The Darkest Winter Read online

  Because of his familiarity with that, Breckinridge didn’t give the man a second glance. He eased aside, taking Dulcy with him, so the newcomer could step past them and they could be on their way.

  Instead, the man stopped short, stared at them, and exclaimed, “Dulcy?”

  Breckinridge felt her stiffen beside him. She said, “I . . . I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know you.”

  “Sure you do,” the man said. His voice boomed out and filled the store. “I’m Bill McConnell. Hell, girl, I was a regular customer o’ yours when you were whorin’ at Tom Mahone’s tavern over in Missouri!”

  Chapter 22

  Horror filled Breckinridge . . . Horror for Dulcy’s sake as he saw how stricken she looked. He’d had a hunch what this riverman was going to say, or at least the general drift of it, but the realization hadn’t dawned on him in time for him to stop McConnell from blurting out those words.

  Dulcy swallowed hard and managed to say, “You’ve made a mistake, sir. You’ve taken me for someone else.”

  A lecherous grin spread across McConnell’s face. “I took you, all right, gal. Every time I had enough coin in my pocket to pay for it! ’Twas money well spent, too. You were one o’ the best I ever had.” His gaze switched to Breckinridge. “When you’re done with this fella, come and look me up. Maybe you’d give me a good price, you know, for old time’s sake.”

  Everyone in the store had stopped what they were doing in order to turn and look at the loud-voiced confrontation near the entrance. Dulcy must have felt those shocked stares. Breckinridge certainly did. Then, abruptly, Dulcy pulled away from him, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed.

  Breckinridge exploded.

  He lunged forward, taking the riverman by surprise. McConnell appeared to have been drinking, although he didn’t seem drunk. He didn’t react anywhere near quickly enough to get out of the way of the punch Breckinridge threw. Breck’s fist crashed into his jaw with enough force to send the man stumbling backward out of control. McConnell went through the open door, across the porch, and then toppled into the street, landing on his back practically underneath the hooves of a wagon team.

  Breckinridge charged out of the store. Behind him, Dulcy cried, “Breck, no!” He was too furious to pay any attention to her. The object of his wrath was right in front of him. That was all he could see through the red haze of fury that had dropped over his eyes.

  Stunned though McConnell was, he realized he was in danger of being trampled by the wagon team and rolled aside to get away from the spooked horses. Breckinridge left the porch in a flying leap that carried him into McConnell just as the riverman heaved up to his knees. The impact knocked McConnell backward again. Breck started punching—wild, looping blows that might have killed McConnell if all of them had landed.

  McConnell jerked his head aside and brought up a knee. He sunk it into Breckinridge’s belly with enough force to make Breck fold over. McConnell was a big, strong man, too, and desperation forced him to get his wits about him again. He grabbed Breck’s shoulders and heaved the redhead aside.

  Quite a few of the store’s customers had followed Breckinridge out the door. They clustered on the porch and shouted encouragement to the fighters. McConnell, no doubt feeling himself to be the aggrieved party, scrambled up and went after Breck. He drew back his foot and sank a brutal kick in his opponent’s ribs. Breck grunted from the impact, but when McConnell tried to kick him again, he was able to reach up and grab the riverman’s boot. Yelling in fury, Breck thrust upward on it. McConnell lost his balance and fell heavily again.

  That gave Breckinridge time to reach his feet. So did McConnell. They came together like a couple of maddened bulls, standing toe to toe and slugging away at each other. The powerful blows rocked each man, but they caught themselves and bored in again.

  Breckinridge was only vaguely aware of the commotion the battle was causing along Knoxville’s main street. People came running from all directions to witness this epic struggle. The combat swayed back and forth until Breck and McConnell were pounding at each other in the middle of the street. Both men were smeared with mud and horse dung. Fists had opened cuts on their faces. Breck tasted blood in his mouth and blinked it out of his eyes. McConnell was in even worse shape. His face was swelling already, his features almost unrecognizable.

