“And what’s the second thing?”
“Bret tells me you can keep figures.”
“I can add columns and tally. But not like a real banker or such.”
“I put my money in a ceramic pot.” Aggie took a drink of tea, before adding, “I can’t do sums. Don’t have the head for it. I can count it, and sometimes there’s more, and other times there’s less.” She glanced up, green eyes sincere. “I come up the hard way. Spent the last ten years learning to read, how to talk, trying to be smarter than the rest.”
“I’m flattered, but it might be that one of the men at the bank could do a better—”
“Could be I want a woman,” Aggie said firmly. “Maybe one as could teach me once she herself gets the way of it. No man from the bank would do that. I’d pay you what you think it was worth.”
“You think I can do this?”
“Bret does. He thinks you can do anything. Says you’re the strongest, toughest, smartest, and most courageous woman alive.”
“Does he?” She paused, somewhat taken aback by his faith in her. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. How much money are we talking about?”
“A couple of thousand a night.”
“Dear God!”
Aggie smiled humorlessly. “If I was doing so well, that ceramic pot would be busting out money all over. You start by paying for cognac, champagne, and wine all the way from France, whiskey from Ireland and Scotland, bourbon from Kentucky, Cuban rum and cigars, tinned oysters and Russian caviar, and it’s all hauled across Indian-infested plains on a jerk line. That ain’t cheap, ma’am. Not to mention fresh meat from the market hunters, real vegetables from down on the Arkansas River, and soda water from Saratoga, not to mention the laundry, the fabrics, the medical, and regular old expenses like firewood and coal oil, and money just seems to disappear.”
Sarah stood, her mind in a fog. She walked over and stared down at her list of figures where it lay open on the desk.
Could I do this?
Hope filled Aggie’s voice. “I could have Mick, the professor, bring the money up here for you to count every Monday.”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Sarah turned, leaned back against the desk, and crossed her arms. “And carrying that much money around, especially on a schedule, would be asking for a robbery. There’s more to it. You have to know how much money is coming in and from what. Is it from the girls, the drink, or the food? How much is going out, and to which accounts? When I worked for a woman in Little Rock, I had to have a list of what I spent and what I charged at each store. Old Mrs. Pennington didn’t teach me much, but she knew where every penny was going.”
Aggie frowned. “Wagon shows up with supplies, I just pay ’em.”
“It’s a wonder you’re not broke.” Sarah slapped her hands to her sides. “What if I came down with Bret on Saturdays? He could run his game; I could sit in the back somewhere and make my sums. You’ll need a ledger book. And you will be required to write down each expense. All of them. Right down to a nickel for a bar of soap from a street vendor. I had to for Mrs. Pennington.”
“Come to my place? Mrs. Anderson, it’s impossible. I run a parlor house, and you’re a respectable lady. It wouldn’t do to be seen within a stone’s throw of my door.”
Sarah chuckled, thinking of what Maw would say.
But this was a job. I’d pay you what you would think it was worth!
Something inside her came clear, as if a blindfold had fallen away, when she said, “I’m not a lady. I’m not even Bret’s wife. The ring, and the lie, was to allow Bret and me to travel and room together without complications. I am Miss Sarah Rogers. An unmarried woman sharing a gambler’s bed and keeping his house. Respectable? It’s a front.”
“You could lose even the illusion by setting foot in my place.”
“I want to learn how to run a business. You want to learn how to sum accounts. As a gambler’s woman, I don’t get invited to the women’s sewing socials as it is. And, well, to be honest, Bret and I aren’t long for Central City in the end. Where we’re going, no one will know.”
“Might be a high price just to learn a business,” Aggie countered. “You’ll be tarred, just as if you were in the trade and Bret were your pimp. And you might find yourself receiving unwanted male attention if they see you there.”
Sarah fingered her ring. “They’ll think I’m Bret’s wife. I really want to learn this.”
Aggie narrowed an eye. “I think Bret’s right about you. About that courage and all.”
72
June 28, 1866
The nightmare had been haunting Billy’s sleep all during the long week before the job. It had bedeviled him as he waited in a camp hidden in the breaks up from the Mimbres River. Danny, meanwhile, had scouted the next target. All things considered, the job had been easy: eliminate a placer miner who was working a claim on a mostly dry tributary of the Mimbres. Up a canyon on the western slope of the Black Range.
Billy simply shot him in the back from ambush one morning as the man walked down to work his claim. He and Danny packed the body onto the man’s mule—and dropped his corpse into a sheer-walled canyon as they made their way over Emory Pass. By the time anyone found his body, if anyone ever found his body, it would consist of sun-bleached, coyote-chewed bones. And damn few of them.
But the nightmare hadn’t gone away.
Two days later, they were spending the night at a small roadhouse—what the New
