FORT GRIFFIN, 1877
HOW MANY LUSTY DREAMS HAD HE DREAMT OF HER SINCE LEAVING St. Louis, dreams he’d at first felt guilty over? For he’d left her, after all, running away without so much as a proper farewell, then burning all her letters that followed him home. But he hadn’t been able to burn away the memory of her or make the dreams stop coming. And after a time, he’d found himself looking forward to the nights he spent with her, imagining himself back in St. Louis, imagining Kate in his arms, imagining Kate’s bed . . .
But there was someone else there now, the cow-thief called Johnny Ringo, and from what John Henry had seen that night at Shaughnessey’s place, Kate was glad to have him there. Would she be as glad to see John Henry again, if he could bring himself to speak to her? Or would she turn the same angry words on him that had filled her last letters, calling him a coward and worse for leading her on and then leaving her? Would she want him again, now that fate had brought them back together? Or would she laugh at him, flaunting her new love affair with the outlaw cowboy?
It was the thought of her laughter that kept him from making himself known, though he asked after her so often that Shaughnessey began to suspect something more than just prurient interest on his part. And hearing what the Irishman had to say about her, John Henry was even more unsure of what he should do. For Kate’s life had not gone well since he’d left her there in St. Louis—and he feared that he may have had some part in her downfall.
Shaughnessey had a barkeep’s knack of knowing how to talk to people and for getting them to talk to him, and he knew all about Kate’s sad story. As he retold it, she’d been a fine actress once with a grand career ahead of her until she found herself both pregnant and unwed. The father of the child was a married man, unfortunately, which left Kate no choice but to find herself another man and marry him to give herself and the baby a legitimate name. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Elder, her new husband, had a good income as a traveling salesman, since a pregnant actress couldn’t find all that much work. But when her new husband soon died in a fever outbreak, Kate was again left to fend for herself, and this time with an infant to care for. That was when she started onto the dance hall circuit, trying to rebuild her old career—though some folks said she’d turned to whoring for awhile, as well.
But it wasn’t her whoring that most surprised John Henry; it was the name of the man who’d fathered her child.
“An odd name it was,” Shaughnessey said, pausing to remember what she’d told him. “Sounded like Shamus, as I recall, but it wasn’t a good Irish name like Shamus.”
“Silas?” John Henry asked, and Shaughnessey nodded.
“Aye, that’s it. Silas it was that fathered the baby, the shameless adulturer that he was, getting her in the family way when he already had a family of his own. It’s one thing to go a-whoring, I always say, and another to go adulterin’. A blessing it was that the wee little thing left this earth before it ever knew the scoundrel that gave it life.”
“You mean the baby died?”
“’Tis true, sad to say. So after all that, Katie had nothin’ left in the end. No adulterin’ lover, no baby, no kind man to be a husband to her. Nothin’ but her career, what there was left of it. And to tell you the truth, she’s not all that much of a dancer, either. She says she used to do an act with a horse, but the horse got sold when the baby came to help pay expenses. I told her I’d get her another horse, if she wanted one, and she could do her act for my customers here. But she says there’ll never be another horse like the one she had. A wonderful horse, she said it was.”
“Wonder,” John Henry mumbled into his drink. “The horse was named Wonder . . .”
“What’s that you’re sayin’, Doc?” Shaughnessey asked. “Do you know somethin’ of our Katie Elder, then?”
But John Henry answered with a shake of his head. “No, I never met your Katie Elder. It was an actress named Kate Fisher I was thinkin’ of. I knew her for a time, back in St. Louis . . .”
For the Kate he knew would never have had a love affair with the likes of Silas Melvin, and he began to think that maybe he had never known her at all.
He took a room at the Occidental Hotel, as Shaughnessey had suggested, a comfortable place run by Fort Griffin merchant Hank Smith and his Scottish-born wife, Elizabeth Boyle. The enterprising Smiths had a notion that Fort Griffin might become a real civilized community one day, and ran their hotel as if it already were. The ledger books were carefully kept, recording each guest’s daily expenses, and Mrs. Smith made a point of not allowing drunken men into the dining room. That didn’t stop John Henry from drinking, however. He just bought his bottle at the bar and took it up to his bedroom where he could drink as much as he liked without the landlady’s disapproving gaze to disturb him.
