King of Spades (26 page)

He glanced up at where the landslide had started. A dark wet spot a few feet above showed where a big rock had been pried loose. It had hit exactly right, triggering an avalanche of loose earth with little sand or rock.

Erden had decided to close the record.

He checked the dirt for color. Nothing. Not a trace.

It was just as well. So long as no one found gold in the dirt the cave was safe. Hidden.

 

A month later Deadwood as a city was a fact. Three miles long, a hundred feet wide, Deadwood followed the gulch in all its tortuous length, beginning well above where the old beaver dam lay and going all the way down to where Ransom had first come upon an abandoned camp. A dugway was cut over the hogback to connect it with the trail to Cheyenne.

First came scattered prospectors, who, like Ransom, had holed up in the Hills during the winter. Then came the first stragglers of spring from Cheyenne. Next came a couple hundred miners from the Montana diggings. After that the gold hunters came in from everywhere, floods of them: from the jumping-off points first—Sioux City, Sidney, Bismarck—and then from all over America—New York, Boston, Philadelphia—even from England and Germany. They came mostly broke, with few supplies. They came on horseback and on foot. Some were educated, men of promise, even men with their careers well started, who wanted one more lark out in the wilds before settling down: lawyers, teachers,
professors, doctors. Some were tradesmen: merchants, clerks, druggists. Some were common laborers: factory hands, farm hired men, draymen. Some were drifters. Chinamen launderers came too. The old miners did the best digging; the rest struck out blindly.

Tents, huts, cabins, houses, stores, saloons, opera houses, hotels popped up everywhere. Was there a boulder too big to move, or a stump too tough to extract, Main Street and its side alleys just went around it. Some pines were left standing for no reason at all. Some miserable hovels had boardwalks; some fancy houses had mud paths. On the least whimsy, gophering for gold sometimes took place on Main Street itself.

At high noon Main Street lay in garish eye-blinding sunlight; at midnight it was as dark as a cave. A dozen steps ventured after dark sometimes led to disaster. Often there wasn't enough starlight to illuminate the eye of a cat. Lanterns cost a fortune.

Deadwood resembled a new prairie-dog town. What had once been a lovely dell was now suddenly a dusty hell of uprooted earth. Each hole had its frenetic digger with dirty claws. Gay chatter as well as yipping complaints flew from mound to mound. Snakes in the grass were accepted. Dawn came up with everybody yipping and digging, and dusk went down with everybody yipping and digging.

To supply this welter of humanity, various freighting companies soon had huge bull trains on the rail, carrying clothes, food, shelter, powder, mining tools. The freight trains were sometimes so long they couldn't turn around on the narrow main street, but had to go out beyond city limits to make the maneuver.

Stagecoaches ran from Cheyenne on regular time schedules. That brought in the spongers. Gamblers, wearing fine linen and broadcloth fresh from the tailor, soon were strolling down Main Street with all the air of men who had nothing on their hands but magnificent leisure. The gamblers,
speaking quietly from behind poker smiles, lived by the philosophy that a poor loser was worse than a horse thief. Girls on the line, wearing dingy old fascinators, soon were strolling down Main Street too, with all the air of ladies who had nothing on their minds but clothes and gossip. The girls, lollygagging in the doorways of their cribs, lived by the faith that the making in private of lovely vulgar sounds was the be all and the end all of life.

Next to come on the stagecoach were the bankers and their opposites the road agents. Free-spending blood, already bored, rode with them.

A single preacher came last. He fit in like a turkey in a saddle.

In some respects Deadwood was born old.

 

When panning no longer paid off, the gold hunters tried rocking. When rocking no longer paid off, they tried placer mining. And all too soon a good share of the gulch was played out.

Some nearly starved to death. To survive, they had to cadge gold dust from the more lucky. They ate rancid sowbelly, they drank on the house when they could, and they dreamed the dreams of the improvident. Some whittled their lives away as they sat on logs along Main Street.

Rumors of new strikes came along almost every hour. Every so often the rumors caught, and like capricious crows on a wire, dusty dreamers took flight in one direction or another, higher up the gulch, or lower down, or across the hogbacks into unexplored draws and canyons.

