by V. J. Banis
“He—he didn’t say, exactly, just west. I’d like to try to find him, Mister Summers, and I’ll need a guide. Of course I’m willing to pay, though I should warn you that I’m not a wealthy woman.”
Summers studied her for a moment. A great many of the men who came here headed west, left their wives behind. Most, experience had taught him, had had good reason.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said aloud.
“Why is that?”
“Well, I could tell you it’s because I don’t like getting mixed up in domestic matters, which is the truth. But more important, I’d never take a woman out there. Nobody who knows the west would. It’s too dangerous. And too strenuous a trip for a delicate lady.”
“I can ride very well,” she said, her wide, solemn eyes regarding him steadily.
“It’s mostly walking.”
“I can do that, too. And I can shoot, not one of those revolvers of yours, but a rifle—what are you laughing at?”
“You,” he said, making no effort to hide his amusement. “You talk like we were going after a stag on some English lord’s estate. You don’t know what’s out there. There’s deserts that would make hell seem a paradise, and mountains it’d take an angel’s wings to get across, not to mention Indians and snakes, and for all I know, fire-breathing dragons. A man’s got all he can do to hang on to his skin, without having to look after a woman.”
“I’m prepared to pay a thousand dollars,” she said, her voice frostier than ever.
“That’s a lot of money. I’m sorry that it’s out of the question. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Mister Summers—”
“Mrs. Denon,” he said, emphasizing each syllable, “there’s a new woman working one of the local whorehouses, and I mean to look her over before she gets too shopworn. So, since our discussion is over—”
She came from the chair as if stung by a bee, her fair skin coloring brilliantly. “Mister Summers, I came to you because I was told your abilities were considerable.”
“As they are.” He grinned. “As I intend to demonstrate to the new woman soon, if I can terminate this interview.”
She did it to him then, the trick with the eyes, the swift and sudden parting of curtains. It made his smile vanish, and if she’d pursued the advantage, she might have made some change in his feelings.
But as quickly as it had happened, it was gone, and she was moving toward the door, looking more angry than hurt, and angry women were an old story for him.
“Mrs. Denon,” he said in a not ungentle tone, “a happy man doesn’t leave a loving wife,” there was only the briefest of pauses, “for any longer than he has to. My advice to you is to go back to Virginia, to your home, and wait until you hear from him.”
“And if I don’t hear from him, Mister Summers? What am I to do then, since you’re offering advice?”
“This is a young country, and there are never enough pretty women, especially true ladies, to go around. When it comes to it, you won’t have any trouble finding a second husband.”
“That may be,” she said. “At the moment, however, my concern is with finding my first husband, regardless of the trouble involved, and with or without your help. Good night, Mister Summers.”
It was peculiar, but he was more aware of her scent after she’d gone than when she’d been in the room; it seemed to grow on the night air, as lilacs will in full bloom.
He made ready to go out, and as he did so he found himself wondering about her husband. He wondered if he’d met him while he was here in town, and what had become of him. Had he died, as most of them did, within a hundred miles of civilization? The plains were cruel and unforgiving of any mistake, and of those who’d gone farther, hardly any had returned to tell the tale.
The Indian came in, the tomcat sidling through the door in his wake. “Remember an Englishman?” Summers asked him. “From Virginia. Would have come through about five months ago, set out with trappers, she says.”
The Indian shook his head, his single braid swaying in the lamplight. “I can ask around,” he said.
“Do that,” Summers said, adding after a moment, “just to satisfy my curiosity.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Claire was roused from her sleep by a thunderous knocking at the door of her hotel room. She was so startled that at first she did not answer, but merely sat in bed with a comforter clutched about her, staring in the direction of the sound. When the pounding came again, she clambered from the bed and ran to the door.
“Who is it?” she asked, pressing her cheek against the rough wood; she could think of no one who might be calling upon her in the middle of the night in St. Louis, unless—
“Summers,” a muffled voice replied.
“Who?” The name eluded her momentarily.
“Summers,” the reply came again, louder and a bit exasperated.
Then she remembered the extremely rude half-savage brute who had been recommended to her as a guide. She must remember to properly thank the person who’d recommended him.
“Mister Summers,” she spoke through the door, “it’s the middle of the night.”
To her annoyance he pounded on the door again, virtually in her ear. Irked, she threw the bolt back and swung the door open. Summers stood there with hand upraised, about to knock yet again. He was dressed in a shirt and trousers of deerskin that had obviously seen seasons of wear untouched by cleaning. She had forgotten, after their brief meeting, how tall he was, so that at close range she had to crane her neck to look up at him.
“Mister Summers,” she said indignantly, trying to look down her nose at him while simultaneously looking upward, “it is the middle of the night, and this is my bedroom. I really must insist—”
“It’s eleven o’clock, ma’am, or thereabouts,” he said, obviously unmoved by her annoyance, “and I came cause I found someone you ought to talk to. Get your clothes on.”
