Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) (29 page)

Joe took out his Bible, turning it over and over in his hands. “Thy will be done,” he whispered.

Then he bent his head and prayed for everyone, but especially for the soul of Annie’s vengeful son.

Molly lugged her valise out the swinging doors of the Red Garter Saloon. Dusty Wichita lay asleep on this Sunday dawn in late July. She put the luggage on the wooden sidewalk and sat on it, looking up and down the street and listening for the stagecoach.

Wichita’s loss was going to be Caldwell’s gain
, she thought. But somehow, she had a feeling it wouldn’t be any different in that wild, wide-open town. Good times and fun seemed harder and harder to come by. Sometimes she wondered if she were merely going through the motions in a frantic search for excitement that was never quite enough.

She took a small mirror from her purse and looked at herself critically, searching for gray hairs. She found one in her soot-black locks, pulled it, and readjusted the expensive silver and pearl combs.
Tomorrow she would be forty years old. Forty.
Critically, she stared at her image, checking the fine lines around her mouth and eyes. Her mirror didn’t lie. In another five years, her face would be wrinkled so that she would look like “five miles of bad road,” as the cowboys said.
What would she do then?
What happened to saloon girls who grew too old and gradually lost their looks?

Well, she wouldn’t worry about that now
. She’d think about good times in Caldwell, that hell-raisin’ settlement on the Kansas-Indian Territory border. Caldwell was the first town where Texas cowboys crossing the Territory could legally get whiskey. That made it a wild, lawless stopping place on the Chisholm Trail. Oh, there’d be dancing and singing and lots of exciting times!

Molly sighed. Somehow, nothing was ever as much fun as she expected as she drifted from one town to the next, one bordello to the next. How many had she seen in a quarter of a century, always hoping the next one would provide the excitement, the fulfillment she craved and never seemed to find? Ten years ago, she’d been one of Miss Fancy’s girls in San Antone. The years and the mileage were catching up with her. She wouldn’t think about that now, she’d think about the thrill of Caldwell.

And after that . . . where would she go? That wasn’t today’s worry. She’d only think about the dancing, the parties, the kind of fun she’d never had living in a tumbledown shack on the edge of St. Joe.

Molly put the mirror away and looked at her hands critically. Pretty, long nails. Not for her the life of a washerwoman hanging over a scrub board like her ma. She thought about Ma now, wondering what had ever become of her. When Molly closed her eyes, she could see the kettle of boiling water on the fire out in the yard, smell the pungent, homemade lye soap, feel the steam on her face.

“I don’t want to live like this, Ma,” she complained, struggling with the kettle. Molly was fourteen, going on fifteen, the year she met Slade.

Ma brushed a wisp of gray hair from her eyes with a red, sore hand. “Be grateful you got food on the table and keep scrubbin’,” Ma whined, reaching for another dirty shirt.

“I ain’t grateful,” Molly said with spirit, sorting through the clothes. “I’m too pretty to waste my life like this, I know it. The fellows in town tell me I am—”

Her ma came at her with the stirring stick from the wash pot and beat her about the head. “You stay away from those boys in town, you hear? They’ll fill yore head with nonsense tryin’ to get between yore legs!”

“Like Pa did yours?” She shouldn’t have said it, knew better even as Ma beat her. But Molly Kelly, the washerwoman’s daughter, had a rebellious streak.

“That’s right!” Her head went up and down as she scrubbed a shirt collar. “And I been payin’ for it ever since! I know what I’m tellin’ you, girl, that’s why you need to work hard and stop makin’ eyes at men. We can have a good life if you’ll just help with the washin’. . . .”

“A good life!” Molly scoffed. “You call bein’ barely able to eat a good life?” She wiped blood from her lip and stared her mother down. “I never had me no fun in my whole life! I want fancy clothes and parties and men kissin’ my hand and dancin’ with me. . . .”

“Your vanity, your love of good times, will send you to an early death,” Ma said direly, returning to her washboard.

Bill Slade, the town tough, had brought his shirts over for Ma to do. The way he looked the fourteen-year-old girl over let her know what he thought of her. He promised her fun and excitement if he could ever come by when Ma wasn’t home. But when Molly planned it that way, his idea was to throw her down on the shack’s floor and mount her in a frenzy. When she cried, he slapped her ’til her head rang. Then he gave her money to stop her weeping.

