Slash released Myra grudgingly. The girl finished wrapping a bandage around Jay’s neck and under her shoulder, securing the poultice to the wound, then finished drawing Jay’s shirt up over it.
“You really shouldn’t ride,” Myra said, leaning back on her heels. “I packed it good, but that wound could open up again.” She bit her lower lip in consternation. “I wish I knew how to get the bullet out, but that’s one trick I never learned.”
“I’ll be fine,” Jay said.
“We could fetch a sawbones here,” Pecos said. He had the horses saddled and ready to go. “I could ride up to Silverton and bring him back.” To Myra, he said, “There must be a doctor up that way, isn’t there?”
“I can’t recollect seein’ a shingle for one, but I’m sure there is. Or someone as good as the real thing.” Myra looked at Jay. “I’ll fetch somebody for you.”
Jay shook her head. “No need. I’m tough as sin. I can make the ride.” She lifted her hand toward Slash. “Help me into my saddle.”
Slash pulled her gently to her feet and then, wrapping one arm around the small of her back, began leading her toward where the four horses stood in a loose clump, ground-tied. “You’re not riding alone. I don’t think you have the strength to sit a saddle. You’ll be ridin’ with me.”
Jay shook her head. “Too hard on your horse.” “That’s one tough hoss. Toughest one I ever owned. Had him a long time. He’s got a sound back on him, that horse does.”
“He’s right,” Myra said, walking up behind them with Pecos, who’d kicked dirt on the fire. “You might feel strong now, but I have a feeling that after a few miles up the trail, you’re going to weaken. Falling out of your saddle could be bad. Really bad.”
She gazed directly at Jay.
Jay looked at Slash and nodded.
Slash helped her up onto the Appy’s back. When he had her safely in the saddle, he toed the stirrup and swung up behind her, easing his own weight behind Jay and the saddle’s cantle, on his bedroll and saddlebags.
Pecos mounted his own horse. Slash started to rein away from the camp but then he saw Myra standing there at the edge of the camp, holding the reins of her horse but not mounting. She just stood there, looking a little lost and forlorn under the round brim of her battered felt hat.
“Where you headed?” Slash asked her.
The girl hiked a shoulder, gave a weak half smile. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could tag along with you all, is there?”
“To Silverton?”
Again, the girl shrugged.
“Pinto’s there,” Pecos said. Slash had told him what Goose Johnson had told Slash about the gang’s next job.
“I got nowhere else to go,” Myra said, fear in her eyes as she slid her gaze from Slash to Pecos and back again. “Nowhere.”
Slash and Pecos glanced at each other.
“Never mind,” Myra said, swinging up into her saddle and reining the mare away from the three. “I understand. Bad idea.”
Jay glanced over her shoulder at Slash, placed a hand on his knee, and gave him a beseeching squeeze.
“Oh, what the hell,” Slash said.
Myra looked hopefully over her shoulder at him.
“It ain’t every day a man gets to share the trail with the gal that nearly drilled him a third eye!” he said.
Chuckling, he swung the Appy through the forest, heading toward the trail hugging the Animas—the trail that should take them in a couple of hours up to the mountain mining camp of Silverton, where Slash hoped against hope they’d find a doctor.
* * *
Slash and Pecos were eager to get on up the trail to Silverton, but they had to keep their speed down to lessen the jarring for Jay. After they’d pushed a little too hard for a two-mile stretch, and then stopped to rest Jay as well as the horses, Myra checked the bandage to find it spotted with fresh blood.
Jay, sitting against a tree, looked pale and worn out. Her eyes were clear, her expression brave, but that didn’t change the fact that she still had a bullet inside her. It didn’t change the fact that she might very well bleed to death before they reached Silverton.
“We can always stop here, Jay,” Slash said. “One of us can ride on ahead for . . .”
Jay shook her head, flung up a hand toward Slash. “Let’s ride. The gang’s up there. You have to get after them before they kill again.”
“Not at the expense of killing you,” Pecos said.
“Thanks, boys,” she said, laying a hand against the side of the big cutthroat’s face. “But, really. I’ll be fine. Come on.” She strode toward the Appy. “Stop dragging your behinds!”
Slash looked at Pecos. Pecos shrugged. He looked at Myra, who also shrugged.
