The young man turned his back on them once again and held his hand up, visoring his eyes and staring up the street. A chestnut horse stood at a hitch rail, bowed against the gale. Dim light shone through the darkened panes of the windows in front of them. On the opposite side of the street, two mules drooped before their flat wagon, each with a rear leg canted. Beyond them two women progressed up the boardwalk, skirts snapping like laundry on a line, with hands clamped on their respective headgear. The thinner, taller of the two had on a broad-brim hat, like a man’s. The other, thicker and squatter, wore a bonnet. Low, dark clouds hugged the horizon and rode the little town proper as if tethered there.
“That was a waste of time, sir. I won’t require a hotel room.” The tall, redheaded stranger smirked at the station agent. “I am heading out to the ranch today. Now, where can I hire a hansom or some such conveyance to bring me there?”
“This just keeps getting better.” Squirly snorted and, patting Teasdale on the sleeve, stepped off the platform. “Dry work, Teas, but I figure I been paid.” He hunched up, his open coat flapping, wisps of silver hair trailing behind his bald head like ragged yarn. As he trudged up the street, shaking his head, the wind carried his voice back to them. “Hire a hansom….Ha! Wait’ll I tell the boys.”
The station agent cleared his throat. “Fact is, Mr. Mac—Mr. Middleton, you need the better part of a day just to make it to your father’s property. You’re in luck—the Maligno’s passable lately. With a good horse and an early start tomorrow, you can make it to the ranch itself not too long after dark. Stays light late now, so that’ll help you.”
“I don’t plan on being here that long. I made this god-awful journey despite the insistence of my grandfather to the contrary and at the urging of a pathetic Denver attorney who claimed to represent the dead man’s interests. I will deal with estate matters, liquidate what I can, and address the remaining headaches from the comfort and safety of my home in Providence, where I fully expect to return within two weeks’ time.”
He drew himself up to his considerable full height and tilted his head to one side, regarding Teasdale as one might a troubled child who doesn’t understand the explanation given him. “Now, before I embark on my trip to the property, perhaps you will be so good as to tell me at what time tomorrow the next train arrives.”
Teasdale could only think of the fact that Squirly was right. “First time for everything,” he said in a low voice as he hefted the bag and headed down the street.
“See here,” said the young man, laying a big hand on Teasdale’s arm. “Where are you going with my luggage?”
Teasdale smiled up at the young man and said, “The next train? Why, that’s scheduled to pull up, oh boy, let’s see….Yes, that would be a week from today. So, next Tuesday, Mr. Middleton.”
“What do you mean? I have appointments to keep. I have important work to do!” As he spoke he followed the older man. “See here,” he said again, but the words whipped from his mouth in a gust of bitter wind as soon as they were uttered.
Minutes later, Teasdale led him to a set of wide wooden steps. The older man bent down and plucked something from the shadows beside the staircase, slapped at it a few times, then presented it to the young man. “Your hat, sir.”
For a brief moment Teasdale saw unadorned delight in the young man’s eyes. Then their gazes met and Middleton snatched the dented, dusty thing and mumbled, “Thank you.”
Teasdale smiled and led the way up the steps and into the foyer of a narrow, two-story building with the simple word HOTEL painted on the facade. He plopped the tall man’s bag in front of the sign-in counter. “Heya, Harv,” he said.
The man behind the counter, nearly bald and with a fleshy red face, stood crouched over a large ledger he scratched in with a pencil. He didn’t look up. Teasdale winked at the stranger and shook his head and rang a little brass bell. The melodic chiming sound echoed in the large room and the man behind the counter looked up. “Teasdale, good to see you today.”
The station agent just nodded. “Harv, this fella here”—he nodded toward the stranger—“needs that room I spoke to you about. Just for the night. I’m guessing you can help him out.”
The hotelier’s smile dropped from his face and his bottom lip thrust forward. He grunted and licked a finger before turning pages in the big green ledger. As far as the other two men could tell, there was no sequence to the page flipping. He finally turned it back to the page he began with and said, “Well…”
Teasdale stood off to the side, hands in pockets, and smiled.
