I guess Randy Clay was right, she thought. Horace Torquist is a very hard man to get a handle on.
The farther from his tent she walked, the better she felt. Then, scanning the bustling encampment, she spied her portmanteau aboard a sleek black horse. It was tied to the saddlehorn, bouncing rhythmically as the glossy beast cantered gracefully alongside a column of Conestoga wagons. She also spied her other gear in a bundle stowed behind the saddle.
“Hey!” she shrieked. “Stop!”
Randy had told her that no one would touch her things, and here somebody had gone and stolen…
She began to run after the horse, yelling again: “Wait! Stop!”
The rider reined his horse to a halt and turned to see who was shouting.
And Emmalee saw Garn Landar grinning down at her from beneath the broad brim of his hat. Around the hat was the band of hammered silver pieces, with one piece missing.
She ran up to him and stopped, breathless and bewildered. The horse was a magnificent animal, the finest Emmalee had ever seen. Its rider, however, looked slightly the worse for wear in the rough, rawhide jacket of a plainsman. A large, irregular bruise discolored his left cheekbone, and there was a touch of blood on his lip, the result of a cut broken open when he’d flashed Emmalee that grin. He looked happy to see her, but surprised as well.
“You made it here!” he said, jumping down from the horse and walking toward her.
“Of course I did. You had doubts?”
Actually, Garn had entertained some misgivings, and even after diving from the Queen of Natchez he’d worried that Emmalee, an unpaid passenger, might have gotten into trouble on the boat. Now he realized that she was fully as ambitious as she seemed and a lot more capable than he’d believed.
“Didn’t doubt it for a second,” he told her, smiling widely, unfazed by his battered appearance. “First time I laid eyes on you I knew you were my kind of—”
Abruptly, yet not ungently, he took her by the shoulders, swung her into the shadow behind a nearby Conestoga, pulled her to him, and kissed her. Emmalee was too startled to know what was happening until she felt his mouth on hers. He held her very close to him and a delicious quiver ran all through her body. Emmalee found herself kissing him back.
It required as much effort of will as it did physical strength to tear herself away from him.
“I’m glad that you’re happy to see me.” He grinned as she smoothed her dress and collected her wits.
Emmalee was irritated by his presumption, but secretly even more appalled at her reaction to the kiss. Her breath was coming fast. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Sure I figured you’d get here,” he was saying, looking into her eyes, standing so close that she could feel the heat of his body. “From the time we started talking on the Queen, I had a feeling you’d be able to do whatever you set your heart on. I like that in a woman. I really do.”
“What on earth are you doing here?” she demanded, stepping a little away from him and putting her hands on her hips, so that anyone watching might get the impression that this conversation was entirely proper and detached. “And would you be so good as not to kiss me again?”
He put on a wounded look. “But that’s why I came here. To kiss you. I never got a chance when we were on the Queen.”
“Would you be serious for once?”
“I am being serious.” His voice, which had been light and teasing in a way Emmalee found both amusing and infuriating, suddenly changed. The words came out like beats on a subtle drum.
“I wandered into camp,” he went on, “saw your bag, and knew you’d be around somewhere.”
“You just ‘wandered in’?” Emmalee responded. She’d noticed his horse, clothes, and battered face. Now she took a complete look. Bulging saddlebags hung from both sides of the black horse, along with two leather scabbards, from which the polished wooden stocks of high-powered rifles protruded. And from a thick leather cartridge-laden belt partially concealed beneath the drooping rawhide jacket hung an unholstered revolver with a barrel the size of a club. Yes, this was indeed a man who might have crossed the Rocky Mountains eight times.
Knowing that Garn must by now have been fired from his job as a scout for Burt Pennington, Emmalee decided to give him a little rope and see if he’d hang himself with it.
“So you just happened to be passing through St. Joe?”
“That’s right.”
“And it occurred to you to look around for me?”
“No other reason, angel.”
“Don’t call me ‘angel.’”
“All right. What shall I call you?”
