“I’ve got an idea.”
The woman glanced around her as they approached, furtive, worried, as if afraid to be seen talking to them.
“Do you speak English?” Laura asked, her voice as gentle as if she were speaking to a painfully shy child.
The woman nodded. “Some.”
She was a good four inches shorter than Laura, who wouldn’t be called tall by anyone, and so slight a good breeze would topple her over. He’d be surprised if she could claim seventeen years honestly. And yet there was dignity in her posture, the hard-won steel that only a fellow survivor could truly recognize and understand.
“Would you speak to us?”
A barely perceptible shudder rippled through her—fear, Sam thought, and indecision. “My house,” she said. “Too late for visitors.”
She spun and led them there without glancing back to see if they followed. Perhaps hoping they would not, thus relieving her of the decision of what to entrust them with.
Her feet pattered lightly across the porch. No squeaks on the board, nor on the hinges of the door as she pushed it open. Well kept, like everything else on the Silver Spur. Money and Haw Crocker’s will went a long way.
It was very small in the house. Sam could make out none of the interior. He started inside, and his leg muscles seized. The air thickened in his lungs, his head going painfully light.
“In!” the woman snapped out.
“Sam?” Laura asked, wondering and concerned.
“I—” The night air was cool and fresh, but sweat broke out on his forehead, his back. “I should keep watch,” he said. “Better I stay out here. Don’t want anyone sneaking up on us if some randy cowboy decides on a late-night romp.”
“We’ll leave the door open a fraction, so you can hear,” Laura said, “and—”
“No,” the woman interrupted. “Inside, or no talk.”
Oh, God. This was the closest thing to a clue—at least a potential one—that he’d had since this whole blasted thing started. And he was either going to have to go inside—inside that tiny, thick-walled, tight cabin that would surely squeeze the air right out of him—or he was going to lose out completely.
He’d been inside the train car. The dining room, Laura’s bedroom. He’d been getting it under control.
But this place wasn’t a fifth the size of any of them, scarcely bigger than a coffin, it seemed. The shades were down, and he just knew she was going to want to shut the door, trapping him inside.
He struggled to draw a full breath. If only it wasn’t so damned dark, if only the small structure had more than one tiny window, if only—
“Please, ma’am, it’ll be all right. No one will see him out here. He’s really very good at that.” Laura—what a wonder—was saving him. “And he’s right. This way no one can come to the door unexpectedly.”
The woman teetered on the edge, worry warring with trust. And then she slipped into the room, a silent wraith, and Laura followed her.
Sam hunched down on the porch, so the bars of the railing would break up his outline, and propped the door open a few inches.
Once inside Laura didn’t dare move. Only a narrow line of light made it through the door, scarcely illuminating the space at all. The heavy air stung her nose, the scent of soap so strong her eyes almost watered.
“You’ve cleaned recently,” she said, hoping a neutral topic would relax the clearly riotously tense woman.
“Smell the men afterward,” she said, her tone vibrating with anger. “Don’t like it.”
Smell the men…? “Oh,” Laura said, her mind skittering away from the images. From Sam’s comments she’d formed an idea of the woman’s function on the ranch. In an isolated place populated mostly by men, she…serviced their baser needs.
But Laura hadn’t given much thought to the reality of it. It was a world so alien from Laura’s own that she couldn’t quite grasp it.
She remembered that afternoon when Sam had kissed her. She’d embraced it, longed for it, recalled it with a sweet and piercing clarity. Yet she couldn’t deny the uncomfortable intimacy of it. To do that, and a hundred times more, with strangers, to open oneself to a man—men—that you scarcely knew and probably didn’t even like…Laura could imagine few things more horrifying. How did a woman end up in that place? Make a choice that this would be her life?
And obviously this woman regretted it. Anger and distaste vibrated off her small body.
But that meant she should have little loyalty to the Silver Spur. And that was what she and Sam needed, didn’t they? Someone who would betray the ranch’s secrets, reveal exactly what was happening here?
