Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  The lion lay on top of someone half hidden in a snowbank, its back to Drew. It turned and sprang into a defensive stance as it heard him, and the lips pulled away from its teeth so fast the upper portion of its head appeared to gather itself in a series of creases back between its flattened ears. A hissing and rumbling came from its throat, and its long tail lashed snow from the body behind it. Drew raised his rifle, sighted and fired. The lion sprang straight up into the air, then fell across its victim, howling and thrashing. Drew levered another round into the chamber and fired again. The lion reared back and collapsed.

  Voices were approaching from the cabin. Drew came closer to the lion and nudged it with the rifle barrel. He saw the man beneath its body was Clarence, and Clarence was still alive despite the blood spilled around him on the snow.

  “Get him …?” he asked.

  “I got him.”

  “Come down hard on me … That’s a big cat.…”

  A faint whisper of breath came from Clarence’s mouth, then stopped. His eyes remained open, but Drew knew he was dead. Nate and Lodi entered the clearing. Drew noticed for the first time the coffeepot and cup near Clarence; the man had died while bringing warmth to Drew. Lodi held his lamp near to Clarence.

  “Gone,” he said.

  “I told him not to come out with no damn coffee,” said Nate. “It had to go and get Clarence instead of the goddamn Pinkerton.… By God, that feller won’t live if Clarence ain’t.”

  Nate headed in the direction of the chair and Torrence. Drew wondered if there was any way to stop him, and decided there was not.

  Lodi was admiring the lion. “Damn, that’s a big one. Skinny, though—see the ribs on it? Looks like you got him clean through the chest, then again in the side, both good hits. Clarence never did listen to good advice.”

  “Kids.”

  “Say what?”

  “He had kids, and a wife. Three wives.”

  “Well, that’s the end of Clarence.”

  Nate’s .45 boomed among the trees.

  “And that’s the end of Torrence. Don’t look so down-in-the-mouth, Bones. You didn’t ask for no coffee. It just happened that way.”

  Both stared at the dead man and the lion until Nate returned. “You fellers know how to skin a cat?” Nate asked.

  “Not me,” said Lodi.

  “They’re good eating if it’s done right. You know how, Bones?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know how to kill a man as needs killing either, do you?”

  “Any man I decide needs killing, I can kill.”

  “You say.”

  “I don’t want to hear argument,” Lodi told them. “Get packed up. I want to be gone from here before sunrise. If there’s one Pinkerton been sniffing around, there’ll be others.”

  “What about Clarence?” Drew asked.

  “We don’t have time for burying. The ground’s like rock anyway, clear through April.”

  “And Torrence?”

  “He’s comfy enough,” said Nate. “Got himself a chair.”

  “They’ll both be taken care of by varmints. Get going.”

  Riding away from the cabin by the light of dawn, Drew knew a part of himself had been left behind in the woods, a part he should have fought harder to hold on to. The thing left behind was just a sliver of a larger thing inside him, a reservoir of sorts, containing his elemental human soul, which Drew supposed had been created with a full measure of goodness inside it. This soul reservoir was probably of finite proportions, Drew reasoned, and he had lost a spoonful of it forever.

  “Don’t be long-in-the-face, Bones,” Lodi told him. “All of us have got more money now. That’s what happens when a man dies. That’s his legacy to his friends. Clarence wouldn’t want to see you looking so miserable, boy.”

  “He’s a sorry-looking son of a bitch anyway,” Nate said.

  Drew ignored him. He knew he would kill Nate someday, and he had no doubt at all that he could do so without losing another piece of the best part of himself.

  34

  Lovey Doll recognized as one of her virtues the ability to concentrate with single-minded purpose on a subject of her choosing. Since rich men were the only subject of any real interest to her, Lovey Doll spent many hours considering their ways. As a species, rich men were becoming less available for her consumption than had once been the case. Lovey Doll knew the mirror did not lie. It was time to get for herself a rich man who would take care of her in perpetuity, even in the event of his death. To ensure that the mortality of the male would not inconvenience her plans for a life of luxurious ease, Lovey Doll would have to marry. She had never been married, despite sharing the lives and fortunes of a number of wealthy men, so the prospect had the added appeal of novelty.

