“But he went to jail instead,” Chris prompted.
The women exchanged looks. “During the night, some of the men decided not to wait to hang him—not that I believe in that sort of thing—but the way they rescued him, well…”
Chris waited patiently.
One of the women leaned forward in conspiracy. “The ah, ah…”
“What Ellen’s trying to say is that the harlots of this town banded together and, carrying rifles, they protected this Mr. Tynan until the federal marshal could get here.”
“They also demanded a new trial and the marshal said there wasn’t any proof that he’d actually fired the gun that had killed the man—there were lots of guns being fired that day—so the marshal gave him life imprisonment instead of hanging.”
Chris took a deep breath. “Who is the red-haired woman?”
The women stiffened, showing their goodness and virtue. “Just one of them. That Tynan stays in her saloon when he’s in town.”
“He really can be very nice,” said a pretty young girl at the back of the group.
A woman who had to be the girl’s mother looked shocked. She turned to Chris. “Some of the girls here have no sense. He’s a no-good waster, travels around and makes the girls fall in love with him, then leaves them crying. You’re best to stay away from the likes of him, Miss Dallas.”
Chris moved toward the door. “I can’t thank you ladies enough for telling me this, but now I have a story to research.” She looked at the women and smiled. “I’ve always wanted to know what the inside of a house of prostitution looks like, haven’t you?”
For a moment, the women were too stunned to speak, but they considered Chris to be one of them. They’d read her articles for years and they felt as if they knew her.
“Yes,” one of the women in the back sighed and the others began to laugh.
“Wish me luck,” she called over her shoulder as she left the dress shop and made her way to the red-haired woman’s saloon. Behind her, she heard murmurs of how brave she was.
There were only two cowboys in the saloon when she entered, sitting at a table listlessly playing cards. A big, aproned bartender was sweeping the floor.
“I’m looking for someone, a tall woman with red hair,” Chris said. “Is she here?”
“Not to ladies, she ain’t.”
“Joe,” came a voice from the head of the stairs and Chris looked up to see the red-haired woman. “This here little lady is Nola Dallas, the one that dressed up as a showgirl, remember?”
The faces of the bartender and the two cowboys changed as they looked at Chris. “Come on up,” the woman called and Chris went up the stairs.
The woman led her to a large room that was very pretty if a bit loud in color for Chris’s taste.
“I’m Red,” the woman said, motioning Chris to a horsehair sofa. “You wanta drink? I ain’t got any tea.”
“Red?” Chris asked.
“On account of the hair. I gave up trying to have a name because everybody called me Red anyway, so why fight it? Now, what can I do for you?”
Chris withdrew a notebook and a pencil from her handbag and tried to look professional. “I believe you know Mr. Tynan. Do you know where he is now?”
Red laughed. “If I know Ty, right now he’s in a bathtub with three of my best girls.”
Chris was so shocked that she dropped her notebook and pencil and bent quickly to retrieve them, trying to cover her distress.
Red sat on the other end of the sofa. “Oh, dear, it’s like that, is it? How long did you spend with him?”
“Just a few days,” Chris said, smoothing her skirt, not lifting her red face.
“And you fell in love with him,” Red said flatly.
“More or less,” Chris mumbled then lifted her head, started to say something then stood. “The man is driving me crazy!” she said with passion. “I thought you might know something about him. He seemed to talk to you as if he knew you.”
“I guess I know him as well as anyone. I helped raise him. Look, honey, women fall in love with Ty on a daily basis. He’s so damned good lookin’ and that voice of his can talk a woman into anything. But I can tell you that, as far as I know, he never has anything to do with good girls like you.”
“That’s just what he said. Oh, Miss Red,” she said, moving back to the sofa. “I’ve never been in love in my life and I don’t even know if I am now, but there’s something intriguing about this man and I want to know all I can find out about him.”
Red looked at her a while. “He deserves more than what he got dealt in life. He’s a good boy and he ain’t never had a chance at nothin’ but bad. If I tell you about Ty, will you tell me how come he’s out of jail?”
