The Bullwhip Breed (2 page)

“This’s it,” remarked the girl, steering him towards the door of a cheap brownstone apartment building. “We’ll have you fit as frog’s hair afore you know what it’s about.”

Opening the door, the girl helped St. Andrew through the dimly-lit hall to a room on the ground floor. She let them into the room and assisted St. Andre across to a bed, sitting him on it then easing him deftly on to his back. Even now St. Andre had seen little of his rescuer for the room was in darkness.

“Just lie easy there, friend,” she ordered. “I’ll light the lamp and then see to fixing your hurts.”

With a sigh, St. Andre relaxed and waited for the lamp to be lit and allow him to take a good look at the girl whose opportune arrival and prompt actions saved him from serious injury.

oooOooo

*
For further details of the Vanderlyne case read
THE MAN FROM TEXAS
by J. T. Edson.

CHAPTER TWO

ALTHOUGH St. Andre did not feel like acting the part of an observant detective, he looked around him as well as he could with only one eye working properly, when the lamp’s light illuminated the room. He found himself in a small, clean room furnished with a wash-stand on which stood a pitcher of water and a towel, a small table bearing the lamp, a couple of chairs, a wardrobe and a comfortable bed.

From his rapid study of the room, St. Andre took his first clear look at his rescuer. Remembering the robust language she used when driving off the quartet, St. Andre half-expected to see a harsh-faced, middle-aged harridan of some kind. He received a very pleasant surprise. Maybe his rescuer could not be termed ravingly beautiful, but she was good looking and well below middle-age.

Most ladies of St. Andre’s acquaintance, and there were several, went in for blonde hair that season, whether born blonde or not, wore it long and taken up in elaborate styles; while their faces retained a pallor aided by powder and make-up. His rescuer had a mop of short, curly red hair on which perched a battered U.S. cavalry kepi at a jaunty angle, and her face bore a healthy tan sprinkled with a few attractive freckles. The eyes of most women St. Andre knew were languorous, inviting; yet a man never knew when he accepted the invitation if the girl would submit in blissful delight as he took hold, or scream for her papa to bring on a shotgun and a preacher. That red haired girl’s eyes held no hidden deceit. Meeting St. Andre’s scrutiny calmly, they seemed to say, “All right, son, hurt or not, you figure you’re the world’s greatest; but I’m from Missouri, I’ve got to be shown.”

Showing her might prove mighty interesting.

Alter his study of the girl’s face, St. Andre watched her walk across the room. Removing the fringed buckskin jacket she wore, the girl hung it on a wardrobe peg then bent and opened a battered box standing against the wall. A tight-rolled scarlet bandana, knotted at her throat, trailed long ends over an open-necked man’s shirt that, like the levis pants she wore, looked to have been bought a size too small and shrunk in the washing. The shirt’s neck was open low enough, and clung tight enough to her rich, full bosom, to dispel any doubts that might possibly have remained in St. Andre’s French-Creole mind as to her sex. From the bosom, she tapered down to a slim waist, without the use of corsets or other artificial aids, then swelled out to plump, curving and eye-catching hips and shapely legs that the levis tended to reveal rather than conceal, and ended in feet clad in Indian moccasins unless St. Andrew missed his guess.

Lifting his gaze from her feet, St. Andre studied the broad leather belt which slanted down at an angle from her left hip to her right thigh. Surely she did not wear a gun? Yes, it showed as she turned from the box. An ivory-handled 1861 Navy Colt, butt forward in a contoured fast-draw holster such as members of the Texas Light Cavalry wore during the War Between the States, or St. Andre missed his guess; the holster bottom fastened down by a thong around the girl’s thigh. An affectation if ever he saw one, probably the girl had been on her way to a masquerade ball when she found him in need of her aid. A long lashed bull-whip hung thrust into the left side of her waist belt. More affectation—at that moment St. Andre remembered the pistol-like cracks and the pain-filled howls of his attackers as the girl drove them off. That whip was no affectation, no matter what the gunbelt and Navy Colt might be.

“Damned if everything you want’s allus at the bottom,” she remarked and swung back to root in the box again, a few muttered curses leaving her lips.

St. Andrew found himself wondering what kind of girl he had come across. She was refreshingly different from his aristocratic and socialite friends, or the actresses and other entertainers he knew or met in his duty. Some of the young ladies of St. Andre’s social set, profound admirers of the intellectual writer Browne Crossman used bad language to express their progressiveness; but they did it self-consciously, showing only that they tried to prove a non-existent point. The red head cursed naturally, in the manner of a man out fishing when he caught his thumb with a hook point. St. Andre grinned as he thought of the vitriolic flow of invective the girl poured upon his attackers while her savage whip-attack drove them off.

“You should tote a gun, friend, happen those were your neighbours,” the girl said, coming to the bed with a buckskin bag in her hands. “Sit up and let’s take a look at you.”

