Silver Dagger

By Debra Milligan

Set in Truckee in 1889, Silver Dagger presents the tale of a young woman named Rory; an Irish cowboy, Kell O’Connor; and the mysterious Josée whose life, and death, intertwine with the fates of those lovers.

The sudden disappearance of Kell from the life of Rory sets into motion a hasty marriage to Jackson Parnell, a man who is unworthy of Rory, and of marriage. She and her child are cast into the clutches of an even more dastardly man, Jim Reid, the owner of Hurd’s Saloon.

Heroes were awfully hard to find that year in Truckee, California.

Filled with haunting strains of music, duplicity, and desire, SILVER DAGGER takes place amidst summer smoke and fire, and an early autumnal blizzard in the Sierra Nevada.

Themes include courage and faith prevailing over cowardice and fear; suffering through love to conquer evil; forgiveness after heartache; the healing power of love; the miracle of birth; and the mystery of redemption.

The Characters
Aurora “Rory” Aames Parnell: Age 18. Mother of Kathleen, wife of Jackson Parnell, waitress in Hurd’s Saloon in Truckee.

Josée: Age 29. Barmaid, waitress, and friend of Rory. Her heart is torn between pure desires and pure demons.

Kathleen: Baby Daughter of Rory.

Kell Seamus O’Connor: Cowboy, Age 22.

Maureen: Pinto horse belonging to Kell.

Jackson Parnell: Age 28. Gambler and rattlesnake husband of Rory.

Jim Reid: Age 45. The bar owner with a shady past and an even more shady present.

Jake Hobbers: Age 27. The Sheriff who tries to enforce the law, sometimes against his better judgement.

Santiago: The Cookie, somewhere in his early 40s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Milligan
• Release date: Oct 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005229153

Debra Milligan

Debra Milligan is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is fluent in French and has varied interests in the fine arts, architecture, history of all kinds, music, horses, hounds, the Golden Age of Hollywood, quilting, fashion, and gardening.

Book preview

Silver Dagger

By

Debra Milligan

Copyright 2022 Debra Milligan

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten - Epilogue

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Dedication

Dedicated to the brave man

whose bride I am.

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Chapter One

The sun burned molten white in the grey sky. Kell O’Connor sat tall and loose astride his horse, letting his long thighs talk to her, smiling at the quick and easy response the animal gave to his muscles. He looked up, his eyes searching the smoky haze for a horizon. He found none. On this early October day, the Sierra Nevada was ablaze with fire. The hot air stung his eyes and the eyes of his pinto who continually shook her head in annoyance.

The horse snorted, clearing some dust from her nostrils.

Aye, he said gently. It gets up my nose a wee bit too, the heat and the haze at this time of year. There’ll be no escaping the dust and the smoke. When it’s gone, I’ll be glad of it. He patted the white mane of his tobiano pinto. You’ll be glad too.

The dry bitter weeds and smoke had indeed gotten up the nose of Kell. He rubbed his nostrils, trying to be free of the acrid odor, but the smell persisted, like a foul wind.

The abrupt sharp blast of a train whistle stiffened the horse, causing her to prepare to bolt. Kell loosened his hold on the reins, and sang in a low, soft purring voice:

At midnight when the cattle are sleeping

on my saddle I pillow my head,

And up at the heavens lie peeping

From out of my cold, grassy bed . . .

The horse calmed, then snorted. Kell waited half a minute, and then he gently tossed the reins over the head of the horse, letting them trail onto the hard dirt. He swiftly dismounted to the dusty ground. He pulled a red bandana from around his neck and wet it with water from his canteen.

Here ye are, Maureen mavoureen, Kell gently put the wet soft cloth to the nostrils of his horse.

She was all he had now, this tobiano black and white paint, named Maureen. He’d gotten her in Elko, Nevada from a curmudgeon rancher, who had traded the three-year-old for some labor from Kell. This Irishman knew he’d gotten a blessed bargain from that codger, living alone in a cabin on the sagebrush steppe of a town named by the Shoshone. Rocks Piled on One Another was long English for Elko. Kell couldn’t wait to leave the shack with this fine horse whom he believed he’d rescued.

He might have been carrying out a splendid act of mercy for this gorgeous equine creature, but the deal was part of remorseful recompense for him. It formed atonement for the death of his beloved Appaloosa who had been with him since the summer of 1887. Reilly had carried him through the rain and the wind and the snow, all over the eastern slopes and rugged hills of Missoula, Montana; and, then, on to Truckee during the spring of 1888. The horse had seen him to safety on his return to Missoula that autumn. He’d subsequently and nobly brought his cowboy from Montana to Elko.

Kell had been forced to put that magnificent horse down, out of its misery from a broken leg. He still mourned the dismal deadly but necessary act.

He sighed. So much had gone wrong, he didn’t know where to pick up the thread of his journey to Truckee. That mission had unraveled more than once. The worst unwinding of his poorly laid plans came at Lovelock, amidst the meadows and the rail yard. That train, heading to Reno, had tempted him, as the means by which to arrive in Truckee, but he couldn’t part from this pinto. Kell then decided to sell his saddle for food and water, enough to get him and his horse through the final leg of riding through the desert.

