Chapter Text
Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.
--Ludwig van Beethoven
Telluride, Colorado
September 1880
“Say, mister,” commented Heyes as they unsaddled their horses and retrieved their saddlebags, “where’s a good eating-house around here? We’re famished.” Out of desperation to lose the men chasing them, they had turned north through Durango, kept on past the fork toward Silverton, and gone over Black Bear Pass, down into the mining town of Telluride. When they came over Black Bear and saw the town below them, like a handful of jewels in a teacup, they had felt as if they just might have found a safe refuge.
The livery stable owner grinned as a slim, dark-haired youth led the sorrel mare and the bay gelding into their stalls and poured each a portion of feed. “Well, boys, count yourselves lucky. This here town’s got the best grub in a hunnerd miles, and maybe further. Best in Ouray County[1].”
“That so?” said Kid, curious. “Where, at the hotel? Might be a little rich for our blood.” After more than 200 miles on the run while trying to escape Jim Caldwell’s newly recruited gang, they were not only almost out of supplies, but short on ready cash.
“Nope, there’s a restaurant over on Pine Street called the Irish Rose. Miss Lillian runs the place. Guess you’d call her an old maid, but her cookin’ is first class. And she’s a good sort. She don’t hold with givin’ handouts, but if a feller’s down on his luck, she’ll give him a good plate if he’s willing to haul some wood or chop ice for her. A nice clean place, too—kind of place you could bring a lady if’n you had a mind to. Or if’n you had a lady,” he joked. He pulled out his pocket watch. “Closes at nine o’clock, better hurry. Corner of Pine Street and Galena Ave., that way.” He pointed in the appropriate direction.
“Thanks,” said Heyes cordially. They left the livery stable, and walked up Columbia Avenue, Kid still favoring his left side from Caldwell’s attempts to beat out of him the information he wanted. “You doin’ all right, Kid?”
“More or less.” His lower back ached fiercely, but he was coping with it. “I tell you, Heyes—Caldwell always was a mean cuss, back when I rode with him, but … I think those ten years in prison turned him loco. Plumb crazy.”
“Think you’re right there.” Heyes shook his head. “He had that look in his eye, like he has one thing in his head and one thing only—that you know where that loot from 1870 is. Didn’t matter what you told him, Kid, he wasn’t going to hear you.” Getting chased by a posse is one thing, getting chased by a raving lunatic with a grudge is something else again. At least the posse’ll give up after a while when they get into the next county or two.
They reached Pine Street, and turned in the direction that the livery man had indicated. “Thanks again for backing me up there,” Kid said to his cousin as they walked.
“Well, they weren’t paying any attention to me. They don’t know me from Adam’s off ox.” At some point, that’s going to be an advantage. Because their attention had been focused on Kid, Heyes had been able to surprise them with his own attack, until he managed to get his cousin away from them and back to their own horses. They’d been running from Caldwell’s men ever since.
At the corner of Pine Street and Galena Avenue, they found their destination: the café called The Irish Rose. The large and attractively painted sign hanging over the porch showed an elegant white rose in bloom, surrounded by shamrocks and thistles. At the bottom of the sign was painted in a handsome script, “L. R. O’More, Proprietress.” A painted sign on the porch read “Fresh Roasted Coffee 10 cents, Specials Daily. Open 7:30 – 2:00, 5:30 – 9:00.” The lower portion of the sign said “No Smoking, No Swearing, No Spitting.” Crisp green and white linen curtains in a large checkered pattern covered the windows. The chalkboard hung up between the door and the window had already been erased, however, showing that closing time was imminent. Heyes tried the door and was gratified to find it was still unlocked; a brass bell rang pleasantly when he opened it. “I’ll be right there, seat yourself,” called out a woman’s voice from behind the swinging kitchen doors.
The two men took seats at a table along the wall which could not be seen from the street. It was indeed an attractive dining room, with dark green tablecloths, a polished oak floor, and a long counter with stools and a big glass cake dome next to the cash register. “What can I do for you fellows?” asked a young woman with dark brown hair, roughly their own age, wearing a green-and-white gingham bib apron over her grey skirt and ivory high-collared bodice sprigged with lavender flowers. “It’s eight forty-five now, so the kitchen’s just about closed. I’m afraid there’s not much of a fire left in the stove.”
“Anything that you’ve got will be fine with us,” said Kid gratefully. “Are you Miss Lillian?” Say, she’s pretty! Not my idea of an ‘old maid lady’…I was expecting someone like my great aunt Rose.
“I am,” she said with a warm smile. “How about the 3 B’s—beans, bacon, and biscuits? And… let me think— there’s half a peach pie left, made with local peaches from some orchards north of here. You’re welcome to it.”
