A chill autumn rain fell intermittently during the early morning, but that didn’t stop a small crowd of the curious from forming across the street from the Lost Creek Hotel.
Word had spread quickly after S. J. Lindstrom came storming down to the hotel lobby without his shotgun in hand. The manager, Ted Wilson, later quietly climbed the stairway and retrieved the weapon, but he wasn’t quiet at all about S. J. Lindstrom’s humiliation on the second floor.
Wilson didn’t know the details, but the fact that Lindstrom was both unarmed and in a red-faced rage told him enough to know that War Hunter and Ella Phillips would not be leaving the hotel before morning. So after midnight, when Wilson was off duty, he hurried over to the King’s High Saloon and told the small group of late night drinkers this new chapter in the story of Jack Creasey’s naked descent into the lobby of the Lost Creek Hotel. But each time the story was told, the more firm became everyone’s conviction that S. J. Lindstrom, while he might have acted rashly trying to throw Hunter and his woman out of the hotel in the middle of the night, sure had the balls of a bear to face up to Hunter ... and the luck of a rabbit—with all four of its feet—to have lived.
Though they were small in number that night in the King’s High Saloon, men who drink into the late hours are, by and large, men who like to talk. It was because they talked that groups of curious onlookers began forming in the morning huddling all about, throwing curious glances up the stairway from the far end of the hotel lobby, and whispering conspiratorially in front of the hardware store and gun shop across the street, all of them anxiously awaiting the sight of two people they had probably seen or passed on the street at least a dozen times in the three-and-a-half weeks Hunter and Ella had been in town.
But, by the same token, they were also waiting for two people who suddenly seemed larger than life—a beautiful woman that some were calling a harlot; and her lover who, without hesitation, had thrown a stark naked man headlong down a flight of stairs. Things like that didn’t happen every day in Lost Creek ... so the small groups of the curious lingered in front of the hotel and waited ...
Slowly buttoning his last clean shirt, Hunter stared out the window of the second floor hotel room down to the street below. A grim smile creased his lips. Those people out there, he knew, were waiting for him and Ella, waiting to gawk and to point. Well, when you’ve killed as many men as Hunter had, there are always times and places when people will gather to stare at you—he was used to that. And as he glanced back at Ella, calmly brushing her hair at her dressing table, he figured that with the life she’d led, she, too, would be used to the stares and the whispers.
“Are you hungry?” he asked softly, stepping away from the window.
“Not very. And I certainly don’t want to eat in the hotel dining room, not after being told to get out of here.”
“You’re right about that,” he said wryly, “We’re not giving any more money to this hotel.”
“Should we leave our things here while we go out and look for another place to stay?” Ella wondered aloud.
“No. That old man’s crazy enough to come back while we’re gone and throw our stuff out into the street.”
“So we’ve got to cart everything we own with us wherever we go?”
Hunter laughed. “You know, it’s not as if we own all that much. Since we met up with Utes at the Great Salt Lake the stuff we’ve got left doesn’t really add up to one whole helluva lot.”
“Well, whatever we’ve got—even if it’s only a handful of clothing and a few keepsakes—we’ve got to leave it somewhere while we find a place to live.”
“We can drop our stuff off either at the stage office or with Del O’Connell.”
“Let’s do it, then, and get the hell out of here,” she exclaimed. “I was getting tired of this damned hotel anyway. Let’s find a place to live where we’ve got more than one small room with a single window, a place with a parlor and a kitchen, and maybe even a little porch.”
“When did you suddenly become so domestic?” Hunter said chuckling. “The next thing you know you’ll be wanting a white picket fence, a dog, and a passel of kids.”
“And not necessarily in that order,” said Ella.
Hunter looked up, startled ... and Ella, seeing the surprised look on his face, roared with laughter.
“Very funny,” said Hunter. “Do me a favor, willya? Willya let me know, ahead of time, what it is you really want ... the dog, the picket fence, or the kids?”
“You’ll be the first to know,” she promised, still laughing.
“Come on,” he said with a grin, “Let’s get the hell out of this dump.”
“I’m right behind you.”
They left room number twenty-six with Hunter in the lead, his stuffed saddlebags slung over one shoulder, his Colt-Patterson Repeater cradled against the other, while Ella followed close behind, carrying a large, but half-empty carpet bag.
It was on the landing at the top of the stairs that Ella first sensed what Hunter already knew. She glanced down to the lobby below and was astonished to see more than three dozen pairs of eyes staring back at her.
“Warfield ...” she whispered.
“I know,” he said, “there’s more of ’em out on the street.”
“Don’t they have anything better to do?”
“I guess not ... and I guess that says a lot about the kind of lives they lead doesn’t it?”
Ella laughed softly as they continued down the stairs. They walked with a quiet dignity past the gawkers in the lobby and past the gossip-mongers out on the street. Their lives were their own and the crowd seemed to sense it. They had thought they would see Hunter humiliated, thrown out of a hotel like a common saddle tramp; and they thought that they would see, in Ella Phillips, the very picture of a woman of shame. But in the cold drizzle and the mist of Lost Creek’s main street, the only thing they saw was a tall man, walking with strong, purposeful strides, and a brown-haired beauty who proudly walked beside him.
“Mind if we leave this stuff here for a while?” Hunter asked John Avery, the local stage-line manager.
“Fine by me,” said Avery. “Heard about your trouble with old man Lindstrom,” he added. “He was way out of line, but I’m glad you didn’t hurt him. The man’s been through a lot these last few weeks, what with his daughter dying in that fire in the Feed and Grain and the killers getting away.”
“You think that kid Dave Bennett and the other feller were guilty?” asked Hunter out of curiosity.
“Old man Lindstrom told young Bennett to stay away from his daughter just a few hours before the fire,” said Avery. “S. J. said the kid was real sore about it ... crazy mad, in fact. Folks saw Bennett and his friend Bobby Winslow drinking that night before the fire started. And they saw the two of them near the Feed and Grain just when the flames suddenly engulfed the second floor and ended any chance of saving Jenna Lindstrom’s life. But the one single thing that’s probably gonna put the noose over Dave Bennett’s head is that, after the fire, he ran away.”
“It’s an odd thing,” observed Hunter, “that Bennett and his friend didn’t run clear out of the territory. You’d think they’d want to get more than a half a day’s ride from here.”
“You believe the kid’s innocent, don’t you?” Avery asked.
“Maybe he’s innocent ... maybe he’s guilty as sin. That’s for a judge to figure out. Right now all I really care about is finding a place for Ella and me.”
“Where’s Ella?”
“She stopped at Adamson’s millinery. Figured on asking Mrs. Adamson if she knew of anyone looking for boarders.”
“Say, that reminds me,” Avery said brightly. “Del stopped in here early this morning and said to tell you about Ree Sloan’s place.”
“Ree Sloan?”
“Yeah, she and her husband, William, own a place over near the south edge of town. It’s pretty run down but O’Connell said it’s clean and under the right circumstances they might be willing to rent out their spare room.”
“Did Del say what he meant by ‘right circumstances’?”
“Something about Ree bein’ sick, and lookin’ for someone to move in who could help her around the house ’til she gets well.”
“I’ll talk to Ella about it,” said Hunter. “Thanks for passing the word along.”
“Sure thing. Say, don’t forget ... you and Del have to be back here at six-thirty tonight to run the last leg of the High Ridge stage.”
“Right. See you later, John ...”