Deek shoved his plate toward Bart and proceeded to light up his pipe, looking through the smoke rings toward the distant corner table.
“What you got in mind for tonight?” Tom asked, looking from Yellow Rose back to Deek.
“Thought we might head over to the Appaloosa, show these locals how to play a little poker.”
“That all?” Tom grinned.
“Maybe not.”
“I thought so.”
“Now, listen,” Deek instructed. “Don’t pull anything fancy. Just play straight, honest poker, win or lose. We’re here for higher stakes than some dumb poker game, you hear?”
“Sure, Deek,” Tom said. “But how much longer we gonna wait?”
“Till I say.”
Yellow Rose got up from her unfinished chicken dinner and walked toward the door.
Deek watched, fascinated.
But he didn’t know that Yellow Rose wasn’t going to the Appaloosa. She was going back up to her room. Yellow Rose was thinking about packing up and leaving Gilead, sometime after Christmas.
As she walked out of the door, young Ralph Sweissgood entered, carrying a tray of empty dishes. He had returned from taking supper over to the sheriff’s office and jail.
“Sheriff,” Charlie Reno spoke from his cell to Elwood Hinge, “anybody ever break out of your jail?”
“That’s an idea worth ignoring,” the sheriff replied.
“That’s not an answer.” Charlie grinned and looked toward Red Borden in the next cell.
“The answer is . . . nobody has, and nobody will.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, do you, Red?”
“We busted outta Fort Smith,” Red said. “That’s a lot more prison than this.”
“Yeah, you’re plenty bad boys. Real killers. But from what I heard, Frank Chase was the brains of the outfit . . . and he’s currently a corpse.”
“Maybe you heard wrong, huh, Red?”
Hinge started to walk away from the cells.
“Say, Sheriff,” Charlie called out. “That was a damn fine meal. How about if we smoked some?”
“Sure. If you got something to smoke.”
“You know we don’t.”
“Then you won’t.”
“Sheriff.”
“What?”
“You know we got nothin’ to lose . . .”
“By trying to bust out, you mean?”
“That’s what I mean. They’re gonna hang us anyway.”
“That they are.”
“You already got a thousand comin’ for Frank and Johnsy. That’s a lot of money. There’s a couple of dead men back in Arkansas. They tried to stop us, they thought they was brave. You think you’re brave, Sheriff?”
“There’s no brave men.” The sheriff shrugged. “There’s just men who’re forced to do brave things, sometimes.”
“Like I said, Sheriff,” Charlie smiled, “we got nothing to lose.”
“Look at it this way, boys. It’s a long way back to Fort Smith. You can take your chances with a federal marshal out in the open, or you can take your chances with me. You’re worth five hundred a piece to me. Dead or alive. And to me, either way . . . it makes no never mind. Good night, boys.”
* * *
At the Appaloosa the Keeshaws had been in a poker game for more than two hours. Deek usually won. Usually when he played poker his mind was on the game. Tonight he wasn’t winning. His losses didn’t amount to more than a few dollars, but both his brothers, who weren’t as good at poker, or anything else that Deek was, observed him making a couple of purely dumb plays. He had just made another one. A fellow named Chris was raking in the pot.
“Deal me out a couple of hands, gentlemen,” Deek said as he rose. “Going to give my hip a rest and change my luck.”
“Draw. Jacks or better.” It was Tom’s turn to deal.
Deek proceeded to the far end of the bar and nodded at Hooter, who grabbed a bottle and followed behind the counter.
“Have one yourself.” Deek smiled.
“Don’t mind.” Hooter poured rye into two glasses.
“A woman should be held by the waist, a bottle by the neck, or—?” Deek asked, “is it the other way around?”
“Depends on the woman, I reckon.”
“You married, Hooter?”
“Nope. The way I see it, marriage is all right for women and that’s that.”
“Speaking of women,” Deek got around to the core of the conversation, “I don’t see Yellow Rose here tonight.”
“No, you don’t.”
“How come?”
“I expect she don’t feel like comin’ in.”
“Have another drink.”
“Don’t mind.”
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Ask.”
“Who owns this place?”
“I do. Partly.”
“Well, it seems you take an awful lot of stick from her.”
“How so?”
“It just seems she pretty much comes and goes as she pleases.”
“She does.”
“The other girls don’t.”
“Nope.”
Francine and Stella were upstairs.
“Is that because Yellow Rose is so much better-lookin’?”
“That’s some of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
“I said I was the owner, partly. Yellow Rose owns the other part.”
“I see.”
Hooter poured Deek another shot of rye.
“Have one on me . . . and Yellow Rose.”
* * *
Rosalind DuPree lay naked atop her oversize, canopied bed. She had, with Mr. Peevy’s permission, and at her own expense, converted two of the rooms into a parlor-bedroom suite at the Eden Hotel. She had at her own further expense installed antique furniture unlike any other in Gilead, or Palestine, or anyplace in Texas.
