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looking. Dante stood nearby, a slack rope hanging from his saddle. The bear lay a yard away with the same boneless look Laura had seen in Angus, the outlaw, and the poachers’ victims.
    “Are you hurt?” Cord gestured at the mess of blood on the front of her flannel shirt.
    Besides a lingering dizziness, she felt no pain. “Must be the bear’s.”
    “You killed him.” Cord grinned.
    “Did he hurt you?” she asked.
    “I’m going to be black and blue where he swiped at me.” He rose, went to Dante, and retrieved his pewter flask of bourbon. Once more, as she had beside the raging Snake, she lifted it to her lips and drank. Cord twisted the top back into place without taking a sip.
    His eyes sought hers. “I’m sorry for insulting your nerve.”
    Laura found herself smiling. After twenty-six sheltered years as her father’s daughter, she felt a sudden fierce joy at being filthy, at smelling of bear.
    And at simply being alive.

CHAPTER FOUR
JUNE 22
    C ord didn’t return her smile, but looked around the canyon rim with a listening air. Although the bear threat had been neutralized, not a bird sang or a chipmunk chattered in the still afternoon.
    Even so, Cord put out a hand as though he had heard something and was waiting to learn what it was. Something disturbing in his expression made her quietly accept his hand to help her up.
    Putting a finger to his lips, he kept his Colt in one hand and picked up the fallen Winchester. Still scanning the area with a wary eye, he reloaded his rifle, mounted Dante, and pulled Laura up to the saddle in front of him.
    Riding hard, they pressed on to the north. Jolted against Cord, she managed to ask over her shoulder, “Do you think there was another bear?”
    “One of the two-legged variety.”
    Hours later, they forded the Lewis River in abroad meadow above the head of the canyon. Turning east from the river valley, they began climbing the northern base of what Cord called the Red Mountains. There, the steeper slope forced them to slow their headlong rush.
    With the danger seeming to be behind them, she had time to think. No one in her family, not her father, not his sister, Fanny, and not Laura’s delicate cousin Constance, would believe she had raised the Winchester and fired into the approaching bulk of bear. They wouldn’t recognize her, riding this stallion in her boy’s clothing, a sense of pride swelling her chest beneath the stain of bear blood. Even Cord had apologized for thinking she didn’t have nerve.
    They climbed higher, first encountering snowy patches, and then rode into a blanket covering the ground, deep and soft. It was last winter’s snowcap, not yet melted in the divide at the headwaters of a rushing creek. A few yards downstream, the heat had melted the snow, and she saw the pool of the hot springs.
    “Witch Creek,” Cord said, “named for the boiling cauldrons on its banks.” Pointing up the steep slope, he showed Laura the steam rising from at least fifty craters. “The early explorers named this Factory Hill. All that smoke made it look like a New England manufacturing town.”
    She wondered if they were safe this close to the hissing vents, but risk was part of the fascination.
    “We’ll make camp here,” Cord declared.
    It seemed a hundred years since she’d awakenedthis morning. The long ride, the wasted carcasses left by poachers, the bear … how she longed to collapse into a dreamless slumber.
    But that wasn’t possible, for Cord was unpacking gear, letting Dante out to graze, laying a fire, and placing his deadly Colt upon the nearest rock where it was in ready reach. She helped as she could, pulling out the cooking pot and mess kit, and filling his canteen with water from the rushing stream up current from the vents.
    While she worked, Laura became more aware of her filthy state. Her blood-encrusted shirtfront felt sticky against her chest, and though the evening chill was settling in, her scalp prickled from where she had