King of Spades

by Frederick Manfred

  He napped. Soft sleep. Silence.

  All too soon Prince nosed him with his rubbery nose, pushing his sombrero to one side.

  “Nnn.”

  Prince blew a masty breath over Ransom’s face.

  “What’s the matter, chum?”

  Prince blew his nostrils with a wet flutter.

  “Oh, you want some water. Pretty soon, chum.” Ransom replaced his sombrero, again dozed off.

  Prince went back to grazing.

  When Ransom next awoke it was to dazzling crystals in his eyelashes. He had cried in his sleep.

  Vaguely he recalled a piece of the dream he’d had. It was something about a grass lizard who refused to sting him and who wept tears over him in the ancient manner of the Yankton Sioux.

  He savored a memory of the last time he’d made love to Katherine. She was always modest at first. But after a while, once begun, she became almost an animal in her ardor.

  He loved that madness in her. In that respect he matched her exactly. Once in the saddle, he must ride, in excess, and if possible, forever. So that finally it was always Katherine who had to haul in on the reins. “Ransom! Dear, dear. Don’t you think we ought to stay a little civilized? A little?”

  He sat up, cocked his hat at a racy angle, squinted around at the sights.

  Prince grazed nearby. The vulture still hung on nothing. Only the cottonwood’s perfect single shadow had moved.

  Ransom spotted a wild clover growing between his spread legs. He picked it. He smelled its purple ball. He played with it between his fingers. A syrupy drop of juice formed at its severed end. He touched a fingertip to it and tasted it. Sweet. Like good hay might taste to a horse.

  He flicked a red ant off his shirt front. He pulled on his boots and got to his feet. He stretched, full length, and groaned in satisfaction.

  He found Prince a waterhole in the nearly dry bed of Lone Tree Creek.

  While Prince sipped at leisure, he had himself some target practice. He made several quick practice draws; then, tossing a silver dollar in the air, fired five times. Each shot caught the silver dollar and flipped it farther on, so that it resembled the flight of a dipping silverfinch. The silver dollar came to rest a hundred paces away.

  Ransom went over and picked it up. “Dead center, Dad. And bent double.” He dropped it into his pocket

  He spotted a coneflower a dozen steps away. Its single dark heart hung to one side, giving him a perfect silhouette to shoot at. With his sixth and last bullet he exploded its head.

  Almost on the shot, something clicked in his head, very loud, making him blink.

  He’d lived this moment before. This he knew for certain. It wasn’t quite the same as that other time in that other life, not quite so shimmering and wondrous. Also, the coneflower he’d just shot still had its rays; the other coneflower in that other time had already shed them. But otherwise it was almost the same.

  Nausea smoked in his belly. Sudden sweat beaded out all over him.

  “Will I ever find out who I am?”

  Loneliness like the scent of flowers wavering in and out of smelling range made it hard for him to breathe. Sudden need for that warm home he had found in Katherine yeasted up in him like a craving for a drug.

  He swung aboard Prince and headed for home. He spurred Prince until the mustang, shocked, broke into a rattling puffing gallop.

  It was dusk when he put up Prince at the livery barn. It was dark when he burst into their upstairs rooms.

  Katherine was at the stove, back turned to him. She was safe.

  He let out a great breath.

  Katherine looked over her shoulder. “Ransom! Whatever have you been up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You look like you’ve just seen the devil himself.”

  “Maybe I have.”

  Katherine laid aside the ladle she’d been using to stir the soup with. “What happened?” She came over and put her arms around him, her one eye squared in concern.

  “Nothing.” It was good to be holding her again. “Slept out in the sun a little too long.” He managed a smile. The little smile gave his large lips a twisted-rope look. “And I guess I all of a sudden got a little lonesome for you. Like one leg getting lonesome for the other.”

  “Dear.”

  “You know something? I think I better go find me a job. Something to do. I’ve got too much time on my hands.”

  “I’ve thought of that.”

  “And we should get married. If not before a minister, at least before a justice of the peace.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I have to. Didn’t I keep myself just for you until I found you?”

  “We’re probably married common law already, you know.”

  “I want it legal. For keeps.”

  “All right.”

  “And I want children. A son. To start off a new line with. And by new I mean new. I don’t know who I am or where I come from. So with me and my son we start fresh. With a clean slate. No sad pasts. Only happy futures ahead.”

  A sudden grimace wrinkled her face, part sneering, part wincing.

  “That’s what it means to live out West. You know? That’s what Sam used to say.”

  The odd look passed on and slowly her face smoothed over.

  “Don’t you want babies with me?”

  “Oh, Ransom. Oh God yes, how I’d love to have babies with you.”

  He heaved a great sigh, then hugged her hard, for one moment pure in heart.

  She coughed inside his tight hug. “You re sure you want to get married legal?”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “All right.”

  “What’s the matter? You sound like you’re not sure you want to marry me.”

  She was crying. “You’re too noble for me.”

  “Oh come now, Katherine, cut it out, you know that’s ridiculous.”

  “But you are.”

  Then that sweet devil desire returned, and stooping quickly, he pushed his nose through the lacy white frill of her blouse, down between her breasts.

