Silver Moon

by Sigmund Brouwer

  This time — especially with nothing else to distract me — I gave Doc’s voice full respect.

  That feather. Sure, I knew lots about it. Came from a sparrow. Small feathers kept the sparrow warm. Big feathers from a wing gave it lift. I could measure that feather, weigh it, maybe even with Doc’s microscope look at it close and tell how all the strands fit together. If I worked real hard, I bet I could have come up with a list as long as my arm of things I knew for sure about that durn feather.

  But what about the other list? Things I didn’t know about that feather.

  How’d the first feather ever get made? After all, logic told me that birds could not have existed forever. At some point, no matter how far back you went, birds didn’t exist. So how did it come about, that very first bird? Why? Crows had different colored feathers from partridges. Why? Even if I could explain the mechanism that made a feather grow from water and seed into a certain color and a certain shape, could I know the answer to how that mechanism had come into existence. Or why?

  When I started to consider those angles about a stupid feather, I felt small.

  And that was just a feather. What about leaves of a tree? Stars above. A newborn calf bawling for its mamma. Spider stretching its web.

  What if I drew up a list of everything I knew? Then compared it to a list of what I didn’t know. Hellfire, the second list would be as long as these tracks, maybe, as long as…

  I shook my head in disgust at where Doc’s convoluted logic was taking me.

  I couldn’t even know how long the list might be. I couldn’t comprehend what I didn’t know.

  That, I reckoned, didn’t place me much differently than a baby at the edge of a lake, running his hands in the sand, happy enough, he wouldn’t wonder that the water at his feet came from a lake. Nor would the baby understand if you tried pointing out the mountains past the lake. Or try to explain he needed a blanket to shade him from the sun. Nope. With sand to keep him happy, what more could there be?

  To this point, all that I knew about surviving on the praires had been enough knowledge that, like the baby, I hadn’t considered there might be something beyond the shoreline at my feet.

  What was beyond? How infinite was God? Was I as truly incapable of knowing as that baby was ignorant of what lay ahead of his first tottering steps?

  I got the edge of that thought, and I decided I didn’t like it much, the black gulf of infinity ahead.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Much against my will, a few months back, Rebecca and a host of other questions had led me to a wary belief and understanding that God was the light of love that gave meaning to my life. I didn’t want to be called a believer — too many of them ran around spouting verse and chapter and played it like a game with rules — but when I’d searched, I’d been found by a quiet peace and an understanding of a God of love behind this universe.

  That’s why it didn’t seem fair, that when I’d thought I had a few answers, there were only more questions. No wonder so many chose to simply cling to church rules and regulations.

  Then another thought struck me. And I grinned upward at the wood panelling of the compartment ceiling.

  I’d slap Doc with these questions. Give him a taste of the medicine he’d used to dose me. See how he might squirm.

  It must have been a comforting thought, for when I closed my eyes, I slept solid until the train lurched to a stop to draw water at the top of the divide. I was asleep again before the train moved on.

  **********************

  If a man wanted to lose himself, Denver was the place. Territory capital of Colorado since ’67, fueled in a spreading bonfire of growth by railroad and then a silver mining boom. The saying was if it couldn’t be bought, stolen or borrowed in Denver, then it couldn’t be bought, stolen or borrowed.

  Cheyenne, where we’d transferred from the Union Pacific line to the Denver Pacific, had five thousand already and dwarfed Laramie, reflected by a depot crowd which had made it easy to watch and follow Dehlia unobserved as she boarded the southbound train.

  Denver in turn dwarfed Cheyenne.

  I stayed in my compartment as passengers disembarked at the Denver station. Even from there, I felt crushed by the noise and confusion that bustled outside my window. Boys hawked newspapers, girls hawked cigarettes and cigars, porters hawked luggage service, and men with horse and buggy hawked carriage rides.

  I was glad that I’d wired ahead to the Pinkerton agency a description of Dehlia and her expected arrival time. Denver had exploded in size since I’d last visited, and not even with two good legs instead of a hobble could I have expected to stay with Dehlia as she made her way into the crowds, for I would have had to remain in plain view almost beside her to do it.

