by Anita Mills
“I wish I could say it wasn’t,” he answered. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Taylor—there wasn’t anything anybody could do.”
The ground gave way, and the world tumbled like a brick wall collapsing around her before everything went mercifully black.
Nebraska Territory: September 11, 1865
Spence reined in and leaned forward to ease his tired shoulders as he stared at the muddy Missouri, thinking it was still a long way to California, and he had to keep going or he’d never make it across the Rockies and the Sierras before winter hit. He’d probably made a mistake by taking the Platte Road west, but he’d wanted to avoid the Comanches and the desert heat in Texas, and any way he chose, he couldn’t miss hitting mountains. Besides, Ross and Liddy had been down this road six months earlier.
It had cost Spence more than five hundred dollars and a lot of wasted time before Allan Pinkerton’s “agency in Chicago had gotten back to him with information gleaned from Ross’s sister Phoebe in England. By telling her Sally Jamison’s will had been probated, leaving Lydia a sizable amount of money, Pinker-ton’s man had managed to get the address of Ross’s maternal uncle in San Francisco.
While expressing horror at her brother’s scandalous behavior, she’d confided that he’d written his family, saying the blockade had made it impossible for him to join them, and he and Lydia were heading west instead, where he’d been promised a position in their uncle’s banking business. Assuring them of his noble intent, Ross had also said Lydia had opened his eyes to her husband’s true character, implying that Spence had married her for her money. Once they were settled in, he also indicated she’d get a divorce, and they’d legalize their “irregular union.”
Irregular union, hell. It was adultery, no matter what they wanted to call it. And Spence would see both of them dead before he’d agree to any divorce. They’d dashed his dreams, stolen his child, and made him the laughingstock of Crawford County, and there was no way on earth he’d forgive them for it.
He just wished he’d found out where they’d gone earlier, before he’d had to spend months enduring the whispers, the knowing looks that told him the whole damned neighborhood knew his wife had cuckolded him. And it hadn’t helped one damned bit to know that most of them pitied him. It he hadn’t been waiting to hear from Pinkerton, he would have gotten out of there a long time ago.
But so far, the information he’d paid for was proving out, he conceded. There’d been a Mr. and Mrs. Ross Donnelly and son registered at the finest hotels in St. Louis and Kansas City last March. Now, if he found they’d stayed in Omaha also, he’d know he wasn’t on a wild-goose chase.
When he reached town, he wanted to find a hotel where he could get a bath and a decent meal for a change. Not knowing what he’d get into in California, and not wanting to carry a lot of money on him, he’d been sleeping under the stars, making himself skillet biscuits and strong coffee, and fishing in the river whenever he could. By now, he was pretty sure he smelled worse than a billy goat.
The bay sidestepped suddenly, and Spence jerked to attention. He heard the heart-pausing buzz before he saw the coiled rattlesnake, and he pulled the reins taut with one hand while he went for the Navy Colt with the other. He pulled the trigger, and the headless coil unraveled to writhe a couple of times before it lay still, looking like a dirty piece of rope in the dusty road. As the gun smoke dissipated, he shoved the revolver back into its holster.
Four months ago, he probably couldn’t have killed the snake with one shot. It had taken him hundreds of hours of practice, but now he could cock and fire five times and hit his mark with every bullet. And he’d made himself quick enough that he could draw and shatter a dropped shot glass before it hit the ground. Ross wouldn’t have any more of a chance than that rattlesnake.
“Come on, Clyde,” he murmured, nudging the horse. “We’re not getting anywhere just standing here.”
Clyde. It was a helluva name for a good animal, Spence reflected wryly. But when Trader had gone lame outside Boonville, Missouri, he’d been damned lucky to find the chestnut gelding that he hadn’t cared what they called it. “Clyde’s a mite fidgety, and that scares some folks off, you know,” the fellow had warned him as he took Spence’s hundred dollars. Fidgety had turned out to mean if the animal was given its head, it ran like an Arabian. What Clyde had lacked, Spence decided, was exercise.
