Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold (21 page)

A short scream from Leona brought him out of this reverie. A quick glance in that direction had him transferring the knife in his boot to the back of his belt, and starting back toward the church.

When the big man pushed her mother to the ground and circled her throat with a dirty arm, a wave of fear so intense her vision blurred swept through Anne. She struggled for breath, the memory of Lem Samuels’ assault leaving her frozen and unable to react. The brute dragged her up onto the wooden sidewalk in front of the first shops close to the church. He stopped by two other big strangers, and said, “He’s coming. He heard the mother.”

The men stood there, waiting, and then Anne saw him. Cord. At the sight, she found herself able to breathe again. He walked to the center of the street, then stood stock-still, didn’t move even when the man holding her pulled a knife and used it to rip her hat off and loosen her hair until it fell around her shoulders.

As Anne’s panic receded, she realized the man holding her had started to breathe hard and fast, as if he had exerted himself, but he had not. He’s afraid, she thought, and he should be.

Cord’s stillness was that of a crouched predator. The hard, flat look that came around his eyes when he was irritated or angry was accentuated a hundred-fold, leaving the skin stretched too tightly over his bones, his mouth a thin, straight line. His eyes burned like live coals.

Her captor began waving the knife, taunting, making the same kind of threats Samuels had about what he was going to do to a “Injun’s whore.” He pressed the knife blade against Anne’s mouth, then waved it to the side as if to make sure it could be seen, did the same thing on one side of her face, then the other. The third time he stretched his arm to the side, waving the knife, Cord’s arm blurred with motion.

Anne never saw Cord’s knife in his hand or in the air, only heard the thump as it buried itself in the fleshy part of the big man’s forearm. The force was so great his arm thudded back against the wooden front of the store behind him, held there by the blade through his muscle embedded in the wood. He began screaming and loosened his grip on Anne. She stamped on his booted foot as hard as she could, twisted away and ran towards Cord.

As she ran, she heard Cord, yell, “Ephraim!” And suddenly Ephraim had her by the arm and was pulling her away, pulling her into the middle of the whole Bennett family.

Anne turned back and saw the two strangers who weren’t wounded, stepping into the street, putting distance between themselves so that they could come at Cord from opposite sides.

Pulling against Ephraim’s tight grip on her wrist, she tried to get away from him, desperate to get to Cord or to get his damned family to help him. “
Shoot
them!” she begged. “Do something! Don’t just stand here. Help him!”

None of the Bennetts seemed even concerned. Frank said, “I sent Gil and Martin back to Eph’s for guns. Calm down, Anne. You don’t need to worry about him.”

Frank moved behind Luke and Pete, who were watching what was happening in the street avidly, and said, “Listen you two. You can watch what happens with one eye but start right now searching the crowd with the other. This is a setup if I ever saw one. Look for another stranger. When we find him, we make sure there’s no backshooting.”

Backshooting! Anne started to scan the crowd herself, then gasped as she saw that the two men were closing in on Cord in the street. He didn’t wait for them. He charged the man on his left. Knowing she couldn’t help him herself in this kind of fight, Anne stopped pulling against Ephraim’s hold. Although the other men both had an advantage in height and weight, she could see that Cord was much faster and much more agile.

Behind her she heard Gil and Martin’s voices and knew the men were all arming themselves. She glanced around for a second and saw Luke and Pete moving through the crowd with purpose but wasn’t willing to take her eyes off Cord long enough to see where they went.

Both heavier men wanted to close in on Cord, but the best they could do were occasional glancing blows. He used feet, fists, and open hands in strange ways. When he slammed both knees into one opponent’s chest, the force of the blow took the man out of the fight long enough for Cord to concentrate on the second man with devastating effect.

The man fell with one leg angled between the road and the sidewalk, and Cord launched himself at the barely rising, winded first opponent off the second man’s knee. The leg bent backward as it was never meant to do with sickening popping noises. A chilling wail rent the air, falling to a thin moan that provided background for the rest of the fight.

The man who had started it all had freed his arm and was wrapping it with a dirty handkerchief. Anne watched Frank walk over to him, thinking he was going to keep the man out of the fight, but Frank just picked up both knives. He grinned cheerfully at the brute and said, “If you want to let my brother cripple you, go right ahead, but I’ll keep these.”

The big man growled, “I’m going to smash that damn Injun to pieces. You watch.”

Frank tipped his hat, “Yeah, sure you are.”

Anne couldn’t believe what she was seeing and hearing. What was the
matter
with these people?

The monster was barely off the sidewalk before the second of his friends was out of the fight for good. He went down again with the breath knocked out of him. This time several hammer like blows of his elbow against the rock-hard clay road surface produced the same heart-stopping wail his friend had made - until he passed out.

Cord rolled out of the way barely in time to avoid the kick the third man aimed at him. The two men circled slowly, the difference in size making a David and Goliath picture.

Anne had all but given up thoughts of getting out of Ephraim’s grip. Now she heard Noah Reynolds’ voice, “You fellas got any idea how we’re going to stop him?”

Frank was standing beside her now. He said, “The only way is with a rifle, I guess. He’ll still be beating on the poor fool an hour after he’s just meat if we don’t.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, I don’t like it much either, but it’s the only way without taking a chance of getting killed ourselves. I’ll do it.”

Anne listened with disbelief, never taking her eyes off what was happening in the street. She saw the third man almost falling steadily backward, Cord driving him back with vicious, cracking blows. He seemed to recover and smashed Cord twice, once in the body and once in the face, throwing him through the air and slamming him on his back, but when the huge man tried to close again, Cord’s boots jabbed into his midsection and rolled him in a crashing somersault. Then it was all over, Cord on his knees rocking the man with blow after blow.

