Demon's Pass (18 page)

“I reckon we'll each one of us take about three dollars' worth,” Tobin said.

“Oh, my. Big spenders, are you? Well, I'm sure we'll have a wonderful time.” The woman smiled. “My name's Amy.”

“Amy, I done laid a claim on you,” Tobin said. “My pards has chose up the ones they want, too. Frank here wants the little Mex gal. Jason wants the skinny one in the red dress, and Parker here, wants Penny.”

“Have you ever been with a woman before, honey?” Amy asked Parker, eyeing him up and down.

Parker felt his cheeks burning in embarrassment. “No, ma'am,” he answered, barely mumbling the words.

“Then you've made a wise choice,” Amy said. “Penny's real good with young boys who're doing it for the first time. It's almost as if she has a calling for it.”

Amy signaled the other three, and they came over to the table to stand beside her. She made the introductions, ending with Penny.

“Penny, this little sweetheart is one of your specials, if you get my meaning,” Amy said.

“She means he ain't never done it before,” Tobin added, and Parker felt his cheeks flush again.

Penny reached out to take Parker's hand in hers. She smiled, and Parker saw a few lines around her eyes that he hadn't noticed before. Perhaps she was older than he thought, maybe even older than the other girls. He liked her eyes, though. They were bright blue, and were clear and deep and somehow not quite as hard as the other girls' eyes.

“There's no need to embarrass the young gentleman,” Penny admonished Tobin. “We're going to do just fine.”

“Well, shall we all go upstairs?” Amy invited.

“I reckon so, unless you're wantin' to do it right down here on the table,” Pecorino said. “And I'm that ready.”

“Well, we certainly don't want to see him bust, do we?” Amy said, laughing. “Come on, ladies, I do believe these gentlemen are badly in need of our services.”

As they all climbed the stairs, Parker was acutely aware that everyone else in the saloon knew exactly what was going on. He thought he could feel their eyes burning into the back of his neck. But as they reached the first landing, he happened to glance into the mirror hanging behind the bar, and it didn't appear that anyone in the saloon was paying the slightest bit of attention to him and his friends. He was surprised by that, but it did make him feel a bit less embarrassed.

Once in her room, Penny shut the door behind them, then lit a single candle. She turned and smiled at Parker as she began stripping out of her clothes. Parker watched, spellbound, as the smooth skin of Penny's shoulders was exposed. Then she turned so that he saw only her back as she removed the rest of her clothes. Calling on all the tricks of her professional experience, she used a shadow here, a soft light there, a movement to hold her body just so. As if by magic, she seemed to lose so many years in age and gain so much in mystery that she became as sensual a creature as anyone who had ever appeared in Parker's fantasies. Finally, raising the corner of the sheet, she managed to slip into bed using the shadows in such a way that he wasn't sure whether he had seen anything or not.

“Are you going to keep your clothes on?” Penny asked.

“No,” Parker said as he began to undress.

She folded the corner of the sheet back, inviting him into bed with her, and showing herself from one breast all the way down to one side of her hip. He got the tiniest glimpse of a black, triangular patch of hair before she readjusted the sheet. He inhaled quickly.

“Oh, my, look at that,” Penny said when Parker was completely nude.

“I'm sorry,” he apologized.

“Don't apologize, honey. The time to apologize to a woman is when it
doesn't
do that. That's the way it's supposed to be.”

Parker slid in under the sheets. She reached over to touch him, and her hand felt as if fire and ice were contained in her fingertips.

“Should I . . .” Parker started, but Penny shushed him, much as one would a small child.

“You just let me take care of everything, honey,” she said. “It'll be all right. Trust me.”

Chapter 12

A fly landed on Parker's face, and though he brushed it away, it returned. It came back a second and then a third time, until finally the irritation of it penetrated Parker's sleep and he was forced to open his eyes.

