“You worried about leaving Jay alone in Camp Collins with that handsome town marshal friend of hers—Cisco Walsh.”
Blowing twin plumes of smoke out his nostrils, Slash turned to Pecos again, scowling. “No, I ain’t worried about leaving Jay alone with Cisco Walsh!”
Pecos smiled with satisfaction and aimed his gaze out over the bobbing heads of the horses in the traces. “Yeah, you are. Sure enough. That’s it.”
“No, it ain’t,” Slash protested. “What does Walsh have that I don’t have?”
“Well, he’s taller. He’s better looking. He has a better personality, though that ain’t saying much. Hell, a rattlesnake has a better personality than you, Slash.” Pecos chuckled dryly. “He takes a bath more than once a month. Visits the barber weekly. And he sure as tootin’ dresses better! How old are them duds you’re wearing, Slash? Ten, twelve years old . . . ?”
“Oh, shut up, you big, ugly galoot!”
“There—now that makes me feel better! Yessir—now we’re gettin’ somewhere!”
Pecos laughed and stared up the winding two-track trail they’d been following since leaving the little settlement of Wheatland, heading northeast into the high, barren desert of eastern Wyoming, where nothing grew in the chalky alkali except rocks and prickly pear. At least, that’s how it seemed. Not much appeared to live out here, either, except the occasional coyote, buzzard, and jackrabbit.
Pecos turned back to his partner, narrowing one skeptical eye. “All right, it ain’t Walsh. If it was Walsh, I’d have gotten a bigger reaction out of you. So . . . what is it? It’s gotta be somethin’ concerning Jay.”
Slash glared at him, narrowed his dark eyes, and opened his mouth to give the bigger man another tongue-lashing. But then, just as quickly, he closed his mouth, squirmed around on the seat as though he had ants in his pants, and looked out to the east, away from Pecos, toward a couple of small, flat-topped buttes humping up against the far horizon.
Pecos knew his old partner in crime well enough to know that Slash was about to speak. At least, Slash would mutter a few colicky words within the next five minutes or so. He was like a volcano that way. He grumbled and smoked a while before the big explosion. Pecos had been right. Something was weighing on the mind of Slash. Now Slash, so uncomfortable under the weight of his worries, was considering lightening the weight a little by talking it out.
That meant it had to be a heavy burden, indeed, for Slash Braddock was the most tight-lipped fellow Pecos had ever known. At least he was when it came to discussing what was on his mind or in his heart.
Patiently, Pecos waited. It was getting late in the day, so he scanned the dry wash falling away on his left for a good place to set up camp for the night. A rattlesnake lay coiled in the shade of a small bitterbrush shrub, along the lip of the wash. Pecos was considering stopping the wagon and shooting the snake for supper when Slash finally spoke. “I got cold feet.”
The snake slithered out of Pecos’s mind like the last fog burned off by a hot morning sun. Pecos turned to his partner and said, “You do?”
Slash filled his lungs noisily and stared at the right hitch horse’s spotted rump. “Yep.”
“About the weddin’, you mean?”
“Yes, of course, I mean the wedding,” Slash snapped. “What in hell else does a fella get cold feet about?”
“All right, all right. Don’t take it out on me!” Boy, Slash really was feeling colicky. His hair trigger was filed down shorter than usual. If he was a gun, a whispered breath would have fired him off by now.
Pecos waited. Slash would talk it out in his own good time. Slash was not a man to be rushed. Pecos knew it could be hours before his taciturn partner vented his spleen about his cold feet, and he was correct. It wasn’t until two hours later, when they were camped in a small grove of dusty cottonwoods on the bank of the wash, with the sun down and the first stars pricking to life, that Slash finally continued the conversation.
As he tossed away the plate from which he’d just scrubbed the last of his cooked beans with a baking powder biscuit, he said, “She’s talkin’ about a house.”
“A house.”
Slash refilled his coffee cup. “Correct.”
Pecos spooned up his last few beans and chewed, thinking. He nodded. “Oh, right. A house. One for you two to live in. Well”—he chuckled—“you weren’t thinkin’ you were going to live in the freight yard shack with me an’ Myra, were you?”
