King of Spades (17 page)

“Ransom!”

He continued to give her great green eyes.

The night lamp was on. The room was full of gold glints and gold shadows. Her tumbled hair resembled a throw of gold coins.

“There's one thing I never did get about you, lady. About how you'll never let me kiss your bare breasts. Nose 'em a little.”

“My God.”

“I can play with your feet bare, but not them.”

She closed her eyes to crinkled slits.

“And another thing, while I'm at it … how come you never let me see you bare naked? We shouldn't have any shame in front of each other any more, should we, as man and wife?”

She closed her lips to a line of whitened flesh.

“Pussy?”

“I can't. No. No.”

He began to unbutton her dress.

She fought him, clawing fingernails, kicking toes.

Laughing, in part malicious, in part impish, he ripped her clothes off, from head to toe, until she lay lovely and exposed before him. “Now look at you. What was wrong that you'd never let me see you as God made you? You're beautiful. You wouldn't deny your own true husband that, now would you?”

She cried aloud, then with both her hands, flutteringly, tried to cover her breasts and her belly at the same time. She crossed her legs tight.

“Pussy, do me a favor?”

“What.”

“Please let me see under that eye patch. I want to see what it's like.”

“No, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“It's not your fault you have it. And if it is a fault, it's the one thing that makes you perfect.”

“Perfect? Oh, God, you're tearing me all to pieces talking like that.”

He reached to remove the eye patch anyway. He managed to lift one corner of it to catch a glimpse of a single teardrop glistening in a quivering cup of flesh before she could push his hand away.

In fighting him off she exposed her middle.

He saw something. “What's this?”

“Nothing.”

A large scar, exactly like the wrinkled smile of a pumpkin jack-o'-lantern, lay across her little mound of a belly.

“Is this what you didn't want me to see, for godsakes?”

She turned her face away from him.

“Why, pet, it's only an operation scar. Why, on you, it's a kind of beauty mark even. Like a birthmark almost, you might say.”

She covered her face with both her hands. Sobs shook her.

“What was it, a gallstone operation?”

“Mmm.”

“You're lucky to be alive then.” He leaned down and kissed the scar. “It makes you that much the more precious.”

She groaned as if she were about to die.

He looked upon her. A rush of compassion for her as well as an impulse to hurt her came together in him. The two emotions were like the alternate troublings of two rivers at a confluence. “Katherine.”

She rolled her head back and forth in a frenzy of torment.

He stripped off his clothes, blew out the night lamp. With a surgelike motion he took her in his arms.

She lay inert for a long time, no matter what he did to arouse her.

At last the impulse to hurt her, to be the cruel topdog to her abject underdog, won out. He roughed her up, brutal.

Then she responded, stirring a little, until, more and more, she became as actively savage as he.

Soon velvet wings, open, began to fly.

 

They lay musing together in the dark.

The windows were open. A soft summer night's breeze trailed threads of invisible gossamer across their faces.

The clock on the mantelpiece tocked irregularly, as if it
might have heart trouble. Crickets sawed under the loveseat. Outside a lone horsebacker came clopping down the street on a tired pinto.

“Ransom?”

“Umm?”

“You're funny.”

“Mmm.”

“A silly boy.”

“Nnn.”

“You don't like it when I don't let you see me naked. Yet when it comes right down to it, you're no different.”

“Prove it.”

She laughed softly in the dark. “Why did you blow out the night lamp?”

“Well….”

“And pull up the quilts to our chins?”

“The night air is chilly.”

Suddenly the sound of wild galloping came to them.

They lay listening to it.

The galloping came on louder.

“Hey,” Ransom said, rousing.

It was a half-dozen horses. In a moment the horses thundered by on the street below.

One of the horsemen was crying something. It was repeated again and again.

Ransom jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

“Ransom, for heaven's sake, what're you doing, leaning out all naked like that? The neighbors will see you.”

“Shh.” Ransom turned his head to hear the better.

The horsemen had gone on about a block before Ransom finally made it out.

“Gold! Gold! In the Black Hills. They've found the real mother lode at last!”

PART THREE

Earl Ransom

1

Ransom struck out for the Black Hills alone.

At the southern edge of the Hills he came upon occasional gold hunters who'd gone belly up. They were hungry, ragged, lousy, bitter. The new strike still wasn't the true mother lode and for many it had turned out to be a trap.

Near Shirttail Canyon early one morning, Ransom came upon a man who really was busted. The prospector rode a bony mule without a saddle and had no other possessions but the torn dirty clothes he had on and a six-shooter stuck in his belt. His boots were shot, bare toes showing through. His black beard was long and mangy.

Both men drew up their mounts at about the same time. Both men checked each other's guns, and then looked each
other over point for point, Ransom with wondering eye, the other with derisive eye.

Ransom let both hands come carefully to rest on the horn of his saddle. “Howdy, stranger.”

The stranger's look of derision deepened as he eyed Ransom's fancy buckskin clothes and his tan mustang Prince and the chestnut packhorse behind laden with tools and supplies.

“Howdy.”

“Where you headed?”

