Cherokee Rose

by Judy Alter

  "You took your luck away from me," he muttered through clenched teeth as he thrust himself deeper into me. "I'll show you nobody does that to Walt Denison."

  When I opened my eyes to look at the horror that was facing me, I saw cruel hardness, none of the laughing charm that had courted me. Quickly I closed my eyes again and willed my soul to some safe place. There are times when fighting an outlaw horse will get you nothing but worse trouble, and I knew better than to fight this time.

  At last, he rolled over and began to snore. I lay for a long time gathering my strength together. My plans for leaving Walt had been vague, unformed, sometime in the future. Now, having seen a cruelty that went beyond what I expected, I knew that I had to leave right away. I couldn't wait for Texas. I don't think he'd have killed me, but he could have hurt me badly—and he could have destroyed my soul.

  Finally, I edged carefully out of the bed. But my caution was needless—Walt snored in an alcohol-induced coma that would last several hours. With slow deliberation, I cleaned myself, dressed in street clothes, and packed my few personal belongings. I left behind all the fancy clothes that Walt had bought me, all those slinky satin dresses that made me look like his kept whore.

  When I walked out of the hotel at four o'clock in the morning, the doorman asked carefully, "Everything all right, Mrs. Denison?"

  "Not quite," I lied. "I've had a call that my aunt is sick, and I need to go to her. Would you call me a cab?"

  Inside the cab, I waited to give the address until we were well away from the doorman, lest he hear and later collapse under Walt's angry questioning. Then I directed the cab to Mrs. O'Riley's boardinghouse in Brooklyn, where I'd stayed all those years before, the first time I'd come to New York with the colonel's show. She was, I figured, close enough to qualify as an aunt.

  She welcomed me with open arms and no questions. "Tommy Jo! You're a sight for sore eyes. Come into this house!"

  Settled into one of her beds, covered by a down comforter, I slept the clock around. Mrs. O'Riley, bless her, never asked a question when I finally appeared at her table.

  "Checked in on you a time or two, I did," she said, "just to be sure you were still alive. Lord, you needed your sleep, child!"

  "Yes," I said, "I did. And I thank you. Now I've got to wire a friend for money so I can pay you and get back to Oklahoma." It was a great comfort to realize that Walt Denison had no way of finding me.

  Mrs. O'Riley sent me off to a nearby office of the Western Union Company, and with still a twinge of reluctance, I sent a wire to Louise asking for money to return home. I gave no explanation, knowing she would demand none until I was once again seated at her kitchen table. That chore done, I returned to Mrs. O'Riley's and reveled in the comfort of her kitchen, the ordinariness of the conversation around her boardinghouse table. I would, I decided, much rather talk to drummers about the sad life of a man whose livelihood depended on sales than talk about the erratic successes of a man whose identity depended upon the gambling table.

  "Tommy Jo, you've got a wire," Mrs. O'Riley said, knocking on my door the third morning that I was in her boardinghouse.

  I was instantly at the door, though still dressed in my robe. "Thank you," I said. "I'll be able to pay you today, and I'll be on my way home."

  She must have seen hundreds of people come through her boardinghouse, most of them much less fortunate than I, and yet that good woman reached out her arms toward me. "I'm glad it worked out for you, love. You're special, among all the boarders I've had." She had never pried into the particulars of what had brought me back to her house this time, but she sensed the nature of the trouble.

  I remembered how stern I thought she was when I first stayed there, and I realized how much I'd learned since then. With her praise singing in my ears and money in my pocket, I made arrangements to return to Oklahoma.

  Bo met the train in Oklahoma City.

  "Bo! What're you doing here?" My delight and surprise were tinged with caution. I guess Walt Denison had taught me to trust no one.

  "Came to pick you up," he drawled. "Louise sent me."

  Suddenly I convulsed with laughter. When she had her mind set on a notion, Louise sometimes forgot about subtlety. Bo looked right put out with me as I laughed, so I struggled to get enough control to say, "I'm really glad she did, Bo. Thank you."

  "Don't know what's the matter with you," he muttered, half to himself, as he loaded my bags into his wagon. "Goin' halfway across the country, getting married to some no-count. Ought to be horsewhipped, you should."

