by J. T. Edson
“Don’t call me Madam,” she said. “I am Eleonore Dumont. Would you like to hear how I came by the Madam Moustache name?”
“Why sure.”
“It is chilly, can’t we make ourselves more comfortable as we talk?”
“Anything you say,” Mark replied.
They stretched out side by side and he drew the blankets and suggans over them, then slipped an arm under her neck while her arms entwined with his.
Eleonore Dumont had been born to a middle class French Creole family but grew with the wanderlust in her feet. She left home to travel with a small show which presented plays like East Lynne to such backwood villages as they came across in their travels. One member of the show had been a retired Mississippi riverboat gambler and he taught the girl all he knew about the mysteries of gambling. She proved to be a willing learner and when the show finally broke up, as such shows always did, Eleonore found herself stranded in Wichita. There were few things a young woman might do to earn a living in the west, but none of them appealed to Eleonore. At last she decided to put her gambling knowledge to a test. Here she ran into her first snag. The saloons allowed women inside only as employees and a few gambling houses allowed women at all, none allowed them in the capacity of player.
In desperation Eleonore borrowed a man’s suit from the belongings of the disbanded company of actors, also a false moustache. In this she entered Bailey’s gambling house. Her luck stood fair and she brought her twenty dollar stake to two hundred on the faro layout, then joined a poker game. Once more the gods of chance smiled on their daughter and she cleaned out the players, winning over two thousand dollars. All this was possible only because Bailey did not believe in wasting money and had few lights except those fixed to illuminate the playing surface of his tables. In fact Eleonore might have taken her winnings and escaped undetected had not a sneeze blown her moustache on to the table.
At first Bailey had been furious when he found a woman not only entered his place but cleaned out a table. However, he saw the humorous side of it. He also saw the attraction Eleonore would offer to him. She started work two nights later, as a dealer at the faro layout. The story of how she came to get the job passed around and men crowded in to see Madame Moustache, the lady gambler. From that day, five years before, Eleonore had never looked back. She travelled considerably and as Madame Moustache became well known.
That then was the story of Madam Moustache—but Mark Counter did not hear it until the following day. After all the night was passing and it seemed foolish to waste time in talking.
At dawn Alice awoke to find Eleonore and Mark already up and about. Eleonore had already gathered wood and started a fire and now brewed coffee over it while Mark gathered in the horses.
“Good morning,” Alice greeted. “Sorry I overslept.”
“A woman of your age needs her beauty sleep, darling,” replied Eleonore.
“Look,” sighed Alice. “Let’s call the whole thing off, shall we. I hate to have to start making catty answers before breakfast.”
She unpacked her travelling clothes and the older of her maid’s costumes after they had eaten the food Eleonore cooked up. Handing the outfit to the dark-haired girl Alice suggested they went to the river, washed and changed.
Half an hour passed and the two women returned. The maid’s clothes fitted Eleonore a trifle loosely and she frowned in a threatening manner at Mark who looked her over with a grin.
“Don’t you dare say anything, my Mark!” she warned.
“All right. Where do you gals aim to go now?”
“Where are you going?” Alice asked.
“Holbrock. It’s a fair sized town up north of here.”
“That will do me, how about you, Madam?”
“I’ll go along, we can chaperone each other,” Eleonore answered. “I can telegraph Culver City and have them send my bags along.”
With their destination decided Mark helped the two women to prepare for the journey. They kept on the range until noon, then swung back towards where Mark guessed the stage route to be. It said much for his plainsman’s instinct that they found the trail, nothing more than the well worn ruts left by stages, horses and wagons travelling northwards to Holbrock.
They spent the night on the shores of a small lake. The proprieties were observed by them all. The girls bathed in the lake while Mark hunted for and shot a couple of cottontails for food, then they buried themselves in preparing a meal and let him have a swim. The proprieties were observed later too, for Eleonore went to bed on the seat of the carriage and most certainly was back there when Alice awoke the following morning.