Laura felt guilty just considering taking advantage of this woman’s misfortune. She vowed to herself that if an opportunity arose to help this woman, she would do so. And that promise helped.
“What’s your name?”
“They call me Mary.” She spat out the name.
“That might be what they call you,” Laura said, “but what is your name?”
Silence. And then: “Been a long time since anyone bothered to ask me. It’s Chen Jo Ling.” Her voice strengthened. “Jo Ling.”
“Jo Ling, how did you come to America?”
She shook her head. “Don’t matter now. Collis, last night—” She swallowed audibly. “Collis visit me. Likes to talk, that one, much as likes to…well. Said you had picture of man who tried to escape. Can I see?”
“They claimed he was crazy,” Laura told her.
Jo Ling made a sound of heavy disgust. “What else he be but escaping? Be crazy not to.”
“Escaping from what?” Sam whispered through the crack in the door. Jo Ling startled, as if she’d forgotten he was there.
She clammed up, as if suddenly unsure she should be speaking about this.
“I see picture?” she asked again.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “It’s gone.”
“They took it?”
“Yes.” Is that what the intruder had been after all along, then? Why?
“You go now.”
“Excuse me?”
Jo Ling pulled the door open and took Laura by the arm, steering her toward it.
“No, no,” Laura said. “I’ve got some questions, we—”
Laura planted her feet and leaned into the pressure of Jo Ling’s hands. The slight woman was a great deal stronger than she looked, but she barely came to Laura’s chin.
“Miss, we do not wish to disturb you,” Sam said. “But we cannot help you if—”
“Who says need help?” Using her shoulder as a prod, she leaned into Laura’s back. “Dangerous for you to be here.”
“Then we’d best get it over with quickly, hmm?” Laura said. “Do you have paper?”
She felt the weight of Jo Ling’s shoulder in her back ease off a fraction. “You draw again?”
“I can try.”
“Okay.”
They left Sam outside, something which seemed to relieve Jo Ling to no end and which he protested less than Laura expected. Once the door was firmly closed and the roller shades over the window tightly fastened, Jo Ling lit a stub of candle.
For a den of inequity the room was disappointing. Laura had envisioned red velvet and flocked wallpaper, gold-leafed statuettes of naked bodies in lurid poses.
Instead it resembled a monk’s cell, so clean as to hold no personality whatsoever, as if no one lived there. The walls were white and completely bare. The single room held a chair, a table with a wash pitcher, and a tiny trunk. The bed was barely big enough for one, much less two and adventures.
She flipped open the top of her trunk, which, from what Laura could see, held very little. It took her but a moment to locate a carefully folded scrap of paper, a pencil shorter than her thumb.
“Here.” She thrust them at Laura.
What if she couldn’t do it again? Laura had been so pleased with the original drawing; it had sprung from nowhere, from her dreams and her distress, forming on the page almost wi
thout her consciously guiding her hand.
This was so much more important.
She closed her eyes briefly, conjuring that face as clearly as if she were back there that day, in the sunlight, waiting, hoping, praying for him to get away.
Yes. Bent over the table, she drew rapidly, surely. The small scrap of paper limited her. The fragment of pencil was unfamiliar in hand, her fingers bent awkwardly around it.
And yet she was finished in moments. “Here. Do you know him?”
Jo Ling leaned over the table, bringing the candle close so she could inspect it, her expression intent. She did not touch it.
“No.” She let out a long, shuddering breath. Laura could not tell if it was disappointment or relief. “Not him.”
“Not who?”
Jo Ling straightened, but her gaze lingered on the sketch.
“Who?” Laura repeated.
The decision hung in the balance, as delicate and uncertain as a dragonfly wing. And then her expression closed off. “No one. No matter.”
Hope deflated.
“You go now.”
