Coming Up Roses

by Duncan, Alice

  “Little Elk?”

  “Lemonade,” Little Elk said in a clear voice.

  H.L. breathed easier. He had no idea whether or not the stories were true, but he didn’t especially want to find out when they had real work to do in order to save a child from whatever kind of hell his captors intended for him.

  “Be back in a minute,” Waldo said as he sauntered off.

  Rose sniffed the air tentatively. If she was like H.L. and most of the rest of humanity, the aroma in Joe’s Italian Restaurante would appeal to her. Joe fixed good food, and lots of it. A Sicilian by birth, Joe had come to Chicago from New York City with his family a couple of years after they’d arrived and been processed through the immigration station at the Battery. As far as H.L. was concerned, if he ever had enough money to hire a chef, the man was going to be an Italian. He loved Italian food. He sighed deeply and smiled at Rose. “Smells good in here, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded. The wind seemed to have gone out of her sails. H.L. hoped so, because he didn’t relish another half-hour or so of being raked over the coals.

  “What’s a wop?”

  The question startled H.L., who’d expected her to begin going over business as soon as she recovered from being startled. “Beg pardon?”

  “What’s a wop?” she repeated. “And what’s a mick.”

  “Ah. A wop is an Italian. A mick is an Irishman.”

  “You’re Irish?”

  He held his hand over the table and rocked it in an equivocating gesture. “Sort of. I guess my ancestors were from the Emerald Isle. I’m from Missouri, myself.”

  “Missouri? Really?” Her blue eyes opened so wide, H.L. had the feeling he might just drown in them if he wasn’t careful.

  “Right. Why does that surprise you?”

  “I—don’t know. I guess I just thought of you as being from Chicago, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think so. I belong here. Ergo, you thought I was of here. Right?”

  She looked at him for several seconds as if she had no idea on God’s green earth what he was talking about. H.L. was slightly puzzled at her reaction.

  Eventually, she muttered, “I guess so.”

  “Antipasto, my friends!”

  H.L.’s concentration had been on Rose to the exclusion of everything else, so Waldo’s enthusiastic announcement surprised him. It also pleased him. He loved the tasty, meaty, olive-y salad. “Thank you, Waldo. I didn’t even think of ordering antipasto.”

  Waldo bowed as he set the platter before them and began serving the antipasto into individual dishes. “Your companions look as though they need a hearty meal, H.L. Besides—” Here he shot a wink and another bow at Rose, who stiffened. “—it’s not often we get so famous a guest at Joe’s.”

  H.L. beamed at him. “Ah, so you recognize Miss Gilhooley?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Waldo even managed to look smitten, and H.L. gave him points for dramatic skill. “I saw you Saturday night, Miss Gilhooley, and I must say I was never more impressed. You looked like an angel riding that white horse around the arena.”

  H.L. noticed that Rose was not so used to people praising her that she couldn’t blush. She blushed now, her cheeks turning as rosy as the tomatoes in the salad Waldo set before her with a flourish. He guessed she’d forgiven him the wink.

  “Thank you. You’re very kind.”

  “Kind? You’re an angel. A princess on horseback. A vision. A—”

  “Right. And more,” H.L. interrupted, laughing. “You may not realize it, Waldo, but you have another famous person dining at Joe’s this afternoon.” He indicated his other companion. “Allow me to introduce you to Little Elk, the great Sioux warrior.”

  Both Little Elk and Rose stared at him, but H.L. didn’t care. If they didn’t know good publicity when it presented itself, he did. The expression on Waldo’s face proved it, in fact.

  “By golly,” Waldo said in a hushed voice. “By golly. May I shake your hand, Mr. Elk?”

  Little Elk, probably used to the strange and unusual ways of the white man by this time, looked vaguely resigned as he held out a rough brown hand for Waldo to shake.

  “It’s an honor, Mr. Elk,” Waldo said, sounding reverent. “It’s a true honor. Even though most people don’t realize it, I read recently that it’s been proven that the Indian is one of the lost tribes of Israel. It’s a real honor to meet you.”

