by Yvonne Jocks
Too late.
Three gambling companions ranting about the dangerous proximity of Mosier Valley.
The sour taste of mash liquor.
Audra in a buggy, lowering her eyes to avoid looking at him.
He'd dreamed the part with Audra, right? He often dreamed about her, here on his pallet in the back room ... though usual y his dreams offered happier encounters than the one that now spun through his memory. He lay very still , simultaneously hot and cold, boneless and yet stiffening with dismay, as if he could possibly resist what was already done. He caught quick breaths, desperate not to be ill , no matter how his throat stiffened and his stomach clenched.
Oh, Lordy.'
Jack opened his eyes—and sleep was better. He felt cold, frozen bone-deep, but flushed hot and clammy, too, as if his skin and his innards were wrestling with each other. His throat ached with the effort of keeping control. Worse than bodily discomfort, though, was his growing certainty that he hadn't dreamed the meeting on the dark road.
His quick, shallow breaths fought something disgusting inside him, something that might spill out at any moment. As it had this morning when he'd dared accost Audra, drunk?
Desperation bred strength and speed both; Jack found his feet and lunged unevenly for the back door, making it into the cold, dead grass of the wash yard behind the store just in time to lose his battle against Harv Jefferson's homemade liquor.
After, momentarily eased of the nausea, alternately spitting bile from his mouth and gulping bitter-cold air, he too easily imagined the picture he made: a hungover gambler in stinking long Johns, sweating despite a record cold snap, on his hands and knees over a pool of his own vomit.
No wonder Audra was gone.
She hadn't even said good-bye?
Jack sat slowly back on his haunches, lost his balance, and fell on his butt, trembling. He wiped at his blurry, burning eyes with the back of his hand. God, but he was pathetic.
She'd seen him drunk. Her. A lady.
He didn't deserve a good-bye. But somehow, like a child believing in Father Christmas, he would have thought Audra would offer one whether he deserved it or not.
Not that he'd ever believed in Father Christmas. He'd just always wanted to.
Cold seeped up from the ground, into his shins and his hips, into his chest. He should get inside.
Somehow, struggling not to think at all , he regained his feet and staggered back inside.
Only once the door closed behind him, and the warm air of the store lapped at his tingling face, did Jack realize just how cold he'd been.
It served him right.
He stood for a long while, propped against the door and trying not to think—or breathe—lest he have to lunge outside again. The stockroom crept in circles around him, despite his standing still, until finally, faintly, he heard Ham saying, “Thank you; come again.” Then the storekeeper hobbled through the door from the stockroom and stopped, leaning on his crutch, to look Jack up and down.
“Damn,” he said.
This time Jack found the strength for the rude gesture. He needed only one hand to hold on to the door, after all .
“How bad did you lose, anyway?” Ham narrowed his eyes. “That store credit wasn't transferable, so if you passed on my IOU—”
“She's gone,” said Jack. The almost inaudible words made it bleakly real.
“What?” Ferris leaned closer, then recoiled from Jack's breath.
“She's gone. I saw her leaving.”
“What?” Quickly, Ferris rearranged his features. “Saw who leaving?”
“Who the hell do you think?” His head tried to fall off again, but he hardly cared. Beautiful, innocent, captive Audra. And hadn't he done a dandy job showing why she should spread her wings some and live a little? Hell , he couldn't even stand up straight.
“The schoolmarm?” asked Ham cautiously.
“No, the widow Parks. Of course, the schoolmarm! And ...” Tarnation, but he felt wobbly. “And there I was, booze-blind, making some show of myself. Thank God her brother was with her.”
Ham leaned on his crutch, intrigued. “You wouldn't find things easier unchaperoned?”
Jack had never been a violent drunk, but even cheerful, he could easily have gotten “handier” with Audra than she deserved or would appreciate. He might not like the brother, but damned if the fellow hadn't come in useful. “I'd find things easier with her here.”
