The Wyoming Debt

by April Hill

  “Good morning. You look like you finally got some rest,” he said.

  Cathy laughed. “Everybody else was up before dawn, even Daniel, but yes, I got some rest.”

  “Just don’t let it become a habit,” he said with a grin. He indicated the peaceful, soft brown cows chewing contentedly in the stalls. “These ladies get pretty uncomfortable and start complaining if someone doesn’t get to them first thing.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Did Caleb do the milking for me, again?”

  “Nope, I did. I try to keep my hand in, so the girls there won’t forget me.”

  “Thank you, and that reminds me. I wanted to ask you about poor old Milo. I’d like to go back to Gopher Hole and get him.”

  “I took care of it,” Will said. “Paid the man for his keep for a week, ‘til I can go and bring him home.”

  “I’m not planning to run away, again” she said quietly. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” Will said, and Cathy knew that for the first time since she’d met him, Will Cameron was lying.

  “I came out here to show you something, “ she said, changing the subject. “After what Daniel told us, I looked through all the things I still have from Jack –the things I stole that day in Denver.” She handed him a tiny, tattered book, made of artificial leather.

  Will opened the little book and glanced at the first stained pages. “A ledger?”

  “It’s an account book, apparently from a bank in Denver.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “The account was opened under my maiden name, but I’ve never seen this book, and I’ve never heard of the bank. I didn’t know the thing existed, until an hour ago, but I understand, now, why there was never any money. Jack was saving up for a rainy day–a rainy day that wasn’t going to include me. It seems the bloom was off the rose even earlier than I thought. The first entry in that book was made more than three years before I finally walked out.”

  “Maybe he was trying to put aside something for you, in case something happened.”

  She shook her head. “There’s a note folded inside. Instructions to the bank, in case of my sudden demise. A Miss Loralee Tucker will be in to withdraw the balance. My successor–lucky girl.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “She used to hang around Jack’s table all the time, when he was winning, anyway. Tall, yellow hair from a bottle, and carrying a lot of extra weight in all the right places.” She sighed. “If I’d known Loralee was waiting in line for him, I’d have given up my place to her in a minute. Poor Jack was always just a half-step ahead of his creditors. I suppose he originally put the money in my maiden name trying to hide it. Without the book, though, or my signature, there was no way he could get his hands on any of it.”

  “Unless you died,” Will said quietly.

  She nodded. “When I first looked through it, I thought it was just Jack’s account of our past-due bills. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a real bank book before. Saving money wasn’t something either of us was good at. Now, it seems I was wrong. According to that little book, there’s just under two thousand dollars in the account.”

  “In a lot of places, that makes you a rich widow,” Will said. “It’s more than enough to get to San Francisco in style, anyway, and take care of you for some time. You can get back on your feet, see what the world has to offer besides saloons and the likes of Jack Thornton.” He sat down beside her on the hay bale. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course. I do owe you something for doing the milking for me.”

  “Why did you marry him?”

  Cathy shook her head. “You don’t ask easy questions, Mr. Cameron. Why did you marry your wife?”

  “I loved her.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  “That simple. I’d knocked around long enough to know what I wanted when I saw it, and Maddie was everything I’d ever wanted. I loved her from the first moment I met her. After the war, Gideon and I tried our hand at scouting for wagon trains, and then did a little trapping for a while, up on the Big Horn. It took two long, hard winters snowed under in a line shack the size of a privy before we got sick of the sight of one another and decided to try ranching. After we bought this place, we started looking around for stock, and heard about a sale up north of here. Maddie’s family, as it turned out. Her Pa had passed on some time back, and her Ma had pretty much had her fill of cows. She was selling out and going back east. Gideon and I rode up there to look over their stock, and bought us a real fine bull and a nice string of heifers.”

  He chuckled softly. “It was obvious after that first trip that Maddie and I had taken a shine to one another, and after we got back home, I guess I began to look kinda mournful. Anyway, one day Gideon says to me that maybe we should have bought a couple of good horses while we were there, so back we went. By the time we’d bought just about every animal in sight, Maddie had made up her mind not to go back to Ohio with the rest of her family. We got married two weeks later.”