  He had stamina, though, and absorbed the punishment Breckinridge dished out while delivering plenty of his own. As far as Breck was concerned, the other man’s blows were little more than insect bites. He ignored them and kept walloping McConnell as hard and fast as he could.

  Eventually, Breckinridge’s slight advantages in height, weight, and reach began to have an effect. McConnell’s punches grew weaker, his reactions slower. He blocked fewer of Breck’s punches, and each blow that landed accelerated the process. Finally, Breck hooked a left into McConnell’s midsection that doubled over the riverman and put his chin in perfect position for the uppercut that Breck started around his knees. The punch landed with a sound like an ax biting deep into a tree. McConnell’s head jerked so far back it seemed like it was about to come off his shoulders. His feet left the ground. He crashed down on his back, like a falling tree this time, and lay there motionless except for his heaving chest. His arms were flung out to the sides. He couldn’t move them anymore. Air rasped over his bloody, swollen lips and through his now misshapen nose.

  Awed silence hung over the street. People stared, clearly shocked to see a brute such as Bill McConnell laid so low.

  Breckinridge turned away from the unconscious man. He brought up a shaking hand and dragged the back of it across his mouth to wipe away some of the blood. A sharply indrawn breath hissed at the pain that caused. He lifted his eyes toward the porch in front of the mercantile and took a couple of staggering steps in that direction as he searched for Dulcy.

  She wasn’t there.

  Breckinridge increased his pace. The spectators gathered on the porch hastily got out of his way as he stumbled onto it. Maybe she was still inside the store, he thought. He stomped through the open doors and looked around.

  Still no sign of her.

  “Mr. Emerson!” Breckinridge said as he spotted the store’s proprietor. The swollen lips made his voice thick. “Mr. Emerson, where is she?”

  Emerson shook his head. “I don’t know, lad. After the fight started, she ran off down the street, crying.” The storekeeper paused, then asked, “Those things McConnell said . . . were they true?”

  The look Breckinridge gave him made Emerson take a quick step back. The man held up his hands, palms out.

  “I’m sorry, son. I had no right—”

  Breckinridge ignored the apology, turned his back, and stalked out of the store. He was starting to catch his breath now. His ears still rung a little from some of the blows McConnell had landed, and his vision was blurry from the blood that had run into his eyes, but he could see and hear well enough. He looked up and down the street, searching for Dulcy, and when he didn’t see her, he grabbed a bystander’s arm.

  “Where’d she go?” Breckinridge demanded. “The gal who was with me, where’d she go?”

  The man whose arm he held had gone pale from pain, fear, or both. He stammered, “I . . . I don’t know—”

  Breckinridge shoved him aside and turned to another man, who flinched back before Breck could take hold of him. “Where’d she go?” Breck bellowed.

  He had to confront three more frightened men before one of them pointed a trembling finger and said, “If . . . if you’re talking about that pretty lady with dark brown hair, I . . . I think I saw her heading into the tavern down yonder.”

  Breckinridge looked at the building the man indicated. Its walls were constructed from large, irregular pieces of red and brown stone mortared together, and it had a red slate roof. The sign hanging over its door proclaimed it to be the RED TOP TAVERN. Breck remembered it well. In his earlier days, he had downed quite a few mugs of ale in there.

  He stomped toward it now, th
e crowd parting to let him through. Behind him, several men tried to lift the still mostly senseless McConnell to his feet, but they weren’t having much success. Breckinridge didn’t care about that. The fight was over and forgotten now.

  All he cared about was finding Dulcy.

  Some of the people followed him, evidently thinking that something else interesting—or violent—was going to happen. Breckinridge became aware of these human vultures straggling along behind him. He stopped, turned, and snarled at them. That caused the bystanders to scatter. Breck reached out, caught hold of the heavy door’s latch, and hauled it open. He stepped into the tavern and paused, his eyes needing to adjust for a moment before he could see what was going on in the dimly lit room.

