"Well, she ain't no honky-tonk gal or anything like that. She was a lady married to Duke Parker, who was a gentleman. He t-took out townsite papers and built that town up there. Then he got k-killed in an accident and she's been running things."
"That's about the way I heard it, too," Tesno said. "But I knew Duke Parker at Sandpoint, before he got married. He might have been a gentleman by education, but he was about as slippery a cuss as I ever met."
"That don't make her a non-lady," Willie persisted. "Wh-what k-kind of a job you think she might give me?"
Tesno saddled up, and they rode together the rest of the day, following the raw new road that looped and plodded through rock and timber to the very backbone of the range. They passed a slashers' ragcamp, a supply train of a dozen heavy wagons, a stagecoach stalled with a broken wheel and loaded with laborers. With the sun haloing snow-veined peaks ahead and the chill of an early-May twilight lurking in the shadows of the pines, they topped a writhing, ragged ridge and looked down on the place called Tunneltown.
It lay in a stump-studded gulch, a double row of log buildings neatly toeing boardwalks along a wide, rut-scribbled street. Tesno whistled through his teeth. He hadn't expected a solid-looking town here eighty-five miles ahead of track—though the why of it was plain enough when a man stopped to think. The workmen here had a tunnel to ream through the rock of Runaway Mountain, two miles of it. They would be here two years, more or less. For that long, Tunneltown was assured of a population with money to spend. And it was assured of a steady stream of transient spenders—freighters, engineers, inspectors, salesmen.
The horses had fallen into an eager trot on the down-grade, sensing food and rest ahead; now they slowed to a walk in the heavy mud of the short, broad street. Tesno made out another cluster of buildings now, six or eight large ones among the pines on the far slope of the gulch. That would be Ben Vickers' camp, he concluded. He reined toward a hitchrail in front of a long, false-fronted building from which floated the tinny notes of a piano. Above the doorway a sign bore the words PINK LADY, painted in red letters against a black background.
"I'll buy a drink," he said to Willie.
"N-no, thanks," Willie said. "D-drinking for pleasure don't agree with me." He nodded toward a livery barn at the head of the street. "You want me to s-stable your horse for you? He'll get better care there than in a construction camp corral."
Tesno dismounted and handed him the reins. "Buy him a quarter's worth of oats. See you around."
He pushed through the batwing doors into the saloon. Men near the end of the long bar turned to look him over, their eyes darting from his face to the Colt on his hip and back again. Gambling tables, mostly faro layouts, were scattered about the large, smoke-layered room. Tesno moved along the bar to a place near the second of two bartenders, who started toward him, then stopped to stare. He was a plump, red-faced man with a white scar on one cheek. He spoke one word, making a question of it.