Hart the Regulator 6

by John B. Harvey

  ‘Is it hell!’

  The doorman glanced at Emily, to see whether or not she had heard Hart’s profanity.

  Emily gave no sign one way or the other. ‘We’re travelling together,’ she said, pointing back at Hart.

  The doorman bowed his head a little and the peak of his cap pecked the air like a bird. T daresay, ma’am, but that don’t change the rules.’

  Hart looked over the man’s outstretched arm; most of the tables were full, folk eating and drinking and talking contentedly and sure enough all of the men were wearing coats of one kind or another.

  Hart remained stubborn in the doorway while Emily hushed the baby boy, and Teresa threatened to whine. The doorman had noticed Hart’s holstered Colt and was beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of his ways.

  ‘We do, sir, have a number of coats for the use of our customers.’

  ‘What?’

  The doorman pointed to his right at a dozen or so jackets hanging from a rope line.

  ‘You want to sell me a coat so’s I can buy your food?’

  ‘No, sir. Lend you a coat.’

  Hart scratched the side of his head and controlled his temper in the face of such small-minded stupidity.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ asked Emily. ‘It won’t do any harm.’ Hart sighed, nodded and motioned for the doorman to fetch him a coat.

  He took the alpaca jacket grudgingly and pulled it on, following Emily and the children into the dining hall.

  Certainly the interior was about as neat and ordered as any such place Hart had been in. There were checkered cloths on the tables, glass vases which held freshly cut flowers, china and cutlery that looked as good as anything you might expect to find in a large city.

  Almost as soon as they had sat down, a waitress appeared beside Hart’s elbow, a small book and pencil at the ready. When he glanced up at her, she smiled back and said for them to take their time. She was round-faced, quite tall, her dark hair gathered up into two sections on top of her head, the one a lesser version of the other. She wore a large white apron, which was tight at the neck and fastened behind her shoulders, belted tight again at the waist and then flowing to the floor. Beneath it, she wore a black dress with arms bare from the elbow.

  She waited while Hart and Emily discussed what they wanted, wrote it down and turned away with another smile.

  There were a half-dozen waitresses, Hart noticed, all dressed in the same way.

  ‘This is some place,’ he said to Emily and she gave him a half-smile and fussed with Henry and answered something he didn’t clearly hear.

  Teresa was staring about her, head moving from side to side, eyes never still. She followed the movements of the waitresses as they went from table to table, from table to the hatch leading through to the kitchen.

  When the food came it was better than any of them had expected - well cooked, tasty, the portions generous.

  ‘Worth putting on a jacket for?’ asked Emily lightly.

  Hart chewed on a piece of pork and nodded. ‘Just about.’

  ‘I was never in anywhere like this,’ she said,’ serving girls all dressed the same.’

  Teresa leaned over and pulled at her mother’s sleeve. ‘When I grow up I want to be one of those.’

  Emily smiled and ruffled her daughter’s hair; her face clouded. ‘What happened back in the store?’ she asked Hart.

  Hart set down his fork. ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Teresa said you grabbed hold of her, sudden.’

  Hart fiddled with a piece of meat that had got wedged between his teeth, poking the end of his tongue at it.

  ‘I want to know.’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothin’. Someone came in, that’s all.’

  ‘Someone came in and you caught hold of Teresa tight enough for her to say it hurt?’

  ‘A man.’

  ‘Which man.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Exasperation showed in her eyes, in the way she moved her plate forward across the table. ‘My God,’ she said in a low, tight voice, ‘but you can be stubborn at times.’

  ‘What else can I say? I don’t know who he was. That’s all.’

  ‘But you thought you did?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or you thought he knew you.’

  Hart freed the meat from his teeth and swallowed it; he sighed and nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  She looked at him. ‘It’s that gun, isn’t it?’

  Hart looked back at her, saying nothing. Teresa was watching them now, one face and then the other, the waitresses forgotten.

