On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch (15 page)

Another stage transported Tory and eight others to the Union Pacific Railroad depot four miles east of downtown, where he paid fifty-five dollars for a one-way fare to Cheyenne City, including stagecoach passage into Deadwood. Exhausted, he stretched supine across a bench with his head resting against his satchel. Two hours later, the conductor’s call for all aboard roused him from his nap. Stepping onto the platform, he could see the engine’s firebox, red-hot with coals. He shuddered, handed his ticket to the porter, and hurried aboard.

He found an empty row of seats and dropped himself into it. The Union Pacific carried a completely different group of passengers: authentic-looking frontiersmen, some wearing funny hats made out of animal skins with the tails still attached. The women dressed spicier, with ruby-red lips and long eyelashes batting at every man. The more decent folk—women traveling with children, families, men on business—huddled together in the middle car, although after his experience with Abel Hendricks, a salesman from the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, Tory wondered if perhaps the grungy prospectors and prostitutes might not make for better company.

Once the train got underway, Tory purchased a small lunch from the dining car (coffee, a ham and cheese sandwich, and pickle slices) and carried it back to his seat. The gruff patter of men’s voices and chortling women entertained him while he ate. Worn out, he pushed aside the empty wrappers, laid his head against the seat, and gazed at the passing scenery of endless cornfields.

About one hundred miles west of Omaha, the landscape underwent an alien transformation. Tory had never seen anything like it. Gone were the verdant cornfields of the heartland. The earth lay arid, like a desert, and odd, isolated grassy uplifts appeared like forlorn goblins. Sagebrush rolled alongside the tracks. The Wild West erupted into his view, an authentic place outside of his imagination. He pressed his palms against the window and peered out.

Vast land stretched mile after mile, with few trees other than a narrow wind-blown strip abutting the Platte River, which paralleled the train tracks. No indication of human habitation other than far-reaching ranches where cattle grazed over tawny fields. A cowboy rode horseback while overseeing the cattle hoarded in a massive mud-covered pen, which Tory guessed were waiting to be corralled onto trains heading to the Chicago Stock Yards.

The train increased speed. Yellow and blue wildflowers carpeting the narrow strip of tawny grass along the river blurred into a haze of green. Afternoon came slowly heading west.

Nighttime eventually caught up with the train. After supper, Tory returned to his seat. He caught his reflection in the darkened window. He looked like a mere boy in ways, a boy rumbling off to meet a man who, in reality, knew nothing about him. The second night brought a nebulous comprehension of his journey, yet the darkness allowed his mind to settle. He drew the curtain and let his eyelids droop shut.

He dreamed of cowboys, Indians, bandits, carnivals. A one-armed homesteader waved to him along the tracks as the train passed. Tory hollered for the train to stop, pleading through the window for the man to wait for him. The engineer drove faster and faster. Black smoke concealed the sun. Wind rushed into his face as the train transformed into a mine car. He was sitting next to Joseph van Werckhoven. They were laughing and clutching each other’s arms. A sense of lightness and gaiety replaced his fear. Then the car vanished from under him, and he was in a freefall. The wrenching fear returned. Below him, the street loomed closer and closer….

With a jolt, he awoke. For an instant, he grasped onto the armrest, fearful he was still falling. But it was the train that had jerked to a slow crawl. The train whistled. A conductor moving from car to car announced, “Cheyenne City.” A robust man in his fifties stirred next to him. He must’ve gotten on while Tory had fallen into a deep sleep. Peering outside the curtain, Tory noticed the large town nearing, like a wooden cavalry under the mask of evening twilight. He checked his pocket watch. Six thirty. He’d slept on and off for the past eight hours.

Excitement and fear lurched in Tory’s throat. He had never stepped foot outside the thirty-eight states. Although Wyoming Territory was poised to become a state, he still considered it a remote outpost, a rugged reminder of how the country stood before the growth of massive cities like Chicago and the western expansion of the railroads.

The western sky implied an earlier hour. He needed to set his watch back an hour to match Wyoming time. Out here, the sun worked differently from what his watch indicated. Everything seemed divergent and strange.

