by Pamela Morsi
Henry Lee and Hannah were almost late getting back to their train and had to grab their bags and run the last few steps. They were flushed and laughing like children when they finally found their seats.
A stiff matron seated across the aisle gave them a withering look of disapproval.
"We're on our honeymoon," Henry Lee told her, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear. Hannah blushed and lowered her eyes. When she looked up again in embarrassment, she saw that everyone in the car was watching them with tolerant approval and smiling at their private happiness. It must have been contagious, because Hannah found that she could no longer be embarrassed, she was just too pleased.
They arrived in Muskogee a little after four. The train station, just off Okmulgee Street, was brightly colored and welcoming, and there were so many people coming and going it nearly made Hannah dizzy to watch.
In an instinctive gentlemanly gesture, Henry Lee took her arm and guided her through the milling crowds toward the center of town. Hannah stared in big-eyed wonder at all the new sights, but then tried determinedly not to look impressed. She wouldn't want everyone to think she was some country bumpkin who'd never seen a city before.
“Is it always like this?" Hannah asked, as she watched a bright red kerosene wagon inch around the comer, barely missing a bicycle headed in the wrong direction.
"Sometimes it's worse," he replied apologetically, "but only on the main thoroughfares. The side streets are a lot quieter."
A little way further they turned off onto one of the side streets Henry Lee had mentioned, and Hannah had to agree the relative peace and quiet was welcome.
On the comer, only a block away from the traffic and noise of the main boulevards, the Williams Hotel could be entered by climbing three marble steps and passing through a curved archway with real stained glass in the windows.
Henry Lee stopped abruptly on the first step as if gathering his thoughts.
"Is this where we are going to stay?" Hannah asked. To her the hotel looked like a palace. "Are you sure we can afford this, Henry Lee?"
Interrupted from his thoughts, Henry Lee quickly assured her that money would not be a problem.
"Hannah," he went on, his look guarded and his cheeks slightly flushed. "You're my wife, and it will sure look strange to these folks if we sign as man and wife and then ask for separate rooms."
Hannah began a thorough investigation of her hands and fingernails, no more able to meet Henry Lee's eye than he was to meet hers.
She had thought it might come to this. In all truth, she had hoped that it would. She didn't know why Henry Lee continued to hesitate to bring her to bed, but she felt it was time. After what had happened under the catalpa tree, he surely must realize that she would not spurn him. Her face grew vivid red at the memory of how ready she'd been to be a wife to him, right there in the grass and shade of the afternoon.
"Hannah," he said, "it wasn't just foolish talk when I said this was our honeymoon. I'm thinking that it's high time that we began to live together as man and wife."
Hannah was not sure if she would ever be able to breathe again. She wanted this, waited for it, but she now felt so shy and scared, she had little idea of how to go about accepting it.
She shyly reached for his hand and still without looking at him she replied, "I am your wife, Henry Lee."
Henry Lee's breath rushed out in a sigh of relief. She was as eager as himself to consummate their marriage, he was sure of it. He wanted to explain it all to her. How he was sure that in the long run it would be better this way. It would make the baby seem more like his and by the time it came along they would be comfortable in their married life. He realized that he no longer cared about the other man. The sins she had left behind her meant nothing at all to him, and he was sure that she wasn't pining after someone else. They would not let the shadows of the past darken their future.
Taking her arm, he escorted her deferentially up the steps and through the doorway. He thought playfully about carrying her across the threshold, but decided not to push his luck.
The lobby was as beautifully decorated and refined as the entryway and Hannah tried not to gawk at the finely-made furniture and the rich fabric of the drapes. The Williams Hotel was very new, and Henry Lee had heard that it was the hotel currently being patronized by Kansas City cattle buyers and Washington bureaucrats. Therefore, it must be very fine indeed. Henry Lee hadn't even balked at the prices. A man only had a honeymoon once, after all, and Henry Lee Watson was a very successful businessman.
