Heart of the West (13 page)

Shiloh had hung up his fiddle for the night, so no one was dancing. The only noise came from a sheepherder in a black plug hat and bib overalls, who stood at the other end of the bar and talked to himself, because no one else would talk with him. But then, mutton-punchers were about as welcome in cattle country as a whore in a preacher's front parlor.

Rafferty decided to amuse himself by watching Mrs. Yorke. Haughty, naughty Mrs. Yorke, who was working hard at ignoring him.

One of the hurdy-gurdy girls—Nancy, he thought her name was—got up and came sauntering toward him. Her lips, which were painted a boxcar red, greeted him with a tired smile. "You lonesome tonight, Rafferty?"

Rafferty shook his head, smiling to soften the rejection. His gaze went back to Hannah Yorke. She must have lost her game, for she was shuffling the cards, her slender white hands moving as gracefully as a dove's wings. She had eyes that stirred a man, and hair the deep red color that on a horse was called blood bay.

The sheepherder pushed himself off the bar and gave his belt a hitch. Nancy saw him coming and hurried away. A moment later Rafferty's nose was assaulted by the stink of woolly monsters and his ears by a voice that grated like a rusty gate. "If you're savin' yer juice for that Hannah, mister, you kin ferget it."

Rafferty turned to look into a face that the wind and sun had sucked dry. "Yeah?" he said. "And why is that?"

"Keeps herself to herself, does Hannah Yorke. She won't have a man in her bed now—not fer love or money. They say that only two years ago she was workin' the line over in Dead-wood. Now thar she sits, with a copper-plated crotch and too hoity-toity to give a man the time of day." He sighed. "Damn. What a waste of a good whore."

Rafferty's lips pulled back from his teeth in a smile. But the sheepherder, who could see his eyes, lost all the color in his face.

The man blinked and scrubbed a hand over his mouth. "Din't mean nothin' by it. Was only talk." He took a step back and then another. "Din't mean nothin'." He kept on backing up until he was standing where he'd been before, mumbling to himself again.

Rafferty's gaze went back to Mrs. Hannah Yorke. The red lanterns cast a glow on her white shoulders and put fiery sparks in her hair. She knew that he was watching her, that he wanted her. Yet she sat over there, playing that game of solitaire, as if she were all alone in the world. And as if she liked it that way.

He'd been trying to charm his way into the woman's bed for months now and gotten nowhere. Maybe that sheepherder had a point, maybe a more direct approach was required.

He set his glass down carefully onto the bar. "Give me a bottle, Shiloh."

"Sure thing." The gin-slinger took an empty bottle from under the counter and filled it from the barrel. He twisted a cork in its mouth and asked Rafferty if he wanted it wrapped.

"No. Thanks. 'Night, Shiloh."

"Good night, cowboy."

Rafferty tucked the bottle into his coat pocket and picked up his gun on the way out. He didn't look at Hannah York, and she didn't look at him.

A mournful bleat greeted Zach Rafferty at the hitching rack. A sad-eyed, red-and-white face looked up at him, lit by the lampshine coming through the saloon's windows. Sighing, Rafferty draped his gun belt over his shoulder and hunkered on his heels to scratch the calf behind its red ears. "I told you I wasn't gonna be gone long. You're worse than a woman, you know that, dogie? Nagging at a man just for having a little drink."

He hefted the calf into his arms, straightening with a groan. He walked around the saloon to the two-story white frame house in back. A small lean-to for a horse sat detached from the house. No horse was in it tonight, but there was enough straw to make a bed for the dogie.

He didn't go to the front door of the big white house, but went up the side steps instead. He tried the latch and was not surprised to find it locked. He took a gimlet and a piece of crooked wire out of his pocket. Within seconds the bolt was sliding back with a soft click, and he was inside.

The door opened onto a small sitting room. He waited a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. His boots made no sound on the thick Turkey carpet as he passed through a doorway into the bedroom. He lit a big potbellied lamp, casting a soft yellow glow on curtains of white gauze and crimson damask, on red silk wallpaper, on velvet perfume boxes and a peacock dressing screen, on a black lacquer lady's desk decorated with roses, vines, and gilt.

He hung his cartridge belt on the post of a bedstead carved with bows and flowers and tossed his hat onto the head of the china pug that squatted on a stand beside the hearth. He shrugged out of his long-tailed sourdough overcoat and threw it on a black horsehair fainting coach. He set the whiskey bottle on the papier-mâché table by the bed and stretched out on a feather mattress so thick it sighed with female pleasure as it took his weight. He fluffed up the embroidered pillows behind his back and crossed his spurred boots on the petit point quilt. He pulled out the makings of a cigarette, rolled, and lit it.

