Wilde West by Walter Satterthwait Page A

light his cigarettes.
    Yes. Convince her. Tonight. Convince her to leave Tabor, a decent chap certainly but clearly wrong for her. Convince her to leave Denver, come along to finish up the tour, and then sail with him for England. Together, they would burn their bridges behind them.
    But what about Mother? How would she react to a daughter-in-law who was not only American, which was accidental and therefore possibly forgivable, but also penniless? Which to Mother was an indication of willful stupidity.
    We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
    He smiled. He rolled over, lifted his fountain pen from the notebook lying atop the mattress, opened the book, and wrote:
    Burn that bridge when we come to it.

    At one-thirty he had been waiting on the north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets for three quarters of an hour. It was an empty, cold, and exceptionally inhospitable intersection. The wind moaned over the rooftops of grim brick buildings, mournfully, drearily, as though it had been reading Dickens. The air was chill. A skein of hard white stars winked overhead: so distant, so frigid, so utterly indifferent to the fate of Man that finally they had become quite irritating.
    He heard the hurried clop of horses’ hooves against hard-packed earth, heard the clack and rattle of a carriage. Looked up and saw the animals, two of them, suddenly appear at the corner in an insane gallop. Coal-black flanks agleam in the yellow light of the streetlamp, they dragged behind them a small black hansom that careened to the left as it reeled in its turn.
    The driver, Oscar saw as the vehicle approached, was swathed in a long black topcoat and muffled about the face with a long black scarf that concealed his face and trailed over his shoulder. A black hat, flat-crowned and flat-brimmed, was pulled low over his head, its shadow masking his face.
    Just before the carriage reached Oscar, the man reined in the horses and pushed down the wooden brake lever with a booted foot. Silently he nodded, tapped the gloved forefinger of his left hand against the brim of his hat, and then indicated, by a curt swing of his whip, that Oscar should enter the cab.
    â€œAh,” said Oscar. Elizabeth McCourt Doe had apparently laid on transport.
    But he hesitated. He peered inside the carriage. Empty. He looked up at the driver. Extremely romantic, to be sure, bundled up like Dick Turpin; but what guarantee was there that the woman had sent this chap? Who knew what sort of villain he might be? A genuine Turpin, perhaps: a real highwayman. Plotting to cart Oscar off and plunder him at gunpoint in some dusky deserted alleyway.
    But highwaymen, if memory served, didn’t drive carriages. Carriages were what they robbed. They rode horses, or they bounded out of bushes.
    Perhaps this was something else they arranged differently in American cities. A lack of suitable bushes.
    The driver leaned over and impatiently slapped the carriage door with the tip of his whip.
    â€œAre you quite sure,” Oscar asked the man, “that you’ve found the right party? Mr. Oscar Wilde?” The impoverished and entirely harmless poet, he almost added.
    The driver nodded, a single brusque movement, and then again, brusquely, smacked his whip against the carriage side.
    My heart and hand I will give to thee …
    Sighing sadly, Oscar opened the door and stepped into the cab.
    Even before his other foot had left the ground, the driver cracked the whip and the horses bolted forward. Oscar’s shoulder slammed onto the seat’s back as his knee smashed against its front. His breath suddenly gone, he wrenched himself awkwardly around, clutched for handholds along the carriage’s side. The carriage lurched to the left and he was thrown against the door, which sprang open and, for a frantic moment before he jerked it shut, revealed an expanse of dark, disagreeable roadway racing away below.
    The carriage bounced and bucked, leaped and bounced as it