CHAPTER 1
SIXTY TONS OF Alaskan salmon freshly hauled from her gut, the schooner Bat McCaffrey lay at a long T-wharf in San Francisco Bay. The high masts groaned with the gentle teeter of the ship, and the stout hemp moorings complained against their stays. Occasionally the massive hull cracked and sighed when a shiver ran down her keel.
Mark Talbot sat in his bunk in the fo’c’sle, under a brass hurricane lantern that swung back and forth with the slow roll of the ship. The air smelled of seal oil, bear grease, rotten fish, piss, farts, and cheap alcohol.
If any of the half-dozen men remaining shipboard considered him at work in the shunting half shadows of his lower bunk, they no doubt would think him repairing an old shirt. At least, that’s what he hoped they’d think while continuing to primp and preen in their shaving mirrors.
If they studied him, however, they would no doubt see the torn scraps of an old blue-and-white-striped sea jersey he was sewing together, quilt-like. Given time, even the dullest witted of his cabin mates would probably figure out he was fashioning a money belt for transporting a cache of greenbacks the size of which most of them had never seen before and probably never would again.
Thrifty, most seamen were not, Talbot had found. And that’s what kept them bound to cramped ships captained by mad loners and boisterous miscreants.
That’s what separated them from him, Mark Talbot, the sailor home from the sea at last.
As of tonight, the twenty-seven-year-old Talbot was an ex-drifter who had come by most of his two thousand dollars honestly. At least as honestly as anyone else who’d spent seven years rousting about this country and Old Mexico and another year working his way up the western seaboard on a fishing vessel.
Now he plucked his booty from the crude compartment he’d carved in the planks beneath his bunk, and secured the cache in the belt. Stuffing the bills in the pockets and patting them flat, he smiled, imagining how thrilled his brother, Dave, was going to be when he saw the booty his long-lost brother was bringing home.
Talbot planned to hand over every penny of it to Dave, to help fortify his older brother against the creditors he knew were the bane of even the hardest-working frontier rancher. He figured it was the least he could do, having left his sibling to ranch alone in Dakota while Talbot went off to fight in the Apache Wars with General Crook in Arizona.
When he’d mustered out of the cavalry, the battle-weary veteran went down to Mexico looking for his fortune in gold but instead found himself hip-deep in another war, fighting on the side of a poorly organized band of peons against a small army of landed rogues.
It wasn’t that he loved war, it was that meeting people here and there about the country had made him a sucker for the vanquished—the single man against many, the proud peon fighting the pampered nobleman for a small plot of ground on which to grow his peppers and beans and to raise his kids.
When the money appeared evenly distributed, Talbot wrapped the belt around his waist, then covered it with his two alpaca sweaters and wool-lined calfskin vest, a gift from a Mexican peon’s daughter. He ran his hand over the vest, remembering the warmth of the girl’s lips on his, the silky feel of her naked thighs under his work-roughened hands.
Pilar had been her name. Enough time had passed that he could think of her now, remember her almond eyes and her long black hair swinging across her back as she rode her dusty burro through a mesquite-lined arroyo—without feeling the rock in his stomach, the unbearable swelling in his throat.
She and her father, the widowed Don Luis, had nursed him back to health after he’d been ambushed in the Cerro Colorados by Yaqui bandits. Talbot had remained on their farm for two months, doing light field work while he recuperated, and falling in love with Pilar, his smoky-eyed Mexican peasant queen.
Then one morning while Talbot was off gathering firewood with a tired old mule, government soldiers raided the farm. Talbot saw the smoke and heard the gunfire, but when he’d managed to coax the mule back to the farm—his wounded left leg was still useless for running—the soldados were gone, and Don Luis lay bullet-shredded by the burning jacal.
Talbot found Pilar in the stable, beaten and raped, her skirt twisted around her waist, her lovely throat cut, her sightless eyes pinning him with a silent cry for help.
Well, maybe enough time hadn’t passed, he thought now, appraising his garb through a veil of tears and trying to suppress the memory. Satisfied the money was well concealed, Talbot checked the time on his pocket watch. He had over three hours until his train left San Francisco. He knew the burgeoning California seaport was no place for a peace-seeking man alone at night, especially one with over two thousand dollars on his person. He considered pulling his army-issue gun out of his war bag but decided against it. He was tired of the damn things. Instead of preventing trouble, weapons often only attracted it.
