King of Spades

by Frederick Manfred

  Ransom set his spade to one side and sat down. He looked down at the brittle yellow calluses in the palms of his hands. The hands were no longer the hands of a card shark. Nor for that matter the hands of a gunslinger.

  “The jehu handling the ribbons is sure pouring it on. Them stylish black flyers is coming on like the wind.” Troy Barb laughed. “Probably one of them cock-up drivers who likes to give his passengers…. Oops!” Troy Barb grunted in sympathy. “What a jolt that was.”

  Ransom waited.

  “There’ll be no lady in a rig going that fast.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  Troy Barb stared down at Ransom. “You don’t seem to have much time for wimmen, do you?”

  The swift tattoo of fleet hoofs and the sound of rapidly clicking wheels came to them. In a moment six black horses galloped into view, followed by a red stagecoach lurching along on leather thoroughbraces.

  “Well, we’ll know in a minute.”

  Ransom got to his feet and deliberately began to dig in earnest. He worked himself around until he had his back turned to the road.

  All too soon the galloping black horses, the clicking coach, and an exploding cloud of dust whirled by.

  “There was a woman in there!” Troy Barb exclaimed. “I was wrong. Some rich dame. All alone.”

  Ransom dug harder.

  Troy Barb pushed back his black hat. He scratched his wild hair with a single finger. “Well, well. Now Deadwood can say she’s a big city. She’s got herself a snooty rich woman.”

  Two days later, the same red coach with its spanking yellow wheels came back up the dugway.

  Ransom was alone in his log cabin. He was sitting dulleyed on the edge of his bunk. The bunk was a rickety affair, three boards placed across two sawhorses.

  “Ransom?” a clear woman’s voice called. “Ransom?”

  The voice jarred him. It chilled him all the way down to his tailbone. He stared at the walls, noting idly that the pine logs were freckled with rosin.

  “Ransom?” There were the familiar quick springing steps, followed by a knock. “Ransom?”

  Ransom stared at where a tin of fermented dough hung above a sheet-iron stove. Above it the ceiling was decorated over with old newspapers.

  “Ransom?” The log door opened with a loud creak. “Ah, there you are, my handsome is as handsome does.” Pause. “Why, Ransom, darling, haven’t you got a hello for me?”

  He ran his hand over his bearded face. The burn over his cheek had healed and his beard had pretty well grown back.

  “Is this all the greeting I get?”

  “Hello.”

  “Ransom. This is a dreadful way to greet your own dear wife. Why!”

  Ransom slowly swung around to have a look at Katherine. “What’re you doing here?”

  Katherine stood in flowing purple in the doorway: hasped purple crinoline skirt over voluminous flouncings of underskirts, long purple gloves, a cunning curved purple hat. “Why, what do you mean, what am I doing here?”

  “Why didn’t you wait until I sent for you?”

  “Why, Ransom, my husband, I’ve come to live with you at the scene of your greatest triumph.”

  “Deadwood is no place for a lady. It’s a regular pigyard.”

  “Ransom, I came because I was determined to live with my husband wherever he was, come what might.”

  “You should’ve waited until I’d made it really big.” The black patch over her left eye he now saw as a disfigurement.

  “Really big? Why, Ransom, they tell me downtown you’re potentially the richest man here.” She stepped toward him. “Besides, even if you hadn’t made it really big, as you say, I would have followed you.” She stopped beside him and stooped to kiss him.

  He turned his face away. “Don’t. I’m dirty. Maybe even lousy.”

  “Well! So this is all the greeting I get after coming all this way. Through cloudbursts and wild Indians and dangerous road agents.”

  “Well, like I said, I didn’t send for you.” Her puccoon perfume caught him in the chest. He remembered all the hothouse smells of her.

  “What’s the matter with you, Ransom? Where’s that fancy boy of mine, who used to pick me a posy of wild flowers before breakfast every morning?”

  He looked her in the eye. “Katherine, are you going to have a baby?”

