He tipped the bottle back, draining it, then tossed the bottle into the brush and pointed up at the window. “You left the damn door open, you stupid cow! The coyotes got the deer!”
Thornton stumbled forward, growling, snarling, and cursing. He crossed the broad yard, which was barren now, clean of all tracks save his own but which at one time had virtually always, day and night, teemed with saddle horses and freight wagons and roaring teamsters, drovers, and miners drunk on the beer and whiskey that Thornton had brewed in his storeroom.
Drunk, as well, on the whores—the best whores in northern Colorado/southern Wyoming—who had once entertained in all the upstairs rooms and who had scented the air with the soothing smells of perfume, incense, lilac water, and opium, and filled it with gay female laughter and the jubilant patter of piano music and singing.
“Goddamn her,” Thornton snarled, stumbling up the rotting porch steps. “Goddamn her all to hell—runnin’ off with that breed, makin’ me look the fool. Forty years of bad luck caused by what?” He stomped through the open door, throwing his arms out for emphasis, fever sweat mixing with the tears streaming down his cavernous cheeks. “By a goddamn, double-crossing whore—that’s what!”
“Bill? What was the shooting?”
The soft voice barely penetrated his consciousness. Midway through the dark saloon hall, he stopped suddenly and let his gaze crawl up the broad staircase.
Ruby stood at the top, holding a buffalo robe over her shoulders. Her feet were bare beneath the robe, toes curled against the place’s penetrating chill. Her black hair hung straight down to her shoulders and her dark brows were furrowed warily.
Thornton’s low-pitched voice rasped up from deep in his chest. “You left the barn door open. Coyotes got the meat.”
“The wind must have blown it open,” Ruby said weakly. “It catches it and slides it back.”
“Goddamn heathen cow.” Thornton reached into his pocket for the revolver, but stopped. The gun was empty. He looked around. The stove loomed to his left, flanked by a wood box. A few lengths of split stove wood lay inside.
Breathing heavily, his breath sounding like a rusty saw, he stumbled over to the box, picked up a length of split cordwood, and hefted it in his hand.
“Worthless bitch.”
Ruby’s eyes widened. “Bill, what are you going to do?”
“Gonna teach you what happens to double-crossing whores.”
“Bill . . .”
Ruby let her voice trail off as Thornton kicked a chair out of his way and shambled toward the stairs, holding the wood down low in his right hand but staring up the staircase with savage menace in his eyes, his thin upper lip curled.
“Bill, no—it was the wind!” Ruby cried as she wheeled and ran off down the hall, bare feet slapping the musty auburn carpet runner.
Slowly, clenching the club tightly in his bony fist, Thornton climbed the stairs.
Chapter 21
Watching Yakima shot out of his saddle and then dragged by Wolf into the hills beyond the ranch had nearly stopped Faith’s heart cold.
Seeing him fall from the passenger car’s roof to roll off down the graded right-of-way, out of her reach once more, had been twice as jolting. She thought that her heart had really stopped beating for a couple of seconds, only to be shocked to life again by Lowry Temple grabbing a handful of her hair and pulling her straight back away from the window.
He’d jerked her around so brusquely, and tossed her back into her seat with such violence, that she’d nearly lost consciousness. Vaguely, she heard the outlaw leader laugh and announce, “Sorry you had to witness that little display, folks. But, ya understand, the woman’s my
wife
and that
half-breed
ya saw in the window . . . well, let’s just say their union wasn’t sanctioned by the Lord, seein’ as how they’ve made a mockery of our marriage vows!”
A few of the traveling women seated around Faith and Temple clucked their disapproval. A couple of the men gave their own opinions about how cheating women should be punished—especially women who cheated with savages—and Temple said, “Don’t none of you worry. It looks like my cousins took care of the problem. I’m taking the little woman home to her pa, see if he can’t do somethin’ with her.”
Faith looked up, her head and heart aching, fury kindling inside her once more, as Temple stared down at her, shaking his head with mock disapproval. “I figured I’d let the old man try to whip some sense into that pretty, whorin’ ass of hers. I’ve done tried!”
One of the men—a drummer of some sort, judging by his cheap suit, pale skin, and derby hat— wished Temple luck as he castigated Faith with a look. Slumped in her seat, she stared straight ahead, reliving over and over the sight of Yakima’s bloody face in the window, then his body tumbling down the hill below the tracks.
She bit her lip but could not hold back the sob bursting from her chest.
Temple, brushing soot and ashes from his jacket and hat, stood across from her as Benny Freeze and Kooch Manley entered the coach door behind him, both looking windburned and exasperated. Manley held a hand to his scratched ear.
“You just go ahead and cry, woman,” Temple said loudly enough for about half the car to hear over the roar of the iron wheels made louder by the sudden opening of the vestibule door. “Cry your eyes out over that heathen. Me, I’ve had it up to here with you!”
He sat back down in his seat across from Faith, furtive mockery in his gray eyes. Freeze and Manley sidestepped between him and Temple and sagged down in their seats, adjusting their holsters on their hips and looking around cautiously.
