The Crossed Sabres

by Gilbert, Morris

  She stood on the platform—alone. Not only had nobody met the train, but the utter desolation of the place hit her with force as she faced the mute buildings where yellow lamplight shone faintly through the windows. Then she turned and saw a man and a small girl who had evidently gotten out of the rear car. He spoke to the child, and the two approached Faith. “I guess we’re all going over to the hotel,” he said. “If you’ll pick out your light luggage, I’ll come back for the rest later.”

  “Thank you,” Faith said. He was tall and in his early thirties, she judged, with black hair and a wedge-shaped face. He wore a light brown suit, a white shirt, and a low-crowned brown hat with a broad brim. He moved lightly, picked up the suitcase she indicated, and led the way down a winding pathway toward the buildings.

  It had been hot all day, but as darkness fell, the air grew brittle. Winter lay just over the hills, which would soon feel the touch of a killing frost, shriveling the grass in one night.

  The hotel had one door and a set of windows. A single railroad tie served as the doorstep. The man opened the door and nodded to Faith, permitting her to enter first. A narrow hall and a steep stairway led to the second floor. The hotel keeper looked up, a man so fat he was spilling out of his clothes. “Together?” he asked in a raspy tenor voice.

  “Two rooms,” the man said.

  “You can take room eight,” he nodded to Faith. “And you can have room four,” he said to the man. “Sign here.” When she had signed, she was close enough to see the man’s writing: Thomas Winslow. He hesitated, then added: Richmond, Virginia. She saw him glance down at the register and knew that he was reading her name.

  “Breakfast at four,” the clerk said indifferently. “The stage leaves at four-thirty.” He tossed a key to each of them, and sat down heavily, picking up a newspaper.

  The three of them moved toward the stairs, and Winslow stepped aside to let Faith go first, then the girl. When Faith reached her room, she unlocked the door, and he entered with her luggage. “I’ll go get the rest.” He paused slightly, adding, “My name is Tom Winslow. This is my daughter, Laurie.”

  “I’m Faith Jamison.” She smiled at the girl, whose solemn gray eyes watched her carefully. “I wish I knew how to make braids like yours, Laurie,” she said. “I could never learn to do it.”

  The man grinned. “I’ll get your luggage.”

  After they left, Faith wondered where his wife was and what he did for a living. He certainly had been kind to her. She stood by the window looking at the fading light. The sun soon dipped behind the horizon, clothing the land with a dark curtain. With it came the sense of aloneness, uncertainty. But God had sent her on this mission. She would trust Him. Bringing her thoughts back, she hurriedly washed the fine coating of dust and cinders from her face, brushed her hair, every stroke reminding her of the strain of the journey, and was ready when she heard the knock announcing Winslow’s return with her baggage. “I brought your trunk and the rest of the bags to the hotel. I left them downstairs, unless you want some of it.” He hesitated, then asked, “Would you care to join Laurie and me for supper?”

  “That would be nice.”

  She accompanied the pair to the dining room, where they sat at a long table already occupied by four men, who were just finishing their meal and left with a nod to the new customers. The menu was sparse—eggs, steak, and apple pie. The steak was tough and the eggs hard. But they were all so hungry they devoured the food quickly. After the meal, Winslow drank coffee, while Faith and Laurie sipped at the warm milk.

  Faith said, “I’ve never ridden on a stagecoach. I suppose it’s much rougher than the train?”

  Laurie looked up, a mustache of white milk on her upper lip. “Sure is! It’ll wear your bottom out in a hurry if you ain’t used to it!”

  Tom Winslow saw Faith flinch, and said gently, “Laurie, I don’t think it’s polite to mention a lady’s bottom in public.”

  Laurie looked surprised. “Why not?”

  “A rule somebody made up.”

  The youngster’s obvious contempt for such foolishness made Faith smile. The relationship between the father and daughter was intriguing—more like adult to adult. The girl had obviously been brought up “by hand,” as Faith’s grandmother would have called it. She had an easy way with her father, not disrespectful, but open and frank. There was little about the girl that was feminine. Her clothing was obviously designed for a boy, and she had few feminine mannerisms that a young girl would ordinarily have.