She remembered for the first time that she was wearing only her nightdress and quickly crossed her hands over her bosom. “How dare you?” she cried, retreating a step. To her horror, he followed her, striding boldly past her into the room. A match flared as he lit the kerosene lamp on the dresser.
“Mister Summers, if you do not leave at once, I shall call for the management and have you thrown out of here bodily.”
At her threat he turned and crossed the room to her in two long strides. Ignoring her commands, he seized her with both hands in a grip so rough it was certain to leave bruises on her trembling shoulders. His ice blue eyes caught and held hers like a pin through a butterfly’s heart.
“I don’t know what kind of schooling you had back in England,” he said, speaking in a low, unfeeling voice, “but you are a pitifully ignorant woman. In the first place, they ain’t enough men in this hotel to throw me out of here, and about the same number with the courage to try, especially if they know me. In the second place, I didn’t come here to see you with your titties half covered nor to try to get your pantaloons off of you. There’s plenty of pantaloons to be gotten off in this town just for my asking it, and a lot better filled out than yours is anyway. No, what I came here for was to tell you I think I found the men that took your husband west.”
“You—you did?” she asked in a tiny, cowed voice. Never in her entire life had anyone, man or woman, dared to speak to her in such a manner. She had never felt so completely at a loss.
“They’re over to Miz Letitia’s now, playing cards and drinking. I came to fetch you, figuring you’d want to talk to them, but you’re gonna have to get your butt moving else they’ll be too drunk to tell you anything. Now start with this.”
He let her go and snatched up her chemise from the chair on which she’d draped it earlier.
“Mister Summers!” she cried, blushing and snatching it from his hand.
“Miss English lady,” he said, smiling, which only infuriated her further, “I have seen every piece of lady’s apparel there is, on, off, and in the process. Why don’t you
just get dressed and quit fussing so?”
“I will get dressed,” she said, with what little dignity she could muster. “Please be so good as to wait outside.”
He looked her up and down with so penetrating a gaze that she half-believed he was seeing right through the fabric of her nightdress. Then he smiled again and shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he drawled. “Make it quick, though.”
He went into the hall again. She closed the door quickly after him, sliding the bolt into place. For a moment she leaned against the door, feeling strangely out of breath. Then remembering the purpose of his visit, and his last words, she began to dress hurriedly. She had no doubt that Mister Summers was the sort to leave if he got tired of waiting, and the full import of his message was just now coming clear to her: the men who had taken Peter west. They would know where he was, and how he was as well.
Summers had scarcely a glance for her when she emerged from her room a few minutes later. “Let’s go,” he said brusquely, starting along the corridor with a stride so brisk that she had to run to catch up to him.
“This place we’re going,” she asked breathlessly, “This Miss...?”
“Miz Letitia’s,” he supplied.
“What sort of place is it? Is it a boardinghouse?”
He laughed aloud. “Not exactly,” he said. “Miz Letitia’s is a whorehouse—best one in town.”
“A...but I can’t go into a—one of those,” she said.
He shook his head, still smiling. “If you don’t beat all. You’re all ready to set out across the prairie to look for your husband, but you’re afraid to set foot in a whorehouse.”
She came to an abrupt halt at the top of the stairs. To her surprise, Summers stopped too. “But people will think—”
“Have you ever given a damn what people thought?” he asked, interrupting her.
For a long moment the two of them regarded one another steadily. For the first time since he’d met her, a ghost of a smile played across her mouth. It transformed her, even in its limited and brief form, making an otherwise unremarkable face seem suddenly to glow from within.
“Now that I think about it, I suppose not,” she admitted.
“First time I saw you I thought, there’s a girl’s been spoiled all her life. Let’s go, before those trappers get bored with drinking and playing cards, and disappear upstairs with some of Miz Letitia’s girls. I never interrupt a man when he’s in the saddle, not if I can help it. There’s some things ought to be sacred.”
The smile vanished with the rebuke. She would have made a sharp reply, but before she could think of the appropriate one, Summers was already halfway down the stairs to the street, leaving her no choice but to race after him. She was grateful for one thing, however—that Mister Summers had declined her request to guide her westward. The mere thought of spending several weeks in his company had since proved unendurable.
* * * * * * *
From down the street, Miz Letitia’s looked like an ordinary house, except that it sat on a dirt track, back from the street and well apart from its neighbors. It was set apart too by the number of lighted windows on all three floors, and by the dissonant rattle of a piano, played with more force than skill.
Instinctively Claire slowed her steps as they approached the front porch. Preoccupied as she was with her own thoughts and fears, she was not even aware of the much gentler tone in which Summers spoke to her.
“There’s nothing much downstairs except the saloon and some card tables,” he said. “The other business goes on upstairs. No need for you even to think about that.”
He opened the big front door, nodding to an enormous hulk of a man who sat just inside to observe newcomers, and led the way along the short corridor to the parlor.
