Hola posse!
Some of you might remember me from The Stray's other game as Wildcat. I'm still lurking in the other game but Wildcat was gracefully Put on a Bus and I kind of like how she wound up actually, so don't expect to see posts from me over there.
I'm coming on board here soon once we figure out if I need to redraw some cards. It's always a little awkward coming in after the start to tie the Posse together, so let me give you the short version and the long version. It's also even harder with this character concept!
Jade Underwood is a city slicker from New York City itself. She is an auditor in the employ of Smythe, Moens, and Von Rosenberg who is coming to Deadwood to count inventories for all sorts of clients. It seems a lot of mining equipment and ore have been winding up on the wrong balance sheets lately.
Jade has a history with Union Blue and studied overseas. She's a tinhorn but a ridiculously stubborn one. I'm trying to connect Jade to the rest of the posse somehow and am open to ideas, the more outrageous and unlikely and dumb (that special kind of dumb where it's so stupid it wraps around the other end into brilliance again) the better.
Also, this. Because.
quote:
Lee Haufax squirmed in the hard wooden chair.
The office was in the back of the depot, it had formerly been the ticket counter before a series of what his room companion would call casualty losses had claimed parts of the original building. The reinforced wall that protected the depot staff hadn’t been affected however, in the architect’s opinion, and cash strapped Union Blue could scarcely afford one brick more than strictly necessary.
The wall was an internal wall now however, and for lack of an elegant solution some clever Chinaman laborer had filled the gaps where the windows used to be with cement, but it still left the bars exposed in a clever bit of artistry. It might have looked purposeful except the rest of the room was a pastiche of whatever salvaged materials they had been able to recover from the explosion, and the other builders were not so caring. The walls were black, blue and white tiles of various sizes inconsistently, a few with the Old Glory inspired logo, and the floor was an ugly mess of recovered planks that still had visible burns on them. They didn’t even bother to sand them.
Done with any care, the room could have been art, a tribute to the depot that once was, but it had just been slapped up haphazardly. Despite this, the room was incredibly clean, there was not a single spec of dirt on those old planks and even the chipped tiles on the walls shone brightly.
But it was the bars that transfixed Lee Haufax. He hadn’t taken a razor to his chin in some time, and the itching kept his fingers at face constantly. The dead silence of his companion created a terrible nervousness that just made it worse. He began to imagine the bars that used to separate clerk from robber were prison bars. They sure looked the part, and they slowly began to expand in his vision.
His reverie ended when the small kerosene lamp, the only light source in this room, was adjusted. The glow intensified, making the desk and chairs, as well as an easel and a surveyor’s case placed on the only shelf in perfectly parallel formation, cast long shadows toward him. The paper rustled.
“Mr. Haufax.,” The voice came. It was surprisingly deep, considering the source. It was then Lee Haufax realized something. Despite sitting right next to the lamp in her grey wool suit, she wasn’t sweating. Her dark eyes were stern as she stared at him over the onyx rims.
“Disregarding for a moment that Mr. Chamberlain’s secretary does not recall authorizing you to purchase livestock directly from suppliers, we need to have words about the price of sowbellies. ”
The man in his torn blue coveralls, covered with black stains, suddenly felt quite unnerved. He was the only dirty thing in the room. If the room wasn’t insanely clean enough, she was immaculate. The feeling of being dirty in a sanitized shadow prison made his skin crawl.
“Well… uh… er… whattya wanna know ma’am, I reckon I can tell you the fair price fer a tail… or a hog leg.. I don’t usually sell them butchered, I deal in whole hogs…” He stammered. Her return glare made her face scrunch, like she held him in contempt.
“A sowbelly Mr. Haufax- “ she began unceremoniously. “Is a commodity price index that the buyers and wholesalers of your ‘whole hogs’ as you put it monitor and recalculate scrupulously to determine the fair market price they are willing to pay for them. The associates of one Charles Dow make quite a tidy sum with this information. ”
Lee Haufax could barely form numerals. He could write pig, rail, lumber and other words in a terrible scrawl after years of practice. His signature was an X. A commodity, an index, a wholesaler and a Charles Dow were some of the woman’s New York nonsense. Indecipherable Yankee talk like that was what started the war to begin with. His anger made him bold and he forgot the prison bars.
“What in damnation are you going on about woman!?”