An attractive young man, dressed in a black and white checked suit, stood behind the desk. He politely acknowledged them with a nod as he spoke into a wooden box on the wall while holding the cylinder attached to it by a cord, up to his ear.
Finishing his conversation he returned the cylinder to its hanging spot on the wooden box and offered a rather insincere apology concerning the bother of modem conveniences.
"We'd like a room for two nights," Henry Lee said.
"Your name, sir?" the man asked.
The man quickly scanned his book finding it.
"Yes, Mr. Watson," he said, "you've requested our best room. That would be the Territorial Suite." He spoke with bombast and self-importance, dragging out the syllables of each word to its greatest possible length.
"If you would sign the book, sir, I will be happy to see you and your lovely lady to your temporary domicile."
Henry Lee was not certain whether he was interested in a "temporary domicile," but concentrated on carefully printing the letters of his name on the register. Henry Lee was too long for him to write, but putting down Watson was far superior to an X.
"A Mr. Harjo was by a few hours ago," the young man told him. "He said you'd be coming and he left you a note." The man reached to retrieve a small piece of folded paper from a nest of boxes on the wall behind him.
As the man gathered up their luggage and asked them to follow, he headed up the stairway at the far end of the room. Henry Lee opened his note and tried to make it out as best he could. Reading was not one of his better skills. He had never attended school and his mother's occasional attempts to teach him were as inconsequential as they were sporadic. He struggled with the first few
words, then shook his head and followed his wife up the stairs.
The Territorial Suite was actually two good-size rooms facing the tree-lined street. The sitting room was slightly crowded with several spindle-legged chairs, three small tables, covered with crocheted doilies, knickknacks, and pictures in every possible inch of available space. It was altogether too fussy for Hannah's taste.
The bedroom was dominated by a massive four- poster bed that made any thought of furnishings fly completely from Hannah's head. She quickly retreated to the fussy sitting room, making herself useful by rearranging the multitudinous objets d'art.
Henry Lee came in, thanked the young man and gave him a penny. He watched Hannah nervously redistributing the ornaments. "I'll open the window and you can toss all this rubbish out," he joked. She smiled shyly, sharing his amusement, and determinedly stilled her restless hands.
He followed the young man out into the hall and stopped him before he reached the stairs.
"Could you read this for me?" he asked.
The young man seemed somewhat surprised and then with a patrician air, dramatically and loudly read Henry Lee's message.
AM FEELING WELL ENOUGH TO ATTEND
THE FUNERAL MYSELF. IT WILL BE
TONIGHT. MEET ME AT THE AMBROSIA
BALLROOM AT NINE THIS EVENING. BRING
YOUR LOVELY BRIDE. IT'S A VERY DISCREET PLACE. HARJO.
Because Henry Lee believed his own lack of education neither to be shameful nor a hindrance, he was not angered or embarrassed by the man's superior attitude. He thanked him, handed him another penny in appreciation, and headed back to his room, pleased.
He found Hannah still standing in the middle of the sitting room, trying to make country-style order out of the ch
aos of city fashion.
"You think these people like all this stuff cluttering up all the time?" she asked him, smiling in mock disgust.
"That's what I've seen," he admitted. "Makes them think they are well-to-do when they have more things than places to put them."
"Seems foolish to me. I want things simple."
Henry Lee walked up beside her; standing as close as was politely reasonable, he reached over and took her hand. He wanted to kiss it, but fearing that boldness would frighten her, merely rubbed the soft skin of the back of her hand against his cheek.
"Maybe, Hannah, we are more suited than we thought."
The slight stubble of his cheek seemed to send little electric shocks down her arms and straight into her chest, constricting it and making it difficult for her to breathe.
