Chapter 13
“Thank God,” Toni said as she and Louisa rode up out of a dry wash and saw the town of Sundown sitting along the tracks before them.
It was getting late. The sun would be gone in another hour. A light snow was falling out of a moody, purple sky.
“Here we are,” Louisa said, sizing up the town before her. “End of the line.”
The town, if you could call the small, rough collection of tracks along the twin spur line rails a town, didn’t look all that welcoming. There were maybe half a dozen shacks and shanties crouched around a few two-story business establishments and a long, low, wooden structure hugging the rails. That was likely the depot station.
Near the depot was a large pile of split cordwood for feeding the locomotives that passed through Sundown, as well as a big wooden water tank on high stilts, also for feeding the trains. The town was so new that as Louisa and Toni approached it from the north along the trail that just ahead became the town’s main street, Louisa could smell the pine resin in the green wood the place had been built from.
Squinting against the fine grains of snow catching in her eyelashes, she could see a broad, unpainted building on the far end of town, on the street’s right side. A sign poking into the street identified it, easily the largest building in town, as the TERRITORIAL HOTEL. On the town’s near end, stood the train depot and a livery barn and corral just beyond it. The small, stone, cracker box–like structure of the Stockman’s Territorial Bank sat just beyond the livery barn.
Aside from three other, much smaller business buildings between the depot and the hotel, there were five or six small, randomly arranged frame houses and a couple of log huts. That was pretty much the entire town of Sundown. All around it stretched flat, nearly featureless prairie—fawn-colored grasses slowly being consumed by the snow.
“I’m surprised this place has a bank,” Louisa muttered half to herself.
“It’ll grow,” Toni said, riding off Louisa’s right stirrup. “It’s along the spur line now, so it’ll grow. Good grazing country up here. The country’s growing. This will be a wealthy place one day.” There’d been a definite note of hopefulness in the girl’s voice as she stared ahead at the town into which they now rode.
“Yeah, well,” Louisa said, leaving her opinion of the place’s future at that. She checked down the pinto as well as the five packhorses behind her in front of the small, wood-frame train depot on her left. “You go on ahead, stable your mount at the livery barn.”
Toni stopped the calico. She’d gotten pretty good with the horse. It minded her without balking overmuch, without fighting the bit. Turning to Louisa, she said, “What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m going to see when the next train is due.” She paused, then looked at the girl. “You flush?”
Toni’s cold cheeks turned a shade darker red, and she glanced down at her saddle horn. “I’ll make do.”
“Here.” Louisa bit off a mitten and reached into a pocket of her denims. She pulled out a coin and handed it over to the girl.
Toni shook her head. “Like I said, I’ll make do.”
“You’re going to need a roof over your head tonight, food in your belly. Until you can hogtie that banker, anyway.”
“I’ll see about getting a job,” Toni retorted bitterly, offended by the Vengeance Queen’s irony.
“You can see about getting a job tomorrow. Until then, take this.” Louisa shook the hand in which she held the coin.
Drawing a deep breath, Toni reluctantly held out her own mittened hand. Louisa pressed the coin into it. Toni drew it to her, looked at it. She looked up at Louisa, frowning. “This is a double eagle. I can’t take twenty dollars from you.”
“You’re not taking it from me.” Louisa glanced at the dead men behind her. “You’re taking it from them.” That was a lie. The double eagle was from the jingle in her own pocket.
Toni studied Louisa critically. Finally, she closed her mitten around the coin, slipped it into a coat pocket. “I’m obliged, Miss Bonaventure.”
“No reason to be.” Louisa glanced up the street. Saddled horses stood at the hitch rack fronting the hotel. Returning her gaze to the girl, she said, “Watch yourself. Men here.” But then, Toni knew all too well what that meant.
The girl nodded, pressing her lips together. She batted her heels against the calico’s ribs and rode on up the gradually darkening street.
Louisa swung down from the pinto’s back and tied it and the lead packhorse to the hitchrack fronting the depot. The brick cobbles surrounding the humble building were lightly snow dusted but cleared here and there by the swirling breeze. A mountain lion hide was tacked to the building’s front wall, just left of the door. The head had been left on, and it snarled, glassy-eyed, at Louisa, long curved fangs showing inside its open mouth.