“What’s wrong? In fact, what’s wrong with everyone in this town?” Middleton shook his head and snatched up his satchel.
“Why, I was about to tell you that you’re in luck, sir. I have—”
“Never mind. I’ll find accommodation elsewhere tonight.”
“I doubt it.”
“What?” said Middleton, turning on Teasdale. The stranger’s shoulders sagged. “Why?”
“Because this is the only place in town with rooms to let, Mr. Middleton.” No one said anything for another few seconds; then Teasdale moved to the door. “I’ll leave you to it, then, Harv.” He nodded at the hotelier, then looked at the stranger and touched a finger to his hat brim. “Mr. Middleton.” He closed the door behind him.
Before either man could address the other, Teasdale poked his head back in. “Almost forgot. You’ll want to talk with Silver Haskell at the livery. He’ll fix you up with a horse in the morning. Good day.” The door rattled closed again, but not before a gust fluttered the lace curtains on the windows beside the door.
“I’d like your best room.”
The hotelier stared at the tall stranger. “God, but you look familiar.”
“A room, please.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. Best, you say? They’re all the same. Some better in some ways, others in others.”
“Just give me a quiet one.”
“Well, now,” said Harv, spinning the guest register toward the stranger. “Depends on the time of day. Street’s busier along toward midday and afternoon, whereas the back’s busier in early morning and, of course, nighttime, when the boys are in town. Too much whoopin’ and we put ’em out back on the bench in the alley for a spell. We call it an alley, but it ain’t really. More like a—”
“Any room will do.” The young stranger stared down at the bald hotelier.
“Four could work.”
“Four sounds fine.”
“Four, then?”
The tall man narrowed his eyes and drew in a breath through his nose.
“Good. Sign here.” Harv tapped a pudgy, ink-smudged finger at a blank line. The stranger noticed the date of the previous guest’s sign-in was nearly a month old.
“I almost hate to ask….Do you recommend a dining establishment? Preferably not too far. I’ve had a long day and I am tired.”
“Big, young fella like you? My word. I was your age I could go all day in the saddle on Pap’s ranch, scrub off the dust, and ride into town most evenings for a game and a snort.”
“How fortunate for both of us that you are not me.”
Harv grunted and said, “Well, your best bet, not to mention your only one in Turnbull, is Mae’s Dinner House, two doors down. My sister-in-law runs it. She’s a German but she can cook up a storm. Married to my brother. Course, he took up with my wife, though. Been gone, oh, let’s see now—”
Middleton hefted his satchel and walked away while the pudgy bald man spoke.
As he mounted the stairs, he heard the hotelier say, “Well, I never….”
Chapter 4
As was his habit when riding long distances, Mortimer Darturo passed the time by musing about his life, his hardscrabble past, and how far he’d come. He knew that others regarded prideful thinking as shameful, but he didn’t care in the least. He reached down and patted the neck of his horse, Picolo. The buckskin responded with a head shake, as if to dispel an irksome bee. Darturo laughed and lit a
short brown cigarillo and settled back in the saddle to the steady motion of the horse over this dry but forgiving land that stretched sandy and rarely green for miles around him.
He wore a black, flat-crowned hat and a tailored black suit sporting accents of brocade, with thin gray stripes running the length of the trousers. He had been mistaken many times for a Mexican gambler. Mortimer Darturo was not of Spanish descent, however, but Italian to the bone. He had been born thirty-four years before of fisherfolk in Ancona and shipped to the Land of Promise as a crying youth, with little more than hollow assurances from his father and mother that they would soon follow. If they did, he never knew. From the hour of his tearful departure aboard the stinking ship filled with his ragged countrymen, he had been made to work, scrubbing tin cookware, hauling slopping buckets of waste topped with flies so thick at times they settled on his face like a moving mask.