Nonplussed, she slid her glasses up on her nose and opened a drawer. The last time he’d been in this situation, a sawed off coach-gun had been shoved in his face. He went crashing to the ground, trying to get away from her before she could aim and fire the…
Book. A plain gray bound book, gray as the suit she wore. “Mister Haufax if you would please. ”
Feeling foolish Lee Haufax sat back down. He thought about trying to make excuse but decided against it. She had no weapon to threaten him with. Well perhaps she did, but it was of a sort beyond his conception.
“As I suspect the maths, as they call it in Oxford… the Old World is very charming with its wording sometimes Mr. Haufax. But I digress. I suspect in any event conceivable in either the known heavens or this terra firm on which we reside, that the arithmetic I used would be lost on you, but it suffices to say the median amount you paid for unbutchered pork was well over a septuplet of the highest rate for the past four years, assuming one calculates in six month rolling averages of course. ”
That just made him mad, now she was using vulgar sexual words they don’t allow in church. “So?” He fired back. “This ain’t yer New York City darlin’, things cost more out here! You’d know that if’n ya ever tried to do any honest work!”
“Be that as it may Mr. Haufax, I suspect the deficit of honesty in this room is not on this side of the desk. Speaking of deficits, once I corrected your ledgers, you seem to be running a rather large one. Tell me Mr. Haufax, why did you fire your bookkeeper, because a bookkeeper would not commit such an egregious error as debiting fixed assets to credit revenues. ”
Lee Haufax smiled, his teeth brown and yellow. He had her. He’d been to learning how the book worked, he might not have finished third grade but he was no fool, he could be book smart when he wished to. All he’d had to do was keep copying what was already there, no one ever actually looked at those stupid things. She’d never be able to tell.
“Well if you’d kindly turn your attention to-“
“To this?” The woman asked, placing the tattered ledger on the desk top with soft thud. It had been repaired with some strips and glue, he saw. He wasn’t sure when she’d put gloves on. The ledger book smelled like Lee Haufax’s armpit sweat even now.
“Mister Haufax, how do you think I figured any of this out? And when I cross referenced your reports at headquarters before coming here, I distinctly noted you cannot write a lower case ‘a’ to save your life and your spelling would only be passable if you were trying to communicate in the Cyrillic alphabet. ”
Lee Haufax didn’t understand a word of that, but he figured out he was being insulted. He was at a loss for words however; snappy comebacks are difficult when you don’t understand the original jab.
“This poor, mistreated volume is full of your handwriting sir, in many nonstandard transactions that quite frankly just do not add up. However you did one thing very consistently I was able to pick up on. ”
The last sentence made sense. He snapped at her. “An’ what’s that!?” He’d intended for it to sound far more menacing somehow.
“You were very good about marking certain entries with a small asterisk, inventory mostly. Since you had on paper far more inventory than you had any space for, well to make this story short Mr. Haufax, I went to city hall, such as it was, and found there were a very limited number of storage facilities available for rent. ”
She removed her spectacles and looked at him pointedly. “One of them used to be a lumberyard. ”
She knows. Lee Haufax knew she knew. Damn it all to hell, the bitch has figured it out. But he was one step ahead of her still. He reached down and turned up the cuff of his pant leg, he kept the Arkansas toothpick sewn in place there for this very situation.
He came up silently with the knife. She was tall, but she wasn’t a cornfed girl like his sister who could carry calves over her shoulders before she caught those bullets with her face. He actually hated to do this, even he had standards, but he couldn’t count on everyone being unable to understand her big words.
The unconcerned woman was cleaning one of the lenses when he heard the revolver’s crisp action cycle behind him. Standing in the doorway were no less than four Union Blue rail enforcers. Lee Haufax swallowed hard. He knew these men, and what they thought of those reputed to be deserters, like Lee Haufax, who may or may not have run and hid from the fourth battle of Gettysburg.
If she had any fear they might shoot at him, miss, and hit her, she didn’t show it. If they saw him try to cut a woman's throat, it was all the excuse they would need. Making one of the better decisions in his recent years, he dropped the knife.
“Mr. Haufax it is quite rude of you to litter. ” she concluded, “And next time don’t record the purchase as, and I quote, Gatling Hogs. Your employer will be very interested to know who bought that particular lot of bacon. Bonne continuation monsieur!”
