by Anya Seton
The carpenter’s wife gave a cry of surprise, and everyone near her crowded around to look. They were impressed, and even the few sophisticated ones, who thought of signals or collusion, could find no evidence of it.
Before Terry could select the next candidate, there was a disturbance in front by the wagon; a girl scarcely older than Fey flounced into the cleared space. She wore a shoddy green silk dress and her elaborately bleached hair towered under a creation of green velvet and ostrich feathers. ‘Say, I’ve seen this trick before and better done,’ she cried, addressing the crowd in a nasal voice; ‘seen it in Buffalo, seen it in Noo Orleans. Come on, girlie ’—she turned to Fey—‘ think you’re so smart, tell me something your pal over there in the phoney beard don’t know.’
‘Atta girl, Belle! ’ cried some of the soldiers. Belle had been on her way to the new mining camps in Colorado, and had reached Fort Lyon when her protector disappeared. Since then she had drifted down to the various Western army posts.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’ said Fey.
‘Tell me my reel name, the one I was born with, for there ain’t no one in the world knows it now, and it’s God’s truth I’ve near forgot it myself,’ said Belle, tossing her ringlets and delighted to have captured everyone’s attention.
Fey stared at the girl steadily. ‘Your name,’ she said, so low that only those nearest heard, ‘was Minnie Hawkins—I think.’
The girl gave a frightened gasp and backed away. ‘How in hell did you know that? ’ she whispered, staring at the small figure on the wagon.
Fey did not answer; she looked into the shallow blue eyes upturned to hers and felt a sharp pity. ‘Your lungs are sick,’ she said gently. ‘You know it, don’t you? You’ve been spitting blood. You must see a doctor.’
Belle put her hand slowly to her mouth; under the purple rouge her skin grew clay-colored. Terry arrived up front in time to hear Fey’s last speech. ‘Exactly,’ he cried heartily. ‘And Doctor Dillon’s Elixir is just the thing for you.’ He whisked a bottle off the wagon and held it out to the terrified girl.
‘No!’ cried Fey, involuntarily, ‘that won’t do any——’
Terry gave her a furious look. ‘Only one dollar, my beauty,’ he said to Belle. ‘Positively fix you up.’
Belle shook her head in a dazed way. She gathered her gaudy shawl tight about her thin shoulders and walked slowly off alone toward her tent behind the arsenal.
‘Get inside!’ snapped Terry to Fey, anxious that she should not ruin any more sales, and when the girl obeyed him, he mounted the wagon and began to sell Elixir.
A few people had heard the conversation between Belle and Fey, and these murmured to others near them. At first, only one or two came up, embarrassed, and hastily plunked down a silver dollar; then, under the influence of Terry’s voice and by the usual process of mass suggestion, they came more quickly. Soon all the fifty bottles which Terry had optimistically prepared were sold. He announced this sad fact and sang ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ for them by way of finale. The crowd gradually drifted away and Terry went into the wagon.
‘We’re in the money!’ he cried, flinging his hat and beard into the comer. ‘Fifty elegant shiny cartwheels, never did as well before!’ He poured them into a silver pile on the cot beside Fey. ‘Nearly clear profit, for I used mighty little whiskey in this batch. Have to get hold of some more bottles pretty soon, though. Still, you’d be surprised what the junk piles’ll yield, once we get back to civilized towns.’
It occurred to him that the girl was very quiet. She had not looked at the heap of dollars. She had taken off her cotton roses and sash, rebraided her hair, and sat on the extreme edge of the cot’s foot.
‘You did mighty well,’ said Terry amiably. ‘I’ll get you some decent duds in the morning. When we get the act polished up a bit, there’s no telling what bonanzas we might hit back East. One thing, though; you mustn’t go telling the customers the Elixir won’t help ’em, my dear.’
‘But it won’t,’ said Fey tonelessly. ‘And when they’re really sick, like that girl Belle, it’s terrible to pretend it will.’
