The Scar

By Howard E. Adkins

An inhuman branding by her drunken husband leaves a scarred and bitter Maggie ONeill. She gradually mellows through the concern of a firm but gentle stranger from Virginia but remains an aggressive Nineteenth Century feminist in the young Idaho Territory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 25, 2001
• ISBN: 9781453582770

Howard E. Adkins

Howard E. Adkins, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, is a retired Ophthalmologist who lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife, Nettie. A fourth generation Idahoan, most of his writing has had either a western or an historical theme. A time period of particular interest to him has been the early Twentieth Century.

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Copyright © 2001 by Howard E. Adkins.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER ONE

The shallow grave was small and its narrow, rocky sides compressed the quilt-wrapped bodies into a final embrace. Maggie Turner, exhausted and bewildered, sobbed a silent prayer as she stared vacantly down at her parents. They had died only hours apart. Nineteen years ago this very day, those two had given her the gift of life. In their passing, they seemingly had snatched it away again, so frightfully dead and empty did she feel at this moment.

They had left her alone in this vast sagebrush desert where the Oregon Trail seemed to stretch endlessly westward! She could not fathom how the Indians or the coyotes or even the rattlesnakes could survive here. She felt like a wearied hulk, broached and sinking, that had been towed into the midst of a vast unexplored sea and then cast adrift.

Maggie scooped up a shovel of dirt in her broken-handled spade but paused, reluctant to cast it over the bodies of her parents. It seemed disrespectful to throw dirt on them, but an even stronger emotion caused her to hesitate. Closing their grave was an act of great finality! In her deep despair, she felt utterly friendless and abandoned. Once she completed the burial, her lonely solitude would be complete. She would truly be alone!

Approaching thunderheads spawned hot wind that churned the desert air and fretted her uncombed hair into a tangle of red. Tears spilled from Maggie’s eyes and blurred the grayish-green carpet of sage that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Biting her lip, she mustered her resolve and strewed dirt over the bodies. She was so tentative, however, that the wind caught up most of the dry soil in a scattering cloud of dust.

In her exhaustion, closing the grave took an eternity, and darkness was approaching as she piled the last rocks over the naked mound to protect her parents from the coyotes. She slumped to the ground, too used up to grieve, and cradled her face in worn and grimy hands.

Visions of the neat Pennsylvania farm they had left last spring crowded her mind. The upper Susquehanna, with its verdant lands, was an Eden compared to this arid and desolate West. Oh Papa, she moaned aloud as she had so many times over the past days, Why did you ever sell out and head for Oregon? Maggie knew that the drowning of her two brothers had nearly destroyed her parents and was the main reason for the move to start a new life. And then losing their entire hog herd to cholera nearly bankrupted them, putting the final stroke to their decision. But other people suffer catastrophes, she lamented, and they don’t pull up their roots and flee into a wilderness. Why Papa? she asked again.

She could still see the tears that had filled her father’s eyes when he sold his two fine teams of Percherons and the Turner’s heavy Conestoga wagon in Independence and bought the oxen to pull a lighter prairie schooner westward on the Oregon Trail. She glanced over at the animals as they grazed on bunch grass in the gathering darkness and was grateful her father had been able to harness his pride to make the change. The huge draft horses would probably be dead by now, she thought, but oxen seem to plod on forever, thriving on hard work and short grass.

Closing her eyes, she pictured how those dumb brutes had toiled up the Kansas to the Little Blue, had nearly floundered to their death in the quicksand of the Platte as they struggled along its North Fork, and finally brought the Turner family safely to Laramie. Then Red Butte, Fort Bridger, and Soda Springs were all milestones, eagerly anticipated but then left behind with mixed emotions. The Turners had felt great satisfaction in reaching each of these important landmarks but could not suppress the anxiety over what must lie beyond. When Mama took sick just west of Fort Hall and Papa five days later, they all knew how justified their anxiety had been.

Typhoid, the Wagonmaster had said. That fever and headache and bloody flux can only mean typhoid!

He had quarantined the Turner wagon, requiring it to stay a day behind the train, but had assigned the scout, Lafe Cox, to accompany it. The picket Cox, fearing for his own safety, had always remained in sight but cautiously came no closer. Maggie had been left on her own to drive and care for the stock, nurse her parents, gather fuel and water . . . everything, while she herself wondered just when the fever would strike her also. She snorted her disgust as she glanced across at his cheerful fire, two hundred yards distant. A lot of help you’ve been, you . . . you . . . She was too enervated even to express the loathing she felt for Cox.