“Well, the man at the livery spoke highly of your cooking, ma’am, and all that sounds just the thing.” Heyes favored her with a charming smile. “Problem is, we’re a little short of cash.”
“How short?” asked Lillian O’More, matter-of-factly. “See, what I just offered you are leftovers, really; I can’t cook up anything fresh this late as the fire’s almost out. So, I wouldn’t ask anybody to pay full price for that. If you fellows have six bits between you, I’ll call that square.” There was a twinkle in her frank green eyes. “If you don’t, I’ve got a pile of wood on the back porch that needs chopped into kindling.”
She turned the sign in the window so it said ‘Closed’, and headed back through the kitchen doors. They heard the back door open, and an old man’s voice called out, “Lillie, who you got in there? It’s ‘bout closin’ time.”
“It’s fine, Uncle Henry. A couple of late customers, that’s all,” she replied. Presently she returned with two plates of beans and bacon with biscuits, and placed them on the table. “Would you like coffee with that? I can warm up the coffeepot on that little stove,” she said indicating the potbellied wood stove in the corner. “And I’ve got a full pot of tea in the kitchen I made for myself, but you’re welcome to it as well.”
“Coffee would be great, ma’am,” Kid answered, “but don’t go to any trouble on our account.” He looked up at her and found himself smiling in spite of the predicament they were in. It was, he found, impossible to look at her and not smile.
“It’s… it’s no trouble at all,” she said, stammering slightly as she met his eyes, and hastily looked away. She vanished briskly into the kitchen, hoping the two men had not seen the color rise to her face.
Heyes gave his partner a sharp look. “Kid…”
“Huh? What?” he said absently, still looking in the direction that Miss O’More had gone.
“I know you, Kid. Don’t even think what I know you’re thinking...” An idea came to him. “You know, maybe she could help us. She’s bound to know if there are any strangers in town …” When Miss Lillian came back into the dining room with the coffee pot, Heyes smiled genially. “You look tired, miss. Why not join us, take a rest?”
“I suppose I can, for a minute or two,” she said, and took a seat at their table. “Thank you.”
“You know, miss,” Heyes said lightly, with his most charming smile, “I imagine just about everyone in town comes to this place…it must be a very popular location.” She was not especially beautiful, he reflected, but she was certainly pretty enough to draw a certain class of customers who were more interested in the scenery than the cuisine.
Heyes’s ploy did not give him the result he had in mind. Instead, the young woman’s expression radiated amusement. “Mister, let me give you some advice. Flattery gets you nowhere with me. If you want something, just ask.” Ignoring his obvious disappointment, Miss O’More briskly got up from the table, and calmly set about cleaning tables and filling the wee glass salt and pepper shakers on each table. This task entailed turning her back on them.
She paid them no further attention until Kid spoke up a few minutes later. “Miss? Please...” She turned toward him, and he looked her straight in the eye, not smiling. “Excuse my partner. We don’t know anyone here, and we do need your help.”
She nodded, picked up the now-hot coffee pot from the woodstove in the corner, grabbed two dark-green coffee cups on her way, and returned to their table. That’s more like it. “I thought that might be the case,” she said, not unkindly, pouring them each coffee and placing a sugar bowl on the table. “It looks like you boys ran into some trouble.” Both of them bore obvious signs of having been in some kind of violent altercation recently, and they were both clearly exhausted and ravenous.
“You could say that,” Kid went on. “We’ve been running flat out for about 250 miles. Three days ago we were in Pueblo.”
Miss O’More drew back, slightly alarmed. “Running? From what? You don’t mean a posse…”
“No, no,” Heyes said hastily. “Nothing like that, honest. We sort of ran into an old acquaintance of his, you see,” he gestured to Kid, “with an old grudge.”
“That must be some grudge, to chase you all that way.”
Both men exchanged glances. “It is,” explained Kid. “About $18,000 worth of grudge, as I recall. It’s a long story.”
Her expression was inscrutable. “Out West, most stories are—yours, mine, everyone else’s. You fellows still interested in that pie?” By that time, their two plates were empty.
“Yes, ma’am,” they both replied.
“I’ll be right back.”
“You gonna tell her the truth?” Heyes whispered as soon as the swinging doors closed behind her.
“I think we’ve got to. The part about Caldwell, I mean. She’s gonna know if we don’t.”
She returned with the pie plate and two more saucers and forks. The light from the lamps on the walls shone on her glossy dark-brown hair, making her braids look like polished walnut. “Ma’am, that was delicious. Those are the best biscuits I’ve had in this whole state,” Kid declared with enthusiasm. “A lot of folks don’t make ‘em right.”
