“I had forgotten you knew Liszt,” John Henry said, his pulse quickening at the unexpected sight of her.
“I’d thought you’d forgotten me altogether,” she replied. “You never wrote back to me, not once.”
“I was busy,” he said, lying. “I had my work in the dental office, and more helping around my father’s place. And I’ve been sick since then . . .”
“You left without saying goodbye. You didn’t even care enough to answer my letters. You have no heart, and I was fool enough to think myself in love with you.”
Her words took him by surprise, though she’d said almost as much in her letters. But since his arrival in Fort Griffin, she’d done nothing to show that she’d had such feelings for him, only offended his pride by her frustrating aloofness.
“And what of Silas?” he asked, his pride speaking out. “Doesn’t seem like you waited too awful long to fall in love again—or to fall into Silas Melvin’s bed. I remember you once claimed to have more refinement than that.”
There was a sudden hot light in her eyes and an unexpected anger in her voice.
“At least Silas was there in St. Louis! At least Silas didn’t leave me!”
“Silas was there, all right. Silas was always there as I recall, ignorin’ his wife to spend his nights makin’ indecent proposals to you. Which were finally accepted, so I hear. I imagine it must have been quite the talk around the theater: the famous Kate Fisher and her married lover, makin’ a baby . . .”
He hadn’t meant to be cruel, but her own words had driven him to it.
“You don’t know anything about it!” she cried, her voice rising with emotion. “You don’t know . . .”
“I don’t need to know. It’s clear that I was mistaken in my estimation of you, back in St. Louis. It’s clear you were nothin’ grander then than you are now, a cowtown whore sleepin’ with a cow thief.”
“How dare you!” she screamed, then at the sound of her own voice she suddenly drew herself back in, the actress taking over again. “I am not a whore. Ringo doesn’t pay me. He doesn’t have to. I’m with him because I want to be.”
“So why aren’t you with him now?” John Henry asked.
“Because he’s drunk. He drinks too much, sometimes, when the nightmares come. He watched his father die with half his head blown away by a shotgun. Johnny gets mournful sometimes when he remembers it and there’s nothing that will soothe him.”
John Henry paused a moment before replying, then he said slowly, “What I meant was, why are you here with me?”
She hesitated a moment before answering. “I heard the music, that’s all. It was beautiful. And there is so little in life that is beautiful anymore.”
Then she turned and walked away, leaving him alone in the darkness.
The music had lost its attraction for him, so he went back to the barroom for another shot of whiskey and found the bar closed and Shaughnessey nowhere in sight. It was, after all, so far past midnight that even the drunks had gone off to sleep the night away. So he helped himself to the liquor and sat down in a round-backed armchair for a nightcap, sipping at the whiskey and toying with his loaded Colt’s. He spun the chamber and cocked the pistol, spun the chamber again and uncocked it. Curse Johnny Ringo, he thought. And curse Kate, as well.
Then he heard a scream and knew without a second thought that it was hers.
He leaped to his feet with the pistol still in his hand, crossed the bar-room in three steps and bounded up the narrow wooden staircase, kicking in the locked bedroom door at the top of hall.
“No, Johnny!” Kate was crying. “Please don’t, I was only trying to help you!”
Kate was lying in the middle of the bed with Ringo crouched above her holding a revolver to her face.
“What would it feel like to die that way?” he was saying in a slurred whiskey voice. “Why don’t you try it for me, and tell me all about it?”
“Drop the pistol, Ringo, or you’re a dead man!” John Henry commanded, and Ringo looked up in drunken confusion.
“Who the hell . . .”
“I said drop it now and let the lady go. Or you’ll learn for yourself what it feels like to get your head blown off.”
Kate used the moment of distraction to pull away from Ringo, rolling off the far side of the tumbled bed.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said. “He would never hurt me, in his right mind.”
“But he’d likely kill you with the mind he’s in now. You’re a fool, Kate, throwin’ your life away on trash like this!”
