The Bold Frontier (27 page)

He couldn’t speak; he was in too much pain. But he did pull himself upward, then sank again. The carriage rattled into motion. He knew two things. The voice was that of a woman. And Chapman would die.

Then the carriage rolled and the darkness finally claimed him.

Coldfield awoke in a small shanty, lying in a rude bunk. In the center of the room, a candle glowed on a table; beyond that, on a similar bunk, lay a rigid body. Coldfield saw the face of the boy Jim, lifeless above the edge of the white sheet. He sat up quickly. It made the pains from the beating worse. The air in the shanty smelled of the mud of Herrod’s Landing; Coldfield was seized with a fit of coughing. He doubled over, waiting for it to spend itself, all the while seeing the terrible face of the boy’s corpse. He struggled to remember. The sound of carriage wheels … no, not a dream.

A noise came from a shadowed corner. He turned, still coughing, and saw the girl standing there. Her hands were clenched, her face lightly marked with visible stains of her tears. Her lips trembled. Coldfield’s coughing passed. He said haltingly, “It was you with the carriage?” She nodded.

“I must thank you, ma’am. That man had me, sure enough. He might have killed me.”

She stepped forward; the candle glow cut across finely molded features. Anger blazed in her blue eyes. “They killed Jim. Cheated us, then killed him on that boat, Mr.—”

“Coldfield. Graham Coldfield.” Coughing shook him again.

The girl’s name, it turned out, was Harriet Masters. Her parents were dead, and she and her brother Jim had jointly owned a barge that carried freight on the Blackwater. A bad storm had wrecked and sunk the barge, leaving them with just a little capital. Jim had rashly decided the
River Queen
was the perfect place to build the small sum into enough money to get back into business.

“He always thought he was so lucky,” the girl finished with a soft despair.

Coldfield watched her, interested. “How did you happen to be there on the wharf?”

She picked up a large reticule from the chair; pulled out a heavy Colt. She held it capably. The barrel gleamed in the candlelight. “This was Jim’s gun. I wanted to use it on the man who runs the
Queen.
Chapman’s his name. He’s got a bad reputation on the river. I warned Jim about him. I …”

She stopped, overcome. Fresh tears showed at the corners of her solemn eyes. But she controlled herself, shaking her head. Strong stuff, Coldfield thought.

“I don’t live in Herrod’s Landing,” she went on. “The hotels were full, and this was the only place I could borrow to put Jim’s body. He died in the carriage a few minutes after we left the boat.” She brushed a hand across her forehead. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not telling this coherently. After I found this place, I took the carriage back there. I wanted to kill Chapman. I sat for the longest time, but I couldn’t get up courage to go on board. Not even with knowing what they’d done to Jim. I guess it isn’t very—admirable for me to admit that to you.”

Coldfield shook his head as he reached inside his coat for a cigar. “You were sensible. You wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Harriet Masters looked at him, silently thanking him for his words. “I was still sitting there when you came off the
Queen
and got into a fight. I recognized the big man. Then I found the courage to do something. I used the buggy whip on him.”

Coldfield grinned slightly. That was fit treatment for Redneck Bates.

Harriet pulled her chair around the table and sat down facing him. Her body hid Jim’s, for which he was thankful. The cramped, unclean room with its candle and sheeted corpse and the tendrils of Blackwater fog creeping under the door depressed him.

“Why was he after you?” the girl asked.

“I worked on the
Queen
up until tonight. As a dealer. Didn’t you see me in there?”

She shook her head.

He hesitated then. His business was none of hers. Yet they were strangely bound together, he and this girl guarding her brother’s body. Both had suffered at Chapman’s hands. So he told her his story, curtly and rapidly. At the end he said, “I’m not after your sympathy, Miss Masters. Men get sick easily enough. I’m sorry I lost my job. It was a good one. But I can stand it. People stand a lot worse.”

“Then why are you so bitter?”

“The beating. Chapman ordered Bates to beat me so I wouldn’t cause any trouble. That I can’t and won’t take. That I’ll pay him for.”

She reached out, touched his hand. Her fingers felt delicate, cool. “You should leave this river. Go into the Southwest, where it’s dry and there’s plenty of sun. You’d be all right then.”

