Colter's Path (9781101604830) (30 page)

“Promise, you say. Promises…the very thing I was talking about. I made promises to your husband. I promised him I would not tell you what I already have. Promise
broken. I promised I would not let you be in any way violated. I have violated you myself. Promise broken. I promised him I would not allow you to become part of the regular flow of female traffic that passes through this place. That promise I have not broken. Yet. But it will be broken. You are a great and stunning beauty. You would be worth more than any woman I have ever sold from this place. I cannot just pass you back to your worm of a husband for the meager fee he is to pay me. Oh no. That would turn me, rather than him, into the very definition of a fool.”

“What is going to become of me?”

He sighed once more, and swore. “I have to see your face again…. It is too fine a face to be hidden beneath that stinking cloth. So luck is with you, my dear. Your request is fulfilled.”

He went to her, untied the cord around her neck, and whipped the sack off her head. Her hair pulled upward with the sweeping away of the cloth, then cascaded down around her face and head, piling on her trembling shoulders. Though the light inside the log pen was dim, she blinked as her eyes adjusted to it after the darker shadows inside the sack mask.

“Ah yes, a fine face. Fine beyond any I have seen. You are truly a beauty, Emma! Truly a beauty!”

“I asked you what was to become of me.”

“I am a merchant, my dear. Like any merchant, I sell a product that others wish to have. In most cases those others live in other lands than ours, though not entirely so. They are invariably men of wealth…. That is assured because only the wealthy can afford to pay for the product I sell. It is product of the highest quality.”

“This product…it is women?”

“And girls. Yes.”

She looked at him, trembling harder, her eyes pooling. “Is that what you plan for me?”

“It's what a man of business and trade, when he is in my particular trade, must plan for the finest specimens of his product. There are men in this world who would pay a literal fortune to possess such a one as you.”

“But it's wrong. It's so very wrong.” Tears streamed as she said it.

“I have never been much concerned with the idea of wrong. Right and wrong is a concept for mothers and nannies and policemen and preachers…and I am none of those things, nor ever will be.”

“Oh, dear God,” she whispered, and lowered her head so she would not have to look at him while she wept. At length, though, she looked at him again. “You said my husband did this to me? Had you take me?”

“It was not his intention for you to be sold in trade. This was simply an easy way, a convenient opportunity, to put you away for a time, get you out of sight and into a place you could not escape, so that during that time he could persuade your father to provide him the ability to pay the ransom. There is no real ransom, of course, beyond the fee I agreed upon to provide my services. The ‘ransom' your father brings is intended, by your husband at least, to go to no one else but himself. For what specific purpose, he did not say.”

“I know his purpose,” she said, a rising anger and sense of husbandly betrayal steeling her and giving her control over her tears. “He plans to use what my father gives him to expand his business, with a partner, and create his own empire and increase his wealth.”

“A worthy ambition. To that extent, anyway, he is not a fool. To the extent he believes I will be content with a simple fee, when there is clearly far more wealth at play here than has been offered to me…to that extent he is a fool indeed. What sort of wealth is it your father possesses?”

McSwain had given his daughter a limited confession of his crime in a past letter. She had destroyed the letter after reading it, as he had instructed. It hardly seemed to matter, in this place with this foul man, to maintain secrets, though. “He stole diamonds that had been given to a college in Tennessee, a college he served as president.”

“Diamonds! Wonderful things, diamonds…immensely valuable, easily hidden, easily turned into cash or put to currency in their natural state…. Diamonds are among
jewels what you are among women, Emma Wickham. Diamonds I will be glad to possess, so I send a salute of thanks out to your father for bringing them to me.”

“He's brought nothing yet, I am sure. And if he does bring them, they will get no farther than the hands of my husband…. God! To think my own husband has…has…” She looked helplessly around at her prison, not knowing just where she was or how close to any of the world she knew, because she had been blindfolded when she was carried here.

“Are you telling me, dearest, that our friend Stanley Wickham would cling to jewels before he would save his wife from a life of carnal slavery to some foreign despot…is that your point to me?”

