CHAPTER 31
Two hours earlier, Hattie had awakened with a start.
At first, she couldn’t remember where she was. The room around her, cloaked in the shadows of the predawn darkness, resembled a room in some fragmented dream, like the nonsensical dreams she often had just before waking.
The room was small, barely larger than a broom closet. She could see the flowered wallpaper and the dresser on her left.
She also saw the skimpy outfit lying on top of it, where she’d left it last night after the saloon had closed just after midnight. It all came back to her—the stolen gold, the town, the job, and the Honeysuckle Saloon and Dance Hall.
She also remembered the noise she’d heard in her sleep, which had awakened her. The faint chirp of a floorboard. She peered toward the door standing three feet from the foot of her bed. She looked at the crack between the door and the floor. An eerie blue light shone dimly in the crack. The light was broken by a single dark blob, as though someone were standing there, just outside the door, the person’s feet blocking the light.
Hattie could almost feel the man standing there. At the moment, she couldn’t hear him, but the prickling of the fine hairs across the back of her neck, and a chill in her belly, told the young Pinkerton detective that a man was there, sure enough.
She thought she could hear him breathing. She thought she could also hear a slight creak in the door, as though the man were pressing his weight against it.
Hattie’s belly grew colder.
Her blood quickened through her veins.
“I know you’re out there,” she said softly, so that only the man in the hall could hear. “Go away, or I’ll yell for Mister Hicks!”
The door creaked faintly again. It was joined by a faint snicking sound, like the soft brush of cloth against wood. The man was pressing himself up against the door.
Hattie thought she could even smell him now—a sickly sweet, unwashed man smell.
Her heart thudding, she tossed her covers aside and dropped her feet to the floor. She grabbed a robe off a chair back and pulled it on. She slid her feet into rabbit-skin slippers, then slid her derringer out from beneath the corset and bustier on the dresser.
Slowly, quietly, she walked to the door. Her heart was really beating now. It beat so hard, rapping against her ribs, that it ached.
She drew a deep breath and pressed an ear to the door. She winced when a floorboard gave a faint chirp beneath her left foot. On the other side of the door, another floorboard squawked. The door creaked as though from the sudden removal of the man’s weight.
“Hello?” Hattie said, staring at the door. “You go away, or I’ll—”
Quickly, she twisted the key in the lock, then turned the doorknob. She opened the door a crack, half expecting the man to shove the door wide and throw himself on top of her. Ready for such a move, she raised the derringer in her right hand and pressed her thumb against the hammer, ready to draw it back and fire.
But no one stood before her.
The floor chirped to her left. She whipped her head that way in time to glimpse a man—or a person, anyway—turn the hall corner and head for the stairs.
“Hey!” Hattie rasped, angrily.
The only response was a clipped, high-pitched, mocking chuckle.
Squeezing the derringer in her right hand, Hattie hurried down the hall to her left. She glanced down the stairs in time to see a man’s silhouette turn the corner at the bottom and disappear, boots or shoes thudding softly. There was another soft, mocking chuckle.
Hattie frowned down the carpeted steps, heart no longer racing as fast as before, a deep suspicion tempering her fear. “Who in the . . . ?”
Probably one of her customers from the previous night. Maybe he’d spent the night up here, with either Lilly or Iris. He was maybe still drunk and, knowing which room belonged to Hattie, who had recently become known in these environs as “Rose,” had decided to have a little fun. She should probably let it . . . and him . . . go.
But she was a true-blue Pinkerton. Her curiosity would not yield. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe the man had had more on his mind than merely pulling an impish joke on an attractive saloon girl. And, anyway, who did he think he was, trying to frighten her like that?
Hattie hurried down the stairs, her slippers nearly soundless on the carpeted steps, her robe winging out to both sides, as did her hair, which she’d given only a cursory brushing after retiring to her room. She’d been so tired after all those hours on her feet, and so sore from being pinched and grabbed all night, that she’d fallen right to sleep.
She gained the bottom of the stairs and made the sharp turn around the newel post on her right. She headed down the short hall toward the saloon’s back door, which was open a crack. The man had gone out that way and had not latched the door behind him. She stepped up to it, shoved it open a foot, and stuck her head out.
She looked both ways along the rear of the saloon. She heard another mocking laugh and jerked her head forward to peer straight out ahead of her. The man stood half behind a shed about fifty feet straight out beyond her, peering with one eye back toward her. The half of his mouth that she could see was twisted in a mocking grin.
He pulled his head back behind the shed, and once again he was gone.
Hattie ground her back teeth and bounded forward. As she moved out away from the hotel’s rear door, she realized her mistake. She’d let herself get flanked. She heard at least one person, possibly two, move up from behind her. They must have been standing to each side of the hotel, hidden. There was a strained grunt, and as Hattie began to whip around, raising the Dderringer, a burlap bag was pulled down over her head and shoulders, slamming her arm down.
The derringer barked in her right hand, the slug plunking into the ground dangerously close to her feet.
Hattie tried to scream, but someone grabbed her tightly, placing something, maybe a hand, over her mouth. Arms snaked around her, and two men, whom she could hear laughing devilishly, picked her up off the ground and began carrying her quickly—in which direction, she did not know.
She was badly disoriented. Her heart was back racing again in terror. She could barely breathe in the tight sack, and what little air she was able to suck into her lungs was fetid with the pine-tar smell of burlap. She felt as though she were drowning inside the sack, and she fought desperately, kicking, trying to punch her assailants, but to no avail.
One of them held her arms fast against her sides, while the other held her legs.
They carried her maybe a hundred jostling feet, turning sharply once, then stopped and set her brusquely down on something. Whatever they’d set her on, it was all sharp edges and very uncomfortable. Mixed with the smell of the burlap was the verdant, piney aroma of wood. They’d set her on a woodpile.
