“Jane,” Frank called. “Jane!”
Jane ignored him. She was sitting at the bar turning an empty shot glass over and over in her hand. He didn’t know how many shots she’d had. Frank frowned. Jane liked to boast that she could drink any man under the table, but the thing was, Frank had rarely seen her drunk. It was another one of the rules of their gang: no drinking before a show or during a garou hunt. They had to stay sharp.
“Jane,” he said. “You know we have a show, right?”
She kept on contemplating her glass.
“Jane!” Frank said again, loudly.
She spun to glare at him. “What? What’s so all-fired important that you have to keep yelling ‘Jane! Jane!’ at me? I can hear perfectly well, can’t I?”
“Remember the show?” Frank asked. “Across the street? In ten minutes?”
She blinked a few times, then sighed. “Yeah, ’course I remember. I’m coming.”
“Good.” He watched her closely as she got up from the barstool and grabbed her hat. She wasn’t drunk—maybe a little tipsy, was all. He held out his arm, and Jane took it. Her body was tight as a bowstring, and she was even trembling. Preshow jitters? But that wasn’t like Jane either.
Something else was troubling her.
“Charlie’s going to be all right, you know,” Frank said, patting her hand.
“That’s what people always say,” she replied mournfully. “They say, ‘Things will be all right, you’ll see.’ But then they’re not.”
“It’s only a broken leg,” Frank said. “He really is going to be fine.”
“I know,” she grumbled.
“Do you want coffee? Or a barrel of water?” he asked, thinking both the coffee and a dunking would do her good.
“I want a barrel of coffee,” Jane said.
“I’ll get you one.”
“Nah,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“So you want coffee, but you don’t want coffee. Help me keep up here.”
She pushed out the door. “What does it even matter anymore?”
“What do you mean?” Frank asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be Calamity Jane, not Melancholy Jane?”
“I’m thinking about changing my name. That has a ring. Hey.” Jane nodded at the line of people wrapped around the building. “Is that for us?”
“It’s a sold-out performance,” Frank said with a grin.
“Good.” Jane swallowed hard. “That’s real good, Frank. You must be over the moon.”
“Getting there.” He hurried the both of them to the back entrance—away from all the people in line to buy tickets. George met them at the door, tongue flopping out the side of his mouth as he looked up at Frank and Jane.
Is Jane hurt? George whined. She smells scared. George, for all his dislike of females, was very protective of Jane.
Frank shrugged—better to answer silently when other people were around—and followed his dog as he led them to the backstage area.
“Are you sure you’ve got this?” he asked Jane.
Jane wiped a hand across her nose. “I was born to got this.”
Wild Bill opened the show. Frank’s father was the epitome of a showman, as always: tall and weathered-looking, with a neatly trimmed mustache and long, tidy curls. When he drew the ivory-handled pistols, the audience cheered so loud it made Frank’s ears ring. Of course, Bill didn’t shoot those pistols, on account of his failing vision and not wanting any unfortunate accidents, but he did regale the audience with the enthralling tale of a particular garou hunt.
“Way back when, I found myself tracking a small pack of rogue garou. They’d been tearing through the country and leaving a trail of bodies behind them.”
The crowd booed.
Bill nodded understandingly. “Well, I tracked them all the way to a cabin.”
Frank rolled the cabin set onto the stage, then vanished behind the curtains for the next part.
“It was said to have been occupied by a good pioneer family—a ma and pa and two strapping young sons—but by the time I arrived, the whole family was dead. I was too late.”
“Horrible garou!” one man shouted.
Bill pulled his hat low, giving the family a beat of silence. Frank swallowed down the lump in his throat. That part was always hard to hear.
“Well, I knew what I had to do. I readied my weapons”—Bill drew his pistols and bent his knees—“and crept up on the cabin. I was hoping to catch them unawares, but they’d picked up a friend on the road. I’d thought there were four—and I saw four shapes moving inside the cabin—but there was a fifth standing watch.”
Frank lowered the paper garou down into the makeshift tree. Everyone in the audience gasped.
