North of Laramie. William W. Johnstone

the parlance of our times, one could be forgiven for saying that I am quite loaded.”

      “You’ve been loaded since you came to Wichita, Hagen. I’ve seen that with my own two eyes.”

      “I mean loaded as in financially,” Hagen clarified. “I come from money, hence all of that fancy talk you mentioned earlier.”

      Trammel stopped building the fire. In the dim light of dusk, he couldn’t see the man’s face clear enough to tell if he was lying. “Don’t lie about something like that. Not now.”

      “I’d wager that you’ve heard enough lies in your time to know the truth when you hear it, Trammel. And you know I’m not lying now.”

      He was right. Trammel had no reason to believe him, but no reason to doubt him, either. Braggarts usually liked to talk themselves up whenever they had the chance. But in all the time Hagen had been staying at The Gilded Lilly, Trammel couldn’t remember a single time when Hagen had spouted off about having money. He never spoke much about anything, really, not even when he was playing cards. He usually got drunk at the tables and had to be carried up to his room, tipping whomever had helped him after he woke the following day.

      But out in the elements as he was, Trammel was in no place to take anyone at their word without a little prodding. “Where’d all this money you say you have come from?”

      “It came from the same place we are headed, my new friend. My family owns one of the biggest cattle ranches in the Wyoming Territory. The Blackstone Ranch, just north of Laramie. Commonly known by its brand, the Bar H.”

      Trammel dropped the piece of firewood he was stacking. “The Bar H. Hagen. That’s you?”

      “My father,” the gambler said. “Mine by right, I suppose, one day when that old sidewinder finally allows himself to die, which isn’t likely.” He pulled the blanket even tighter around him. “Evil never dies.”

      Trammel had heard about the Bar H long before he had come to Wichita. The Hagen family had employed the Pinkerton Agency on more than one occasion, though Trammel had never worked on any of their cases. But he knew they had one of the biggest ranches in the Wyoming Territory, if not the biggest.

      But Trammel knew that just because this man said he was a Hagen didn’t make it so. There were still plenty of details he had to know first before he believed him. “If you’ve got so much money, then what the hell are you doing out in Kansas, much less a place like Wichita?”

      “It’s a rather long story, I’m afraid, as such stories tend to be. But I’ll be happy to tell it to you in broad strokes while you continue to build that fire. It’s getting cold, and I’m starving.”

      Trammel kept building the fire as Hagen began talking. “My father and I never got along. It’s probably my mother’s fault as much as it was mine. She insisted on tutors and a classical education while my father wanted a son to take up the family business when his time came. He wanted a doer, not a thinker. He wanted a son who could ride and shoot and handle livestock. Trouble was I was naturally even better at all of those things, too. Much better than my brothers, Bradford and Caleb. Rather than be grateful, I think that made him resent me all the more. He figured a fancy education would ruin me, but I delighted in proving him wrong. Still, the die was cast against me and, when I was old enough, he pulled one of his many strings with his numerous friends to get me enrolled in a school in New York.”

      “No fooling?” Trammel looked up from the woodpile. “I’m from New York.”

      “Yes, I know. Lower East Side, if I’m still any judge of regional accents.” Hagen quickly added, “No offense, Trammel, but one who travels as much as I have tends to develop an ear for such things.”

      Trammel sat back on his haunches. “I’m from Five Points. How the hell did you know that?”

      The gambler smiled. “One of my many useless gifts. Anyway, I went to school and excelled in all the things both in the classroom and out of it, but my resentment of authority remained with me. I graduated at the bottom of my class despite my abilities and went on to have a mediocre career as a result.”

      Trammel went back to building the fire. “Which school was that?”

      “A little place along the banks of the Hudson River known as West Point.”

      Trammel had struck a match to light the fire, but stopped. “You were in the army? As an officer?” The flame burned his fingers and he cursed as he dropped the dead match in the pile.

      “Not much of one, I’m afraid,” Hagen explained. “They shipped me off to Arizona to fight the Apache, probably in the hopes I’d be scalped. I acquired something of a reputation as a soldier’s officer, which didn’t exactly make me popular with my colleagues in rank. As soon as my stint was up, I left.”

      Trammel struck another match and, this time, got the fire started. “Then why didn’t you go home?”

      “That was my father’s idea. Mother was dead by then, and King Charles had no desire to see me again. That’s what they call him, though he certainly thinks of himself as American royalty. He had his people tell me he’d continue to pay for my travels for the rest of my life on the condition those travels didn’t include a return to the Wyoming Territory. So, I spent time in all the places a wanderer like me would be expected to go. Manhattan and Boston and Philadelphia were nice, but too staid for my tastes. All of that ceremony and formality made me feel like I was back in the army. I had always had a knack for gambling among the officers I served with and decided to ply my trade on the long train voyages between one destination to another. Realizing city life wasn’t for me; I was naturally drawn to the mighty Mississippi, where I found a home on the riverboats. When I wore out my welcome there for a variety of reasons I don’t wish to discuss, I decided to head to the one place where I thought a man could quietly drink himself to death in oblivion. Wichita, Kansas.”

      Trammel slowly blew on the fire, waiting for it to catch enough so he could begin to cook dinner. “If I had your kind of money, I’d buy a place in Washington Square and never leave.”

      “You’d get bored, especially once you’ve experienced life out here. The people are as petty as they are pretty. They’d never accept you and your accent, just as they never accepted me for all of my experience and money. We have the stink of the frontier about us, my friend. Me among the Apache and you among the desirables. Me from the frontier of a nation and you from the frontier of the human condition. People tend to resent what they can never understand or experience.”

      Trammel didn’t think so, but wasn’t fool enough to argue with a man who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. “I know a little more about that world than you think I do. Believe me, the money would help take plenty of sting out of whatever anyone thought of me.”

      “I know more about you than you think I do, Trammel.”

      The fire finally caught, and he could see Hagen a bit better now. Some of the color had returned to Hagen’s face, and his shaking had died down by quite a bit. “You don’t know a damned thing about me. You don’t even remember all the times I carried you up to your room after gambling all night.”

      He didn’t know why Hagen’s words had made him feel resentful, but they had. He forgot about it as he said, “Enough talk for one night. Time to start dinner.”

      He began digging the pan out of his saddlebag, along with the beans and bacon Lilly had given him before they had left.

      Hagen began talking again as the food began to sizzle on the pan. “You were born in Five Points. Your father was Scottish and your mother was of some other northern European descent. Norway, I’d take it, given the high cheekbones and deep-set eyes.”

      Trammel dropped the pan in the fire and hardly noticed.

      Hagen went on. “Your ancestry belies your large build. Highlanders and Vikings were like that. Anyway, you grew up poor in horrible conditions and, when you were old enough, you began manual labor, probably finding easy work