He could have done his drinking elsewhere and would have preferred to have taken his liquor at Shaughnessey’s Saloon where the conversation was often more interesting than the card games. But Shaughnessey’s had the uncomfortable presence of Kate, whom he was doing his best to avoid. Since his return to the Flat, when he’d learned in quick succession that she was in Fort Griffin, was bedding a cowboy, and had lowered herself to sleep with Silas Melvin, he’d had ambivalent feelings for her. His attraction to her was still there, as it had been from the first time he saw her on the day of the St. Louis storm. But his estimation of her had fallen so far that he was almost angry at himself for feeling attracted and wasn’t sure he even wanted to see her again.
But Fort Griffin being the smallish town that it was, he couldn’t avoid Kate forever. So he wasn’t surprised to run into her when he did, while she was mailing a letter at the post office. He knew she was a letter-writer, of course, having been the uncomfortable recipient of all those passionate epistles she’d sent to Valdosta after his hasty departure from St. Louis. But somehow, he’d never pictured the exotic Kate doing something as ordinary as buying postage.
His own letter was addressed to Miss Martha Anne Holliday, Forrest Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia, and he had just handed the letter over to the postmaster at the Butterfield Overland Stage post office when he turned around and came face to face with Kate. She must have heard his surprised catch of breath and sudden cough, for even the postmaster commented on it.
“You all right?” the man asked, and John Henry nodded quickly.
“Just fine, thank you,” he replied, then regained his composure enough to tip his hat to Kate, a common courtesy to cover his sudden awkwardness.
He had two thoughts as he looked down into her rouged and powdered face: she had grown a little thinner over the years, and she was even more striking than he had remembered her to be.
“’Afternoon, Miss Fisher,” he said, and added with practiced manners, “It’s nice to see you again.”
“Good afternoon, Dr. Holliday,” she replied, though he noticed that she didn’t add the same mannerly comment.
“I’m stayin’ here in Fort Griffin awhile,” he said, as though he needed to make some explanation for his presence, and she answered with a nod of her head, making her gold earrings dance against her honey-gold throat.
“So I heard,” she said blandly. “Shaughnessey mentioned there was a dentist in town. I thought the name sounded vaguely familiar.”
Her chill reply was unnerving. He’d expected heat when they met again, anger or tears or something other than this cool propriety, but she looked at him from under the brim of her narrow bonnet as though she had never had any interest in him at all.
“I was just sending off a letter to my cousin . . .” he said, finding that he had nothing really to say.
“Well, I’m sure he’ll be pleased to hear from you,” she replied, then added with an unmistakable tinge of sarcasm, “I thought perhaps you didn’t know how to write.”
The postmaster must have been listening in, for he laughed at her comment then added with a smile, “Caught your show the other night, Miss Elder. Mighty fine acrobatics you do up there. You’re a helluva performer, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
At the sound of the praise, a smile swept across Kate’s face and she curtsied toward the postmaster, her stiff taffeta skirts rustling against the floor. Quicksilver she was, mercurial. She was also an actress, John Henry reminded himself, her enigmatic behavior all a show. Had her willing behavior with him, in those weeks in St. Louis, been all a show as well?
“You are too kind,” she said to the postmaster, gushing, and held out one gloved hand to his, turning all the heat that John Henry had expected for himself onto the stranger at the mail window. Then she went about her business, seeming to ignore him completely as she bought postage and sent off her letter.
He could have turned and left the stagecoach office then, and probably should have, as Kate clearly had no interest in continuing their conversation. But her aloofness somehow made him stand his ground instead.
“Kate,” he said, as she finished her postal business and turned around to face him once more, “we need to talk . . .”
“Really?” she said, slipping her coin purse into a tassled handbag. “I can’t imagine what we’d have to talk about, Dr. Holliday. My teeth are just fine. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
But as she brushed past him and stepped to the door, he said lightly: “I hear you’re with Ringo now.”
And finally, she gave him something like a smile.
“That’s right,” she said. Then she turned regally and swept out of the post office.
As much as Kate’s coolness bewildered him, her smile bedeviled. What had it meant? he wondered, pondering on it when he should have been concentrating on the cards or living a life of pleasant, mindless abandon. Was she pleased to be with Ringo, or pleased that he had noticed? And the more he pondered on it, the more he came to dislike the cowboy he’d never met, though that didn’t mean he was having any renewed feelings for Kate. Of course, he wasn’t. His pride wouldn’t allow it.