At first she had difficulty seeing through the clouds of tobacco smoke that hung thick and stagnant in the air of the noisy and crowded room. The women—and there were more of them than she would have anticipated—were of a recognizable sort, buxom, voluble, overpainted. The men were more varied: young, old, boisterous, and quiet; but all of them were fierce and hardened. They were the sort of men who had abandoned city ways and city manners, had braved hardship and dangers to live here on the isolated fringe of civilization. For the first time she saw their crude, brash manner, which had so dismayed and offended her since her arrival in this outpost, for what it was—the first necessity for survival in such a place as this.
And for the first time too she realized how completely out of her element she was. She glanced around at the other women in the room—as hard and ferocious in their own way as the men—and her courage faltered.
As if sensing something of what she was feeling, Summers put a hand on her arm. “Over this way,” he said, piloting her deftly through the crowd. One overeager trapper, his eyes glazed with drink, made a grab for her skirt, but Summers somehow managed to be in the way, and the hand was hastily snatched back.
Three men were playing cards at a table against the far wall. Summers paused beside one of these and asked, “Your name Morton?”
Without looking from the cards he was shuffling, the man replied, “Depends on who’s wanting to know.”
“I’ve got a lady here, wants to talk to you,” Summers said.
Morton paused to glance briefly in Claire’s direction. She smiled nervously, until he turned his head slightly and spat a stream of brown tobacco juice in the direction of the cuspidor, missing it and her skirt by inches.
“Already made me plans with that colored gal over at Annie’s,” Morton said, returning his attention to the cards. “Why don’t you see if you can catch me next time, honey. And leave your business manager home. We can do without him. Never could abide them fellows anyhow.”
Summers’ voice when he spoke again was low, even, and icy cold. “The lady,” he said, emphasizing the latter word, “wants to talk to you.”
“Some other time,” Morton said, laying the deck of cards in the center of the table. “Cut?”
Summers’ hand moved so swiftly that Claire had not even seen the hunting knife appear in it until it had sliced through the cards, its tip plunged into the wood surface of the table.
“Now,” Summers said.
The other two players, taking another look at the newcomer, began to edge their chairs back from the table. In a moment they were gone, vanishing into the crowds and the smoke.
Morton cocked his head and glanced sideways up at the standing man. Though Summers was clearly the taller of the two, Morton was far from a small man. He was built like an ox, with massive and powerful-looking shoulders, and a thick sturdy torso set on short squat legs. His eyes, little and dark, peered out from above a tangled black beard. He wore a torn and shapeless hat that almost concealed a premature bald spot on the crown of his head.
Summers, ignoring the scrutiny, pulled one of the now empty chairs around for Claire to sit. She did so a bit shakily. The hunting knife in front of her still vibrated from the force with which Summers had imbedded it.
“What’s this all about?” Morton asked, pouring a shot of whisky from the bottle on the table without offering them any.
“You took an Englishman west with you, about five months ago,” Summers said.
“What if I did, whose business is that?” Morton asked in a surly tone. He reached for the hunting knife and tugged it free, studying its sharply honed blade and testing its balance in the palm of his hand.
“Mister Morton,” Claire said, “I believe that man may have been my husband. Denon, Peter Denon—was that his name?”
Morton was silent for a moment. “Sounds right,” he said finally.
“But—can’t you be sure?” she asked.
He gave her a scornful look, as though she should have known better than to ask such a question. “Out there,” he nodded his head in what she presumed was the westerly direction, “names don’t matter so much. When there ain’t but you and one or two others for five, six hundred miles, you can pretty well follow who’s s
aying what to who.”
Claire gave a sigh and tossed her head. “Then there’s no way of knowing it was him?” she said.
“Puny-looking fellow, curly headed?” Morton asked. “Spends most of his time praying?”
Claire’s flagging spirits lifted. “Yes, yes,” she said eagerly, “that must have been him. Then you know! Where is he now? Is he all right?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“But....”
“He was, the last I saw him,” Morton added. “We left him out there.” Again that unconscious nod toward the west.
“Where’d you leave him?” Summers asked.
Morton regarded him steadily across the table. “We went up the Missouri, my partner and me, and the Englishman. He paid us to take him as far as we was going. Followed the Platte. You know it?”
“Some.”
“Left him about where the South Platte branches off. Told him he was a damn fool not to head back with us. It was already winter and the river threatening to freeze up on us, but he said he was going to keep on west.”
The three of them were silent for a moment, exchanging glances. Summers, looking at the girl, saw that her eyes were feverish with excitement. It made him uneasy, knowing what was coming next. Hardly realizing that he did so, he gave his head a warning shake, but she ignored it, or didn’t notice, he couldn’t tell which.
“Could you find that spot again?”
“Nothing to it.”
“Mister Morton,” she asked, leaning across the table toward him, “could you take me there?”
Morton almost choked on the whisky he was drinking. “Beg pardon, ma’am?” he said.
“I said, could you take me there?”
Morton laughed, shaking his head. “No, ma’am, I sure couldn’t take a woman out there. With the Indians, and the storms and such, and the animals, a woman wouldn’t last three weeks out there.”
“But you mentioned Indians,” she said coolly. “I presume they must reproduce in the normal manner?”
“Huh?” Morton said.
“She’s talking about squaws,” Summers said.