“I say three at most,” Hargraves was saying.
“Three what?” Cleve asked.
“Petticoats … Jones thinks she is wearing at least four.”
“Four? I am sorry, gentlemen. She is wearing six.”
“Six!” Jones exclaimed. “You’re crazy, Van. It’s all that lace that fools you.
She can’t be wearing more than four.”
Hargraves put down his glass. “You’d better not bet with him, Alien. From all I hear, Cleve’s an expert on everything pertaining to the female of the species. Anyway, there’s no way to prove it.”
“Look.” Cleve had scarcely taken his eyes from the girl on the stage. “I just stuck you for dinner, and don’t mind doing you in a little more. I will lay you an even hundred she has not less than six petticoats on.” “How would you prove it?”
“Go backstage and find out. Is it a bet?”
“If I go with you to check.”
“Fair enough.” Cleve got up. “Let’s go!”
It was crowded backstage. Girls were coming and going in various stages of undress. There were no proper dressing rooms, simply shoulder-high screens, and behind each of these a girl was disrobing or changing costume. Cleve van Valen worked his way through the group with the assurance of a man to whom no situation is entirely strange, and the two gamblers followed. Lilith Prescott was easy enough to find. She was behind a screen, only her head and the very top of her shoulders visible, while over her head hung an elaborate dress suspended by wires and prepared to be lowered about her. A wardrobe mistress stood outside the screen ready to take her clothing as it was removed. Cleve looked across the screen at the girl’s pretty, somewhat flushed face and asked himself if he had really come backstage to satisfy a bet, or to see more of this girl? Was it because her glance seemed to have catalogued him and brushed him aside as of no importance? He smiled at the thought of his pride being injured by so slight a thing, but admitted that it nettled him. He was not, he believed, more than ordinarily vain, but he had been fortunate with the attentions of women, of all sorts and kinds … and after all, what sort of girl would be dancing in such a place?
As he hesitated, awaiting the proper moment to ask his question, he heard someone say, “Oh, I beg your pardon!”
Glancing around, he saw a middle-aged man moving somewhat diffidently through the backstage crowd. Obviously, he was both confused by the disorder and embarrassed by the visible extent of bare flesh and stockinged leg, but he persisted until he reached Lilith Prescott’s screen. Hesitantly, he said, “Miss Prescott? Miss Prescott?”
She did not even look up. “Later.”
“It’s quite important, Miss Prescott. I—“
“It’s always important. The older they are, the more important it becomes.”
A petticoat flopped over the edge of the screen, and Cleve lifted a finger. “Miss Prescott, you misunderstand. I am Hylan Seabury, attorney in the matter of Jonathan Brooks.” Seabury paused. “Does he mean nothing to you?” “That old goat?”
“Well,” Seabury said testily, “you evidently meant something to hun. He included you in his will.”
She looked over the screen, startled. “He what?” Her eyes went past Seabury, meeting those of van Valen. She looked away.
A second petticoat flipped over the screen, then a third. Cleve’s fingers registered them as they appeared. “I’m going to win, gentlemen. Not less than six.”
As he spoke there was a momentary lull in the noise backstage and his voice sounded loud in the partial silence.
“You will have to go to California, Miss Prescott, to take advantage of the bequest, but if I were you—“ “You’re not me. And I wouldn’t go to California if John Jacob Astor willed me all of San Francisco.” As she spoke the fourth petticoat flopped over the screen and was taken up by the wardrobe mistress.
Cleve’s fourth finger came up. “See? That makes four. And my bet was not less than six.”
“Mr. Astor has no such holdings in San Francisco, Miss Prescott. However, you will discover the yield from Mr. Brooks’s holdings is not to be scorned. Definitely not.”
The fifth petticoat appeared atop the screen, and the men whose task it was to lower the ornate costume cleared their lines.
“That’s all, Mary. All right, boys.”
“All?”
“You heard me. That’s all!” She lifted her arms into the dress as it descended around her, moving her shoulders to settle the dress into place. “Yield, you said. Yield of what?”
“Gold, Miss Prescott. In fact, I am advised the property is considered quite a good one. Now, if you would like to sign these papers—“ “Did you say … gold?”
“Precisely. The claim yielded thirty-five hundred dollars during the first week.”
Lilith glanced past Seabury at Cleve van Valen, who was counting gold eagles into Jones’s outstretched hand. “You win,” Cleve said, “but damn it, I’d have sworn—“ “You did swear, but you lost. Not less than six, you said, and we all heard you.”
Dropping the last coin into Jones’s hand, Cleve heard Lilith saying, “For that much, I might even go to California.”
Disgusted with his luck, Cleve turned away, and as he walked off, Lilith flopped the sixth petticoat over the screen, then stuck out her tongue at his retreating back.
Chapter 8
It was night, and a distant glow upon the sky … now, what would that be? Stars overhead, and somewhere, not too far off, a dog barking. No sound but the creak of his saddle and the clop-clop-clop of his horse’s hoofs. The air was cool, and he thought he could smell the river.
Cleve van Valen knew he was seven kinds of a fool, starting off after a girl who might not even have come this way. Had he not heard her say she would not go to California? Still, when the lawyer mentioned gold she was interested … and so was he.
Cleve took a long, slow look at himself and did not like what he saw—a grown man who had wasted fourteen or fifteen years of his life gambling, and who was now searching for a girl simply because she had inherited a gold mine. And why? Because he hoped to marry her and so gain possession of the mine and its income. There was little in the past of which he was proud, yet nothing of which he was actually ashamed; but if he did what he had set out to do there would be reason for shame. If he could manage it at all … and that was the joker in his little deck of cards, for Lilith Prescott had manifested not the slightest interest in him at any time.
She had glanced his way, seen him and the company he kept, and had ignored him from then on. And that was what rankled.
Yet the thought aroused amused irritation. What kind of a child was he to be irritated because she ignored him? He had been loved by women, and he had been hated by them, and once a girl had even tried to kill him, but none had ever been indifferent to him.
Was it that which disturbed him? Or was it the thought of losing a chance at all that gold?
She had cost him a hundred dollars because of one petticoat, and he intended to have his own back. So he told himself—and he lied in his teeth. He was going to try to marry Lilith Prescott, not because he loved her or even liked her type, but simply because he had failed at everything else and was looking for a soft spot to light before he got too old. And when a man faced up to such a decision it was not a very nice thing.
But how in God’s world could he find one girl in a place as wide as the open West? Even such a girl as Lilith Prescott? Find her he must. In his pocket he carried three twenty-dollar gold pieces, and he owned the horse he rode. He had a pistol in his belt holster, and a few clothes wrapped in a blanket behind his saddle. He had no rifle, no experience with the frontier, and nothing to warrant his going west.
He had suddenly, on a mere whim, tied his future to this girl with her legacy; yet what else could he have done?
He was not even sure she had come this way—only that she had quit her job and disappeared into thin air. But coming on the heels of the legacy, it was a likely supposition. Around Independence and its neighboring area, gathered the people who were moving westward in their wagons and on horseback. There they gathered, arranged themselves into wagon trams, repaired equipment, and generally prepared for the long journey ahead of them. Suddenly van Valen topped out on a rise and drew up in amazement. Before him, the wide plain stretched toward the river, and in the center of that plain was a town with lights ablaze, although it was past midnight. But it was not the town that surprised him, nor even the fact that it was lighted at this late hour—it was the campfires around.