The Threshold (45 page)

“You can’t be out now. You’ll have to wait here until it’s over.” The lady knelt to unbutton Callie’s coat. “You’re soaked through. I’ll have Dorothy warm you some soup.”

Callie’s eyes adjusted enough to pick out a staircase rising from one side of the hall and a loaded coat tree at its base. “But I can’t leave her out there.”

Another shape formed in a doorway across from the staircase. Callie knew the voice but couldn’t make out the features of the man. “What is it, Lydia? Has it started?”

“No, Father, a waif in the street looking for her mother. We can’t allow her out now.”

The man sighed. “You will find your strays, won’t you?”

Lydia guided her into a parlor and pushed her into a chair next to a stove. The air was old and stuffed with heat. She unbuttoned Callie’s boots and drew them off.

“Until what is over?” Callie asked, but Lydia was gone. Callie blinked until she saw the face of the elderly lawyer who’d accused her father of planning to blow up the railroad to keep the militia out of Telluride. He’d sounded so much more powerful in that room in the courthouse. He sat now and put one foot up on a stool, his hands cupping a goblet with dark drink at its bottom. “I’m not a waif or a stray,” Callie told him. “I’m Callie O’Connell.”

“I would have thought everyone had been warned by now. Those union devils are marching on the town and no one is safe until they’ve been … O’Connell?” He leaned so close to her she could see the hair in his nose. “You weren’t sent off on the train this morning?”

Callie explained about her mother leaving the train as Lydia presented her with a bowl of soup and some tea. If the union was marching into town, would Bram be able to persuade Pa to stay in Ridgway? Did Callie now have to worry about them too? She was too tired to find the strength to decide what to do next. The heat of the room and the food lulled her senses more. Finally she said, “You’re Lawyer Barada.”

“And you’re the spawn of an anarchist,” he answered. “But as long as you must be in our midst, you might as well make yourself useful, Callie O’Connell.”

“Father, she’s little more than a child and distraught over her mother. She—”

“She can help you take the children to the attics, where it’s safer. Dorothy and I shall hold the fort down here. Off with you.”

Callie swallowed some more of the soup in a tiny attic room with a narrow cot and a washstand. She sat next to a freckled boy and his younger sister. “May I please have my coat and shoes? It’s cold up here.”

“They’re drying behind the kitchen stove.” Lydia handed her a blanket and wrapped the children in quilts. Then she stood at the window and shivered. “Finish that soup and hush. We’ll find your mother when it’s safe to be out.”

“My pa is not an anarchist.” The soup was cold already but the chill in the air cut through Callie’s grogginess. “He’s an Irishman.”

“What’s a pa?” the little girl asked, eyeing Callie with suspicion. She had long sausage curls like Callie once wore.

“She’s talking about her father.” The boy snickered.

“Your children are rude,” Callie told his mother, and slipped off the bed. “I thank you for wanting to help me, but I have a family too.”

“Your own manners are not above reproach, miss,” Lydia snapped. The planes of her face were so much softer than Ma’am’s. Her scent was as delicious as that worn by the fine ladies at the hotel as she knelt and hugged Callie to her. “I’m sorry and I do understand your worry. It’s just that desperate men are marching on the town.”

Callie pushed away and went to the window. This “fort” provided a clear view of the street above the shoveled paths that could hide her mother if Callie were down there. She could see almost everywhere, but no dark form without a hat scurried below. “Do you have a window this high to look out on the back of your house?”

“There are only paths to the privies out there.” But Lydia led her to the door.

“Looking for her maw,” the boy explained to his sister, and hooted like Johann Peterson the school troublemaker up at Alta used to do.

But there was another high window in the narrow room across the hall. As Lydia had predicted, paths led only to sheds and privies in backyards as far to either side as Callie could see. All were empty.

“Did you find a maw?” Lydia’s daughter asked when they returned. She and her brother stood at the window now, their quilts at their feet. “Is that a maw?”

Callie rushed to look down where the little girl pointed to an oblong object in the front yard. It had a bar of different-colored glass across its top. Its sides opened outward and gentlemen with bare heads and light clothing stepped into the snow.