For a moment he didn't know where he was. Then he remembered what had happened the night before, and he turned his head to see a woman in bed with him. She was on her back, her head was turned away from him, and the bedcovers had slipped down from her left shoulder, allowing Parker to closely examine her exposed breast, which was lighted by a beam of sunlight stabbing between the bottom of the dark green shade and the edge of the windowsill.

Penny's position had pulled her breast nearly flat so that the globe of flesh Parker had made a thorough exploration of last night, was now just a gentle curve. Quietly, gently enough so that Penny wasn't aware of what he was doing, Parker lifted off the cover, then rolled it all the way down to the bottom of the bed. With her body fully revealed, Parker was able to see in person, for the first time in his life, a totally nude woman. He lay with his elbow bent and his head resting on his hand, studying her.

“Enjoying the show?” she finally asked, without opening her eyes.

Parker, who had thought she was asleep, was startled by her unexpected remark, and he jumped. “I'm sorry,” he said quickly.

Penny laughed, then pulled the cover back over her. “I'm glad you enjoyed it,” she said. “But I'm chilled, so, if you don't mind.”

“No, ma'am,” Parker said quickly. “No, ma'am, I don't mind at all.”

“You're just passing through town, aren't you, Parker?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“It's a good thing.”

“It's a good thing?” Parker replied, surprised by her comment. “Why?”

“Because you are the kind of young man I could corrupt very easily. And that's something I would not like to see happen. Promise me you won't be corrupted.”

“Yes, ma'am, I promise.”

“Good. Now, run along. Go eat breakfast, join your friends, or go back to your wagons. If you stay here any longer, I might start trying to get you to go back on that promise right now.”

Parker got out of bed and dressed, acutely aware of her eyes on him the whole time. Then, when he was fully dressed, he started for the door.

“Parker?” she called to him.

“Yes, ma'am?” He looked back toward the bed.

“I hope you have a good rest-of-your-life,” she said.

“Thank you, ma'am. You too,” Parker said as he stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.

 

With their water kegs full, the stock well rested, and the wagons in good repair, Clay and Parker led the train out of Pueblo. After going north for a few miles, as if heading for Denver, they turned west to pick up the trail to Demon's Pass.

Clay had examined the map several times, and no matter how one looked at it, this route would save them three hundred miles. Under normal conditions, three hundred miles would translate into two weeks, and this late in the fall, two weeks could be the difference between an unfettered passage and being caught in a deadly winter blizzard.

Because of the mountain man's warnings about the difficulty of the route, Clay confessed to Parker and Marcus that he continued to have some reservations about it. However, the fact that there were only three wagons in his train made Clay confident that they would succeed where others, apparently, had failed.

The first day of travel was one of the easiest days they had had since leaving Independence, and when they camped that night, the party was in very high spirits. Travel was much more difficult the next day but no one worried about it. “After all,” Clay assured them, “we're goin' to have as many hard days as we have good.”

Thanks to bad weather and a thrown wheel on one of the wagons, the third day was more difficult, and some were beginning to get disheartened. Pecorino even suggested that maybe they would have been better off going the other way.

“No, I'm with Clay on this,” Marcus said. “We can put up with some hard traveling if it saves us three hundred miles.”

On the fourth day they reached a valley that was lush with grass and had an excellent source of water. Their spirits brightened again.

Late in the morning of the fifth day, the wagons followed the creek into a canyon. The walls of the canyon were a foreboding red color, and they loomed three hundred feet or more above the canyon floor. Because the wagons were closed in by walls on either side, the canyon filled with the ricochets of the fall of every hoof, the creak of every wheel, and the whistle of each driver, bouncing back from the walls in an avalanche of sound.

Parker looked high up on either side, feeling dwarfed by the steep, rocky cliffs.

“Sort of awesome, isn't it?” Clay said, riding up beside him.

“I didn't know there was country like this anywhere in the world,” Parker said.

