The Gamble (I) Page 11

  To love a woman, a man had to be able to do all those things. He pictured Scotty doing them now. Nobody else Marcus knew was good enough for her. Her pale beauty deserved Scotty’s dark good looks. Her bright laughter deserved his teasing grin. Her perfect body deserved another equally as perfect.

  What would a man say first?

  You’re beautiful.

  Do first?

  Touch—her cheek, her lips, her angel hair.

  Feel like?

  As if the world and all its glory were in his hand.

  Jube... Jube...

  “Jube, let me do that,” Scotty was saying in the room across the hall. He did all the things Marcus Delahunt could only dream of doing. One by one he pulled the pins from Jube’s fluffy, white hair. He felt it tumble into his hands and smoothed it over her milk-white shoulders. He unbuttoned her dress, then freed her corset stays and watched her long-legged body emerge as she kicked free of garters and stockings. When she turned and looped her arms around his neck, he placed his hands on the sides of her breasts and kissed the black mole between them, the one the rest of the world thought she glued to her skin each morning. He kissed her willing mouth, touched her in ways that temporarily held loneliness at bay. He laid her on the bed and murmured endearments and told her how he’d missed her and how glad he was to have her back. He linked their bodies with the most intimate of caresses and found within her a surcease for emptiness. He even cleansed her and himself when it was over. And wrapped her close in the big, soft bed and slept naked with her breast within his palm.

  But between them the word love was never spoken.

  CHAPTER

  6

  The first herd of Texas longhorns arrived the following day. Bawling and bullheaded they came, driven by men who’d been three months in the saddle on a dusty, dry trail. Both the cattle and the men were dirty, thirsty, hungry, and tired. Proffitt was ready to accommodate them all.

  Its inordinately wide streets were designed first to handle the unlovable beasts with horns twice the width of their bodies; next, to assuage the frustrations of the weary Texas cowboys who drove them.

  Agatha looked out the window of her millinery shop and watched two boys race across the street—their last chance to do so for some time. From the far end of town the rumble of hooves could already be felt. Resignedly, she said, “Here they come.”

  The herd passed through Proffitt from west to east, a shifting, drifting, sometimes unmanageable mass of beef flesh that created a stream of red, brown, white, and gray cowhide for as far as the eye could see. Beside them rode the hardscrabble cowpunchers as tough as the hundreds of miles of mesas they’d crossed. Saddle-weary and lonely, they wanted three things: a drink, a bath, and a woman, usually in that order.

  The prostitutes had already returned to the cat houses on the far west edge of town after wintering in the bagnios of Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Garbed in dressing gowns and scanty corsets, they stood on the railed roofs and hung from the windows, waving and beckoning.

  “Hiya, cowboy! Don’t forget to ask for Crystal!”

  “Tired of that saddle, cowboy? Li’l ole Delilah’s got somethin’ softer ya can ride.”

  “Up here, big boy! Hoo-ee! Would you look at that beard, Betsy?” Then cupping her hands to her mouth, she called, “Don’t shave off that beard, honey. I lo-o-ove beards!”

  The trail-worn cowboys stood in their saddles and waved their battered John B’s, white teeth flashing in their grimy faces. “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Lucy! Just ask for Lucy!”

  “Keep it hot, Lucy! Big Luke’ll be back!”

  The cattle flooded the street from hitching rail to hitching rail, sometimes even clattering onto the boardwalks themselves. Unruly and stupid, they often reverted to their wild, untamed nature, charging into the open doorways of saloons, breaking windows with their horns, rolling their eyes and charging anything that got in their way.

  “Here goes the last of our peace for the summer,” lamented Agatha as the lead bull led the herd past her door.

  “I think it’s exciting.” Violet’s eyes glittered.

  “Exciting? All that dust and noise and smell?”

  “It isn’t dusty.”

  “It will be. As soon as this mud dries.”

  “Honestly, Agatha, sometimes I don’t know what it is that tips your damper.”

  At that moment Scott Gandy and Jack Hogg stepped onto the boardwalk and stood watching the mass of moving beef. Hogg wore a starched white apron tied around his belly. Gandy wore his usual black trousers but had left his sack coat behind. Today his vest was coral. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. He braced one boot on the rail and leaned on his knee.

