Deep Purple Read Free

middle of the main winding thoroughfare—the Camino Real, the last lap of the Kings Highway from Mexico City. In the Plaza de la Mesilla she saw people sleeping out on the open ground.
    “ Are there no rooms to be had?” she asked the lawyer with growing concern as the coach halted before what her instincts told her had to be one of the West’s notorious saloons.
    Ogilvee chuckled. “ Nary a hostelry—unless one considers the outhouses the people seek on particularly cold nights. But most of the time, madam, it's too hot to sleep indoors even if Tucson did have a hotel. They call it a Tucson Bed—you lay on your stomach and cover yourself with your back!” He slapped his knee again, laughing at his drollery.
    "I ’m surprised people bother to sleep,” she said, eyeing the many brightly lit establishments that rimmed the plaza. From inside the coach she could hear the army mules braying in the corrals and mixing with the loud music and laughter coming from the cantina. Even at that time of the morning the cantina doors swung constantly with the entrance of miners anxious to spend their nuggets and hidalgos reckless with their Mexican 'dobe dollars.
    When the Mexican town of Tucson came into the New Mexico Territory with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, it was known as the Old Pueblo, but to Catherine the plaza about the Meyer Street Saloon in no way resembled a sleepy little pueblo.
    "Anyone going to meet you, madam?” Ogilvee asked.
    “ Yes,” she said, looking uncertainly past the doors into the smoke-congested room. "But I don’t think they expected me to arrive this late.”
    He grunted. “ I promised the guv’nor I’d see you through. Let’s see what we can do.”
    He led her into the saloon, his hand protectively at her elbow. For a brief second she paused as her senses were assaulted —by the thick, acrid smoke of cigars and tallow candles, by the noisy men packing pistols at their hips, and by sights she had only dimly imagined in her musings.
    Games of chance were in full swing with the tables of monte and faro crowded by tense throngs of gamblers. At a bar that she would have sworn was a block long men lounged in tipsy conversation. Beneath an immense gilded mirror a bartender served drinks to a pompous old madam and a stripling.
    The surveyor general ushered her over to the bar. The stran geness of the place with so many men pressing about her made the pulse at the hollow of her throat beat a little quicker. The surveyor general had warned her that Tucson was a resort of horse thieves, murderers, and vagrant politicians. “Men who are no longer permitted to live in California or Texas find the Tucson climate congenial to their health, madam.” She was beginning to think that Ogilvee knew what he was talking about.
    “ I don’t suppose you have a place the lady could stay?” Ogilvee asked the bartender. “Just for a few hours?”
    The squat Mexican rounded his eyes as he glanced at Catherine. Wordlessly he shook his head. “ You are making the joke, senor? A lady—here?”
    The aging madam whom Catherine had seen with the young cowboy turned to face her, and C atherine could see up close how the rouge clogged the woman’s wrinkles. “There’s the bath at the back, Emilio,” she told the bartender. Then to Catherine, “For a small fee that you pay the darky attendant, dearie, you can even rent a bathtub.”
    Catherine co uld think of nothing she would like better than a bath and change of clothes before meeting with her prospective employer. She thanked the surveyor general for everything and, after her trunk was safely ensconced behind the bar, made her way down the saloon’s narrow, dark hallway with her carpetbag in hand. The farther she proceeded, the murkier and sleazier the hall became. And when a man staggered through the doorway of a room on the right, she jumped.
    She literally had to force her footsteps past the man , who stood so tall his curly yellow-brown hair brushed the low