The Overlanders by Kathryn Ewers Bundy

Author:Kathryn Ewers Bundy [Bundy, Kathryn Ewers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FF, Fiction, GLBT, Historical, Lesbian, Romance, Western
ISBN: 9781463529512
Amazon: B00516IUT6
Published: 2011-05-15T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Once she had secured a room, Frank turned her attention to making a living. The funds she had taken when she left, supplemented by the odd jobs along the way, were nearly run dry. She needed immediate employment, but had no idea what she could do to earn money.

Her first two days in the city, she tramped the streets and alleyways, sidled along the docks, admired the fine downtown shopping district, and rambled through woods, acres of scrubby grass, climbed the hills and absorbed the views all around. Despite its reputation, San Francisco did not strike her as the sinkhole of evil and sin that she had been led to expect. There were certainly many barrooms, and it seemed that the population was 90% male, but it was often thus in towns and settlements. Women stayed indoors, as feminine sensibility and occupation demanded. The sort of women one would see upon the street was not, by and large, of the most respectable kind. This is not to imply that the good matrons of California Street, flanked by servants carrying their bundles, were not of the most impeccable reputation. But it did not take much observation to note that the streets were also inhabited by women of more questionable virtue. It was a port, after all.

Frank was becoming accustomed to being accepted in her male persona without question. She marveled at the trickery to be obtained by so simple a deception as clothing herself as a boy. Not only did the people she encountered take her by her appearance, they denied their own doubts. Sometimes, she would be conversing with someone who would examine her closely, as if he noticed something amiss. She did not disguise her voice and, though it was in the low range for a woman, it would hardly be mistaken for the timbre and tone of a man’s speech. Her hairless face and high cheekbones would seem to cry out her actual sex, but none challenged her. She found that, among men, there was a tolerance for exception that she had never suspected. She passed as a callow youth a decade younger than her true age. Did that not put the lie to the histrionics of so many women of her acquaintance, her sister Virginia included, who bemoaned old age at three and twenty?

It was during her solitary rambling that she met Barney Sullers. She was taking her noon meal beneath a spreading chestnut tree high upon a hill overlooking the town below and the blue bay beyond. From this vantage point, it was easy to pick out the areas of town by their level of congestion and by the smoke rising from chimneys of businesses and factories. The industrial section belched exhaust continuously, clouds of black and gray rising from tall, round chimneys and drifting inland toward the hills on the mainland and the mountains beyond. Frank wondered idly if the smoke and steam caused dirt to settle as far away as the farmlands. She

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