“I’ll fetch a doctor . . . or somebody.” The man’s hat slipped to the rug, and he started to rise, but she grabbed his arm with her left hand.
“No.”
“You’re sick.”
“It’ll pass.”
Feeling it again, suddenly giddy with excitement, she brought his hand to her stomach. “Wait,” she ordered. “Do you feel it?”
“Ma’am?”
“There.” She laughed, and from the look in his dark eyes, she knew he had felt it, too.
“He kicked. He kicked. That’s as hard as he has kicked yet.”
The man’s face lost all color, and he let his hand slip from her stomach and drop to his side.
“You’re . . .” He could not finish.
“Don’t you think it felt like the kick of a son?”
Now he sprang to his feet. “I’ll get you . . . midwife . . . doc . . . ummmm . . .”
“No.” She laughed as though forty days had passed since she had thrown up. “It’s not time yet.” Tears of joy welled in her eyes. “It is the kick of a son.”
He stared at her with a child’s eyes.
“How’s your head?”
“Ma’am? Oh.” His right hand went toward his scalp. “Fine. I reckon.”
“You look well.”
“Ummmm.”
“Did you like the peach pie?”
He blinked. His lips parted. Closed. He glanced out the door he had left open, too. “It was . . . good. Real . . . good. You . . . you want me . . .” He gestured vaguely. “Close the door?”
“No, not yet. The cool air feels good.”
“It’s getting colder.”
“I’m not an invalid. Just morning sickness. You wouldn’t understand such things.”
“No, ma’am.”
She brought her right hand over toward him. “We have yet to be introduced properly. My name is Ellen. Ellen Story.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know.”
She waited.
He looked at her hand, glanced out the open door, and rubbed his hand against the coarse wool of the greatcoat before swallowing her tiny hand in his giant one. He wet his lips.
“Boone,” he said. “Mason Boone.”
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mason Boone.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Might I have another sip of water?”
He knew she was stalling—of that she had no doubt—but he raised her head, let her drink, and lowered it gently on the cushioned side. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m looking for your husband.”
“He is not here.”
He waited more than he needed to, but when he knew for certain she had no intention of adding anything else, he said, “Well, ma’am, might you happen to know where he is? It’s quite important.”
Nelson, she realized, would never have shown this much patience. Those brown eyes, she thought, so deep, mysterious. The baby kicked again. She smiled.
“It’s a boy,” she told him. “I know it.”
“I’m sure he will be, ma’am.”
Back on the farm in Platte County, Missouri, before they had moved off to Leavenworth, friends had told Ellen that her eyes were blacker than the pits of Hades, with not an ounce of kindness showing in them. Her eyes, it was said, could scare a drunkard to sobriety or a sober person to drunkenness. But his . . . she found safety in those deep brown eyes.
“I mean him no harm, ma’am.” He drew in a deep breath, exhaled. “But I really need to find him.”
Trust someone, she told herself. She frowned. She had trusted Nelson Gile Story, and look where that had gotten her. But the baby kicked again, and she regretted such mean thoughts about her husband. She made the mistake of looking up at Mason Boone again.
“He’s leaving town,” she said. “Taking the stagecoach to Salt Lake City.”
The man rose. “Would you happen to know what time that stage is leaving town, ma’am?”
She answered with a shrug.
“Or . . . where the stage leaves from?”
“Down Wallace Street,” she said. “Big sign. Next to the mercantile.”
After pulling on his hat, he took the cup and refilled it from the pitcher on the table, brought the cup back, setting it gently in her hand. “You sure you don’t need a doctor, ma’am?” he asked.
“I’m fine, Mr. Boone. Thank you.”
“Yes, ma’am. Should I close the door for you?”
“That would be nice of you, sir.”
When she heard the door begin to close, she called out, “I hope to see you again, Mr. Boone.”
But he did not answer. The door settled snugly, and she heard the sound of his boots until the crunching of snow ceased.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The pong of sizzling salt pork made Constance Beckett bilious, but a sudden terror removed any chance of throwing up. She opened her mouth to scream—yet only a soft gurgle rose from her lips, and her lips burned with pain.