  ‘As long as you wear it, as long as men know you live by it, then you’re going to draw others to you like a bee does honey.’ She drew breath. ‘As long as you’re with us, we’re in danger.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’

  Her eyes caught fire. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what would have happened if that man in the store had been who or what you thought? What would have happened then?’ She looked for a moment at her daughter. ‘What would have happened to her?’

  Hart leaned forward and set a hand upon hers to calm her, persuade her. ‘It ain’t like that. Nothin’ would have happened in there. Nothin’.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’ She slid her hand out from under his.

  Hart pushed his chair back away from the table and wiped at his mouth with his hand. ‘I’m tellin’ you, you’re better off with me than not. All of you. Long as I’m here there ain’t nothin’ goin’ to happen. Not to Teresa, not to anyone.’ He gave a curt nod and looked into Emily’s doubting face. ‘You’ll see.’

  Chapter Five

  It was the way the old woman had died that Rose couldn’t get out of her mind; it stuck there like a knot of vomit at the back of her throat. She felt that her breath stank of that old woman’s death. The two bullets hurling her back through the doorway, breaking her apart. Old woman’s blood. Rose imagined that she could taste it on her lips and for a second she gagged, certain she was going to throw up.

  No: the feeling faded, leaving just the memory, the stink of blood that had filled the way station. Those two standing in the middle of it, looking round, shaking their heads. The nigger saying it: We sure made a bloody meal of this one, we surely did.

  A bloody meal - she wondered how long ago that had been. Wanted to know badly and then as soon she didn’t care. Knew it didn’t matter. Not to her. Time. It didn’t matter to her. Not for long.

  She laughed and the laugh changed abruptly into a dry coughing.

  Not for long.

  They had thrown her on to one of the spare horses and tied her legs.

  ‘Try an’ make a run for it an’ you know what’ll happen,’ the tall one had said, the one the other called Waite.

  She had nodded her red hair and he’d laughed but there’d been nothing humorous in the laugh, nothing happy or pleasant. She knew laughs like that: she knew what would happen. Then and later. Later and at the end. The only thing she didn’t know for sure was when that end would be.

  The fool drummer - she forgot his name, had already forgotten his face - had tried to stop them taking her. He’d shouted at Waite and run at the horses and Waite had turned his mount sharply into the easterner and sent him crashing to the ground. Rose had waited for the report of the pistol but it hadn’t come. The drummer hadn’t been worth killing.

  He wasn’t a threat - not even as much threat as an old woman who was half out of her mind and who clung to an old Navy Colt with two crippled hands. He wasn’t a threat and seeing him writhe on the ground wasn’t going to be any fun.

  They’d had fun of that kind enough for one day. Maybe the stench of other folks’ blood was getting to their nostrils, too, maybe it was climbing up their craw.

  Rose doubted it.

  She thought they got used to the stink of drying blood the way she got used to the stink of men’s come.

  Whichever it was, it went with the way of life.

  The
y’d talked little as they rode, the tall one with sunken eyes riling the nigger from time to time and not seeming to realize how much the nigger enjoyed it, how much the nigger depended upon it. The third man, him with the patch over his eye, he never seemed to speak at all, not unless he was asked a question right out. But he looked at her, right enough, that single eye of his working overtime. Yes, he looked at her and she knew what he saw.

  It had been the best part of five hours’ ride before they had her, the sun never letting up even late into the afternoon, their clothes sticking to them, the smell of sweat - human sweat, animal sweat - sealing them together. When they had seemed to be heading for nothing but more grass, for another fold of land that would slowly change into yet another and then the same, they had come to a steeper valley, a shack built into the side of it, a stream, horses.

  ‘You got here,’ called the man who came out of the shack to greet them. ‘You got here near to time.’

  He was stocky, his belly beginning to get soft and fat. He held a rifle in both hands, a vest stained pink with sweat clinging to his chest, tan pants and scuffed boots worn outside.

  ‘What the hell d’you expect?’

  The man shrugged. ‘You been late before.’

