Since the day that the Prescott School for Boys and Girls opened on a crisp late October morning, Jake and Ben had made three round-trip runs between Prescott and La Paz.
On the first trip they rode in separate wagons. On the second trip they both rode in Ben’s wagon and, in spite of Jake’s garrulous nature, the conversation was on the sparse side. Ben was nowhere near as withdrawn as he had been when they first met in La Paz, or on the journey to Prescott with Ike, or during the early time when they got there, but still, there was a certain residual reserve about him.
But by the third trip, they not only rode together and talked to each other, but more often than not, it was Ben who initiated the conversation. Sometimes about Ike, other times about Sister Bonney or the boys, even about marriage.
Once, when Ben mentioned Melena’s name and how, now that things were going better, the two of them hoped that soon there would be a baby sister or brother for Benjie, Ben looked at Jake and asked, “How about you?”
“I know that Ike was married, but how about you, Jake? Have you ever been married?”
“Nope.”
“Never been in love?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then I won’t ask.”
“You’ve already asked . . . so I’ll tell you. It was at Temple, back in England. I was sitting up front, and for some reason something made me turn back and look. There she was, across the way, close to the back. After that first glimpse I couldn’t help turning and looking at her again and again. She wasn’t the most beautiful girl I ever saw, but there was something about her, mostly her eyes, something that made me feel I had knives in both knees, something that made me tremble and made me try to catch my breath. I knew I had found the woman I wanted to marry. When the prayers were over, I pushed my way through people and went to where she was—but she wasn’t. She had left. Outside, I looked everywhere. But she was gone. I never heard her voice and I never saw her again . . . and maybe it’s better that way. But you know something? Not a day goes by that I don’t remember those eyes, and think of her and hope that sometime, somewhere, I’ll see her again. But one thing I’m sure of . . .”
“What’s that?”
“It won’t be in Prescott.”
“You never can tell, but that’s some story, Jake.”
“It is,”—Jake smiled—“if you believe it.”
“Huh? I don’t know whether to believe you, or—”
“I’ll tell you something you can believe. Something you can see with your own eyes.”
“What?”
“Indians. Apaches. On that ridge.” Jake pointed. “They been riding along with us for the last mile or so.”
Jake took off his hat, held it up high and waved.
“That one up front. From here he looks like Colorados to me.”
The Indian up front waved back.
“To me, too.” Ben nodded. “But it sure is a different Colorados than we met that first time.”
“You’re right about that. He’s changed. But then, we’ve all changed some.”
“Sure have, Jake.” Ben smiled. “Some more than others.”
As the loaded wagons with Jake and Ben in the lead wagon rolled by the window of Lessur’s office, Gallagher shook his head.
“Well, boss, looks like business is boomin’ . . . for them. That’s their third trip. . . .”
“I realize you can count to three, Gallagher. Just shut up.”
“Sure, boss. Anythin’ else you want me to do?”
“Yes, there is.” Lessur picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “I want you to make another run to La Paz. Here’s the list.”
Gallagher took the paper and glanced through it.
“All this?”
“No, you damn fool, just half of it.”
“Huh?”
“Of course, all of it.”
“Well, I just meant . . . stuff’s beginning to pile up in the warehouse and—”
“And things are going to be different around here, and soon. We’ll get rid of all we’ve got stored . . . and some other things.”
During that time in November when Jake was away with Ben, Ike would hear the boys’ nightly prayers, then sleep on his bed in the room next to theirs for the rest of the night. But when Jake was in town, once or twice a week, Ike would walk over to the Emporium, watch a card game—seldom playing himself—but would listen to Binky’s orations, have one or two drinks, sometimes with Binky, sometimes with Oliver Knight or Doctor Zebelion Barnes or Tom Bixby, but usually with Belinda Millay at her table while she kept her fingers mobile with a deck of cards.
Lessur was usually there, usually playing cards and usually winning. Ike never sat in and played against him. Neither did Belinda.
On one of those nights as Ike and Belinda were at her table, she shuffled the cards and slapped the deck.
“Cut.”
Ike cut.
She picked up the deck and dealt. Five cards apiece.
“Take a look,” she said.
Ike looked at his hand.
She didn’t look at hers.
“You’ll take three cards. Right?”
“Right.”
