She couldn’t even ride out alone on a horse, as she’d so enjoyed doing in Dakota, despite her being as capable in the saddle as nearly any of the men at Chain Link. If she did, she incurred a loud, castigating rebuke from Wild Bill himself, if one of the hands had seen her, and by Lee if he was around and not off riding around the county with Neumiller, laying down his hard, uncompromising brand of justice.
They thought that she might encounter a rattlesnake and her horse would throw her, or that she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to the ranch. She knew how to avoid such dangers. They treated her like property, or worse—like a child incapable of fending for herself, though she had been raised to be no hothouse flower, and she was tired of it.
“Goddamn . . . sons o’ bitches . . . !” came another deep-throated plea from outside. “Help . . . me . . . bastards!”
She turned back to the window. The wounded man was trying to sit up, fumbling to get a purchase on the Longhorn’s porch steps. Still, no one appeared to be going to the man’s aid.
What was Glendolene supposed to do—climb back into her bath and pretend she hadn’t seen him and couldn’t hear him while he bled his life out in the street?
Unable to stand by any longer while a man died before her—where was Neumiller, anyway?—Glendolene toweled herself dry, dressed quickly in a chemise and pantaloons, then threw on a heavy wool robe. She stepped into a pair of elk-skin slippers and left the room. She locked the door, pocketed the key, and padded downstairs.
There was no one at the hotel desk in the lobby. She glanced into the dining room, hoping she’d find the Indian who’d escorted her to her room earlier, but apparently the dining room had closed since she and Lee had dined together an hour ago, before Lee had left to play poker with several businessmen friends of his and his father’s. The dining room chairs were stacked upside down on the tables from which the white cloths had been removed. Luther was probably out in his shack behind the hotel.
Spying no one else, Glendolene pushed through the double glass doors and looked around, shivering as a chill wind bit into her. She fought the doors closed against a strong gust and latched them. Reaching up, she removed the pins from her hair and let it fall in a messy tangle about her neck, somewhat keeping the wind from sliding its icy hands down her back, chilling her to the bone.
She looked across the street. The wounded man sat slumped on the bottom step of the Longhorn Saloon, elbows on his knees, head dipped toward his chest. In the windows of the saloon behind him, shadows slid this way and that.
She glanced at the dark, swinging figure of Preston Betajack, felt a shudder independent of the wind rattle through her, and then moved on down the porch steps. Halfway across the street, a newspaper blew against her legs, and she paused to kick it free, losing one of her slippers as she did.
She cursed, set the foot clad in a thin silk stocking down in the cold street, and hobbled forward until she’d regained the slipper. Continuing across, she stopped before the man slumped forward, legs extended before him, boot toes pointed out, spurs ringing as the wind raked them. He’d lost his hat, and thin strands of gray-brown hair blew back across his bony, nearly bald skull.
“Are you . . . alive . . . ?” she asked, feeling inadequate for the task, shivering, holding the robe closed across her breasts. The horses to her left all looked at her curiously, their tails blowing up over their backs.
The man lifted his head slightly. He was silhouetted against the saloon lights behind him, so she couldn’t see his face clearly, but his eyes appeared slitted. He had a thin gray beard and a mole off the right corner of his thin-lipped mouth. The fur of his bear vest rippled in the wind.
“I’m hurt bad, lady,” he said tightly, just loudly enough for Glendolene to hear. “Get me to a doc, will ya?” He smelled strongly of alcohol.
“Hold on.”
Glendolene climbed the porch steps and pulled open one of the saloon doors. She stepped inside, drawing the door closed behind her, and looked around at the long, smoky, lantern-lit room.
There were a dozen or so scruffy-looking men milling about the place, some obscured by the thick tobacco smoke. Half were standing at the bar to her right. Glendolene nearly choked on the stench of the smoke, sweat, leather, strong drink, and women’s sweet perfume. One of the three women in the room laughed raucously off to her right, pointing at a man crawling around on the floor on his hands and knees and swinging his head and whinnying like a horse.