  “Guess we’ll get to bed,” Winslow said, rising to his feet. “Four o’clock is fairly early, and it’ll be a rough trip. Good-night, Miss Jamison.”

  “Good-night.” Faith lingered for a time, but there was nothing to see, no one to talk to, so she soon retired to her room. Stripping off her dusty clothing, she sponged off in the tepid water, put on the thinnest nightgown she had, and lay down on the lumpy mattress. Sleep came quickly, and it seemed as if she had only closed her eyes when a knock at the door startled her awake. “Breakfast in ten minutes!”

  She dressed quickly and hurried downstairs. Winslow and Laurie were seated at the table, along with three men. She nodded to the pair, then ate the breakfast of bacon, hot cakes, fried potatoes, and bitter coffee—or tried to. The food was heavy and greasy, so she consumed very little. Winslow and his daughter had already finished and were outside by the waiting stage. When she emerged, Winslow said, “I put your luggage aboard.” Holding out his hand, he helped her into the coach, then nodded to the girl, who scrambled inside and sat down beside a window opposite Faith. Her father climbed aboard and sat beside Laurie; then the other three passengers, heeding a warning call from the driver, came out of the hotel and got inside, one of them beside Winslow and the other, a large man, on the seat with Faith. The third man, tall and lean, crawled up to sit with the driver.

  The driver spoke to the horses, and the stage moved out of the yard with a lurch. They lumbered across the baked earth, turned sharply around the corner of the hotel, then picked up speed, the coach wheels lifting and dripping an acrid dust. The coach swayed and shuddered as it struck deeper depressions, shaking the passengers jammed together on the two seats. The rolling of the coach sent the huge man roughly against Faith. He grunted an apology, but the seat was so narrow, he couldn’t prevent the jostling.

  The scenery at first was interesting to Faith, but as time dragged on, the day grew warm. The four horses went at a walk, at a run, at a walk, each change of pace producing its agreeable break and its new discomforts. By ten o’clock the dust had rolled inside the coach, laying its fine film on everything as the heat shot up. At noon the coach drew up before a small drab building in a yard littered with tin cans and empty bottles. Faith got out of the coach slowly, stiff from the ride, and after a quick dinner, climbed back in with everyone else for the second half of the day’s journey.

  The heavy man joined the driver and the other passenger this time, so Faith was a little more comfortable. “Would you like to sit with me, Laurie?” she asked the girl. “There’s a little more room here.”

  “No thank you.” The answer was polite, but firm. She won’t get too far away from her father, Faith thought. Those two are very close.

  By late afternoon the heat was almost unbearable, the dust like a screen through which the passengers viewed one another. Their faces grew oil-slick, the mixture of sweat and dust making small rivulets down their dirty faces. The smell of the coach grew rank with the odors of bodies, and Faith grew faint from the discomfort.

  At last the driver’s voice called out, “Whoa up!” and the stage stopped abruptly. The driver got down and called, “Night stop.” Faith let the others get out first, and was grateful for Winslow’s hand as she stepped down. Her legs, numb by now, betrayed her, and she fell against him as her feet touched the ground. For one moment she held him; then embarrassed, she stepped away.

  This station was worse than the hotel where they’d stopped the previous night. Two-storied and squar
e, it was hard for her to picture any structure more graceless. They walked into the long front room and were met by a taciturn man with three days’ growth of whiskers and a fetid smell. “Only got one room left,” he muttered.

  Winslow stared at him, but Faith said, “Laurie, maybe you wouldn’t mind sharing it with me, just for one night.”

  Laurie looked up at her father, who nodded. “Yes, ma’am, that’ll be fine.” Then she asked, “Where will you sleep, Daddy?”

  “Curl up in the coach, I guess.”