Bill pulled himself straight up and squeezed a trigger. “Bang!” he shouted (because the guns weren’t loaded), and Frank made the paper garou flutter to the floor. Half the audience jumped in their seats.
“I shot it, and the garou went down, but the noise alerted the others to my presence. All at once, I was surrounded.”
Frank worked the pulleys until four more paper garou descended, and on the far side of the stage, Jane started growling. Frank growled, too.
The crowd collectively gasped, and a child shouted, “Watch out, Wild Bill!”
Bill held his guns out to his sides, bent in a ready position, and slowly turned a circle as the paper garou menaced him. “This was it,” Bill said, his voice low and ominous. “Outnumbered four to one. I knew I was done for.”
Several audience members shifted in their seats, and worried mutters rippled through to the back of the theater. Frank smiled, even as he kept up his part of the growling.
“But then,” Bill said, and a hush fell across the room, “we all heard the sound.”
Nothing happened—the theater was quiet.
Frank looked at George. “Come on, boy,” he whispered.
Sorry, George thought. I like this story.
Everyone waited, and Bill looked like he was thinking about repeating the line.
“George, now,” Frank hissed.
George whined, loud enough for everyone to hear, but it didn’t sound quite like a normal dog whine. No, it sounded like a baby crying.
“Yes,” Bill said, “I heard a baby cry, and so did those garou. It was clear by the way they were lookin’ that they’d had no idea there was a baby in that cabin—that those pioneers had not two children, but three—and that the ma and pa had hidden their baby when that gang of garou came. And as I looked around at the beasts surrounding me, I knew I had to find that child before they did.”
The paper wolves fluttered as though they were running, and Bill was running too, and everyone in the audience leaned forward.
“It was a race for the child,” Bill said as they all moved toward the cabin. “But the garou weren’t going to let me get there first. One ran ahead, and I tried to keep up, but garou are faster and stronger than a mere human. I knew it would take all my skill, all my daring, to get there first—and then a garou jumped me.”
There was a tussle, and the audience was one part tense breathing and one part nervous laughing (because it was a paper garou, after all) as Bill battled the garou and then: “Bang!” he cried, and Frank released the paper garou to drift to the floor.
“Just then, another garou came for me, and another!” Bill spun and shot—“Bang, bang!”—and both wolves dropped. “But the fourth wolf, the one that had gone ahead, was getting away. I ran with all my strength, following him into the cabin.”
Behind Bill, Jane opened the cabin set to reveal a quaint room with a cold fireplace.
“We could both hear the baby crying, the garou and I.”
Bill waited, and George didn’t miss his cue this time; he made that baby-crying whine again.
Frank maneuvered the last paper garou to leap toward the sound. Bill aimed, fired—“Bang!”—and the garou went down.
The audience cheered as Bill holstered his pistols and bent over the stage’s trapdoor. Everything went quiet as he reached in and drew a small bundle.
“I got to the babe first,” Bill said with just enough volume to carry into the audience. “And when I picked him up in my arms, he stopped crying because he knew he was safe—that I would never let anything happen to him again.”
On cue, George stopped whining, and Bill glanced over at Frank. They shared a look, like they did every time Bill told this story, and then Bill turned back to the audience. “That child lives, even now.”
The whole crowd whooped and cheered as Bill strode off the stage, the bundle still in his arms. Frank and Jane hurried to clear the cabin set—and close the trapdoor—and then it was Frank’s turn. He felt his shoulders relax.
Frank was the best trick shot this side of the Mississippi, and by that, he meant either side of the Mississippi. This was where he shined. He shot a glass ball from across the stage, sighting using a mirror, with his back turned. He shot a bottle that was right next to him by ricocheting the bullet off a metal plate in the rafters of the theater. He had a woman from the audience pick a playing card—the ace of hearts—put it in a vise, and shot straight through the tiny red heart from ten yards away.
The crowd cheered wildly.
And then he introduced the Calamity Jane.
Jane stomped onto the stage, carrying her bullwhip over her shoulder and a pistol on her hip. “Evening!” she called. “I’m gonna do some tricks now. You want to see some tricks with the bullwhip?”
“Yeah!” cried the crowd.