“Jump on ole Charlie horse’s back, Lil, an’ I’ll ride ya upstairs fer a tumble!” howled the drunkard.
Glendolene looked at several of the men staring back at her. Their eyes, opaque from drink, raked her up and down, lips stretching with vague lasciviousness.
“Hey,” said the nearest man standing at the bar, blinking slowly beneath his broad hat brim.
Glendolene turned and went back out. She moved carefully down the steps and turned to the man slumped before her. “Do you know where the doctor’s office is?”
The man lifted his head, looked at her, and pointed halfheartedly in the direction of the gallows. She looked that way to see several wooden buildings standing to the left of the Silk Slipper, before the brightly lit windows of which a dozen or so horses stood tied.
“All right,” Glendolene said, crouching beside the man. “If I’m going to help you, you’re going to have to help me. Can you stand?”
He nodded slowly.
Glendolene slid up against him and wrapped his left arm around her shoulders. “Help me now!”
He planted his boots in the dust of the street and used his legs to help Glendolene hoist him to a standing position. As he leaned into her, she stepped forward, grunting under the man’s weight as she walked him across the street, keeping the gallows on her left, the Silk Slipper on her right. She felt the slick wetness of the blood oozing out of him, and she gave another inward shudder, hearing the painfully thin breaths wheezing in his lungs.
They were halfway to the other side of the street when a gurgle traveled up from deep in his throat and suddenly his knees buckled. He fell, dragging her down on top of him with a surprised scream.
“Glendolene?” said a familiar voice.
Sprawled over the top of the wounded man’s body, she looked up to see two figures standing on the Silk Slipper’s front stoop, above the fidgeting horses, staring toward her.
“Oh, God—help me, Lee!”
Both men ran down the porch steps and around the horses as Glendolene looked down at the wounded man, who lay now with his eyes open, his chest rising and falling shallowly. His mouth was open, and he was making a faint sucking sound.
“What in the name of Christ is going on, Glendolene?” Lee said as he dropped to a knee on the other side of the man she’d been trying to help. “What are you doing out here? Who is this man?”
“I don’t know. I saw him—”
“Karl Luedtke,” said Sheriff Neumiller, standing over the man who now looked dead. “Wolfer. Comes in from time to time to cheat at cards over at the Longhorn.”
“That’s where he was shot,” said Glendolene, sitting back on her heels. “No one was helping him. I saw him from the hotel window and came out to try to get him over to the doctor’s.”
“For cryin’ out loud, Dave,” her husband intoned, staring at Neumiller, “don’t you have any deputies making the rounds this evening?”
“Sure I do. Warren’s out delivering a subpoena, but Jim Harrison should be out here somewhere . . .” Neumiller let his voice, thick from drink, trail off as he looked around the nearly empty street. “Maybe he’s warmin’ up for a spell back at the office. Cold out here.” He looked down at the wounded man and shook his head as he puffed on a fat, half-smoked stogie. “Luedtke’s looked better—I’ll give him that.”
Glendolene slid her exasperated gaze from her husband
to Neumiller and back again. Both men reeked of tobacco smoke, alcohol, and—this was no surprise and it troubled her only slightly—women’s perfume. “He has little chance of looking any better until we get him to the doctor, gentlemen!”
“Of course!” Lee leaped to his feet, glancing down at the bloody man distastefully, then turning to Neumiller. “Can you . . . ?”
The Silk Slipper’s front doors opened, and Lee called to the men walking, slightly staggering, onto the stoop. When the men were moving between the horses and heading toward the wounded Mr. Luedtke, Glendolene climbed to her feet and brushed the dirt, gravel, and flecks of horse manure from her robe. As she did, she glanced toward the gallows to her left.
Something there flashed in the light from several oil pots and the lamplight emanating from the Silk Slipper. She stared at the darkness beneath the gallows. As Lee and Sheriff Neumiller guided the other men, who bore Mr. Luedtke between them, toward an outside stairs that climbed to the doctor’s office, Glendolene wandered slowly, cautiously over to the gallows, feeling a deep revulsion growing in her belly.