“Miss Alden will do.”
“Fine with me, Miss Alden will do.”
“Ride along now,” she said. “Give me my things and go.”
“Why? I just got here.”
“I’m very busy now. I’ve just bought a berth on this train.”
Garn laughed. “What’d you buy it with?” he asked sharply. “Was that ungainly old joker chasing you down the Cairo docks because you absconded with orphanage funds? Or were you lying to me about that whole orphanage business in the first place?”
“I wouldn’t talk about lying if I were you,” Emmalee responded. “I know you were supposed to work for Burt Pennington. I know you arrived here in St. Joe late…”
“That would never have happened if I hadn’t tried to impress you at the roulette table.”
“…and I also know that Pennington fired you, so there!”
Garn’s black eyes widened. “You know all that? Miss Alden, you continue to surprise me. I figured that, with luck, you might get as far as St. Joe. But if you plan on traveling across the Great Plains, you’re going to need my help. So since I’m here I’ll just sign on as a scout for Horace Torquist.”
Emmalee laughed, trying to sound brave and nonchalant. But she was beginning to understand, from the things she’d heard, that passage overland might prove more difficult than she’d anticipated.
“You don’t think you need my help?” He grinned.
“Thank you, no. But that’s not what made me laugh. You see, I’ve just come from a meeting with Mr. Torquist, and I don’t think you’ll quite fit into his plans. You’re not the kind of man he’s looking for.”
“He may not know it yet, but I’m exactly the kind of man he desperately needs.”
“It seems that you figure everybody needs you, don’t you?”
“Well now, since you seem to know so much about it, what kind of man is he looking for?”
“Mr. Torquist wants men and women who are responsible and respectful and of high moral character.”
“I couldn’t be described more succinctly. Torquist took you on just because you happen to have the same virtues?”
“Well…no.” Emmalee faltered. “That is, not exactly. I made an agreement with him…”
“You don’t seem too happy about it. What were the terms of agreement?”
“Actually, it’s a fairly standard thing. In return for passage, I agreed to work for him. For two years.”
“What?” cried Garn, astounded. “You signed away two years of your life?”
“It’s not that bad,” she told Garn. “I can buy myself out of the agreement for five hundred dollars.”
He seemed relieved. “Look,” he said readily, reaching into his pocket, “let me give you the money. You got yourself into a no-good deal.”
He pulled out a thick wad of greenbacks, wet his thumb, and started to peel off twenty-dollar bills, one by one. Emmalee was, once again, astounded by all the cash, and as Garn bent over his counting, she noticed again the band of silver discs around his hat.
“How did you get your hatband back?” Emmalee asked him suspiciously. “When you jumped from the deck of the Queen, you were broke, weren’t you?”
Garn stopped counting and looked at her. The cut on his lip reopened when he smiled. “A resourceful man—or woman, possibly—is always rich. The morning af
ter that incident in the Queen’s casino, I managed to win a few games of poker in a Cairo saloon. Then I bought passage on the next steamer for Hannibal, where I boarded the Queen and politely requested a return of my money and silver.”
“So that’s where you got beaten up?”
“To some extent, angel…forgive me, Miss Alden will do. But I sure won’t be having any more altercations with Brutus, and I have my hatband back…minus a piece of silver, of course.”
Emmalee looked at the one vacant section on that strikingly extravagant hatband and felt guilty, both for having accepted the silver from him and for having exchanged it for money. Now he was offering her a handful of bills.
“Take the money,” he said. “Buy your way out of the contract now. Pay me back whenever you can, or don’t pay me back at all.”
“And what would you expect me to do in return for this ‘gift’ of yours?” Emmalee asked.
“What would I expect of you? Why, nothing that you aren’t already prepared to give me.”
“You misjudge me greatly, sir.”
“Sir? Sir? I thought we were friends.”
“Keep your money,” Emmalee pronounced, drawing herself up to her full five feet seven inches and assuming as dignified a stance as she could manage. “I have been prepared from the start to make my own way, and that is what I shall do.”
