Haunted Houses

to face him.
“Please, let me go. I don’t know you, sir.”
“Wal, you can git to know me mighty fast!” With that, he jerked Kate toward him, and her bag full of groceries fell from her arms, its contents spilling all over the ground.
“I seen you before, wearin’ them raggedy clothes. You need a purty dress, a gal like you.” He thrust his bearded face close to Kate’s own. She screamed, and a knot of men began to gather around them. Kate strained to break free, and, as she did, her dress tore at the shoulder. She began to cry.
“Now, see what you went and done,” Bill said, leering at her. “I tole you, you needed a purty dress, and I’m going to take you to git it.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” a hard-edged masculine voice spoke up from the crowd. Bill Bailey glared at the man the crowd parted to let pass. A tall, well-built fellow with bright blue eyes, curly black hair, and expensive clothes, it was obvious he was no cattleman.
Bailey released Kate and, fists raised, started for the stranger but stopped abruptly when the man’s hand slid toward his pocket. That meant a pistol. Bailey turned away, melting into the little knot of onlookers. The stranger covered Kate’s bare shoulder by putting his jacket around her and began picking up the contents of her bag from the dirt of the main street.
“I want to see you safely home,” he said. “What is your name, young lady?”
“Kate Morgan. And yours, sir?”
“Lou Garrou.”
She rode behind him on his horse, and Garrou seemed in no hurry. He had gotten off a Mississippi riverboat that afternoon and was in town to enjoy himself. In answer to her question about his occupation, he said, “Just a traveling businessman,” and that he would be moving on in a day or so. He came back to see her that night and the following afternoon, much to everyone’s astonishment, he appeared at the Morgan farmhouse with a box of pretty clothes for Kate. Since he was still there at suppertime, they invited him to sit down and share their meal.
When Garrou showed up about noon on the third day, he asked Kate’s father if he could marry her. The surprised farmer told Garrou that he didn’t know as to how his daughter should marry a traveling man.
“Well it’s time I settled down on some land of my own,” Lou replied, chewing thoughtfully on a blade of grass. Kate’s father liked the sound of that, and her stepmother, eager to get rid of the girl, said, “It’s high time Kate got married.”
So a justice of the peace performed the ceremony, and afterward Morgan pressed a fifty-dollar note into his daughter’s hand. It was the first time since her mother’s death that Kate had seen tears in his eyes.
The river looked like a sheet of gold in the late afternoon sun as the couple boarded a Mississippi packet heading south to Savannah, Fulton, Comanche, and Moline. The names all sounded exciting to Kate. But while the big paddles of the boat rhythmically pounded the water, Kate found out what her husband’s “business” was. He was a gambler.
That night she cried and told him he had deceived her. He became angry and asked her what difference his making a living gambling made if she cared about him, and, if she didn’t, she could always go home. Kate could just imagine the anger in her stepmother’s face if she showed up at the front door. There was nothing to do but make the best of it.
From then on Lou and Kate traveled everywhere there were gambling tables and card games. When they were not on riverboats, they stayed in cities like San Francisco or Sacramento, anywhere Lou could find games with high enough stakes. Usually, he registered Kate under the name Mrs. Anderson Barnard. Whether this was his real name or one he had chosen to protect his identity if there was trouble he would never say. But Kate did know that after the card games there were sometimes hot words and angry losers.
In a few years she settled in Visalia, California, while Lou went on traveling. Sometimes he would show up unexpectedly, promise her he was going to change, stay for a week or two and then leave again. During one of these visits, Kate said, “Why can’t we live like other people do?”
“You’re right, honey. We’ll buy us a little house in Los Angeles and start a family,” he said, hugging her.
They bought the house he had promised and for a while Lou seemed content. Because he was, so was Kate. There were games around town, and money rolled in. Lou tried hard not to become too greedy. He would win a few games, then let himself lose one or two, keeping his bets small. But after four or five months of this, he began to get restless. It was just like it had always been when they stayed anywhere for long. The stakes in the games weren’t big enough, or there was more money to be made elsewhere—Frisco or Denver. Then one night he didn’t come home. He had never done that before or left town without telling her. That was the first of October 1892, and a few weeks later Kate found that she was pregnant. She wanted to tell Lou, but where was he?
Just before Thanksgiving a letter arrived. He wrote that he didn’t think he would ever be able to settle down, and it wasn’t right for a pretty woman like her to be saddled with a drifter. He would see her in a few weeks and bring the money for her to get a divorce. “You keep the house,” he wrote. “A man like me has got no use for one.”
Kate was heartbroken but sure that when he found out about the baby, everything would change; she would find him. One of his favorite haunts was the Hotel del Coronado in San