She pushed the carriage without comment, but appeared to be considering his offer, debating herself. Beckstead started to speak, but they had reached the offices of the Montana Post, and Professor Dimsdale must have seen them through the window, for he stood at the door.
“Good day to you, Missus Story.” The professor spoke to Ellen, but his dead eyes stared at Beckstead.
“Professor Dimsdale.” Ellen stopped the carriage, moved closer to the editor, and straightened when she saw how weak, how pale he looked.
He held a silk handkerchief in front of his mouth, stifling a cough, and tried to smile, but pain wrecked his face. “Have . . . you . . . heard . . . from . . . your . . . husband?” Every word sounded like a desperate struggle. This time he looked at Ellen as he spoke, but as soon as Ellen had shaken her head, Dimsdale stared at Beckstead. “Well . . . the mail . . . travels . . .” He coughed, just once at first, but then again, dropping the white cloth flecked with spots of blood, and falling back against the wood.
“Doctor . . .” Ellen brought her hand over her mouth.
The printer—Beckstead’s bunking mate, Patrick Walsh—stepped out of the office and put his right arm, covered with a black cotton sleeve stocking, around the editor’s shoulder.
“Ellen . . .” Beckstead looked at the woman. “Take Montana for the rest of your walk. I will call on you tomorrow evening unless Missus Martin tells me her daughter has another engagement.” He had already hired Grace, so he knew that wasn’t the case. “If Grace can’t come, I shall send word to you. No, no, don’t give me that look. I am your doctor, and Shakespeare has been prescribed. Fear not. I don’t think you will be called upon to play Lucy again.”
He watched her go, then stepped into the office, closing the door behind him.
* * *
“I asked . . . Patrick . . .” Dimsdale struggled with words and fought for breath. He must have lost ten pounds since Beckstead had seen him last. “To . . . tell you . . .”
“He told me, Professor,” Beckstead said.
The editor coughed again, swallowed, then spit, and groaned.
“What have you been eating?”
“Rye.”
“I said ‘eating,’ Professor.”
The dying man tried to smile. “Rye.” His head shook feebly. “All I . . . can keep . . . down. And I . . .” A full minute passed before he could finish the sentence. “Have . . . no . . . appe . . . tite.”
Without his grip, there was little Beckstead could do. But . . . even had he a stethoscope or probe, there was nothing he could do.
“I can bring you a bottle of laudanum,” Beckstead said after timing Dimsdale’s pulse and listening to the wheezes, the coughs.
“No.” Dimsdale again tried to smile. “The paper. It . . . requires . . . a mind . . . without . . . impairment.”
“But you still drink rye?” Beckstead shook his head.
“Rye is . . . an . . . editor’s . . . best . . . friend.”
Beckstead looked across the newsroom at Walsh, who shook his head, and went back to setting type. “I’ll call on you tomorrow morning,” Beckstead said. He walked to the door.
“Doctor?”
With his hand on the doorknob, Beckstead turned back to the editor.
“How . . . long?”
Beckstead’s frown worsened. “Months. If that. It depends on your will. But whiskey and a newspaper office, those do not help.”
“They . . . help me . . . Doctor.” He coughed again, but turned in his chair, bent his head to a piece of paper, and his right hand moved across the desk, searching for a pencil.
Ten minutes later, Seth Beckstead knocked on that familiar door. Ellen answered it and stepped back in surprise.
Removing his hat, Beckstead asked, “Ellen, can I talk to you?”
* * *
He never planned on telling her this. Rarely even thought he would say the words out loud.
Three times Thomas Dimsdale had sent word with the printer that he desired Beckstead to pay a house call at the newspaper or Dimsdale’s home. The first time, Beckstead had told Walsh, “He knows where I office. Have him come there,” and laughed off the Irishman’s reply, “He doesn’t want anyone to know how sick he is.”
Beckstead never went to the Montana Post. He wouldn’t have gone by there this day but he had not been thinking about anything but Ellen, the baby, the new carriage, the beautiful summer day.
“Aren’t you a doctor?” Ellen said, not angrily, though. She never judged anyone, not even that bastard she had married.