  "Yes, sir," I said meekly, climbing into the wagon. "I probably should be."

  "Your pa's not happy, either," Bo continued, almost oblivious of my reaction. "Says he knew that Denison fellow was no good for you."

  At that I bit back a sharp retort. Papa had been all for my marriage to Walt, and he knew it, but Bo didn't.

  Once he finished chastising me, Bo had little to say, and I was shamed into silence, so we rode most of the way to Guthrie without speaking, except for occasional small talk.

  "Horses are fine."

  "Pardon me?"

  "Your horses—Governor, Guthrie, Sam—they're doin' fine."

  Walt had argued with me when I said I wanted the horses sent to Guthrie while we were in New York. "I have grooms, you know," he said haughtily. "They're better able to take care of your precious horses than that cowboy in Guthrie." But I had won out, and the horses had been ridden—not shipped on a train—back to Bo.

  "Oh. I—I guess I knew they would be. Thanks."

  "Need riding, though."

  "I'm sure they do. I'll start in the morning."

  When we were almost to Louise's house, he ventured, "You back to stay this time, Tommy Jo?"

  I thought for a long minute. It was a question I hadn't really faced yet. But at length, when I answered, I could only say what was the truth at that moment. "I don't know, Bo. I think I am. I really think I am. But I can't say. I think—no, I hope, I'm through with show business." I'd made too many decisions in my life that I hadn't lived with. This time I wasn't making any promises to anyone, not even myself.

  "That's good," he said with a slight grin.

  Louise greeted me with a hug, a mug of hot chocolate, and a calmness that, like Bo's attitude, demanded no answers. I could, I knew, tell my story when I felt like it. Until then, I was home.

  We sat at the kitchen table, and I fingered the scars in the wood Bo and Louise talked about the weather and the lack of rain and whether or not the owner of the print company would be elected mayor, while my thoughts drifted back... to the Wild West show, Buck, my dreams of glory and fame and, yes, riches, my days with Walt. All of it seemed hazy compared with the reality of a kitchen table and a mug of hot chocolate. I had been truthful when I told Bo I hoped I was home to stay—it was just taking me a while to realize it. Maybe Guthrie was reality and all the rest was a dream I'd chased too long. Maybe in Guthrie I'd find the real Tommy Jo Burns.

  And Bo? I didn't even want to think about him. I could have started things up with Bo again in a flash—I sensed that immediately, but I didn't think that was fair to him, at least not until, if and when, I decided that I was home to stay, that Bo and life in Guthrie were really what I wanted. Bo deserved better than someone who was trying to find her way. Even someone who finally thought she was headed in the right direction.

  "Got to be goin'," Bo said, rising lazily from the table. "Start work at six in the morning." He looked pointedly at me.

  "I'll be there, Bo," I said. It was a good way to start.

  The End

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  Page forward for a note from the author

  followed by an excerpt from

  JESSIE

  Real Women of the American West

  Book Four

  Author's Note

  Cherokee Rose is fiction inspired by the life of Lucille Mulhall, the woman for whom President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term cowgirl. It should in no way be read as biography. Lucille had an exciting life, the stuff of fiction, and I have woven several parts of her life into this narrative. But more than telling Lucille Mulhall's life, I wanted to tell the story of all the women who rode and roped in the Wild West shows in the first decades of the twentieth century. For the sake of storytelling, I have given personality to people about whom I could find little record and sent Cherokee, my fictional cowgirl, on adventures that are, in truth, borrowed from the experiences of Ruth Roach, Mildred Chrisman, Bertha Blancett, Florence LaDue, and a host of Lucille's contemporaries. Little is recorded of Lucille's two marriages beyond their approximate date and duration, and there, too, I have taken the liberties of the novelist. The character of those two marriages—and other relationships in these pages—is purely a product of my imagination and should not be attributed to the real Lucille Mulhall or anyone associated with her.

  But the 101 Ranch show, and that king of them all, the Buffalo Bill Wild West, were very real, and the story of the Wild West cowgirl could not be told without including them undisguised. Even there, though, I have taken liberties—the character of Colonel Zack Miller, for instance, should in no way be confused with the real Zack or Joe Miller of the 101—Colonel Zack's personality grew and took on a character of its own as this story progressed.

