Her saloon was Trinidad’s golden eyesore, though when the Sante Fe spur came in that would undoubtedly change. For now, the Victory served the town’s population of three-hundred-some just fine, with plenty of trade coming from cowhands and others affiliated with the ranches in San Miguel County. And as for the railroad spur, she was confident her establishment, one of the finest of its kind in the Southwest, would fare well with whatever competition might come.
Running the biggest, fanciest watering hole in a boom town wouldn’t be bad at all.
From the towering embossed steel ceiling with its kerosene-lamp chandeliers to gold-and-black brocaded walls ridden decoratively by saddles and spurs, the Victory was a palace of gambling and drink. Witness the gleaming oaken bar with its bow-tie-sporting bartenders, in back of whom nestled bottle upon bottle of bourbon along room-expanding mirrors. Cowboys and clerks lined up at the bar, with its hanging towels ready to remove foam from mustaches and a brass foot rail interrupted by occasional spittoons for the deposit of tobacco juice.
Mostly, though, the Victory was a casino, complete with dice, roulette, chuck-a-luck, and wheel of fortune. At the far end on a platform, a piano player contributed lively honky-tonk for a tiny dance floor, where grimy cowboys pawed powdered dance hall girls, but didn’t get very far, not since Rita shut down the foofaraw house upstairs.
Up front, opposite the bar, were the tables where customers sat drinking, a pair of gaming tables beyond that. House dealer Yancy Cole, in his standard riverboat gambler attire, dealt faro, as he often did. At the other table, Caleb York and several City Council members were playing stud poker without a house dealer, as was their wont, and with no cut to the Victory either—a harmless payoff to the city fathers. These tables were positioned near the stairway to the second floor, which had been remodeled strictly into Rita’s private quarters.
Rita had never imagined this life for herself. She’d grown up in Houston, where she’d done the books for her father’s modest blacksmith shop. On her papa’s death, her sister, Lola, inherited the smithy, which she sold, then came to Trinidad and opened the Victory in partnership with the notorious Sheriff Harry Gauge. That had left Rita in Houston to eke out an existence as a waitress in bars and cantinas. Lola had promised to send for her little sis, but months passed without that happening.
That Rita might inherit a business so fine and profitable as the Victory had come as a surprise. But following as it had upon her sister Lola’s tragic murder at Gauge’s hands was a shock. Not long before her death, Lola had written her about Caleb York and it was clear her older sister had an interest in the man.
And now the younger sister did.
York had shown plenty of interest in Rita, too, but not the marrying kind, or even the one-woman variety that Willa Cullen had inspired in the man, which fed marriage rumors around town. What Rita and York had was more a friendship, the kind that included trips upstairs to her private quarters that sometimes lasted overnight.
Those nights had tended to come when York and the Cullen girl had fallen out over something or other, which had occurred several times, if not often enough for the saloon owner to think one of these interludes might turn into a concerto.
Tonight something was different with Caleb. For one thing, he’d already been drinking when he came around. He was not a man to drink heavily. She’d even queried about his caution with drink.
“Is it something that was a problem once?” she’d asked him upstairs, a while back. “Something you had to get shy of?”
“No. I like a drink. But it’s like smoking.”
Smoking he also avoided, only rarely rolling one or lighting up a cigar. Not never. Yet rare.
“How is it like smoking?” she asked.
“Smokers whose pouch runs empty—or are in circumstances where they shouldn’t partake, like on a stagecoach with ladies present—can get nervous-like. Get the shakes, the way drinking men do, if they can’t lay hands on the stuff.”
“Some feel it’s a price to pay for the enjoyment.”
“They aren’t men with my reputation. They aren’t in my line of work. I need to be steady of eye and hand, Rita, if I aim to stay alive.”
But right now, York—who almost always won at poker and when he didn’t seemed at least easily able to break even—was losing. Not hand over fist, but getting money taken by the likes of Mayor Hardy, banker Burnell, druggist Davis, and even Harris, mediocre players all.