“Your wish is our command, your highness,” Slash said, helping Jay up into the saddle.
“Now, those are the words a gal likes to hear!” Jay glanced back, placed a hand on Slash’s cheek, and smiled. “You’re learning. Slow but sure . . .”
Chuckling, Slash reined the Appy out onto the trail and touched spurs to its flanks, continuing their meandering trek along the Animas River. It wasn’t long before Jay lolled back against Slash, groaning in troubled sleep.
Pecos rode up beside his partner. He looked at Jay slumped back against Slash’s chest. He leveled his gaze on Slash and said, “What I was gonna tell you back in Saguache . . . just before them Pinkertons galloped into town . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I was gonna tell you I know how you feel about her.” Pecos glanced at Jay. “And I’m gonna tell you now you best tell her an’ tell her soon. Not that I think she’s gonna die but, hell, you never know when any of us is gonna kick off. If you don’t tell her, you’ll regret it.”
“You done with the sermon, Preacher?”
“Yeah, I’m done.” Pecos reined away from Slash, putting more distance between them. “That’s all I’m gonna say on the subject, you stubborn damn fool. . . .”
* * *
By the time they reached Silverton, cradled in a small valley hemmed in by towering, thirteen-thousand-foot-high peaks including Anvil Mountain, which already had a light dusting of snow on it, Jay had been leaning back against Slash, sound asleep, for a good half hour.
She didn’t stir even after she and Slash as well as Pecos and Myra Thompson began weaving through the camp’s heavy traffic and became ensconced in the loud hubbub issuing from every quarter—sudden bursts of laughter rising from raucous conversations here and there about the street, the barking of dogs, the loud pings of blacksmiths’ hammers, and the frenzied pattering of pianos caroming out through the camp’s many and sundry saloons and houses of ill repute.
“Pardon me, friend,” Slash said, drawing up to a tall, bearded man in buckskins who’d just pulled a freight wagon drawn by a six-mule hitch up before a sprawling mercantile building. “Can you tell me where I’d find a sawbones hereabouts?”
He hadn’t finished the question before Myra said, “There!”
Slash followed her pointing finger toward a wooden sign jutting into the street atop two unpeeled pine poles, roughly a block ahead and near where two dogs sat, licking their chops as another man in smoke-stained buckskins butchered a deer hanging upside down from a wooden tripod. As the man carved, he tossed each cur a chunk of the sinewy meat.
“Thanks anyway, pard,” Slash said to the burly freighter, and reined the Appy back into the street where he barely avoided a collision with a passing ore dray. He was roundly cussed by the stout black man driving the four-mule team, likely heading for the smelter.
Ignoring the black man’s regaling, Slash booted the Appy over to the building—or part of the building—the sign identified as the office of DR. H.T. ROSENCRANTZ, M.D. A painted hand pointed up a rickety stairs toward the second story of the equally rickety-looking building, the bottom half of which a sign identified as HATCH KETTLEMEYER FRESH MEAT & JERKY.
As he drew the Appy up to the two-story building, Slash turned to the man butc
hering the deer and feeding the dogs and said, “The pill roller in his office?”
“Nope.” The deer butcher, also bearded and burly—Slash had so far seen few unshaven men in Silverton—rolled a lucifer match around between his lips and shook his head.
“Where might we find him?” Pecos said. “We got an injured woman.”
“I got no damn idea,” said the bearded deer butcher, who appeared in his early to mid-thirties. While dressed in bloodstained denim overalls and a ragged, wool plaid shirt and floppy-brimmed leather hat adorned with a lone hawk feather, there appeared a vague air of refinement about the man.
“Take a look at this camp,” he said. “It’s filled to brimming with men of every stripe, an’ they’re still comin’. Miners and market hunters, mostly, and when they ain’t fightin’ with pickaxes and shovels in drunken saloon brawls or shootin’ each other over claim disputes”—he did not pause while he tossed each cur a chunk of fatty meat from the half-skinned deer’s left ham—“they’re blowin’ themselves up with dynamite or gettin’ their bones crushed to fine powder in mine collapses. The doc left early this mornin’ after delivering a baby just after midnight an’ I ain’t seen him since. Likely won’t see him again till midnight tonight, if then.”