“I was just doing a little experiment,” Ringo said to himself, “just having a little demonstration . . .” He swayed on his feet and put out a hand, reaching for the air.
“You’re not worth wastin’ a bullet on,” John Henry said in disgust. Then he grabbed the drunken man by the arm and pushed him out the open door. “Sleep it off in the street, Ringo. The lady is through with you.”
And Johnny Ringo, driven by his own private demons, gave Kate a sorrowful look before he stumbled down the stairs.
John Henry turned back to where Kate stood holding onto the brass bed frame and breathing fast.
“He said he was going to shoot me,” she whispered. “He wanted to show me how his father died . . .”
“He’s crazy, Kate. And you’re crazy for bein’ with him.”
Then she looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.
“Hold me!” she cried, trembling and reaching out to him. “Please hold me . . .”
But when she went into his arms, John Henry felt the soft rise of her body under the satin dressing gown, and he forgot that she was frightened and only needed comfort.
“Kate,” he said hoarsely, “Kate . . .” and he bent his head and kissed her.
And somehow, he wasn’t surprised when Kate slipped the dressing gown from her shoulders and slid her arms around his neck.
“Why don’t you close the door?” she said in that sultry voice he had dreamed about for so long. “And you can put that pistol away, as well. I won’t be giving you anymore fight.”
Making love to Kate was like no kind of lovemaking he had ever known. She had a hunger about her, a seemingly insatiable need to please and be pleased that kept him hungry, too. And though he had thought that one night with her would satisfy him, he found himself wanting her again every night. She was like some sweet, heady liquor to him; once he got started drinking, he couldn’t seem to stop.
For the convenience of their affair, Kate moved into his room at the Occidental Hotel. But she was only there a week before the hotel’s proprietress, the virtuous and very Presbyterian Mrs. Smith, discovered that the doctor’s new companion wasn’t his legally wedded wife and made a fuss about them staying there together, waking them early one morning with a brisk knock on the door and a voice filled with righteous indignation.
“Honeymooner’s, I thought you were, the way you’ve been spendin’ all day and night in the bedroom! Then one of my other guests says to me, ‘They may be honeymoonin’, but she ain’t no doctor’s wife. That’s Katie Elder, the dance hall girl. Well, I’ll not be allowin’ any such things under my roof, Dr. Holliday! The Occidental is a fine hotel, not some cheap bawdyhouse where harlots and such can ply their trade. Shame on a fine man like you, bringin’ disgrace upon yourself by such fornications!”
It was the same sort of speech that his mother would have given him, had she known about his sins, and once it would have made him feel guilty enough to beg forgiveness. There was a time when the memory of one night with a prostitute had driven him into fits of remorse. Now here he was living in sin, and he hardly felt any guilt at all. Even the thought that by taking a mistress he was somehow being unfaithful to Mattie didn’t trouble him too much, for though Kate had his body, Mattie still had his heart.
He found it interesting, in fact, that while he and Kate were making love, he could still summon up visions of Mattie’s sweet face smiling at him. And sometimes, holding Kate’s soft,
perfume-scented body close to his, he let himself imagine that it was Mattie who was there beside him in his bed. And if that meant that it were really Kate he was being unfaithful to, well, that was the chance a woman took when she left a life of chastity.
“So you’re throwin’ us out, Mrs. Smith?” he asked, standing in the open doorway of his room while his landlady finished her tirade. She’d roused him from a pleasant sleep and he hadn’t had time to do more than pull on his trousers and undershirt and run his fingers through his sleep-tousled hair.
“You give me no choice, Dr. Holliday. I’m pleased to have your own business, but I can’t allow such wickedness in my house. So until you put that harlot out or marry her and make an honest woman of her . . .”
“Marry Kate?” he said, laughing at the very thought of it. “She may be my mistress, Mrs. Smith, but she will never be my wife!”