He linked his fingers behind his head, his elbows spread wide. He winked at the ceramic cupid that looked down on him from atop the shawl-draped mantel.

He didn't have long to wait. He heard the front door opening downstairs, heard her heels clicking across the hall. Carpet muffled her footsteps now, and then lantern light filled the adjacent sitting room.

Her shadow crossed the threshold first.

In the dim light her eyes were two black holes in a face as pale as birch. Her lips looked stained with blood. She pulled a little ivory-handled pistol out of the pocket of her violet dress and pointed it at his belly. "Stand up, mister," she said in a smoky voice that would have made him hard if he hadn't been that way already. "Slow and easy."

He stood up slow and easy. Even so, the rowel of one of his spurs caught in the finely sewn quilt, ripping it. The little gun in her hand was a two-shot weapon, and at this distance it could blow a hole in his guts big enough to kill him.

"Step out into the middle of the room." She waved the pistol to show him where she wanted him.

He went where she pointed, but he couldn't stop the smile from tugging at the corners of his mouth. "You gonna salute me with that boob gun, Mrs. Yorke? Or shoot me with it?"

The ceramic cupid on the mantel behind him exploded into a thousand shards. The concussion of the shot rang in his ears, and he laughed. He had felt the kiss of the bullet as it passed his cheek, but he hadn't moved so much as a breath. "You missed," he said.

She swung the barrel of the gun over and down until she had drawn a bead on his balls. "I never miss, cowboy."

He tugged at the buckle of his belt and started toward her. "The name is Rafferty, darlin'. And neither do I."

CHAPTER 5

The wind smacked against the cabin. The log walls trembled and creaked. The wind was a constant thing, settling then blowing, settling then blowing. Clementine tried to breathe in time with the wind. She thought the wind would drive her mad.

Her hands worked a ball of dough, kneading, twisting. It oozed through her fingers, soft and warm and sticky, stirring up a strange, hot restlessness within her. She punched her fist into the dough and looked down the length of the table to her husband. The sour smell of the beer she'd used for yeast pinched her nose, and the wind shrieked outside. She looked at him and felt a hot pain in her chest, as if she'd laced her corset too tight.

His bare forearms rested on the worn brown oilcloth as he shoveled in the last bite of a stack of flannel cakes. His hat was pushed back from his sweaty face, his collar lay unbuttoned against the grimy neckline of his union suit. He looked so big and rough and masculine sitting at her table. She hadn't known that men could look like him, be like him.

Gus glanced up, his gaze meeting hers, and he smiled. And though the strange, hot restlessness within her eased some, the memory of it lingered still, like yesterday's ache.

He stood up, the nail-keg stool scraping across the rough floor. "How about if I pour you some more of my famous horseshoe coffee?" he said, his voice booming in the cabin's stillness.

She wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes, leaving a streak of flour on her cheek. She watched his hands as he poured the coffee, hands that were rough and callused and strong. Hands that worked her body the way she worked the dough, worked at being gentle when they touched her now at night, gentle and patient. A gentle man... Her father was a gentleman, but the only touch of his she remembered was the bite of his cane.

Gus added a dollop of canned milk to her coffee and passed her the tin cup, his hands staying on hers a moment. His smile was pure Gus McQueen, lighting his face like a sunrise; his eyes laughed. "I ought to get you a milch cow so's you can have fresh milk for your coffee. And maybe a flock of laying hens, too."

"You'll spoil me if you aren't careful," she said. She had only the vaguest notion of how to go about milking a cow. And hens. Would she have to do anything to the hens to get them to produce eggs? Yet if other women had managed to learn these things, then so would she.

She felt her husband's gaze on her. His eyes had narrowed to sleepy slits, and there was a tautness to him as he looked at her. She knew that look. She knew he saw a woman's body that belonged to him, and he wanted her.

She turned away, fumbling with her recipe book to cover the wild beating of her heart. She propped the thick book up against the lard bucket. Her fingers, lumpy with drying dough, left stains on the pages. Behind her she heard Gus release his breath as a sigh.

The book was
The Woman's Exchange Compendium.
It instructed a wife on how she must order her life. On Monday, wash; on Tuesday, iron; on Wednesday, scrub the floors and bake. Not until the last Friday of the month would she be able to sit down and rest a spell, for that was the day set aside to polish the silver and clean the crystal lusters on the chandeliers. Even Clementine knew that tin spoons didn't need polishing, and she doubted there was a crystal luster to be found anywhere in western Montana.

On each page was a thought for the day. Today's thought was "It is better to do one thing one hundred times than one hundred things one time." It seemed like a silly sentiment, especially if one had a hundred things to do. The book, with its preachy tone, annoyed her. But then, the wind and everything else was unsettling her today.

