The Fire of Greed by Bill Yenne Page A

are.”
    Without further elaboration, she left him to savor his whiskey and went about her chores, rattling about with her glassware and moving things in a small pantry.
    What passed for a back bar was cluttered with an odd collection of artifacts that had apparently been found in the desert. There were deer antlers, a coyote skull, some old rusty pieces of iron, and a rusted pistol with its handgrip rotted off. And naturally, there were strings of dried chilies.
    There were also several dried birds which would have been an embarrassment to any taxidermist, including a raven that seemed to be looking straight at Cole. He guessed that this had been the bartender’s intention when she placed it in that spot. At the top, in a place of honor, there was an old brass helmet of the kind the Spanish conquistadors wore hundreds of years ago.
    â€œI see by that sign that you sell suppers,” Cole said as he saw her stoking her stove.
    â€œYep,” she said without elaboration.
    â€œWhat’s your specialty?”
    â€œBeans and rice on a tortilla with some chicken thrown in.”
    â€œSounds good.”
    â€œYou want eggs on top?”
    â€œThey fresh?”
    â€œYou seen all them chickens runnin’ around in the street this afternoon?”
    â€œYeah, I’ll have a couple of eggs.”
    Maybe it was the aroma of the cooking, and maybe it was their force of habit, but as she began cooking, three other men wandered in, bought whiskey, and asked for supper. It was soon evident that the woman’s specialty was her
only
. Everything she cooked was a variation on beans and rice on a tortilla with some chicken, as well as a handful of dried red chilies, thrown in.
    Cole studied the newcomers, wondering if one of them might be the Dutchman.
    He imagined that none of them looked the part, but then realized that he really didn’t know what a Dutchman was
supposed
to look like.
    As he ate, Cole thought back to his last store-bought meal, the
carne asada
at the Refugio del Viajero in Santa Fe. His thoughts naturally also went back to Nicolette de la Gravière, with her graceful movements, her long dark hair, and her lips the color of dried red chilies.
    Just as Santa Fe and Luera were opposite poles on the scale of civilization in this territory, Nicolette de la Gravière and tonight’s hostess were opposite poles on the scale of womanhood. Cole imagined the bartender when she was as young as Nicolette de la Gravière. He imagined Nicolette in twenty or thirty years, and wondered whether those years would be as unkind to her, or if she would retain that sort of timeless, regal beauty that women such as her mother seemed to preserve.
    Naturally, being a man, he had imagined himself as part of Nicolette’s life. He knew that he could not tire of a face like that, or of a smile like that. He had thought of the similarity of that face to the face of Hannah Ransdell, the woman of about that same age he had met last winter up in Montana Territory. Hannah was quick and perceptive—and she could ride and shoot as well as most men. She was naturally, and almost perfectly, beautiful, but the little threesome of freckles on her nose added a humanizing touch, softening the classical perfection of that beauty.
    He often thought about Hannah, and he thought often of Natoya-I-nis’kim, the Blackfeet woman with the long black hair who had saved his life, and he thought about several other women he had met in the years since Sally Lovelace had left him.
    It seemed that it all came back to Sally.
    She had changed his life by turning a wandering man into a man who could think about settling down. She had changed his life
again
through the revelation that
she too
wished to wander, but
without
Bladen Cole.
    It all came back to Sally.
    She had not so much cursed his life as she had painfully exposed the curse that had been there all along. Cole was meant to be a man who would not, indeed
could
not,