Katy Run Away (2 page)

She was also staring across the yard and straight at Katy. When she saw that Katy had noticed, she smiled and beckoned with two fingers.

Tired as Katy was, her stomach rumbled again. Her mouth watered. Every part of her body cried out as Katy climbed to her feet and limped toward the chow tent. It felt at least ten degrees cooler when she passed under the flapping edge of off-white canvas and into the shade beneath.

“Hey, baby girl,” the scandalous woman said, her voice a little high and squeaky, when Katy approached her table. “You look so tired. Hungry, too. Set, set! Set yourself on down. ‘Les, of course, you think I’ve got something catchy and wrong.”

Though her smile didn’t diminish, something turned hard and daring in the young woman’s dark eyes. Katy didn’t sit; it felt more like a collapse. Some of that hardness melting from her features, the dark-haired woman pushed her half-empty bowl of stew across the table. Katy didn’t argue. Her stomach rumbling loud enough to broaden the other woman’s smile, she pulled the bowl toward her and dug in. She knew she was hungry, she just didn’t know how much until that first savory mouthful of potato and barley and big chunks of stewed beef crossed her tongue. She stuffed her mouth—one, two, three bites—and when nothing more would fit, she chewed, hiding behind a trembling hand because her lips couldn’t quite close until she partially swallowed.

Chin propped against one fist, the woman smiled again. “Yeah, I remember being like that, too. The Yiangs is nice people. Good people. But all that warshin’ is hard, hard work. And it don’t pay for piss, much less bed and board. You roomin’ with them?”

Having just stuffed another spoonful in her mouth, Katy shot her a guilty look across the table. She was eating like a pig. She tried to slow down. She tried to sit properly upright, despite her aching back, and swallowed repeatedly until her mouth was empty enough to talk. “I’m renting at Miss Bailey’s.”

“Miss Bailey’s?” Eyebrows arching, the young woman snorted. “Baby girl, you can’t make your weekly working laundry. The Yiangs is nice, but they will dock you for scorching a shirt or being late. First time that happens, you can kiss Miss Bailey’s goodbye. And how you going to eat? You ain’t making, what? Forty cents?”

Her spoon scraping the bottom of the now empty bowl, Katy couldn’t meet her eyes. “Thirty-five.” She could cheerfully have finished off two, even three more bowls, despite feeling what she’d already eaten sitting in the pit of her stomach like an indigestible rock.

“Baby girl, ain’t you got no folks you can ask for help?”

“No.” Katy lifted her chin, stubbornly refusing to meet her eyes or to consider going home again. She didn’t think she could stomach what was waiting for her there any more now than she had the day she’d left. What had that been, only a week ago? Right now, it felt like forever. She felt a stab of guilt, wondering if her mother was worried about her.

“Well.” The woman tsked. “You ain’t gonna make it working other folks’ dirty warshin’. You need a better paying job.”

Katy shook her head, the thin set of her shoulders slumping as she admitted. “It’s the only thing I could find.”

The other woman blossomed into another grin. “You ain’t looking right! The Abilene’s always looking for dancers, and with all that pretty blonde hair and blue eyes, baby girl, there ain’t no way Big Benny’d say no to you.”

Katy recoiled. Her gaze dropped to the empty soup bowl on the table in between them, and she was instantly ashamed of that knee-jerk reaction. “I…I can’t. I’m…not like…that.”

“That?” The other woman arched an eyebrow, but didn’t lose her smile. “Honey, Abilene’s ain’t no whorehouse. We cater to the fellas, but we don’t sleep with them. We just dance for ‘em and with ‘em, give those hard-working boys something pretty to look at and soft to hold when they come rolling inta town with their pockets all full and jangly. Maybe it ain’t proper, but it ain’t spreading our legs either. And I’ll tell you something else, baby girl. It ain’t thirty-five cents a day.” Folding her lace-gloved hands over the table, she leaned in close to Katy. “I made sixteen dollars last night alone.”

Katy’s jaw dropped.