  “What?”

  “Are you going to have a baby?”

  “No, I’m not, worse luck.”

  His eyes shied off. He hated it that he couldn’t keep looking her in the eye. At the same time he knew that she knew he couldn’t.

  “Ah, so you’ve gone and found yourself another girl, have you?” She stood arms akimbo beside him. “Some young slip of a thing? Cooing and billing? And not a brain in her pretty little head and going to have a baby?”

  A nervous twitch tugged at his lips. He fought it away. What he needed now was a real poker face.

  “Haven’t you?”

  Ransom just barely managed to keep his face straight.

  “There is another woman then, isn’t there? There has to be.”

  “Quit ropin’ at me with all them silly questions.”

  “Earl Ransom!” She gasped, and backed off a step. “And after all I went through to get here. And after even getting us a house downtown.”

  “You—got—us—a—house—downtown? Already?”

  “Yes. I bought that new green house a half-block off Main Street there. On the turnoff to Mt. Moriah. Across the stream. It’s the only one in town with a water closet.”

  Ransom fought off a shudder.

  “Our household goods will be arriving from Cheyenne any hour now.”

  Ransom touched his right eye with thumb and forefinger.

  “You’ll help me when they arrive, won’t you, Ransom, dear? So we can set up housekeeping right away?” A tear gathered in the corner of her dark-brown eye. “It was always my dream that we would at last have that sweet little nest far out in the West.” She sucked a deep breath. “Oh, Ransom, my darling, you still love me, don’t you? Because if you don’t, my darling, I shall go mad with grief.” She fell on his neck and sought out his lips in his black beard and began to kiss him passionately.

  All the hardness he’d built up against her collapsed. A weird impulse to smile twisted his lips.

  “Please, Ransom, darling, do please kiss me. Like you used to. You don’t know how I’ve lived for this moment. Oh, Ransom, I’ve had such an unhappy life, that if you don’t kiss me now, after all that, why….”

  He found himself turning, and at last, with wibbling lips, kissing her.

  He half-expected to hear the granite peaks whistling again.

  The green house set back from Main Street was lovely. Ransom helped Katherine move in, furniture, furnishings, trunks of clothes. He helped her roll out her expensive Persian rugs. He supervised the movers when they set up the four-poster in the big bedroom upstairs.

  The house was quiet. Main Street was far enough away for its usual hubbub to be muted. The little stream flowing at the foot of the house purled just loud enough to give life a murmurous tone. Occasional footsteps on the wooden bridge made it homey.

  Katherine persuaded him to clean up, so with a bar of soap he took his first bath in a tub in months.

  Katherine also got him to dress up for their first dinner together since Cheyenne, in the black suit she’d once bought him. She herself wore a young bride’s white.

  “And please, darling, don’t come to the table wearing your gun. For once.”

  “If you say so.”

  When he entered the dining room, she had the food on the table, steaming and savory, potatoes, gravy, meat, cabbage, dried-apple pie, set around a flower centerpiece.

  Courteously he helped her into her chair, then went around and sat at the head of the table.

  “You like it?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s what I always dreamed of.”

  All too familiarly his hand picked up
the linen napkin and unfolded it across his lap. “It’s hard for me to believe.”

  She smiled tiny wrinkles around her one eye. “’Tis for me too.”

  He looked down at his plate.

  “Will you ask the blessing, Ransom?”

  He swallowed a loud click inside his high white collar. Pray? Finally he managed to shake his head.

  She still had a smile. “There’ll soon be a preacher here. Then we can be married legal like you always wanted.”

  There was already a preacher of sorts in town. She apparently hadn’t heard about him.

  “Even if we are already married common law.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m so glad you still want to.” She spoke sideways to herself. “I should’ve known better than to let you go by yourself and live alone here so long. Bachelors out in the wilds always fall into bad habits. Get peculiar notions about things. Antisocial. They want a woman all right, but not all night.”

  Of all people Madam Kate ought to know. The thought left a bitter trace in his mind.