Manley, seated next to the window beside Temple and fishing a handkerchief from a pocket, leaned toward the outlaw leader and cast an accusatory glare at Faith as he said softly, “Chulo bought it, boss.”
“I know, fool,” Temple grumbled out the side of his mouth, staring straight ahead at Faith. “I saw . . . along with everyone else in the friggin’ car!”
“He tried to fight that breed,” Manley said, dabbing at his creased ear with the handkerchief. “The fool shoulda shot him, but you know how Chulo is.”
“Was,” corrected Benny Freeze, grinning to Faith’s left. “I’m sorry Chulo’s gone an’ all. I mean, we was bonded partners.” He hiked a shoulder and broadened his grin. “But I reckon with him gone, we can cut that bounty pie into bigger pieces. . . . ”
Faith didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. She curled up in her seat and turned inward, tending her grief, sorrow, and rage in a dreamy, brooding silence.
If Yakima was still alive after another violent encounter with her captors, it was unlikely he’d be able to sniff out her trail again. The man was as good a tracker as Faith had ever known—and she’d known many in her years as a working girl on the frontier—but he probably had no clue as to where Temple was taking her.
Besides, trains weren’t all that regular in this neck of the frontier, and he’d be stranded out here without even a horse. . . .
She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep until someone grabbed her coat and jerked her awake.
“Git up, you cheatin’ bitch.” Temple grinned down at her, his rifle scabbard in one hand, his saddlebags thrown over his other shoulder. “Time to switch trains.”
Faith dropped her feet to the floor and rose from her seat, only half feeling the aches in her sore, cramped muscles. Out the train windows, a thick, oily darkness—it must have been the middle of the night—was relieved by the fuzzy aura of bull’s-eye lanterns and the crimson glow of cheroots and cigarettes.
She and the men disembarked from the train and moved with the crowd toward the brick station house on the brick-paved platform. A sign tacked to the depot announced BELEN, NEW MEXICO TERRITORY.
The wind howled—a bitter wind biting into her core. Smoke was torn to and fro across the frigid darkness.
As Faith moved like the undead, hollowed out by helplessness and grief, she gave little thought to beseeching assistance from the crowd.
As she approached the station house behind a pair of drummers in long wolf coats, mink hats, and leather grips, she saw an old man with a walrus mustache and a tin star pinned to his ratty buffalo coat. The constable leaned against a rain barrel, talking and laughing with a black porter while puffing a hand-rolled quirley.
As they approached the lawman, Temple squeezed Faith’s arm warningly, but Faith had no intention of causing any more killings.
They waited out the ninety-minute layover in the depot house in which two potbellied stoves did battle with the bone-splintering, high-altitude cold. Then, when the Denver flier rolled in from the south, Temple ushered her onto the vestibule between a passenger car and a Pullman sleeper.
Temple turned left, opening a door of the sleeper car while pulling Faith along behind him.
“You got Pullman tickets?” Manley said, frowning incredulously at the outlaw leader while Benny Freeze moved up the steps behind him. Their breath puffed in the chill night air woven with unlit cinders.
“Me and the girl got the last compartment,” Temple grunted around the cigar in his teeth. “Gonna keep her outta the crowd so we don’t have any more embarrassing incidents.”
As Manley and Breeze grumbled indignantly behind Faith, she let Temple pull her into the Pullman car in which all the compartments had been made up and a couple of kerosene lanterns smoked on the thinly paneled walls. Snores sawed through the sour, musty quiet as did a girl’s soft chuckle.
Temple opened a compartment door, jerked Faith in behind him. Nodding to a uniformed attendant passing along the hall, Temple closed the door and locked it.
He lit the single bracket lamp, then doffed his hat, hung it on a wall hook, and canted his head toward the double bunk beneath the window. Faith doffed her own hat and sagged back on the cot, the warmth from the charcoal brazier on the floor to her right feeling good against her legs.
She’d been so cold in the depot that the heat took her mind a little ways from her enervated fatigue. But when she looked up and saw Temple standing there in the half darkness against the door, running his hands through his hair and staring down at her darkly, she felt the old rage kindling inside her once more.
Her eyes dropped to the revolver jutting up from beneath his coat. Could she find a way to snatch it? She’d only get herself beaten or killed, and she’d never know what had happened to Yakima.
The outlaw chuckled. “Well, well—alone at last. Ain’t this cozy, Mrs. Temple?”
“Diddle yourself.”
“Got a sharp tongue on you.” Temple sat down beside her on the double bunk. “My women don’t speak to me that way. I don’t allow it.”
“I’m not your woman.”
She gasped with a start as Temple pulled her toward him by her coat. He kissed her hard on the mouth, letting his lips linger over hers before he pulled back but continued clutching her coat in his fists. A devilish grin twisted his features, slitting his iron gray eyes. “Been wantin’ to do that for a while.”
Faith ran a sleeve across her mouth, revulsion churning in her gut. “I thought you didn’t use force.”
“That was just to see what’s got that half-breed in such a goatish frenzy over you—riskin’ life and limb to get you back.”
Faith could feel the man’s own goatish heat, see the lust in his eyes as he stared at her, the lewd grin frozen on his face. Suddenly, he drew her toward him once more and closed his mouth over hers.