His pride wouldn’t allow him to keep hiding out from her either, now that they had finally crossed paths again, so he proved his disinterest by returning to his old place at Shaughnessey’s Saloon. Why should he deny himself the company of the friendly Irishman just because there was a troublesome woman living in the rooms upstairs? And what difference did it make to him if he could hear Kate and Ringo going at it on the squeaky bed overhead while he sipped at his whiskey down below? There was hardly a saloon in town that didn’t have a brothel attached to it, the squeaking of bed frames as much the music of Fort Griffin as the clamor of honky-tonk pianos playing out of tune.
Shaughnessey’s piano was an exception, however, as he’d paid good money to have a nice instrument hauled out from Dallas. Shaughnessey had dreams of turning his watering hole into a real varieties house one day—the reason he’d paid good money for Katie Elder, as well, who knew something about the theater. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many good piano players on the Texas frontier, so Shaughnessey’s spinet took the same abuse as the lesser instruments on the Flat, gathering prairie dust and cigar smoke on its ivory keys and going slowly out of tune.
John Henry’s mother would have been pained to see the way that piano-forte was treated, a fine piece of workmanship being worn out by the wild frontier. She would have dusted the keys and oiled the rosewood cabinet until it gleamed and had the strings tightened and tuned again. She would have played it as it was meant to be played, making something lovely out of it instead of letting it go to waste the way it was. And thinking of her made him feel a sudden yearning to have her music in him again. So, late one night after the stage show had ended and the back room had cleared out, he took his whiskey with him and sat down at the spinet, thinking he might play a bit.
His hands were still agile, with all the card playing and dealing he’d done in the last few years, but his memory for the music had faded some. The only piece he remembered well was the one his mother had most loved, the little waltz she’d been playing the night Mattie had taught him how to dance . . .
“Franz Liszt,” a voice said, giving the name the proper Hungarian pronunciation, and from out of the shadows of the darkened dance hall stepped Kate. She was wearing the red satin dressing gown, her glossy dark hair loosed from its hairpins and hanging down around her shoulders, and without the fashionable bonnet and bustle she looked smaller, somehow, and fragile almost. Then she moved toward John Henry and the dressing gown fell open a little showing a glimpse of bare white skin beneath the satin.
“I had forgotten you knew Liszt,” John Henry said, his pulse quickening at the unexpected sight of her.
“I’d thought you’d forgotten me altogether,” she replied. “You never wrote back to me, not once.”
“I was busy,” he said, lying. “I had my work in the dental office, and more helping around my father’s place. And I’ve been sick since then . . .”
“You left without saying goodbye. You didn’t even care enough to answer my letters. You have no heart, and I was fool enough to think myself in love with you.”
Her words took him by surprise, though she’d said almost as much in her letters. But since his arrival in Fort Griffin, she’d done nothing to show that she’d had such feelings for him, only offended his pride by her frustrating aloofness.
“And what of Silas?” he asked, his pride speaking out. “Doesn’t seem like you waited too awful long to fall in love again—or to fall into Silas Melvin’s bed. I remember you once claimed to have more refinement than that.”
There was a sudden hot light in her eyes and an unexpected anger in her voice.
“At least Silas was there in St. Louis! At least Silas didn’t leave me!”
“Silas was there, all right. Silas was always there as I recall, ignorin’ his wife to spend his nights makin’ indecent proposals to you. Which were finally accepted, so I hear. I imagine it must have been quite the talk around the theater: the famous Kate Fisher and her married lover, makin’ a baby . . .”
He hadn’t meant to be cruel, but her own words had driven him to it.
“You don’t know anything about it!” she cried, her voice rising with emotion. “You don’t know . . .”
“I don’t need to know. It’s clear that I was mistaken in my estimation of you, back in St. Louis. It’s clear you were nothin’ grander then than you are now, a cowtown whore sleepin’ with a cow thief.”
“How dare you!” she screamed, then at the sound of her own voice she suddenly drew herself back in, the actress taking over again. “I am not a whore. Ringo doesn’t pay me. He doesn’t have to. I’m with him because I want to be.”
“So why aren’t you with him now?” John Henry asked.
“Because he’s drunk. He drinks too much, sometimes, when the nightmares come. He watched his father die with half his head blown away by a shotgun. Johnny gets mournful sometimes when he remembers it and there’s nothing that will soothe him.”
John Henry paused a moment before replying, then he said slowly, “What I meant was, why are you here with me?”
She hesitated a moment before answering. “I heard the music, that’s all. It was beautiful. And there is so little in life that is beautiful anymore.”
Then she turned and walked away, leaving him alone in the darkness.