A steam whistle sounded behind him. Half turning in the saddle, he could see the train coming down tracks parallel to the road. Suddenly, the air brakes squealed, and the black iron locomotive shuddered before it slowed. The cars passing him proclaimed Union Pacific R. R. in bold, gaudy letters. Mustachioed men and bonneted women stared out of windows rolling by. In one of the cars, a tow-headed little boy had his nose pressed against the glass while he waved at Spence.
As the track cleared, a wide sign peered across the rails, welcoming strangers. Omaha. The Gate City of the West. The train’s clattering wheels ground against the steel tracks as the air brakes grabbed again, venting a burst of steam and smoke into the air. Mastered now, the cars rolled docilely into the whitewashed depot marked simply, Omaha.
While porters pulled iron steps down and a heavy door swung open, Spence scanned the street ahead, looking for a place to stay. Two signs stood out, one calling attention to a boardinghouse, the other announcing a hotel. In about five minutes the street would fill with people leaving those railroad cars.
Giving Clyde another nudge, he guided the horse up to the hitching post just as a huge man with beefy arms and enough hair on him to keep a buffalo warm threw a decidedly scruffy cowboy outside. The fellow pulled himself up by the crosspost, tucked his shirt in, and ambled off down the dusty street.
“Come back, and I’ll set the bedbugs onto you!” the big man called after him.
Spence dismounted and pushed the broad brim of his hat back for a better look at him. “How much without the bedbugs?” he asked.
The behemoth looked him over before answering, “Three dollars, if I had a room, but I don’t. Railroad keeps me full up.”
He decided to try the hotel. Crossing the street, he stepped up onto the wooden porch that ran the length of the establishment. It looked respectable, but that was about all. A sign posted outside listed the menu, featuring fried bullhead, buffalo stew, and something called slugbelly, each costing fifty cents. Bold letters at the bottom, no whiskey on premises, leapt out at him.
The clerk looked up, took in the gun and holster tied down to his leg, then shook his head. “No firearms in the parlor, mister. I know,” he added, waving his hand as though he’d heard more than his share of complaints. “But if we let you carry a gun, then we got to let the cowboys, and they’ll shoot up the place. And no spitting on the floor either. If you chew, use the spittoons.”
“I don’t chew,” Spence murmured, unbuckling his gun belt.
“The maid’ll be glad to hear it.” The clerk opened a big black book and turned it around. “Name, where you’re from, and where you’re going.”
“You don’t want to know much, do you?”
“If you don’t pay up, we send the law after you. And don’t put down John Smith either,” the man told him dryly. “He’s already been here three times this week.”
Taking the pen, Spence wrote “Spencer D. Hardin, Crawford County, Georgia.” Following the line across, he added, “San Francisco, California.”
The clerk turned the register around, then noted, “I reckon you’re a Reb, ain’tcha?”
“Was. The war’s over, and we’re all just one big, happy family of Americans now.”
“Georgia, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I been seein’ a lot of you folks coming this way. I guess since you lost, not too many of you got much stomach for staying put.” To demonstrate, he pushed the book back to Spence. “Lookee here—any page you want to open, I reckon there’s half a dozen Rebs on it,”
Thumbing through it, Spence scanned the names
until the entry he was looking for caught his eye. Mr. and Mrs. Ross Donnelly, Macon, Georgia. Headed to San Francisco.
Apparently, his expression gave him away. The clerk looked at him, then to the page. “Guess you seen somebody you know, huh?”
“Yeah. I don’t suppose you remember the Donnellys, do you?” he asked casually. “He’s a tall blond fellow—about my height, I’d say—and she’s a very pretty woman with dark hair and eyes. They had a little boy with them,” he added, trying to jog the man’s memory.
The clerk followed the line with his finger, noting the date. “That’d be quite a while back, but seems to me .. · yeah, the Donnellys. Be hard to forget that pair, that’s for sure. They was here quite a spell— didn’t check out for a couple of weeks.”
“Oh?”
