Territory (4 page)

The stranger was as dusty and shabby as any drover at the end of a long cattle drive. But the long drives were over, except in old men’s stories, and none of them had ever ended in Arizona Territory. He wore spectacles with dark lenses, as if the light of day was too much for him. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was staring at her.

“May I help you?” Mildred said, and her voice cracked.

The stranger seemed to wake with a start. “I … Is this the newspaper office?”

He was real. Surely ghosts didn’t stammer. She looked at the type cases, the page she was setting, the press and the folding machine hulking like bears and visible through the door to the back room. “I believe it’s one of them, yes.”

His eyebrows rose above the spectacles. “There’s more than one?”

“Gracious, any town with only one newspaper isn’t big enough for the name.” She thought of some of the company mines farther north. “Or it’s owned by someone.”

He was still, digesting that. Mildred thought he was staring again. Where the devil was Harry? And the pressmen—shouldn’t they be here by now? There was no sound from the back room.

“
Is
there something I can help you with?” Mildred asked.

The stranger ducked his head and took his spectacles off. Mildred tensed. But the eyes he raised to hers were wide and tea-colored and unmarred. His smile wasn’t the toothy, confident one of a man about to call her “sweetheart” or tell her what a pretty thing she was. It was, in fact, mildly apologetic.

“I’d like to buy a copy of the paper,” he said.

She hadn’t expected that.
But it’s a newspaper office, for heaven’s sake.
“You’re a tad early for today’s.”

“I’ll settle for yesterday’s. Things don’t change that fast here, do they?”

“You’d be amazed.” Mildred pushed through the gate and across the aisle to the cabinet behind Harry’s desk. Two copies left. She’d remind Harry to increase the run today; the holdup would sell papers.

The holdup. She felt the presence of the man behind her like a hot stove at her back. She glanced over her shoulder.

He hadn’t moved. He was looking at her partly set page, his head tilted at a near-painful angle. Or perhaps he was reading Harry’s copy.

What kind of temptation would twenty-five thousand dollars be to an out-at-the-elbows drifter? How dirty would a man get, waiting in the washes for a stagecoach to make its run, riding all night to avoid the posse? And what if a robber
were
brazen enough to come into town after the attempt, clever enough to realize that sensible people would expect him to be anywhere else?

She took a paper from the stack and came back to him. “Five cents.”

He dropped the nickel into her palm. It seemed to burn her skin, but she closed her fingers over it anyway. “I’m new to town,” he said. “My name’s Jesse Fox.”

Mildred ignored the hint. “I hope you have a pleasant stay.”

“Meaning, you don’t expect I’ll be here long.”

“I try not to show a rude interest in other people’s business.”

His eyebrows went up in mock surprise. “But this is a newspaper office.”

Wary as she was, she had to laugh at his wounded look. “Oh, are you news, then?”

Fox shook his head. “I’d hoped for a mention in the social column, at least. ‘Newly arrived in our fair camp is Mr. Jesse Fox, late of Durango, Colorado.’ ”

“ ‘Who has come for the benefits of our salubrious climate’?” She found herself remembering people who hadn’t found the place healthful—Bud Philpot being the latest. Fox’s brown eyes, clear as running water, met hers. She felt as if he were seeing all the way to the back of her skull.
“Will
you be here long?” she added quickly.

“I thought that wasn’t your business?”

“You can’t expect to be reported on if you won’t say much.” Talking to him made Mildred nervous, but
not
talking was worse.

“Are you a reporter, Miss …”

“No.”

He looked down at the paper in his hands, then up again at Mildred. “I can find out your name, you know.”

It didn’t sound like a threat, but Mildred tensed, even so. “Then I needn’t make you a gift of it,” she said, in the voice that had warned off bankers’ sons in a dozen Philadelphia ballrooms.

Either he was richer than a banker’s son, or he had some more effective source of impudence. He grinned at her. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t put you to the trouble.”

The back door banged closed, and Mildred looked around to see Harry coming past the press into the front room. She heard the pressmen, as well;
two sets of boots on the wood floor, two hoarse voices, the steel-and-cast-iron racket of setting up the press.

Harry gave Fox an unreadable stare. “Mrs. Benjamin taking care of you?” he asked mildly.

Fox blinked at Harry; then he caught Mildred’s eye and lifted his eyebrows. Mildred clenched her hands together in front of her and glared at him.

“She’s been a great help.” Fox bowed his head gravely to Mildred. “Good day, Mrs. Benjamin.” And he tucked his paper under his threadbare elbow and left.

“Who was that?” asked Harry.

“His name is Jesse Fox, he’s just passing through, he’s lived in Durango, and yesterday’s newspaper was good enough for him.”

Harry sighed. “I don’t know why papers don’t hire more pretty young lady reporters. People will tell ’em anything.”

“Like it or not. So you’ve never seen him before?”

“Not that I recollect. But there are people in the world I haven’t met. Isn’t that column set yet?”

With Fox gone, the sun shining in the window, and Harry’s dry voice in her ears, she felt foolish. The robbers would be fifty miles away by now.

“Did he say if he was putting up somewhere?” Harry asked.

“If … No, he didn’t.”

“Hm.” Harry moved papers on his desk until he unearthed his humidor. He took out a cigar and nipped the end off. “Might be a good thing to know.”

“So he worried you, too!”

“Millie, never talk yourself out of your instincts. So long as they don’t lead you to jail or to court, you might as well see if there’s anything to ‘em.”

“I just set type. No instinct needed.”

