Territory (21 page)

Others, wiser in business and law, were steaming mad and ready to drag Gilded Age into court if they could. And a few, not wise but even more angry, declared the partners in the Gilded Age Mining Company ought to be careful about sitting down to dinner with their backs to the window. Mildred documented all of it.

Each person’s story and situation added itself to the last. A structure began to take shape in her head, the shape of the story of Gilded Age’s attempted theft. And theft it was, just like a rustler’s attempt to brand someone else’s cow.

The article grew, in fact, just as one of her fictional stories did. Ideas, figures, phrases at first drifted unconnected in an alarming void, and Mildred wondered how they would ever become something linear and convincing. But the more information she gathered, the more bits stuck together. Facts demanded a certain order to be understood. Witness accounts built to an emotional
peak. By the time she’d collected the statement from the Gilded Age lawyer that, in many words, said nothing at all, she was rushing along on a tide of elation.

The clerk in the office of the Justice of the Peace didn’t look up at her entrance. “I need to speak with the justice, please,” she said.

The clerk still didn’t look up from the ledger in front of him. He had thin, fox-colored hair and a face like risen bread dough, and smelled strongly of macassar oil. “Make an appointment. Next week’s the first you can get.”

“I need to see him immediately.”

“Sorry. Soonest is next week.”

The elation emptied out of her.

She could go back to Harry with her job unfinished. He could send Richard Rule to get the last piece, to write the story, and he would see that she was a typesetter after all, as she’d known from the start. There was no shame in being right.

But the story was in her head, nearly finished and
hers.
Rule might reject it when it was done, but until then she had a responsibility—not to the
Nugget,
but to the story itself—to bring it safe home.

She dropped her handbag with a satisfying bang on the clerk’s ledger, and set her palms on either side of it so that she leaned over him. He jerked back and finally met her eyes. His looked unnaturally large behind his spectacles.

Well-bred ladies did not behave like this. She had always been a well-bred lady, however much she flirted with eccentricity. Well-bred ladies descended no farther than to setting type.

But they didn’t sell sensation stories to magazines, either.

“I’m loath to impede the business of the city of Tombstone,” she said in her kindest voice. Inwardly she trembled: that sentence sounded like Harry at his most vitriolic. “But I’m afraid the justice would be deeply disappointed to learn you’d denied him a chance to rebut the story he’ll read in tomorrow’s
Nugget.”

“What story?” the clerk said, a little too sharply.

Mildred smiled and shook her head. “Now, how would we sell papers if we told everyone what was in them before they were printed?”

“You’re … with the
Nugget?”

You’re not any more surprised than I am.
“Yes, I’m with the
Nugget.
My heavens, did you think I’d come for tea and gossip? Be a good lad and announce me.”

He stood up with a scrape of chair, as cowed as if she’d transformed into
Mayor Clum before his eyes. Mildred wondered if it was the “lad” that had finished him off, as if he weren’t Mildred’s age or maybe more.

The clerk disappeared into the inner office, and popped back out a minute later. “Right this way, ma’am.”

Mildred picked up her bag, smoothed her gloves to hide the shaking of her hands, and set out on her first interview of a city official.

Richard Rule was a darkly handsome man who could charm the shoes off a draft mule. Mildred had always liked him, though not half as much, she suspected, as he liked himself. But he wrote outstanding copy.

After his first stammering surprise at finding that the sheaf of papers she handed him was an article assigned by his boss, he set charm aside and went to work. Mildred watched as he drove his pencil through lines and phrases. “Too intellectual,” he said of one, and “Redundant,” of another. He cut one whole sentence at the end of a paragraph, and turned the page.

“But that’s the conclusion the earlier statements lead to,” she protested.

“That’s right. And if you let the reader reach it by himself, he’ll be convinced it’s true.” Rule plunged on, and Mildred watched, her heart sinking lower with each page.

But she didn’t want to be a journalist, did she? She’d done a bad job, and proved she had no business outside the railing that fenced her type cases. She was a very good typesetter. Nothing was changed.

So why did she feel so melancholy?

Rule finished the last page and tucked it behind the rest. Not a page had escaped penciling.

“Good work,” he said.

Mildred wasn’t sure at first what she’d heard. Then she glanced up at Rule’s face. He stared rather impatiently back.

“Good?” Mildred asked. It came out as a croak.

Rule’s expression softened. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t seem like a man trying to communicate with someone who spoke no English, either. “Here, look it over.” He passed the pages back to her. “If I’ve marked anything that you don’t understand, ask.”

She read them as he waited. He’d removed words as a gardener might prune the topiary. He’d cut phrases that separated facts from their meaning. He’d made workmanlike sentences graceful, and made halting paragraphs flow. She’d thought he was making her work his own. Instead he’d made it into what she’d meant it to be.