The music had lost its attraction for him, so he went back to the barroom for another shot of whiskey and found the bar closed and Shaughnessey nowhere in sight. It was, after all, so far past midnight that even the drunks had gone off to sleep the night away. So he helped himself to the liquor and sat down in a round-backed armchair for a nightcap, sipping at the whiskey and toying with his loaded Colt’s. He spun the chamber and cocked the pistol, spun the chamber again and uncocked it. Curse Johnny Ringo, he thought. And curse Kate, as well.
Then he heard a scream and knew without a second thought that it was hers.
He leaped to his feet with the pistol still in his hand, crossed the bar-room in three steps and bounded up the narrow wooden staircase, kicking in the locked bedroom door at the top of hall.
“No, Johnny!” Kate was crying. “Please don’t, I was only trying to help you!”
Kate was lying in the middle of the bed with Ringo crouched above her holding a revolver to her face.
“What would it feel like to die that way?” he was saying in a slurred whiskey voice. “Why don’t you try it for me, and tell me all about it?”
“Drop the pistol, Ringo, or you’re a dead man!” John Henry commanded, and Ringo looked up in drunken confusion.
“Who the hell . . .”
“I said drop it now and let the lady go. Or you’ll learn for yourself what it feels like to get your head blown off.”
Kate used the moment of distraction to pull away from Ringo, rolling off the far side of the tumbled bed.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said. “He would never hurt me, in his right mind.”
“But he’d likely kill you with the mind he’s in now. You’re a fool, Kate, throwin’ your life away on trash like this!”
“I was just doing a little experiment,” Ringo said to himself, “just having a little demonstration . . .” He swayed on his feet and put out a hand, reaching for the air.
“You’re not worth wastin’ a bullet on,” John Henry said in disgust. Then he grabbed the drunken man by the arm and pushed him out the open door. “Sleep it off in the street, Ringo. The lady is through with you.”
And Johnny Ringo, driven by his own private demons, gave Kate a sorrowful look before he stumbled down the stairs.
John Henry turned back to where Kate stood holding onto the brass bed frame and breathing fast.
“He said he was going to shoot me,” she whispered. “He wanted to show me how his father died . . .”
“He’s crazy, Kate. And you’re crazy for bein’ with him.”
Then she looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.
“Hold me!” she cried, trembling and reaching out to him. “Please hold me . . .”
But when she went into his arms, John Henry felt the soft rise of her body under the satin dressing gown, and he forgot that she was frightened and only needed comfort.
“Kate,” he said hoarsely, “Kate . . .” and he bent his head and kissed her.
And somehow, he wasn’t surprised when Kate slipped the dressing gown from her shoulders and slid her arms around his neck.
“Why don’t you close the door?” she said in that sultry voice he had dreamed about for so long. “And you can put that pistol away, as well. I won’t be giving you anymore fight.”
Making love to Kate was like no kind of lovemaking he had ever known. She had a hunger about her, a seemingly insatiable need to please and be pleased that kept him hungry, too. And though he had thought that one night with her would satisfy him, he found himself wanting her again every night. She was like some sweet, heady liquor to him; once he got started drinking, he couldn’t seem to stop.
For the convenience of their affair, Kate moved into his room at the Occidental Hotel. But she was only there a week before the hotel’s proprietress, the virtuous and very Presbyterian Mrs. Smith, discovered that the doctor’s new companion wasn’t his legally wedded wife and made a fuss about them staying there together, waking them early one morning with a brisk knock on the door and a voice filled with righteous indignation.
“Honeymooner’s, I thought you were, the way you’ve been spendin’ all day and night in the bedroom! Then one of my other guests says to me, ‘They may be honeymoonin’, but she ain’t no doctor’s wife. That’s Katie Elder, the dance hall girl. Well, I’ll not be allowin’ any such things under my roof, Dr. Holliday! The Occidental is a fine hotel, not some cheap bawdyhouse where harlots and such can ply their trade. Shame on a fine man like you, bringin’ disgrace upon yourself by such fornications!”
It was the same sort of speech that his mother would have given him, had she known about his sins, and once it would have made him feel guilty enough to beg forgiveness. There was a time when the memory of one night with a prostitute had driven him into fits of remorse. Now here he was living in sin, and he hardly felt any guilt at all. Even the thought that by taking a mistress he was somehow being unfaithful to Mattie didn’t trouble him too much, for though Kate had his body, Mattie still had his heart.
He found it interesting, in fact, that while he and Kate were making love, he could still summon up visions of Mattie’s sweet face smiling at him. And sometimes, holding Kate’s soft, perfume-scented body close to his, he let himself imagine that it was Mattie who was there beside him in his bed. And if that meant that it were really Kate he was being unfaithful to, well, that was the chance a woman took when she left a life of chastity.
