“Nothing I can pinpoint. But the way the man you beat rose to Kendrick’s defense makes me wonder a little bit if they haven’t got something going between them.”
“Nope, that tussle was personal ‘tween me and Volpes. We’ve locked horns before, but nothing like this, and I suppose I shouldn’t have lost my temper. But he’s been swaggering and bullying around too long, and needed the stuffing knocked outta him.” Melville jumped down and untied the horse, adding sheepishly, “Think he knocked some stuffing outta me, too. Anyway, maybe this’ll be a lesson for Cap’n Ryker to keep him on a shorter leash.”
“Ryker? Guthried Ryker?”
“Yeah. Know him?”
“Strictly by reputation,” Jessie said grimly.
“Well, Volpes is Ryker’s foreman. He’s mean enough to steal the blanket outta his mother’s kennel, but he’s kinda at odds with Kendrick and Halford, him working for Cap’n Ryker and all.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, when Kendrick and Halford arrived here about this time last year, they bought the old saloon and put options on some other properties like the hotel, and generally began acting like bigshots. Then Cap’n Ryker showed up with even more money to spend speculating, and naturally it’s stirred up resentments and competition.”
Jessie was still perplexed. “That much makes sense. But if Kendrick and Halford are interested in gaining property ...”
“Sure are,” Melville said, nodding, as he climbed up onto the wagon seat. “Them and Cap’n Ryker, squabbling over this and that like two dogs over a bone, to see who’ll wind up lording it over the other.”
“Then why’d you tell me Kendrick doesn’t want your ranch?”
“Because that’s what he’s told us, Jessie. Says he’s only interested in town property, money-making property. Says if he took over, he’d have to abandon it and write it off as a total loss, or else try to run it and end up scratching and starving like we are. He says he’d rather have us make payments to him like a loan, than to have us hand over a spread of skin and bones and worthless dust.”
Jessica pursed her lips, pondering for a moment, suspicious of saintly gamblers unwilling to rake in the entire pot the instant it was won. And her brief exposure to Kendrick had not left her impressed with his charitable qualities. She gazed skeptically up at Melville, asking, “Have you offered the ranch to him, Daryl?”
“No, and I don’t aim to, unless I’m forced. But speaking of our worthless ranch, I’d best be getting Dad home to bed. Are you still planning to ride out to the Flying W tomorrow morning?”
“At the crack of dawn. Though I wish we could go now, and not waste time spending a night at the hotel,” Jessie replied, then turned to Ki. “We are staying there, aren’t we?”
Ki nodded. “It’s all arranged. Luggage too.”
“Well, you just remember that fork in the road,” Melville said. “When you pass our place tomorrow, Jessie, you stop in.”
“Thanks, we might, if it won’t be any trouble.”
“No trouble, no trouble a-tall, ‘cepting you don’t come a-calling like you’re expected to. Then there’ll be trouble.” Grinning broadly, Melville released the brake and lashed the reins, and the horse started plodding down the street, the wagon creaking behind it.
Jessica stood beside Ki, watching Melville slowly haul his besotted father home. Daryl was a smooth hairpin, she had to admit; and he already had so many problems that she certainly didn’t want to cause him the slightest bit more trouble. So of course she’d visit.
Chapter 5
Moving to the boardwalk, Jessica and Ki watched the departing wagon, Ki remarking, “I looked for you at the sheriff‘s, Jessie. He told me he’d met up with a dratted female of your description, but otherwise he couldn’t help any.”
“You can say that again, Ki,” Jessie replied with disgust. “How’d you know to find me in the saloon?”
“That’s where the thick of the uproar was. Where else would you be?” Smiling, Ki took a pocketful of .38 cartridges from his vest and handed them to Jessica, adding: “These are from four boxes I bought. The rest I put in your room.”
“Thanks.” Loading her revolver, she glanced at the bath house next to the barber shop. “Does the hotel have a bath?”
“Two. Fifty cents extra, fresh water daily, reheated noon and evening, and I’ve already reserved the one on our floor for us.”