  Being that she had moved her things to Glory Hole, the man in question would have to be Leo Brannan, the richest man in the nation’s western half, it was said. That he had a wife already was seen by Lovey Doll as no great obstacle in her path to winning him. Lovey Doll, although not a religious woman, believed God might possibly have blessed her enterprise when it became known that the wife had lost an arm in a freakish accident, and had thereafter taken to her room like a mad recluse. No normal man could tolerate such behavior for long, Lovey Doll was sure, and when the time came for him to stray in search of more pleasant pastures, she would be prepared. The fact that Brannan’s only child was a girl, ugly and a little crazy, it was said, made Lovey Doll’s plans even more viable. All rich men required an heir, a boy to pass their wealth on to, and Lovey Doll was even prepared to give birth, if that was required, though the thought of herself swelling out like a barrel was repugnant. The winning of Leo Brannan from his wife, marriage and impregnation: it would all have to be accomplished without delay, before her mirror told Lovey Doll she was no longer the fairest of them all, and before the money she had raised by selling her jewelry was gone.

  A close study of her target proved difficult. The man had little interest in public appearances, and on the one occasion she caught a glimpse of him outside the mining office, having waited for more than two hours, she was surprised to see how modestly dressed he was, and how very unremarkable he seemed, if his mismatched eyes of blue and brown were overlooked; an ordinary fellow, still quite young despite the early symptoms of a potbelly and baldness. He certainly did not look like anyone capable of resisting her. Lovey Doll went home with the warm glow inside that came from certainty, a conviction that if she made her first move soon, it would pay off quickly and handsomely.

  Lovey Doll had changed her name before arriving in Glory Hole, deeming it prudent to be known from that time on as Imogen Starr. She lived in a modest boardinghouse run by a Mrs. Garfinkle, the wife of one of Brannan’s lower echelon of bookkeepers. The size of her room, and the plain fare served at mealtimes, were a daily reminder to Lovey Doll of how very far she had fallen since being obliged to leave Denver. The circuitous journey itself—south to Pueblo, west to Salida, then north again to Leadville and the Glory Hole spur—had taken a day and a night, even though the town lay less than a hundred miles from her starting point as the crow flies, and Lovey Doll had taken it as an omen of difficult times ahead. Now that she had Leo Brannan in her sights, Glory Hole’s inaccessibility was simply another personal challenge. After they were married, she would tell Leo he ought to build a direct line from Glory Hole to Denver, no matter what the cost or technical problems involved in laying track over the great divide might be. It would be her first act of influence upon him, and they would visit Denver frequently to savor its brighter lights, its faster pace and flashier style. She might even have Leo build her a mansion in Denver so they might live there for most of the year. That would be delightful, thought Lovey Doll, and she did not seriously doubt that all of it would happen the way she wanted.

  By surreptitious inquiry of Mrs. Garfinkle and her dreary little husband, Lovey Doll learned that Leo had of late begun making the lengthy, three-cornered trip to Denver by ra
il every other week or so, always in the company of a young man named Rowland Price. The private Brannan car made the trip less arduous for Leo than for the common traveler on that route, but it was not clear just why Denver had become such a magnet for the man. He had been in the habit of visiting the Denver Mining Exchange no more than twice a year until recently, and had not even owned a private railroad car until the advent of the mysterious Mr. Price.

  There was speculation throughout the town, and presumably in Denver too, over the back and forth journeyings of western America’s richest son, but Mr. Garfinkle confessed himself ignorant of their meaning. “I guess I’d be the last to know,” he said, and Lovey Doll silently agreed. She believed Mr. Garfinkle admired her person very much, but was too afraid of his wife to do more than glance in Lovey Doll’s direction, even when addressing her in conversation at the dinner table. The other guests at Mrs. Garfinkle’s were equally nonplussed, but surmised that whatever it was that took their patron away from the valley for days at a time, it was bound to make him more millions, and that could only be good for everyone in Glory Hole.

