We were a sad group that night. We gathered in Aunt Hilda’s room in Red Dobie’s boarding house-cum-salon. The tinkle of the music-hall piano downstairs, the clang of metal pitchers and the occasional wild burst of laughter came through the floor. We didn’t feel much like laughing; melancholy claimed us. We sat in silence.
It is sad to lose a friend. Even though Mr. Baker had been the strangest friend I’d ever had. It had taken a long time for me to learn to like him. Even in the desert, riding our stagecoach or tramping for miles on foot, there had been something that lingered in the back of my mind. Mistrust. I couldn’t forget that this was a man who had lied and cheated and murdered, who had traded in human beings as if they were so many pieces on a chessboard. But then, slowly, flashes of real generosity from him had put me to shame. It is possible for someone to change. He had offered me his last sugar-coated wafer. Made me swap seats in the stagecoach, so I could rest my head against the side window.
These generosities sound small, but there was also the larger thing. That he had gone against his brother, who by the sound of it had always dominated him. He had cast off evil and stood up, at last, for the right thing. Now that he was dead, I finally realized how much I valued his loyalty, how much safer he made us all feel. He had died so far from home, without his brother, who for most of his life had been everything to him. My heart was heavy as lead.
They planned to bury him in the camp’s cemetery; it had taken a furious argument on my part for them to agree to burn his body first. I shuddered to think what Cyril was afraid of. Cecil was versed in the dark arts—who knew what diabolical uses he could have for his brother’s body?
I had told my friends a little of what he said as he lay dying, though not all. Aunt Hilda paced up and down the small room, her boots thudding on the bare planks. Frankly her restlessness was getting on my nerves. Now she broke the silence.
“We’re jammered,” she said.
“Pardon?” Rachel said.
“Word I made up, pretty obvious really. We’re in a jam. Or in a pickle, a stew, a soup. A big juicy jam. Up the creek without a paddle, stuck in the Irrawaddy in monsoon, canoeing down the Thames in a leaky—”
“We get the point,” Waldo cut in.
She flashed him a smile. Waldo was always her favorite. If Rachel had interrupted her, it would have been another story.
“Cards on the table?” Aunt Hilda continued. “As far as I can see, we’re stuck in this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere. We don’t know where we are going, because Mr. Baker was leading us on this foolish wild-goose chase. And, to cap it all, we are stone-cold broke. Not a nickel or a dime to our name. So far Red Dobie, who I must say seems a bit of a gentleman, is footing the bill. But how long before he turns off the tap?”
“Pretty soon, I should think,” Waldo said. “It’s every man for himself out here.”
“Exactly. And in normal circs I heartily approve. But these aren’t normal, blast it!” Her eyes gleamed. “If it comes to it, we might have to put Rebecca here to work as a showgirl.”
Rachel blinked, then flushed deep red. Isaac let out a brotherly yelp of outrage.
“What?” Aunt Hilda said innocently. “I’m only saying that she’s a pretty little thing. These miners would pay a good deal to hear her sing. Let’s face it—we don’t have many options. The way things stand at present, we don’t even have enough to pay our stagecoach back to civilization.”
“Things haven’t come to such a pass,” I said, quietly. I dug into my pocket and lifted something out. Then I strode over to the side of the room and held the thing to the lamp. It was a big stone, the size of a sparrow’s egg, and it shone with a million points of blue light. How it blazed! It was by far the brightest thing in that shabby hotel room.
A chorus of oohs and aahs came from my friends.
“It’s beautiful!” Rachel gasped, looking at it greedily. “I’ve never seen something so lovely.”
Aunt Hilda strode forward and lifted it out of my hand. She held it between her stubby fingers, tilting it this way and that so that it caught the light. The stone sparkled, warming my aunt’s face.
“An Indian diamond. From one of the Raj’s princely states, if I’m not mistaken. And of darn good quality. Where on earth did you get it, Kit?”
“You’d have to ask Mr. Baker. My guess is that the brothers bought it, or stole it, when they were in India. He pressed it on me when he was dying. Said he’d hidden it in the false bottom of his trunk. Bandit Bart had emptied the trunk, but didn’t think of a false bottom. It wasn’t till later, after he had died, that I looked at it and realized how fine it was.”
