and that opal glinting like a good life?
There’s a heap of world Snow White doesn’t understand. She can ride and she can shoot and she can hold her rye, she don’t fare well in high company and she don’t know a thing about cattle. But getting beat down by a body twice your size who just wants to take the one thing you’ve got in this world from you—yeah. Snow White knows something about that. And she’s about the fastest draw til you hit the Dakotas. She did it out in the street out of respect to the piano girl. It feared her less than she thought. No different than a tin goose in a gallery, only she got no prize for firing true. Snow White felt a damn sight worse over the seagull she brought down way back. Funny how a gun can speak your pain so clear.
When she sheaths her barrel, she sees it: one of the red pearls fell off somewhere in the mud. Nobody’s daddy is pleased.
Ten miles out of town Snow White broke up sobbing into her pony’s mane. Charming stood bold, took all her tears so she could keep on going.
Snow White follows the moon.
Snow White
In the Underworld
Round about Nevada the grass gets scarce and the critters get shy. All those apples are long gone and the bullet situation is not promising. Snow White hitches up her need and goes looking for work. She suffers some worry over whether her femaleness will trouble her, but the truth is after riding those back countries down, most everyone looks the same.
She finds what she’s looking for in a gemstone mine south of Blue Coffin. You could ride right over it and never know it’s there: the men live below snakes in the hollows left after the axes and drills have stripped the shine out of the rock. Coupla the boys even throw down rugs, perch a picture of the missus back home up on a spit of stone. One hollow’s set up for a saloon, a tilted splintery bar, whiskey so cheap and stiff the boys call it Who-Shot-John, a card table and seven stools nobody stops fighting over. Snow White stows Charming with the camp horses in a corral run by a woman just about as old as the wheel and heads underground. It don’t escape her this is her father’s mine. Nevada is his mother’s teat; where he made his fortune. Well, why shouldn’t Snow White have a fortune, too? Not that she expects one. She’s no fool and a night in a gold camp will straighten you right out on the odds of making your dimes on the lode. If you want to get straight, which most nobody does once they’ve seen the good blue and the hard yellow.
It’s neither of the two down here. It’s the true red: rubies. Bloody knuckles; apple rinds. Snow White gets a skinnier cut on account of her being a girl and a half-breed heathen if ever the foreman did see one, but it’s something. It keeps Charming in hay and her in beans-on-griddlebread and on Sunday they get tinned peaches if the take’s been good. Way Snow White figures it, in a month she’ll have enough socked away to head back north, up to Montana which she has not forgotten, into the Territory. In a month she’ll have enough to quit worrying if she hasn’t seen so much as a badger stumble past her sights. The company man smiles and rolls his cigarette. It’s what they all say. Just a month and I’ll bring my people out. Just a month and I’ll move up top to Blue Coffin where they got proper houses. Just a month and I’ll be shitting rubies, that’s how rich I’ll strike. Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today.
Snow White does not complain. She swings her ax and learns to see in the dark. She forgets what it’s like to smell nice. She gets so that her heart beats faster whenever she sees a glitter of red in the gloom. Just about every week some idiot tries to get her to wash their clothes or scrub them down or show that cook how to make a proper tuck-in. Just about every week some bruiser gets tied and bellows at her to show them her Injun witchcraft or tries to get their hands under her shirt. Give us a smile, Snowy. Give us a taste. We