“She was more’n pretty, mister—she was the kind that’d make a man sit up when she walked by. And that little kid was the spittin’ image offer, too—didn’t look anything like his pa.”
“That’d be them, all right.”
“ ‘Course when I got to know ‘em, I wouldn’t have that woman for all the tea in China,” the man declared flatly. “Got a nasty temper if things don’t go her way, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” Spence agreed dryly. “High-strung.”
“Exactly. She didn’t like it none that we wouldn’t take coloreds, but I’d like to see a place that does,” the clerk recalled with feeling. “I had to send the old woman over to the undertaker, and the missus was wanting her to take the boy with her. Said she was too tired to fuss with him, you know. Them was a long two weeks for everybody, I can tell you. By the time they left, I was feeling sorry for the mister, even if he was a mite uppity himself.”
“Two weeks seems a long time to stay in Omaha,” Spence murmured.
“Ain’t it? But he said they’d been told they couldn’t get through the mountains afore May, and he didn’t see no sense in sitting around with no creature comforts at Fort Laramie while they was waiting for the road to open. Then the old woman takin’ sick didn’t help things either, I guess.”
“I thought you said she stayed at the undertaker’s.”
“Yeah, and Joe Black told me all about it after they finally left. By then, Mrs. Donnelly wasn’t feeling too well herself. Donnelly said he thought it was something she ate, but it wasn’t.”
“How’s that?”
“She took her meals here, but nobody else came down sick that week. No, sir, if it was anything, it was all that bile boiling up in her—that woman was downright peevish about everything. Now I ain’t for hittin’ no woman, you understand, but if she’d been mine, I believe I’da made an exception. When she wasn’t screeching about something, she was crying over it. Nothing the husband or kid did suited her.”
“Traveling was probably hard on her,” Spence murmured. “I don’t think she’d been out of Georgia in her life before then. But you were telling me the old woman was sick, too.”
“That’s right. Joe was complaining about what she’d cost him for a month afterwards.”
“Joe?”
“Joe Black’s the undertaker. He’s got a place in his shed for coloreds and Chinamen, ‘cause we can’t have ‘em stayin’ here.”
“Where would I find him?”
“Go right outside, take a right to the corner, then another right at it. Two blocks after you turn, you’re standing in front of the place. If Black’s not in, he’ll be at the cemetery, which is straight down the same road.”
“Thanks.”
So Ross had seen the other side of Liddy. As he took his gun back and slipped the room key into his pocket, Spence enjoyed a grim satisfaction. He hoped she’d given the bastard hell all the way to California.
Following the man’s directions, he made the second turn, then walked two blocks down the dusty street. Directly ahead of him a black-lacquered coffin had been placed on two sawhorses. On the side facing him, red letters traced with gold advertised the place.
FUNERAL PARLOR AND EMPORIUM
Joseph W. Black, Proprietor
Dignified Services Reasonable
In Omaha Since 1856
“Anybody here named Black?” he asked of a man standing outside.
“Might be.” The fellow flicked ashes off the end of his cheroot as he gave Spence the once-over, then shrugged. “I reckon you’d find ‘im inside if you was to look for ‘im. Ain’t seen ‘im come out, leastwise. Been kind of a slow day so far. Guess you could say Omaha’s gettin’ to be downright respectable. Ain’t that always what happens? Once the tracks is built, the wives start coming, then the churches go up, and pretty soon the damned place ain’t no fun anymore,” he lamented.
“They call that civilization,” Spence observed.
A fat, balding man with spectacles looked up from the newspaper spread over a long, scarred table as Spence came through the doorway. “Help you, son?”
“I’m looking for somebody.”
“Alive or dead?”
“A colored woman. Fellow over at the hotel says you put her up overnight last March.”
“Could be. March is long gone, son, and I don’t pay much mind to who stays here as long as they pay up.”
“This one’s a big colored woman—about as round as she is tall. Waddles when she walks, too. She probably weighs a good two hundred pounds.”
“Nah—that don’t help me. Like I said, I don’t pay much attention.”
