by Bill Brooks
She reached out and touched the wrist of his left hand. The hoot of an owl drifted out of a tree; its sound was primitive and lonely and crawled under the skin.
“My name is Rose,” she said.
Chapter Six
Before they parted, Cole took the Colt Thunderer backup with the two-and-a-half-inch barrel from his shoulder holster and gave it to Rose. “It’s got small grips,” he said. “But it’s enough power to stop a man, even one the size of Gauss, should you need to use it.”
She seemed reluctant to take it, her hands lying at her sides, not reaching for the nickel-plated pistol that looked like silver in the moonlight.
“You don’t have to wear it openly,” he said. “Wear it in the pocket of a jacket.”
He opened the cylinder, showed her the empty chamber that he kept the hammer on and the five remaining shells. “It’s a single-action. You need to thumb back the hammer before you can fire it.” He ejected the cartridges and showed her how. “Just aim it like you would your finger, hold it steady while you squeeze the trigger.” The hammer snapped down with a hard click. He took hold of one of her hands and placed the pistol in it. “It’s up to you, Rose.”
She tried it, her thin frame silhouetted like a black paper cut-out, her arm extended, pointing the pistol toward nothing more than darkness.
“Just squeeze it slowly, don’t pull,” he said. The hammer fell on the empty chamber. She didn’t flinch, but the barrel of the pistol dropped noticeably. “Try it again,” he said. The second time was better; the third was better still. “How does it feel?” he asked.
“It’s heavy for such a small gun,” she said, lowering the revolver to her side.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t know if I will,” she said, looking at the pistol in her hand as though she couldn’t comprehend its meaning.
“Remember what Gauss did to you,” he said. “There are other men who would do the same if given the chance. It’s your decision. I won’t force you to take it.”
Cole saw her close her eyes against the memory, the pain that came with the memory. He waited for her to decide.
She held out her hand for the cartridges. He placed them in her palm and watched her slip them, one by one, into the chambers, snap shut the cylinder. It looked larger than it was in the smallness of her hand.
“Remember, keep the hammer on an empty chamber,” Cole said. “And practice shooting it so that you get used to the feel of its kick . . . and so you can hit what you are aiming at.”
She looked doubtful.
“It’s not that difficult,” he said. “The trick is not to be afraid. A pistol is a close-range weapon. Aim at the largest part of your target . . . the chest. Not many shootists can hit anything with a pistol at more than forty feet. Not under fire they can’t.”
She let out her breath all at once.
“The thing is, you may not have to use it at all. But if you do, at least you’ll have it, and, with some practice, you’ll be able to hit what you’re aiming at. Real important in a gunfight.” He tried to put a touch of humor on it, but wasn’t sure he’d succeeded.
She looked at Cole then, the faintness of her eyes seeking his own. Her breathing was soft, like the muted purr of a cat. “Why is it,” she said, “that some men can be like Gauss and others like you?”
“The world is made up of all sorts of men, Rose. Why we are who we are is just a matter of luck of the draw, I suspect. I don’t know the true answer.”
“You are very kind,” she said.
“I’m not a saint, Rose. I just don’t like to see people get hurt. It’s real important you learn how to shoot that piece and protect yourself, especially in a place like Deadwood. Don’t count on the kindness of others to protect you. It’s a hard fact, but one you need to be aware of.” He saw the softness go out of her eyes.
“I suppose you are right, Mister Cole.”
“You can call me John Henry, I prefer it. Mister Cole makes me sound old, even if I seem that way to you.”
Again she touched the back of his wrist. The bones in her hand and fingers were as small and delicate as a bird’s.
“I reckon we had better get some sleep,” he said. “We still have twenty miles tomorrow in that Concord.”
She hesitated before removing her hand. “I will pay you for the pistol once I get to Deadwood and get settled.”
