CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Hungry, girlie? Feeling gant?” Susan Stanton said. “Well, get used to it. You’ll be a sight hungrier before we reach a settlement.” She had removed Jenny Calthrop’s restraints and handed her a canteen. “Here, chew on some water. That’ll help.”
A sparse stand of blackjack oak and mesquite provided enough wood for a small fire that took all of Susan’s lucifers to light. She’d complained bitterly, cursed Jenny for a Jonah, and prophesied that they would not have another fire.
“Seems like our luck is already running muddy, huh?” she said.
“I could’ve lit the fire with one match,” Jenny said. “You lack patience.”
“Right now, I lack a lot of things, a good meal, a soft bed and, above all, money,” Susan said. She stretched out her long, booted legs and tapped her toes together. “Look at my thighs,” she said. “All bruised and scratched from scrambling around that damned mountain and my skirt is torn.”
“That’s because you dress like a fallen woman,” Jenny said.
Susan raised an eyebrow. “How would you know how a fallen woman dresses, you little prig?”
“I imagine they wear a lace-up corset like you that shows off the tops of their . . . bubbies.”
“Bubbies? You mean tits?”
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Jenny said.
Susan Stanton lay back on her elbows and tilted her head to the night sky where the stars looked like scattered diamonds on black velvet. The moon rode high, surrounded by a red and blue halo. The prairie was silent, apart from insects that made their small sounds in the grass.
Susan Stanton talked, uncaring if Jenny listened or not.
“I was raised in a brothel in Austin because my mother still had to work as a whore to keep us both alive. She was a mulatto and I was told she was beautiful, at least for the first few years she worked in the Lucky Star. Do you know what a mulatto is, you ignorant little whelp?”
Jenny made no answer.
“A mulatto means she was half black, half white, kind of coffee colored. She died when I was six and the brothel madame raised me, a woman by the name of Henriette Melancon. She was all right, kind of rough and ready, and when I was sixteen, I took my mother’s place. Well, girlie, that didn’t last long. There are men whose idea of a good time is to beat a woman. The first one who tried that with me ended up with a bullet in his belly from my derringer. Of course, the law would’ve hung me since the man I killed was a respected businessman in Austin. Henriette got me out of town thanks to a stagecoach driver who was a client of hers. She gave me fifty dollars and a word of advice. Want to know what that advice was?”
Jenny Calthrop was silent.
“Well, I’ll tell you anyway,” Susan said. “She told me I’d never make it as a whore because I hated men too much. She said I should become a nun where I’d never be around the male gender.” The woman laughed, the laugh of a fallen angel. “I didn’t become a nun. I followed the outlaw’s path, rolling drunks, later killing men for money, and then I fell in with Clay Kyle and the rest, as they say, is history.”
She turned her head and stared at Jenny. “Does it surprise you that a woman raised in a brothel dresses like a whore?”
Jenny’s mouth was tight. “How many men have you killed?”
“Hold up your hands and spread your fingers. Now count.”
“Ten.”
“That’s how many men I killed for profit. Count the fingers on one hand, and that’s the number I killed for fun. Susan Stanton laughed again. “Girlie, I’m your worst nightmare, a creature straight out of the lower pits of hell. Am I not?”
“Stop!” Jenny said. “You scare me when you talk like that.”
“I love scaring little girls,” Susan said. “Especially strait-laced little bitches like you.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, I may shoot you before this trip is over. I’ll have to think about that.”
“I’d rather die than work in a place like the Lucky Star,” Jenny said.
“Hmm, is that fact? We’ll just have to wait and hear what you decide when you have to choose between a bullet and a brothel, won’t we?”
Jenny didn’t answer, her eyes staring into the darkness. A light bobbed in the gloom and then came a clanking, rattling, metallic sound like the clattering of a stack of cheap tin trays.
* * *
Susan Stanton rose to her feet, buckled on her gunbelt, and stood, legs apart, ready. “You stay right where you’re at,” she told Jenny. “If there’s shooting, get down on your belly and stay there.”
A moment later, a man’s voice called from the darkness. “Hello, the camp!”
“Who’s out there?” Susan answered.
“Out here?” the man’s voice said. “Who would it be but Jacob the peddler?”
“State your intentions,” Susan said.
“And what would my intentions be? Do I want to sit at your fire and warm my old bones and drink coffee?”
“We have no coffee and no food either,” Susan said.
“And don’t I have both?”
“Then come on in,” Susan Stanton said. “If I see a gun in your hand, I’ll shoot you.”
“A gun? What does a peddler need with a gun?”