“Yes, ma’am. Sixteen dollars and I ain’t even whoring.” The young woman smirked, her dark eyes shining. “I got me an account down at the bank. Nine dimes out of ten, I put it straight to savings. A girl’s got to be smart about these things. I’m pretty nuff now, but looks don’t last forever. I figure, six more years of this and then I’mma retire, get me some fancy dresses, move someplace nobody’s ever heard of, find me a nice man what’s half billy goat in bed and raise us up a passel of kids on a real live ranch with mustang ponies and a white picket fence. Yes sir, that right there’s my ten-year plan and it suits me right on down to the ground. But what about you? Ten years from now, what do you want to have? A place of your own? A family? A man what knows there’s more to you than a slap and tickle ‘twixt the bedsheets?”

Katy stared at her, unable to think about anything but her bedroom back home, Nana and Cook laughing in the kitchen, the smell of hotcakes rising up through the floorboards and the low of cattle calling in the distance.

“You tell me, baby girl,” the woman across from her smiled again, a little sad and a little knowing. “How you gonna get any of that scrubbing other people’s muckups for thirty-five cents a day?” She shook her head, groaning a little as she reached for Katy’s hands. “Look at your poor fingers. How long before you think all the rest of you is gonna look just that red and raw and broken?”

The two women looked at one another; one lost and one commiserating.

“A ten-year plan; that’s the ticket to a better life.” Knocking twice on the tabletop, the satin-dressed woman stood up. “Think about it,” she said, and then she walked away.

Katy sat at that table for a long time, until she heard Father Yiang angrily calling her back to work. When she tried to stand up, her body hurt almost worse than when she’d first sat down. And because she was late, at the end of her third day, instead of thirty-five cents, the Yiangs only paid her twenty. Neither one of them spoke to her, not even to say goodnight. It would be days later before Katy thought to wonder if that were because they’d already known she wouldn’t be back.

She spent her last night at Miss Bailey’s sharing a bed with that snoring, old woman, and the following morning she packed up her few meager clothes and walked down the street to Abilene’s. She didn’t look back that time, either.

* * * * *

Four months later…

Cal Beckton rode into Dustwallow driving fifty-seven head of cattle ahead of him. Between himself and the four hands he’d brought with him, they got the small herd corralled at the stockyard for railway transportation, and then he breathed a sigh of relief. It was his first shipment since taking over his father’s ranch, and though he knew he had big shoes to fill, he was a man in his prime and very well groomed to take over the job. He’d spent his life following in his father’s shadow. He’d grown up in the saddle and on the range. There wasn’t anything a working ranch could throw at him—from roping and riding to branding and breeding or mending and building—that Cal couldn’t handle. He’d done just about all of it and he loved it. It wasn’t just a lifestyle; for Cal, it was a passion and he had great ambition for where he wanted his father’s ranch—his ranch now—to go. The Beckton name wasn’t much now, but someday that was going to change. He would see to that.

Cal swung down out of the saddle and stretched, bending into a couple of squats to work the stiffness out. He rubbed his back. Discretely, he even rubbed his butt, and then he headed into the station office to log his arrival and wire the buyer that his cattle were on the way. It would take two days for the herd to reach its destination by rail and then payment would be wired back to him. Until that time, Cal was determined to enjoy himself in town.

In its infancy of becoming a real civilization, half of all Dustwallow was still in tents, and everywhere he looked there was a saloon. Most of the men who called this place home were a rough and hardy bunch—cowboys, miners and mountain men, merchants, business men and a handful of well-to-do sophisticates who, collectively, probably owned damned near everything he was looking at. He saw virtually no women, something that wasn’t uncommon in towns such as this, though he could hear the telltale laughter of the fairer sex flowing down the street on waves of bawdy music. Well, there’d be plenty of time to get to know some of those ladies later on. Right now, it was business before pleasure.

He stopped by the post to pick up his mail, a letter from his aunt in Philadelphia. Judging by the postmark, it had been sitting there for about three months. At the mercantile, he provided the clerk with a long list of supplies for his hands to escort home again and finally placed a long-distance order for that fancy new stove—four burners and two small oven compartments for baking—for the remodeled kitchen he was building onto his father’s house. It was shoeing time again. He arranged with the blacksmith on a day to come out to the ranch and then, business settled, he turned his mind to pleasure. For the extravagance of a nickel, he bought a bath and a shave. He rarely found the time to make it into town these days, so he wasn’t about to waste this golden opportunity.