Garn looked genuinely startled for a moment, an expression quickly replaced by an intelligent assessment of the young woman who stood, shoulders back, chin up, and lovely chest out before him.
“So you weren’t kidding after all,” he said. “I didn’t think so, but you can see that I wanted to be sure.”
“All you wanted,” Emmalee said to Garn, uneasily conscious of the appraising way his eyes were moving from her breasts to her mouth to her eyes and back to her breasts again in a way that raised heat in her body, “all you wanted was a feather to stick in that empty place in your hatband!”
Garn put the bills back into his pocket and smiled broadly, leaving a scarlet touch of blood on an incisor. “No, Miss Alden,” he said, his magnificient voice turned too tender now to be believed, “no, that may have been what I thought I wanted at first, but now I must have you.”
“Lord, spare me!” Emmalee said. Thank God Horace Torquist was the manner of man he was; he would never accept onto his train a cavalier desperado like Garn.
“Just remember. Miss Alden,” Garn was saying as he took her gear from the back of his black horse, “it’s the prerogative of each of us to decide what we want.”
“That is very true,” Emmalee agreed.
“And when I decide what that is, I go after it. If somebody takes it away from me”—he touched his silver hatband—“well, I make it a point to get it back.”
“I’m so glad,” said Emmalee.
Garn handed Emmalee her portmanteau. “You’re different, Emmalee,” he told her. “Really different. That’s why I’m going to protect you on the trail from Indians and bandits and your own stubbornness.”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Landar,” she replied crisply, taking her gear from him. “Just watch out for yourself. That ought to keep you busy enough. Now, good-bye.”
Garn mounted, tipped his hat, and cantered off easily on the elegant black, passing on his way a long, rangy woman with a thin face, a wispy gray bun of hair, and hooded, clever eyes. The woman rode up to Emmalee and looked down from her stolid mule.
“You’re the Alden girl, ain’tcha? I’m Myrtle Higgins. Come along. I got work for you. And, by the way, what the hell was that all about? Who was that young fellow you were jawin’ with? I ain’t seen him around.”
“His name is Garn Landar.”
“Hmmm. Handsome-looking man. What’d he want?”
“Well, I signed a contract with Mr. Torquist—”
“Yeah, so I heard.”
“And Mr. Landar wanted to give me money to buy myself out of it.”
Myrtle Higgins shrugged. “I saw all that cash he was offering you. Thought it might be another kind of deal entirely.”
“Never! I’m not that kind of a…person.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m going to make my way on my own. I’ve learned that it’s the only way to be certain that I control my own life. I wouldn’t let a man like…like Garn Landar maneuver me into a situation where I’d be beholden to him.”
“Sure, sure,” said Myrtle Higgins.
“Why, to have taken Garn Landar’s money would have been like selling myself,” Emmalee raged. “And he’s the type of man who just loves having everything he wants, having things his way.”
“Maybe he just fancies you,” Myrtle suggested.
“I’m not going to sell myself,” Emmalee declared again.
“But honey,” said Myrtle Higgins, gesturing toward Horace Torquist’s tent in the distance, in front of which Garn Landar’s black horse was tethered, “but honey, ain’t that exactly what you’ve already gone and done?”
Emmalee had no answer.
“Sure is a prime piece of stallion,” Myrtle said.
“What? Oh, yes, an excellent horse.”
“I’m talkin’ about Garn Landar,” Myrtle said.
Sea of Grass
The Torquist train rolled out of St. Joe, Missouri, on May 8, 1868, wagon after wagon after wagon, and struck off upon the grassy heart of the windswept Kansas plains. All morning long citizens of the town waved, calling Godspeed and farewell as the slow column passed, exuberantly but solemnly too, down Market Street and westward: 178 Conestoga wagons, 311 horses, 256 oxen, 88 head of dairy cattle, 29 dogs, 424 people. The Torquist company was not particularly large. Burt Pennngton’s train, which had departed two days earlier, was almost twice as big, and raised a mighty cloud of dust that could be seen, swirling like a pillar of smoke, against the western sky. That cloud of dust was Torquist’s constant goad and bane; in order to overtake it, he drove his people hard, and drove himself harder.