  They went up rickety stairs that moaned and creaked under their weight. The room was the worst Faith had ever seen. The ceiling was thrown together with rough lumber whose edges never quite lay together. A single window with a green discolored roller shade provided the only ventilation. A small lamp and a wash basin and pitcher sat on a table made of fragments of wood. Above that a blemished mirror hung askew. The bed was a four-poster made of solid mahogany, strangely out of place in the rough room, and on it lay lumpy quilts and two pillows without slips.

  Faith bent over to stare closely at the blankets, then peeled them back to study the mattress. “At least I don’t see any bedbugs,” she announced.

  “A rough place,” Winslow muttered.

  “Yes, but the only place. It’ll be all right for one night, won’t it, Laurie?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Laurie,” Winslow said, “you wash up and we’ll eat.”

  Depressed by its ugliness, he left the room and walked outside. He found the pump, took off his shirt and shook the dust out of it, then plunged his head under the rush of cool water, savoring it as it sluiced over his chest and back. After washing up, he sat on the steps and watched as riders came in, tied their horses to the hitching rail, and entered the place. Something troubled him, and he went to the stage, climbed into the boot and found his valise. He removed a gun belt with a Navy .44 in a worn holster, fastened it around his waist, then moved back to the hotel.

  When Faith came down the stairs with Laurie, she saw the gun, but made no comment. The dinner triangle set up a series of raucous hammering sounds, and they went into the dining room. At one of the tables three women were seated. Heavily made up and speaking shrilly, they uttered harsh, jarring laughter at the remarks from men at the table. Winslow pulled out a chair for Faith at the far end of a long table, placed Laurie next to her, then seated himself between them and the others.

  The meal was brief, for the others at the table soon finished and moved out of the dining room into the saloon across the hall.

  When the meal was finished, Faith asked, “Could we walk for a while?”

  “Sure,” he nodded, and seemed relieved to get outside. The stars shone brightly, and a sickle moon, turned butter yellow by the haze in the air, lay low in the sky.

  They walked far enough down the road so the sounds of the tinny piano and the raucous laughter from the saloon faded. The quiet flowed over the darkened desert, formless and mysterious.

  “Do you live in the West?” Faith asked.

  “Yes,” he answered, then added, “My home was in Virginia—but we’ve been out here for quite a while.”

  “It’s new to me,” Faith murmured. Peering into the darkness, she said, “It’s a bigger world than I’m used to. Back home you can’t see for the buildings and the hills. Here, during the day, I think you must be able to see a hundred miles!”

  He smiled in the moonlight. “Makes a person feel sort of small, doesn’t it?”

  “Very small.” She looked up at the stars, adding, “They seem so close!”

  As she watched, a falling star traced a silver line across the velvet blackness, and Winslow said, “Make a wish, Laurie.”

  The girl looked up at him. “Will it really come true?”

  “Well, I guess sometimes wishes come true—not too often.”

  Faith realized he was teaching the girl something. Perhaps not to expect too much. Maybe not to trust in stars, but to lean on her own efforts. She thought of her own childhood, how she’d been at Laurie’s age, and felt a trace of pity for her. She needs a woman. She seems sturdy, but I’ll bet she gets afraid at times.

  They continued walking, about half a mile. Winslow told about a bear hunt he’d gone on, and Laurie asked questions. How big was the bear? Were you afraid when he came at you?

  Finally they walked back, and when they got to the door of the room, Winslow stooped over and kissed the girl. “Good-night,” he said, and moved away as though he had shown too much affection in front of an outsider.

  When they were inside the room, Faith put on a nightgown, but Laurie seemed shy. “You know what?” Faith said, understanding the girl’s embarrassment. “I’ve got an extra nightgown. Why don’t you wear it tonight? It’s too big for you, but it’ll be like playing dress-up.”

  Laurie asked curiously, “Did you play that when you were a little girl?”

  “Of course! Now, let me find that gown—”

  While Laurie put on the gown, Faith brought out her Bible and sat beside the light. “I always read a little before I go to bed, Laurie. Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I can read out loud this time?” Faith asked, and when Laurie nodded, she turned to the gospel of John and read the fourth chapter. As she read the story of the woman at the well in Sychar, Laurie watched her with careful eyes. After Faith finished, she said, “Was the woman bad?”

