They gathered back at the magistrate’s runabout to confer on what to do next. To be sure, they had already learned much in their investigation, but the trustee felt a sense that he was being rushed by circumstances, tested against a wave of expectations already crashing upon him. What would that pushy senator from Independence who had lost his brother—Colonel York—do when he learned the Benders had lit out? How soon before the same howls for vengeance went up, the headlong rush to visit retribution on the Benders and anyone in the way, which had so thoroughly bloodied Kansas earth before the war? How many hours before the same furies of self-righteousness stalked their land again?
Looking up, Leroy Dick could already see dozens of people—a veritable crowd on those parts—converge on the Bender claim. They came from all directions, on horseback, by wheeled conveyance, on foot. All the neighbors, except for Brockman and Ern, who lived less than two miles away. He made a little mental note of that, the incuriousness of that pair, as his eyes swept the horizon, settling finally on the little orchard behind the cabin— the orchard where the Benders were often seen at work, patiently, meticulously grading and regrading. And then he saw it.
From the modest height of his carriage there was a rectangle of discolored soil among the apple trees. With the runoff from the night’s rain, the edges of the patch had been deepened, leaving the outline of a shallow mound about six feet long and two feet wide.
“Men, get your shovels,” Dick said, a hollow thrum of regret in his voice. “I think I see a grave.”
Chapter Two
Borrowed Rooms
JULY, 1857
KATE LEARNED YOUNG how to sleep in borrowed rooms. In the summer she would be in bed no later than six, with the sun still mockingly high in the southwest, blowing its hot breath across the careworn white muslin that seemed to dress every window in every hotel west of Chicago. Wide awake, she would watch it tremble, appearing to swell and retreat as the distant giant breathed across the dusty plains until, at dusk, a steady breeze rose in the east, propelling the material inward like a ghostly hand reaching toward her in the twilight. Only then, safe and tight in the bedclothes, would she feel the urge to close her eyes.
But not yet to sleep. For with day’s end came the clatter of dishes through the thin floorboards, as dinner was served the guests impatient for the night’s real business to begin. Before the games, before the losses, all the guests were in high spirits, doling out deep-voiced innuendoes and hearty helpings of comradely laughter. The good humor stopped when the dishes were cleared away, and the liquor, smokes, and cards came out. In her mind she could picture them, if only in her child’s terms—large unshaven men intently bent to their game, muttering to themselves just as she did when she arranged her dolls.
With this image in her mind, of all those giants at play, and of her father sitting among them all, rolling the butt of his cigar along his lips as he did when absorbed in a task, drowsiness would finally overcome her. And when she awoke in the morning, he would always be there, still in the clothes he wore the night before, saying something inscrutably poetic such as—
Be not afraid, dear gumdrop: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and n’er hurt.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about my ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds I thought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked
I cried to dream again.
They were words that, by their music, fetched her from the far shore, but also caused her unease, making her cry out, “Papa, what are you saying?” But as often as she asked, she never got an answer. Instead, he would just smile in his mysterious way, the whiteness of his teeth rivaling in brilliance his diamond stickpin.
And soon after the fruits of his night’s labor would arrive: breakfasts delivered to their room on polished silver trays. Eggs and steaks and biscuits of buttermilk. Blackberry jam in crystal bowls, and Seville marmalade in jars with labels from New Orleans, New York, San Francisco. Potatoes in cream and plums stewed in their own juice. And for him, pots of black coffee, thick and smelling of the woodstove, with a potency she imagined worthy only of full-grown men.
When the eating was done, and if the night was particularly profitable, a parcel would come, dressed with fancy string. Inside would be a new dress for her, suitable for a promenade down the dusty, manure-strewn streets of whatever camp hosted them. On his arm she would cling in her fresh stiff finery, mindful of all the adult girls who did the same for their “daddies.” And how they would scowl at her behind her father’s back! Contempt mixed with disbelief at this youth, this six-year-old with her powder-free glow, her unpainted lips like plump, reclining bloodworms. She learned to perceive their contempt, hidden so flimsily beneath their cries of “Oh, just look at the little darling!” until her father had turned away and their faces hardened.
She perceived it, and learned to return it, raising her pert little chin in their directions and closing her downy eyelids at the sight of them, “the broken-down provincial whores,” as her father called them. She would repeat this phrase herself as best she could, “the broke-down purple wars,” like a magic formula to protect herself from their spite.
This perpetual holiday was her life. From town to gambling town they would travel by train, or by coach to the less connected camps, like boon companions. He shared his hopes and his frustrations as he would to any partner, in frank and vivid language. He scratched himself in intimate places in her presence and laughed about it. He’d given the girl her first sip of beer at the age of three and her first nip of champagne at five. He taught her curse-words in German, the language of his parents, and laughed when she unleashed Teutonic abuse on tardy waiters.