  As it was, I only got a glimpse of her as she stepped off the train and beckoned for a porter to take her luggage. Then she disappeared into the crowds.

  I stood to a relaxed stretch. The Pinkerton man would stay with her, for she was an easy target in those black jeans and with the figure and blond hair that snapped heads from all sides.

  Halfway through my stretch, I froze.

  I hadn’t seen his face — he’d stepped down to quickly from the train and was moving away from me, wearing a black full-length coat, and a Montana stetson that gave me a glimpse of thick, wavy, dark hair.

  But from behind my train window, I did recognize those boots.

  Snakeskin.

  Unless I missed my guess, those were the same boots I’d seen hidden behind a wardrobe in the Union Pacific hotel back in Laramie.

  Chapter 28

  The Broadway Hotel stood, as Helen Nichols had earlier told me, near the bank of Cherry Creek, not far down from the South Platte. Here, the buildings were cramped together on the flat plains that ended abruptly just west of Denver, where the sheer walls of the Rockies stretched to peaks some 14,000 feet high.

  I could see the pale blue of those mountains from the second-floor veranda outside my room at the Broadway, just as I could look down from that veranda at the wide streets that ran straight furrows between the cramped buildings. Denver was permanent enough that many of the buildings were brick, not wood, but civilization had not encroached so far that the streets were more than mud and dirt.

  I leaned on my cane as I walked to the stairs at the south end of the hotel. I was here at the Broadway because Bob Nichols had stayed here, and I was hoping I might see or hear of something that would have been significant to him, a Wyoming rancher.

  I’d shown his photo while I was checking in the night before, but the hotel clerk hadn’t remembered seeing him. The clerk, however, had been happy to prattle about other things.

  Like these stairs. He’d explained how the stairs and this entire end of the hotel had actually overhung the rain-swollen torrents of Cherry Creek as it ate away the bank during the spring flood of ’64, with that water just inches from touching the hotel itself. I had — as was obligated with such folk lore — expressed admiring disbelief, for Cherry Creek in the fall hardly seemed capable of drowning a trussed cat. The clerk had assured me of the truth of his tale and added that the creek that May had also washed away a sawmill, a church, a newspaper and several stores, as well as City Hall and all its records, not to mention twenty drowned Denverites, including the mother of the wife of a friend’s friend who been taken almost from her bed itself and whose death had been the disaster’s only silver lining for the surviving in-laws.

  I’d departed long before the flood of ’64. My last summer in Denver had been ’58, at a dance hall belonging to the first and only woman I had loved before meeting Rebecca years later.

  On the train ride here, it had been strong in my mind, curiosity about Clara’s dance hall.

  At the hotel desk, I’d nearly asked the clerk if it still stood near the section of town where the red lights twinkled at dusk’s first darkness. I’d managed to refrain from expressing that curiosity, however. Instead, I had contented myself by promising I would allow mys
elf to stroll past it, if given the chance, but that I would definitely not step inside.

  I reached the end of the veranda, and tested my left leg with a slow step downward onto the stairs. Pain, alright, but an itchy pain, like stretching and testing the leg would feel good. I decided to turn around and leave my cane in the room. The less attention I might draw to myself, the better.

  Five minutes later, I was in the smoky eatery next door to the Broadway Hotel. Leather eggs and rock-hard bread made me homesick for the Chinaman, but were a good excuse to eat slow as I waited for Allan Pinkerton’s man to deliver word on Dehlia Christopher.

  *************************

  Allan Pinkerton’s man was thin and old and small and smiled apology from below a gray bushy moustache, as if he expected me to protest that he was thin and old and small.

  “You’re Keaton,” he said as he pulled up a chair to sit at the table. “I know because I was looking for the scar. Desk clerk tipped me on it.”

  “I’m Keaton.” I pushed my plate aside and stood to shake his hand.

