He held the wagon laces softly in his hands, but had complete control of the pair of draft horses in front of us. We were silent, but it was companionable. I wanted to know more of him, and he wouldn’t offer it up freely.
“How long have you and Hattie been a couple?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A while.”
“You were terribly angry with her at the stage.”
“Well, I wasn’t expecting what she did.”
“You made up quickly, though.”
“Sure. I’m her man, and she’s my woman. We don’t stay mad for long.”
“Where are you from?”
“Missouri.”
“Which part?”
“Moved around a lot.”
“How’d you make it out here?”
“Got on as a teamster for a wagon train in ’63 and decided to stay. It was real pretty. The mountains.”
“They are beautiful. I’m thinking of staying, too. For the very same reason.”
“You seem like a real nice lady.”
“Thank you.”
“Hattie don’t like you much.”
“Oh, I’d hoped I was winning her over.”
“She’s a tough nut to crack.”
“Do you have any tips for me?”
“Standing up to her was a good start.”
“She told you about that?”
“She did. Should have seen the grin on her face when she did. Between us, I think she likes you more than she lets on, but she has a reputation to uphold.”
“I will by no means deprive her of her tough reputation.”
“She’s slow to trust, but when she does, she’ll never let you down. My advice is this: don’t lie to her. If you do …” Jehu shrugged. “She won’t let it pass without meting out consequences.”
“I wouldn’t imagine.” I grabbed the seat as the wagon lurched over the uneven ground. “Tell me, Jehu: What was your role in the robberies Garet and Hattie did?”
He looked at me sideways. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m writing a book about you all, remember?”
“Guess I forgot, since you haven’t been asking many questions since we’ve been back from the roundup.”
“We’ve been very busy, haven’t we?”
“That we have. You’ve turned into a right good horsewoman.”
I blushed with pleasure. I had. Garet had been correct when she said she would fix my fear of horses. I would never love them as she did, but we’d come to an agreement: I wouldn’t be afraid of the beasts if they wouldn’t throw me. “Thank you. I’ve worked very hard.”
“My role was to tell them about easy targets.” He shrugged. “I only helped Garet with the first bank robbery. Didn’t like it much.”
“The first? I thought your first job was a stage?”
“That was in ’75. In ’73 she robbed a bank. The Bank of the Rockies. Same one you’re robbing October first. Coming full circle, Garet says. She did most of the work, I came at the end, tied the clerk up.”
“She did it herself?”
“During the day, too. She was tying up the clerk when I walked in. Stole about ten grand from Connolly that time.”
“He owned the bank?”
“That’s why we hit it. Has she told you about losing her first ranch?”
“No. What happened?”
“She can tell it better than I can.”
“She says she’s writing a journal for me.”
“I’ll let her tell it. But I can tell you the after. We were desperate, and Garet was angry. There was a certain amount of revenge in it, which is why I went along with it. I thought she’d get it out of her system, get her pound of flesh, get us a stake to start over, and that would be it. Never thought we’d do it again. Then we did. She was good at it. Loved it.”
“I see.”
“Don’t judge her too harshly.”
“I’m not judging her in the least.”
Jehu pulled up the horses, stopping the wagon on the narrow part of the pass. To my right the mountain fell off into a deep ravine. I gripped the side of the wagon. “What are you doing?”
“Hattie thinks you’re a Pinkerton.”
“What?”
Jehu didn’t answer. He knew I’d heard his statement.
“That’s preposterous.”
He waited. The wind whipped through the mountain pass, and the aspen trees below swayed and shimmered.
“No, I don’t work for Allan Pinkerton.”
“Who do you work for?”
“No one. Myself. I’m writing a travelogue of the West. Now I’m going to write your story.”
“No, you’re not.”
“What?”
“We don’t want you to.”
“Who? Garet?”
“No, Garet wants it, and you let her think you’re doing it. She’ll be … Well, she won’t know the difference soon enough. But if you write it, they’ll find us. How many white teamsters are married to black women? Not many. Probably none but us. I told Garet I’m not leaving the Hole for the rest of my days, and that’s a promise I intend to keep. I won’t be able to do it if you go blabbing about us, who we are, where we live.”
“Jehu, I would never put you in harm’s way. Please believe me.”
“Let me put this another way. If you write one word about us, I’ll find you and kill you.”
I couldn’t help myself, I laughed at the idea this soft-spoken man could ever do such a thing. “You?”
“You don’t want to test me to see what I’ll do to protect me and my own.”
The smile faded from my face, and I glanced over the side of the mountain. It would be so easy for him to push me over, and no one would be the wiser. He would tell Garet he’d dropped me at the train station, and if I never arrived in Denver everyone would assume I’d gotten cold feet and moved on. I’d never felt so vulnerable in my life.
My voice was faint when I replied. “What can I do to convince you I won’t betray you, that I won’t write about you?”