 

Many a broke adventurer offered to muck for Ransom.

Ransom and his partner Troy Barb declined the offers. Ransom and Troy Barb worked their claims at the beaver dam just enough to pay their way. They were getting a hundred dollars to the pan and could afford to take it easy. Both were waiting for a rich mining speculator to come
along and buy them out, a man with enough money to mine the ore with proper equipment.

Ransom was careful to register his white-quartz claim in his name only. Every so often he went up to check to see if his stakes were still in place. He kept his eye peeled for sign that someone might have stumbled upon it.

While up there, he also kept his eye peeled for Erden. But he never saw any new sign of her.

4

One noon late in June, right after dinner, some miners higher up the gulch spotted a plume of dust coming down the main dugway. The miners hallooed to those below and soon Ransom and Troy Barb were alerted.

“It's too early for the Cheyenne run,” Troy Barb said as he leaned back on his spade. “That ain't due till about dusk.”

Ransom nodded. He wasn't too anxious to look.

Troy Barb climbed up on a rock. He shaded his moon eyes with a hand. “Tain't the treasure coach either. Though 'tis a Concord. Because I see yellow spokes flashing.”

Ransom set his spade to one side and sat down. He looked down at the brittle yellow calluses in the palms of his hands. The hands were no longer the hands of a card shark. Nor for that matter the hands of a gunslinger.

“The jehu handling the ribbons is sure pouring it on. Them stylish black flyers is coming on like the wind.” Troy Barb laughed. “Probably one of them cock-up drivers who likes to give his passengers…. Oops!” Troy Barb grunted in sympathy. “What a jolt that was.”

Ransom waited.

“There'll be no lady in a rig going that fast.”

“Let's hope not.”

Troy Barb stared down at Ransom. “You don't seem to have much time for wimmen, do you?”

The swift tattoo of fleet hoofs and the sound of rapidly clicking wheels came to them. In a moment six black horses galloped into view, followed by a red stagecoach lurching along on leather thoroughbraces.

“Well, we'll know in a minute.”

Ransom got to his feet and deliberately began to dig in earnest. He worked himself around until he had his back turned to the road.

All too soon the galloping black horses, the clicking coach, and an exploding cloud of dust whirled by.

“There was a woman in there!” Troy Barb exclaimed. “I was wrong. Some rich dame. All alone.”

Ransom dug harder.

Troy Barb pushed back his black hat. He scratched his wild hair with a single finger. “Well, well. Now Deadwood can say she's a big city. She's got herself a snooty rich woman.”

 

Two days later, the same red coach with its spanking yellow wheels came back up the dugway.

Ransom was alone in his log cabin. He was sitting dulleyed on the edge of his bunk. The bunk was a rickety affair, three boards placed across two sawhorses.

“Ransom?” a clear woman's voice called. “Ransom?”

The voice jarred him. It chilled him all the way down to his tailbone. He stared at the walls, noting idly that the pine logs were freckled with rosin.

“Ransom?” There were the familiar quick springing steps, followed by a knock. “Ransom?”

Ransom stared at where a tin of fermented dough hung above a sheet-iron stove. Above it the ceiling was decorated over with old newspapers.

“Ransom?” The log door opened with a loud creak. “Ah,
there you are, my handsome is as handsome does.” Pause. “Why, Ransom, darling, haven't you got a hello for me?”

He ran his hand over his bearded face. The burn over his cheek had healed and his beard had pretty well grown back.

“Is this all the greeting I get?”

“Hello.”

“Ransom. This is a dreadful way to greet your own dear wife. Why!”

Ransom slowly swung around to have a look at Katherine. “What're you doing here?”

Katherine stood in flowing purple in the doorway: hasped purple crinoline skirt over voluminous flouncings of underskirts, long purple gloves, a cunning curved purple hat. “Why, what do you mean, what am I doing here?”

“Why didn't you wait until I sent for you?”

“Why, Ransom, my husband, I've come to live with you at the scene of your greatest triumph.”

“Deadwood is no place for a lady. It's a regular pigyard.”

