Lake of Fire (14 page)

“Laura who?”

Indeed
. He had been so secretive on the trail that of course she had not volunteered a last name. Nor had he asked.

Cord held out his hand near shoulder height. “About this tall, brown hair … came in last evening.”

The woman’s faded blue eyes softened, as he blundered on, “A little slip of woman …”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know all our workers, and we don’t have anyone named Laura.”

“She’s lying.”

Captain Quenton Feddors listened to Pinkerton man Manfred Resnick, who faced him across the desk in the Lake Soldier Station. “I don’t know about what or why,” Resnick went on, “but Laura Fielding’s story doesn’t ring true.”

Feddors spit tobacco juice into a tarnished brass spittoon and wiped his sparse goatee. He balanced his straight-backed wooden chair on two legs and looked out the post window. The log building fronted an open field overlooking Yellowstone Lake, a short walk north of the hotel.

“Lying?” At last, there might be some excitement on his watch as commandant of the First Cavalry’s garrison. Since Superintendent Oscar James Brown had left the park and his replacement, George William Goode, was not due until July 23, Feddors was enjoying his month of power.

“How do ya know she’s lying?”

“The hesitation.” Resnick shrugged a thin shoulder. “The way she won’t look at me straight.”

Perhaps Laura Fielding was just trying not to stare at the bad eye. Feddors was having trouble with that himself.

Resnick crossed his arms over his chest. “At Pinkerton, we’re trained to question people.”

“If you’re so good at reading folks, suh,” Feddors said, “I should get you to help me out with the men heah.” In the months since he’d come out from Tennessee, he was finding the Yellowstone post to be the
most frustrating of his twenty-year career.

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s not?” Feddors rejoined.

He had found the soldiers, spread over the park in twelve remote stations, to be an undisciplined and untrained lot. And though every man carried a red book of regulations that forbade the use of alcohol, it was rampant.

“The enlisted men go AWOL to the saloons and whorehouses in Gardiner.” Feddors referred to the small rough town four miles north of Fort Yellowstone, down the Gardner River named for a different pioneer family with a distinct spelling. “The troops even bring women into the park to the stations. They know females are forbidden, except for tourists viewing the facility.”

Feddors could see by the dull look on Resnick’s ferret face that he wasn’t interested in the garrison’s troubles.

As he leaned back, Feddors’s uniform blouse gaped between brass buttons over his stomach. Reaching to smooth the blue wool together, he advanced his theory about the stagecoach murders. “Did Laura Fielding at least get a good look at them Injuns?”

“The stagecoach wasn’t attacked by Indians,” Resnick protested. “There were two white men. Frank Worth was found dead. Miss Fielding said the other one was tall and blond.”

“You said she was lying. They had Injun troubles down in Jackson. In ‘95, folks left their homes and
circled up their wagons at Wilson Ranch.”

Resnick paced with small rapid steps.

Feddors went on, “One of the reasons they brought in the cavalry in ‘86 to oversee the park was because the Nez Perce came through in ‘77 killing tourists and ranchers for no reason.”

“If that were so, why did it take them nine years? The Nez Perce War is ancient history.”

Feddors’s cheeks heated. To him, it was yesterday; he’d been a boy of fifteen the summer he’d watched the Nez Perce sweep through Yellowstone.

Resnick stopped pacing. “Twenty-three years is long enough for people to forget the Nez Perce lost their homes in Washington and Oregon Territory. They’ve never been allowed back on those lands.”

“Are you defending them?” It gave small comfort to know he outweighed the young detective and could throw him over his shoulder if he cared to take the trouble. “The Nez Perce would never have been driven from their homes if they hadn’t been killing white men with their bows and arrows.”

“Worth wasn’t killed with a bow and arrow, but a forty-five,” Resnick drilled. “Maybe his partner shot him.”

Feddors dropped his chair legs to the floor with a thump. “Maybe the Indian had one.”

Cord pushed open the door of the soldier station. With
his Winchester over his shoulder, he showed his pistol to a soldier behind a desk. “I need to declare these.”

“Nice-looking Colt.” The captain, by his insignia, sounded pleasant enough, but his smile did not extend to his dark eyes. He wore a waxed mustache and straggling dun-colored goatee that failed to offset his thinning hair.

Beyond him, a wiry man in a pinstriped suit leaned against the chinked log wall, hands in his pockets.

Cord placed the Colt on the table. The captain lifted it and checked the chamber. “A forty-five.” He raised the weapon and sighted at the lake through the open door. “Feddors,” he said abruptly. “Quenton Feddors. In charge of all army personnel in the park.”

With a whole sentence on the air, Cord detected a drawl, Tennessee or northern Georgia. He also noted how Feddors’s eyes followed him as he unshouldered his Winchester and set it on the desk.

“Sutton,” he offered, “William Cordon Sutton,” giving what he thought of as the double-barreled version.

The other man observed both Cord and Captain Feddors without introducing himself.

“Any particular reason you didn’t stop by the south entrance and have these weapons sealed according to park regulations?” Feddors sounded sharp.

“My horse got lost,” Cord related with a straight face.