He pulled out a knife, and I flinched. He sliced his right palm open, and I grimaced. He handed the knife to me and held out his hand as if to shake. I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat, closed my eyes, and slit my palm. I gasped in pain, but Jehu grabbed my hand and squeezed our blood together. “Say it.”
“I promise I won’t betray you, or your family.”
“Say you won’t write about us.”
“I won’t write about you.”
“Blood oath. To break it is to curse yourself.”
“To what?”
Jehu pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to me. He grinned. “Hattie’s vengeance.”
The train is pulling into Cheyenne. I’m going to stay the night at the Rollins House hotel to gather my thoughts. I will need to check in with Dorcas Connolly, and I need to have a solid lie ready for her, one that will satisfy my assignment and earn me some money but won’t betray five people who are doing more good than bad, and who have threatened to kill me more than once.
The first thing I need to do is find a doctor to look at my hand and bandage it better than this bloody, soiled handkerchief.
It would be easier if I kept going east, back to Chicago. I could write the book, publish it as Grace Trumbull, and disappear. Grace Trumbull doesn’t exist, after all. I confess, I miss Claire Hamilton.
Thursday, August 2, 1877
Platte River Boarding House
Denver, Colorado
I arrived in Denver this afternoon. Garet and Hattie will arrive in a couple of days. Tonight I go to the women’s suffrage meeting and set our plan in motion. Tomorrow I visit Dorcas Connolly.
Friday, August 3, 1877
We met in a café across the street from the Bank of the Rockies, the very bank we plan to rob on October first. Dorcas didn’t want to take the chance of me running into Callum Connolly at the office. I was relieved; it meant Dorcas hadn’t told her nephew about me, who I was, what I was doin
g.
Dorcas was glad to see me. She’d started to fear for my safety when she didn’t hear from me in so many weeks, or that I’d discovered the task was too difficult and had moved on. Her nephew arrived in Denver a week ago, and after a little coercion Dorcas was able to discover that yes, there had been a woman on the stage, and she had gone off with the bandits.
“Was it Margaret Parker?”
My heart leaped into my throat. “Who?”
“She may have called herself Garet?”
“No. The leader is a woman named Sally Steele. She and her gang are former prostitutes who decided they’d rather rob rich men than lie with them.”
Dorcas’s disappointment was apparent. “But the black woman …”
“A prostitute, as well.”
“I was so sure.”
“Who is Margaret Parker?”
“Someone I used to know, who might have held a grudge against us.” She stared into her china cup of coffee before snapping her attention back to me. “Where have you been for the past two months?”
“In a remote cabin in the mountains. That’s where they hide until interest in them dies down.”
“Then where do they go?”
“I don’t know. They took me to Pueblo, and I caught a train from there.”
“So they’re somewhere south?”
“That is where they hide, yes. In an old mining cabin.”
“What else can you tell me about them?”
“That was their last job.”
“Was it? Why?”
“They have enough money, and they feel like they won’t be ignored forever. They were a little afraid pistol-whipping Mr. Adamson would change the tenor of the search. How is Mr. Adamson, by the way? Has he settled into his new job?”
“He’s dead.”
“What? Not from being hit in the head, I hope.”
“No. He died in Gunnison.”
“I didn’t particularly like him, but to die so senselessly.”
“It happens more often than not here.”
“Yes, I know. A man was killed in front of me in Colorado Springs.”
“Adamson is no great loss, according to my nephew. A sniveling coward, I believe is what Callum called him. Enough about the dead man. What now, Miss Hamilton?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How do you plan on apprehending this Sally Steele and her gang of whores? You went to the sheriff in Pueblo and told them all you know?”
“I had an unpleasant experience with the Pueblo sheriff when I went through there in May. He didn’t take kindly to a woman questioning him, and he firmly denied women were robbing around his area. I am following them to San Francisco.”
“San Francisco?”
“Yes, that’s where they’re headed to open a general store. I’ll leave in a couple of weeks, give them time to establish themselves. They will be easier to locate. There can’t be too many women opening general stores in the city, can there?”
“What makes you think they weren’t lying to you?
“Because they don’t know I know. Being a master eavesdropper comes in handy in my line of work.” I remembered Garet catching me easily and hoped I didn’t blush too much.
“Why did they let you go?”
“They believed I was a travel writer. I told them my time with the Steele Gang would be the best chapter in the book. I would do them justice, but I had a steamer ticket in New York City waiting for me.”
I watched Dorcas sip her coffee as she took this barrel of lies in. “Has your nephew heard from the Pinkerton?”
Dorcas studied me. Finally she smiled, though no humor was in it, and said, “Not that I know of, but Callum likes to keep his secrets. When are you leaving for San Francisco?”
“August fifteenth, I think.”
“That won’t work. I am traveling with Callum through the middle of September.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“I’m coming to San Francisco with you.”
“What?”
“Oh yes. I want to be there when we catch these women.”
“It may take me a while to locate them.”
“If I’m there to help, we will cut the time in half.”