“Pull the sack off,” ordered a low, dull voice that Hattie thought sounded vaguely feminine. “Hurry up, Vernon, dammit!” the speaker added, sounding even more like a female, but a female with a low, hoarse, unpleasant voice.
Vernon pulled the sack off Hattie’s head. She raked in a deep breath as her hair fell back down around her shoulders, tumbling against her face. Cool, fresh air pressed against her. She drew it into her lungs and looked around, squinting into the murky, dawn shadows.
Sure enough, she was sitting on a woodpile inside a small shed. Four people stood in a ragged semicircle around her. One was a woman. The other three were men. They wore trail gear and pistols. The woman’s stout body was clad in a knee-length wool coat secured with a wide, brown belt to which were attached two holsters housing long-barreled revolvers. She wore high men’s riding boots. On her head was a floppy-brimmed felt hat. A chin thong dangled down her lumpy chest.
Hattie thought she might have been in her early thirties, maybe a little older. Her cheeks were fat enough to be smooth, the eyes darkly shadowed beneath her hat brim. Long, tangled, dark-brown hair hung down the woman’s shoulders. Her nose was doughy; her eyes were flat and mean as they studied Hattie, the woman’s upper lip curled disdainfully.
“Who’re you?” she asked.
Hattie spat sharply to one side, to try to rid her mouth of the awful, cloying smell of moldy burlap. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”
The woman stepped forward, bunched her lips, and slapped Hattie hard across her left cheek.
“Oh!” Hattie cried, falling onto her right side against the lumpy, sharp-edged chunks of split wood.
The men standing to each side of the rotund woman grinned beneath the brims of their own weather-stained Stetsons.
“Let’s try again,” the woman said. “Who are you?”
Hattie sat up, caressing her stinging cheek and regarding the woman angrily. “Go to hell!”
The woman bunched her lips again and cocked her arm for an even harder blow.
“Wait!” Hattie cried, raising her left arm up in front of her, shield-like. “The name’s Hattie. Hattie Dunbar!” Dunbar was her mother’s maiden name.
“Who the hell on God’s green earth is Hattie Dunbar?” the woman asked.
“I’m from a cabin east of here,” Hattie said, deciding to go with the same story she’d given Clifford Hicks.
“Who’re those two old hornswogglers that Red Ingram has locked up in his jail?”
“What?” Hattie said, not having to feign surprise.
The mean-eyed woman glanced at the men around her. “Forget it. Let’s take her back to the ranch. Daddy’ll wanna have a talk with her.”
“Wait!” Hattie said. “You’ve got no right to take me anywhere. I work here—in the Honeysuckle.”
“We’ll see about that.” The fat woman glanced at a man standing to her right.
The man held his hand up. “Look here,” he ordered.
Hattie looked at the man’s hand. As she did, the woman lifted a block of wood and smashed it against Hattie’s right temple.
Hattie crumpled, and everything went as dark as the darkest night until she found herself again with the sack over her head, lying sprawled on what felt like feed sacks. She must have been in a wagon, because the sacks were jostling around violently beneath her, while she bounced around on top of them.
Her hands were tied behind her back, and her ankles were tied as well. She couldn’t move much or pull the sack from her head, which felt as though someone had driven a stout-bladed knife through it, from just above her left eye to the back of her neck.
It throbbed as though a big, tender heart was now where her brain used to be.
She felt the sun on her body, still clad in her nightgown and robe. She’d lost her slippers, so her feet were bare, and she could feel the warm sun on them as well. It was stifling hot and stinky inside the burlap sack, which pushed in and out as she breathed, sucking air through the coarse fabric.
Grunting, wincing against the ever-present throbbing pain in her head, Hattie sat up, working her head around, trying to finagle the sack off her head.
“Settle down,” came the toneless voice of the mean-eyed woman. “Or I’ll bullwhip ya!”
“Where are you taking me?” Hattie cried out.
“Shut up or I’ll bullwhip ya!”
Hattie recoiled at the notion. She couldn’t imagine what a bullwhipping would feel like on top of the braining the mean-eyed woman had given her. She lay back down, gritting her teeth against the wagon’s every pitch and sway, crying out in agony when one or two of the wheels slammed hard into a chuckhole.
It was a long ride. Hattie supposed it seemed longer than it really was, given her physical agony, but she knew by the way the sun slid from one side of the wagon to the other that they were on the trail for at least a couple of hours. She could hear the clomping of other shod mounts, probably horses, behind her, and she occasionally heard men talking in a desultory fashion.
The second hour was an exercise in pure, unmitigated misery, and Hattie had to set her jaws and grit her teeth to get through it, though she thought for sure that at any second her tender brain would swell up and explode.
Tears streamed from her eyes, dampening the inside of the sack.
Torture. The ride was pure torture . . .
She grew hopeful when the wagon started to slow.
She blew a slow sigh of relief when it stopped altogether, hoping that it would not start up again after a short pause. Twice the woman had stopped the wagon to rest the mules. Hattie knew that at least two mules were pulling the wagon, because she’d heard them bray a time or two.
“Well, here we are, little girl,” said the mean-eyed woman in her low, toneless voice. “Home again, home again, jiggidy-jag!”
Hattie sighed and slumped against the feed sacks.
“Franklin!” the mean-eyed woman called. “We got somebody up at the mine?”
“Kentucky and Giff are pullin’ duty at the mine, Gerta,” came the response in a male voice from a distance.
“Good,” Gerta said. “Fetch Daddy! Tell him we got trouble!” In a lower voice, which Hattie could tell was directed at her, Hattie, the mean-eyed woman said, “But no more trouble than you got, little girl!”