“Maybe I will.” His eyes bored into hers. “But not until I get Chapman.”

She rose and walked to the door, opening it. She stood with her back to him, looking out into the fog-laden darkness where a few lights glimmered on the river like misty cat’s eyes. She had a fine back. Young and firm and straight. He watched her as she said softly, “Mr. Coldfield, I have two thousand dollars on the
River Queen.
Perhaps we could work together.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

She turned and faced him as he approached. They stood silent a moment. Then she offered her hand and he pressed it. Her skin had a warmth to it; a warmth that somehow brightened the room despite the presence of Jim’s body. He held her hand an instant longer than was necessary. She glanced away, disturbed, and he regretted his forwardness; this was no time for such things. Yet knowing he was no longer alone helped renew his strength.

“First,” he said, “we ought to take care of your brother.”

Her strength seemed to drain away. She collapsed against him, bitter sobs rising in a broken rhythm. He looked down at her tawny hair and slipped his arm around her lightly, just enough to make her aware that it was there if she needed it. Presently her crying subsided again.

“I think I’d better take the gun,” Coldfield said. She handed it to him, and he slipped it into his wide belt. It felt good there, heavy and latent with power. He picked up his hat. “You wait here. I’ll be back soon.”

He scoured Herrod’s Landing for a suitable room. The hotels, as she had reported, were full. But he managed to locate one vacancy: a small attic room in a boarding house on a side street. They took Jim’s body there in the carriage and woke the town’s funeral director to make arrangements for burial. Then Coldfield rode back to the boarding house in the long black-curtained hearse and helped with removal of the body.

He made sure Harriet Masters was secure for the night, then strolled over to the main street. The air was chilly, but it did not bother him now. A new calm, a new, almost peaceful sense of purpose filled him. Together, he and the girl would make Chapman pay.

He found a back table in one of the smaller saloons and sat up all night with a bottle of redeye, drinking and thinking his black thoughts and staring off hollow-eyed into a grim nowhere.

They buried Jim Masters in the morning. The plot was tiny, but it overlooked the river from a low bluff. No preacher was available, so the funeral director, a small mousy man, read from the New Testament.

Coldfield didn’t hear the words. His eyes were on the river. The
Queen
had left her berth and was chugging downriver toward the burial site, paddle wheel turning over with a continuous roaring fall of foamy water, fluted stacks belching smoke into the morning sky.

The rattle of dirt against the wooden coffin brought Coldfield back to the immediate moment. Harriet was crying again, quietly. Coldfield studied her. A certain amount of grief had to be expected, but some women would have become hysterical. She was holding up well. Coldfield respected her for the way she managed herself.

The last of the earth was shoveled into place and the small headstone set. The gravediggers hefted their shovels and moved off through a grove, lighting cigars as they dropped their feigned air of seriousness. The mousy funeral director hurried over to Coldfield to request his fee. Coldfield paid him from what little money he had left. The man tipped his worn beaver hat and went hopping off through the grove after his workers.

Harriet looked at Coldfield. “Shall we go?”

He shook his head, pointing. “I want to watch the
Queen
go by.” Hatred etched his face. Harriet stood by his side, understanding his need for fueling the fires inside him.

The
River Queen
plowed through the turgid, mud-yellow waters, her wheel revolving, scooping and flinging a huge volume of water up and over the paddles. The whistle tooted jauntily. Coldfield clearly made out the pilot’s face as the steamer passed the bluff. He saw Redneck Bates moving along the deck but the big man didn’t notice the observers. Coldfield’s hands closed involuntarily. He cursed. Harriet Masters showed no reaction.

The
Queen
slowly grew smaller, showing her stern with its foaming wake as she nosed out beyond a sand bar and cut around a sharp bend. The smoke from her stacks smeared the sky in ugly clouds as she disappeared.

“I’ve seen enough,” Coldfield said, excited now, keenly aware of the hatred feeding him like some kind of drug. “Come on. We’ve work to do.”