A bobbing lantern parted the night and a horse-drawn wagon, both animal and conveyance small, emerged from the gloom. The peddler drew rein on his horse and, with surprising alacrity, hopped down from the driver’s seat. He was a small man, thin, dressed in shirt, pants, and a vest, and he removed the cloth cap from his head, revealing an unruly mop of gray hair, and bowed. He then straightened and addressed Susan Stanton. “Is this not Jacob Birkin, the peddler? And, you ask, what do I peddle? Do I not sell, all at cost mind you, coffee beans, spices, baking powder, oatmeal, flour, sugar, hard candy, eggs when available, honey, molasses, crackers, cheese, syrup, dried beans, ammunition, and cigars and tobacco? And what do I have for the ladies? Do I not carry cloth, pins and needles, thread, silk, buttons, collars, undergarments, hats and shoes, soaps, toiletries, and elixirs? And don’t I always have in stock, lanterns, lamps, ropes, crockery, pots and pans, tin trays, cooking utensils, and dishes? And does Jacob Birkin not always carry an adequate supply of Dr. Jenkin’s Ladies’ Remedy, guaranteed to cure female hysteria, put a shine on hair, banish the rheumatisms, and restore a wandering womb?”
“And you get all that stuff in your peckerwood-sized wagon?” Susan said.
“Ah, is that not one of the peddler’s secret skills?” Jacob said. He smiled. “Now, shall we tap my water barrel and put the coffee on to boil while I take care of my horse? Do I not have coffee already ground and crackers and good cheese? Do you like cheese?”
“Mister, right now I’m hungry enough to eat a longhorn steer, hide, horn, hooves, and beller,” Susan said.
“And what about you, young lady?” the peddler said to Jenny. “Are you hungry?”
The girl nodded.
Jacob smiled and reached into his wagon. A glass jar opened and he came up with a pink and white candy stick that he handed to the girl. “Do you like peppermint?”
“Yes, thank you,” Jenny said.
“Now, is it not time to put the coffeepot on the fire?” the peddler said.
* * *
As the coffee boiled, Susan Stanton found it difficult to carry on a conversation with a man who answered a question with one of his own. But she gathered that Jacob Birkin was one of an estimated twenty thousand peddlers, most of them Jews, who traveled all over the frontier selling their goods at isolated ranches, farms, and settlements. He was now headed for a booming town named McLaren’s Landing that lay to the southwest where there was a brisk cowboy trade.
The coffee was drunk, a goodly amount of cheese and crackers eaten, then Birkin, a perceptive man with shrewd blue eyes, turned them on Jenny and said, “Why are you so quiet, young lady? Is something troubling you?”
Jenny’s gaze darted to Susan Stanton. As of that instant, she knew the peddler’s life hung in the balance.
“I took her from a house where she was being abused by her drunken stepfather,” Susan said. “I plan to take her to live with my parents in Thunder Creek, that’s a small town north of here.” She looked hard at the girl and then said, “She’s very mentally disturbed and doesn’t talk much.”
“Is that not heartbreaking?” Birkin said, shaking his head.
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Susan Stanton said. “Heartbreaking.” Her eyes glittered in the firelight.
“Do you know why I was concerned about the girl?” Birkin said.
“No, tell me,” Susan Stanton said.
“Two days ago, on my way south, did I not meet up with a Texas Ranger who stopped me to buy coffee and tobacco? And did he not tell me to keep my eyes skinned for a young girl kidnapped from a ranch north of here?”
“It’s not this girl,” Susan said. Her voice was strangely flat, emotionless, almost menacing.
“No, not this girl, is she?” Birkin said. “But what did the Ranger tell me? Did he not say that the Concho County Cattleman Association has posted a five-thousand-dollar reward for the girl’s safe return?”
Susan raised an eyebrow at that. “Five thousand?”
“Is that not what the Ranger said?”
“Posted by the cattleman’s association?”
Birkin nodded, the closest he’d come all night to a direct answer.
“Then we’ll keep our eyes open,” Susan Stanton said.
The peddler glanced at Jenny Calthrop but said nothing.
* * *
At first light, Jacob Birkin made more coffee and shared a breakfast of beef jerky and hardtack. Susan Stanton dug into her saddlebags and came up with money enough to buy more dried beef and biscuit and a handful of black cheroots. The peddler threw in a few candy canes for Jenny and a box of lucifers.
After he put his nag in the traces he climbed into the wagon’s driver’s seat and said to Jenny, “Have a safe journey, young lady.” He tipped a perfunctory nod to Susan Stanton but said nothing more.