“I thought I was,” he said. Almost got up and left, not just the Story cabin, but Virginia City . . . Montana Territory . . . the western United States. “Till Antietam.”
It was not the kind of story you told a mother, or any woman. You might not even tell a priest. It was the story most doctors would take to their graves.
He remembered the dead on that warm afternoon. The horses were bad enough, but the men . . . or what had once been men . . . in blue, in gray, in butternut. You could hardly tell what uniforms they wore because of the flies, the maggots. Gas hissed from their mouths, ears, nostrils, and the wounds caused by musketry, bayonets, cannon. But these men were dead, bound for burial—and none too quickly.
Dr. Seth Beckstead had other woes. He and two other doctors had turned a farmhouse, the barn, the lean-to, into hospitals outside of Keedysville. Ambulances still brought in the wounded, some two days after the rebs had retreated back for Virginia.
“We took command of two of the ambulances,” Beckstead said. “Not to haul the wounded, or even the dead. To take away our trash.”
Trash. Fingers. Toes. Limbs. Arms, from the forearm if they were lucky, at the shoulder joint if they weren’t. Hands. Feet. Legs. A well-placed minié ball left a doctor with no choice but to amputate.
“Once I thought I was a doctor,” he said. “Once I thought I could save lives. At Antietam and for the rest of the war, I ruined lives. I crippled men. I was no surgeon, but a carpenter. Sawing. Sawing. Sawing.”
He remembered after one long stretch in what had been the formal parlor, the rugs and wooden floor now slick with blood, gore, water, he stepped away from the table to find coffee, good coffee, something that could keep him going, and found the floor littered with what he had taken off dozens of men. Before long, they had no quinine, no morphine, not even castor oil or adhesive plasters.
“I prayed for me to die before I stepped to the table to perform surgery. Surgery?” He laughed. “Butchery.”
He stopped, realizing how much he was saying, and tried to pull away, to apologize, to run to South America or the North Pole, but Ellen had her gentle hands around the back of his head, and she pulled him to her, let his head rest against her shoulder. And he sobbed without shame. He saw in Professor Thomas Dimsdale what he had seen in 1862 and for the years after that. A hopeless case. It was not what he thought he would see when he had left the University of Maryland.
His head rested against hers.
“It’s all right, Seth,” Ellen whispered.
He pulled away, just slightly, saw her eyes, filled with tears, and he leaned closer and kissed Ellen’s sweet lips.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Wind, sun, dust. That’s all they knew. Following the Smoky Hill Trail westward, then north and along the Big Blue. Just a short while back, Boone and others had prayed for the sun, begged for not one more day of clouds and rain. Now they thought it might never rain again. At least, Boone thought, they had water. The Big Blue still ran high.
He swung slowly, sorely, off the buckskin. Didn’t even remember unsaddling the gelding, or leading it to Sibrian, the new wrangler. After slapping the dust off his leggings, he made his legs move him toward the wagon, where José Pablo Tsoyio’s coffee told him that he was not in hell. Purgatory, perhaps. But not quite hell. When he saw Nelson Story walking back and forth, hands behind his back, shaking his head, Boone frowned.
If that hard-rock bastard tells me to
take first watch on the herd ...
Story didn’t.
When he saw Boone, he stopped pacing. He didn’t even glance at Jameson Hannah, riding in from the herd on his zebra dun. Instead, Story brought his hands to his sides and said, “Boone. Catch yourself a horse and ride back and find out what the hell is holding up those two cripples you hired as wagon drivers.” He pointed down the trail. The wind had blown away the dust from the longhorns, and Boone could see clearly in the darkening day the line of double-hitched freight wagons moving toward camp. Four teams of oxen, hauling two wagons each, with a bullwhacker walking alongside the oxen and a guard riding in one of the wagons, the sun reflecting off the Remington breechloader he held across his lap or braced on a leg or sack of grain or whatever.
The stragglers, not in view, would be the two drivers bringing along the single wagons of mostly supplies Story had ordered months before even beginning this damned cattle drive. Boone looked at the pot of coffee. Laughing, Hannah slid out of the saddle and extended the reins toward Boone. “Take my horse, Boone,” he said, and when Boone was mounted and riding out of the camp, Hannah added, “I’ll try to save a cup of coffee for you.”
