What Gold Buys

by Ann Parker

  The familiar sights, smells, and sounds of the silver rush boomtown that was Leadville enveloped her. It was a place of constant movement, shifting dreams, and phantom schemes. Of silver wealth, pulled from underground by backbreaking work and tenacity, wealth that poured easily into the pockets of the silver barons, and squeezed to a grudging trickle for those whose hands brought it to the surface, to the stamp mills, and to the railroad for transport. The profits pulled from that mineral river also fed the businesses of the town, much of it finding its way to State Street businesses of entertainment, ease, and ill-repute.

  This was Leadville.

  A home where fortunes were made and lost, often at dizzying speed. Where dreams were created and destroyed, sometimes in a toss of the dice or an assay of a claim. Where life could be snuffed out with cruel suddenness, in the dark of an alley, in the depth of a shaft, in the dusk of opium, morphine, or alcohol…or in the pain of childbirth. Leadville. It pulsed with energy, with drive, with purpose.

  It was a mountain metropolis. Colorado’s City in the Clouds.

  It was—Inez took a deep breath, and filled her eyes and ears yet again—it was home.

  As she allowed the familiar symphony of sights and sounds to settle over her, she detected a faint, discordant note. She cocked her head, still, listening intently. That sounded like…

  Then again.

  A shot. Distant. Not a rifle, most likely a revolver.

  And again.

  Well spaced. Deliberate.

  She looked down at her husband, Mark Stannert, who had stepped off first, and was holding out his hand, patiently, waiting to help her descend.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what, darlin’?”

  “Gunshots.”

  Mark glanced around the chaos of the station, giving the cacophony of people, animals, and machinery time to sink in.

  A volley of shots boomed out, punctured by energetic hoots and hollers from the far end of the platform. People scattered away from the vicinity, leaving a clear view of a clutch of men, guns being reholstered, slapping one of their own on the back, then hoisting him into the air and bearing him away, with raucous cheers. “Sounds like someone’s train’s come in, in more ways than one,” observed Mark. “Let’s hope they stop by the saloon to celebrate.”

  “I know what I heard, and that wasn’t it. Three shots. Deliberately spaced.” She looked at Mark, who had removed his sober-as-a-judge black bowler and was knocking the travel dust from it. “Whatever happened to that ordinance forbidding the discharge of pistols within town limits?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not as if someone shootin’ a gun is an unusual happenstance, even in town.”

  Inez shook her head, annoyed at herself, annoyed that the three even shots lingered inside her mind like an insistent echo.

  Letting her gaze wander the forward length of the train, she saw that the outward flow of disembarking travellers had slowed to a trickle. Those impatient to board pushed in the other direction, maneuvering onto the train. Toward the rear, the baggage porters who had just finished emptying the cars were now busy dealing with an inward flux of boxes, trunks, crates, and mail bags.

  A carriage, draped all in black and pulled by two black horses topped with black head-plumes advanced slowly toward a baggage car hitched two cars down from where Inez stood. A pathway opened up as if by magic as the funeral coach moved up alongside the sliding doors. Two somber-faced black-coated men, black crepe armbands visible over the sleeves of their coats, clambered out of the back. Up front, another man, dressed in a formal frock coat of similar midnight hue, looked around briefly, his eyeglasses catching a brief flash from the sun. He removed his bowler to dab at his high square forehead with a handkerchief, before replacing his hat. He climbed down from the funeral coach and walked to the baggage car to talk to the handlers, who had whipped off their peaked caps, in deference to the departed. The driver remained in place, holding the horses steady as the handlers jumped out of the car and began sliding the coffin from the back of the carriage under the direction of the man in charge, who Inez surmised was the undertaker.

  Inez lingered on the top step, mesmerized by the sight of some soul departing for the last time from Leadville. “No more dreams and schemes for that one,” she said half to herself. As if in agreement with Inez’s assessment, the sun flashed off the sides and top of the coffin, just as it had from the undertaker’s spectacles. It was, she realized, a metal casket, polished to a high, mirror-like shine, with gleaming gold fittings.

