The Bold Frontier (25 page)

Sheltered by the porch roof, he eased the door open. Lamplight and the smell of dust drifted out. Beyond the closed door of the bedroom, bedsprings squeaked and groaned, and a bullish voice exclaimed. “Oh, that’s mighty fucking good, oh my Lord yes …”

Rolf Greencastle would have lit out immediately for the hen house but for the intrusion of that obscenity into the unseen customer’s declaration of pleasure. That word set his hair to crawling under his hat. An unbelievable premonition gripped him. Held him rigid on the porch a good five minutes, while similar professions of pleasure, similarly punctuated with all sorts of bad language, convinced him that his suspicion was correct and that, somehow, he was caught in one of those inexplicable apocalyptic disasters that left total carnage and sorrow in their wake.

Blood rushed to his head. His eyes felt bulgy as he flung the door wide and cannoned across the parlor, nearly knocking over a flickering lamp with a pearly globe. He took a deep, hurtful breath—this was worse than the time he’d ridden carelessly over a rise and come upon half a dozen young men of the Southern Cheyenne tribe, each and every one in a bad mood—and prayed for God and Jimmy to forgive him. But he had to know.

He opened the bedroom door.

A fat-bottomed little man rolled over on his back and shouted, “Who the profanity are you? What the obscenity is going on here?”

“Rolf, oh Rolf,” Jimmy said, trying to cover herself with the bedding. She sounded more grief-stricken than angry. As for Rolf, his aching eyeballs were fixed on the soap-lock of the enraged chap leaping from the bed and seizing his yellow-striped trousers while throwing all sorts of obscene invective at the stunned intruder trembling in the doorway.

“Will you get the shit out of here, you bugeyed intrusive little son of a bitch?” screamed General Philip Henry Sheridan; for it was the very same.

“General Sheridan, please calm down,” Jimmy said. Rolf could not see her just then, the general was in the way. But he distinctly heard the cocking of the Deringer. Sheridan heard it too, and it arrested his angry rush to dress and depart. His little white corporation quivered above the waist of the regulation trousers he was hastily buttoning. Rolf reckoned him to be in his middle thirties, with careworn lines around his black eyes.

“I have a gun pointed at your back, General,” Jimmy added.

“You have what?”

The barefoot Sheridan spun around and his disbelief quickly evaporated. Jimmy was sitting up in bed, one hand clasping the sheet over her bosom, the other pointing the hideout pistol at Sheridan’s chest, which was white as a bottle of milk.

“General, how did this happen?” Rolf gasped.

“Who the double profanity wants to know? Who the repeated obscenity are you?”

“Just someone who wants to save your life if possible, General.”

“Rolf,” Jimmy said, “I don’t want to shoot you too. My mind’s made up. He’s going to die. Don’t make more bloodshed.”

Water dripped from Rolf’s chin. At first he thought it was rain but then he realized he was indoors, and it was sweat. The low-trimmed lamp at the bedside, the heavy draperies closed and securely tied that way, gave the room a confined, sultry air. The air of a tomb, he thought, wishing he hadn’t.

Sheridan was struggling into his shirt, one moment looking miffed, the next letting his anxiety flicker through; the man was clearly no fool. “General, how the devil did you get over here?” Rolf exclaimed. “You’re not supposed to arrive till tomorrow.”

“Arrived early,” Sheridan barked. “And I found this letter—this charming letter—” He indicated a paper sticking from the pocket of his blouse, which lay over the back of a chair half hidden by his rain-dampened caped overcoat. “From someone who signed herself Daughter of Joy. It was a very fetching missive.” He sounded outraged. “It was a special invitation to one of our, ahem, country’s heroes to enjoy an hour in the grove of Venus—free of charge.” By now Rolf’s mind had begun to edit out all of the simple and compound obscenities with which Sheridan filled these and all his other sentences.

“And you fell for it?” Rolf asked. In other circumstances, you might have heard the crash of an idol coming off its pedestal.

“Well, sir, God damn it, I am a bachelor—a man like any other. A man with appetites! A man with feelings!”

“You didn’t have any feelings when you burned my daddy’s farm on the Valley Pike in Shenandoah County, Virginia, and sent him off to Detroit, Michigan, to catch the glooms and die.”

“Shenandoah County?” Sheridan muttered. He turned to the bed. “I remember that place of course, but not your father. What was his name?”