‘Suffering Saints!’ cried Terry. ‘It won’t hurt them either. Do a lot of ’em good if they believe in it. It’s human nature to believe in something you’ve paid a whole dollar for. My God, Fey, I wish you’d quit balking all the time; you’re worse than the mules. You wanted money, and now we’re getting it. If you do what I tell you, we’ll get rich. Plenty of fortunes started from smaller beginnings than this. Look at old Astor, he began by peddling furs and cheating the Indians; look at Vanderbilt, hired himself out in a sailboat, or Jim Fisk. There’s a buccaneer for you!’ Terry had forgotten Fey, who he knew very well would recognize none of these names. Exhilaration produced by the show’s success and several swigs of ‘Taos lightning’ had released one of Terry’s dominant interests. With vague but steadily strengthening ambition he had followed every newspaper mention of Eastern financiers. They had all begun in the humblest of ways, but amongst them now, they controlled pretty nearly all the big money in the country. And they had done it by a mixture of opportunism, shrewdness, and guts. That’s all you need, thought Terry, exultantly, and I’ll bet I’m on my way.
He took another drink and reverted to speech. Solitary musings soon bored him. ‘There’s Simeon Tower, too. I read a piece about him in the Salt Lake paper. He isn’t forty yet, but they say he holds the New York Stock Exchange in the palm of his hand. Every time he winks, it goes up, and every time he spits, it goes down. And what was he doing twenty years ago?’
Fey knew this to be a rhetorical question. She had no means of knowing that Simeon Tower would ever be more to her than an obtrusive name, repugnant because by means of it Terry was blithely escaping from the subject which profoundly disturbed her—the rightness of selling Elixir to the sick—into interests which she did not share.
After a moment Terry answered himself. ‘ Why, this Simeon Tower was nothing but a hotel waiter, and they say he made his first extra dollars by fixing the clients up with fancy women on the side. So you see,’ said Terry, returning to the point after all and giving her the surprisingly warm coaxing smile that was his greatest charm, ‘you can’t be too squeamish, my pet, if you want to be a millionaire. One way’s as good as another, and I promise you, when the time comes for us to part, you’ll get a fair slice of the take.’
‘When the time comes for us to part,’ thought Fey. And she thought, too, of her confident speeches to La Gertrudis. She turned slowly and looked at Terry. By the light of their one candle, his red head flamed against the canvas wall of the wagon. His legs were crossed and he sprawled beside her with his usual effect of long-limbed ease. From his body came the odor of tobacco and leather; stronger than these was the indefinable flavor of young virility.
‘It’s about time we repeated that kiss,’ murmured Terry, his eyelids drooping. ‘I enjoyed the sample this afternoon and so did you.’
As she did not move or speak, his muscles taughtened. He grabbed her roughly and, forcing her head back, began to kiss her mouth and her throat.
In the midst of his mounting passion, Terry had room for annoyance. She was as inert and limp under his kisses as a dead kitten. None of the swift response she had shown before.
And suddenly, though she made no sound, tears welled down her cheeks and into his mouth, and she began to cry with the hopeless abandon of a hurt child.
He straightened, releasing her, so that her head fell to the cot.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he shouted at her. ‘What’s the matter with you? I thought you liked me.’
She made a great effort and controlled her sobs. ‘I do,’ she whispered. ‘I love you, but you don’t love me.’
Terry straightened and looked down at her. Huddled on the cot, her cheeks wet and her mouth quivering, she looked about twelve. All her coolly poised little manner, her self-contained dignity, had vanished. She seemed completely defenseless.
‘Oh, my God!’ cri
ed Terry, moved by exasperation and something else which he didn’t want to feel. He picked up his sombrero and the bottle of Taos lightning. ‘Here, you can have the cot tonight. I’ll find some place for myself. Some place more amusing.’ He stalked through the canvas flaps and jumped lightly over the wheel. She heard the diminishing sound of his footsteps on the gravel of the parade ground.
After a while Fey straightened full length on the cot, pulled her shawl over her, and tried to think. It was neither virtue nor morality which made her deny herself to Terry, for whom her body yearned. That type of morality was seldom considered in the Barrio Analco. There you naturally slept with a man if both you and he wanted it. If there was enough money to pay the priest and get the sanction of the Church, why, that was all the better, but by no means essential. Many of the happiest couples had never dreamed of bothering the padre about their union, and until the coming of Bishop Lamy and the reform, the attitude had been reciprocal. But Fey knew that the Americanos felt differently. La Gertrudis, who had had so much experience, felt differently. She had been bathed in grateful tears for days when her Manuel at last decided to marry her.
