Moser wagged his head, smiling broadly. “Damn, won’t that be something. Us having new boots and maybe a new shirt to go along with ’em—and a brand new shiny rifle too.”
“We got to get our outfits before we go drinking up everything we earned.”
“How ’bout some poker, Jonah?”
“Does figure that we’re due some fun, Artus. Let’s get into town and see what they got for us in the way of trail fixin’s.”
They saddled their Creek horses down in the tent shantytown and mounted. Jonah cradled the old muzzle loader across his lap as they pointed their noses east, a stiff, chill wind at their back, troubling the long, brown hair that now brushed Hook’s shoulders. Icy flakes hammered them in a growing swirl of white against the monotonous brown gray world as they pushed back toward Abilene.
Hard for a man to really tell, with as thick as the clouds hung overhead, but it was midafternoon by the time they reached the new town. Within another hour, they were stepping from a mercantile, wearing unfamiliar new boots, new canvas britches, and calico shirts. With new, stiff pinch hats on their heads and new Spencer rifles cradled protectively in their arms. Hook and Moser tied their old clothes in saddlepacks at the edge of the wide street.
“What now, Jonah?” Moser sighed.
“Don’t think I ever seen you smile so big, cousin.”
“Never had so much to smile about, I s’pose. There was a time or two that last few months where I got to wondering if I’d make it through butchering out another buffalo. We was always bringing our meat in, and it disappeared quicker’n we could shoot and gut and skin.”
“You sure had a bad mouth on you there the last few months.”
“What you expect—up to my elbows in blood ever’ day. Smelling like a gut-eater all the time. Even caught myself turning up my nose at my own smell, Jonah. Come a time or two the wind shifted.”
“We do smell like two of the prairie’s finest, don’t we?”
“You reckon there’s a place a man can get some of this washed off?”
He looked up, then down the one street that Abilene boasted beside the newly laid track. “One of these watering holes bound to have some water they can heat up for a man wanting to scrape some prairie stink off him. C’mon.”
In minutes they were standing at a low bar, watching the approach of an ugly barman.
“Most fellas just like washing the dirt down with some of my whiskey,” he told the pair of buffalo hunters. “I suppose for a dollar I could get them out back to heat you some water you two could swish around in.” He shrugged and turned. “Follow me.”
They pushed past a blanket hung over a crude doorway, passing into a steamy, warm room where two stoves were crackling, pumping out plenty of heat. Beads of moisture popped out on Hook’s forehead, just standing there, his eyes peering through the foggy gloom.
“Hey! Get over here!” the barman ordered, then turned to whisper to the two men. “This bunch ain’t bad as a lot I’ve seen—ugly as sin and stupid to boot. But they do what I tell ’em, and they keep the place clean.”
Jonah watched two middle-aged squaws appear out of the gloom of lamplight and steam. Dark stains covered the fronts of their hide dresses, from sagging breasts to the soaked moccasins they wore on their feet.
“We take in laundry,” the barman explained, then smiled as if in need of no more explanation. “And if the price is right, either one of these ugly sisters can clean a man’s plow right proper. Damn, but Injun women is good in the blankets.”
He reached over and squeezed a woman, one hand on her rump, the other rubbing a breast. She looked at Moser and Hook with a faint smile, as if already figuring out what they had come for.
“No, they want to wash,” said the barman, loudly, as if the women were deaf just because they did not readily understand his English. “No poking now.” In sign with his hands and gyrating hips, he made the women understand that it was not fornication the customers had come for—but some of the squaws’ hot water instead.
“That’ll be two dollars,” he said.
When Jonah had paid him, the barman bent down and gave one of the squaws a sloppy kiss on the mouth, then turned through the blanket doorway, proud of himself as the woman wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and grimaced. The two squaws looked at the pair of men, wrinkling their noses slightly at the stench in the close room. Hook could tell that the smell of the buffalo hung heavy about them both. He pinched his fingers on his nostrils and made a wrinkled face to show he agreed with them.
Both old squaws smiled, then signaled the white men into the far reaches of the low-roofed back room, where they were shown low wooden tubs on the floor, filled with half-dirty water, a scum of soapsuds drifting on the surface. Jonah dabbed a finger into the water.
“Least it’s warm, cousin. You take that’un.”
“We gonna undress in front of these women?”
“They ain’t women, Artus. They just two old squaws.”
Jonah dropped his britches and hurried out of his boots. When he had his longhandles off, the rifle and the belt gun handy beside the tub, he stepped in and settled himself. “Now don’t this feel good. I ain’t had something like this soak in … last time was before I walked off to join General Price.”
“You been smelling a might gamy, that’s for—”
Jonah looked up when Artus stopped talking suddenly. Out of the foggy haze lit with two hissing oil lamps emerged a third woman, younger than the other two and the closest thing to pretty Jonah had seen in years. He swallowed hard, looking at the way her black hair gleamed in the saffron light as she pulled the hood from her head, her proud breasts pressed against the buckskin dress as she dragged the blanket capote off her shoulders.
“Lordee, Jonah—I didn’t figure on taking a bath in front of a girl.”
“She … she ain’t a girl, not rightly.” From what he could see, she was something damned closer to being a woman.
Now she flicked her shy eyes at them both, then bent to pick up the bundle she had carried in with her. Clothing, secured in a snow-stiffened canvas bag. One of the old women came over to her, talking in a foreign tongue. The girl set her bundle aside and went to a stove, where she picked up a steaming kettle. From it she poured a little hot water in Jonah’s tub, warming the water for the white man.
“You out—wash clothes,” she said brokenly.
Broken though they were, the words fell clearly English on his ears. Yet it took a moment more before they registered. In that time, Jonah found himself staring—absorbed in studying the way in which coming in from the cold had made the young woman’s high-boned, copper cheeks glow, how her hair lay plastered against the side of her head with melted snow and the overwhelming humidity of this low-roofed back room.
Jonah cursed himself. A faint, burning tingle rumbled across his loins, stirring what had been for so long dormant flesh. He had clearly been too long without a woman.
“She wants us out?” Moser asked.
“Seems so,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the woman, who put the kettle back on the stove. She then threw Moser a towel.
“I ain’t finished,” Artus said. “Just getting to enjoy this. ’Sides, we paid a dollar to sit and—”
“Looks like we ought to go play some cards, Artus. ’Pears our time is up lollygagging here in this soapy water.” He reached up to catch a towel the woman threw him, high enough in the air that he had to come out of the tub, standing just enough.
She smiled at Hook, admiringly, then turned away to go work with the two older women.
“Thank God that squaw looked away,” Moser complained. “I wasn’t about to come out with no woman staring at my privates like that. You didn’t tell me these Injun women are so bold they got no shame to ’em.”
Hook hurriedly dabbed the damp towel over the length of his shivering body, water puddling onto the rough- plank floor with the melting snow the young woman had dragged in. “Don’t know a thing about Injun women, cousin.”
“But you spent time out here.”
He grabbed for his longhandles. “Don’t mean I ever met an Injun woman. Can’t claim I ever seen a one, much less know anything about ’em. C’mon—grab your clothes. We got a poker table calling out to us.”