“That’s a relief,” she sighed, starting along the boardwalk. She felt grubby and unkempt and in need of a good scrub, from all that had occurred since the ambush. But the bath house, like most cow-town bath houses, would be a male preserve where men would mingle, arguing such weighty issues as women and liquor. She had little interest in bathing with them and airing her differences.
Ki fell in beside Jessie, and they walked in the same direction as the still-visible wagon. He hadn’t been blind to her interest in the ruggedly handsome rancher, but neither was he so crass as to pry, other than to ask, “Daryl, did you say his name was?”
“Daryl? Why, yes, Daryl Melville, and his father, Tobias.”
“He seems to be shouldering a heavy load.”
“I believe he is,” Jessie replied, and briefly sketched what she’d learned. “And call it a hunch or feminine intuition, Ki, but I also believe there’s some kind of link between what’s happening to Daryl and what’s happening to Mrs. Waldemar.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Jessie said grimly. “Not yet.”
They entered the combination telegraph and post office that butted against one side of the hotel. Approaching a wizened oldster who sat behind a barred window, Jessica asked, “Are you acquainted with the owners of the Thundermug Saloon?”
“Yes’m. Halford and Kendrick, know ‘em well.”
“Know their first names? And where they’re from?”
That almost stumped the grizzled clerk, but after scratching his chin thoughtfully, he answered, “Woodrow and Barney, I recollect. Can’t say positive where they hail from, ‘cepting they’ve gotten and sent mail and wires to an’ from back East, Washington way.”
“You’re a dear,” Jessie said, dimpling a big thank-you smile. She then composed a long telegram that caused the clerk, sworn to secrecy by the rules of the telegraph company, to regard her with even livelier interest. Addressed to the Circle Star ranch in Texas, her message directed that a large draft of money be relayed, and a quick investigation be done on Woodrow Halford and Barney Kendrick, both from Washington, D.C.
“Hold all replies for either me or my friend,” Jessica instructed, indicating Ki. “Nobody else, no matter what you’re told.”
After paying the clerk, they stepped back out onto the street, Ki turning automatically toward the hotel. But Jessica, shaking her head, said, “There’re a few things I wish to buy first, now that we’re spending the night. Or do you want to meet me here later?”
“No, I haven’t anything special to do,” Ki replied, and began to walk with Jessica back up toward the general store. “I hired a stablehand at the livery to fetch our things from the cabin, but I doubt he’ll return much before nightfall. Oh, and I also rented two saddle horses, a pair of matching bays. The hostler assured me they can be hitched to a buck-board, if you prefer.”
“I don’t. My suspicion is that before we’re through, we’ll be having to ride where there aren’t any trails.”
In the store, Jessie took her time perusing the slim stock of ladies’ articles. At length she decided on a plaid flannel shirt to replace her ruined blouses; a calico wrapper and a frilly Empire-style nightgown made of fine nainsook; a bar of castile soap; a box of hairpins; and a traveling set consisting of a Russian bristle hairbrush, nail and toothbrushes, and an imitation ebony comb, all packed in a seal-grain leather case.
Ki, bored silly, made the common male error of asking, “Just what are you planning to do with all that, Jessie?”
“Well, I don’t plan to wear filthy clothes after I’ve bathed, and
I don’t plan to sleep naked in any hotel,” she declared with womanly logic, “and I certainly don’t plan to go visiting tomorrow looking dirty and smelling and with my hair all in a tangle.”
From the store, they went to the hotel. The Grand Continental may not actually have been grand, but it had a distinct air of faded gentility. Its oak front door had an oval window in it, thick and bevelled, with chintz curtains hanging behind it. There was a well-worn but clean carpet of flowing rose pattern on the lobby floor, and through the scarlet portiers toward the rear was a dining room with a crystal chandelier and linen settings. The wiry, thin-lipped, gimlet-eyed clerk at the reception desk had a different air about him, that of eau de lilac, and was obviously an insufferable prig.
Collecting her key, Jessica asked, “Is there a laundry service?”
“Of course,” the clerk said with a sniff. “Anything accepted by eight in the evening will be washed and ironed and delivered by morning.”
