by Lou Cameron
“Let’s be fair,” Will said to him. “You know some say Butch and Sundance left the country, or at least they went back east a spell. It wasn’t Kid Curry’s fault that they put that sneaky new safe aboard that train. Save for that, everything went slick as usual.”
Banger shook his head. “The hell you say. He told us he had a hideout we’d be safe in, after. Yet he told this newspaper gent we was headed back to the Hole in the Wall!”
“He might have had some other hole in another wall in mind,” Will suggested. “Where in the U.S. Constitution do it say we have to leave a permanent address on file with the law?”
Banger stared morosely at the sick man under the blanket between them. “Slim’s done for,” he said. “We’re just asking to get caught if we stay here much longer.”
Will said, “Kid Curry may not take it kindly if we leave him here like this.”
“That’s what I just said,” Banger replied. “Without Butch here to keep Kid Curry calm and laughing, he’s just plain mean. I never did think he was all that smart. I don’t know where the hell he thinks he’s heading now, and I forone don’t care. I just risked my freedom for next to nothing, and I don’t mean to lose it entire by following a lunatic one mile farther.”
He got to his feet. “I’m going to double back and see if I can catch a train to Denver or someplace as sensible. Are you coming with me or do you still buy that yarn about the tooth fairy, Will?”
His sidekick hesitated, then rose with a nod and turned to the man up the slope. “He’s right, Pecos. Kid Curry’s lost his touch. This reporter gent can look after Slim, and I for one will be proud to protect your sweet ass from the law.”
Pecos replied in a grim but surprisingly sissy voice for a two-gun man of any age. “You mention my sweet ass one more time and I’ll kill you,” he said. “I got kin riding with the Wild Bunch, and we all agreed Kid Curry was the leader on this raid. You all can bugger out if you’ve a mind to. Men with no balls ain’t no use to the outfit anyways.”
Will laughed, then made the mistake of jeering, “Take down them britches and spread your sweet cheeks and I’ll just show you who’s got balls or not.”
So Pecos killed him.
Banger had to have been as surprised as Stringer by such a lightning draw. But both he and Stringer came unstuck by the time Will flopped all the way down to the grass, lifeless as a wet dishrag. Then Banger was going for his own gun, and Stringer, having nothing better to aim, had pulled up a clump of grass by the muddy roots and thrown it at him.
It might have thrown Banger’s timing off. It might not have really mattered, for Pecos caught him over the right eyebrow with a second round, and he fell dead and literally brainless with his gun still gripped in its holster.
Pecos was sitting and Stringer was on one knee on the grassy slope, the sounds of gunfire still echoing from the hills all around, when Pecos began to cry, sobbing. “Damn it, I never asked to be birthed a girl, you know.”
Stringer did know now. It was surprising how disgusting a young gent looked with such a pouty baby face when one considered how nice the same cameo features fit even a he-dressed she. But Pecos still had that smoking gun out. So Stringer chose his words carefully as he told her, “You’re fast enough for a gunslick of any persuasion, Miss Pecos. If they already knew you was a gal, it serves ‘em right for talking so dirty in front of you.”
Pecos sniffed. “I’m still sorry I lost my temper,” she said. “Old Will had that coming and Banger should have stayed out of it. But what vexes me now is that any lawman within miles could have heard them shots. We got to get Slim mounted and consider some serious riding, hear?”
Stringer moved over to the sick lunger and felt Slim’s head. It was too feverish to worry anyone about him being alive. But Stringer could feel Slim’s pulse anyway, in the throbbing veins of his dry hot temples. “If you want him dead, just put a third bullet in him,” he told Pecos. “It won’t discomfort him as much as hauling him around might, but the results will likely be the same.”
Then he tried, “You ride on if you’re afraid they’re closing in on us, Pecos. They won’t arrest me, and I’ll be proud to stay here with old Slim.”
It didn’t work. “That well may be,” she said. “But they’ll hang Slim for sure as soon as he’s up to it. Do you know that when they hanged Black Jack Ketchum, it tore his head clean off?”
