The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Tom sent word to the house as soon he saw Stroudmire approach you. He figured something was up, and Alice said that, if you were around, Shorty would be, too. She sent Eben after him. Eben’s the house bouncer at Alice’s. He’ll find Shorty quick enough, if he ain’t already. Alice thought he might be over at Nellie’s. That’s where she sent Eben to look first.”

  “Nellie?” Rose’s repeated softly. “So that’s her name.”

  “Didn’t you know about her?”

  “Not her name.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” She forced a lop-sided grin. “I’m glad you showed up, though. I ain’t sure anyone else would’ve helped.”

  “Everyone’s afraid of Stroudmire, including me. You looked into his eyes. What did you see?”

  “Weren’t no soul in there, that’s sure.”

  “You’re safe for now, but you ought to come back to the house before Stroudmire puts someone to watching the rear door.”

  “I can’t, Nora. I got a horse out back, plus I need to locate Shorty. He’s still got my money.”

  “Don’t worry about Shorty. Eben’ll bring him around when it’s safe, and Callie’s already taken care of your horse.”

  “Callie. The cook?”

  “Come on,” Nora said. “But keep that pistol handy. Stroudmire ain’t a man who likes to be made a fool of, and I suspect that’s what he’ll be feeling like real soon, once he starts thinking about it.” She paused, glancing over her shoulder at Rose. “When he thinks about it a while, I figure he’s going to want to kill somebody. You shouldn’t be around when that happens.”

  Chapter

  13

  Standing at an upstairs window in Alice’s parlor house, Rose stared across the town. The view was interesting, although not especially attractive. She thought the lights from all the windows looked like a diffused reflection of the stars, and shadows that were buckboards and pedestrians moved in a steady flow along the streets. But for all that, it was a lonely scene, and exclusive. All those homes, all those families, yet how many among them would welcome Rose Edwards if she were to show up on their doorstep?

  There was a sound behind her and she turned, letting the curtain fall. Nora came into the room, looking harried and relieved at the same time. “Callie and Eben are back,” she announced. “They’ve got your stuff.”

  Callie came in first, lugging Rose’s saddle in one hand, the Sharps in the other. “My goodness, girl,” Callie said, puffing. “How’d you ever throw all this stuff onto that horse of yours. I had enough struggle just pulling it off.” She dropped the saddle next to a chest of drawers, then leaned the rifle in the corner.

  Eben came next, carrying the weathered canvas pannier that Rose and Shorty had used for their personal gear on the trip back from the Pipestem. He set the pannier on the floor beside the saddle and straightened slowly, his black face sheened with perspiration. “This here’s all of it,” he said, arching his back. “Mister Tibbs said this is all your gear, plus some extras, some blankets and skillets and such. He said you was to keep it.” Plucking a fist-size buckskin pouch from inside his shirt, he held it toward her. “He said to give you this, too. Said he hadn’t had time to figure it all out on paper yet, but thought this would cover your share of the pelts.”

  Reluctantly Rose extended her hand; Eben set the pouch in her open palm. She recognized it as Shorty’s money poke, the once golden buckskin now stained nearly black, the cotton drawstring raveled. “Did he … ah … did he say anything else?” she asked.

  “He said he was sorry,” Eben replied gently. “Said he was going to light out for Junction City to look for Collins.”

  Rose’s fingers closed over the pouch, crushing the soft leather in her fist. “Well, I reckon that’s that then,” she said, feeling suddenly light-headed.

  “That bastard,” Nora said vehemently.

  “Yeah, ain’t he though,” Rose replied, unable to mask her disappointment.

  “I’d like to whack that Shorty Tibbs upside his head,” Callie declared. “Men don’t know half the heartache they cause.”

  Looking uncomfortable, Eben began an unobtrusive retreat. “I’ll just let Alice know I’m back,” he said genially.

  He’d almost reached the door when Rose said: “Eben.”

  “Yes’m?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why, you’re welcome, Miss Rose,” he answered, then left the room.

