The Gamble (I)

1880

Agatha Downing looked out the window of her millinery shop and saw a life-sized oil painting of a naked woman crossing the street. She gasped and clenched her fists.
That man again!
What would he think of next? It wasn’t enough that he’d set up business right next door selling spirits and encouraging honest men to squander their hard-earned money at gambling. Now it was pictures of naked women!

Aghast, she pressed a hand to her boned corsets and watched the jovial band of ne’er-do-wells coming her way. Shouting ribald accolades, they jostled their way toward the Gilded Cage Saloon, bearing the framed canvas on their shoulders. The street was wide and muddy; it took them some time to cross. Before they were halfway, all the men on the boardwalk had joined them, hooting, doffing their hats, paying lewd homage to the Rubenesque nude. The closer they got, the tighter Agatha pressed her corsets to herself.

The disgraceful figure stood a good six feet high with arms raised to heaven as if waiting to ascend—full front, voluptuous, and naked as a fresh-hatched jaybird.

Agatha dropped her glance from the disgusting spectacle.

Heaven, indeed! The entire lot of them were bound in the other direction. And, it appeared, they were aiming to
take the children down with them!

Two young boys had spotted the revelers and came running down the middle of the muddy street to get a closer look.

Agatha flung her door open and limped onto the boardwalk.

“Perry! Clydell!” she shouted at the ten-year-olds. “Go home at once! Do you hear?”

The pair came up short. They looked up to see Miss Downing pointing a finger toward the end of the street.

“At once, I said, or I’ll tell your mothers!”

Perry White turned to his friend Clydell Hottle with a sickly expression on his freckled face. “It’s old lady Downing.”

“Aw, shoot!”

“My ma buys hats from her.”

“Yeah, mine, too,” Clydell despaired. They gave a last inquisitive glance at the naked lady on the painting, turned reluctantly, and shuffled back toward home.

Mooney Straub, one of the town’s drunks, raised his voice from the mob in the street and called after them, “Wait’ll you’re a little older, boys!” Coarse laughter followed and Agatha’s outrage burned even hotter.

They were nothing but riff-raff. Though it was only ten o’clock in the morning, Mooney Straub could scarcely stand on his feet. And there was Charlie Yaeger, whose wife and six children lived in a hovel fit for pigs; and Cornelia Loretto’s young son Dan, who’d been hired on next door as a keno dealer, shaming his poor mother terribly; and the fearsome-looking bartender with thick white hair growing over only the left half of his skull and a livid red scar covering most of his face; and the tall skinny Negro piano player whose eyes never seemed to miss a thing; and George Sowers, who years ago had struck it rich in the Colorado gold fields but had drunk and gambled away his entire fortune. And leading the troop, the one responsible for delivering this plague upon her doorstep: that man they all called Scotty.

Agatha stationed herself on the steps before the saloon and waited as the brigade of Satan’s army splashed its way
through the spring mud. When they reached the hitching rails, Agatha spread her arms wide.

“Mr. Gandy, I must protest!”

LeMaster Scott Gandy lifted a hand to halt his followers.

“Rein in there, boys. Seems we’ve got company.” He turned slowly and raised his gaze to the woman standing above him like an avenging angel. She was dressed in dull gray. Her Austrian-draped tie-back skirt was cinched tightly, front to back. Her bustle jutted high like the spine of a spitting cat. Her hair was drawn back into so severe a knot it looked as if it gave her a perennial headache. The only spots of color she possessed were the twin blotches of pink on her stiff white cheeks.

Letting a grin lift one corner of his lips, Gandy lazily doffed his low-crowned black Stetson.

“Mornin’, Miz Downin’,” he drawled in an accent fairly oozing dogwood and magnolia blossoms.

Her fists clenched at her hips. “This is an outrage, Mr. Gandy!”

He continued holding the hat aloft, grinning lopsidedly. “I said, Mornin’, Miz Downin’.”

A fly buzzed past her nose but she didn’t bat an eye. “It is
not
a good morning, sir, and I won’t pretend it is.”

He settled the flat-crowned Stetson on his coal-black hair, pulled one boot out of the mud, gave it a shake, and settled it on the lowest step. “Well, now,” he drawled, reaching into his waistcoat pocket and extracting a cheroot. He squinted at the blue Kansas sky. He squinted at her. “Sun’s out. Rain’s stopped. Cattle’re bound t’ be comin’ through soon.” He bit the end off the cheroot and spit it into the mud. “I’d call that a middlin’ good day, ma’am. How ‘bout you?”

“You can’t mean to place that...”—she pointed indignantly at the picture—”... that sister of Sodom on the walls of your establishment for any and all to see!”

He laughed, the sun glinting off his straight, white teeth. “Sister of Sodom?” He reached inside his close-fitting black sack coat, patted his vest pockets, and came up with a wooden match. “If y’all find it offensive, no need t’ worry.
Once I get it inside, y’ won’t have t’ see it again.”

“Those innocent children have already seen it. Their poor mothers will be horrified. And what’s more, anyone, young or old, can peek beneath those ridiculous swinging doors any time.” She shook a finger at his nose. “And you know perfectly well the children will!”

“Shall I post a guard, Miz Downin’?” His drawl was so pronounced,
guard
sounded like
god.
“Would that satisfy y’all?” He struck the match on the hitching post, lit the cheroot, tossed the match over his shoulder, and grinned up at her through the smoke.

The slow, nonchalant drawl aggravated her as badly as his cavalier attitude and the stench of his cigar.

“What would satisfy me is to see you send that sinful painting back where it came from. Or, better yet, use it for firewood.”