Too antsy to remain aboard ship—he’d been anticipating this for too long—Talbot grabbed his war bag, bid farewell to his cabin mates, and headed up the companionway. On deck he strolled aft and gazed over the bulwarks.
It was a foggy, haunted night, and full dark. Somewhere in the surrounding hills, bells tolled in a steeple. It was a forlorn sound on a quiet winter’s night. Not unpleasantly forlorn. It bespoke land. How long had he waited to set foot again on land? On American soil?
Without even glancing around to consider the ship and to bid farewell to the past seven years of wandering, the tall, broad-shouldered young man with a thick mass of curly brown hair snugged his watch cap onto his forehead, lowered himself lightly over the bulwarks, descended the long ramp, and stepped upon the freight-laden wharf with an involuntary sappy grin.
A landlubber once again and forever more!
He would have knelt and kissed the rough wooden dock but wasn’t sure he’d be able to regain his feet; his sea legs gave him the precarious, slightly intoxicated feeling of treading water on land. Swinging the war bag over his shoulder, he picked his way down the wharf and through the dockyards.
He found the internationally famous Baldwin’s Saloon a half hour later, sandwiched between a brewery and a closed market from which the noise of live geese and ducks issued.
Baldwin’s was everything he’d heard it would be. Three front doors, several levels divided by mahogany rails, a half-mile long bar, and a clientele composed of everyone from doctors and lawyers to immigrant street workers and heavy-eyed night clerks on their supper breaks.
The Chinese market gardeners tended to seclude themselves in the shadows, but their conversations were no less boisterous than those of the Prussian-born bankers from Polk Street.
Talbot found a table and stowed his war bag beneath his chair. When one of the half-dozen shiny-faced, impeccably dressed waiters appeared, he ordered a long-anticipated meal and a stein of the beer brewed next door. In spite of the rank odor of wort and hops issuing from the aging vats, he was curious.
Ten minutes later he dug into a bowl of thick pea soup laden with ham, heavy slabs of underdone roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and two sides of fresh vegetables. When the waiter returned looking amused, Talbot ordered dessert: suet pudding, which came liberally seasoned with butter and sugar.
When it was all over, he shoved his chair out from the table, gave a belch, and loosened his belt. He kicked his legs out before him and crossed his ankles.
“Will there be anything else, sir?” came the uppity voice of the waiter.
“Another stein,” Talbot said. “And what time is it?”
“A quarter of ten, sir,” the waiter said, glancing haughtily at the big Regulator clock over the bar.
Talbot said, “Another now and keep them coming until eleven. I have a ferry to catch at eleven-thirty and a train to catch at one.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Let me know when it’s time to go, will you?”
The man flashed a look of exaggerated reverence. “Why, of course, sir!”
Talbot was working his way to the bottom of a third stein and feeling quite dreamy, gazing about him with warm, gauzy, half-tight objectivity. A Chinese busboy, about fourteen, strode past with a tray heaped with dirty dishes balanced on his left shoulder.
The boy had a look of concentration on his gaunt, tired face. Probably on the thirteenth hour of a fifteen-hour shift, Talbot thought.
He was watching the boy and ruminating on the harshness of life when a leg swung out from one of the tables and a shoe connected with the boy’s backside. The blow pushed him awkwardly forward, head snapping back.
The tub of dirty dishes fell backward off his shoulder with a raucous crash. Glass flew. The boy gave an indignant scream that seemed meant not only for the fat, red-faced gent who’d assaulted him, but for all the gods in heaven.
“Hey!” yelled one of the bartenders above the din, fixing an angry gaze on the boy struggling to his knees. The boy’s face was bunched with grief. He wagged his head and blinked back tears.
Talbot fought the impulse to intervene. Forget it; it’s not your war, he told himself. You’re going home.
But the voice in his head was drowned out by the image of the poor lad before him, fumbling and sobbing amid the broken glass, and of the man who’d assaulted him—who sat smoking with his compatriots, red-faced with laughter, reveling thoroughly in the boy’s humiliation.
Talbot pushed his glass around on the table and brooded, hearing the grating laughter of the fat businessmen and feeling his ears warm with anger. “Ah, shit,” he sighed, reluctantly pushing himself to his feet. He walked over to the man who’d assaulted the busboy. The man was short, with a paunch and a round face framed by graying muttonchops.