  “Humpf,” Callie said, regarding the empty doorway. Then she turned to Rose. “If it helps, Shorty told Eben he wouldn’t have left if he hadn’t been sure you were safe.” She made another snorty sound of disgust. “Just proves there ain’t no critter thicker skulled than a man, except maybe a Missouri mule, and even that ain’t a sure-fire guarantee. I’ve met many a mule I’d consider downright intelligent compared to some of the men I’ve seen traipse through parlor houses over the years.”

  “They’re all bastards,” Nora said, “but crying about it won’t change anything.” To Rose, she added: “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

  “I don’t hardly know what to do. I’d been thinkin’ about goin’ home and rebuilding the cabin, but I guess I’d counted on Shorty to help with that. I ain’t sure I got the wherewithal to go it alone any more.”

  “Maybe you ought to just go to burrow for a while,” Callie suggested. “Ain’t nothing you can do tonight that you can’t do next week.”

  “That makes sense,” Nora said. “Take some time and think about what you want to do.”

  “I can pay,” Rose said.

  “If you can pay, Alice will charge you a dollar a night,” Nora said. “You’ll have to share a bed with someone, though. There ain’t no empty rooms.”

  “We got us a full house,” Callie agreed. “Pearl and Jessie are already sharing a room. Miss Alice is gonna have to build herself a larger place if this keeps up.”

  “It’ll just be for the convention and roundup,” Nora explained. “We’re expecting a lot of men through here in the next few weeks. The ranch owners and ramrods will come for the cattlemen’s convention. After that, they’ll start one of the district roundups from nearby.”

  “Be a barrel full of drovers in for that,” Callie predicted.

  “Won’t I be in the way?” Rose asked.

  “No,” Nora assured her. “You can bunk in here with me. I don’t allow men in here, so you won’t be bothered. Besides, I doubt if you could even find a room in a hotel. They’ve reserved all their beds for the ranchers, and a lot of them will be double-bunking, too.”

  “Well, then,” Callie said briskly, as if everything was settled. “I’ll go heat some water. You’ll want a bath, I expect.”

  “I … ah … naw.” Rose blushed at the thought of taking a bath indoors, where people would know what she was doing, or could even walk in on her accidentally. Although the prospect of hot water was appealing, she considered it more modest to bathe in a river or creek, where she could see someone approaching from a long way off. But Callie wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Don’t start fretting over foolishness,” she chastised. “You ain’t the first gal to show up here needing a bath and a change of clothes. You dig out what you’ve got, I’ll freshen it up while you’re scrubbing. If you need anything else, we’ll find it around here somewhere. How’s that sound?”

  It was what an educated person might call a rhetorical question, Rose decided, for sure as shooting the stern look on Callie’s face precluded any further argument. Shrugging submissively she said: “Why, now that I think on it, that sounds like a fine idea.”

  • • • • •

  The next few weeks turned out to be perplexing ones for Rose, who’d never in her life been in the presence of so many women. She was certain they must consider h
er as backward as a woods waif, if not outright ignorant, yet as time went on she began to strike up tentative friendships with several of them, and to lower her guard around the rest.

  Callie was a big help. It was she who encouraged Rose to reach out first, rather than always hang back. In many ways, Rose’s relationship with the heavy-set black woman reminded her of a small child’s dependency on its mother. It irked her that she should crave such bonds now, in her twenty-fifth year, yet she couldn’t deny something immensely gratifying about it, too.

  It was to Rose’s deep regret that she was unable to forge the same level of intimacy with Nora. If Callie had become a kind of surrogate mother to her, then Nora remained very much a distant, salty cousin. Not that they didn’t get along. Nora was as conversant in the harsher realities of a fallen woman’s lot as any whore, and she and Rose shared a mutual respect based on the experiences each knew the other had suffered and survived. But in the end, neither women possessed the skills necessary to bridge the barriers those circumstances had created. They became good friends; they just never became close ones.

