On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch (9 page)

He tried to find those advertisements that might contain secret codes. Maybe some of the men sought male companionship. Maybe they had cryptic meanings for those discerning enough. But he’d never heard of such a gimmick. Did people do such things?

Lonely fellow, long on love and short on stature, seeks someone to keep close to his heart….

“Someone”? Might that be a hint? Most of the other advertisements were specific. The women sought men; the men sought women. Was this man being purposefully vague? Did “someone” mean a man? It was a long shot the advertisement concealed a coded message.

He read more of the advertisements, monitoring them for secret meanings. Nothing really jumped out at him. But one in particular touched his heart. Despite the bachelor clearly mentioning he sought a woman, Tory kept coming back to it, rereading the short passage over and over.

Softhearted, tall, good-looking bachelor, aged 38, looking to correspond with ladies between the ages of 19 and 35. I’m partial to blondes, but you can be of any nationality. Sturdiness and honesty are most important. City life not for me; I like quiet rustic living. Let’s become friends.

Transfixed by the words, Tory could hardly take his eyes off the fine black print. He had no idea where in the western part of the United States the “softhearted” bachelor lived, but his musings carried him over the vast prairies west of Chicago, past Peoria, over Iowa, to Nebraska, and onward to the frontier, where wild animals and Indians still roamed, lurking behind mountains and in canyons.

A gentle implied honesty emanated from the man’s reaching out for human companionship, accentuated with masculine determination. Tory, both aroused and intrigued, yearned to learn more about him. Where did he live? Where had he come from? He reread the earnest advertisement again and again, as if the more he read, the more he might unlock some special meaning concealed behind the words.

Animated in a way he hadn’t experienced since meeting Joseph van Werckhoven, he sat at his desk by Edison lamp (the latest gadget given to him by his parents for his nineteenth birthday) and withdrew a sheet of paper from the top drawer. Did he dare do what traipsed in his mind? It would be cruel and improper, wouldn’t it?

Yet unlike most those who frequented the cabaret on 35th Street, the men who had placed advertisements in
Matrimonial News
were bachelors, uninterested in renters, male or female. Writing to one of those men couldn’t be horribly wrong. Living alone on the wild frontier, the man would appreciate someone taking the time to reach out to him. What if no one else bothered to write? As long as Tory kept his identity hidden, a mutual correspondence between two lonely souls would harm no one.

He twisted the lead from the fluted end of his pencil and placed the tip on the paper. He figured the best way to compose the letter was to write with little reflection. Let his heart flow and the words would follow.

With the pencil poised in his hand, he pictured the “tall, good-looking bachelor” with honed muscles living ruggedly on his homestead. Chopping wood, retrieving water from an old-fashioned well, trapping rabbits and possums or whatever frontiersmen trapped.

Tory gazed toward his bedroom door. Somewhere out there in the wilds of America’s frontier, a real man needed love. Desperate to the point he’d taken out an advertisement.

A strong man, a man who had already stolen Tory’s affections with one simple message.…

Chapter 7

T
HE
pot boiled over onto the cast-iron stovetop, hissing with steam. Franklin Ausmus cursed up a storm.

His mind was stuck on more than cooking his venison stew for lunch. He still worried over the silly personal advertisement he had placed in
Matrimonial News
three weeks ago. By now, the latest edition must’ve hit the kiosks across the country. Would anyone even bother to respond? He had been living in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory for nearly ten years, and the longing for companionship had begun to gnaw at him like a chigger bug. In a few more years women would most likely no longer find him a good catch—if they ever had.

He hadn’t even set eyes on a decent woman in years. The ones he came across in Spiketrout were mostly “working women” catering to the men of the gold rush. Those who were God-fearing arrived in the Hills already married, usually to missionaries who wasted most of their time with the Indians, trying to civilize them. He only knew of one decent unmarried woman in town—a widow close to sixty. Spiketrout’s marshal had whispered to him a few years back that nine out of ten women in the Black Hills worked as prostitutes.

He’d had his fill of those types. During the Civil War, commanding officers had brought prostitutes into the camps when the waiting for battle got so gruesomely tedious men in the same units were fighting each other to burn energy. Fearful of losing precious soldiers in careless duels, they paid “camp followers” in silver to entertain the troops. He didn’t care for women like that, but even he had had needs. An enlistee in the Union Army, like most of the boys back home in eastern Tennessee, he’d had difficulty resisting the temptation more often than not.

And there was that crazy time in Richmond back in 1864. He was only sixteen at the time, with two years of fighting already under his belt. The city was crawling with soldiers, both Federal and Confederate. He had never witnessed so much carousing. As a country boy, the largest city he’d ever seen was Knoxville, nothing near as teeming as Richmond.

Residents fumed over the drunken antics of the soldiers who furloughed in the city during the year-long siege of Petersburg—and over the prostitutes, male and female, hawking their trade wherever they were appreciated. One time, a male renter had enticed Franklin down a secluded alley. Franklin had understood what the spicy boy, no older than he, had intended. He didn’t dwell on it much at the time—nor did he now. War was a different animal. Comprised of different parts. Particular mores and ethics. No borders, no laws. Just war. Under the constant strain of fight or flight, soldiers searched for anything to alleviate the tension.

On the planet War, his fondling of the renter seemed as natural as when he and his girl back in Tennessee had kissed for the first time by the creek behind the schoolhouse. The boy in Richmond had unleashed something primitive within him. He recalled how the boars on his family’s hog farm would sometimes mount the beta males in a show of dominance. Some boars seemed to prefer them over the females. Their troublesome antics worried the hog farmers, who often had to force copulation, a not-so-pleasant task. In that instant in the alley, Franklin had understood the power they might have felt, the drive for domination. The stress of battle had been released in a way he’d never imagined.