The three other men at his table looked like the first and were similarly dressed. Well-to-do businessmen. They were all laughing at the busboy, fat cigars clutched in their fingers.
Talbot stopped at their table and gazed down coolly at the round-faced man. “Okay, you’ve had your fun. Now kindly help the boy gather his dishes.”
The fat man frowned and lifted his red face to the tall, broad-shouldered sailor standing before him. His laughter had died, replaced by a quizzical grin. “I beg your pardon?”
“Help the boy gather his dishes,” Talbot repeated, hating the whole mess.
“Well!” the man grunted, instantly indignant. “I guess I won’t!” He slid his eyes to his companions, who all looked equally outraged. They were not used to being challenged by those beneath them, and they were incensed by such an affront.
The Chinese boy mumbled something as he scrambled to retrieve the unbroken plates and beer steins. Talbot thrust out an open hand to him. “Wait.”
The boy looked up at him, confused.
“Stop,” Talbot said. “This man is going to help you.”
The boy squinted and parted his lips, betraying his discomfort with English. But he seemed to realize the gist of Talbot’s intervention. Instinctively he recoiled at the thought, shaking his head gloomily.
“No,” he said. “I … I pick up.”
“No, he pick up,” Talbot said, pointing at the red-faced man, who slid his glowering gaze between the Chinese boy and Talbot, as though he’d just found his calfskin shoes covered with dog shit.
“Who the hell do you think you are!” the man yelled at Talbot, standing slowly and puffing out his chest.
The tables around them were growing silent. The bartenders were watching, half amused, grateful for the diversion. Frozen with terror, the Chinese boy sat on his butt, watching Talbot and the fat man. His lips moved but he said nothing.
An angry red curtain welled up from the corners of Talbot’s eyes. From deep in his brain rose Pilar’s high-pitched screams for him, who was too far away to save her.
“I’m the one who just told you to help that boy pick up his dishes,” he said tightly.
“I will not!” the man yelled hoarsely, looking to the other tables for help.
Talbot’s voice was reasonable. “You made him drop them, you’ll help him pick them up.”
“And I told you I won’t do it!”
Talbot’s arms moved so quickly that no one in the room knew what had happened until the sailor’s hands hung again at his sides. Then it was obvious from the fat man’s stagger backward into his table and from the mottled glow on his cheek that he’d just been slapped. Backhanded.
The other men at the table rose slowly and backed away, watching Talbot as though he were some escaped circus animal.
Two large, muscular men in frock coats appeared from nowhere, hurrying between the tables. They’d been hired to keep order, but a “Hold it,” grunted by one of the barmen, stopped them in their tracks. They looked at the barman witlessly. The barman jerked his head back, and both bouncers retreated.
Talbot did not say another word.
“Be careful, Albert,” one of them whispered to the fat man. “These sailors hide knives in their clothes and know how to use them. Just itch for a reason to, in fact.”
The fat man, leaning back against the table, pushed the table away. He rubbed his raw cheek and looked up at Talbot with enraged eyes.
The man’s friends were silently watching behind a veil of cigar smoke, shamed by their fear and inability to help, but also amused.
The room was nearly silent. Someone coughed. Talbot could hear the quiet hiss of the gas jets. His heart was pounding but his face was taut and expressionless. The fat man looked at him. The fear in his drunken, glassy eyes was growing, the pupils expanding.
“Now help that boy gather his dishes,” Talbot said.
The man took one more look around the room. No one appeared willing to lend a hand. In fact, they seemed to be enjoying the spectacle.
Figuring he could not be any more humiliated than he’d already been, and figuring the only way to end the spectacle without getting stabbed was to comply with the young brute’s wishes, the man pushed himself forward, sinking to his hands and knees and gathering the dishes that had rolled under chairs and tables. Too startled to move, the Chinese boy only watched him as he worked, wheezing and cursing under his breath.
The others watched as well, though several, unable to endure the fat man’s humiliation any longer, returned to their tables and their drinks. They shook their heads and smiled wryly, throwing back their drinks.
“Next time you feel like having fun at someone else’s expense,” Talbot told the fat man when he’d finished filling the tub and was regaining his feet, wheezing and brushing sawdust from his trousers, “remember what goes around usually comes around.”
