New Orleans, Spring 1872.<br/><br/>The shipping district of the city was a broad sprawl of warehouses and docks.  My train arrived in this district with a long, slow exhale of steam, and it was into afternoon sun that I stepped with my pack in hand, the bundle containing all my belongings save the longarms which I had to stow with my mount in order to ride with civilized company.<br/><br/>I continued to draw stares on the platform as I had in the car.  Repressed people with unquenchable senses of self-righteousness.  Mostly city folk, where a woman with pants-- much less a gun (though mine, I assure you, was not on display)-- was considered an explicit thing to look upon.  One little girl keeps springing to mind, though-- a little freckled thing, perhaps ten years of age, who kept peeking over the back of her mother's bench and pointing her fingers like pistols at me, and who kept asking an an embarrassingly loud voice (embarrassing for her mother, anyway) if I was the ranger girl from the funny books.<br/><br/>As if conjured by the memory, the girl and her bustle-clad, broad-hatted mother stepped onto the platform from a car down-- they'd left after the mother couldn't stand the girl's inappropriate behavior any longer.  I had my saddlebags slung over my shoulder and was securing my gun belt with both hands.  The freckled girl's face lit like a candle at the sight of it, and she started hopping from one foot to the next.  "Mama, mama, it IS her--"<br/><br/>But the woman, whose clothes had sufficient material to fashion into the drapes and frills for a whole sugar plantation, was preoccupied and hissing at a porter about a set of luggage.  The girl continued to stare with the pure adoration only a child seems to have, so I reached up past the black felt patch over my eye, and I pinched the flat brim of my Reno-style hat, tugging it down in a little salute to her.<br/><br/>Her little face beamed, and then her mother tugged at her hand and they disappeared on the bustling platform.<br/><br/>I tucked a little cigarillo between my teeth and scratched alight a Lucifer match from my shirt-pocket.  Seeing a woman smoking in most of the urbane cities I've seen would be a shock worth reporting, but there's something about New Orleans so that it doesn't elicit comment.  So like this, I set off.<br/><br/>My freshly polished ostrich boots carried me down the planks of the platform.  Cathing a glimpse of myself in the station window's afternoon reflection, I stop to check everything... this is not something that I am in the habit of doing, because I typically don't give a fuck who sees me.  And while I actually<i>do</i>care today, I still want to dress like... well, me.  Not some dolled up trollop.<br/><br/>I wore denim pants that I'd owned just long enough to break them in well, so they fit like a glove.  I had procured a new, red leather vest, double-layered and cinched up tight to my body with laces at the sides and back like a corset.  The shirt beneath it was black, comfortable cotton, with buffalo-horn buttons-- three of them open at the top.  I wore gloves too, of course... black kid-leather, with reinforced palm and finger pads, but more out of habit than necessity.  My long jacket, black seal, was over my shoulder and padding the saddlebags.<br/><br/>The weather was fine, the river's fecund scent reassuring and alive.  So I went to fetch my horse and long-arm weapons, to chat again with the porters who, I'd come to understand, tended to be reasonably nice fellows when you didn't talk down to them.  Then, it'll be an hour or two's ride to the Quarter, where I hoped Baptiste would be waiting.<br/><br/>*<br/><br/>I arrived at the fine, glossy doors of Baptiste's home shortly before midnight.  I was dusty, bruised, cursing and disappointed.<br/><br/>You see, I tend to get involved in others' affairs... it's a habitual self-destruction that I can't seem to deny.  So when somebody's steam-powered factory unit had a sudden backfire, and it set a horse-drawn coach tearing down Canal street with a terrified couple on the running board, I had to get involved and ride down the carriage and bring it to a stop.<br/><br/>When I heard a scuffle on Decatur, I rode my horse to investigate and found a whelp of a pickpocket being flailed for failing to bring in enough coin.  It took me a while to rehabilitate the offender and to deliver the boy to an orphanage.<br/><br/>Then, when I tried a shortcut through Jackson Square, I was lucky enough to meet a handful of sailors riotous with drink and too broke to afford even one whore between them.  I felt a civic duty to help them get to someplace quiet to sleep it off, even if that someplace quiet happened to be where-the-hell-ever I managed to stow their unconscious, beaten bodies after they tried to jump me.<br/><br/>It'd been nearly a year since I'd last walked my horse down Conti Street, and by the time I got there it felt like ten.<br/><br/>I raised my fist and knocked loudly at the door.  I'd decided by then that come hell or high water, I was going to drag him to bed, and that if his assistants didn't answer quick enough I was going to bust in and take him sleeping.  Leaning back into the doorframe, I kept my horse's reigns loose in my grip and let my eyes close.  How good it would be to hear that voice again...