  H.L. feared for a moment that Waldo might actually fall on his knees and do some sort of obeisance before Little Elk, but he didn’t. After another moment or two of sharing outrageous complements between Rose and Little Elk, Waldo took himself off.

  “Don’t mind Waldo,” H.L. advised. “He’s Italian.”

  “He seems very nice,” Rose said uncertainly. “What does his being Italian have to do with anything? There were Italian soldiers at the fort near Deadwood. They seemed just like everyone else to me.”

  “Ah, but we each bring our culture with us into this life, Miss Gilhooley. And Waldo’s Italian.”

  “Oh.”

  When he glanced at her, she was frowning and fiddling with her fork.

  He wondered what he’d said to bring on that frown, but didn’t pursue it. He wanted to introduce his new friends to Joe’s fabulous food.

  “Dig in,” he prompted. “This is an Italian salad, and I think it’s great.”

  He didn’t have to ask twice. Apparently Rose was as hungry as he and Little Elk were. She cut a delicate bite of lettuce and tomato, stabbed a bite of salami, and put the combination into her mouth. H.L. watched avidly as she chewed. Her eyes narrowed, then went wide, and she appeared somewhat puzzled.

  “Well?” he asked when he couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. “What do you think?”

  She put her fork on her plate and looked at him. “I’ve never tasted anything like it. It’s . . . different. Tasty. Um, we don’t generally mix meat into our salads back home in Deadwood.”

  He chuckled as he tackled his own salad. “Don’t reckon you do. Most folks don’t, although I suppose you could look at it sort of like a cold stew.” Turning to Little Elk, he asked, “What do you think?”

  Little Elk seemed to be pushing his tomatoes and lettuce aside so that he could get at the salami and cheese on the plate. “Good,” he said.

  A man of few words, H.L. thought with amusement. Not like H.L. May, who made his living with the little suckers. After taking another big bite of his own antipasto, he said, “I like the dressing. It’s tangy.”

  “Tangy,” Rose repeated after swallowing another bite from her own plate. “Yes. That’s a good word for it.”

  He didn’t know why she appeared so unsure of herself. Hell, all she had to do at the moment was eat, and he knew she was hungry, because he’d heard her stomach growl. “You don’t have to eat the whole thing if you don’t want it,” he said, feeling as though he’d sold out a friend to the enemy—how anybody could not like Joe’s food was incomprehensible to him. “Waldo will be bringing our spaghetti pretty soon.”

  Rose swallowed another small bite of lettuce and tomato and cleared her throat. “Um, when we were in Rome, I think we ate spaghetti, but I’m not sure. The food was different there. But good,” she added in a rush, as though she didn’t want him to think she was complaining. “I, ah, have enjoyed eating different foods in different places.”

  “Yeah? That’s good, because Chicago’s got ‘em all. We have Spaniards and Poles and Italians and Greeks and Irish and Bohemians and Bulgarians and Germans and just about every country in the world represented somewhere in Chicago.”

  “My goodness.”

  As H.L. had predicted, Waldo arrived bearing plates heaped with spaghetti and meatballs in a tomato sauce that smelled enticingly of garlic and other exotic spices. They were exotic to Rose, at any rate, who had as a child become used to eating beans and meat boiled together—when her mother could get meat. They’d often eaten eggs from the chickens out back, cooked with onions, and served with a side dish of some
sort of greens.

  After Rose had started shooting game, the family’s diet improved considerably. Still, except for her mother’s garden, in which she grew onions, cabbages, kale, beets, carrots, and a few other crops that could withstand the harsh Kansas weather, Rose’s diet had been rather circumscribed until she’d joined the Wild West.

  Even these days, she approached new foods with a certain degree of caution. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy new experiences, but that she worried about her country stomach. She wasn’t precisely sure how much it could take of new and unusual foods.

  After watching how H.L. tackled the long strings of spaghetti by twirling them with his fork balanced on his spoon, Rose attempted to do the same. All but one spaghetti strand slipped from her fork’s tines, but she figured that was all to the good. It would be easier to swallow a little bit of something she hated than a huge forkful. As soon as the savory mixture touched her tongue, she decided she needed more spaghetti practice.