Gently, yet showing that she had handled injured men before, she helped him sit up and remove his jacket. Her eyes studied him and formed their conclusions. While he did not look much right at the moment, mussed up and all bloody, she decided he would be a handsome cuss most times. Black curly hair, regular features, a neat, thin moustache; wearing expensive clothing and looking like he was used to doing so, but with a good spread to his shoulders, a lean, fighting man’s waist and, if the way he fought those four jaspers be anything to go on, hard muscles that he knew how to use. In fact, he looked a tolerable hunk of man to her way of thinking.

“I—have—a—gun.” St. Andre replied.

“Then why in hell didn’t you start to using it?” she sniffed, swinging the jacket onto the bed rail.

Something hard clinked against the rail and the girl turned, dipping a hand into his inside pocket to lift out a fancy, pearl-handled Smith & Wesson No. I Pocket revolver which she eyed with distaste. Yet she did not shriek in simulated horror and drop the gun, or wave it around with a finger on the trigger to the danger of life and limb. Handling the gun with obvious knowledge of such things, she turned smiling eyes to him.

“See now why you didn’t use it,” she said and laid the revolver aside. “Reckon you didn’t want to knock the dust off their jackets.”

Despite his injuries, St. Andre was still a Frenchman in the presence of a pretty girl and as such figured it to be time he asserted some of his masculine superiority over that calm, competent young female.

“It would have done more than just dust a jacket,
cherie
,” he told her, sniffing the dripping blood up his nostrils.

“Maybe,” she answered, sounding doubtful. “The name’s not ‘Sherry’, it’s Martha Jane Canary, though I’d not thank you for calling me ‘Martha’.”

“Then what do I call you?”

“My friends call me Calam, or worse. Which, afore you ask me, is short for Calamity.”

While speaking, the girl had opened her bag and taken out what looked like a powderhorn, tipping some snuff-like grains of dust on to the palm of her hand. Turning, she approached St. Andre and held the hand towards him.

“Here, sniff some of this up your nose.”

“Huh?”

“Could allus call in one of them fancy city doctors and he’d look you over then tell you what we both already know, that somebody you a helluva licking, and charge you five dollars. Only I like to do it more gentle and cheaper.”

So saying, the girl brought the palm of her hand up under his nose and stabbed her other forefinger hard into his stomach. Taken by surprise, St. Andre breathed in, sucking a quantity of the powder up into his nostrils. For a moment his nose felt clogged up, but the bleeding stopped.

“What was that?” he asked, watching the girl put away the powder and open a large snuff box.

“Powdered witch hazel leaves. And this here’s gum from a balsam fir. I reckon it’s better for stopping open bleeding like this on your face. This might hurt a mite, friend.”

She went to the washstand and poured water from the jug into a bowl. Returning with the bowl and towel, she gently washed the blood from his injured eye. For a moment St. Andre felt scared as he saw the concern show on her face, then relief replaced the expression of anxiety.

“Calamity you said your name was,” the detective said, trying to ignore the stinging pain the bathing caused. “Well, it nearly was a calamity. The life of New Orleans’ best detective might have been cut off in his prime had you not come along when you did.”

“Was there two of you in the alley?” asked the girl with a smile. She spread something cool and sticky on the gash over his eye.

“Only one. I, myself.”

“And you’d be who?”

“Philippe St. Andre, Detective Lieutenant, at your service.”

“Right pleased to know you. Might not be seeing too good out of that eye for a spell, but at least you’ve got an eye left and the cut over it don’t need any stitching.”

“I suppose you could have done that too?”

“I’ve had to afore now,” the girl admitted. “Stop the pain by making ‘em chew on the bark of a pepperwood tree, if there’s one handy. If not, I’ve got a couple of other real good painkillers. One of ‘em’s make the hurt feller drink whisky until he goes to sleep—.”

“I’d imagine that would cause him to cut himself again when he woke, to get the same treatment,” St. Andre interrupted.

“If it does, I use the other pain-killer next time.”

“And what might that be?”

“Hit him over the head with the empty bottle,” she answered calmly, then eyed him with interest. “Ain’t never been a gal for being nosey and asking questions about things, so I’m not going to ask you if them four was riled-up fathers after your hide.”

“
Mon Dieu!
I forgot them,
cherie
.”

“Likely they’ll not forget you for a spell. Shouldn’t be hard to cut from the herd, happen you look for the marks that old whip of mine put on ‘em. One’ll have a busted wrist most likely and the others’ll all carry marks.”

“You’re quite a girl to have around in a calamity, Jane,” smiled St. Andre, then he stiffened and stared at the girl, realising how the last two words came out. “Calamity—Jane—you can’t be!”

“Want to bet?” she grinned back.

“
Sacre bleu!
” St. Andre ejaculated. “So you’re the famous Calamity Jane!”

“Yep,” replied the girl, clearly just a mite proud that her name and fame had reached as far as New Orleans. “I’m the famous Calamity Jane. Only I didn’t know I was famous down here in New Orleans.”

St. Andre stared in fascination at the girl he previously believed to be no more than a legend created by Westerners for the purpose of joshing dudes. Many highly sensational tales of her adventures, prowess and capabilities had appeared over the last year in such magazines as the
Police Gazette
and
New York Ledger
; in fact even the sedate
New Orleans Picayune
occasionally carried stories concerning the life and times of Calamity Jane.

