Katy Run Away Read Free Page A

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