“It is.”

“So much the worse for him, then. And especially, so much the worse for you. Should he decline to cooperate, it will be shocking indeed to Mr. Wickham when pieces of his wife begin appearing in his mail…fingers, toes, an ear, an eyelid, even an eyeball…maybe even portions of a more, eh,
delicate
nature, might you not think? Hmm?” He actually chuckled.

Amazingly, Emma managed to hold her emotions. “Is there no end to the evil in you, sir?” she asked Turner.

He looked upward and rubbed his chin in an exaggerated aping of a man thinking hard about something. Then he looked her in the face, smiled, and said, “No, my dear. I think there is not.”

He left her alone then, but neglected to put her sack hood back on her again. An inexplicable kindness or an oversight, she did not know. But it provided her the chance to see how the outward-lifting trap exit functioned, and the chance to examine the bonds that held her wrists and ankles. She pondered trying to reach her ankle bonds with her fingers, then realized she had been tied in such a way as to not allow her to do so.

She was trapped in this hell, and could see no way out on her own. “God,” she prayed, “send me rescue. In the name of your power and holiness, oh, God, send me rescue.”

She could not tell whether the prayer rose any higher than the low, flat ceiling of parallel logs above her.

She could only sit there, praying and hoping and hating Stanley Wickham, a man she had tried hard to love but who had given her back only betrayal, abuse, and seeming loathing. If only, if only, if
only
she had listened to her own heart and to her father and chosen Jedd Colter instead! She would not be here, hopelessly trapped and betrayed, and surely destined for some foreign port to become the plaything of some man even more wicked than her own husband.

Send me rescue
. The prayer rose again and again.
Send me rescue, God. Hear me in my dark prison and send me rescue
.

But no one came except the ugly and unwashed Mexican named Paco, who dropped into the pen as the sun was beginning to set and approached her with a bitter, nauseating smile.

After that it became unspeakable.

Paco did not forget to remask Emma, and he tied the cord around her neck too tightly, forcing her to struggle for air all the night long, and experience no real sleep. The mask was not removed again until the next day around noon, when she was finally given food…something she thought initially was squirrel meat served on stale bread until she found part of the pinkish tail of a rat among the minced meat. She was so hungry she ate it anyway, her bonds having been adjusted enough to allow her, with straining effort, to reach her mouth with the food, though not to also reach the knots at her bound feet. These men were experienced and wickedly clever in the machinations of captivity. She washed her pathetic meal down with dirty water given to her in an even dirtier wooden cup.

They left the hood off for good this time, but never did they untie her. Through one of the cracks between logs making up her pen, Emma saw a woman being led out of her pen by Paco, who held a rope that was tied to her still-bound ankles. With no freedom to move her
feet, she could only hop, and when she apparently progressed too slowly to suit Paco, he cursed and yanked at the rope, pulling her feet from beneath her and sending her slamming to the ground. He cursed her again, loudly, and kicked her until she managed to somehow get up again. Then he led her to a little clearing within full view of all the other cabin pens, and stood by while she did the best she could to perform the basic private functions demanded by nature, this with her hands and feet still bound. It was an inefficient, ugly affair, and the woman, who looked to be at least part Indian, wept in humiliation throughout. A slightly crippled Mexican girl, Rosita, whom Emma would later learn was Paco's illegitimate daughter, performed the cleanup, which consisted of harshly dashing two bucketfuls of water on the pathetic and shamed woman. Paco turned the rope over to his daughter to take the woman back to her pen.

Through the gap in the logs, Emma watched the sad woman reach her pen. Her guardian managed to get the trap open at the top without letting go of the rope, then got back down and with unexpected strength helped the woman hoist herself up the wall and then fall inside the log prison. The trapdoor was closed down and pinned closed with a heavy wooden rod, and suddenly Emma heard a rattling of her own pen's door.

It was Paco. He had come for Emma. It was her turn.