Stringer grimaced. “Well, things like that can happen if they don’t figure the drop just right. But they might not hang old Slim here. Didn’t they just put the Tall Texan and his moll in prison when they were caught in Saint Lou?”
Pecos shook, her head. “Tex Kilpatrick never kilt nobody, and all poor old Laura was good at was screwing. Slim, there, is wanted for more than one killing. I don’t mean to leave him here for the law whilst I still have any bullets left.”
That seemed to remind her she ought to reload, and Stringer had already noticed all the .44-40 rounds in her cartridge belt. So as she fed her six-gun, Stringer rose, saying, “You might have a time explaining more recent shootings when and if a posse gets here. So why don’t I just drag these old boys into the mine and let the rats worry about ‘em?”
That didn’t work either. As he moved over to the bodies down the slope a few yards, Pecos said, “Unbuckle their gun rigs, slow, where I can still see you doing it. I know you gave your parole, but I ain’t as stupid as I might look to you.”
Stringer smiled sheepishly and then, since the lady still had a big gun in her little fist, he did as he was told. Then he got a grip on Banger’s boot heels and hauled him off the grass and across the mud to the mine adit. The rock floor inside was almost as slick. So it was easy enough to leave the body about where he’d been forced to spend last night.
It wasn’t until he’d done the same for old Will, dragging him a few yards deeper into the mine, that Stringer noticed something odd. Dragging the two bodies, hadn’t sweated him enough to matter, but he still felt air on his cheek, blowing the wrong way. He sniffed and noticed the mysterious breeze didn’t smell stinky enough for expanding mine gas, and it was a hard-rock mine to begin with. So what was left?
Stringer hunkered down to go through the pockets of the two dead men. He’d been hoping for a derringer. He wound up with just over a hundred dollars in paper and change, along with one of those fancy new cigar lighters that ran on benzine. He flicked it on. You could sure see a lot better in a mine with a cigar lighter. The big flickering flame said he was right about that air current too. He moved gingerly but deeper into the abandoned mine. Kid Curry had warned him the timbers back this way were rotten. But the ones he’d passed so far looked solid enough. So did the granite roof, until he came to a caved-in stretch where said roof had come down to almost block the passage. But almost wasn’t entire. The lighter was throwing orange rays. That rock pile was sort of blue-lit in places. He flicked the lighter off. He could still see almost as well, for daylight was coming down through the big hole in the roof.
Stringer stared morosely up at the little circle of blue sky high above him. While he saw at a glance he could have done a Santa Claus in reverse the night before, if only he’d known, it was a mite late to consider now. “Shit,” he muttered. “This is a fine time to tell me.”
The recent cave-in Kid Curry couldn’t have known about was little use to anyone now that Curry and all those horses in and about the front entrance were long gone. He stared up at the teasing patch of sky some more as he weighed his chances at the moment. They weren’t half so good in broad-ass day with an armed and dangerous woman on the far slope of the little valley, likely gazing more or less this way. Even if he could pop out of the far slope like a gopher and she missed him at that range, he’d still be too close to her for comfort, and she had just warned him not to take her for a fool. There was no way to get away from Pecos with neither a mount nor a gun to call his own. He considered every way he’d ever heard of to avoid the company of an armed and mounted enemy in country one might
not know half as well as the other side. Then he finished rolling the dumb smoke he’d started without thinking, lit it with his fancy new cigar lighter, and headed back to see if he could make the pretty little thing a friend instead of an enemy. By the time he got back to Slim and Pecos, it was already warming up considerable. Pecos had opened her jacket and tossed the big black hat aside on the grass. This gave the effect of someone sticking the head of a Gibson Girl atop the body of a shabby two-gun saddle tramp—although with the jacket open, she bulged more female under her hickory shirt.
He didn’t sit down with them right off. “When and if we ever ride on,” he said, “those ponies will carry us farther if they feel less abused. With your permission, I mean to unsaddle and graze ‘em out here in the sunlight. It wouldn’t hurt their saddle blankets all that much, either, if I spread ‘em on the grass to dry.”
She frowned up at him. “We’ll never get all five rounded up and resaddled soon enough to matter if a posse comes busting over yonder ridge, damn it.”
