The Whip Hand

The sod huts and tarpaper shanties and log cabins with a few wood frame buildings lining the main trail through town sat in a crease between large, low, fawn-colored bluffs. Atop the bluff south of town stood one lone pine tree. That was the only tree anywhere in sight, though scraggly shrubs lined the wash that cut around the south edge of the town, between the town and the bluff with the lone pine on it.

Age-silvered log shacks and sod huts lined the wash that appeared to be a trash dump for those living along it. Sickly looking men and wizened women milled around the huts, with sickly looking animals in stock pens and rudimentary stables hammered together with mismatched boards and stone. It was midday, but in a chicken coop down there along the wash a mixed up rooster was crowing. A dog sat atop the brush roof of one of the sod shanties—a black and white collie dog—barking at the newcomers riding into town.

Machado’s bunch had been avoiding towns on their eastward trek toward the Missouri River, which Annabelle had heard one of the gang members mention was only another day or so away. She wondered why they were heading into Lone Pine but, as they did, Annabelle couldn’t help entertaining the possibility that she might find help here.

The town wasn’t much but surely it had a lawman.

The buoyant thought had no sooner swept through her brain than she saw a sign tacked to two unpeeled pine poles extending out into the main street.

It read simply CONSTABLE in unsteady black lettering.

That’s all it needed to say to cause Annabelle’s heart to pick up its beat.

The gang had pushed hard that day, but now they walked their tired, sweaty horses into the town. The constable’s office was coming up on Anna’s right—a weathered log shack with a tin roof, deeper than it was wide, loose chinking between the gray logs. There was a small, roofed stoop fronting the place. An old man sat in a chair to the left of the cabin’s front door, which was half-open, exposing deep shadows within.

He was a little man, but he sported a bulbous paunch, and a bulbous red nose occupied a good portion of his badly weathered face with a thin gray mustache mantling his upper lip and a spade beard of the same color adorning his chin. His skin was ruddy and sun-blotched, freckled. He sat the chair smoking a pipe with an almost dreamy air. A tin cup sat on a small, halved-log table beside him.

When he saw Machado, he smiled around the pipe stem, smoke wreathing his head topped with a battered tan Stetson. Annabelle eyed the man hopefully as she rode the horse Machado had stolen for her, killing its rider in cold blood. Surely the lawman would see that her wrists were tied to her saddle horn, that she was a captive in need of rescuing. She doubted the old man could do it himself but surely he’d gather other citizens, form a posse of sorts.

She felt that hope, that certainty only briefly.

It became clear to her that she was likely not the only captive Machado had paraded through Lone Pine.

It became even clearer to her when the old lawman started laughing.

He stared at her, and his little eyes were pinched up as he laughed, throwing his head back as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard. He kept laughing as the gang and Annabelle rode on past him. She could hear him laughing even a block away, as they headed for a large, barrack-like, unpainted, wood frame, clapboard-sided building another block farther on, sitting perpendicular to the street that followed a bend around the large place, easily the largest building Annabelle had so far seen in Lone Pine. Girls in skimpy, brightly colored clothing—there were a lot of reds and blacks—lounged around on the wooden, second-floor balcony.

THE LONE WOLF HOTEL was painted in large, black, ornate letters across the top of the building’s second story, just below the mansard roof.

Judging by the skimpy attire by the girls on the balcony—some of whom were leaning against the rail smoking cigarettes in long, wooden holders—the Lone Wolf was more than just a hotel.

Don’t tell me, Annabelle thought, that he’s going to put me up in another hotel again? After her attempt to escape from Cheyenne Bend, she’d thought she was a goner. But he’d let her live. Even after killing Big Nick by ramming his own bowie knife into his neck, she was still alive!

She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it.

Ahead, Machado reined his horse to a stop in front of the building and smiled up at the doves du pave fluttering like colorful birds on the balcony. One of the girls, a pretty, green-eyed mulatto with shoulder-length, frizzy black hair, called through the open French door behind her, “Miss Delphine, Mister Machado is here!”

Silence.

Then Annabelle could hear footsteps growing in volume until the front door atop the porch opened and a pretty, brown-eyed blond woman in a flowing, cream gown appeared. She threw a hand up against the door frame to her left and took a drag off the long, thin, brown cheroot protruding from a long white porcelain holder.

“Well, Mister Machado,” she said coquettishly, in a heavy, Southern, slow, beguiling accent from somewhere far below the Mason-Dixon Line, “what an honor to have your grace us here at the Lone Wolf with your presence again, sir!”

Even sitting her mount at the tail end of the back, Annabelle could hear Machado’s seedy chuckles. He leaned out to the right of his saddle, placed an elbow on his knee, raised that hand, and beckoned the woman with his right index finger. At first, she frowned, befuddled, then, gown flowing around her in the breeze of her graceful passage, crossed the porch, drifted down the steps and moved over to have Machado whisper into her ear at some length.

While he spoke into the pretty woman’s ear, she cast her gaze around the uncouth ruffians to Annabelle and arched both brows as though in surprise.

“Oh . . . she pretty,” Annabelle heard her say to the slaver leader.

Oh, no, Annabelle thought. Another whorehouse madam in cahoots with the goatish ol’ Saguaro.

He pinched his hat brim to the woman, then reined his horse back down the street in the direction from which they’d come. The man who’d been leading Annabelle’s horse dropped the reins and, along with the two others, followed Machado—likely to one of the several saloons Annabelle had spied on her way into town.