  One day near the end of her first week in Miles City, Rose was sitting on the top step of Alice’s front porch with her face tipped to the warming rays of the sun. The snow was gone and the land was drying out. A fresh blush of green shaded the hills, and songbirds warbled in the budding trees. Her head was bobbing, and she might have drifted off to sleep in another minute or two if the door hadn’t swung open on its squeaky hinge. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Nora coming out of the house in a demure blue dress. A matching pill-box hat was perched atop her dark curls, and she carried a cloth purse in one hand, decorated with embroidery and small beads. She might have looked downright pretty if not for the stub of a cheroot jutting from a corner of her mouth.

  “Dang,” Rose exclaimed, twisting around for a better view. “You clean up right pert.”

  “Smart ass,” Nora replied, squinting into the sunlight.

  “Well, flattery ain’t my strong suit,” Rose admitted, “but I do like that dress. It’s eye-catchin’.”

  “Christ, that sun is bright.” Nora moved into the shade near the front wall. “You could go blind in this much light.”

  “Feels good to me,” Rose said.

  Nora gave her a calculating look. “You ought to get yourself a better dress. That thing you’re wearing looks like a wrung-out rag.” She took the smoked-down cigar from her mouth and flipped it into the yard. “I’m going into town. You want to come along?”

  Caught off guard, Rose quickly shook her head. “Naw, I’ll stay here.”

  “You ain’t been into town since you got here. Scared?”

  “No, I ain’t scared.” She stood and hesitantly ran her hands down over her hips, eyeing her get-up. It was a fact she’d been feeling rather homely of late. The old gray dress she’d salvaged after the fire at her cabin last year had acquired a large, reddish stain along one thigh, absorbed from the leather of her saddlebags. Plus the fabric was worn thin over her shoulders and under her arms, the color faded so badly a person could hardly make out the thin pink stripes that ran vertically through the material. “I reckon I could use a new one,” she concluded.

  “Sure, get yourself a new dress, maybe some new knickers.”

  Rose’s cheeks grew warm. She’d been wearing her old long-handles under her dress, although with the sleeves and ankles rolled up so that they wouldn’t show. Still, she didn’t suppose a new pair of bloomers would bankrupt her.

  She hurried upstairs to get her money while Nora waited on the porch. She felt an odd mixture of excitement and apprehension as she shoved Shorty’s buckskin poke down beside the Smith & Wesson in the bulky cloth purse Callie had loaned her. She knew from Nora that Stroudmire and Haus were still buzzarding around town, although they were keeping a low profile, and lately had avoided the Silver Star.

  The rumor floating around Miles City was that the two shootists were waiting for someone connected with the upcoming cattlemen’s convention to give them the go-ahead. No one seemed quite sure what that go-ahead might pertain to, but such limitations of fact did little to check the flood of speculation. All the girls at Alice’s were convinced the mysterious they were about to unleash the Stranglers once more, to finish hanging the thieves and rustlers they’d missed on their first sweep.

  Rose held a different notion. Having been something of a participant herself during the Stranglers’ raid in 1884, she remembered all too well one of their most intimidating tactics—their secretiveness. No one had known what to expect or who to trust, and that uncertainty alone had convinced many of the territory’s worst scallywags to seek out more tolerant ranges.

  In Rose’s opinion, there was nothing covert about Stroudmire and Haus; they were about as inconspicuous as a couple of dead horses lying in the middle of the street. Because of that, Rose was convinced there was no connection between them and the Stranglers, other than the monied interests that probably financed both parties.

  Although the two gunmen were prominent in Rose’s thoughts, she didn’t bring them up. In fact, she and Nora didn’t speak at all as they entered the business district, when her nervousness began to increase for entirely different reasons.

  Traffic along the streets and boardwalks was forcing Rose to take more notice of her attire. Her stained dress and wind-roughened face and hands, her long, loose hair with neither bonnet nor hat or even a simple ribbon to control it hadn’t caused her much concern at Alice’s, where everyone knew her story and accepted her. But it was different here, and she could well imagine what the people they passed must think—a big, oafish girl tagging along like a simpleton beside a properly costumed woman such as Nora.