He was immediately sorry, for Feddors let his Colt down onto the wooden table with a clatter. “Nevers!”
he called.

A young sergeant stuck his head in from the rear room. Of medium build with a broad open face, wavy brown hair, and thick glasses, he nodded briefly at Cord.

“Fix these weapons,” Feddors ordered.

Nevers turned away and came back with a roll of red tape. He picked up the Colt.

While Cord watched, the soldier tied the mechanism with the tape. Then he lit a wooden match and melted a dollop of red sealing wax onto the knot; if anyone took off the tape, it would be obvious. “Sir, anyone traveling with weapons can be stopped by a soldier at any time for an inspection.”

Feddors chuckled. “Anyone failing inspection will be marched to Mammoth for a hearing before the acting superintendent. That’s me, suh. Or if anyone leaves a campfire burning. Or defaces the formations. The penalty begins at expulsion from the park and goes up from there.” He gestured toward Nevers. “Tell the man what happened to that poacher we caught a week

ago.”

“He was force marched from near Yellowstone Lake up to Mammoth. The captain presided at his hearing and then personally horsewhipped him before expelling him permanently from the park.” He spoke in a monotone.

Cord kept his expression grave. “I don’t think you’ll have any problem with me.” He hated being obsequious, but it seemed the best way to handle the little
captain’s Napoleon complex.

Feddors was studying him. “There was a stagecoach attack down near Menor’s Ferry in Jackson’s Hole a few days ago. Couple of people killed.”

Cord hesitated, then figured it was safe to admit; the man who’d rented him the rowboat this morning had talked of little else. “I heard,” he said. “A terrible thing.”

“One of the outlaws was killed with a forty-five.” Feddors aimed a stream of tobacco juice at a brass spittoon. “Gun like this.” He ran a finger along Cord’s Colt.

“I bought that in Salt Lake.” Cord noticed that the man against the wall was on alert. “Andrew Stanislow had maybe fifteen guns that would shoot that same kind of bullet.” The big Russian had laid out piece after piece onto the worn wooden counter for inspection. “Not to mention all the other weapon sources in the world.”

“Yeah.” Feddors shot a look at the man beside the fireplace.

Cord nodded at a Cavalry Model Colt hanging in a holster on the wall. “Don’t all the men in your garrison carry a forty-five?”

Feddors became absorbed in watching Sergeant Nevers securing the trigger of Cord’s Winchester. With a jerky efficiency, Nevers pressed a pad of paper with carbons toward Cord for his signature. He gave him a smudged copy of the acknowledgment that unsealed weapons were prohibited in the national park.

Cord pocketed the paper.

“By the way,” Feddors said, “while you and your horse were lost, you didn’t happen to engage in some poaching with those unsealed weapons? Some of my men found a mess of dead game down south … including a grizzly.”

Hot words rose to Cord’s lips, but he managed to speak in a mild tone. “Poaching is illegal.”

“Last I checked.” Feddors placed a hand on the red leather-bound book he carried in the breast pocket of his blue tunic. Gold letters indicated that the book contained the park regulations.

“I didn’t shoot a bear or any other game,” Cord said truthfully. He’d killed a man, though, albeit one who’d behaved like an animal.

Through the open door, he saw sunshine on water and grass waving in the summer wind. He took up his useless guns and moved toward the bright day.

As he passed through the doorway, he heard the man against the wall say, “Don’t ask me how I know, but that one’s lying, too.”

Cord shook hands with banker Edgar Young outside the Lake Hotel barbershop. Edgar’s boyish, freckled face was topped by a head of wild russet hair that would defy the cutter’s craft. Rubbing the beard he’d decided was about to come off, Cord wished he’d had a chance to get to know his backer better before coming to the negotiating table.

“I’ve been wondering where you’ve been,” Edgar said.

“I checked your room earlier.” Cord did not acknowledge that he was a day or so later than he’d expected.

“Things are not going as smoothly as we had hoped.” Edgar’s tone was grave.

“We knew this was an uphill battle,” Cord said. “The railroad’s managed to control the park concessions through dummy corporations run from eastern drawing rooms for the past twenty years.”

Edgar nodded. “While they lobbied Washington for permission to build branch lines into the park.”

Only recently had the executives of the Northern Pacific become sufficiently frustrated to want to lay off some of the properties.

“Is Norman Hagen representing the railroad?” Cord had been introduced to the big red-bearded blond beneath high chandeliers in the paneled lobby of St. Paul’s Ryan Hotel. “He and I hit it off well in the spring … that is, I thought so.”

“He’s here, all right. With a nasty fellow by the name of Hopkins Chandler.”

Cord led the way into the small shop, empty save for a barber in a black suit, stropping his straight razor while waiting for business. Edgar climbed into a barber chair, and Cord took the one adjacent.

Edgar’s dark eyes were serious. “The news is that Lake Hotel manager Hank Falls wants to buy the place out from under you.”

Cord swore an oath that made the barber flinch. “When you approached me in Salt Lake last spring
and offered to finance out of your bank in Great Falls, you made it sound like we could buy the hotel without opposition.”