Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  The nature of the mining was the cause of the great slag heaps of rock that dotted the encircling hillsides, and the tall and narrow buildings, like the outhouses of giants, that overshadowed the town. Tailings from the mines, the crushed and broken rock left over from the mining process, had been used to fill in the ruts in the streets of Cripple Creek. Some said that the sharp-edged granite still contained ore in quantities too minute to make extraction profitable; still, for this reason it could be claimed in all seriousness that the avenues of the town were paved with gold.

  Spread over the rolling interior of the crater, Cripple Creek was a town of up-and-down streets, lined for the most part with jerry-built wood-framed business establishments of unfinished lumber topped by false fronts in a variety of angular styles. Here and there was a structure of brick, such as the Palace Hotel with its ornate veranda, but the many rough, unpainted buildings and houses, interspersed with an occasional log cabin chinked with a mortarlike mud, gave the place a raw look. For all that, it was not completely without amenities. The principal street was strung with telegraph wires. Stores sported striped awnings to protect their display windows containing groceries and clothing, mining equipment, hardware, and drugs from the powerful effects of the sun at that elevation. There were painted signs splashed on their sides advertising the benefits of tonics, shaving creams, and pork and beans. Nearly everywhere one looked in this town of single men, there were signs proclaiming the availability of furnished rooms.

  There were two major thoroughfares, named for the two men, Bennet and Myers, who had platted the town on their cattle ranch in the middle of what had become known as the three-million-dollar cow pasture. Bennet Avenue was a street of retail establishments, of stockbrokerage houses, assay offices, banks, hotels, barbershops, and eating houses. Above it, to the north, were the schools, churches, and homes of the affluent and upstanding element in the community. Two blocks below it was Myers Avenue, where the tenderloin began.

  The tenderloin. Though Serena had seen the name spelled out in the newspapers, had even heard it applied from time to time to certain sections of New Orleans, she had no clear idea of what it meant. Riding slowly along the length of the street beside Ward, she began to have some idea. At this hour of the morning, when the day should be beginning, little moved. Everything was quiet, though it was not the silence of peace but more the drugged somnolence of exhaustion. Broken beer bottles glinted brown in the sunlight. The smell of stale food and liquor hung in the air, vying with the odor of animal dung from in front of the hitching racks, and from the scavenging burros that rambled here and there, pawing at refuse piles in the alleys like dogs. The rough, uneven sidewalks, with their high sides shored up by rocks and log timbers on the slopes, were empty except for wandering drunks, groping along the walls, and laundry women with straggling hair hefting baskets of soiled linens. There were a few open doorways at the eating places, or at the saloons where barmen swept soggy sawdust into the street and threw the contents of cuspidors after it. But farther along, most of the houses were closed, the places with the neat look of private homes or select hotels, as well as the small shotgun houses with signs carrying crudely lettered women’s names above the doorframes. Here, the doors were shut tight, the curtains drawn, the lanterns with red glass shades that hung on poles before them burned out. There was one exception. In the doorway of one house Serena saw a girl leaning on the jamb, her wrapper falling open to reveal a black corset cut indecently low, made lower still as she stretched and yawned and scratched at her tousled, brassy yellow hair with talon-like fingers. Serena looked quickly away.

  Nearer to hand, there was a building which proclaimed itself to be the opera house, and another splashed with lurid posters advertising vaudeville offerings of dancing girls in flesh-colored tights and strippers in French underwear. There was a place called the Red Light Dance Hall, and another that styled itself the Mountain Belle. There were saloons in board shacks whose kerosene lanterns revealed sawdust floors, crude wooden benches, and an array of bottles behind a slab of wood for a bar. These had names like Last Chance, the Deer Horn, Hard Rock. And then there were drinking places with brass and amber glass chandeliers, sanded wood floors, and barmen in white aprons standing before mirrors framed in gold leaf over polished mahogany bars skirted with brass foot rails. Saloons of this ilk had names like the Abbey, the Opera Club, the Golden Eagle.

  The Eldorado was one of the latter. Serena and Ward drew their horses to a standstill before the hitching rack. Serena, holding her shawl tightly over her torn dress, allowed Ward to help her down. As she stared at the rough and rowdy life that flowed along the street around her, trepidation seized her. What was she doing here? She did not belong, could never belong, in such a place.

  Ward took her arm. The steps which led up to the wide double doors of the saloon, with their colored glass panes, were before her. There seemed nothing to do but allow Ward to escort her inside.

  The barmen turned as Ward entered. One set down a cuspidor he was cleaning. Another slid a mug foaming with beer along the bar and slapped down his polishing cloth. Wiping their hands on their aprons, they came forward with warm smiles and wide grins to pound Ward on the back and make him welcome. The few customers surged to their feet to join the melee, to demand explanations for his absence and a report of his luck on his prospecting trip. Serena, standing to one side, was ignored. Ward made no effort to bring her forward or to introduce her, an omission for which she, catching the sidelong glances slanted in her direction, was grateful.

