Well Traveled

by Margaret Mills

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  4760 Preston Road

  Suite 244-149

  Frisco, TX 75034

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Well Traveled

  Copyright © 2010 by Margaret Mills and Tedy Ward

  Cover Art by Catt Ford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-61581-602-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  October, 2010

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61581-603-3

  Chapter 1

  LIVINGSTON, Montana in the summer was hot and windy and green, nestled against a big bend in the Yellowstone River and bustling with the engine of progress. It was altogether a great place to visit, and Gideon Makepeace had been happy to do so. But he’d heard from the local folk about just how hard Montana winters were—harder than any he’d ever suffered through in Texas or Florida or Louisiana—so he was just as happy to be headed out today, in plenty of time to avoid one.

  Mister Landon had been a fair boss, paying him well for his horse skills and treating him with less awe or envy and more respect than most respectable men would treat a fella from a traveling show, but after three months here, butting heads with Landon’s regular help, and seeing the futility of doing work that those horses’ asses would as likely undo in weeks, Gideon was happy to be moving on, too.

  “Gonna miss you, Gideon,” Tommy, one of the youngest of Landon’s hands, said as he came to stand next to Gideon. “Wish you didn’t have to go.”

  Gideon smiled at him, slapping him on the back. At sixteen, Tommy was four years Gideon’s junior and one of the best hands Landon had. Gideon felt a score of years older than the boy, most days, because he’d known so much more about horses and life by the time he’d reached sixteen. “Miss you, too, Tommy. If you decide to leave Livingston, look up the show—we can always use a good horse hand, and I’ll be glad to put in a word for you with Bill and with my dad.” Gideon’s daddy ran the horses for Bill Tourney’s Wild West Show and had since before Gideon had been born, back when Bill still rode broncs and the show numbered no more than two dozen rowdy men and women. Before Gideon was even old enough to reach a horse’s withers without a stepstool, he had learned the trade from his pa.

  Tommy nodded, flushing a little with the compliment. “Thanks, but don’t expect to see me anytime soon. Mister Landon wants me taking up your work with Boxer—he says he thinks I’ve learned better than anyone else. That’s a damned fine horse, Gideon. Always was, but now that we can handle him good….”

  Gideon smiled, feeling something in him ease a little. Landon clearly wanted the best out of his stock—just not enough to spend his days at the barn himself and keep an eye on the rougher men responsible for keeping his breeding farm running. Landon liked his wealth and his travel, and had only got back from another trip just five days past. The pair of them had spent the last three days talking about two studs Gideon had put most of his time into. Tall roans both of them, the studs were four and five years old, respectively, and while they’d never be anything like his Star, they weren’t bad animals at all. Boxer was the five-year-old, and while he was a little bit lazy, he listened to Tommy.

  Gideon watched the roans now, standing quiet in halter with their ears swiveled toward the noise of people on the street or the steam and clang of the smithy, back behind this livery. Three months ago they’d have been bucking and rearing, panicked. Gideon cast a measuring eye to their stance and bit his lip as Landon walked toward them, calling out to the horses as if they were people.

  “Good to know you,” Tommy said, shaking Gideon’s hand quickly then moving away. “I’ll remember everything you said.”

  As he left, Landon walked over, his eyes still on his horses. “They’re my best studs,” he said, like that was news after all this time. “They’ve thrown over a dozen healthy foals off my own mares, but better yet, they’re gonna fetch higher stud fees now when folks cotton to how smart they are.”

  The old man was probably right about that, Gideon thought with a smile.

  “I appreciate your work with ’em, Gideon,” Landon said, and clearly the man did.

  “I did my best, sir, but still—don’t expect ’em to be like Star, all right? Worse, you let your boys get impatient with ’em, and they’ll likely unlearn everything you and me have taught ’em so far.”

  Landon laughed and shook his head. “You’re as sentimental about horseflesh as most men are about their wives,” he said, and Gideon shrugged. The man was right, after all; a great horse could be ruined by a bad trainer, while a mediocre horse with a skilled trainer could surprise the hell out of a man. Gideon secretly thought Landon had the latter in most of his animals, but these two studs were all right. Good lines, good conformation, good lineage—tempers as hot and hard as their pricks, too, he thought with a frown.

  In the calm, low voice Gideon had taught him to use, Landon spoke to his horses. “Boxer. Square up.” Boxer’s ears flicked forward, and he lifted his right forefoot, then set it down pretty much where he’d had it before. “Square up,” Landon repeated. Boxer did a little better, shifting his weight and bringing his right foot into line with his left. “No anger in him either,” Landon said approvingly. “Don’t know how you schooled that out of him.”

  “Like I told you, sir, you can cow a horse, or you can respect it.” More quietly, “And I still think your whole investment’ll be better off if you send Johnson packing.” The man who ran the barn drank too much to make animals trust him. People, too, probably, but then folks could be a lot more gullible than horses.

  “I’m thinking on it. Already talked to Tommy about taking over Boxer’s handling—but I reckon you know that.” There was a smile in the man’s voice.