Freshly bathed, shaved, and with as much road dust as possible beaten out of his clothes, he shined his spurs, hitched his gun belt and headed down the street to check out the saloons. A good game of Faro, a few shots of whiskey, and maybe a pretty girl on his lap and in his bed—oh yeah, he was definitely going to make the most out of the next two nights.

He let the music and laughter pull him down off the wooden walk, across the muddy street and into a brightly lit, laughingly loud, bawdy little dancehall called The Abilene. There was no door. He simply walked inside and let the cigar smoke and scent of rot gut whiskey and sweat envelope him. He could smell perfume, too, but he didn’t need to rely on his nose to find the ladies. They were everywhere, laughing, chatting, serving drinks, sitting on laps, and a line of five were dancing a can-can on a half-moon stage just beyond the bar. Cal stood for a moment in the doorway, admiring five pairs of bloomers tied at the knees with five different colors of ribbon, five satin skirts and frilly underskirts all pulled up to five grinning ladies’ chins.

They were rouged up, their laughing faces painted to really accentuate the beauty on that rainbow array of blondes, brunettes and one carrot-topped red-head, all kicking their heels up high before letting out mirror whoops and snapping around to bare their bloomer-clad bottoms for the enjoyment of the room. And Cal was not immune. Those were some lovely little ladies up there. The redhead was cherubically plump, and when they snapped back around to resume the can-can, her cheeks were as rosy as the nipples peeking above her tight bodice. The two brunettes were lean and lithesome, small breasted, small waisted, and so close in appearance that they could have been sisters if not twins. And the blondes…oh, he had a special place in his palate preference for blondes. One was Viking tall and the other, slender and small, voluptuous in all the right places, with a mountain of cascading curls bouncing on her shoulders and spilling down her back, and…

Recognition suddenly struck. Cal knew that short, little blonde. He knew her face. Where had he seen her? Not out at his ranch, surely, and this was the first time he’d ever set foot in the Abilene. Although not a newcomer to the pleasures of a bawdy house (or dancehall, for that matter), he was relatively sure she wasn’t one of the girls he’d frequented in the past. Admittedly, when he came to town for that, it wasn’t their faces he was most interested in seeing, but she just didn’t look familiar in that way. Rather, she looked…

Recognition hit him again, hard enough this time to turn him cold and then madder-than-a-boiled-owl hot all over. That little blonde gal kicking up her heels on that stage, snapping back around and showing a room full of hooting cowboys and miners the plump alluring heart of her bloomer-clad bottom wore the face of a man he had once considered a second father. Sam Furlow, the man who had once employed both Cal and his father on his sprawling ranch up in Wyoming. Who had not only taught Cal half of everything he knew of ranching, but who had taught him how to swim and fish, who had taken him hunting, who had brought in a doctor from Idaho when his father had taken so sick everyone thought for sure he would die, and who had sold Cal and his father their first hundred head of cattle and at a price so low they might just as well have been free.

That was little Katy Furlow up there on that stage. Tagalong Katy. Little Brat Katy. Katy who had followed him around the ranch while he’d worked, getting in the way, asking little girl questions, being obnoxious at times but fun at others. Katy, the little sister he’d never had, the absolute light of her Sam’s eyes and the only person he could not stop thinking about on that day when he’d learned that old Sam had died. That had been the first and the last time since coming to manhood that Cal had cried.

Little Katy Furlow.

Her daddy had to be rolling over in his grave with shame.

Cal had absolutely no memory of crossing the room. The next thing he knew, five shocked young women had stopped dancing and he was hopping up onto the stage. He didn’t care about four of them. The full brunt of his incredulous fury was focused solely on the shorter blonde. “You rotten little brat!”

Katy’s blue eyes were huge and she stumbled backwards, but not fast enough to evade his grabbing hands. She yelped when he jerked her around, catching her shoulders in both hands and giving her a single hard shake. Shrieks erupted from the other ladies; objecting shouts rippled through the audience.

“Benny!” One of the brunettes tried to grab his arm. “Hey! You let my baby girl go!”

Cal shook her off. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the tall and massively formed bartender coming out from behind the bar, cocking and loading a long-barreled rifle. He was slightly less aware of someone else calling out for someone to fetch the sheriff. At the moment, Cal was much too angry to pay any attention to either threat. His gaze remained locked solely on Katy’s startled face and the sudden light of recognition that sparked in her sky blue eyes just before her cheeks turned a brilliant shade of red.