Henry Lee saw her reaction and it gave him a strange sense of power and control. He pressed his advantage and pulled her gently up against his chest. There was no pressure or force, he merely held her there, next to him. He could feel her trembling, trembling for him. He followed the direction of her eyes and found her gazing at the bed in the next room. It was to be their marriage bed and they both knew it. A tremor of his own fear skittered through his thoughts, quickly replaced by compassion and concern for Hannah. He was the man of vast experience, and no matter what her past, she was not sophisticated or worldly. He would court her tonight, win her and when he took her to him, she would never regret it.
Hannah felt both shy and bold simultaneously. She wanted his touch and was afraid of it, too. At least now she knew that the waiting would be over soon. Tonight they would be man and wife at last. She wanted the waiting to be over. She wanted to find out what the marriage bed was all about. But mostly, she wanted him. She wanted Henry Lee to touch her and kiss her and make her feel again the way he'd made her feel that afternoon under the catalpa tree.
Remembering her own lack of control and the bombardment of sensations that Henry Lee had sparked in her rekindled her fears. Perhaps her eagerness made her seem desperate or unnatural. It was terrible not knowing what behavior was normal for a wife, not knowing what was expected. Henry Lee sensed her apprehension and ambivalence and quickly released her. He was willing to wait, to see her more eager. He had plans to quiet her fears and get her used to his touch.
“Tonight you'll get your chance to show off that pretty new dress," he said.
"Where are we going?" she asked, excited.
"It's called the Ambrosia Ballroom."
Chapter Fourteen
U.S. Chief Deputy Marshal Tom Quick of the Muskogee District, Indian Territory, sat in a rocking chair on the upstairs porch of the courthouse. He loved to sit there in the evening with his boots propped up on the railing, and watch the comings and goings on Okmulgee Street. He had seen a lot of things come and go in the twenty-three years he'd been a lawman in the Indian Ter-
ritory. He'd seen Muskogee when it was nothing but a wide spot in the road. And the folks that were running it these days, he'd seen them when they were still making messes in their knee-pants. Some said that Tom Quick was too old for the job these days, that all he did was sit on that porch and ramble on about the past glory of the marshals. How quickly they could forget. They'd already forgotten how he'd rounded up Zip Wyatt's gang. How he was in on the killing of Ike Black. And they didn't even recall him running those worthless Caseys to ground.
Once he had known every outlaw in the territory on sight. Now he sat on the upstairs porch and watched for kids stealing apples from the greengrocer across the street.
As he sat, rocking and thinking, his boots tapping out an unknown melody, something caught his eye. A full-breasted young woman in a blue calico dress was walking down the street. She was a welcome sight to Tom who, although he was well past sixty, still had trouble remaining faithful to his long-suffering wife of forty years.
The filly in the blue dress was built just the way he liked. No delicate little princess, but a sturdy, buxom gal that a man could ride half the night without fear of wearing her out. She looked a bit too respectable for his liking, however, and she already had a man with her.
Marshal Quick might well have returned to his thoughts had the man beside the woman in blue not, at that instant, turned to her and smiled. It had been years since he'd seen it, but he recognized that face immediately.
"It's Skut Watson's boy!" he stated aloud, with absolute certainty. The boy didn't favor his old man a bit, but he'd seen him plenty of times as he was growing up and he would have known him anywhere.
He'd had run-ins with Skut Watson practically from the day that he'd come to the territory. The boy's father had been a lazy, drunken, professional liar and cheat. He'd have stole his own grandma's underdrawers if he thought he could make a nickel. The worthless piece of thieving trash had been of so little account as to have been hardly worth the trouble to arrest, except to collect the money for the mileage.
Marshal Quick knew that this whelp was not as bad as the father. But he was a moonshiner and whiskey peddler, that was well known, even if he had never been caught. He made whiskey on a little piece of bottom ground on the edge of the Territory in the Creek Nation. Old Skut had traded his wife's allotment among the Cherokees for that place near the border so he could scurry across to safety when things got too hot for him. The boy continued to live there after the old man died, making his whiskey without interference from the lawmen in Muskogee a hundred miles away.
