Читать книгу The Untamed Heart - Kit Gardner - Страница 7

Nebraska

April 1880

Sloan Devlin, fifth Earl of Worthingham, held four kings and an ace. The smooth-handed gentleman seated to his right slid his entire pile of bills and coin into the center of the table, raising the stakes well above four thousand.

“I call, tenderfoot,” the man drawled. Beneath the brim of his low-crowned black hat, his mouth twisted into a grin that would have sent any well-seeing female to the floor in a faint. “Lay them on the table, gents.”

Across the table two railroad businessmen with bulging bellies and whiskey-ruddied cheeks tossed their cards onto the table. The one who called himself Hyde rolled his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and glanced from the black-hatted man to Sloan. The other, Strobridge, gulped from his glass and glanced nervously around the otherwise deserted railcar. Over the tops of their brown bowlers a barren wash of gold whizzed past beyond the windows. The car’s wooden floor vibrated beneath Sloan’s shoes, each clickety-clack of the rails registering the locomotive’s westward trek across the prairie.

The gentleman cheat, who’d neglected to mention his name, stared at Sloan. The man had resorted to deceit as though he’d done it countless times before. But a gambler down on his luck was never too hard to recognize. Sloan had known several in his thirty-five years, men who utilized their quick hands to stack the deck or deal crookedly, fluttering the cards up like a flock of quail and neatly assembling them as they wished. A man had no chance against those fellows, unless luck played her hand, and Sloan had always found luck at the gaming table. Elsewhere—well, that was another thing altogether.

At first glance Sloan had registered the gambler’s babysmooth hands, and the finely made, high-heeled French leather boot he crossed over one knee. Maybe only a few years younger than Sloan, he’d been graced with the good looks and bold manner that marked him as part of the dashing American West Sloan had traveled from England to discover. His skin and hair were of the same sun-burnished hue as the landscape beyond the windows. He wore his fresh-from-the-tailor’s-iron linen and broadcloth with an elegance common to the men who occupied London’s most fashionable gaming houses, and yet his eyes remained wary as if he’d seen enough to expect the worst of people.

He obviously hadn’t expected to be outwitted by the bespectacled Englishman he’d marked as an easy dupe.

Sloan spread his cards faceup on the table. “Four kings and an ace.” It was an unbeatable hand. All eyes swung to the gambler.

He was staring at Sloan’s cards with the kind of passive, cheek-twitching calm that in Sloan’s experience typically indicated tremendous distress. He lifted lifeless eyes and Sloan felt every muscle tense.

The gambler spilled his cards onto the pile of chips in the center of the table.

Hyde coughed. “By damn.” His eyes angled at Sloan. “Where’d you say you were from?”

Sloan drew off his spectacles, folded them and slid them into the breast pocket of his topcoat. “Cornwall, England.” He indicated the booty. “I take it this is mine.”

Hyde pushed the pile of bills toward Sloan and began filling a sack with the coins. “They play poker over there in England?”

“Not exactly.”

“That where you learned to cheat, gent?” The gambler surged to his feet, toppling his chair.

Calmly Sloan folded a stack of bills. He could feel the man’s angered heat radiating from his chest. Sloan glanced at the hand lingering near the open flap of his waistcoat, fingertips perhaps inches from cold steel. Sloan kept folding bills.

“Now hold on there,” Strobridge crowed, bouncing out of his chair. “We’re all civilized gentlemen here. My friend Hyde here and I have come all the way from Boston without encountering any fuss, or any Indians and we don’t need any trouble now. Peaceful business in Denver is what we’re about. Just peaceful Union Pacific business in a lawless land. There’s no need to draw your gun, Devlin.”

“I wasn’t intending to,” Sloan said, stuffing the wad of bills into his pocket. “I don’t own one.”

All three men stared at Sloan.

Sloan shoved his chair from the table and rose to his full height, which, as chance would have it, was a good two inches taller than the gambler, high-heeled French boots notwithstanding. Their gazes locked.

“In Cornwall,” Sloan said, “there’s a saying that any man who calls another a cheat in a game of chance is doing so because of his own guilt in the matter. It’s not the winner who must defend his well-earned victory but the loser who can’t stomach his failure at deception.”

The gambler’s eyes were as bleak as a dead man’s. Sloan’s stare was just as uncompromising.

“Dammit, now, shake hands,” Strobridge sputtered with a forced laugh. “Go on. Then we’ll open ourselves a fine bottle of brandy. We can drink to the success of the Union Pacific railroad and to all the silver ore flowing out of the Rocky Mountains. That’s where the fortunes are made, gents. Not on one game of cards. Go on, now. We’re civilized men, remember.”

Sloan extended his hand to the gambler. But swallowing pride was too damned difficult for some civilized men. To others, indeed, what was a bit of lost pride next to needless loss of life? Sloan had learned that lesson firsthand and it had been a costly one.

So costly, he’d left Cornwall and the tinners he’d championed against the mine owners. So costly, he’d left Devlin Manor, his tenants, his estates, and all the responsibility that came with a sudden inheriting of a title.