  To one side of the long barroom was a staircase with a mahogany railing and turned balusters. Little by little, Ward worked his way in that direction. At last the time came when he could accept one last challenge at a game of cards, promise once more to be down later on in the day, then sweep Serena with him up the stairs to the second floor.

  He moved quickly along the narrow hall bare of carpet or paint to a transomed doorway. Taking out a key, he fitted it into the lock and turned the knob, then swung to glance at Serena.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, a frown drawing his

  thick brows together.

  She stood with a hand pressed to her chest. “Yes, I think so,” she answered, attempting a smile. “I’m just a little out of breath.”

  His face cleared. “It’s the altitude. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. You will have to take it easy until you get used to it.”

  “You would think that as slow as the wagon train was moving I would have had time enough.”

  “Possibly, but you came the last four thousand feet over-night, and that’s quite a distance straight up. Cripple Creek, at ten thousand feet, doesn’t like much being two miles high.”

  He stood back for her to precede him into the room. She did so without thinking, concerned as much with finding a place to get away from the men below, to sit down and catch her breath, as with where he was taking her. Just inside the door she stopped.

  Before her was a sitting room with a bedroom and other accommodations stretching beyond. There was about them a masculine air, but it was the heavy, over-opulent masculinity of the seraglio. The floors were covered with Persian carpets in gold and black and red. Billowing gold silk draperies, overhung with red and black brocade, edged with fringe, and looped up with tasseled ropes, blocked the sunlight at the front windows. Portieres of the same style hung at the doorway that led from the sitting room into the bedroom, and yards of the same fabrics were draped about the four-poster bed. Instead of settees, long low couches with splayed lion’s feet, tight-rolled tube pillows, and piles of silk and satin cushions had been used in the sitting room. Beside them were overstuffed chairs and stools with leather seats worked in gold. Paisley shawls had been thrown over every surface. On one of the low round tables placed near the head of a couch sat a hookah water pipe. On another was an enormous brass urn filled with peacock feathers. Directly in front of the entrance door was a preserved elephant’s foot surmounted by a marble tabletop on which
sat an enamelware bowl in brilliant colors, filled with fruit.

  “My God.”

  It was Ward who spoke. He stood just inside the room with his hands on his hips and a look of incredulous amazement on his bronzed face.

  “You — you live here?” Serena asked at last.

  “I thought I did.” His voice was grim as he answered.

  “Ward! Ward, you’re back!”

  The happy scream came from the hallway. Hard upon it, a woman burst into the room. As Ward turned, she threw herself into his arms and twined her hands behind his neck. Tilting back her head heavy with a weight of auburn hair and crowned with a broad-brimmed hat of black straw set with pheasant wings, she pressed her red mouth to his lips. She moved her pliant body, clad in a walking costume of black-and-white foulard fitted tightly to her opulent shape, against him, a low sound deep in her throat. For an instant he seemed to respond, then he lifted his hands, closing hard brown fingers around her wrists to prise them loose.

  “You are up early,” he drawled, “or is it late?”

  The woman grimaced. “I had to go down and inspect a shipment of wine for the parlor house that came in on the Denver train. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you had just gotten off. I had to come and see for myself. I thought this time you were never coming back!”

  “You know I always turn up, Pearlie. But what is this? What have you done to my rooms?”

  “Don’t you like it?” she pouted, lowering her head so she could just see him beneath the brim of her hat, at the same time fluffing the boa of rust-and-black feathers that hung over her arms. “It’s the latest thing from New York. I thought you might like being rigged out like a Persian prince.”

  “You misjudge me,” he said dryly.

  “There’s no need to get nasty! And there is no need for you to live in stoic squalor either! I thought it would be a nice surprise.”

  She swung around to survey her handiwork. At the sight of Serena the woman’s wide smile vanished. She went still, a blank look in her pale-blue eyes that quickly turned to one of glittering rage.

  “It’s certainly a surprise,” Ward began.

  The woman called Pearlie cut across his words without ceremony. “Who is this person? What is she doing here?”

  Ward lifted a brow. “Allow me to introduce you,” he answered, his tone over-cordial to the point of irony.

  “By all means!” Pearlie snapped. She stepped away from Ward, a move that brought her closer to Serena. There was about her the bristling antagonism of an animal that has discovered another of the same species and sex in its territory.

  “Serena,” Ward said, circling with deceptive loose-limbed casualness to interpose his body between her and the other woman. “May I present my business partner, darling? She likes to be called Pearlie.”

  “How do you do?” Serena said, her voice even, but the glance she divided between the other two wary.

  The auburn-haired woman might not have heard the greeting. “Not by everyone I don’t!” she snapped, throwing back her head, her pale-blue stare icy cold. “You haven’t said what she is doing here.”

  “I fail to see how it concerns you,” Ward answered.

  “Do you now? Let me make my concern clear, then. I want to know whether she is here for business, or for pleasure, your own pleasure!”

  Ward turned to face her, the look of distaste on his face so evident that Serena was not surprised when Pearlie lost a degree of her confidence. “She is not here,” he said softly, “for your business.”

  “You — may want no share of the parlor-house profits, but that hasn’t kept you from visiting it now and then!”

