Silver Moon

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Minutes later, I had a roll of bank notes as thick as my fist. It would cover triple what the lawyer Brian Scott had promised me earlier in the day he’d charge to look into Leakey’s mine dealings with Bob Nichols.

  These hired guns, however, weren’t as easily disposed of as a lawyer’s bill. I could not shoot them. I could not let them go.

  The horses stamped restlessly in front of the carriage, reminding me of how I wanted inside that silent dark interior.

  “Driver,” I said, “Have you heard of an undertaker named Morgen?”

  “Yup.”

  “From what I saw, he lives right next door to his funeral home.” I peeled off some bank notes. “I’d be obliged if you could pay him what it takes for the inconvenience of calling at this hour for a couple of extra large coffins.”

  ******************************

  Later, inside the carriage, with the light of the outside lamp spilling inward upon her, it broke my heart all over again, to look into the face and eyes of Clara Johnson, now Clara Laningan.

  I didn’t trust my voice, so I swallowed hard and waited for what she might say after all these years. My hands felt like large rocks, and no matter where I placed them, they felt awkward in my lap.

  She stared back, her face soft in the darkness cast by the hood of her bonnet.

  Heartbeat followed heartbeat and still nothing was said.

  The carriage was moving now, and we both swayed with the jolting of the road, each in our own corner of thought and memories.

  I’d met her first when I was fifteen. That was ’54, the year my brother Jed drifted us into Denver, where Clara was just another dance-hall girl at the Golden Slipper.

  Jed and I were orphans — Jed as wild as I was shy — the only survivors of a Crow Injun attack that had killed our parents on a lonely wagon trail beyond the shadows of the Bighorn Mountains. We’d spent a fall and winter with the mountain men who’d found us, then time with friendly Shoshoni in the grassland basins north of the Greybull River.

  I followed Jed in our driftings after the Shoshoni simply because he led. In Denver, he’d firmly announced he wanted to travel alone during the summer, and with equal firmness announced that I was to stay there to wait for his return. I’d agreed, simply because he’d declared it that way.

  I wasn’t the only one who Jed could mesmerize by the force of his will. Jed found me work and lodgings at the Golden Slipper, an arrangement that resulted from the infatuation of the dance-hall matron who saw me as a good way to insure Jed would indeed return to her.

  That summer at the Golden Slipper I chopped wood, swept floors, toted water — and from May until September spoke less than a dozen words to the girls who made their living at 25¢ per dance, the cost for a cowboy to spin them for five minutes around the floor to the sounds of tinny music. This was common enough. Many dance-hall women were straighter then a deaconess, and their job was to dance with the men, talk to them, flirt a bit, and induce them to buy drinks — but nothing more. So little did I know about women and men that I assumed all the other dance halls were similar. On the day I discovered that red lights at the other halls meant the spins there cost more and involved less clothing, I was so shocked that a light wind would have sent me tumbling down the street.

  When Jed returned for the winter, he hired on as protection at the front door. Already, he was good with his guns, and unafraid with his fists. I chopped wood — much more wood as it got cold — and toted water and swept floors.

  Jed left again the next summer. At his directive, I remained. Shy to the point of pain, happy to be ignored, I quietly chopped wood, toted water and swept floors.

  Clara, the dance girl closest in age to me, but infinitely wiser in the ways of the world, took pity on me in my ignorance and shyness. She made it her habit to try to engage me in conversation, a difficult task on her part when I was unable even to lift my eyes from the floor to look into her face. Because of that habit, I knew her feet well, and could describe every pair of shoes she’d worn that summer, but I would not have been able to describe the color of her eyes — green as I saw on the day she lifted my chin to gently kiss my forehead.