Sloan’s belief in a peaceful settling of differences had ended with his father taking a stray lead ball in the chest and dying just steps from Devlin Manor’s door. After witnessing that, only an idealist who was a fool would still cling to the idea of men resorting to diplomacy over violence, a handshake over pistols at dawn.

So he was an idealistic fool, but Sloan wasn’t ready to abandon his faith in the human spirit. It was because of it that he’d set out from Bristol on the Cunard steamer to embrace the American frontier in all its unbridled splendor, to see its vast and varied landscape with its climatic excesses, its giant herds of buffalo, its Indians, its bold pioneers who were in the process of writing a stirring chapter in history, a saga of heroic proportions. Until now, he’d viewed the West through the eyes and canvases of the European painters who imagined it. Now he would experience it, and somewhere on this vast land he would rid himself of the burden of putting his father into the line of fire, and restore his worthiness of the title. Maybe then he could return to assume the responsibilities.

“Get the brandy,” the gambler ordered, clasping Sloan’s hand in his woman’s smooth fingers. “And get the gent a glass.” He settled himself in his chair as the two railroad men scrambled below the table, producing a bottle and several glasses, which they filled and set before Sloan and the gambler.

“To silver,” Hyde said, lifting his glass. “May no one-horse, shantytown dare to stand in the way of progress.”

“And to all the lily-white, land-owning virgins that ever called those one-horse towns home.” The gambler displayed a flash of teeth and drained his glass. “May they forever turn to a man in times of great need. And may that man be me.” His chuckle spilled slowly from his lips as though he savored a thought. “That, gentlemen, is all the fortune I’ll ever need.”

Hyde and Strobridge echoed his laughter. “If you’re on your way to Denver, Devlin,” Strobridge began, as he filled his third glass with a less than steady hand, “I know of a saloon in a town called Deadwood Run, couple stops before Denver. The Devil’s Gold. I have a special lady there. I always pay her a call once I finish up my business in Denver. This trip will be no different Dakota Darby’s her name. She’ll show you how to spend that money you got there, and it won’t be on cards.”

Sloan set his empty glass on the baize. “I’ll remember that”

“Looking for great enterprise, eh?”

“Rather the opposite. Preferably off the railroad line.”

Hyde puffed up his chest “There isn’t a place worth seeing that isn’t on the Union Pacific line. Nothing except stretches of prairie waiting for the track to come through and make them into something. And no one worth knowing, either, especially the fools that think they can hold out on the march of the iron horse. It’s the coming of industry. You’re a smart fellow. You can understand that. But some folks are too stubborn to see it no matter how much money you wave under their noses.”

Sloan narrowed his eyes on Hyde. “Money for their land.”

“It isn’t for their mules.”

“Or their tarantula juice,” the gambler muttered into his glass. “One gulp of that homemade brew is enough to make a hummingbird spit in a rattlesnake’s eye. I prefer my drink like my women—smooth, unspoiled and mighty pure.”

Again the railroad men sniggered their agreement After a moment Strobridge glanced at Sloan. “All the land for the asking and they sit tight, refusing to budge.”

“Maybe they think they’ve good reason,” Sloan said.

“Sure they do. It’s their pride, the same damned pride that saw them westward seeking their fortunes in the first place.”

“Fortunes you promised them.”

Strobridge’s glass poised at his lips. “I’m no swiveltongued promoter, spouting empty promises.”

Sloan puckered his brow and fished one hand then the other into the inner pockets of his topcoat. “I believe I read something that sounded like a promise in a Union Pacific prospectus I was given in New York. Or was it Chicago? Something about the paradise awaiting development west of the hundredth meridian. It must be in my valise.

“According to your verbiage, gentlemen, if I remember correctly, the frontiersman is an idealized figure, his plow a sacred symbol, your railroad a harbinger of progress. Gold and silver were the thematic notes sounded endlessly in this brochure with land, open space and freedom tinkling in counterpoint. That sounds like a vision of the new Eden and promise enough for a man to abandon his share of a family farm in the East and pack up his family and head west.”

Hyde jerked his head at the window. “Look out there, Devlin. All you’ll see is an endless bonanza. The Union Pacific firmly believes in the natural process of individual enterprise. Any determined man can share in the good things if he works hard enough. And the railroad’s going to be there to provide it for him. If he’s smart.”

“Damned right,” Strobridge said. “I’m not saying you’ll find fools everywhere, Devlin. Most enterprising folks wouldn’t dare come up against the power of a company like the Union Pacific.” He punctuated this by shoving one finger skyward.

“You’ll find all the crazies you want in Prosperity Gulch,” Hyde added, chomping on his cigar. “Most damned impertinent bunch of poor cusses you’ll ever meet. Eking out a living from the South Platte on less than twenty cents a day. After the big mine exploded last year and killed a handful of them, you’d think they’d all just pack up, head back east, and give it up. And yet nothing short of the cavalry will get them out of our path.”

“They’ll move,” Strobridge snorted. “Our line needs to go through that land if we’re going to get track around the mountains to the rich mining towns in the deeper valleys. This time, they’ll move. They’ll have no choice.”