One of the bedroom walls had been turned into library shelves, well stacked with well-read volumes. Philosophy, history, fiction—chiefly romantic, and much of it Dumas and Dickens, the complete works of Shakespeare. But the majority of Rosalind DuPree’s bedroom library consisted of poetry. Chaucer, Drayton, Donne, Herrick, Milton, Shakespeare, Lovelace, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Blake, Hood, dozens of others.
Not a day or night went by that she didn’t take one or two of the books down from a shelf and reread a passage, a page, or a hundred pages before and after her stint at the Appaloosa Saloon.
She alternated from one escape to another. From the past to the present. She was running away from both but going nowhere.
But more and more she had abstained from the Appaloosa. It was just a matter of time before she would leave the Appaloosa and Gilead and probably Texas behind as she had, at other times, left other places, and most often, other people; different but the same. Ordinary people, predictable in everything they said and did . . . and wanted. Predictable as her life had been since St. Louis.
Soon, she would move to another place, probably San Francisco, take along her books and furniture and leave the ordinary, predictable people of Gilead behind.
But there was one man in Gilead who was neither ordinary, nor predictable.
Her head lay on one of two large goose-feathered pillows and she could see the curves and planes of her bare, seductive body stretching forward almost to the foot of the bed. Her face, framed with long, softly coiling locks, was as beautiful as it had been when she left New Orleans more than a decade ago, before the War for the Confederacy, the beloved Confederacy, but not her beloved Confederacy. Her body, too, was still as firm, yet pliant and desirable as it was that day in Paris when she looked into the dressing mirror and realized that at the age of sixteen she had become a woman.
She was in Paris to become a lady.
Rosalind had been sent there by her mother, Marie, who remained in New Orleans, having moved there from Charleston when Rosalind was an infant. Marie DuPree never spoke of her dead husband, who h
ad left them enough money to provide for all the necessities and most of the luxuries that the two of them would ever need and desire.
Then the letter came.
From Marie DuPree on her deathbed to her daughter in Paris. The letter that revealed the dark legacy bequeathed from Marie to Rosalind.
For hours, then days, Rosalind never stopped crying. Again and again she looked into the mirror for any physical trace of her bloodline, on her face or body. The eyes, nose, hair, her lips, the nails on her fingers. There was nothing to expose the secret. She was the same Rosalind DuPree that she had been before the letter came.
She decided the secret would remain a secret. She returned to the antebellum South, visited her mother’s gravesite, then listened as the lawyer read her mother’s will. There wasn’t as much as Rosalind had been led to believe, but there was the house, the furnishings, and more than enough to keep the three servants until Rosalind married one of the several beaux who had pursued her even before she went to Paris.
But for Rosalind DuPree there was only one beau. She knew that she would marry Wade Hammond from the first moment she saw him when she was thirteen and Wade was almost sixteen. Carriage rides, cotillions, moonlight walks along the river, and the promises both of them made to each other the night before she left for Paris.
The Hammonds of Louisiana had the largest, finest plantation for over a hundred miles in any direction, and the most slaves. The Hammonds had helped to settle and develop the state of Louisiana since Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of the territory from France.
Wade Hammond made it official. Six months after Rosalind returned from Paris, after what was considered a suitable period of mourning, he asked Rosalind to marry him. Her reply was prompt and eager and positive. They broke the news to Wade’s mother and father.
Mrs. Hammond smiled a curious smile and said nothing. But she did something. She hired a law firm in Charleston. The assignment, to find out everything possible about the family DuPree.
The law firm of Rutledge, Smathers and Smathers earned its fee and a bonus.
The engagement was broken off, and somehow, it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out how, the revelation of Rosalind DuPree’s background became common knowledge throughout New Orleans society.
Rosalind and Wade met only one time after that, accidentally. He stuttered and stammered and never once looked into her eyes.
She left him and New Orleans and went to St. Louis. She swore she would never fall in love with another man. She also swore that she would make no secret of her grandmother’s African heritage.
Four years later she read in a St. Louis paper that Wade Hammond had died valiantly for the Confederate cause . . . of typhoid fever.
How many times had she been asked by how many men . . . “How did a girl like you . . . ?”
Her answer was never the same. And never the truth. Except once.
Elwood Hinge had not asked.
But for some reason, one night she told him everything. He never said a word. He held her close to him and kissed her gently and never said a word.
She looked at the canopied cover of her bed and thought again of the verse that she first read shortly after she had gone to St. Louis, and thought of so often since.
I traveld thro’ a Land of Men
A Land of Men & Women too
And heard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew
Chapter 10
The cabin was illuminated only by the kerosene lamp on the table. Also at the table, a plate of food half-eaten and a bottle of whiskey more than half-empty, and Shad Parker, who had fallen asleep with his head resting on his loglike forearms.
The day’s work and the whiskey had brought temporary surcease. If he were lucky he would be unconscious for another hour, maybe two, and then as he had done so many nights before, he would slowly awaken, desperately conscious and infinitely alone.
But not this night.
Suddenly his head bolted up. Eyes alert. His body turned toward the cabin door and the sound, the sounds outside. Faint, but there.