“Sure you will, because you’ve got a pair of kings and nothing else.” She dealt. “Now look.”
He did.
“You feel good because you caught another king. Right?”
“Right!”
“So you’d bet pretty heavy. But don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .”—Belinda discarded her top card without looking at her hand and dealt herself a card from the deck—“. . . you’d lose. I just dealt myself a flush.” She turned over her cards. “All blue.”
“I’ve been in a lot of card games, but that’s the most amazing hand I’ve ever seen anybody deal.”
“That’s nothing.” She smiled. “I’m only pretty good. You ought to see some of the gamblers on the riverboats or in New Orleans. They’re really good.”
“What about our friend,”—Ike pointed at a table—“Mister Lessur? Pretty good or really good?”
“Not really good.”
“That reminds me. You never did finish telling me the story of your life. How did you get to be . . . pretty good? You started to say something about your father. . . .”
“Oh, yes. My father. He was a simpleton. An honest, hardworking Tennessee farmer, but a simpleton. Worked seven days a week all his life and died in debt. But his brother, my Uncle Max, never worked a day in his life and lived in relative comfort all his days, playing cards in and around Memphis.
“Uncle Max made sure not to win so much that the losers would quit playing with him, but enough for his needs. He had a gift with numbers, and nimble fingers that could deal seconds and thirds. He was kind enough to teach his little niece a few tricks while keeping his fingers limbered. By the time I was twelve I could count the cards at blackjack. By fifteen, Uncle Max proclaimed me a poker master. Sometimes I could even beat him . . . but not long after that both he and my father were dead. One in a duel after a card game, the other from hard work and a weak heart.
“But a fifteen-year-old girl couldn’t play poker for a living . . . and then, Mister Silver, as the story goes, ‘I met a man’. . . and the rest isn’t so pretty.”
“Good evening, you two.” Rupert Lessur had finished his game, collected his winnings, and stopped by Belinda’s table.
Both Ike and Belinda nodded, but didn’t answer the greeting.
“And I want to thank you, Miss Millay, for a very enjoyable and profitable evening.”
“No thanks necessary, Mister Lessur. To me it’s a matter of indifference. The house never loses.”
“Mister Brady lost the house.”
“Mister Brady wasn’t good enough.”
“And you are?” Lessur smiled.
Belinda cut the deck . . . and revealed the ace of spades.
“Very amusing. I’ve seen other players do that . . . and still lose.”
She replaced the ace in the deck.
“Would you care to try?”
“Oh, no.” He smiled and tipped his hat. “Not me. Good night.” He reached for a cigar as he left.
“Be careful,” Ike said. “I think Mister Lessur’s got something up his sleeve.”
“Good advice, Big Ike.” Belinda nodded. “Take it.”
As was his custom each night before retiring, Ike Silver wound his gold watch, pressed the stem to open the lid, listened to the tune it played and looked at the wedding picture pasted to the inside of the lid. This night he thought of the lines in a poem.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these, “It might have been.”
He thought of what might have been if Rachel hadn’t died giving birth to Obie. Of what might have been if they were all there together. His only consolation was that every time he looked at those two boys, in a way, Rachel went on living.
Ike Silver closed the lid of the watch and went to bed.
Once more, Captain Bourke and Lieutenant Gibbs stood at a distance at Spanish Flats, where Crook and Colorados met, talked and smoked.
Lieutenant Gibbs smiled as he spoke to Bourke, who was not smiling.
“Looks like they’re getting along like two peas in a pod.”
“Far as I’m concerned, they’re not two peas. One’s a snake and he’ll strike whenever it damn well suits him, just like those other snakes struck my brother.”
“Maybe not, Captain. Things change.”
“Things,” Bourke replied, “not snakes.”
Crook puffed on his cigar, then tapped off the long white ash. “We’re more than halfway there, Colorados. It won’t be long before your pardon comes through and we can both sign that treaty.”
“Other treaties have been signed.”
“Not by you and me.”
“That is true, Gray Wolf. You have kept your word. I will keep mine.”
“I know that. Then maybe I’ll meet your bride so I can give her a wedding present.”
“The treaty will be present enough.”
“How is she . . . what is her name?”
“Su-Wan. She has brought me much happiness.”
“There will be more to come when you have children.”