She scowled up at the silhouetted form of the man hanging from the rope, twisting this way and that in the chilly winter wind. Again, something flashed on Preston Betajack’s dead body. Up near his right shoulder.
Something compelled Glendolene to get a closer look.
She took several more steps, staring up at Betajack, hearing the rope above his head creak and groan. Only, the man hanging from the gallows was not the man she’d seen hanged earlier. It was not Betajack. Betajack was no longer here.
The man here now was a stocky blond gent with a thick blond handlebar mustache. He wore a brown suit, and on the right lapel of his brown tweed suit coat, a deputy sheriff’s badge flashed as the body turned, catching the light from the Silk Slipper.
Glendolene stumbled backward, fell. “Lee!” The shout got tangled up in her throat and came out as a hoarse whisper. “Sheriff Neumiller!” she said again, a little louder this time, but the words were still lost in the wind.
The man hanging before her stared down at her through half-open eyes, his swollen tongue poking out one corner of his slack-jawed mouth. He seemed to be leering at her.
Glendolene cleared her throat, tried again: “I think . . . I found Deputy Harrison. . . .”
Chapter 5
“Pshaw—he can’t read!” intoned Old Judith.
Ignoring the woman, Yakima smoothed the letter onto the table. He positioned the flickering oil lamp so that the shadows slid aside, and the buttery light bathed the large, rounded, flowing, female script before him. Yakima cleared his throat and, using the year of schooling in a Denver boardinghouse for Indian boys and then his own self-schooling afterward, haltingly but relatively smoothly, he read:
Dearest Husband,
The children and I feel so blessed that you will be home for Christmas this year, and that you are bringing a very special present. It was so wonderful to receive your last letter and to read in it your most welcome news! I am relieved that you will be staying home from now on, and that you have managed to find a way to buy the hotel. We will all work together, the four of us side by side, and be happy that we are all together at last. Jimmy’s become a strapping lad in this past year. He can haul two buckets of water from the well at once, with Mr. Whiskers on his shoulders! Caroletta is a beautiful young lady, Del, and she is Mrs. Overholser’s best student in both reading and math. Just like her pa. Ha!
Travel safely home to us, Del. Today, we are cutting a tree in the hills and will have it decorated by the time you arrive! This will be a most special Christmas!
Bless you, my husband. I and the children will be eagerly awaiting your return.
Your loving wife,
Annabelle-Day Clifton
“Who’s that letter for?” asked Old Judith, staring over her glasses at her son, unmoved by the missive’s sentiment. The fire popped behind her.
Yakima refolded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. “The man who saved our hides.”
“I wasn’t talkin’ to you!” Old Judith cawed like an angry blackbird, pinching up her wizened face behind her reading glasses that had slipped lower on her nose. It was, in fact, the first time she’d addressed Yakima directly.
“Well, that’s just too damn bad,” said Lewis, ignoring his mother. “So the Negro was goin’ home for Christmas. Hell, I am home for Christmas.” He fumbled beneath the table and brought up his old Colt conversion revolver. As he slid his chair back and stood awkwardly, placing one hand on the table to steady himself, he ratcheted back the pistol’s hammer. “And I’ll be keepin’ my cut of the gold. You can do with your share of it whatever the hell you wish.”
“There you go, boy!” said Old Judith, adjusting the wolf skin draped around her spindly shoulders. “I don’t care who that money belonged to.” She balled up her tiny red fists. “It’s here now, and here it will stay less’n someone wants to come fightin’ for it!”
“Grandma,” Trudy said, eyes aghast, “it’s Christmas!”
“It ain’t Christmas yet.”
“Yeah, but those poor people.”
“They’re black people,” Lewis said. “And they’re used to doin’ without. Just like this red nigger standin’ here before me.” He wagged the pistol at Yakima. “You leave the gold there. Go on. Pull your picket pin. You done wore out your welcome here, dog-eater.” This last he bellowed, red-faced: “Saddle up and fog the damn sage!”