“Who is that you’re talking to, darling?” Kate called from the bedroom behind him, and Mrs. Smith took a quick glance past him to where Kate was still lying in bed, undressed under the rumpled bedcovers.
“Harlot!” Mrs. Smith said with a scowl. “I want her out of my house today, Dr. Holliday! And don’t forget to pay your bill on the way out. It’s $20 for the room and $22 for the liquor from the bar.” Then she turned on her heel and swept down the hall.
“Well, Kate,” John Henry said with a sigh, as he stepped back into the room and closed the door behind him. “It appears we’re gonna have to find ourselves other accommodations. Our hostess doesn’t approve of our livin’ arrangement.”
Kate sat up and pulled the sheets around her, her glossy dark hair tumbling over bare shoulders.
“To hell with her, then,” she said, lifting her chin in that proud, haughty way of hers. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this.”
“Have you?” John Henry asked as he crossed the room and sat close beside her on the bed. Though they’d spent half the night making love, the sight of Kate with nothing but a bed sheet wrapped around her was still mightily arousing.
“And just what fine establishments have you been thrown out of, Kate?” he asked, bending to kiss her neck. “I’d hate to have a bad woman ruin my good reputation.”
“What do you care about your reputation? All you need in this town is fast hands at the card table.”
“Oh, I’ve got fast hands, all right,” he said with a smile. “Shall I show you again?” And as he spoke, he slipped his hands under the sheet and slid his fingers over her breasts, and Kate shivered with pleasure at his touch.
“I thought we had to leave the hotel,” she said. “It will take me some time to get dressed.”
“And who the hell wants to see you dressed?” he asked, pulling the sheet aside and pushing her back down on the bed. “If I wanted a lady, I sure wouldn’t be lookin’ for one in Fort Griffin, Texas.
“And where would you look, my love?” Kate asked, smiling up at him with smoky blue eyes.
“Georgia,” he replied, mumbling the word against her lips as he leaned down to kiss her. “Georgia . . .”
If Kate heard, she made no reply except to sigh and pull him closer.
The owner of the old Planter’s Hotel wasn’t nearly so particular about the personal lives of his guests, especially when they paid the room rent in advance and ran up a big bar tab on top of it, and he was pleased to have Dr. Holliday and his lady friend staying there.
They took two rooms at the hotel, one for a bedroom and one to use as a dental office so that John Henry could start practicing again. Though it had been more than two years since he’d done any real dentistry at all, it came back to him fast enough, and once he put up a signboard in the hotel window, he had all the patients he could handle as he was still the only dentist in Fort Griffin Flat. “Doc” Holliday, the locals took to calling him, and he could have made dentistry a full-time job again with all the cattle-drive cowboys coming through town, but he’d come to Fort Griffin to gamble and he didn’t want to lose too much time at the tables.
He started most nights with a round of Monte, picking up a little extra cash before moving onto a game of draw poker with anyone who had enough money to make an attractive pot. It was high stakes gambling he was interested in; penny-ante was for gutless cowboys who didn’t know how to play the game. And he found that Kate made a surprisingly good companion for a gentleman gambler. With her dramatic looks and full-bosomed figure, she was stunning in the new gowns he bought her, and standing by his side at the gaming tables, elegant and aloof, she was a natural capper and often all the distraction he needed to pull a winning card out of a losing hand. The other gamblers were too busy looking at her to pay attention to the game the way they should have been when they were playing with a man like Doc Holliday.
And after a successful night in the gambling halls, Kate liked to count up their winnings while lying in bed before making love again. It made her feel so safe, she said, having Doc taking such good care of her, that she hardly even thought about Johnny Ringo anymore. As for sharing a bed with a man who was suffering from the consumption, that didn’t seem to worry her much. There’d been worse things to catch than a bad cough in her life as an actress.
Chapter Nine
FORT GRIFFIN, 1878
KATE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT RINGO ANYMORE, BUT John Henry had an uncomfortable run-in with him one night after a long game of poker at the BeeHive Saloon when he found the cowboy lingering in the shadows outside the gambling hall.