Her heart pounded. She felt cold, clammy, but imagined beads of sweat popping out on her knotted brow. She pictured the beads, red like blood, and that reminded her of . . .
She tried to sit up, but couldn’t. Swallowing down bile and fear almost left her gagging. Her throat felt raw, as though someone had crushed her voice box. She tried to talk again, but couldn’t.
Where was she?
In a wagon. That much was certain. The canvas tarp overhead popped in the wind. She couldn’t move to see what lay in front of the wagon, but through the oval opening in the back saw the grayness of . . . of . . . of . . . Nebraska. Fort Kearny. The pounding inside her head rang out like a smithy’s hammer, and she reached up to touch her skull with trembling fingers. A bolt of pain shot from her head down her spine, and she gasped.
Once she could breathe again, found feeling in her fingers, she realized something was wrong. Trembling, she probed the rest of her head.
Her hair.
What had happened to her hair?
Voices interrupted that thought, outside, probably by the fire where someone was ruining a piece of salt pork—if any piece of salt pork had not already been ruined. Her throbbing head prevented much focus on what anyone near the wagon had to say. She looked to her left, carefully, and saw an empty sack, a bedroll. Moving her head or eyes more would have killed her, so she just stayed like that, and slowly began to realize that her hair was not the only thing missing.
What happened to my clothes?
Her right hand drifted down to find hard duck trousers. Fingered a heavy woolen shirt. She couldn’t see her feet, but from the feel she knew those black sateen lace-ups purchased at Mr. Miller’s store in Nashville were history. Coarse woolen socks between her feet and the leaden weights someone had nailed into her heels itched like mad.
Hoofbeats clopped outside. Maybe, Constance thought, I am to be rescued. If only her throat, her mouth, could make some noise. She tried. Nothing.
A conversation began outside. She tried to sit up, but that just sent her back onto the thin woolen blanket her captors must have thought would feel like a bed. It felt like iron.
“Captors,” she mouthed, and slowly understood. I have been kidnapped.
“Murdered, you say?”
The raw voice outside numbed her.
“And robbed.”
“No fooling?” the first voice, nasal but musical, sang out.
“Dupree said the major had maybe a hundred dollars on him when he left Taggart’s.”
“You bluecoats got paid already?” another voice drawled.
“Hell, no. Listen, I ain’t standing here bandying words in this teat freezer. Y’all seen anybody?”
“Anybody?” The nasal voice laughed. “We seen everybody, Lieutenant. Which in Dobytown and Kearny in December ain’t a whole lot.”
“McDonald, you and Major Balsam weren’t exactly on the best of terms,” this lieutenant said.
“Because Major Balsam was a cock—”
Constance Beckett’s mou
th dropped open. “Not only that,” the nasally man continued, “he was . . .”
Her blush deepened. And turned pale an instant later.
Balsam. Major Balsam. Major Warner Balsam. That’s when she remembered. Which caused her to scream.
But no sound came out. She turned her head and began sobbing without control, wishing she could forget.
WANTED: Correspondence
A simple enough request, an advertisement she had seen in the Nashville Daily Union. She had even asked the reverend at the Congregational church what he thought, if it would be proper for a widow like herself to correspond with a complete stranger. Her memories galloped ahead of their correspondence, his love of Tennyson, her fondness for Byron, her life in Tennessee, his in Iowa, her work with the church and children orphaned by the recent unpleasantness, his love for duty and his command in the 7th Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.
Could she fall in love with a soldier who had fought against her late husband?
Well, it turned out that Major Balsam’s command had seen no action against the Confederacy. Mustered in in 1863, Balsam had been sent north to the Dakotas to campaign against the Sioux. Later, Balsam’s command was stationed at Fort Kearny on the Oregon-California Trail in Nebraska Territory. He wrote about watching the cranes in the Platte River, the buffalo, the savage Indians, people and more people migrating westward. He wrote that he would be overjoyed if she might travel west. He proposed marriage.