“Boone.” Story’s voice stopped him. Twisting in the saddle, he saw the ramrod moving toward his horse, tethered to the tongue of the second wagon being driven by Bill Petty. Story reached into the driver’s box and pulled out one of the .56-50 Remingtons. He grabbed a box of ammunition, too, and started walking. “Better take these. Just in case.”
* * *
Two miles down the trail, he found the wagons. Moving like infantry, maybe even as slow as artillery. No Indians in sight. No busted axles or lame mules. Mickey McDonald cursed, and the wagons crawled along.
Boone kicked Hannah’s horse into a trot and rode up to the wagon being driven by Cory Bennett. “You best hurry. The boss is fuming.”
“Tell him to bugger off,” Cory said.
Turning the horse around, Boone rode alongside the wagon. “I don’t think I want to do that.” He looked back at Mickey McDonald, a good thirty yards behind Bennett’s wagon, then leaned closer to the driver’s box. “Why are you doing this?”
Bennett’s head jerked to the side. “Doing what?”
“Dressing up like a man.”
The eyes widened. Then Bennett laughed, used the whip on the mules, and shook her—not his—head. “Boy, you must be blind.”
“Maybe, but I’m not a fool.”
The head stared ahead, one hand on the whip, the other holding the lines.
“My name’s Cory Bennett. I’m a mule skinner. That’s all you need to know.”
Boone swore underneath his breath. “All right, Cory Bennett. But if you and your pard don’t get these wagons to camp soon, you’ll be out of work by the time we reach Fort Kearny. Story will replace you two in a heartbeat.” He kicked the gelding into a lope, but still heard Bennett’s one-word whisper: “Kearny.”
* * *
He didn’t ride too far ahead, and somehow Bennett and McDonald picked up the pace, dragging the mules and wagons into camp after sundown. Sure enough, here strode Nelson By God Story.
He had been angry with the two skinners for at least a week, always the last to show up in camp—a long time after the other wagons had arrived. Even when Story had started Bennett and McDonald at point, they dragged in last by the day’s end.
This time, he shoved Bennett against the wagon. “You keep dawdling like this and I’ll drive the damned wagon myself, and you and your filthy pard can walk back to Fort Riley or Hades for all I care. I’m damned tired of this . . .”
“Then give them mules that aren’t half-lame.”
Story whirled away from Bennett.
Well, Boone figured, he couldn’t blame anyone but himself . . . and his mouth. No sense in backing down. “You couldn’t drive that team any faster.”
“Boy, I’ll hitch you to the harness and let you pull these wagons.”
Boone laughed. “I believe we were at Ebbitt’s saloon in Washington City when you told those senators and that banker about how slow your mules were when you and your wife came up to Montana Territory. And before that how you hauled wood with one mule blind and the other mostly lame.”
“Boone.” Cory Bennett stepped away from the wagon. Story whirled, shoved Bennett back, hard into the wheel. And Boone made a beeline toward his boss.
A shrill whistle stopped him, and Story, and even Cory Bennett.
Mickey McDonald spit tobacco juice into the grass, wiped his mouth, and said, “Mr. Story, you hired us to get your wagons to camp every day, and every day we’ve gotten your wagons to camp. And we will continue to get your wagons to camp, Lord willing and Indians finding better pickings. But my pard and me will drive these mules so they won’t be slow-footed when we need them to run faster. They’s slow-footed enough.”
Boone waited. Story took his hand off the butt of one of his Navy Colts.
“Unhitch your mules, boys,” Lehman, the wagon boss, said. “Supper’s cold. There’s some coffee left, though.”
Boone started to take Hannah’s horse to the remuda.
“Boone.” This time it was Hannah who spoke. “Go ahead and keep Sad Sadie. You can spell Luke Beckner watching the herd.”
“And give that Remington back to Bill,” Story added.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
In the three-plus years in which Virginia City had been, officially, a town, the log cabin on Idaho Street had been a home, a brothel, a saloon, a hotel (with its two rooms and summer kitchen), a billiard hall, a home again, an apothecary, a barbershop, and, since April, a café. The food could best be described as adequate, but people came for the excellent coffee. And the wine selection.
