AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She angled her head to regard him. “I could’ve recognized you anywhere. You’re just like your photograph.”
He glanced at her with slight annoyance. “I’m not just like the boy in that photograph though. I’ve aged.”
“I thought you were so daring and romantic. I thought you were the most glamorous man alive.”
“I get along fine with girls of ten, it’s when they grow to be eleven or twelve that I’m a goner.”
She giggled and then her thoughts must have anguished her for she grew taciturn, her gray eyes looked at something remote in the night, she gripped a shawl around her with a pale fist at her breasts. Two minutes passed and then she became embarrassed by her own silence. “I guess an angel must be flying over us.”
Bob made no comment.
She said, “The mountains are so steep everywhere! It’s like you’re inside an envelope!”
Bob spied her profile and her especially pretty smile. He said, “You were going to ask me about what Jesse was like.”
“How’d you know?”
“They always do.” Bob gentled Miss Russell’s elbow to guide her around for the descending walk to the Omaha Club, and then he glided his right hand to her lower back, feeling the girl’s letting through her cool gown. He said, “He was bigger than you can imagine, and he couldn’t get enough to eat. He was hungry all the time. He ate all the food in the dining room and then he ate all the plates and the glasses and the light off the candles; he ate all the air in your lungs and the thoughts right out of your mind. You’d go to him, wanting to be with him, wanting to be like him, and you’d always come away missing something.” Bob looked at the girl with anger and of course she was looking peculiarly at him. He said, “So no
w you know why I shot him.”
Miss Russell sighted the ground as they walked, and when she spoke again there was grief in her voice. “My father would read to us about it from the newspapers he bought. He said we were living through a great moment in history. He thought you’d done the world a big favor.”
Bob said, “On your right is the Leadville Headquarters. Over there is the smithy’s shop. You can’t see them from here but I’ve got four green tents behind the club and men go in and out all night.”
She said, “You’re making me sad.”
He could see by the lights in her eyes that the girl was crying. “You ought to go back.”
She shook her head in the negative but wouldn’t say anything.
He said, “Don’t work for me.”
“No?”
“You’ve got your dignity yet; I wouldn’t give it away for money.”
Dancing had given way to an intermission and groomed men in ugly brown clothes were lingering around the club and standing on Rio Grande, smoking cigarettes, spitting juice, glowering at Bob and the girl.
She said, “Maybe I’ll go then,” and Bob suggested she might find other work in Jimtown. And though she said she might try some stores in the morning and even seemed grateful to Bob, Miss Nellie Russell of St. Joseph, Missouri, instead purchased whiskey and some grains of morphine and that night committed suicide.
IT WAS MIDNIGHT when Deputy Sheriff Ed Kelly righted himself from his cot and gave an ear to the nickering of a horse. He sought out his gun and scurried across the earthen floor of his cabin, getting to the rough board door just as it was rapped. He opened it with his gun cocked and peered out at a man he didn’t recognize, with a brown jawbeard and mustache and orange beaver coat. The man grinned at Kelly’s longjohns and said in a high Southern voice, “You and wash soap ought to meet once or twice.”
“Do I know you?”
“You got your eyes open?”
“You woke me.”
The man sagged against the cabin logs and looked down Bachelor mountain into the gulch and the fog of light that was all they could see of Jimtown. “You hear that music?”
Kelly stepped out with his pistol by his hip. He could just make out a piano.
The man lighted a cigar and said, “It’s the Omaha Club. Bob Ford’s having his grand opening tonight.”
Kelly spit to his right. “I’ll give him a grand opening one of these days.”
The man ticked his head. “I come to tell ya regarding that. He’s got on one of his periodicals and he’s puffed himself up to say he’s going to kill Ed Kelly on sight.”