“No need. It was a gift to me in the first place.” He didn’t tell her that it had once belonged to a Creek policeman over in the Nations whose wife had used it to murder him in a quarrel over an octoroon woman. The wife had sold it in order to pay for her husband’s funeral. It had cost Cole $25. He had liked the way it balanced in his hand and didn’t mind paying the extra for it. He had owned it for several years as a backup.
“It’s generous of you,” she said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Just stay alive, Rose. Don’t let anyone harm you. And when your business in Deadwood is finished, go back home. Go back to people who love you and will care for you. This country is no place for someone like you.”
Cole stood there in the cold night air for a while after she had left and thought about another young woman he had once known who was in some ways much like Rose in her delicacy and her pain, and in his wanting to protect her. Only he hadn’t been able to. It was a memory he had tried hard to keep tucked away, like a tintype kept in a drawer under some shirts. But Rose’s vulnerability had dredged up the memory of Zee Cole and he saw his late wife’s face behind the lids of his eyes as he closed them. And the softness of her voice whispered to him like the wind easing through the trees.
John Henry, I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave little Tad. Please, make it so I don’t have to leave you both. John Henry . . . promise me that you will take care of our son and that you will never forget me and that you will tell him about me. Will you tell him about me? Will you remember me always as I was? Please, please, please.
They were her last words to him, and now they tumbled through his head like loose rock breaking down a mountainside, each word bruising his soul. She had died that night and took some of him with her. Their infant son died two days later, taking most of the rest of what was left of him. They called it the milk sickness. He had never understood it or tried to beyond what it had cost him. Someone once said: “That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.” He was not so sure.
Cole could hear Torres’s breathing from across the way. It was deep and sonorous now, the rhythmic sound of the exhausted or the drunken. But he had the feeling that he was a man who would awaken instantly if approached. Men like Torres never slept the sleep of the dead. Instead, they rested somewhere just below the surface of consciousness, their framework tuned to the slightest noises, their nerves frayed as the cuffs of their shirts. Men who could kill you while you were still sleeping.
The night was blue-black and empty, the stars pinpoints of light, and the chill air held in it a warning of an early winter. Cole smoked another shuck and let all that day’s weariness creep in, not wanting to go to bed, not wanting to think about girls like Rose or those who were being murdered in Deadwood or men like Gauss and Torres. He didn’t want to think about Zee, either, or a son he’d never get to see grow up. Maybe the dead were the lucky ones. That night he dreamt about Rose.
She was pointing the silver pistol at him, thumbing back the hammer. He could see the slow turning of the cylinder, see the blunted dull gray heads of the bullets, hear the clicking of the mechanism, her hand steady, her face a mask of deliberate calm, and he knew within that moment that she would kill him and there was nothing he could do to stop her—and he wondered why.
The following morning produced a sky that was swollen with the gray bellies of clouds the size of Conestogas, bunching together, crowding the cañon walls, obscuring the tops of trees that stood blue-green in the cold dawn light. They had breakfast outside at a long table and the child, Tess, told her mother she was cold a
nd everyone else ate their meal in the silence of people who are uncomfortable and not much given to conversation at that hour of the morning. The driver and the guard went about their work of harnessing the team of horses without the benefit of exchanging words. Wood smoke rose from the stone chimney inside the log dugout where the cook stove was. Everywhere there was the smell of burning pine, thick and tangy in the chill air.
Rose sat directly across from Cole and several times he looked up to see the gratitude in her eyes and thought it was a good thing that other people can’t know our fears.
The gambler ate with rapid deliberation. He wore a pinky ring that had a small diamond set in it and his hair was greasy from not having been washed. The pores of his skin were black from the road dust, and his growth of unshaven beard was a light rust that rolled with the movement of his jaw as he ate. Cole saw Torres, hunkered by the corrals, watching the driver and guard hitch the team. He looked no differently than he ever did, the sweep of his sombrero’s brim low over his dark eyes, his heels lifted off the ground so that they could support his haunches, his back bent to the wind that blew down from the northwest. He seemed not in the least disturbed by the cold weather or the effects of the Mexican Mustang Liniment from last night. Cole saw then that he was chewing what looked like a strip of jerky. He was still curious about his business in Deadwood.