Rather than push their horses too hard they spent a third night out on the range within four miles of Holbrock. They had supper and went to their respective beds as usual.
Mark heard the stealthy footsteps and felt the warm body wriggle alongside him and rolled over.
“Did I tell you how I became known as Poker Alice?”
The voice sounded just as cool, calm and collected as ever. It also came as quite a surprise to Mark, who had been expecting Eleonore. He could almost swear he heard a low chuckle from the carriage.
“Why’d it take you so long to decide to tell me?” he asked.
“My dear chap, one should never rush into—er, telling one’s life story.” Alice replied, slipping her hands around him and bringing her lips towards his face.
It appeared that Poker Alice had been born the only child to an eccentric younger son of a noble English house and that her mother died when she was just over a year old. Her father had been what she described as a bit of a masher, one of the men-about-town. Yet in his way he loved and cared for her and she grew up in an atmosphere of hunting, fishing, shooting as practiced in England. She could ride a horse or handle a team and could use a shotgun very well. From one of her father’s cronies, an earl whose family had lost its money in speculation which failed, she learned the secrets and arts of gambling.
On her father’s death, riding to hounds (to disprove a doctor’s theory that to do so with four broken ribs would prove dangerous), Alice took what she thought would be a trip around the world. In the United States she became fascinated with the gambling houses and with her calm assurance invaded the sacred domain of the male. Hoping to teach her a sharp lesson a group of poker players allowed her to sit in on their game. They taught her all right, to the tune of several thousand dollars of their money.
That night saw the birth of Poker Alice. She accepted the name they gave her and moved on. Seven years had passed and Alice’s name was known over the west. Unlike Eleonore she rarely took the dealer’s chair at a saloon faro layout, preferring to run her own poker game. She accepted Trent’s offer to come to Culver Creek more to see a new section of country than because she wished to work for the man, meaning only to stay on for a couple of weeks, then if the town looked like it could accommodate it, start her own game. Her stay had been shorter than she expected.
However, Mark did not hear her story that night. What he did learn was that beyond the cool, calm and regally carried exterior Alice was all woman and did not come second even to the warm, volatile and vibrant Eleonore.
All in all Mark would not have minded if the journey to Holbrock took another couple of days instead of finishing the following morning.
The carriage horses stepped out in a lively manner as if they knew they would be in a stall and getting grain fed when they reached the town. Mark rode his blood-bay alongside and listened to the story of Poker Alice’s life, while Eleonore, with memories of telling her own life story still fresh in her memory, grinned broadly and winked at Mark.
Alice used the rest of the time until they came into sight of Holbrock to tell her life story. She stopped talking as the horses topped the last ridge and they saw the town at the foot of the slope.
From the look of things the town had grown considerably since the time, almost four years back. Dusty Fog and the Ysabel Kid paid it a brief but hectic visit. Brenton
Humboldt’s meat packing plant stood at the far side of the town, large and busy looking. The main street now looked more imposing and behind it ran other smaller streets leading to the houses of the workers at the plant and the subsidiary industries of the town.
On the side towards which Mark and his party now headed lay the homes of the richer members of the community, the influential citizens who controlled and ran the town. Showpiece of them all was Humboldt’s house, a big, fine looking building of white stone and considerable elegance, with a large well cared for flower garden and lawns before it, a high iron railing fence around it, and a set of open wrought iron gates from which a gravel path swept in a curve to before the main entrance to the house.
Mark felt a little sad as he saw the gates ahead of him, soon he would be leaving the two girls to take on the boring task of being an honored guest at the wedding of two people he had never met and did not know. The two women would carry on into town, put up at the best hotel and make their plans for the future, most likely he would not see them again. Neither woman would be likely to open her game in town and probably did not intend to stay on any longer than it took to book a ride on the stage, or rest the carriage team. He grinned as he wondered what Humboldt would say if he rolled up and introduced Poker Alice and Madam Moustache as his friends. It might be amusing to see Humboldt’s dilemma as he tried to get rid of the girls without offending Ole Devil Hardin’s representative. Only the fact that such an action might embarrass the girls prevented Mark from carrying out his idea.