  “Ransom, cut that out.”

  “They’re always so soft. Like fresh bread every day. What do you do to keep them like that, reheat and butter ’em every morning?”

  “Ransom.”

  “And why must you always go putting a fence around them? Like they might be a couple of stacks of slough hay somewheres to be kept safe from a herd of wild buffaloes?”

  “Ransom.”

  “Well, if you won’t let me have my hay”—he abruptly let her go and with a sly smile picked up tie soup ladle—“let me at least have a couple of onions boiled in milk.”

  “I’m not sure I like that, Mr. Earl Ransom.”

  They laughed together.

  She served him soup, meat, potatoes, onions, a dried-apple pie, a pot of tea.

  He ate heartily. There was about him the air of a hungry wild animal.

  He talked a blue streak. He talked about his days with Sam Slaymaker: near drownings, buffalo stampedes, gun-fights, prospecting for gold on Pike’s Peak, blizzards on the Nebraska prairies, near massacres at the hands of the Sioux, barroom brawls in Denver. He rattled on and on. He couldn’t seem to stop.

  She eyed him, wonderingly.

  He helped her wipe dishes, still talking.

  She listened, vaguely hearing a boy’s voice behind the man’s voice.

  He helped her tidy up the kitchen, still talking.

  Finally she reached up and tweaked him playfully by the ear. “Ransom, what makes you so talkative all of a sudden? Hey?”

  “What?”

  “Ha ha. You haven’t got yourself another girl, have you? That I don’t know about?”

  “What?” he cried. His green eyes rolled a high white. “What?”

  She let go of his ear. “I’m sorry. Skip it. I didn’t say it.”

  His brow and cheek blanched to the color of a turnip.

  “Forgive me, dear. I was only teasing.”

>   “You,” he said, choking. “You.”

  “Really. I’m sorry.”

  “You better be.”

  “Well, I said I was.”

  He stared great green eyes at her.

  “Ransom!”

  Of a sudden he reached down and picked her up and stiff-legged carried her into the bedroom. He landed her on their four-poster and lay down beside her.

  “Ransom!”

  He continued to give her great green eyes.

  The night lamp was on. The room was full of gold glints and gold shadows. Her tumbled hair resembled a throw of gold coins.

  “There’s one thing I never did get about you, lady. About how you’ll never let me kiss your bare breasts. Nose ’em a little.”

  “My God.”

  “I can play with your feet bare, but not them.”

  She closed her eyes to crinkled slits.

  “And another thing, while I’m at it … how come you never let me see you bare naked? We shouldn’t have any shame in front of each other any more, should we, as man and wife?”

  She closed her lips to a line of whitened flesh.

  “Pussy?”

  “I can’t. No. No.”

  He began to unbutton her dress.

  She fought him, clawing fingernails, kicking toes.

  Laughing, in part malicious, in part impish, he ripped her clothes off, from head to toe, until she lay lovely and exposed before him. “Now look at you. What was wrong that you’d never let me see you as God made you? You’re beautiful. You wouldn’t deny your own true husband that, now would you?”

  She cried aloud, then with both her hands, flutteringly, tried to cover her breasts and her belly at the same time. She crossed her legs tight.

  “Pussy, do me a favor?”

  “What.”

  “Please let me see under that eye patch. I want to see what it’s like.”

  “No, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “It’s not your fault you have it. And if it is a fault, it’s the one thing that makes you perfect.”

  “Perfect? Oh, God, you’re tearing me all to pieces talking like that.”

  He reached to remove the eye patch anyway. He managed to lift one corner of it to catch a glimpse of a single teardrop glistening in a quivering cup of flesh before she could push his hand away.

  In fighting him off she exposed her middle.

  He saw something. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing.”

  A large scar, exactly like the wrinkled smile of a pumpkin jack-o’-lantern, lay across her little mound of a belly.

  “Is this what you didn’t want me to see, for godsakes?”

  She turned her face away from him.

  “Why, pet, it’s only an operation scar. Why, on you, it’s a kind of beauty mark even. Like a birthmark almost, you might say.”

  She covered her face with both her hands. Sobs shook her.

  “What was it, a gallstone operation?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive then.” He leaned down and kissed the scar. “It makes you that much the more precious.”

  She groaned as if she were about to die.

  He looked upon her. A rush of compassion for her as well as an impulse to hurt her came together in him. The two emotions were like the alternate troublings of two rivers at a confluence. “Katherine.”

  She rolled her head back and forth in a frenzy of torment.

  He stripped off his clothes, blew out the night lamp. With a surgelike motion he took her in his arms.

  She lay inert for a long time, no matter what he did to arouse her.

  At last the impulse to hurt her, to be the cruel topdog to her abject underdog, won out. He roughed her up, brutal.

  Then she responded, stirring a little, until, more and more, she became as actively savage as he.

  Soon velvet wings, open, began to fly.

  They lay musing together in the dark.

  The windows were open. A soft summer night’s breeze trailed threads of invisible gossamer across their faces.

  The clock on the mantelpiece tocked irregularly, as if it might have heart trouble. Crickets sawed under the loveseat. Outside a lone horsebacker came clopping down the street on a tired pinto.