  “Never any doubts, or regrets?”

  “Nope. Of course, there was so much work, neither one of us had a lot of time to think about it. Hannah came along nine months later. A day or two earlier, and Maddie’s Ma would have come after me with a frying pan–or a double load of birdshot.”

  Cathy smiled. “That’s nice. I wish it had been that way with Jack and me. Maybe my problem was that I wanted everything.”

  “And he had it?”

  “No, but he promised to get it for me, and I believed him. Jack wasn’t like any of the other men I’d known, and there’d been a few, by then. For one thing, he stuck around. I‘d landed in a real bad place–sick, and alone. Jack blew in like a warm breeze, put me up in a nice hotel, got me a doctor, and paid all my bills. He nursed me back to health really, and came by every day to see that I ate right. I kept waiting to see how much of my pride he wanted in return for everything he’d done, but he never asked for a thing. He just kept telling me that I was too good for the places I’d been working–that I was a lady, and needed to dress like one.” She sighed. “And he told me I was beautiful. No one had ever said that to me before. He went out and bought me a lot of new clothes, elegant things, not the gaudy ones I was used to. And all that time, he never asked for one thing. Never tried to get me into bed. Never even tried to kiss me.”

  Will chuckled. “Men can be devious, too, you know. When they want something.”

  She laughed softly. “Like you’ve always said about me, I was a slow learner. I fell in love with him almost instantly, of course. I would have done anything he asked me to, at that point. It’s not like I was some innocent young girl, either. Every man I’d ever known was the kind who had his hands up my dress two minutes after he’d tipped his hat. Jack was different. When he asked me to marry him, I thought I’d misunderstood.

  “When I was feeling well enough, we left Utah, and went to Texas. Jack assured me that’s where the money was. All those booming cattle towns, and all those dumb cowboys ready to give up their wages at the tables. He promised me we’d be living like royalty, like the kings and queens of Arabia. I didn’t even know where Arabia was, then, but it sounded better than Utah.

  “Jack had this way of smiling that made him look like a little kid. It was kind of his trademark. It took me a while to figure out it was really his mask. Ann in the end, of course, none of it worked out the way Jack had said it would. The towns we stayed in had cattle, all right, and plenty of cowboys, drunk and sober, but none of them had the kind of money Jack had promised, and most of them weren’t quite as willing to part with it as he thought. Jack was a fairly good poker player, but he was a better cheat. We came a long way from living like kings and queens, and got thrown out of more places than not. Finally, I suggested that I should go to work, as well.

  “My ‘work’ was to sit at Jack’s table and keep the suckers supplied with drinks, smiles, and whatever was needed to take their minds off what Jack was doing under the table. He slipped the ma
nagement a few extra dollars to let me take the place of the place’s usual hostesses, and I made sure the table’s occupants were happy, and never thirsty. The combination was a good one. Jack was good looking, and mannerly, and that encouraged the better-heeled players. Before long, we were bringing in a good living, and moved upstairs to a private salon.

  “It was nice for a while. We made money, and lived well. Maybe not like Jack had promised, but well enough. For a long time, I kept after him to try to buy us a little store, or something, so we could settle down and get out of the saloons, but that never happened. After a while, it was easier to do what he wanted than be fighting all the time. I owed Jack everything.”

  “When did it go bad?” Will asked.

  “You know, that’s funny. I can’t really remember. Jack drank when he wasn’t winning, and then, of course, he’d lose even more. Somehow, it was always my fault. My timing, or what I was wearing–or not wearing.

  “It wasn’t long before he started hitting me. At first, I thought it would stop when things got better, but it never did.” She paused for a long moment, and looked out the barn door toward the prairie. “That last night, he had lost a very big pot. He blamed it on me, and I guess he was right. Anyway, he came upstairs later and hit me so hard I crashed into the wall. He punched me in the face a few times, and then dragged me to the bed by my hair. I tried to roll myself into a ball, the way I usually did to protect my face, at least, but that just made him even madder. He did a first rate job, even with me huddled up like that. After that, he turned me over, and … Anyway when he’d finished doing what he wanted, he rolled off me and fell asleep, and that’s when I decided it was time to leave.”