  The irony of her embarrassment, that she felt more awkward in a dress than she had earlier that week trotting Albert down Main Street in male garb, didn’t escape her, but it was also a fact that she’d always felt like a charlatan whenever she tried to make herself look more appealing. She could still hear the voices of her pap and brothers, ridiculing her efforts at femininity.

  What’s an ox need a ribbon for? her pap had once queried, the last time she’d pleaded for such foofaraw. Even though she knew he had a mean streak, and that others considered her attractive, the question still haunted her.

  Rose figured Nora was taking her to Broadwater and Hubbell’s, but they passed the big brick mercantile without so much as a glance in the window. Instead they turned into a narrow log structure a block east of the larger store, where a small bell on a leaf spring above the door announced their entrance. A woman looked up from a table in a corner of the front room where she was pinning a hem on a dress. She was petite and blonde and had hard eyes, but she smiled when she recognized Nora. Rose pegged her as another survivor, although she had no idea from what. Nora introduced her as Doris Bochner, an old friend from Kansas City.

  “Doris has a dressing room in back, where horny old men can’t hang around trying to catch a peek,” Nora explained.

  While Nora browsed through bolts of cloth out front, Rose followed Doris down a hall to a small cubicle at the rear of the building. Rose hadn’t known what to expect from a dressing room, being unacquainted with the term, but she decided, once she’d seen one, that her ignorance had probably stood her in good stead. Had she anticipated much at all, she likely would have been disappointed. There was a short bench, nails in the walls for hangers, and a full-length mirror on a cherry wood stand. A window admitted light, although its panes were covered with brown butcher’s paper for modesty’s sake. Pink wallpaper, peeling and water-stained, hung on the walls.

  “It isn’t fancy,” Doris admitted, “but at least a woman doesn’t have to order her unmentionables in public, or from a male clerk. You can try on a dress, too, to make sure it fits properly.”

  “It’s … nice,” Rose said lamely, eliciting a strained smile from Doris.

  “Honey, it’s a sca
nt step up from a dirt-floored tent, which is what I started in, but it’ll have to do until we’re all rich and can afford mansions. Now, what did you have in mind?”

  Rose hadn’t a clue, and Doris quickly took charge. By the time they left the back room a couple of hours later, Rose had bought two new dresses—one of dark blue serge with pearl buttons down a pleated bodice, and the other linen in a soft shade of green, with white piping and a green bow that tied in back. She’d also purchased stockings with garters, petticoats, bloomers, camisoles, a pair of pointed-toe black shoes that laced to above the ankle, and a flat-crowned straw hat with a narrow, straight brim and a piece of black ribbon for a hatband. Some small white handkerchiefs and a woolen shawl for evenings completed her ensembles. In addition, Doris helped her with her hair, showing her how to fasten it above her head with long pins in the current, casual fashion.

  Nora was slumped in a chair in the front room when Rose emerged from the rear of the shop. She looked tired and irritated, but came over to lend a hand when she saw the boxes in Rose’s arms. Rose paid the bill with money she’d earned from trapping, and the two women left the store.

  “Do you like ice cream?” Nora asked when they were outside.

  “Ice cream. Shoot, everybody likes ice cream.”

  “There’s a place down the street that sells it. It’s an apothecary shop, and I promised Pearl I’d pick up a tin of cocaine powder for her.”

  Rose frowned. “Pearl ought to stay away from that stuff. I think it’s making her brain jittery.”

  “It ain’t your business or mine,” Nora replied. “I promised her I’d pick some up. You want to come along or not?”

  “Sure.”

  The apothecary shop was located in a small, wood-framed building overshadowed by a two-storied brick bank with lawyers’ offices overhead. Rose and Nora found seats by the window, and when a heavy-set older woman came to take their order, Nora asked for two bowls of ice cream with chocolate sauce and a sprinkling of crushed pecans over the top.