He nodded but insisted, “Life is a gamble, and the house has to win in the end. Meanwhile it pays to study the odds. The law may or may not be on our trail. Those ponies figure to get sick, sure, if we don’t start treating them better. You can see Slim, here, won’t be riding anywhere for a spell. But I’ve been studying on your own situation. If we see anyone coming over that ridge to the south, your best bet is the mine adit. You can make it easy before anyone can ride within rifle range, and once they’re down here, they’ll hesitate pretty good before they’ll risk going head first into a hole in the ground after even a lady with two guns.” She smiled bitterly. “Hell, why should they? Anyone can see that once they had me denned like a fox in that one-way burrow, they’d just have to wait me out until I gave up or shot my fool self.”
“That’s what they’d do, all right,” he said. “They’d just hunker down around the adit and cuss down the shaft at you. But, you see, there’s another way out. You’d have to wait until dark, of course, but once the slopes all around got more star-lit, you’d be in fine shape to crawl up and out a sort of rabbit hole two thirds of the way up yonder. You can’t see it from here, even by broad day. So why would anyone in the posse be expecting you to pop out of it?”
She stared up at him thoughtfully for a long silent moment before she said, “I think you’re just funning me. How come we was able to hold you prisoner overnight in that mine if, all the time, you knew of a way to get out?”
He shrugged. “I gave my parole,” he lied. “Even if I hadn’t, I’m a newspaper man. I’d be a fool to let a news feature like this get away from me. Nobody outside your gang has ever given the true facts to any outsider, and I’ve already discovered the outside world has a lot of misconceptions about the Wild Bunch. Can I see to those ponies now?”
She rose gracefully to her feet. “Leave ‘em be. None of ‘em suffer from TB like Slim, and they was watered and oated only an hour or so ago. I want you to show me that rabbit hole, and for your sake, it had better be there.”
He said he never argued with a lady with two guns, and led her along the contour above the level of the mine yard and adit to save needless mountain climbing. When they’d worked their way around to more or less above the tunnel below, he waved upslope and said, “Hold your fire if I have to zigzag some. I’ve only seen the bottom of the hole so far, and this ungrazed elk grass may make the finding of the top a chore.”
He was righter than he’d wanted to be. They’d worked their way farther up the slope than he’d figured on, and Pecos was starting to cuss as well as pant in the thin mountain air when he suddenly spotted a patch ahead where no grass tops seemed to be growing. “Watch your step,” he cautioned her. “It’s a hell of a ways down, almost straight.” Then he dropped to his hands and knees to crawl up the last few yards. Pecos did the same. So they were soon on their mutual knees, hip to hip, staring down what looked more like a bottomless garbage pit than anything else that might belong up here in the middle of nowhere.
Pecos laughed like a little kid who’d just noticed someone bringing her birthday cake from the kitchen. “I thought you was funning. But hold on. How does one find the bottom end in that maze below?”
“You just keep moving back until you see daylight, of course,” he said. “There’s no maze. The old-timers just followed one vein under this slope until it pinched out. But if you need exact directions, I left Banger and Will just this side of a big old rock pile.. The rock pile’s directly under us right now. As you can see, it’s a considerable climb. But the walls are lumpy enough to offer plenty of hand and foot holes.”
She looked around. “This tall grass is made for crawling too.”
“I’d still wait for dark before I tried that,” he said. “Grass tops move, and you know how nosy some posse riders can get, even when they can’t see what’s making things move when the wind’s not blowing.”
Pecos moved back from the hole and rolled on one hip and elbow as she stared down the slope. From up there the tethered ponies looked like mice and poor old Slim looked like he was sandwiched between two bitty postage stamps. She sighed. “I wish I’d thought to bring a picnic basket up here with us. Wouldn’t this be a fine place for a picnic, MacKail?”
He found a comfortable position beside her. “My friends call me Stuart. Did they really sprinkle you as Pecos?”
She sighed. “Not hardly. My real name’s Opal. Opal Place.”
Stringer shot her a curious look. “Do tell? I hear the Sundance Kid keeps company with a runaway schoolmarm called Etta Place. Might you and she be kin, Opal?”