  Inez noted the dearth of mourners: the two men who had accompanied the funeral coach appeared to be the only ones who were present to see the dearly departed on this final journey. They stood, hats removed, heads bowed. From their appearances, she surmised they were young, still approaching their prime, as opposed to the undertaker whose dark beard and hair was shot with silvery undertones. Perhaps they are here to say farewell to a friend, a business partner. Someone wealthy, but new to town, and felled by violence or disease. Called home by grieving family on the sunrise side of the continent, or even over the ocean.

  Mark turned to look at what had captured Inez’s attention. He shook his head, said, “I’m guessing no one we know. Those fellows don’t look familiar to me. New to town, maybe, and one of them met with misfortune. So many, they come and they go, one way or another, right, darlin’?” The funeral carriage pulled away with a squeak and a rattle, to be replaced by the next of several baggage wagons, anxious to disgorge their own contents.

  Mark resettled his hat and held out his hand. Inez accepted. Once she reached the platform she withdrew her hand, and gave her traveling skirts and cloak a good shake. Soot and cinders floated away on an October breeze that had an icy snap to it, a reminder that winter was stepping over the threshold to make itself at home in the high mountain city. She glanced covertly around the station as she fussed with her hat, tilting it a bit more to one side and straightening the travel veil. Mark caught her shifting gaze and his mouth twisted beneath his well-groomed mustache. “Expectin’ someone special to arrive and deliver the eulogy, Mrs. Stannert? Or maybe a welcoming committee from church?”

  She parried smoothly. “I thought Mr. Jackson might be coming to pick us up.”

  Her statement was a lie. He knew it. She knew he knew it. It was all part of the game they had been playing—thrust, parry, riposte—ever since they had reconciled in Colorado Springs. If, Inez thought, reconcile was even the proper word for their uneasy marriage-bound truce. And even that period hadn’t lasted long. A few good days, a week, and they’d slowly, surely, started slipping back into their old ways. It had been, Inez concluded, an “interlude,” and little more than that.

  Nothing had really changed.

  Any warmth that had ignited between them during their stay in the Springs with Inez’s Eastern seaboard relatives had slipped away as the time to return to Leadville had approached. It wasn’t just the air that got colder and thinner as they traveled from the Springs to Leadville, at the top of the Rocky Mountain range. The temperature between them had plummeted as well, growing frostier with every mile of track that clickety-clacked under the parlor car.

  “Hmmm.” Mark made a noncommittal sound. But its very neutrality indicated that, reasonable as her explanation was, Mark wasn’t taken in.

  The shadowed knowledge of Inez’s lover—the Reverend Justice B. Sands—walked between them like a ghost, accompanied by the phantom presence of Mark’s most recent paramour, an actress who had spirited him away from Leadville more than a year and a half ago.

  Ignoring the chill cast by their shared infidelities, Inez pressed forward with her line of inquiry. “You did telegraph Abe that we were arriving on the afternoon train, didn’t you? If he’s coming from the saloon, he would need to be sure Sol is there to handle the bar. Otherwise, heaven forbid, he would have had to close it for the afternoon.”


  They began to walk together, side-by-side, but not touching. They paused to watch the regurgitation of innumerable Saratoga, steamer, barrel-stave, and flattop trunks from the baggage cars. The mountain of luggage was accompanied by a flurry of smaller hat trunks as well as more business-like industrial boxes and crates. Inez noted with satisfaction that her possessions were all present and accounted for.

  “I sent word to the saloon yesterday, as to which line and when,” said Mark, after he directed a baggage handler to their trunks and boxes so that they could be brought to the front of the station. “But I’d put bets on Sol bein’ the one to pull greeting duty at the station. Abe likes to keep a personal eye on the goings-on at the saloon when we aren’t around. Sol’s good behind the bar, but still a bit of a greenhorn. Gets rattled when there’s trouble brewing, not sure whether to step in or step back. Still, he’s got a steady pouring hand, a good listening ear…just needs a little more time to age.”