Young Darturo had been born to working people, and though the work was distasteful to him, he assumed this was the deal his parents had struck for his passage, the best their sacrifice could render for him, in order to get him, their beloved son, to the Land of Promise. At least that is what he thought at the beginning of the trip.
The two months at sea seemed to take years. Mortimer had suspected for half of that time that the captain, a slack-bellied tyrant covered in black, curling hair that trapped droplets of sweat, had plans to keep Mortimer aboard, secured in the hold with chains, until they were back at sea. The captain liked how hard Darturo worked.
By the time they docked in Boston Harbor, Darturo had formed a plan. Once the ship had been emptied of cargo and passengers, the captain led him under pretense to the far reaches of the hold, as Darturo knew he would. The big man delivered his usual clouts, his meaty hand smacking Darturo on the cheeks, the ears, the forehead. Darturo smiled and retreated in the dark, waited for the fat man to lunge, thinking he was driving the boy one step closer to the manacles behind him, bolted to the hull, clanking with the gentle motion of the busy harbor.
“You stand there, boy. You know what must be done.” There was a wide grin hidden in the dense mat of poking black hair of the man’s beard. He slipped off the leather braces from his shoulders, popped free the buckle from its straining belt, and then the sweating bulk of the captain’s body stepped in front of Darturo.
As the captain’s trousers dropped, he reached for the boy. Darturo pushed upward with all the pent strength of a short life gained working hard for others—first at the docks hauling nets, dragging boats, lugging the catch, then at sea hauling, dragging, and lugging for the ship’s vile crew. But now he would be free. As Darturo pulled the captain’s own dining knife through the great swinging sack of belly, and as the mass of slick guts slopped to the floor, the boy felt as if something had climbed down off his back. He felt taller and older for the first time since leaving home.
The big, sweaty face moved toward his own, as if to make out a bit of missed conversation, the captain’s eyes the only brightness in the dim hold. Darturo bent forward and whispered into the sweat-soaked beard, “Yes, now I know what must be done.”
Time stilled long enough for a young man to step aside and draw a breath, his first of freedom, even as the older man groaned and pushed out a final foul breath. The captain pitched forward, his head smacking the manacles, setting them swinging. He dropped to the grimed floor of the hold, his great hairy head matting in the pile of his own sopping guts.
Despite this first triumph, as he came to think of it, Darturo found life in the harbor city a hard thing. He endured other such attacks of filth and disgust, and he spent the next few years working to forget it all, but found that he could not. It occurred to him one night as he clawed his way through the trash pile behind a dining hall, kicking at rats who were nothing more than competition, that since he knew he would never forget the hard life he had now been presented with, perhaps there was a way he could make it work for him. He vowed to spend the rest of his life doing to others what had been done to him. The only bit that amazed him was that it had taken him so long to figure out.
The hat he’d had for six years now. It had belonged to a man who had explained the promise and allure of the West to Mortimer in such glowing, vivid strokes of conversation one night over a shared bottle and a warm fire in a rail camp that after Darturo had sliced open his gut in much the same manner as he had that of the captain, first clamping one hard hand over the sleeping man’s mouth, he’d vowed to take to the road to see if the man had lied to him. He must have, so rich did the West sound to him that night….
From New York he’d traveled, on the man’s horse and in the man’s clothes, to St. Louis. From there he’d gone, well, everywhere. And he was having the time of his life. The man had been true to his word, and Darturo thanked him every morning when he settled his hat on his head for the day and climbed on his horse.
Along the way he’d learned a few things. Namely that he did not like the South. It was hot and too many things living there tried to sting and bite him—animals, snakes, the people too. And the southernmost of it bordered the ocean. He needed no reminders of life on the shore. The Southwest was little better, but it was drier. Though it too offered vicious, unending heat and vile creatures intent on harming him. Of necessity through the years, he had become capable of all manner of ranch work. However, he dusted off those rudimentary and distasteful skills only when other, less strenuous work was scarce.
