Roper, seemed slightly angry, a man at the end of his patience. “You got yourself, two strong whores, and a Chinee in the kitchen. That’s enough to dig a hole someplace.”
“Damn you, it ain’t near enough and—”
Suddenly Roper shoved the muzzle of his Colt into Farrell’s belly and pulled the trigger. The gun roared, and Farrell stood upright for a moment, his face shocked, unable to believe that he’d been killed, and then slumped to the floor.
“I can’t stand a complaining man,” Roper said, looking down at Farrell’s writhing body. He holstered his gun, turned on his heel, stepped into the kitchen. Roper returned, pushing ahead of him a small, terrified Chinese man by the scruff of the neck. He shook the little man like a terrier with a rat and said, “You speakee American?”
The Chinese nodded.
“Good. You see the man on the floor? He’ll be dead soon and you’re the new proprietor—you know what proprietor means? You do? Good. Then you’re the new proprietor of this establishment. Under-standee?”
“I understand,” the Chinese said.
“What’s your name?” Roper said.
“Huan.”
“All right, Huan, a damned heathen name if you ask me, when Farrell dies, you’ll have five men to bury. Can you do that?”
The little man nodded. “Yes, I take them far, far away from here.”
“I don’t give a damn where you take them. Some folks here want them buried, understand?”
“Mr. Farrell not dead yet,” Huan said. He put his fingers in his ears and said, “He making big row.”
“Yeah, he is, ain’t he?” Roper said. He drew his gun and fired a shot into Farrell’s head, and the man’s pained shrieks stopped. “Now he’s dead.”
“Damn you, Roper, you murdered that man,” Red Ryan said.
“You care, Ryan? He wasn’t a Patterson employee, just a saloonkeeper and pimp.”
The army wives were sitting in stunned silence, their eyes as round as coins. Lucian Carter had an arm around Stella’s shoulders as though to comfort her. She looked like she didn’t need comforting, her speculative gaze fixed on Roper.
“The man was unarmed,” Red said.
“That was Farrell’s problem, not mine,” Roper said. “He should’ve armed himself.”
“When we reach El Paso, I’ll press a murder charge,” Red said.
“And I’ll deny it, and nobody in El Paso will lose any sleep over the death of a two-bit pimp who turned up his toes at the ass-end of nowhere.”
Stella Morgan said, “It looked to me that Farrell was going for a hideout gun. I’d swear that on a stack of Bibles.”
“Carter, what about you?” Roper said.
The man hesitated for a moment, and then Stella whispered something to him, and he nodded and said, “The pimp had a sneaky gun on him. I’m sure of that.”
Roper grinned. “You still going to press charges, Ryan?”
“I will, and I’ll make them stick,” Red said. “What I saw was cold-blooded murder.”
Suddenly Roper was tense and a hollow silence descended on the room . . . waiting to be filled by whatever came next.
“Since I’m an accused murderer, maybe you want to take my gun away from me, Ryan,” Roper said. He was primed . . . ready for the draw.
Red had been there before, and he knew how fast he was, quicker with the gun than most. “I reckon I will,” he said.
“No!”
Stella Morgan leaped from her chair and got between the two men.
“Let’s settle this in El Paso,” she said. “Mr. Muldoon, how far to Fort Bliss?”
“We’re two days out,” Buttons said.
“Two days out, and there’s still Apaches around,” Stella said. “You fools, this is no time to be killing one another.”
Edna Powell had the same idea because she rushed to Red’s side as fast as her dumpy legs would carry her. “Oh, Mr. Ryan, please don’t fight.” She glared at Roper. “Mr. Roper, you’re a dreadful, violent man. I thought you very brave when you fought the savages, and I still do, but now I’m very disappointed in you.”
“And that goes for me too,” Rhoda Carr said. “You can rest assured that Corporal Carr will hear of this.”
Roper grinned, swept off his hat, and made a leg. “Ladies,” he said. He brushed past Ryan and walked out of the room.
Buttons took Red aside and whispered, “Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to kill that man.”
“I reckon I’ll let the law do that,” Red said.
Buttons shook his head. “No, that’s not how it will happen. The law won’t act, and it will be down to you.”
Red smiled. “You have a crystal ball, Buttons?”