His cheeks heated as he remembered his escapades in the South’s capital. He realized he was getting a little aroused thinking of how he had pushed against the renter’s backside, pressing him into the brick wall of the tavern in the alley. A beer in one hand, and in the other… well…. He had been drunk. From what he’d noticed, the boy had had an abundance to drink himself, and plenty of money stuffed in his pockets. Apparently Franklin hadn’t been his only client.

“Why aren’t you fighting in the war?” Franklin had asked him afterward, while the renter counted his remuneration.

“I am.” The boy had fanned his greenbacks before Franklin’s bleary eyes and grinned. “I’m helping, you can be sure of that.” And he’d raced down the alley, most likely straight back to work.

Not too long after that, a lucky shot from a falling Confederate landed Franklin in an Army hospital in Maryland for a good month. He hadn’t even heard the gunshot blast. His comrades said the shot had come from the forest partition between rival camps. His unit had scouted out the woods and found a dead Confederate, his musket still smoking. Someone had blown off half of his head, they said. He had likely fired off a ball as a last hurrah, striking Franklin Ausmus in the process. A blistering exclamation point at the end of his farewell proclamation. Franklin had predicted nothing good would come from the grove of river birch and pignut hickories. But one good thing came from his injury: his foray as a soldier had ended.

Yet war waged on for him on other fronts. When he returned home to Tennessee, he experienced the first pinch of rejection. Soldiers’ lives were in a constant forward march. So were the lives of those left behind. While he had fought for the Union, his girl had taken up with another man—a Confederate soldier with a far less gruesome injury than Franklin’s. Last he heard she had married the Confederate veteran, now a big gun hog dealer with stock in the railroads.

Her rebuff forced him to demand something more from people. He would not give himself to anyone out of desperation. He longed for something deeper than a bride and a balloon-framed house. He’d rather live alone than cling to a frivolous marriage that exuded loneliness.

But years of high expectations had alienated him from many. His only constant companion the past ten years was Wicasha, a Lakota Indian he’d met while working in the quartz mine north of Deadwood back in ’75. He lived beyond the hillocks in a camp in an area even Franklin had never ventured into. Besides Wicasha, nine years ago Franklin had befriended a yellow retriever he’d named Ash because she’d survived a small forest fire. A loyal companion for four years, she had died from tumors that had devoured her body. Franklin couldn’t withstand the anguish of losing a beloved hound again.

The years had piled up, each one lonelier than the preceding. Finally, he’d come across that silly magazine at the mercantile in Spiketrout. His advertisement was a last-ditch effort at true companionship. Like a fish net tossed into a lake, perhaps it might catch something worthwhile. Still, lingering doubts circled him.

The periodical listed no rules regarding who could answer. The editors merely forwarded the letters of those who bothered to write. What if some crazy woman replied? At least it would be nice to correspond with a woman of a gentler disposition than he’d become accustomed to in the Black Hills. A simple penmate might pass the lonelier hours, at least. He didn’t have to meet anyone eye to eye.

He wondered if he should have come out clean straightaway about his deformity. Not too many women wanted a lame man like him. But there lay the glory of letter writing. He could keep the sides of himself he disliked concealed.

He wasn’t a gambling man. Yet placing the advertisement was a game of chance. Risk-taking amused Franklin when the odds tilted in favor of the players. What were his chances of actually meeting a fine lady who might one day become his bride?

Steam from the pot of stew irritated his face. The moisture clung to his whiskers, which he needed to shave. Perhaps he’d go into town after lunch for a bath and trim. Of course, he knew he was fooling himself. The real reason he wanted to go into town was to check with the postal office to see if he’d received any responses to his advertisement. He reckoned it might be too soon for anyone to have replied, but no harm to look.

“Ausmus!”

He jerked up. That wretched man was pestering him again. He recognized his irritating accent. He wiped his hand on his buckskin trousers and glanced out the window. Some men had no understanding of the word “vamoose.”

He strapped on his holster, in case the man wanted more trouble, and stepped outside his cabin. “What’re you doing back here? I told you last month to keep off my land.”

“I was hoping you changed your mind about selling,” the man said in his French drawl.

“Won’t happen, Bilodeaux. Been here near ten years, before all these deadbeats came barreling through the Black Hills looking for more and more gold. If you want gold, go find it, just not on my property.”

“You have a natural creek pool.” From his mount atop his gray stallion, the French Canadian pointed his white-gloved finger toward a grove of ponderosa that concealed the creek running through Franklin’s land. “Everyone knows there are gold deposits that fill the pool. Lots of it. Everywhere else, the placer gold has dried up.”

“It don’t make me no nevermind.”

“You are a selfish man, Ausmus.”

“Selfish for doing what I want with my own legal property?”

“Only a fool could resist panning for such easy-gotten gold.”

“Only a fool would, if you ask me.”

“I will not give up on you, Ausmus.”

“I keep telling you, I won’t change my stance.”

“Every man has a price.”

“You think you’re Napoleon, Bilodeaux?” In fact, Bilodeaux, short like Napoleon, carried airs the way the French general was said to have done during his charges throughout Europe. His eyes, sharp blue, intelligent, and penetrating, absorbed everything around him. His full lips were always puckered as if he wanted to spit. But Franklin harbored no fear of the man. Like the mosquitoes that attacked the Hills in midsummer, Bilodeaux was a mere pesky annoyance.

Yet lately, Bilodeaux’s encroaching had increased, along with the fast depletion of the easily gotten placer gold. In the past, when gold had come easier, Bilodeaux and Franklin had butted heads over his land only once or twice a year, when they ran into each other in town. Already this spring, the bandit had trespassed on his property twice. The warming weather had made it easy. Were his incursions going to increase in frequency?