Ransom was in an opulent bedroom with a lovely woman. He couldn’t quite look her in the eye. “Miss Katherine … ah … are you sure of Hermie?”
“Why?” The bright look faded out of Kate’s face.
“I saw the Colonel wink at Hermie just as he left.”
Kate’s lone eye opened wide. “So that’s it!” Her hands flicked once against her thighs. “That bitch! Excuse me.”
“That’s all right.”
“So. So. I might’ve known she’d be two-faced. That sometimes happens when a girl plays it both ways.”
Ransom gave Kate a puzzled look.
Kate put a hand to her cheek. “Oh dear. How my tongue does run on. Well, it’s still true. When business is slow and the girls get lonesome, Hermie sometimes plays the lover.”
Ransom continued to look puzzled.
“You handsome goose you, didn’t you catch on to that with that name of hers? Hermie? It stands for hermaphrodite.”
Ransom’s brows came up.
“I should never have let her in the house. Though I have to say that since she’s come the girls have been more contented. There hasn’t even been the hint of a cathop. It’s all been one happy family.”
Ransom sat down on the edge of the four-poster. His stomach didn’t feel right.
“Hermies are sometimes quite handy. They can’t father children. Yet they keep the girls quiet.”
“Lord.”
“Well, I’m not going to chase her out. Not yet. I have too much use for her. Meanwhile, even if she is the spy, we’ll keep up the pretense of being married. At least until this blows over.” Kate gave him a sweet smile. “That we’ll manage, won’t we?”
Ransom fell silent.
“I don’t mean we should sleep in the same….” Kate paused. “Well, maybe we should at that. And let Hermie have her peeps through the peephole. Hum.” Kate snapped her fingers. “Mr. Ransom … er, Ransom, dear, we can always play at bundling. Sleep between separate sheets. Not that it really matters.”
Ransom turned red. Slowly he shook his head.
“What is it, dearie?”
“No.”
“What, no?”
“If I have to sleep up here, I’m sleeping on the floor. In my suggans there.” Ransom pointed to his bedroll.
“But, Ransom, dear—”
“That’s it, Miss Katherine. More than that and you can all go to hell.”
3
Four days later, sitting in their bedroom, both Ransom and Miss Katherine overheard Rut say to Sulie out in the hall, “Well, if it was me, I’d never let my husband sleep on the floor. By his lonesome. I declare! I If married I was, married I’d be, and in bed all proper with my own cockaroo. Yessiree. And I’d make certain sure he was happy up on his roost and blowing his bugle.”
Miss Katherine stirred in her chair. She was looking out at the world through the east window. “Drat that Hermie.”
Ransom sat staring out of the north window. In the falling twilight outside, the long swooping plains of Wyoming were slowly turning to rust.
“She has used the peephole.”
Ransom crossed his legs. His thoughts were jumping about like sunfish caught in a boiling spring.
“Unless you want to take your chances with the Colonel’s notion of mercy.”
Ransom wanted to bed with Katherine all right. But he was afraid. Taking that first jump off the tree limb onto the sack swing, from a great height, was always a true sweet terror. To know what it meant to be a man with a maid, to know a woman belly intimate, was to know at last what lay beyond the mountain. But.
With a sigh Miss Katherine got up and lighted the night lamp. Then she came rustling slowly toward him. “I don’t mean you any harm, Ransom. Believe me. You mustn’t be afraid of me. The white sheet between us shall remain white.”
Ransom touched his hand to his right eye.
“Was Sam really telling the truth?”
“About what?”
“That you’re really still a twig not bent?”
Ransom’s cheeks turned a maiden red.
She smiled. “There’s always a first time for everything, yes. And if, as Sam said, you wish to save those first sweets for marriage, I shan’t spoil that for you. I’ll admire you for it instead. Oh, I may wonder a little. Yes. As any woman would. But I have no claim on you. So, so far as I am concerned, I shall help you keep yourself pure and untouched until you find that right one.”
His eyes sweat.
“So you needn’t worry that I shall tempt you. I am all the more the one, really, to help you keep yourself as you are.” Another sigh broke from her, and a melancholy grimace drew down the corners of her sensual Indian-cut lips. “All the more me. Oh God yes.”
Ransom shot her a look. He spotted in her expression the settlings of what must have been an awful time in the long ago. “Then you ain’t never really done it either?”
She pointed to the black patch over her eye. “You’ve noticed this, of course.”
He nodded.
“I lost it in defense of my person.”
“I see.”
“It doesn’t become me, does it?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Do you mind it much?”
“I like it on you.”
She smiled, inward. “You’ll do. Already you know how to bend a little to please a woman.”
He couldn’t resist knowing more. “How did it happen?” “Someday maybe I’ll tell you.”
“A man with a gun?”
She stared down at him. “Someday I’ll tell you. But not now.”
“In a way it makes you look even prettier.”
“Ah, you.” Lamplight emphasized the light-brown shadows in the gold of her hair. A mischievous look quirked the corners of her mouth. “Tell me. Don’t you really know what it means to be a king on the mountain with a woman?”
