Dorothy Garlock (6 page)

Riding beside Charlie on the wagon seat, Willa studied the country ahead. It was big, open and grassy as far as the eye could see. The prairie grass was a pale gold carpet that stretched to the low foothills. On the breeze that came from the south was the smell of the sun-ripened grass and cool river water.

It was lonesome country. Here the gigantic herds of buffalo had roamed for hundreds of years. Here the rawhiders had come to slaughter them by the thousands. Here the Indians had to give up their land and move west.

Somewhere ahead was the Powder River and the stage station.

Toward evening Gil rode back to the wagon.

“The station is ahead. I’ll drive in, Charlie.”

The boy stopped the team, jumped down and took his father’s horse to the back of the wagon. When they were moving again, Gil looked over at Willa.

“Could be we’ll run into a rough bunch here. It’s best not to let ’em know you’re a
loose
—I mean unattached woman.” He grinned and winked.

Willa stared at him without a hint of amusement. She took a deep breath and controlled her temper.

“If I can get work at the stage station, I’ll stay and earn my fare to Deadwood or Sheridan.”

“Any work you’d get here would be flat on yore back. Better stick with me, Willa.”

The familiar way in which he used her name made her temper flare. “You are a crude man, Mr. Frank.”

“I’m tellin’ ya like it is, sweetheart. Ya got no choice. Every stitch ya got on yore back belongs to me. I could dump ya off at that stage stark naked. That old torn up nightdress ya was wearin’ didn’t cover much.”

Shocked speechless, Willa opened her mouth, then closed it. She breathed deeply and squared her shoulders.

“You . . . you’d take this dress? You’re more despicable than I thought!”

He shrugged. “A man’s got to do what he must, sweetheart.”

“My gratitude doesn’t extend to sleeping with you, Mr. Frank. I thought I had made that clear. Why do you insist on keeping me with you?”

“I need ya, honey. I want Oliver, my brother-in-law, to know his sister ain’t the only highfalutin’ woman I can get. Oliver sets store by manners ’n’ all that. He’s the kind that jumps to his feet when a woman comes in and puts his coat on for supper if’n it was hotter’n hell outdoors.” Gil’s laugh ended in a snort of disgust.

“That’s the behavior of a gentleman, but I fail to see how that concerns me,” Willa retorted with her chin tilted defiantly.

“Ya got airs, too, honey, just like Oliver. He’ll set me up in a business in town cause it ain’t fittin’ fer a
lady
to be wanderin’ around from pillar to post.”

“You’re going to let him think that we . . . that you and I—?”

“Ya guessed it, sweetheart. Yore my intended.”

“You’re out of your . . . mind!”

“It’ll work. Wait ’n’ see.”

“I’ll tell him as soon as we arrive that I’ve no intention of marrying you.” His chuckle made her clench her teeth in suppressed fury.

“I got a week to change yore mind.”

*  *  *

The station at Powder River had originally been built by soldiers sent to protect freighters carrying supplies to Fort Kearny. When it was abandoned by the army, it became first an outlaw hideout, then a stage station and post office on the route from the Black Hills to Sheridan. The wild and bloody history of the station was well known. At one time or another most of the noted outlaws and gunfighters had passed through.

Gil Frank stopped the team on a small rise and looked down at the long, low building with twin chimneys rising from each end. Striped with red clay that filled the chinks between the logs, it looked as if it had grown there along with the cottonwood trees that surrounded it. A weathered barn and a lean-to shed with a sagging roof stood amid a network of corrals.

Several unhitched freight wagons were parked outside the corrals. Mules inside the enclosure chomped on hay that had been tossed into a forked feeder. There were no horses tied to the hitching rail in front of the station, but more than a dozen horses were penned in one of the corrals, and others were staked out in a meadow nearby.

*  *  *

Smith Bowman had ridden in the day before. He liked the station manager. Byers ran a good place in this tough land of tough men. In his lifetime Smith had known a few good men, many more that were borderline and some that were
downright bad. He had helped bury some of the reckless borderline type and had had to kill several of the bad or be killed himself.

As Byers prepared a meal, Smith sat in a far corner of the station room with his hat pulled low, listened to the rattle of dishes, and studied the occupants of the room. Four of the five men at the poker table were freighters. Several of the onlookers were cowhands he had seen before. The fifth man at the table was a notorious bounty hunter—one whom Smith would classify as risky. He’d stay shy of him. He had learned to trust his instincts.

4

^“
W
e’ll camp over yonder under those trees,” Gil said, turning the wagon toward a grove a good distance from the station. “You ’n’ Jo Bell stay out of sight. Charlie can do the camp chores. I’ll go down there ’n’ get the lay of the land.”

“Do you expect trouble?”

“Women are always trouble if a man is hungry enough for ’em. Climb over the seat. Get in the back,” he said sharply when a man came to loll in the doorway of the station.

Willa climbed into the back and tied the canvas down behind the wagonseat. She made her way to the end of the wagon and sat down. Charlie sat on the tailgate holding the reins of the sorrel horse. Jo Bell lay on her bunk.

“Just when there’s somethin’ to see, we can’t see it,” she complained.

The wagon bumped over rocky ground and came to a stop well out from a stand of oak trees, whose limbs grew too low to allow passage beneath them. The sun had gone behind the mountains. Long bars of red streaked the sky and pink-tinged clouds hung low on the western horizon. The air was cool as
it can be on the prairie when no breeze is stirring. The smell of woodsmoke and cooked meat coming from the station hung in the air.

Gil came to the end of the wagon.