“Nope, I don’t need no crystal ball. I have something better.”
“What’s that?”
“The Irish gift, Red . . . the Irish gift.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Because of the simmering tension between Red Ryan and Seth Roper, Buttons Muldoon made it clear that he’d decided to forgo sleep and drive directly for Fort Bliss without any further stops.
“Buttons, there aren’t any more stage stops between here and the Franklin Mountains,” Red said.
“I know that,” Buttons said. “My plan is a halt just long enough to rest the horses and let the passengers stretch their legs.” He took his eyes off the trotting team and turned his head. “You still aim to turn Roper over to the law?”
“Just as soon as we reach El Paso,” Red said.
“Pity Dallas Stoudenmire is no longer with us,” Buttons said. “He had a way of dealing with the likes of Roper. He’d just shoot him.” He called out over his shoulder. “You hear that, Seth?”
From his perch on top of the stage, Roper said, “Hear what?”
“That if ol’ Dallas Stoudenmire was still El Paso city marshal he would shoot you on sight fer a scoundrel.”
“Stoudenmire couldn’t shade me, not on his best day, he couldn’t,” Roper yelled above the rumble of wheels on the sun-baked ground.
“Easy to say now he’s dead,” Buttons said.
“What about you, Ryan? Do you reckon I could’ve shaded Stoudenmire?”
“I know you can shoot an unarmed man in the belly, Roper,” Red said. “And that’s all I know.”
Roper laughed. “You’re a funny man, Ryan, a very funny man.”
Muldoon didn’t like where the conversation was headed. He hoorawed the team into a canter . . . and fifteen minutes later he saw the Apache.
* * *
“Ahead of us, Red,” Buttons said.
“I see him,” Red said. “He’s watching us.”
The Apache sat his pony just out of rifle range. He wore a soldier’s blue coat with corporal’s chevrons on the sleeves and carried a Winchester, the butt resting on his thigh.
Red grabbed his shotgun and said, “Drive straight at him, Buttons. Let’s see what he does.”
“Right now, he’s not doing anything,” Buttons said. “Ah, and now he’s made a liar out of me.”
The Indian yipped, swung his horse around, and rode back the way he’d come.
“Slow down, Buttons,” Red said. “He might be trying to lead us into an ambush.”
Buttons slowed the team to a walk as Lucian Carter stuck his head out the stage window and said, “Ryan, what’s happening?”
“Apache,” Red said.
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“And one’s enough,” Buttons said.
Red heard Edna Powell say, “Oh dear no, not again,” exactly expressing his own thought.
“Ryan, where do you want me?” Carter said. “You’re the general here.”
“Stay where you are,” Red said. “If we’re attacked again, you’ll protect the ladies.”
But the attack never came.
When the Apache showed again he rode with a buffalo soldier cavalry patrol led by a white captain wearing a fringed buckskin jacket with Cheyenne beadwork. Th
e officer led his men to the stage and drew rein.
Buttons had halted the team and now he said, “What can I do for you, Cap’n?”
“I’m Captain James Moore, Company L 9th Cavalry,” the soldier said. “I’ve been ordered to find and escort an officer’s wife to Fort Bliss. We were informed by wire from Fort Concho that she left several days ago. Is she on this stage, driver?”
“Would that be Mrs. Stella Morgan?” Buttons said.
“It would,” the captain said.
“The lady is inside,” Buttons said.
Captain Moore kneed his horse to the side of the stage, looked inside, and said to Stella, “You are Mrs. Morgan, I presume.”
Stella smiled and fluttered her lashes. “Indeed I am.”
“Captain James Moore at your service, ma’am.” He bowed in the saddle. “I am here to escort you to Fort Bliss.”
“You are very gallante, Captain,” Stella said.
“Your obedient servant, dear lady.” Moore looked at Edna and Rhoda. “And you women are?”
“I’m the wife of Corporal Powell,” Edna said, smiling. “And my companion is the wife of Corporal Carr. Our husbands are serving with the 15th Infantry.”
“Ah yes, I was told a couple of enlisted men’s women might be on the stage,” the captain said, dismissing them.
Stella said, “For a moment there I harbored the brief hope that Major Morgan would be with you, Captain.”