“My father got him out. Have you ever heard of Delbert J. Mathison?”
“About as often as I’ve heard of beer. Tynan ain’t got hisself mixed up with the likes of him, has he? That man will eat Ty alive.”
“He’s my father,” Chris said, then waved her hand in protest as Red started to apologize. “I know him better than anyone. For some reason, he got Ty out of jail to kidnap me from where I was visiting and take me home. Tynan said that it was because he knew the rain forest, but I don’t think that’s all of it. I think my father had another reason and I have no idea what it is.”
Chris lowered her head. “I never met anyone like Ty and I like him a great deal. I sense that there is more to him than one can see right away. I…I’m afraid I threw myself at him. He told me that if he touched me my father would send him back to jail. Needless to say, I stayed away from him for the last few days of the trip.”
“I told you that Ty never touches innocent girls. The last time he did, he got thrown in jail and would be dead now if some of us girls hadn’t stepped in.”
With an expectant look on her face, Chris waited for the woman to speak. She was older than Chris had originally thought, but her skin was well cared for and soft looking.
Red got up to get another drink of well watered whiskey. “I don’t usually drink this time of day but seein’ Ty again and havin’ him to worry about makes me wanta get drunk and stay that way. You were right when you said that I seemed to know him. I’m one of four women that are the closest thing to a mother that boy ever had.”
She sat down across from Chris. “He wouldn’t like me tellin’ you this but you give me a lot of pleasure in them articles of yours and I wanta do somethin’ for you. About twenty-nine years ago when I was just startin’ out in this business—and I was little more than a kid myself—a miner brought a newborn baby to the house where I was workin’ and left him to us girls to take care of. That old man was as bad as they come, nobody could stand him. He’d cheat cripples if he could. Well, he brought this baby in and he hadn’t even cleaned it, it still had the birth filth on it and it was weak from hunger. We ran around real fast and found a woman to feed the baby and we took care of him as best we could for as long as we had him.”
“And that was Tynan? How had the miner come by him?”
“He wouldn’t tell us until we’d given him free whiskey, but he said he’d found a pregnant woman wandering in the forest, out of her head. She stopped in front of him—I’m sure he didn’t volunteer to help her—and delivered the baby herself. She whispered the single word of Tynan, then died. Knowing the miner, it’s a wonder he didn’t just walk away and leave the dead woman and the baby. But I guess he had plans to get what he could so he wrapped the boy up and brought him to us.”
Red stood, her back to Chris. “We did the best we could but a whore house ain’t no place to raise a kid. All the girls adored him and I’m sure we spoiled him rotten, but we had problems we couldn’t help. When Ty was about two, we dressed him up in a little suit and escorted him to Sunday School. The ladies of the congregation ran us off. They wouldn’t believe that Ty wasn’t one of our byblows.”
Red paused a moment. “He stayed with me until he was six years old. I never loved anybody more than I loved that
boy. He was all that I had.”
“What happened when he was six?”
Red gave a resigned sigh and looked back at Chris. “The miner that’d found him came back with a lawyer, said Tynan was legally his and took him away. Two towns away, he stood Ty on a table and auctioned him off to the highest bidder.”
Chris sat still for a moment as she let this sink in. A little boy stood on a table and auctioned off as if he were an animal. Slavery had been abolished years ago. “Who, ah, bought him?”
“Some farmer on his way east. I didn’t see or hear from Ty for twelve years. By then he was the strappin’ big, good-lookin’ thing that he is now, but he’d changed. I got him to tell me some of what had happened after he left the farmer’s.” She paused to smile. “I don’t think the farmer was too happy with Ty’s leavin’ ’cause Ty had a couple of scars on his legs and when I asked him where he got ’em, he said it was caused by differin’ opinions about whether he should leave the farmer’s or not. I think the man worked Ty like a draft horse. After he left, at twelve, he was on his own. He traveled around, took odd jobs, got into a bad crowd a couple of times, learned how to use a gun, all the things a boy does. Then for a while he seemed to be headed for real trouble but something changed him. I don’t know what it was or if it was anything special. A friend of his, an outlaw, got hisself hanged and that may have had an effect on Ty, I don’t know, but whatever it was, somethin’ made him go straight.”