At the depot, Tory grabbed his satchel and debarked from the train with the flow of passengers. He lavished extra time on himself by washing in the depot’s lavatory. He brushed his teeth, scrubbed his face, splashed limewater on his neck, and fixed his unruly hair.

Stepping outside, where the sun nudged above the flat highlands in the east, he peered up at the depot’s lofty sandstone clock tower. That was when he noticed the time. The ticket agent in Omaha had said the stage for Deadwood would leave straight from the Cheyenne depot at six thirty sharp “without fail.” It was twenty-five after.

He adjusted his eyes from the dust stirred by the carriages picking up and dropping off passengers, and peered around. The Cheyenne-Deadwood Stage, hitched to a six-horse team, was waiting by the western entrance. The final leg of his journey, and it was preparing to leave without him.

Chapter 11

W
ITH
his satchel bouncing against his side, Tory circumvented a jail wagon loaded with convicts and raced over to the stagecoach. Breathless, he approached a man who appeared to be the stage agent. “Is this the stage to Deadwood?”

The agent peered at him. “We… we… we almost l-l-l-left you behind. Y-y-you’re late.”

Tory was puzzled by the man’s manner of speech. He had never come across anyone like him in Chicago. “I’m sorry, sir. I got held up inside the depot.”

“N-n-no talking about getting held… held up around this stage. People riding s-s-stages don’t like to hear such things. That’s… that’s number one on the list. Let m-m-me see your ticket.”

Tory obliged him. Satisfied, the agent grabbed Tory’s satchel and handed it to another worker, who was securing luggage on the back of the Concord. About six passengers sat on the roof of the stage. None of the workers seemed disturbed by their presence, so Tory assumed it was protocol.

The agent turned to another man, who Tory assumed was the driver. “This h-h-here’s your l-l-last passenger.”

The driver wide eyed Tory. “You’re fairly late,” he said. “I’ll have to run down all the rules for riding the Concord. I just got done telling everyone else.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Now listen good. Whatever you do,” the driver said, “don’t go mentioning stagecoach robberies or Indian uprisings while riding, even for laughs. If you do, I’ll toss your little rump out the coach so fast you’d think you was a hawk flying through the sky. You understand, don’t you?”

Swallowing hard, Tory nodded. So that was why the other agent had chastised him when Tory had mentioned being “held up.” Boyhood stories of Cowboys and Indians sprouted into reality. They materialized as bona fide as the inhabitants of his neighborhood of River North.

“No cussing,” the driver went on. “We got a lady and child passenger. No smoking cigars or pipes. You can chew tobacco, but use a spittoon—but only if no one inside the coach minds. There’ll be no consumption of liquor whatsoever, no matter what. I’ll know you’re sipping even from my post outside, so don’t even try. And if you’re gonna sleep, which I reckon you got to for such a long journey, don’t snore or lean on no one. It ain’t none too polite.”

“You don’t need to worry about all that, sir,” Tory said, his mouth dry. “I don’t do any of those things.”

“One other thing.” The driver narrowed his brown eyes at Tory. “Keep your firearms on your person at all times. No drawing them out unless called for. I got a double-barrel shotgun and a .44 Smith & Wesson, and my partner riding shotgun got two sidearms and a state-of-the-art Winchester that can take down a buffalo if need be.”

“But I don’t have any guns,” Tory said.

The driver’s forehead corrugated with harsh wrinkles, his eyebrows raised near to the underside of his suede cowboy hat. “You don’t got no firearms?”

“No, sir.”

“You going into the Black Hills unarmed?”

Tory shrugged and flushed.

The driver shook his head and pulled on the end of his bushy mustache. “I’ll be darned. You city folk sure do live dangerously, that’s for sure. Now get a wiggle on so we can get this party rolling.”

Climbing into the stage, Tory noticed what he feared were two gunshot holes on the side of the door. He worried he would never make it into Spiketrout alive. One good thing about arriving late—he secured a window seat. Fresh air from the open window would be welcome while squeezed in with seven other passengers.