  She lifted the bowl of potatoes with both hands and passed it to him. “Why don’t you begin, dear.”

  The potatoes were done to a fare-thee-well. So was the gravy and the meat and the cabbage. And so was the sweet dried-apple pie. It was good to eat a town meal again.

  All through dinner she kept up a bright patter of talk. She refused to notice his noncommittal air, that all was not well between them. Though every now and then she couldn’t resist more bemused sideways remarks. “My, what a handsome man that stagecoach driver was.” She pecked at her potatoes. “Once he called me a young lady.” She poked at her meat. “I was most grateful to be called that, what with all that dust.” She picked at her pie. “From where he was sitting up there on the boot, my skin probably did look young at that.”

  Ransom touched a hand to his right eye. Already about to be a father of a child by one woman, here he was now in a spot where he still might very well become a father of a child by a second woman. It was time he ran off to some other set of far dark hills.

  She even had a box of cigars for him. Remembering how Sam had liked them, Ransom lit up. He blew out a plume of smoke.

  “Now you just go over there and set in your easy chair, husband darling. By the bay window there. Where you can see the people go by.”

  “I’d rather watch the stream go by.”

  “Suit yourself.” She watched him settle down in the big leather chair, watched him put his feet up on the footstool. “With that cigar, you look so … so dignified. Like a town father almost. Or a senator even.”

  Where was Erden? Right at that moment?

  Katherine kept talking pleasantly all through washing dishes. She was as game as hornets.

  After a while the cigar began to taste foul and Ransom chucked it into the brass spittoon beside him.

  And all too soon it was time to go to bed.

  She locked the front and back doors. She drew the blind to the bay window. She blew out all the big lamps. She picked up the small night lamp and headed for the stairs.

  Ransom sat on, silent as a coyote at noon.

  She paused on the bottom stairs. “Coming, dearie?”

  “I … I think I’ll sleep down here on the sofa.”

  “Why, Ransom, husband, we are going to sleep together, aren’t we? We don’t want to go through that again, do we?”

  “I’ll sleep down here.”

  She refused to see it except in a certain way. “Such a shy fellow you are. Like some rusty old bachelor.” She breathed heavily. “Oh, please come, Ransom. We are man and wife now, aren’t we? And it’s been such a long time since we’ve made love. I’ve saved myself all this time for you. Oh, my darling, please.”

  The familiar winning tone of her voice reached into him so that he found himself once again turning a little in her direction.

  She stepped behind him. She leaned down and kissed him on top of the nose. “Darling,” she breathed. The front of her white dress opened.

  The puccoon perfume of her poured over him. It tore him all up. “Katherine.”

  “Everything’s all right, darling. Come away to bed. I can’t wait to hold you in my arms.” She touched her lips to his ear. “Don’t deny your wife.”

  “Can’t we first get acquainted a little?”

  “First? You are deep, my husband.”

  He closed his eyes.

  With a coy gesture of indulgence she placed the night lamp on the smoking stand beside him. She sat herself in his lap with a winsome flounce. She ran her fingers through his beard and gave several little tigerish tugs. She nuzzled him. She suckled the lobe of his ear. She lipped his lips. “Don’t you ever say anything ever, darling?”

  There was even some puccoon perfume in the stitched black patch over her left eye. He tried rough wit. “My bellows don’t work so good with you sitting on them.”

  She liked that. She teased him with the tip of her tongue.

  He let his lips and teeth be opened. He groaned. He could feel himself awaken under her. His flesh was willing.

  She loosened his tie and collar. She ran a hand inside his clothes, stroking his skin, pressing her small palm around and over his shoulder muscles. “Darling. The thought of your sweet boy innocence … the thought that someone else’s enjoyed it besides me, oh God, that drives me wild.”

  His arms were of a mood to betray him. They slipped around her. They pressed her close.

  “Talk to me,” she whispered hoarsely. “Talk to me. I do so love the sound of your voice. I hear red when you talk. The kind of red that drives me mad.”