She handed the pages back. No, not pages—
copy.
“I see.” What she wanted to say was, “I have been given a revelation,” but she didn’t think Richard Rule would be comfortable in the role of a literary burning bush.

“By the time this comes out tomorrow, there’ll be some fur flying. Follow up, see if you can get a statement from one of the partners. I’d like some background on town lot claims, too. The records office is open for a few hours yet.”

“You want me to write another?”
You sound as if you fell on your head,
Mildred scolded herself. But she had to be sure.

Rule frowned. “Don’t you want to?”

“Yes. I do.”

“All right then.” He handed her pages—her copy—to Joe Dugan at the type cases. When Rule turned away, Joe looked across the aisle at her, grinned, and winked.

Tombstone’s citizens had begun to move into the town before it existed, that was the problem. Goose Flats and the Tombstone Hills had belonged to the Apaches, until one day they were the property of a hundred prospectors and speculators chasing veins of silver and claiming land not by its surface virtues but by what might be underneath it.

Then the saloons and bordellos and general stores and boardinghouses appeared: tents put up on any level patch by people come to get rich on silver secondhand. Someone replaced his tent with adobe, and another built a wood-frame building. Next thing anyone knew, there were streets with names, and lot boundaries. And other than the old mining claims, there was no proof of ownership of those lots besides occupancy. The Apaches had never deeded them to anyone, after all.

The Gilded Age Mining Company was claiming large chunks of town on no better authority than that Tombstone could as well belong to the Gilded Age as to anyone. It was nonsense. But they had only to intimidate a few lot owners, or win a few court cases, and the partners could leave town as wealthy men. They would, of course, have to leave town.

Mildred left the records office with her mind on her opening sentence, and ran hard into a fellow pedestrian. The shock drove a squeak out of her, and a huff of wind out of her victim. A grip on her shoulders kept her from stumbling. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry, Miss Benjamin,” said the voice that went with the grip.

She looked into the face of Tom McLaury, and her own grew hot as a stovetop. “No, it was me—I wasn’t looking—I’m so sorry—”

McLaury let go of her shoulders, but she felt the pressure of his fingers still. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Thank you. Are you?”

He shook his head and looked grave. “I don’t mean to brag, but it takes more than one young lady to do me lasting harm.”

“How many
does
it take?” Mildred asked. She was annoyingly aware of the physicalness of him. Harry Woods could stand this close, and she never thought about it.

He blushed and laughed. “I guess I’m not sure. I haven’t put it to the test.”

“I expect it depends on the circumstances.” He wasn’t shocked or offended. That was nice. “And your goat?”

“Living a life of ease, Miss Benjamin, and mighty ungrateful for it. No prison built can hold him.”

“If you decide he’s for the stewpot after all, don’t tell me. I’d feel responsible.” Then she registered what he’d called her. “It’s ‘Mrs. Benjamin.’ ” McLaury’s expression went a little stiff, before she could finish with, “I’m a widow.”

“Oh.” His face unfroze. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It was a while ago.” She realized that for the first time she didn’t have the precise number of weeks at her mental fingertips. Maybe there wasn’t room, with all that town lot information.

“I went along by the
Nugget
office, and they said I might find you here.”

“You were looking for me?” Mildred would have to talk to someone about forwarding gentlemen callers. Probably Harry.

McLaury turned red again. “There’s a play at the Opera House tonight. I know it’s not much warning, but my brother and I are in town until tomorrow noon …” He took a breath and set his jaw, as if expecting to be punched. “Would you care to go with me?”

For the first time, Mildred noticed McLaury’s clothes. Not the drover rig that the ranchers wore into town. He wore a smart dark town suit and a starched white shirt, a satin-stripe waistcoat and matching tie. His unruly brown hair had been slicked smooth, and the hat he turned in his hands might be new. She looked down, embarrassed, and saw that his shoes were shined.

She couldn’t. Well, why not? Because she hadn’t for so long, that was why. She remembered going to the theater, concerts, cotillions—but that was before David. She didn’t know how to behave, how to talk to a man who wasn’t her husband or her coworker.

Silly—she was talking to him now, wasn’t she? And what made her think her debutante behavior would apply to widowhood, anyway? Here was a friend, asking her to a play. She didn’t need to flirt with him.

But what if he flirted with her? Well, what if he did? If she didn’t like it, she could discourage it, gently. If she recalled how. Oh, heavens, it was just a play!

She looked up into Tom McLaury’s face, and found his blush had drained away. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to go to the play with you.”

He grinned the wide white grin that had disarmed her at their first meeting, in the street over the goat. “Shall I come for you at your place? Oh, except I don’t know where that is.”

She told him, as she thought,
Dear God, what have I done?
She supposed she’d be asking that until the evening was over. She watched McLaury walk down the street and swore to postpone all internal debate until he brought her home at evening’s end.