Cutthroats

by William W. Johnstone

  Slash looked at his partner, his own expression hopeful, and said, “Could it be, you think?”

  “Who else?”

  “You think Jay organized that posse?”

  “I didn’t see her nowhere in town, did you? Maybe she’s waiting for us at Sam Scudder’s old place!”

  “Christ Almighty,” Slash said, scratching his chin. “Maybe it’s true!”

  Just as suddenly, he frowned again as he and Pecos stopped to let their horses drink from a spring-fed freshet that threaded the middle of the otherwise dry arroyo.

  “But why would she send them riders to free us after she double-crossed us with ole Bleed-’Em-So?” he asked. “Don’t make sense.”

  He looked at Pecos, hoping maybe his partner had a convincing explanation.

  Pecos didn’t seem to, however. The bigger man stared down at the dark, meandering stream at which both tired horses drew eagerly, then shook his head and turned to Slash again. “I don’t know, partner. But it’s got to be her. I think she’ll have an explanation for what she done. I mean, it’s gotta be her. Who else would have sprung us from that gallows? I mean, besides Jay, we don’t have another friend on God’s green earth!”

  Again, Slash silently chewed on the possibility, nodding slowly.

  Pecos was right. Who else could have sprung them?

  Jay would have an explanation for being on the train with Bleed-’Em-So. She’d explain everything. Damn soon, the three of them—him, Pecos, and Jaycee Breckenridge—would be heading back down to Mexico together as the first snows powdered the Rockies.

  That thought made him even happier to still be dancing on this side of the sod.

  “Did you see the look on Bleed-’Em-So’s face?” he asked Pecos, grinning broadly, the possibility that he’d see Jay again soon improving his mood even more. “When he seen them masked riders swarming in around us?”

  Pecos threw his head back and laughed.

  Slash laughed, too, thoroughly enjoying the remembered image of the chief marshal’s incensed, horrified, and exasperated face as Bledsoe cut loose with his double-bore greener.

  After they’d shared a good long guffaw, he and Pecos pulled up their horses’ heads and continued on down the trail. They crossed the arroyo, climbed the opposite bank, left the cedars, and trotted off across a prairie carpeted in purple sage.

  “Hey,” Slash said, turning to his partner trotting his buckskin off his own left stirrup. “What was that confession you were about to make to me on the gallows? You know—just before our angels swooped down to save our asses, er . . . leastways, give us a reprieve from eternal damnation?”

  Pecos looked at him, slack-jawed. “Huh?”

  “You were gonna tell me you know how I felt about somethin’.”

  “I was?”

  “I could have sworn you were!”

  “Hmm.” Pecos frowned and studied his saddle horn a little too closely and thoroughly. “Boy, I just don’t recollect, Slash. I reckon in all the commotion it slipped my mind.”

  “Come on,” Slash said, prodding his partner. “You know what I’m talkin’ about.”

  “Golly, I don’t, Slash.” Shaking his head, Pecos batted his heels against his buckskin’s flanks, urging the horse into a rocking lope. “Looks like we got another one o’ them bad summer storms rollin’ down from the Sawatch behind us. We’d best haul our freight!”

  Slash scowled after him, frustrated. He glanced over his shoulder.

  Sure enough, another gully-washer was on its way. High, gunmetal clouds were sliding toward them, grumbling with distant thunder and stitched with lightning.

  Slash lowered his hatless head, shivered against a rising wind, and booted his Appy down the trail after Pecos.

  * * *

  The storm was like a hapless posse.

  Twice it almost caught up to the two southward-heading cutthroats, spit a little rain and shot a little lightning at them, then, as though taking the bait of a false trail, it veered off to the east or the west. Ever persistent, however, like a posse made up of riders who’d had money in the bank the two cutthroats had robbed, it veered back after them.

  It caught up to them when they were dropping into the broad swale in which the late Sam Scudder’s relay station on the old Gunnison Stage Road hunkered low amidst brush and sage. It was positioned across the stage road from a low-slung adobe brick barn and several other now-dilapidated outbuildings as well as a cedar rail corral and a windmill jutting above a broad stone stock trough.