  His heart slugged heavily as he spotted Dulcy sitting on a bench at one of the tables. She was so close to the man beside her that she might as well have been in his lap. She had one arm around the man’s shoulder and was using the other to caress his beard as she spoke softly into his ear.

  But like everyone else in the tavern, they turned their heads toward the door to look at the redheaded man-mountain looming there.

  “What in the blue blazes?” Breckinridge yelled. He started toward the long table where Dulcy sat. The man she had been cozying up to hurriedly abandoned her. The other men at the table scrambled to their feet and headed for the bar, too. A burly, grizzled, mostly bald man stood behind the bar. His name was Mackey, Breck recalled. He reached down, picked up a bung starter from a shelf, and laid it on the bar just in case.

  Dulcy stayed where she was. She regarded Breckinridge with a cool stare as he came up to her. She didn’t say anything, though, so after a second he exclaimed, “What the hell are you doin’?”

  “What does it look like?” she asked. “I’m working at my profession.”

  “Your profession, as you call it, is bein’ my wife!”

  “We’re not married,” Dulcy said.

  “We’re fixin’ to be!”

  “No, we’re not,” she said. Her voice was hard and flat. “It was a mistake to believe that we ever could be.”

  Breckinridge flung a big hand toward the doorway and said, “Because of what that stupid bastard said in the store? I gave him a thrashin’ he’ll never forget! I busted up that son of a bitch good!”

  “And what did that change?” Dulcy asked. “Did it make me any less of a whore?”

  “You ain’t a whore!”

  “I was. You know that, Breck. Nothing can change that. Not ever.”

  A feeling of helplessness welled up inside him at her calm, almost icy resolve. He didn’t like it. He had always been able to grab hold of his problems and shoot them, punch them, or just shake them until they went away. But as he looked at Dulcy, he realized that none of the things he was really good at would help in this situation.

  He had to try to make her see that she was wrong. He said, “You’re upset because o’ what that fella said, and I don’t blame you.”

  “It was the truth. I said that I didn’t remember him, but I do.” She smiled faintly. “He was a good customer. Not as rough as you might have thought he would be.”

  The image that called up in Breckinridge’s mind made him a little sick. He knew perfectly well how Dulcy had lived in the past, but like the fight with McConnell, it was over and done with and didn’t mean anything anymore. He could put all those thoughts away and not let them bother him. He’d pondered it some, and he knew it was true. He wasn’t fooling himself.

  “You ain’t gonna make me feel bad about you,” he said, quietly now as his rage subsided and the fear of losing her took its place. “You could never make me think I’m makin’ a mistake by marryin’ you. I done plenty o’ things in my life I ain’t very proud of, but I figured that by gettin’ hitched to you, I’d be makin’ a new start. I figured we could just forget everything else and worry about what’s gonna happen from now on.”

  “That’s what I am worried about.” She finally stood up and faced him. “You know what’s going to happen, Breckinridge. Some gossip is probably already riding out to your parents’ farm to tell them everything McConnell said. By the time we could get there, your mother and father and brothers will all know that I’ m a—”

  “Don’t say it,” he rasped.

  “A harlot, then. A trollop. A fallen woman. Call it whatever you want. It’s the truth, and they’re going to know it.” She sighed. “I wish now I had told them myself, the way I wanted to. It would have ended things between you and me, just as surely, but at least I would have known that I was honest with them. They’re good people, and they deserve the truth.”

  “What about you?” Breckinridge demanded. “What do you deserve?”

  Dulcy smiled and gestured to indicate the tavern around her and the men who were watching with avid interest. “This is what I deserve, Breck. If you can’t see that, you’re a fool.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, unable to come up with any words to refute her argument, even though he still believed she was completely wrong. At last he said the only thing that was still in him.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said in a voice tinged with sadness, “but it doesn’t change a damned thing.”

  Breckinridge had never run from trouble. He had always been the sort to charge right into it. But he had never faced anything quite like this, either. He stood there, his hands opening and closing, his breath trapped in his throat, a band around his chest that tightened more and more until it seemed to be on the verge of squeezing the very soul out of him.