“Maggie, Patricia,” the pretty Southern blonde yelled up to the balcony. “Your assistance, ladies, please!” she added, puffing on the long cigarette holder and eyeing Annabelle sitting her horse alone, a good thirty feet away from whom she figured was the Lone Wolf’s madame. She was probably in her mid-thirties, and it was a hard-won thirties, but she was still pretty.

When two girls strode out of the Lone Wolf, Miss Delphine began strolling toward Annabelle, still puffing on the cigarette. A mousy redhaired girl and a pretty, lithe girl with long, black hair fell into step beside her, all three eyeing Annabelle as though she were a cut of meat they were thinking of purchasing in their local grocery.

“Well, hello, there,” said Miss Delphine, stopping near Annabelle and crossing one arm on her chest while puffing the cigarette with her other hand, slowly blinking, her light brown eyes raking Annabelle up and down. “Pretty,” she said, while the girl with long, black hair produced a stiletto from a sheath strapped to her right thigh and began sawing away on the ropes binding Annabelle’s wrists to her saddle horn.

“What’s happening?” Annabelle said, wondering if she had just been given another opportunity to flee. If so, she would not. He knew she would not. She was too broken, and she knew she would only be caught again.

She was so exhausted, she wanted to die. She thought if a gun were available, she might very well shoot herself. She wouldn’t, of course, when it got right down to it. Because she would think about her beloved Hunter, Angus, and Nate.

The Box Bar B and all her beloved horses.

But was it all possible she would ever see them and the ranch again?

“What’s happening, dear heart,” said Miss Delphine, pulling the cigarette holder away from her mouth and blowing a long plume of smoke, “is that I might just be able to save your life if you cooperate.”

Annabelle frowned curiously. “How?”

Miss Delphine tossed her head toward the sprawling building behind her. “Come.”

“Where am I going?”

“Inside. We’re going to make you presentable.”

“Presentable.”

Miss Delphine gave a shrewd smile. “He’s sweet on you, dear heart. Otherwise, I have no doubt you wouldn’t have gotten this far. Come! Girls, help her!”

Maggie and Patricia helped the shaky Annabelle down from the saddle. She was so weak from exhaustion and hunger she could barely walk. Each girl wrapped a hand around her waist and led her up the porch steps, across the porch, and into the rambling building that smelled of wood smoke and cooking food. She found herself in a large, well-appointed parlor with a sprawling kitchen through a doorway on her left. She was led across the parlor and then up a narrow, winding, enclosed stairway, past one landing to a third and then down a hallway lit by windows on both ends.

Miss Delphine stood in an open doorway halfway down the hall, on the left side. “We’ll put her in here. Leave her to me for now; fetch bath water.”

Miss Delphine led Annabelle into what appeared a suite of rooms. She eased Anna down into a soft, brocade sofa then went to a cabinet, produced a cut glass decanter, and half-filled two cut-glass goblets. She gave one to Annabelle.

“Here. It’ll cut the trail dust.”

Annabelle accepted the glass but looked up sharply at the pretty blond woman as she stared down at Annabelle, the smoldering cigarette holder in one hand, the glass in her other hand. “You work with Machado?”

“Yes.”

Annabelle drew her mouth corners down in defeat, nodded slowly.

“But not how you think,” said Miss Delphine, her slow, dog-wood blossom-soft accent strangely comforting. Maybe because it sounded like Hunter’s when he was tired, weary after a long day gentling a horse in the round corral that Annabelle hoped against hope she would live to see again. “I keep the girls alive. Those he sells to me, I make sure get returned to where they come from. If he sells me to you at a price I can afford, I will see you get back to where you came from. However, I think he’ll want to save a pretty redhead like yourself for Corazon. He can afford you. I probably can’t if he asks for what I think he’s going to ask. I can save two girls for the price he’ll likely ask for you. I can keep you alive, however. For now. How you fare when you leave here will be up to you.”

Footsteps sounded in the hall, and then Patricia and Maggie came in with two steaming buckets of water apiece. They disappeared through a doorway Annabelle assumed led into a washroom, and she promptly heard the water being poured into a tub.

“First,” Miss Delphine continued, “we have to make you clean and pretty. You’re going out on the town tonight, don’t you know?” She threw her head back and gave a tittering laugh. “I didn’t think I’d ever live to see it, but he’s tumbled for one. He’s tumbled for you, Miss Annabelle Buchanon.”

Suddenly, she frowned, deeply curious.

“Buchanon. That’s a name from my Southern past. The war . . .”

“My husband is Hunter Buchanon,” Annabelle said and took a sip of the brandy.

It went down well, almost immediately filing off some of the sharpest edges.

“Ahh,” said Miss Delphine, removing the cigarette stub from the holder and mashing it out in an ash tray on the table before her. “That, too, will up the price.”

Annabelle leaned forward, holding the glass in both hands on her knee, giving the madam of the Lone Wolf Hotel a pointed look. “Do you seriously believe I will go out ‘on the town’ with that man. The savage who beat my husband, possibly to death, and kidnapped me, intending to sell me to Missouri River slave traders?”

“Yes.” Miss Delphine nodded. “Because you want to live. If you want to live, you must do what he wants you to do. For now, he wants you to be his woman. So be his woman. Go out and eat a nice meal, drink some French wine, and pretend to enjoy yourself. That way you might live to see another day. Aggravate him, and he will forget about Corazon and the tidy sum your pretty red head will fetch and stick a knife in your heart.” The madam shook her head. “You’ll never be seen or heard from by those you love again.”

She poked another cigarette into the end of the holder and lit a match.