Hamilton snorted, sympathetic as a stump. “You can't go two days without her?”
“Two days?” echoed Jack stupidly, angrily. Audra was gone.
“Two days. Her brother took her to Fort Worth to celebrate the New Year.”
Jack opened his mouth, then closed it. He inhaled deeply, recoiled at his own breath, and tried again. “Fort Worth?”
“Big place west of here. County seat. Queen of the cow towns. That Fort Worth.”
Jack said, “Two days?” Then he couldn't stand the idiocy of not adding something of his own, no matter the brutal pain of each word. “What makes you figure that?”
"Been tending store all morning—you remember what that's like, right? One customer mentions hearing a buggy go by before sunup, someone else says they've been talking to the widow Cribb, next thing you know, the storekeeper has the entire story." Damned if Ferris wasn't enjoying this; his normally sullen eyes shone. “You thought she was gone for good, huh?”
Two days? Caught between relief and mortification, Jack said nothing. Besides, the world had started to swoop again.
Ham chuckled. “Who would've thought? A schoolmarm's got you tied to a snorting post!”
Even hungover, Jack dismissed the very idea. Maybe Audra Garrison had cherished some fantastic hope of lady-breaking him; more likely she worried about his immortal soul. Even her kind eyes must see she could hitch up to better for the long haul.
especially after this morning.
Al he'd wanted from her was ... well, more than a lady like her could or should give. But all he'd ever truly hoped for was to see her spread her wings a mite; to have the privilege of helping her do it; and maybe, with charm and a little luck, to leave her with memories of him that might be as fond as his memories of her.
He'd probably blown his chances at most of those hopes. But she would be back. That gave him the opportunity to at least apologize, maybe undo the worst of the damage.
Jack looked down at his sorry self and felt ill again—and not simply because of the hangover.
“Where's the closest place I can get a full bath and barber shave, maybe new clothes?”
“Bedford, maybe six miles from here, on the main road. Think you can ride?”
“No.” He held on to the door behind him, tightly. “But I will be within two days.”
“I've got rye whiskey upstairs, if you need some hair of the dog that bit you.”
Jack's head pounded like hooves at a horse race, and he was rapidly starting to feel like the track.
One, maybe two shots would go a long way toward burning off the sickness. But he remembered
—blearily—Audra looking away from him, embarrassed.
“Much obliged, but no.” He spoke carefully, so as not to further annoy his stomach.
Second chances didn't come around often enough for him to chance this one.
When Thad knocked at her door for lunch, Audra took a deep breath for courage and said, "I would like to carry my own room key, please."
Thad blinked at her, surprised, but gave the key easily enough. “If you want.”
After that, in moments when she began to worry about either her behavior in the past or the choices in her future, Audra noted the extra weight in her reticule, and it encouraged her. After a lovely restaurant lunch, she and Thaddeas strolled Main Street toward the fine new Tarrant County courthouse, built on a bluff overlooking the Trinity. She ventured to establish her independence even further. “I have decided to stay in Texas, Thad.”
“You have?” he challenged carefull
y, not wavering in his comfortable pace.
“It's not that I don't want to go home,” she assured him. “I miss everyone terribly! But I have a position here. How can I abandon my responsibility to those children?”
“You can abandon them if Pa tells you to,” Thad pointed out. She was not twenty-one.
“Have you ever left a job halfway?” she asked. “Has Papa, even when he was going against Indians and bandits? I'm his daughter.”
“That's different,” Thad noted. “Ladies face different dangers than men.”
“You would finish the job,” she pointed out. “You would stay.”
Thad snorted. “A drunken gambler would hardly pose any risk to me.”
Why did it so annoy her to hear Jack referred to in that way?
He was a drunken gambler! Still , she frowned. “And Mr. Harwood is your main concern?”