She had strolled over a couple of times and perceived the problem. He was betting recklessly—not betting big, just not paying attention. Few men she’d ever known had the focus of the tall legend that was Caleb York. Right now the only thing legendary about him was the way he seemed able to put away whiskey without falling off that chair.
The game broke up just after midnight, but Caleb was still sitting there, shuffling the cards. That he was able to do so after all that drink was impressive, but after a time he stopped shuffling and just sat and stared.
She took the chair next to him. “Caleb, why don’t you come upstairs with me?”
His eyes went to her. He smiled. “Best offer I had all night.”
He got up and she took his arm, just to be sure, and he took the rail with one hand and let her guide him by holding on to him at right. She was impressed by how steady he seemed.
She walked him to her bathroom—she had indoor plumbing (the customers got the privies out back)—and he stumbled in, and when the door closed, it sounded like a horse relieving himself in there.
Then, in the bedroom of her suite, with furnishings she’d had shipped in from Denver, she helped him out of his coat, gun belt, and boots, and onto the big brass canopied bed with satin spread, flounces, and pillows. He was already half asleep, and an anomaly in this determinedly feminine room with its walnut furnishings, velvet curtains, and loomed rugs with flowery designs.
The bed was big enough for two and she got undressed and put on her nightgown and curled up beside him. He smelled like whiskey. Generally, he smelled bad.
But here he was, and she had him all to herself.
And yet she had heard the rumors about the conflict between Victoria Hammond and Willa Cullen. Somehow that played into this. Was he in this condition, and here in her bedroom, because things were again amiss between him and Willa?
She didn’t care. She just didn’t care. She had him. And this time she would keep him. She fell asleep, filled with an oddly hysterical joy.
Then in the middle of the night, he spoke in his sleep, dreaming.
One word.
“Willa,” he said.
With whom Rita suddenly had something in common, too, because she was another strong woman in tears.
CHAPTER TEN
Deputy Sheriff Jonathan P. Tulley had never been versed in the notion of three meals a day, till of late.
Back in his prospecting days, the staples of his diet had been coffee, hardtack, and jerky. And since he’d come to Trinidad two years or more ago, when he was living under the boardwalk, he’d settled for what scraps he could wangle from back of the café and the hotel restaurant.
After he got himself cleaned up and dried out, thanks to Caleb York, Tulley had got that job sweeping out and doing general chores and such at the livery stable, where blacksmith Clem Hansen shared his stew and chili beans and such like, midday, which was generally enough to keep a skinny creature like Tulley going. And did that Clem make a mean cornbread! The smoke of it cooking had darn near drowned out the manure smell.
But these here days, Tulley was a working man, with a monthly paycheck and clean clothes, and a once-a-month customer at the bathhouse behind the mayor’s barbershop, where he also got his whiskers and what growth remained on top of his skull tended to. Even got splashed with bay rum, and the barbering mayor used some kind of daubing stick on wherever Tulley got nicked.
These things the deputy settled up for out of his pay, and happy to; but other things were what Caleb York called “perquisites.” The main
one of these was the three meals a day Tulley partook of, which were the cause of the small paunch he was growing that was challenging the button at the front of his store-bought britches.
The café donated his breakfast, eggs, and taters and a biscuit or sometimes oatmeal and cornbread (not as good as Clem’s, however). This privilege came because the folks running the place was paid for serving up food for the jailhouse prisoners, which San Miguel County didn’t have any of right now. Tulley would partake of that fare, in such cases. Visitors to the calaboose only et twice a day, though—coffee in the morning was all they got. Maybe some hardtack, if they had the teeth for it.
The restaurant at the hotel let Tulley have a plate of things they had left at closing, which tallied with when he started his nightly rounds. The dining room was closed and they let him sit in that fancy space all by hisself, chowing down on beef and more taters and even sometimes pie. This was fare he was used to, as he’d often sampled their menu in his under-the-boardwalk days, taking potluck out of the refuse can. The hotel folk was always nice to him back then, letting him sit on the rear stoop and just help himself. They even thanked him—said it helped keep the dogs away.
