Pests
FROM ELDRIDGE HOUSE, Kate proceeded to the Kansas-Pacific station on the east-west line. The alternatives discussed back in Thayer—to go back east or to the outlaw colonies in the South—inspired her to take neither. She opted instead to go west, to try her luck in the Colorado Territory. A city like Denver, only recently linked to the transcontinental railroad and growing fast on mining and timber, would have a large pent-up demand for the kind of extraordinary services she could provide. And even if it didn’t, she could always try her luck further west, in Salt Lake, Virginia City, or San Francisco. At the very least, she could take solace in the fact that every mile she went was another mile between her and Almira.
Her train was a few miles out of Salina when, weary of hearing her voice in her head, she picked up the little volume of Horace she could never seem to get through. She was particularly struck by a line from Book 1: “Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man’s cottage door and at the palaces of kings.”
She became aware of the steady pinging of raindrops against the roof of the carriage. The noise became so loud she raised the window shade and peeked out. There she saw what she first took to be a storm of soot swirling around the train, as if the contents of a coal hopper had become airborne. The true nature of the “storm” became clear when one of the swirling black projectiles struck the pane, leaving a smudge of green innards.
So we witness the plague, she thought. She had heard the stories of the locusts—of onslaughts so fierce they stripped the paint from fences, lifted shingles from roofs, ate the leather from buggy seats. Farmers found the flesh of unpicked fruit consumed, leaving only the pits hanging from the trees. Travelers caught on open ground were thrown when their horses panicked; cattle were left bloodied and blind as the pests attacked their eyeballs. It was one of the most dreaded hazards of the Great American Desert.
By some chance, the swarms had not appeared in the years the Benders operated the grocery. Her first impulse, then, was to think herself fortunate to have her curiosity satisfied now, in her last hours on the prairie. That impulse did not last.
A wing of the swarm withdrew, gathering into an enormous coil. It towered and tumbled and rolled beside the train for a while, dipping now and again toward the ground to taste its prospects, until it rose, contracting. The passengers at the windows pressed their noses to the glass, waiting to see what would happen next.
The cloud exploded, pouring forth fleshy missiles that slammed against the panes. She heard the tinkle of broken glass from somewhere; women screamed, and a man took out his pistol to brandish at the swarm. Kate reflexively covered her eyes. When she peeked through her fingers, she found her window still intact. But the swarm was not done with them.
Outside, the black cloud was suddenly gone. She looked skyward, expecting to see it scud away like a departing thunderstorm. Yet above there was nothing but blue. Then she dropped her gaze to the ground—and discovered there was no ground.
Instead of grass and ties and soil, there was a living carpet of locusts. Their armored bodies shined like splatters of grease in the sun. Their legs and wings and antennae bristled, resolving into chitinous eddies as the creatures flailed against each other. Now and again she saw a bump on the landscape that might have been a recognizable object—a buggy inundated as if the insects had collectively decided to mock the shape of a human conveyance. One of the bumps kicked, lifted its head. The horse got its eyes open for only an instant before the swarm closed over its face.
The train was losing speed. Two cars and a tender ahead, the engine huffed and churned with steam that should have sent it hurtling at sixty miles per hour. Yet it was doing only half that and slowing down. Puzzled, the engineer leaned from his cab to peer down the track. The right-of-way was so solidly covered, the wheels of the engine’s fore truck carved a wake of insects. The engine was stalling due to a phenomenon not unheard of in plains railroading: the driving wheels had lost adhesion to the track because it was slick with the crushed bodies of locusts.
The engineer closed the throttle, hoping less steam would enable the drivers to engage better. Instead, the train lurched as if he’d pulled the brake. Leaning out, he saw the drivers spin, catch, and slip again. He whistled. Bowing to necessity, he closed the throttle, saw the train to a safe halt, and—because the cab had no door to close against the swarm—took refuge in the first passenger carriage. As he traversed the aisle in his greasy overalls and sweaty stink, he tugged his cap at the startled passengers. Taking the first empty seat, he stretched out and threw a forearm over his eyes. In five minutes he was catching up on his sleep.