Slash cursed.
“Is he the only doctor in town?” Myra asked.
The man eyed her suspiciously, pausing for a moment in his work of trimming the skin and sinew away from the deer’s hide as he peeled it down the carcass’s back. “Don’t I know you?”
“No!” Myra said, coloring angrily.
“I think I do.”
“Answer the question,” Slash said.
“Yes, he’s the only sawbones this camp has,” the man said, continuing his work of peeling the hide down the deer as though he were peeling a giant banana, grunting with the effort.
“Ah, hell,” Pecos said, turning to Slash. “We might just as well have stayed in camp. We came all this way, put Jay through that long ride for nothin’!”
“Oh, don’t get your drawers in a twist!” cajoled the butcher.
Slash wrapped his hand around the grips of the .44 holstered for the cross-draw against his left hip, aimed the revolver at the bearded man’s head, and clicked the hammer back. “I don’t like your tone, mister.”
The butcher turned to Slash and held his bloody knife and other hand up in supplication. “Don’t you get your drawers in a twist, neither! What I was gonna add, if you’d give me half a chance, is Uncle Henry is the only bona fide, paper-wieldin’ sawbones here in Silverton. When Uncle Henry’s busy, as he is now, I take up the slack for him.”
“What?” both Slash and Pecos asked the man skeptically.
“Sure enough,” the butcher said. “Name’s Hatch Kettlemeyer. H.T. ‘Henry’ Rosencrantz is my uncle on my mother’s side. Henry done taught me near on everything he knows about the cuttin’ an’ sawin’ an’ suturin’ business. It ain’t all that different from what I do for a regular livin’—you know, cuttin’ up meat to sell to folks to eat!”
He laughed.
Slash and Pecos shared their deeply skeptical expressions with each other.
Hatch Kettlemeyer stuck his skinning knife into the deer’s ribcage, then turned around and dipped his bloody hands and arms into a corrugated tin washtub steaming over a low fire behind him. “Oh, don’t worry—I’m just joshin’. I might not have a fancy diploma with gold letters and fancy writin’ hangin’ on my wall, but”—he held a hand up to the side of his mouth and imparted with a secretive air—“do you know that when Uncle Henry’s out of earshot, a lot of folks around town tell me they’d prefer to have me cuttin’ on ’em . . . or settin’ their broken bones . . . than Uncle Henry his ownself?”
He pressed two still-bloody fingers to his lips, chuckling devilishly, then sunk his hands in the steaming water once more. “Go ahead an’ take that purty lady up to Henry’s office. Door’s open. Take her on into the examining room behind Henry’s desk, and don’t mind the mess in there. Or Henry’s cat, Rufus. That’s Henry! Even if he wasn’t too busy to straighten up, he wouldn’t do it. He’d rather go fishin’ up at Crater Lake or in the Animas instead, though he has damn little time for it. Go ahead—take the lady upstairs. I’ll be along in a minute.”
Slash hesitated. He glanced down at Jay, who had awakened now and was looking around groggily, as though trying to get her bearings.
“It’s all right,” Myra said. “I’ve heard about Mr. Kettlemeyer. He’s as good as a doctor.”
Scrubbing his hands and arms with a sliver of soap, working up a good lather, Kettlemeyer turned to Myra, his eyes wide with sudden recognition. “I have seen you before! Where was it now?” He paused, thoughtful, then: “Oh—whoops!” he added quickly, flushing and turning back to his scrubbing. Under his breath, he said, “Me an’ my big mouth. When do I ever not stick my foot in it?”
Slash glanced at Myra, who had turned bright red and was staring down at her saddle horn.
Quickly and maybe a little too loudly changing the subject, Slash said, “All right, then—I guess we don’t have no choice in the matter.”
“Don’t reckon we do!” Pecos said.
Slash swung down from the Appy’s back but quickly reached up to hold Jay upright in the saddle. “Jay, we’re gonna take you up to the doctor’s office, have this man take a look at you.” He drew her gently down to him and took her in his arms. “How you doin’? You all right, darlin’?”
Weakly, Jay nodded and said, “I sure could use a shot of Taos lightnin’ . . . dull this pain . . .”