  He placed his hand at the small of Inez’s back to guide her toward the station door. Inez slipped away from his touch and began walking toward the station door at a brisk pace, remarking, “Too, with Mrs. Jackson still enceinte, I imagine Abe would prefer to remain at the saloon. That way, everyone knows where to send him a message when her time comes. I’m surprised that—” She cut herself off, not wanting to discuss such indelicate matters in public. But privately, she worried that Angel Jackson had yet to give birth. By late July, shortly before Mark’s surprise return, Inez and Abe had teamed together to insist that Angel stop waiting tables at the Silver Queen. Although Angel’s energy never flagged and she still moved about with astonishing speed and grace, her gravid body strained the fabric of her apron, and Inez feared she might go into labor right there on the sawdust-strewn plank floor. Apparently some of their customers feared the same thing: Inez had spotted them averting their eyes and shrinking into their chairs with shoulders hunched as Angel passed behind them, as if they were afraid that any slight touch would induce childbirth.

  And then, there were the others, the drunken or not-so-drunken louts who leered and commented, acting as if she couldn’t see or hear. Or worse, acting as if Angel was still one of the “working girls” at Frisco Flo’s parlor house at the end of block, instead of being the proper married woman that she was. When the stares got too bold and the comments too loud, or if behavior moved beyond “look, don’t touch,” the perpetrators quickly discovered that Angel could more than hold her own. What’s more, the owners of the Silver Queen did not suffer them or their foolish ways any longer than it took to toss the culprits into the ever-present mud and muck of Tiger Alley behind the saloon.

  Inez’s musings were interrupted by a small voice at her elbow. “Posy for a penny, ma’am?” It was a tiny girl of indeterminate age—Inez guessed four? Maybe five?—muffled in layers of rags against the cold, looking up at her through a tangled nest of hair. The flower held tight in her rag-wrapped fist was drooping and fading fast as the day’s residual warmth. Inez bit her lip, then dug out a penny from her no-nonsense black reticule and placed it in the small palm, closing the tiny dirt-crusted rags over the coin with her own suede-gloved hand. She smiled at the urchin, shook her head at the proffered flower, and watched the girl scamper off. “Is it my imagination or are there more ragamuffins around now than two months ago?”

  “Most likely you’re seeing true.” Mark opened the station door for Inez. “The train makes it easy for folks of all kinds to get here now. They land in town, families and young ones in tow, dreaming of easy pickin’s. When the weather’s kindly, hopes are high, and every one of them is sure they’ll be walking around town like Horace Tabor, a bonanza king of Leadville, inside of a week. When reality sets in and summer disappears, then it’s all shoulders to the wheel, from youngest to the oldest.”

  He glanced sideways at Inez. “Any pennies we hand out’ll just circle on back to us when the head of the household comes in to the Silver Queen hankering for a shot of Jig Juice or Blue Ruin, a bowl of beans, or a lucky turn of the cards. It doesn’t help to go sermonizing or fussing about it. If we turn them away, sayin’ use those coppers to put food on the table for your family, well, those pennies will move on down State Street to some other saloon or a gaming hall or whorehouse. Money has no morals.”

  “No need to lecture, Mr. Stannert,” snapped Inez. “I wasn’t born yesterday, and I ran the saloon just fine during your absence. Abe and I kept the saloon a going concern and turned a tidy profit while you were gallivanting down in Denver with that floozy of an actress, Josephine What’s-her-name. Besides…”

  She looked him up and down, openly taking his measure: impeccable bowler, precisely waxed mustache, silver-and-gold-thread embroidered waistcoat, fine worsted sac coat and black trousers, gold-headed cane in hand. All topped off with a slight smile that invited confidences but didn’t reach calculating blue eyes that took in everything. Mark looked every inch the prosperous businessman or cardsharp, which he was, on both counts.

  “…Sermonizing isn’t your strong point,” she continued. “Leave the soul-searching to those who have a soul.”

  “Ah, could you be referrin’ to Reverend J. B. Sands? The preacher who, before he found God, spent a fair portion of his life sendin’ any number of souls to the afterlife to earn his living?”