Jane uncurled her whip and leveled a glare on the corked empty whiskey bottle George had placed earlier that day. “Have any of y’all seen a cork popped out of a bottle by a whip?”
“No!” came the shouts.
She drew her arm back, whipped it forward, quick as a lightning strike, and . . . the bottle clattered to the floor.
Frank’s breath caught. Jane never messed up like this.
“Whoops.” Her face went red. “I was just practicing that time. The sun was in my eyes.” The crowd laughed. “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
George trotted across the stage and replaced the bottle on the stool.
Jane’s eyes trained on the bottle. She exhaled slowly. Then with one loud snap, she removed the cork from the bottle—without breaking the bottle.
The audience applauded enthusiastically, but Jane wasn’t finished yet. She snapped her bullwhip to the right and to the left, and then she snapped it toward the bottle again. The bottle flew up to the rafters, and Jane stepped forward and caught it as it came down. Then she picked up the cork and placed it on her own hat. She flicked the bullwhip, and the cork went flying while her hat stayed in place.
Frank clapped right along with the audience.
Jane smiled and bowed. Her part was done. “Now for the fi-nal-ee,” she said. “Mr. Frank Butler will shoot an apple off George’s head!”
George went to one side of the stage and sat calmly while Jane steadied the apple. The audience leaned forward in anticipation.
Frank took aim with his rifle. He held George’s gaze. There was nothing but trust in his dog’s brown eyes.
Frank squeezed the trigger. A shot rang out across the theater. The apple flew into the air, a neat hole through its center. George yipped and grabbed the apple in his mouth. “Frank! Frank!” the crowd cried. “The Pistol Prince!”
Frank waited for George to bring the apple to him, as usual, but the dog hopped off the stage and darted into the crowd.
“George, come,” Frank called. But instead George trotted over to a girl in the front row and deposited the apple at her feet.
She reached down and picked up the apple. “Why, thank you!”
Frank squinted through the lights to get a look at her. She wore her hair down, while most young ladies pinned theirs up, and her dress wasn’t the fashionable type, those huge silk gowns with sweeping bustles in the back. This girl wore a plain dress made from a simple blue cotton, but it fit her slender form perfectly.
“Here, boy.” Frank tried again. “Bring me the apple.”
George stayed right where he was.
The girl rubbed the dog’s head. “What a good boy!”
Oh gosh, she was asking to lose a limb, but George licked her hand and then . . . laid his head in her lap.
Frank glanced over at Jane. Her mouth was hanging open in astonishment. Bill, too, seemed baffled.
The girl looked up and caught Frank’s eye again. “Your dog has excellent taste.”
“Yes, he does,” Frank replied, and bowed to her with an exaggerated flourish, as if George’s behavior was meant to be part of the show, because he didn’t know what else to do.
The audience clapped and clapped. Jane stepped to one side of him and Bill to the other for the curtain call. Frank took their hands, and the three of them gave a final bow.
“You up for poker after?” Bill asked as the cheering started to die down.
“Yes, sir,” said Frank. The two of them played poker most nights after the show. It relaxed Bill, and always provided Frank with extra pocket money.
“Good, good,” Bill said quietly. “I need to do some thinking on this business with the Alpha. Poker will help.”
Poker always helped, Frank believed.
“You gotta schmooze with the ladies first, though,” Jane reminded him. “They’re already forming up a line to meet you.” She made her voice higher pitched and tried to flutter her eyelashes. “Oh, Frank! You’re so manly we can’t stand it! Whatever shall we do?” He expected her to keep on ribbing him, but she seemed to remember something sorrowful, and her grin faded.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
“It’s not like you to miss your mark, Jane,” commented Bill.
“Nothing. I’m fine.” She let go of their hands and stalked off the stage and out the side door.
Frank shrugged at Bill. George finally returned to Frank’s side, wagging his tail and panting like nothing was out of the ordinary.
“What was all that about—with the girl in the blue dress?” Frank said out of the side of his mouth as he waved one final time to the audience.
Did you smell her? George thought.
“Of course not. When would I have had a chance to smell her?”
I like her, sighed George.