And so for the second time in her life, Kate found herself marooned on a train. The predicament depressed her, and not only because she faced an unknowable number of hours stuck there while being sought by the law. The very idea of being back in that same position made some unreasoning part of her despondent, fearing that her career was also stuck. Tempted to cry, she bent over and buried her face in her book. But for the moment she didn’t cry, for she reminded herself that at least Almira wasn’t there, and she had $12,413 in banknotes in a purse hung by a string under her skirts.
Half the day later the pests had shown no inclination to leave. As the hours wore heavy on the passengers, they idled away the time at the windows, tossing lit cigars and cigarettes. Where they landed, the insects parted, forming holes around which they would spiral, as if they were draining underground.
The women took out their knitting, their pocket Bibles, or if they were particularly bold, their penny romances. Kate was tempted to offer them impromptu tarot readings but decided against it. Under the circumstances, advertising her expertise would probably not be wise.
The ordeal mercifully ended before sunset. A boy who had no cigars or cigarettes to fling at the locusts decided instead to try his precious India rubber ball. Bouncing, the ball disturbed so many of the tiny monsters that some invisible threshold was crossed. The entire swarm began to ascend, and the passengers, at first pleased but then panicked, rushed to shut the windows. The black blizzard swirled around the train and then rose, manifesting into a dome that distant observers took for some enormous explosion. The train was momentarily thrown into darkness as the sun was blotted out.
And then the light returned. The swarm had vanished as abruptly as it had arrived, leaving a clear sky. But the consequences of its stay were scattered on the ground all around them. The buggy parked beside the tracks had been stripped of its upholstery. The grass as far as she could see had been trampled down by millions of tiny feet, the taller plants stripped of leaves. The horse that had been overwhelmed struggled to get back to its feet, its eyes and nostrils bloody.
The sun’s return had a rejuvenating effect on the engineer. He yawned, stretched, and scratched the thatch under his arms. Then he went forward again, making small pleasantries at the passengers before he passed through the door to the tender.
Ten minutes later they were under way. Kate returned to her Horace, skimming over the last of the pages before the train made its scheduled stop at Salina. She had just closed the book when she looked up and found a man staring at her.
He was seated in one of the opposing seats across the aisle. Dressed fairly well in a suit of blue and black plaid, he nevertheless had the look of a man not used to city clothes. In the creases of his deeply lined face was the grime of a thousand days on the trail; in his eyes was the glint of a gaze that had spanned miles of empty space. Those eyes were on her now, concentrated across the mere feet separating their seats. Kate paled.
He rose, leaned into her space and said, “You’re Kate Bender.”
His voice was like a load of ore dumped from a mining car.
He paused to watch her reaction—which she made as minimal as possible—and added, “I’m sure of it.”
Kate smiled a smile that was frayed and mirthless.
“Do I know you, sir?”
“I’m the feller who’s going to bring you in, that’s who I am.”
“Is this a joke?” she asked. “Or is it customary in these parts for men to accost solitary women?”
He smiled. “Clever, aren’t you? They said that. But it won’t do you no good.”
Their eyes locked. Kate was reeling from her discovery, but still fortunate in one respect: if this was a lawman, he surely would have identified himself as such. He was likely just a freelancer, a civilian who made a career of perusing bounty notices in post offices and railway stations. Most likely he was as shocked by his good luck as she was by her bad.
“Help! Somebody please help me!” she cried, rising a little in her seat. All eyes in the carriage turned to her; the plaid suit didn’t retreat, but his lips lost their cocksure twist.
“Is this man disturbing you, miss?”
Another passenger, an ordinary workman traveling with his family, stood up. The bounty hunter kept his eyes on her as if she’d somehow contrive to vanish if he turned his head. But the workman insisted:
“You better play your game somewhere else, friend. There are families here.”
“Yes, this man has been bothering me since Lawrence,” said Kate. “He won’t take no for an answer.”
“This here is a wanted criminal,” the other man said. “She murdered a dozen men in Labette County.”
