Dance with the Devil

by Victoria Wilcox

  “Drunk perhaps, but only a little crazy,” John Henry said, his drawl beginning to slur. Then he pulled open his suit coat and laid his hand on the pearl-handled revolver in his shoulder holster—Bat’s revolver, special ordered from the Colt’s Manufacturing Company. “Who’s your second, Mr. Colton? You’re gonna need him in a moment.”

  Kid Colton still seemed to think John Henry’s growing anger was just a joke, as he sat unbelieving—and worse, laughing out loud.

  “I’d like to see you try it, Holliday! They don’t call me Kid for nothing. Ain’t nobody faster on the draw than me, not even Billy the Kid hisself. Why, I bet I could take you with one hand behind my back.” And as he reached toward his revolver, John Henry’s new Colt’s flashed and fired, the bullet slamming into Kid Colton’s shooting arm and throwing him backward in a howl of pain.

  “Well, I reckon Billy’s reputation is still intact,” John Henry commented, as he covered the startled crowd with his smoking six-shooter in one hand and swept up his poker winnings with the other. “Hold the door for me, will you, Kate darlin’? My hands are full.”

  Though John Henry had done his gentlemanly best to assuage both their honors, Kate was still fuming after their quick retreat to the Southern Hotel.

  “I wish you had killed him for me. He deserved it, the bastard!”

  “Watch your language, Kate. There’s a lady in the room,” John Henry replied, as he sat sprawled in an easy chair holding a glass to his aching head. The pleasant glow of the gambling was wearing off and he was beginning to have a raging headache.

  “You had an easy shot at him,” Kate went on as she paced the expensive carpet. “Why didn’t you just put a bullet through his head and be done with it? Insulting me that way! Now he’ll come back looking to settle the score and you’ll just have to fight him all over again.”

  “He won’t be comin’ back again anytime soon, not with that shootin’ arm. I did enough damage to teach him a lesson, anyhow. Besides, Bat asked me to stay out of trouble.”

  “Bat?” she said, stopping to stare at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sheriff Masterson, back in Dodge City, when he gave me this pistol. He asked me to stay out of trouble, if I could, for Wyatt’s sake. I reckon killin’ was the kind of trouble in particular that he was talkin’ about.”

  “Wyatt?” Kate said, her eyes flashing. “Always Wyatt! What about me? I’m the one whose honor was defiled! Damn Wyatt! I wish Larn’s men had collected on that bounty and killed him back in Dodge.”

  “What did you say?” John Henry said, looking up sharply. “What do you know about Larn’s men? I swear, Kate, if you do know somethin’ . . .”

  “I know plenty! I know it was Larn’s money that was behind the bounty on Wyatt’s head. I know it was Larn’s men who tried to kill him back in Dodge. And I wish they’d done it!”

  “That’s a dangerous accusation to make. Are you sure of this?”

  “Of course, I’m sure!” she said with a haughty laugh. “Who do you think told John Larn about Wyatt’s nosing into his rustling, anyway? Who else knew what Wyatt was doing there in Shackleford County, except for you and me, or knew Larn well enough to pass the message on? It was me who told John Larn about Wyatt’s detective work! And my only regret is that I didn’t tell him sooner. Wyatt would be dead by now and out of our lives forever . . .”

  “Damn your schemin’ little soul to hell!” John Henry cursed as he flew from the chair and grabbed her roughly. “You almost got your wish, and got me killed, to boot! I ought to finish you before you can do any more damage!” And as he spoke, his hands slid up from her honey-colored shoulders to her perfumed neck. “I could kill you right now!”

  “You wouldn’t dare!” she said defiantly as his hands tightened. “You don’t want to make any trouble, remember? For Wyatt’s sake . . .”

  “Damn you!” he said again, and let his hands fall away from her. “Get out of here! Get out of my life! Go back to the streets where you came from and leave me in peace . . .”

  His words were choked off by a sudden tearing pain in his chest, sharper than any pain before, searing his lungs like fire.

  “Doc?” Kate said, as he gasped and reached for the chair to steady himself. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  But he couldn’t answer her as his chest gave way all at once and the blood came up from his lungs, filling his mouth and choking him as he struggled to breathe.