  Gideon tilted his head to look sidelong at his companion. George Landon saw an investment on the hoof in horses, like cattle or hogs. Gideon couldn’t even say the man was wrong. Landon was the man with the land and the money and the fine studs, after all.

  Landon had been down in Casper in May, to sell some yearlings and to catch Bill Tourney’s Traveling Wild West Show. Landon had introduced himself to Robert Makepeace, Gideon’s pa, with the idea of offering a yearling to the show and increasing his breeding farm’s reputation. After the trick riding events, though, the breeder had changed his mind.

  “Robert,” he’d said, “I’d like to hire you to teach my studs some schooling. They’re already in high demand, but if I can show off how smart they are, too, I’ll have folks coming from New York and California to get their mares covered.”

  His daddy had been no more willing to leave the show than Landon would have been to travel with it, but Gideon had loved the idea. “Setting up in somebody’s nice guest house, sleeping late and bedding down early? Interfering with a local gal for longer than a few days’ time?” He still remembered the look the elder Makepeace had given him for that one.

  “You’d best remember what interferi
ng with local gals can cost you,” his daddy had chastised him. “And more important, what it can cost them. You find better things to do with your time, son.”

  Gideon had shared the thoughtful silence, certain that his pa wasn’t hinting at how he himself had been made, but equally sure the man was right. Eventually, he’d nodded his head. “Yessir. Still, you’ll put in a word for me, won’t you? Make sure he knows I’ve got the grit to tackle the job?”

  His daddy had grinned. “Yessir. Hell, that kind of money, I almost wish I’d be willing to part from my horses or my woman and do it myself.”

  So Gideon had found himself here, enjoying easy work, fresh air, and the tourists who poured through on their way to Yellowstone National Park. He’d spent his fair share of time trying to charm the birds out of the trees in this bustling city, and mostly avoiding the daddies who’d want to geld him if they caught him too close to their daughters. Wives were safer. Men could be safer still, at least on the road. Gideon hadn’t even found a feller really worth looking twice at around here, much less worth the risk of approaching, not when he couldn’t move on right quick if things fell out wrong. It weren’t no trouble to take matters in hand, so to speak, not with the private room Landon had given him. And when the need drove him too hard to ignore it, he’d visited a very nice prostitute on B Street. Thin and boyish, she’d been worth every dollar he had paid her, for the more worldly company as much as for the fucks.

  “You all right with how we settled out, Gideon?” Landon asked, bringing Gideon out of his musings.

  “About my pay? Yessir.” Landon had an account at the Wells Fargo Bank and had had a letter sent to the branch in San Francisco, opening an account for Gideon into which Landon had deposited nearly all of the $400 Gideon had earned for his summer’s work. The show would land in San Francisco sometime in September, and Gideon planned to meet it there. “You were right, sir, the best way to lose that money would’ve been to carry it on me the whole trip.”

  “Especially since you’re so determined to hop off and sightsee,” Landon agreed, nodding. One thing Gideon liked about the old man was that as a traveler himself, he seemed to understand the need to see new pieces of the world. Gideon had near five weeks, maybe more if the pickings in California were good for Bill, to get to San Francisco to meet up with Bill Tourney’s Wild West Show, and he’d already talked with a Northern Pacific ticket clerk and at length with Doctor MacCray, who had traveled across most of the Rockies in both America and Canada.

  In his wallet, folded flat and tucked carefully into the breast pocket of his traveling coat, he had the forty dollars he’d accepted in cash and his train tickets—the one for himself and the one for his horse. Forty dollars was plenty to get him west in comfort. “Yessir,” he said again, and checked his pocket watch. “I’ve got four more hours, sir. You want help taking these boys back to your spread?”

  Landon chuckled. “No, no. Boxer here’s going to the Lazy R, fifteen miles downriver. I want to show him there while he’s at his best—before my men ruin him again,” he said. Gideon was just glad that humor infused the man’s voice.

  “Sorry, don’t mean to talk so much or so bad about your employees.”

  Landon waved it away. “You probably aren’t wrong, Gideon. I never thought much about it before, but to see how well you manage animals that Johnson swears shouldn’t be handled without a gun and a bullwhip… well, let’s just say you’re making me see things a little more clearly.”

  Gideon brought up his ‘aww shucks’ smile, one he’d practiced for audiences and pretty women alike. “Right kind of you to say, sir.”

  Landon turned to him and extended a hand to shake. “I’m letting Bill and Tommy take Boxer downriver on the flatboat, not Johnson,” he said with a smile. “Reckon even an old dog can learn a few new tricks, eh?”

  Gideon felt his smile widen, a real one this time, and shook hands firmly with the old man. He’d already said his goodbyes on Landon’s stud farm, shaken hands with the other men who he’d tried to teach the finer points of horse training, pretty sure that most of them wouldn’t do any damage, but equally sure that few of them boys had the patience or the skill to work a horse past the basics of bending to halter, or cutting and roping. It was what they knew. “Tommy will do you well—and Boxer, too. You take care of yourself, sir,” he said sincerely.

  “You, too, Gideon.”