  “Kels Madden. As you might be able to tell, I’ve been with the agency since we were one office in Chicago. I get the lighter stuff now. The youngsters get cases like the James Brothers. Suits me fine. I don’t need to be a hero.”

  He removed his hat and set it in his lap as he sat. His hair was as bushy as his moustache, rumpled by sweat. In his dark jacket, he seemed like a cheerful mouse.

  “But like I always say,” he continued. “There’s old bulls and there’s young bulls.”

  “Yeah?” I’d heard it before, but didn’t have the heart to stop him.

  “See, an old bull and a young bull were on a hillside, looking down at a bunch of cows. Young bull says, hey, let’s run down and chase with one or two. Old bull says, naw, let’s walk down and chase them all.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “I’ll remember that,” I said. “I hope it didn’t take much running to stay with the woman off the train.”

  “Nope,” he said. “She wasn’t hard to find. And I blend in good with crowds. She took a carriage ride, and I followed in one behind. You’ll find a receipt, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “From the train station, I spent maybe a ten minutes trailing that woman,” he said. “That was it. She didn’t go no place else but the fancy mansion up on Banker’s Row.”

  “Banker’s Row.”

  “Not the street’s real name, but no one calls it anything but Banker’s Row. Unless you own a bank or a mine, you don’t own a house there. Some of them are bigger than hotels.”

  I nodded as I absorbed that.

  “And she stayed all night,” he said.

  “You stood outside and waited?” I tried to imagine this man hiding in a tree somewhere nearby, shivering away the night coldness of fall in Colorado.

  He shook his head. “Youngster might do that. But how do you cover all the exits from a house that big? I hopped out of the carriage as soon as I could, went round back that mansion and had a talk with one of the cook’s maids. Big black woman. I even sweet talked her into a cut of fresh bread.” He flashed a grin from beneath that bushy moustache. “Bribe helped too.”

  Another grin. “Couldn’t get a receipt on it, though. You’ll have to trust me on that part of your bill.”

  Any man of Pinkerton’s could be trusted. I didn’t protest.

  “The maid can’t be expected to know the comings and goings of visitors.”

  “Well, Marshal, here’s where you get your money’s worth. That blond woman, she wasn’t no visitor.”

  “Interesting,” I said. And it was. Dehlia Christopher, the daughter of a banking or mining magnate? Why the brothers in rebel gray? Why…

  “You do take the fun out of a surprise,” Kels interrupted my thoughts. He brightened. “I got more that oughta draw a flicker from that poker face of your’n.”

  Difficult to stay uninvolved with the man’s sunny disposition. “You’re telling me that I’ll be happy to pay your bill?” I asked with a smile.

  “Yup. I don’t know what your game is, but it’s obvious you don’t know much about her. And it’s a big enough game you’d stay with her from Laramie.”

  “I hope you’re not adding this detective work onto the bill.”

  “Naw. Just feeling around. A hard habit to break.”

  “So what else did you learn.”

  “Dehlia Girard showed up at the front door two months ago. Long lost daughter, the maid told me.” He was watching me carefully. “Hah! I knew you’d flinch.”

  He was right. “Girard?” I could hardly move my mouth, it’d had slammed open so wide with surprise.

  “Instructions on the telegram hadn’t said more than follow, but it hadn’t taken much, so I did extra.”

  I was leaning forward now, my coffee getting cold. “Girard,” I repeated. “Dehlia Girard. Not Dehlia Christopher.”

  “Her father’s David Girard — vice-president at Denver First.” A sly shake of the head. “If you want to believe the story she told when she showed up. And the maid didn’t. None of the help do.”

  “Slow down,” I said. “I’m going to buy you breakfast, and you’re going to tell me all of it.”

  He did between mouthfuls.

  Late spring it had been when Dehlia Girard appeared at the mansion. She’d waited in the front hall for hours before David appeared in the early evening. She’d run forward and thrown herself in his arms, crying out, “Papa, Papa!”, the first indication to anybody in the mansion about why she had insisted on waiting.