“I’m not surprised,” Waldo said. “A man like that. A millionaire. He would have carried some insurance on him. Well—thank heavens he was so practical. One has to have an instinct for saving one’s skin.”
I gave Waldo a hard look. I hadn’t forgotten what he had done to our Apache friends. Everything about him was repulsive to me. His slick blond hair, the look of smugness about his full lips, his self-satisfied blue eyes.
“Oh, I expect you know all about being practical, Waldo,” I said. “It’s all about Number One with you, isn’t it? Blast the consequences for anyone else.”
I felt a moment of glorious satisfaction as I saw the look of shock on his face. Aunt Hilda turned round and glared at me.
“Well, I think Waldo has the right attitude,” she snapped. “We have to be sensible here.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. I won’t let the side down. I’ll be just as selfish as you and Waldo,” I snapped at Aunt Hilda, and stalked out of the room.
The air was blue with smoke in the saloon bar downstairs and thick with conversation. The others hurried after me as I entered the room. A cowboy was tinkling away at an out-of-tune piano, and a couple of showgirls were dancing. They wore ruffled scarlet skirts, scandalously short for they only just covered their knees. They kicked their legs in the air to reveal lacy white underwear. Their hair was bright blond and they had thick circles of rouge on their cheeks. A third lady was singing, or at least that’s what I think she was doing. Her voice was so whiskey-rough it wouldn’t have disgraced a gunslinger.
Rachel coughed as we entered the saloon. I could tell she didn’t want to be here. Aunt Hilda strode forward, though, cutting her way through the throng of cowboys, miners and the men playing poker in a cloud of cigarette smoke. I noticed the card players had a beautiful cover on the table. It was made of soft skin and sewn with intricate blue beads. Unmistakably an Apache tunic. It must have been a trophy from their raid on our friends’ village. The sight made me harden my heart even more against my former friend Waldo.
There weren’t many women here, to be sure, a handful apart from the saloon girls, but that didn’t bother my aunt. You had to admire her. Whether at a garden party at Buckingham Palace or at a raucous bar in the middle of nowhere, she was always precisely the same.
“What’s your best whiskey?” she barked to the bartender. The sea of revelers parted for her, as if she was Queen Victoria herself. “The very best, mind.”
“I guess that would be Red Eye or maybe Coffin Juice,” the bartender replied.
“Ha! I’ll have a double Coffin Juice and, let me see, lemonade for the—”
“I’ll have a beer,” Waldo said, puffing out his chest.
I glanced at him. Here he was again, showing off that he was older than the rest of us. By one measly year.
“Very well, a beer and three lemonades.”
The bartender returned in a few minutes with the three cold glasses of lemon, the beer and the whiskey.
“That’ll be fifty cents,” he mumbled.
“I’m afraid I can’t pay,” my aunt bellowed at the top of her voice.
“Ma’am?” the bartender mumbled, confused.
“Drat it, man, can’t you speak English? We’re flat broke. We were robbed and we simply have no money left.”
Why my aunt chose to boom this embarrassing information so loudly I had no idea. The tinkling piano stopped and every head turned to us, so it seemed. I flushed red and I could see Waldo was mortified. He cares so much about appearances. And, of course, he pretends he is an American now. Down the bar, Red Dobie, who was drinking a flagon of ale with a girl on his arm, turned to us, frowning. I wondered why Aunt Hilda was testing his patience so much. He had been generous, for he was grateful for the return of his horse Carlito. But, as she had already warned us, there were limits!
“Put it on the tab,” Red Dobie yelled. He paused and his lips curled. “This time.”
Aunt Hilda had the attention of every man and woman in the room. She smiled, enjoying herself.
“I haven’t been quite clear,” she said. “I should have said, we can’t pay with money.”
Out of her bag she drew the diamond and held it up, in the center of her flat palm. We were in the middle of a crowded saloon, blazing with gaslight, glittering with glasses, chandeliers and the showgirls’ cheap jewelry. It wasn’t the dingy bedroom upstairs.