“Did she now?” the workman laughed. “I bet the pretty lady is an anarchist to boot!”
“Listen friend, why don’t you just sit down, shut up, and mind your business?” And with that, the bounty hunter parted his jacket to reveal the worn wooden grip of a Remington 1858.
“Are you a constable, sir?” asked another male passenger, rising. This one spoke with a British accent, and was dressed in a seersucker suit that was severely wrinkled from hours tucked in his seat.
That she had attracted two such disparate defenders struck Kate as absurd; fearing she’d laugh, she covered her face in her hands and cried, “He won’t leave me alone! I’m at my wits’ end!”
“I’m telling you rubes this girl is a murderess. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Murdered them all with her bare skinny hands, I bet,” the workman said, and looked to the seersucker, who approved the joke.
A third man rose—this one much broader in the beam, with a knife the length of a rolling pin on his belt. His odds deteriorating, the bounty hunter closed his jacket.
“This isn’t over, Miss Kate Bender.”
“This is just what he did before. He’ll wait for me at the station and try again on the next train!”
“Well he won’t this time,” declared the third man as he bellied the bounty hunter down the aisle. The latter gave way as the others joined in, pushing him the length of the carriage and through the door.
A moment later she heard a commotion in the next car. Male voices yelled, and there was a bang as if a body had struck a wall. Then she saw a dark figure fly from the train, arcing like a diver into the sea of short grass. There was just time for her to see the bounty hunter carve a furrow among the stems. His gun followed, disappearing in the morass.
Her benefactors returned. With a slight bow of his head, the seersucker reclaimed his seat. Kate, obliged, returned a shy smile.
At Salina, she exited the train and, to confuse any possible pursuit, bought a new ticket and reboarded. Now she had two tickets, her first one to Denver and a second as far as Hays City. If the Salina ticket agent was questioned, he could only honestly report that she had debarked far short of her real destination.
She took a window seat in the darkest corner of the car and cracked the window to smoke. The pleasant familiarity of cigarette smoke was soon overwhelmed by the concentrated stench of dung, which wafted through the train from the cattle pens windward of the station. She suffered it as long as she could until suspecting that the odor was permeating her clothes and hair.
She turned to shut the window—and saw something that stopped her. There was a man standing on the platform with a newspaper. He was middle-aged and still handsome, his fine silvery hairline converging to a widow’s peak, his brow lined with the character of a fine oaken chest. Hands on the window frame, she stared at him with her cigarette drooping from her lips. His hair was long, brushing the top of his starched collar. His black suit was free of dust, his pleated shirtfront crowned with a cravat of blue silk. He was every inch the quality of man she imagined her father had become in the years of their separation. He was wealthy, worldly, and—from the lack of a ring on his left hand—unencumbered by some clinging mediocrity of a spouse.
Seeing this man both thrilled and frightened her, for as much as she liked to imagine meeting her father by blind luck, the fact remained that she didn’t know him. Of his appearance, she had only the slightest of memories. She had tried to conjure up his face in her mind for months after joining Almira, lying awake at night with the effort of it. By pure will she had managed at first to cobble together some impression, mostly regarding how he smelled of cigars and rosewater, and the contour of his hands, which she used to lace among her tiny fingers. She remembered the peculiar calluses he got from holding the cards. But the years and the beatings had stripped her of her memories of her father’s face, his voice. She liked to believe that some hidden power, some imperative of their shared blood, would tear away her ignorance the moment she laid eyes on him again. But the fact was that she wasn’t sure—just as she wasn’t sure if this gentleman, with his newspaper on the platform at Salina, Kansas—should mean as much to her as she hoped.
The man noticed the unfamiliar woman staring at him. Meeting her eyes, he gave a brief nod. In his eyes was a flicker of lust, and Kate knew it must not be him. She shut the window.
FOR THE SAME reasons he avoided the trains, Leroy did his best to skirt the property lines and stay out of sight of homesteads. The exercise made him feel like a transgressor, even as he did what was manifestly the right thing.