“Thank you,” she replied, smiling. “My mother was from Iowa, and taught me everything she knew.”
Heyes grinned. “We’re from Kansas ourselves, ma’am. A day’s ride east of Emporia.” From a little town that isn’t even there anymore…thanks to the border wars.
“But you’re not from the same place, I think,” she said thoughtfully. “You two don’t have the same accent.”
“I lived in Arkansas for a few years,” Curry admitted, impressed.
She nodded. “So… what about this man with the grudge, and where do I come in?”
Kid sighed ruefully. “About ten years ago,” he began, as Heyes started dividing the half pie between them, “I was young and stupid, and fell in with this gang that ran around western Oklahoma and southwest Kansas. You know, that neutral strip they called No Man’s Land. Sometimes they crossed into Texas or Colorado a little bit. The leader was this Jim Caldwell, went by ‘James Elliott Caldwell’ if he had a suit ‘n’ tie on. The short version is that we—that gang, I mean—robbed a bank in Garden City, Kansas. I was just short of eighteen, and I’d only been running with the gang about six months, so they didn’t trust me to do more than be the lookout and hold on to the horses so they could make their getaway.”
“All right,” she said, in an even tone that revealed neither judgment or disapproval. “What then?”
“Then—I was outside, see, so I never saw exactly what happened—I heard shooting. I looked, and saw that the gang had shot someone, and that was it, for me. I took one of the horses, drove off the rest, and lit out for Texas as fast as I could. Bank robbery was one thing, but I wasn’t interested in being party to a murder.” He took a sip of the coffee, hoping it would do something for the headache he’d had since getting jumped in Pueblo. Spending several hours at 11,000 feet over Black Bear Pass hadn’t helped, either. “Saw in the papers later that most of ‘em were caught, though some of ‘em got away, like me. Now Caldwell’s escaped from prison, and …”
“And he’s after you for the loot.” He nodded. She turned to Heyes. “How do you fit in to all this?”
“I’m his partner. We’re cousins,” he explained. “We grew up together more or less but when all that happened, we’d lost track of each other for several years.”
“So what happened three days ago?”
“We were in a saloon in Pueblo, having a beer, minding our own business, and playing some poker. Then we were leaving,” Heyes said, “and this unpleasant fellow got the drop on us and sticks a gun in his back, and one of his men does the same for me. They drag him into an alley, and start getting rough. This Caldwell fellow starts laying into him about “Where’s the money? What did you do with it? It’s mine,” and started trying to beat the information out of him. They were ignoring me, so the one holding me got careless. He got his nose broken, poor fella.” Heyes had shifted his weight, stamped on the man’s foot with his boot heel, and then swung around with his favorite left hook as soon as the gun barrel was out of his back.
“At that point, things got kind of interesting,” said Kid. “It was a real free-for-all for a few minutes, but we managed to get away from Caldwell and his boys with about a half-hour’s head start.” He decided not to favor her with the details.
“We thought we’d lost them,” Heyes added, “But when we stopped for water and supplies in Alamosa, we saw them catching up, so we took off again.” He finished the last of his share of the pie, and went on. “They were still on our tail in Pagosa Springs. About when we hit Bayfield, we decided to take the next sharp right turn and head straight north, past Durango, and over Red Mountain and Black Bear pass, hoping to lose them. So here we are.”
“That explains a lot,” the café owner said. “You see, you can’t really ‘pass through’ Telluride; it’s not on the way to anywhere. You have to be coming here to get here.” She sat back in her chair and regarded them both, thoughtfully. “If it’s any help, I believe you. So what do you want from me?”
“We don’t know who lives here and who doesn’t,” Kid said simply. “You’ve been here and you probably know everybody in town, so you would know. Can you tell us if you see any strangers who are hanging around town, or who come in here to eat? All we want is to hole up around here for a while, find some work, and hope Caldwell doesn’t figure out which road we took.”
“Very well,” Lillian O’More answered. “If you can describe these men to me, or tell me any names, I’ll see what I can do. If I see anyone who I’m certain doesn’t live here, I can let you know. And I can ask Susanne and Molly and the girls to look also, and listen. How’s that?” She gave both of them a searching look. “One more question— are both of you all right? Does either of you need a doctor?” She stopped and waved to a slim dark-haired boy who had come in from the back door; Heyes recognized him as the same kid who worked in the livery stable. “We have a good one in town—Dr. Hoogendyk, he’s Dutch— and I can send Tommy there to get him if you need me to.”