Yet the purity of that diamond’s glow, its intense blue flame, drew every eye in the room. A silence grew and Aunt Hilda, every inch the showman, let it linger for a while.
“This,” she said, “is no ordinary diamond. It is a fabled gem. Priceless and unique. Ladies and gentlemen, you see here before you—all the way from the savage shores of the Hindu Kush—the incomparable Gem of Jaipur!”
A deep oooh went around the room. The pretty redhaired girl on Dobie’s arm, in what looked like a corset and a tiered skirt, was staring hungrily at the gem.
“As you may have heard,” Aunt Hilda continued, “we are travelers from far away. From good old England. While we were guests in your fine country, one of your fellows robbed us. He took everything we owned, practically down to our gold teeth!
“This isn’t what I call hospitality, but we’ll skate over that. We were penniless, desperate. If it hadn’t been for Red over here, we would have starved. Thank you, Mr. Dobie, by the way.”
Red gave a little bow as all eyes turned to him. Aunt Hilda continued, in full sail.
“We would be in a pretty pickle right now if it wasn’t for one thing. One of my friends, Mr. Cyril Baker, God rest his soul, was clever. Oh yes, he was clever enough to hide the Gem of Jaipur from the robbers.
“So, I offer this gem to you tonight for auction. Only dire circumstances would force me to sell it, but as you have heard, our situation is truly desperate.
“Now, lords, ladies and gentleman,” Aunt Hilda said, getting carried away, for there were no lords and few gentlemen for miles, “THE GEM OF JAIPUR GOES TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER TONIGHT.”
She stopped and closed her hand, cutting off the diamond from general view. Then she sank down onto a barstool. With her left hand, she picked up the glass of whiskey and downed it in one gulp. An admiring buzz filled the bar.
Red Dobie’s girl turned toward him and cried, “I got to have that diamond, Red. If you love me, if you truly love me …”
“Now listen here, sweetie,” Red said, licking his lips nervously, “be sensible, cutie pie.”
“Don’t cutie pie me. I tell you I want that Gem of Jedburgh, or whatever it is.”
Other drinkers, the more prosperous-looking, were also staring greedily at my aunt. But she took her time, clicking her fingers for more whiskey, which she downed equally quickly. I hoped she wouldn’t be too drunk to auction the diamond.
“Right,” she said, getting up off the stool and revealing the diamond in her hand. “I am going to start the bidding at one thousand dollars.”
There was a huge gasp around the saloon bar. Red paled. Aunt Hilda frowned in irritation.
“I call that a very, very fair starting price. Take this diamond into any jewelry store in New York or Frisco and you would get twenty times that sum, easy profits. How do you put it over here? Fast bucks, ladies and gentlemen.”
I had no doubt my aunt was telling the truth because the diamond looked rare and valuable. But this was a poor town in a rough desert. There were no pots of gold buried in these people’s backyards, or so I would guess.
“So who’ll be man enough to bid me a thousand dollars?”
To my surprise a dozen or so hands went up. Red Dobie’s among them. It seemed I had underestimated the wealth in these parts. Perhaps there really was silver and gold buried in the desert around here, as well as lead and copper.
As Aunt Hilda led the bidding higher and higher, most of the bidders fell away. There were only a couple left now, Red Dobie and a man at the bar, whose mouth was shaped in a permanent sneer. He wore a ten-gallon cowboy hat and two nickel derringers on his belt. From the way people shrank from him, I guessed he was not popular—an outlaw maybe, or some kind of villain.
The bidding was up to five thousand dollars now. A lot of money, more money than many people would see in their lifetime. Aunt Hilda abruptly stopped at that. She turned to Dobie and Mr. Sneer.
“You both desperate for this diamond, correct?”
“Give my last bullet for it,” said Mr. Sneer.
“Yeah—we are,” Red muttered, with a glance at his girl.
“Then prove it. I’ve got all the money we need. In fact, I don’t need to cart a great wad of dollars around. We’ll only be robbed again. It’s other stuff we want now. Horses, provisions, guns. I see the truth of it now: guns are more important than food in the Wild West.”
“We can give you all that,” said Dobie.
