CHAPTER 6
The jail cell stunk from all its previous occupants. The hard, bare mattress on the narrow bunk had vermin living in it. The small chamber was dank and uncomfortably chilly this morning. During the night, the fog that nearly always came in and blanketed San Francisco had crept through the single barred window and hung in the air, making the place even more unpleasant.
The cold and the damp caused Gordon Lewiston’s broken arm to ache even worse than it would have otherwise. He had spent a miserable night, able to sleep for only a few minutes at a time before the pain woke him.
More than ever, he needed the blessed relief that the smoke of the lotus would have provided for him.
The day before, a doctor at the hospital where the police had taken him had set the broken bone, splinted the arm, and wrapped it tightly in bandages.
“This man should remain here in the hospital under a physician’s care,” the medico had told the police, but the officers didn’t pay any attention.
“He’s charged with attempted armed robbery and assault,” one of them had told the doctor. “He’s going to the lockup, busted wing or no busted wing.”
Lewiston supposed he should have been grateful they’d gotten him as much medical attention as they had. But it didn’t really matter.
If he remained behind bars for very long, he would die from lack of opium. He couldn’t live without the stuff. Never had been able to, ever since he’d come back from Cuba and the war against the damn Spaniards.
At least they had put him in a cell by himself, not one of the larger holding cells. The men they threw in there would have seen that he was injured and couldn’t defend himself, and there was no telling what might have happened to him overnight. It wouldn’t have been good, though.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside the row of cells. Lewiston remained sitting on the bunk with the thin, gray, scratchy blanket wrapped around him. He hadn’t been able to find a position lying down where his arm didn’t hurt like blazes, so any sleep he had snatched during the night was done sitting up. He didn’t raise his head to watch the jailer approaching.
But then the footsteps stopped and the man said, “Lewiston, you’ve got a visitor.”
A visitor . . . ? Who in the world—
Lewiston raised his eyes, saw the woman standing there, and groaned.
“Alma,” he said. “How did you find me?”
She said, “Once I’d poked through every opium den and joss house in Chinatown and you weren’t in any of them, I knew you had to be either in jail or lying dead in an alley somewhere. So I came here next.”
“Hoping that you’d find me here?” Lewiston asked with a faint smile. “Or that you wouldn’t?”
“Don’t be like that,” Alma snapped. “If I’d wanted you dead, I would have killed you myself a long time before now.”
“Lady,” the jailer said, “that probably ain’t the wisest thing to be sayin’ in front of somebody who works for the law.”
“Oh, go away and give me a minute with my husband,” Alma told the man as she glared at him.
Nobody could stand up to Alma when she looked like that, as Lewiston knew all too well from experience. The jailer muttered, “All right, all right,” and retreated to the far end of the corridor. Alma turned back to the bars and gripped them.
Lewiston’s spirits couldn’t help but rise for a moment as he gazed at her. Life had been hard on Alma. Being married to him had been hard, and he could admit that.
She was twenty-eight years old but appeared to be six or seven years older than that. She was still a fine-looking woman, though. Her blond hair had a shine to it, even in these dingy surroundings. Maybe especially in a place like this. Her eyes had lines around them, but they were still like blue pools to her husband. There were lines around her mouth, too, but Lewiston wanted to kiss her, anyway.
“Alma, you shouldn’t have come.” Emotion choked his voice as he stood and moved slowly over to the bars. “You should get far away from me and forget you were ever married to me. You deserve better, and it won’t be long until you’re free to find it.”
“What are you talking about, Gordon?”
He waved his uninjured arm at his surroundings. “I won’t live long behind bars. You know that. You’ll be a widow, and you can find yourself a husband who can take care of you like you deserve.”
“Stop being an idiot,” she said. “I’ll get you out of here, and we’ll go someplace where you can get better—”
“There’s not any such place,” he interrupted. “And you can’t get me out. There’s no money for bail.”
“I’ve put aside a little you didn’t know about—”
He was too tired to even be bothered by the admission that she’d been hiding money from him. Good for her. He said, “But there’s not enough, is there?”
“Well . . . no. But if the man you tried to rob were to drop the charges against you, they’d have to let you go, wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know. They might. Why would he do that, though?” Lewiston shook his head. “I did try to rob him, you know. I threatened him with a gun, and then I tried to cut him with a knife.” He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “What a fool I was. That man Jensen, he was just playing with me. I couldn’t have actually hurt him in a hundred years.”
“Jensen,” Alma repeated.
“Yeah. He gave his name to the officer who arrested me. Smoke Jensen.”
“Did he say where he lives?”
Lewiston frowned. “Why? Alma, what in the world are you thinking of?”
“I thought that if I talked to this man Jensen and told him that you’re not really a criminal, not a bad sort at all, he might see his way clear to dropping the charges.”
“No!” Lewiston said. “I don’t want you getting mixed up in this, Alma. You’ve already had way too much trouble in your life because of me. Anyway, it wouldn’t do any good. Jensen’s a cowboy. A real hard-bitten type. The policeman acted like he’s some sort of famous gunman. There are dime novels about him.”
“He’s still a man,” Alma insisted. “He must have a spark of decency in him. I’ll tell him about how you were wounded in Cuba, and about the laudanum and the opium—”
“He guessed already about the opium,” Lewiston said, wanting to hang his head in shame. “I don’t think he cared.”
“I’ll make him care. I’ve always been able to convince men to do what I wanted, ever since I was fourteen years old. You know that, Gordon.”
Lewiston didn’t doubt it. Alma’s beauty might be faded a little, but she was still one hell of a woman. He didn’t know everything she had done over the past couple of years to help them get by, and he didn’t want to know. But this time it wasn’t going to work.