“Ransom, I came because I was determined to live with my husband wherever he was, come what might.”

“You should've waited until I'd made it really big.” The black patch over her left eye he now saw as a disfigurement.

“Really big? Why, Ransom, they tell me downtown you're potentially the richest man here.” She stepped toward him. “Besides, even if you hadn't made it really big, as you say, I would have followed you.” She stopped beside him and stooped to kiss him.

He turned his face away. “Don't. I'm dirty. Maybe even lousy.”

“Well! So this is all the greeting I get after coming all this way. Through cloudbursts and wild Indians and dangerous road agents.”

“Well, like I said, I didn't send for you.” Her puccoon perfume caught him in the chest. He remembered all the hothouse smells of her.

“What's the matter with you, Ransom? Where's that fancy
boy of mine, who used to pick me a posy of wild flowers before breakfast every morning?”

He looked her in the eye. “Katherine, are you going to have a baby?”

“What?”

“Are you going to have a baby?”

“No, I'm not, worse luck.”

His eyes shied off. He hated it that he couldn't keep looking her in the eye. At the same time he knew that she knew he couldn't.

“Ah, so you've gone and found yourself another girl, have you?” She stood arms akimbo beside him. “Some young slip of a thing? Cooing and billing? And not a brain in her pretty little head and going to have a baby?”

A nervous twitch tugged at his lips. He fought it away. What he needed now was a real poker face.

“Haven't you?”

Ransom just barely managed to keep his face straight.

“There is another woman then, isn't there? There has to be.”

“Quit ropin' at me with all them silly questions.”

“Earl Ransom!” She gasped, and backed off a step. “And after all I went through to get here. And after even getting us a house downtown.”

“You—got—us—a—house—downtown? Already?”

“Yes. I bought that new green house a half-block off Main Street there. On the turnoff to Mt. Moriah. Across the stream. It's the only one in town with a water closet.”

Ransom fought off a shudder.

“Our household goods will be arriving from Cheyenne any hour now.”

Ransom touched his right eye with thumb and forefinger.

“You'll help me when they arrive, won't you, Ransom, dear? So we can set up housekeeping right away?” A tear gathered in the corner of her dark-brown eye. “It was always
my dream that we would at last have that sweet little nest far out in the West.” She sucked a deep breath. “Oh, Ransom, my darling, you still love me, don't you? Because if you don't, my darling, I shall go mad with grief.” She fell on his neck and sought out his lips in his black beard and began to kiss him passionately.

All the hardness he'd built up against her collapsed. A weird impulse to smile twisted his lips.

“Please, Ransom, darling, do please kiss me. Like you used to. You don't know how I've lived for this moment. Oh, Ransom, I've had such an unhappy life, that if you don't kiss me now, after all that, why….”

He found himself turning, and at last, with wibbling lips, kissing her.

He half-expected to hear the granite peaks whistling again.

 

The green house set back from Main Street was lovely. Ransom helped Katherine move in, furniture, furnishings, trunks of clothes. He helped her roll out her expensive Persian rugs. He supervised the movers when they set up the four-poster in the big bedroom upstairs.

The house was quiet. Main Street was far enough away for its usual hubbub to be muted. The little stream flowing at the foot of the house purled just loud enough to give life a murmurous tone. Occasional footsteps on the wooden bridge made it homey.

Katherine persuaded him to clean up, so with a bar of soap he took his first bath in a tub in months.

Katherine also got him to dress up for their first dinner together since Cheyenne, in the black suit she'd once bought him. She herself wore a young bride's white.

“And please, darling, don't come to the table wearing your gun. For once.”

“If you say so.”

When he entered the dining room, she had the food on the table, steaming and savory, potatoes, gravy, meat, cabbage, dried-apple pie, set around a flower centerpiece.

Courteously he helped her into her chair, then went around and sat at the head of the table.

“You like it?”

He nodded.

“It's what I always dreamed of.”

All too familiarly his hand picked up the linen napkin and unfolded it across his lap. “It's hard for me to believe.”

She smiled tiny wrinkles around her one eye. “'Tis for me too.”