In the highly coloured stories St. Andre read, Calamity had been portrayed as either a fire-breathing middle-aged dragoness, or a ravingly beautiful woman of high birth who fled to the West to forget a lost lover. Calamity was neither, but merely a rather unusual product of the times. Before disappearing into the West, Charlotte Canary left Calamity and the rest of her children in the care of a St. Louis convent. However, there had been too much of Charlotte’s spirit in Calamity for the girl to accept the nuns’ rigid discipline. On her sixteenth birthday, Calamity—then plain Martha Jane—hid in One of Dobe Killem’s wagons and was not discovered until that evening at the end of a day’s trip. She might have been returned to the convent had Killem’s cook not been too drunk to make a meal for the men. One of the few things the nuns managed to teach Calamity had been cooking and the meal she threw together for the hungry men ensured that she could stay with the outfit.

That trip raiding Sioux wiped out two other outfits, but missed Killem’s wagons. On reaching their destination, Killem made a good profit and his men began to regard the girl as a good luck charm. So they kept her with them. At first Calamity helped the cook, did chores around the camp, then graduated to driving. From the men she learned to handle a six-horse Conestoga wagon, use a bull-whip as tool and weapon, shoot well with rifle, revolver or shotgun, and generally take care of herself on the plains country of the West. Due to a licking at the hands of a saloon girl, Calamity learned to fight. More than that, she developed a liking for fighting which led her to enter saloons and toss down a challenge to take on the best gal in the house, all-in hand-scalping with no holds barred. Her outfit picked up a fair amount of cash betting on her, for so far Calamity had never been beaten in a fight.

St. Andre knew none of this. All he saw was a merry-faced, competent and capable girl, unconventional perhaps and well outside his considerable knowledge of the opposite sex. She reminded him of the fresh-faced, buxom country girls one saw around the poorer section of the city; wholesome, naive, innocent—only he doubted if Calamity would prove all that innocent if things came to a head.

“How about your ribs?” she asked.

“I think they’ll be all right,” he replied, feeling suddenly shy and not doubting she would want to examine his torso should he claim different. So he changed the subject. “What brought you to New Orleans?”

“Somebody in the Army bought up a big bunch of horses cheap down here and wanted ‘em shipping up the Big Muddy to St. Jo. So they sent for Dobe Killem, he’s my boss, to handle the collection and delivery. We come down by steamboat and here we are. I went out to see the sights just afore dark and got lost coming back. Reckon the boys’ve gone off to that Madam Darcel’s place and want me to meet ‘em there.”

“Madam Darcel’s—,” gasped St. Andre. “You mean the
Cheval D’Or
?”

“Yep. Though what the hell a ‘Shovel Door’ is, I ain’t figured out.”

“
Cheval D’Or
,” corrected the detective. “It means Golden Horse. But it’s no place for a young lady.”

“Happen I see any going in,” grinned Calamity, “I’ll warn ‘em.”

Knowing something of Madam Darcel’s saloon, St. Andre felt he ought to give a further warning.

“I owe you my gratitude for saving me, Miss—,”

“Happen you want to show that gratitude,” she interrupted, “stop calling me ‘Miss’ and start saying ‘Calam’, or Jane, or even that there ‘Sherry’. And don’t go to fretting. The boys protect me—and I protect them.”

“Is any of the boys your—,” began St. Andre, then tapered off, not knowing how to finish his question.

“Nope. None of’em’s my ‘your—’. They’re like a bunch of big brothers to me. Reckon I’ll go on out and find em.”

‘Unless you have other ideas,’ her manner hinted.

St. Andre, as has been said, was a Frenchman, a lusty healthy young man with an eye for the ladies and a heart that took kindly to romance. Unfortunately he was also a policeman responsible for keeping the peace and investigating crimes. The peace had been broken and a crime committed, which meant he must put duty before what he felt sure would be a pleasure.

“I must also go out and try to find somebody,
cherie
,” he said regretfully, and waited for an explosion. No girl liked having that kind of offer tossed aside.

“Them four?” she asked. calmly; perhaps the calm before a breaking storm.

“Those four,” he agreed. “There are questions I must ask them.”

“I figured there might be,” Calamity stated showing neither disappointment nor annoyance, only complete understanding. “A good lawman can’t let anybody get away with working him over. It gives other folks wrong ideas and puts bad medicine in ‘em.”

“Who told you that?” asked the detective in surprise.

“The best danged man who ever wore a law-badge—west of the Mississippi that is.”

“And who would that be, Wyatt Earp?”

“That fighting pimp?” scoffed Calamity. “I’m talking about a real man. You maybe heard of him. Dusty Fog.”

“You know Captain Fog?” asked the impressed St. Andre, for the man named had been one of the most talked-about soldiers in the Confederate States cavalry and much in the news since the meeting at the Appomattox Court-House brought an end to military hostilities.
¹

“Met him a couple of times,” Calamity admitted. “Know his pard, Mark Counter a whole heap better.”
²