Chapter Three: "Working for Miss Kitty"

Matt walked back to his office. Festus was puttering about at the cookstove making something he would call coffee. Matt had greeted him briefly earlier in the morning as they passed on their dawn walk through town. He glanced at his desk, at the stack of mail, and at the ledger books. He wanted nothing more than to sit quiet for a while and think, but he clapped Festus on the back and invited him to breakfast. As they walked across to Delmonicos, Doc joined them, and the three men sat down at their usual table, facing the door. Coffee appeared and large plates of food. Their conversation was relaxed and ordinary as Festus caught him up on the town's activities over the past two weeks, and Doc chatted about births and deaths and the interesting scars that could result if a man stuck a loaded gun into the waist band of his trousers.

"What I don' understan', Doc, is why he was a-carryin' that pistol aytal'. If he wanted to carry a gun, he coulda got hisself a gunbelt."

"Maybe he didn't want anyone to know he was carrying, Festus. Probably the reason he had that gun behind him. Good thing, though, it wasn't up front." Doc chortled as both of the other men visibly winced. Medical humor was his specialty.

Matt sat back with his coffee and let his mind drift as Festus and Doc continued to argue and insult each other. Another day in Dodge. The familiarity of the routine calmed him and moved him past what he had thought might be an awkward meeting with the doctor after the intimacy of their talk earlier. But no, his gaze rested on the short, rumpled figure of the older man, and he shook his head very slightly. Doc must know the secrets, and the heartaches, of the whole town – and decades of other towns and other people before Dodge. His own problems, and Kitty's, were part of that larger picture. That soothed him somehow, although it didn't actually make things better. His gut wrenched at the thought of what he and Kitty had lost.

Early in the afternoon he closed his ledger, folded a set of reports to send on to the governor's office, and headed out for the Long Branch. The place was nearly empty. Sam was behind the bar, and the Marshal walked over to the far end, away from where a few other customers stood drinking. Sam came down to join him. "Bring you a beer, Marshal?" Matt nodded and the barkeep pulled a beer and handed it to him.

"Is Kitty around?"

"She was down earlier, but went back upstairs about an hour ago. Said she'd be down later in the afternoon." Sam hesitated. "She hasn't been too well this last week, Marshal."

Matt took a sip of his beer then looked at Sam across the glass. "I heard that, Sam. I had breakfast with Doc." Matt drank again, wondering just how much Sam did or didn't know. "I'll go up and see her in a bit. Tell me, Sam, which one of the girls is Annie?"

Sam gestured to where a slender girl with brown curls was sitting at a table with a very young cowboy. The cowboy was drinking a beer and talking earnestly to her while she wrote in pencil on a cheap tablet of paper. "She new here, Sam?"

Sam considered that. The girls that worked for the Long Branch didn't usually stay too long. Cora, sitting at a table near the door with two young men and a pack of cards, had been around for the longest, nearly three years. "Annie's been here since about the first of the year, Marshal. Surprised you don't remember her."

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It was a week after New Year's Day when Sam knocked on the door to Kitty's office. "Come in, Sam." She called recognizing his knock. Sam opened the door and escorted in a very slender girl, just over medium height with brown curls and hazel eyes.

"This is Annie, Miss Kitty. She's looking for work." Sam stood looming over the girl until Kitty smiled at them both and said, "Take a chair, Annie, and we'll talk. Sam, I'll call if I need you."

Sam gave the girl a quick encouraging wink, and then retired, shutting the door behind him. Kitty looked Annie over. Her dress was neat, and high necked, but fitted closely to her body to reveal more curves at second glance than at first. She looked young, maybe twenty, but her eyes were more mature than her years seemed to indicate. "What's your name, honey?"

"Annie. Annie Dodge." she replied.

"Tell me where you're from and tell me what you do, Annie." Kitty asked.

"I'm from Texas, ma'am. North Texas where it's dry as bones and there are more cows than people. I grew up in a boarding house. I can bake and cook and clean and serve tables. That serving tables part, it led to working in a restaurant and then a saloon when I had to make my own way."

"Well, we don't do much cooking here, but there's cleaning enough for all the girls to help. Do you have any other clothes, Annie?"

"Yes, ma'am. I left my bag out there with the big barman – my, he is big, isn't he?" Her gaze was very direct as she answered Kitty's real question. "I have a couple of the right kind of dresses, Miss Kitty. I know what to wear and I know how to sew."