  Violet poked her head outside and shouted above the sound of the herd, “Hello, Mr. Gandy!”

  He swung around and dropped his foot. “Miz Parsons, how are you?”

  “Better be careful. Sometimes those creatures take a mind to visit the saloons.”

  He grinned. “I will. Much obliged.” The late morning sun lit his boots and trousers, but the shadow of the roof fell across his head and shoulders. His eyes moved to Agatha, hovering behind Violet. His voice cooled.

  “Miz Downin’.” He tipped his hat.

  For a moment their eyes clashed. Was he the one? Certainly he lived closest, could easily have left the saloon and run upstairs to tack a note to her door anytime while she was gone last night. Was he capable of such duplicity? Standing in the morning sun with the dimples decorating his face and the reflection from his coral-colored vest lighting his chin from below, he certainly didn’t look ominous. Still, her heart tripped with uncertainty. She nodded curtly.

  “Close the door, Violet.”

  “But, Agatha—”

  “Close it. All that noise gives me a headache. And the stench is unbearable.”

  When the door closed, Jack Hogg observed, “I don’t think Miss Downing likes us.”

  “That’s puttin’ it mildly.”

  “You think she and that temperance union of hers can do us any harm?”

  Gandy propped his foot on the handrail again and reached into his vest pocket for a cheroot. “Not with Jube and the girls here.” His eyes followed a driver who rode higher than the herd, flapping his hat and cursing at the beasts. “We’ll have those cowpokes fightin’ for a place t’ stand in the Gilded Cage.”

  Hogg’s eyes lit with amusement. The unscarred corner of his mouth lifted. “Think Jube and the girls opened a few eyes last night, huh? Did you see that Downing woman gawk when Jube came out of the cage?”

  Gandy lit his cigar and chuckled. “Can’t say’s I noticed.”

  “Like hell you didn’t. You were enjoying it as much as I was.”

  “Seems t’ me I do recall seein’ her face over the top of the swingin’ doors, lookin’ a little interested.”

  “Shocked, you mean.”

  Gandy laughed.

  “That’s probably more skin than she ever saw on her own body.”

  Gandy drew deep and expelled a cloud of smoke. “Probably.”

  “A woman like that, heading up a group of females with reform on their minds, they get up a head of steam and they can cause plenty of grumbles.”

  Gandy’s boot hit the worn floor of the boardwalk. He tugged his vest down, crooked the cheroot in one finger, and turned to Jack Hogg.

  “Y’all just leave Miz Agatha Downin’ t’ me.”

  The cattle milled and mooed all that day—and the next and the next—bisecting Proffitt in an ever-shifting mass of hooves, hides, and horns. Tucked up beside the railroad tracks on the east edge of town, the stock pens stretched across the prairie like an endless crazy quilt. Trains clanged in empty and went out full, headed for the packing houses of Kansas City. The drumming of hooves on the loading ramps rolled steadily from sunup to sundown. Cowpunchers with long poles walked or straddled the wooden rails, earning their trade name by prodding and poking the cattle to keep them moving. Only whe
n the last brand had been counted, and their tally books were folded away inside their vest pockets, did the “punchers” get paid by their foremen.

  Sporting a hundred dollars’ trail wages in their pockets, raring to spend every last cent, they took Proffitt by storm. They hit the saloons first, then the clothing stores. But the busiest place in town was the Cowboys’ Rest, where for two bits they leaped into a tub of hot bathwater—some fully clothed. They shucked off and threw away their filthy, rawhide-patched britches, emerging from the bathhouse in stiff new Levi Strauss blue denims and crisp yoked shirts with pearl buttons running down their chests. At Stuben’s Tonsorial Parlor they lay back in comfort and received their first haircuts and hot shaves in three months. They tied new silk bandannas around their throats and hit for the women and whiskey. Smelling of blue dye and hair pomade, some with new Stetsons that had cost them a third of their poke, or new boots that had cost them half, they visited the likes of Delilah, Crystal, and Lucy, whose yard signs warned: NO ADMITTANCE TO UNBATHED MEN.