Jessica took her purchases to her room, which was on the second floor, at the rear. The room was in keeping with the rest of the hotel, with a plain bureau, a drab armchair, and a large wardrobe sporting a full-length, discolored mirror. The bed, though, looked clean and comfortable. On the side of the room opposite the bed, a dreary blue curtain hung from a rail, covering, she assumed, a communicating door to Ki’s room.
She opened the window a crack, to let out the mustiness, glancing out at the roof of the sheriff’s office, and then down at the dark, narrow alley that ran between it and the side of the hotel. As a view, it left much to be desired. She pulled the blind, and after lighting the kerosene banquet lamp on the bureau, she locked the door after her, and went back down to Ki in the lobby.
They ate an early dinner in the dining room, the food palatable if not interesting, the waiter surly and prone to swatting flies with his serving tray. The young stableboy arrived with their luggage, and after he’d left with a generous tip, Jessie and Ki ordered brandy and coffee, and sat discussing what little they knew.
When it was time for her bath, Jessie returned to her room, where she reloaded her derringer, stripped naked, and put on her new wrapper. She bundled what she’d been wearing with her clothes from the trunk, then took them next door to Ki, asking him to give them to the clerk downstairs.
Then, gathering her toiletries and locking the door behind her, Jessica placed the room key in her wrapper pocket along with her derringer, and went down the corridor to the bathroom. The hook on the bathroom door worked, but just in case, she folded the wrapper so the derringer could be quickly reached from the galvanized tub of tepid water. Cautiously satisfied, she slipped into the tub and settled down in the water for a long, well-deserved soak.
Ki, meanwhile, was deciding that he might as well add some of his own dirty clothes to the bundle Jessie had given him. Tossing in most everything except his jeans, vest, and rope-soled slippers, he waited until he heard Jessica close and safely latch the bathroom door, then left his room and walked down to the lobby.
The twit of a clerk wasn’t there. The only person in the otherwise deserted lobby was the girl who cleaned the rooms and made the beds. Ki recalled passing her in the upstairs corridor earlier that day, when he’d first checked in, while she’d been carrying a stack of linens similar to the bundle of clothing he now had in hand. She was now perched on a rickety stool behind the reception desk, concentrating so hard on the game of solitaire she was playing that she failed to notice Ki’s approach.
“Excuse me,” Ki said.
Stiffening, the girl hastily began to gather the dog-eared cards together, as if he’d caught her doing something very wrong.
“You don’t have to stop,” Ki said.
“Oh, I should,” she replied guiltily. “If Uncle Humphrey catchs me sinning like this, he’ll whup me good.”
She was a vivid creature, as fiercely pretty as a panther kitten. About twenty, Ki judged, with flaming red hair and great amethyst-blue eyes set in a freckled, tanned face, and with a wide red mouth that was slowly beginning to soften into a relieved smile.
“Uncle Humphrey?” Ki asked. “The clerk?”
“And manager, and owner,” the girl explained. “He’s out for dinner right now, and I’m just holding down the fort till he gets back. That can be a spell at times, but if you want to come back...”
“No, I only want to leave some laundry.”
“Well, you can put what you’ve got ‘round back here.”
Ki moved to the end of the counter and dumped the bundle. He could now see that the girl was wearing a cheap muslin dress cut rather high on the knees, laundry-boiled over the years almost to the transparency of lace gauze. Her legs were long and bare, her feet encased in low-cut moccasins. He also noticed that although her body was slender and wasp-waisted, she had the large, succulent breasts and thighs of a mature woman built for breeding.
She twisted on the tall stool and regarded the bundle suspiciously. “You’ve got some lady’s things in there, too.”
“Miss Starbuck’s.”
She paused thoughtfully, then said, “Are you two ... ?”
Ki chuckled. “Not in the way you’re thinking.”
She giggled and then neither of them said anything more for a while. She just kept looking at Ki, appraising his tight-fitting jeans and vest and his bronzed, muscular form that they barely covered, until her scrutiny and the silence grew embarrassing.