  The place had become tumbledown in the wake of Sam’s passing, Slash saw. He didn’t know who owned it now. It had been years since he and Pecos had stopped here for a hot meal and strong drink.

  The rain came in a thick curtain from the northwest. In seconds, both riders were drenched from their heads to their boot toes, the downpour matting their hair to their heads and streaming down their faces.

  Slash and Pecos stabled their mounts in the barn, removing their saddles, rubbing the horses down with scraps of burlap provided for the job, and giving them water and a pail of oats. Pecos stopped in the barn’s open door, staring toward the brush-roofed former station house that now served as a backcountry watering hole.

  Three horses stood beneath the brush arbor fronting the place, hanging their heads and tails against the sharp bite of the wet wind. The rain ran off the ends of the arbor poles to patter into the mud behind them, forming a broad pool.

  Slash moved up to stand beside his partner. He looked at the saloon and the horses, then turned to Pecos. “What’re you waiting for?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Goin’ in there without my guns.”

  “Well, what’re you plannin’ on doin’—cowering out here like a dog without your guns?”

  “Yeah, I just might.” Pecos turned to Slash. “What’re you gonna do? Just walk in there with those cuffs on your wrists and no guns at your side?”

  “This is an old outlaw camp,” Slash said with an amused grunt. “I’m sure the patrons are probably very accustomed to seein’ fellas sporting handcuffs. Besides, we might know someone in there. Hell, Jay might be in there!”

  “The cuffs will draw attention to us. And I don’t like havin’ fellas payin’ attention to me without havin’ access to my guns, which are probably still locked up in that town marshal’s office in Saguache, consarn it anyways!”

  Pecos brushed his wet coat sleeve across his wet nose and mouth.

  “Look,” Slash said, “those horses might belong to whoever we’re supposed to meet here. I say we go in and have a look around.”

  “You’re right,” Pecos said. “We might know someone in there. Someone whose fur we mighta rubbed in the wrong direction. You know how folks is sayin’ there’s no honor amongst thieves? We’re livin’ proof, Slash!”

  “Ah, crap,” Slash said, throwing an arm out in disgust. “I’m goin’ in. You hide an’ watch!”

  CHAPTER 19

  Leaving the barn, Slash strode back out into the rain that was coming down at a forty-five-degree angle. What the hell? He couldn’t get any wetter than he already was. After he’d taken a few steps, he said over his shoulder: “I can already taste that ale and whiskey! Mmm-Mmmmm!”

  He turned his head forward, grinning. He knew that would get Pecos’s goat, and it did. Wet footsteps sounded behind him and then Pecos was falling into step beside him. “You devil!”

  “Chicken liver.”

  “I just don’t like pokin’ my head into a known wolf den without my guns.” Wolf dens were what the outlaw breed called watering holes and other such places that relied mainly on their own breed of law-dodging clientele. “Besides, you know how these places attract bounty hunters.”

  “Like I said, chicken liver.”

  “Better a chicken liver than wolf bait!”

  Slash moved past the three horses tied to the hitch rack on his right and mounted the wooden boardwalk from which a clay olla pot hung from the r
afters. He steeled himself a little as he pushed through the batwings. Pecos had been right about the foolhardiness of entering such a place unarmed, but under the circumstances, he didn’t see what choice they had.

  The masked stranger had said someone would meet them here. Jay might be that person.

  Instinctively and automatically, Slash stepped to the left of the batwings, and Pecos stepped to the right, so that any lead that might be directed at them would fly on out the doors and also so that they wouldn’t be outlined against the light behind them, murky as it was. Just as instinctively and automatically, Slash’s hands moved to where he normally wore his guns—for the cross-draw on his left hip and thonged low, butt back, on his right thigh.

  Of course the guns weren’t there. He’d been all too aware of the absence of his weapons for nearly an entire week.

  He felt a little foolish for having reached for them, though he doubted anyone inside the place had seen his hands move. The saloon was awash in dark shadows relieved only by the dull gray light pushing feebly around the batwings now slapping into place behind him and Pecos, and through the rain-washed windows.