  As the town’s population swelled from a modest two hundred to fifteen hundred, merchants’ tills rang as incessantly as the hammer from Gottheim’s Blacksmith Shop. Proffitt’s three livery barns were busier than anthills. The Kansas Outfitters sold enough harness to reach across the entire state. At the Drover’s Cottage—offering real mattresses and pillows—all one hundred rooms were filled. Halorhan’s and the Longhorn Store sold enough Bull Durham tobacco to fill a hayloft. Union suits practically walked out on their own legs. But of all the establishments in town, eleven did better than the rest. Eleven proprietors of eleven saloons stood back and watched themselves get rich overnight selling Newton’s whiskey at twenty-five cents a glass, keno cards at twenty-five cents a game, and Lazo Victoria cigars at a nickel a smoke.

  Prosperity was a difficult thing to fight, the ladies of the W.C.T.U. found out. The night after the first herd arrived, they broke up into small groups and dispersed to all eleven saloons to solicit pledge signatures. Agatha’s group took the Gilded Cage. Though they tried to get the cowboys’ attention, it was impossible. Their interest in throwing whiskey down their throats was too intense. When the bar became so crowded that it could not accommodate all the drinkers at once, they formed a double flank. Someone cried, “Fire and fall back!” And every glass went bottoms-up. Then the second contingent took its turn bellying up to the bar. Once Jubilee and the girls appeared, the noise inside grew so horrendous, the clientele so unruly, that Agatha declared it was useless and sent the women home.

  In her apartment she settled down to read the book Drusilla Wilson had given her, T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Barroom. It told the story of Joe Morgan, a likable but weak-willed man who frequented a saloon run by the hardhearted, money-grubbing Simon Slade. Gradually, Joe became addicted to alcohol and lost whatever will he’d once possessed. Devoid of ambition, he became increasingly irresponsible and spent all his time in the bar, where his daughter Mary came to beg him to return home. One day poor Mary was struck in the head by a beer mug, thrown at her father by Slade. Poor Mary died. Within a few days, Joe had died as well, a victim of delirium tremens. Joe’s wife was left a widow, childless and impoverished.

  The story left Agatha depressed. Listening to the music and revelry from downstairs, she tried to think of Gandy as another Simon Slade. The picture wouldn’t gel. When she was reading the book, Slade came across as a whiskered, crude oaf of rough-spoken ways and greedy bent. Gandy was none of these. He was mild-mannered, neat to a fault, and apparently generous. Though it would be difficult to fight such a charming man, fight him she must.

  But not without proper ammunition. During the next few days temperance activities were suspended until Joseph Zeller could get their pamphlets printed. When he did, Agatha sent Violet, as the official W.C.T.U. treasurer, to the Gazette office to pick them up. She also wired away for additional copies of Ten Nights in a Barroom from the publisher. She read her latest issue of The Temperance Banner, taking notes, gathering ideas for her local. And she wrote two letters: one to Governor John P. St. John, supporting his introduction of a prohibition bill before the Kansas State Legislature; the other to the First Lady of the United States of America, Lucy Hayes, thanking her for her staunch support of the temperance movement, and for forbidding the serving of alcoholic beverages in the White House so long as her husband, Rutherford, was in office.

  Agatha felt much better then. It seemed as if she’d been powerless against the many attractions innovated by the proprietor of the Gilded Cage Saloon. But the pamphlets would help. And anyone who read a copy of Ten Nights couldn’t help but be moved by it. The letters, too, gave her a great sense of power: the voice of the American people at work.

  It had been three days since she’d seen Gandy. Business at the millinery shop had picked up somewhat, too. A couple of cowpunchers had ordered wide-brimmed leghorns to be decorated for their “mothers”—Agatha smirked, recalling how serious the pair had looked when explaining who the hats were for. How gullible did they think she was? No “mother” would wear a leghorn hat decorated with grosgrain “follow-me-lads” trailing off the back brim to the center of her back. She had no doubt she’d see her creations sashaying down the street on the heads of two soiled doves one day soon.