The men behind her were quiet now. Anne took a quick look over her shoulder and panicked at the sight of Frank hefting his rifle thoughtfully. If she couldn’t pull out of Ephraim’s grip, there were other ways. She pivoted to face him and brought her knee smartly into his groin. He released her wrist and doubled over towards her with a strangled sound.

Anne turned and ran, crying, “Cord, Cord.”

She ran to him and grabbed him by the arm, pulling and gasping. “Stop, stop. They’re going to shoot you.”

Cord came to his feet as if she were another enemy, one fist still pulled back, then recognized her. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Without waiting for an answer he took her upper arm in a vise-like grip and marched back to the Bennetts.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Eph? You too old, too slow, and too soft to keep hold of one damn woman for the space of a fight? I’m taking her down to your place to clean up.”

Anne noted with satisfaction that Ephraim was only just barely standing upright again and not capable of a reply, but Cord had a harder hold on her now than his brother had had. He shoved her up the street toward the house. She struggled against his unrelenting grasp.

“Let go of my arm. You’re hurting me.”

There was no answer. He kept right on walking.

“Cord, you’re hurting my arm. Let go.”

Still no answer. Furious, she stopped walking and braced her whole body, digging in and absolutely opposing his forward push. He could either drag her off her feet or stop. He stopped.

“You can either drag me or you can let go of my arm and
ask
, and I’ll go anywhere you want.”

Cord did look like the devil some called him. One eye was beginning to blacken and swell. There were thin lines of blood from each nostril and one side of his mouth, and his cheek had split again right where Anne had sewed it the previous October. For the first time she could understand someone describing his eyes as wolf-like.

Cord glared back at her for several seconds and then let go of her arm. “Get your ass down the street to Ephraim’s
please
.”

Chin in the air, she turned and went. Cord followed, and she was aware of the rest of his family and her own mother behind him because she could hear the murmur of their voices.

At Ephraim’s house, Cord walked right in and kept going through the kitchen towards the back of the house.

“Where are you going?” Anne asked.

“There’s mirrors and stuff in the spare bedroom. I’ll get Martha to bring you what you need.”

Anne stopped in the middle of the parlor. “What I need is to go home right now. I don’t want anything from Martha or any of the rest of them. They were going to shoot you.”

“No, they weren’t.”

His attitude was the last straw. Anne lost the last shreds of control.

“All right, don’t believe me! It must be terrible to think you’re married to a dim-witted liar. I’m telling you I heard them talking about shooting you just to keep you from beating on that disgusting piece of filth in the street. But of course your faith in your damn family is complete. Since we’ve been married not one of them has ever said a kind word to you or about you. They just stood there and didn’t even try to help, but they wouldn’t hurt you would they? Why waste your life being married to me? Living with me? Why don’t you move back to the big house so you can be close to your precious, damn, useless family? Why not move here? Why n….”

He cut her off with his hand across her mouth and held her pressed against him with one hand in the small of her back and the other across her mouth. Anne only struggled briefly before giving in to his superior strength and standing quietly, smoldering.

He spoke very softly. “Suppose you take a deep breath and count to ten and listen to me. It’s not that I don’t believe you. I believe you heard something that you thought meant they were going to shoot me, but I know that’s not what they were going to do. They wanted to stop me because they’ve got it in their heads once I start beating on a man I won’t stop till after he’s long dead, and they think if I beat a man to death in front of the whole town, I’ll hang. Not much sense saving me from a hanging by shooting me, is there? Now think hard, exactly who said what? Try to remember the exact words.” He removed his hand.

Anne was in control again. She very carefully related exactly what had been said.

“Yeah, well, when they said use a rifle, they meant clubbing me with it, not shooting me.”

“But they could kill you that way too!”

“Mm. Less likely.”

“Why do they think you’d kill that man after he was unconscious?”

“Well, there was Hatch, and then a while back I jumped somebody pretty bad, and Frank got in the way. I was choking Frank a bit, and Eph clubbed me off. They think I’d have killed Frank and the man I started on.”

“Was that Boggs?”

“Yeah.”

With all her anger gone, there was nothing left but the fear. Anne buried her head against his chest. “I’m sorry, screeching at you like that in front of everybody. I was so afraid, and then you were mad at
me
.”

“Annie, I was mad because you could have gotten hurt. If I hit you accidentally I could break your jaw - or your neck. It scared hell out of me to have you run out there like that. Don’t cry. Come on, don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Yes, you are.”

His mouth was against her temple, tracing her cheekbone, sipping the tears from her eyes. He kissed gently across her cheeks, along her jaw, down her throat. Anne stopped sobbing. She took a deep shuddering breath, whispered, “That’s nice.”

From the kitchen, Anne heard her mother’s raised voice. “I don’t care. That’s my daughter!”

Cord pulled away from her so fast he was almost across the room by the time Leona hurried into the parlor. As he disappeared toward the kitchen, Anne glared at her mother. The only reason the Bennetts were worse than her own family was that there were more of them.

CORD WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN
to find his whole family sitting around the big table, as was Rob Wells. Frank was the only one who would even look at him, although the look was a single disgusted glance. Every member of the family had interpreted Anne’s sudden silence in the same way, he realized.

Oh, hell, what did it matter? “Martha, would you take some water to Anne? She’s got blood on her face.”

Martha didn’t waste her scorn, merely dipped water into a basin and left. Cord dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, suddenly feeling very tired and hurting worse - and in more ways - than he wanted to think about. No one said a word. No one seemed to move.