Red closed her eyes for a minute. “Goin’ straight just about killed him. He took all the jobs nobody wanted or was too afraid to take on. He’d even go into towns run by outlaws and clean them up. But, since he always left dead bodies behind him, one after another, the good townspeople would always ask him to please leave.”
“But that’s not fair,” Chris said.
“Honey, we ain’t even come to unfair yet. Like I said, Ty never did fool around with clean girls, he always had sense enough to stay away from ’em. But that didn’t keep the girls from swarmin’ around him. They like the way he ignores ’em. Well, one of ’em, a real pretty little thing used to twitch her tail around Ty till he was about to break. Then one day she come into the saloon to get him. I saw her cryin’ and he was holdin’ her. He’s always been a sucker for tears, couldn’t stand ’em on a woman. Next thing I knew he was saddlin’ a horse and takin’ rifles out of a cabinet. This girl said that a big rancher around here was attackin’ her father and could Ty help.”
Red took a drink of her whiskey. “I told him not to go, that it wasn’t his fight, but he wouldn’t listen. There was a gun battle and when the dust and gunpowder settled, the big rancher’s son was dead and Ty was being hauled off to jail.”
“And that’s when you rescued him.”
“Heard about that, did you? Yeah, we rescued him. He didn’t kill that man’s son, that girl did and he was gonna hang for it rather than turn her in. It seems that she’d been sneakin’ out to see the boy and had only been usin’ Ty to make him jealous. But, even knowin’ that, he wouldn’t turn her in. I got to thinkin’ that maybe he didn’t mind dyin’. Sometimes he acts like he don’t think he’s worth much.”
“He said he wasn’t good enough for me,” Chris said softly. “He said I deserved more than somebody like him.”
“Don’t you believe it, honey, there ain’t nobody better ’n him.”
“That’s exactly what I thought too,” Chris said with a grin. “Do you think there’s any way I can tempt him into giving me what I want?”
“And what you want is Tynan?”
“With all my heart and soul.”
For a long while, Red stared at Chris. “You know, you may be just what he needs.” She stopped and narrowed her eyes. “I feel like I know you from years of readin’ your stories, but I’m warnin’ you that if you think Ty’s just one of those cases of yours and you get rid of him after a little while I’ll—”
Chris burst out laughing. “This is a turn of events, isn’t it? Isn’t it usually the father who warns the prospective young man?”
Red returned her smile. “I ain’t too good at bein’ a mother.”
“It seems to me that you’ve done a fine job. At least I like what you’ve done. My problem is that Ty doesn’t like me. At least not the way I like him. How can I get past the threat of prison and the memory of how another so called ‘good’ girl treated him? And, besides, I think he really likes another type of woman better than me.” Chris looked down at her own slight curves.
Red didn’t get to answer because of the voice at the door.
“Red, you awake?”
There was no question of whose voice that was.
“Just a minute, Ty, baby,” Red called. “You come with me,” she said, taking Chris’s arm in her hand as she opened a closet door. “This is a place for men that can’t but like to watch. You stay in here and listen. I’ll find out how much Ty does or doesn’t like you. You game?”
It was on the tip of Chris’s tongue to ask questions about the closet, but she suppressed herself. “Yes,” she whispered, then Red half shoved her into a chair and closed the door.
“I’m just comin’, Ty honey,” she called and went across the room to open the door.
Chapter Eight
Ty’s hair was wet and he was just buttoning his shirt.
“Don’t even put it back on,” Red said, holding the door open for him. “I want to look at that back of yours.”