She talked it over with the reverend and with her closest relative, even though Aunt Charlotte despised the color blue, the Stars and Stripes, anything Yankee. Yet Aunt Charlotte told Constance, “Warner seems like a nice young man. He might help you forget about Leland.”
Who, please God, did Warner hire to write those letters? Surely this could not have been the same man.
The conversation by the fire—the scent of salt pork no longer prevalent—snapped her from her memories.
“Ain’t getting any argument from me on that matter, Lieutenant. If Major Balsam’s face was to catch fire, I would have put it out with an ax. But I surely wouldn’t stick a knife in his heart. Cut his throat, maybe? Cut off his balls? Well, if I thought he had any.”
The officer said, “Perhaps I should search your wagons.”
Constance looked through the opening. No place to hide in this freight wagon, but could she roll over, move to the driver’s box, hide . . . ?
“Help yourself, Lieutenant. But if you find a low-down skunk of a man-killer, can we split the reward for the capture of that son-of-a-bitching asshole killer?”
The wind made the lieutenant’s reply incomprehensible.
The nasally voice chuckled. “How come I ain’t surprised? You hear that, Coleman? There ain’t no reward posted for the capture or killing of the major’s murderer. Yeah, I bet it would be damned hard to get anyone to put up even a Pawnee scalp, popular as Balsam was.”
Constance heard the lieutenant’s profane response.
“If you gonna search the wagons, get to it, bub,” the person Constance guessed to be Coleman interjected. “So I can have another cup of coffee. If you ain’t . . .”
Saddle leather squeaked, traces and spurs sang out, a horse snorted, one must have bucked, and the lieutenant gave some command that Constance could not understand. The sound of hooves moved away, and now, through the oval opening in the wagon, Constance could see dusty, blue-clad soldiers trotting away. She mouthed her thanks to Jesus and God for her deliverance.
By the campfire, the blasphemous bullwhacker shouted at the retreating soldiers: “Hey, Gibbons. If you capture the fellow who gutted Balsam, bring him to Leavenworth. That way, before y’all hang him, we can give the son of a bitch the medal he deserves.”
From cold, relief, tension, fear, revulsion . . . a combination?. . . Constance began to shake. After trying to lift her head, to make sure the bluecoats were indeed returning to Fort Kearny and not doubling back to drag her out of the wagon, kick her to the gallows, and stretch her neck before she could tell them why she had killed Major Balsam, Constance tried to control her breathing. Her head propped on the blanket and wood. Through the opening, she saw only the cold gray of Nebraska. The voices of the man who spoke through his nose and his companions had stopped.
The image of Major Warner Balsam suddenly filled the opening. Big, bearded, breath stinking of tobacco and whiskey. This man knew nothing of Byron or Tennyson; he understood only brutality. As soon as Constance realized this, she had asked him for money to buy passage back to Nashville.
That was the first time he struck her.
Then . . . she had wanted to kill herself.
A week later, Balsam said he was tired of her, but he knew she still might fetch a decent price at Charlie’s cribs, so he was dragging her out of the laundresses’ quarters and into Dobytown—the miserable village of soddies and earthen buildings in a raw, ugly country where the cold burned your skin, stiffened your hair, and stopped blood from flowing.
When he shoved her against the privy’s door and put his tongue in her ear, saying something about one more trip for memory’s sake before she whored herself to death, she spit in his face. He slapped her savagely, kneed her savagely between her legs, doubling her over. She had reached out to break her fall, landed against him, laughing, and found the wooden handle of something sheathed in his boot top. When he jerked her to her feet, the weapon came out of his boot. He pushed her against the privy. She tried to scream, but his big hand grabbed her throat and began to squeeze. Harder. Harder. She could not breathe. She could barely see him. He pressed his palm tighter. He laughed.
God, she remembered praying.
And He gave her strength. And Major Warner Balsam looked down and now saw the knife in her hand, yet still he laughed. He dared her, “Use it, bitch.”