“Can you lend me fifty dollars, handsome?” The stranger scratched himself vigorously. “Then I just might tell you.”

“I just broke camp.” Ransom blew some road dust off his sleeves. “Or I'd offer you some coffee.”

“You wouldn't care to cool your saddle?”

Ransom tipped back his sombrero. “I mean to make Custer yet tonight.”

“Ha. Another fool jackass.”

“Hey. How so?”

“Thinking people can run through the Hills and go picking up gold just for the taking.”

“What's wrong with using a spade?”

“Like hogs let loose eating ground nuts off the grass.” A big louse emerged on the surface of the stranger's black beard and began to fight its way through various tangles.

Ransom's nostrils edged open a little.

“Crazy people on a wild stampede for fool's gold.”

“That your story?”

“I hate to admit it. But, it's true.” The stranger scratched and scratched. “I've got the I-quit-fits. For me, it just didn't pan out I sunk five hundred dollars into this expedition and, by God, I never took a color.” The stranger gave Ransom another careful study. “You really can't lend me a fifty spot? Because I'm strapped.”

“How far is it to Custer?”

“Fifteen miles of pure up and down.”

Ransom stared up at the high shoulders of the canyon, at
the thick stands of lofty ponderosa down the steep sides, at the tender ferns growing underfoot. “Any water?”

“None to speak of.”

“Any Indians?”

“None so far.”

“What happened to that new boom camp up north?”

“Color petered out.”

“Hard luck.”

“Worse yet, General Crook's chasin' everybody out.” “Where'd he come from?”

“Orders from Washington, D.C. He says the Hills is still off limits for us. And will be for at least another year. It's according to an old treaty we signed with the Sioux. The whole of the Hills still belongs to them and they're being balky about selling so much as a square inch of it.”

“That's a helluva thing.”

“I know I'm not going to stay and tough it out any longer.” Pause. “You hain't got a smile of whiskey on you?”

“Not a drop.”

“I couldn't badge some bacon off you? I can make the other two meals out of water.”

Ransom reached down into a saddlebag behind him and came up with a strip of jerky. He tossed it across to the man. As it passed by, the mule made a sudden snap at it; missed.

The man began to gnaw at the jerky ravenously. “When I get back to old Cheyenne, I mean to order me a meal of oysters, eggs, beef, and a stalk of celery. But this'll have to do for now.”

“Think you can make it?”

“I have to. I can't let my wife down back in Omaha. Not with a thunderhead of debt hanging over her. Well, hup-up, old skate, maybe we'll find us some wet grass yet. On the back trail home.” And with that the raggy prospector rode off into the shadows, going south.

Ransom thought of his Katherine back in Cheyenne. At
least she didn't have any debts to face. In fact, it was the other way around. Katherine was too rich.

Ransom remembered the promise Katherine had extracted from him when he'd left, that he was to let her know the minute he'd struck it rich, so that she could follow him with all her household goods. “Then we can have it wonderful,” she'd said, “in our sweet little nest far out in the West.”

 

Two hours later, just as Ransom was about to climb a hogback, he spotted a blue color darker than the blue of the sky. First black hats appeared under the pines along the skyline, then blue uniforms, then gray horses. It was an Army patrol out looking for stray prospectors.

Ransom was off his horse in a whip. Quickly he led Prince and the packhorse into a thicket of lodgepole pines. He threw an arm around each horse's neck and with his hands muffled their rubbery lips. Luckily the two horses were too tired to be unruly, and stood patient and still.

“Sooner or later,” Ransom muttered to himself, “the Sioux are gonna have to get out anyway. And I mean to be the first in to make the big strike.”

The patrol halted on the crest. While they blew their horses, an officer carefully surveyed the canyon with a glass. Once Ransom was almost sure the officer had spotted him. The officer's glass swiveled back suddenly and seemed to fix on Ransom's hideout in the thicket. Silver reflection gleamed momentarily on the glass like a flash of gunfire.

“Damn, but I don't want to go back after coming this far.”

Ransom checked his packhorse to see if any of the metal might be gleaming in the sunlight, the new spade, or the pickax and pan. There was nothing glinting that he could see.

His heart clopped in his ears.

The officer at last put his glass away. He raised his arm curtly. And then the patrol was off, galloping along the top
of the hogback, going southwest toward the Cheyenne trail.

“Now, if I don't run into them mad Sioux, I'll make it.” Ransom led his two horses out of the thicket. “And I'm sure not going to stop in Custer now.” He checked the one-man diamond-hitch on the packhorse to see if all was secure. “I'll go around it to the west. Cross over on high ground.”

 

More and more pinnacles and peaks of rock emerged out of the green mantle of the forest. Stunted pines no higher than Indian corn passed under the belly of his mustang. Ransom rode over weathered granite passes as slick as river ice. On the right, far ahead, he spotted the highest point in the Black Hills, a bald crag of gleaming granite.

The canyons deepened. Most were dry. Heated bark exuded clouds of pine perfume. Even the raw rock had a singular aroma.

Occasional Indian graves hung like clots of moss in the trees. The bodies were invariably wrapped in green blankets. Offerings in memory lay in the grass underfoot.