Spence decided the undertaker wasn’t nearly as garrulous as the desk clerk. “She might have had some folks with her—a blond fellow in his late twenties—a little dark-headed kid—maybe even a very pretty dark-headed woman.”
“They all sound like you?”
“Pretty much.”
“Maybe,” Black said, going back to his paper.
“It’s him I’m looking for, not her. Him and the boy.” Reaching into his pocket, Spence took out a silver dollar and laid it on the open newspaper. “This help any?”
The man studied the coin for a moment before he looked up, his eyes narrowing. “Not a bounty hunter, are you?”
“No.” Spence almost couldn’t get the words out, but he managed to say, “He and I were friends in the war, and I’ve got something I want to give him.”
“Well, I didn’t see much of the white folks, but the old mammy stayed in the shed out back for a week or two. She took sick a couple of days before they came to get her—stunk up the whole place with the runs. Had ‘em so bad I had to get rid of the mattress and lime the privy pit after she left.”
“She was that sick?”
“Mister, I’ve been in the undertaking business a long time,” Black told him, “and I’ve buried a lot of folks. I don’t know where that old colored woman was headed, but I’d be surprised if she got there.”
“What do you think ailed her?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it to anybody around here, but there’s a couple of things it could’ve been, both of ‘em bad.” When Spence said nothing, he went on, “If I had to guess, I’d say it was cholera.”
Feeling as though the wind had been knocked out of him, Spence managed to ask, “What makes you think that?”
Black looked at him as if he were an imbecile before he answered, “I could smell it. I’d seen whole families wiped out with it before—young folks, old folks, and everything in between. Been two epidemics I know of just since I came out here, and a lot of folks died. I didn’t take any chances, mister—I burned that mattress as soon as she was gone.”
Spence had seen enough cholera firsthand to haunt him a lifetime. He’d watched Danny Lane and a hundred others die from it in the last four years. Diarrhea. Vomiting. Dehydration. Death. It took about two weeks from exposure to come down with the damned stuff, and another week and a half to die from it. If Black was right and it had been cholera, then there was a good chance they’d all gotten it.
It wasn’t universally fatal, Spence reminded hi
mself. Beef tea, rice, and a lot of boiled water kept some cholera victims alive long enough to outlast the lethal effects of diarrhea. But once a patient became too dehydrated, his fever shot up, causing delirium, and he didn’t want to put anything in his stomach, quickening the fatal end. He thought of Joshua, and he knew small children rarely survived.
Across the table, the undertaker drew a deep breath, then looked at Spence soberly. “I expect she’s dead by now, probably buried somewhere between here and Fort Kearny. Last I saw of her, your friend was making her carry that little boy. Said he hadn’t gotten much sleep himself—that he’d been up more’n half the night taking care of his wife.”
Unable to stand hearing any more, Spence turned away to walk blindly past the door. He hadn’t come all this way to find his son dead of cholera. Now it was more than the need to get across the mountains before winter that drove him.
He’d have to travel by daylight and go slow enough so he wouldn’t miss a grave along the road. It’d be like looking for the needle in the haystack, but he had to do it. He had to know if Liddy and the boy were alive.
He’d looked at every grave along the way, dismounting to read the crude, misspelled markers. Ellen Davis, Biluved wif, sadly mist. Billy Tompkins, aged six. Tansy Wilson, dyed of milk fevver. She wer onlie twenny. Grampa Hayes, he dint mak it. Eliza Campbell, age 19, and babby gril. Babby Willy. Tess Carpenter, age 11. Mother Lillie, Son ]onny, Dotter Mary, all ded of fever. Macy Harris, gone to her maker, July, 1865. Thad Hayes, cot colera.
They went on, seeming to dog every mile telling their tragic stories.
Reading the boards and rocks set over those final resting places, he noticed a common thread—the road west was hardest on women, kids, and old folks. But Liddy and her Auntie Fan had apparently made it this far. Either that, or Ross and Josh had perished, too, and there’d been nobody left to bury them. He’d seen the bare human bones along the road, and most of them had been gnawed on by wolves and coyotes.