The Bold Frontier

by John Jakes

  “Stand back or I’ll blow your head off,” Jimmy whispered. Both hands, and the Deringer, trembled, and Sheridan’s black eyes darted from the gun to Jimmy’s face and back again. He clearly saw his death but a finger’s twitch away. He didn’t advance but he stood fast, and even a little taller. Rolf almost whistled; the man had testicles of steel.

  “I ask you not to pull that trigger until I tell you what happened.”

  “Your men savaged me in the smokehouse, for one.”

  “I am deeply grieved,” Sheridan said, without a single profanity. “I never intentionally made war on women. I do know such things happened.”

  Jimmy blinked and sat back, expecting, perhaps, something other than this soldier’s calm and measured determination in the face of impending death. “I remember your father, and your farm, now that I put my mind to it, because it was there that we lost a young soldier named Birdage, the day after the battle at Fisher’s Hill. A white-haired farmer came rushing from his house as we rode into his dooryard, and he fired a shot.”

  “Did you expect a man like Daddy wouldn’t defend his property from filthy Yankee scum invaders?”

  “No, I expect that would be any man’s natural reaction,” Sheridan said, his voice still level. Rolf swayed in the doorway, dizzy, hearing the beat of rain and what sounded in his ear like the rushing winds of black hell and judgment in the sky. Very soon, he expected to see fountains of blood all over the room’s rose-pattern wallpaper. “I can understand why I was a target. Unfortunately your father’s shot struck a soldier named Asa Birdage.”

  “Who cares, who cares?” Jimmy screamed. “He was sixty-two years old!”

  “Asa Birdage was eleven years old. Asa Birdage was our headquarters drummer boy.”

  Jimmy’s face was curtained by horror. She flung back against the headboard, wanting to deny Sheridan’s statement. He simply stood there with his hands hanging easily at his sides—maybe he wasn’t so easy inside, but you couldn’t tell except for the rise and fall of his potbelly—and Jimmy began to shake her head from side to side. “No, no” she said, and then she burst out crying. “Liar. You’re lying to save your hide.”

  “Young woman, I am an honorable man. I have been accused of many things, but never of deceit. Your father slew one of my soldiers. Who was scarcely more than a child. I felt prison was fair punishment. Perhaps I erred. Perhaps I was unjust. I acted to prevent another death. Others in my command that day wanted to shoot your father on the spot.”

  “No, oh no,” Jimmy wept. Sheridan’s eyes took on a pitying look. Rolf leaped by him, giving him a fist in the shoulder—how many times did you get to land a blow on a hero? on a legend?—and with one quick decisive grab, he removed the Deringer from Jimmy’s hand.

  “I am thankful that you believe me, miss,” Phil Sheridan said in a voice oddly humbled.

  “I’m not, I’m not,” she cried, covering her tearful face. Rolf knelt beside the bed and with both hands delicately lifted the hem of the sheet so as to hide her breasts. His cheeks were scarlet.

  General Sheridan quickly donned his singlet and then his blouse. He was once more sounding stern when he said, “If anyone mentions these events, I will deny my presence. I will lie till the throne of Hell freezes.”

  Rolf Greencastle was trembling inside. But he tried not to let it show when he turned his eyes on the national hero and scorched him. “I think you’d better light out of here, Phil.”

  Phil lit out.

  After about three hours, Jimmy’s sobbing wore itself out and she fell asleep. Rolf pulled up a cane-bottomed chair and sat beside the bed, keeping a vigil. The rain fell harder. About four in the morning, Jimmy woke up.

  She quickly covered her left breast, which had been peeping over the hem of the sheet as she slept; Rolf had been admiring it for the better part of twenty minutes. Although he knew her body intimately, his admiration was of a different nature than the simple lust he’d satisfied at the Overton Place before.

  “Why did you do that?” she said. “Why did you stop me?” She sounded deathly sad. He feared the glooms were coming again. The terrible glooms.

  “You tell me something first. How could you take him into your bed, hating him that way?”

  “Oh—” A little sniffle. “Part of the trade, that’s all. You learn to shut out everything. How bad the customer stinks. How mean he is. With him it was harder. For a while I thought it wouldn’t work, I’d go to pieces. Then I remembered my daddy and I made it work. Got him right where I wanted him.”

