Dance with the Devil

by Victoria Wilcox

  “She one of your whores?” John Henry asked, going back to his drink.

  “Nothing so cheap as that,” Shaughnessey replied, “more’s the pity. I’ve had plenty of offers to pimp for her, but I’m the one that has to pay. Katies’s a dancer in my floorshow. I had a real stage built for it out behind the gamin’ room. Come back tonight and you’ll have a treat. Until then, you might go lookin’ for a room over at the Occidental Hotel. Nicest place in town, and Mrs. Smith makes a good meal for her boarders, as well. As for me, I mostly take my meals down at Lottie Deno’s place. She’s not much of a cook, but she’s got her charms.”

  “Lottie Deno? Now that is a name I know. Isn’t she the lady gambler?”

  “That she is, and more besides. Keeps the biggest brothel in town, so you might say she’s competition. But I don’t mind losin’ a little money her way as long as she doesn’t charge me for my own time with her. ‘Tis a tricky business bein’ in love with the madam of a whorehouse, but when there’s nothin’ but whores in town, a man doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter, now does he?”

  Everyone in Texas had heard of Lottie Deno, though where she came from or what her past was, no one knew for sure. She’d arrived in Fort Griffin one afternoon on the stage from Jacksboro and immediately went about setting up a quality house of prostitution. She hired only the most experienced girls and wouldn’t sully the reputation of her establishment by bringing in the virgin runaways other madams liked to employ. Lottie claimed that she didn’t want to be responsible for tarnishing a young lady’s good name until the young lady had tarnished it for herself. So most of Lottie’s girls were divorcees or fallen angels who’d been disowned by pious families in the east. And unlike other madams, she didn’t frown upon her employees falling in love with the customers and going off to start families of their own. Made her feel like a proud mother, she said, when she got to throw a wedding party for one of her girls.

  “Aye, she’s a good woman,” Shaughnessey went on, “and a good business woman, besides. I gave her a gift of some new bedroom furniture, awhile back, and she stopped chargin’ me for her own services. ‘Course, she still sees her other clients. It’s business, you know. But I’m her favorite and she lets everyone know it. Ah, Lottie, darlin’!” he said, getting moony thinking about her. “The love of a good woman is a glorious thing!”

  John Henry didn’t bother pointing out that, as a successful madam, Lottie couldn’t really be termed a good woman. Shaughnessey was obviously too in love with her to care about the technicalities.

  In the midst of Shaugnessey’s fawning, John Henry hadn’t noticed that the bedsprings had stopped squeaking upstairs until the hollering started up again.

  “Sounds more like fightin’ than lovemakin’ up there,” he commented. “What’s the argument?”

  “Katie’s not fond of her cowboy’s line of work. He’s been in the employ of Sheriff Larn since he showed up here from Travis County. They say he shared a jail cell down there with that killer, John Wesley Hardin. He’s killed a man or two himself, in the Mason County Range Wars, but mostly, he’s just a cattle thief. Katie wants him out of it, but he’s proud of his work. You’ll likely run into him around town. Name’s John Ringgold, but folks call him Ringo.”

  And as if he’d heard the introduction, the cowboy came down the wooden stairs with a clatter of boots and spurs and still buttoning his trousers from the tumble with Katie Elder. He wasn’t bad looking for an outlaw, John Henry noted, with a lanky walk and drooping auburn mustaches and a face a lady might have called pensive.

  “Looks more like a poet than a killer,” he commented.

  “That’s the funny thing about looks,” Shaugnessey replied, “you never can guess what they’re hidin’ inside. Take you, for instance. I’d never have taken you for a killer, either, but you did the deed.”

  John Henry couldn’t argue the point, though he didn’t much like the turn of the conversation.

  “So what time’s the show tonight?” he asked, paying for his liquor with two silver pieces slid across the bar. “I think I’d like to take a look at that new dancer of yours.”

  “Starts at eight, but you don’t have to wait that long. She’s comin’ downstairs just now. Ringo must have forgotten to kiss her goodbye.”

