Evidently, she couldn’t find a word bad enough to describe the way she felt about Sophie. So instead she balled up a fist and swung it at Sophie’s head.
Sophie saw the blow coming and jerked aside with a startled yell. She launched a blow of her own and slapped Della across the face.
That was a mistake. The hard life Della had led had made her quick to defend herself. She shoved Sophie back, then went after her, slapping and clawing.
John Henry moved toward them, intending to break up the fight. That might be more difficult than it sounded. As a lawman back in Indian Territory, he had gotten in the middle of plenty of ruckuses, but they were always between men so he didn’t have to worry about being too careful with them. He could wallop a few heads with his gun barrel if he couldn’t make the combatants listen to reason any other way.
He couldn’t do that with Sophie and Della. He had to try to stop them from hurting each other without inflicting any damage on them himself.
Before he could manage to get between them, Sophie lowered her head and tackled Della around the waist, forcing her to stagger backwards. The back of Della’s knees hit the edge of the bed. She fell across the mattress, and Sophie sprawled on top of her, striking at her with both hands.
John Henry got hold of Sophie’s waist and dragged her off the other young woman. He turned so that his body was between them, and when Della came up off the bed with fire in her eyes and tried to get to Sophie again, John Henry fended her off with one arm while he kept the other arm looped tightly around Sophie. She was struggling to get loose from his grip so that she could resume the battle.
“You two just stop it right now!” John Henry commanded. His voice was loud with exasperation. “Neither one of you has any reason to be acting like this.”
“I don’t like her!” Della said. “She’s a nasty, stuck-up bitch!”
“At least I’m not a two-bit tramp like you!” Sophie shot back at the blonde.
“You’re probably not worth two bits! No man in his right mind would pay that for you. She’s a cold fish, John Henry. You can tell that by looking at her.”
John Henry didn’t think any such thing was true, but he didn’t figure saying that would help the situation. So instead he said, “Just be quiet, both of you. You’re going to disturb the other folks in the hotel. This ruckus has gone on long enough.”
“It was just getting started,” Sophie said through clenched teeth.
“Well, it’s over now,” John Henry insisted. “Della, I think you should go.”
She stared at him coldly.
“So you’re picking her over me?”
“I’m not picking either of you,” John Henry said. “I just don’t want both of you leaving at the same time and starting this fight all over again out in the hall.”
“You’re going to make me leave, too?” Sophie demanded.
“I think we’ve said everything to each other that we have to say right now.”
“Maybe for good, if that’s the way you feel,” Sophie threatened.
John Henry still didn’t want that, but he couldn’t have the two women trying to kill each other in his hotel room, either.
Della said, “Fine. I’m not going to stay where I’m not wanted.”
“You’re not wanted here, I can promise you that,” Sophie said. “John Henry, let go of me, damn it!”
“In a minute,” he told her. “Della, you go on now. I’ll see you sometime at the Silver Spur.”
Della stalked out of the room, throwing one last murderous glance over her shoulder. John Henry used a foot to nudge the door closed behind her. Only when the door was firmly shut between Sophie and Della did he let go of Sophie.
She straightened her dress, pushed back some of the rich brown hair that had fallen in front of her eyes, and glowered at him.
“I thought you had better taste than that, John Henry, I really did.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Sophie. There’s nothing going on between Della and me.”
“Not for lack of her trying, I’ll bet,” Sophie snapped.
John Henry shrugged. It was true that Della had made it abundantly clear from their first meeting that she was interested in him. That didn’t mean he returned the interest in anything other than a friendly way.
“This doesn’t have to have any effect on matters between us,” he said.
“I’m not so sure about that,” she replied coolly. “If we’re going to work together, we have to trust each other, and I’m not sure I trust you anymore.”
“Just because some saloon girl set her cap for me?” he asked in amazement as he spread his hands. “How is that my fault? I don’t have any control over that.”
“You could have told me about her.”
“I didn’t see any point in it. It just didn’t seem important. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
Sophie regarded him with narrow eyes.
“I’m not sure there is any ‘us’ anymore,” she said. “I’m going to have to think about it.”
“Don’t think too long,” John Henry said bluntly. “They’re bringing the gold down from the mountains the day after tomorrow.”
Her breath seemed to catch in her throat.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I’ve got sources,” he said, not wanting to admit just yet that Jason True had told him.
“You’re sure of the information?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Then we really don’t have much time, do we?”
“That gold will be here before you know it,” John Henry said.
“And the gold is the important thing.” Sophie nodded slowly, as much to herself as to him. “All right. I guess I just lost my head there for a minute. It’s none of my business what you do with women like that.”
“I haven’t done anything,” John Henry said.
“You don’t have to lie. I really don’t care anymore.”
“I’m not—” John Henry stopped. Let her think whatever she wanted, he told himself. Like she said, it didn’t really matter. “Was there anything else we need to talk about?”
“I suppose not. Not right now, anyway. The three of us will have to get together tomorrow to discuss our plans.”
“You mean you, me, and Doc?”