  Waite didn’t bother to answer, just rode on past him and dismounted over by the rough corral. Walker and Weston followed him, leaving Rose tied to the saddle of her horse, the big-bellied man looking at her and almost dribbling.

  ‘Didn’t say you was bringin’ a present,’ said the man. ‘How d’you fellers know it was my birthday?’

  ‘You wait your turn,’ snapped the one-eyed outlaw. ‘She’s ours.’

  ‘Share an’ share.’

  ‘You heard. Wait your turn.’

  ‘Cut it out!’ called Waite, pushing the stocky man in the direction of the shack. ‘Mace, you cut it out. There’s other things more important. The rest of ’em here yet?’

  Mace gave the girl another glance and shook his head. ‘Colley an’ Little Ben rode in this mornin’. No sign of Rafe yet.’

  ‘Jesmond?’

  Mace shook his head. ‘B.J. neither.’

  ‘Shit!’ Waite stomped his foot and sent up a cloud of dust ‘What the hell they playin’ at?’

  ‘Could’ve run into some trouble.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  Mace shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘Law, maybe.’

  ‘What law?’ Waite got closer to Mace and pushed his fist into his stomach, not punching him, pushing, forcing him back step after step. ‘What law? What you heard?’

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘You holdin’ out on me an’—.’

  ‘I ain’t holdin’ out. Why the hell’d I want to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t want anythin’ to go wrong. Not on this one. It’s too big. Too good.’ He stopped pushing Mace and glared over his shoulder. ‘Walker, mount up again an’ take a ride west. See if there’s any sign of B.J. or Jesmond.’

  ‘Hey, now, I been ridin’ near enough all day same as you an’—’

  ‘Do it!’

  Walker opened his mouth to argue but clamped it shut again; most times he’d argue it out with Waite but he sensed that this wasn’t one of them.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘Okay.’

  He came back less than an hour later, slapping dust from his clothes, his throat dry as an old piece of bone. He hadn’t seen anything of either man.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Mace. They’ll be here.’

  ‘They’d better!’ Waite swung a whiskey bottle at the side of a crate that was being used for a chair and splintered it off. ‘They better!’

  The bottle went from hand to hand and the talking got louder and the tales got longer and all the time Rose sat crouched in the far corner until finally Waite hurled the empty bottle through the sacking that hung down over the window and then they had her. Waite first, then the nigger, Walker, then the one-eyed and after that Rose didn’t know what or who and hardly knew when.

  Sated, stupid drunk, they left her against the side of the wall and rolled up into their blankets and slept. No one cared if she sneaked away, except that if she tried to take a horse or a gun they’d know soon enough and come after her and then it wouldn’t be pretty.

  Rose wouldn’t be pretty. She allowed herself a smile. Damn long time since anyone had accused her of that - being pretty. Everything else.

  She could have run off into the night for all they cared, finished with her now and one or two of them already starting to snore.

  Something rustled and hooted outside and Rose shuddered, always feeling safer in the towns, rough as they were, than out in the wild. Nothing but acre on acre of shifting grass and the moon sliding between clouds, and creatures she didn’t know or understand.

  She pulled the ragged coat round her shoulders and wiped something sticky and drying from around her mouth and closed her eyes.

  She tried not to think but it was like trying not to breath. Her mind sorted through the scraps of conversation, sifting facts from the boasting, worrying away at what the men were meeting up for. Not that she cared, she didn’t give a silver dollar which bank, which stage, which freight wagon they were planning to take. But she wanted to know, her curiosity wanted to know. Her mind active.

  She’s bright, Sarah. Bright as a button. Bright as a new pin. Look at her sitting there, you can see that brain of hers ticking round.

  Too many whorehouses and too many back rooms had all but put paid to what intelligence her parents had seen in her as a kid. Pretty she’d been, too, golden haired with blue eyes and rose-colored cheeks that always looked as if they’d just been freshened by the wind. Now her hair had been hennaed so many times it bore no resemblance to its original color, not even deep at the roots. Her cheeks only shone rosy-red when she rouged and powdered them before a mirror. When she was fourteen her eyes had changed from blue to green.