  “Doc!” Kate screamed again, reaching for him as he fell, and the world spun around him and went dark.

  There was a voice hanging above him in the misty darkness.

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “Two days,” Kate replied, her voice mingling with the other, a man’s voice.

  “And the bleeding? It was worse than this?”

  “Yes. I was afraid to leave him to send for you. There was so much— clots and tissue.”

  “The lesions, no doubt,” the man’s voice said. “You are aware that he has the consumption?”

  “I know,” Kate said, “I don’t need to hear about it. I just need to know what to do. My father was a surgeon. I can do whatever you tell me, Dr. Beshoar. Just tell me what to do for him, please. I can’t let him die like this . . .”

  “It won’t be easy,” the voice answered heavily. “You must take him down to New Mexico, to the hot springs in Las Vegas. There’s a resort there that specializes in treating consumptives. The best doctors in the country visit to try out new treatments. There have been some remarkable cures . . .”

  “But it’s winter! He’ll die if I take him over that mountain in the snow!”

  “He’ll die if you don’t take him,” the voice said. “Don’t wait too long to decide.”

  Kate hired a wagon and team to carry them over the Raton Pass into New Mexico, joining on with a big freight outfit that was taking supplies to the military outpost of Fort Union. It would take a week or more for the wagon train to reach the fort, and Las Vegas was another day past that. They could have taken the faster route by Barlow and Sanderson Stage, four days direct to Las Vegas, but Dr. Beshoar warned that the jarring ride of the coach could start the bleeding again. Better to make a bed in the back of the wagon, he advised, and pray for a gentle journey.

  But there was nothing gentle about it. The wagon, a white-canopied prairie schooner on iron-rimmed wheels, took every rut in the road with a thudding jolt that woke John Henry from his feverish sleep and set him off to coughing again. And in his fitful sleep, he dreamed he was back in Jonesboro again, with Mattie’s cool hands wiping his fever-drenched brow. But it wasn’t Mattie, he kept trying to remind himself. It was Kate, selfish and haughty Kate who was putting her own life in danger to take him to safety, and he clung onto her hand as if she could stave off the sickness and keep him alive.

  “Doc, Doc,” she whispered, as she hovered close to him in the wind-blown cold of the wagon bed. “You’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’ll be in Las Vegas soon. The doctors at the hot springs will know what to do for you . . .”

  Then the wagon would hit another rut, jostling him and starting the bleeding up again.

  “Kate,” he mumbled, coughing and retching into the bowl she held to his mouth. “Don’t let me die . . .”

  “Never!” she said, her voice as fierce as the howling wind all around them. “I will never let you die!”

  And in the comfort of her courageous words, he slept again.

  They were five days crossing the Raton Pass, the wagons crawling carefully forward to avoid the deep ravines that crisscrossed the mountain. At the bottoms of those ravines were the remnants of wagons that hadn’t survived the crossing: wagon wheels and axles and harness-trees smashed to pieces along Raton Creek. To help the wagon trains make the crossing, someone had driven huge iron rings into the mountainside, and the wagons were tied down onto the rings, holding them back from careening out of control.

  At the crest of the mountain, the outfit rested at the
ranch of Dick Wooten, the shrewd owner of the toll road over the Raton Pass who charged two bits a head to make the crossing, collecting on every oxen, horse, sheep, and man who made the trip. It was his iron rings that made the crossing possible at all, and his hot coffee and hospitality that made it bearable. But Kate was impatient, waiting for the teams to be watered and fed, and she bent over John Henry, spooning some of her own coffee into him.

  “Kate,” he whispered, meaning to thank her, but she shushed him.

  “Save your strength, my love. We’ve a long way to travel yet.”

  But with the Raton Pass behind them, the road became easier, the mountain falling away into long plateaus with the green paradise of New Mexico lying ahead.

  The outfit stopped again at Willow Spring to water the horses, and camped out near the Clifton House before over-nighting at the trail town of Cimarron. John Henry spent the night in a real bed at the St. James Hotel there, and though there was noise all night from the bar-room below, he slept well for the first time in many days.