Jimmy whipped her other hand onto the hideout pistol’s grip, and the sheet fell, baring her breast. She took no notice. Her beautiful eyes burned. Rolf knew the end was at hand.

“Cosgrove Sturdevant was his name. He took a shot at you because your damned brute soldiers had ruined our farm and carried me off to rape me. For punishment you sent him to prison up north. A poor helpless middle-aged farmer!”

General Phil Sheridan gathered himself and hooked his thumbs in the waist of his trousers, further revealing his potbelly, of which he took no notice. In a hard, strong voice, he said, “I do remember that incident. And you are wrong about it.” He stepped toward the bed. “What happened was—”

“Stand back or I’ll blow your head off,” Jimmy whispered. Both hands, and the Deringer, trembled, and Sheridan’s black eyes darted from the gun to Jimmy’s face and back again. He clearly saw his death but a finger’s twitch away. He didn’t advance but he stood fast, and even a little taller. Rolf almost whistled; the man had testicles of steel.

“I ask you not to pull that trigger until I tell you what happened.”

“Your men savaged me in the smokehouse, for one.”

“I am deeply grieved,” Sheridan said, without a single profanity. “I never intentionally made war on women. I do know such things happened.”

Jimmy blinked and sat back, expecting, perhaps, something other than this soldier’s calm and measured determination in the face of impending death. “I remember your father, and your farm, now that I put my mind to it, because it was there that we lost a young soldier named Birdage, the day after the battle at Fisher’s Hill. A white-haired farmer came rushing from his house as we rode into his dooryard, and he fired a shot.”

“Did you expect a man like Daddy wouldn’t defend his property from filthy Yankee scum invaders?”

“No, I expect that would be any man’s natural reaction,” Sheridan said, his voice still level. Rolf swayed in the doorway, dizzy, hearing the beat of rain and what sounded in his ear like the rushing winds of black hell and judgment in the sky. Very soon, he expected to see fountains of blood all over the room’s rose-pattern wallpaper. “I can understand why I was a target. Unfortunately your father’s shot struck a soldier named Asa Birdage.”

“Who cares, who cares?” Jimmy screamed. “He was sixty-two years old!”

“Asa Birdage was eleven years old. Asa Birdage was our headquarters drummer boy.”

Jimmy’s face was curtained by horror. She flung back against the headboard, wanting to deny Sheridan’s statement. He simply stood there with his hands hanging easily at his sides—maybe he wasn’t so easy inside, but you couldn’t tell except for the rise and fall of his potbelly—and Jimmy began to shake her head from side to side. “No, no” she said, and then she burst out crying. “Liar. You’re lying to save your hide.”

“Young woman, I am an honorable man. I have been accused of many things, but never of deceit. Your father slew one of my soldiers. Who was scarcely more than a child. I felt prison was fair punishment. Perhaps I erred. Perhaps I was unjust. I acted to prevent another death. Others in my command that day wanted to shoot your father on the spot.”

“No, oh no,” Jimmy wept. Sheridan’s eyes took on a pitying look. Rolf leaped by him, giving him a fist in the shoulder—how many times did you get to land a blow on a hero? on a legend?—and with one quick decisive grab, he removed the Deringer from Jimmy’s hand.

“I am thankful that you believe me, miss,” Phil Sheridan said in a voice oddly humbled.

“I’m not, I’m not,” she cried, covering her tearful face. Rolf knelt beside the bed and with both hands delicately lifted the hem of the sheet so as to hide her breasts. His cheeks were scarlet.

General Sheridan quickly donned his singlet and then his blouse. He was once more sounding stern when he said, “If anyone mentions these events, I will deny my presence. I will lie till the throne of Hell freezes.”

Rolf Greencastle was trembling inside. But he tried not to let it show when he turned his eyes on the national hero and scorched him. “I think you’d better light out of here, Phil.”

Phil lit out.

After about three hours, Jimmy’s sobbing wore itself out and she fell asleep. Rolf pulled up a cane-bottomed chair and sat beside the bed, keeping a vigil. The rain fell harder. About four in the morning, Jimmy woke up.

She quickly covered her left breast, which had been peeping over the hem of the sheet as she slept; Rolf had been admiring it for the better part of twenty minutes. Although he knew her body intimately, his admiration was of a different nature than the simple lust he’d satisfied at the Overton Place before.