  Agatha’s thoughts were interrupted when someone pounded on her back door.

  Before she could reach it, Calvin Looby, the station boy, stuck his head inside. He wore a white-and-navy-blue-striped railroad cap and small, round, wire-rimmed spectacles. His chin looked as if he’d rammed it into the point of an anvil and set it back a good two inches. He had teeth like needles and nearly nonexistent lips. She’d always pitied poor Calvin his bad looks.

  “Delivery for you, Miss Downing.”

  “A delivery?”

  “Yup.” He checked his railroad bill of lading. “From Philadelphia.”

  “But I didn’t order anything from Philadelphia.”

  Calvin removed his railroad cap and scratched his pate. “Funny. Says here plain as a windmill on a Kansas prairie: Agatha Downing. See?”

  She peered at the paper Calvin extended.

  “So it does. But there must be some mistake.”

  “Well, what you want I should do with it? Railroad delivered it to its destination. That’s all we’re responsible for. I’d have to charge you to haul it back to the depot again.”

  “Charge me? But...”

  “’Fraid so. Regulations, ya see.”

  “But I didn’t order it.”

  “How ‘bout Miss Violet? Think she could’ve ordered it?”

  “Most certainly not. Violet doesn’t do my ordering for me.

  “Well, it’s a mystery.” Calvin looked back over his shoulder into the yard. “What do you want me to do with it, then?”

  “Do you know what it is?” Agatha went to the back door.

  “Carton says: Isaac Singer Patented Treadle Sewing Machine.”

  “Sew—” Agatha’s heart began to thud. She stepped outside anxiously. There stood a sleepy old piebald mare hitched to a parsley-green railroad dray. On the dray a huge wooden crate stood out against the backdrop of her shed and “the necessary.”

  “But how... who...?”

  Suddenly, she knew. She looked up at the rear of the building. The landing was empty but she had the feeling he was somewhere chuckling over her confusion. She glanced at the single window facing the backyard from his office. It was vacant. She turned back to Calvin.

  “But if you take it back, what will happen to it?” She moved closer to the carton, drawn against her will.

  “We’ll put it on the next train heading back to Philadelphia. Can’t let a thing that big lay around the depot takin’ up space.”

  She walked to the wagon and reached up to lay her palm on the side of the carton. It was warm from the midday sun. She experienced a sharp stab of greed. She wanted this piece of machinery with a pagan intensity that yesterday she’d have thought it impossible to feel. She h
ad the money, thanks to Gandy. But spending it seemed so final. Consorting with the enemy. But heaven knew her failing business would be miraculously revived by such a machine.

  She turned to Calvin, wringing her hands. “What are the shipping costs, exactly?”

  Calvin studied his paper once more. “Doesn’t say here. It just says where t’ deliver it to.”

  She’d had that catalogue clipping on her wall for so long—suppose the price had gone up appreciably?

  She made a quick decision. “Could you bring it into the shop, Mr. Looby? Perhaps if we open the crate I can find the papers inside.”

  “Sure thing, Miss Downin’.”

  Calvin clambered onto the dray, pushed and shoved and unloaded the cumbersome crate onto a flat, wheeled conveyance, which he rolled through the back door of the hat shop. In the workroom, he removed the wooden cap with a claw hammer. Atop the packaging material was the bill. Stamped across it in neat black ink were the words PAID IN FULL.

  Confused, Agatha looked from the bill to Calvin. “But I don’t understand.”

  “Looks to me like somebody give you a gift, Miss Downin’. Well, what d’you know about that!”

  She stared at the paper.

  Gandy? But what was his motive? Three cancan dresses? Perhaps. But there could be several other motives in that shrewd mind of his. Bribery. Whitewash. Subversion.

  If it was bribery, she wanted no part of it. She already felt uneasy about accepting the generous amount he’d paid her for making the red birdcage cover.

  And if he were seeking to throw a red herring over his secret nighttime counterplays, it seemed odd he’d spend so much money to do so.

  Subversion? Would he be devious enough to undermine her W.C.T.U. efforts by suggesting to the officials that she was doing business with the enemy? Oddly enough, she didn’t want to believe it of him.