by Jeff Rovin
The doctor fell back a few paces. “Ma’am?”
“We should go back. We should find my Ben, alive or . . . or wherever he is.”
“That will be done, Mrs. Keeler. You have my word. But you also have to think of yourself and the children now. You saw. There are men back there—the man who shot at you, who I killed, was their friend. They aren’t going away.”
“But I feel so helpless. Things—things were getting better.”
“What do you mean?”
“The fur trade,” she said. “Pelts were coming in from Canada, lower cost. The two other trappers from this region gave up. They went up to the Klondike, rumors of gold and all. Then President Arthur, the Lord bless, put on all these tariffs—and the demand rose again. Ben went out, full of hope for the first time in years.” She smiled for the first time that Stockbridge could recall. “Funny how a little thing so far away can change your spirits.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I thought—I hoped and still do—that he had stayed out longer just in case things changed again, like I read about them doing in Washington.”
“As you say, that just may be what he’s done,” Stockbridge told her.
“But I don’t feel it.” Mrs. Keeler managed a thin smile. “I’ve known Ben for so long, and so close, it’s as if a part of me is gone.” She looked up at Stockbridge, her cheeks turning bright red. “I’m sorry. You’ve been so kind, and I shouldn’t burden you. I barely know you.”
“There’s no need for apologies. I know that feeling all too well. And what I learned is that you have to let other people help you.”
“Did you lose someone, Doctor?”
“Several someones, all of them dear. Mrs. Keeler, you took a bold, brave step coming out here. Now you have to take another by going back for the sake of the children. I have experience with people like those we met, and also with tracking. You’d be doing me a favor, and an honor, to let me see to this.”
“Doctor, you are good. Me and Ben and the kids have never had anyone other than ourselves to rely on. It’s a new feeling.”
“I know that, too.”
“Ben and me—we ran away when we were teenagers, my parents disapproving of Ben’s trade. They had ambitions for me. They’re the publishers of a newspaper, the Colorado Line & Telegram.”
Stockbridge suppressed a snicker. “I know the publication. Did any part of you want that life?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “I’ve always loved the outdoors. The idea of a desk, ink, presses, type, counting out words for advertisers—it held no appeal.”
“That could be where your boy gets his interest in writing and reporting.”
“Maybe. He doesn’t really know his grandparents.”
“Perhaps this would be a good time to fix that.”
Mrs. Keeler thought for a moment, then sighed. “That’s too big a thought for right now. But thank you for giving me the thought, Dr. Stockbridge. You may be right.”
Still riding beside the wagon, Stockbridge looked ahead. He saw nothing but more boulders, more cacti, and more dirt. “Will we reach your place before nightfall?”
“Maybe a little after,” she said.
Stockbridge peered at the cacti that were the only things that grew here. They were clustered together around what were probably pockets of water close to the surface.
“Is there water nearby? The horses will need it.”
She looked north, then south, then decided and pointed southeast. “There’s a freshwater pond about two miles out of the way. We used to make it a day’s outing, taking the children there to swim.”
“It’s a detour we’d best take,” Stockbridge said.
Unlike on the trail, the plain to the southeast was dotted with hills so low, they barely merited the name. That was why the trail was where it was, pushing straight across the flatlands. Stockbridge suspected the region was laced with underground streams, something common to the land below the Rockies. Like the trail, the terrain would afford very little cover if they were attacked. Just the boulders, and he did not relish being pinned down behind one.
Mrs. Keeler seemed to read his mind. “Do you think those men are following us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you?”
“Probably, though not at once. Men make foolish errors when they don’t take time to think. Either way, the animals need rest.”
Mrs. Keeler nodded. “I wonder if we should have just given him the wagon.”
“Forgive my asking, but you have an old injury, yes?”
“My leg. From a fall decorating a Christmas tree. It did not heal properly.”
“Well, ma’am, you would not have survived the walk back,” Stockbridge said, “and I don’t think they would have left you your fuzztail.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“If you don’t mind, when we reach the cabin, I’d like to look at your leg. Might be something that can be fixed.”
“By cutting?”
“That would have to be a part of it, yes.”
The woman shook her head. “Thank you, but I near bled to death having Rachel, and it seems that this is what God wanted for me. It hasn’t held me back any.”
“I can see that. Offer stands if you change your mind.”
The woman smiled appreciatively before drifting into thoughts of her own—perhaps the past, perhaps the present, perhaps tomorrow. Stockbridge trotted to the front of the wagon and told Rachel the plan.
“I know the place,” she said. “We always came to it from home, but I think I can find it this way.”
“I could find it, too,” Lenny said. “You see all the tracks in the ground? Lots of people probably come here.”
Rachel frowned. “Lenny, there aren’t ‘lots’ of people living in this part of Colorado. Plus, lookit—those are a lot of horse tracks, but each horse makes four of them.”
“I didn’t mean just horses, but other animals, too.”
“You said ‘people.’”
“I meant animals, too. Anything that’s thirsty.”
“Tell you what,” Stockbridge said. “Rachel, why don’t you follow your nose, and, Lenny, you follow the tracks? Let’s see if they meet.”