His preference was not to work at all, at least for him, and instead consisted of pitting one frenzied person against another in hopes of an outcome that shot sparks high into the sky and money deep into his pockets. He found that desperate, angry people paid money for certain services that with a little thought, they could themselves accomplish. But no matter, he was there to help. And that is what he told the woman in Boulder just two months before he arrived in Denver.
She had been a wealthy chicken, cuckolded for years, who despised her philandering husband. But she didn’t know quite what to do about it, only knew that she wanted something to happen to him. Something bad. Something permanent. That task had required Darturo to be more aggressive than he had expected, but so skillfully had he pitted the two against each other that the results would be talked about in Boulder for years. Once their bodies were found, of course, liberated of all their cash and jewels, naturally. I am not a greedy man, he thought. Plenty of heavy, ugly furniture was left for their heirs to sell off.
Mort smiled at the memory, and reined up at a small white wooden sign. One end angled upward but still pointed toward the trail ahead.
“Turnbull. Fifty miles.” He grunted and wiped grit from his face, taking care not to drag it across his eyes, for then they would sting. “That sounds like the place the fat little Denver lawyer spoke of, eh, Picolo?” He slapped the buckskin’s neck and urged him forward with gentle spur taps to the belly. As they trotted toward the far-off place, he smiled, curious to see what would happen next in his life. He had plenty of money left from Denver, but it was his takings from the Boulder episode, as he chose to call it, that allowed him time enough to wait for his next project to present itself.
He’d never had trouble in the past in finding an opportunity. If he had any plan, it was to perhaps visit Mexico. His saddlebags were full of more money than he could spend down there in two lifetimes. And he figured that since he’d already used up this one, there would be plenty for him to enjoy somewhere south of the border. For however long it lasted.
“First, we will see what Turnbull brings, Picolo. If there is nothing to the fat lawyer’s chatter and it turns out there are no arguing people, and so, no land for us to take and then sell—or keep for our own and become fat, land-owning judges ourselves—we will move on to Mexico. After we’ve had a drink or two, and a game or three. Ranch country like this, there’s bound to be many clever cowhands looking to strike it rich off a dumb foreigner.” Darturo urged the buckskin into a trot. His low, dry chuckle spiraled up and away, breaking apart in a l
ight breeze like old paper over the long, flat plain around him.
Chapter 5
Two hours after he’d checked in, Brian Middleton reversed his journey downstairs and through the hotel’s now-empty lobby. He stepped down into the street and looked southward. The wind had abated and darkness crept in. He discovered that the warm, welcoming glow lighting the boardwalk leaked out from the dining establishment that the hotelier had recommended. He pushed open a squeaky screen door and stepped inside.
“Sit anyvere. I bring you coffee.”
Middleton realized the fat, red-faced woman in the apron was talking to him, so he nodded and chose a table off to the side of the room. There was no one else in the establishment, but the smells in the close, warm room made him lick his lips. He set his derby hat on the seat of one of the other three chairs at his table and sat down. The table covering was oilcloth, but clean. He had hardly expected wine and candles, but this really was rustic. He looked around, wincing at the crashes and shouts from the kitchen.
“Out. Out of here until I call for you. Useless man….”
From a doorway in the back hurried the little bald hotelier. He saw Middleton and smiled, and as he squeaked open the woodstove’s door he said, “So you made it. Good.”
Middleton managed a half smile and a curt nod to the hotelier. He wished he had brought a newspaper. There wasn’t even a menu to read. The woman came with a cup of steaming coffee and looked at him. “Harvey is right. You look like—”
“Hush, Mae. That ain’t our business.”
“Oh, bosh.”
Harv replied by clunking another hunk of wood into the firebox and slamming the door.
He mumbled something Middleton could not discern, but the woman evidently had heard him, for she scowled at Harv and said, “Enough of dat noise from you. Or no pie.”
She turned back to Middleton and with the back of her hand pushed flyaway strands of gray-brown hair from her red face. “You like the beef, yah? And potato, carrots, biscuits—big and fluffy—and more coffee.”
Dead Man's Ranch Page 2