Ransom flashed green eyes at her.
“Surely you’ve seen a stallion have his way with a mare? How his head droops afterward?” She spoke with a touch of breathlessness.
Again Ransom turned a deep red. “Now you’re just being nosy.” Yet he thrilled to her pressing questions.
“A couple of seconds ago you were the nosy one, weren’t you, asking how”—she pointed to her black patch—“how did it happen?”
“Well, I guess I was.”
“So?”
“Someday maybe I’ll tell you.”
Delight showed in her eye. “You’ll do, my dear, you’ll do.” She reached a hand, gently, to touch him on his buckskin sleeve. A livid spark jumped between them. “And I can see you know at least one kind of playing. With words.”
“Some things are too personal.”
“I know.”
“Better left alone. Like a skunk in his hole. A skunk looks tame enough to pet. But you better not try it.”
Katherine laughed. “True enough.”
They spoke in low tones. The sound of female laughter, of someone tinkling a piano below, came to them in washing irregular waves. Horsemen clopped by outdoors. There was a shooting on the other side of town.
His arm where the spark had jumped between them was hot all the way up to his neck. Ransom wished with all his heart she were someone else. The sweet woman smell of her gave him an edge so hard it hurt on every throb. If only she weren’t a madam. To feel drawn toward a woman like Miss Kate was like licking a lump of sugar tinctured with alum.
“Mam, how come this kind of life?”
Her eye half lidded over.
“Well, it does seem odd to me. You yourself don’t with the men. Yet here you are, making a living managing other girls who do.”
“We all have to make a living, don’t we?”
“The bridle still don’t fit the horse somehow.”
She picked at a thread in her purple dress.
“I notice you always wear purple. Never pink or red like the other girls do.”
“A king’s right.”
“A queen’s, you mean.”
A shadow moved into her eye. “Yes, a queen’s, of course.”
He saw the darkling look in her eye, wondered about it, stored it in his memory. “Why don’t you try some other line of work?”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“Managing a store or something. A millinery.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“There must be a reason.”
“There is.” She gave him a bitterish look.
“Revenge?”
“Maybe.”
“Because of losing that eye?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s not good.”
She touched her black eye patch. “Wait until you have to wear one of these.”
“Sounds like you’re on the prod. And that’s looking for extra trouble.”
She picked, picked at the thread in the seam of her purple dress.
“Just how did you get into this? I mean, how did it start?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes. As long as we’re going to play at husband and wife, yes”
After a silence, slowly, very reluctantly, she told a little about it. “It was in Denver. I saw a notice in the paper asking for a cook. At a boardinghouse. I needed the work so I took it. It didn’t take me long to figure out it was hardly a boardinghouse. It was the hours. You know. Well, I felt sorry for the girls. The mood I was in after losing my eye and all. So I stayed. The wages were tops. The old madam told me I could do business on the side if I wanted to. I told her I couldn’t. Just couldn’t.”
“You’d be drinking from the bottle with two straws if you did, huh?”
“Never thought of it that way before, but, yes, that’s right.”
“Then what happened?”
“The madam died. And the girls voted for me to take over.”
Ransom waited.
“But I’m not sorry.”
“You’re not?”
“No. Because, Ransom, my dear, I am rich today.”
Ransom gave her a sourish look.
“You don’t approve?”
“You live your life and I’ll live mine.”
She threw him a sudden mixed look, partly sneering, partly wincing. “Each to his sheet, is that it?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, maybe we both should hold the thought.”
A trio of horsemen galloped up in the dark. There was the sound of raillery and rowdy pushing as the cowboys tied up at a hitching rack. There followed a knocking on the front door. In a moment high-pitched girlish greetings mingled with heavy male laughter.
Ransom couldn’t resist asking it. “What was your family name?”
“My new husband is full of questions.”
“Or were you an orphan too like me and never knew your last name?”
She nodded.
“An orphan?”
“Yes.”
“Raised by strangers?”
“Mostly.”
“No one to love you? Because you belonged to no one?”
“No one.”
“Like me.”
“Like you.”
Ransom found himself wanting to pull her down into his lap. “Well, then after this terrible thing happened to you, you didn’t take a last name like me?”
She smiled, indrawn. “I’m known as just plain Kate to some. And Miss Katherine to specials.”
“You’d prefer to remain a riddle?”
She quivered beside him. Then she burned her single dark eye into his. “The Army considers us married. So I must know something. For sure. And I ask you again. Are you truly innocent of women? Come to a head with me.”
Ransom flashed her a youth’s tortured look.
She reached down to touch him again. This time there was no spark, only tender warmth as her fingers settled on his arm. “I’d be the last person on earth to start you off on a downward path.” She laughed to herself. “Or on an upward path. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. I admire you for wanting to save yourself for your one true love.”
He thought this over a moment. “Then you have?”
She withdrew her hand. “Yes.” She paused. “And now I’ve probably lost you.” She paused again. “Haven’t I?” A smile twitched at the corners of her eyes. “I am mightily taken with you, Ransom. And I’m mightily tempted to lie with you.”