Maggie dragged herself to her feet, knowing there was still work to do. She started a fire and fed it branches of sagebrush until flames licked half a dozen feet into the air. Plodding with weariness from countless hours of nursing and washing bodies, of cooking and comforting, Maggie dragged her parent’s things from the wagon and piled them at the edge of the fire. Smoke billowed up as flames consumed featherbeds and pillows, comforters so carefully quilted in happier days of the past, and finally all the clothing her parents had worn over the previous two weeks. Poking and stirring with a stick, she persisted until nothing but ashes remained.

Scattered raindrops, a niggardly fulfillment of the thunderhead’s promise, hissed as they struck the dying embers. In a few moments, even those passed away and the only remnant of the storm was the ceaseless wind.

Maggie Turner wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down under the wagon. Filled with despair and loneliness, she was too exhausted to eat or even to cry. So, with eyes that were dry but filled with hostility, she looked contemptuously at the fire across the deadline which Lafe Cox had formulated in his mind and refused to cross. Shaking her head with loathing, she burrowed deep in her blanket. Troubled sleep engulfed her almost immediately.

-—-

For eight days, the solitary Turner wagon followed ruts of the Oregon Trail with no sighting of the train that had gone on ahead. So fearful of the fever was Lafe Cox that Maggie’s closest contact with him had been a few shouted words from no nearer than a hundred and fifty feet. Seeing him brought to mind the contemptuous Charlie La Port. That mustachioed jack-a-dandy! was the most derogatory commentary of La Port she allowed herself although she growled her invective while prodding viciously at the nearest ox with her goad. That Charlie! That filthy lech! He used to hover around our campfire every night buttering up to Papa, but all the while he was just sniffing around and hoping to glean what he could of me. Then when the folks took sick and I needed him, he couldn’t put miles between us fast enough as he skipped off with the wagon train. That . . . that son of a bitch! The unfamiliar epithet tasted good in her mouth when she realized she had been talking out loud.

The counter on her wagon wheel indicated she had been covering over fifteen miles a day, perhaps slightly more than the train itself, so she hoped to overtake the caravan soon. By nightfall each day, after walking every step of the way, she felt as though the distance had been fifty miles instead of fifteen! With the load lightened since the death of her parents, Maggie could have ridden but would have been unable to control the three yoke of oxen nearly as well, so she plodded along in the deep silt, goad in hand and shouting commands at the animals.

For two hours this morning, Maggie had seen a dust cloud ahead and thought she must be closing on the wagon train, but suddenly the plume disappeared. Now, in mid-afternoon, she discovered the reason; the string of wagons had dropped out of sight into a sheltered river valley.

The trail, which had sometimes widened to a dozen sets of parallel wagon tracks across the desert, suddenly crowded into a single set and angled down from the sagebrush plain along a cut in the rimrock. Below was a lazy river with cottonwoods lining its banks as it coursed along a broad, shallow valley. The Oregon Trail wound along the south bank of the river as far as Maggie could see, and just visible in the distance was the wagon train which had been her traveling companion most of the way from Independence, Missouri. Anxious to catch up, she pressed the oxen for greater speed, but with little result.

The sun was low in the west when Maggie overtook the train. It had encamped in a well-used site across the river south of Boise City. The brash town of newly sawn boards and dusty streets had sprung from the territorial wilderness a year ago because of the need for a military fort in the area following gold discoveries a year before that in the Boise Basin to the north.

Smoke from many cooking fires already hung heavy in the air over camp when Maggie sought out the Wagonmaster.

I’m surprised you caught up with us so soon, he said, removing his hat and wiping sweat from his brow. We didn’t get in here more’n an hour ago.

My folks died, and I buried them, Maggie said. Your man, Cox, ain’t worth spit!

He kept you safe from Injuns, didn’t he?

Yes, he did that all right. ‘Course, a three-legged yellow dog could have done the same, ‘cause we didn’t see no Injuns, Maggie replied.

Well, Ma’am, you still may have ‘the fever’ about you, so I want you to camp way back along the line, away from all the other wagons, the big man said, hooking his thumbs into his galluses. You hear? He spit tobacco juice.

I hear. And it’s Miss! Not Ma’am! She saw Charlie La Port look at her and then duck out of sight behind a wagon. Your concern in this, my time of grief and need, is touching indeed, Maggie said, bristling her face upward toward his.

Backing away, the Wagonmaster said, Get the hell away from me and the train! I ain’t tellin’ you again!

You and that fearless Lafe Cox have the same yellow decoration down your back, mister, so I can see why he works for you. And I’ll tell you something else. I’ve had me a belly full of you and your wagon train and everybody’s fanciful dreams of Oregon! I’m going across the river and sell my rig in that town, stay put, and just say to hell with you, your wagon train, and all the rest of it, mister.

Well, Ma’am . . . Miss. You do just that! Your Pap done paid me in full for his trip in this here train so’s I just don’t give a good God damn what you do. Except, don’t you give my people ‘the fever’.