Slash sat back against his saddle, raised one knee, and rested an arm over the top of it. “I reckon I hadn’t gotten that far.”
Pecos chuckled again. “Well, how far had you gotten, Slash? I mean, you did finally manage to work up the oysters to ask her to marry you. What were you thinkin’ would happen after that? After you two were married, I mean.”
“Like I said, that’s as far as I got. It took so much out of me to finally ask her to hitch her star to my wagon, that once she said yes, I was so relieved to have all of that over and done with, I just stopped thinking about it. All of it. The whole thing. I hadn’t gotten beyond the wedding. In my head, I’m sayin’.”
Slash sipped his coffee, swallowed, and continued. “I didn’t think about the house or livin’ together, just her an’ me? Just the two of us. Man and wife. We gonna walk to church together every Sunday? Am I gonna be able to go to a saloon when I want to? Have a drink with you—just you an’ me out alone? Or am I gonna be tied to the house? An’ speakin’ about the house—I reckon that means I’ll be a house owner, then, too, right?”
“Yeah, if you buy a house, that’ll make you a house owner, all right, Slash.”
Pecos suppressed the laughter he felt boiling up inside his chest. This was no time to laugh at Slash. For Slash, this was serious business. What might have seemed obvious about the situation to Pecos was all new to Slash. For Slash, his married life was a puzzle that was all coming together so he could get a better idea of the complete picture it shaped and colored. Pecos could see by the fear in his partner’s eyes and the slight tremor in his voice that he was having a crisis of spirit. Of heart. Of courage.
Slash Braddock had faced entire posses, laughing while the bullets cut the air around him. But the thought of marrying and settling down with a woman in a house frightened him like nothing else ever had in his life.
“I reckon I’ll have a yard to keep up. A garden to grow. I’ll have to keep paint on the damn house.”
“Yep, yep. That’s what goes with home ownership, Slash. You’re right.”
Slash cut his suspicious eyes at Pecos, furling his dark brows. “Are you laughin’ at me?”
Covering a chuckle bubbling up from his throat, Pecos sipped his coffee, sighed, smacked his lips, and gazed soberly back at Slash. “Nope, I’m just tryin’ to work my mind around what you were thinkin’.”
“I told you—I wasn’t thinkin’. At least, not beyond the wedding.”
“Well, hell, you don’t want to live with me the rest of your life—do you, Slash? You said it yourself—I smell bad. And I snore loud.”
“That’s for sure!”
“Believe me, if it was me—if I had a good woman who had accepted my proposal of marriage, I wouldn’t have a single second thought of skinning out on you and thanking my lucky stars for the escape, to boot!”
“Yeah, well . . .” Slash scowled down at the fire.
“Marry the woman,” Pecos said, gently. “Buy the house. Sure, you’ll have to keep it up. Sure, you won’t be able to live like you live now—drinkin’ an’ whorin’ and playin’ cards all hours of the night an’ day. You’ll be a homeowner. You’ll have to stay home and rock in your chair and talk to your wife and tend your garden. But think of what you’ll get in return.”
Slash looked at him expectantly.
“You’ll get Jay,” Pecos said, smiling warmly into his old friend’s eyes. “Jay. You love her, Slash. I know you do. Without her, you’d just get old alone . . . which is what’s more than likely gonna happen to me.”
“
You?” Slash scoffed. “You’ve been with more women than I’ve ever talked to! You’re just goin’ through a dry spell . . . if you don’t count Myra, of course.”
“I ain’t countin’ Myra,” Pecos said, testily. “She’s too young for this old buzzard.” He wished she wasn’t. He liked Myra plenty. But she was too young, and there you had it.
“Yeah, well, Miss Langdon ain’t too young.”
“She’s plenty young, too, but . . .” Pecos chuckled and absently tossed a rock side-armed into the wash, listening to it bounce across the gravelly bed. “That’s too much woman for me.”
“Hell, that’s too much woman for the two of us put together!”
“Besides, she ain’t the marryin’ type. She’s the kinda woman who likes her life without a man. She’s the kinda woman who likes a job instead of a man. I reckon I can’t blame her. Would you want to be married to either one of us, Slash?”