His companion did nothing to make him feel better. On the trail and at the campfire, she kept her eyes down, as if the slightest provocation would set him off. Though she had been treated like chattel much of her life, she had a superior way about her that made him feel like some unwashed brute, a barbarian from the steppes who slept in his saddle and gargled with urine. When he offered her perfectly decent trail food, like a stale biscuit or a piece of roasted snake, she would take it, examine it, and look at him as if asking, “Do you expect me to eat this?” And yet, she lacked the instinct for what he took to be obvious courtesy. When she had the need, she would hike up her overfancy petticoats and relieve herself right in front of him and his horse. Appalled, Leroy looked away—and felt sorry for the horse.
It occurred to him to learn her real name. He tried to learn it by pointing to himself and saying, “I am Leroy Dick. Dick. Dick . . .” To that, she widened her eyes and folded her arms across her chest.
He persisted, naming himself and then pointing at her, until she laid a hand on her breast and said “Biyu.” He repeated the word, Biyu, but the sound displeased her coming from his mouth. Assuming a sour expression, she shook her head. “Ah kim,” she insisted, and refused to answer to any other name out of what, to him, seemed sheer bloody-mindedness.
At last they approached Salina. This was a growing town tucked in the confluence of the Salina and Smoky Hill rivers, its profile dogtoothed with steeples. After asking around, he learned there was a small Chinese population. They occupied what turned out to be half a street, with three laundries, a butcher, and a cobbler. He chose the cobbler to make further inquiries.
The shop was a former saloon, with empty whiskey bottles still on the shelves and a bar converted to a cluttered workbench. The only light in the place was from a single lamp and the daylight leaking through the gaps in its slapdash construction. When the proprietor stepped out from behind his work he turned out to have enough English for his business. On seeing him, Biyu uncorked a torrent of furious Cantonese that took the man by surprise. Her outburst pasted his ears back until, after some minutes, it subsided like spent anger. The cobbler shifted his eyes at Leroy in a way that made Leroy nervous—there was no way of knowing if she was making wild accusations about him.
“You understand her?” he asked.
The cobbler frowned. “She speaks in dialect. Hard for me.”
“I took her from a pair of procurers round Iola. She says she knows Denver, so I thought I might send her over there. I would take her myself, but I’m on peace business . . .”
The cobbler raised a hand to indicate he had no use for details. He called out, and a woman appeared from behind a curtain. Biyu commenced speaking again, and the woman—presumably the wife—listened with what seemed like comprehension. As she interpreted Biyu’s story back to her husband, he nodded, rubbing his chin.
“She say you save her life,” he told Leroy. “You need reward, but she sad to have nothing to give . . .”
“No need,” replied Leroy. “Ask her how we can get her back to her people.”
The cobbler asked his wife, who questioned Biyu.
“She not from Denver. She say she have no family there.”
Now it was Leroy’s turn to rub his chin problematically. It appeared the girl’s rescue might divert him even further from his purpose. Or worse, he would have to explain what he had done to Mary Ann.
The cobbler and his wife conversed in a way that seemed to have great consequence, as Biyu listened with widening eyes. After a final affirmation, he turned again to Leroy.
“She stay here for now. Maybe she go home, to China. We see.”
Leroy was astonished. He looked to Biyu, who looked back with an expression that said If not this, what?
“Are you in earnest?”
The cobbler jerked his head, not understanding.
“I mean, is this what you want to do?”
“This is what we do.”
Turning back to his bench, he selected a pair of men’s boots. It was a fine set in brown leather, not for riding but for strutting about town.
“Your reward. For her.”
Leroy gazed at the shoes, disconcerted. “No, I can’t,” he said.
The cobbler shook the boots under his nose. “You take. Reward.”
Clearly, to refuse the gift would be a serious insult. He took the boots. As the cobbler’s wife led Biyu through the curtain, Biyu looked back at him with the frank gratitude she had denied him on the trail.
The proprietor retired behind the bar again, abruptly losing interest in him. Leroy moved to leave, but hesitated.
“How old is she? Might you ask?”
The cobbler shouted the question. After some murmuring, the answer came back.
“Twelve years,” he said.