  As his eyes adjusted to the room’s twilight, Slash saw that there were four other people inside the place. Two men stood at the crude plank bar that ran along the rear wall. A girl who appeared at least part Mexican stood behind the bar. A fourth man sat at a table ahead of Slash and to his and Pecos’s right, near a wood stove that issued fragrant smoke from the cracks around its ill-fitting doors.

  The man at the table was a Mexican around Slash’s and Pecos’s age—mid- to late fifties. He was playing a mandolin and smoking a loosely rolled cornhusk cigarette. At least, he’d been playing the mandolin and singing softly, mournfully when Slash and Pecos had first entered. Now he was staring incredulously at the two soaking wet newcomers, narrowing one eye and peering through the smoke wafting around his head, on which he wore a ragged straw sombrero.

  He’d removed his right hand from the mandolin’s strings and placed it on the Colt Navy resting on the table before him, near a glass and a tequila bottle.

  The other two men at the bar, also Mexican, had closed their hands over the grips of their own holstered pistols.

  “Hola, amigos,” Slash said affably, showing his empty hands to set them at ease, then striding forward, Pecos falling into step behind him.

  They bellied up to the bar, to the right of the two Mexicans, both of whom were younger men. All three wore the garb of ranch hands. Slash couldn’t help feeling a poignant pang of disappointment at not seeing Jay here. But, then, maybe she was still on her way. If it was she they were going to meet, that was. He wasn’t going to let go of that hope just yet.

  He turned to the dark-eyed Mexican girl standing behind the bar, facing the two young Mexican men, and said, “How about a pair of ales, little miss? And whiskey?”

  She was a pretty, frail girl with long, dark-brown hair falling straight down her slender back. She wore a calico blouse, sleeves rolled to her elbows, and denim trousers with a hemp belt trimmed with a round brass buckle.

  She shook her head quickly, glancing at the silver bracelets on Slash’s and Pecos’s wrists. “No ale. No whiskey. Tequila only, amigos.”

  Slash glanced at Pecos, who shrugged. Slash turned to the girl and smiled, saying, “Tequila it is, senorita.”

  While the girl prepared the drinks, Slash could see out of the corner of his left eye the two young Mexicans taking his and Slash’s measure, no doubt noting the handcuffs and the lack of weapons. Slash didn’t look at the young men directly but only ran his hands back through his longish hair, pressing out the excess rainwater and brushing it off on his damp trousers.

  When the girl had poured two shots of tequila, Slash and Pecos leaned forward against the bar, nursing their drinks, each holding his own quiet counsel, wondering who they were waiting for, waiting . . .

  Meanwhile, one of the young Mexican men resumed a conversation he’d apparently been having with the senorita before Slash and Pecos had entered. The young man and the girl were speaking Spanish, which Slash, having spent a good bit of time hiding out on the other side of the border, spoke nearly fluently, as did Pecos, to the point where they could distinguish regional accents.

  Slash wasn’t purposely trying to eavesdrop, but as the young man’s and the girl’s voices grew gradually in volume, both also acquiring a nasty edge, Slash couldn’t help overhearing. Apparently, the young man had been sparking the girl for a time, taking her to dances. They’d even talked of marriage. But then the girl had caught the young man with another girl, several times, and . . .

  “That was the last time, Tio,” the girl said in Spanish, backing away from the bar and crossing her arms on her chest. “I told you I wanted never to see you again, so go now. You must leave!”

  The young man cursed, slammed his shot glass down, and leaned over the bar, his face red with anger. He threw out an arm to grab her but she lurched back out of his reach.

  “Blast it, Justianna!”

  Slash emptied his glass and slammed it down on the bar, frowning at the young man standing six feet away on his left. “Listen, sonny—you heard the girl. Time to pull your picket pin!”

  Pecos elbowed Slash, saying tightly, “What the hell you doin’, partner?”

  The young man—he had a long, narrow face with a slender, slightly crooked nose and two molasses-dark, close-set eyes—turned to scowl at Slash and say in heavily accented English, “Shut the hell up and drink your tequila, old gringo!”