Then his hand fell from her throat, and he staggered back.
And that was all she remembered.
Yet it must have been a dream. The knife. The major. The man with the nasal voice and a vocabulary that was 79 percent vulgarities, and the salt pork, and the lieutenant saying that the major had been murdered.
Because Major Warner Balsam had climbed into the back of the wagon. And Constance Beckett screamed and wanted to keep on screaming till a nasal drawl silenced her.
“Shut up, woman, or Lieutenant Gibbons and his boys will be loping back here and you’ll be lynched before sundown.” The voice added profanity Constance had never heard, even from Balsam’s lips.
“That’s better.”
A little man squatted beside her.
“The Bulgarian is brewing some tea,” the runt said. Maybe that meant something. Perhaps he spoke in code. “Coleman’s hitching the teams, and we should be lighting a shuck in fifteen, twenty minutes. That’ll give us time to get acquainted. I’ll talk.” He pulled out a writing tablet and a pencil. “You can write. I trust you learned your letters and such. If not, well, I’ll teach you Injun sign. So here’s the deal. I’ll speak first. You’re coming with us to Leavenworth, Kansas. It ain’t that I want you owing me your life. It ain’t that I figure I can get half your earnings because I know you killed Major Horse’s Arse. Let’s just say we’re two peas in a pod, lady. You can call me McDonald. Mickey McDonald. And I know it ain’t polite, at least not here on the frontier, but what the hell can I call you?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He walked over to the Eagle Corral on the corner of Jackson and Cover streets, to ask Foster how much he was getting for beef, so Foster showed him the three corrals—empty. “How much would you pay for a steer?” Story asked.
“Same rates as horses, mules, oxen, and donkeys,” Foster answered.
“I mean if you had a steer to sell?”
Foster rubbed his chin. “Well, selling steaks isn’t what we do for a living. This is a livery. Not a butcher shop. Or the Stonewall Store.” His expression changed. “What do you mean by steer?”
“You run a livery and a cattle yard, Foster. You know what a steer is.”<
br />
“You giving up gold for cattle, Story?” The liveryman chuckled. “Thinking about becoming a rancher? No profit in that. Tried my hand in Texas. Learned my lesson. That’s why I went into the livery business.”
Story hadn’t expected that bit of background. “Where in Texas?”
“Southern tip of Tarrant County. South of Fort Worth.”
“Good cattle town, Fort Worth?”
“Well, you got to understand, Story, there wasn’t much of a market for cattle in Texas. Not back when I was there. Hides. You sold the hides to a tannery and ate the beef. That’s changed some now, I hear. Got a letter from a cousin who went up the Shawnee Trail with a neighbor. Through Dallas, across the Indian Territory, into Missouri. Planned to sell a hundred head.” He stopped and blew out a long breath.
“Planned?” Story asked.
“You were in Kansas, Story. You remember bushwhackers and Jayhawkers during the war. Well, Missourians jumped the drovers, killed two, took the herd. Like I say, I’m glad I got out of ranching. And if you’re thinking about bringing cattle to Montana, you’ll want to stay out of Missouri and Kansas. Which will be damned hard to do, because most of the cattle you’ll find is in Texas. You serious about ranching?”
“I’m thinking about diversifying my interests. Cattle markets are good in Kansas City, better in Chicago. And I bet a man could do right well with a herd in the Gallatin Valley.”
“By Jehovah, Story, you sound serious.”
“Ever heard me tell a joke, Foster?”
The man studied Story harder. “Wait till I tell Culver about that. Nelson Story. Rancher.”
“Now, you haven’t answered my question. How much would you pay for a steer?”
“To eat?”
Story nodded.
“Whatever the professor over at the Post says beef’s selling for in Chicago, we’d match that, I’m sure. Then Culver and me would quadruple the price and sell it to Solomon Star, who’d triple that price before he sold it out of his store. Like I said, Story, it’s economics.”
A Thousand Texas Longhorns Page 7