West of the Law

Chapter 26

McBride was tightening the cinch on the mustang’s saddle when a shuffle of feet made him turn fast, drawing from his waistband.

‘‘Take it easy, gunfighter. It’s only me.’’

Dolly’s voice. She stepped out of the shadows and stopped a few feet from McBride. ‘‘You’re pulling your freight?’’

He shoved the gun back in place. ‘‘Looks like.’’ The woman was silent and he was forced to add, ‘‘I’ve had enough of High Hopes to last me a lifetime.’’

‘‘Did Shannon Roark say she’ll leave with you?’’

‘‘You know about Shannon and I?’’

‘‘Lute told me.’’

‘‘Yes, she’s leaving with me. I’ll meet her at the livery an hour from now, a bit less.’’

McBride saw Dolly’s smile flash in the gloom of the barn. ‘‘Don’t count on it, McBride.’’

He was startled. ‘‘What do you mean, don’t count on it?’’

Dolly took a step toward him. ‘‘Miss Roark has become accustomed to the good life. I haven’t seen her tonight, but I bet the dress she’s wearing cost more than a city policeman makes in three months.’’

‘‘We’ll get by,’’ McBride said defensively, but all at once a strange twinge of unease began tugging at his belly.

‘‘What was she wearing in her ears tonight?’’

‘‘I don’t know.’’

‘‘Yes, you do, McBride. What were her earrings like?’’

He hesitated, like a man standing at the edge of a precipice, afraid to take a step into the unknown. ‘‘Diamonds,’’ he said finally. ‘‘She wore diamond earrings.’’

Dolly’s laugh was scornful, without humor. ‘‘And when you get to New York or Boston or wherever you’re going, you’ll buy her diamonds?’’

McBride slapped the mustang’s neck. ‘‘Like I said, we’ll get by.’’

‘‘Not without jewels, fine clothes, a big house and a carriage and four horses, you won’t.’’

‘‘Dolly, you’re forgetting one thing—Shannon loves me.’’

‘‘Does she, now?’’

‘‘Yes, she does.’’

‘‘McBride, Shannon Roark loves only herself. That’s something you’ll learn, maybe sooner, maybe later.’’

McBride smiled, thin and bitter. ‘‘Dolly, what do you know about love? You’re running out on a man who needs you.’’

The woman’s shadowed face revealed no offense. ‘‘That’s where you’re wrong, McBride. I love Lute, I love him dearly—that’s why I won’t stick around and watch him die one day at a time. I owe him that much, I owe myself that much. Years from now, when I’m old, I’ll remember him, but I’ll remember how he was. I’ll remember the good times we had together when we were young and the sun shone brighter.’’

Unbidden, McBride felt a surge of compassion for Dolly that she noticed and laid aside. ‘‘Don’t feel sorry for me, McBride,’’ she said. ‘‘Feel sorry for yourself.’’

She turned to go but stopped, as though she’d suddenly remembered something. ‘‘The first time you came to Lute’s house, you asked him if he knew about orphan trains. Are you still interested?’’

‘‘You were listening?’’

‘‘No, Lute told me. You intrigued him, McBride, and he wanted to talk. It was one of his better days.’’

‘‘I was interested then, hardly at all now. But I guess I’d still like to hear what they are.’’

Dolly leaned and rested her arm on a stall partition. ‘‘The trains seldom get as far west as Colorado, but a few have pulled into Denver in past years. They leave from Chicago, New York, Boston, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati and they’re packed with children removed from city orphanages. Most of the kids are under fifteen, and they’re chosen for their health and good looks.

‘‘Handbills, flyers and newspaper articles alert people along the rail route when the trains will be stopping. When an orphan train pulls into a town, the children are displayed for, as it’s called, adoption.’’

McBride was interested despite himself. ‘‘It’s a good way for orphans to find a home.’’

‘‘For some it is. But others are beaten and worked to death and God knows how many fall into the hands of perverts who abuse them horribly. There’s no oversight to the orphan trains, no follow-up, and if a child is beaten or worked until he drops, nobody cares. In some places there are so many orphaned teenaged girls, they’re worth only twenty cents more than a Missouri mule.

‘‘Of course, saloon owners and pimps like Gamble Trask are eager participants in the adoption process. They know that many girls, and boys, prefer being forced into the worst kind of sexual slavery than starving to death or dying of disease in an orphanage.’’

Dolly’s teeth gleamed. ‘‘You’re from the big city, McBride. Ever visit an orphanage?’’

McBride said he had not, an admission that gave him a twinge of conscience.