  The last words were said with a shade of defiance accompanied by a vicious glance in Serena’s direction.

  “Until now,” Ward said, finality in his tone.

  Pearlie paled beneath the powder and rouge that close inspection revealed on her face. “How noble, though it does seem to me that the first time you brought a woman in here you could have picked one with a little more class. This one hardly seems willing, much less able, to hold your attention. What did you do? Carry her off and rape her?”

  Ward, his face set, moved to the door that still stood open behind them. His hand on the knob, he said, “If you don’t mind, we will talk later. Serena and I have had a long trip. We would like to settle in.”

  The woman looked from Ward’s chiseled features to the flush of color that suffused Serena’s face to the hairline. Reaching out, she twitched aside the shawl that Serena held around her, exposing the torn edges of her bodice and the ivory swells of her breasts where she had tucked the ragged edges into her chemise.

  “Good Lord! I was right!” Pearlie said, and went off into a gale of shrill laughter.

  “That will do,” Ward said, his voice hard.

  “To think of it,” the woman gasped, holding a hand to her abdomen. “You, of all people, so fastidious, so aloof from all the crawling vices and weaknesses of other men — and women. Rape, my darling Ward! And I suppose she was a virgin, too. That would appeal to you.”

  “I said that’s enough!”

  “Oh, it is, is it?” Pearlie said, suddenly sobering. “Is it indeed? Will it ever — when will it ever — be enough?”

  Serena straightened her shawl. It was as though they had forgotten her, as if the pair of them spoke across some dark void, a meaning beneath their words only they understood. Serena felt a tremor of disturbance move over her that had nothing to do with her embarrassment. Dislike for the auburn-haired woman rose inside her. Swinging around, she moved to the windows of the sitting room that overlooked the street. Her back stiff, she lifted a fold of the gold silk gauze draperies and stood staring out.

  “Later,” Ward told the other woman, and there was the sound of concession in the grim shading of his voice.

  “Yes,” Pearlie answered, “by all means, later.”

  There came the soft swish of skirts, followed by the closing of the door. A heaviness descended over the room. Serena heard the slow approach of Ward’s footsteps. He stopped close behind her. Unconsciously, she braced herself, though for what she could not have said.

  “I apologize for the things Pearlie said. I never meant your welcome to be like this.”

  “That man, Otto, said she wouldn’t like me being here. I see what he meant.”

  “There’s no need to let it concern you. What Pearlie likes or dislikes has nothing to do with you.”

  The stern inflection in his voice sounded a warning. There was no indication to Serena that it was for her; still, there was always that possibility. Perhaps I had better go, if I am going to cause trouble.”

  It was a moment before he answered, and then his voice was hard. “Go where?”

  “Anywhere. There must be something I can do.” She made a slight movement of her shoulders, aware, though she deplored it, of a sense of waiting inside her. They had not spoken of his virtual kidnapping of her since the night before. There had been no time, no opportunity.

  “I’m sure there is,” he replied, reaching out to take up a curling tendril of her hair that had escaped from the chignon low on her neck to curl across her shoulder, “but would you like it?”

  She swallowed hard. “I suppose I would have to.”

  “And what of my peace of mind?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It would be like throwing a kitten to the hounds.”

  “I have claws,” she said sharply.

  “Sink them in me, then,” he said, his green gaze level, his voice even. “I intend to be the leader of the pack.”

  She swung to face him, her blue-gray eyes dark as she scanned the brass-like hardness of his face. “You may have tricked me into coming with you to Cripple Creek, but you can’t keep me here.”

  “Can’t I? Forgive me for pointing it out, but you are as near to being naked as makes no difference beneath the shawl. You have no money, no friends. And the one thing you do have, your sweet and fra
gile beauty, is only a danger to you. I don’t doubt you would like to be rid of me — I keep remembering that you did not deny an interest in Cripple Creek’s mining millionaires.”

  He paused as if to give her a chance to do so now. Serena hesitated. The admission he so obviously expected would leave her dependent upon him, his total responsibility by reason of his having forced himself on her. She did not want that. She was no charity case who must be grateful for his support and patronage. As soon as she was decently dressed once more, as soon as she could learn something of the town, she would see to making her own way.

  A muscle corded in his jaw. “At least we know where we stand. This may not be what you wanted, but for now, regardless of what you may think, it will be better for you.”

  “That is, of course, your whole consideration,” Serena snapped, “what is best for me?”

  “By no means,” he corrected, blandly ignoring her sarcasm. “You should know, after last night, that my compassionate instincts are undependable, my good intentions easily overcome.”

  She opened her mouth for an indignant retort. It was never spoken, for he reached out with his iron grasp and drew her to him, pressing a warm kiss to her parted lips. Just as abruptly as he had caught her to him, he released her.

  “I have to attend to the horses and telegraph Mrs. O’Hare about your trunk. You will be all right alone here, so long as you don’t try to go below this floor. Keep that in mind, because I intend to leave instructions with the barkeep down-stairs that you are not to set foot below the landing of the stairs. No doubt he would enjoy the tussle it might take to put you back where you belong; somehow I doubt you would. Is there anything you need before I go?”