She had stolen the book from the kitchen of her father's house on Louisburg Square. At the time she had thought she might find a use for it during her adventures in the Montana wilderness, and, oh, how provident she had been. But the recipes it contained were unforgiving of inexperience. The bread she'd made yesterday had baked up as hard as the seat of a mule skinner's wagon.

She put the dough she'd kneaded on the back of the stove to rise. She moved the stew kettle to a hotter spot on the range and added more water. In another three hours she would be setting the table for dinner. Today was Monday; she should be washing. She could wash tomorrow, but then when would she iron? So much to do... She wanted to take her camera out of the trunk, where it had remained hidden from Gus's sight, and photograph the cabin and the cottonwoods and the way the black mountains ringed the valley, looking like a choir of nuns in their stiff white caps of snow. But there was the washing and the ironing and dinner to get and the bread to bake.

Gus scuffed across the floor behind her in his stocking feet, and she went still, wanting him to touch her and yet not wanting it. He reached around and ran his finger slowly through the dusting of flour on her arm. "There's something about a woman up to her elbows in baking that makes a man want to..." His words trailed off as his breath fluttered warm on her neck. She felt the heat and urgency within him, and she leaned back into him.

"You smell good," he said.

"I smell like beer."

He hummed and nuzzled her neck. "Beer's good."

He turned her so that they were standing chest to chest. Her breasts tightened, her nipples beading up against his searching fingers. She pulled away from him. "Not in the daylight. It isn't proper," she said, even though she wanted him to take her in and lay her down on that big iron bed and join with her.

"I was only going to kiss you. You want me to kiss you, don't you, Clem? Admit it. In fact, you want me to do more than kiss you."

"Maybe." She ducked her head, hiding the heat in her cheeks. She was coming to like what he did to her in bed at night, although she wasn't sure why, or even if she really
did
like it. It aroused within her such a feverish restlessness, a heat in the blood. And yet it left her feeling hollow inside. And sad and lonely.

He heaved a loud sigh that was mostly put on. "I suppose I oughta get back to fixing that drift fence."

He picked up his work boots from in front of the stove, where they'd been drying out. He sat on the woodbox to tug them on by their mule-ears. Mud drifted in pastrylike flakes onto her kitchen floor. Yesterday it had rained hard, what Gus had called a toad-choker, and the sod roof had dripped mud. She had spent all morning cleaning the floor, and now he was dirtying it again already.

She pointed a finger at the mess he was making. "If you'd done the scrubbing of that floor yourself, Gus McQueen, you'd have more of a care where you go planting your filthy boots."

He looked up in surprise. "What's got you so riled this morn—"

A dreadful howling cut him off in mid-word. Long-noted high-pitched whoops that sounded like a hundred lonesome coyotes all crying at once.

Clementine's gaze flew to the gouge in the wall, and fear clogged her throat, stopping her breath.
Indians.

The howls died away, and for the space of a heartbeat all was quiet. Then a cacophony of hoots and yips and hollers erupted right outside their door. Clementine's one thought was to run, but when she went to move her legs they were as stiff as stilts.

"What in the blazes...?" Gus stood up, stomping his heels down into his boots. He gripped Clementine's shoulders, propelling her forward, out of his way. "It sounds like we're being shivareed, though it was supposed to've been done on our wedding night, not two months after."

He threw open the door, pushing Clementine out ahead of him, and she thought maybe he was laughing, but she couldn't hear him above all the hooting and hollering. The two old prospectors, Pogey and Nash, were doing a jig in the yard, their hobnailed boots splattering mud. They accompanied themselves by rattling strings of tin cans and pulling a rosined bow across a splintery board.

They stopped when they saw they had an audience. Big grins creased their leathery faces. They managed to look both guilty and proud, like two wolves caught in a henhouse and all set to brag on it.

Clementine's heart still pounded from the fright she'd had. After all that hollering, it seemed strangely quiet, though the wind whistled through the lattice of cottonwoods along the river and whipped her skirt against her legs. The river was running high from yesterday's rain, rushing as loud as a train through a tunnel.

Gus wrapped his arm around her waist and drawled behind a laugh, "Outraged citizens have been known to tar and feather certain scoundrels for disturbing the peace like that."

Pogey combed his beard with grimy fingers while he eyed Gus slowly up and down, making a show of it. "Looks downright sassy and satisfied in his married state, don't he, Nash? Content, I guess you could say."

Nash nodded in solemn agreement, his big owl eyes unblinking in his bony face. "'Content' is just the word I was searching for. Content as a frog with a bellyful of flies."

"Content as a honeybee in a buckwheat field."

"Content," Nash said, "as a dead pig in pink mud."