  “Oh, my! This is wonderful!”

  “Good,” Little Elk added. He didn’t bother with H.L.’s fancy maneuvering with fork and spoon, but rather cut his spaghetti into manageable bites and spooned them into his mouth, foregoing his fork altogether. Rose deemed such an expedient solution to a messy problem quite clever on his part.

  “Glad you like it.”

  H.L. could probably have been forgiven his smug expression, had Rose been in the forgiving mood. She was still irked with him, however, and didn’t appreciate it. Nevertheless, she felt as though she were starving to death, and the food was delicious, and she ate as quickly as she could, given the overall slipperiness of the fodder provided.

  “After we eat, we need to plot strategy,” H.L. said between mouthfuls.

  “Indeed,” said Rose, likewise engaged.

  Little Elk grunted. One thing you could say for the Sioux, thought Rose indulgently, was that they didn’t get sidetracked. If the problem was finding lost boys, they concentrated exclusively on that. If the matter at hand was supper, they concentrated on that. She had to admit that life was probably much simpler and more easily handled if one tackled one problem at a time. At the moment, she decided she’d be happy to concentrate on supper, except that Bear in Winter’s young face kept obtruding itself into her mind’s eye.

  They finished their meal after not too long, however, so Rose could turn her entire attention on the Bear problem. She smiled at Waldo as he picked up her plate, but the smile faded when she saw his black frown. She cast a quick glance at H.L., but his face didn’t offer her any clues as to why the waiter should be displeased.

  “You didn’t like your supper?” Waldo asked Rose peremptorily.

  “What?” She goggled for only a moment. “Oh, no! I mean, yes! I loved it. It was delicious. I’ve never eaten anything so tasty.”

  Waldo eyed her narrowly, then looked down at her plate. Rose guessed she had left a lot of her spaghetti uneaten, but she’d stuffed herself until she feared she’d pop if she’d taken one more tiny bite.

  “You didn’t eat much.” Waldo sounded accusatory.

  “Give the girl a break, Waldo,” H.L. said, laughing. “She’s as big as a minute. Such a small package can’t hold a whole lot.”

  Rose bridled. If she wasn’t trying to soothe the waiter’s temper, she’d have said something scathing to H.L. May, who was probably the rudest, most impossible, rash, and impertinent man she’d ever met in her life. Instead, she forced a smile and said, “That’s it, all right. I ate as much as I could. I wish I could hold more, but I just can’t.”

  Waldo said, “Hmmm,” as if he didn’t believe either of them, but he didn’t look quite as upset as he had a moment earlier. Without questioning Rose further, he took the plates away.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Rose turned to H.L. “How dare you speak of me as if I were a—a—a—” Fiddlesticks. She didn’t know a word for it.

  “Commodity?” H.L. supplied, grinning at her.

  “Yes.” Actually, she didn’t know. What was a commodity? Blast! She was going to buy herself a dictionary and read the blamed thing from A to Z as soon as they found Bear.

  “I only did it to soothe Waldo’s sensibilities, Miss Gilhooley. He takes it hard when people don’t finish their meals.”

  “Good heavens, that plate held enough food to serve six people, for heaven’s sake,” she grumbled, feeling out of sorts—but no longer hungry.

  “I eat what you don’t next time,” Little Elk offered.

  Rose glanced at him, feeling guilty. She ought to have remembered how much Little Elk and the rest of her Sioux friends loved food. She figured it was because their generations-old way of life had been so severely compromised by white settlers in recent years that they ate whatever they could find whenever they could find it, and as much of it as possible. “I’m sorry, Little Elk. I’ll remember next time.”

  He nodded and smiled, and she knew he didn’t fault her for forgetting her manners this time.

  “All right, folks, let’s plan some kind of strategy in finding the lost boy.”

  “He’s not lost,” Rose reminded H.L. with feeling. “He was kidnapped.”

  “Right.”

  She resented it when he rolled his eyes, as if he found her insistence on exact wording unnecessary and annoying.

  “All right. We can’t dash off in all directions, because we won’t get anywhere, so I have a suggestion.”