The shingle announcing simply SUNDOWN DEPOT ratcheted back and forth on its rusty chains, beneath the building’s broadly overhanging eaves.
Lifting her gaze to the stovepipe protruding from the shack’s shake-shingled roof, the Vengeance Queen saw that the place was occupied though it didn’t otherwise appear to be. Smoke lifted from the pipe to get pressed low against the roof by the breeze before it was quickly torn and dispersed. It was perfumed with the smell of cedar and pine.
Louisa stepped up onto the brick platform, removed her hat and muffler, and shook her hair so that it spilled loosely about her shoulders, shedding the snow that had clung to it. She stepped to the front door and turned the knob.
The door squawked open on unoiled hinges. She stepped inside, slowly pushed the door closed behind her, latching it. As she did, she instinctively stepped to one side, not allowing the light from the door to outline her.
A soft whistle sounded to her left. Louisa jerked her startled gaze to see two men sitting on the bench on that side of the door, running the length of the front wall. They had all manner of gear, including saddles and saddlebags, piled around them. They wore their heavy coats open, and the larger of the two, a tall, fat, bearded, blue-eyed man in a quilted elk-hide coat, wore a battered black felt hat. The smaller man—lean and wiry and rolling a matchstick around between his thin lips—was bareheaded, his hat hooked over the horn of the saddle resting on the bench beside him.
“Look at that, French,” said the little man. “Ain’t she purty?” He smiled at Louisa. It was more of a leer, revealing one missing front tooth.
The big man, French, shoved his saddle away, clearing a spot on the bench to his left. He patted the cleared spot on the bench. “Come on over here and sit down beside me, pretty girl. If you’re here for the train, you got a long wait. Ain’t gonna get here till tomorrow afternoon, most like. And that’s only if the tracks don’t get blocked by the snow.”
“So a train is on the way?” Louisa asked hopefully, ignoring the leers in the men’s eyes. Or trying to, anyway. She almost succeeded despite the way their eyes turned glassy as they raked her up and down.
“Certain-sure,” said the smaller man, his eyes on the rise where her breasts were pushing out her coat. “Might as well take a load off.” He cleared a small spot beside him on the bench and grinned. “Sit down beside me. French ain’t had a bath since last Fourth of July. He stinks to hog heaven!”
“That’s a lie an’ you know it, Cully,” accused French, his big, bearded face turning crimson. “I took a bath just the other day over at the Territorial.” He glowered at Cully. “Just before Tutwiler kicked us out on account o’ you cuttin’ that half-breed swamper he had workin’ for him!”
Louisa rolled her eyes at the seedy pair of hardtails—likely ranch hands laid off for the winter and heading toward warmer climes. They’d spend the winter fighting, gambling, getting drunk, and mistreating the doxies they’d badly underpay.
Louisa glanced at the ticket cage to her right. It was vacant, though what appeared to be a solitaire hand was laid out on the pine counter just inside, near a whiskey bottle and a shot glass. A quirley lay at the edge of the counter, its burning coal hanging over the edge, sending a curl of gray smoke into the air of the shadowy niche that also housed a telegraph key.
Louisa turned to the two men now arguing on the bench to her left, and said, “Where’s the stationmaster? Hey, you two—pipe down! Where’s the—?”
“Here, I’m here!”
Louisa turned to see a stocky man with longish dark brown hair struggling through a trackside door in the far back wall of the place. He, too, wore a thick beard. Louisa judged him to be in his late thirties, early forties, once a hard worker, judging by a layer of thick muscle, but gone to fat. He had an armload of split wood in his arms, which were clad in a grimy striped blanket coat with a torn and dangling pocket.
He drew the door clumsily closed behind him and strode into the waiting room, shivering, shaking his long, greasy hair back away from his face, revealing his doughy, rawboned features including a nose like a door handle.
He shivered, cursed the cold, and walked over to the big potbelly stove sitting in the middle of the room. As he did, he glanced at Louisa.
He glanced away and then glanced back at her again. He stopped dead in his tracks and looked her up and down. His eyes widened, turned glassy, glistening in the gray light angling through the two windows in the wall behind the pretty, hazel-eyed blonde.