  Gideon stepped back into the shade of a tree and leaned against it, hiding his bare head from the noonday sun, and stuck his hands deep in his pockets as he watched Landon wave Tommy over.

  He waved again when Landon did and glanced over to the livery corral where Star dozed in the shade of the building. He and his horse were both at a loose end now.

  He’d said his goodbyes to Lila at the whorehouse, to Doctor MacCray, to everybody who’d come to mean anything to him in his long summer here. His bags were packed and held at the train depot, and only his tack, his hat and his horse still wanted collecting. He didn’t have nothing to do now but get himself a drink, maybe saddle up Star and walk her along the banks of the Yellowstone River before he had to load her onto the train.

  He didn’t know how long he’d lingered, trying to decide how to kill the last of his time here, before a commotion on the other side of the livery caught his attention. Angry voices and a body hitting a wall, it sounded like, got him pushing off the trunk of the tree and moving fast. A couple of months back he might not have gotten involved—these folks didn’t take kindly to their Chinese or to their whores showing up in the wrong parts of town, and they didn’t take kindly to interference either—but he was leaving today, so he could make the effort without much risk.

  He jogged around the corner of the big livery stable in time to see an Indian try to lever himself up off the ground, and to see a boy who worked at the stable put his foot to the man’s chest and shove him back down. “Hey!” he yelled. He knew that kid and had thought he was a decent fellow. “What the hell are you doing?”

  It was clear even from here that the Indian had a problem with his leg; it was bound up and swollen, and when he’d fallen back down and landed some weight on it, he’d groaned and curled in on himself. Gideon didn’t cotton to folks treating animals badly. He sure as hell wasn’t going to stand by and let them do that to a man who hadn’t done nothing to them.

  “We don’t allow no Injuns in Livingston,” the boy, Jacob, said.

  Gideon was frankly shocked. He hadn’t heard Jacob talk this bad even about the China men. “Who made you the boss around here, boy?” he snapped, stepping up and putting himself between Jacob and the man on the ground. He was a little worried about Tom the blacksmith. Tom was a big man, tall and burly and heavily muscled from his work, but Tom looked to be torn between Jacob’s affront and his own decency. “You two,” he said, pointing to the other two men who’d joined in the fray. Or started it, maybe. “I’ve seen you both go into that church right on Callendar Street. That the way God tells you to treat the sick?”

  “God tells us how to treat heathens,” the bigger of the two, Bart Elston, said, and he spat on the ground near where the Indian lay. “These heathens drink and steal and kill honest, hard-working people.”

  Gideon resisted the urge to shift his weight to the balls of his feet and narrowed his eyes. He’d met Bart in a saloon, known the man well enough to say howdy to him on the street, and Bart wasn’t a man who went out of his way to work hard at anything. “Bart, you don’t want to waste your energy on foolery like this,” he said with a frown.

  “You’re leaving today, ain’t you, Gideon?” Tom asked, but his tone wasn’t as hard as Bart’s. “Why don’t you just go on along and let us handle this?” He met Gideon’s eyes, and even though he wasn’t carrying the hatred Bart seemed to, Gideon saw the set of his shoulders and his jaw.

  Gideon couldn’t take them on. Four of them, and at least three of them angry—that was a loser for sure.

  But he couldn’t leave the Indian alone either; he h
ad too many Indian friends to walk away from this stranger now. There was no denying that there was anger and even hate between many whites and redskins, but most of the Indians he knew were as good and decent as the best white man.

  His back was to the man on the ground, but he’d gotten a good look before he’d stepped past him: he was a small man, slender, with long black hair hanging loose around his face, and eyes that weren’t the color a full-blooded Indian should have.

  Gideon relaxed his stance a little and stuck his hands into his pants pockets. “He ain’t all Indian,” he said. “Maybe the white half of his soul ain’t worth beating on just for the Indian half.”

  Bart Elston and his friend stiffened further, and Gideon felt his jaw tighten. No doubt they were thinking the worst on how a half-breed might have got made. But Tom looked hesitant about the idea of white blood on his hands, so Gideon figured he had a winning argument here.

  “I will go,” a faint voice called from behind him, the words almost too soft to hear.

  Elston took a step forward. “Get on out of here, Injun—before we take you out of town ourselves.”

  Gideon heard movement behind him, the rustle of hide clothes, the scraping of sand and rock as the Indian moved, trying to get to his feet. He was breathing hard, too hard. He needed a doctor bad enough that he’d come into Livingston alone to look for one. “I’ll help him,” Gideon said, taking a step back but still facing Tom. Tom was the closest he had to an ally here. He’d cowed Jacob, but Elston and his friend could stir the kid up again, quick. “I’m leaving anyway—may as well let him go with me.”

  “Could just string him up,” Elston said, smiling in a way that made Gideon’s blood run hot with anger. Without thinking, his hand drifted toward his revolver, but before it made contact, Tom spoke up.

  “For what, Bart? Falling down?”

  “He might have been eying the horses,” Elston said, his suspicion exactly the kind that someone who wanted to would believe.