“Make camp, Charlie. I’m ridin’ down to the station to see if it’s a fittin’ place for my women folk.” He looked at Willa, grinned, and winked, a gesture that was becoming more and more irritating to her.

“Can I go, Pa?”

“Jo Bell, honey, mind yore papa ’n’ stay out a sight. I ain’t wantin’ to have to worry none ’bout ya.”

“I can’t see nothin’ way up here,” she whined.

“Honey, if those horny roosters got a look at my little gal, they just might go outta their minds ’n’ come a-stormin’ out here. I’ll be back soon as I can. Be a good girl, hear? It ain’t goin’ to be but a week or two now ’n’ you’ll be sleepin’ on a featherbed at yore Uncle Oliver’s.”

“All right, Pa. But make Charlie go get a fresh bucket of water. I’m just so thirsty I could die.”

Willa’s desire to slap the girl was so strong that she clenched her fists and buried them in the pockets of her apron.

Gil Frank felt sudden excitement as he approached the squat log building. He had money in his pocket from his winnings in Hublett; and if he were lucky enough to sit in on a game, he would be well fixed by the time he left the station.

The mere prospect of playing cards with rough, unskilled men was exhilarating. Long hours of practice had made Gil a man who could do things with cards. While shuffling, he could load the top of the deck or the bottom and deal from either end. He knew all about slick aces, marked or trimmed cards, sleeve holdouts and finger rings for the purpose of marking cards. In short, he was a professional gambler and a good one. He usually played a fair game, but he was not above cheating in order to win.

He tied his horse to the rail and stepped into the smoke-filled room. The smell of cooking food and rank tobacco mingled with body odor and manure tracked in from outside. A red-faced man worked over a cookstove at one end of the room. At the other end five men sat around a table playing poker. Several onlookers straddled chairs. All eyes, including those of the man with his hat tipped over his forehead, turned to Gil when he entered. After a brief look the men went back to their game as if it were not at all unusual for an Easterner dressed in a dark suit and fancy vest suddenly to appear in the doorway of the station.

The station man wiped his hands on an apron tied about his ample waist and came forward. His face was extremely broad, his hair sparse, and he was clean shaven.

“Howdy.” He held out his hand. “Figured you’d be here ’bout now.”

“Ya was expectin’ me?” Gil said after the big man had released his hand.

“Sure was. Knowed two, three days back ya was headed this way, ’n’ ya had a lad ’n’ a couple women folk. This is big country, but not much goes on out here that folks don’t know about.”

“Dog-gone. If that don’t beat all? Name’s Gil Frank.”

“Byers. Station keeper and cook . . . now. Goddamn cook ran off a week back. Glad to know ya, Mr. Frank. I got a pot of chicken with tators and peas cookin’. Figure yore women’d be wantin’ garden stuff along about now.” The cook’s face was flushed. He glanced quickly, guiltily around, then lowered his voice. “Course it ain’t chicken. Pheasant is what it is, but there ain’t much difference if ya don’t know it.”

“Well, now, ain’t that good of ya? It’s a shame, though, that ya went to all that trouble. My wife ’n’ little girl are plumb tuckered out. Lordy, they’re the bashfulest two you ever did see. It purely scares the daylights out of ’em to
think of meetin’ a room full of strangers. They’re figurin’ on washin’ up, eatin’ a bite, ’n’ beddin’ down.”

Byers studied the wiry, slender man with the insolent eyes. He’d seen a thousand men come and go. Something about this one didn’t ring true.

“I’m plumb sorry to hear it.”

“Tomorrow they just might be in a better frame of mind.”

“If that’s the way it is, I’ll dish up a bait ’n’ ya can carry it to ’em.”

The cook’s attitude showed that he was disappointed at not having the females he had expected at his table for supper. Too bad. Gil studied the men in the room: freighters, cowboys, drifters, rough men who more than likely were as horny as a herd of billy goats. If he had Starr with him, he would set her up in the wagon and the two of them would pocket some easy money. He didn’t have Starr so it was useless to think about that. But he had Willa, who would make him more money in the long run if he could keep her away from the freighters headed for Sheridan or back to Deadwood.

Gil eyed the whiskey bottles and glasses on the tables. The way the liquor was flowing, the card players would be primed for a good plucking by nightfall. It could not be said that Gil Frank was a man who missed an opportunity.

“What do I owe ya?” he asked when Byers handed him a pot with a rag wrapped around the bail.

“Nothin’. It’s for the ladies ’n’ the lad.”

“They’ll be obliged. They surely will. I’d like to come back and set in on supper. I ain’t had a visit with nobody but women in a coon’s age.”

Byers stood in the doorway and watched Gil carry the pot up the hill to the wagon. “He ain’t had a visit with nobody but women in a coon’s age. Ain’t that a downright shame?”

“He ain’t goin’ to let that woman come near.” The comment came from a bug-eyed, slack-jawed man at the poker table.

“Reckon he thinks Rucker’d jump her like a ruttin’ moose.” The bearded man who spoke scraped the legs of his chair on the floor as he swiveled around to look out the door.

“He ain’t too far off. I ain’t had me none in God knows when. Last I had was in Laramie. That was last March. Hellfire! It ain’t no wonder I’m ’bout to bust my britches.” The card player slammed his cards down and raked the chips in from the middle of the table.

“Hell, Rucker, I heared ya ’bout split that little whore in two down there in Laramie. Heard she’s been a-walking spraddle-legged ever since.”

Rucker grinned. “I give ’er one hell of a ride. She warn’t complainin’. Nosiree! I left her a smilin’ and a purrin’ like a pussy cat.”

“If she charged ya more’n two-bits she got stung.”