Only two passengers, the woman with the child and a gentleman wearing a navy frock, returned his smile and nod. The others, greasy-faced, with razor stubble and soiled clothes, focused their bloodshot eyes on their battered boots.

For the first several miles, his fellow passengers rode solemn and quiet, and as deadpan as the eastern Wyoming landscape. No one read, for it would most likely have made them sick, as Tory discovered. The modern Concord stagecoach minimized the impact of the rough three-hundred-mile Cheyenne-Deadwood Trail; even so, the trail’s unexpected jolts dropped Tory’s stomach to his gaiters. He worried about the safety of the six men riding on top. Everyone else seemed to take it in stride. On the frontier, people seemed more hearty and individualistic. He did not want to appear too fresh out of the city.

He tucked his novel,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, back inside his coat pocket, wishing to establish some connection with his fellow passengers. He was drawn to the one woman sitting across from him with the snoozing toddler in her lap. He cleared his throat and smiled at her. “How old is your child?” he asked, unsure if the child was a boy or a girl.

“He’ll be three in December.” The woman held the child tighter to her blouse.

“What’s his name?”

“James Jr.”

“He’s a cute fellow. Where are you traveling?”

The woman studied Tory a moment with her blue eyes, apparently assessing whether his kindness preceded ill will. Then she grinned and gave a gentle tilt to her head. “We live in Ft. Laramie,” she said. “I was visiting relatives in Cheyenne with my son.”

“Have you traveled on this stage before?”

“Yes, many times. My husband works for a supply contractor in Ft. Laramie, and I travel frequently to visit family back home. Hopefully by this time next year we’ll have train service in most of eastern Wyoming and we can leave these rickety stages behind.”

Tory wanted to ask her if she’d ever encountered wild bandits or marauding Indians during her stage journeys, but he remembered the driver’s dire warning. “They’re building train routes all over, it seems,” he said instead.

“Yes, I think they’ll have them going clear up to Alaska one of these days. Where are you heading?”

“Spiketrout is my final destination.”

“Are you a prospector?”

“No, ma’am.” Tory tittered with laughter.

The woman shifted her dozing child on her lap. “Every time I take this coach it’s full of prospectors heading to the Black Hills,” she said, lowering her voice and nodding toward some of the other passengers. “It’s the whole reason why the stage line is here. Started after the gold strike in ’74. But the gold’s running low, I hear.”

One of the older scraggly prospectors lifted his head. His grizzled beard brushed against his lap when he fired gray eyes at Tory. “You going for gold?”

“No, sir,” Tory said. “I have other business there.”

“Most the placer gold is played out,” the old man said. “There’s some gold in the mountain rock if you willing to dig for it. I got a small mine near Lead I bought off some hard case for one thousand dollars. You ain’t thinking of staking a claim near Lead, are you?”

“Like I said, I have other business in the Black Hills.”

The old gentleman glanced out the window. “Everyone wants gold,” he said, flashing Tory his sparkling eyes. His bushy silver eyebrows looked like caterpillars crawling across his forehead.

“I’m not interested in any gold,” Tory said politely.

“You’re not, huh?” The old prospector seemed to digest Tory’s words, as if he found them alien. “Well, you might not be seeking gold, but you’re searching for a treasure in some form or another. Everyone is.”

“I suppose,” Tory said, smiling with tight lips.

Yes, the old prospector, sage from many years observing human nature, perhaps had a point. Tory was a prospector of sorts. And he realized he was chasing after more than the old prospector. Tory longed to stake a claim, yet on something far more ethereal than hilly mines and muddy creeks.

The Civil War hero whom Tory had corresponded with throughout most the spring and summer stood as Tory’s buried treasure. With each passing mile, Tory became more certain that Franklin had not misrepresented himself. But Tory had. How could he have been so deceitful, passing himself off as a woman? To a veteran? He had raised the hopes of a lonely man for his own selfish fantasies. And wasn’t that all they were—fantasies?