Ransom came upon an awesome ravine, long, deep, a stream trickling down the middle of its green bottom.

“I better take it. It leads straight north. Besides, it's time to irrigate the horses.”

He slid off Prince. He checked the diamond-hitch on the packhorse. Then, peering down and picking out a route, he carefully led them down. They inched along narrow ledges. They passed under teetering boulders. They slid between massy trunks of ponderosa pine. They circled through mazes of half-fallen trees. They plowed across powdery rotten trunks. Occasional rattling rockfalls splashed to either side of them.

“One slip and our name'll be mud.”

Magpies, dippling their long tails and flashing white, clattered angrily at them.

The head of the stream began exactly where they hit the
bottom of the ravine. A spring poured quietly out of a wall of green turf. It ran as if someone had only just then punched a hole in the green wall.

The packhorse stepped up and drank sidewise at the falling jet of water.

Prince waited. Prince had taken a fancy to drinking out of Ransom's sombrero.

Ransom, thirsty himself, had to laugh at Prince's delicacy in waiting. “All right, you win.” Ransom filled his hat and held it out for Prince.

Prince drank in his usual graceful sipping manner.

“Don't know what'll become of you should they ever gun me down.”

Prince drank the hat dry, down to the last drop, then nudged Ransom for more.

Ransom obliged him.

When Prince had finally filled his belly to almost double its size, Ransom helped himself to a hatful.

The two horses had gone to grazing lustily, and Ransom was about to sit down on a rock and have himself some jerky, when he became aware of another presence.

A dozen paces away, in deep brush, stood a prospector. He had on a big black floppy hat, a red flannel shirt, a black vest and pants. His leather belt and boots were badly scuffed. He'd half drawn his gun. He was an old man.

It was too late to go for his own gun, so Ransom decided to bluff it through, easy. “Hi there, Old-timer. I see the Army sweep missed you too.”

The old prospector's red-streaked eyes oscillated. His cheeks swelled in and out like a turkey gobbler's.

“Find any colors?”

The old prospector rolled his head from side to side, all the while looking at Ransom and his horses exactly like a mad bull.

Ransom stayed cool. A smile wriggled in his black mustache.
“We're just passing through. We don't mean to run you off your claim.”

The old prospector lifted his gun an inch.

“C'mon, Old-timer, pour your coffee in a saucer and let it cool.”

The old prospector chewed with a gobbling sound.

Ransom eased his feet apart. “Got yourself a prospect hole and won't let anybody else in, eh?”

The old prospector raised his gun another inch, almost free of its holster, the tip of the gun sight flashing.

“No need to snap your gun, friend. I don't intend to hang around. I've got my own idee about where the mother lode is.” Ransom quietly scratched his belly through his buckskin shirt.

The old prospector's mad grizzly face finally parted in the middle. “No funny tricks now, sonny. You moughtn't fare so well with a feller what wam't brought up gentleman-like.” “Them's high words, friend.”

“You better board that horse again, pilgrim. And dust. Before I decide to take him for myself.”

“What's the matter, did the blue ducks take yours?”

“No.” All of a sudden the old prospector began to break. “No, the Army didn't get 'em. 'Twas a goddam panther.”

“Cat? In the Hills?”

The old prospector let his gun fall back into its holster and sat down with a thud on a rock. “The Hills are full of cats.” His head sank between his shoulders.

“I'll have to be more careful from now on.”

“Had me a fine mare with a stud colt. Bays, the both of 'em. Best friends I ever had.” The old prospector wept. “It happened t'while I went to set out my location marks. Left the mare and colt behind. Tied the colt to a tree, thinking the mare would stick close. Well, a panther came along. The mare broke away, of course. I can't blame her for that. And when I come back, all I found of the colt was that over
there.” The old prospector pointed behind his back without glancing around.

Ransom looked. Not forty steps away lay a colt's fuzzy head, tail, and feet. Green flies buzzed around the remains as thick as swarming bees. “Lord.”

The old prospector wept unashamedly. “I'm as brimful of bawl as a egg is of meat.”

“Too bad.”

“I ain't had an hour's sleep in four weeks, thinking on where my darling went, waiting for her to come back.”

“Your darling?”

“My mare.”

“That's awful.”

“Yep, that's what comes of concluding to make a shortcut to wealth.”

Ransom sat down on a rock across from him.

“Yep, when I came out here a couple of months ago, I felt like I'd at last dealt myself a royal flush in the game of life. That the whole world was my jackpot.”

“The mare never did come back?”

“No, she didn't.” The old prospector wiped his tears on his sleeve. “The panther probably got her too.” Hate flashed out of his black beard. “But, by God, I got my revenge. I got the panther what got the colt. Hrr!” The old prospector's eyes blazed yellow for a moment. “I waited patient for a week and finally nailed him. He came back for the rest of the colt.”

“Good for you.”

“Yep.” Then the old prospector's head sagged again. “But after killin' and eatin' the panther, I been dreamin' of cats every night. For a fack.” The old prospector heaved a beard-ruffling sigh. “You hain't got some barbwire juice on you?”

“I don't drink.”