by Bill Brooks
“Only those who took liberties with me,” she said, giving him a hard stare.
He grinned weakly. “You care for a dipper of water?” he said, nodding toward a well that stood in the sun twenty feet from the corral. “I’d be happy to fetch some for you.”
“That would be pleasant of you,” she said, after which the drummer then hurried off, perhaps grateful to be out of her glare.
Cole noticed, when she spoke, she had large, horsy teeth that did nothing to improve her looks. She looked his way. He was rolling a shuck and anticipating how long it would take to make a change of the team and get back on the road again. This Beaver Smith, the man who owned the line, said they’d make San Antonio in two, maybe three days, depending on the weather.
“What’s weather have to do with it?” Cole had said.
“I mean whether or not they is any road agents, busted wheels, or other disasters that might befall us along the pike,” he had said, then grinned foolishly like a man who’d just played a great joke purely for his own amusement.
The woman said now: “What about you, bub?”
Cole licked the edge of the paper and finished the roll before twisting off the ends and striking a lucifer off his heel. “What about me?” Cole said.
“You interested in why I carry this pistol proud on my hip?”
“Not really.”
“Why ain’t you? Most men are when they see a woman with a hog-leg strapped onto her skirts.”
“I’m just not,” Cole said. “Free country, you can wear what you want, it’s none of my business.”
“Now I like that in a feller.”
“Like what?”
“His willingness to live and let live. That’s the way my Sam is, too.”
Cole really didn’t want to engage her in conversation and was relieved when the drummer returned with a dipper of water, which he handed her. She placed it to her lips but did not drink genteelly. She drank more like a man would, spilling a good portion of it, then wiping her chin with the cuff of her sleeve, never once taking her gaze from Cole. Finished, she handed the dipper back to the drummer and asked if he might go inside the little way station and see if they had any hard candy.
“I’m partial to candy,” she said. “The hard kind. I’ve got teeth like a squirrel’s, you know what I mean.” She gave the drummer a lascivious wink, which caused his knees to buckle.
“Yes, ma’am,” the drummer said, and quick-stepped it to the way station.
“Amazing what a man will do just for the sniff of a woman,” she said.
“Amazing,” Cole replied, then strolled over to the corral to look at the horseflesh.
The next thing he knew she was right there beside him.
“Going to see my husband, Sam,” she said. “Got him in jail in San Antonio.”
Cole was silent.
“Planning on hanging him.”
“That’s too bad.”
She breathed through her long nose; it was an audible sound. When Cole didn’t say anything more, she added: “Sam was always a man with bad luck on his side.”
“In my experience, it’s usually more than just bad luck that gets a man hanged,” Cole said.
She snorted, and Cole could smell the faint odor of sweat and rose water as she stepped in a little closer to him. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s me that’s the one with the bad luck. Every man I’ve ever had a thing to do with has come to a terrible end … Sam’s just one. I had a lover went to prison for twenty-five years, serving time this very moment in Illinois. Green Duck, you ever heard of him?”
“No.” Cole was content simply to smoke his cigarette and watch the hands exchange teams, turn out the old ones, and round up four fresh mounts to put in the traces. One particular animal they were having trouble with—a stout gelding with a blazed face.
“I spent a little time myself in the calaboose down in Dallas once,” she continued, as though Cole had encouraged her somehow. “They claimed I was fencing stolen horses. Can you imagine that?”
Cole could, but he didn’t say anything. She had an irritating manner of speaking, her voice too loud, too sharp to the ear.
“Well, if you ain’t never heard of Green Duck, you ever heard of Cole Younger?”
Cole nodded that he had.
“He was my first husband. It didn’t work out, even though we had us a child. Cole was too restless. He was cousin to Jesse and Frank James, you know.”
Cole didn’t know why she was telling him all these things. Maybe she thought he had the same fetching interest in her as the drummer had. Or maybe, because he showed no outward interest, it was a challenge to her the way it is to some women. All Cole knew for sure was, he had no interest in this woman and her lovers or her life or her reasons for being on the mud wagon.
The drummer returned and said: “Sorry, my sweet, but they have no hard candy, not even a twist of licorice.”
He was a ferret-faced little man, barely taller than the woman. Seeing as how Cole was taking no interest in her, she suddenly allowed herself to warm to the man, smiled, and said: “Why, that’s OK. What’d you say your name was there, feller?”
“George,” he said. “George Pepperstick.”
“How do, George Pepperstick. I’m Belle … Belle Starr,” she said, and offered him a fancy gauntleted hand.
Cole had heard the name now that she’d mentioned it. It was a name much bandied about the courthouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, when he had worked there. Although he’d never encountered Belle Starr before, or any of her roost of outlaws, he’d heard plenty of stories, randy and otherwise, about her. And once, while he was in the employ of Judge Parker, he’d heard the judge had sentenced Belle Starr to six months in the Detroit House of Corrections for being in possession of stolen property, mainly missing nags with altered brands illegally gained from throughout the Nations.
The driver hawed them back into the mud wagon and off they went again, only this time Belle Starr not minding so much that the drummer’s eyes were all over her and his hand was resting on her knee.
