Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

might dance on the stage, showing their garters, or with the customers on the floor, and/or entertain privately in their rooms on the second story. Though whoring was not a requirement for a female who worked there, you might say it was a recommendation and the only way to make a decent income. But what I mean to say is, there wasn’t no compulsion or white slavery.
    There was those who disapproved of the selling of flesh as a degradation of the fair sex. Aside from preachers, it was a rare man who held this opinion unless it come to his own daughter, sister, wife, or mother. Out West in the time of which I speak, there was the usual distinction between good girls and bad, but if you didn’t consort with a soiled dove you might never have no women at all, there being not that many of the respectable type. So Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, and most of the others had intimate associations of more than a night at a time with sporting women, and the same was true of Wyatt Earp.
    Working at the Lone Star, I come to know the girls on the premises well enough, and not all was what if you enjoyed full sight you could call pretty, but all seemed to know how to appeal to a man, and this was sometimes most true of them who was the least attractive in feature or form, like Cockeyed Kitty, Iron-Jaw Tillie, and Liz Big Bottom, for a turn at any of who there might be a waiting line. I expect they could make a fellow live up to a better idea than he normally had of himself, and you can’t ask more of a woman than that.
    I was making a nice income tending bar at the Lone Star, where in addition to the wage, a cowboy who had won at faro or chuck-a-luck might ask you to drink on him, and you’d swallow from a glass of cold coffee but credit yourself for what he was paying for whiskey, and there’d be some who would tip generously if you would listen to how they was a-going to skin alive the next greaser they encountered because one cheated them on the sale of a horse, or how no Yankee lived who could put a head on John Wesley Hardin, a famous Texas gunfighter of the day, though I do believe he were in prison down in Texas at this time, so he never had the chance to lock horns with Bat or Wyatt, though there was a claim by Hardin’s admirers that once in Abilene, years before, he had got the drop on none other than Wild Bill “Heycox,” as they called him. If so, that was the first I heard of such, but I’m not saying it couldn’t of happened, not having been at that scene, which was the only way you could test the truth of anything you heard by way of gunfighting. You’d hardly get it from some whiskeyed cowboy with his talk of “John Wesley,” like he was his best friend.
    Back to the Lone Star girls, I guess the ones most popular was them that would make a fellow like this think maybe, for as long as he were in bed with them, he was J. W. Hardin or maybe his cousin Manning Clements, another with a big rep as a troublemaker.
    There was some girls pretty enough to make you wonder why they was doing that, until you considered how good the money was and then the alternative, marrying some sodbuster like their Pa and between childbearing and all the heavy-labor chores, dying young, or staying in a city tenement (for some was Irish from Boston and New York, come West for new opportunities), ditto as to disadvantages as well as breathing bad air. The Lone Star, under Bat Masterson’s ownership, was not the kind of place where a man no matter how much he spent could abuse or mistreat a member of the fair sex just because he was hiring her favors.
    I was on good terms with all the girls, and even had a couple I felt especially friendly towards, one because she was so young-looking and the other on account of she seemed so old and tired (though as it turned out, the little one had turned thirty and the other was only two years older and eventually had put by enough money to open her own brothel down the road), and to either of them two I