The Wyoming Debt

by April Hill

  But enticing the marks was just the beginning. Alex’s real work started when the game was finally underway. Her job was to tip the odds Jack’s way, usually by distracting the sucker at just the right moment. And last night, she hadn’t done her job to Jack’s satisfaction.

  She had perched on the edge of the table, the way she always did, leaning so close to the mark that she could smell the man’s rancid hair oil and feel his hot, rank breath on her perfumed breasts. And as she always did, she ran her fingers through the sucker’s limp, greasy hair, cooing soft nonsense into the guy’s hairy ear. Then, edging closer, she dropped her hand to let her fingers creep along the mark’s dirt-slick trouser leg until the tips of her painted nails brushed against the throbbing bulge in his crotch. This move always got the mark’s attention, of course, and it was working beautifully until raucous laughter broke out at the bar. Another bloody fistfight had begun–the usual nightly entertainment at Top Notch.

  Alex glanced away for only a moment or two, but the commotion had thrown off her timing, and during those crucial seconds of inattention, the mark had reached across the table and drew his next cards. When she turned back to the game, the sucker was already clutching the new hand close against his chest, and Jack was giving her that familiar, disappointed look she knew all too well–the look that seemed to say, “Why do you make me do this to you, darlin’?”

  The odds were around fifty-fifty that when Jack finally rolled out of bed he wouldn’t remember what had happened last night, but Alex wasn’t ready to play the odds. Not again. By the time he woke up, she planned to be aboard a train out of Denver–a train to anywhere Jack Thornton wouldn’t think to come looking for her. Finding such a place wouldn’t be easy, of course. She’d need a town with no cheap saloons, no crooked poker tables, and no slobbering drunks waiting to be fleeced.

  She dressed quickly, and then edged around the dimly lighted room on tiptoe, keeping a wary eye on the rumpled bed as she gathered what she needed. Just about everyone in the place knew and feared Jack’s temper, so she wrote a quick note and tacked it on the door, warning against a knock. If no one disturbed him, he’d probably sleep most of the day, and with any luck at all, she’d be long gone before he missed her.

  After throwing a few her own things in a bag, she tossed in Jack’s wallet, his silver stickpin with the big ruby in it, and his diamond shirt studs. His gold watch and chain were still on the bedside table, and for a moment, she considered not taking those. Jack had always told her that the watch was all he had left to remind him of his father. A bit of sentiment she had stopped believing when she read the inscription on the back: To Osgood, With Love from Mother. She slipped the watch and chain into her pocket. A few more anxious moments of feeling around under the dresser drawer, and she located the fat brown envelope of papers and the wad of cash he kept hidden for emergency traveling money. She needed the money more than he did, she reasoned, and stealing all of it might just slow him down a little.

  Two minutes later, dragging one large valise stuffed with everything of value they owned, Alex limped down the street to the depot to buy a ticket out of Denver–and out of the long nightmare she had once called a marriage.

  San Francisco had been her first choice, but the westbound wasn’t due until 5:30 that evening, and she couldn’t risk the wait. When Jack woke up and noticed her missing, he’d check the station immediately, and even though the building was fairly large, finding a safe place to hide for that long without drawing attention would be virtually impossible. A study of both of the ticket agents had left her uneasy, as well. Had she seen either of them at Top Notch? It wasn’t a place frequented by the city’s more respectable male citizens, but she couldn’t be absolutely certain that one of them wouldn’t recognize her. A woman with bruises, cuts on her face, and a badly swollen eye would be sure to be remembered, especially one traveling alone.

  And then, an idea occurred to her–an idea that would cut deeply into her available cash, but might throw Jack off the trail for a few days, at least. The thing was not to hide, but to make herself as conspicuous–and as memorable–as possible.

  Alex marched up to the counter, and after making a great fuss about the extravagant cost of traveling “these days,” paid for a first class, one-way ticket all the way to St. Louis. Where to actually get off was something she would decide, later, when she was safely on her way.