Tom Quick studied their progress down the street, us hand resting on his chin in concentration. It was pretty easy to figure out what had brought him so close to the law. After the crackdown on moonshiners in the area and the breakup of Pally Archambo's organization, whiskey was in short supply. Watson had obviously come here to expand his business and take up where Archambo had left off.
It was the marshal's duty to see that didn't happen. Tom Quick was not one of those modem, city-type marshals, who were thinking that a little moonshine making or whiskey peddling was more a nuisance than a crime. He knew what liquor could do in the hands of the red man. Even among the whites, he personally believed that the consumption of alcohol was the main reason for most killings, shootings, rapings, and general mischief in the territory. And those that made and sold the evil elixir were as guilty as the perpetrators.
Trafficking in intoxicating beverages had given more than one outlaw his start on the road to crime. It was his duty as marshal to find out what the no-account bootlegger was doing in Muskogee, and if he was here to sell whiskey, Watson was going to find himself behind bars by nightfall.
As he watched the couple, laughing and cheerful, make their way down the street, he called out through the door behind him.
"Wilson! Get me Neemie Pathkiller right away!"
Looking once again on the couple disappearing out of sight, he focused his tired eyes on the woman's broad behind. "Maybe she ain't as respectable as she looks."
Hannah couldn't quite believe her good fortune; a new dress, a handsome husband at her side, and an exciting new city to enjoy them in. Henry Lee was wearing the suit he had worn at their wedding, but he was not at all the somber groom that he had been that day. He laughed and joked and told stories, determined to entertain his wife.
As they slowly made their way down the street, they stopped to look into the doorways of stores as they passed. Neither had spent much time admiring store-bought goods, and now found themselves fascinated by the abundance of things that were actually available for purchase. In towns out on the border, only the essentials of living could be found for sale, and those were usually at premium prices. But here in Muskogee, where trains came and went in a half dozen directions, every possible necessity and luxury seemed to be readily available in abundance.
They had shopped at the major dry goods store to buy presents for Hannah's family. A trip to the city was a big occasion and everyone would want a remembrance. Next they had made a stop into Maclntee's Jewelry where Henry Lee had surprised her by pullin
g out of his pocket the wedding ring he'd given her.
"Could we have this sized to fit my wife?"
The jeweler assured them that he could have it done by the next day, and took the measure of the third finger of Hannah's left hand.
As they headed on down the street, Henry Lee's eye was captured by the display window of a saddlery. A fancy, hand-tooled saddle with silver studding sat like a work of art on a sawhorse.
"It is beautiful," Hannah admitted.
Henry Lee smiled at her in agreement. He had never owned a decent saddle horse, considering that a luxury for a man who made his living from a wagon, but he appreciated a thing of beauty and was pleased to share it with Hannah.
He liked the way her mind worked, she thought in much the same way that he did. That made it easier to talk to her. He could just tell her things and she could understand without needing a big explanation.
He wished that he'd told her about his business. Surely, she would be able to understand that, too. But tonight was not the night for confessions. Tonight was strictly for courting. And, he thought smiling to himself, later, for loving.
At supper, Henry Lee was in such a state of agitation, anticipating his plans, that he failed to notice the man eating alone at the table next to him. The man, of native heritage but dressed in white-man's attire, was neither short nor tall, thin nor fat, young nor old, handsome nor ugly. He had no distinguishing features at all. It was one of the things that made Neemie Pathkiller good at his job. Nobody noticed him or remembered his face. That made it easy for him to observe others and remember everything. He had worked for Tom Quick on plenty of jobs. He knew his business and he rarely made mistakes. As he watched the young whiskey peddler at the next table, he knew that this job would be easy pickings. The man was obviously so taken with his lady friend that he hardly knew what was going on around him. Constant vigilance might not be mandatory for cowboys and farmers, but criminals who weren't on their toes filled up jails.