The dispute ended, Stockbridge fell back to cover the rear. He did not know if the men would pursue, but he did know one thing: The wagon was leaving tracks as well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Molly Henshaw was six years old, she had dreamed of becoming an actress on a big-city stage. She put on little plays for the chickens and cows on the family farm in Maryland, and memorized correspondence her parents received so she would have words to say. She gave soaring, dramatic readings of “due” notices and the “foreclosure.”
When Molly Henshaw was seven, her father had been killed in the War, and her mother took to bed in their dark attic apartment in a home for destitute War widows, where she remained until she died. Still seven, Molly went to live in Pennsylvania with a relative on her mother’s side, Aunt Eva Sommer. Aunt Eva was a seamstress who lived with her daughter, Thomasina, who was nine. Eva was still married to Izzy Sommer, but he had left three years earlier, and no one knew where he was.
When she was eight, and with Aunt Eva’s approval, Molly learned a trade from Thomasina: picking pockets. When she was nine, Molly was beaten by a man who caught her in the act. Then she was beaten by Aunt Eva, not for the first time nor for the last. Still acting—only now to keep from crying—Molly liked to pretend that she was a great lady living in a fine house. It did not matter that the girl was just performing stories from newspapers she found in the streets. Eva thought she was being mocked and took a belt to the girl.
When she was twelve, Molly ran away to become an actress. She got as far as Ohio by hiding in trains and stealing food and clothes from luggage. When she was thirtee
n, Molly was already seven months on the job as a cleaning girl at the Hotel Cleveland. When she turned eighteen, and six hotels later—having moved farther south and west—the woman with blond curls and big brown eyes landed at the Poet and Puncher, a saloon in Buzzard Gulch. It was named for the fact that the men who ate and imbibed there either told one another their woes or beat the whiskers off one another. But that did not affect Molly. What did was that there, every Friday and Saturday night, there were performances by the White and Black Ladies—a mix of freed slave girls and poor Southern belles of once-grand plantations. And between those shows, Molly was allowed to take to the stage to read limericks that had been submitted during the week by patrons. It was not art and it was not even acting, unless wearing a bathing costume with the skirt and pleated blouse but no drawers and pretending to be warm was acting.
Promise Cuthbert had not known he had a love of verse until he’d heard it from the lips of Molly Henshaw. Molly did not like Cuthbert, but she did not mind him, which was more important. And being known as the girl of Captain Cuthbert was more important still. It made sure that locals and visitors alike let her be. Cuthbert did not like to share.
Every week, before going on, Molly would smoke one of her hand-rolled cigarettes in a tiny dressing room. She would stare at herself in the mirror and tell herself that this was an opportunity to learn how to tame a rowdy audience. And she did. Up there, in the flickering glow of the footlight candles, she could tease them, pose in ways that drove them loco, or use words they did not understand before introducing a limerick—that shut them up, and to cover their embarrassment, they threw coins at the stage. Everything they flung, she kept.
In short, she learned how to control men. The rest of the time, the other five days a week, she bathed many of those men at the adjoining Pap Hotel. That was all: just a bath, for two bits above the normal two-bit price. She split that money with the owner of both establishments, Raspy Nikolaev.
Raspy’s real name was Rasputin. But with a throat worn to tree bark by the Balkan tobacco he smoked, everyone called him Raspy. He did not mind, as long as their money was not foreign or Confederate and they didn’t abuse Molly or the other young bath girl, Doris. He lived a good life here, with a suite on the second floor—complete with a terrace for tea and breakfast, when it was warm—and a large surrey. Though Nikolaev did not have three friends to go riding with him, he liked the ostentation of the big buggy. It made him feel important. He had come to these shores to be important. Nikolaev had been part of a secret plot to annex California for Russia immediately after the Civil War. When that had blown up—unlike their explosives, which had failed to, allowing a local militia to cross a bridge and kill most of the foreigners—Nikolaev headed east with some of the Russian gold that was supposed to build a bigger, better stronghold. He got as far as Gunnison, where the question was: Use the rest of the money to go to the East Coast, or stay here and buy a saloon?
That had been thirteen years ago.
Nikolaev was very protective of his employees. It was an odd quirk in the otherwise sweaty, arrogant foreigner. Maybe Doris was right when she said, “He likes being a tsar, and a ruler needs devoted subjects.”
Molly didn’t care. It was the first time in her life someone had looked out for her.
Actually, there were two people who did that. Doris was too preoccupied with trying to find a husband, preferably a rancher. But never far from Molly’s elbow was the linen girl and overall domestic Yi Huang, a tiny woman in her forties who was widowed and eager to work.
On most days, Molly was all right with her life. Rarely happy but not discontent. What helped was to take her own bath several times a week and, relaxing, to read magazines and newspapers. She liked stories about people. Their joys or sadness transported her, briefly, to a place that was sometimes better, sometimes worse than her own.
