No Job for a Lady (4 page)

The truth is, I simply believe that if you want something, you must go full speed ahead. If I didn’t have that attitude, I would not have gotten a reporter’s job when I lacked both the experience and education required—and I would not have left after nine months as a reporter to establish myself as a foreign correspondent over the objections of my employer.

I have the tickets gripped firmly in my fist. I paid for them and they are both mine. But I have to deal with this man and I am used to getting my way. I will start with sugar.

“My mother will appreciate your kindness in getting her a sleeping berth. This trip has been so hard on her.”

“You already told me that your mother is not traveling with you.”

“She’s feeling better and will—”

He lets out a loud guffaw. His coarse laugh is loud enough to attract the attention of those around us.

“I beg your pardon.”

We stop and face each other. My tongue is still tied.

He shakes his head. Rather than angry, he appears to be perplexed. Even amused. “Such a little package of surprises you are. I’m not certain that you even have a mother, but if you do, I very much doubt that she would admit the relationship in public.”

“How dare you.”

“How dare I? You are the daredevil, madam. With reckless disregard for the truth as you plunge ahead. You’re a funny girl. You won’t have dinner with me, but you are willing to sleep with me.”

“
Sir!
There’s no call to be vulgar!”

“Look who is calling the kettle black. Lies flow off your tongue like Niagara.” He smirks. “You should have just said that you wanted to share a compartment with me.”

“That’s not true. I’ll have you to know I have no intentions of sharing that compartment with you. Here”—I reach inside my purse—“here’s two dollars. You’ll be able to purchase a seat for that.”

“I get it. You use me as a tool to get yourself a comfortable compartment and then you throw me out like an old shoe.” He turns his back to me and walks away, not even taking the money I offered.

I start to call him back but stop, worried that he is angry enough to cause a scene. Instead I watch him disappear into the crowd.

I feel horrible. He’s right: I did use him for my selfish gain. My mother’s sudden illness threatening to make me cancel the trip, and my career, and miserable nights on the train from St. Louis, have left me off balance.

So desperate to have everything go right, I’m out of control. I will have to rein myself in before I get into deeper trouble than I already am.

As for the man, I’ll find him on the train and buy him lunch. There is no reason I should feel guilty. I didn’t really cheat him out of a sleeping berth. I was in line before he was and was entitled first to what was available.

I will try to be in a charitable mood toward the man I have wronged, but I hear a devilish whisper in my head that says the best solution of all would be that he is unable to get a ticket because the train is sold out and thus I won’t have to face him and eat humble pie.

5

Grateful that I have only one piece of luggage, I scurry off to board the train. With all the people boarding and few porters, it would be a pain trying to maneuver more luggage.

I decide to set down my carpetbag and wait for the crowd to thin down before boarding. No sense in getting trampled. Besides, I have comfort in knowing that I have a private compartment all to myself, so I won’t even have to fight to get a window seat.

Even though I am still not over the trauma of having finagled my “husband” out of a sleeping berth, I am cheered by the fact that I don’t see him. Maybe my wish has come true and he wasn’t able to get even a bench seat on this one, or maybe he decided to wait until tomorrow for another train heading south. Either one works for me.

My mother would be mortified if she knew what I had done. I chuckle over what she would say if I told her that I got a train compartment by pretending a stranger was my husband. Besides being irked by the damage to my unsullied reputation, she would tell me that by trifling with a strange man, I had risked being murdered by the Servant Girl Annihilator,
2
who has killed a number of people in Texas, most of them women—damnable deeds done in the dark of night.

“What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” is her customary rejoinder when I confess that I have strayed even modestly from her strict guidelines for feminine deportment.

My response that desperate times call for desperate measures rarely satisfies her fear that someday my impulsive acts will be too bold for my own good.

I stop chortling about how I put one over on the man as it occurs to me that he might be very angry indeed at me. I’m amused because I won, but he might be a sore loser. There is nothing he can do even if he wanted to. I have the tickets. But I look around again anyway, paranoid that he’s about to descend upon me.