On Colorado Avenue horses tugged the Gatling gun from the direction of the hotel with the sheriff and his deputies riding to each side and a horde of mounted soldiers behind it and more on foot behind them. Across the street Ma’am darted from a shoveled passageway and turned down Townsend Avenue back toward the depot, her pins gone and her hair flying.

And Callie was flying out of the attic room and down two flights of stairs. The necklace Elsie’s little Margaret had insisted she wear flopped so that Callie grabbed onto it to hold it down. The quartz stone on the end of the chain felt hot. She turned at the bottom of the stairs and raced toward the light at the end of the hall, almost colliding with Lawyer Barada as he emerged from the parlor. She’d guessed right. This was the kitchen and a heavy woman sat at a table peeling apples.

“Here, you!” the woman shouted as Callie grabbed her boots and slipped them on without buttoning, yanked her coat from a hook on the wall, and took off back down the hall. This time she did collide with the lawyer. Lydia was there too by now and made a grab for her arm as Callie fought to slide back the bolt on the door. The bolt was well oiled and moved smoothly and Callie managed to slip out of two pairs of hands as if she too were oiled.

52

Captain Bulkeley Wells had argued with the general about bringing the wonderful Gatling gun on this expedition when word was sent on the telephone wire from the Junction that strikers were headed for Telluride. Moving the weapon was too slow and Wells preferred to meet the rednecks on the road before they made it to the camp. He shivered now in anticipation and frustration riding beside General Bell, behind the lumbering Gatling and Cal Rutan with his unpredictable gunmen. The latters’ duty supposedly was to see that any sympathizers in the town did not pick off the Gatling’s escort before it could be positioned to fire on the enemy. Actually there was not a man in the lot who would miss out on the bloodletting even with an army to do the job instead.

The sound of the army at his back straightened Wells’s spine. But he was stunned when he spied McCree Mackelwain. This was the second time he’d faced this man from horseback over a snowbank, this man who could seemingly disappear as if by sorcery through a door to another world. One of his women was trying to pull the O’Connell girl into an odd contraption—some sort of enclosed vehicle with glass windows. Homer Barada and his daughter watched from the doorway.

“Not here,” Wells shouted to the general as the order was given to release the horses from the Gatling and prepare for battle. “We’re in the town still.”

“No time,” the general answered. “The enemy is upon us.” The enemy had halted down the street, a ragtag band of ridiculously small numbers.

A man with huge green spectacles and signs sewn on his coat announcing him to be the sheriff of San Miguel County climbed the snowbank out of Barada’s front yard. “What the fuck?” he asked in amazement, and sank up to his crotch. “You making a movie or something?” He picked up a handful of snow and tasted it. “This shit’s real, man.”

Wells’s horse, Horatio, began to spin under him and stopped only to rear. By the time he was under control the Gatling’s horses were being led away, back through the cavalry already hemmed in by heaped snow to either side and causing an unmilitary fracas as the infantry behind tried to push forward. The Gatling was to be in the forefront always and now could not be easily moved. Conflicting commands shot everywhere as Wells tried to bring his own Troop A to order.

The false sheriff with the foul mouth extricated himself from the snowbank and fell into the street practically under Horatio’s hooves. Bob Meldrum appeared, his own horse giving trouble, and Bulkeley ordered him to remove the creature from the path of battle. But General Bell had drawn his sword, shouting at one and all, to either begin the attack or to restore order to the ranks. In the chaos it was impossible to tell which. The general collided with Meldrum and both were unseated. Three men now scrambled on the snow and ice at Horatio’s feet. The animal made to leap the bank into Barada’s yard. Bulkeley resisted his mount’s impulse only by cruel measures and with harrowing danger to himself and those below him but just in time to see the general’s horse and that of Meldrum skirt the Gatling and take off toward the enemy.

“Give me your horse, man,” General Sherman Bell ordered, and grabbed a stirrup. “Dammit, I’m in command here.” Disabused of his need to climb the snowbank, Horatio resumed his spinning and sent the general flying. Wells grew dizzy before he finally found himself thrown off and at the steed’s feet with the others.