  With her ticket in hand, she sat down on a bench at the end of the platform, and waited. Only fifteen minutes now, but the wait was sheer agony. From where she sat, she had a clear view of the street, as far as Top Notch. She watched nervously, certain that at any moment, she would see Jack come striding down the street toward the station, his face livid with rage.

  A quarter of an hour later, right on time, the eastbound Union Pacific train pulled into the station in a suffocating cloud of steam and smoke. Alex boarded the proper coach, found her reserved seat, and sat trembling for several minutes until the whistle sounded one last time, announcing the train’s departure. Then, with a mixture of fear and excitement, she watched from her grimy window as the great, black engine ground and clanked and slowly gathered speed. As the outskirts of Denver started to disappear behind her, she sat back with a deep sigh, and closed her eyes. Her new life was about to begin–a life with no husband, no money, and no prospects. But a life with hope.

  * * * *

  As a child, Alex had dreamed of being married, and in these dreams, even the word, marriage, meant being loved and protected. It meant being comfortable, and not having to scrape and do without. In those naive daydreams, the man was always a man of considerable means–not necessarily rich, but solid and prosperous. Alex had been poor long enough to know that being poor wasn’t the noble condition the Bible suggested. He would have to be a kind and generous man, though. Handsome, of course, and educated, with charm and wit. A tender, loving husband, yes–but a very well-fixed one.

  A man exactly like Jack–or the way Jack had seemed when she first met him.

  By the time Jack came along, Alex had concluded that there were two possibilities that could explain why she hadn’t found the man of her youthful dreams–the man who would give her his undying love, along with comfort and security. Either the man she had dreamed of simply didn’t exist, or she was sorely lacking in what it took to find and keep him. By twenty-five, she was convinced that she’d blown her best chance. She was already beginning to notice tiny lines around her eyes, and in the right light, even a gray hair or two. There was little question that she was beginning to run low on the kind of bait necessary to attract the big fish she had hoped to catch.

  Alex had never liked hard work. She hadn’t liked hard work since she was a girl, forced to do hard work every day on her Uncle Chris’s dairy farm in Minnesota, and since that time, her opinion of work hadn’t changed. Orphaned at ten in a blizzard, she had been handed from second-cousin to great-uncle, to third-cousin-once-removed for several years, until her “Uncle” Chris and “Aunt” Marta had finally agreed to take her in. The aging couple weren’t actual blood relations, but since they were the only ones offering to take her, Alex’s financially struggling family was only too pleased to agree to an arrangement that gave them one less mouth to feed.

  Aunt Marta was forever weak and ailing with mysterious illnesses the doctors couldn’t diagnose, so Alex cooked, cleaned, and laundered until her hands were raw. Whatever Marta’s unknown ailment was, though, it never kept her from administering a vigorous beating when Alex complained about the heavy load of chores she had been assigned.

  “Maybe that’ll learn you some respect,” Marta suggested smugly, after one such whipping. “A stumpy little thing like you, with no prospects? You ought to get down on them scabby knees o’ yours and thank me and Chris for bringin’ you up proper like we done, in a decent Christian home.” The old woman droned on, shaking a fat, stubby finger in Alex’s face. “You’re gonna need to know somethin’ about hard work if you’re lookin’ to find yourself
a husband. You ain’t no beauty, you know.”

  But by that point, Alex was no longer interested in finding a husband. She was looking for a way out, and try as she might to be grateful, she felt more resentment than gratitude for the threadbare, self-serving charity she’d received from Uncle Chris and Aunt Marta.

  On that particular day, Alex was just fifteen, overly plump, clumsy and self-conscious. But while there was no indication yet of the changes to come, Alexandra’s prospects were about to markedly improve.