He rose swiftly and silently from the chair and moved in the direction of the door. He took up the rifle leaning near the entrance, turned the knob, and opened the door a crack.
He looked through the darkness toward the sounds and caught sight of a fleeting silhouette that leaped over the fence of the chicken coop and blended into the chocolate night.
Shad waited just a beat, then opened the door wider, walked out, and closed it noiselessly behind him. He walked across to the chicken coop, looked toward the point where the silhouette had fled, then followed.
His mind was clear, his reflexes and rifle ready, as on the battlefield. He stalked through the brush toward the high curved horizon of the hillside. Step by silent step, until the hunter’s instinct commanded him to stop.
He whirled and automatically aimed his rifle. Then lowered it.
For just a moment he looked at the owl less than fifteen feet away. And the owl looked back at him, with one eye closed, the other insouciantly glinting in the cold faint moonlight.
He turned and walked again and saw it near the top of the rise. A flickering glow. He moved ahead, this time with a fixed destination.
He made his way to the entrance of the cave, a small irregular hachure that fronted a natural hollowed-out portion of the hill. Shad flattened out near the entrance and listened.
Silence.
He moved his head to get a look inside. There was a feeble fire, barely burning but throwing off an erratic glow against the uneven walls of the miniature cavern.
Still no sound, except for the occasional crack of dead wood blistering in the tiny fire.
Whoever was there had to be crouched in the darkness. He might have caught sight of the hunter with the rifle in pursuit. From what Shad had seen of the figure running away, he didn’t appear to be armed. At least not with a long gun. But whoever it was, armed or not, he must by now have known that he was cornered. Shad Parker didn’t hesitate any longer.
“Don’t budge,” he said as he stepped inside, rifle at the ready. “All right now. Whoever you are, you know what I came for. Don’t do anything sudden. Slow and easy. Now, one foot at a time, step out into the light and keep your hands low.”
Shad, rifle pointed, watched as the small figure emerged from a black corner.
“Slow and easy,” he repeated.
Through the shadowy firelight Shad saw a gaunt, dirt-smudged face with defiant pinwheel eyes, hatchet blade mouth, long rankled hair, and an insolent expression.
Along a torn trouser, a dirty, sinewy hand clenched a fat dead chicken. Austin Coats said nothing.
Shad Parker didn’t know what he had expected to find, but it wasn’t what stood before him.
Austin had seen the man who owned the property only from a distance. Standing there in the cave just a few feet away the man looked taller and more terrible. He looked like he had risen from hell with his hair on fire. He leaned with his shoulders forward as if he was going to leap. There were deep creases on either side of his narrow mouth, and his eyes flashed danger.
“What you doing up here?” Shad asked.
“You don’t own this cave.” Austin was surprised at his own defiance, or maybe it was stupidity.
“I own that hen, thief. Drop it.”
Austin dropped the lifeless hen.
Shad Parker looked at the dead fowl whose neck had been wrung.
“I ought to twist your neck.” Shad said it as if he just might.
“We’re hungry,” Austin blurted.
Shad raised the rifle again. His eyes darted into the dark recesses of the cave.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
Silence.
“Your pa send you down to steal my chickens?”
Austin made no answer. Shad moved the barrel of the rifle across the cave.
“Step out, mister, before I let some lead fly around here.”
Sh
ad watched as another figure stood out from the shadows. She appeared to be a year or so younger than the boy.
“Brother and sister,” said Shad, “by the looks of you.” He started to lower the rifle, but stopped as he heard another footstep.
The third one was smaller yet. A boy about six, ropelike arms and legs, with an unmistakable resemblance to his brother and sister.
Shad ran the fingers of his left hand through his thick, whorled hair. The small boy stopped at the side of his sister. She took hold of the boy’s hand and looked straight at the man across the cave.
“That all of you?” Shad asked.
“That’s all of us,” Austin replied.
They did not cower, the three of them facing the tall and terrible man. They were afraid, especially the younger two, but all three of them, dirty, ragged, and hungry, faced the stranger in the eye. They didn’t plead or cry. They were ready to take their punishment.
Shad observed and approved of that, at least. They had the look about them of having been punished before. Of having learned that pleading and crying didn’t make matters better, and sometimes worse. Shad looked at them a moment in an effort to determine if he had ever seen them before.
“You kids from around here?”
Austin shook his head slightly.
“Runaways, huh?”
This time there was no answer, nor any sign from any of them.
“How long you been up here in this cave?”
Peg and Davy were waiting for Austin to answer, but as yet Austin hadn’t decided to say anything further.
“Your folks’ll be looking for you. Why’d you run away? You do something wrong?”
Silence.
“You’ll go back home when you get hungry enough.”
“Nobody’s looking for us. We haven’t got any folks.”
“Orphans, huh?”
“That’s right . . . and we ain’t leavin’.”
“We’ll see.”
A cruel, vagrant wind swept into the cave. The meek fire gasped and tried to stay alive, but died. The night and the cave turned even colder. Shad took a couple of steps closer to the dead fire and picked up the hen, then turned and started toward the opening.
“Mister.”
The Christmas Trespassers Page 7