Pogey whirled on his partner, flinging his arms wide. "How in hell can a pig be content if'n he's dead? And who ever heard of pink mud? You never do make any sense, Nash. Yap, yap goes yer jaw, flap, flap goes yer tongue, and the two of 'em don't work together long enough to make a lick of sense. Do you think the sun comes up in the mornin' just to hear you crow? Good God almighty—"

Nash whipped the slouch hat off his head and whacked Pogey hard in the stomach with it. "Curb your tongue. You promised you wouldn't cuss."

Pogey's gaze fell to the scuffed toes of his boots. He tugged at the pendulous lobe of one ear, then slanted a sly glance up at Clementine. "Reckon I ain't used to bein' round a genu-ine lady."

Clementine stood with her arms crossed behind her back. The stance squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, making her look even more the lady, though she was unaware of it. "Thank you, Mr. Pogey, for your consideration of my tenderfoot sensibilities," she said, and she shocked the men by flashing one of her rare and ravishing smiles. "I am pleased to see, Mr. Nash, that you were able to redeem your teeth."

Nash stared at her, his jaw agape. "Huh? Oh." He plucked out his teeth and looked at them as if his mouth was the last place he'd expected to find them.

Pogey tugged on both ears, then scratched his chin through his beard. "Well, hel—shucks, we done brought you a wedding present. Mrs. McQueen."

The men had walked out to the ranch leading an old sway-backed burro that was now tied to the hitching rack in front of the cabin. The burro carried a small pannier, and out of one side of it Pogey took something wrapped in a piece of canvas. With a grin so big it lifted his ears, he gave the canvas to Clementine.

The thing squelched in her hands as she unwrapped it slowly. The rancid smell of butchered meat rose up to sear her nose. The meat was thick and flat and black, and dripping blood onto her gray sateen skirt. It looked like the severed tongue of some monstrous beast.

She tried to keep the horror she felt from showing on her face. "Why... thank you, gentlemen."

Gus's eyes laughed at her. "It's a beaver tail, Clem. What you do is make soup out of it. The old mountain men consider it a great delicacy."

"I... I'm sure it must be delicious." She wondered if her book had a recipe for beaver tail soup, and the thought made her smile again.

From out the other side of the pannier Nash produced a clay jug with a cork stopper. "We know you're a temperate man, Gus. So we brought us along our own refreshment."

"Don't stand there in the mud," Gus said, laughing. "Come in."

The two old men trailed Gus through the door, tracking more mud onto her floor. Clementine didn't mind; she was pleased that someone had come out to see them. She doubted there would be many others. She knew what they all thought of her, what the RainDance country thought of her—the whole of this merciless, unforgiving place. She was an outsider, a genu-ine starched-up lady with no grit in her heart, and they were all laughing at her for it. Sometimes she felt even the mountains and the wind were laughing at her.

Gus drew himself a small tin pail of home brew. He had two buckets of beer every noon with dinner. Each evening, while Clementine washed up, he took a bucket outside with him to watch the sun set. In Montana drinking beer wasn't considered
drinking.

The men settled around the table. The prospectors' rank smell overwhelmed the cabin. They not only patronized the same tailor as Nickel Annie, they had her bathing habits as well. Clementine put the beaver tail in the sink. She hoped Gus wouldn't really expect her to make soup out of it.

Pogey lifted the whiskey jug in a toast. "Here's how, Gus. Man, you could've knocked me over with a whistle when you introduced the purtiest gal ever to come to Rainbow Springs as your wife."

Nash rubbed his beaky nose, honking a laugh. "Yup. Pogey here was so surprised his eyes were popping like a stomped-on toad's."

Pogey slammed the jug into his partner's bony chest. "Try corkin' your lips with this, you ol' flannelmouth. Some men talk when they got somethin' to say. You talk 'cause you figure you always gotta be sayin' somethin'."

There was a Montana way of doing everything, Clementine realized, and that included arguing and whiskey-drinking. She studied Nash as he curled his forefinger around the handle, rested the jug on his bent elbow, put his mouth to the spout, and tilted his arm. He drank for a long time, and when he lowered the jug his mouth puckered up tight as if pulled by a drawstring. He swallowed, shuddered, and smacked his lips. "What're you acting so proddy about, Pogey? Nobody expects a man to sit silent as a stuffed duck when he comes a-visitin'."

"Nobody expects im to gabble like a turkey neither. Gimme that jug before you drink it all."

Clementine went to the low coffee-case couch and settled down on the soogan padding, her stiff sateen skirts rustling loudly in the silence. She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her bent knees. She wished that Gus would say something, but he had turned brooding of a sudden, cradling the pail between his two big hands and staring down into the dark brew.