  “Well, she’d had a very hard life, Laurie.”

  “But Jesus didn’t care about that?”

  “He cared, but He knew she wanted to be a better woman than she had been.”

  Laurie studied the Bible, then lifted her gray eyes. “How did Jesus know that? He’d never met her before, had He?”

  “No, but Jesus knows all of us. And He loves us all very much.”

  Faith waited, hoping that the girl would open up to her, but there was a puzzled look in her eyes. She lay there silently for a few moments, then said, “Good-night.”

  “Good-night, Laurie,” Faith returned. She put the Bible on the table, blew out the light, and lay there wondering about Laurie and her daddy. She slept fitfully, for the noise from the saloon came through the floor, and she could make out some of the profane speech clearly. A bad thing for a child to hear was her last thought before she fell asleep—except for, I wonder where her mother is?

  When she awoke the next morning, Faith found Laurie gone. Rising at once, she dressed, packed her case, then went downstairs. Laurie was sitting with her father in the dining room, and she had a small smile—her first—for Faith. The three ate the rough food, then hurried outside to get on board the coach.

  A very tall thin man was standing on the porch, his back to the wall, and he gave Faith a careful look as she came to the coach. She was startled when he took her arm, thinking at first it was Tom Winslow. But Winslow was loading the suitcases into the boot, his back turned. Faith tried to pull away, but the man merely grinned, saying, “Sweetheart, you look plumb sweet this morning. How about you and me sit together on this here stage?”

  He had a razor-thin face, a sharp nose, and hazel eyes that ran over her boldly. Faith said a little breathlessly, “Please let me go!” But he ignored her, his lips curving up into a pleased smile. There was cruelty in his face, and when the driver said, “Cut that out!” the man gave no heed. Slipping his arm around her waist, he said, “Lem’me help you into the stage. We got to get acquainted.”

  “Let the lady go.”

  The man looked over his shoulder, an insolent expression on his face, but when he saw Winslow standing there, his eyes grew watchful. He released his grip on Faith, then turned to face the other. “We’re doin’ right well without your help,” he said harshly. He let his fingers brush the cedar handle of the gun he wore low on his hip. There was a threat in his voice and a menace in his posture. Sensing trouble, a man behind Winslow took one look, then scurried out of the way.

  Faith had never been close to a violent situation, but she
knew that she was in one now. The man who had touched her was stiff, his hand poised over his gun; and though Winslow seemed almost at ease, there was danger in him, she knew.

  “Friend, you can take the next stage,” Winslow said, his voice soft, almost musical, on the morning air. “There’s no room for you on this trip.”

  The man stiffened, cursed; then his hand was on the handle of his gun—but he stopped abruptly, for the .44 at Winslow’s side appeared in his hand. His hand had been little more than a blur to Faith as he had drawn and leveled the gun at the other. Now he said, “Driver, I guess we’re ready.” He moved forward, took the gun from the other man, who stood as if frozen in place, then said, “All aboard.”

  Faith got on, then Laurie and the other passengers. Winslow stepped in, took a seat, then said to the man who was staring at him with pure hatred, “I’ll drop your gun down the road a piece.”

  The driver spoke to the horses, and the stage pulled away. The men who sat in the stage watched covertly as Winslow tossed the gun out the window, and Faith noted that Laurie’s face was so pale that her freckles stood out. Her own breath was coming in short bursts, and she clasped her hands together to conceal their trembling.

  This was a different world, as foreign to her own as if it had been China or the South Pole. She had read of the violence of the West, but it had all been so academic, words on paper. Now she realized that only by the closest margin had the crisis passed, that if things had differed in just one minor detail, Winslow might be lying in the dust bleeding his life out—either he or the other man. She studied him as he looked out the window, somehow shocked that he showed not the least effect of the encounter. He sat totally relaxed as he moved with the rolling of the coach.

  Finally he looked down at Laurie. “You all right?”