Lake of Fire (56 page)

I wish I could say we were saved through action on our part, some clever sleuthing of cold cavern air, but we fell into our refuge without seeing it. In a dank lava tunnel with a cone of dirty snow unmelted from last season, smoke nearly suffocated us
.

We lived, yet are guaranteed no more and no less than anyone who takes their hold on life for granted
.

On the hillside below Mammoth Hot Springs was the fort cemetery. According to Dr. O’Malley, who had talked incessantly all the time he spent in Danny’s room, Private Thomas Horton of the 22nd Infantry had been the first serviceman buried there in 1888. In the past twelve years, civilians had been added, including Isaac Rowe, who in 1899 had been struck by lightning on the jumbled rocky narrows of Golden Gate Pass above Mammoth.

Death, it seemed, lurked anywhere and everywhere.

Laura imagined the six soldiers Feddors had
rounded up, smoking cigarettes while their rifles were stacked against each other, awaiting orders to execute a prisoner. They wouldn’t ask who Cord was or where he came from.

How would their wives or sweethearts feel if they were shot for no reason, their mothers, sisters, and friends bereft because a blind bigot abused his power?

What time will the hearing be? As it is already first light, I shall not go to bed. And as soon as reveille sounds, I will be sure John Stafford knows what happened. Surely, if he is present at the hearing, he can ensure that cooler heads prevail
.

Constance had decided the West was too hard, but Laura bowed her head and thought that life … and death, in this wildly beautiful land, would be enough if she could be with Cord.

Behind the Staffords’ house, inside Fort Yellowstone, shots rang out.

Lieutenant John Stafford came running down the stairs into the hallway of his house. Laura was on her feet, waiting for him. “During the night,” she told him, “Captain Feddors called up some soldiers with rifles to stand by for Cord’s hearing this morning.”

She followed John to the kitchen window. He pulled aside the white lace curtain and looked out over the yard facing the main body of the fort.

A steady stream of enlisted men poured onto the
covered porch of the hundred-thirty-foot barracks, some still buttoning their uniform blouses. Normally no one came out in the morning before they were ready to pass inspection.

The wooden pendulum clock on top of the pie safe said it was five past six. “It lacks fifteen minutes until Boots and Saddles and another ten until Assembly at six-thirty,” John said. “What can be going on?”

Katharine Stafford appeared in a chenille robe, her dark hair tumbling from a heavy coil. “From what you’ve said about Feddors,” she glanced at Laura, “maybe he decided to skip the hearing.”

“You two stay here.” John reached for the belt hanging just inside the kitchen door and strapped on his Colt.

“Wake up, Sutton,” a harsh voice grated.

Lying with his back to the door of the cell in the Fort Yellowstone stockade, Cord wasn’t asleep. Not after hearing the dawn volley of shots echo over the fort.

He’d heard every word during the night, including Captain Feddors’s order that a firing squad be called and that they sight in their weapons as soon as daylight permitted.

Carefully, he rolled over on the bunk and put his bare feet to the cold floor. Running a hand through the filthy dark stubble on his chin, he thought longingly of hot lather and a barber with a well-stropped razor.

“Get dressed!” The slender young man in the open doorway could not have been more than twenty, with brooding eyes that turned down at the outer corners.

Reaching for his socks and boots, the only items of clothing he’d taken off, Cord found his wounded hands shaking. He got to his feet, moving slowly for all his muscles ached, and went to urinate in the bucket in the corner. He’d used it before, and the odor was rising. He cast a longing eye at the water pitcher he’d emptied hours ago.

The soldier handcuffed him before taking him outside. The sun had not risen, but Cord looked gratefully at the dawn sky over the flat top of Mount Everts. The sparse grass growing on the rocky earth outside the stockade was heavy with dew.

“Guard!” the soldier barked.

Six men with 1892 Krags marched from behind the guardhouse. In unison, they snapped their weapons to their shoulders and fell in around Cord.

“Forwaaaaard march!”

The sharp accent on the last syllable made Cord jump as though someone had fired one of the weapons. He swallowed and tried to calm the pounding of his heart.