  That kiss was a reward. One drunk cowboy had been particularly insistent that his five-minute spin become something more. He’d followed her to the back of the building where she’d gone for fresh air. Her cries alerted me, and I‘d found her struggling to push away from his arms. I’d waded in without thinking about his friends or his revolver. That was when I learned that chopping wood, toting water, and sweeping floors do add considerable muscle to a gangly frame. He went down without a sound. She fled for the safety of the interior of the dance hall. The next morning while I sat at breakfast, she stopped beside me, and to the applause of the other girls, bestowed upon me my reward, that first chaste kiss.

  It took another summer before I was brave enough to speak to her on a regular basis.

  No one in Denver was prettier as she blossomed into womanhood. Her face was not quite chubby, and had an alluring pout that drew men like moths to flame. Her hair was blond and fine and promised as much softness as the rest of her ripe body. It was a package that hid a razor-sharp mind. By then, she had convinced several business men to help her purchase the Golden Slipper. Her first official act as owner was to promote me to hired gun in Jed’s absence, for he spent his winters at the dance hall teaching me gunplay, knife throwing and fist-fighting, all the education he’d been acquiring during his summers away from Denver.

  At the end of the summer of ’57 — I was eighteen then — she inexplicably chose me as the only suitor in her life and all the following winter was the most glorious time of love I have ever experienced.

  I should have stayed at the Golden Slipper in the spring and summer of ’58. Instead, I listened to Jed when he suggested I follow him to hunt wanted men for bounty.

  It was a decision that killed Jed and left me in jail in Pueblo, facing death at the end of a rope until — like this night some fifteen years later — sweet Clara and sweet salvation had arrived together to save my life.

  Chapter 33

  “Hello,” she said, voice soft as her touch in my memories. “It is you, isn’t it? I mean, the scar, it is from Pueblo all that time ago…”

  I briefly squeezed my eyes shut against those memories. It seemed all my years of hunger and aloneness and pain of unanswered love for her had compressed into this tiny moment.

  “It…” I swallowed past a lump in my throat. “It is, Clara. Only I go by the name of Samuel Keaton. Seems I left my other name behind, along with a lot of other things.”

  The carriage hit a bump. Neither of us lost the eyes of the other.

  “I missed you,” she said. “Fifteen years I’ve wondered about you, prayed you’d return and other nights prayed that you’d died and would never return to haunt me. I’ve asked myself again and again why I let my pride send you away that night in Pueblo. Just when I’d managed to put you out of my life, you were there, in the back of my restaurant, wearing the same gentle and lonely fear that first made me care when you were a skinny kid who hauled water without saying a word. I thought I was a girl all over again, the way I shook and trembled.”

  She laughed. “Course, to see you safe after fretting all these years, I nearly took out a gun myself and shot you right where you sat. How dare you not come back to me!”

  “You saw me in the restaurant,” I repeated, because that was easier than thinking through everything that was flooding me.

  “Even if I hadn’t at first, how could I have missed you later? Not many drag out their meal over four hours.”

  “You followed me.”

  “I didn’t trust myself to stop at your table. Worried I might make a fool of myself. I didn’t know if I wanted to follow you either. But I knew if I didn’t speak to you, I’d spend another eternity regretting the lost chance.”

  “You saved my life again. Sure that’s a habit you want to acquire?”

  “I may want to
,” she said. “But it won’t happen. We have until the carriage stops.”

  “Then what?”

  “You go where you were headed before you stopped at the English House. I go back to my husband.”

  She must have taken my silence as disbelief.

  “Yes, I’m married. My oldest boy is the same age as you were when I first saw you at the Golden Slipper. While speaking to you like this is not wrong, if people see us together, they may take it that way. I will not shame my husband in that manner.”

  She paused. “We will not talk again.”

  “Don’t break it to me so gentle,“ I said.

  It caught her off guard, the dryness in my words. She blinked, shook her head, blinked again, and clapped her hands together in delight. “You’ve found a sense of humor!”

  I cocked my head, a silent question.

  “As a boy, some days you’d take the world so serious. I’d catch a look across your face as if you’d been run down by a buffalo and hadn’t seen it coming or going. It always made me think of how your ma and pa had passed on and what you’d been through, and I’d want to hold you tight and tell you everything would be just fine.”