  John Henry followed Shaughnessey’s glance toward the staircase where a woman in a red satin dressing gown descended the steps with something almost like queenly grace, imperious in spite of her undress and loose hair hanging like a dark cloud around her shoulders hiding her face. John Henry watched her, amused, as she waited for her cowboy to come back to her and then shouted a profanity at the door when he did not.

  “She’s got a bit of a temper, as you can see,” Shaughnessey said with a laugh. Then he called to the girl. “Katie, m’darlin’, come over here. I’d like you to meet someone.”

  “I’m not interested in meeting anyone just now,” she said, not bothering to look his direction. “I’m going back to bed for a nap. You can send my supper up before the show.” Then she tossed her hair out of her face and turned and glided back up the stairs as gracefully as she had come down, like undressed royalty in that satin robe of hers.

  “So what do you think?” Johnny Shaughnessey asked with a smile. “Do I have a prima donna on my hands?”

  John Henry nodded in mute agreement, unable to put his thoughts into words. She was a prima donna, all right, too fine for a place like Shaughnessey’s Saloon, with her tantalizing mix of worldliness and refinement, her tumble of glistening dark hair, her skin the color of golden honey, her voice that sounded like something exotic and intoxicating. Too fine for this place or even for the Comique Theater in St. Louis where he’d first laid eyes on her.

  For Katie Elder, the cowboy’s lover and Shaughnessey’s dance hall girl, was his Kate.

  Chapter Eight

  FORT GRIFFIN, 1877

  HOW MANY LUSTY DREAMS HAD HE DREAMT OF HER SINCE LEAVING St. Louis, dreams he’d at first felt guilty over? For he’d left her, after all, running away without so much as a proper farewell, then burning all her letters that followed him home. But he hadn’t been able to burn away the memory of her or make the dreams stop coming. And after a time, he’d found himself looking forward to the nights he spent with her, imagining himself back in St. Louis, imagining Kate in his arms, imagining Kate’s bed . . .

  But there was someone else there now, the cow-thief called Johnny Ringo, and from what John Henry had seen that night at Shaughnessey’s place, Kate was glad to have him there. Would she be as glad to see John Henry again, if he could bring himself to speak to her? Or would she turn the same angry words on him that had filled her last letters, calling him a coward and worse for leading her on and then leaving her? Would she want him again, now that fate had brought them back together? Or would she laugh at him, flaunting her new love affair with the outlaw cowboy?

  It was the thought of her laughter that kept him from making himself known, though he asked after her so often that Shaughnessey began to suspect something more than just prurient interest on his part. And hearing what the Irishman had to say about her, John Henry was even more unsure of what he should do. For Kate’s life had not gone well since he’d left her there in St. Louis—and he feared that he may have had some part in her downfall.

  Shaughnessey had a barkeep’s knack of knowing how to talk to people and for getting them to talk to him, and he knew all about Kate’s sad story. As he retold it, she’d been a fine actress once with a grand career ahead of her until she found herself both pregnant and unwed. The father of the child was a married man, unfortunately, which left Kate no choice but to find herself another man and marry him to give herself and the baby a legitimate name. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Elder, her new husband, had a good income as a traveling salesman, since a pregnant actress couldn’t find all that much work. But when her new husband soon died in a fever outbreak, Kate was again left to fend for herself, and this time with an infant to care for. That wa
s when she started onto the dance hall circuit, trying to rebuild her old career—though some folks said she’d turned to whoring for awhile, as well.

  But it wasn’t her whoring that most surprised John Henry; it was the name of the man who’d fathered her child.

  “An odd name it was,” Shaughnessey said, pausing to remember what she’d told him. “Sounded like Shamus, as I recall, but it wasn’t a good Irish name like Shamus.”

  “Silas?” John Henry asked, and Shaughnessey nodded.

  “Aye, that’s it. Silas it was that fathered the baby, the shameless adulturer that he was, getting her in the family way when he already had a family of his own. It’s one thing to go a-whoring, I always say, and another to go adulterin’. A blessing it was that the wee little thing left this earth before it ever knew the scoundrel that gave it life.”

  “You mean the baby died?”