“Hm,” he said again, and struck a match on the flank of the stove. “Maybe you ought to get on with that.”

She went back to her page. On the stand beside Harry’s copy were six of the thin lead strips she spaced lines of type with. They teetered on their narrow edges, forming three chevrons with their points toward the door like a compass needle.

Mildred swept them back into the type case. She wasn’t sure why Harry shouldn’t see them, but he was the one who said she should trust her instincts. She was certain the heat in the six strips of lead was her imagination.

 3 

The red paper banners flapping on a handcart made Sam jump like a cat. An old man sprang out of the way and screamed at the horse. Jesse looked down from the saddle, dazed, and the old man shifted his stream of high-pitched abuse to him.

Jesse frowned, ransacking his memory for Chinese words and inflections. When the old man slowed down, Jesse said carefully, “Sorry thousand times. Unworthy—” The noun escaped him. Or should he have already used the noun?

The old man peered up at him, snorted, and hobbled away. Jesse sighed and turned Sam’s head into the flow of traffic.

It was not, strictly speaking, flowing. They’d been on the main street a moment ago, and Jesse would have sworn to a judge that he hadn’t turned off it. But the passage that Sam picked his way down now would have been an alley, if alleys were ordinarily busy and crowded and loud.

On both sides, wooden buildings and canvas tents compressed the pedestrians, horses, mules, wagons, livestock, and bins of merchandise into a dense, nearly undifferentiated mass, like nougat candy. Jesse could smell incense, raw meat, cooked rice, and a faint odor of chicken coop in an oddly homely combination. Except for the old man, people seemed to dodge him without looking at him.

A grocer dragged a basket of pale green leaves out of a cart and set it with other baskets under his awning. Two middle-aged men in high-collared padded jackets met, smiled, and bowed to each other while the crowd jostled by. Two women, their hair rumpled, wrinkled silk wrappers clutched around them, stood at the flaps of a tent and scolded a man outside stirring a kettle of rice gruel. He growled, and they screamed with laughter.

In front of a squat adobe, a little boy plucked
bao
out of a steaming pan with a pair of tongs so big he had to use both hands. The sight of the rolls, the smell of steamed bread, made Jesse’s stomach rumble. An apothecary stood
behind a pine plank laid across two barrels. Behind him stood an antique hundred-drawer chest of polished mahogany. Jesse recognized ginseng root on the plank counter, but nothing else.

Through the door of a wooden house Jesse could see a glitter of gold and scarlet paint and the glowing tips of joss sticks burning at an altar. A handcart loaded with wooden cages of shrieking, flapping chickens made Sam throw up his head and snort.

He was in Chinatown.

Well, of course he was. But this was Tombstone’s Chinatown. He realized that for the last few minutes he’d been riding through the Hoptowns of Silver City, Virginia City, Sacramento, and San Francisco, unconscious and unsurprised. It was so familiar that he felt almost at home.

And why shouldn’t home be five minutes in a place you’d never seen, because a signboard or a doorway or an accent reminded you of something you took for granted long ago?

Jesse shifted his aching left arm, rolled the shoulder. He wouldn’t stop here, but he needed to find someplace soon—he should feed Sam and let him rest, get himself a bath, change the dressing on his arm. And sleep.

When he was tired, time ceased to be railroad-track linear and became like a school of fish. That was probably how he’d ended up in the newspaper office. Just sleepwalking, after leaving the city marshal: get the local paper, get a feel for the place. But he wasn’t stopping in Tombstone.

When he’d remembered that, standing in the office of the—what was it?—the
Daily Nugget,
it was like waking up. Waking up to find Mrs. Benjamin before him, deep in her work. She’d eyed him as if he were a varmint and she was trying to recall if he was the trapping sort, or the shooting sort.

None of that explained why he’d pretended he might stay in town. The sun through the window had turned her curling, untidy hair into a crown of fire. She’d worn the craftsman’s face as she bent over the page: focused and distant at once. And when she’d raised her head, her dark eyes had seemed to pull him into her, so that those quick, tapering fingers seemed to be his, and when those eyebrows went up, he could feel them on his own forehead. That, too, was probably because he was tired.

Mrs. Benjamin. She’d been mad enough to spit when her boss had given him her name. Pretty—well, prettyish, mostly in the way her face moved. Photographs probably didn’t do her justice.

That was Mr. Benjamin’s problem. Jesse was going to Mexico.

When the dentist, Holliday, had reminded him about his pistol, he’d answered without thinking. Already sleepwalking. Well, he’d buy another
damned gun. Better than turning back into the center of town, where the air seemed thick and clinging for all its dryness.

Sam stopped short. Jesse lurched forward over Sam’s neck as a streak of black passed almost under his hooves. Then he heard a jangle of Chinese, and a small boy dashed under Sam’s nose.

“Hey, careful!” Jesse yelled after him, and realized he’d spoken in Chinese, out of the shoals of memory. The black streak, he saw before the boy and his quarry disappeared, was a pig.

He looked up. The plaque nailed to the doorpost beside him was gilt-edged scarlet with the Chinese characters for “physician” in black. There was a notch in the bottom edge where a knot had fallen out of the wood and been painted over. The sign painter had smudged the last upright stroke of his calligraphy.

San Francisco.
“Everyone else puts his name on his sign,” Jesse protested as he stood at the door that led up to Chow Lung’s second-floor rooms.

“Perhaps everyone else needs to,” Lung replied. “My patients know my name, and those who are not yet my patients only want to know there is a doctor within.”