  “You loved me because you pitied me?” I wasn’t sure I liked this, seeing myself through her eyes.

  “Hardly. What touched my heart was your braveness. I felt sorry for you, but you never felt sorry for yourself. You’d never quit what you started. When you lit into that cowboy for me, I saw for the first time that you had fire. I eventually realized you were strong, much stronger even than Jed, but didn’t know it yourself. Then you filled out and had that durn crooked grin that made all our hearts flutter and…”

  “You must be talking about a different person than what I remember,” I said. “You were the one I always dreamed of but never once expected to look twice in my direction. Like an angel you were. You’d fluff that blonde hair of yours…”

  I stopped, for she was pulling loose her bonnet. She tossed her head a few times to fluff it like she’d always done, except now, even with the dim light of the outside lamp, I could see it was no longer blonde.

  She laughed more delight. “You were so innocent, you never once figured I dyed this, did you?”

  “No, Ma’am. You’re still the vision I remember, though.”

  She was. The years had taken from her face its chubbiness, leaving a classic beauty that would not diminish as she grew older. Her hair, still thick, was brunette, and fanned a promised softness across her shoulders.

  It was all I could do not to reach across and touch that hair, if only to let me believe this was not a dream.

  There was the creaking of the carriage suspension, the slap of horses’ hooves on dirt, and the irregular jouncing of our leather benches. All of this reminded me that I was awake, that I truly was with Clara as we rode aimlessly through the streets of Denver.

  Perhaps she felt the same as I did, for she lifted her hands from her lap. She set one down on the bench between us, leaning forward on it and bracing against it as she reached with her other hand to touch my cheek.

  “Last time I saw this, it was still an open gash,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been surprised to see this scar.”

  I brought up my hand to hold hers, but she drew away, placing the distance between us again.

  “Why didn’t you come back to me?” she asked.

  My turn for disbelief. “You’d sent me away,” I said when I found my voice. “I clearly remember your last words. They were the words I heard every night as I tried to find sleep. ‘Ride off the face of the earth,’ you said. My hatred and scorn will follow you until you die.”

  “I was angry.”

  “Evidently.”

  “You should have known I wanted you to come back begging for me.”

  I sighed. “I was the one who couldn’t even tell you dyed your hair. Someone tells me to ride off the face of the earth, I figure it’s more than a hint. Specially after what I’d done.”

  Clara sighed. “Strange thing is, next morning when I’d cooled down, I saw it in a different light. She’d walked into your hotel room. She’d thrown herself at you. And from what you’d said, you pushed her away before giving her a chance to prove her intentions. I had no cause to send you away.”

  Clara shook her head in sadness. “But by the time I saw it in a different light, you were gone and I had no way to call you back.”

  I said nothing. My memories of the weeks in Pueblo were painful enough.

  “Worst thing is,” she said, “I sent you away the one time you needed me so bad. I could see it in your eyes, the way you told me everything from behind the cell bars. You needed me to forgive you, and I sent you away.”

  “They were not easy years. How Jed died stayed with me for a long time.”

  “Is it easier now?” Her question was whispered.

  I shrugged. “There was more to how he died than me being with his girl.”

  I told Clara what I’d learned in the months before my marshal position in Laramie, how the girl in my hotel room had set both Jed and me up for our deaths, why I was still alive, and about the man she’d been working with, and how I’d finally faced him down earlier in the summer.

  There was long silence after that. I had no idea of how much time had passed since leaving her restaurant. It wasn’t until a jarring bump that a wince of pain reminded me that I’d hardly given any thought to the new damage to my leg.

  She noticed. “Those boys didn’t have a tea party in mind. May I presume they’re part of the reason why you’re here now?”

  “You may.”

  I explained to her what had brought me to Denver. It was easier than talking about the chances with each other we had lost.