“Don’t.”
“Come again?”
“I mean … don’t take your hand away.” He took hold of her hand and placed it on his buckskin sleeve. Then, shivering, he quickly pushed it away.
The smile on her face deepened and it drew the corners of her mouth back into knotted dimples in her cheek. The inner edges of her lips resembled taut rose petals. “Don’t worry. I understand. That extra pillow on my bed shall remain untouched. And your johnny-nods shall continue to have his sweet innocence.” She turned away. “There is work to do.” And abruptly she left the room, purple dress whispering.
He sat alone. He looked down at his hands. His lower lip was doubled and dark and his green eyes were clotted with torment.
If she could only have been a young girl. Untouched.
Some man, some lover somewhere, had once been there with her. Sweet words had once been whispered and kisses had been given. She had received and given flesh with another. The darling inner tissues of her had been made ripe with another man’s bubbling bulb of flesh.
“Who am I? Where am I?”
He jumped up and began to pace back and forth. With every step the fringes on his buckskins threshed as with the sound of maple seeds shaken in a light breeze.
“I want her.”
He clenched his fists. His eyes glowed like a puma’s.
“Who am I to cast the first stone?”
He gripped the back of his chair so fiercely the top of it shattered in his hands.
“That first jump onto that sack swing.”
He strode to the window and looked out into the night.
“If you miss that sack, it’s your neck. And if not your neck, for sure your butt. Skinned. But if you latch onto it, what a ride up on that other side!”
Hermie brought Ransom supper on a tray: crisp fried potatoes, onions boiled in milk, a square of broiled beef-steak, two slices of bread with wild honey, dried-apple pie, and a pot of tea.
Hermie had a fuzz-lip sneer for him. “I hope you appreciates them onions boiled in milk, sir.”
“Ah, there’s only one milk cow then in all of Cheyenne, I take it?”
Hermie squared her wide shoulders. “Well!”
“You sound a little like you might be jealous.”
“You know an awful lot to be so innocent, is all I got to say.”
Ransom hunched a shoulder against her.
Hermie left.
The moment the door closed, Sam Slaymaker began to talk in the back of Ransom’s head.
“Well, boy, I see you’ve joined the outlaws for good.”
Ransom stared down at the banquet in front of him.
“Killed yourself a man in a whorehouse.”
Ransom suddenly didn’t feel hungry.
“Got you a brand on your soul that every sheriff in the country can read. Even by moonlight”
Ransom sucked on his lower lip, even bit on it a little.
“The kind of brand that’ll never come off. Or grow over.”
The rich smell of the food began to gag him.
“Better skip the country, boy. Before you get in too deep with this Kate woman.”
All of a sudden Ransom took the tray and dumped all of the food into the gold-trimmed chamber pot under the four- poster.
“Something about her just don’t set right, does it, boy?”
Ransom lay down on the four-poster and crossed his legs.
“Ain’t she a juicy piece though? Mmm-hmm. I told you it’d be fun if you could get her to skin an onion with you.”
Ransom covered his face with a pillow. His crossed
legs were a comfort to each other.
“How she can smile. Man, man.”
Ransom whispered, “My God in heaven, how did I ever wind up in here anyway?”
An hour later Katherine came back. She carried a long package. “Guess what I have here for you.”
“I wouldn’t know.” He still lay on the bed with his legs warmly crossed.
“Guess.” Her purple dress rustled as she came toward him.
“Oh, a box of shells. To kill more Horses with.”
“Ransom.”
“Or a new pick and shovel. Along with a pan and a gold-dust bag.”
She paused. “You really mean that last, don’t you?”
“As soon as this mess clears up, I’m off for the Black Hills to find me a gold mine.”
“Why?”
“I’m in a hurry to get somewhere. Be rich and independent. Do something big.”
“Many a poor duffer has already come back from the Hills flat broke.”
“Not me.”
Katherine couldn’t help but smile. “Well….” She placed the long box beside him. “Open it.”
With some reluctance he sat up and opened the box. He drew out a complete set of new clothes. “Holy bulls.”
“Like it?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s for you.”
“But why for me?”
“Like it?”
“You shouldn’t’ve done it. It’s too good for me.”
“Handsome is what Ransom wears.”
“Where’d you get this fancy city suit way out here? A rich man’s black like this?”
“A new clothier in town.”
“But why for me?”
“Your wedding suit.” Quickly she added, “In case anybody asks.”
He had to admit he liked the black suit.
“Put it on,” she urged.
“Now?”
“Now.”
“I’d better not.”
“Listen. Take it.”
“No.”
“Take it. Listen. Consider it pay for stepping in like you did when Horses went loco.”
“Well…”
“Please.”
“All right. It’s about time I had a fancy suit like this. But remember, I’m going to pay you for it, now that Sam’s left me his span of mules.”
“Don’t be silly.”
He brushed the suit with a loving hand. “But I do thank you for picking it out for me.”
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