By the sixth day, the trail had climbed to an elevation of several thousand feet, and squeezed down to the point that it was barely passable by the men on horseback, and even more difficult for the wagons. In fact they saw the remains of some wagons that didn't make it, including one which had fallen into a deep crevice, killing the oxen. Wolves had already visited the site, and along with the buzzards, had long since picked the bones so clean that they shone brightly in the sun.

They stopped for a moment to look down at the wreckage, taking a drink of water as they rested.

“How long you think that's been down there?” Parker asked.

“You ask me, it's been down there for twenty years or more,” Clay replied. “I expect it's left over from the days of the big wagon trains.”

“Wonder if any of the people went over with it?” Jason asked.

“Probably not,” Marcus answered. “Comin' through here, they was probably leadin' their teams rather than drivin' 'em. Especially if they had big trains.”

“Maybe we should be leadin' our teams as well,” Pecorino suggested.

“Naw, we got mules, not oxen,” Marcus said. “Mules is more surefooted, and the faster we go, the sooner we'll get through here.”

“I don't know, maybe I've made a big mistake,” Clay said, giving voice to the doubts that had begun to plague him. “I'm beginning to think I should have never insisted that we come this way.”

“You weren't the only one wanting to do it, Clay,” Parker said.

“But I forced the issue,” Clay insisted.

“You're not planning on turning back, are you?”

“No, no, it's too late now. If it were earlier in the season I might, but we can't turn back now. We must go on. We have no choice.”

The drivers, who had been standing on the edge of the crevice, looking warily down at the wreck, climbed back onto their wagons and wearily continued on.

Later that day, Clay and Tobin rode ahead to scout the trail. When they reached the top of a long, sharp-spined ridge, they got off their mounts and walked out to the end of a flat rock. Ahead, there appeared to be two possible ways to proceed.

“Which way do we go, boss?” Tobin asked.

“If we continue straight ahead, we would go that way,” Clay said, pointing in front of them. He turned a little to the right and pointed toward a long, upward sloping canyon. “But I've got a feeling that's the way we should go.”

“Yeah, well, it has to get easier, because it sure can't get any harder,” Tobin replied.

The new route proved to be no easier than the old had been. In fact, as they progressed up the canyon, the route became much steeper and choked with slippery trails. They had to pick their way slowly, cutting timber and moving rocks, working until the blisters on their hands broke and bled. By evening, everyone was so exhausted that they fell asleep immediately.

The next day, there were times when the going was so difficult that roads couldn't even be made. They were following nothing but a small Indian trail and the wagons had to be hauled up to the top of the ridge by windlasses and doubled teams, then lowered down the other side.

They moved out of one canyon and into another, where they encountered a small creek. Although it didn't seem possible, this canyon was worse than the previous canyon had been. Its bottoms were crowded with boulders and wild growth, and by now they were making no more than a mile or two per day. Six days later, they left the main canyon and started up a side canyon. So far, each day, and each turn, had made the situation worse.

It was now two weeks since they had taken the cutoff. It was nighttime and the little party made what camp they could. Parker was leaning against the side of the lead wagon, so exhausted he could hardly stand, drinking a cup of coffee, when Clay came up to stand beside him.

“Some coffee over there,” Parker said.

“Thanks.”

“I can't believe there was ever a time when I didn't like this,” Parker said as Clay poured his own cup and freshened Parker's.

Clay put the pot back on the hot embers, then looked over at Parker. “I'm sorry, kid,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

Clay sighed, then took in the wagons and teams with a wave of his arm. The men were lying or sitting around on the ground, in various poses of fatigue. “For this,” he said. “Bringing you, and them, through this hell. We never should have tried this cutoff.”

 

The next day Parker, who was riding in the lead, reached the top of the pass. As he did so, he was overwhelmed by what he saw in front of him. The sun glared brightly from the white surface of a desert that stretched, unbroken, from here to the shadowy suggestion of a mountain range far, far, on the distant, shimmering, horizon. Not only was there no water, there was not one tree, shrub, or blade of grass to be seen. The desert was at least seventy miles wide. It looked impassable, but they had no choice. They could not go back.