  I told her about the double murder. Missing money. The murder attempt on me. The death of Clayton Barnes. About Dehlia. David Girard. She laughed at my descriptions of Mayor Crawford and of Brother Lewis in the jail cell with a horse. She clucked sympathy at my confusions, nodded agreement at my assessment of those two fine men, Doc Harper and Jake Wilson. And when I finally finished, she posed her next question without pause.

  “What in the world to do you intend to do with the coffins?”

  “Leave them,” I said. “You heard what I told those men.”

  “You weren’t serious.”

  “Sure I was. The most harm it’ll bring them is a little thirst.”

  “They’ll wet their pants,” she protested, not without a trace of giggle. “Two days in a coffin?”

  “That’s all I need,” I said. “Two days. It’ll give me time to wait in the mining shack and clear this straight through.”

  I winced at another bounce. “Wet pants ain’t nothing compared to how my leg burns. Least they could have done was lashed the good one.”

  “And if two days isn’t enough?” Clara asked.

  “Set those two lose so they don’t die,” I said. “Then send your driver to the mine. At that point, if I’m not dead, I could probably use help.”

  Chapter 34

  I found the mining shack in the gray of a cold drizzling mist that hid the mountains during my entire ride from Denver. The shack stood alongside a small stream at the head of a steep-walled valley, where the water riffled a shallow path down a bed of gravel. Low cloud-cover muffled all sound except for the gurgle of the stream’s water, and when I’d first seen the shack as it loomed into view from the cold fog, this silence had heightened my impression of a ghostly, shrouded silhouette.

  That mining had taken place here for years was obvious. Aside from the shack, there were piles of rocks and a tom at the side of the stream. This rock would have been dug by pick and shovel from the streambed, thrown back onto the tom, and once washed, thrown back onto the bank. The tom — a long trough that worked like a miner’s pan — washed bits of gold free of sand and gravel. It was open at both ends for water flow, and was long enough that three or four men could work side by side at the same time. Long since abandoned and without water flo
w, the center of the tom should see chunks of gravel which glistened with rain.

  It had been a long ride from Denver to reach this site. I’d followed a deeply rutted wagon trail, its double gash of passing wheels long softened by several season’s growth of long grass. The trail took me upsteam as the valley narrowed, until in the last few miles the broad plain of the valley bottom had become little more than the width of the banks carved by the stream, the road steeper with the twistings of the stream’s curves.

  My vantage point was above the final twist in the road, where it turned suddenly to reveal the shack in its forlorn decay. From where I was lying in a shallow depression in the ground behind a low bush, I’d already paced the distance down to the wagon trail. Five running steps. And from there, another ten steps to the sagging wood door of the shack.

  It was a very small world, with the fog so low that visibility was down to the sparse trees immediately around me, the far edge of the creek bank, and the shack those fifteen steps away.

  Despite the ease of ambush given by the grey drizzling fog, by my cover, and by the steep slopes and the twisting road, I’d hoped for better.

  David Girard in his snakeskin boots — I expected no one else — would need no more time than it took to creak open the door to see that the shack was empty.

  I had done the same, to find an old bunk and iron stove. The bunk was a rotting frame of wood slats held disjointed by rusty nails. Straw poked through holes in the rain-stained mattress where mice or squirrels had eaten through the gray canvas. The stove’s chimney pipe had been partially dismantled, as if halfway through someone had decided it was not worth the effort of stripping further. Cobwebs, scattered mice droppings, and the vague staleness of fermented mold all convinced me it had easily been years since any miner had used the shack as a shelter during breaks from the exhausting labor of shoveling streambed gravel onto the nearby tom.

  In short, Girard would not need to step inside to realize no one waited him. Since I didn’t want to shoot him — dead or badly wounded, he would be unable to answer my questions — I had to be ready on the road behind him when he turned away from the doorway. I needed to be waiting with my rifle steady, giving me enough of a drop on him that he wouldn’t risk going for his gun to force a shootout.