“I didn’t,” Slash said, rising in disgust and grabbing his brown whipcord trousers off a chair. “You did!”
“Ah, hell!” Pecos twisted around and flopped belly down on his cot, burying his head in his pillow. His big Russian .44, snugged inside its brown, hand-tooled leather holster, hung by its shell belt hooked over elk horns mounted on the wall above his head, within an easy grab if needed. Such a move had been needed more than a few times in his and Slash’s long careers as riders of the long coulees, or the owlhoot trail, as some called the life of a professional western outlaw.
Slash quickly stepped into his pants. Then his boots. He left his blue chambray shirt on the chair but he strapped his twin, stag-butted Colt .44s around his waist, which was solid as oak at his ripe age of fifty-seven, which he was not above crowing about to Pecos, who’d grown a little fleshy above the buckle of his own cartridge belt.
Slash rarely walked more than five steps without either the revolver or his Winchester Yellowboy repeater. As he grabbed his hat off the kitchen table his bone-handled bowie knife, also strapped to his shell belt, rode high on his left hip, behind the .44 positioned for the cross-draw on that side. He swept a hand through his dark-brown hair, still thick, he was proud to know, but well streaked with gray—especially up around the temples and in his long sideburns that sandwiched a broad, strong-jawed, brown-eyed face—the face of a handsome albeit middle-aged schoolboy.
One who’d spent the bulk of his life out in the blazing western sun.
That he was no longer a schoolboy, however, made itself obvious once again as it always tended to do upon his first rising. As he tramped across the kitchen, his hips and knees and ankles popped and cracked, stiff from too long in the mattress sack after too many years forking a saddle and sleeping on the hard, cold ground of one remote outlaw camp or another. An old back injury, the result of being thrown from a horse during a run from a catch party nearly twenty years ago, made Slash curse under his breath as he lifted the popping skillet off the range and slid it onto the warming rack, so the vittles wouldn’t burn.
He pulled a couple of heavy stone mugs down from a shelf near the range and set them on the table. He dumped two heaping helpings of sugar into one, because he knew Jay liked her mud a little sweet—“Just like her men,” she often quipped—then used a deer hide swatch to lift the hot black coffeepot from the range, and filled both mugs to their brims.
“Is Jay gonna be all right?” Pecos asked, his chagrined voice muffled by his pillow.
“Of course, she’s gonna be all right,” Slash said, heading for the door. “She’s Jay, ain’t she?”
He fumbled the door open and stepped out, drawing the door closed behind him with a hooked boot. Jay stood ahead and to his right, her back to him, staring out over the porch rail toward the lone grave on the knoll.
The sun glowed in her hair. Birds flitted about the sunlit yard around the cabin ringed with pine forest. Tall stone escarpments flanked the place. The cabin, originally built by a hermetic, now-dead fur trapper, was situated here on this mountain shoulder in such a way that it couldn’t be seen from any direction unless you rode right up on it. And the only way you were likely to ride up on it was either by accident or if you’d already known it was here and you were headed for it.
That’s what had made the place such a prime hideout over the years. After a bank or train job, the Snake River Marauders, as Slash and Pecos’s old gang called themselves, often split up their booty and then separated themselves into small groups of twos, threes, and fours, scattering and holing up till their trail cooled. They’d meet up again later at some far-flung, prearranged place to plan their next job.
Sometimes Slash, Pecos, and Pistol Pete, the old outlaw from the far northern Dakota country, would meet Jay in Mexico, and they’d spend their winnings in Durango, Loreto, or Mazatlán. Sometimes they’d sun themselves on the beaches of the Sea of Cortez, drinking pulque and tequila and feasting on spicy Mexican dishes like tortas ahogadas and chilorio.
Sometimes they’d hole up here for weeks or months at a time, hunting in the San Juans and the Sawatch to the north, and fishing and swimming in the pure, cold mountain streams. It was the time between jobs spent either here or in Mexico that Slash had always preferred over the jobs themselves, but he could never deny his almost primal attraction to the danger and excitement, as well as the money, that had always lured him back to the outlaw trail.
Now he set the cup of sugary coffee on the rail in front of Jay and kissed her tear-damp cheek. “Cup o’ mud for you, darlin’,” he said. “Put hair on your chest.”
Staring toward the grave atop the knoll, Jay laughed at the old joke she and her old friend Slash had shared all the years they’d known each other—going on fifteen now—and offered her usual retort, “I don’t want hair on my chest, Slash. That doesn’t sound appealing to me at all!”
Slash gave a wry snort and sipped his coffee. “How you doing?”
“Look at me,” she said, still staring toward the grave. “It’s been how long, now? Going on five years? And I’m still pining for that man turned to dust under those mounded rocks over there.”
“That’s all right. He was a good man. He deserves pining for.”
“Yes, he does, at that.” Jay hardened her voice as well as her jaws as she turned to her old friend. “But it’s time for me to move on, dammit, Slash.”
“You’re right on that score, too, Jay.” Again, Slash sipped the rich black coffee.
“I’m still young . . . sort of,” she said with proud defiance. “I still have my looks. Or most of them, barring a few crows-feet around my eyes and a little roughness to my skin . . . as well as to my tongue,” she added drolly.
Slash looked at her, which was one of his favorite things to do. She was a slight, petite woman but with all the right female curves in all the right female places. She wore each of her forty-plus years beautifully on a face richly tanned by the frontier sun. The lines and furrows had seasoned her, refining her beauty and accentuating her raw, earthy character. Her hazel eyes were alive with a wry, frank humor.
She was the most sensuous and alluring woman Slash had ever laid eyes on, and he’d first laid eyes on her when she was well past thirty.
“Hellkatoot,” he said. “You’re still a raving beauty, Jay. There’s not many women over forty who’ve kept their looks as well as you have. You’ll find a man. You just gotta start lookin’ for one, that’s all.”
Jaycee Breckenridge drew a deep, slow, fateful breath. “I’m not gonna find one out here, am I? The only men who come around here anymore are you and that lummox lounging around inside like Diamond Jim.”
Slash smiled.
“And you two don’t deserve me,” Jay said with another laugh.
“We sure don’t!” Slash chuckled and shook his head.
Besides, he knew, they shared too much history. Good history and bad history. He’d once gotten his hopes up about Jay, a long time ago. But then she’d tumbled for the older, wiser “Pistol” Pete Johnson, five years Slash’s senior, old enough to have been Jay’s father.
She’d preferred the astuteness and assuredness of the older man. She’d been taken by the burly Pete’s rough-sweet ways and his bawdy humor. Mere days after she’d met the man at the country saloon she’d been singing in, she never looked back. At least, not as far as Slash knew, and he thought he knew her as well or better than anyone on earth, now that Pete was gone.
“I’m so sorry, Jay,” he said, looking off in frustration.
She frowned at him, puzzled. “For Pecos? Don’t be silly. He only mentioned his old friend’s name.”
“No, not for Pecos.” Slash turned to her. “For me.”
Jay looked at him askance, with sharp admonishment. “Let’s not go down that trail again, Slash.”
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Riding Shotgun Page 26