“The other girls laugh at me when I talk about it,” Mousey said wistfully. “But I know Tommy will marry me as soon as we’ve saved enough money to buy in on a little place of our own.”
On entering the dining room, Calamity began to see the reason for Mousey’s almost pathetic eagerness to be friends. All the other half-dozen girls seated around the table appeared to be either older, or at least more suited to the life of a saloon-girl. Brassy, hard-faced, none of them would be the sort of friend an innocent kid like Mousey wanted and most likely her attempts at making friends met with constant rebuffs.
More than any of the others, one girl took Calamity’s attention. There was trouble, or Calamity had never seen it. The girl was a blonde, slightly taller and heavier than Calamity, shapely, beautiful; and knowing it she had an air of arrogant truculence about her.
For the rest, they looked like the kind of girls one expected to find in a saloon. Maybe a mite younger and better-looking than one figured on in a small town such as Caspar, but run-of-the-mill. Even the buxom brunette who sat at the head of the table and smoked a cigarette, she would be one of the boss girls and, while looking tough and capable, did not strike Calamity as being out of the ordinary.
“How do you feel, Dora?” Mousey asked sympathetically, going to the blonde.
“Great, how else?”
“But I thought——” the little blonde gasped.
“God! You’re dumb!” the bigger girl spat out.
“She’s not alone in that,” snapped the buxom brunette. “If your brains were gunpowder and went off they wouldn’t stir your hair.”
An angry glint came into Dora’s eyes, but she knew better than give lip to Maisie. So she turned her spleen on somebody else. Her eyes went to Calamity who still stood at the door, taking in the red-head’s travel-stained clothing and lack of make-up.
“Who’re you?” she asked.
“This’s Marty Connelly,” Mousey introduced, sounding puzzled. Dora did not act like a girl grieving for a dead lover. If it had been Tommy who—here Mousey stopped herself with a shudder—well, she wouldn’t act like Dora did at such a time.
Smarting under Maisie’s rebuke, Dora watched Calamity walk toward the table and decided to establish her superiority over the newcomer. Which only went to prove that she had no right to call anybody else dumb.
“Is the boss hiring tramps now?” she sniffed and a couple of her particular friends giggled.
Calamity looked Dora up and down with cold eyes. While she had refrained from handing Phyl her needings upstairs, Calamity figured there must come a time when meekness stopped; and that time had arrived right then. If she allowed Dora to push her around, her subsequent social position would be under the blonde; which Calamity reckoned might be mighty undesirable.
“Looking at you,” Calamity said calmly, “I’d say the boss started hiring old tramps some time back.”
“My my!” Dora purred, twisting around in her chair. “Aren’t you cute?”
With that the blonde hurled forward and lashed around her right hand in a savage slap calculated to knock its receiver halfway across the room and reduce her to wailing submission. Only to achieve its object the slap had to land on the other girl first.
Throwing up her left hand, Calamity deflected the slap before it reached her. Before Dora recovered balance or realized just how wrong things were going, Calamity drove a clenched fist into the blonde’s belly. The blow took Dora completely unawares, sinking in deep and driving waves of agony through her. Croaking with pain, Dora folded over and caught Calamity’s other fist as it whipped up. Dora came erect, a trickle of blood running from her cut lip, and caught a roundhouse smash from Calamity’s right hand. The fist crashed into the blonde’s cheek just under her eye and sent her sprawling backward to land with a thud on her butt by the table.
“All right, you alley-cats!” Maisie yelled, throwing back her chair and coming to her feet. “Simmer down. If you want to fight, save it until tonight and do it in the bar for the paying customers.”
“I’ll take her any time!” Calamity hissed, crouching with crooked fingers as she had seen so many belligerent girls stand at such a moment.
“How about you, Dora?” asked Maisie, knowing the entertainment value of a good hair-yanking brawl between two of the girls.
Dora did not answer, but sat on the floor trying to nurse her swelling, pain-filled eye, soothe her puffing-up lip and hold her aching, nausea-filled stomach, sobbing loudly all the time. Never a popular girl, Dora received little sympathy from her fellow-workers.
Looking down at the blonde, one of the other girls gave a laugh and said, “I don’t think Dora feels like tangling with Marty.”
Walking to Dora’s side, Maisie bent down and pulled the blonde’s hand from the eye, looking at the discoloration forming.
“Whooee!” said Maisie with a grin. “That’ll be a beauty soon. Anyways, it’ll keep you out of the way for a few days. Which’s a good thing, the way you’re acting. You’d queer the boss’s game going on like you are when you’re supposed to have lost your own true love. Now shut your yap, or I’ll turn Marty loose on you again.”
Knowing that Maisie meant every word she said, Dora stifled her sobs. She dragged herself to her feet and limped slowly from the room. Looking around the table, Calamity did not figure she would have trouble with any of the other girls.
Now all she had to do was start learning the proof of the saloonkeeper’s part in the Caspar County cow stealing.
Chapter 10 BRING ME HIS WALLET
ALTHOUGH CALAMITY WONDERED HOW ELLA Watson would take the news of her actions, no complaints came down from the boss’s office. Over the meal Calamity became acquainted with the other girls. She let it be known that she left Austin at the town marshal’s request, but none of the other girls pressed her too deeply about her past. Having seen how Calamity handled Dora, a tough girl in her own right, the rest figured that the redhead might resent too close questioning and had a real convincing argument for anybody who tried. One thing Calamity made sure the others knew, how Mousey stood with her. Always a generous and good-hearted girl, Calamity had decided to take Mousey under her wing and intended to give the friendship the little blonde craved but found missing among the other saloon workers.
After eating, Calamity waited until Mousey dressed and then they left the Cattle Queen. While walking along Main Street toward the Chinese laundry’s bath-house, Calamity listened to Mousey’s chatter and kept her eyes peeled for some sign of Danny Fog, but saw nothing of him. However, Mousey, telling of the discovery of Gooch and the cowhands’ bodies, let Calamity know that Danny had arrived and appeared to be well involved in the business which brought them both to Caspar County.
Even without formal training, Calamity used the best technique for a peace officer involved in such a task; she let the others do most of the talking. With Mousey that proved all too easy. Starved for friendship and loving to talk, she prattled on and gave Calamity some insight into the doings of the area.
“That Dora!” Mousey sniffed indignantly. “She was in love with Sammy, yet she doesn’t even look as if she cares about him being killed.”
Calamity doubted, from the little she had seen of Dora, if the girl really loved a forty-dollars-a-month cowhand. However, Mousey’s words gave Calamity an idea of how Ella Watson ensnared the young cowhands into her cow-stealing organization. Women were far outnumbered by the men out West and the local young cowboys would easily become infatuated by a saloon-girl. After that, the rest would be easy.