Page 44 of The Saloon Girl's Only Shot
If she ever had been introduced to Virgil, she’d know that hardass was even less moved to pity for fools who got themselves into fixes than Owen was.
“I could take you to camp to meet him,” he held up a hand as she whipped her head around, expression glowing with sudden hope, “but it’s forty miles into the mountains. Even if you convinced him to pay for this report of yours, there’s nowhere for you to sleep there. There’s a bunkhouse full of men or whatever canvas tent you bring with you. I’m offering to let you stay here where there’s a stove, and your friend Jane is nearby, and you’ll have all the information you need to write this report of yours. If he hires you.”
“That’s true,” she murmured and chewed the corner of her mouth.
“Virgil will turn up here once he catches wind of what I’m doing.” He and Virgil were very different in many ways, but they came from the same squalid circumstances in the same unforgiving town in Virginia. They’d kept each other alive through many a rough time so Virgil would take it as his duty to make sure Owen wasn’t in over his head. “You can float your idea past him then. While you wait, you can work for me.”
“Helping with your books?” she asked skeptically. “You told the men at the corral I would be serving drinks.”
“That too.”
“Hmph.” She scowled at the blank wall across from them. “I don’t mind that, you know. Most of the men only want a friendly ear, but some think giving me a dollar entitles them to take liberties.”
“I told you?—”
“I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about other men. Mr. Fritz expected me to tolerate it.” She turned her head to stare straight into his soul. “Will you?”
“No,” he said abruptly and did his own glaring at the far wall. He’d seen plenty of women wronged in his lifetime, starting with his mother. At times, when things had been at their worst, she’d taken men in to keep a roof over their head. As Temperance might have noticed with Mavis, Owen did what he could to make amends for women being pushed into doing something they didn’t really want to do, purely out of a need to survive. “I want you to do more than serve drinks, though. I want you to keep my ledger. Do your budget thing to keep me profitable.”
He might not know how to do something like that, but he followed just fine when Ira read aloud the mine’s income and expenses. Owen understood the importance of tracking costs and returns, making sure everything added up.
“You don’t want to do it yourself?” she asked curiously. “Wait. Are you planning to open this saloon and go straight back to your mining camp? For heaven’s sake, Owen. I know as much about saloon keeping as I do about undertaking. You can’t leave me to run it.”
“I’ll be here through the winter.” He would need a manager come spring, but he would worry about that once he was open and had a sense of the business.
The bookkeeping part had hung him up all along. He had always known he would have to trust someone for that. Virgil thought Owen was gullible for the way he sometimes took people on faith, but he had to operate on his gut when it came to reading and writing because he couldn’t do either. Not well enough to know when the words or numbers didn’t match what was being said.
“Your budget will be fairly simple,” Temperance said thoughtfully, looking around the empty room. “Price out the upper floor, but don’t spend on it yet. Open the doors as soon as possible, so you can start paying down your expenses. You’ll need glassware and a few chairs. Whiskey, obviously. We’re going into winter, so you’ll need a lot of firewood. If you want to offer a plate of beans the way Mr. Fritz does, you’ll need dishes and cookware. Then it’s a matter of tracking your sales every day to see when you’ve paid down your outlay. It’s very straightforward. If you want to pay me to write that in a book for you, I’m happy to do it, but it wouldn’t take you more than a few minutes at the end of the day to do it yourself.”
The fact she was honest about that, and had admitted that her father wasn’t coming after all, tipped him into trusting her with something he rarely admitted to anyone.
“I can’t do it myself.” He realized the line that was digging into his palms was the edge of the table where he was clenching it. “I don’t read or write.”
“Not at all?” she asked with surprise.
“Not much.” He scratched behind his ear. He could write his name and make out some words if he had time and privacy to sound it out. Mostly he read people.
“Not everyone has a chance to learn when they’re children. There’s no shame in it. Goodness, I’d bet half the men here struggle with it. I could teach you,” she offered. “I was starting classes at the seminary, planning to make a profession of teaching at a women’s college, before….well, before I decided to come away with my father.” She brushed at a wrinkle in her gown.
“I had a chance to learn and couldn’t. I’m not the brightest nugget in the pan.”
It was supposed to be a joke, but it fell flat because it was too true. Too sharp against his lungs. Virgil had tried to help him when they were boys at school, and, later, when they’d been in the army. They’d almost come to blows, Virgil had been so frustrated at Owen’s inability to grasp what Virgil claimed was ‘plain and simple.’
“I understand arithmetic if you tell me the numbers, but I can’t write them down.” When he thought of values, they came to him likes dots on a die. He saw patterns and groups that produced a result that was obvious and accurate, but he couldn’t put it on paper. “I love stories too. If someone is reading a book aloud, I’ll always sit down and listen. I steal all the fancy words I hear, but I can’t read them myself.”
“Oh.” That’s all she said, but he could hear what was going on in her head.
Like most people in Denver, she was under the impression the partners in the Venturous Mining Company were educated, savvy businessmen, given what they’d accomplished since arriving here.
In reality, they were a ragtag team of drudge-workers who’d fallen ass-backward into a lucky strike.
“The thing Virgil and I saw most in California was that the men who got in first, got up first. You grab the gold and invest it in something that will keep paying after the claim dries up. Things like shops and saloons and brothels. I refuse to profit off girls on their backs. Owning a mercantile is too much book work. You have to track every doodad and fiddlestick, write letters to order things. But a saloon sells one thing. A man without smarts needs to keep it simple.” He ran his hands up and down his thighs. “Plus, I’ve got the gift of the gab. Good whiskey and good conversation will always bring people in the door.”
“I don’t think you lack smarts,” she said with a gentle look that made the inside of his chest prickle. “Your intelligence shows itself in other ways.”
Sure, it did. He was a helluva shot with a long gun. That and fifty cents would buy him breakfast.
“I’ll work for you, but not for dance tokens and tips,” she said decisively. “You’ll have to pay me a proper wage. Perhaps two dollars a day?”