I was took by something in this little gal. Still not lust, for I have always preferred them seasoned and sturdy for that purpose. I guess I just liked her spunk.
I says: “All right, I’m good for the fare. But I’ll tell you what I want for it. I just want to sit here long enough so my friend will think I had a good time. You’ll get your money and not have to work for it.”
That was O.K. by her when she saw I meant it and creased her little paw with the cash. In fact, I reckon she liked it a whole lot better: there wasn’t much opportunity in them days to make five dollars by setting.
Now since she had revealed her cockiness once, she didn’t go back to that drab, melancholy style no more, which was merely a role. I have said they tried to offer all types at this place. I reckon she appealed to the hombre who liked to imagine he was laying some little overworked servant girl, maybe an orphan to boot, under the back stairs.
In her true character she was right impudent. She could have put her clothes on now, but she didn’t, just lay back with her hands behind her head and her knees raised in the glare of the kerosene light, and says: “Say, you ain’t got a cigar?”
“Smoke, too, do you?” says I. “My, ain’t you the rough one.” I was needling her for the fun of it. I had to kill some time and didn’t know what else to do. I set down again on the foot of the bed, where there was ample room, for she lay along the length of it but was small and besides had her knees lifted. “I expected,” I says, “to find the K.C. gals more refined and ladylike.”
Well, her green eyes looked as if they started to flash, then suddenly she flung an arm across them and her thin chest commences to quake with sobs. Shortly I felt terrible, and I gathered her up in my arms, setting her on my lap again, and she cried against my shoulder, clutching into me as if it was her last hope upon earth.
“Now, now,” I says, giving her a fatherly kiss into the tangled red curls on the top of her head and patting her bare, bumpy spine, “you tell your troubles to Uncle Jack.”
She snuffles into my neck a bit, and then tells me the following.
“I was born and bred in Salt Lake City to one of the most respectable families there, my Ma being married at fifteen to a famous Mormon leader. You would know the name right off if I was to tell it. Now, outside folks have a funny idea about Mormons on account of the number of wives they take, but I tell you that is the reason why you won’t find a den of iniquity like this in Salt Lake. My Ma was my Pa’s eleventh wife, and you take us girls here at Dolly’s, why, we fight amongst ourselves all the time, but my mothers never did exchange a harsh word with one another. I had fifteen sisters and twenty-one brothers, and we lived in a house that was like a hotel. All we did was work and pray from early in the morning until night.
“Up to the age of fourteen, I guess there wasn’t a purer girl on earth than myself, for I regarded the human body as the holy temple of God and wouldn’t have dared to profane my mind with other than a wholesome thought. I had grown right pretty by then. One day my mothers sent me over next door to borrow some sugar. Now the people that lived there was another Mormon elder named Woodbine and he had only six wives and ten children, and as it happened all the women and younguns was out working in the fields at this moment, only the elder was to home, a man of fifty with a big black beard.
“ ‘Amelia, isn’t it?’ he says as he lets me in. ‘What a pretty girl you have become. The sugar is I believe in the pantry.’ So he goes along with me there, and says: ‘I believe it is on the high shelf. I’ll lift you up.’ Which he does with his huge hands, and that’s all that happened then, except that when he put me down he was purple in the face and breathing hard though I couldn’t have weighed much.
“But a day or so later, my Pa calls me into his presence and informs me that Elder Woodbine would like to take me as his seventh wife. It wasn’t no good to protest, for my Pa had decided on it and I didn’t dare to cross him, so what I done is run away that very night.
“Well,” she says, sobbing at the thought of it, “there have been many times after when I regretted my foolishness, for in these two year since I have seen little but the worst side of the Gentiles, many of them just as whisker-faced as the Elder Woodbine and as old, and some with bodies furry as a bear; whereas instead of a device of pleasure to any man who comes down the road I would have been an honored Mormon wife.”
It could have happened, I reckon, though it was the typical story you could get out of any whore: they always stemmed from good families, by their account. I don’t say I swallowed the entirety of it. The mention of Salt Lake and Mormons, in themselves, would not have take my especial note, though you may recall my Pa’s aim away back to head for Utah, which is why I fell in with the Cheyenne and had all the subsequent adventures.