For their first arrival into Holbrock, Eleonore had made her long hair up in a bun and hidden it under a maid’s cap. The dress she wore, especially when she sat on the driving box by Alice, hid and effectively disguised her figure so she looked little or nothing like the vivacious and beautiful Madam Moustache. Alice, in her severe travelling clothes and with her hair taken back tightly under a hat, did not look like the coolly beautiful woman who dealt cards in high stake poker games.
Being aware of the vindictive nature of Trent’s kind they quite expected him to pull strings and have a warrant out for the arrest of Alice and Eleonore, then cause their return to Culver Creek where he might force them to pay for the damage his greed brought to his saloon. So the two women decided to adopt the simple disguise on their arrival in Holbrock and to see how the land lay before making a move.
Suddenly Eleonore drew her breath in with a hiss as she stared at two riders who turned from a side street ahead of them, glanced their way and started to ride along the street towards the town center, Mark studied the men and wondered what attracted Eleonore’s attention to the men. To his eyes they, although wearing cowhand clothes, spelled hard-cases. They did not sit their horses or show that indefinable something which identified one cowhand to another. From the look of their low-hanging guns they were no more than a couple of toughs who would hire out fighting skill to the highest bidder. Yet Mark could almost swear he had seen some kind of a law badge on one’s vest. Of course, their kind did find employment as deputies under a certain type of town marshal or county sheriff and Mark did not know what sort of law Holbrock might have.
“Those men!” Eleonore said, speaking quickly, but quietly. “The one on the right worked for Trent. I saw them together on the day I arrived and learned the man was a hired tough, supposedly a deputy, but really on Trent’s payroll.”
“You sure of that?” Mark asked, seeing the men talking together and taking surreptitious glances towards his party.
“Of course. I arrived in Culver Creek two days early, so as to look around and try to learn what sort of a place Trent ran. I saw that man and I rarely forget a face.”
Mark could guess what the men were doing. They had seen him and noted the two women. In a moment they would ride back to start asking questions. So far they were not close enough to recognize either woman and make-up concealed such marks of the fight as remained. Possibly the two men did not believe Poker Alice and Madam Moustache would be riding side by side in a carnage and on amiable terms, but they might turn and come up to check.
“In there!” Mark snapped, indicating the gates leading to Humboldt’s home.
To give her credit Alice reacted fast. She swung the head of her team towards the gates and Mark followed. He threw a glance towards the two men, seeing they had started to bring their horses around towards him. Mark followed the carriage and caught up alongside as it approached the front of the house.
Just as Alice halted her carriage before the imposing main entrance, the doors were flung open and Brenton Humboldt emerged in something of a hurry. He came to a halt at the sight of his visitors and a frown puckered his brow, for he did not know any of them.
“Mr. Humboldt?” Mark asked, although the big, pompous looking man in the expensive broadcloth suit fitted Dusty’s description so well that he could be none other than Mr. Brenton Humboldt himself.
“That’s correct.”
Even as he made his reply Humboldt studied the party at his doors with some interest. He noted the team horses and the stylish, though trail-marked, carriage, both of which cost good money. Then he looked up at Alice. In some way she contrived to look far different from Poker Alice, yet still retained her air of refinement and gentility. Humboldt noted her expensive, though travel-stained clothes of impeccable good taste and her calm, dignified demeanor. He glanced at the obvious lady’s maid seated by Alice, then finally studied Mark.
“I’m Mark Counter, from the OD Connected,” Mark introduced. “Dusty couldn’t get here, or the Kid, so I came.”
A delighted beam crossed Humboldt’s face, along with a flickering expression of relief, although Mark could not be sure whether this be caused by his arrival or the fact that the Ysabel Kid would not be on hand for the wedding.