  Cathy looked down at her hands. “I want to tell you something, Will. Just so you’ll know. I wasn’t a prostitute. I never …”

  “I know that, Cathy. I never thought it.”

  “Of course you did, and you weren’t far wrong. The fact is, if I’d stuck around, I probably would have ended up that way.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have.”

  She smiled. “Thank you for thinking that well of me, but you, of all people should know how I feel about hard work. Say what you want about being a whore, but I always figured the work wasn’t all that difficult–once you got past a couple of things.”

  “That’s a lot of things to get past,” he said quietly.

  “Maybe that depends on where you’re starting from. The morning I robbed Jack and lit out, I didn’t feel much different from the ladies downstairs.”

  Will reached down and took her hand in his. “That’s over, now.”

  “Is it?”

  “That’s kind of up to you. When I talked about your going to San Francisco, earlier, I was hoping you’d tell me you’d changed you mind.”

  Cathy sighed. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me, Will. I can’t risk another misunderstanding.”

  “All right, will you marry me, after I divorce you? If I need to, that is? I’m a little confused by the legal side of all this.”

  “Will I get spanked if I say no?” she asked, laughing.

  He grinned. “That idea did cross my mind, but then I figured I might wake up some morning missing some part of me I was especially fond of. You’ve still got one hell of a licking coming for running away like that and scaring the pants off everybody, but I guess it can wait ‘til after the wedding. And if I catch Caleb using your favorite word again, he wont be the only one getting his mouth washed out with brown soap.”

  “It just slips out, sometimes,” she said. “That word.”

  “You see it slipping out a lot in the future?”

  Cathy shrugged. “Who knows? Old habits die hard.”

  Will chuckled. “Well then, I think I might just have to ride over to Arabella Peppmuller’s one day soon, and buy me a real big wooden hairbrush. I understand a thing like that packs quite a sting, and makes it real hard to sit down for a couple of days. And after that particular word goes away, I figure we’ll just have to work out the rest of whatever rules there are like a couple of grown-ups.”

  Cathy smiled. “Wise decision. We can do it as equals.”

  Will laughed. “Well, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here. You ladies haven’t actually got the vote yet, whatever the state of Wyoming says.”

  “We ‘ladies,’ as you put it, have other methods of getting our way,” she observed.

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Who knows? Twenty years from now, maybe Hannah’ll be voting. The twentieth century. That sounds like a long time away when you say it out loud, but it’ll be here before we know it.”

  “And you and I will be old,” she said with a sigh.

  “Speak for yourself, Grandma. I’ve got a few good years left. And before we get one foot in the grave, how do you feel about kids? More of them, I mean. Yours and mine?”

  “How many did you have in mind?”

  “We’ll start with one, and see how it goes. I guess you’ve already figured out they can be a handful.”

  She handed him the tiny book. “Lucky for you I come with a dowry. This should certainly take care of adding a room or two on to the cabin. Build a new barn, maybe. Send all those children to good schools, somewhere.”

  He chuckled. “You think Switzerland might be far enough?”

  “You know,” Cathy observed. “It’s funny. In our whole time together, cheating at cards every night of our lives, Jack and I never accumulated even a tenth of what’s in that book. He must have been rolling drunks or robbing banks on the side. He’d be furious to know it was going to buy lumber, feed or baby shoes, eventually.”

  Will turned the book over in his hands. “On the other hand, Gideon always told me you can’t grow decent corn from rotten kernels. I’ve come this far making my own way, without cheating anyone or trifling with anyone’s wife–knowingly, that is. If it’s all the same to you, I’d kind of like to stay an honest man. With that said, and since you’ll probably never be able to locate all the men he took this money from what’s in this book belongs to you, so I guess it’s your call, what to do with it.”