“I hope Uncle Humphrey doesn’t come back and find me sitting here doing nothing,” the girl said at last. “He doesn’t like me to become familiar with the hotel guests, he says. He’s afraid something might happen to me, I guess.”
Ki grinned. “What kind of something?”
“Oh ... you know. Men in here all the time, coming and going. Uncle Humphrey gets powerful mad if I stop and talk to any of them.”
“And you never do?”
“I am now, ain’t I?”
She lifted her brows when she said that, and looked sideways at Ki. And Ki found himself wondering if there was anything under that dress of hers. Somehow he thought not. There wasn’t any reason to believe that it was the only thing she was wearing, but he got the idea, and then he tried imagining what it was like beneath it.
It didn’t take much to imagine her breasts. Her lips were full and red; big nipples, then, strawberry in size and color. She had fire-red hair. Between her legs would also be a frothing mass of red, bushy between the cheeks of her big solid rump.
Ki licked his lips. “And is your uncle right about it?”
“What do you think?”
Ki glanced down at the bundle, then across the lobby toward the door, then finally back to the girl. What a vixen, he thought; she exuded sex like her uncle smelled of lilac perfume. He needed her like he needed a bad case of poison ivy, but if a woman’s offering, a man will take, even if he has to get off his deathbed for her.
Huskily, he answered, “I think I know what you need.”
She sat with a light smirk on her face and then, because she evidently wanted him to make the first move, Ki stepped over the laundry and went to her stool. The girl tilted her face up to him and pressed her lips to his, her tongue darting between his teeth.
Ki held one hand on the stool to keep it from falling over, and slid his other hand over her shoulder, down her dress front. She wriggled some but didn’t object, and in a second he was massaging one of her breasts. All things considered, she had damn big breasts for her size, because Ki didn’t think she could weigh more than a hundred pounds, but her breasts w8uld have worn well on any woman. She didn’t say a word when he started kneading them, but after a long moment she broke her kiss and watched his hand caressing her nipples.
“‘I wonder why she ain’t trying to fight me,’” she said. “Is that what you’re thinking? Why I’m not putting up any struggle?”
“I’m not thinking at all right now.”
“All right. But you wonder just the same, I’ll bet. I do, I know. And I don’t know
the answer. I can’t imagine why I’m such a pushover. I’m one of those girls who’re easy to get, I guess.”
“This stool is liable to collapse,” Ki said, wanting to change the subject. “Let’s either stop or go somewhere.”
“I can’t leave the desk. We can do it here.”
“Your uncle or somebody might come in.”
“Maybe. But let’s try it anyway and find out.” She slipped from his embrace and went to the front door, snapping the catch on the lock and pulling down the window shade. This is crazy, Ki thought as she turned and walked back toward him. But her eyes had that vacant, burnt expression that some women got when they were ready to be seduced, and she was breathing hard, as though there weren’t enough air in the lobby. Here was blatant challenge, here was passion deluxe. And what man could turn his back on that?
The girl went around the end of the counter and settled down on Ki’s bundle of laundry. Slowly, sensuously, she stretched back across the dirty clothing, her dress hiking up above her knees, and she crossed her arms behind her head and gazed invitingly up at him.
Ki sat beside her, and she said, “Don’t undress me.”
“I’d like to see you naked.”
She rubbed her leg against his, and pulled her dress up a little. “I know. It’s better when you’re naked, but you were right, Uncle Humphrey or somebody could come along.”
“Has your uncle ever caught you doing this?”
“Almost. I had to hide in a closet for two hours.”
Ki eased her dress higher and saw that she was wearing a pair of short lacy pantaloons, tied by a drawstring at her waist. “Don’t wrinkle my dress in back,” she said, arching her bottom so he could get it up from under her and spread it out beneath her back. “I guess I’m stupid, letting you do this at all. How’d you know I would? You didn’t seem to be worried about me raising hell or anything.”
Ki untied the drawstring and began to take her pantaloons off. They were tight from having been washed and shrunk a lot, and were hard to slip over her hips. “I don’t know,” he replied.
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