Cord 5 by Owen Rountree

Author:Owen Rountree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: colt 45, action heroes, piccadilly publishing, gunfighters old west, cord and chi westerns, best western ebooks, historical thrillers westerns
Publisher: Piccadilly

Nine

“There was some trouble” Cord mumbled, toying with a glass of beer.

Kelly did not press. He had only asked one question so far, carefully phrased, casually voiced, and accompanied with a grin: “How is that hell-raising spitfire pard of yours?” Which was a polite way of giving Cord a chance to say whatever he wanted, or nothing of substance at all. Still, Cord thought he heard a note of challenge. There were days when he would have filled Chris Kelly in on all his doings in a second, but now he just stared down into his glass.

“Well, Chris,” Cord said lamely, “there was a time.”

“Women,” Kelly said and shook his head ruefully.

“Sure as hell,” Cord agreed. They raised glasses and drank. Chris Kelly was drinking bourbon, and Cord had a mug of draft. He was not generally partial to beer, but it would not have been mannerly to refuse Chris Kelly’s offer of a drink, and Lord surely had to be one of the all-time worst towns in the West for a man to guzzle down a great deal of bourbon whiskey and then howl for trouble.

So Cord was sober, which did not mean he was clearheaded. He felt that Chris Kelly could see through him like window glass. When Kelly toasted his coming the first time, Cord was jolted by something like panic: Chris Kelly knew the whole story, of Chi’s entrapment and Cord’s intention to betray him to save her. Chris Kelly was playing him like a fish, waiting for the kill.

Cord got himself calmed and hoped Kelly noticed nothing. Act normal, for Christ's sake, Cord told himself. Kelly was not prescient, and the fear that he was came out of Cord’s own guilt.

But surely Kelly recognized subtle differences in Cord’s demeanor and was a mite cautious. In the outlaw life you learned to be suspicious of any deviation, if you wanted to stay healthy and whole.

“She was a one,” Chris Kelly said, and Cord sure as hell knew who he meant.

He drank a couple of swallows of the beer, which was cool enough so the bubbles bit at Cord’s throat. When he’d ordered it he’d expected the piss-warm flat brew that was usually served in backwoods bars with no competition. It turned out the bartender had rigged up a pulley contraption with a rope net, mounted on the edge of the gorge and anchored to steel spikes driven into the rock. The netting held two kegs, which the bartender winched down into the creek water for cooling. That went a ways toward explaining the double-helping of muscle on the man’s good arm.

“I made a mistake,” Cord said.

“You sure as hell did,” Kelly said without rancor. “But what the hell. The whole damned business looked bad, back then.”

Cord stared at the tabletop as if it were a window on the long-ago. “You ever see that German, Oosterbahn?”

“I heard he was dead.”

“Well, the way he drank, they always said it would get him.”

“It did,” Chris Kelly said. “He got run down by a beer wagon.

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