“Not Jensen,” he said. “I’m sorry, Alma, there’s just nothing you can do for me.”
“Where can I find him?” she insisted.
From the far end of the corridor, the jailer called, “Time’s up, lady. You’re gonna have to go.”
Alma gripped the bars harder and said, “Tell me, Gordon.”
Lewiston swallowed. He supposed it couldn’t hurt anything for her to try.
“The Palace Hotel,” he said. “Jensen told the officer he was staying at the Palace Hotel.”
She reached through the bars and stroked his gaunt, stubble-covered cheek. The jailer yelled, “Hey! Get your hand out of there! No touching or reaching through the bars.”
Lewiston caught hold of her hand with his good one and pressed his lips to the back of it for a second. Then Alma stepped back as the jailer stomped angrily toward her.
“Don’t give up, Gordon,” she said.
He managed a weak smile and a nod, but he didn’t believe it.
He had been in the process of giving up for too long to stop now.
* * *
Smoke always traveled light, but the same couldn’t be said of Denny and Louis. Denny had added to her load with her shopping excursion, too. Because of that, the cart that a porter wheeled out of the Palace Hotel that morning was piled high with bags. A second porter helped load them into a wagon.
Smoke ambled out of the hotel’s front entrance and watched the loading. He didn’t like having anybody taking care of chores for him, but he fought the urge to step in and heft some of the bags himself. That was the porters’ job, and they might be insulted if he acted like they weren’t doing it correctly. He would give both men a good tip when they were finished.
While he was standing there, he looked up and down the street, halfway expecting to spot Peter Stansfield lurking around somewhere near the hotel. There was no sign of the reporter this morning, though, so Smoke hoped he had found somebody else to write about . . . and to bother.
A carriage was parked in front of the wagon, waiting to carry Smoke, Denny, and Louis to the train station. Denny wasn’t the sort of young woman to spend hours and hours getting ready to go anywhere, but she was enough of a female that she usually wasn’t as prompt as her brother, either. When Smoke heard a footstep behind him and glanced over his shoulder, he wasn’t surprised to see Louis.
“Is your sister almost ready?” Smoke asked.
“When I knocked on her door, she said she would be down in just a few minutes.” Louis shrugged. “Don’t ask me what that translates to in actual time.”
“Are you talking about me?” Denny asked from behind him.
“Of course not,” he said smoothly as he turned to smile at her.
“Yeah, you need to take up the law, all right,” she said. “It’s the natural profession for anybody who lies that easily.”
Smoke flipped open the turnip watch he had just taken from his pocket to check the time. “We’d better get going,” he told his children. He snapped the timepiece closed. “We don’t want to miss that train.”
He cast an eye toward the distant mountains. The sky was overcast this morning, as it often was in San Francisco, and the clouds were a dark, ominous gray in the direction of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Denny wore a dark brown traveling outfit today, and Louis was in a brown tweed suit. The cold air that swept along the street made both of them shiver as they started toward the carriage.
Smoke had traded in his town clothes for garb more suitable to riding the range. He wore a sheepskin-lined jacket over a flannel work shirt and jeans. The authorities in San Francisco frowned on wearing guns openly, so he hadn’t strapped on his shell belt and holster this morning.
But there was a Colt Lightning .41-caliber double-action revolver tucked into the waistband of his jeans, out of sight under the coat but where he could get to it quickly if he needed it. He didn’t anticipate needing the gun, but he had carried one for enough years that it didn’t feel right to be unarmed.
As his old friend Pearlie had once said, “I been packin’ iron for so long that if I don’t have one on me somewheres, I walk slant-wise.”
Smoke felt the same way.
They climbed into the carriage and the driver slapped the reins and got the pair of horses hitched to it moving along the street. The wagon with the bags rattled along behind them.
Since the carriage was the open type, the driver was able to turn his head and say over his shoulder, “They tell me those horseless carriages are gonna take over and fellas like me will be out of a job. You believe that?”
“They’re the coming thing,” Louis said. “I read the other day that there are already several hundred automobiles in service in the United States.”
“Maybe out on flat land,” the driver said. “You reckon one of those rattletraps could make it up and down hills like we got here? That takes a good team o’ horses!”
“Maybe you’re right, sir. I’m a young man, but I’ve already seen enough in my life to know that it’s difficult to keep things from changing. Sometimes everything seems to change while we’re not even looking!”
The driver just harrumphed and kept his team moving.
The carriage and the wagon arrived at the depot a short time later. More porters came out to unload the bags, place them on carts, roll them inside, and load them into the baggage car of the eastbound train that would be departing shortly.
Smoke, Denny, and Louis had round-trip tickets good any time—one of the advantages of being an investor in the railroad—so they didn’t have to stop at the ticket windows in the lobby. A conductor met them beside the steps leading up to one of the cars.
“Mr. Jensen,” the blue-uniformed man said as he tugged on the brim of his cap. “Good to see you again. You, too, young Mr. Jensen and Miss Jensen.”
“How’s the weather along the route, Mr. Kanigher?” Smoke asked. “I don’t mind saying, I don’t really like the look of those clouds over the Sierras.”
“And well you shouldn’t,” the conductor agreed. “Word came last night from the Summit Hotel in Donner Pass that it had started snowing heavily up there. Juniper Jones, the telegrapher, said it was snowing fit to bust, in fact. But I reckon the snowsheds and the Chinese walls are doing their job. Last I heard, the tracks were still clear and open and the telegraph wires were still up. We’ll make it through if anybody can.”
“That’s good to hear,” Smoke said, “because I’m planning on being home for Christmas.”