‘‘They’re prisons, cold, dark prisons, overcrowded, disease-ridden, hellholes of starvation and abuse.’’

‘‘How do you know so much about orphan trains?’’ McBride asked. He anticipated what the woman’s answer would be and she did not prove him wrong.

‘‘I was a child of an orphan train. I was sixteen then and quite pretty. A man just like Gamble Trask bought me and forced me to service any cowboy who got drunk and felt the need for a woman. I was working the line when Lute found me. He killed the man that owned me and then a lawman who tried to stop us leaving town. I owe him for that, but I figure my debt is paid.’’

McBride told himself that none of this was his concern, but the policeman’s curiosity remained strong in him. ‘‘Why did Theo Leggett hang on to life long enough to mention orphan trains? Is one stopping here?’’

‘‘Yes, day after tomorrow. It’s a special train out of New York, put together by a man named Sean Donovan for Gamble Trask. All of it done with the blessing of the city’s charitable organizations, I should add.’’

‘‘Special, how?’’

‘‘All beautiful, blue-eyed, blond girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen. An even hundred of them. The train will make no other stops. It will arrive in High Hopes directly from New York.’’

‘‘How do you know all this?’’

‘‘Silas Knowles, the ticket agent, told me. He is aware of everything that happens on the Santa Fe railroad, has a lot of friends down the line.’’

‘‘I remember him as a free-talking man,’’ McBride said.

‘‘He is at that. But he told me because at a later date I promised to give him something he wants. But he may not need it anymore. Silas has two hundred dollars saved and he plans on asking Donovan and Trask if he can use it to adopt the prettiest twelve-year-old he can find on the train. He says even a man his age has his needs.’’

McBride was thinking. The orphan train could explain why Donovan was in town. He was looking out for his merchandise. But what was Gamble Trask going to do with a hundred young girls? Then he remembered Portugee. The man was a slave trader. He could buy the girls from Trask and later sell them at a profit . . . but where? San Francisco? Or somewhere else?

A hundred girls was a lot of females to ship, but Portugee had a silver, persuasive tongue. He could tell them he was taking them to a wonderful new life in California, load them on a train and scuttle back across the Divide. If any of the girls guessed what was going on and balked, he had a dozen men to ensure that they stayed in line during the trip.

There could be another, perhaps even more pressing reason why Donovan was in High Hopes. Someone at police headquarters in New York had opened the letter McBride had sent to Inspector Byrnes and had told him the man who killed his son was holed up in High Hopes. Donovan was ever a man who liked to mix business with pleasure and he’d be eagerly anticipating putting a bullet into John McBride. Or a death much worse and a whole lot slower.

Dolly’s light laugh lilted from out of the darkness. ‘‘McBride, no matter what you think, you’re still a peace officer. I can see your brain working.’’

McBride shook his head, clearing his thoughts with the clean sweep of self-interest. ‘‘Dolly, the orphans are not my problem. I’m getting out of town with Shannon.’’

‘‘You’ll turn tail and run and leave a hundred young girls to their fate?’’

‘‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’’

‘‘Then you’re very much less of a man than I thought you were. No wonder you feel the need to hide your face behind a false beard.’’

McBride was exasperated and it honed a hard edge on his voice. ‘‘Look at me, Dolly. What do you see? I’m one man. There’s only me. What the hell do you expect me to do?’’

‘‘Be the sworn law officer you claim to be. Don’t allow those girls to be bought and sold like cattle. Five years from now not one of them will still be alive.’’

‘‘That’s no business of mine.’’

‘‘At one time you thought all the terrible things that were happening in High Hopes were your business.’’

‘‘That was then, this is now. To reach where I am this very moment I’ve had to step over the bodies of dead men. Well, I’ve had my fill of death and killing. I want out of it, and so does Shannon.’’

Dolly’s head nodded in the darkness. The mustang chomped on his bit and in the distance the mournful coyote chorus was in full voice.

‘‘Then God help you, John McBride,’’ Dolly said. ‘‘From this night until the end of your life you will never again be able to hold up your head in the company of men.’’

The woman’s words hit McBride like blows. He watched in silence as Dolly turned her back on him and walked out of the barn. A sick, empty feeling in his gut, he knew that a piece of him had gone with her . . . and it would never return.

McBride gathered up the reins of the mustang. He would take the long way around to the livery, holding to the darkness. Where he belonged.

Two shots, close together, hammered apart the glassy fabric of the night.

‘‘Oh God, Shannon!’’ McBride whispered, his face wild with fright.

Then he was running . . . running toward the sound.