Kitty liked the looks of the girl, but she looked just a little too… nice. She cringed a bit inside, but asked quite calmly, "Are you a whore, Annie?"

Annie's chin rose a little but she didn't protest the question. "No ma'am, I am not. I know about men, I've had my share, but I'm not a whore, and if that's what it takes to work here, then I'll be moving on." She did not, however, rise from the chair, just continued to look Kitty in the eye.

"Girls who work here, Annie, they're going to be asked. Sometimes asked nice, sometimes not so nice. But you'll be asked. Every single day." Kitty replied.

"As long as I don't have to say yes, then I'm satisfied with that." She replied, and then her eyes twinkled as she went on, "And ma'am, I can say no to a cowboy in a way that's going to make him almost happier than if I said yes, and that's going to make him pretty eager to come back and ask me again."

Kitty laughed out loud. "I think you'll do, Annie. I think you'll do fine. Let's try it and see how we get on. I pay ten dollars a week, and I pay on Monday morning. There's a free lunch at the bar every day, and you can help yourself. Your other meals are on your own. You go tell Sam to show you a room and tell you what hours he wants you working."

Annie rose and reached across the table to offer Kitty her hand. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am. I'll do my best for you, Miss Kitty." Kitty, surprised, but not displeased, took her hand and they shook firmly as two men who had just made a deal on a herd of cattle.

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"Surprised you don't remember her," said Sam.

"I probably should, Sam. Pretty little thing. What's she doin' over there?"

Sam smiled. "She writes letters for the cowboys - to their sweethearts, or their wives, or mothers." A customer at the other end of the bar called for another drink, and Sam went to get it. Matt stood drinking his beer and watching the girl Annie. Her cowboy was talking to her intently, his head bent closely over hers. Matt watched her smile and shake her head. She pulled off the top sheet from her pad of paper, folded it, and handed it to him. The boy finished his drink and went out. Watching the dejection in his step caused Matt to raise a hand to his mouth to cover a grin. It was pretty clear to him what the question had been.

Finishing his beer, Matt walked over to the table. "Mind if I join you, ma'am?" he asked.

Annie's eyes rounded just a little. "Sure, Marshal. What can I do for you?"

"Just wanted to talk with you, Annie." He sat down in the chair next to her, and said, very quietly, "And to thank you for what you did for Miss Kitty this last week."

Annie smiled at him. "Miss Kitty's been really good to me, Marshal. I'd do anything I could for her. It's no problem to help out when she was," a minor hesitation, "sick."

"I know what happened, Annie." Matt said, "But I appreciate that it's not something you want to talk about. That makes it easier for Kitty."

She nodded, smiling up at him. "For certain it does, Marshal. Some of the girls here gossip something awful." Her eyes grew rounder yet as the Marshal took her hand and closed it over a ten dollar gold piece.

"That's just for a thank you, Annie. It comforts me some to know Miss Kitty has folks here she can count on. "

Annie caught her breath at the size of the tip, but told him, "You don't have to do that, Marshal, but thank you." She looked down at the table and then up into his face almost shyly, "I'm saving."

Feeling far older than his forty some years, Matt smiled at her with real warmth. "I thought you might be, Annie. Thought you might be. Look, will you scoot upstairs and tell Kitty I'll be along in a few minutes? I've got some things to do down at the post office."

When Matt returned ten minutes later, Annie wasn't in the bar. He nodded to Sam, and walked up the stairs to Kitty's room. She was sitting on the settee with a shawl around her shoulders and her feet up. Matt locked the door behind him and went to lay a hand on her cheek before he sat down across from her.

"Feeling all right, Kitty?"

"Not bad, cowboy. I had the best night's sleep I've had in some time."

He thought about that, looking around the room. The room was all Kitty – comfortable, elegant, feminine. No one coming in to talk with her would see anything that hinted another person shared her room. But he thought about the rack on the wall near the door for his hat and gunbelt, and that tall straight-backed chair just inside the door. He settled deeper into the oversized armchair across from her settee. That chair, and the huge bed, not to mention the bathtub in the room next door, had to be the largest in Dodge. Familiar with his silences, Kitty watched his eyes as he considered the room, but waited for him to speak. "I always sleep better here, with you, Kitty, than anyplace else. I just hadn't thought about what it's like for you here alone."