  “’Tis true, sad to say. So after all that, Katie had nothin’ left in the end. No adulterin’ lover, no baby, no kind man to be a husband to her. Nothin’ but her career, what there was left of it. And to tell you the truth, she’s not all that much of a dancer, either. She says she used to do an act with a horse, but the horse got sold when the baby came to help pay expenses. I told her I’d get her another horse, if she wanted one, and she could do her act for my customers here. But she says there’ll never be another horse like the one she had. A wonderful horse, she said it was.”

  “Wonder,” John Henry mumbled into his drink. “The horse was named Wonder . . .”

  “What’s that you’re sayin’, Doc?” Shaughnessey asked. “Do you know somethin’ of our Katie Elder, then?”

  But John Henry answered with a shake of his head. “No, I never met your Katie Elder. It was an actress named Kate Fisher I was thinkin’ of. I knew her for a time, back in St. Louis . . .”

  For the Kate he knew would never have had a love affair with the likes of Silas Melvin, and he began to think that maybe he had never known her at all.

  He took a room at the Occidental Hotel, as Shaughnessey had suggested, a comfortable place run by Fort Griffin merchant Hank Smith and his Scottish-born wife, Elizabeth Boyle. The enterprising Smiths had a notion that Fort Griffin might become a real civilized community one day, and ran their hotel as if it already were. The ledger books were carefully kept, recording each guest’s daily expenses, and Mrs. Smith made a point of not allowing drunken men into the dining room. That didn’t stop John Henry from drinking, however. He just bought his bottle at the bar and took it up to his bedroom where he could drink as much as he liked without the landlady’s disapproving gaze to disturb him.

  He could have done his drinking elsewhere and would have preferred to have taken his liquor at Shaughnessey’s Saloon where the conversation was often more interesting than the card games. But Shaughnessey’s had the uncomfortable presence of Kate, whom he was doing his best to avoid. Since his return to the Flat, when he’d learned in quick succession that she was in Fort Griffin, was bedding a cowboy, and had lowered herself to sleep with Silas Melvin, he’d had ambivalent feelings for her. His attraction to her was still there, as it had been from the first time he saw her on the day of the St. Louis storm. But his estimation of her had fallen so far that he was almost angry at himself for feeling attracted and wasn’t sure he even wanted to see her again.

  But Fort Griffin being the smallish town that it was, he couldn’t avoid Kate forever. So he wasn’t surprised to run into her when he did, while she was mailing a letter at the post office. He knew she was a letter-writer, of course, having been the uncomfortable recipient of all those passionate epistles she’d sent to Valdosta after his hasty departure from St. Louis. But somehow, he’d never pictured the exotic Kate doing something as ordinary as buying postage.

  His own letter was addressed to Miss Martha Anne Holliday, Forrest Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia, and he had just handed the letter over to the postmaster at the Butterfield Overland Stage post office when he turned around and came face to face with Kate. She must have heard his surprised catch of breath and sudden cough, for even the postmaster commented on it.

  “You all right?” the man asked, and John Henry nodded quickly.

  “Just fine, thank you,” he replied, then regained his composure enough to tip his hat to Kate, a common courtesy to cover his sudden awkwardness.

  He had two thoughts as he looked down into her rouged and powdered face: she had grown a little thinner over the years, and she was even more striking than he had remembered her to be.

  “’Afternoon, Miss Fisher,” he said, and added with practiced manners, “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Holliday,” she replied, though he noticed that she didn’t add the same mannerly comment.

  “I’m stayin’ here in Fort Griffin awhile,” he said, as though he needed to make some explanation for his presence, and she answered with a nod of her head, making her gold earrings dance against her honey-gold throat.

  “So I heard,” she said blandly. “Shaughnessey mentioned there was a dentist in town. I thought the name sounded vaguely familiar.”

  Her chill reply was unnerving. He’d expected heat when they met again, anger or tears or something other than this cool propriety, but she looked at him from under the brim of her narrow bonnet as though she had never had any interest in him at all.

  “I was just sending off a letter to my cousin . . .” he said, finding that he had nothing really to say.

  “Well, I’m sure he’ll be pleased to hear from you,” she replied, then added with an unmistakable tinge of sarcasm, “I thought perhaps you didn’t know how to write.”