“You do well drumming, George?” she asked.
“Do fairly well,” he said. “Peddle knifes, special-made, guaranteed not to dull even after a thousand uses … the secret is in the honing.”
“Oh, now that’s very interesting,” she said. “But how much you reckon you make drumming knifes, say in a year?”
It went on like that for several hours, Belle Starr learning of the drummer’s earnings and he more than happy to brag a bit, saying how in one year alone he made almost $5,000, to which she feigned great surprise and said: “No!”
His face shone like a new penny. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Why, I expect to earn half as much again this year. Everyone has need of a good knife. Would you like to see an example of my wares?”
She laughed bawdily and said: “You show me yours. I’ll show you mine.”
After two more stops to change teams, they pulled into a jerkwater town that Beaver Smith said had a hotel and a whiskey den. The other three or four other buildings were closed at that hour of the evening.
“We’ll rest the night, be back here at dawn,” Smith said. “You want a bed, the Alamo’s the only place that’s got any. You want a drink, a sandwich … something like that … you’ll find it at Dirty Alice’s, that way.” He pointed with his nose toward the saloon.
“I don’t know about you,” Belle said to knife drummer, “but I could stand me a drink and some pickled eggs. Care to buy a lady dinner?”
“Shore do,” he said, and offered her his arm, which she dramatically took.
“You want to come along and join us?” Belle asked, casting a backward glance at Cole.
“Maybe later,” Cole said, and headed toward the hotel.
A man with a milky eye cast it in Cole’s direction when he entered and s
aid: “You in on the mud wagon?”
“You have any rooms to let?”
“Sure, sure. You want one to share or by your lonesome?”
“Lonesome,” Cole said, and signed the register and gave him the $2 he was asking for the room. Cole trudged upstairs and removed the pistols, the ones he hadn’t sold that he’d taken from the Rufus Buck gang. Then he propped the Winchester in the corner before sitting on the bed to remove his boots. His ribs still hurt like hell but the rest of him was healing fine. He figured to forgo supper and grab some shut-eye. It’d be another long day tomorrow and with any luck—considering if the “weather” held—they’d arrive in San Antonio the next day. With even greater luck, Teddy Green and Harve Ledbettor would have found Ella Mims and have her in hand when Cole arrived. He had every confidence in both men.
He lay back on the bed, which sagged under his weight, and closed his eyes and soon drifted into a light sleep.
He awoke sometime later to the sounds of laughter on the other side of the wall, and it didn’t take but an instant to recognize the bray of Belle Starr and the voice of the drummer. The one thing Cole had noticed earlier was the silver wedding band on the drummer’s third finger, left hand. Somewhere he had a wife waiting for him to return; some men were fools. Cole rolled over and closed his eyes and tried to shut out the sounds of their revelry, which went from loud talk and laughter to whispers and the creak of bedsprings, with Belle every now and then screaming out an epithet that would make a frontier marshal blush.
Finally Cole couldn’t take it any longer and pulled on his boots, re-armed himself, and went down the stairs, out the door, and over to Dirty Alice’s saloon. A whiskey or two, supper, and maybe once he returned to his room, things would have quieted down. The drummer didn’t look like he was up to an all-nighter with the likes of Belle Starr.
A sloe-eyed faded rose tried to join Cole while he stood at the bar. He thanked her for her offer, bought her a watered-down whiskey, then took his sandwich and drink glass to a table where he sat alone. He tried not to think at all beyond the moment and killed an hour at Alice’s before returning to his room. It was quiet next door.
Cole arose at 5:00 the next morning, shaved, washed his face, and combed his hair, then armed himself again and headed out the door. That’s when he noticed the door to the adjoining room ajar and saw the drummer sprawled on the bed, face down and dressed in just his socks. Cole knew right away what had happened. He shook the drummer until he moaned and his eyes fluttered.
“Well, at least she didn’t kill you,” Cole said.
The drummer muttered something, and Cole took the pitcher of water next to his bed and poured it over him. He came up with a start, spluttering and waving his hands. Cole noticed the silver wedding band was missing.
“She skinned you,” he said.
“Huh?” The drummer fisted the sleep and water from his eyes.
“Belle Starr skinned you.”
He blinked several times, noticed that he was naked, and quickly grabbed at the blanket to cover himself.
“What? What?”
“You damned fool, you got skinned, cleaned out, rolled for your poke … even your wedding ring.”
He looked at his left hand. “Oh, Jesus.”
“How much did you have on you?”
He glanced at the corner of the room, where a valise stood open, then scrambled off the bed to check it, his pale bare buttocks exposed.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said again. “My wallet is gone.” Then glancing about. “So are my knife samples!”
“How much in all?” Cole asked.
He slumped there on the floor, a sprig of hair like a long piece of seaweed hung from his otherwise bald scalp. He was calculating in his mind the losses.
“Two hundred in my wallet and the knives and case worth at least a hundred more.”
“That’s a lot for the pleasure of an ugly woman,” Cole said. “You better get dressed, if you want to make the mud wagon.”
