Read Online The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum - Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t recklessly spending money at the faro tables every night. On Blake Street, Chase, who had a keen sense of what people craved, had used some of the profits from his gambling parlor to build a large red brick building for the Palace Theater. The Palace had 750 seats, and most nights they were filled. There were comics and vaudeville acts, but the real draw was the parade of young women who opened each show in frilly skirts short enough to expose their knees. When they kicked their legs up high in unison, many of the men in the crowd sighed as if they were catching their breath. When they weren’t performing, the ladies were required to mingle with the audience; and if the mood and the gratuity were agreeable, there were heavily curtained boxes flanking the stage where the mingling could run its course in private. The West was a lonely place for the men who had come in droves from somewhere else to create new lives and find their fortunes; unattached women were in short supply. In Denver, the frolicking pretty ladies of the Palace caused quite a sensation.
    Suitors flocked to the stage door, and fellows with dash, wit, money, or simply luck would often find an evening’s company. Sometimes, though, the attractions would run deep, and marriages would ensue. No less a longtime womanizer than Ed Chase would marry Frances Minerva Barbour, one of the glamorous Barbour sisters, after first listening to her sing at his theater. Bat Masterson—the very man who years earlier had hurled a beer mug at Charlie Siringo’s skull—had followed the money to Denver and wound up marrying Emma Walters, a long-limbed Palace dancer.
    Soapy’s affections, however, never moved in such a direction. He was content simply to pursue his fancies. And unlike his fortunes at the faro tables, here his luck ran strong. Then one night he was standing, as was his sly practice, in the wings off the Palace stage when he witnessed an event that caused his temper to rise. A gambler he knew from the Arcade backhanded one of the singers as she was heading backstage. It wasn’t a hard blow, just a mean, quick slap. But Soapy didn’t like men who mistreated women. On instinct, he rushed over and, with a single punch, knocked the gambler down. The man scrambled to his feet, but the wild, resolute look on Soapy’s face discouraged him from pursuing the matter. He simply turned and walked away.
    That night Soapy accompanied the grateful singer to the boardinghouse where she was staying. Her stage name was Allie, but she told him that her friends called by her real name, Mary. Mary Noonan had long blond hair, which she wore wrapped in a high bun, and a face that was friendly and reassuring rather than beautiful. Yet while many of the pretty dancers and singers Soapy had courted from the Palace were seemingly uncomplicated women, frank about their hopes to the point of brazenness, Mary was a different sort. She was reserved, even a bit standoffish. She behaved as if she had no time for or interest in Soapy. She didn’t respond to his attentions with the immediate intensity of feelings that Mamie had so freely offered to Charlie Siringo. Then again, Mamie had been a sheltered fifteen-year-old without either experience or guile; Mary had met enough of the West’s lonely men to be guarded. Besides, a showgirl learns not to put too much trust in romance.
    Mary made it clear that she wanted nothing from Soapy and that, in fact, she would find the offer of a “present” insulting. Perhaps those rebuffs were what attracted Soapy and first set his mind spinning. Whatever the reason, he intensified his pursuit. And in time Soapy came to realize that she had taken hold of his heart in a way no other woman ever had.
    They were married in February 1886. Within a year, their first child, a son, was born. Soapy’s life, he understood, had changed dramatically. Yet he attempted to navigate through the responsibilities of love and fatherhood as he did the rest of his