  Lovey Doll’s stratagem for causing her path to cross that of Leo was arrived at after considerable thought. It had the boldness and simplicity of a classic maneuver, and while not in any way original, would almost certainly prove effective when used upon a man as unworldly as Leo Brannan, for all his wealth, apparently was. The one unknown factor was Price, who seemed to have become closer to Leo than his own shadow; Lovey Doll would cope with his presence somehow.

  The car had been a worthwhile, if extravagant, investment. Painted a deep maroon, with gilt curlicues around the windows, it presented a splendid sight. The interior was velvet plush, the studded leather armchairs commodious, the sleeping quarters palatial by any standard. At one end of the car was a small kitchen, amply stocked with fresh food and old liquor, more than Leo alone, or Leo and Rowland Price together, could possibly have consumed on the ride to Denver and back. The modern toilet apparatus, with its hand-carved mahogany seat and porcelain pedestal, was the last word in comfort. Leo, still not trustful of the menacingly sloshing cistern poised above the user, referred to it as his throne of Damocles.

  En route to Denver again with Price, Leo pondered his new and secretive way of life. He was aware of Glory Hole’s conjecturings regarding the frequent trips, and had no plans to satisfy anyone’s curiosity. The scenario laid out for him by the Praetorians was a long-term venture, with public declaration at least five years distant, or whenever the newborn cabal within Big Circle was assured it could successfully take control of its parent. He was being groomed for the role of a lifetime, and his visits to Denver, being newsworthy because of his fame, were explained to reporters as business meetings at the Mining Exchange.

  Such meetings did take place, but there were other, more important gatherings for Leo to attend. Surprisingly, the members of Big Circle who previously had blackballed the admission of Leo Brannan into their ranks had relented quite suddenly, and issued the most cordial of invitations. Price had been suspicious of the offer at first, then advised Leo to accept. “After all, to be a Praetorian, you must first be persona grata with Big Circle. Now you may talk to every man inside the larger group, and not alert them to the stirrings within their own organization. It’s the perfect cover, a Trojan horse that places you inside the citadel years in advance of our own plans! You’ll be within the circle that’s within the circle, Leo, and only the initiated will know.”

  Access to Leo whenever he visited Denver was strictly controlled by Price. After departing from the smoky chambers of the Mining Exchange, he was escorted to the plush sanctums of Big Circle, where he saw several of the same faces he had seen at his previous engagement, and from there he would be taken to another place, wherein several of the individuals he had so recently been talking with also appeared. Leo was obliged to learn who was an important figure in Colorado’s mining elite, who a part of Big Circle, and who a Praetorian. Some men were all three, and the juggling of their separate identities was not an easy task for Leo. The secret of his being the newest Praetorian was entrusted to a very few. He was whisked from his hotel room via back stairways and closed carriages to their various meetings, and these were never held in the same place twice.

  Leo found he took to the atmosphere of mystery and subterfuge with an enthusiasm that was almost boyish, and was heedful never to reveal this aspect of his participation, even to Rowland Price, who accompanied him everywhere. Price was well liked by all members of Big Circle, and so was considered by the Praetorians to be the ideal companion for their leader-in-waiting. For Leo, the excitement of being feted and flattered had come too late in life to turn his head. He considered himself a practical man, a pragmatist, and no fool to be manipulated by scheming inferiors. He accepted the Praetorians for the idealists they clearly were, and was committed to their cause. Still, he would have cooperated with none of it had the pursuit of a clandestine goal proved less invigorating. Leo required the stimulus more often, now that he had become accustomed to it, and so would travel to Denver on the least pretext, not just to satisfy the faith held in him by others, but to get away from Elk House and Zoe.