“Looks like Katie’s got herself a damned lunger these days, the way you been coughing in there all night,” Ringo said, taunting. “Hope she don’t kill you off before I get a chance to do it myself. She’s a regular cyclone in the sheets.” Then he slipped a revolver from his pocket and gave the barrel a spin. “You stole what’s mine, Holliday, and I want it back.”
“I didn’t steal your woman, Ringo,” John Henry said contemptuously. “She came of her own accord. Not that a cow thief like you would understand such a thing.”
“I’d watch what I say, if I was you, or they’ll be more than one pistol drawing a bead. I got high-up friends in this town.”
“Is that a confession or a threat?” John Henry answered cooly, though his hand moved toward his own pistol pocket. He was sure he could beat a drunken cowboy in fast-draw, but had no desire to hang another murder on his conscience.
“Just call it a warning,” Ringo replied. “This here’s a hanging town for men who make trouble. Like you.”
For a moment, they stood staring each other down, pistols ready, until John Henry forced a laugh. “If you want Kate, why don’t you come ask her yourself? But I’d take a bath before you do. You reek of cow manure.”
Then he turned on his heel and walked down the center of the muddy street. If the cowboy wanted to take a shot at him, he’d have to do it plain sight.
Ringo didn’t bother him again, spending his time making trouble with the cattle ranchers of Shackleford County instead. Rumor had it that he and his friend Pony Diehl had thrown in with Hurricane Bill Martin’s gang of cow rustlers, making night raids on the local ranches and running off branded cattle. But although the rustlers were the ones doing the lawbreaking, they were just hirelings in the employ of the real outlaw of Shackleford County: former Sheriff John Larn.
The Vigilance Committee, the old law before there was law in Fort Griffin, suspected that Larn was behind the rustling as he was the only rancher in the county who wasn’t losing any of his own cattle to the rustlers, but until he made some move himself, there was little the vigilantes could do against him. The longer he succeeded in stealing from his neighbors, the more arrogant John Larn became, even handing out one-hundred dollar bills to men who’d lost their cattle to him. But he never got too brash to stop watching his back, and he started traveling with an armed guard whenever he went into town.
Larn didn’t drink much that anyone knew, and he rarely gambled, but when he did feel like taking in a game, he did his playing at the Beehi
ve Saloon where his favorite henchman, Hurricane Bill, had an interest. John Henry had played against Larn at the Beehive a few times and found him to be a bad poker player but a good loser, which made him good company for a night of cards. Hurricane Bill, himself, had joined them on occasion, and the rustler duo made a comically ill-suited couple: John Larn in an expensive suit of clothes and fancy tooled leather boots, and Hurricane Bill in a matted buffalo hide coat to match his heavy matted beard. But on one warm summer evening, they were joined by an even odder looking pair of sports—Lottie Deno, the red-haired lady gambler and whorehouse madam, and a fidgety young man with a tangle of curly hair who was introduced as Billy Brocious.
“But we call him Curly Bill on account of his pretty hair,” Hurricane said as John Henry and Kate made their entrance. “Curly’s working with me and Mr. Larn these days.”
“That’s enough, Hurricane,” cautioned John Larn. “We don’t need to talk business in front of company. I’m sure the doctor has more interesting things on his mind than cattle ranching.”
“Would that be Doc Holliday?” the lady gambler said with a lift of a brow. “I believe Johnny Shaughnessey’s mentioned your name to me. And this must be the talented Miss Elder,” she added, giving Kate a generous smile. “I was disappointed to hear you’re not dancing anymore.”
“I’m with Doc now,” Kate replied. “He makes enough off the gambling for both of us, don’t you my love?”
“I do my best. But you are an expensive woman to keep, Miss Elder. I am often forced to desperate means to pay your bills.” And so saying, he reached a hand to his vest pocket, making the other players freeze in their places.
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