Katherine O’Neal (15 page)

Tales had spread far and wide of Texas
cowboys “hurrahing” the town, of gunfights on the streets, of
murders that had resulted in hurried burials on the now-infamous
Boot Hill. Indian scares were still rampant. Dodge had a reputation
as the wickedest little city in America, where bad men consorted
with loose women in the seventeen saloons, three dance halls, and
assorted brothels that serviced the population of a thousand. Where
con men, horse thieves, bank robbers, and gunmen were as common as
grasshoppers on the surrounding plains.

Saranda had spent time in Kansas back in the
days when Bat was hunting buffalo and scouting for the army, but
Dodge had never impressed her. Wichita was the wild and woolly
Kansas town then, and it was there that she’d made her headquarters
before leaving with Bat for Sweetwater, Texas. It was there, too,
that she’d met Wyatt Earp, who’d been marshal at the time. Wichita
had, along with Ellsworth, Hays City, and Abilene, a reputation for
being the most unrestrainable burg in the country, but apparently
these brief flashes of splendor had simply been rehearsals for the
wickedness of Dodge. In comparing the other cowtowns, a Kansas
paper had printed the headline:

DODGE CITY. A DEN OF THIEVES

AND CUT THROATS — THE WHOLE

TOWN IN LEAGUE TO ROB THE

UNWARY STRANGER.

She knew newspapers tended to exaggerate. But
if Dodge was wilder than Wichita had been, she knew they hadn’t
exaggerated much.

She folded the paper she’d been reading and
used it to fan herself. The train was stifling, smelling of
unwashed bodies, witch hazel, and hair oil. She wore a plain
traveling suit and a hat the color of sand, designed to render her
invisible as she moved from town to town. A mousy-brown wig covered
the shimmer of her moonlight hair. Now she found it heavy and
cloying in the heat. It was too hot to keep the windows closed and
too dusty to open them. Everyone was suffering, fanning themselves
and complaining about the oppressive temperature.

She’d never thought she’d have to return. The
West, while offering ripe opportunities to ply her trade, had never
appealed to her. The dust, the heat, the uncouth men who reminded
her of the lean times on the streets of London’s East End. The
smell of poverty and desperation. Too many people running from the
law, old lives, themselves. Her travels had provided an opportunity
to search the country for Blackwood, ferreting out the corners con
artists were known to inhabit. When she’d learned of his presence
in New York, she’d set out with high hopes and soaring spirits. But
everything had changed. It was no longer a wild adventure, a game.
Suddenly, it was too real. Because of her, two decent men had been
killed—men who’d loved her, men she’d sworn to protect. Coming back
to the western plains brought home to her how bitterly she’d
failed.

She closed her eyes. The rhythmic chugging of
the train should have soothed her. But she was beyond soothing at
this point. For three months now, after her escape from New York,
she’d been hotly pursued by the law, bounty hunters, Pinkerton men,
and U.S. marshals, all determined to return her to justice and
collect the reward.

The journey west was never easy. Every town
she turned up in offered another close call. There was never a
moment to rest, never an opportunity to feel safe. Never even time
to properly mourn the Van Slykes’ death. She’d had to vary her
route, backtracking, heading north or south when she wanted to go
west, just to throw off her pursuers. She took stages, rode
horseback, even talked her way onto a hunting expedition—no small
feat in a country dominated by stubborn men—in an attempt to break
the predictability of her route. But no matter what she did or
where she went, she came so close to being caught time after time
that she began to wonder if someone was reading her mind.

The train began to slow as they meandered
through herds of bawling longhorn cattle tended by ragged cowboys
and drew into town. She looked out the window and saw horrendous
piles of bleached white bones stacked along the side of the
tracks.

The passengers in her car strained their
necks or stood by their seats to get a glimpse of the infamous
Dodge City.

“Boot Hill be damned,” said a fresh-faced
young greenhorn with a whistle. “They just chuck their dead
alongside the road!”

Some gentlemen in the back chuckled. One of
them kindly leaned forward and explained, “Them’s buffalo bones,
son. Our ruffians fare a tad better.”