  When the wagon train pulled in sight of Wagon Mound the next day, Kate roused him to see it for himself.

  “The last landmark of the Santa Fe Trail,” she told him. “The drover said it’s the one thing every traveler prays to see, if they make it this far.” And as she helped him to sit up, cradling him in her arms like a child, he had the grandest view he had ever seen: a single mountain rising up out of the rolling vastness of New Mexico, and looking for all the world like a huge prairie schooner with its canvas canopy blowing open in the wind.

  “A wagon of stone!” Kate called it. “We’ll tell our children how we saw it when we traveled the Santa Fe Trail together. We’ll tell our grandchildren, too, one day. You are going to get well, my love! You are going to live!”

  The wagon train reached its destination at the military outpost of Fort Union, a circle of red sandstone barracks standing starkly against the blue New Mexico sky. But though Fort Union had a small hospital with a doctor on staff who treated travelers as well as the soldiers, Kate was determined to keep pushing on to Las Vegas.

  “Just one more day,” she promised him, as their hired wagon separated off from the rest of the outfit and rolled on in creaking solitude, following the tracks left by thousands of wagons gone before. The ruts were so deep in some places that they could be seen for miles ahead, two lines traveling off into the tall prairie grass, leading the way to Las Vegas and beyond to the trail end at old Santa Fe.

  It was with wonder and relief that John Henry took his first sight of the green meadows around Las Vegas and the Church of our Lady of Sorrows, Nuestra Señora de Dolores, standing silently over the old Spanish plaza that was the heart of the town.

  “Gratia plena,” he mumbled, all of the Latin prayer that he could still remember. Then he added in the Spanish he had learned from Francisco Hidalgo as a child so long ago: “Gracias, Catarina.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  NEW MEXICO TERRITORY, 1879

  HE OWED HER HIS LIFE; THAT WAS THE SIMPLE TRUTH OF IT. WITHOUT Kate, he’d be dead in the ground in Trinidad, his passing mourned by no one but the gamblers who would steal his last belongings, and maybe the Earp brothers if they ever heard of it. And Mattie, he reminded himself. Mattie still loved him in spite of the distance between them; her constant letters proved that she did. But would she love him still if she knew about Kate, who had turned from his mistress into something more?

  Kate had been his strength and his salvation in those awful days following his sudden illness in Trinidad. And sick as he was, he had been at her mercy, relying on her to do everything for him. Kate had made all the arrangements for their leaving Trinidad, getting him out before the law could get to him for the shooting of Kid Colton, and keeping him alive on the torturous trip over the Raton Pass and down into New Mexico. So he couldn’t begrudge her signing the guest register at the Hot Springs Hotel as Dr. and Mrs. Holliday. Surely, only a wife would do so much for a man who had tried to kill her.

  The Montezuma Hot Springs, named for the Incan king who supposedly took the mineral waters there, were located up narrow Gallinas Canyon a few miles to the southeast of Las Vegas. The springs bubbled up out of the rocky bed of the Rio Gallinas, steaming and smelling of sulfur and drawing visitors from all over the country to come sit in the shallow pools carved by the water. Near the pools, a bathhouse had been erected and the hot mineral water diverted into tubs and showers where an attentive staff provided the personal care the resort was famous for. The regimen was simple: wash in the clear stream water then soak in the steaming sulfur pools, letting the minerals permeate through the vital fluids of the body. Modern medical practice held that the sulfur water would change the chemistry of the body, helping to fight off illness. Consumptives came by the droves, as did sufferers of a hundred other ailments, and some were even cured.

  Above the stream and the springs, connected to the bathhouse by a narrow footbridge, was the new Hot Springs Hotel, elegant in native red granite with a main floor lobby and guest rooms on the second and third floors. From the white-painted verandah and balconies that wrapped the building, guests could take the clear mountain air and enjoy the healing view of the pine-covered canyon walls. But it was the smell of the place that John Henry would never forget: the hot sulfur pools stinking like rotting eggs; the sweet fragrance of the Piñon pines clearing his senses as he rose, crimson-skinned and sweating, out of the mineral baths.