Yakima looked up from the dark maw of the old Colt shaking in Lewis’s fist, to the man’s beet red face, the nostrils of his long hawk’s nose flaring, upper teeth showing through his snarl. Calmly, Yakima reached for the gold sack, untied the rawhide strings from the neck, and emptied his coffee cup onto the floor.
He stared hard at his former partner, not sure whether the man would shoot him or not, or, if he did squeeze the trigger, if the slug would land anywhere near him. With the way the half-breed’s luck was holding, it would likely punch out his heart, but his hands remained steady as he poured the gold dust into his tin cup until the cup was filled to the brim. The granular flakes glistened in the lamplight.
He retied the neck of the sack. “That there is more than you deserve. Call it a Christmas present from Mrs. Clifton.”
“Don’t you dare, goddamn you,” Lewis bit out as Yakima rose from the table and, feeling the muscles writhing like snakes beneath the skin of his back, turned to drop the gold into the saddlebags. He buckled the flap over the pouch, then donned his flat-brimmed, low-crowned black hat and his buckskin mackinaw. He draped the saddlebags over his shoulder, went to the door, and opened it.
“I’m warnin’ you, goddamn your red hide!”
“Pa!” Trudy screamed.
The gun cracked, its explosion filling the room. Old Judith gave an exasperated bellow. Yakima looked over his shoulder at Trudy wrestling the smoking gun out of Lewis’s gnarled hand. There was a hole in the middle of the table. Trudy gave another scream as she pulled the pistol out of the old man’s hand, and Lewis cursed sharply as he fell over his chair. The chair slid out from beneath him, and he hit the floor with a loud thud and an angry wail.
“You’re drunk, Pa!” Trudy stepped back away from her father, whom Yakima could no longer see from his vantage at the door. Voice shaking, Lewis’s angry bellows dying gradually, she said, “You’ll thank me in the mornin’.” She glanced at Yakima, her eyes cold and hard.
Yakima went out and drew the door closed behind him, standing there on the stoop for a moment, feeling a cold rock in the pit of his stomach.
* * *
Yakima saddled Wolf and rode out to an old, seldom-used line shack in the hills above the Shackleford ranch-stead. He wanted to ride farther, but it was a dark night. Wolf was tired from the earlier ride, and Yakima didn’t want to risk injuring his prized stallio
n in the dark. Lewis wasn’t worth it.
He wasn’t worth the gold Yakima had given him, either, but it made him feel better to leave that filled cup behind as he lit out for Belle Fourche. At least, in the direction of Belle Fourche. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to reach the little town up northwest of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory. With winter coming on fast, which could mean snow at any time, the trip could take anywhere from several days to a week.
What the hell? He didn’t exactly have anything else lined up, as he’d figured—foolishly, he realized now—on spending the winter on the Shackleford Ranch, breaking horses and trapping more as the weather permitted.
The small brush-roofed log line shack sat against the shoulder of a broad, low hill, with an escarpment rising off its eastern side. There was a dilapidated corral in front of it and a small stable and a corral in better condition attached to its west side. The half-breed was glad to see no lights in the windows, no smoke issuing from the rock chimney. There were no actual trails except wild-horse trails through this remote country, so he didn’t doubt that he’d been the last visitor here.
He and the woman.
He tried to press her image to the back of his mind, still unsure she hadn’t been a ghost that his own lonely, lusty imagination hadn’t conjured, because she’d told him so little about herself, wanting to know nothing about him. They’d met by accident out here at the line shack, and one thing had led to another. Then they’d met here a few times before she’d said she wouldn’t be back and simply ridden away. Toward a near ranch, he’d assumed.
Yakima rode up to the cabin and looked around, always cautious, always wary. Occasionally, he had men hunting him—bounty hunters paid by those who’d felt they had been wronged by him in one way or another, on his many wanderings throughout the frontier as he’d searched for something he hadn’t yet found and doubted he ever would.
It was his old Shaolin monk friend, whom he’d called George because he hadn’t been able to pronounce his Chinese name, who’d once told him while teaching him Eastern fighting techniques that we all searched in vain, because we’d long ago found what we were looking for—the secret was in knowing what that thing was.
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