By the time Ellen Story stopped in for coffee, Colonel Jack Langrishe had poured two glasses of his third bottle of Madeira, so he and his wife waved her and little Montana to join them. Now at the neighboring table, Jenette played peekaboo with little Montana, who cooed and laughed with blessed content in her top-line baby carriage, while Ellen sat across from Langrishe, well in his cups.
“We hope you shall return to our small city,” Ellen managed to say.
“Perhaps, dear Fluffy,” Langrishe said. “Perhaps.”
“Lucy,” Jenette corrected, and put her hands over her eyes, grinning with the beauty of a fine actress, then jerking the hands away, her face radiant, and telling Montana, “I . . . seeeeeee . . . youuuuuu.”
Sweet, precious baby Alice Montana Story giggled with a baby’s delight.
The theatrical troupe’s leader put his elbows on the table—Ellen’s mother would have thrown a fit over that—and leaned forward, winked, his eyes suddenly lecherous. He said, “Well, little darling, I wish I could talk you into joining our jovial group of thespians. Helena in a few days. Boise. Salt Lake City. Then back to our base in Denver.”
Ellen made herself smile. “I am a mother, Colonel.”
After guzzling, he splashed more red wine into the goblet, spilling more onto the table, and slurped the Madeira. “Dear Missus Puf—Lucy. Did you not have a grand time reading lines with the greatest theatrical troupe west of the . . . some damned river?” His eyes lost focus, became glassy, finally locked on to Ellen again. Out of the corner of Ellen’s eye, she saw Jenette turn away from the baby and beam vehemence toward her husband. Ellen knew that look. Jenette was telling John “Jack” Langrishe to close his mouth and not utter one more syllable. Ellen had given Nelson similar, silent messages, though not because her husband was intoxicated, just being an ass. She also knew the hopelessness of such tactics.
“Wasn’t it, sweetheart?”
“Jack,” Jenette whispered, trying to keep control.
“It was one of the highlights of my life, Colonel.” Ellen wished she had stayed home and brewed her own coffee. “I do love the theater.”
“You should start one, sweetheart. And you’re damned right it was a highlight for you, appearing with my colleagues and me. God knows, honey
, that fellow of yours . . .”
“Jack.” Jenette’s frigid eyes matched her voice.
But the colonel had his wine, a lot of wine, and his ears needed a good cleansing. “. . . hell, he paid enough for it.”
“Excuse me.” Ellen challenged Jenette’s tone.
Red wine dribbled onto the front of the colonel’s white silk shirt. He wiped his mouth with his right arm, staining the sleeve as well. His wife slumped into her chair and sighed. “You stupid bastard,” she said.
Leaning into Langrishe’s face, Ellen demanded, “What do you mean?”
“Why . . . nothing . . . child.”
“What do you mean?”
The actor looked to his wife for help. Instead, he got this: “Tell her the truth, before she beats it out of you.”
Colonel Jack Langrishe wet his lips, wiped his brow, and finished his glass of wine. He tried to smile, stopped quickly, tried to straighten, and finally leaned forward, resting his chin on the bridge he formed with his hands.
“It was merely a . . . a . . . a good . . . deed. Your . . . we . . . we thought it . . . considering your love for the boards . . . we thought . . . you see.” He looked like an actor who had completely forgotten his lines and realized none of his friends on the stage was willing to help him through this nightmare. So Langrishe looked away from Ellen and at his wife.
“The son of a bitch,” Jenette said, “took up your beau’s offer. That doc paid the stupid prig to pick you to play the part of Lucy. Oh, Lenore was drunk enough. She always is. But she decided to let you take over the role. For the good of our troupe, and for the glory of your town.” She smiled. “You were quite good, though.”
“I see.” Ellen bowed to the woman. “Thank you for your honesty and kindness.” She did not look at Langrishe, but grabbed the handle to the carriage and left the café, bound for Dr. Seth Beckstead’s office, until she remembered he would likely be paying a call on Professor Dimsdale. Good. That was closer, and more convenient.
A Thousand Texas Longhorns Page 28