Sophie sniffed and said, “I certainly didn’t mean you, me, and . . . what was that creature’s name? Della? The three of us are not going to be doing anything together, John Henry. You might as well get that thought out of your head right now.”
“It was never in there,” John Henry promised her. His only thoughts were of how to protect that gold bullion until it was in those armored, well-guarded Wells Fargo wagons and on its way to Lordsburg.
That was plenty as far as he was concerned.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Della was still seething as she walked back toward the Silver Spur. She had slipped out of the saloon the back way so that Royal Bouchard wouldn’t see her leaving and want to know where she was going. Bouchard was a good man, not without his flaws, certainly, but nowhere near as abusive as some of the men she had worked for in the past.
One of his flaws, though, was curiosity. If he had known that she was on her way to throw herself at John Henry Sixkiller one last time, he probably would have tried to talk her out of it. For her own good, he would have said.
The way things had turned out, maybe that would have been better, Della thought. Then she wouldn’t have felt like such a fool when she saw that stuck-up brown-haired witch in John Henry’s hotel room.
She hadn’t heard the woman’s name and didn’t know who she was or why she’d been there. She’d been slightly relieved when John Henry insisted that the brunette wasn’t his wife, but clearly there was some sort of relationship between them, something deeper than the friendship that evidently was the only thing he felt for her.
Della sighed. With the sort of life she had led, she should have known better than to let herself feel anythi
ng genuine for a man. That always caused trouble in the long run, and sometimes in the short run as well.
She hadn’t reached the Silver Spur yet. In fact, she was just passing the saloon called Red Mike’s, when two men slapped the bat wings aside and stepped out onto the boardwalk, blocking her path. From their reactions when they saw her, Della could tell that they hadn’t gotten in her way intentionally, but that didn’t make them move. They stayed right where they were, so that she would have had to step down into the street to go around them.
“Well, howdy,” one of the men said with a grin that was half leer. He squinted at her in the light that came through the grimy front windows of Red Mike’s. “You’re one of them fancy gals from up at the Silver Spur, ain’t you?”
“Excuse me,” Della said. “Could you let me by?”
“No, I don’t rightly think I could,” the man said. Della recognized him now as Ben Morton, one of Billy Ray Gilmore’s men. The other one was part of Gilmore’s gang, too. After a moment she came up with his name: Wes McCallum. Morton went on, “I want to talk to you for a minute.”
Della wished she had put on a jacket or a shawl of some sort before leaving the Silver Spur. The way both men were looking at her bare shoulders and the exposed upper portion of her bosom made her uncomfortable.
After all the men she’d been to bed with, that didn’t seem like it should be possible, but this was different somehow. For one thing, she was out on the street tonight, not in the familiar confines of the saloon where help was just a quick shout away in case anything went wrong.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, hoping she could get rid of them quickly.
McCallum said, “We wouldn’t mind availin’ ourselves of the pleasure o’ your company for a spell, missy.”
“Come on up to the Silver Spur, then,” Della said. “I’m sure we can work something out.”
“What’s wrong with right here?” Morton demanded.
“On the boardwalk? That’s sort of public, isn’t it?”
“I was thinking more of over there,” Morton said as he gestured toward the nearby mouth of an alley.
“You’ve got me pegged wrong, mister,” Della snapped, somewhat offended by the suggestion. “I’m not some sort of two-bit—”
She stopped. She’d been about to say that she wasn’t a two-bit tramp, but that was exactly what the brunette in John Henry’s room had accused her of being, she thought. Maybe that’s all she really was. She had no right to put on airs of any kind.
Alleys were smelly, dirty, and uncomfortable, though, and a girl had to have some standards, even a saloon girl. She shook her head.
“You’ll have to come up to the Silver Spur,” she insisted.
Morton moved closer to her, close enough for her to smell the whiskey on his breath as he said, “You don’t understand. I said here.”
“And I said no,” Della shot back with anger flashing in her eyes.
McCallum growled, “Hell, don’t argue with the slut, Ben. Just take her if you want her.”
“That’s just what I’m gonna do,” Morton said.
He lunged at Della, who tried to twist away but couldn’t escape him. He grabbed one of her arms, spun her around so that he was behind her, and clapped his other hand over her mouth so she couldn’t cry out.
“Gimme a hand with her, and you’ll get a turn, too,” Morton told his companion.
McCallum chuckled and said, “Sounds good to me.”
He took hold of Della’s other arm, and together they dragged her toward the alley. She squirmed and tried to get away, but her strength was no match for theirs. As the darkness of the alley swallowed up the three figures, she wished she was back in John Henry’s hotel room, even if that infuriating brunette was still there.
At this moment, though, John Henry Sixkiller might as well have been a hundred miles away for all the good he could do her.
* * *
Della didn’t put up a fight for very long. For one thing, she knew that if she gave the two outlaws too much trouble, they would be more likely to hurt her. It would be easy enough for them to kill her if they wanted to, and nobody in Purgatory would do anything about it or even care, except maybe Royal Bouchard. To everybody else she would be just a dead whore, a nuisance to be consigned to an unmarked and forgotten grave on Boot Hill.
So she calmed her raging temper and resigned herself to cooperate with them. The sooner this ordeal was over with, the better.