But these considerations would not have deterred Fey if she had felt that Terry loved her. As it was, she knew that she would soon lose him if she yielded. But they could not go on indefinitely like this either. She lay on her back, staring through the darkness at the grimy canvas roof. As often, when she was alone, her fingers closed around the turquoise pendant. It had much of the same texture and smoothness as her own flesh, but it was colder than her skin. Contact with the stone gave her a tingling awareness in her fingertips. The awareness reached her conscious mind in the form of a question. ‘ Sometimes I see hidden things for others—why can’t I do it for myself? ’ And she calmed her mind to the listening stillness and waited for the golden light—the feeling of certainty. It did not come.
Instead, confused, vaguely menacing, images drifted through her mind, and her heart grew heavy with apprehension. After a while her fingers relaxed, dropping the turquoise. She gave a painful sigh and fell asleep.
She dreamed that she was alone in the desert, lost and unhappy, wandering without purpose. And as she stumbled along, she heard herself crying; a thin, monotonous sound. Suddenly she was no longer alone. A man walked beside her, and there was great comfort in his presence. She could not see his face, but she heard his voice. ‘Turn back,’ he said. ‘Turn back with me. You and I must go up there.’ And he pointed behind them to a mountain which she knew to be Atalaya, though it looked different from Atalaya. Much sharper and steeper, and its sides jagged with rocks.
‘It’s too steep,’ she said, but she hesitated beside the stranger, feeling closeness to him and a poignant sympathy. Then the scene changed. On the horizon she saw a single high cottonwood tree. ‘There’s a spring there by that tree,’she cried. ‘I’m very thirsty.’ And she rushed over the desert, leaving her companion behind. Beneath the tree beside the spring, Terry was waiting for her. He laughed, holding out his arms as she ran toward him. Panting and desirous, she threw herself against him.
Fey stirred and awoke. In the first semi-waking moment she knew fear. Then a cock crowed lustily from a near-by back yard, and one of the mules gave an answering bray. The fear vanished and was replaced by a vivid sensual bliss. And her body reproduced for her the dream sensation of her rush into Terry’s arms.
Chapter Six
WHEN TERRY reappeared the next morning, he brought a man with him, a gnarled, bearded specimen of a rapidly vanishing type—the frontier scout.
‘This is Sam Bridges/ announced Terry brusquely; ‘going to ride with us up through Raton Pass.’ And he added, in a malicious aside to Fey, ‘He can be our chaperon, my dear.’
‘Pleased to meetcha, ma’am/ said Sam, lifting his coonskin cap one inch. ‘ Glad of the lift. Want to get back home to the Colorady Springs before them Goddam Utes goes on the warpath again.’ He shifted his tobacco quid, shot a brown stream at the mules’ hoofs, and laid his rifle on the wagon seat.
‘Utes going on the warpath? ’ inquired Terry. He knew that it was reckless to start up through Raton alone, even though it was a much safer route than the Cimarron crossing. Prudence would suggest waiting a day or two in Fort Union until they could attach themselves to one of the regular wagon trains. But Terry did not consider it; he could not have endured plodding along behind the oxen for a daily trek of twelve or fifteen miles when the mules could often do fifty. And though the extra gun might turn out to be useful, Terry had not included the filthy old scout from any prudent motives; he had invited him into the wagon with the idea of punishing Fey.
‘Been some trouble in Trinidad at the horse-races ’twixt the Injuns and the Mex greasers—• beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,’ said Sam delicately—his rheumy eyes had shown him a little Mexican wench and the Mexes didn’t like being called greasers—‘but the fuss’ll likely smooth down. Uncle Dick Wootton’ll handle them Utes, like he’s done before.’
‘That the man who built the tollroad over Raton?’ Terry asked.
Sam nodded. ‘With luck, we’ll spend tomorrow night at his hotel to the top o’ the pass.’
‘We better get going, then,’ said Terry. He hitched up Calvin and Harriet, drove around the parade ground to Cunner’s Emporium. He reached in his pocket. ‘ Here,’ he said roughly to Fey, ‘get yourself something decent to wear.’
Fey looked at the fifteen silver dollars in Terry’s big hand. Her first instinct was to refuse them; she liked neither the way they had been earned nor the method of presentation. On the other hand, she knew that, as they left Spanish country behind, her tattered clothes would become increasingly outlandish, and Sam’s contemptuous ‘greaser’ had stung.