She smiled and stretched. "I've made myself pretty snug. But it's always better when you're with me, cowboy. Though I wonder sometimes how you manage to get any sleep at all when you're in town. You always do the late rounds, and you're always up at dawn."

He took the late night rounds so that he could join her after Front Street had closed down for the night. Years on the trail woke him at first light, and he was always – almost always – up early so as to be away by the time anyone might see him coming out of the back door and wonder where he'd been. They both knew those things and it didn't need comment. "Sometimes I catch some sleep in the afternoon over at the jailhouse if things are quiet. And if I'm out travelling with Buck, why then we both sleep from dark to light." Most often a bedroll on the hard ground, or, if he was lucky, a pile of hay in someone's barn, but he was used to that, and usually slept well if not deeply.

Another long pause, and he said, "I talked to Doc this morning, Kitty.

"Oh?" her look was direct, and not exactly pleased.

"Seemed to me he thought maybe I haven't been taking care of you as well as I should. I got the feeling he, maybe, thought it wasn't quite right that we're, well, together, so often.

"That must have been some talk, Matt." Kitty said, her voice wry but eyes snapping.

"It wasn't exactly comfortable," he admitted. He could see she was upset, but felt he needed to move on. His voice was stark now. "Do I bother you too much, Kitty? Should I stay away? Or maybe," he smiled a bit with his eyes, "Just let us both get more sleep?"

"Oh, Matt." The anger that had been building drained away like water. She rose and came over to sit on his lap and hold his face directly in front of hers. "Matt Dillon, do you have any idea how, how proud, I am that you come to me every night? Every night you can? Do you know what it does for me to know that the tallest, handsomest, strongest fella in Dodge wants me? Not some young girl down in the barroom, but me?" She laid her head against his shoulder now and spoke softly into his neck, but Matt had very good hearing. "And I always want you, Matt. Always. I lay in that big bed by myself, when you're gone, feeling alone and feeling, well, empty, without you. Sometimes thinking about you, and you not being here just about drives me crazy." She wanted to reach down and stroke him, but she didn't. It wouldn't be fair at this point.

"What else did Doc say?" she asked after a quiet space.

He chuckled a bit remembering asking her the same question last night. "Well, he told me he thought likely you hadn't been able to get pregnant for a time. That your body was healing up from those bad years before you came to us. But that now, well, now you probably could. He told me I needed to be more careful of you, and he did seem pretty surprised to find we were together so often." Matt sat her up straighter on his knee so he could see her face. "You likely know more about that than I do, Kitty. Can't say I ever thought about it. Doc said that most people who are together for a long time…"

"Married couples." She interrupted him gently.

"Most of them get to the place where they don't want each other anymore." He stopped for a moment and then continued, "I can't imagine not wanting you, Kitty. As much now as ever I did when we were first together."

Kitty stroked his face lightly. "You have no idea, do you, cowboy, the compliment you've just paid me?" She rose and walked across the room, toyed briefly with a hair brush, then set it down. "I think some people, who really love each other, never get tired of each other. Look at Bess and Will. Nine babies in twelve years!" She grinned wickedly, "And Doc fusses at them about it, too. I've heard him. You should see Bess blush!" Her face straightened and she came back and lowered herself to the floor by Matt to lay her head on his knee.

"But I think Doc's right that for most people it's different. A woman trying to work a claim with her husband, and a baby coming every year when there's not enough food for the ones already there – yes, I can see how she'd want to turn him away even if she loved him. Or maybe people just grow into different lives, fill themselves up with other things 'til there's not as much room for each other." She sat back and looked directly into his eyes. "Do you think you would really want me as much if we were together every day and every night? If I had a baby every year and got fat?"

He chortled a little and chucked her under the chin. "I'd make you work too hard to get fat, sweetheart, and I would love every single one of those yearly babies." He stood, lifting her from the floor to his arms with no more effort than picking up a kitten. He settled her back on her chaise as she had been when he entered. "I have to get back to the office, Kitty. You take it easy this afternoon, and I'll see you tonight."

"Come on back about six and I'll feed you." she said, knowing that with his visit to her midday he wouldn't have time for any other meal. He nodded his thanks, but at the door he turned and told her very seriously, "I will love you, and I will want you, every day of my life, Kitty Russell. You just believe that."

"I do, Matt. I do." And only, when the door had closed behind him, did she whisper, "I just wish I didn't feel that every day could take you from me forever."