Soon they were once again inside the stage, including the gambler, now that Rose had recovered sufficiently to sit up. The road climbed farther into the Black Hills, the sides of the cañon walls closing in so that no two wagons could pass one other at various places. One time the stage had to be stopped so that the driver and guard could climb down and remove a lodgepole pine that had fallen across the road.
By noon they arrived in Deadwood. The last twenty miles of the journey had seemed the longest. Cole had done some prize fighting at one time in his younger days, and, after long bouts, his ribs and arms and chest would be sore for days from the blows of other men’s fists. It was nothing compared to the pounding the stage trip had given him, only the pain was in different places.
He climbed down and waited for his saddle and Winchester to be handed down from the boot of the stage. The woman, Suzanne Smith, approached him, her daughter clinging to her hand. He saw the listlessness in the child’s eyes—small vacant pools of blue that were absent of light.
“I want to thank you again for what you and Marshal Torres did to protect us,” she said. “Perhaps later, after we’ve gotten settled, you will allow me the opportunity to show you my appreciation in a more tangible way . . . dinner, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Cole said. Her little girl looked up at him, the dark ringlets of her hair damp against her head, damp and uncombed and unclean, as was her dress and her shoes, which were spotted with dust. Then her gaze shifted impatiently to her mother.
“Have the driver tell you of a good hotel or boarding house,” Cole said to the woman. “Your child looks as though she could use some rest and decent food and a bath.”
“Yes,” she said, “I will.” She looked into his eyes a moment longer as though searching for an answer to an unspoken question, then turned and went over to where the driver was standing at the rear of the coach, talking to a man whose belly hung over his belt buckle.
Cole watched the gambler pick up his valise, saw the glint of his pinky ring, then watched as he marched off down the walk and become quickly lost in the flowing mass of humanity that crowded the streets of the ramshackle town of Deadwood.
“It looks like hell on wheels,” Miguel Torres said as he stepped past Cole, his carbine in one hand, his blanket tied over his shoulders. Then he paused, leveled his gaze at him, and said: “Last night . . . I talk too damn’ much when I drink. And I sometimes drink too damn’ much. Don’t get the idea we’re friends. I don’t make friends. To me, you are just like everybody else . . . potential trouble.” Then he turned and walked away.
Somehow, Cole understood what he meant about friendship and not trusting and knowing what you were about in this life. It was a good way for him to be if Torres wanted to stay alive very long in his business. It was the same for Cole who hefted the Dunn Brothers saddle in one hand, the Winchester in the other, and asked the driver where he might find a livery. Before he could answer, Rose touched Cole on the shoulder.
“I’ll keep your advice,” she said. “I’ll practice till I get it down. I just hope I don’t ever have to use it.” He started to say something, but she cut him off. “If I do, I do,” she said. “I ain’t afraid.” When he shook her hand, he felt its smallness in his own, and said: “Good luck to you, kid.” She smiled, the driver and the man with the big belly looking on. “Thanks Mister Cole. Thanks for everything.”
The driver told Cole where he could find a livery and he walked in that direction.
Deadwood was laid out on a long narrow street that was without a straight line to it. Trailing off at angles were one or two other streets. Every building in the town looked like it had been put up in a hurry. Everywhere stood the enterprise of a boom town: saloons, honky-tonks, gambling dens, whiskey tents, crib houses, a couple of hotels, hardware stores, jewelers, restaurants, opium dens, gunsmiths, butcher shops, and a shoe repair—all jammed cheek by jowl in raw-lumber, false-fronted buildings, canvas tents, and hodge-podge structures of lesser quality. The street itself was clogged with teamsters, mules, horses, and oxen teams hauling more lumber and more mining equipment, all trying to pass and get around one another. The result was a lot of men cursing the air. The sharp report of hammers could be heard farther down the street. Still more permanent buildings going up. Men lounged about in bowler hats and claw-hammer coats—attorneys-at-law and real-estate agents. Only they had another name for them in the South; they called them carpetbaggers.