Maureen mavoureen was now all he had, except for his satchel of personal treasures. Five years earlier, at the age of seventeen, he’d carried those keepsakes with him to America from Connemara, Ireland. He didn’t mind being a saddle tramp, but now he was merely a tramp, without the saddle. It was true, he knew, that the ultimate indignity of any cowboy was to ride without a saddle, but Kell O’Connor had not fully immersed himself in cowpoke culture. He took of it what he needed, and ignored the rest; of the rest, there was much he’d not ever contemplated as necessary.

He couldn’t even do what the cowboy had so easily and naturally done in the song he’d just sung so lovingly to his pinto: pillow his weary head on his finely tooled leather saddle.

He’d ridden on a coarse blanket through the Nevada desert, then braved the charred Sierra Nevada to arrive at this town, his destination, Truckee.

Feeling the horse breathing more freely, Kell pulled off his gloves. He stuck the moist bandana into his rear pants pocket. He did not remount but stood, stroking the mare between her eyes and then down the nose, again and again, in a circular motion, from top to bottom, around and up, then down again, from top to bottom.

Wearily, he gazed around him, at Hurd’s Saloon, located across the street from where he and his pinto had come to rest on Front Street. The back door to this saloon conveniently opened onto Jibboom Street, facilitating without much delay the transactions between the soiled doves and their customers who soiled them.

Kell had already had quite enough of the goings-on along Front Street, sometimes called Commercial Row. It didn’t matter which name this main thoroughfare through downtown was given; the road led to perdition if a man didn’t have his wits about him. He vowed to have his wits about him this time on his way through Truckee.

He eyed the clapboard general store, facing him from the railroad tracks. It seemed to him that nothing had changed since he’d last seen this street, this town, one year earlier, in early October 1888. This young man stared into the distance, not really seeing anything, and seeing everything.

A man either lives life as it happens to him, and meets life head-on and commands it, or he turns his back on life, and he starts to wither away. At this moment, Kell O’Connor knew not how to avert his gaze from the horizon of fate, but he knew with a fierce certainty that he had run from his destiny, one year ago.

The road home to that horizon, to his fate, was now a smoky horizon. He wished, and almost prayed, for the way to reach that destination. He knew that the road home was through redemption, but he knew not how to reach that solemn splendour.

He mounted his horse. Gently, he pulled on the reins and uttered a few clicking noises. We’ll be straight off, for now, his voice was almost a whisper.

The horse stepped briskly, straight ahead, toward the more respectable part of town. There, the Methodist Church proudly stood. This house of worship formed the biggest barrier between the humbly respectable citizens and the raffish gamblers and the saloon hussies.

Help! Help! Almighty God! Help!

At the sounds of these screams, Kell glanced to his left, up a steep street. He suddenly saw a four-wheeled wicker pram, hurtling down the street, ever faster and faster, heading toward him. He jumped from his horse and ran to toward the baby buggy. He lunged toward the front, and took the blow of its force upon him. The wheels stopped and, miraculously, the little buggy came to a swift halt without overturning.

A tall black-haired woman ran to Kell. Oh, good man! Thanks be to you and to our Lord!

Her large hands took hold of the infant inside of the pram. No fears, my lovely, a sad and lamenting tone accompanied the tears from this statuesque woman of stunning, yet severe, beauty.

Kell looked at the sweet infant with the dark brown curls, and he immediately knew this wee babe was not the child of this woman with obsidian eyes, blue-black hair, and coppered pale brown skin.

You’ve had the calamitous time, he touched the weathered hand of this woman.

It got away from me, the eyes of the woman were wild and inflexible at the same time. She is safe now, safe . . .

The woman placed the whimpering babe into the baby buggy, and took hold of the hand of Kell. Looking into his eyes, she paused, with a startling sense of recognition of this stranger. A moment, or many, flickered silently between them, and then she said hoarsely,

I can never repay you, but somewhere down the road, God will.

She took hold of the handle of the pram and walked away from him.

Kell felt breathless while he watched the tall, large figure of this woman in her long, lush skirt of plaid in dark red and orange hues and a balloon sleeved-frilly white blouse. She rounded the corner with the wicker pram, disappearing from his sight, onto Front Street.

Kell ambled toward his pinto. As he mounted his Maureen mavoureen, these words echoed in his mind:

Is folamh fuar é teach gan bean. Empty and cold is the house without a woman.

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Chapter Two

From the slit between the two parted calico print curtains, hanging on a narrow window in the hallway on the second floor at the front of Hurd’s Saloon, Aurora Rory Aames Parnell had stared down at Kell O’Connor, dismounting his pinto.

It surprised her, how much it hurt to see him again. Yet, the tears that stung her eyes and rolled down her cheeks offered to this girl, this young woman of eighteen, a strange release from the pain that had gripped her memory of this cowboy. That aching pain, for the briefest of moments, gripped her heart less tightly as she eyed the lean figure of this tall Irishman. The aching pain told her with undeniable simplicity that she loved him, even more than she had before.

There was no running away from her feelings this time. This young woman did not even try to flee the rush of sensations that filled her as she watched this young man smoothly alight from his horse.

She loved him. She’d loved him, right from the start. She would