Lifting his dark eyes to Talbot’s, the man said again, “You’ll pay for this, you son of a bitch.”
He retrieved his crisp bowler from the table and made a beeline to the nearest double doors. His ears and the back of his neck were crimson. Adjusting the hat with the first two fingers of each hand, hiding his face, he pushed angrily through the doors.
After Talbot had regained his seat, the waiter appeared with a fresh beer. “This one’s on the house. It’ll probably be your last.” He gave a haughty smile. “Enjoy!”
CHAPTER 2
ON AN UNSEASONABLY cold Sunday afternoon in November, Homer Rinski and his hired man, Jack Thom, entered Rinski’s small cabin in Rattlesnake Gulch, western Dakota Territory, brushing snow from their coats. They stomped their boots and slapped their hats against their knees.
Their faces were red from the cold, hair mussed from their hats. The chill air invaded the cabin like the gray light, which swept shadows into corners before the door closed.
The tall, rail-thin Rinski was pushing a hard-earned sixty, and he sounded like every year of it, breathing hard from his work forking hay from the wagon into the paddock behind the barn.
He hacked phlegm from his lungs, opened the door a crack, and spat outside.
Turning back into the tiny two-room cabin, he found his nineteen-year-old daughter’s eyes on him. She’d been setting the table for dinner and held a plate in her hands. She had her late mother’s dour countenance.
“Do you have to do that?” she snapped at her father.
“Do what?”
“Do what?” the girl mocked. “Spit! And look at all the snow on the floor!”
“Oh, Mattie,” Homer Rinski lamented, hanging his coat and hat on the deer antlers beside the door, “one should never raise one’s voice in the house of the Lord.”
“This ain’t a church,” the girl retorted sourly.
“The house of every good Christian is the house of the Lord, dear daughter. Besides, how you’re ever gonna find a husband, with a mouth like that, I’ll never know.”
Ignoring the remark, the girl slammed the plate on the table and turned to the range at the back of the cabin, where several pots gurgled and sighed, sending steam into the cabin’s late-afternoon murk. “Both of you wash. There’s water there on the bench. Then sit up. I don’t want this gettin’ cold after all I slaved today.”
Easing around each other in the cabin’s close quarters, the men washed and sat down to table with eager but slightly bashful looks on their rugged faces—like bad boys with clear consciences.
As was his custom, Jack Thom sat silently, eyes on the table, hands in his lap, until all the kettles and pans had been set before him, and Mattie had seated herself across from her father with a sigh. The hired man punctuated Rinski’s traditional five-minute table prayer with a heartfelt “A-men” and said nothing else until he’d scrubbed the last of the venison grease from his plate with a biscuit and downed the last of his coffee with an audible slurp.
“That sure was a fine spread you put on, Miss Mattie,” he praised with a truckling smile, consciously returning his hands to his lap. He was never sure what to do with the oversized appendages, but knew from Mattie’s caustic sneers they didn’t belong on the table. “I thank you very kindly.”
Thom was a big man with thin blond hair, a round face framed in a perpetual beard shadow, and dung-brown eyes, which Mattie thought the dumbest eyes she’d ever seen on a dog, much less a man. His clothes were old and worn from countless washings. Even fresh from Mattie’s washtub, they smelled like cow- and horseshit and something distinctive but unidentifiable that Mattie attributed to the man himself.
The bunk in his shack smelled the same way.
“Yes, Jack,” she replied, tiredly clearing the table.
When they’d eaten all Mattie’s dried apricot pie, the men sat in their usual homemade chairs in the cabin’s small sitting room. They usually played cards or checkers on the small table between the chairs, but since this was Sunday and Homer Rinski didn’t think either game appropriate, they just sat there, silently staring, occasionally mentioning the weather or some chore that needed doing, regularly leaning forward to pluck a split cottonwood log from the woodbox and add it to the woodstove. They snoozed, snoring.
When Mattie had finished washing the dishes, she called from the kitchen, “Are you ready for your tea now, Papa?” Her voice had changed. It was not nearly as sharp as it had been. Homer Rinski thought the girl was happy to be through with her dishes.
