echoed in the hallway, but no one answered. Cord pulled on trail clothes.
The man Cord had elbowed lay very still, and a lot of blood had come out of his mouth. When he crouched next to him, Cord found he was dead as the rest. That shook Cord a little. The man would have killed him, and Cord did not regret that he was dead, but it was not easy to kill a man with your hands, and this one had in a way died by accident. For some reason that was unsettling to Cord.
Cord dragged the bodies thumping down the back stairs, Chi standing guard while he loaded them in the wagon they found in the alley. Cord drove it around to the main street. He unhitched the team, dropping their traces on the ground and wrapping the halter ropes around a hitch rail, and left the wagon in the middle of the road.
He walked across to the hotel in silence. Fear ruled curiosity, and no one had been drawn out of their beds by the muffled gunshots.
Chi was standing beside the door of her room. Her anger had already evaporated, but Cord’s was rising. Now Pell had himself Cord’s gun for sure; the goddamned bastards had just tried to kill him.
“I’ll sit watch,” Cord said.
She smiled and shook her head. “Go to sleep. I’m awake. One is enough.”
Cord started to protest—but Chi was the only one of them with whom he did not wish to argue, and he let it drop and went by her to his room.
“You looked fine in your underwear,” Chi said to his back. He shut the door on her low laughter.
Chapter Eleven
Cord threw up the sash of the window and breathed in the morning air, which was as chill as creekwater. The day was bright and blue, the blue becoming a little washed out toward the glare of the sun in the east. Cord should have been feeling at top form, but instead he was rubbed near to the raw edge by a night of floundering in tangled sheets, rolling and wadding his pillow, and sleeping only until he was reawakened by the same bad dream, always something to do with falling from great heights.
He dressed and washed his face in icy water, then went down the silent hallway and knocked on Chi’s door. She called, “Come,” and he went in. She was at the window too, her back to him, her holster two steps away on the bed. She always had a way of knowing it was him.
When she turned, she seemed calm and looked rested, despite the half-night of guard duty. “Trouble dragging yourself upright?” She said, but lightly. “After sunup, I found a room down the halt with a tub,” she went on, “All the faucets brass-plated and polished. There was a boy sneaking beer downstairs, and I paid him to stoke up the steam boiler. Had me a real running-water hot bath.”
“Getting soft before your time,” Cord said.
“I’ve always been soft, Mr. Cord.” Good humor gleamed in her eyes. “Guess there’s never been anyone to notice. But now I’m getting soft enough to taste some high living.”
“Better hook up with Pell.”
Chi laughed. Her serape was draped over the chair under the gunbelt, and she was slim as a willow switch in her black leather britches and a plain woolen shirt. Her boots were lined up next to the chair, and she was barefoot.
Cord drew quick breath. He had never seen her like this. Her dark hair was loose and thick down over her shoulders; she had begun rebraiding it when Cord walked in. She looked like someone else and more desirable than ever.
“Buenos dias, querido,” Chi murmured. “You look serious. Is the Krugar cabrón on your mind?” Her fingers divided the fall of hair into three strands. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t run. That is why we survive.”
Cord took out his tobacco pouch, looked it over sourly, and put it back in his shirt. “Maybe so,” Cord said, “but damn ... We’re coming up to a turn in the trail, Chi. All that talk about growing old is a crock of eyewash, because we won’t get old hustling this life, and maybe it’s coming time to follow that turn. The country is filling up with towns and commerce, and there aren’t many clear views left that aren’t cut by railroad tracks or telegraph wires. All the good land is gone, too, probably—dammit, we’re going to miss our rewards.”
It was a long speech for Cord. Chi had a speculative light in her eye. “I always figured one day and the next was all the reward you got. I never figured on a place of my own, but we could talk. First there is this trouble.”
Cord let it drop. She knew what he meant and would not make it easy. “It’s not our trouble,” he said. “Just something else owed from the past.”
“Pay the dwarf off with a couple yards of rope.”
Cord grinned at last. “You sure are sentimental.”
“That’s me,” Chi said. So Cord knew they hadn’t been arguing. He wasn’t sure before.
“Pell is our friend,” Chi said, “and we do owe him, you know that. We’ve been riding these roads a long time, and we know the few others who ride it with us. I have come to tolerate the little man. Maybe what we owe him is respect.”
“Could be.”
“One more reason,” Chi said. “Maybe the most important one: The dwarf is in the right. He won’t be pushed, and we know that one...” Chi tied off the braid and lifted her hands, frustrated at not expressing the thought as she wished. “The few like us, Cord, we must stick together.”
“Well, sometimes enough is enough,” Cord said.
“Sure,” Chi agreed easily. “But not this time.”
Cord was thinking of going to her, of determining whether she would let him put his hands on her. Before he set his mind to it, she turned back to the window. “See how they run.”
Cord stood beside her. Up the street a half-block was the wagonload of corpses where Cord had left it. Directly below them, the miners were streaming toward it and out of New Jerusalem.
They filed along the rutted dusty street on horseback or driving buckboards and a few afoot, bearing their possessions in canvas rucksacks like tramps. A man looked up to their window – the Cornishman who had spoken the night before – and saw them and looked quickly away. The miners paraded past, already beaten and pathetic.
“Good enough for them,” Cord said. He moved from the window. “Early on in this business, I could have seen it their way. Turn your back on trouble and look somewhere else for your Promised Land. Nobody likes a fight.” He glanced at her to see if she thought he was making any sense. Chi was seated on the chair pulling on her wool socks. He wondered if she would feel as soft as other women when she looked lean as a running mountain cat.
“Ooh.” Chi moaned without looking at him, but it was just the tightness of her black boots as she drew them on. She finished dressing quickly, strapping on her gun belt below her waist, lowering her serape over her shoulders, shaking out her braid and setting her flat-brimmed hat just so on her head. Then she was the same quick deadly gun woman he’d been siding for ten years, and the moment and its soft possibilities were gone.
“That Krugar sent men to kill us,” Cord said. “Now he’s got the war started for sure.” No matter how agey you might feel, no matter how much you hankered to be out of the endless cross fire and settled down, you could not allow some son of a bitch to come breaking into your bedroom with a weapon, some bastard who would parade you out and kill you in your union suit.
Chi was smiling, reading his thoughts. “You looked pretty good last night,” she said. “Big hairy-chested man, nice tight ass.”
“Shit,” Cord said and felt the heat in his face. He knew she was teasing, but still that was the part he could not stomach: the indignity, being screwed around by fools.
Chi adjusted the serape on her shoulders. “What now, querido?” Why did she always give that term of endearment a sardonic twist?
Cord opened the door for her. “For starters,” he said, “I could use some breakfast.”
A citified little dude sat at one of the tables in the Ophir. A round-faced Germanic-looking man with a black mustache and short-clipped gray hair sat opposite in miner’s duds. There was a pen and ink bottle between them. The miner skimmed over a document, then dipped the pen and signed. The little man reached inside his coat, removed a deck of bills, peeled a few off, and placed them on the table beside the ink bottle. The miner stared at the money for a few moments as if studying a particularly cunning riddle, then picked it up and stuffed it in a pocket without counting it. He stomped out past Cord and Chi, who had just come in the door. He kept his eyes down and away from them.