He glanced over his shoulder and appreciatively scanned the naked image from head to foot. “She’s here...”—he turned back to Agatha—”... and she stays.”

“But you simply can’t hang such a picture!”

“Oh, but I can,” he replied coolly, “and I will.”

“I cannot allow it.”

He smiled rakishly, took a deep drag of the cheroot, and said invitingly, “Then stop me.” With the cigar he gestured over his shoulder. “Come on, boys, let’s take the li’l lady inside.”

A roar rose behind him and his henchmen lunged forward. Gandy took one step up only to find that Miss Downing had taken one step down. His knee came against her stiff gray skirt, sending her bustle higher up in back. His grin remained fixed, but he raised one eyebrow. “If y’all will excuse us, Miz Downin’.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort.” It took great fortitude for Agatha to hold her ground with his knee-high boot touching her skirt. But she stared him down. “If the respectable businessmen of this town are too timid to speak up against these dens of vice and corruption you and your ilk have brought upon us, the women are not!”

Gandy pressed both palms to his knee and leaned forward till his hat brim nearly touched her nose. He spoke quietly,
the drawl more pronounced, but with an unmistakable note of menace. “I wouldn’t like t’ manhandle a woman in front of the townsfolk, ma’am, but if y’all don’t step aside you’ll leave me no choice.”

Her nostrils narrowed. She drew herself up more erect. “Those who step aside to allow indecencies of this sort are as guilty as if they’d committed them themselves.”

Their eyes clashed and held: his piercing black, hers defiant green. Behind Gandy the men waited in ankle-deep mud, their snickers having subsided into expectant silence. Down the street Perry White and Clydell Hottle shaded their eyes with their hands, waiting to see who won. On the opposite side of the street, a saloonkeeper and his bartender stepped to their own swinging doors, observing the confrontation with great amusement on their faces.

Gandy stared into Agatha Downing’s determined eyes, realizing his steadiest customers and best friends waited to see if he’d back down to a female. To do so would make him the laughingstock of Proffitt, Kansas. He wasn’t raised to be disrespectful to the weaker sex, but she left him no choice.

“As y’ wish, ma’am,” Gandy drawled, then nonchalantly anchored the cigar between his teeth, clamped his hands around Agatha’s arms, whisked her off the step, and planted her eight inches deep in the mud. The men roared with approval. Agatha yelped, flailed her arms, and tried to pull her shoes out of the quagmire. But the mud only sucked her in deeper, and with an ignominious splat, she landed on her bustle in the ooze.

“Attaway, Gandy!”

“Don’t take no guff offa no skirts!”

While Agatha glared at Gandy, his henchmen carried the naked lady up the wooden steps through the swinging doors of the Gilded Cage Saloon. When they’d disappeared, he tipped his hat and offered a dazzling smile. “G’day, Miz Downin’. It’s been a pleasure.” He made his way up the steps, cleaned his boots on the boot scraper outside the door, then followed the rowdy rabble inside, leaving the half doors swinging behind him.

* * *

From the opposite boardwalk the entire confrontation had been observed by a woman dressed in unrelieved black. Drusilla Wilson paused with valise in hand. She had the build and rigidity of a railroad tie, a nose like a scythe blade, and eyes that looked as if they could drill through granite. Her thin mouth was downturned, the upper lip almost obscured by the lower. Her jaw was undershot, reminiscent of a grouper’s. Beneath the undecorated brim of a stark black Quaker bonnet, a thin band of hair showed, and an inch of its center part. That hair—black, too, as if nature approved her bid to appear formidable—was drawn flat down over her temples and pinned her ears against her skull. She radiated the kind of sternness that caused people, when introduced to her, to step back instead of forward.

After witnessing the altercation across the street, Miss Wilson turned to a red-bearded man with a waxed handlebar moustache who stood just outside the swinging doors of the Hoof and Horn Saloon. He was clad in a red-and-white-striped shirt with elastic sleeve bands cinched around a pair of enormous arms. Those arms were crossed over a massive chest that bounced each time he chuckled. On his fiery hair sat a black felt bowler. The stub of a dead cigar protruded from the red brush surrounding his mouth.

“That woman’s name—what is it, please?” Drusilla Wilson demanded officiously.

“Who? Her?” He nodded toward Agatha and chuckled again.

Drusilla nodded, unamused.

“That’s Agatha Downing.”

“And where does she live?”

“Right there.” He removed the stogie and pointed with its sodden end. “Above her hat shop.”

“She owns it?”

“Yup.”

Drusilla glanced at the pitiful figure on the far side of the street and murmured, “Perfect.” Lifting her valise in one hand, her skirts in the other, she started toward the stepping-stones that crossed the muddy thoroughfare. But she turned back toward the red-bearded man, who still
smiled as he watched Agatha trying to extricate herself from the mud.

“And your name, sir?” she demanded.

He gave her his brown-toothed smile, then plugged his tiny mouth with the cigar once more. “Heustis Dyar.”

She cocked one eyebrow at the scarlet lettering on the false-fronted building above his head. “And you own the Hoof and Horn?”

“That’s right,” he announced proudly, slipping his thumbs behind his suspenders, jutting out his chest. “Who wants t’ know?”

She gave a smug half nod. “Drusilla Wilson.”

“Drus——” He yanked the cigar from his mouth and took one step toward her. “Hey, wait a minute! What’re you doin’ here?” Scowling, he whirled toward his bartender, whose forearms rested on the tops of the swinging doors. “What’s
she
doin’ here?”

Tom Reese shrugged. “How should I know what she’s doin’ here? Startin’ trouble, I reckon. Ain’t that what she does everyplace she goes?”