“We’ll give you a share of the saloon, half of it,” said the girl, flouncing her skirts and shaking her glossy carrot hair at the same time.
“A tenth,” said Dobie.
“Red!” the girl snapped.
“Make it a quarter,” Dobie said.
“I’ll take a tenth of your saloon,” said Aunt Hilda. “It looks like a good business. I also need good horses for all my friends, provisions, and let’s say a couple thousand dollars to see us through back to Frisco.”
“Done!” said Dobie, while the other man snarled, “Not so fast. It ain’t a fair bargain.”
A couple of derringers glinted in the gaslight, one for each hand. People screamed and backed against the saloon walls, others dived under the tables. In seconds a path had cleared between Dobie and Mr. Sneer, both of them holding their pistols. My aunt was still there, sitting straight-backed at the bar, holding her glass of whiskey.
“Now don’t be a fool, Jack,” Dobie drawled. “You know I don’t allow no gunfights in my saloon.”
“Seems to me that you gettin’ some mighty preferential treatment, Red. I could stand it when it was just Candy here; she’s a tramp anyway—”
“You take that back.” Red snarled at the insult to his girl.
For answer Mr. Sneer raised his guns. But Red was quicker—his hands flashed: bang, bang. In a split second both pistols had been shot clean out of his opponent’s hands. All that remained of them was smoking lumps of metal on the sawdust floor.
Pure fury glinted in Mr. Sneer’s eyes. He spat at Red, a huge gobbet of saliva, then turned tail and stormed out of the saloon. The doors swung after him, banging violently.
“Don’t be coming back, Jack,” Red shouted. “As sheriff, I say your sort are not wanted here. This is a decent lawabidin’ town.”
“I’LL BE BACK,” came the yell through the saloon doors.
As soon as Jack, or Mr. Sneer, as I thought of him, had gone, conversation started up again. The poker players went back to their tables, the girls flocked together, chattering excitedly. Shoot-outs, it seemed, were not that rare in this bar, whatever rules Red liked to lay down.
Waldo was whispering in my aunt’s ear. She listened and then turned to Red with a big grin.
“Hey, Mr. Dobie,” she yelled at the top of her voice. “I forgot to say, we want one horse in particular—Carlito.”
A huge gasp went up around the saloon. I could see hard-bitten miners shaking their heads. Others started whispering. There was anguish on the face of Red Dobie; you could see him wrestling with the dilemma. His girl put her hand on his shoulder and turned him round to look in her eyes.
“For me, Red,” she said.
“All right—take him. Carlito’s yours,” said Dobie. He blinked, his eyes watering.
I frowned at Aunt Hilda. I thought she was being cruel to Dobie, who after all had been kind enough to us. He had made a big mistake. Surely there were other girls in Chloride City? And beyond in Las Vegas and Dodge City? But there was only one Carlito. And I would take a horse over a diamond any day. A diamond is only a piece of rock, while a horse is a living, breathing treasure, one that can take you to the ends of the earth.
“A bottle of champagne to celebrate!” Aunt Hilda bellowed. “I’m buying.”
“We don’t have champagne,” said Dobie, who didn’t look like celebrating at all.
“In that case, another whiskey for me. Beer on the house for everybody, Red, courtesy of me, Hilda Salter.”
Dozens of people descended on the bar. Some looked as if they hadn’t washed for weeks. My aunt was hidden by a loud, drunken mass, and for a moment I thought they would lift her on their shoulders. Others began singing, “For ’e’s a jolly good fellow….”
Apparently they believed Aunt Hilda was a man!
So that is how we became part owners of one of the wildest saloon bars in the whole Wild West.
I’d thought of many outcomes for my journey—but not that we would become owners of what my father would have called a low drinking den! Well, you never can tell what life will hold, especially when you set off from the safety of your neighborhood into the great wide world.
It was several hours before we were able to retire to bed. In that time, I think Aunt Hilda had stood half of Nevada strong liquor. We’d seen the showgirls dance the cancan—and left just before a drunken brawl looked likely to start up, for some of Mr. Sneer’s friends were in a very bad mood after he was denied the diamond.
I had seen enough of the West to guess that drunken brawls were usually resolved down the barrel of a gun.