Laura nodded. She understood Jo Ling’s fear. Why should she trust them? She was clearly in a precarious situation, alone on this ranch so far from her past and anyone who might help her, unhappy and hopelessly trapped.
And she would remain trapped, as caught in her situation and life as Laura had been in her sickroom, as Sam had been in Andersonville. If she did not take this risk, with them, she would be confined here for a long time. Perhaps forever.
“Jo Ling.” Laura brushed her fingers over the surface of the cheap paper. “It really is very sad. He tried so hard to get away. We could tell that he was ready to sacrifice everything to escape or die trying. We could not help him then. I’d hoped we could help him now.”
Jo Ling’s eyes glimmered, liquid regret welling up.
“We could, you know. My father is very powerful, more so even than Mr. Crocker.”
“Not true! No one bigger than Mr. Crocker.”
“My father is.” Laura nodded emphatically. “And Mr…. Kirkwood out there, he is very skilled at rescuing people. I should know. He rescued me once.”
Jo Ling wavered, a tiny spark of hope flaring to hesitant life.
“We could help you,” Laura said. “This may be the best chance you ever have, the only chance, to get out of here.”
“Why you think I want out? Good food. Good house.”
She recited them automatically, as if someone had told her just that. As if someone had tried to convince her that she should be grateful for being forced into whoredom.
“Jo Ling, does Mr. Crocker visit you?”
“No.” She chuckled, bitter and empty. “He have Lupe. No need to visit me.”
Lupe. She should have realized. “Then what about the man in that sketch? And whoever you thought that man might be? We can’t possibly help if we don’t know what’s going on.”
Inevitably drawn, Jo Ling’s gaze slid back to the sketch on the table. “Man Ho,” she murmured. “Thought maybe…thought it Man Ho.”
Careful, Laura told herself. Too many questions, push too hard, and Jo Ling would be scared off as easily as a frightened doe.
“Who’s Man Ho?”
“My…friend. Met on the boat to San Francisco. Kind to me.” She sniffled. “Did not see after they find out I was girl.”
“After they found out you were a girl?” Laura frowned, confused, disturbed.
“Decide I would be more useful…here than in mines. But did not know about the mines yet then.”
“Sam?” Laura said, a fraction louder. “Are you getting all this?”
“Yes.” Just the sound of his voice steadied her, familiar and smooth, comforting and exciting at the same time.
“I think maybe you should come in here. I’m not sure what to ask anymore.”
“I…”
Laura moved to the door—quickly, only two steps, and eased it open a fraction.
“Have you seen anyone out and about?” she asked him.
“No. It’s been quiet.”
“We’d better get you in and the door shut, though. It’s either that or douse the light, and it’s better to see her face.”
She heard him take a deep breath. “All right.”
The room seemed instantly smaller when he slipped in the door. He had to duck to enter, and his head must have nearly brushed the ceiling when he straightened, his shoulders as wide as the doorway.
He closed the door, leaning against the wall beside it. Jo Ling took a step back.
“It’s all right,” Laura promised. “You can trust him.”
As she did. Unreasonably, given what she knew of him: that he was willing to put honor aside in favor of expediency. That he had traded his loyalty for money, his principles for comfort. That once they’d settled this he would ride off to his next job, his next hired duty, and she would never hear from him again.
And still she trusted him, with a bone-deep belief, unreasonable but unshakable, that he would do his best for her during this time and that he would never hurt her needlessly or thoughtlessly.
“Why were you on the ship?” Laura asked.
The night ticked by, silent and waiting. And then Jo Ling nodded. “Parents sold me.”
“Sold you?”
“To merchant who needed a…don’t know the word.” Her smile was bitter. “I become same thing anyway, but for more than one.”
Horror washed over Laura. She understood that there were those in the world, many in the world, who were not so fortunate in their parents as she. They had confined her, yes, protected her so assiduously she sometimes thought she might go mad with it, but they’d always had her best interests at heart.
