Lake of Fire Read Free Page A

numbly, aware of nothing but the impossible fact she had survived.
    Then, with the rising sunlight, she began to notice her surroundings. Her skin prickled in the chill air; her ears tuned to the scrabble of the black stallion’s hooves in the cobbled bottomland. With her nostrils flaring at the pungent mix of sage, horse, and male perspiration, she realized she also stank from the sweat of fear.
    It flashed her back to the stream bank, counting the seconds she had to live before her tracks were found. Cringing in anticipation of bullets tearing into her flesh, heart racing, breath cut off when Cord covered her mouth and nose. The sharp concussion of the Colt going off still had her ears ringing.
    Tears welled so quickly she couldn’t blink them back. She stifled a sob, and her chest felt as though it would explode. Shoulders shaking, she pressed her lips together.
    Don’t think about it. Wait until you’re alone and can write it all down. Then you can fall apart
.
    Pressing a fist to her mouth, she held her breath until the sharpest agony abated. Though the immediate danger seemed past, she had to keep her wits about her. Would Cord believe a young man sobbing like a girl?
    Laura wiped the tears from her cheeks and studiedhim. His profile might have been carved from brown sandstone, with a hawkish nose and a sculpted jaw his beard could not hide. High and prominent cheekbones might have belonged to an Indian, but she’d never heard of one with blue eyes and thick facial hair. Though the set of his jaw conveyed he was still angry at a boy who’d done nothing to defeat the outlaws, he seemed to have accepted her story about the valise of women’s things being taken to her … his … absent mother.
    Laura sighed. If only there had been a chance to know her own mother better.
    The rustle of skirts and the scent of lemon verbena had always preceded Violet Fielding into a room. On the hottest August day when the breeze off Lake Michigan died and flies droned, Violet’s hands always felt cool. During her life, Forrest Fielding’s rigid demeanor had been tempered by his wife’s unquenchable lightness of heart. When she died, he turned from merely wooden to stone. Pushing ten-year-old Laura into the role of hostess and supervisor at Fielding House, he had set exacting standards for everything.
    In the years since, she’d yearned to break free, but stayed with him because she had no better place to go. A woman’s options were limited: entering a convent, for which she had no vocation; becoming a nanny or companion, preposterous with the Fielding wealth; or getting married.
    With deft motions of his knees, Cord steered Dante several hundred feet down a pair of steep riverterraces. In the innermost valley, the Snake River sparkled in the sun. Although it rushed smoothly past, boiling eddies revealed its turbid depth. Born in Yellowstone, the spring torrent flowed south forty miles from its headwaters.
    “Menor’s Ferry,” Cord said.
    A wooden frame on each riverbank supported a metal cable works strung across the flood. Tied to the far shore, a board platform topped two flimsy-looking pontoons. She couldn’t imagine Dante balancing on the raft and riding the current.
    “Halloo!” Cord called, his voice coming back in an echo. The wind stirred the squat willow bushes and wild roses.
    All was silent. A whitewashed cabin near the boat looked deserted.
    Cupping his large hands, Cord shouted again for the ferry operator. There was no answering hail. “Menor said you couldn’t work it from this side,” he explained. “It keeps people from crossing without paying their twenty-five cents.”
    “Now what?” Laura asked in her little-boy voice.
    With a look at the river, Cord concluded, “We’ll have to ford.”
    “What?” Floating snags of trees demonstrated the current’s power.
    “Not here.” His tone made her feel stupid.
    He turned Dante upstream to a place where the river spread a hundred yards wide, separated