“Like that, huh?” grinned Calamity with a knowing wink.
“Just like that. Now me, I’d prefer more muscle on mine.”
“And me.”
“Well, come on. I’ll show you where you bed down. The kid you’ll be with’s all right and not in your class. There’ll be a meal downstairs in about an hour.”
Ella Watson looked up from her work as Soskice entered, although she knew that only one person in town would have thought to enter her private quarters without showing the courtesy of knocking first.
“Who was the girl with Phyl?” asked the lawyer.
“A new one. She came in on the stage. Got run out of Austin by the law, and has been in the State Penitentiary or I miss my guess. Anyway, I’ll have a message sent to the Golden Slipper asking about her.”
“Do you always hire jailbirds, Ella?”
“They’re the safest kind. Naive fools like Mousey are all right for attracting certain kinds of cowhand, but you daren’t let her kind know you’re doing anything illegal. You can’t rely on, or trust, kids like Mousey, but you can trust a dishonest dame as long as she doesn’t know too much and has something to lose.”
“You should know,” sniffed Soskice, sinking into a chair. “Why’d you chance going out with those two cowhands who were killed?”
“They had a small bunch of unbranded stuff but were scared by Gooch. So I went along to show them how safe it was. Only it wasn’t. Gooch found us.”
“There’s nothing to tie you in with them, is there?”
“Not a thing. Don’t worry, you’re in no danger. Only the two cowhands knew I was going with them. I met them after we closed and wore men’s clothing. Nobody would have recognized me, even if they’d seen me. Why didn’t you come here before?”
“I—I was busy all yesterday,” answered the lawyer.
“What were you doing?” asked Ella bitterly. “Packing ready to run if I was proved to be involved and caught?”
A dull red flush crept into the lawyer’s cheeks and sullen anger etched itself on his face. However, he held his comments and thoughts back. Much as he hated to admit the fact, even to himself, he needed Ella Watson’s aid to carry out his plans much more than she needed him for hers. Without Ella, he could get nowhere for the cowhands regarded him with amused contempt, ignoring the fact that he bore the results of an Eastern college education and felt he ought to be honored and respected for it.
“It wasn’t that,” he said. “You know we have to be careful. What do you make of the man who found the bodies?”
“Danny Forgrave? He’s a cowhand, likes money and isn’t too worried how he gets it,” Ella answered and told about the bets Danny made the previous evening.
“Sounds a likely one for you then,” remarked the lawyer. “Is he good with his guns?”
“Not better than fair. Either Wren or Stocker could take him.”
“You haven’t heard from the packing plant about the next shipment they’ll want, have you?”
“Not yet, but I ought to some time this week. We’ve a fair bunch held at the hideout, all wearing Stocker’s brand,” she replied then looked in a calculating manner at Soskice. “What’re you getting out of this, Dean?”
“Huh?” grunted the lawyer.
“I’m in it for money. Not because I hate the big ranchers for working and building something my old man didn’t have the guts, intelligence or ability to make. I pay the cowhands to steal, to take all the chances, then get the money back off them in the saloon. It’s all clear profit for me. What do you get out of it?”
For some reason Ella knew her question would not be answered. Soskice looked around the room, down at the floor, anywhere but at her and when he spoke, the words had nothing to do with her question.
“The ranchers are getting riled about the stealing. Maybe they’ll call in outside help.”
“Not another bounty hunter, after what happened to Sammy and Pike,” Ella assured him. “And only the county sheriff can call in the Rangers. I don’t reckon Farley Simmonds would chance that.”
“I don’t know about that. He moved fast enough to send to Ysaleta and get word about that cowhand. I saw him on the way here. It seems that Forgrave pulled out of Ysaleta a few steps ahead of being told to go.”
“I thought so. That boy’ll be useful to us if I can get to him, and
“Maybe I do it so I can be close to you.”
While Ella doubted if Soskice ever did anything for anybody unless he saw a very good profit motive coming his way, she did not mention the thought. For all his faults, Soskice could sure make love and she reckoned that she might as well get something out of their association.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go tell Phyl to send a telegraph message to the Golden Slipper in Austin and find out about Marty Connelly. Go wait in the bedroom and when I’m through we’ll see how close we can get.”
Not knowing that her
Although the girls’ room was anything but grandiose—it consisted of a couple of small beds, a dressing table, washstand and a small cupboard for storing the bulk of their clothes—Mousey appeared to be highly satisfied.
“I never had anything like this before,” she told Calamity, clearing her belongings out of two of the dressing- table’s drawers. “Always lived in a shack. Six of us kids shared one room, it had a dirt floor and we used to pass down clothes one from the next. Boy, this is living here.”
“Yeah,” Calamity answered. “Where’s a gal take a bath?”
“Down the street at Ling Sing’s Chinese Laundry. He runs a bath-house at the back. I’ll come with you, but let’s grab a meal first.”
All in all, Calamity found Mousey to be quite a talker. By the time they reached the small staff dining room, Calamity knew all about Tommy and the little blonde’s intentions in that direction. It seemed that while Mousey enjoyed the glamor of being a saloon-girl, she still appeared to be quite willing to return to a small cabin with a dirt floor—provided Tommy went with her.
“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