There were many other things Maggie would like to say to the Wagonmaster but decided it would just be a waste of good breath. Instead, with a final withering glare at him, she silently prodded the oxen with her goad, urging them north across a rock-strewn ford of the shallow Boise River and into the frontier town.

-—-

With the contents of her wagon stored at the livery barn where she had sold the prairie schooner and oxen, Maggie explored the three streets of Boise City. With the money Silas Turner possessed when he died and what she had salvaged from sale of the wagon, she had $247 gold and $6 silver in her purse. This was not a paltry sum, but when she considered the fact that money and a few pieces of furniture were the only legacy she would carry into her new life, the amount seemed fearfully inadequate.

She drew some satisfaction from the transaction with the liveryman. Them oxen’ll only sell for beef, and damn poor eatin’ at that, he had said. I’ll give you three dollars apiece if you’ll throw in the yokes too.

I’d eat ‘em myself, hooves and all, before I’d sell ‘em to you at beef prices, she had replied. You wouldn’t butcher ‘em. You’d turn around and sell ‘em to some poor pilgrim over there across the river whose animals are played out and who is practically pulling his wagon himself. And for ten times what you paid me! I can conduct that sort of business myself, thank you very much.

Well . . . he had said, squinting an eye and thoughtfully scratching deep in an ear with his little finger. I reckon there might be a market for ‘em in the wagon trains, at that. Possible. Ain’t likely, though. Awful late in the season. I’ll give you five dollars apiece. After much haggling back and forth and even threats on her part, she had gotten six times his original offering price for the animals. He had appeared glad to get rid of her.

Maggie passed the Overland Hotel and noted idling men slouched in chairs on porches at both levels of the two-story building. She felt their predatory eyes following her as she hurried along the plank sidewalk. Knowing she must find a place to stay, she walked on since the Overland looked too expensive and not all that safe a place for a single young woman. Further exploration led her past Mrs. Slade’s Room and Boarding House, a rambling clapboard building with a freshly painted sign nailed to a porch post.

I’ll give it a try, she said aloud and then clenched her teeth and shook her head. I’ve got to quit talking to myself, she thought. People will think I’m touched.

Mrs. Slade answered the knock at the door. She was a big woman, about forty, with strands of gray in her hair and a face much worn by care. Yes? she said, looking Maggie up and down and noting a very dirty, disheveled young woman.

I’m Margaret Turner, Ma’am. I have just dropped out of the wagon train that arrived this afternoon and plan to stay here in Boise City. Do you have a room?

Suspicious because of Maggie’s bedraggled appearance, Mrs. Slade asked, You got money?

Yes. How much is room and board?

$3.50 a week. And a week is the minimum. I need pay in advance.

Maggie gave the woman a five-dollar gold piece and two dollars, saying, Here’s two week’s rent. I’ll go back to the livery and get my clothes. I would truly enjoy a bath when I return.

Mrs. Slade’s face relaxed and her eyes became less wary. I dare say.

-—-

Mrs. Slade was gratified in the change that two hours of time had wrought in Maggie’s appearance. Her frock needed ironing and had a musty smell from being in a trunk for weeks, but it was clean and attractive. The young face was well scrubbed and framed by tight wavelets of fiery auburn hair, still wet from the recent bath. Mrs. Slade had to admit that her new boarder was a beauty.

Suppertime was during your bath, Margaret, Mrs. Slade said, but I kept a plateful for you in the warming oven. Sit down here in the kitchen and eat while I do the dishes. You can throw out your bath water later.

Thank you, Mrs. Slade. I haven’t sat up to a table in weeks! Certainly Maggie had not encountered fresh garden peas or roast beef swimming in a lake of rich gravy for a very long time. She hungrily attacked the food without another word.

While Maggie ate, Mrs. Slade washed the dishes and, through friendly conversation, extracted the salient points of the young woman’s story. With an understanding harvested through her own personal disasters along life’s torturous way, the older woman became tenderly commiserative.

You poor dear, Mrs. Slade shook her head and sympathized in a motherly fashion. I don’t blame you one bit for not going on to Oregon. But have you given any thought to how you’ll support yourself here in Boise?

Well, Maggie said, emptying the second glass of milk, I cipher pretty well and, if I do say so myself, am a very good reader. I thought maybe I could teach school.

No. We already have a school teacher.

I can sew. Perhaps there’s a seamstress who would hire me.

It’s mostly men here, my dear, and they just wear their clothes ‘til they rot and drop off, no matter how they fit. Mrs. Ahearn takes in sewing for what women need it done, and she barely keeps body and soul together on what work she gets, Mrs. Slade replied.

Work in a store, possibly?

I’m afraid not. The clerks in the two mercantiles are both men. And no other stores would be fit places for a woman. Oh, I suppose you could throw hash at Brownfield’s eatery.