Everyone had known that the trek would not be easy, yet all were stunned at the random suddenness with which life and nature attacked their high dreams of destiny. The tall, sweet grass bent flat and died beneath wheel and hoof. Dust of dry earth, fine as powder, rose into the air and settled down upon the travelers, coating eyelids, lining nostrils of men and animals alike, forming a constant rind of grit around their panting mouths. The water wagon, driven by diligent but excitable Lambert Strep of Tennessee, was mobbed all the time, until Torquist, fearing a depletion of the precious supply, decreed strict rationing and made it stick by the force of his will. Thirst never ceased, nor did dust, and after a day on the trail, horses and oxen and men were coated with whitish-gray powder. The once-white canvases of the Conestogas, rippling, billowing in the wind, were coated too, and from a distance, in spite of the sunlight, it appeared as if a procession of ghosts and ghostly wagons had set out upon a journey into disintegration and shadowy nothingness.
The first horse collapsed thirty-seven miles outside St. Joe. Horace Torquist shot the floundering beast between the eyes, cursing ill luck. He and a half-dozen other men dragged the dead animal to the side of the trail and set to work cutting hide from the carcass, cutting horseflesh into thin strips for drying. The trail to Olympia, across Kansas, Colorado, and the Rockies, was long, hard, and unpredictable, and edible meat of whatever kind could not be discarded. Horseflesh, salted and dried, tasted like beef jerky, except that it was slightly sweeter if the horse—unlike this hapless beast—was not too old.
The first person died on the eleventh day out of Missouri, a six-month-old girl fallen victim to dehydration and the heat of the ceaselessly burning wind. She was buried in haste, with scant ceremony, beneath thick Kansas sod. The wails of the child’s heartbroken parents could be heard all along the line of the train. In time the cries diminished, becoming part of and indistinguishable from the sobbing of the wind itself, and the wagon train moved out once more, past a makeshift cross of wooden sticks.
Emmalee, trudging al
ong beside the wagon to which she had been assigned, forced herself to stare straight and hard at the tiny cross, remembering similar crosses on the banks of the Monongahela and outside Springfield, Illinois, recalling all the other crosses in the grove above the Mississippi. Death preyed first upon the fearful. It would not get her.
“I’m going to live a long time,” she told herself. “A very, very long time. I’m going to make it out west and get land and—”
“Talking to yourself already, Emmalee? It’s a bad sign.”
Emmalee looked up to find Randy Clay riding along beside her. She had been walking next to a team of horses pulling one of the Conestogas—adults, unless ill, walked in order to spare the beasts additional burden—but he was on his dapple-gray. Randy had been assigned as a scout and outrider, sometimes reconnoitering ahead of the train, sometimes riding up and down the line of march to check up on the progress of the company.
“Here. Swing up behind me for a minute,” Randy offered. “Give your limbs a rest.”
Emmalee suppressed a smile. Randy was so correct. She remembered how appalled Mrs. Jannings had been when she’d complained of a sore hip once. Polite people did not say arm or leg or—God forbid—hip. They said “limb.” Emmalee decided that Randy was really quite sweet. He was probably even blushing under his sunburn.
“Hoist me up,” she told him. “It wouldn’t hurt to take a load off my legs at all.”
Randy reached for her and his powerful arms plucked her from the ground as if she were a feather. She twisted her body in midair, straddling the gray horse, and swung into a position behind Randy. She put her arms around his waist lightly, adjusting herself to the slow, swaying motion of the horse, which smelled of sweat and saddle leather. Randy smelled dusty but vital, a slight band of perspiration streaking the faded blue shirt that strained against his big shoulders. The horse felt warm between Emmalee’s thighs.
The Passionate and the Proud Page 7