“Comin’ right up!” Pecos swung down from his saddle, tossed his reins over a hitch rack at the base of the stairs climbing to the doctor’s office, then headed across the busy street toward the nearest saloon—the Silver Lode.
Slash carried Jay up the rickety stairs. Myra hurried ahead to open the office door, and ten minutes later, Slash and Myra stood around the examining table as Hatch Kettlemeyer, now donning steel-framed spectacles, crouched over Jay, slowly removing the bandage and poultice, wrinkling his nose against the stench.
“Despite the stink of that stuff, I commend you, young lady,” Kettlemeyer said. “That’s a good poultice. Nothin’ like mud and horse water to clot the blood and keep out infection. As long as the horse wasn’t carryin’ infection, of course,” he added with a wry chuckle, which he clipped quickly when he saw that neither Slash nor Myra laughed at the joke.
On the leather-padded table, Jay lay groaning and stretching her lips back from her teeth. She lifted one knee and then the other, and her face was pale. Seeing her like this made Slash feel as though he were sporting a rusty knife in his guts.
He was glad when Pecos showed up with the whiskey.
Slash took the bottle from his partner, popped the cork, and showed the bottle to Kettlemeyer, who was closely examining the exposed wound. “This all right, Doc?”
“Sure, sure.” Kettlemeyer looked at Jay. “Drink up. There’s laudanum around here somewhere but no tellin’ how long it would take me to find it, what with the mess an’ all.”
A fat, gray, tiger-striped cat lay atop an overstuffed medicine cabinet, licking its front paw and using the paw to scrub its face. Out in the main room, the doctor’s desk looked like a small mountain of medicine bottles, medical instruments, note pads, and books spilling pages of scrawled notes. There were also a couple stuffed fish and deer and elk trophies on the walls, caked in dust and spiderwebs. A cabinet clock ticked loudly.
“Here you go, Jay,” Slash said, helping Jay sit up just far enough that she could tip the bottle to her lips without spilling.
As Jay took several pulls of the whiskey, Pecos leaned close to Slash and said into his right ear, “I overheard a couple of men over at the Silver Lode. They were bullion guards from the Old Hundred Gold Mine. Sounded like they’d just delivered a goodly amount of gold onto the narrow-gauge leg of the Denver and Rio Grande heading for Durango.”
Slash looked at Pecos. �
�The train still at the station?”
Pecos shook his head. “A fella on the street said it pulled out for Durango less than a half hour ago.”
Slash whistled.
Apparently, Jay had overheard the conversation. She just now pulled the bottle down once more and said, “What’re you two lugs loitering around here for? You’re just getting in the way and stinking the place up.”
“No,” Slash said, shaking his head. “We’ll be right here for you, Jay.”
“Yeah, we ain’t budging until that bullet’s out, Jay.”
Jay’s eyes nearly crossed in anger. “Will you two cutthroats listen to reason for once in your lives? You go do what you came here to do, and keep yourselves out of jail! Like I said, I’ll likely be here for a while.” She took another pull of the whiskey, then corked the bottle and laid her head back against the examining table. “You’ll know where to find me.”
“She’ll be here for a while, all right,” Kettlemeyer said, dabbing a cloth soaked in carbolic acid around the edges of the puckered, quarter-sized wound in Jay’s chest. “That bullet’s in there deep. Going to take me a while to get it out. Go do whatever it is you got to do.” He added under his breath, “Just for godsakes don’t tell me what it is . . .”
“Can’t do it,” Slash said, stubbornly shaking his head. “I won’t leave you alone.”
“I’ll be here.” Myra had spoken from where she stood in a corner near the medicine cabinet atop which the cat now lay sprawled on its back. Myra took a step toward the examining table, entwining her hands before her. “I’ll stay with her.”
Jay looked at Slash and Pecos. “There you have it. Now, haul your freight!”
Slash sighed. He was still reluctant to leave her, but there was a good chance the Snake River Marauders had that gold-bearing train in their sights.
Better than good, in fact. They were too close for Slash and Pecos to not go after them.
Who knew when they’d get another chance this prime?
“All right,” Slash said, nodding. “All right.” He looked at Pecos. “You heard the lady. Let’s haul our freight!”
They strode out of the examining room, across the cluttered main office, and out the front door.
Cutthroats Page 25