Emma lifted up her face and screamed in unmuted anguish.

T
he job of town marshal of Scarlett's Luck, California, ended for Rand Blalock and transferred to his deputy, Jedd Colter, with the death of Blalock's horse. It wasn't the mere fact that the horse was dead that ended Blalock's job, because other horses could be had. It was the way it died and a resultant effect of that death that turned the tables in new directions.

Blalock was riding, the horse merely plodding, down the muddy main thoroughfare of the mining camp, when deep inside the horse's heart, something shuddered, wrenched, sped for five seconds, then halted for all time. The aging beast's heart gave out, causing its legs to give out immediately after. The horse simply stopped walking, stood unmoving a few moments with Blalock in the saddle wondering what was happening, then collapsed as if its legs had turned to air. The left side gave out before the right, however, so the horse fell at a tilt and Blalock's left leg was pinned beneath it and broken. He decided even before they got him out from under the horse that his career in law enforcement was over. He was too old for this kind of nonsense.

“I don't even know why I came to California,” he would later tell Jedd Colter. “The only reason I tracked
down your wagon train was so I could tell Treemont the bad news about his kinfolk…. Now Treemont's dead, too. I just don't know why I bothered to come this far. I never had any ambition to look for gold.”

“The point is, you're here,” Jedd would tell him. “Maybe there's a reason, maybe it's just something that happened for no reason at all. But you're here, and it's a good place, and you may as well settle in and enjoy all you can of it.”

“I used to be the wise one, Jedd. Now it's you.”

“It's like I've said oft before. It ain't wisdom. It's experience.”

When Blalock's horse died beneath him and broke his leg, neither Blalock nor anyone else noticed that his tin badge had gotten knocked free and fallen onto the ground. It was Ben Scarlett who later spotted and retrieved it, and so as not to lose it before finding a chance to return it to its owner, he pinned it on his vest and forgot about it. He'd taken to wearing a cast-off cravat he'd found crammed between a rain barrel and an alleyway wall, and having no idea how to tie it, he'd managed to leave one end of it hanging down oddly, covering the badge so that forgetting it was there was easy to do.

Ben was walking up the same street Blalock's horse had died on on a Tuesday morning when a youthful fellow walked up to his side and said, in a Pennsylvanian accent, “Excuse me, sir. Are you the sheriff here?”

Ben looked down at the boy and was struck by the notion that he'd seen this face before. Just where or when, he had no idea.

“Me, sheriff? Ha! No, son, no. I'm just the local drunk. The one they named the town for.”

“Oh. I saw your badge there and just thought—”

“Oh, that. That belongs to the local marshal. He lost it when his horse died out from under him t'other day, and so I put it on my chest till I could find the opportunity to give it back to him. Not that he'll be needing it, though…. He quit his marshal job when his leg got broke under the falling horse.”

“Oh.” The youth obviously had followed only part of Ben's hurried narrative.

“Son, my name's Ben Scarlett. I've seen you before, somewhere.”

“I don't know…. I haven't been in California for long. I came with my family in a wagon train out of Pennsylvania.”

“Me, I'm from Tennessee. Knoxville. I was a drunk there, too.”

“My name's Squire Napier,” the boy said. “I'm from Philadelphia. My father…stepfather, really…wanted to come to California to find gold and have good things happen to us. So far there hasn't been much good. My sister was sickly all the way here, and died. She's buried by the roadside between here and the town of Bowater. We buried her cat beside her.”

“Cat?”

“Yes, sir. There was a man in another wagon train who had a cat that had died and he'd had it stuffed and mounted. He was kind enough to give it to Winnie—that was my sister, Winnie—so she'd have something to play with and keep her spirits up with during the rest of the trip to California.”

Ben looked more closely at Squire's face, and it all came back. This was the very boy who had sneaked into the wagon that night McSwain's dead cat had been stolen—the very lad who stole it, in fact.

“I'll be, son…. I know who you are, and I was there in that wagon the night you sneaked that stuffed cat out.”