Colorados nodded, smiled and smoked.
Naked, Su-Wan bathed in the cold running stream. She was copper-colored with long blue-black hair, fawnlike eyes set wide apart with curled lashes and narrow eyebrows for an Apache. She was tall for an Indian woman, with wide shoulders, blossoming breasts, a tapered waist and full hips that narrowed into strong, lengthy legs.
She scooped the water with both palms onto her face, shivered just a little and walked gracefully out of the stream, then froze at the sight of Quemada.
His eyes absorbed her nakedness. Still, she did not move. She did not try to cover herself. And in her eyes there was defiance . . . until he turned and walked away.
That night as they lay in their wiki-up, smoky and private, Colorados sensed a difference after they had coupled, and finally spoke of it.
“Su-Wan, is there something wrong?”
“Not as long as we’re together,” was all she said, then put her arms around him.
“Ben, can this last?”
“Can what last?”
“This. You and me together . . . with Benjie, here in this place, with these people. Every time you leave to go to La Paz, even though I know it’s just for a few days . . . I get an ache in my heart . . . thinking maybe something’ll happen . . . and you won’t come back . . .”
“I’ll always come back to you, Melena.”
He put his arms around her and drew her close where they lay.
“I’m back now.”
TRUCE HOLDS!!!
So read the headline in the new edition of The Prescott Independent.
The story, once again by Oliver Knight, went on to say in part:
. . . this marks the third edition since we first printed the welcome news of a truce between the U.S. Army and the erstwhile hostile Mimbreno Apaches, as agreed to by Colonel Crook and Chief Colorados, thus giving the lie to numerous naysayers and crepehangers who went around Prescott proclaiming the truce had as much chance of succeeding as a flatiron of floating at sea. Well, nuts to you, naysayers, because it won’t be but a few more editions before an official TREATY is signed by said parties.
“I made it my business to deliver this to you personally, Rupert,” Oliver Knight said as he placed the newspaper on Lessur’s desk and looked at him and Gallagher, “since, as I recall, you were one of the naysayers about the truce.”
“Oh, no!” Lessur feigned incredulity. “You must have misunderstood, Oliver. I’m all for prosperity and peace in the Territory.”
“Sure you are, Rupert . . . your own prosperity, and a piece of everything you can grab in the Territory.”
“Why don’t you just go ahead and print something like that, Oliver, and see what happens?” Lessur grinned.
“Is that a suggestion, or a threat?”
“Take it any way you like, Oliver.”
“In that case, Rupert,”—Knight walked toward the door—“I suggest you keep reading the Independent.”
After the door closed, Gallagher looked at Lessur as Lessur lit a cigar and didn’t seem at all distressed.
“That little bastard’s got nerve, hasn’t he, boss?”
“That little bastard,”—Lessur inhaled the smoke from his cigar—“is going to have a couple of other things to write about in the next few editions of his newspaper.”
“It won’t be long now, Big Ike. The shorin’s all done, everything’s cleaned up, the diggin’s begun, and what we’ve dug out so far looks as rich as anything I’ve ever come across.”
“Glad to hear it, Sean. You and your men’ve put in a lot of hard work these past few weeks.”
“We’re used to it, but I’ll tell you one thing we’re not used to.”
“What’s that?”
“Spectators . . . at least they’re spectators so far.” Dolan pointed toward a ridge, where, outlined against a gray November sky, a half-dozen mounted Apaches could be seen, but not identified.
“I see what you mean.”
“Every day, well, most every day, they show up, look down on us for a time, then just disappear. We know about their burial ground between here and there, and believe me, we don’t go anywhere near it. They can have their ghosts. We don’t want any part of ’em. All we want is pay dirt, and we’ve already got that.”
“Good.”
“And speakin’ of pay dirt, like I said, it won’t be long before we’ll be needin’ your best and strongest wagon to haul that yellow outta here.”
“You’ll have it, just send down word.”
“We’ll do that, but . . . I’ve got a feelin’. . . .”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Well, that things are goin’ too good. My sainted mother used to say that she didn’t like things to go along too good . . . better that things are just in between . . . that way nothin’ can go real wrong.”
“Some Jewish mothers seem to have the same outlook, but in this case—”
“You’re right, Ike, they could be wrong.”
“They better be.” Ike smiled.