  “It was a mighty good trick,” he agreed. “You could have blown his head off any time you wanted to.”

  “Why did you stop me?”

  “I didn’t want anything to happen to you. I didn’t want you to keep on having the glooms the rest of your life.”

  “Why, why?”

  “I don’t know, I guess because I love you.”

  They stared at each other. He was fully as surprised as she was.

  The next day he helped her put the Overton Place up for sale and they rode away together and neither one ever saw General Phil Sheridan again.

  The Tinhorn Fills His Hand

  GRAHAM COLDFIELD WALKED UP the plank of the steamer feeling the dizziness again. The lanterns of the River Queen had been lit against the lowering dusk, and he paused in the light of one of them, leaning weakly against the wooden wall, his head bowed. The quiet lap of the Blackwater River rose from the hull.

  Beyond the wharf sprawled the town of Herrod’s Landing, bawling with laughter and the rattle of carriage wheels and occasional shouts. Coldfield paid no attention. Dizziness fogged his brain. A sharp pain in his stomach made him close his eyes and groan. The damp night air brought a cough to his lips.

  A couple dismounted from a carriage on the wharf and came up the plank, brushing past him. The woman gave him an odd look and laughed prettily, twirling her ornamental parasol as she passed. Coldfield ignored her. Terrified, he tried to fight the sickening motion of things around him. The world tilted and blurred before his eyes. He was weak, and ill.

  Coldfield was a tall man, slender, with a long-jawed somber face. His gray eyes seemed empty in the lamplight. He leaned against the wall, finely dressed in a dark suit, black tie, and brocaded vest, the very model of a fashionable river gambler. But within his mind, he could already see his position slipping away.

  The Queen was the best vessel on the river, and her gambling saloon attracted the most trade. Coldfield had climbed as far as he could in his kind of work. He dealt faro on the Queen, and made a good living at it. He lived quietly, like a gentleman, satisfied that hard times were over for him. He’d nearly forgotten the cheap back-country saloons; the nickel-ante stud games; the long nights spent in the saddle moving from town to town. He had worked long and hard to reach the position of dealer on the Queen. And now suddenly, it was all tumbling out from under him.

  It’s this damned river, he thought. Always damp and foggy and chill, like tonight. It weakened a man; cut down his resistance. Dazedly, Coldfield shook his head. If Tom Chapman, owner of the Queen, found out that he was having these spells, he’d be finished. That thought terrified him more than anything. To go back to riding from town to town, living with a half-empty, growling stomach most of the time—he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t. But maybe it’s not what you think it is at all, he thought. Maybe you just haven’t been eating or resting enough.

  He straightened up slowly. He was lying to himself. He was a sick man.

  Well, he’d have to be careful. Above all he had to keep the secret from Chapman. He started to move along the deck, aware that the carriages were arriving more frequently now, that the crowd was swelling. He bumped into someone in the shadows and hastily drew back, his fingers reaching instinctively toward the derringer in his waistcoat pocket.

  The man stepped out of the dark, lamplight falling across his massive, ugly face. Coldfield recognized Redneck Bates, wearing a cap and high-collared jacket. Coldfield didn’t lik
e Bates, whose position on the River Queen was obscure. Bates, Coldfield suspected, was aboard to permanently remove anyone Chapman wanted removed. It was that simple. The dislike he felt for the big man sprang mostly from a contempt for the man’s thick-skulled ignorance, mirrored now in his piggy eyes as he squinted at Coldfield. Bates had immensely powerful hands and a short temper.

  “Hello, Redneck,” Coldfield said quietly. “I didn’t see you standing there.”

  “I been here a minute or so,” Bates said. “I seen you, tinhorn.” Bates always called Coldfield tinhorn, a word which jabbed the gambler like a thorn. Maybe that was another reason for his intense dislike of the man; that and the fact that Bates lived by the strength of his hands, while Coldfield prided himself on living by the quickness of his mind.

  “I seen you,” Bates repeated. “You was weaving back and forth.” His eyes puckered together. “Are you sick or something?”

  “No,” Coldfield snapped. “I feel fine.”