She looked at the silver in her hand as she wiped the blood from her thighs, deciding it was easier than doing laundry. She hadn’t realized men would pay for that. Slade kept coming by, filling her head with stories about parties and fine dresses, about faraway places like San Francisco. It went on for months before Ma walked in unexpectedly one day while Molly was washing herself off. There was a terrible scene with Ma screaming “Jezebel” and taking a pair of shears to Molly’s magnificent, long hair, leaving it cropped and ragged.

At that point, Molly threw a sadiron at her and fled the shack forever, moving in with Bill Slade.

It had been exciting—except when he beat her. Bill Slade was as mean as a riled porcupine. He had two partners, saloon toughs called Trask and the Mexican. The three of them sat around drinking and making plans about how to get rich without working for it. When Molly tired of the cramped hotel room, reminding Bill Slade that this wasn’t what he had promised her, he beat her up again, letting his friends rape her while he watched and laughed.

Word must have gotten around that Slade needed a fourth man, a man extra good with a rifle. A handsome red-haired fella named Joe McBride showed up, desperate for money, saying he didn’t care how he got it. . . .

Molly looked up and down Wichita’s deserted street, wondering if the stage was going to be late. Joe McBride. She thought of Joe fondly, wondering whatever had happened to him. In all her life, there’d been only two men Molly really gave her heart to—and neither one of them loved her back. The first had been that big, handsome Kentuckian, Joe McBride. The other man was Maverick Durango. But she was a lot older than Maverick, almost old enough to be his mother, and she knew that she had no chance there, either.

If Joe hadn’t spurned her, she might have had a son of her own; as it was, she had no one who really cared about her. She thought jealously of the woman he had spurned her for, wondering if he ever got his Annie back. Twenty-five years. Had it really been twenty-five years since she’d seen Joe that last time?
My, how time flies!

The thought so depressed her that she got out her little mirror again, reassuring herself that she didn’t look almost forty, touching the expensive combs smugly. Long ago, Molly’s hair had grown out and never been cut since Ma had taken the shears to it, chopping it off around her ears. Men told Molly she had the most beautiful hair of any woman they’d ever met. They all seemed to like to tangle their fingers in it when they made love to her.

Joe McBride. She’d done her best to seduce him. There was something about his green eyes, his gentle ways, that reached out to her. A decent man like that should never have gotten mixed up with Slade, but he needed money bad. Wherever he was, he might think he was still wanted for murder. Molly smiled to herself with satisfaction. After all these years, the time limit on the robbery charge had surely run out. And Molly had contacted the sheriff in St. Joe, letting him know McBride didn’t kill that bank teller.

Molly sighed now, looking up and down the Wichita street, wondering where that damned stage was. There wasn’t a soul on the street except Wilbur, the telegraph operator.
Lord, he’d seen her!
She’d hoped to get out of town without having to say good-bye to him.

His Adam’s apple bobbed in his thin neck. He saw her, changed directions, and came toward her, a scrap of paper clasped in his bony hand.
Did he ever go anywhere without that damned green eyeshade?

“Molly, what’s this? You goin’ somewhere? You didn’t say nothing about leavin’. . . .”

“Just decided to go last night after hearin’ some of the cowboys talk about what a good-time town Caldwell was.”

“But I’d thought maybe someday, you and me—well, you know. . . .”

She frowned at him and brushed a wisp of hair back up into the fancy combs. “Just cause you give me a gift don’t think it means you own me. You think I could live on a telegraph operator’s salary?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Molly, them fancy hair combs cost me a whole month’s salary,” he gestured toward her. “I ain’t always gonna be poor. I got big plans. . . .”

“Everybody’s got big plans. Had me some myself before I had to face reality.” She thought about Joe.

Molly stood up and shook the wrinkles out of her dark red traveling dress. “You ain’t never gonna amount to much!”

“No, I got friends! And they’re gonna cut me in on something.” He stood looking at her hungrily, the forgotten paper clutched in his thin hands. “Gunmen! Real gunmen! All I got to do is let them know when the army payroll’s gonna be transferred onto the Austin stage. It’s secret! The army don’t want to let anyone know about that payroll for all them soldiers in the Red River campaign, afraid the Indians’ll attack in force.”

She looked at him skeptically. “If there was a payroll, they’d send soldiers to guard it.”