  Rose frowned at him. “I don’t believe you have any tracking skills at all, Mr. May. How could you? You live in the city. I believe Little Elk and I would be better equipped to find the boy.” He looked peeved.

  Rose didn’t care. Bear in Winter was worth fighting for, darn it.

  “Listen, Miss Gilhooley. I know you consider yourself akin to some kind of great white hunter, but before you barge off and get yourself into trouble, don’t you think we ought to figure out where the lad might be?”

  She sniffed, but had to admit he was right. “How do you propose to do that?”

  “I have lots of contacts on the streets of Chicago, Miss Gilhooley. Many of them aren’t the sorts of people you ought to be involved with. However, I’ll bet I can find out where a kidnapped boy might be taken. We’re fortunate in that the fellow who took him is a distinctive one. There can’t be too many wooden-legged, black mustachioed man nabbing children around Chicago.”

  “I hope not,” Rose said glumly.

  “Me, too. So, since it’s almost time for your performance, I recommend you and Little Elk go back to the Wild West. I’ll get in touch with my informants during your show, and meet you afterwards. Tomorrow’s Sunday, so you don’t need to worry about getting back at any particular time.”

  Rose wasn’t sure about this. “You mean, you think we ought to look for him at night?”

  “That’s probably the best time. Oddly enough, it’s when most criminal activity takes place.”

  Rose ignored his smirk. “Bear in Winter was snatched in broad daylight,” she pointed out.

  “Right, but wherever they took him, I expect they’ll be transporting him to wherever they want him after dark. Darkness is the criminal’s friend.”

  “I see.” Her flesh crawled, actually. But Little Elk would be there to protect her, she reminded herself, and felt better at once.

  “Also, you won’t like this,” H.L. continued, “But I think you’d better not come with us, Little Elk.”

  “What?” Rose regretted the shrillness of her voice, but she’d been too startled by this pronouncement to modify her tone.

  “No,” said Little Elk, sounding much less hysterical than Rose, but exceptionally firm.

  H.L. shook his head. “I know you want to come along, Little Elk, but you’d attract too much attention. If you and Miss Gilhooley discuss the matter before we set out, if she’s as good at tracking as she says she is—”

  “I am,” Rose cried, stung.

  “I’m sure.” H.L. sounded as if he were attempting to placate a squawking
child, and Rose wanted to thump him. “Anyway, if . . . I mean since she’s good at tracking, if I can get any firm leads, she and I can follow up on them without attracting the amount of attention an Indian might. Don’t you see?”

  Little Elk’s frown was about as black a one as Rose had ever seen on his generally impassive face. “No,” he repeated stubbornly.

  Scowling furiously, Rose considered H.L.’s statement. She absolutely hated to admit he might be right about anything, but she feared in this case, he just might be. “Wait a minute, Little Elk. He might have a point.” Because she didn’t want H.L. to think she approved of him, no matter how right he might be every once in a while, she shot him a scowl. He grinned back. This time she did thump him, with the toe of her foot against his shin.

  “Ow! Dammit, why’d you do that?”

  Rose was pleased when his smirk vanished. She batted her eyes at him. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. May. I’m sure I didn’t mean to kick you.”

  He leaned over to rub his shin. “I’ll just bet.”

  She ignored him and spoke to Little Elk. “But in this case, I’m afraid he may have noticed something important that we didn’t think about. Especially if, as he suspects, we’re going to have to go into some rough neighborhoods where people might decide it would be fun to taunt an Indian.”

  She knew Little Elk was familiar with people like that, since there were scads of them around Deadwood. The only places where people didn’t seem to take delight in being cruel to Little Elk and his kin were in lands far, far away from any lingering memories of the Little Big Horn and other of the so-called “Indian troubles.”

  As much as she deplored the slaughter of General Custer and the Seventh, she imagined she’d fight anybody who tried to take her home away from her, too. She could, therefore, sort of understand the Sioux point of view on the matter. Besides, Rose knew Sitting Bull, who sometimes traveled with Buffalo Bill, and she liked him as much as she liked Little Elk.