Rarely did one story do both. The article about Dr. John Stockbridge was one such. She read it after already having overheard talk about him at the bar. When she finally saw a copy of the Colorado Line & Telegram, the drawing was like something from a stage drama: one man falling backward, his hand on his wounded breast; the other tall, stalwart, legs in a wide stance, hat low, a large shotgun still smoking; and onlookers running away, with a horse rearing, its eyes wide with terror. The caption:
DR. VENGEANCE STRIKES WITHOUT MERCY!
There was something awful but enchanting about the idea of a mysterious, fearless avenger. Molly was not one to follow the serial exploits of famous actresses or military heroes, the kind of thing that interested other women. Sarah Bernhardt, that new stage sensation Lillie Langtry, the fallen George Armstrong Custer. They were either self-promoters or, increasingly, a product of the press.
But this Dr. John Stockbridge—he was new. New and fascinating in a way that the figures in Scripture had once captivated her when she had acted their stories as a child. Sitting in the fast-cooling tub, she found long-unremembered words and phrases returned to her, and they made her smile.
“‘Be strong and of a good courage. Fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the Lord thy God, He it is that doth go with thee; He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee!’”
“You need something?” Yi had said through the door of the bathroom, a small room with slanted windows that let in warm sun like into a painter’s studio. There was even a small table with flowers in a vase.
“Yes, but not from you,” Molly replied confusingly.
Yi walked away, muttering. Molly returned to the broadsheet. The report about the showdown was new, just three days old. And it was here—close enough, anyway. Gunnison was the better part of a day’s ride. She did not know what Mr. Otis A. Burroughs had uncovered subsequent, but she was tantalized, then quickly obsessed, by the idea of making her own assessment of things.
A man so in love with his family that he sought to profane his own hands with the blood of the killer!
Asking Doris to fill in for her—which the other woman agreed to do, for two dollars—Molly persuaded Nikolaev to loan her his surrey, and she had ridden all the way to Gunnison in the hope of hearing of the deed from those who had witnessed it—or, if the fates were kind, actually laying eyes on this man.
She had achieved just one of those, but it was enough.
The encounter with Dr. John Stockbridge had occurred late in the day, entirely by chance, as she was passing by the Outfitting Depot of the Bartholomew Brothers. It was late afternoon, and Molly had intended only to ask the proprietor where she might find lodgings for the night. That was when a man on horseback, about to cross her path, had stopped to let her pass.
She did not. The woman, transfixed, stopped the surrey so fast, she actually lurched forward.
“Are you all right?” the deep voice asked.
“Yes—well, no . . . yes.”
Her mouth had been uncertain but her eyes never left the figure before her. He was wearing a different coat—furs, not a duster—but the hat was the same, pulled down the same, and so was the shotgun. He held the reins with one hand, his left, and clutched the double-barrel shotgun along the inside of his right arm. His horse was packed as if for a journey.
Because it had been closing in on twilight, few people were about the dark street. Perhaps that was the reason the infamous figure was out now.
The two had remained in place for what seemed longer than it took to read that story. And it told her more, too. The man was a rock, but he was not unfeeling. She could sense it with a kind of animal awareness.
“Please, ma’am,” the deep voice had said, “after you.”
The words had not broken the spell but deepened it. Molly had lingered and smiled weakly, both for just a moment. Then she had urged her horse forward softly and rolled on to beneath the big sign that hung well out over the street.
Molly had watched as the man left town, headed west. He rode at a good clip, as if anxious to avoid p
ursuit—
Or to start over somewhere else? she had intuited.
Molly had not, herself, remained in Gunnison that night. She was suddenly not tired. Buying bread and cheese from the Bartholomews, she had turned around and gone back to Buzzard Gulch, the surrey’s lantern guiding her way. She had gotten what she came for and wanted nothing more. It had been perfect—one of the few things in her life that ever had been. She memorialized it in verse she composed on the way home, seeking the words to express how right it had been. Even her boss had noticed, and she had finally confided to Raspy Nikolaev—no one else, not even Doris—about her daring pursuit and encounter.
“I think you are in love,” Nikolaev had said after hearing her tale.
“I think you are right,” Molly had replied. “That is why I am telling you. I would ask you to please watch out for me whenever the captain is here. He may think it is for him.”
Molly did not mention her trip or her secret love to Cuthbert. She kept it to herself, in the locket of her heart. Whenever she opened it, she felt as though there were a guardian angel shining a strange, hopeful light on her.
Like so much of her life, it was silly but real.
That had been a week before, seven days in which the power of the encounter had gone undiminished. What Molly did not know, when Cuthbert rode up to the Pap Hotel that night, was that the ephemeral relationship was about to take on another dimension: deadly.
CHAPTER NINE
Liam McWilliams had no difficulty picking up the trail of Dr. Stockbridge. It had been ground into the earth by the Keeler wagon and Stockbridge’s own—Grady’s own—horse.
It was midafternoon, and the light was good. Not only were the tracks fresh, undusted by the temperate wind, but the rear wheels of the wagon had suffered nicks that left a distinctive pattern. It must have happened at a spot near where Grady had stopped them, since what remained of the tracks coming up Peak Road looked fine. Going down, every turn produced a jagged diagonal line.