Leroy wandered Salina for some time. Feeling he needed food, though not particularly hungry, he drifted to the Pacific House dining room and examined the board of offerings. The prix fixe meal was a steak of undeclared cut, boiled cabbage, and baked potato, for seventy-five cents. Sitting alone at the table farthest from anyone else, he ate deliberately and without pleasure, requesting three refills of his shot glass until his waiter brought him a whole bottle. He was almost finished when he noticed that his unspecified steak was sirloin and that it was well-done, not medium as he had requested.
He sat for a while with a toothpick and his evening smoke. In one crystal clear moment he saw that there was indeed something more he could do for the girl. He tossed a dollar on the table and went straight out to retrieve the horses from the cobbler’s.
The livery was east of town, opposite the mills on the bank of the Smoky Hill. After securing his own mount, he led Morris and Crane’s horse—the one Biyu had ridden—into the barn. There were two men inside, talking and in no particular hurry to serve him. As he waited, he made some mental calculations of the cost of getting the girl to San Francisco. And though he had no clue how much passage on a freighter to Asia would cost, he hoped the sale of one good chestnut mare would cover most of it.
He had been turning these thoughts over for some time when he began to attend to what the men were saying. Seems that there was an unusual arrest made at the train station the day before. The person apprehended caused the men some amusement; this was not the usual run of fugitive, but a woman. And not just any woman, but a fine, handsome one, of the caliber rarely seen among Kansas wives or prostitutes. From the way they marveled, Leroy would have guessed the exotic spy of some foreign power had been caught—the kind that could pass for a countess or the concubine of a king. One of the men was quite sure she was the mistress of a German baron who had disappeared on a bison-shooting expedition in Nebraska.
“She killed him?” asked the livery’s owner.
“There’s talk of murder.”
“Go right to hell.”
“I’m only telling you what I heard. Not a word more.”
Leroy’s curiosity got the better of his patience:
“Any of you know what this woman looked like?”
The owner eyed him through the gloom and dust. “Sorry for my language, mister. Didn’t see you standing there.”
“Got a horse to sell.”
The man’s examination was quick, composed merely of leading the horse in and out of the barn and slapping its flesh in various places. He looked the animal in the eye, as if asking it what a fair price might be for itself. Then he said “A hundred dollars, including the tack.”
“I was hoping for a hundred and fifty, and twenty for the saddle.”
“What a splendid thing is hope.”
“A hundred twenty. Including tack.”
“I’ll give you a hundred and ten.”
“Done.”
An hour later he had the liveryman’s signature on a note to the bank, payable to “Leroy Dirk.” Fingering it by the edges, he turned it around and around as he contemplated making the liveryman write it again—but opted not to.
“So this girl that got clapped yesterday. Did you see it happen?”
“Not while I got a business to run,” came the frosty reply.
“Would it be a good bet they’d be keeping her in the town jail?”
“I never tell a man how to bet. But you’d not be far wrong.”
The streets of Salina were dirt, but lined with boardwalks neatly carpentered and painted white. Clopping around, Leroy found the jail just a couple of blocks from the hotel where he’d had his supper. The wood frame structure looked much like a small office, except for the two cells in the back. His eyes swept the spaces behind the riveted meshwork. There were no prisoners there.
“Afternoon,” said the suited man behind the desk. A mature gentleman, his pale dome shined where his hair receded. A pair of gray handlebars descended from his ears, bowed along his jawline and met under his nose. There was ink on his lips where the wet his fingers to turn the pages of his newspaper.
“Good day,” he replied, his position awkward. “I am Leroy Dick, trustee for Labette Township.”
“Labette? That’s a ways off, Mr. Dick.”
Extending a hand, the man introduced himself as Luke Parsons, the sheriff.
At length Leroy learned he was the very Luke Parsons who had joined the John Brown gang during the troubles before the war. He was with Brown at Palymra, and in the fight at Osawatomie, trading fire with a superior force of proslavery Missourians. But when Brown went east to build up his war chest, Parsons chose to settle permanently in Kansas. Like most of Brown’s compatriots, the great man’s reflected notoriety had made him a minor celebrity. That he’d taken up a badge in remote Salina was news to Leroy.