Rinski smiled. His nightly tea, with a medicinal jigger of chokecherry wine. Homer Rinski did not sleep well without the toddy. He knew the Lord did not mind, for he never imbibed until he was drunk, only sleepy. Without a good night’s rest he would not be able to work his six full days, and does the Lord not “judgeth according to every man’s work”?
Settled back with his tea, laced with the wine to which Mattie had added several splashes of cheap corn liquor, Homer Rinski quoted from the Good Book in his droning singsong, pausing only when the flame in the wall lamp guttered and coughed black smoke.
Across from him, Jack Thom nodded his head, stifling yawns and feigning interest. He was anticipating eight o’clock, when he could return to his own shack for the night and uncork a bottle of sour mash he’d bought from Nils Spernig on Big John Creek.
Mattie darned one of her father’s socks in her chair beside the stove. Occasionally she lifted her eyes to Jack Thom. His eyes met hers, then darted away. His face flushed. The girl smirked.
“Well, Jack, here is a passage I’d like you to sleep on tonight,” Homer Rinski told his hired man at five minutes to eight.
Thom slid his gaze to Rinski and smiled wanly.
Holding the ten-pound tome in his gnarled hands, Homer Rinski took a deep breath and quoted dramatically, “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.”
He looked at the hired man, who smiled and nodded. Rinski smiled sincerely. “Good night, Jack. Sleep well.”
Thom shook his head, as though deeply touched. “I do believe you missed your callin’, Mr. Rinski. You shoulda been a preacher.”
“We’re all God’s preachers, Jack.”
“Yes, sir.” Thom stood and stretched, seemingly reluctant to leave such cozy, wholesome quarters. He gave Mattie a brotherly nod. “Thank you again, Miss Mattie. That was one fine meal.”
The girl did not lift her eyes from her needlework, but only nodded. When Thom had buttoned his coat, snugged his hat on his head, and gone out into the cold, dark night, Mattie put down her work and stood.
“Another cup … since it’s Sunday?” she asked her father.
Homer Rinski made a show of considering the offer. Then he nodded gravely, casting his eyes back down at the open Bible in his lap. “Guess it couldn’t hurt,” he muttered.
He sipped the tea for another hour. Mattie repaired several socks and a pair of long johns, occasionally lifting her eyes furtively to appraise the old man.
Rinski’s eyes were getting heavy, she could tell. He blinked often and squinted. Several times he jerked his head up from a doze.
“You’re looking sleepy, Papa,” Mattie said, smiling innocently.
Rinski only grunted and read on. Mattie rolled her eyes, clicking her knitting needles together and recrossing her legs under her long gray dress. Should have given him an extra shot, she thought.
When Rinski finally slammed the Good Book closed, Mattie gave a start. She’d about given up on him.
“Well, I do believe I’ll turn in, girl.” He rose stiffly, creakier still for the two shots of corn liquor Mattie had included with his wine. His blue eyes were rheumy and his bulbous nose fairly glowed.
“Okay, Papa,” Mattie said casually. “Sweet dreams.”
“You better go soon yourself.”
“I will.”
Mattie listened as Rinski climbed the ladder into the loft, undressed, and settled into his mattress sack. She continued darning, hands shaking with agitation and anticipation, biting her lower lip, until the old man’s snores had resounded for a good quarter hour.
Then she dropped her work in a pile by the chair, stood, and tiptoed to her heavy blanket coat hanging on a peg by the door. She pulled it on, wrapped a scarf around her head and neck, then stood listening to the snores, measuring them to make sure the old man was sound asleep.
Satisfied, she turned to open the door, then slipped quickly through the narrow opening, grimacing at the whoosh of the wind under the eaves. She softly latched the door behind her and, head down, ran into the darkness.
* * *
Jack Thom’s lean-to sat half a mile from the main cabin, beyond a knoll and around an aspen copse.
It had been the first cabin Homer Rinski had built after arriving in Dakota Territory from his farm in Illinois. His wife, Anastasia, had fallen ill and died on the overland journey, leaving Homer to raise Mattie alone.
Mattie moved toward the hovel along the rock-hard hummocks lining the frozen creek, twisting her ankles with every step, lifting her skirts with both hands. The tiny triangular structure stood in silhouette against the rising moon. Smoke puffed from its chimney.
Mattie mounted its one step and pushed through the door, closing it quickly behind her.
