Then Dolly grabs me, smothering my face in her spongy cleavage, and damn if she don’t slide her hands around onto my posteriors and grind and bump her treelike thighs against me. I don’t say it wasn’t somewhat interesting, for she was quite a bit of woman, though it was also rather disquieting as if an aunt got fresh with you, and in addition I had my pride to think of, so I pushed her off.
“Ooo,” says she, making a coy thing of her heavy lips, “he’s a spunky little fox, ain’t he now?”
Hickok says, laughing: “You got a nice girl for him? He’s nervous, you see.” So she calls the women over, and they was a good deal better-grade than you could find on west of there until you got to San Francisco. One or two was right pretty, even, and all was fairly clean-looking and showed no old knife-scars or bad pock-marks. Dolly run a first-rate place, I’ll say that for her.
I looked them over, and some made lewd remarks to me while others acted standoffish and even cold, for as a group they had to appeal to all tastes, but the one I chose wasn’t either forward nor snotty. She was kind of sad and wistful-looking, in figure short and slight, with dull reddish-brown hair that appeared to have been set to curl but come out rather wispy. Some faint freckles showed in the tender skin underneath her eyes. She wore a red dress that exposed her shoulders and her legs to the knee, and the heels of her slippers was run over so she stood slightly bowlegged.
Don’t sound spicy-looking, do she? Well, she wasn’t. But neither was I in need of a whore at that point. That was Hickok’s idea and not mine; and I’ll tell you when a fellow like him suggests something, you take it under consideration, especially when you have just seen him shoot down a man with such little ceremony.
So not feeling any desire, I chose this here girl as the least desirable when it come to the fleshly, and we danced some to the pounding of a baldheaded man on a tinny piano, who was addressed like all such as the “Professor.” I ain’t much of a dancer, and you wasn’t supposed to be in a place like that, where your partner would shove out her belly and roll it against yours for a minute and then drag you off down the back hall and into her little cubicle or crib from which the expression “crib-girl” derived.
Now that’s what this little gal done hardly had the music commenced, come grinding into me, only she didn’t have no stomach worth the name, and was instead raking me with her sharp hipbones, and being I was skinny too, the last thing it brought to mind was lust. So I pushes her away, meanwhile trying to jig a little in my heavy boots, for the Professor was beating out a lively tune, but she takes this action as indicating that I was raring to head for the crib, and wearily, mechanically, yet with positive force, pulls me down the hall.
Her cubicle had an iron bed in it and a rickety chair that would have collapsed had there been space to do so, for its width consumed the distance between bed and wall, and as to the length of the room, you can gather that from the fact that its door had to swing out into the hall.
She lit a coal-oil lamp on a bracket, and I set upon the bed, being there was no place further to go, and in one movement she shucks her dress, hangs it on a hook, and mother-naked, takes a seat upon my knee.
Now I had knowed she was right young, but not until this moment did I realize to what degree. Her flat little bosom, her slender flanks and bony knees: she wasn’t just skinny, she was hardly more than a child, which condition her facial rouge had misrepresented.
I asked how old she was.
“Twenty,” says she.
I leaned back to put some distance between our heads. “Go on,” I says.
“Well, eighteen, then.” She lays further into me and begins to work at my collar.
So I dumps her off and stands up, which a wider man could not have managed, and I don’t see how a man of Hickok’s length could have stood erect under that low ceiling.
I guess she was worried I was about to leave, so she assured me in consternation that she knowed how to do everything and anything, and never had a complaint yet.
I says: “All I require at the moment is the truth about your years. I can’t use nothing more at this time, on account of I believe I picked up a dose the other day, but I’ll be glad to give you the dollar anyway.”
“Dollar?” she cries indignantly, and all thoughts I had of her basically innocent and wistful ways had to change. “You cheap bastard, it costs five times that to let your pants down in this house.”
“Well,” I says, “damn me if I would pay five dollars to top the Queen of Russia.” I was amused by her anger. Them freckles lit up and her hair went redder. She reminded me of someone. “No, indeed,” I goes on, “let alone some skinny kid of fourteen.”
“I’ll be seventeen any day now,” she says. “And you get on out of here with your dollar or I’ll call Harry and have him throw you out.”
