A Tale Out of Luck Read Online Free Page A

opposite corner of the saloon and saw Jack Brennan and his men passing a whiskey bottle and playing a game of poker. That Jack Brennan made her nervous. He was just so big and rough looking. The scar on his cheek was hideous. A saloon girl, Dottie, who had never been nice to Jane the whole time they had worked together, was sitting with the cowboys, sharing their whiskey. Flora was looking over Jack’s shoulder. She seemed to sense Jane standing across the room, and looked up at her. Wordlessly, she dismissed Jane with a tilt of her head and a smile.
    Thank God for Flora Barlow. Jane didn’t have much, but she knew she’d be well nigh desperate without Flora.
    Jane walked to the swinging doors and stepped outside unnoticed. She breathed a sigh of relief that blew a stray lock of golden hair out of her face. It was cold outside, and she had forgotten her shawl when she walked to work this afternoon in the warmth of the Texas sun. She embraced her own shoulders against the chill, as if hugging herself.
    “Why don’t you wear my coat?”
    She gasped, then looked up to see Jay Blue Tomlinson in the moonlight, a saddled horse at his side. “Good Lord, are you still looking for a way to get your head stove in?”
    He offered a nonchalant shrug. “Those rounders from the Double Horn don’t scare me.”
    “Well, do me a favor, Jay Blue. Next time you knock one of them down, make sure he doesn’t have ahold of me first.”
    “Sorry about that. How about if I escort you home?”
    “I can escort myself just fine, thank you.”
    “But I insist. Here, wear my coat.”
    She hesitated, then grabbed the coat. She didn’t really want to encourage him, but it was cold. He helped her put it on, as if he were a gentleman instead of a cowboy, and they began walking down the street, Jay Blue leading his horse. She almost thanked him for the coat, but thought better of it.
    “It looks good on you,” he said.
    “It smells like a barn. I forgot my wrap, that’s all. It won’t happen again, so I don’t want to find you lurking out here, waiting for me anymore.”
    “Waiting for you?” Jay Blue forced a laugh. “Have mercy, Janie, you think I was waiting for you? I was just stargazing. See, there’s Pegasus. There’s Pisces, and Cassiopeia.” He was pointing every which way.
    “Don’t call me Janie. I hate that.”
    “Sorry. That’s what Miss Flora calls you, so . . .”
    “She’s the only one I let call me that. My name is Jane.”
    They strode down the dirt street, Jay Blue’s jinglebobs tinkering away like a carnival wagon. “Okay. Jane it is.”
    She glanced at him, her eyes fully adjusted to the moonlight now. “You look terrible.”
    He touched his split lip. “Of course I do, walking next to you. Helen of Troy would look like a mud fence walking next to you.”
    She tried not to show it, but she liked the way he put that. This Jay Blue tended to say things with his own flare. In general, she was sick and tired of being told she was pretty, but he always found an original way to say it.
    When she was little, back in that East Texas town where she was born, Jane’s folks told her she was pretty every day, and she had loved it then. But then her father joined the Confederate army when she was nine, and went away to war, never to return. Later, her mother took up with a freighter who started doing things with Jane that even she, at the age of thirteen, knew he was not supposed to be doing.
    So she told her mother, and her mother shot the man in his sleep. Then it got worse. The county sheriff jailed Jane’s mother. A lynch mob made up mostly of the dead man’s family broke into the jail and hanged Jane’s mother in her own cell. All this because Jane had turned prettier than she was supposed to be at the age of thirteen. No, she did not care for being pretty one little bit. She just didn’t know how not to do it.
    She still remembered clearly what her mother told her when she got to visit with her that one