“Hell, we practically been married for the better part of thirty years!”
They laughed at that, but they both knew it was true. It had been a good marriage, too, though neither man would admit that, of course. They preferred to pretend they were enemies. Pecos wasn’t sure why men got embarrassed about how they felt about each other. He supposed he loved Slash. He alsosupposed that Slash loved him back. Neither, of course, would admit as much, much less to each other.
Hell, slow Apache torture couldn’t have forced it out of either of them.
But there it was.
Maybe that was the cause of Slash’s cold feet as regards his marrying Jay. Or one of the things, anyway. The main thing, Pecos knew, was that Slash was basically a lonely, solitary soul. He didn’t want to be. He loved Jay. He wanted to be with her for the rest of his life, into his old age, probably right up to his death. He didn’t want to die alone.
On the other hand, it was hard for Slash to be with anyone for more than a few minutes at a time. With anyone except Pecos, that was. But even Pecos had to give his old friend plenty of room to be silent and brood and moon around about stuff only Slash knew about.
“I reckon it’s time for us to divorce each other, pard,” Pecos said. “Time for you to hitch your wagon to Jaycee Breckenridge.” The big ex-cutthroat stared out over the wash. It would be pitch-black in another twenty minutes. The rolling prairie stretched away beyond the wash, silent and still. There weren’t even any coyotes yammering. Not yet, anyway.
“Don’t worry,” he added, pensive, Slash’s own brooding mood infecting him now, too, “I’ll be along soon. Leastways, I hope I’ll find a good woman soon. It sure would be funny if you, a love-’em-for-a-night kinda fella, ended up the married one and I ended up in some Odd Fellows Home of Christian Charity, babblin’ to myself, goosin’ the butt of the old ugly spinster who ran the place, and gettin’ slapped for my trouble.”
When Slash didn’t say anything, Pecos turned to him. “Wouldn’t it?”
But Slash had retreated into himself again. He sat with one leg up, one arm draped over his knee, his coffee cup now empty, staring out across the dry arroyo. He was wondering, worrying, brooding.
“Oh, well,” Pecos said, a deep yawn coming over him. “It’ll all work out. Me, I’m gonna go water some prickly pear, then go to sleep. I’m a sleepy fella.”
He didn’t know if Slash had heard him or not. Slash didn’t say anything. He just stared off toward the eastern horizon on which stars were glittering like expensive jewels.
Pecos heaved his tall, brawny frame up, dusted off his pants, then wandered off in the darkness. He glanced at where the wagon sat to his right. The four horses—his and Slash’s and the two-horse hitch—stood idly where they were tied to the picket line Slash had strung between two cottonwoods. Pecos’s buckskin was staring off to its right, toward the south, while the other three stood with their heads hanging, appearing ready to call it a day.
Pecos stopped near where the arroyo swung toward the south, unbuttoned his trousers, and got a stream going. He sighed, rocked back on his heels. He tipped his head back, closed his eyes.
Behind him, one of the horses whickered softly.
Somewhere out across the arroyo curving around from behind Pecos’s left shoulder to angle off in front of him, drifting south, another horse snorted. The sound had been clear in the silent night, above the trickle of Pecos’s water stream.
Quickly, he got himself put away and buttoned up.
He moved back to the camp. “Slash,” he said, keeping his voice low and reaching for his Colt revolving rifle, “I think we got company.”
He looked around, frowning. Slash wasn’t sitting where he’d been sitting just a few minutes ago.
“Slash?”
“Down here.”
Pecos looked into the arroyo. Slash stood on the bottom of the wash, holding his rifle low in one hand, staring south.
“We got company,” Pecos whispered.
“I know.”
CHAPTER 9
Colt rifle in hand, Pecos scrambled down the bank and into the wash as fleetly as possible for a man of his size.
He ran crouching through the deep sand and loose gravel to a small island in the wash tufted with sage and short brown grass. Slash had moved onto the island and was crouching behind a rock. He had his own Winchester carbine in his gloved hands, and he was staring across the broad wash toward the south.
Pecos crouched beside him. “Who is it, you think?”