“So you’re throwin’ us out, Mrs. Smith?” he asked, standing in the open doorway of his room while his landlady finished her tirade. She’d roused him from a pleasant sleep and he hadn’t had time to do more than pull on his trousers and undershirt and run his fingers through his sleep-tousled hair.
“You give me no choice, Dr. Holliday. I’m pleased to have your own business, but I can’t allow such wickedness in my house. So until you put that harlot out or marry her and make an honest woman of her . . .”
“Marry Kate?” he said, laughing at the very thought of it. “She may be my mistress, Mrs. Smith, but she will never be my wife!”
“Who is that you’re talking to, darling?” Kate called from the bedroom behind him, and Mrs. Smith took a quick glance past him to where Kate was still lying in bed, undressed under the rumpled bedcovers.
“Harlot!” Mrs. Smith said with a scowl. “I want her out of my house today, Dr. Holliday! And don’t forget to pay your bill on the way out. It’s $20 for the room and $22 for the liquor from the bar.” Then she turned on her heel and swept down the hall.
“Well, Kate,” John Henry said with a sigh, as he stepped back into the room and closed the door behind him. “It appears we’re gonna have to find ourselves other accommodations. Our hostess doesn’t approve of our livin’ arrangement.”
Kate sat up and pulled the sheets around her, her glossy dark hair tumbling over bare shoulders.
“To hell with her, then,” she said, lifting her chin in that proud, haughty way of hers. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this.”
“Have you?” John Henry asked as he crossed the room and sat close beside her on the bed. Though they’d spent half the night making love, the sight of Kate with nothing but a bed sheet wrapped around her was still mightily arousing.
“And just what fine establishments have you been thrown out of, Kate?” he asked, bending to kiss her neck. “I’d hate to have a bad woman ruin my good reputation.”
“What do you care about your reputation? All you need in this town is fast hands at the card table.”
“Oh, I’ve got fast hands, all right,” he said with a smile. “Shall I show you again?” And as he spoke, he slipped his hands under the sheet and slid his fingers over her breasts, and Kate shivered with pleasure at his touch.
“I thought we had to leave the hotel,” she said. “It will take me some time to get dressed.”
“And who the hell wants to see you dressed?” he asked, pulling the sheet aside and pushing her back down on the bed. “If I wanted a lady, I sure wouldn’t be lookin’ for one in Fort Griffin, Texas.
“And where would you look, my love?” Kate asked, smiling up at him with smoky blue eyes.
“Georgia,” he replied, mumbling the word against her lips as he leaned down to kiss her. “Georgia . . .”
If Kate heard, she made no reply except to sigh and pull him closer.
The owner of the old Planter’s Hotel wasn’t nearly so particular about the personal lives of his guests, especially when they paid the room rent in advance and ran up a big bar tab on top of it, and he was pleased to have Dr. Holliday and his lady friend staying there.
They took two rooms at the hotel, one for a bedroom and one to use as a dental office so that John Henry could start practicing again. Though it had been more than two years since he’d done any real dentistry at all, it came back to him fast enough, and once he put up a signboard in the hotel window, he had all the patients he could handle as he was still the only dentist in Fort Griffin Flat. “Doc” Holliday, the locals took to calling him, and he could have made dentistry a full-time job again with all the cattle-drive cowboys coming through town, but he’d come to Fort Griffin to gamble and he didn’t want to lose too much time at the tables.
He started most nights with a round of Monte, picking up a little extra cash before moving onto a game of draw poker with anyone who had enough money to make an attractive pot. It was high stakes gambling he was interested in; penny-ante was for gutless cowboys who didn’t know how to play the game. And he found that Kate made a surprisingly good companion for a gentleman gambler. With her dramatic looks and full-bosomed figure, she was stunning in the new gowns he bought her, and standing by his side at the gaming tables, elegant and aloof, she was a natural capper and often all the distraction he needed to pull a winning card out of a losing hand. The other gamblers were too busy looking at her to pay attention to the game the way they should have been when they were playing with a man like Doc Holliday.
And after a successful night in the gambling halls, Kate liked to count up their winnings while lying in bed before making love again. It made her feel so safe, she said, having Doc taking such good care of her, that she hardly even thought about Johnny Ringo anymore. As for sharing a bed with a man who was suffering from the consumption, that didn’t seem to worry her much. There’d been worse things to catch than a bad cough in her life as an actress.