“Why did you do that?” she said. “Why did you stop me?” She sounded deathly sad. He feared the glooms were coming again. The terrible glooms.

“You tell me something first. How could you take him into your bed, hating him that way?”

“Oh—” A little sniffle. “Part of the trade, that’s all. You learn to shut out everything. How bad the customer stinks. How mean he is. With him it was harder. For a while I thought it wouldn’t work, I’d go to pieces. Then I remembered my daddy and I made it work. Got him right where I wanted him.”

“It was a mighty good trick,” he agreed. “You could have blown his head off any time you wanted to.”

“Why did you stop me?”

“I didn’t want anything to happen to you. I didn’t want you to keep on having the glooms the rest of your life.”

“Why, why?”

“I don’t know, I guess because I love you.”

They stared at each other. He was fully as surprised as she was.

The next day he helped her put the Overton Place up for sale and they rode away together and neither one ever saw General Phil Sheridan again.

G
RAHAM COLDFIELD WALKED UP
the plank of the steamer feeling the dizziness again. The lanterns of the
River Queen
had been lit against the lowering dusk, and he paused in the light of one of them, leaning weakly against the wooden wall, his head bowed. The quiet lap of the Blackwater River rose from the hull.

Beyond the wharf sprawled the town of Herrod’s Landing, bawling with laughter and the rattle of carriage wheels and occasional shouts. Coldfield paid no attention. Dizziness fogged his brain. A sharp pain in his stomach made him close his eyes and groan. The damp night air brought a cough to his lips.

A couple dismounted from a carriage on the wharf and came up the plank, brushing past him. The woman gave him an odd look and laughed prettily, twirling her ornamental parasol as she passed. Coldfield ignored her. Terrified, he tried to fight the sickening motion of things around him. The world tilted and blurred before his eyes. He was weak, and ill.

Coldfield was a tall man, slender, with a long-jawed somber face. His gray eyes seemed empty in the lamplight. He leaned against the wall, finely dressed in a dark suit, black tie, and brocaded vest, the very model of a fashionable river gambler. But within his mind, he could already see his position slipping away.

The
Queen
was the best vessel on the river, and her gambling saloon attracted the most trade. Coldfield had climbed as far as he could in his kind of work. He dealt faro on the
Queen,
and made a good living at it. He lived quietly, like a gentleman, satisfied that hard times were over for him. He’d nearly forgotten the cheap back-country saloons; the nickel-ante stud games; the long nights spent in the saddle moving from town to town. He had worked long and hard to reach the position of dealer on the
Queen.
And now suddenly, it was all tumbling out from under him.

It’s this damned river, he thought. Always damp and foggy and chill, like tonight. It weakened a man; cut down his resistance. Dazedly, Coldfield shook his head. If Tom Chapman, owner of the
Queen,
found out that he was having these spells, he’d be finished. That thought terrified him more than anything. To go back to riding from town to town, living with a half-empty, growling stomach most of the time—he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t. But maybe it’s not what you think it is at all, he thought. Maybe you just haven’t been eating or resting enough.

He straightened up slowly. He was lying to himself. He was a sick man.

Well, he’d have to be careful. Above all he had to keep the secret from Chapman. He started to move along the deck, aware that the carriages were arriving more frequently now, that the crowd was swelling. He bumped into someone in the shadows and hastily drew back, his fingers reaching instinctively toward the derringer in his waistcoat pocket.

The man stepped out of the dark, lamplight falling across his massive, ugly face. Coldfield recognized Redneck Bates, wearing a cap and high-collared jacket. Coldfield didn’t like Bates, whose position on the
River Queen
was obscure. Bates, Coldfield suspected, was aboard to permanently remove anyone Chapman wanted removed. It was that simple. The dislike he felt for the big man sprang mostly from a contempt for the man’s thick-skulled ignorance, mirrored now in his piggy eyes as he squinted at Coldfield. Bates had immensely powerful hands and a short temper.

“Hello, Redneck,” Coldfield said quietly. “I didn’t see you standing there.”

“I been here a minute or so,” Bates said. “I seen you, tinhorn.” Bates always called Coldfield tinhorn, a word which jabbed the gambler like a thorn. Maybe that was another reason for his intense dislike of the man; that and the fact that Bates lived by the strength of his hands, while Coldfield prided himself on living by the quickness of his mind.