“Do you not trust me to do the job?”
“You haven’t done it yet. Callum’s trips are always open-ended, so you’ll need to be flexible.”
“Of course.”
She left a ten-cent piece to pay for our coffee and stood.
“Miss Connolly, I will need payment for my time.”
“I gave you an advance.”
“Which went to expenses, travel, clothes, food, board.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars should suffice.”
“I’ll send it around to your lodgings.”
“Thank you.”
Sunday, August 5 , 1877
Garet and Hattie arrived yesterday and told me today about Garet’s big plan to visit Connolly. It is an enormous risk, a danger I’m uniquely positioned to tell her about, but I cannot. To do so would be to admit I’m a Pinkerton, to admit to the ruse I’ve been playing. Hattie would surely kill me, as she has threatened to do. Who knows, Garet might kill me. Either way, it would be the end of friendships I’ve grown to cherish, and I cannot risk that. I need more time to gain their trust, to help them in their heist. To misdirect Dorcas.
Tomorrow she is going to Callum Connolly’s office to repay the money she stole in the first bank robbery, in ’73, when they were starving and needed to eat. She claims arriving, a dying woman wanting to make amends for past mistakes, will divert suspicion from her being involved in any of the other heists. It was the only one they could definitely identify her from, since she’d had the audacity to tell the clerk, “Tell Colonel Connolly Margaret Parker sends her regards.”
I admit, it has a certain flash, but it was a colossally stupid thing to say.
What’s interesting, though, is that Dorcas never mentioned the ’73 bank robbery to me, either at our original meeting or yesterday. I guess she is basing her Parker Gang theory on two members being white women and one a black woman, and her belief Margaret would have a significant enough chip on her shoulder to harbor enmity toward Connolly’s empire for all these years. Did the clerk not give Connolly the message? Or did Dorcas hold back the information from me? I can’t imagine why she would, especially based on our first meeting. She had given the robberies enough thought and consideration that she had spotted a pattern and had directed me to take the stage, which had turned out to be correct.
I argued with Garet that admitting to one robbery would only bring suspicion on her for the others. Margaret argued for the opposite, that a dying woman making restitution would be seen in a sympathetic light, and she would say she was going to England to live with family, or some convincing lie. She hasn’t settled on it, she says. She waved away my arguments, said her decision was final and I was wasting my breath.
I asked Hattie what she thought, to back me up. She studied me for a long time, and I remembered Jehu’s confession: “Hattie thinks you’re a Pinkerton.”
If there was a moment to confess, that was it, but I didn’t, and now … I’m not sure if Garet would change her plan even if I told her about working for Dorcas, Dorcas’s suspicions, and the chance that Salter has revealed her identity. Garet suffers from an outsize case of hubris, and I suffer from a case of chronic longing. Longing to be independent, to be accepted, and to be loved.
Tuesday, August 7, 1877
Garet’s ploy appears to have worked better than she expected, and I can only surmise that Salter hasn’t been in touch with Callum Connolly since Connolly refused to have the sheriff arrest her and instead invited her to see her old ranch. I don’t understand why she wants to visit a place that will only bring back bad memories, and said as much.
“Even a Connolly is human enough to give a dying woman her last wish. We leave on Friday.”
“We?” Hattie asked.
“He’s taking me.”
“That was not the plan.”
“No, but it is now. If I want access to his office, I have to go with him.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Hattie said.
“I can handle Callum Connolly.”
“It’s a damn fool thing to do, go alone.”
“Do you have a better plan?”
Hattie left in a huff. I soon followed, citing a suffrage meeting that didn’t start for three hours.
Since divulging her terminal diagnosis, Garet has been free to talk about her imminent death, to joke about it, to almost embrace it, never considering that every remark she thinks of as so witty cuts to the bone those who care about her. I can’t afford to let her, or, God forbid, Hattie, know the depth of my feelings, lest I invite ridicule.
I’ve never felt the sharpness of mortality before. Kate died quickly of an unexpected illness. My grief for the loss of my friend was inexplicably intertwined with the shock of seeing a woman who was healthy on Monday fall ill on Wednesday and die on Friday. Garet talks about death but hides her deterioration so well there are long stretches when I forget, when everything feels normal. But there is nothing normal about this situation, helping these women plan a heist while watching a woman I admire smile and laugh and live while she slowly dies.
The suffrage meeting was precisely what I needed to break myself out of the doldrums, at least for a couple of hours. There is nothing quite like the energy of a hundred women united in a common idea, who believe in the righteousness of their cause and that our side will win in the end. As I looked around the room, I wondered how many of these women would stand up for Garet and Hattie if they were caught, if their belief in women’s rights extended so far as to support women who clearly broke the law, though with the best of intentions. I decided to see, and introduced the rumor of a female gang into a group of seven women I was talking to.
“Women outlaws? Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing.” That was Patricia Perkins, a bubbly, vacuous woman whose husband owned a general store downtown.
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