Parsons was nothing if not instantly obliging to a former jayhawker. On hearing Leroy sought the Benders, Parsons promised to set him up with the best lodgings, a good meal. He regretted the poor deal he had gotten for his horse—if he’d asked at the jailhouse first, he would have gotten his price or better. He was more than amiable—until Leroy brought up the subject of the “countess” arrested at the train station.
“Oh, that. She’s not here.”
“I can see that. Is there anything to the story?”
“Well, she ain’t no countess. Or a Bender, for that matter,” he said, face purpling. “There’s a man who thinks she is, I’ll give you. When I came by to make sure it was all done under the flag of law, he waved a document under my nose.” And Parsons tore off the syllables of that word, document, like it was the devil’s own alibi.
“The governor’s proclamation?”
“A letter from a certain senator in Topeka, the gist being I should go hang myself. So what was I supposed to do? Go against the interests of senators and congressmen and all the king’s men, for this little confection of a girl? So he’s got her.”
“Got her?”
“At the courthouse. If he hasn’t set out with her already. What business is it of mine, anyway? I’m only the sheriff of the whole fucking county.”
They sat for a moment as Parsons simmered and Leroy pensively chewed his lip.
“So this man. He’s a Pinkerton?”
Regaining his humor, Parsons laughed. “You said it, my friend! Though I’d sooner call him a dandy. Say it to his face, in fact, if I didn’t have duties a fair man must place above his pride.”
The courthouse was a new-built, two-story affair made out of native stone, with arched windows and a cupola. It was the kind of grand structure they could only dream of building in Harmony Grove, though Salina was not a much older community. Confronted by a line of chambers off the main corridor, he was directed first upstairs, then to the back of the building, and finally to the most remote room, a small office used by the town surveyor to store the county plats.
Inside sat two people: a man he didn’t know, and Kate Bender. She wore an unadorned traveling dress, her hat and gloves lying on the table before her, beside a half-drunk cup of tea. As they looked at each other, a smile gathered on her face, as if some private promise had been redeemed. He had to tear his eyes from her.
The Pinkerton was a real sharper—a gentleman in a silk suit, with gold cuffs and a mane of silver hair. He also had a cup of tea, and deck of cards laid out for solitaire. Though he only worked for Colonel York, he seemed more a senator than his employer.
“Something you need?” he asked.
Leroy explained himself and how he found his way there. As he listened, the Pinkerton leaned back, interlacing his fingers as if he were a critic evaluating a show. When Leroy was done, he kicked his way back to an upright position. Something about the way he did this made Leroy think he would not get a good review.
“Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Dick, but all I can tell you is what I told the sheriff. I represent certain interests in Topeka that supersede local authority. I’m to deliver this suspect to those interests without distraction or delay, and I intend to do just that.”
“With respect, sir, as trustee of the jurisdiction where the crimes were committed, I would say I represent more than ‘local authority.’ ”
“Alleged crimes,” interjected Kate.
“That may well be,” the sharper replied to Leroy, ignoring Kate. “But my orders make no such distinction. If you want, you can take it up with the senator.”
He held up York’s letter for him to read. Leroy didn’t take it.
“I think you know this is irregular as hell. This woman is a fugitive from justice, not the object of some private vendetta.”
“You’re wasting your time with this fool, Leroy,” said Kate. “Don’t you think I’ve been telling him the same thing since yesterday?”
“You shut up, cunt, or I’ll shove those gloves down your cocksucking hole,” snarled the Pinkerton.
Then he turned back to Leroy and continued as if their exchange had never been anything but a pleasant chat: “You are at liberty to take the matter to Topeka, sir. For now, I must ask you to leave, before you overexcite the prisoner.”
Vexed now, Leroy turned slowly to the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob.
“I never caught your name, friend.”
“Maybe if you read the letter, you would have.”
He was through the door when Kate called after him, “Don’t let them do me this way, Leroy! If I must answer to the law, let it be by your side!”