In St. Louis he won big at the faro tables and bought her her first pony. It was a sorrel with a four-pointed star that she loved right away. She called him Nickers because he was a smart pony who would always nicker when they arrived at a new place, as she was led off to the hotel and he to the livery. These partings pained her because she never knew how long it would be before she rode him again—a day, a week, or many weeks. It all depended on how the cards treated them.
But mostly there were the books. For a man of her father’s vocation, the investment of time with his opponents was as important as the investment of money. He therefore left her with much time alone, for which he tried to compensate by steering every manner of printed matter into her hands—newspapers and pamphlets and circulars and catalogs—but mostly just books. The hotels always had a few on hand, usually moldering in some corner case. Presented with them, she would feel their weight, turn the pages, wave aside the dust, and laugh, “But I’m just a kid. I can’t read!” To which he would laugh his avuncular, never paternal laugh, and remark like some barbershop wag to his buddies, “No time like the present, Katie!”
Though she sensed, even with her child’s intuition, her father’s impropriety, it had one healthy effect: she wished never to disappoint his exaggerated faith in her abilities. No one had ever sat down to teach her to read. None of the books she found in hotel lobbies was appropriate for the task. But for the length of many idle afternoons, and sometimes evenings, she would sit with these masses of incomprehensible symbols, puzzling them out. Sometimes she was so frustrated she would throw the books away, or kick them along the floor with her little high-button shoes. More often, she tried so hard that sweat stood out on her forehead, and she would have to buttonhole drunks and bellhops to ask, “Good sir, can you tell me what this word means?” And though half of them lacked either the education or the sobriety to answer, she asked again and again, and again still more, until the words made a kind of sense.
/> In this way she made slow progress—and familiarity with a strange collection of subjects. She was one of the rare six-year-olds familiar with the works of Sir Walter Scott, albeit more with the names of the characters than the stories. She had dipped into Washington Irving and the liberal philosophers Burke and Montesquieu, especially the latter’s discussion of the renal glands, but not any of his theories of government. She sampled the dialogues of Plato but disliked them because they had no pictures. Much more to her taste was a book of demonology called The Lesser Key of Solomon, which she found in a lobby in Evanston, Illinois. The first section (“Shemhamphorash”) included a list of seventy-two demons known to King Solomon, with descriptions of their powers and, best of all, pictures.
In essence this was nothing more than a catalog, much like those that sold harvesting equipment and ladies’ underwear through the mail—except much more absorbing. She spent hours poring over the parade of demons, examining their attributes, deciding which were her favorites. Among her champions was the noble Stolas, who appeared as an owl with a crown and the legs of a stork, and who taught knowledge of the Heavens. And there was King Balam, who taught invisibility and rhetoric and had three heads, one human, one bull, and one ram. She was also impressed that King Balam rode on a bear—probably a Rocky Mountain grizzly. These were “good” demons who made her feel that her world made sense. She dreaded the “bad” ones with equal passion, particularly Andras, who rode a wolf and fed on the discord of others, and the cruel Focalor, who drowned men in their ships.
One day her father gave her a ream of plain paper and a box of sketching pencils. This inspired her to carefully trace the image of every one of the seventy-two, cut them out, and arrange the paper armies on her bedspread. Each demon duke and demon king got his chance at the forefront of his familiars. At her signal, they would charge up the little hill of woolen fabric to contend at the summit. And when they met, she could hear the rumble of their clash shake the bowels of the earth—though to the guests in the other rooms, it was just the half perceptible murmuring of a lonely girl.
She was playing this very game—matching the wily Zepar against the valorous Purson—when her father came to her that last time. It was early one morning in Denver, and from his undisturbed bed she could tell he had been playing all night. This in itself wasn’t unusual—such stints actually tended to be the most profitable for him, resulting in extra gifts for her. But this time all the blood seemed to have drained from his cheeks, and his eyes were filled with a fear she had never seen before.
“Get up now,” he said. “Es ist an der Zeit, dich anzuziehen.”
“What’s the matter?”
“We have to leave.”
She dressed, less to please him than to calm herself by her obedience. As she did so, he cracked his trunk abruptly, tossing his clothes into it in a manner that, to older eyes, would have seemed a combination of haste and resignation. He said nothing and did not look at her. Unlike every other time he came back from a night of pokering, he did not go to the dresser to remove his ivory cuff links—the ones backed with gold, which he’d won in a game before she was born—because they were gone.
With the disappearance of those cuff links, and a child’s natural sensitivity to the mood of her parent, she became alarmed. But she was also uncomprehending, confused by the presence of a threat made more terrible for being unknown. Unlike the bad demons in her book, this terror had no name.
When she was packed and had donned her coat of navy wool, and the little hat trimmed with lace designed for a woman four times her age, he laid his hand on her shoulder. He did not push her but with a shuffling of his feet crowded her out of the room with his body. His gaze remained fixed over her head, never dropping it to meet hers.
