Sandy had no idea how she would have survived in a better city.
In the older parts of the country, cities were civilized places. But not in Makos Point. The first pioneers had come to this land just a few generations ago, and the city had grown up from nothing in just that short time. It was a ramshackle tangle of courthouses, shops, hospitals, slaughterhouses and brewhouses, clustered like moss around the railyard that was its only link back to civilization. Here, every woman carried a gun on her hip, every door had a lock and every animal was branded as insurance against thieves. Men stayed close to their sisters and wives, or else they traveled in groups; in this rugged land, there were many desperate women with nothing to lose, women willing to take a husband with or without his consent. A man could raise his fists to defend himself, of course, but then he would be saddled with a reputation as a woman-beater, and his future prospects for marriage would be ruined. In more civilized lands, the night's watch prevented this from happening, but out here, women took it upon themselves to defend their brothers and husbands from cloying hands.
In a city as lawless as this, Sandy and her gang had room to live. There were odd jobs to be taken, clandestine things that needed to be done strictly off the record, and when that failed, there were always gullible newcomers to fleece: adventure-loving girls who had bought guns and horses and now thought they were demigods, mail-order husbands seeking their new homes, runaway soldiers and would-be bounty hunters of both sexes, all new to the territory and easily duped.
It gave Sandy no pride that she and her gang won their living this way. Her mother had taught her wisdom and respect, not larceny. At least, that was what Sandy remembered her mother teaching her. Tuberculosis had taken her parents when she was still a girl, and there had been no place for her but the streets, no family left to her but the gang.
"Hey," said a fierce voice as Sandy rounded the corner to the Horseradish Saloon, "Sandy! Watch yourself, damn it!" Out of the alleyway stepped Sarah, the guns of the gang. Her broad-brimmed hat was pulled low, obscuring her eyes. "You see that gal following you? Sneaky little bitch is sticking her nose where it don't belong. She's up to something, I know it."
Sandy turned to look. She saw nobody.
"Don't look, you idiot!"
Sandy put on a fake smile. "Well, then I'm powerful lucky I have you to watch out for me," she said, and she continued into the Saloon. 'It's not Sarah's fault,' she reflected. 'It's her job to worry too much.'
Inside, the smells of tobacco and hot food intruded on the senses, the tobacco smoke so thick that Sandy blinked tears into her eyes. Outlaw women mingled with down-on-their-luck cowgirls as waitresses plied them with cheap food and alcohol. But the clientele's eyes were on the stage, where two handsome, well-built boys danced and sang a jaunty song to the music of their fiddles. A painted sign above them announced 'The Free-Fiddling Cosmo Brothers.' A string of barbed wire separated the stage from the dining area, which gave one an idea of the nature of the place.
Sandy stopped at a table where a familiar woman drank contentedly. "Matilda," said Sandy, "Any luck?"
"Plenty," said Matilda, by which she meant that she had pickpocketed half the people in the room. "Gonna get so, so drunk."
Sandy opened her mouth to reprimand her and remind her of the virtue of temperance, but she stayed herself. 'That's Cary's job,' she reminded herself.
In the back of the honky-tonk, in a room that officially didn't exist, Sandy knocked and heard Cary's voice bid her to enter, and did so.
In a room lit only by a candle, Cary, the leader of the gang, sat up in bed, disheveled, shiny with sweat, but with the light, happy expression of afterglow.
To that, she owed Jasper, the man who lay next to her. Tall and muscular but with a gentle, measured manner, possessed of a kind of blunt, honest-looking handsomeness, he looked back at her through mild brown eyes and a head of sensuous, wavy brown hair. He looked at ease, but he did not smile. Jasper very rarely smiled.
The gang had found Jasper at a low point, having lost his job as a farmhand, alone and vulnerable. They had taken him in and given him protection, and in exchange, he used his fingers and his tongue to please them. Someday, when they could afford it, the women of the gang would avail themselves of him to have children and start families, but that day was still in the future.
"Sandy," said Cary lazily. "Did you find what we need?"
Sandy reached into her pocket and pulled out a glass phial stopped with a cork. "The general store let it go without much of a haggle," she said. "Now will you tell me what you want it for? And why were you wantin' the phial to come with a cork?"
Cary grinned, picked up a newspaper from the nightstand and threw it to the foot of the bed. "If you will, read the story on the front page, second from the rightmost."
Inwardly, Sandy's hopes fell. This had the smell of another harebrained rags-to-riches scheme, which was Cary's specialty.
In between a yarn about disappearing cattle and rumors of war between the railroad companies, a headline on the front page announced that 'samples' had gone up in value. The article was mealy-mouthed in the way that suggested an unmentionable subject matter. Then it mentioned the disease in the swamps, and suddenly Sandy realized what she was reading. She flushed.
"Yes," said Cary, easing herself out of bed. "This will make us rich, Sandy. I have a keen eye for these things. I had a word with the local doctor, and she said we will earn extra if you can fill that phial more than halfway. You did tell me, didn't you, that as a child you milked cows?"
Sandy flushed deeper.
Cary smiled. "This will be identical. Good luck." With that, she pulled on her clothes and trotted out of the room.
As soon as Cary shut the door, Jasper said, "You are welcome onto the bed if only you'll explain to me what's gotten into her."
"Cary ain't told you?"
Jasper shook his head sadly. Being illiterate, he had to rely on the women for his news.
"Well..." Sandy eased herself into the bed and tried to think how to say it. In a way, it was absurd that she was nervous; she had stripped Jasper stark naked before, and she had enjoyed his tongue more times than she could count, and yet this embarrassed her. But when a man asks a question, a lady explains herself, so Sandy explained, "You're familiar with the New Logton swamps, isn't that right?"
"Of course," he said.
"Well, the infants there've suffered a wave of disease. And the swamp-dwellers, they're a superstitious bunch, so they've decided that the fault is in the seed of their men. So as they can have healthy babies, they say they need seed from men who've never lived in a swamp."
"Oh..." Jasper covered his mouth with his palm as he began to understand.
"Maybe you've heard, thanks to new-fangled things the doctors've come up with, it's now possible to..." she shied at the word. "...extract... a man's seed, preserve it and ship it out of town without losing its potency. And the swamp-dwellers are offering good money for 'clean' seed." Sandy held up the phial she had bought. "I guess Cary wants me to do the extracting." She pictured it in her mind's eye, and she felt heat prickle beneath the pit of her stomach. She tried not to show it. "How are you feeling about this?"
Jasper finally took his hand away, and to her surprise, his mouth curled into a guarded, naughty smile. "Today's my lucky day. You have my permission."
