Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(26)



Her sponsor glared, but the horsewoman directed an inquisitive glance over her shoulder at him. “This is the homeless child you mentioned? Rumi?”

“Romy.” Her smile amplified one-hundred watts. “As in roam, roaming wherever me heart calls.”

“Romy,” Duke warned, his thick brows lowering like storm clouds.

The sound of her given name on his lips took her by surprise. He had yet to use it. She knew she could be much worse off, assigned to some depraved lout who took advantage of the situation and her. Yet here she was in service to a good-looking man who could barely tolerate her.

Leaning over the apple crate that served as an end table, Sally flicked on the dusty, fringe-shade lamp, and her brown hair, clasped at her nape by a rawhide string, cascaded over one shoulder. The lamp’s ruby glass cast a forgiving light on her face, which was very pretty but already beginning to look weathered.

Next, she flicked on the radio. Neither its melodic “Stardust” nor the lamp’s glow over the stark parlor softened the tension. “Well, nice to meet you, Rumi.”

“And nice it is to meet ye, Silly.” At Duke’s glower, she amended, “Sally.” She backed toward the kitchen. “Well, I will leave ye two to yuir tame little checker game.”

In the bunkhouse, duel-to-the-death poker was already afoot

Her huaraches, from the box of donated clothing, she kicked off under the makeshift table. It was a cable spool topped by a rescued portion of a horse stall door. Sitting in on the next round, she pretended not to notice the sly looks exchanged between the ranch hands.

Of the fifty marks Gideon had tossed her as a salve for his guilty conscience, she had little left, but she nudged the requisite two bits out to the center as ante. “I’m in, but I warn ye gents I know more than a wee bit about poker.”

Smirks behind held cards passed around the table.

The guys were easy pickings. When she won three times straight and on the fourth hand laid down three Queens and a pair of Three’s, Glen’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He and Skinny Henry both tossed in their hands.

Arturo’s glossy brown stare jumped from her spread to her. With a stub of a cigarette between his lips, he mumbled, “Eet ees not posseeblee.”

“First lesson, Arturo.” She dragged the few tattered one-dollar bills and pile of coins in the table’s center toward her already sizeable heap. “Anything is possible. And, second, a card game is like war. Ye choose yuir battles.”

And right now, she was battling between keeping her mind on the poker game in the bunkhouse and the checker game in the main house.

Jock swigged his firewater whiskey and, frowning, skidded his cards onto the makeshift table’s discarded mound. “Well, lass, you sure enough know how to pitch a battle with the cards.”

“Tis not about the cards. Tis the about the people. Always about people. Take Bud, there.”

The kid shifted his glum gaze from her pile that contained his dollar and seventy-five cents to her. “What about me?”

She liked the lad. He seemed responsible and quick. Up early every morning that week in time for breakfast and uncomplaining when she burned the toast, that just before she had short-circuited the toaster. Learning the vagaries of an electric range after growing up with a wood burning stove was escalating her frustration about everything in her new life.

“Ye see, when ye’re about to play a risky card, Bud, ye tug on yuir cap. So, doff that cap next time ye play with these gents.”

She half turned in her chair, her arm slung over its back, to look at the Negro, who sat on one bunkbed. “Micah, ye could rob these galoots blind.”

The middle-aged man barely looked up from his nails that he was cleaning with his pocket knife. “Me? Auh never played poker, Miss Romy. It’s against the Baptist’s Word.”

“Sort of like Old Maid,” Jock joshed, his grey bushy brows wagging and his tobacco-varnished teeth flashing. “Nothing to it.:

She wrinkled her nose at the Scotsman. “Like ye know, Jock. Ye realize, I am the one with yuir money. But tell ye all what, I’m going to give ye laddies a chance to win back yuir losses.”

The five at the table perked up. She turned back to Micah. “With yuir deadpan expression, ye can lead these five a merry chase. Here, take me place, and I shall guide ye through a couple of hands.”

He looked away quickly. “Auh don’t think so, Miss Romy.”

“Come on, Micah. If ye willna give me a chance, at least, give yuirself a chance.”

That must have resonated with him. He stared over her head for a few seconds, then rose and shambled toward the table.

The eagerness of the other five subsided as Micah caught on. He was a natural, as she had predicted.

The ranch hands might not have taken to her but she had earned their respect, at least.

She patted Micah’s shoulder, and headed back across the sparse turf to the main house to finish up the dishes – well, that, and to check on that other game. The game of love.

In the kitchen, the bare and dangling overhead light bulb haloed Duke and Sally, sitting across from one another at the table with the checkerboard between them. From the living room, the radio was playing Benny Goodman’s ‘Swing, Swing, Swing.’

With a cigar clenched at one corner of his mouth, Duke was chuckling at something Sally had said. His stove-pipe legs were stretched out under the table at either side of her denim skirt-draped ones.

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