“I don’t know, but I see a fire.” Slash jerked his chin toward the low bank rising on the wash’s southern edge. A small fire flickered under a cottonwood over there, on the lip of the bank.
“Was it there before?” Pecos asked, keeping his voice down. The night was so quiet, sound would carry far.
“If so, I didn’t see it till just a minute ago.”
“Someone followin’ us?”
“Maybe.” Slash shrugged. “On the other hand, could just be some fellow pilgrim.”
“I reckon we’re not gonna get any sleep till we find out if that pilgrim is friend or foe.”
“That’s what I was thinkin’.” Slash raked a thumb across his jaw and chewed his bottom lip. “I reckon we could pull our picket pin and move a little farther along the trail.”
“Too dark.”
“Yeah.”
Pecos placed his hand on his partner’s shoulder. “Let’s check it out. Probably a cowhand. Most he’ll likely do is offer us a cup of mud. We got some leftover beans, so maybe this will all go friendly-like.”
Slash gave a wry snort. “I like the rosy way you look at things, pard.”
“Yeah, well—come on, you cynical cuss. Why don’t you swing around to the north and I’ll swing around to the south . . . just in case?”
“That’s better.”
As Slash straightened to a crouch and drifted off to the north, Pecos drifted south, moving as quietly as possible through the sun-scorched brush, keeping an eye on the fire but looking widely around it, as well. The fire could be a trap. On the other hand—why would it be?
The two former cutthroats were just that—former. On the other hand, there was likely a bounty hunter or two . . . or even a lawman or two . . . who hadn’t heard the news. Someone might have seen Slash and Pecos in Cheyenne or even in one of the little backwater towns they’d passed through after leaving Cheyenne, like Chugwater or Wheatland, and recognized them. Maybe the person of topic even had an old wanted dodger in their saddlebags, or remembered one from a Western Union bulletin board and decided to up their life’s ante . . .
That was the trouble with the outlaw way of life. It stayed with you, dogging your heels like a hungry coyote, even as you walked the straight and narrow....
Pecos swung wide to the south, finally climbing up out of the wash about fifteen minutes after he’d left Slash. He couldn’t see Slash to the north because by now it was too dark. There was still a little light left in the sky, but it didn’t help much down here on the ground.
Atop the wash’s southern bank, he drop
ped to a knee and looked around carefully. Someone might be waiting for him in the brush over here. He couldn’t see the fire because of the brush and scattered, gnarled dwarf cottonwoods and cedars standing between Pecos and the mystery camp. Also, he thought the camp lay around a slight bend to the northeast. He was probably about a quarter mile south of it. Slash was probably that same distance north of it by now.
Pecos took his time looking around and listening. Slash was likely doing the same. They’d been chased from one end of the country to the other for so long that they both had cultivated a keen sense of caution. They’d also acquired sharp senses. Continuing to look around, his eyes now having adjusted to the dark, Pecos listened, as well.
There was only a faint breath of a breeze making the short grass rustle. Far away to the north, probably from a jog of buttes he’d seen in that direction before the sun had set, a couple of coyotes were yammering. Pecos could barely hear the sounds when the breeze ebbed.
No other sounds came to his ears from close by.
Slowly, making no sudden movement that could be picked up easier by the eye than slow ones, Pecos began working his way north. He kept a few feet back from the lip of the wash, meandering through the widely spaced trees, careful not to kick stones or break blowdown branches.
In a few minutes, he could see the fire’s wan glow before him, partly obscured by brush. He took several more steps, swinging his gaze from left to right, then back again, occasionally turning full around to see behind him. He held the Colt revolving rifle down low, where the light from the stars or the fire wasn’t apt to reflect off of it.
When he figured he was roughly twenty feet from the camp, he stopped and called, “Hello? Anybody here?”
Slash yelled from somewhere ahead, “Pecos, get down—it’s atrap!”
Pecos dropped like wet clothes from a line.
Rifles cracked. A bullet screeched over him. He rolled and saw a lap of flames from a rifle barrel. The bullet ricocheted shrilly off a near rock. Pecos gained a knee, raised the rifle, aimed at where he’d just seen the rifle flash silhouette a man, and fired. He fired again . . . again.
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