  “I still owe on the bond,” she said quietly. “I won’t feel right until I’ve paid it off. “

  He handed the little book back to her. “Not from this, you won’t. And once it’s paid properly, we’ll get married, again legally.”

  “Well, then, a honeymoon might be nice,” she suggested. “Before all those babies start coming.”

  He thought for a moment. “Nope. A man should pay for his own honeymoon.”

  Cathy yawned. “I guess we’ll simply have to have a honeymoon right here, then–at home. I noticed Hannah putting clean sheets on the bed this morning. Do you think maybe she’s begun putting two and two together?”

  Will grinned. “Hannah’s been putting two and two together since she was toddling around the barnyard. She’s been watching cows and horses and chickens get together almost that long. One real advantage to being raised on a ranch. There’s not a lot of mystery left about what goes on between the boys and the girls. “

  “Well, I certainly hope you’re wrong about that, “Cathy said, smiling sweetly. “I’d hate to think our honeymoon’s going to be dull.”

  Will pulled her to her feet and kissed her, long and hard.

  “I haven’t been a boy for some time, Mrs. Cameron, and it’s been four years since I’ve had a beautiful woman in my bed. I think I can still figure out a few ways to make a honeymoon interesting.”

  THE END

  Bonus Short Story: A PICNIC IN THE PARK

  by April Hill

  Arizona Territory, September, 1894

  It was not quite six o'clock that Labor Day morning when the old brass alarm jangled, but the room was already hot and stifling, and Molly Holman woke up slowly, her head aching from lack of sleep. Dan had left the bedroom window last night when they went to bed, hoping to catch a whisper of breeze, but now, the relentless early September sun was pouring in over the dusty window s
ill like a river of molten lava. She could hear her husband moving about the room, dressing to go to work, and Molly pushed herself up on her elbows to speak to him.

  "I feel awful," she groaned. "I hate summer, and I hate this town, too. Doesn't it ever get cool here? Or rain?" Dan came over and kissed her on the mouth. "Good morning to you, too, and for your information, greenhorn, this is cool. Take a look looked at the calendar. It’ll be fall in a couple of weeks."

  "And all the trees will start turning orange and red, right?" she inquired sarcastically.

  Dan laughed. "Trees?"

  "I'll bet they need sheriffs in Massachusetts," she said wistfully. "Or in Vermont, maybe? You're the very best lawman I've ever met. I'll bet you could get a job, anywhere."

  Dan grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. "I'm the only lawman you ever met, and I already have a job. Now, get your butt out of bed. You're supposed to join your fellow conspirators down on Main Street before the parade starts, aren't you?"

  Molly glanced up nervously, searching his face for any sign that he might suspect. For one anxious moment, she was afraid she'd given something away. Why had he used a ridiculous term like that? Conspirators? Had she said something that would ruin today's surprise? He didn't seem suspicious, but still…

  The problem was that Dan knew her too well. They had celebrated their first wedding anniversary only two months earlier, yet sometimes it seemed to Molly that her husband could read her mind. Keeping a secret from him was always difficult—even a nice secret. A not so nice secret, like today's, was virtually impossible. Several months ago, for instance, when she'd been forced by circumstances beyond her control to "borrow" the money he'd given her to pay the grocery bill. Bookkeeping was not one of Molly's talents, and with her dressmaker's bill seriously past-due, there had simply been nothing else to do. Telling Dan that she'd bought a new dress when she still owed Mrs. Frawley for the last two would have resulted in a stern lecture. And if he'd asked to see the entire bill, she might well have had to lift her shirts for another hard switching. (Since he knew that she hated being switched like a child, Dan sometimes did just that when she'd been extravagant with money. After ordering her to lift her skirt and open the rear flap of her drawers, he'd leave her standing there, exposed and embarrassed while he went to the backyard to cut a sturdy switch from one of the scraggly bushes. The wait was always interminable, and Molly was never sure which was worse—the anticipation, or the agonizing sting of the rough switch on her thighs and on the trembling cheeks of her bare bottom.)