Cole walked down to the city marshal’s office, but the door was locked. He intended to report Belle Starr, not that it would do much good. She’d probably stolen a horse and cleared out. Cole sauntered back over to the way station and waited while the driver and his assistant harnessed up a fresh team of horses. He rolled a shuck and was lighting it when he saw Beaver Smith look beyond the team and say to his assistant: “Why, that drummer forgot his shoes.”
Cole looked and saw the drummer walking toward them in his bare feet.
“She took my shoes, too,” he said.
“Who took your shoes?” Beaver Smith asked.
“Why, that woman with the fancy pistol you sold a ticket to in Amarillo.”
The driver grinned. “You figured Belle to show you a good time without her getting something out of it? Mister, what sort of fool are you?”
“The biggest this side of the Chisos,” he said. “Maybe the biggest in the whole of Texas. The thing I don’t get is why she’d steal my good shoes.”
“Why, probably to take them to her husband, Sam Starr,” Beaver Smith said. “Belle probably wants him to look his best when he goes to meet his Maker.”
They had a good laugh over that—Beaver Smith and his assistant—as the drummer and Cole climbed into the mud wagon.
“This is the worst trip I’ve ever had,” he said. “What will Wilamina say when I come home with no shoes on my feet?”
Cole said he didn’t know and sat back for the rest of a long ride.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The mud wagon and the drummer pulled into San Antonio late on the third night. A busted wheel had delayed their trip by some six hours. They halted in front of a gentlemen’s club, the Golden Spur.
Cole needed to stretch his legs and decided to stroll down to the Guadalupe River, less than a block away. It was late and most establishments—except for the drinking parlors, gambling halls, and bagnios—were closed for business, yet it was still too early to find a room.
The air was warm and carried with it the smell of the river. The gaslights of the bridge were reflected in the green water below. The odor was pungent—damp and fishy. Across the way, ghostly under a full moon, stood the stone chapel of the Alamo—all that was left from the battle decades earlier between a handful of Texans and Santa Anna’s army of over a thousand men. The chapel was the last refuge of the Texans. But neither the chapel nor its holy walls could save them from death. Cole had read that after the last Texans, including Crockett, had been rounded up, they were executed—shot in the back of the head—and thrown on a pyre, the smoke of which could be seen for fifty miles. Men died for a lot of reasons, border disputes being just one.
Cole listened, half thinking if he listened hard enough he might still hear the clatter of musketry and the cries of the wounded. But all he really heard was the clatter of shod hoofs on cobblestones and the cries of children playing down by the river, the voices of old men telling them to hush or they would scare away the catfish that the old men were so patiently trying to catch.
One of the old men saw Cole standing on the bridge and called to him: “¡Hola, amigo!” Cole nodded and asked if he’d caught many fish this night and he said, yes, he’d caught a few, but that in the last hour he hadn’t caught a single one. “I have brought too many of my children with me to do any real good,” he said, his face oily brown in the dim yellow light from the bridge. “My little ones like to play too much and are not serious enough for fishing.”
“Sí,” Cole said, and moved on.
For some reason Cole felt a deep uneasiness, as though someone were watching him, causing the flesh on the back of his neck to prickle. The sense of Ella Mims was strongly in his mind, like she was nearby, maybe just around the next corner, waiting for him. He knew how foolish this was, but at one point he turned and looked behind him. It was a disturbing feeling and he knew that he was letti
ng his mind play tricks on him, like a man on the desert who sees mirages of cool water that don’t exist. While not a superstitious man, Cole did believe in trusting his instinct because it has saved his hide more than once.
He continued walking the streets, trying to pay attention to his intuition, going blindly where his feet took him. Around every corner, he expected to run into her—the feeling that she was close was that strong. After an hour or so he gave up. He drifted back toward the center of town. Nearing the hotel he’d decided to check into, a man approached him from the shadows and he prepared for whatever trouble was coming.
“Pardon me, sir, would you happen to have a match?” He was a well-dressed man, had a dark mustache, was slight of build, and wore a cape.
Cole reached in his pocket and handed him a lucifer, which he struck against the brass plate on the hotel’s wall. It was then, when the light flared, that he saw the familiar face of Doc Holliday. He lit his cigar, then held the light for a moment before snapping it out. He inhaled and coughed, then inhaled again, as though he were trying to do battle with himself by smoking away the lung fever in him.
“You’re a long way from Deadwood,” Cole said.
Holliday cocked his head, trying to figure out who Cole was, but with the heavy shadows he couldn’t tell. “Do we know each other, sir?”
“We met in Deadwood, Doc. John Henry Cole. Remember?”
“It is truly you?” he said, his voice unable to contain his surprise. “Why, I heard that you had been killed in Cheyenne … that a man had shot you in the back. I see now that was wrong, for here you are, walking around in my town.”
“Oh, when did San Antonio become your town, Doc?”
“Why, every town is my town whilst I’m in it,” he said, then coughed again, hard, and had to support himself against the wall, his hand braced against the brass plate.
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you about my demise,” Cole said. “I’m not staying long, so you’ll have the city all to yourself.”