“He is.” Thaddeas looked both ways, then steered her steadily but unexpectedly across the bustling, brick-paved street. She peeked past him and saw his reason. They were passing the White Elephant Saloon and Restaurant. Through the window it looked rather elegant, complete with cut-glass chandeliers, and the clientele dressed respectably.
“Audra!” chided Thad, low. She stopped staring, but with effort. Apparently uptown saloons were better than others— perhaps in the same way moderate drinkers were better than habitual
drunks. Not a month ago, Jack had freely admitted that he drank only “now and again.”
“I am certain,” she said now, carefully, “that no matter his faults, Mr. Harwood would not force himself upon unwilling women. I believe him to be a man of...” The memory of Jack's self-descrip-tion quietly amused her, even after this morning. “Of at least middling character.”
"Audra, you have not seen enough of the world to understand just how ugly drinkers and gamblers can ..." Thaddeas paused in front of an establishment called the Theatre Comique, then steered her around the corner. “Let's go this way.”
“Why?” This time, when she craned around him, she saw signs for the Bismark and the El Paso saloons on what would have been their side of the street. On the White Elephant side stood an establishment calling itself the Club Room Saloon and Ten Pin Alley. No prone forms marred the neatly swept wooden sidewalks. Several of the buggies hitched in front of them rivaled those of Cheyenne or Denver.
“My goodness,” she murmured, following Thad's urging onto a quieter side street. “Uptown Fort Worth certainly provides interesting entertainments, doesn't it?”
“They are not entertainments,” said Thaddeas in a growl. “They are saloons.”
She couldn't resist asking, “Do they have gambling?”
“Open-door gambling is illegal here,” Thad reminded her stiffly. “It's illegal in all respectable cities.”
Which would have settled it, except that something about the way he averted his eyes when he said that caught her suspicions. She did not like suspecting Thaddeas, but...
“Is there something you aren't telling me?”
“Nothing you need to know.”
But she had the key to her own room. And, she realized with fledgling teacherly instincts, her beloved older brother had not in fact answered her question.
She stopped right there on the afternoon sidewalk, so that Thaddeas had to stop, too, and she phrased the question as she might for Jerome Newton. “Yes or no. Do they have gambling?”
Thad scowled at her, but she did not look away. Amazingly, he broke first. "Yes, Audra. Yes! The White Elephant is infamous for its gambling. As long as they're discreet, the law looks the other way."
“Oh.” She felt incredible relief that not only might Jack not be a drunkard but, if he must gamble, perhaps he did so in establishments like these. And yet...
“You wanted me to think it was all horrid and ugly like the Acre, didn't you?” And that, through association, Jack was ugly, too. “You wanted to frighten me home. How dare you!”
Thaddeas continued to scowl. He turned away and asked the cold afternoon sky, "Why did this have to happen on my watch?"
“Why did what have to happen?”
“You.” He turned on her again, gestured toward the bustling street. “These ... questions!”
She waited for more, but he appeared to have given up. So she made her own painful
commentary. “I never would have believed you, of all people, would lie to me.”
He took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, then planted it back on before speaking with careful calm. “I did not lie, Audra. I simply neglected to tell you the whole truth.”
And he was not the only person in this family to do that, of late. If he'd known how Jack Harwood had kissed her, much less how eagerly she had kissed Jack Harwood back ...
She had the grace to look down.
“I am not trying to frighten you,” he added. "But it concerns me that, having met a gambler outside of his normal surroundings, you may get false impressions about him and his world. Vice is horrid and ugly, and it supports a horrid, ugly world. That you would even question that makes me even more certain you should come home."
“I do not mean to defend vice,” she said quietly. “I am merely trying to understand how you could insist I leave a job half-finished, merely because of a gentleman—”
Thad rolled his eyes but she did not take it back. Jack was gentle and very much a man.
“A gentleman,” she repeated with desperate control, “whom you barely know, and who in any case means to leave town. Simply because he gambles.”
Thad sighed deeply. “We'd better return to the hotel.”