A long and depressing silence followed. Finally, Mrs. Slade said, I just opened this rooming house. My husband was killed last spring up in the Basin. If all the rooms get rented, I’ll have more to do here than I can manage by myself. If, when your two weeks are up, my room and board lists are full, and if you ain’t found other work by then, you could help me here. There’s a tiny room off the back porch. I’d give you that and your board rent-free for helping out in the kitchen. We can work out the details. What do you say, Margaret?

Oh thank you, Mrs. Slade! Thank you, Maggie replied and tears came to her eyes. The world looked immeasurably better than it had out there on the lonely desert.

CHAPTER TWO

As the days passed, Maggie settled into her new surroundings. With an intense interest, she explored the town that nestled between Fort Boise to the north and the river to the south. The livery stable was flanked on one side by the stage station and on the other by a blacksmith shop. Next to the station was the yard and barns of a freight outfit, and next to that was Brownfield’s, the town’s only eating place except for the fancy dining room at the hotel. There was a bank, two mercantile stores, a Chinese laundry, the Overland Hotel, the assay office, a harness and saddlery shop, two barber and bath shops, a fresh meat market, a weekly newspaper, and more saloons than she could count.

The saloons and barbershops were out of bounds for a proper lady, but so thoroughly did she inspect every other place of business that within two days, all of Boise City’s residents were acquainted with Margaret Turner, at least by sight. She was that beautiful and lively young redhead what just came to town.

Since Boise City had only seven more-or-less eligible women for over four hundred single men and even the married ladies of the town drew more than their share of hungry stares whenever they ventured out in public, there was considerable interest in Maggie’s presence. Seemingly unaware of the stir she was creating, Maggie strolled the dusty streets, an auburn beauty in a gingham frock and with neither bonnet nor parasol. She appeared almost wanton in her innocence.

But the first person to broach an actual conversation with her on the street towered half a head over Maggie and took up much of the board sidewalk with her bulk. You’re Maggie Turner, ain’t you? she asked.

Yes, Margaret replied. She gazed up into the woman’s broad face. The eyebrows had been plucked to thin lines that arched over hard, blue eyes. Cracks appeared in the white face powder when the face wrinkled with a forced and humorless smile. Her lips were unnaturally red and had an exaggerated cupid’s bow shape. Her black dress billowed like a tent below a white lace bodice and made rustling sounds when she moved.

They call me Big Minnie, and I have just the place in this here town where you can make yourself a fortune, she wheezed in a throaty voice as though speaking exhausted her.

With her country-bred callowness, Maggie replied, Well, I’m in need of a job, that’s certain.

You’ll like the girls. There’s Molly-B-Dam, Lottie, Touch-the-Button Sal, and Timberline, although that one gets moody as hell at times, Big Minnie said. We charge $3.00 a throw and I get two of that. We might even get more for you, for Crissake, with all that red hair. In return, I feed and clothe you and furnish your bed, which you can use even when you ain’t working. Won’t get a better deal ‘n that anywhere. Hell, dearie, on a good night, you can hump at least a dozen of these bucks around here. You just figger how much that comes to over the course of a month. Hell of a lot of money, I can tell you! Big Minnie wheezed breathlessly from her lengthy speech.

Maggie had slowly realized what Big Minnie was talking about and bristled her response. I don’t reckon I’m interested in your line of work Ma’am, not if it makes a body as pussle-gutted as you are. I swear, Minnie, you’d dress out three hundred if you’d dress out a pound. I’d give the slaughter house a wide berth, was I you.

Maggie turned and walked away in the opposite direction. She stifled a girlish giggle, flattered that Big Minnie thought she might be worth more than her other girls and not quite able to summon proper indignation at the blowzy madam’s offer.

-—-

What’s a beauty like you doin’ in a God-forsaken town like this? or How do you do, Miss. I’m Charles Ostervelt and newly arrived from the East. Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to dinner this evening at the Overland? or I . . . uh . . . don’t suppose . . . uh . . . you’d be intersted in . . . uh . . . havin’ supper with . . . with me tonight? or I’m Johnny Talbot, li’l darlin’, an’ I struck it rich up in the Basin. How’s about me an’ you spendin’ a little of that gold together? or I’m a ring-tailed tornado, sweet things, an’ I’m about ready to blow this town. I’m giving ya the chance to come with me, girly-girl. The approaches were frequent and as varied as the men making them to Maggie. There were tall men and short, muscular ones and wizened, handsome and scruffly. She was flattered by the attention and even accepted one invitation to dine with the one who was most persistent. As a group, though, she found them all too unkempt or crude or boring to interest her greatly. She entertained Mrs. Slade with her imitation of the more outrageous flirtations.

The one man who genuinely intrigued her, however, was of only average height with black, curly hair in need of a cut. The two things she found irresistible about him were his laughing blue eyes and