“Threats never moved pride,” Sloan said, remembering all too clearly the beleaguered tinners in Cornwall standing firm with their demands in the face of threats from the mine owners. All threats had accomplished was bloodshed.

“Money should move pride, Devlin, and it hasn’t. I’ll be damned if I return to my boss in Boston when this month is out without clearing the way for our line.”

“By driving the people from Prosperity Gulch.”

“After our business in Denver I’m sure as hellfire going to try, even if it means calling in the cavalry to do it. We’ll just have to convince those folks that when their town collapses, as it surely will, their lots will have no more market value than town lots on the moon.”

“Where is this worthless town?”

“Ten miles straight north of Deadwood Run.” Hyde jerked his chin at the gambler who dozed in his chair. “Our gambling friend can’t abide smooth liquor, Devlin. I wonder if it’s the same with smooth women.”

Gathering up his winnings, Sloan bid Hyde and Strobridge good-afternoon and left their railcar for his own some three cars back. Curiosity had drawn him from the overcrowded heat of his car several hours before and had delivered him to the railroad men’s poker table. He was glad it had. He now had an idea where he might be getting off the line.

Dare to make a difference…. His father’s words seemed to echo from the rhythmic click of the rails as he moved briskly through the cars. He’d dared once to champion a cause for the beleaguered against the mighty and had failed. Opportunity was again here. Was it a cause worth championing? Perhaps. The mighty couldn’t get mightier than the Union Pacific Railroad, and the people any more beleaguered. Were they worth closer scrutiny? Absolutely. It was all waiting for him ten miles north of Deadwood Run. He could turn on his heel anytime and leave that town and those people. He had no ties to bind him there.

Just as he stepped between the last two cars, something jabbed him in the back.

“I’ll take what’s mine now, gent” The gambler’s snarl rose above the roar of the train.

Sloan went still. Heat billowed up from the train’s belly. “Is this how you show thanks in the American West, stealing from the man who covered your cheating hide?”

“You’re right about that, gent I’m going to steal from you what I should have won. But in the West we go one step farther with English gents we don’t like.”

Sloan felt the gun nudge deeper against his back. “I didn’t take you for a coward.”

“Turn around then,” the gambler growled. “I’d rather look into your eyes when the bullet finds your liver. Slow and easy. Just turn around.”

With hands hanging loosely at his sides, Sloan turned in the cramped space.

“You’re a queer bird, gent,” the gambler muttered as he rid Sloan of his sack of coins and the folded bills in his pocket. Tucking these into his topcoat, he squinted at Sloan’s embroidered plum waistcoat and starched cravat made of the finest French linen. His eyes hardened on the ruby stickpin nestled in the linen folds.

Sloan flicked his eyes over the gambler’s shoulder into the railcar, where several passengers loitered. “You’d best shoot me now before the passengers begin to suspect foul play. You’ll have the small matter of my body to dispose of, you know.”

Profuse color climbed from the gambler’s collar. “The prairie’s as good a place as any for you, gent. The crows and buzzards will pick your bones clean before anyone knows you’re there. A wagon might not come by for a week or longer.”

Sloan allowed a hint of a curve to soften his mouth. “Then what are you waiting for?”

The gambler’s eyes narrowed. Doubt, suspicion, chagrin swept over his handsome features, but not a fierce desire for blood. Sloan had suspected as much. This man was no killer. To Sloan’s way of thinking, the gambler needed a small push over the edge of his rage. And he was betting the man would resort to fists first over his gun.

Sloan’s voice rumbled low and distinctly ominous even to his own ear. “You’re as soft as you look, sir.”

The gambler took an instant too long to throw his punch. With lightning deftness, Sloan deflected his fist with an upward slice of his forearm, smacked the pistol from his hand with the other, then brought both sides of his hands cleaving into each side of the gambler’s thick neck before he could draw another breath. The gambler went rigid, groaned, then fell back against the side of the railcar and slid to the floor. Sloan bent and retrieved his winnings. Twisting one fist into the gambler’s shirtfront, Sloan hauled him to his feet and shoved him against the railcar.

“In the future,” he said silkily, “you would do well to leave us queer birds to our business. Perhaps, then I will leave you to yours.” Sloan turned and, with one flex of his arm, tossed the gambler from the train. With grim satisfaction he watched the gambler land and roll into a thatch of bleached grass that lined the track in deep gullies on both sides and swept in unbroken, breathtaking beauty from horizon to horizon.

Straightening his cravat with a jerk of his chin, he smoothed his double-breasted frock coat, tugged at the velvet cuffs, drew a deep breath, flexed his massive hands and turned to enter the last car. As he did so, the polished tip of his pointed shoe nudged the gambler’s pistol. Bending, he retrieved the gun and, for several moments, stared at it, feeling the weight of the cool steel in his palm. His finger brushed over the ivory grip, curled around the trigger, traced the length of the scrollengraved silver barrel. And then he threw the gun over the side of the train and pushed open the door to his railcar.