Cully, who had stopped arguing with French, chuckled seedily. “Me an’ French—we got us a new friend, Jerry. See what happens when you leave?”
“Somethin’ special happens,” French said, his voice low but teeming with sleazy laughter.
Jerry’s coal black eyes raked Louisa up and down, a smile gradually growing on his mouth.
“French and Cully tell me a train is due tomorrow afternoon,” Louisa said to Jerry. “That right?”
Jerry’s eyes brightened even more. He smiled even wider. He turned away from Louisa and dropped the wood from his arms into the bin beside the stove, glowering at French and Cully and saying, “This ain’t no hotel. If you two are gonna hole up here till the train pulls in, you can at least split wood and keep the stove fed, damnit!”
He turned to Louisa again, and his unctuous smile was back in place, his eyes roaming across the swollen top of her coat. He brushed his hands together. “What’s your name, pretty lady?”
Louisa smiled stiffly. “The train.”
Cully chuckled through his teeth. French gave a snort.
“What about it?” Jerry said.
“One is pulling through here tomorrow afternoon?”
“That’s right. If the weather holds.”
“Can I purchase a ticket?”
“Why, sure you can,” Jerry said, planting his fists on his hips. “But first you gotta give me a smile.”
Louisa stared at him blankly.
Cully chuckled through his teeth again. Again, French snorted.
“All right, all right,” Jerry said, glowering at Louisa as he pushed through a Dutch door to enter his cage. “You’re purtier’n a speckled pup, but you sure are a sour little thing. A pretty girl should cheer a place up. A storm’s on the way, don’t ya know. That’s what the old man said.”
Staring through his cage now, over the playing cards, whiskey bottle, and shot glass, he plucked the quirley off the counter and stuck it in his mouth. He slid his eyes from Louisa to Cully and French, now sitting behind Louisa as she stood in front of the cage.
“The old Injun who lives down by the creek says so,” Jerry continued. “That old dog-eater’s bursitis starts actin’ up somethin’ fierce when a storm’s on the way. He goes through twice as much wood in his old shack, keepin’ the place warm. When he starts howlin’ about his bursitis, you know you’re in for one hell of a storm!”
“I’m sorry about your Indian’s bursitis,” Louisa said. “Tell him to grind up some mint and lavender and liberally apply the paste to his joints. Now, it’s getting late and I have horses to tend, so I’d like to purchase a ticket for Bismarck and be on my way.”
Jerry sat on the high stool fronting the counter inside the cage and squinted his eyes as he took a deep drag off the quirley. “Bismarck, eh?”
“Right.”
“What you got goin’ in Bismarck, pretty lady?” Another sleazy smile tugged at the agent’s mouth corners as he blew smoke out his nostrils at Louisa through the cage.
“That’s none of your business, Jerry. Just the ticket, please.”
“Just the ticket, huh?”
Cully and French snorted and squirmed around on their bench. Louisa heard one of them take a pull from a bottle. He chuckled, choking a little on the tangleleg, and drew the bottle down sharply, coughing. The other man squealed hoarsely.
Louisa removed her mittens and gloves and set them on the counter. “Just the ticket.”
“All right,” Jerry said, drawing on the quirley again and holding the smoke in his lungs as he said, “that’ll be twenty-five dollars.”
“Twenty-five dollars?” Louisa shuttled her gaze to the various ticket prices chalked on a board on the cage to her left. “The board says it’s three seventy-five to Bismarck.”
“Oh, that,” Jerry said. “That’s summer prices. I ain’t gotten around to changin’ ’em yet. Yeah, in winter the cost goes up. You know—on account o’ the weather an’ such. Costs more to run a train in the winter.”
“It sure does, that’s true!” laughed Cully.
There was the sloshing sound of either him or French taking another drink from the bottle.
Louisa pulled her mouth corners down.
“Is that too much?” Jerry asked.
“I don’t have twenty-five dollars,” Louisa lied. She looked up at him again and injected feigned beseeching into her gaze. “Please, Jerry. I have to get to Bismarck. I can’t afford twenty-five dollars, but I have to get to Bismarck just the same. Oh, please, Jerry—you must help me!”
“Help you?” Jerry said, his eyes brightening like those of a wolf smelling fresh meat.