  Then, feeling closer to panic than he ever had in his life, he turned and rushed out of the tavern, stumbling into the road. He put his hands to his head as the blood pounded madly inside his skull. Instinct guided his steps back toward the wagon parked in front of the mercantile.

  No one got in his way.

  No one would have dared.

  Chapter 23

  “That was just about the end of it,” Breckinridge said to Morgan as they sat on the log next to the creek. Morgan’s pipe had gone out while he listened to the story, but he hadn’t gone to the trouble of relighting it. “I know I went back to the store and found that Mr. Emerson had packed up the supplies my ma wanted and put ’em on the wagon. Then I drove back out to the farm. But you can’t hardly prove any o’ that by me, because I don’t really remember any of it. I remember the look on Ma’s face, though, when she first saw me, and I knew then that Dulcy was right, somebody had already been out there and told ’em what happened. She looked at me like she had when I was a little kid and my dog died, only this was a whole heap worse.”

  Into the silence that settled down over them, Morgan said, “Damn it, Breck, I’m sorry. I wish now I’d just left you alone. I didn’t mean to stir up so many bad memories.”

  Breckinridge laughed humorlessly. “Seems to me that’s exactly what you meant to do. But that ain’t necessarily a bad thing, so you don’t have to apologize for it. It’s been like . . . havin’ a sore place on my soul that won’t go away. It’s just been a-festerin’ and gettin’ worse. It needed to be opened up, so all the bad stuff could be let out.” He leaned forward, laced his fingers together between his knees, and nodded. “Now it has.”

  “You mean . . . you feel better now?”

  “I reckon I do. It kind of surprises me, too.”

  After a moment, Morgan said, “I have to know . . . What happened to Dulcy?”

  “Well, here’s the thing. My ma and pa and every one of my brothers told me to get on back to Knoxville and fetch her. My pa said he didn’t give a damn what anybody thought, he’d gotten to know her and figured she was a fine gal and thought I still ought to marry her. Ma said the same, although I could tell it really did bother her a mite, Dulcy’s past and all, I mean. But us Wallaces stick together through thick and thin, and if I wanted to get hitched to her, that was what I ought to do. Edward and the other boys said the same. But I was so tore up inside—not from that fight w
ith McConnell, you understand, I got over that in a hurry—but from the way she just up and give up on us, that it was the next day before I let ’em talk me into it. Last place I’d seen her was at the Red Top, so I went there and found that she’d left a letter for me with Mackey, the fella who ran the place. It said that she was leavin’, and that she wouldn’t ever cause me no more trouble, and that if I really did love her, I hadn’t ought to try to find her.”

  “But you did try to find her, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did! I searched high and low all over that part o’ the country for weeks.” Breckinridge sighed. “I guess I ain’t as good a tracker as I figured I was. I never turned up a trace of her, Morgan. She was gone like she hadn’t ever been there. Finally, there was just nothin’ left to do except say good-bye to my folks and brothers and head on back to St. Louis to meet you, like we’d planned.” The brawny shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “You know everything that happened after that.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. I’m sure sorry, Breck. It’s not fair, the way things worked out.”

  “Life ain’t fair. Or I reckon maybe it is, on account of sooner or later it r’ars up and wallops everybody in the face, don’t it? You just got to shake off the punches and go on.” Breckinridge laughed again, and this time the sound had some genuine warmth in it. “I got to admit, havin’ good friends like you and Runnin’ Elk and White Owl helps. And bein’ with Dawn Wind . . . Well, I reckon that’s gonna help that sore place inside me go away. I can already feel it gettin’ better. Now, you just got to do one more thing for me.”

  “Anything, Breck, you know that.”

  Breckinridge slapped his friend on the shoulder, nearly knocking him off the log, and said, “Take them pelts to St. Louis and get a good price for ’em, then come back here in the spring and we’ll do it all over again.”