Humboldt stepped forward with his hand extended. “Pleased to see you, Mr. Counter, or may I call you Mark? We were despairing of seeing anybody from the OD Connected, the wedding is tomorrow at eleven. Get down. I’ll have one of the servants take care of your horse.”
“I’ve got to take Lady Alice along to the hotel first,” Mark answered. “She’s travelling alone, except for her maid and I said I’d see her safe.”
“Lady Alice?”
“Why sure. This is Lady Alice Hatton-Green. I met them out on the range this morning.”
“I’m out here with pater,” Alice put in, guessing what Mark had in mind and going along with it. “He’s up-country on a big game hunt, but I decided I would come along and see one of your western towns.”
“Pater?” asked the puzzled Humboldt.
“My father, Lord Hatton-Green. I suppose there is a hotel in town?”
“Well, yes, there is,” agreed Humboldt. “But I’m sure we could put your Ladyship up here for a few days.”
“I wouldn’t wish to put you to any trouble,” Alice replied and lifted her hands to start the team forward.
She hoped that Mark knew what he was doing, for the two men sat their horses across the street and in front of the gate, ready to halt the carriage and ask all kinds of inconvenient questions.
Mark knew Humboldt to be a snob of the first water and gambled on the man’s willingness to be able to introduce a member of European nobility as a house guest when his friends came to his daughter’s wedding. Mark knew Humboldt would never allow Poker Alice and Madam Moustache to enter his house, even to save them from trouble which was not of their making, so the big Texan used a trick. The lie had some slight truth in it. Alice did come from a noble British house but she could not claim to have Lady prefixed to her name.
“It will be no trouble,” Humboldt put in hurriedly, reacting just as Mark guessed he would.
“I couldn’t really accept your hospitality,” Alice said and felt Eleonore dig a warning elbow into her ribs. However, Alice knew how to handle men of Brenton Humboldt’s type and knew the more reluctant “Lady Alice Hatton-Green” appeared to be, the more eager would be his efforts to persuade her to stay. “But I insist. My wif
e would never forgive me if I let a Lad—you stay at the hotel. You must stay with us, we feel it is our duty to the good name of Texas to offer you our hospitality. Tell your maid to take your hand luggage to your room and I’ll have your team attended to and your trunk brought up.”
“Very well, thank you for the offer,” Alice replied, giving in gracefully as if conferring a favor upon him. She looked towards Eleonore, “Fifi, bring the bag.”
A hint of the red flush of annoyance crept to Eleonore’s cheeks. Then she glanced at the gate and the two watching men. This was no time to object to a change of names.
“Oui, oui, your lady-sheep!” She answered, laying great emphasis on the last word although Humboldt thought it no more than a delightful French pronunciation.
Gallantly Humboldt helped Alice to alight from her carriage. He then turned and told the footman, who stood at the door watching everything with some pop-eyed amazement, to inform Mrs. Humboldt they had guests.
In the hall Mark and the girls watched with amusement as a rather annoyed-looking Mrs. Humboldt appeared from a room along the large hall which faced the main entrance. Humboldt bore down on her, leaving his guests, and began to whisper urgently. They could see the change in Mrs. Humboldt’s attitude when she heard one of her guests was a Lady and the other the son of a very rich Texas rancher and a trusted member of the OD Connected ranch crew. This latter meant much less to Mrs. Humboldt than the fact that she had a chance to introduce a real British Lady to her friends.
Mrs. Humboldt bore down on the party. “James will show you to your room, Mr. Counter,” she said. “And I will escort you, if I may, your ladyship. But I’m afraid that with the wedding tomorrow and everything we have no room to accommodate your maid. Perhaps she could stay at one of the hotels in town?”
“Hum!” Alice answered, seeing a chance to have some fun at Eleonore’s expense. “I think not. I lost my last maid by letting her go out, she ran away with a cowhand.”
“It’s so difficult to get loyalty from the lower classes these days, isn’t it?” agreed Mrs. Humboldt, throwing a glance at Eleonore who had to make an effort to stop landing her hostess a lusty kick in the bustle.