  The postmaster must have been listening in, for he laughed at her comment then added with a smile, “Caught your show the other night, Miss Elder. Mighty fine acrobatics you do up there. You’re a helluva performer, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  At the sound of the praise, a smile swept across Kate’s face and she curtsied toward the postmaster, her stiff taffeta skirts rustling against the floor. Quicksilver she was, mercurial. She was also an actress, John Henry reminded himself, her enigmatic behavior all a show. Had her willing behavior with him, in those weeks in St. Louis, been all a show as well?

  “You are too kind,” she said to the postmaster, gushing, and held out one gloved hand to his, turning all the heat that John Henry had expected for himself onto the stranger at the mail window. Then she went about her business, seeming to ignore him completely as she bought postage and sent off her letter.

  He could have turned and left the stagecoach office then, and probably should have, as Kate clearly had no interest in continuing their conversation. But her aloofness somehow made him stand his ground instead.

  “Kate,” he said, as she finished her postal business and turned around to face him once more, “we need to talk . . .”

  “Really?” she said, slipping her coin purse into a tassled handbag. “I can’t imagine what we’d have to talk about, Dr. Holliday. My teeth are just fine. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  But as she brushed past him and stepped to the door, he said lightly: “I hear you’re with Ringo now.”

  And finally, she gave him something like a smile.

  “That’s right,” she said. Then she turned regally and swept out of the post office.

  As much as Kate’s coolness bewildered him, her smile bedeviled. What had it meant? he wondered, pondering on it when he should have been concentrating on the cards or living a life of pleasant, mindless abandon. Was she pleased to be with Ringo, or pleased that he had noticed? And the more he pondered on it, the more he came to dislike the cowboy he’d never met, though that didn’t mean he was having any renewed feelings for Kate. Of course, he wasn’t. His pride wouldn’t allow it.

  His pride wouldn’t allow him to keep hiding out from her either, now that they had finally crossed paths again, so he proved his disinterest by returning to his old place at Shaughnessey’s Saloon. Why should he deny himself th
e company of the friendly Irishman just because there was a troublesome woman living in the rooms upstairs? And what difference did it make to him if he could hear Kate and Ringo going at it on the squeaky bed overhead while he sipped at his whiskey down below? There was hardly a saloon in town that didn’t have a brothel attached to it, the squeaking of bed frames as much the music of Fort Griffin as the clamor of honky-tonk pianos playing out of tune.

  Shaughnessey’s piano was an exception, however, as he’d paid good money to have a nice instrument hauled out from Dallas. Shaughnessey had dreams of turning his watering hole into a real varieties house one day—the reason he’d paid good money for Katie Elder, as well, who knew something about the theater. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many good piano players on the Texas frontier, so Shaughnessey’s spinet took the same abuse as the lesser instruments on the Flat, gathering prairie dust and cigar smoke on its ivory keys and going slowly out of tune.

  John Henry’s mother would have been pained to see the way that piano-forte was treated, a fine piece of workmanship being worn out by the wild frontier. She would have dusted the keys and oiled the rosewood cabinet until it gleamed and had the strings tightened and tuned again. She would have played it as it was meant to be played, making something lovely out of it instead of letting it go to waste the way it was. And thinking of her made him feel a sudden yearning to have her music in him again. So, late one night after the stage show had ended and the back room had cleared out, he took his whiskey with him and sat down at the spinet, thinking he might play a bit.

  His hands were still agile, with all the card playing and dealing he’d done in the last few years, but his memory for the music had faded some. The only piece he remembered well was the one his mother had most loved, the little waltz she’d been playing the night Mattie had taught him how to dance . . .

  “Franz Liszt,” a voice said, giving the name the proper Hungarian pronunciation, and from out of the shadows of the darkened dance hall stepped Kate. She was wearing the red satin dressing gown, her glossy dark hair loosed from its hairpins and hanging down around her shoulders, and without the fashionable bonnet and bustle she looked smaller, somehow, and fragile almost. Then she moved toward John Henry and the dressing gown fell open a little showing a glimpse of bare white skin beneath the satin.