“You could have waited in the barn for me!” she said sharply, marching across the small, cluttered room to the stove. She sat on the stool before it and crouched over her crossed arms, shaking. The thought that she’d spent the first half of her life in this tiny, fetid shelter made her even colder.
Jack Thom lay on the room’s single cot, under a buffalo robe, his head propped against the wall. He cradled a bottle beside him like a baby. His eyes were rheumy.
Mattie could smell the booze. It mixed with the smell of sweat and leather and mice and that other thing that could only be Jack Thom himself.
“I thought maybe your pa would go out and check the stock. He sometimes does that himself when he don’t … you know”—his voice thickened with self-pity—“when he don’t feel like he can trust me to do it.”
“So?”
Thom gave a half-hearted shrug and took a swig. “He woulda seen me lurkin’ there and wondered what the hell.”
Mattie sneered. “You coulda told him you were checkin’ the stock!”
“I—I never thoughta that, Mattie.”
Mattie rolled her eyes and lowered her head between her knees, gave a cry, and shuffled her feet angrily. “Oh, I’m so cold!”
Thom patted the cot. “Come over here; I’ll warm you up.”
Mattie looked at him and smiled thinly. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Thom nodded sincerely, as though he’d just been asked something deadly serious.
A flirtatious light rose in Mattie’s eyes. It made her gaunt features appear less so. Color rose in her cheeks. “Suppose I do. What then? Will you share that bottle with me?”
“Sure.” Thom held out the bottle as if for proof.
Mattie’s smile grew. Slowly she took off the blanket coat and dropped it on the floor beside the stove. “You know what I like about you, Jack?” Smiling, eyes glittering, she looked at him, awaiting an answer.
“What’s that, Miss Mattie?”
“You’re stupid.”
The big man wrinkled his brow. “I … I ain’t—”
“I’ve never minded that in a man,” Mattie said, thoughtfully unbuttoning her dress, her eyes on Thom. Sipping his whiskey, he watched her dull-wittedly, desire creeping into his eyes and smoothing the ridge in his brow.
“As a matter of fact, I prefer it. If they think too much, they might think about not minding what I say, and I wouldn’t like that.”
Mattie peeled the sleeves of her dress slowly down her arms. She shoved the garment down her waist and legs until it lay in a pile at her bare feet.
“I don’t like it when my men don’t mind me, Jack. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Thom swallowed, watching the thrust of Mattie’s pear-shaped breasts against the wash-worn chemise. “Huh?”
Suddenly her voice rose and her face turned angry. “Are you listening to me!”
“What? Yeah.”
“No, you weren’t. You were staring at my titties!”
“No!… Well, but—”
“Oh, shut up, Jack,” she said. “Here, have you a good look.” She pulled the chemise over her head and tossed it on the floor. The light from the single lamp shone on her powder-white breasts, soft belly, and plump thighs.
She undid her dark hair from its bun and let it fall across her shoulders. She stared at him coolly, enjoying his eyes on her body. At length she said, “It’s cold out here, Jack.”
Thom lifted the buffalo robe. “Come over here, Miss Mattie. Let me warm you some.”
“Thank you, Jack,” she whispered, crawling in beside him. “I don’t mind if I do.”
She gave a girlish giggle, reached for the bottle, and tipped it back. Snapping it back down, her eyes bulged as her throat worked, audibly fighting to keep the liquor in her stomach.
Finally she coughed. “That’s … awful.”
“It has to grow on ya slow,” Thom said defensively, taking back the bottle and enjoying a long swallow.
Mattie reached up and encircled her arms around the hired man’s thick, beard-bristled neck, which was the color of old saddle leather from all his years—probably since he was ten—of riding range, digging wells, and brush-popping lost calves.
Mattie didn’t know where he was from; she hadn’t asked and he hadn’t told. Theirs was not a relationship built on chatter. She could tell by looking at him what his life had been like—not all that different from hers.
The rough calluses on his hands often etched fine white lines on her flesh. The sweet pain tided her until she could sneak back to his cabin or meet him in the tall grass by the windmill.
“Pull it out, Jack,” she whispered in his car. “Pull it out and do me, Jack.”
“Wait,” he said, jerking the bottle back up.
She lifted her head to look into his face severely. “Pull it out and do me, Jack—not the bottle,” she said tightly.