Down at the tail end of the train, a handsome carriage pulls up to a private railcar. A well-dressed man and woman descend from the carriage to board the railcar.

The man is dressed in a long black-tailed coat, with a top hat and cane; the woman has on a very large floppy black hat filled with lots of black feathers and a light black coat. I squint but still can’t make out their features.

My interest is immediately roused. Private railcars are the height of luxury, comparable to owning a yacht. That gets me thinking: Could the occupants provide me with interesting materials for a dispatch? They have to be somebodies!

While I won’t stoop to write boring news about society weddings and teas, we “unwashed plebeians” are all fascinated by the luxurious and often scandalous lives of the very rich, especially their excesses, so I will keep my eyes open. Who knows, the private car could be holding railroad robber baron Jay Gould himself, who put down a southwestern railroad workers’ strike by hiring violent strikebreakers to beat the striking workers into submission. Clever devil that he is, he afterward boasted that he was able to hire half the working class to kill the other half.

Catching him with a mistress or ruining a secret business deal by making it public would not only make a dandy story and satisfy my sense of justice that he needs more than his nose pinched, it would guarantee my position at the newspaper.

A porter walks by, pushing a cart filled with luggage, and I stop him. “Excuse me.”

“Yes, miss?”

“Do you know who that couple is?”

He glances to where I am pointing. “No, but they must be people of great wealth and importance. It’s all hush-hush; not even the crew’s been told who they are. That’s a real fancy private railcar they are boarding. Must be awfully nice to have so much money.” He shakes his head and laughs as he moves on.

The whistle blows and the conductor yells, “All aboard! All aboard! Last call to board!”

I reach for my carpetbag, when a young man grabs it.

“Allow me.” He gives me a boyish grin.

I let out a small cry of surprise. It’s the young cowboy from the saloon, who later stood on the street and watched my window.

“What are you doing here? Following me?”

The gunslinger’s grin gets wider. “No, ma’am. Looks like we just have tickets on the same train. Besides, if I followed you, I did it very quickly, because I got here before you.”

“How do you know you got here before me?”

“After I bought my ticket, I saw you near the ticket booth, having a dustup with a gent. What was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t look like nothing to me.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

I reach to take my bag from him and he swings it behind his back.

“Excuse me, but that is my bag.”

“I’m gonna take it aboard for you. Is this all you are taking to Mexico?” He nods back. “My trappings are over there.”

His gear is a rolled-up bedroll with a prairie coat and leather gloves thrown on it. Next to the bedroll is a saddle with chaps slung over it and a rifle on top of the pile. The leather saddle, like his clothes, is well broken in—which is why, I suppose, cowboys take their saddles with them.

“I travel a bit lighter than cowboys.”

“So I see. My name’s Harry, but my friends call me Sundance.” He gives me a sly smile. “You met a couple of them last night. Not that you took much of a fancy to any of us.”

Uh-huh. I almost ask him why he was spying on me last night, but I hold my tongue because I don’t want to tip him off. If he was spying on me, I want to catch him at it.

Sundance has a look that shouts “bad boy” to me. It’s his cockiness—the grin that says he’s laughing at you and those bold eyes that seem to undress me. But he does it in a way that is both flattering and intriguing, unlike a crude masher.

He reminds me of the boys my mother has always told me you don’t bring home to meet the parents. “There are the good boys,” she says, “who dress proper and aren’t wild. And there are the bad boys, who have a look to them and are always getting into trouble.”

He’s a cowboy, that’s for sure, but there’s something else about him that makes me wonder how much time he spends herding cows—as opposed to using that gun he keeps strapped to his leg.

He is dressed for range work—white wide-brimmed Stetson, red bandanna around his neck, checkered wool shirt, heavy denim jeans. His boots have pointed toes to help guide his foot into a stirrup and high heels to keep his foot from slipping through the stirrup.