  He swept a flap of his buckskin jacket back away from the Remington riding high on his left hip, in front of a large Green River knife, and nodded pointedly, threateningly at Slash. “Comprende?”

  Slash’s cheeks flushed slightly. He’d forgotten himself, reacted automatically. Reminding himself where he was and of the unarmed condition he was in, he gave a weak, sheepish smile and turned his head to stare back down at the bar. He glanced at Pecos, who stood glaring admonishingly at him, and then grabbed the bottle the girl had left on the bar and refilled both his and Pecos’s glasses.

  “What do you say we sit down and behave ourselves?” Pecos said, keeping his voice low and tight with admonishment.

  He grabbed the bottle and his glass, swung around, and headed for a table near where the third, older Mexican had once again kicked back in his chair, quietly strumming his mandolin and singing very softly and gently in Spanish about a young man and a girl who met along a shady creek:

  “Cuando las rosas silvestres estaban,

  En flor y el aire de la primavera olía a manzanas . . .”

  (When the wild roses were in full bloom

  And the spring air smelled like apples . . .)

  “Yeah, yeah—I’ll be right behind ya,” Slash said, glowering down at his tequila.

  He wanted to sit down, but he felt compelled to stay where he was, for the young man was fuming at the girl now, jutting his head belligerently across the bar and threatening to skin her alive if she didn’t listen to reason. The second young man stood on Tio’s far side, chuckling softly through his teeth.

  The girl stood back against the shelves of the back bar, arms crossed on her chest. She shook her head slowly, defiantly, quietly sobbing, her heart broken.

  “No, Tio, I am done with you. You must go now. If Papa comes back and finds you here . . .”

  “Mierda!” Tio yelled, slamming his right open palm down on the bar, making a sound like that of a pistol going off.

  The girl jerked with a violent start, gasping.

  “I have had enough of your insolence, Justianna!”

  The young man stepped around his partner and moved through a break in the bar, tramping around behind it toward the girl.

  “Hey, now!” Slash said.

  Tio’s amigo turned to face Slash, grinning and tucking his coat back behind the low-slung Colt thonged on his left thigh. It was just then, seeing that the two young men were so well-armed, that he realized they weren’t ra
nch hands but cutthroats not all that unlike himself and Pecos.

  The only difference was that these two were younger.

  And Mexican, of course.

  They were likely hiding out up here from the law in their own country, whiling away their time sparking the norteamericana girls like Justianna. Breaking their hearts. Slash once did the same thing in these two young desperados’ native land, but he’d never threatened nor frightened any girl on either side of the border like this hombre was threatening and frightening this girl here.

  “Stay out of it, partner,” Pecos warned as he eased himself into a chair at the table he’d taken.

  Slash drew a sharp breath through his teeth in frustration. He threw back half of his tequila shot, set down the glass, then grabbed the edge of the bar, leaning forward, trying to keep his wolf on its leash. But when the young man stalking the girl down the bar toward Slash suddenly lunged forward, grabbed her arm, and slapped her savagely across her right cheek with the back of his right hand, Slash’s wolf ran to the end of its chain.

  He slammed the top of the bar and lunged forward, his fingers digging into the edge of the bar’s crude planks. “Now, boy—that ain’t how you treat a—”

  Before he could get another word out, the kid pulled his Remington and thrust it across the bar toward Slash, clicking back the hammer with an angry snarl. “What I tell you, old gringo?”

  His close-set eyes bored into Slash. The kid’s eyes were dark and flat, like a panther’s eyes.

  Slash stared at the dark, .44-caliber maw yawning at him two feet from his face, the barrel aimed at his left eye. The kid’s hand didn’t shake a bit. He’d killed before, and he’d kill again without hesitation.

  Slash heard Pecos give a bereaved groan behind him.

  The man to Slash’s left, shorter and softer than Tio but roughly the same age, smiled broadly, cheeks dimpling behind three or four days’ growth of beard stubble. The older man had stopped playing the mandolin. He was chuckling very softly and darkly behind Slash, about ten feet away.