  Bates shrugged. “You sure was staggering a powerful lot. This here river can get a feller mighty sick— you know?” A thick-lipped grin spread across the mouth of the bigger man.

  “Forget it,” Coldfield said. An instant later he had cause to regret the words; the sharpness in them.

  “You wouldn’t be ordering me around now, would you, tinhorn?” Bates stuck his thumbs into his jacket pockets, looking for a chance to show off his strength

  “If you want to call it that. I told you I’m not sick and to forget about the coughing spell.” He had initiated this. Accidentally, to be sure. But he couldn’t turn back now.

  “I don’t cotton to being pushed around, tinhorn.” The wicked gleam in Bates’s eyes grew brighter. He took a step forward, as if to see what Coldfield would do next.

  Coldfield hesitated; slowly lowered his hands. Then he brought his right hand up with a swift motion, palming the derringer and aiming its tiny barrel at a spot between Bates’s close-set eyes.

  “Look,” Coldfield said quietly, “get out of my way and stop jawing.”

  Sudden hatred showed on the other man’s face. That was replaced by a look of craftiness. Coldfield was amazed at the way simple emotions moved over that flat, brutal face. “Sure, tinhorn. I’ll step aside. But I ain’t forgetting.”

  He moved back toward the wall. Coldfield pocketed the derringer and walked quickly by. At the next turn in the deck, he spun around and looked back. Redneck Bates still stood under the lantern, staring off across the water toward the lights of Herrod’s Landing. He had a knife in his hand. He didn’t look at Coldfield. Coldfield realized he’d made a dangerous enemy in his haste to conceal his own sickness.

  The pain was duller, but still with him, as he hurried along the deck and into the brilliantly lit saloon. The hearty sound of male voices mingling with higher feminine ones crashed against his ears like the roar of surf. The small string orchestra wheezed away at “Buffalo Gals.” The tables were crowded.

  Tom Chapman had done an unprecedented thing with the Queen. He’d opened the gambling saloon to women as well as men. He attracted wealthy people that way; young bucks and their ladies who had money and position and who could afford to brave public scorn when the ladies lifted their skirts and stepped up the plank to this less-than-respectable world of green baize tables and easy money. Coldfield looked around, but he didn’t see Tom Chapman. Coldfield’s regular table, number three, was waiting, deserted as yet.

  He crossed the big room, glancing at himself in the mirrored walls. Good God, he thought, I do look sick. Thinner, with sunken eyes. With his hat off, his graying hair was obvious. A man of thirty-three shouldn’t have gray hair, he told himself. But he had it, a mark of the way he’d driven himself to reach the top, here in the gilded main saloon of the River Queen.

  He slipped into his place behind the box. One of the waiters appeared instantly with fresh cards. He cut the paper with his fingernail and began an elaborate shuffle. Before he was finished, he had a full table. They know me, he thought proudly. They come to me for a fair game.

  He got the high-stake faro game going, turning the cards out of the box with practiced ease. In less than three quarters of an hour he’d cleared a little over eleven hundred dollars for the house. As players left, new ones took their places. The noise and smell of cigar smoke increased. Coldfield himself lit a Cuban cheroot. He was in control now, though the pain in his chest had grown sharp again. His palms were clammy with sweat. That was something new.

  A disturbance intruded on the regular noise of the saloon. A young man at the stud table next to Coldfield’s got up quickly, shouting a curse. Frankie Topp, the dealer, also rose. Behind the young man stood a girl, her blue eyes wide with anxiety. She clutched her escort’s arm. “Jim, let’s get out of here.” Coldfield studied her, his hand mechanically keeping up with his own game. She was older than the young man but not by very much. She had a fresh-scrubbed look. Her clothes, like her companion’s, were obviously homemade. She didn’t fit with the gilded ladies who patronized the Queen.

  “I’m not getting out of here till I get my two thousand back,” Jim said.

  Coldfield smiled thinly. Frankie Topp was shrewd, but evidently his tricks hadn’t worked this time.

  “I saw what you did—palm the bottom card of the deck. I want my money.”

