“Butler, where the hell are you?”
Deep down, the worry just kept building. He’d expected Butler to come back. But in the following days there had been no word. As his anxiety built, Doc played to his strengths; what was the point of knowing people who knew everything if they couldn’t locate a lost lunatic? But no one in Big Ed’s, Francis Heatley’s, Ed Jumps’s, or Patrick O’Connell’s circles had heard anything. These were the people who made it their business to know everyone else’s business, and they had their networks alerted to report any sighting or rumor about Butler.
Doc had even gone to the extreme of offering a hundred-dollar reward. The culmination of that so far apparently futile venture was that every lunatic in the city had been rounded up by various posses of drunks and delivered to Doc’s doorstep in hopes that it might be the wayward Butler. It had been a hell of an incentive for creativity. For a hundred dollars a man could stay “roostered” on hooch for a couple of weeks.
“Me and my damn mouth,” he whispered to himself as he stepped around a battered freight wagon and its team of drooping oxen. From an alley came the clatter of tin cans. Moments later, a pack of half-starved dogs shot out, startling a passing rider’s horse into a bucking fit. Hot on their heels a man appeared in pursuit, waving a stick and cursing as the canines vanished into the thoroughfare.
Ah, Denver!
What the hell had possessed him that day? Was he just as crazy as Butler? Throat tickling, he stifled a cough, and shook his head as he batted at the flies that buzzed up from a slimy green puddle of something in the street.
He’d gotten his fill of flies in Camp Douglas and hated the damn things. Denver City’s manure-filled streets, lines of rickety outhouses, piles of half-rotted garbage, and tossed tins bred millions of the buzzing beasts—not to mention the alleys where drunks and vagabonds shit, pissed, and vomited their guts out. Nor was there any shortage of animal carcasses decomposing in the sun and crawling with maggots. Denver swarmed with flies like hell swelled with sin.
At his surgery, Doc fought a constant war with the beasts. Even in benighted Camp Douglas, they’d finally figured out that flies carried contagion.
At the corner, a man perched on a freight wagon and called out, “I got the last canned peaches in Denver! Two dollars a can! Ain’t no more to be had! Get ’em now! Twenty cans left! Won’t be no more.”
A small crowd stood around, most with hands in pockets, some fingering their last coins and wondering if it was worth the cost. Back in the United States a can of peaches might have sold for ten cents.
Being summer, the grass was up, which meant the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had shut down the Platte River Trail in the north, the Smoky Hill Trail across Kansas, and the Kiowa and southern Cheyenne had closed the Arkansas River route in the south. Word, however, was that some fool general named Custer was chasing back and forth across the Plains in an effort to defeat the heathen once and for all.
Good luck on that.
Doc, as he always did, experienced that little surge of hope as he opened the door to his surgery and stepped in. A quick scan of the room showed no Butler. Instead a thick-shouldered Irishman sat across the desk from Aggie. He wore a fine broadcloth sack suit over a shaw-collared vest. An expensive dark-brown felt homburg rested at his elbow on the desk.
As the man rose to his feet, Doc figured him as being in his early forties, maybe five foot six, and white was infiltrating the fiery red hair at his temples. Whiskey or frostbite had left its trace in the veins in his pug nose, but the green eyes that fixed on Doc were as shrewd and cutting as a ten-dollar Bowie.
“Ah, let me guess,” the Irishman said, offering his hand. “Ye must be Dr. Hancock. I’m Patrick O’Reilly and most pleased to meet ye. Jist come t’ check on Aggie, here. An’ ’tis a wonder. Yer a miracle worker, Dr. Hancock. Me Aggie, she’s near to the perfect rose I’ve always known.”
“Philip Hancock, sir. At your service.” He glanced at Aggie and winked to set her at ease. He’d often wondered at the relationship between these two. In the weeks since Aggie had been boarding with him, his interest had grown as had his discomfort.
She’d been the madam in one of the most prominent parlor houses in Central City. He’d also heard that it had been burned the day of her assault. That she was essentially wiped out and destitute, yet here sat O’Reilly, looking after her welfare? He cringed at the history they must have, at the intimacies they’d shared.
Over the weeks, he’d rather taken to Aggie’s company. And, though it seemed sacrilege to admit, her cooking was a thousand times better than Butler’s. Even given the scanty rations that dwindled with each day that the trails remained closed.
She delighted him with her little jokes, the wry sense of humor, and quick wit. More than once, she’d assisted him with emergencies in the surgery when Dr. Elsner wasn’t available. Aggie didn’t have a squeamish bone in her body when it came to blood, effluvia, pain, or excrement.
And now her rich and powerful patron was back, smiling at her across the desk.
Doc wanted to laugh with futility.
“Doc?” She pointed to a covered tin resting on the side of the desk. “I brought hot biscuits, butter, and side pork. I figured you’d have a hunger on.” She paused, brow lifting. “How was