  “Ransom?”

  “Umm?”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Mmm.”

  “A silly boy.”

  “Nnn.”

  “You don’t like it when I don’t let you see me naked. Yet when it comes right down to it, you’re no different.”

  “Prove it.”

  She laughed softly in the dark. “Why did you blow out the night lamp?”

  “Well….”

  “And pull up the quilts to our chins?”

  “The night air is chilly.”

  Suddenly the sound of wild galloping came to them.

  They lay listening to it.

  The galloping came on louder.

  “Hey,” Ransom said, rousing.

  It was a half-dozen horses. In a moment the horses thundered by on the street below.

  One of the horsemen was crying something. It was repeated again and again.

  Ransom jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

  “Ransom, for heaven’s sake, what’re you doing, leaning out all naked like that? The neighbors will see you.”

  “Shh.” Ransom turned his head to hear the better.

  The horsemen had gone on about a block before Ransom finally made it out.

  “Gold! Gold! In the Black Hills. They’ve found the real mother lode at last!”

  PART THREE

  Earl Ransom

  1

  Ransom struck out for the Black Hills alone.

  At the southern edge of the Hills he came upon occasional gold hunters who’d gone belly up. They were hungry, ragged, lousy, bitter. The new strike still wasn’t the true mother lode and for many it had turned out to be a trap.

  Near Shirttail Canyon early one morning, Ransom came upon a man who really was busted. The prospector rode a bony mule without a saddle and had no other possessions but the torn dirty clothes he had on and a six-shooter stuck in his belt. His boots were shot, bare toes showing through. His black beard was long and mangy.

  Both men drew up their mounts at about the same time. Both men checked each other’s guns, and then looked each other over point for point, Ransom with wondering eye, the other with derisive eye.

  Ransom let both hands come carefully to rest on the horn of his saddle. “Howdy, stranger.”

  The stranger’s look of derision deepened as he eyed Ransom’s fancy buckskin clothes and his tan mustang Prince and the chestnut packhorse behind laden with tools and supplies.

  “Howdy.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Can you lend me fifty dollars, handsome?” The stranger scratched himself vigorously. “Then I just might tell you.”

  “I just broke camp.” Ransom blew some road dust off his sleeves. “Or I’d offer you some coffee.”

  “You wouldn’t care to cool your saddle?”

  Ransom tipped back his sombrero. “I mean to make Custer yet tonight.”

  “Ha. Another fool jackass.”

  “Hey. How so?”

  “Thinking people can run through the Hills and go picking up gold just for the taking.”

  “What’s wrong with using a spade?”

  “Like hogs let loose eating ground nuts off the grass.” A big louse emerged on the surface of the stranger’s black beard and began to fight its way through various tangles.

  Ransom’s nostrils edged open a little.

  “Crazy people on a wild stampede for fool’s gold.”

  “That your story?”

  “I hate to admit it. But, it’s true.” The stranger scratched and scratched. “I’ve got the I-quit-fits. For me, it just didn’t pan out I sunk five hundred dollars into this expedition and, by God, I never took a color.” T
he stranger gave Ransom another careful study. “You really can’t lend me a fifty spot? Because I’m strapped.”

  “How far is it to Custer?”

  “Fifteen miles of pure up and down.”

  Ransom stared up at the high shoulders of the canyon, at the thick stands of lofty ponderosa down the steep sides, at the tender ferns growing underfoot. “Any water?”

  “None to speak of.”

  “Any Indians?”

  “None so far.”

  “What happened to that new boom camp up north?”

  “Color petered out.”

  “Hard luck.”

  “Worse yet, General Crook’s chasin’ everybody out.” “Where’d he come from?”

  “Orders from Washington, D.C. He says the Hills is still off limits for us. And will be for at least another year. It’s according to an old treaty we signed with the Sioux. The whole of the Hills still belongs to them and they’re being balky about selling so much as a square inch of it.”

  “That’s a helluva thing.”

  “I know I’m not going to stay and tough it out any longer.” Pause. “You hain’t got a smile of whiskey on you?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “I couldn’t badge some bacon off you? I can make the other two meals out of water.”

  Ransom reached down into a saddlebag behind him and came up with a strip of jerky. He tossed it across to the man. As it passed by, the mule made a sudden snap at it; missed.

  The man began to gnaw at the jerky ravenously. “When I get back to old Cheyenne, I mean to order me a meal of oysters, eggs, beef, and a stalk of celery. But this’ll have to do for now.”

  “Think you can make it?”

  “I have to. I can’t let my wife down back in Omaha. Not with a thunderhead of debt hanging over her. Well, hup-up, old skate, maybe we’ll find us some wet grass yet. On the back trail home.” And with that the raggy prospector rode off into the shadows, going south.

  Ransom thought of his Katherine back in Cheyenne. At least she didn’t have any debts to face. In fact, it was the other way around. Katherine was too rich.

  Ransom remembered the promise Katherine had extracted from him when he’d left, that he was to let her know the minute he’d struck it rich, so that she could follow him with all her household goods. “Then we can have it wonderful,” she’d said, “in our sweet little nest far out in the West.”