He took the girl’s arm and piloted her between headstones toward the cemetery gate. She turned once for a brief glance at her brother’s grave, then climbed into the carriage. Coldfield climbed up beside her, somehow unexpectedly proud to be riding with her, to have her for a partner in his little game of revenge in which he’d bought chips. She would be a woman for a man to cherish. She was younger than he; much younger. That would be a barrier— He stopped the reverie. They had no time for such things now. Perhaps later, if Chapman died and they retrieved the two thousand dollars …

He hawed to the team and the carriage jolted along the ruts, back down the bluff toward the town.

The next weeks brought an endless chain of surprises. In company with Harriet, Coldfield traveled down the Blackwater, following the
Queen
from town to town, talking with men the girl had known when she and her brother ran their barge business. He was astonished by the amount of resentment against the
Queen
and her customers: young dandies, blooded bucks who drank and gambled their lives away, and women who only had their bodies as collateral for their gentlemen friends. They were in a minority, these men who diced and sported gold-headed canes, these flashy women. But they were intensely disliked by nongamblers, common folk.

That aspect of the gambling trade had never struck Coldfield before. Sitting at his faro table, he’d drawn his salary, lived well, and never considered the morality of his work. He hadn’t suddenly become a reformer, bent on stopping the trade the
Queen
represented; men would never stop gambling. But the more he listened to men talk, the more stories he heard, the more it soured him. Because more than one had been cheated. More than one had wound up in an alley, beaten in response to a protest. The idea of running a crooked game had never occurred to Coldfield. He’d always lived by reputation, and a reputation for dishonesty ruined a gambler in the long run, even if he profited temporarily. But evidently Chapman felt differently, and he’d been too self-centered to see it. Coldfield felt as if he were emerging from some kind of dream as the miles rolled under the wheels of their carriage, and he talked to more men and to their stout red-knuckled wives.

Then he went by himself to a shack in a river town and talked to a girl, hardly more than eighteen, who was thin and pale and unhealthy looking as she perched on the edge of a cot in her cheap spangled scarlet wrapper. Coldfield kept smelling the sharp aroma of lye as she told him Chapman’s crew acted as pimps when the
Queen
was docked in town. They got a percentage of all the trade from the young bloods they directed to this dismal crib-lined street. Coldfield talked with others, sometimes politely referred to as soiled doves; they told the same story.

In the same town he met a man named Acton, a gray-haired, thick-armed man who said, “You tell me when you’re going after Chapman, mister. I’ll be there. My girl died down on Crib Street. She ran off—I didn’t even know where she was until the pox had her and it was too late.” His eyes were sullen, bitter.

Acton and the girls were the first to point a new direction. Now Coldfield began following it from town to town as he followed the
Queen,
always with Harriet Masters beside him. He sought a spot to force a conclusion and decided on St. Elmo, a sizable town at the southernmost bend of the river. The
Queen
would dock there a week before proceeding downstream to the confluence of the big river. Coldfield rounded up sixteen men, secured their promise that they would be in St. Elmo, armed, the first week in October. Acton was among them.

Acton’s son Tod, a youth of sixteen, offered to travel with them, to run errands. Coldfield accepted. He felt like a general gathering an army. But it was a good feeling. The chest trouble had grown worse, yet he managed to put it out of his mind for long periods. He was intent on his plan. And growing close to Harriet as each day passed.

One night toward the end of September, he was eating dinner with the girl in the dining room at the Wagon Top Hotel in Pitcher, a town thirty miles north of St. Elmo. He poured brandy for himself; lit a cigar. Then he reached across the table and took her hand. “You know, if it hadn’t been for you, we’d never have come this far.”

“What little we had left after the barge went down—the office furniture and my clothes and the rest—it wasn’t of any use to me, Graham.” She smiled. “I feel foolish sometimes. We’ve already spent part of the two thousand dollars, traveling like this. But then I remember Jim and I know it’s worth it.”

“I feel some others have a stake in this, too. Ben Acton, for one. The
Queen
’s not just a place to gamble. She’s a disease, poisoning the whole Blackwater river. And I didn’t know it.”

Harriet smiled again with gentle tolerance. “You didn’t know a lot of things. All of us lived walled up behind our own illusions.”

He smiled back at her. “Recognize any more of mine?”