  By the age of sixteen, Alex had lost her adolescent plumpness and developed a sort of golden, dewy prettiness that surprised no one more than Alex herself. She wasn’t beautiful yet, and at only three inches over five feet tall, she was on the delicate side. Her eyes were gray, and her hair was the color of autumn. On the rare occasions when she let it down, her hair framed her face in soft ringlets that fell to her waist. The local boys had already begun to take notice, which definitely pleased her, since it renewed her early hopes of finding a well-off husband. One hot afternoon, though, having observed the male attention she was attracting, Uncle Chris found reason to take her into the darkened barn for what he described as a “good talking-to” on the subject of a woman’s good name and reputation. For her own good, he said in a stern voice. When Uncle Chris began to illustrate his discussion of his young ward’s virtue by sneaking a hand beneath her skirts and thrusting an exploratory finger into the slit of her worn cotton drawers, seventeen-year-old Alexandra hit her Uncle Chris over his balding head with a shovel full of cow manure. Afterward, she went inside the house, helped herself to what cash and jewelry she could find, and left the farm forever. She would seek her fortunes elsewhere–in California, ideally. As ignorant of life as she was, young Alex knew very well that Uncle Chris had begun to see his role in her life as a bit more than uncle-ish. She also knew very well that she could do better than this–a lot better.

  Alex’s prospects improved more, and even flourished, for a time. But then, inevitably, they began to fade. She had managed to avoid hard work, though, finding very quickly that with a little powder and rouge, she could make a more than adequate living for herself as a hostess in the tawdry saloons and gambling establishments found in almost every town she passed through on her way west. Keeping intact what Aunt Marta had called “a woman’s crowning virtue” had been difficult, and after a few years, far too time-consuming. And, of course, there was also the competition to consider. By the age of twenty-four, Alex had come to understand that she was no longer the freshest, most luscious fruit on the vine, and that the virtue she had protected for so long was no longer all that appealing. In the rough places she lived, unmarried women of her age or better were normally regarded as one of two things–a pitiful spinster, or a potential whore.

  She finally gave the gift of her virginity to a handsome young salesman she’d met in Amarillo, who promised to marry her and take her, at last, to San Francisco. He treated her like a queen for two weeks, and then disappeared with her week’s wages, all her jewelry, and the brassbound, genuine leather steamer trunk she had purchased when she first started out for California. Alex spent two weeks mourning the loss of her first love, then blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and sold everything she had left to purchase a one-way stagecoach ticket to San Francisco. Somewhere in Utah, she became desperately ill from a bad mutton roast, and found herself laid up in a flea-ridden hotel in a no-name mining town, flat broke and too weak to work.

  And then, on the very morning of her twenty-sixth birthday, Jack Thornton rode into town, and everything about Alex’s life changed.

  Chapter Two

  Big Dooley Creek, Wyoming Territory, two months later

  The young sales clerk who was now calling herself Catherine Reynolds stood up on the wobbly wooden footstool and turned her head to one side, trying to get a closer look at the top of her head in the scrap of broken mirror. The angle was bad, and the light in the store’s cluttered backroom was dim, but there was little doubt about it. A few strands of bright copper were beginning to show, glinting among their drab companions like flashes of autumn sunlight. Cathy Reynolds’ mouse-brown hair was fading, and redheaded Alex Thornton was beginning to reemerge.

  It had been eight weeks since Alex left Denver, and the journey from the Top Notch to Peppmueller’s Mercantile and Sundries had been circuitous and unpleasant. Which was why she was working as an underpaid clerk in a dusty stage-stop in Wyoming, instead of as a hostess at a fine hotel or restaurant in San Francisco, as she had planned.

  Thirty minutes after the train rumbled out of Denver, Alex had finally opened Jack’s fat envelope of emergency travel money, and discovered that she’d made off with nothing more than a stack of overdue hotel bills and threatening letters from Jack’s long list of creditors. Having used her own small savings on the train ticket to St. Louis–a journey she knew would be perilous to finish, she rode east for just two more stops before leaving her shawl on the seat to disguise her intentions, and exiting the coach quickly, when it seemed no one was watching.

  The nondescript town where she had landed was apparently nothing but a water and mail stop, boasting one seedy commercial hotel and several small stores that appeared to be going out of business. Alex took a room at the back of the hotel for two nights–just long enough to take stock of her resources and come up with a plan.