Not surprisingly, that didn’t take long. Both of them were drunk and eager, and Della knew all the tricks of the trade. When they were both finished, she started straightening her clothes while the men stumbled off toward the back end of the alley.
They stopped to roll and light quirlies, and McCallum said, “Once we’ve got our share of that gold, we can buy ourselves better whores than that one.”
Della felt a surge of resentment at those overheard words, then told herself she was crazy to care what a couple of dumb brutes like those two thought of her.
Besides, the word “gold” had caught her ear.
With their lust satisfied, Morton and McCallum had already forgotten her. She slipped closer to them as they smoked and talked.
“Once we’ve got our share of the gold, we can buy damn near anything we want,” Morton said. “Even divvied up, $75,000 goes a long way.”
Della’s breath froze in her throat. Seventy-five thousand dollars was a lot more money than she would ever make in her life. It was a lot more than she would even lay eyes on. She could barely imagine that much money.
Like everybody else in Purgatory, she had heard whispered rumors that the three big mine owners, Jason True, Arnold Goodman, and Dan Lacey, were talking about combining their bullion into one big shipment. That would amount to a fortune like the one Morton and McCallum were talking about, so she had a feeling the rumors were true.
From the sound of what they said, the thing was going to happen soon. And it was no wonder that Billy Ray Gilmore’s gang planned to go after it. That much gold would be too tempting a target for any outlaw to ignore.
Hell, Della thought, other than whoring she’d always been pretty law-abiding, and it was more than enough to tempt her.
Maybe lucky for her, she wouldn’t have any idea how to go about stealing a big pile of bullion like that. So her thoughts turned to some other way she might be able to make some money off of this situation. Maybe the mine owners would give her a reward if she tipped them off to what the outlaws were planning.
On the other hand, True, Goodman, and Lacey weren’t fools. They would have to be aware already that Gilmore might make a try for the gold. So it probably wouldn’t work for her to approach them, she thought . . . unless she had some really specific information to sell to them, information that would allow them to thwart whatever Gilmore had in mind.
Shoot, she would take just one bar of that bullion as a reward. That would be just fine with her, she told herself as she slipped closer to the two men who stood at the end of the alley, smoking. She didn’t want to miss anything they might have to say.
“You really think we’ll be able to get our hands on it?” McCallum asked.
“I don’t see why not. You know Billy Ray always gets what he goes after. And this time he’s got that fella Sixkiller workin’ as an inside man at the bank.”
Della’s breath froze in her throat. John Henry was one of the outlaws? She couldn’t believe that. It didn’t make any sense. He had killed Junior Clemens and Jack Bayne, after all, and shot that varmint Duke Rudd and his dim-witted friend Sam Logan. He couldn’t be part of the gang.
“Yeah, well, I don’t much like that,” McCallum said. “It’s a mistake lettin’ Sixkiller in on the deal. I don’t trust him.”
“Neither does Billy Ray, but if he can help us get our hands on that bullion, I reckon I can put up with him for a while.” An evil-sounding chuckle came from Morton. “At least until we’ve got the gold. Then it’ll be easy enough to put a
bullet in Sixkiller’s back. Pay him off in lead instead of bullion.”
“Yeah, I like the sound of that,” McCallum agreed.
Della’s heart slugged in her chest. She didn’t want to believe that John Henry was working with these outlaws, but they seemed convinced of it. And even though she prided herself on being a good judge of men’s character—she saw so much of it, and so much bad—she had known John Henry for only two days. She supposed she could be wrong about him.
“Yep, two days from now we’ll all be rich men,” Morton mused as he flicked away the butt of his smoke. The orange coal at the end of it made an arc through the air. “Hit the bank as soon as the last part of the shipment gets here, before the guards have a chance to get set. That’s mighty smart of Billy Ray, setting it up like that.”
There was the information she needed, Della thought. She could tip off Mayor Cravens, as well as the three mine owners, about the precise time the Gilmore gang intended to strike. They ought to be grateful enough to her for that to make it worth her while. She was still shocked and disappointed that John Henry was part of the plot, but she forced that out of her mind as she began to slide along the wall toward the street.
Maybe she ought to go to John Henry first. He wasn’t actually a member of the gang; he was just working with them. If she told him that they planned to double-cross him and kill him as soon as the robbery was successful, maybe he would drop out of the plan. Yes, she decided, she would go back to the hotel first and hope that brunette harpy was gone by the time she got there.
“Hey,” Morton said suddenly, “where’d that whore go?”
Della froze in the shadows.
“Why?” McCallum asked with a chuckle. “You ain’t ready for another little fandango with her this soon, are you?”
“It ain’t that. I just don’t want her eavesdroppin’ on what we were just talkin’ about.”
“Oh, yeah,” McCallum said, sounding a little worried now. “Billy Ray told us to keep our traps shut, didn’t he? I guess between the whiskey and the lovin’, my mind got a mite muddled.” He paused. “Reckon it’s all right, though. She probably skedaddled back up to the Silver Spur as soon as we were finished with her.”
Day of Rage Page 16