To sell your own daughter into what amounted to a repulsive and intimate kind of slavery…it was so far beyond her experience as to be incomprehensible.
“So I run away,” she continued. “No place to go. But there was foreign man. American man. He take students to America. Young men only. I braid my hair and change my clothes and say I boy.”
“Sam?” It made no sense to Laura. She looked over to Sam to see if he could sort it through. He leaned against the wall, his head back, and even in the flickering candlelight she could see his forehead gleamed with sweat. “Sam?” She took a step toward him. “Are you all right?”
He held up a hand to halt her progress. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.” His voice was thin with strain. “Just having a little relapse of whatever I had in Silver Creek. I’ll be okay.”
“Let’s get you back to the house.”
“No!” he said sharply, worried that, if they left now, they might never get Jo Ling to speak to them again.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“Exclusion Act,” he said. “Eliminated all immigration from China except for a couple of exceptions. Mostly students.”
“Yes!” Jo Ling said. “Said we could be students, come to America to study.”
“How many?” Sam asked.
“Boat full.” She shrugged. “Hundred? Two hundred?”
“What happened to them all?”
“Oh, there more. Many more than that, here already when we got here. Put us on trains, come here.” Her voice slowed. “No school.”
“Only mines,” Sam said.
“Yes. Only mines.”
“Sam, I don’t understand. Why would they bring all those students here?”
“He’s bringing them in illegally, Laura. Forcing them to work in the mines.”
“But…but…” The picture was coming into focus, sharp, painful fragments of a truth she did not want to see. “But how?”
“Probably not that hard,” Sam said. “Have to have somebody on the payroll at the docks where the ships come in, of course. Somebody else to look the other way at the rail yard when you load them up. A private train, most likely. But beyond that…it’s pretty simple. And you’ve got all the cheap labor you need.”
“Lik
e slaves?”
“Yeah.”
Sam’s breathing grew labored, loud enough that it seemed palpable, taking up its own space in the small room. Anger, Laura thought, roiling up, blasting like a hurricane from within. Because she felt it, too, as powerful a thing as had ever gripped her.
She spurted for the door. Sam caught her arm, a quick strike of his own while he remained leaning against the wall. But despite the sudden reappearance of his mysterious illness his grip was strong, stopping just this side of painful. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go break Haw Crocker’s miserable evil head, that’s where I’m going.”
“Yeah, that’s a good plan.”
“I thought so.”
“Laura.” He met her gaze. The strain of it showed on him. The sharp directness that usually marked his eyes was absent; instead they were glazed and unfocused. His mouth was thin and tense, and a bead of sweat trickled down the side of his lean cheek. “You’ll never get to him. And if you do, you’ll never get out of here safely afterward.”
Laura wasn’t sure she cared, as long as she could make sure Crocker suffered along the way.
“It won’t do them any good,” he told her.
Darn it. “Do you always have to be restrained and reasonable and right?”
“I try.”
“So what now?”
He sucked in a breath through his teeth, as though he had to struggle to bring in enough air, and pushed off the wall. “Jo Ling. There was a man who was here. Maybe six months ago. Griff Judah.”
“I—” She hesitated. “Lot of men. Don’t know many names.” She frowned. “Why?”
“Please try to remember. He wasn’t here long. He’s tall, even taller than me, but thin. Brown hair.”
She closed her eyes, as if mentally sifting through a pile of photographs. Faces, Laura thought. Faces of men. Faces she’d seen above her in the dark, men she’d…Laura forcibly shut down the images. If she dwelled on that she was going to be ill.
“Don’t know,” Jo Ling said. “Sorry.”
Sam swayed. Laura stepped closer, afraid he might faint. And then he opened his eyes, looking directly into hers, and it seemed to steady him.
“That’s it, then. We’d better be getting back.”
“Yes, I—” She stopped as an idea bloomed. It was a long shot. A very long shot. But maybe…She dashed back to the table and flipped over the scrap of paper.
A Wanted Man Page 20