Fiona fetches everyone's drinks in the nude

The bartender looked Fiona up and down, and grinned. “Texas Pete?”

“How did you know?” said Fiona, frostily. Sitting at the table in her corset and clinging bloomers, feeling the eyes of half the saloon on her skin, it had seemed to Fiona that the obvious course of action was to cut her losses and go to bed. That is, until she’d glanced at her next hand of cards, and observed four kings. She cast a practiced eye over Texas Pete, concluded from the nervous way he was moving his cigar back and forth in his mouth that he was bluffing this time for real, and gone all in again.

A few minutes later, sitting at the table in just her clinging, lacy, flower-embroidered bloomers, one hand folded primly across her ample chest as the other clutched her cards, Fiona’s natural inclination had been to flee shrieking from the room. But the straight flush in her hand, and the gleam of fear in Pete’s eye, suggested to her that a different course of action might be more lucrative.

So now she was fetching everyone’s drinks in the nude.

The bartender picked up a brass bell from behind the car, jangled it loudly, cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted “Hey, everyone! Pete got another one!” Fiona shrieked and did her best to cover herself, without spilling any of the four glasses of whiskey she was holding, as the saloon whooped with laughter and the pianist struck up a merry tune. There was, of course, no disguising the fact that she was standing naked on the sawdust-coated floor of the crowded miners’ bar, with no way to conceal her full breasts, pink nipples, bare bottom or golden bush from the merry crowd.

“What do you mean, another one?” she sputtered.

“Why, old Pete there’s the greatest card sharp the West has ever seen. Nothin’ he likes better than fleecin’ a greenhorn gal right out o’ her last scrap o’ clothin’ and leavin’ her nekkid as a jaybird in some location y’aint pertikkerly s’posed to be nekkid in. Saw him do it to a whole posse o’ Mexican gals once, down south o’ the border, and damned if afterwards he didn’t make ‘em all go nekkid to church.”

“But you can’t go naked to church! You’d be naked!”

“That’s what the Mex gals said, but ol’ Pete can be mighty convincin’. Anyway, you owe this here establishment about… now, let me see.” He quoted her a number, and Fiona blinked.

“That can’t possibly be correct,” she said. “Just for room and board?”

“It’s all the miners pushin’ up prices, with their pockets full of gold and suchlike.”

“But Pete won all my money! I don’t have a dime on me!”

“So I see,” the bartender said, grinning at Fiona, who had put the glasses of whiskey down and was doing an awkward little dance with her hands, wishing she had a better way to conceal her peachy posterior from the curious gazes of the stubbly (though not unhandsome) miners. They were looking at her like they hadn’t seen a woman in months, which was in some cases more or less true. “Lucky for you, there happens to be a job goin’ in this here establishment. You work hard, you’ll have your debt paid by tomorrow morning.”

“What kind of job?”

“Waitress, for a start.”

“And that comes with a waitress uniform, I assume?”

“Guess again.”