She cupped her two hands and silently received the heavy load of silver. Then she slowly entered the emporium. Merchandise was scarce and high-priced on the Trail, and there were, of course, no ready-made dresses. She would have failed of any purchase except a needle and spool of thread if Mrs. Cunner, the storekeeper’s wife, had not been touched by Fey’s obvious disappointment. ‘You poor little thing,’she said. ‘You sure do need some good Christian duds. Nice girl like you don’t want to be going around half nekkid.’ And she found for Fey some black strapped slippers, cotton stockings, and solved the dress problem with a second-hand but serviceable calico, a soft blue, sprigged in yellow, made with a tight high bodice and long skirts. ‘ ’Twas meant for a bigger woman, dearie,’ said Mrs. Cunner, ‘but it’s all I can give you and you can take it in a mite.’
Fey thanked her, added at her guide’s suggestion a packet of hairpins, and returned to the wagon with her bundles.
All that day Fey stayed inside the wagon, altering the sprigged cotton dress as best she could. Her task was hard because she had only the barest knowledge of sewing and the wagon bumped and joggled continually in the deep but—at present—mercifully dry ruts of the Santa Fe Trail.
The two men sat in front and talked across a bottle of whiskey which stood on the seat between them. The whiskey had little effect on Terry, but old Sam gradually became garrulous and maudlin.
In the afternoon, after they had forded the Cimarron Creek and were rattling along the level sagebrush plain, Sam began to see Utes hiding behind every mound and hillock. Much time was lost while he took shots at distant objects which later turned out to be stones or sagebrush, or even in one case an inquisitive prairie dog.
Thus they did not reach Maxwell’s hospitable ranch that night, as they had hoped, but camped again in the open. At suppertime Fey quietly appeared in her new dress, and her braids were no longer hanging but pinned neatly around her head. Both men were startled at the change.
‘Tasty little piece,’ mumbled Sam. ‘Don’t look like a greaser no more.’ And he sidled up to Fey and gave her a tentative pinch on the arm. She turned her head and sent him a long cool stare. The old mountaineer’s hand dropped and he spat nervously at a mesquite stump.
Terry’s reaction wa
s scarcely more complicated. He, too, wanted to touch her, but she now seemed to him really unattainable. With shoes and stockings and a long skirted calico and her hair up, she looked like any respectable American girl and this effect automatically released the ingrained chivalry with which all Western men were early taught to view those valuable, because rare, specimens on the frontier. Moreover, he noticed for the first time the proud carriage of her head, the fineness not only of her ankles but of her wrists. It occurred to him that her wild tale of aristocratic blood might have some foundation. In common with the rest of the country, Terry shared a grudging awe of lineage and established ancestry. They didn’t mean anything, of course, in a democracy, but all the same they added value. This disconcerted him, and during the rest of the two days before they reached the top of Raton Pass, he was unusually quiet. All the last afternoon the tired mules plodded up the long steep grades. Not nearly as long nor as steep as they had been before Richens Wootton gave up freighting and Indian fighting to start a highly successful business enterprise. Two years ago he had obtained charters from Colorado and New Mexico and proceeded to build his famous tollroad over Raton Pass—the roughest and hardest part of the entire trail. Greatly improved though it was, it remained a difficult pull, and the men and Fey walked most of the time to spare the animals. Her feet swelled and ached in the confinement of shoes. Often she was tempted to take them off, but she had seen the effect on Terry of her new type of clothes and she was unwilling to lose any advantage.
At dusk they finally reached the crest and ‘ Uncle Dick ’ Wootton’s hotel, an overgrown log and adobe cabin beside a stream. Along the rooftree ran a large sign, ‘ Wootton & McBride, Lodging, Supplies,’ an incongruous commercial note which usually delighted travelers surfeited by wilderness scenery and mountain grandeur.
Even more businesslike was the tollgate which barred the road. The mules stopped of their own accord, and Harriet, resting her head over the top bar, gave a mournful weary bray. At once Uncle Dick himself strode out of his house. ‘Howdy, folks,’ he called, his shrewd good-natured face beaming. ‘ One-fifty’ll get you through. You aiming to stop here tonight, or go on and camp out? Don’t advise it, though. Injuns on the Colorady side’re kinda restless just now. Got a big party of ’em here for a powwow.’