“Alas, dear lady, the major was wounded in a skirmish with some hostiles,” Moore said. He read Stella’s face and said, “Nothing serious, a slight inner leg wound, but enough to keep him out of the saddle for another week or so.”
“Then I’ll count the hours until I can be at his side,” Stella said.
“And that’s what I would expect to hear from an officer’s lady wife,” Captain Moore said. “I hope that when I enter into the state of matrimony I find a bride who will display such love and devotion.” He glanced at Lucian Carter, touched the brim of his forage cap, and then swung his horse away.
“Judging by the bullet holes in the coach, you’ve been under attack,” Moore said to Red Ryan.
“Yes, Captain, we had a brush with Apaches,” Red said.
“Well, I have good tidings. The latest news we have on the wire is that the war chief Ilesh is dead and that the Chiricahua are already drifting back to the San Carlos,” the soldier said.
Red wanted to say, “I know he’s dead, because we killed him,” but he decided against it. Captain Moore wouldn’t believe him anyway. He settled for, “That’s good to hear.”
“Indeed, it is,” the captain said. “Probably Ilesh and his band ran into a punitive column from Fort Concho, and they killed the rascal.”
Buttons looked at Red from the corner of his eye, but said nothing. Roper was also silent, no doubt because he didn’t wish to draw attention to himself. The army exerted real power on the plains and with Ryan’s threat of a murder charge hanging over him, the last thing he wanted was to deal with any kind of legal authority.
Buttons said, “You plan to ride straight through to the fort, Cap’n?” Buttons said.
“No, driver, we’ll camp tonight and reach Fort Bliss by tomorrow evening,” Moore said. “It will be good for Mrs. Morgan to get out of the cramped stage for a while and enjoy the stars.”
“And the other ladies will too,” Red said.
“What other ladies?”
“Mrs. Powell and Mrs. Carr.”
“Oh, yes, of course, and them too,” Captain Moore said.
* * *
When night fell and Captain Moore and his buffalo soldiers made camp, the troopers made a fire big enough to boil coffee and fry bacon. Buttons Muldoon was amazed. “Cap’n, we’re surrounded by nothing but grass, how do them black boys find the makings for a fire?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Moore said. “But I swear they could start a blaze on top of an iceberg.”
The night passed uneventfully, apart from one incident that puzzled Red Ryan and made him wonder at Stella Morgan’s thinking. She sat close to Captain Moore, her firelit eyes on the scout. “He is an Apache, isn’t he?” she asked, nodding in the Indian’s direction.
“Yes, he is,” Moore said. “His name is Nascha and he’s a Jicarilla.”
“Bring it over here,” Stella said.
Moore looked puzzled but he spoke to the scout in his own tongue and the man stood near Stella. After a while she reached out a hand and the tips of her fingers lightly stroked the smooth skin of the Apache’s brown, muscular thigh. Stella’s tongue touched her top lip and she shuddered, her breath coming in little gasps. Finally she withdrew her hand and said, “Send it away, Captain Moore. It smells.”
The officer did as Stella asked, then he and Ryan exchanged glances. Moore looked as puzzled and ill at ease as Red did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When Buttons Muldoon drove the Patterson stage into El Paso, the town was booming, thanks to the arrival of the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Set in a green valley with a nearly perfect, year-round climate, the city attracted merchants, entrepreneurs, and more than of its fair share of young men on the make. But a myriad of undesirables arrived with the professionals. El Paso was a haven for gamblers, gunmen, thieves, murderers, and whores who frequented the town’s scores of saloons, dance halls, gambling establishments, opium dens, and brothels that lined its main streets.
For a while Dallas Stoudenmire had kept order with his shoot-now-ask-questions-later method of law enforcement, but Stoudenmire was six months in the grave, and the town that Red Ryan saw around him was wide open and raring to go.
The stage’s side lamps were lit as Buttons followed the cavalry escort to nearby Fort Bliss and pulled up outside the headquarters building in the evening light. Captain Moore went inside and when he returned he was accompanied by a colonel, several junior officers, and a handsome major with gray in his hair who leaned heavily on a cane.