So that was breakfast and supper. And in between was lunch over to the Victory. The saloon served up free cold cuts to drinking men, also yellow cheese, rye bread, celery stalks, pretzels, peanuts, smoked herring, and dill pickles, all good and salty, to make a body good and thirsty. Now in Tulley’s case, being on the wagon as he was, “drink” only meant coffee or maybe sarsaparilla, but Miss Rita didn’t charge him nothing for either of them.
This perquisite stuff weren’t a’tall bad, he told himself.
Things were slow at the Victory, even for a weekday, as Tulley sat at one of the tables opposite the bar, tended to only by Hub Wainright currently. Just a handful of cowboys was on hand, though a good share of clerks and such on their lunch hours were tossin’ back a beer or two with their free lunch.
The deputy sat alone, just nibbling at the cold cuts and cheese, barely chomping on the celery, hardly tasting the dill pickle, even if it did make his eyes water.
Caleb York had not been in to work today.
Not yet. The desk in the office had sat empty all morning. Tulley hadn’t got worried till about ten. The sheriff often took his time coming in, particularly when they didn’t have any guests checked in to the “Hoosegow Hotel.” Like now.
For a man who didn’t talk much, Caleb York had a sociable side. He would stop in at stores and see how folks was doing, find out if any trouble were afoot. Stop by businesses like the bank and the undertaker’s, maybe stick his head in at the Enterprise newspaper, if he was irritated with the editor at the time.
But Tulley had stopped in at most of those places himself today, asking after the sheriff, and nobody said they’d seen him. And Tulley himself hadn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon, when his boss said he was riding out to see the Hammond woman.
Now, he had a way with the ladies, Caleb York did, and Tulley had heard tell the Hammond woman was a fine figure of a handsome female of the species, which could mean that was where the randy, badge-wearing so-and-so may well have spent the night.
But it wasn’t likely he’d wound up at the hotel, and his room there, because Wilson, the chinless clerk, said he hadn’t seen the sheriff, not last evening nor this morning. And the stairs were right next to the check-in desk.
Of course, Miss Willa lived out that general direction, and that was probably the answer. Several times in recent weeks, Caleb York had stayed out to the Bar-O till dawn, or anyway so Tulley figured (not wanting to pry). So probably nothing to worry about.
Probably.
Problem was, Caleb York lived an eventful kind of life, and Tulley could not stop his imagination from bucking like a bronco. Never mind the tales they told about the sheriff in his Wells Fargo days, or what they wrote about in the dime novels—that man attracted trouble like Tulley had attracted fleas under the boardwalk. Since Caleb York rode in town a stranger, the deputy had been at that man’s side, fighting outlaws and other no-goods, enough times to challenge any gun-fighting lawman’s reputation—and all in under a year!
Tulley wouldn’t have believed half of it if he hadn’t suffered through most of it.
Still, it weren’t like the man couldn’t handle hisself. Nothing to worry about.
Tulley picked up a piece of pickled herring and tossed it in his pie hole and chewed, then swallowed. Not a thing to worry about. Nossir.
Then he noticed Miss Rita, leaning against the bar like just another cowboy, watching him. This time of day she rarely was seen in one of them fancy gowns. Wearing no face paint whatsoever, she was covered up, neck to floor, in a light blue blouse with puffy sleeves and a black walking skirt.
His mouth full of yellow cheese, Tulley smiled and nodded to the proprietess, and she came over, walking nice and easy, smiling the same way. Minus the cheese.
Miss Rita pulled a chair out and sat herself down. In that silky voice of hers, she said, “I bet you’re wondering what’s become of Caleb York.”
Tulley felt his face go red. Lunch wasn’t the only reason he’d come, and in fact he was in here an hour earlier than was typical. Caleb York having a way with the ladies included Miss Rita Filley, and the sheriff had spent more than one night upstairs in the quarters where this beauteous saloon gal lay herself down at night.
But that hadn’t happened for a while, not since Caleb York and Miss Willa let word out they was preparing to wed. The sheriff had standards and morals and such, and that was among the virtues Jonathan P. Tulley admired in the man, near as much as he admired the way Caleb York could put bad men in the ground.