“Naw,” he adjusted the eyeshade excitedly. “All them soldiers is busy fightin’ Injuns! I think the army thinks if they ship it like a regular trunk, nobody’ll notice, be any the wiser. . . .”

“Oh, Wilbur, you’re just big talk,” she scoffed.

“No, Molly, listen! I’m to wire them when the army decides the date, when the payroll box is goin’ on the Austin stage, and my friends is gonna rob it as it goes through some little jerkwater town somewhere west of Austin, I don’t know where just yet. But they’ll cut me in for helpin’ them!” He grabbed her arm, “I’ll be able to buy you a lot of nice things besides just pearl combs. . . . .”

She brushed his hand off in annoyance. “Is that what that message is about?”

He glanced down in confusion at the obviously forgotten, crumpled piece of paper. “This? No, this is a message that finally got through for that little school teacher. The wire’s back up again. Injuns keep cutting it. No telling how long it’ll be back up this time.”

That snippy little school teacher
. Her lip curled in anger as she remembered the sassy little redhead sloshing water all over Molly and Maverick. “What happened to that little tart, anyway?”

Wilbur grinned, obviously delighted to be the bearer of bad news. “Why, she left town a week or so ago with that trail boss from the Triple D right behind her.”

Molly felt a surge of jealous fury. “Maverick?”

“That’s the one,” he nodded with malicious delight. “Ain’t he the one you broke a date with me over when he hit town? Everyone’s says you was sweet on him.”

“So what if I was?” She shrugged. “If they left town separately, that don’t mean they met anywheres.”

Wilbur adjusted his eyeshade against the early dawn light. “I figure they left separately so nobody would suspect nothin’, figuring to meet up out on the prairie someplace. They rode off the same direction.”

“Which way?”

“Southwest.” He pointed off toward the flat, desolate prairie outside Wichita.

“There ain’t nothing out there but buffalo grass and rampaging Indians.” Molly peered that direction, remembering the redhead’s words about Maverick accompanying her back to Texas. Jealously, she imagined them traveling together, sharing a blanket at night. . . .

“I don’t know what to do with this message since she’s gone. . . .”

“Message?” Molly looked from his thin face to the crumpled paper in his hand. “Who’s it from?”

“Her daddy. I ain’t supposed to discuss the wires that come through; that’s confidential. . . .”

“Wilbur, don’t get highfaultin on me.” She held her hand out. “Everybody knows you gossip about all the messages you handle worse than some old ladies’ sewing circle. Let me see it.”

He hesitated only a moment before handing it over.

Molly stared at it. She reread it twice, then threw back her head and laughed. Tears came to her eyes as she stared at the paper. “Well, if that don’t beat all! No wonder she looked so familiar to me! I kept thinkin’ I’d met her someplace else! Joe’s daughter! Joe’s daughter!”

Wilbur stared at her. “Are you all right, Molly? What’s this all about, anyway? If you know these folks, do you want to maybe send the daddy a wire, tell him he missed his daughter? It might be important to him. . . .”

“No, I’m not gonna send him no damned wire tellin’ him they’re on their way.” Jealous fury made her hand shake as she crumpled the message, throwing it down in the dirt of the street.

She had lost Joe McBride to Annie, and now his and Annie’s daughter had stolen Maverick from her. Hell, no, she wouldn’t do anything to stop whatever was going to happen when they all came together. She was only sorry she wouldn’t be there to see it. Maybe it was serious enough that the two men would shoot it out; maybe they would kill each other. Well, it was good enough for them!

Wilbur peered at her anxiously. “Are you all right, Molly? You don’t look so good. Are you sure you don’t want to do nothin’ about this message?”

She thought about it a long moment. She could warn Joe with a quick wire that the pair was on their way; that might help him some. He’d managed to rescue that Annie girl and had a daughter by her. Annie, the girl he’d spurned Molly for. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Molly smiled slowly, watching the breeze blow the scrap of paper along the street toward the stagecoach that had just rounded the corner, rattling across the bridge.

“No,” she said. “Forget it, Wilbur, it ain’t important.” She leaned over and picked up her valise.

The little telegraph operator caught her arm. “Don’t go, Molly! ” he whined. “These three guys is gonna cut me in on a big thing. I’ll have money to buy you nice things. . . .”