Reveille had not yet sounded. The neat red-roofed buildings of Officers’ Row lay silent in the crisp morning air. They crossed between the canteen and the long barracks, the smoky smell of woodstoves, frying bacon, and baking biscuits wafting from the canteen’s kitchen. Enlisted men milled on the barracks porch
and in the yard, clearly roused by the early shooting.

Cord wondered if any of the armed soldiers had a wife waiting at home, with whom they could awaken every morning, the way he wanted to wake with the sweet warm weight of Laura beside him.

The rising sun caught him in the eyes, while the steady cadence moved them past the first of the stables. The ground before the long red-roofed building was ruined where the footsteps of men and horses’ hooves allowed nothing to grow. Cord heard the soldiers’ boots fall on hollow ground, as if the very bowels of hell lay beneath Yellowstone.

Where was this hearing he was supposed to have? He expected reasonable men like Lieutenant Stafford would be there, that he’d have a chance to tell his side of the story. Even during the long night in his cell, staring out through the bars at the slowing revolving stars, he’d held on to the fierce belief that his innocence could not fail to shield him.

Cord had always wondered how a condemned man managed to meet the hangman without dissolving into a shivering mass of what was once human. Looking at the youthful soldiers carrying their rifles, it did not occur to him to beg for a mercy that was not theirs to offer.

Sergeant Larry Nevers heard shots from the direction of Fort Yellowstone while his horse galloped the
road down through The Hoodoos. The great jumbled blocks of limestone, fallen from an earlier, more massive series of hot-spring deposits overlooking Mammoth Valley, were a sign that he was only a short distance from his destination.

He’d ridden through the night, stopping only at Norris for the arranged fresh horse because something told him Cord Sutton needed help.

Hank Falls knocked on the door of Alexandra’s room in the vacant house awaiting the arrival of the new Yellowstone superintendent. “Alex,” he called.

After the terrible night, he’d lain down only an hour ago, but with the dawn he’d been disturbed by shooting somewhere behind the house. It forced him to admit he was wide awake, and he pushed his tall frame to a sitting position on the side of the bed. Studying the planes of his face in a shaving stand on the dresser, his mind flooded with images of his brother, a thin ascetic mirror Hank would never gaze into again.

“Alexandra!” Hank tried the knob.

It opened easily to reveal his sister, asleep with her golden hair spread over the pillow the way it had when she was a little girl. She looked so innocent when she slept.

Hank left her and turned toward the stairs. He went down, through the hall and kitchen, and out the rear onto the high back porch. Behind the identical
duplex next door, Lieutenant Stafford’s wife stood looking toward the barrack and stables.

“What’s going on?” he called.

“That shooting,” she said, her eyes concerned.

“Practice?” Hank suggested, but even as he spoke, he remembered that it was against the cavalry’s regulations to target shoot in the park.

“Maybe it’s something to do with the Fourth, but the celebration’s not till later.” She frowned. “The only crimes the garrison deals with are poaching and defacing the formations …”

And burning the
Alexandra
.

Hank took the wooden stairs down from the porch three at a time. He hurried behind the large double barracks, where soldiers had gathered between the fort shop and the stables.

Looking around, he spied Lieutenant Stafford entering the near stable, followed at about ten paces by Laura, wearing Alexandra’s dress.

“John!” Laura called, as he went in the side door of the long building. “Wait.”

He turned. “I told you to stay with Katharine.”

“Did you think I would?” she challenged.

“I suppose not.” Even in the gray light inside the stable, she saw that he might have been amused.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I got a look at what’s happening. Cord’s being
taken under armed guard to the place behind the stable where Feddors whipped the poacher. As there’s been no hearing, I don’t know if Feddors plans a trumped-up story of Cord attempting escape, or the like, and plans to whip him before holding a hearing … or if he’s lost all concern for losing his commission and hopes to order an execution.”

Laura swallowed. “Wouldn’t he end up in prison?”

“If the evidence holds in Cord’s favor.”

“Cord would still be dead,” Laura pointed out.