Pecos chuckled fondly. “Etta’s my first cousin, and we’re the only kin either of us have, now that nobody else in the family will have anything to do with us. You got the part about her being a runaway right. But I don’t recall her ever teaching any school. Old Etta was working for Madam Fannie Porter in Fort Worth, with Annie Rogers, when Sundance and Kid Curry decided it made more sense to keep a private whore than to risk riding into town every time they wanted some slap-and-tickle. So they got Etta and Annie to run off with ‘em.”
Stringer smiled thinly. “The schoolmarm version is more likely to go down in history. I didn’t know the Wild Bunch worked that far south. Of course, if anyone else knew just where they might show up, they might not spend so much time at large. Do they call you Pecos because you, ah, worked in Texas one time, Opal?”
She shook her head. “Not as a whore, if that’s what you mean. Like Etta, I had to get away from our more sedate kin before they druv me crazy with all that praying about hellfìre and damnation. But I wasn’t half as wild as her. I got away from home young by eloping with a cow thief. We had us a nice little spread on the Pecos for a spell afore things started to go wrong.”
“What went wrong? Did the law catch up with your man?” he asked.
“No. He caught up with a bottle. You’d have to be a woman to understand, I reckon. I’ve found that all I have to tell most women, even real schoolmarms, is that I made the mistake of marrying up with a drinking man, and then I don’t have to tell ‘em another word.”
Stringer nodded soberly. “I get the picture. But how did you wind up riding with the Wild Bunch, in pants, after you left your husband?”
“I couldn’t go home,” she said. “I was still wearing skirts a lot more when I took up with Grat Winslow. You met him last night when we stopped your train. He was the one who rid upstream when the rest of us rid down.”
Stringer cocked an eyebrow at her. “You must not have been too fond of him.”
“Oh, Grat was all right, if you don’t mind strong and stupid,” she said. “I can’t even rightly say it was dumb of him to desert like that. You see, it was my notion, not his, to join Kid Curry and the others in these parts when Curry sent out word he was putting the Wild Bunch back together for a grand train robbery. You saw what a poor haul we made in the end. I was tempted to ride off with Grat last night. But like I told them others, I got kin riding with the o
utfit. I’ve been trying to hook up with my cousin Etta again. Once I do, I might be able to talk her into leaving with me so’s we could go into some better-paying business together. I know lots of things now about running brands and forgin’ bills of sale.”
Stringer grinned. “I’m sure you do. But everyone keeps telling me that Butch Cassidy, Sundance, and your cousin Etta have left the country, Opal.”
She shrugged. “The same story was going around when Butch and Kid Curry stopped old Engine Number Three. It was likely Etta who talked Sundance out of going along that time. She’s a smart old gal. She made it almost through high school afore she run off to be a whore. She likely guessed correct about the way that last big job would turn out. I know they say she and Sundance have a sheep spread in the Argentine right now. On the other hand, a friend of mine spotted her in Cheyenne just a few months back, and folk was getting letters from South America from all three of them at the very time Butch and Kid Curry was stopping that old express train in Montana. So I’m hoping we’ll meet up with Etta and the others up the trail, as the old gang gets back together again, see?”
Stringer suspected he was starting to see more about the way the Wild Bunch really functioned than he was supposed to. So he didn’t mention the fact that Pecos was probably right about her cousin being in the Cheyenne area at the moment. He hoped like hell she’d stay there, for if his suspicions about a certain mighty pretty gal he’d spent a night with just north of Cheyenne were at all correct, he sure didn’t want to meet up with her again in the company of the Sundance Kid—with or without a gun of his own handy.
But he felt it was safe to ask just what Cousin Etta might look like, so risked adding, “I hear tell she sometimes tries to pass herself off as a Cherokee breed.”
“That’s even wilder than schoolmarm,” Pecos replied. “But I reckon she could if she had to. Both of us are sort of dark Welsh-blooded. But don’t mention such matters to Kid Curry when we catch up with him and the others. He gunned a man in Billings once for asking if him and his brothers might have Indian blood.”