She folded her hands, which had long, tapering fingers, and leaned forward, confidential-like.
“Caleb’s fine, Mr. Tulley,” she said.
Tulley let out a sigh that began at the tips of the toes of his boots. “I am right glad to hear that, Miss Rita. Right glad.”
“He’s upstairs now, as it happens,” she said, with a nod in that direction. “Sleeping it off.”
The deputy frowned at her in puzzlement. “Sleepin’ what off?”
That seemed to amuse her. “I would think you, of all people, would know what it means to sleep it off, Mr. Tulley.”
His frown dug deeper. “Ye shorely cannot mean that the sheriff drank hisself under the table.”
She pointed past the deputy. “No, he stayed upright in a chair at that table right there . . . where he was playing with the mayor and a few others. He was losing, by the way.”
Tulley cocked his head. “Losin’ what?”
“Money. At poker.”
He reared back a tad. “I suppose that happens to the best of ’em.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Caleb York lose to the likes of Clem Davis and Newt Harris? And banker Burnell?”
Tulley thought about it. “Probably jes’ gettin’ their guard down, ’fore he pounced.”
Rita smirked. “If by ‘pounced’ you mean losing several hundred dollars to them, then yes. He sat there drinking and losing all evening, until I walked him upstairs and he flopped on the bed, asleep or passed out. Either way, he’s still out.”
The deputy was shaking his head. “Jes’ had hisself a bad night.”
She bobbed her head toward the bar. “It’s been slow here, but a few cowpokes stopped by. Funny how after getting a few beers in ’em, those boys do talk. Worse than a bunch of gossiping old women.”
“Ain’t they, though—they go on ’bout anythin’ tickler?”
She nodded, her pretty dark eyes half-lidded now. “You’ve heard the rumors about hired guns signing on with both Willa Cullen and the Hammond woman?”
He nodded back, forcefully. “I have. I be the very one tol’ the sheriff! That’s why he headed out to the Circle G yesterdee.”
She sighed, and there was no sign of amusement in that pretty face now. “That goes along with what I heard from those cowhands. Talk is, small ar
mies from both camps were lined up yesterday along the opposite banks of Sugar Creek . . . and that one of the Bar-O riders was shot and killed.”
“Oh my.”
“Someone called Clements, a gunfighter.”
Tulley grunted. “Not much of a one, t’would seem.”
“Well, he was up against the best.”
“Oh my!” Tulley squinted at her. “Caleb York shot one of Miz Cullen’s hirelings! Why would he do such a thing?”
“Apparently Clements shot first.”
“. . . That’d do it.” Tulley mulled some. “So after that sad state of affairs, the legend sits down and punishes hisself, losin’ to his lessers, and then gets soused to the gills like there weren’t no t’morrow.”
Her eyes were wide now. “Well, there is a tomorrow, and this is it—but he still hasn’t come down.”
The deputy pushed away his plate, which was empty, and got to his feet. “Wal, some fool’s got to be the law in Trinidad till he gets hisself up and around.”
Tulley started to stalk out, but reaching the batwing doors, he paused and looked back at the lovely saloon owner. “You inform that Caleb York that Jonathan P. Tulley was in! That I will be at my post. You tell him so!”
She smiled gently. “I will, Deputy. I will.”
Back inside the adobe jailhouse, Tulley stewed and paced, and paced and stewed. His general pattern in the afternoon was to take a nap in one of the cells—he lived out of the kind of beat-up old suitcase cowboys called a cooster, which he would transport to whatever accommodations might be free in the little cellblock. He preferred the lockup right off the office, and mostly used that as his casa, but sometimes Caleb York had a prisoner in-house who he wanted to keep a close eye on.
Having somewhere warm to sleep with a roof over his head, other than hay in a stall over at the livery, was a perquisite Tulley quite relished. The cots were right comfortable, and most afternoons he fell asleep as soon as he settled. Today, with his mind ajitter with worry over Caleb York’s situation, Tulley took an endless near three minutes of tossing and turning before nodding off.
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) Page 12