I’m far from being a cowgirl, but I was raised around horses and have done quite a bit of horseback riding myself. Even won a few ribbons.

His clothes appear clean and have a dusty look that shows they are well-worn from days in the saddle. His low-hung gun could be slid out fast because it isn’t strapped down.

I saw some cowboys working cattle on the plains during the train ride from Pittsburgh, but this is the closest I’ve been to one, other than the cowboys in the books I read as a little girl. The fictional cowboys fascinate me because they have interesting adventures—going into unknown territory and having to fight rustlers and Indians. They are nothing like the farmhands in my hometown of Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534.

I test the waters about what I saw last night.

“How’s your friend Howard, the one you were helping back to the bunkhouse last night? He seemed a bit, uh, reluctant to go with your friends.” My tone lets some puzzlement about his reluctance slip out.

“Oh, he’s over there.”

I follow the jerk of his head and there Howard is, in the flesh. He is easy to recognize, with his bowler hat and thick beard. He’s boarding the next train car down, a gunnysack slung over his shoulder.

“He’s with you. A cowboy?”

“Yep. But not exactly a cowboy. He’s our cook, though he’s hard to keep in line. If he’s not about to get his poke cleaned by a lady of the night, he’s running off to his first love, prospecting for gold.

“We were just helping him out last night. It’s a written code between us cowboys—never leave a partner alone in that condition. Didn’t want to see anything bad happen to him. That old coot knocks down more booze than a preacher guzzling holy water.”

The train whistle blows again with the warning of departure.

“I think we’d better board if we want to make it to Mexico City.” Sundance gives me that grin of his.

Once I’m aboard, he hands me my carpetbag.

I give him a smile and practice my Spanish.
“Gracias, señor.”

He salutes me with his fingers on the rim of his hat as he turns to go back and get his gear.

“My pleasure, Nellie.”

I open my mouth to ask how he knows my name, but he’s already slipped through the door.

6

“Who’s the cowboy?”

“What are you doing here?”

It came out as a screech of horror. He’s here! Occupying a seat in
my
compartment.

“Why don’t you step in and close the door before people think you’ve seen a snake.”

“I have!”

Slipping in, I slide the door shut behind me, then drop my carpetbag and glare at him. My temper rises as he chuckles.

“Nice to see you, too.”

“What are you doing in my compartment? You have no right to be here. I’m going to call the conductor and have you arrested.”

He shakes his head. “Apparently, you haven’t looked carefully at the compartment tickets.”

“What about them? Your name’s not on them.” I take the two tickets out of my purse as I speak. “I paid for them and—”

I stop and stare at the tickets.

“Ah … I can see your grasp of the situation spreading across your face like the illumination from one of Mr. Edison’s newfangled lightbulbs.”

There in bold print is an
H
on one and a
W
on the other.

“
H
for husband,
W
for wife.” He smirks. “Mexico is a very religious country. As the ticket agent says, compartment ticket holders must be husband and wife or of the same sex.”

“I will not be bullied. I will not share this compartment with you.”

He shakes his head and shrugs. “I don’t expect you to. Find yourself a seat on the train. Better hurry before they are all taken.”

The train lurches forward and I grab the wall for support. We are already under way.

“Look,” he says. “This is an awkward situation for both of us. I suggest we make the best of it. If we squabble, we will both be kicked off the train. I will pay my half of the compartment and we’ll share it. There’s room for both of us and even more privacy than there is in the corridor. And despite any judgment of my character by you, I am a gentleman.”

He is right about more privacy, even if we share the compartment. Other than a couple of small compartments at either end, the berths in a Pullman are lined up down the corridor, one above the other in what is called the “open section.” Modesty is secured by the sleeping clothes one wears and by a heavy black curtain the porter hangs in front of each berth.

The compartment has two sofa seats facing each other. There is not enough leg room between the two for people to face each other. Instead, one person sits at the end of a seat and the other person sits at the other end of the seat across the way. At night, the back from the sofa seats are used to fill the legroom to create the lower berth.