  The conversation, carried on in low but increasingly tense tones, was interrupted with a crash as the station door flew open to shouts of “Mr. Stannert! Mrs. Stannert! I say, hold up!”

  Inez turned her back on Mark, bestowing a brilliant smile on the handful of nattily dressed nobs descending upon them and exclaiming, “Why, it’s the merry Lads from London! You all appear relatively sober. How can that be?” Privately, Inez thought of the five top-hatted dandies heading their way as the “Lost Lads of London.” The Lads, British remittance men living in the Colorado Springs area, had been shipped off from the seat of “the empire on which the sun never sets” by their well-heeled families. As to why they all ended up in Colorado, clustered in the Wild West of the New World, Inez had her theories.

  At the first of every month, their living allowances or remittances rolled in—over the Atlantic Ocean, across the Mississippi River and the wide-open prairies, to renew the accounts of each highborn black sheep and second son. Such payments ostensibly allowed each castaway to keep body and soul together, in some fashion or other. In practice, however, come the first or second weekend of each month, they all bought tickets from Colorado Springs to Leadville, arriving in Leadville with wallets stuffed with banknotes and the devil in their eyes.

  The result?

  A bacchanal of high living in the City in the Clouds—spending freely on expensive cognac, oyster-stuffed quail, high-priced prostitutes, and high-stakes games of chance—until pockets and wallets were empty. As part of this routine, they made the Silver Queen their first and last stop. At the start, they all handed over to Inez any pocket valuables they didn’t want to lose to chance or thievery, as well as enough cash to pay for return tickets. She would deposit everything in the Silver Queen’s safe so that, at the end of their debauchery, they at least retained the means to return to the Springs. Usually Tuesday, although sometimes it was Wednesday or Thursday, they would straggle in, hung-over and depleted in more ways than one, collect their goods and their ticket monies. Down from the peaks they’d rumble to live meagerly on beans and beer, counting on the goodwill of the sizeable English émigré community in the Springs to keep them solvent and sated for the remainder of the month.

  In the station, Inez held out her hand, wiggling her gloved fingers meaningfully. “Tickets, gentlemen.” As they all began to pat down waistcoats and check pockets, she added, “I wasn’t certain you would make it off at the stop. It rather looked as if you were intent on depleting the parlor car of all the high-quality firewater at their disposal, even if it meant traveling to the end of the line. Sir Daniel? You have your chit?”

 
Daniel Tipton dressed in an olive-green ensemble from boots to top hat, held his paper payment for return aloft between two fingers. “Much as I love the old D&RG—the founder is a good friend of the paterfamilias—there’s no chance I would deplete my monthly remittance before bestowing a goodly portion upon the Silver Queen, the fairest drinking establishment in all of Colorado. Bloody perish the thought, Mrs. Stannert.”

  She slid the bills from his two-fingered grasp. “Why, thank you, Mr. Tipton. Rest assured we’ll keep a stock of our best under lock and key until you gentlemen grace the bar. And I shall take good care of this, per usual.”

  One of Tipton’s companions stepped forward, removed his top hat, pulled his safe-passage-home money from the lining, and handed it to her with a mock bow. His sleek blond hair glinted, putting Inez in mind of a light-coated otter, emerging slick from a river, while his mustache, waxed to sharp and vicious points, could have been whiskers.

  “Thank you, Mr. Epperley,” said Inez.

  As the others jostled forward to hand in their paper and specie, Epperley tipped his hat back on his head, calling out the name of each in turn, “Balcombe, Percy, and Quick…sounds like a bloody bunch of barristers.”

  “Shut it, Epperley,” said Balcombe. “Tipton and Epperley could be wool exporters or accountants, so don’t be so snub.”

  “Enough,” said Inez. “You all start squabbling and scraping now, the law will step in and you won’t have an opportunity to sample the wares of State Street. I’m sure you all recall what happened last June, yes?” She tucked the money into her purse.

  “Oh, June.” Quick shuddered. “Perish the memory. Twenty-four hours under the auspices of the county gaol.”

  “Could have been longer,” Inez noted. “None of you were being particularly forthcoming as to what happened in that suite in the Tabor Grand.”