The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman Page B

beer wagons, top hats, and spinning parasols, “O Susannah!” fiddling on the soundtrack, white letters with square serifs on the scrim: DENVER. Crowding in for a tight shot of the scripted legend on a sign, swinging crazily from chains attached to a porch roof trimmed in gingerbread, we remove our hats, pat down our hair, and prepare to enter the Wood Palace. We step back a moment to allow a burly party in shirtsleeves and handlebars to hurl a drunken saddle tramp out through the swinging doors, then join the customers inside.
    The main room, two stories high and hung with a chandelier that doubles as a trapeze, features green baize gaming tables, a mahogany bar as long as the
Mayflower
and more cunningly carved, a stage, and a high ballustraded hallway with stairs cantilevering up to it; nymphs and satyrs randy about in oil on canvas at the top, bordered by bronze cherubim. All the tables are in use and noneof the six bartenders is idle. The usual chubby quartette gallops in sparkling leotards onstage; if we strain our ears, we may detect the anachronistic notes of a can-can. This is an entertainment after all, and not a historical tale.
    We’re just in time to see that high railing collapse and a pair of battlers fall ten feet to the table beneath, demolishing it and interrupting a lively game of faro. Once again the burly fellow goes to work.
    We suspect, of course, that all this is staging. The Wood Palace’s real business is conducted behind the numbered doors lining that second-story hallway. From one of them, if our fortune continues (and this is the same as catching a glimpse of Victoria passing through the Buckingham gate in her coach), Nell Dugan may make an appearance before the last drunk is swept out.
    Late in life, when the laws of time and nature had packed off with those physical charms that had made her a doubtful subject for serious journalism, Nell told a reporter from the
Post
that she’d come to America at fourteen with just a dollar and forty cents in her pocket. Matronly vanity gave her license to pare six years off her age, and social discretion to leave out mention of the letter of introduction she’d sewn inside the lining of her shabby coat, addressed by the mayor of Limerick to Michael McFee, president and principal stockholder of the Denver Topical Mining Company.
    It was an arrangement of convenience for all three parties. The mayor’s wife had become suspicious to the point of certainty, and Nell had placed in safekeeping a number of letters of an indiscreet character written to her in his hand. McFee, a confederate of the mayor’s before emigrating ten years before, lived like Vanderbilt sofar as the scale of life in the Colorado Territory could support, and desired both a mistress and a taste of the companionship of old Erin; Nell chafed at the restraints placed upon her by a puritanical father and a farmer husband who stank perennially of sod. “It was like going to bed in me own grave,” she told the reporter, who recorded the remark in his notes but forebore to publish it. The mayor stood her passage to New York, McFee her train fare to Denver, where the question of her accommodations pivoted upon the impression she made. It was a gamble; but like any good gambler, she was well aware of the odds, and that they were in her favor. A photograph made at the time the article appeared in the
Post
suggests, beneath the folds of fat of a prosperous middle age, something of the stake she brought to the table at twenty. Forty years of good Irish whisky, half-dollar cheroots, and carnal calisthentics may thicken the waist and coarsen the skin, but can neither alter the impudent tilt of the nose nor dim the devil in the eye.
    McFee was a gambler as well, and knew a good hand when it was dealt. He set Nell up as titular owner of a former boardinghouse on Holladay Street that had been converted first into a hotel for prospectors weary of canvas and thrice-boiled