  His fingertips found supple flesh under her necklace. He felt himself sliding.

  “It’s been so long.”

  Even as he was about to swing over her, it started again. That odd haunting business of knowing he’d lived that moment somewhere sometime before. And again it would not quite come clear. Though he was as sure of it being true as he was of the smell of her perfume.

  She shifted in his lap. She loosened his trousers. There was in her gesture the hint that she might be helping a little boy.

  The re-remembrance remained dreamlike. Something about being rooted and then cut off.

  She fondled him.

  He had to know. He gnashed his teeth to keep himself in hand. He found that to hold himself back was delicious ecstatic. Ahh. It was touch and go. He could go either way. Ahh. If he could just hold himself back another moment, trembling, firm, quivering, he just might, finally and at last, penetrate the mystery of that not quite re-remembrance.

  She fondled him.

  It was wrong. There was Erden. But also because of something else. What was it? He trembled. He wavered.

  She gave him a little tug of love.

  It tipped him. The almost re-remembrance faded away.

  “Love.”

  He cursed inwardly. Then, letting go, he hugged her hard. He drew back and taking hold of the top of her white dress with both hands, he tore open her bodice all the way to her waist. The sight of her half-fallen pear breasts and her slim waist was also an old half-remembered ache.

  “What’re you doing?” she squeaked.

  “You have too many nice clothes as it is.”

  “Ransom!”

  Carefully he tore the rest of her dress down to the hem. She looked like a halved white harvest apple. “You won’t miss this dress.”

  She hated having her dress torn. Yet she took the tearing to mean he was crazy in love with her again. “Darling, you’re mad.” Quickly she covered her wrinkled scar with a hand.

  “Mad I am, yes.” He pushed her hand aside. He shoved his brushy face into her neck and between her breasts. He surged up, rose with her in his arms, placed her on the purple Persian rug and possessed her.

  She took it all for true love.

  He set himself against any other thought but the way of a man with a woman. Comb still bright and high, he next carried her upstairs, finished undressing her, f
inished undressing himself, took her yet again on their four-poster. If he was going to sin against Erden he might as well sin the whole hog.

  She cried out from the midst of her rack of joy. “At last! At last! To be doing it again and again. Oh, Ransom, darling, I fear I have an unnatural appetite for it.”

  Through half-open eyes he saw that the throes made her a young girl again. The tiny netlike traces around her eyes were hard to find. Her sighs were those of a girl-child.

  They were insatiable with each other. They seemed to be on top of each other all night long.

  He went on a burst with her for a week.

  5

  Two months later. It was morning. They had just thrown back the quilts and were about to get up. Once again his eye fell on the scar on her stomach. It still fascinated him. The wrinkled smile of it was like the smile of an old woman with a secret to tell.

  As before she tried to hide it with a covering hand.

  He promptly pushed her hand aside.

  “Please, Ransom.”

  “Sure is funny you ain’t proud of that scar.”

  Her gold hair rustled in her pillow.

  He gave her belly a light clap. “Lots of people used to die from gallstone operations. So you should be proud of it.”

  “Please don’t stick your nose into something for which you may be sorry later on.”

  “What’s the matter, chum? You got something to hide?”

  She sat up blazing. “What do you mean?”

  “Have you?”

  “Listen, you.” She quite deliberately placed her hand on her velvet wings. “I’ll have you know that no child has ever passed these portals.”

  Ransom noted that for all her blazing manner her brown eye for one fleeting second couldn’t quite hold up to him.

  “I swear to God, Mr. Earl Ransom.”

  After a moment Ransom shied off himself. “I have to believe you.”

  “Well! I like that.”

  Then it was his turn to bristle. “Listen, puss, you were running The Stinging Lizard when we first met, you know.”

  Pause. “That hurt.”

  “All right. I believe you.”

  There came over her face again that familiar sudden grimace, part sneering, part wincing.