“For Pete’s sake, mister, can’t you see these women are in mourning?” Brian fumed. “What a damned rude thing to do!”
The man reddened. “Well, I just…I thought—”
“Jess York was his name,” Miranda put in. “He was my husband’s best friend. They knew each other back during the war. Jess had lost his wife and daughter to raiding union soldiers, so he took to gunrunning for the Confederates. Is that enough for your story, Mr. Chadwick?”
The man whipped out a pad of paper and a pencil. “Yes, yes.” He met her eyes. “Mr. York stayed here in Laramie with you and your daughter then, to kind of watch over you while you wait for your husband to be released?”
“He was a loyal friend,” Miranda answered, suspicious of what the man was thinking. “Yes, he had promised Jake to watch out for us.”
“That’s enough,” Brian said, leading Miranda away from the man.
“Oh, wait! Mrs. Harkner, I heard something in Cheyenne you might want to know.”
Miranda stopped and turned, hoping for news about Lloyd. “Yes?”
Chadwick shoved the pad of paper back into a pocket on the inside of his winter coat. “Someone called me from the newspaper office in Cheyenne. Great inventions, those telephones, aren’t they? Who would ever have thought a while back that there would be railroads connecting East and West, or contraptions we could talk into and speak to somebody miles away?”
Miranda thought how wild this West was when she and Jake first came out here. So much had changed. “Yes, they truly are a miraculous invention. What did you hear from Cheyenne, Mr. Chadwick?”
“Well, they say it was a Lieutenant Gentry who turned in your husband four years ago. Is that right?”
The remark brought a sharp pain to Miranda’s heart. “Yes.”
Chadwick grinned. “Well, ma’am, maybe it will give your husband a little satisfaction to know Gentry is dead. He was transferred from Colorado to Arizona. He’d gotten promoted to general, so he decided to stay in the army. At any rate, he was out on patrol, and he and his men were attacked by renegade Apaches. Killed every last one of them. Tortured and scalped them. I just thought maybe you’d like to know.”
Miranda felt a glimmer of the satisfaction of revenge, but it was dimmed by the fact that Gentry’s death had come too late to help her husband. “Yes,” she answered. “It’s just too bad that didn’t happen a few years earlier. If it had, my husband wouldn’t be rotting away in prison right now, and we would still have our son with us.” She faced the man squarely. “Don’t bother me again, Mr. Chadwick, unless you have news about my son.” She turned away and headed toward town with the preacher and Brian and Evie.
So, she thought, Lieutenant Gentry was dead. What good did that do anyone now, except the satisfaction of knowing perhaps he had never even got to spend all his bounty money. She hoped he was tortured longer than any of the others, that he was now burning in hell!
***
Jake stayed on his cot when the new prisoner was brought in along with a second cot. Two guards positioned the legs of the upper cot into the holes in the legs of Jake’s cot to create a bunk bed for the new man who would share the tiny cell with Jake. Jake made no move to get up, stared at the springs overhead, hated the closed-in feeling that engulfed him when he had to look up at another bed.
“You get to stay with somebody famous,” a third guard told the new man. “Your bunkmate is Jake Harkner. Used to be the fastest gun anywhere around till he busted up his own hand in a temper fit.” The guard chuckled and the other two left the cell. The third man closed and locked the door. “Next meal is at six, Peterson. Try to get along with Harkner. He gets a little ornery sometimes. Maybe the two of you can practice drawing on each other to keep busy.” He laughed again and turned away.
“Fuck you,” the one called Peterson muttered. He turned to Jake. “You really Jake Harkner?”
Jake felt the cough coming again and he sat up to clear his lungs. This cough was getting worse, and he wondered if he had tuberculosis, or maybe he was dying from the same lung disease that had killed Jess. Poor Jess. Jake had gotten the news in a letter from Miranda. His best friend was dead, and he had wanted to die himself at the news. Another ray of hope was gone, and now Miranda was even more alone. He coughed for several seconds before he could answer his new cellmate. “Yeah, I’m Jake Harkner,” he finally answered, “and I’m not feeling too great, so don’t try to strike up a conversation.” He felt like he was burning up with fever, yet he felt cold at the same time. He pulled a blanket around his shoulders.