  I am indebted to several sources for information about Lucille and the 101. Most important among them are The 101 Ranch by Ellsworth Collmgs and Alma Miller England (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937) and Lucille Mulhall: Wild West Cowgirl by Kathryn B. Stansbury (Mulhall, Okla.: Homestead Heirlooms Publishing Company, Box 34, Mulhall, OK 73063). Also of help was The Cowgirls by Joyce Gibson Roach (Houston: Cordovan Corporation, 1977; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1990).

  I am even more in Joyce Roach's debt for her lengthy and painstaking explanations of the art of roping and her careful reading of those portions of the manuscript. And I thank Bobbie Simms for acting as first reader and managing to temper her wholehearted enthusiasm with valuable insight and suggestions.

  Page forward for an excerpt from

  JESSIE

  Real Women of the American West

  Book Four

  Excerpt from

  Jessie

  Real Women of the American West

  Book Four

  by

  Judy Alter

  Award-winning Author

  JESSIE

  Reviews & Accolades

  "Lulls the reader into forgetting this is fiction."

  ~Publishers Weekly

  I was the son my father never had, the child who would follow his dreams of an America expanding westward to the Pacific Ocean. And I was the parent that my husband longed for, the one who gave him the love, acceptance, and respectability he needed. I was a daughter and a wife, conscious always of the proper role of a woman... and always chafing against it. And yet I was myself—only I learned that lesson almost too late in life.

  My father was Thomas Hart Benton, for forty years a United States senator from Missouri, one who fought for westward expansion and who fought equally hard against slavery, to the final destruction of his political career. He was a man of towering strength who brought me up in his shadow, wanting me to be both the helpmate he missed in my invalid mother and, still, the dainty, beautiful daughter he thought all men should have.

  My husband was John Charles Frémont, explorer, topographer, soldier of fortune, presidential candidate, senator, governor, mining king, and, sometimes, bankrupt failure, court-martialed soldier, disgraced businessman—a man whose whole life was shadowed by the fact of his illegitimacy. That I loved him passionately has never been in doubt, nor that he loved me equally. But ours was a rocky relationship, with him away more than he was at home, filled with dreams and visions of what could be, while I coped too often with what really was. Our marriage was a series of good-byes—sometimes he returned to me in glorious triumph, but there were also days of dark disgrace. I saw two of my infant children die, watched my husband flirt with the temptation of a lover—a temptation I myself once put firmly behind me for his sake—and suffered a devastating estrangement from the father who had taught me all I knew—all this for the man I'd impulsively eloped with at the age of seventeen.

  Without my father and my husband, the course of American history would be vastly different—less dramatic, I believe, and less triumphant. Westward expansion, even the crossing of the continent with the railroad, would have come without them but perhaps not so soon nor so effectively. The world should not judge such men as it does ordinary mortals... and yet it judges them more harshly. When I think of the part they had in the course of history, I like to believe that I, too, had a hand in the shaping of our country's history. I know I was of inestimable help to my father and, perhaps more important, I shaped the life of my husband. I was a good wife and a good mother to our children... but my life went beyond those roles, and I was not typical of my time, more's the pity.

  Jessie

  Real Women of the American West

  Book Four

  by

  Judy Alter

  ~

  To purchase

  Jessie

  from your favorite eBook Retailer,

  visit Judy Alter's eBook Discovery Author Page

  www.ebookdiscovery.com/JudyAlter

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  Judy Alter retired as director of Texas Christian University Press and began a new career writing mysteries. The first, Skeleton in a Dead Space, was published in September 2011 and the second, No Neighborhood for Old Women, in April 2012. More are to come. Alter previously wrote about women of the American West and is a former president of the Western Writers of America. In 1984 her book Luke and the Van Zandt County War was named best juvenile novel of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 1988 she received a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for her novel Mattie, and in 1992 a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame for her short story, "Fool Girl." In 2005 she received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from Western Writers of America.

  Judy Alter lives with her two dogs in Fort Worth, Texas. She is the single mother of four and the grandmother of seven.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  A Note from the Publisher

  Author's Note

  Excerpt from JESSIE (Real Women of the American West, Book 4)

  Meet the Author