The tracks ran parallel to the main street of
town, which she remembered was called Front Street. The town hadn’t
changed a lot in two years. To the right was a collection of wooden
buildings, most of them saloons. There was a crowd of people
gathered at the depot. Only one train from the East came through
town each day, and its arrival was still a great event. Most
townspeople came out to greet it.

There was quite an assortment of swaggering
humanity assembled about the small depot. Tall-hatted Texans
mingled with merchants in boiled shirts, buffalo hunters in
bloodstained buckskin, slick-haired gamblers in broadcloth and silk
hats with carefully tended mustaches and diamonds underplaying
their air of measured gentility. Bullwhackers drove their wagons
with cracks of their bull-whips, crying out to their teams of oxen,
nearly knocking pedestrians off the boardwalks as they rattled
through town, but pulling their teams to a sudden halt in the
middle of the road to view the proceedings. Frontiersmen, scouts,
mule skinners, railroaders, and gunfighters all turned out to see
who might step off the train.

The few women were dressed in gingham and
cheap prints, but most had the used look about them of whores and
actresses of one variety or another. There was dust everywhere;
everyone’s clothes seemed to have a fine smattering. And permeating
the air was a stench she’d forgotten, the putrid odor of the vast
stockyards, of so many thousands of cattle waiting to die; a smell
the regulars swore they no longer noticed.

Saranda stepped out into the summer carnival
atmosphere, wondering instinctively how she might use it to her
advantage.

Her first order of business was to locate
Bat. At the sheriff’s office, she was told he was out in the county
but was due back by evening. She didn’t leave a message. With
wanted posters of her flooding the country, some hotshot deputy was
likely to wire New York before Bat returned.

Her second task was deciding on a cover. She
knew from experience that often the best hiding places were the
most conspicuous. Anyone looking for her would be seeking a woman
hiding in dark corners from the forces of the law. They’d never
expect her to flaunt her presence in town. Thanks to Jackson’s
generosity, she had a valise full of the best clothes money could
buy. Such attire would appear suspicious if she didn’t have a cover
worthy of them. Deciding that she might as well put them to use,
she donned her finest New York clothes, kept the brown wig, topped
it with a hat only a woman of supreme confidence would dare be seen
in, placed wire-rimmed spectacles upon her nose, and marched into
the Dodge House to announce herself, in ringing English tones, as
the Countess of Lynderfield.

“C-Countess?” stuttered the proprietor. “Why,
we’ve never had—well, we’ve had our share of visitors, don’t get me
wrong. President Hayes rolled into town just last year. Didn’t get
off the train, but he was here. But we ain’t never had no royalty
before.”

She didn’t bother to correct him. Peering at
the hand-lettered sign that promised to “change the bedlinens every
ten days whether they need it or not,” she decided the deception
was expedient. If he thought her royalty, perhaps she’d be afforded
clean sheets.

Dodge House was the best hotel in town. Like
the rest of the buildings on Front Street, it was a long, narrow,
rustic wooden building. It had a gabled roof, boasted two stories,
had a porch out front with a balcony running across the front of
the upper floor, and was attached to the billiard hall next door.
Mr. Cox, one of the proprietors, bragged that it contained
twenty-eight rooms, a restaurant, and bar, and could accommodate
ninety persons. Having traveled about the West for longer than she
cared to remember, Saranda was accustomed to such boasts.

She spent the next few hours exploring the
town, reading newspapers, learning everything she could about her
surroundings. Dodge House was crammed full of cattle barons and
businessmen, all more than eager to discuss the merits of the town
with a titled, if somewhat dowdy, Englishwoman. She was treated
with the greatest deference and clumsy gallantry. She could easily
have lived off the offers for dinner she received on an hourly
basis.

But it was costly, keeping up the pretense of
nobility. The money she’d received for the bracelets was all but
gone. She had fifteen dollars left. So as she explored the town,
she began to plan the best way of making a living.

Dodge was a minuscule town, consisting of six
streets running east and west, and four bisecting them. Front
Street fronted the railroad, and it was in the Plaza around Front
and Bridge streets that the primary businesses were congregated.
The streets were little more than wide dirt paths continually
churning dust into the air. As most of the buildings were made of
wood, barrels of water were dispersed at periodic intervals in case
of fire.