  Frankie Topp smiled gently and said something apologetic. Jim started around the table, fists clenched. The girl screamed as the small nickeled gun popped into Frankie’s fist and exploded with a flat sound. A red smear spread on Jim’s shirt, just above his heart. Another woman screamed and the hubbub of voices rose.

  Then, almost like some genie from a bottle, Redneck Bates appeared behind the boy and clamped his arms around him. The boy fought, struggled, but Bates had no trouble dragging him to the door and out. The girl followed quickly. Coldfield turned back to his own game. Chapman allowed his dealers to play crooked if they could get away with it. The young couple had made a mistake in coming aboard the Queen; the company was too fast, and the boy had a hole in his chest, possibly fatal, for his foolishness. If he lived and made a fuss, Bates would look him up and break his neck. Chapman tolerated no interference with a successful operation.

  The disturbance remained a topic of conversation for some minutes. Finally, the saloon resumed its usual tone of busy confusion. The hours wore on; the pain in Coldfield’s chest became worse. At last he could no longer fight the dizziness. He cursed himself as the faces across the table swam out of focus. He reached too quickly for the edge of the table, spilling the neat card decks carelessly on the baize. He closed his eyes, gripped the table edge, his head swinging from side to side. He heard a woman’s horrified exclamation from the seat across from his. Suddenly he keeled over, his cheek smacking the table top.

  A moment later he opened his eyes. The attack had passed. But he remembered what had happened. His stomach hurt.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Another of the house gamblers stood there, motioning him away from the table. He got up stiffly.

  “I’ll take over for you, Coldfield,” the man said, and Coldfield knew that word had already traveled to Tom Chapman: Coldfield’s sick. Coldfield passed out at the table. It was Chapman’s business to know things almost as soon as they happened.

  The house man stared at him. “You’d better go see Chapman.”

  Coldfield nodded, aware of the horrified gaze of the woman at his table. He hurried away from her accusing eyes; blindly he pushed through the crowd and up the stairs to the mezzanine. He didn’t bother to knock on the intricately inlaid door. He walked straight in through the curtained foyer to the desk where Tom Chapman sat.

  Chapman was built like Redneck Bates. But there the resemblance stopped. Intelligence showed in Chapman’s wide-spaced brown eyes. His hands were delicate, almost feminine, untouched by dirt, odd contrasts to his long, thick arms. The office shone with the glow of expensive lamps on polished wood. The peaty smell of good whiskey floated in the air.
r />   Chapman gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Graham.” There was no cordiality in his eyes.

  “I heard you got violently sick at the table,” Chapman said after a moment.

  Coldfield shook his head. “No, only a little dizzy. Look, Tom—”

  “Don’t call me Tom. You’re a hired hand, nothing else. Now what happened?”

  Wearily, Coldfield replied, “I just got a little dizzy and passed out. A few seconds, no more. I’m tired, that’s all it is. Otherwise I’m fine.”

  Chapman shook his head. “I can’t have a sick man working for me. I run this place on atmosphere as much as anything. Everything proper and refined. I can’t have dealers passing out, that’s flat. I’m sorry, but you’re done on the Queen.”

  The words struck Coldfield like a sledge. All his years of struggle wiped out that fast. And Chapman had been so cordial when he hired him. “I thought we were friends. Hell, I’ve been with you three years now—”

  “I’m in business,” Chapman cut in; Coldfield saw the ruthlessness he’d always known was there. “The river does funny things to a man. Fever, pneumonia, just plain craziness sometimes. Go out to Arizona. Soak up some of the sun, and when you’re over whatever it is, come back and see me. Maybe I can do something for you then.”

  The words burned Coldfield like heated cattle irons. Chapman didn’t give a damn about anybody. He kicked people around, like that boy who was cheated, without ever worrying about it; nothing mattered but the River Queen.

  In moments, Coldfield’s life had gone to pieces. He saw himself in the saddle again, riding from town to town in the cold gray winters; shivering in cheap rooming houses; cadging a drink when he couldn’t draw any customers into a game.

  “Look,” Chapman said abruptly, “this would have come sooner or later anyway. Redneck told me he saw you staggering around earlier tonight. You couldn’t have kept it quiet for long. Get off the Queen without a fuss and I’ll give you two weeks’ wages.”