  Her first step, and the most vital, was to change her name, which she did by combining her own middle name of Catherine with a brand of cheap smoking tobacco she’d noticed on a sign at the railway station. With that done, she bought a single bottle of cheap brown dye, disguised her flaming copper hair, and went out looking for the cheapest way north, perhaps to Cheyenne.

  With her cash almost gone, she bought a ticket on the first northbound stagecoach that rolled through. Her money wouldn’t take her as far as Cheyenne, the surly driver explained, but they “might be able to work something out” if he didn’t get too many passengers. During their entire conversation, the driver kept switching from one foot to the other, trying for a better look down the front of her dress, a familiar indignity that Alex had learned to expect during these sorts of “negotiations.”

  Now, as she studied the strands of red on the top of her head, “Cathy” realized that she should have purchased a second bottle of the smelly dye, despite its exorbitant price of twenty-five cents. Alex had never shown much talent at being thrifty, but in those first days on the run, she had already learned a hard truth–money didn’t come easily. In the months ahead, it was very clear that Cathy was going to have to learn to live on a budget. One of the talents Alex had learned in the lean years with Jack was shoplifting, but the risk hadn’t seemed worth it. Not for a damned bottle of ugly brown dye, anyway. She was still too close to Denver to feel secure, and she knew that when Jack came looking for her, the local jail would be one of the first places he checked.

  Cathy stepped down from the stool, kicked it across the storeroom in frustration, and swore.

  “Damn it to hell!”

  Mrs. Peppmueller frowned on swearing, and since the greedy cow owned the store and paid her meager wages, Cathy had learned to monitor “Alex’s” language, and to intercept some of the more colorful expressions that popped out. What had sounded charmingly risqué in the raucous atmosphere of a saloon had already drawn curious glances and raised an eyebrow or two at Peppmueller’s, and she couldn’t afford to lose this job. Not yet. Not for another week, until she’d helped herself to enough cash to make it to California. No, Alex thought, with a small smile. “Cathy” wasn’t the kind to embezzle from an employer, even a disagreeable harpy like Arabella Peppmueller, whom they had both already learned to detest. The stealing would be Alex’s job. Cathy could keep dealing with the store’s seedy customers, and placating Arabella.

  The only reason Alex was still here, working under a false name as an overworked sales clerk was because she lacked the funds to do anything else. Making her way north, a pawnbroker in Cheyenne had laughed
in her face when she asked how much she could get for Jack’s ruby stickpin, diamond shirt studs, and his gold watch. The items had turned out to be as fake as his lofty promises. From there, it had been all downhill. Even a seat on the stagecoach headed north had cost more than she had, forcing her to pay the remainder of her fare with a seductive smile and several promises of her own to the leering driver–promises that she had no intention of keeping.

  After he had discharged the only other passenger at his destination, the driver stopped the stage, climbed down, and attempted to collect what she had promised him, right there on the coach’s dusty horsehair seat. When she’d declined to honor the contract, he’d dumped her here–in the middle of nowhere. In this godforsaken sinkhole of a town, Big Dooley Creek.

  Peppmueller’s wasn’t exactly a prosperous establishment, and skimming cash from each day’s receipts had been harder than expected. The first thing she’d have to do in California would be to get a job–maybe even an honest job, for a change. Maybe even in another store–one where the management didn’t seem bent on pushing their employees into an early grave with overwork. On the other hand, Arabella’s constant abuse had made stealing from her almost a pleasure, just as dealing on a day-to-day basis with the store’s grubby, unwashed clientele would make leaving Big Dooley Creek an event to be celebrated. Jack had run a crooked poker table, and beaten her, but he’d always smelled clean, and if there was one thing you could say about Jack it was that he’d never been boring. She didn’t like to admit it, but sometimes, late at night, alone in her narrow cot in the back room, Alex missed him. Of course, it was the original Jack she missed, the Jack she’d married–or thought she had. The same Jack who’d said he loved her, and treated her like a princess for a while, until he began to disappear down the throat of a whiskey bottle.