There was a man waiting for them in the hallway. His eyes were blue and shone with the icy glint of an axe blade left in the snow. She backed up against her father as he tried to shut the door.
“You pullin’ foot on me?” the man asked.
“You could have set downstairs.”
“Is this it?” The man turned the cold blue light of his gaze down on her. This, and the way he referred to her as “it,” propelled her backward, against the unyielding bulk of her father.
“To hell with you, Clarrity, if you won’t let me talk to her first.”
With a casually indolent shifting of his weight, the man removed his shoulder from the wall and stood up straight. For the first time she noticed how his free arm crooked at the elbow and disappeared under his coat, where a butt of gun metal shone. In all her time around saloons and gamblers, Kate had never before seen a man place his hand on a firearm.
With a look of faint accusation, but saying nothing, the man retreated down the stairs. The heavy tread of his boots, the clop, clop . . . clop . . . clop, descended with increasing slowness, like a dying heartbeat. At the foot of the stairs there was a creaky floorboard she knew well because she liked to jump on it on her way down to the dining room. The board groaned as he paused on it.
“Who’s that man, Papa?”
He swallowed with the expression of a man forced to drink poison.
“Look here, gumdrop. This man is called Clarrity, and we have this little deal going. For it to work I’m going to need you to play along. Can you do that for me?”
She smiled. “What’s our play?”
“He thinks he won himself a little girl in our card game, and you’re gonna go off with him and do what he says. OK?”
“It’s OK. When will you come get me?”
“Soon. Real soon.”
They went outside. Nickers rocked his head when Kate appeared at the door, stepping with anticipation as her little carpetbag was loaded on his back. The sky was a cloudless, severe blue, the mountains clear even miles away. A little crowd had gathered for some reason to watch her go—she didn’t know why. And there was Clarrity, mounted and waiting on a big black, half turned around with the grip of his pistol still showing under his coat.
Her father boosted her into her saddle. The sorrel was small enough that Kate’s eye level was barely above his when she was mounted. Looking to him for reassurance, she got nothing but averted eyes and a faint, pained smile on his face.
“Play along,” he whispered.
He handed the lead rope to Clarrity, who started them down the street. And though she didn’t want to fail her father, Kate felt her stomach flutter and her knuckles ache as she grasped the reins.
Some of the women she’d seen around town were outside the hotel, watching her go. These were the same “broke-down purple wars” she’d met in a hundred other places, always with a sneer on their faces as they inspected her miniature, unmerited finery. Out of unthinking habit, she looked down on them coldly—until she saw that this time they weren’t sneering. Instead, they seemed sad, as if someone had run over a dog in the street. Their feathered heads turned together, following her as she departed, the regret of their forsworn maternities pouring from the pits of their blackened eyes.
Chapter Three
Clarrity
To attempt a portrayal of that era and that land, and leave out the blood and the carnage, would be like portraying Mormonism and leaving out polygamy . . . The deference that was paid to a desperado of wide reputation, and who “kept his private graveyard,” as the phrase went, was marked, and cheerfully accorded.
—Mark Twain, Roughing It
THEY RODE IN silence for the next two hours. Clarrity never looked back to check if she was still there, and Kate never called on him to slow down. The gambler and the girl, evenly matched in their stubbornness, traveled together as if willing themselves separate, save only for a sense of proprietary entitlement on the man’s part, which kept his ears attuned to the pony’s hoofbeats behind him. When they sounded too far behind, he pulled up and waited, resuming before she caught up. Kate, who would sc
arcely let her eyes rest on the man’s wool-clad back, did nothing to stop Nickers from turning aside on the trail to browse. Here, she used the opportunity to turn in her saddle, scanning the distance for her father. For he was surely out there somewhere, tracking them. He would know when it was time to end their game.
Shortly after noon they reached an ugly peak clad in broken cobbles. A black pipe clung to the low angle of the hill’s flank, tail buried in a gathering of haphazard, tar-papered shacks, pouring out smoke from its summit. Closer, and mud-caked byways appeared, zigging and zagging through the mining camp as if some of the buildings were impatient to cross the thoroughfare. The uneven street lines made it impossible to judge at a glance how many people were out—with each turn of a corner, more hatted figures appeared, each greeting the appearance of Kate and her companion with a quick appraisal of her pony and fancy rig. But by the time she was abreast of them, they seemed to have forgotten her existence, resuming some inward totaling of imaginary fortunes.
Clarrity dismounted at what looked like a livery, except that the proprietor was wearing a bloody smock and he was butchering fresh meat on a block. The men conferred in low tones, the proprietor stroking his chin hairs. The question occurred to her of what they might be negotiating, but only as a matter of idle curiosity, for what had this man Clarrity’s business to do with her? Preferring not to give him the satisfaction of asking, she looked down to straighten the laces of her fancy French riding gloves—the ones her father had bought in New Orleans.
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