  He spent most of his days in the bathhouse or sleeping in his room at the hotel. He had little appetite, though Kate had trays of food brought up to him three times a day. It took all his strength just to keep breathing, inhaling the malodorous fumes as he bathed in the waters and prayed to be one of the miracle cures of Las Vegas. And when he wasn’t bathing or sleeping, he sat in a slat-back chair near the window of his bedroom, looking out across the peaceful canyon and wondering how many more winters he would live to see such beauty. If it hadn’t been for Kate, he wouldn’t have lived to see this one.

  Milagro! A miracle! That was what the attendants at the Hot Springs called his recovery. The doctors were a little more cautious, pointing out that the hemorrhaging of his lungs meant that more of the vital tissue had been lost, replaced with scarred pockets that would never heal. And though it did seem that he had obtained a remission of sorts, the bleeding under control and his breathing less wheezy, he would have to take better care of himself in the future. He would need to rest as much as possible, stay away from the tiring influences of late nights in the saloons and gambling halls, keep his drinking in moderation. But smoking tobacco could certainly do him no harm and might even help to exercise the lungs.

  It seemed only proper to say a word of thanks to God for the miracle cure. His mother would have expected it of him, and Mattie would have been pleased to see him stepping hatless into the cold stone sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows in Las Vegas, lighting a candle like a practiced Catholic. He wasn’t Catholic, of course, but the Nuestra Señora de Dolores didn’t seem to mind, accepting his thanks in the smoky darkness and asking no explanation for his presence there.

  Kate, however, was not so benign. Though she’d been raised a Catholic herself, she thought his sudden foray into religion a foolish show.

  “It was me who saved you, not Our Lady,” she said with something like jealousy. “Did she hire on with that freight team to carry you across the mountain? Did she nurse you in the snow? I’m the one who loves you, Doc, not the Virgin. As though you’d want a virgin, anyway!”

  And though he could tell by the tone of her voice that she was waiting for some sarcastic word from him, agreeing that he was happier with her whorish behavior, he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Being in that Catholic church had brought back memories of standing in the sanctuary of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Atlanta the last time he’d seen Mattie, when all he’d wanted was her saintly heart. Kate might be his passion, but Mattie was still his love and always would be.

  Still
, he couldn’t deny Kate’s part in his cure, carrying him across the Raton Pass and down the Santa Fe Trail and staying by his side at the Hot Springs. So when she wanted to take expensive rooms at the Exchange Hotel on the Plaza in Las Vegas instead of more economical accommodations at a boarding house, he couldn’t deny her. Besides, the view from the lace-curtained windows of their second floor suite was uniquely picturesque, looking out across the dusty plaza with its teams of horses and wagons and a windmill sporting a gallows.

  That vivid reminder of the wages of sin should have kept him out of the gambling halls, but the Exchange Hotel was even pricier than the Hot Springs Hotel had been, where the $6 a day for room and board had cleaned out most of his remaining cash. He needed some money fast, and the fastest way to make money, in his experience, was to wager what he had on a game of cards.

  He found a game quick enough at the Billiard Saloon across the plaza, and found himself in jail again soon after that. For Las Vegas, like Dallas, was trying to rid itself of the sporting element, at least in the part of town in sight of Our Lady of Sorrows. Kate’s only comment was that Our Lady was no lady after all, taking his prayers and then taking away his income like that. But mostly, she was piqued at having to pack up her gowns and things and move on again, as John Henry paid his twenty-four dollar fine and bought two stage tickets to nearby Otero where he’d heard the gambling was easier and the town was looking for a dentist.

  Nuestra Señora de Dolores, standing solemn in gray stone and Gothic towers on the hill above the plaza, kept her silence.

  The town of Otero lay at the confluence of the Mora and Sapello Rivers, fifteen miles north of Las Vegas. It was a fortunate location for the village as the Santa Fe Railroad, building down into New Mexico Territory from Colorado, had chosen to lay tracks right through the middle of the place, so Otero would soon be a wide-open railroad town. Not that Otero was shy on business without the rails. As a stopping point on the Santa Fe Trail, the town had always had its share of commerce and was already busy enough that the town dentist was looking for a partner to help him take care of patients, and John Henry was glad to oblige.