  It had not been his fault she had lost her arm, but his wife’s behavior suggested it had. Leo no longer pretended to understand the workings of Zoe’s mind. Her thoughts were as hidden from him as her daughter’s. They were strange birds of distinctly esoteric feather, and he felt uncomfortable in their presence nowadays. His own secret life paralleled that of his wife and stepdaughter, and Elk House contained two separate worlds as a result. He supposed he had never truly understood Zoe. It was she who had caused his elevation to the upper strata of the very wealthy with her belief in Omie’s vision of a golden stag beneath the ground, yet Zoe had not once reminded him of it, nor mentioned her audacious salting of the worthless mine she had bought for him from his partners. She gave the impression of being above such tawdry stuff as the accumulation of riches, and her silence on the subject of Leo’s fortune and its peculiar beginnings had of late begun to irritate him. Zoe’s removal of herself and Omie from his life was a kind of insult, Leo thought, a standing away, as if the business he practiced was far below the realm occupied by the pair of incomprehensible females he once had shared a humble cabin and life with.

  Everything had changed, and the changes had begun long before Zoe lost her arm. Leo doubted that what had been left behind would ever return, and compensated himself for the loss (he had genuinely been fond of them both) by concentrating even more intensely on those things of the material world which they rejected. Leo was a comparatively young man still, with physical needs that were no longer met by his legal bedmate. The absence of carnal love in his life was something Leo had not dared to dwell upon at length, preferring to lose himself in his usual work as owner of the nation’s most successful string of gold mines, and more recently as the undisclosed agent of political reform awaiting his chance to walk upon an even larger stage. Satisfaction of the flesh was not essential to the business of living, even if its denial did produce innumerable sleepless nights.

  As he watched some of the most beautiful land in the west roll by his window, Leo felt a little sorry for himself. It seemed that a man could never have all that a man required, but must sacrifice a measure of something or other in order to maintain whatever it was that pleased him most. Leo was not ready to accept that wealth was the thing that pleased him most, but it was certainly the only commodity he possessed in abundance. If there was a moral lesson to be drawn from his life, he could neither approve of nor acquiesce in the meanness of its parameters. He was not a happy man, and so was ideally positioned to embrace salvation in the appealing form of Lovey Doll Pines.

  It was Price who first made him aware. Leo had been lost in thought as he stared at the mountainside ravines, when Price approached him. “We have a stowaway,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “A woman on the front platform. She must have climbed ov
er the rail from the last passenger car. She says she won’t go away until you speak with her.”

  “Remarkable. Is she a lunatic?”

  “Not in my opinion.”

  “What does she want to speak with me about?”

  “She wouldn’t say. She was most polite.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to see her before she tries to climb back and falls under the wheels.”

  “I’ll open her purse first, if you don’t mind.”

  “What for?”

  “To be sure she isn’t carrying a pistol.”

  “Good God, Rowland, have you been reading dime novels? Why on earth would she wish to shoot me?”

  “Who knows? A grudge of some kind, real or imagined.”

  “But you say she appears sane.”

  “Attractive too, but that’s beside the point. If you want to see her, I’ll have to search her purse.”

  “Then do so, and don’t keep the lady waiting.”

  Lovey Doll was presented to Leo several minutes later. He thought her a most presentable woman, smartly dressed, with a charming smudge of soot on her blushing cheek.

  “Good day to you, ma’am.”

  “And to yourself, Mr. Brannan. I apologize for the dramatic intrusion, but really, how else does a nobody such as myself find a way into your presence?”

  “How indeed. Please sit down. Price, be so kind as to fetch our guest a cup of coffee, would you?”

  Lovey Doll arranged herself in one of the leather armchairs. Leo took a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to her. “Pardon me, but you have a trace of smokestack on your left cheek.”

  She took the handkerchief and dabbed at her face.

  “I am Miss Imogen Starr, Mr. Brannan, and I have a bone to pick with you.”

  “What manner of bone might that be, Miss Starr?”