Kid shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m plenty sore in places, but nothing that needs seein’ a doctor for. If what they did was going to kill me, it already would’ve, somewhere around Walsenburg or Alamosa.”
“All right,” she said. “I thought I should ask, just in case.” She fumbled in her apron pocket. “But I can see that your back is hurting you. This might help.” She placed on the tabletop in front of him a couple of packets labeled “J.R. Watkins. Patented Headache Powder. Since 1868.”
Heyes eyed her, impressed. “You don’t miss much, ma’am, do you?”
“In this business? I can’t afford to. I have to have a good sense for who might pocket the silverware, take liberties with the dining-room girls, or walk out without paying. So, I notice details.”
“The lady has a point there.” Kid acknowledged, slipping the packets into his coat pocket. “Anyway, about that six bits, ma’am…” he added, and gave her his two quarters and Heyes’ two dimes— it was a nickel short, but they still needed to pay for a room and the livery stable. “Will that do?”
“Just fine, thank you,” she said. “The Sheridan Hotel is over on Colorado Avenue, but it isn’t cheap. There is the Beaumont and the Excalibur near there. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to shoo you fellows out so I can close…” she paused, realizing something. “And come to think of it, I don’t know what your names are,” she added with a smile.
“Joshua Smith,” Heyes replied, “and my cousin here is Thaddeus Jones. Miss O’More, it’s been a pleasure.” He and the Kid both tipped their hats to her and departed.
They walked back to the livery stable, checked on the horses, and went to find a hotel. After asking around, they settled on the Auburn Hotel, which was in the middle as far as prices and amenities went, and went up to leave their gear and saddlebags in their room. “The night is still young,” Heyes observed, much revived by good food and good coffee, “and I saw three saloons on the way here from the café. Which one shall we try?” He got no answer. “Kid?”
“Tell you what, Heyes,” his cousin said, stretching full length on the bed nearest the window, “you go without me. I think I’m staying right here.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah. I just don’t want to move, is all.” The woman in the café, Miss Lillian, had guessed right; his back was killing him, thanks to a couple of hard kicks from one of Caldwell’s men. How had she figured that out?
Heyes followed his partner’s train of thought. “That’s quite a girl, all right. I like her spunk. Who knows, maybe we even got us a friend in this place.” He smiled ruefully. “She had us pegged dead to rights, didn’t she?”
Kid grinned. “You should’ve seen your face!” he chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman immune to the Hannibal Heyes charm before.” Then his face grew sober. “You know, I guess she’d have to be pretty tough, or somebody’d take advantage of her six days a week. Wonder what she’s doing way out here in the middle of nowhere… she ain’t married, and she ain’t a widow.” As pretty as she is? That’s impossible. And there’s somethin’ sad about her. I’m not sure how I know, but…
“Don’t even think about her, Kid. If Caldwell shows up, we have to be raising dust out of town ten minutes later.”
Hannibal Heyes left the Auburn Hotel, and went for a reconnoiter of the town, or at least the part of it they were in. They could take a ride around the other parts of it tomorrow. He noted the locations of the bank, the sheriff’s office, and telegraph office. Near the bank, an office had the neatly painted sign, ‘Richard L. Bancroft, Counsellor at Law.’ An attorney, huh? That’s more civilization than I was expecting in a place like this.
He walked past the school house, with its hand-painted signs saying “Congregational Church meets here Sun 10:00 Worship Wed. 6:00 pm Prayer Meeting”, and “Square Dance 7 – 10 pm. 2nd and 4th Sat.”
Having oriented himself, Heyes then decided to see if he could improve their financial situation by a few well-spent hours in the “Black Bear” Saloon.
It was approaching one o’clock in the morning when he walked back to the hotel, satisfied with his success. One hundred fifty-three dollars would last them a while, and give them a stake to get into some higher-stakes games as well. There had to be some— Telluride was making a name as a mining boom town.
“Hey, Kid, it’s just me,” he said softly as he let himself into the hotel room. There was no response; Kid was so thoroughly asleep that he didn’t awaken or even stir when Heyes came in. Heyes looked around—a few damp spots on the carpet showed that Kid had had a bath brought in, and there were both empty packets of the headache powder carefully discarded. An issue of the Rocky Mountain News from a week ago lay on the chair.
He bolted the door to their room, and peered out the window to see what was happening in the street. Satisfied, and feeling safe for the first time since Pueblo, Heyes blew out the lamp, got into the other bed, and surrendered to sleep.
[1] Nowadays, Telluride lies in San Miguel County, which was split from Ouray County in 1883. At the time of this story, Ouray County had not yet been divided.