A soldier opened the stage door and assisted Stella Morgan down and then Edna and Rhoda, who seemed a little confused . . . in contrast to Stella’s poise and dazzling smile as she saw her husband. But she stayed where she was, making Major Morgan, despite his wound, limp to her. The couple embraced, the major’s smiling face revealing his obvious delight at the reunion, though Stella seemed stiff and remote and she finally pushed her husband away, gently, but still a definite, if genteel, shove.
If Major Morgan was disappointed at his wife’s reaction, he didn’t let it show, and he was still smiling broadly when he introduced Stella to the colonel.
“I’m so glad to meet you at last, Mrs. Morgan,” Colonel David Anderson said, bowing over Stella’s hand. “Major Morgan has often spoken of your beauty, and now I find that it was no exaggeration.” He smiled. “You bring your own light to illuminate our dreary surroundings.”
“You are most kind, Colonel,” Stella said, playing her role to the hilt. “I confess that the major and I have been separated for too long.”
“And my only regret is that we will not long have the pleasure of your company,” the colonel said. “Major Morgan’s retirement takes effect tomorrow at noon and then you are off to Washington. Is that not so?”
“Indeed, it is so, Colonel Anderson,” Stella said. Her smile was perfect, that of a dutiful, loving wife. “Both John and myself consider the rail journey the first step of a great life adventure.”
“Then I am delighted, and wish you all the very best for your future,” Anderson said. Then, in a conspiratorial whisper, “I have planned a ball in your and Major Morgan’s honor for tomorrow evening.”
Stella said, “That is most gracious, Colonel.”
“You will be the belle of the ball, dear lady,” Colonel Anderson said. “I fear you will outshine all the other officers’ ladies.”
Stella fluttered her eyelashes. “La, Colonel Anderson, you do flatter me so.”
“Flattery where flattery is deserved, my dear,�
�� the colonel said, beaming.
Red Ryan heard and remembered the night in the Stan Evans barn when he’d seen Stella and Seth Roper in the throes of passion. It occurred to him that the woman said all the right words to Colonel Anderson. . . but to Red she sounded as false as the chime of a cracked bell.
* * *
“And we’ve been invited to the ball,” Edna Powell said. “Mr. Ryan, isn’t that wonderful?”
Red smiled. “It sure is. And after all that’s happened, make sure that you and Mrs. Carr enjoy yourselves.”
“Oh, we will, Mr. Ryan,” Rhoda Carr said. And then, “Corporal Carr, do you have something to say to Mr. Ryan?”
Corporal Carr was a small, slender man with chevrons on the sleeves of his blouse. “I want to thank you for saving my wife from the savages, Mr. Ryan,” he said. “It was most . . .”
“. . . most heroic of you,” Rhoda prompted.
“Yes, most heroic of you and . . . and . . .”
“I am in your debt forever,” Rhoda said.
“In your debt forever,” Corporal Carr said. He looked relieved that his ordeal was over.
Red was amused. It seemed that Corporal Carr had been coached by his spouse. “You’re most welcome,” Red said. “But it was my duty as an employee of the Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company to see to the well-being of my passengers.”
“Corporal Powell, do you have something to add?” Edna said to her husband.
In contrast to the small Corporal Carr, Corporal Powell was a big-bellied man with a round, good-humored face. He spared Red a speech, but put his arm around Rhoda’s ample waist and grinned. “Mr. Ryan, you’re true blue on account of how you brought the purdiest li’l gal in Texas safely home. Tomorrow night, she’s gonna be the belle of the ball.”
“I think there will be two belles of the ball,” Red said. “I can’t see any other gals being prettier than Edna and Rhoda, and that’s a natural fact.”
As Edna blushed and Rhoda smiled, Corporal Powell grinned and stuck out his hand. “Put it there, Mr. Ryan. Y ’all just said a natural fact we can surely agree on.”
* * *
Red Ryan left the enlisted married men’s quarters and walked through moonlight toward downtown El Paso, which was ablaze with thousands of newfangled gas lamps and the siren song of the raucous saloons luring the unwary and those who preyed on them. Red’s destination was a stage depot, originally built by the Butter field company, but now shared by half a dozen different carriers, including Patterson & Son. He figured that Buttons Muldoon was still there, shooting the breeze with other drivers, and hopefully he’d lined up passengers for the return trip to Fort Concho and points east.
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