“He’s not actually trained for battle,” he explained to General Sherman Bell, and regained his feet in time to see Horatio’s amazing leap over the Gatling gun and down the street to join his fellows.

The sheriff in green spectacles asked Wells, “You the director, or what? Where’s the cameras?”

The general commandeered another horse by pulling its rider off and raised his sword once more. Wells climbed the bank now to find the enemy advancing again and Simon Doud, the Pinkerton agent, sniffing at the contraption in Barada’s yard. Mr. Cree Mackelwain had discovered a hard patch of snow and peered over at the consternation in the street. He was laughing. For a moment Wells saw the humor in this hectic but dangerous situation too and their eyes met in a meeting of minds so profound and unexpected he could almost feel the challenge and questioning beneath the other man’s mirth. But Wells had no time for questions and he turned to leap upon the horse offered up to him by one of his officers.

Captain Bulkeley Wells rode his borrowed horse into the fray.

Simon Doud had purposely refused a mount, considering his role as one of observer and investigator. He’d walked among the infantry until it had become disorganized and then had sidestepped the turmoil around the Gatling gun. But sight of the metal object on Barada’s lawn through the snow passage shoveled to the lawyer’s house had caused Doud to alter his course. Investigating was what he’d been trained to do. There was always someone needed with a clear head to make reports. And everything suspicious at a time like this was worthy of investigation.

Two very tall men wearing tight-fitting suits of gray with no overcoats opened a door on either side and stepped out. One produced a glazed card and flashed it before Doud’s eyes, retrieving it before it could be read. “You want to tell us what’s going on here?”

Doud liked neither the man’s tone nor his bearing. “I would very much like to know what this metal object is, sir.” If there was an answer he didn’t hear it over the growing confusion in the street and the noisy struggles of a girl being pulled inside the object by a woman in trousers. As Doud moved to the aid of the girl he was physically restrained by one of the tight-suited gentlemen. “What’s your name, mister?”

“Simon P. Doud, investigator for the—”

“Hell, join the crowd. What do you think we are?” And with that the man began pushing and pulling Doud around the object. Doud decided they must be instruments of the dreaded union and put up his own struggle. He and his captor were impeded by the snow but eventually Doud found his arms pinned behind his back and himself propelled headfirst into the shiny object. The girl pleaded and fought from an overstuffed seat in front of him.

“Release that child or I’ll have the militia off the street and here to see that you do.” The other false investigator slipped in and closed the door in front of Doud. He was hemmed in.

“Where’s Mackelwain?” one of his captors demanded of the woman, but she ignored him, continued arguing with the girl, and at one point even tried to hug her.

Doud wondered if his voice could carry through the metal and glass over the lamentations of the females in the front seat. And if it did, could it be heard by his allies in the street, who were making plenty of noise of their own? He could see over piled snow—horses rearing, hats flying, and men obviously in sore straits.

“Should I go get Mackelwain?”

“Sheriff’s out there. Let him do it.”

“I should like you to know,” Doud put in, “that the sheriff and I are on very good terms.”

“Callie, it’s not safe out there,” the woman said. “Where did you get that pendant? It should be destroyed or buried or … Here, you can’t have that.” They struggled over something on the seat between them. “It’s evidence. Of what I’m not sure. The sheriff—”

“It’s highgrade …” Callie quieted, leaned away against the glass of the door at her back.

“Well, yes, it’s highgrade. Actually it came from under your house in Alta.”

“You took Pa’s highgrade?”

“It could have been anybody’s who lived there in all the years after you moved out. It could—” But before the woman could finish her sentence, Callie had opened the door and slid out and away, carrying a brown paper bag.

Doud was delighted for her and wished he could do the same. One of his captors did open his door and try to grab the woman when she too left the vehicle to give chase to the girl, but he slammed it in Doud’s face. The other man drew him back before he could decide which gizmo on the door released the hidden latch.

Cree had left the sheriff’s car when the investigators did but hadn’t planned to wander far from Aletha. When she went back to the real world he intended to be with her. But the racket in the street drew him farther from the car than he’d intended. He had to get back and he had to warn the sheriff to stay close to Aletha. But the sheriff was gone. Cree found himself staring at Bulkeley Wells over the snowbank instead.