The railroad tracks were known as the
Deadline. North of the Deadline, firearms were prohibited and
were—at least in theory—required to be checked in special gun racks
provided in hotels, corrals, gambling establishments, and saloons.
The first thing anyone saw when coming into town from the west was
a hand-painted sign, crudely scrawled, that stated: THE CARRYING OF
FIREARMS STRICTLY PROHIBITED, and under that another suggesting:
TRY PRICKLY ASH BITTERS.

South of the Deadline was another story.
While the law was enforced only when necessary north of the line,
it was rarely enforced in the south end. There, brothels, dance
halls, variety theaters, and saloons thrived at all hours of the
day and night, with drunken cowboys shooting in the streets and
zigzagging from one establishment to the other, looking for
trouble.

Bridge Street continued south to the toll
bridge spanning the brawling Arkansas River. South of that,
cattlemen grazed their herds, waiting for shipment east or
fattening them up for the continuation on the trail north. At the
northeast end of town was a bold, treeless hill dotted with
makeshift graves—the Boot Hill for which all other such renegade
cemeteries were named. There, euphemisms for being shot to death
included such epitaphs as
killed by lightning
and
too
many irons in the fire
.

If she’d thought it would be difficult to
ferret out the local society of confidence men, she was mistaken.
Most of them plied their trade openly in the form of showcase games
on the wooden sidewalks of Front Street. There, they set up glass
cases displaying counterfeit jewelry and baubles, hoping to entice
youths fresh off the trails. After months of eighteen-hour days in
the saddle, suffering meager provisions, the ravages of weather,
and assorted accidents and perils along the seemingly endless trail
from Texas, the cowboys rode into Dodge ready and willing to spend
their hard-earned wages on one brief but memorable hurrah. They
were lured to the cases of jewelry, convinced they’d been offered
the best deal in town, and often stayed to participate in games of
three-card monte or the pea-and-shell ruse. It would have been the
easiest thing in the world to walk over and fleece the fleecers of
their easily won cash, but she didn’t know yet how much assistance
she’d require from them. She decided to keep a low profile.
Besides, she had her cover to consider.

Soon enough, though, she had to face the
prospect of making some money. Waiting until dark, she donned a
simple grey frock, let her own hair flow loose, and snuck out the
back way of the hotel, heading south of the Deadline. There she saw
firsthand the ruckus that had inspired Dodge’s reputation.

The din was astonishing. In New York and
London, the noises of the cities sounded like a constant hum—the
streetcars, the trains, the clopping of horses’ hooves on
cobblestones, the honking of horns on the thoroughfares, the
calling of hawkers in the streets. Nothing unusual, and readily
taken for granted. Here, the racket was irregular, even dangerous.
Loud, tinny music drifted from behind saloon doors. The streets
were full of Texans, swaggering their arrogance, determined to show
these Kansas Yankees that they’d stand for none of their northern
laws and even less of their guff. They rode their horses up on the
boardwalks and into saloons where they brandished sixguns and
ordered another drink. Gunfire sounded regularly as some of the
“hurray gangs” shot out lights or mirrors or windows, or anyone who
happened to get in their way. They seemed to thrive on annoying
other citizens, shoving their way to and fro with booming voices
that carried an equal measure of curses and threats. Saranda jumped
as a bullet whizzed by her head to strike an object uncomfortably
close by.

She was grabbed a time or two and twirled
about the street in a high-spirited jig, mistaken for a dance-hall
girl on the make. These men had been on the trail for as long as
six months and hadn’t seen a woman in all that time. They reeked of
the excesses of alcohol and carried firearms they weren’t shy about
using. It was a perilous situation at best. She quickly realized
she could be accidentally killed just crossing the street.

She was rescued from a particularly insistent
cowboy by the unannounced arrival of Bat Masterson. Amid the filthy
cowmen, he was a welcome sight. Unlike a lot of westerners, he took
pains with his appearance. His mustache was neatly trimmed, showing
a bit of lip underneath. He was dressed for evening in a black suit
and white shirt with a string tie fastened below the stiff collar.
His derby was set at a jaunty tilt. He walked with a slight limp,
but it was such a loose-hipped, cocky walk that it belied the
impediment and didn’t slow him down. The tip of his cane gleamed
gold in the light of the gas lamps.