Miners in their stiff dirty clothing, their eyes hollow and streaked like raccoons, leaned against the support poles of overhangs and squatted on the steps of several establishments, watching the goings-on and each other. Other men stood around in doorways: pimps, gun punks, pickpockets, judging by their eager, expectant eyes and their slouching postures. Frontier flotsam—every town had them, just like every town had mongrel dogs and tame Indians. The foot traffic up and down the street was heavy with gamblers, faro dealers, vagrants, sloe-eyed women in colorful dresses cut high on the bottom and low on top. If there was a profession to be named, there was a face to match it somewhere in that crowd. Everyone wanted to strike it rich and take their share of the gold. Some took the yellow metal from the earth, others took it straight from the miners’ pockets. That was life in the mining camps.
Cole found what he was seeking at the far end of town—Black Hills Livery & Rental. An old gent whose features looked as though they’d been cut out of the very rock itself sat a three-legged stool, his grizzled, craggy face tilted toward the sun that now appeared between a split in the clouds.
“I might need to rent a horse while I’m here,” Cole said.
The livery man’s eyes opened with the slowness of a yawn. Tiny lines of dirt were creased in the folds of his skin. He was bundled up in a heavy buffalo-hide coat that looked several sizes too large for him. His unshaven face was a patch of gray briar. His mouth twisted downward at the corners, the right side stained brown from a lifetime of chewing and spitting tobacco from that side. “A horse?” he said, as though he had not heard that word before.
“That’s what you do here,” Cole said, glancing up at the sign painted over the double doors of his barn, “rent horses?”
“’Course I do, when I got ’em to rent. Trouble is, I ain’t got one to rent right at the present.” He looked irritated that Cole had disturbed his rest. His eyes trailed over Cole and he held up the palm of one hand to shade the sun’s glare so that he could better see who it was that had come to trouble him. “You’re a long drink of water,” he said, then spat off to the side from a cud he had stored in one cheek. “Ain’t seen you before, have I? Folks coming in here a hundred a day to pan t
he gold. Cutters and shooters, there’s a killing a night right out there on them streets. Had to carry two off just this mornin’. Somebody laid ’em out last night. Ain’t nobody knows who done them boys. Ain’t nobody even cares. Welcome to perdition, mister.” Then he spat another watery brown stream and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“When do you reckon you will have a horse for rent?”
He looked at Cole’s saddle. “That’s a double rig,” he said. “We called them rimfires, down on the Brazos. A Dunn Brothers, ain’t it?”
“That’s right.”
He smiled his approval. “I should have a horse or two due in later on today, or tomorrow. Cost you four dollars a day. And before you tell me how pricey that sounds, remember . . . I’m the only livery in Deadwood. You could always walk to wherever it is you need to go. You from down on the Brazos?”
“I’ve been in the neighborhood a time or two. Can I leave my saddle stored here?”
“You can. Set her down and I’ll take her in soon’s my siesta is up.”
Cole looked at his hands. They were rough, the fingers twisted and knotted at the joints. “You cowboy for a time?”
Light came into his face, along with the first show of friendliness. “Man. I must’ve drove ten thousand of them god-damn’ creatures. Five long, hard seasons. Drove them from the Río to Kansas and Nebraska and later on up into Montana. Now there is some damn’ righteous country . . . Montana. Purtiest place I ever seen. Would’ve stayed, but I didn’t.” He spat again. “Come here instead. Tried mining gold and my hands froze up in the creeks. The arthritis crippled up my fingers, bummed my knees, crawled into my back. Then I took to this. Horses is all that I know any more, all that I care to know. It ain’t a bad business.” He spat out the blanched cud into his hand this time, looked at it, and threw it aside. “All gone,” he said. “Dead as Yankee soldiers on Pea Ridge. Har! Har! Har!” He had a laugh like the bray of a mule.