  The story came out shortly after, delivered by David Girard himself. Dehlia was the daughter of his first wife, a woman he’d lost to Yankee soldiers early in the Civil War. Dehlia had been taken in by his sister and her husband, then been lost and given up for dead when that family’s farm, too, had been overrun. Dehlia had wandered away in a stream of refugees, been adopted by a passing family, and after all these years, had finally tracked down her father.

  The story sounded thin to me.

  I wasn’t the only one. Mrs. Lesley Girard, ten years senior to her husband David, found little in the tale to bring her joy. And inviting into her house a beautiful younger woman as a permanent house guest brought her even less joy. The maid reported that all of the servants felt on a daily basis a considerable tension because of Mrs. Lesley Girard’s dislike of the new arrangement.

  Kels Madden informed me of even more that I found of interest.

  Mrs. Lesley Girard was the moneyed one, part of a line of wealth that had grown each generation since her forefathers had begun the banking industry in Boston. David had married her less about five years before, and with the marriage, had taken on the title of vice-president at Denver First.

  When I asked why Mrs. Girard tolerated such a story, Kels Madden grinned and told me he’d asked the same thing.

  It was of vast amusement to the servants, he said, Mrs. Lesley Girard’s infatuation of David Girard. She was a granite-hearted town leader, society pillar and shrewd businesswoman, yet she simpered and cooed around her darling husband.

  Had, I asked, there been rumors about David and his so-called daughter.

  Kels nodded appreciation at that obvious question and told me that no, there’d been nothing to point to more than her claimed story. Except for two things, as the maid had archly mentioned. One, David Gerard and Dehlia Gerard made it appear frosty between them at the mansion, as if they were working extra hard to dispel any notion of romance. And two, David Girard did spend a lot of time away from the mansion. On business in Cheyenne, he always explained.

  That was all that Kels Madden had for me.

  I counted out bank notes to pay his bill, and then asked as casual as I could. “If a fellow was looking for fun, would you recommend the Gold Slipper?”

  He looked at me strange. “Gold Slipper. How’d you know about the Gold Slipper?”

  “Dance hall, right?”

  “Sure,” he said, “But it
burned down over ten years ago.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t going to ask about —

  “Clara Johnson,” he said, another smile lighting his wizened face. “You can’t know about her. You’re too much of a pup. And it’s been near twenty years. She was a legend here. Broke all our hearts when she went respectable on us.”

  “Just heard about her once in passing,” I said. “At a campfire, from an old cowboy on the trail.”

  “Well, son,” Kels said. “You tell that old cowboy that Clara Johnson is now Clara Lanigan. And she and her husband run the best restaurant in Denver, by the name of the English House.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll pass that on.”

  He stood, spry for someone so thin and small and old. He tipped his hat, gave me a final grin, and left me alone at my table.

  The English House. I’d walk by. Maybe. But I wouldn’t take a meal there. Not a chance.

  Chapter 29

  A.L. Leakey had the corner office of the second floor. Directly below him was the funeral home that belonged to an undertaker by the name of Frank Morgen. I knew, because I’d had to walk through it to find the stairs that led to Leakey’s office. By the considerable industry at the undertaker’s, and by the lawyer’s own admission, Leakey was in the wrong profession.

  I sat in the chair opposite a scarred, unvarnished desk in Leakey‘s cramped office. He stood at his office window, hands behind his back, shoulders slumped, staring down on the street.

  “It’s not so much that the undertaker will never run out of clients,” Leakey said, glumly. “It’s that he gets his money up front, and gets to stiff the clients — good one, huh, stiff them? — when they’re so upset or guilty or —” Leakey turned to me and shook his head “— happy, maybe with a big inheritence, that no one complains at his prices. Worse, some days it stinks so bad up here, with what he uses to pickle the bodies, that I can hardly breath.”

  Leakey was blond, thin-haired, of medium height and medium build with his dark vest and suit, he was remarkable only for the dark gravy stains on his tie and a waxed handlebar moustache which he now twirled between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.