Cowed, Thom corked the bottle and set it carefully on the floor beneath the cot, then went to work under the covers, slipping out of his breeches and fumbling with the fly of his long johns. He grunted with the effort, puffing his sour liquor breath and nearly nudging Mattie off the narrow cot.
She held on and crawled on top of him. A dark, willful look knitted her brow and tightened her jaw.
“Do me, damn it. Do me, Jack,” she groaned, mounting him.
They were going good when Thom heard something outside. It sounded like hooves crunching snow.
“Listen,” he whispered, but Mattie—head down, lips pooched out—was riding away on top of him and groaning louder and louder with each thrust. She hadn’t heard him, much less what was going on outside.
Thom listened. The sounds grew closer. A horse snorted.
“Listen!” Thom yelled, lifting his head and throwing the girl off him with a quick swing of his left arm.
As Mattie, screaming, hit the floor, the door blew open and two men ran into the cabin, shotguns aimed at the cot.
“Wait!” Thom yelled.
“You wait, ya ugly beggar!” rasped one of the men.
They were both dressed in long dusters. White flour sacks covered their faces. Holes had been cut to expose the eyes and mouth. Their breath was visible in the chill air.
To Thom they looked more like devils than anything his nightmares had ever conjured. His heart pounded. He was only vaguely aware of Mattie’s screams and curses.
“You wait for this!” the man on the right shouted.
Thom covered his head with his arms. “No!… wait. What do you want!”
“He wants to know what we want,” one man said to the other, eyes flashing with a grin. Then, as if noticing Mattie for the first time, he said to Thom, “Fuckin’ the boss’s daughter, eh, Jack?” He hooted. “Stealin’ our beef and fuckin’ the boss’s daughter. I do believe we got us a live one here!”
“I didn’t steal no beef, you lyin’ sons o’ bitches!”
“Sure you did, Jack. I seen you.”
“You’re just sayin’ that so’s you can kill me and drive the Rinskis out.”
Both men laughed, lips parting behind their masks, shotguns held high, the stocks snugged against their cheeks.
Thom peeked out from between his elbows, rolling his eyes between the two masked figures. “Oh, Lordy,” he said fearfully. “Oh, Lordy, you’re the ones that killed poor Lincoln Fairchild last summer, and that schoolteacher from Pittsburgh!”
One of the men laughed and turned to the other. He turned back to Thom. “Naw, that was bandits, Jack. Didn’t you hear what the sheriff said?”
Thom shook his head and swallowed hard. “That weren’t no bandits. It was you two killin’ those poor people and makin’ it look just enough like bandits so that’s what the sheriff would call it. You knew the rest of the Bench would know it was the Double X drivin’ ’em out.”
“You got it all figured out, don’t you, Jack?”
“Oh, Lordy,” Thom moaned.
The man on the left turned to Mattie. She was curled up against the woodbox, covering herself with her arms and spewing epithets at the two intruders. “You can tell your pa what ya seen here tonight,” the man told her. “Tell him you and him’s next if you don’t hightail it off the Bench—ya hear?”
“Get the hell out of here, you sons o’ bitches!”
“Did you hear me, girl?” the man yelled, turning to give her his full attention.
“I know who you are, you sons o’ bitches!”
“Who are we, then?”
“Randall Magnusson and Shelby Green!”
Just then Jack Thom flung his right hand beneath the cot and brought it up with a .44 Remington conversion revolver. Awkwardly he thumbed back the hammer, taking too much time. The Double X men discharged their shotguns with ear-pounding blasts, instantly filling the cabin with the smell of smoke, powder, and fresh blood.
Mattie screamed, covering her face against the horrible vision of Jack Thom disintegrating before her—blood and bone splattering the wall behind him. She continued screaming, dropping her head between her knees. Spittle and vomit leapt from her lips.
Her screams settled to low moans, and she heard shotguns broken open and shells dropped to the floor. Boots scuffed.
There was a long silence. She could hear harsh breathing. Someone cleared his throat, moving toward her. The toes of his boots prodded Mattie’s naked thigh.
“You know what?” he said to his partner. “I don’t think this little whore’s been satisfied … yet.”
Dakota Kill copyright © 2000 by Peter Brandvold
The Romantics copyright © 2001 by Peter Brandvold
