Katy Run Away Read Free

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