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“So you have no real experience in pleasuring a lady.” She lay back and said, “I’ll teach you.”
They reveled until she’d attained a chaos of sufficiency. Catching her breath and with her eyes still shut, she heard him snap open a tin, and then he knelt over Sallie and seemed to be holding and steering himself.
“And now what are you doing?” she asked.
“Silently entering,” he said.
* * *
The Cattle King of the Pecos returned from some legal wrangling in the east around noon. The Kid had already shifted his belongings to the bunkhouse and soon was sitting bootless, hatless, and gunless with Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre in the hallway outside the office of the Jinglebob Land & Livestock Company. Sallie brought them lemonades during their hot wait and flushed when the Kid declared with fervor, “Really enjoyed our night, Miss Chisum.”
Scurlock slyly asked him, “Oh, and why is that?”
She was going to fabricate a lie but decided instead to hurry from them when John Simpson Chisum, whom all and sundry called Uncle, walked out of his office and fixed a tired gaze on the three Regulators. Because his father was an Englishman, he’d found common ground in his partnership with John Tunstall and the Scotch-Canadian McSween despite having grown up in Texas. And now he looked on their former employees as mere unfortunate remnants. Uncle John had just celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday in St. Louis, but he seemed far older, with a cane he leaned on, a goiter in his throat, overlarge ears, and a waxed mustache with ends curled up like the horns of an Angus bull.
“You fellows here for a job of work?” Doc and Charlie allowed that’s what they were hoping for, and Chisum said, “Well I’m not hiring. The cattle you see here are just for my repasts. Rounded up the rest and sent them to Texas. Sold em to the Hunter and Evans company.”
“Begging your pardon,” Doc said, “but who is hiring?”
“You could head up to Fort Sumner and try Pete Maxwell. He runs through cowpokes about as soon as I do a can of Folgers coffee.” Uncle John penciled a note for them to give to the cattleman up north, and, like hirelings, they made a slinking, grinning, bowing exit. The Kid was embarrassed for them. Uncle John scowled at the Kid. “What about you, Billy?”
“You see those horses in the bunkhouse corral?”
“Hadn’t noticed.” Chisum went to his office window and looked out. “Stolen?”
“Yes sir. We got them from Jimmy Dolan.”
Chisum turned. “I have troubles enough, son. You’ll have to get them out of here.”
“And do what with them?”
“Sell em in Texas. There’s an itty-bitty town on the Canadian River. Tascosa. Cattle drives head right through it, and their horses are always ending up scoured or lame.”
The cattle baron sat down in a creaking office chair as if their meeting was ended. The Kid hesitated before saying, “You owe me five hundred dollars.”
Uncle John was writing in a ledger and did not look up. “How’s that?”
“Bill McCloskey said you’d agreed to pay us five dollars per day for hunting down Harry’s killers. And I read in some newspaper that you’d hired gunfighters like me at five hundred dollars a head.”
Chisum tried to kill the Kid with his stare. “You were misinformed,” he evenly said.
With a childish stridence he regretted, the Kid argued, “We put in the time. We risked our lives. We ought to get paid for it.”
Uncle John tilted to slide out a side drawer of his ambassadorial desk, saying, “You make a lot of sense, Billy. Let me get out my petty cash.” And then he lifted from the drawer his Colt .45 and cocked it. “You’ll need to be leaving now, Kid.”
“But we’re only asking for what’s right.”
“Tell you what. You can steal my cattle when you’re hungry.”
“You’re just giving us permission because you know we’ll do it anyway.”
Chisum smirked. “You’re bright, Billy. Nothing gets past you.”
* * *
And so it was that just John Middleton, the fawning Tom Folliard, and the Kid headed to the Texas Panhandle with the stolen herd while the Coes forsook horse thievery for a fresh start at farming in Colorado; Frederick Tecumseh Waite rejoined his roots in the Indian Territories, became a tax collector, served in the Chickasaw legislature, and never again fired a gun in anger; and Josiah Gordon Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre tucked their cohabiting sisters, furniture, and belongings into cells in the Indian hospital at the Fort Sumner that the Army had abandoned.
The Kid never again saw Sallie Chisum. She dutifully listed in her red journal Willy’s mailed gifts of “a beaded Indian tobacco pouch” and “2 candi hearts,” but then she seemed to fancy other men more and in 1880 married another Willy, a German immigrant who hired on as a bookkeeper for the Jinglebob company. When Uncle John died in 1884 from gruesome surgery on his jaw, Sallie shared in an inheritance of $500,000. She sent her sons overseas for schooling in Germany and became estranged from them. She divorced Willy in 1895 and married the man who gave his name to Stegman, New Mexico, becoming the town’s first postmistress. She divorced that husband, too, and then remained alone as she ran a successful cattle company and died rich, aged seventy-six, in 1934.