  Rose! Come on, Rose! Come to Uncle Toby! There’s a good girl. There’s a good little girl, there’s a good little—

  She had been too frightened to say anything. Not then, not later, never to her parents. Only years afterwards to one of the girls she’d made friends with in that first house. That had been Roxy. Rose and Roxy - inseparable for how long? It had seemed a good part of a lifetime. Once when she’d worked it out, she’d been astonished to discover it had been no more than nine months. Nine months in a mining camp in Montana with a madam who carried a riding whip to hustle folk about their business and who once laid it across Rose’s back when she thought Rose was holding out on her.

  But she’d told Roxy, the pair of them laying on a cot in the early hours of the morning, the first light seeping through the gaps between the planking. Roxy had nodded, knowing, understanding, she’d stroked Rose’s arm and laid her head against Rose’s cheek and after a few moments Rose had felt what she knew were tears. It had been the same for Roxy, too - not quite the same - with Roxy it had been her own father.

  Rose’s eyes had changed from blue to green: they had been opened.

  There had been a boy who came round to do jobs for her father and who’d looked at her in the same way she realized her uncle had been staring at her for almost a year.

  Come on, Rose!

  She had hated it the first time, the second and the third; with the boy it had been slightly better but little more. Fumbled, hasty, ignorant. She had blushed under her mother’s gaze and turned away. Whatever her mother had known or guessed, she kept it to herself. And then O’Hara had ridden by with his saddle bags stuffed full of promises and dreams. He had watered his horses, eaten with them, sat talking long into the night until Rose’s father had no alternative than to offer him a place to bed down in the barn.

  Come on, Rose!

  The straw had prickled her back, the insides of her thighs; the soft dust of it had made her eyes sting and coated her skin. O’Hara had taken her gently, more gently than any man before or since, but he had taken her just the same.
Promises and dreams.

  Rose had crept back inside the house with his words whirling between her ears, the feel of his body clutched tight. She had lain awake, much as she did now in the shack, unable to sleep for her thoughts. Awake, she had heard him lead his horse away before dawn.

  Her mother had looked down at her tear-stained pillow, looked into her tear-torn eyes and known and still said nothing

  Six months later Rose had taken a job at the town store, living in a small room above in the week, seeing her parents on Sundays, riding back home with them from church.

  Green eyes: dreams and promises.

  Come on, Rose!

  One Sunday she had not been at the service and her father had searched for her, worried; her mother had nodded sadly, wisely, knowing. He had been a miner, silver in his pockets and the deeds to a ranch in his bag, that look that Rose knew in his gray-green eyes. She had gone with him, asking too few questions, perhaps already fearing the answers.

  She need not have - all she would have heard would have been lies. All the miner ever told her was lies.

  What else should he have done? Told her that his mine had been a failure and that the silver he had with him he had stolen from a man he’d smashed over the head with a shovel until his face was unrecognizable; told her that the deeds to the ranch were a fake; that his name was false; that he would drink most of what money he had and then he would beat her until she agreed to lie down on a grubby cot with men he brought from the saloon and pretend that it was her first time. Time after time after time, the first time.

  When there were no more men in that place to fool, he took her to another and then another until one night she slipped from beneath his arm, stole his money, stole his horse, rode as far as she could and prayed that she’d never see him again. She didn’t.

  In his place there were others.

  And finally - finally for that stage of her life - there had been Diamond Sadie. A bosom like a sideboard, hair like a mane, a voice like a bear’s and hands like silk.

  You’re a pretty girl. I like pretty girls. Why don’t you come and work for me? Rose didn’t know; not then.

  Later she knew but by then it was too late. She was marked, branded, tarred and feathered with the name whore and no one was ever going to accept her as anything else. It wouldn’t matter where she went or who she met. Rose Jackson: whore. It could have been embroidered on her clothes; set in scarlet letters on her forehead. Whore. Come on, whore!