“I would like to resolve this.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them, nodding. But he took off his scarf—it matched hers, both knitted by a family friend— and draped it around her neck. “We'll walk slowly.”
When he offered his coated arm, she took it.
“First,” he said, "I don't trust Harwood to leave Candon anytime soon, and neither should you; he's got a comfortable situation there. Second, even if he wouldn't force himself on an unwilling lady, it's not force that worries me from his kind."
She tried not to wonder about willing ladies. “His kind?”
"Con men don't use force; they use deception and illusions. They make their prey want what they offer, whether it's papers for a nonexistent gold claim or a chance to win easy money in a game of three-card monte.“ He eyed her darkly. ”Or something even more dangerous for women. By the time their victims realize it's humbug, they're too late."
She wished he did not sound quite so certain—nor quite so sad. As if, as a lawyer, he'd seen that very thing more often than she could imagine. She also wished it did not sound so much like that steep slope off the path of righteousness her book had spoken of.
She said, “But Mr. Harwood has been honest about what he does.” Once she'd found him out, anyway. “If he hid his gambling, like people at the”—for the first time, she spoke the name of a saloon—"at the White Elephant do, he could help at the mercantile without suspicion. Isn't pretend respectability just as bad as open sin?"
Thaddeas countered, "You think its better to flaunt one's bad behavior, to imply that there's truly nothing wrong with it?"
“Is it really so wrong? Things like gambling, even drinking? In moderation, I mean!” Couldn't one take just a step down the stony slope and still find her way back to the right path?
The longer Thad stared at her, the more she regretted asking him that, no matter how the question haunted her lately. Thaddeas was not Jack, hadn't Jack's easygoing ways or his objectivity. finally he said, “You're determined to stay in Texas when I leave.”
She nodded, but warily. He wore his serious-news face, and that meant trouble.
“I'll allow you to do that on one condition,” he decided.
“Allow me?”
He narrowed his eyes and confirmed, “Allow you.”
Since he could legal y force her onto any train he chose, she asked, “What co
ndition?”
“That you let me take you back into Hell's Half-Acre.”
“What!” Audra stared at her brother, disbelieving, and heard a popping sound from the south. It could be fireworks, celebrants starting the new year—new century!—early. But it might be gunfire.
“Thaddeas Garrison! That's not a proper place for me, and you know it!”
“I thought you were all owing for moderate impropriety,” he challenged. "You take a look at the virtues of honest sin. See what happens when people make excuses about moderation. Then at least folks like Harwood won't be able to delude you."
Unable to think of a strong enough argument on her own, she invoked her oldest and best
protection. “I don't think Papa would like this idea.”
“I know he wouldn't, but he's not here.”
“Couldn't I see some gambling in one of the nicer saloons?” she almost pleaded.
"With the hypocrites? They wouldn't let you in. At least in the Acre, we can probably find some kind of mission or settlement house, some decent women to talk to." They both knew that such charities were the realm of older matrons, not impressionable young ladies.
He was, she thought, daring her. Bluffing! Surely he wasn't serious when he said, "It's Hell's Half-Acre, Audra, or Wyoming. You choose."
And she must not choose Wyoming. “You won't let anything happen to us?” she hedged.
He winced at her choice, but his resolve did not waver. "I will never let anything happen to you if I can help it. That's why we're doing this."
He was not bluffing. Neither would she. So Audra tucked her arm back under his.
“We're going by the hotel first,” Thaddeas told her, starting to walk again.
“Why?”
“To ask about missions and to get my gun.”
“I thought Fort Worth had an ordinance against carrying firearms,” she noted, nervous.
And Thaddeas said, “It does.”
Chapter Nineteen
Make your pens carefully. You may whittle the nibs to the individual tastes of the pupils.
—Rules for Teachers
Jack's hopes to raise his image in Audra's eyes—at least back up from slobbering inebriate to charming-but-dissolute scoundrel— hit a powerful snag. She didn't come back by the store.