“It’s fine,” Tynan said but removed his shirt obediently.
Red ran her hands over his skin, turned him toward the light—and the closet—so she could see better. “It’s all right but it’ll be weeks before it’s fully healed. And you’re skin and bones. We need to fatten you up.”
He put his shirt back on. “You sound like Chris.”
“She that little blonde rode in with you? The one everybody’s sayin’ is Nola Dallas?”
Ty poured himself a whiskey and sat down on the sofa. “God, that’s good. The thing you miss most in prison isn’t freedom but the small pleasures of life like good food and drink, a clean bed,”—he grinned—“and women. You ought to pay that Leora more. Whatever you’re paying her, it’s not enough.”
“You’re not answerin’ my question. Is that little blonde Nola Dallas?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at his whiskey. “Tell me what’s been going on the last couple of years. Business good? You seem to have more girls than usual.”
“I think some of the girls in the tub with you weren’t mine,” Red said heavily. “Tynan, stop dancin’ around me. What are you doin’ back here? Are you free from jail permanently or what?”
He smiled at her. “With a few hitches, I am more or less free.”
“Hitches? Such as what?”
“One pretty little blonde that’s about to send me back, that’s what.”
“Oh?” Red asked, eyebrows raised.
“Don’t play innocent with me. Even in the tub the girls were giggling about this famous Nola Dallas being here. Is she really all that famous? I mean I know what she’s done, her father gave me a stack of newspaper articles to read about her or by her, but I thought that out here…”
“Honey, she’s what every woman dreams of being: brave, courageous, a fighter, and she’s made it in a man’s profession.”
“More than I’ve done,” Tynan muttered.
“Was it really bad in jail?” Red asked, sitting across from him.
“I think old man Dickerson had friends. I guess he figured that if he couldn’t kill me with a rope, he’d have it done with whip and chains.”
Red reached out, caressed his cheek and Ty kissed her palm. “But you’re out now,” she said.
“If I keep my hands off that pretty little daughter of Del Mathison’s. And I’ve had easier jobs.”
“You like her, huh?”
“Well enough, I guess. Any man would like a woman who put herself in his path the way she does. The first few times I met her she didn’t even have her cloth
es on.”
Red leaned back against the sofa. “Really? I can’t imagine that someone of Nola Dallas’s fame would have to pursue a man.”
“Well, she damn well has pursued me. Said she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.”
“Would that be so bad? A home and kids?”
Tynan stood and refilled his glass. “Are you going to start on that again? Look, even if I did marry somebody, it couldn’t be her. Her father holds the papers for my release. I take her back to him, leave her and I get a full pardon. I touch her and I go back to jail. And then there’s the money, too.”
“For taking her back?”
Ty looked at Red. “Did you see that city dude that rode in behind me? He’s a fine, upstanding citizen, born with parents and a silver spoon in his mouth, and Mathison wants his daughter to marry him. I get ten thousand dollars if I bring his daughter back in love with Mr. Asher Prescott. Course she had to go and fall for me.”
“How inconvenient for you.”
Tynan grinned at her. “It wasn’t my fault. I told you she followed me everywhere. I tried to stay away from her but there she’d be—usually stark naked. I’m only human, you know.”
“More human than the rest of us. Did you ever think that maybe she liked you?”
“A girl like her? All she wanted was a fling before going back to her rich daddy. I’d have one night in the hay, then the rest of my life in jail regretting it. No thanks. Deliver me from good girls. I think I’ll just stick with Leora and her kind.”
“Oh Ty,” Red said, standing, putting her arms round the back of him. “What are you going to do with your life?”
“Not spend anymore time in jail. I thought I’d take the ten thousand and buy some land with it.”
“The money you get for matchmaking Miss Mathison with that man? You’re sure you can do that?”
Ty walked to the window and looked out into the street below. “I admit it’s not easy, not with what Mathison gave me to work with. That man has no…force, I guess you’d call it. He doesn’t even know how to win a girl.”