“That’s what my mother told me before I left swaddling clothes!” Slash laughed. “See if you can pink one of them nasty, low-down dirty dogs, Pecos!”
They were halfway up the hill, but so far, the three men ahead of them, staggering around, drinking and shooting and laughing, hadn’t appeared to have seen the jail wagon barreling toward them. They were too drunk, and the noise inside the church, their own shooting, and the roar of the flames probably covered the wagon’s lumbering din.
“Well, try to hold this hideous contraption steady, dammit!” Pecos barked as he rose to his feet.
“This is as steady as she gets!” Slash returned.
They were within a hundred yards of the church now. The wagon was bouncing so violently that Slash couldn’t see clearly, but he did see one of the three killers turn toward him. The man’s lower jaw sagged, and his eyes widened. He held a bottle in one hand, a rifle in the other. He staggered drunkenly backward, then turned toward the man on his right—a big bruiser with twin black braids and distinctly Indian features. The Indian had just fired his rifle into the church. Now he turned to see the jail wagon mounting the hill, and his own black eyes snapped wide.
Pecos spread his boots shoulder width apart on the floor of the driver’s box. He aimed the Colt’s revolving rifle over the heads of the lunging horses, and fired.
The white man before the wagon had been raising his own rifle. As the bullet cut into his upper left thigh, he stumbled backward, turning to his right and triggering the Winchester wild. No, not wild. The third man who’d been standing over there—a tall, thin, shaggy-headed man—gave a yelp and grabbed his own right thigh. He was holding a pistol and a bottle, but now he dropped the bottle and bent down to inspect his leg, cursing loudly.
“Damn, Talon!” he screeched, looking in glassy-eyed exasperation at the man now lying on the ground howling and holding his own wounded leg. “You shot me!”
With those two down, Slash aimed the geldings at the Indian. The Indian saw him coming and raised his own rifle. But the horses were right on him, so he threw the rifle aside and wheeled to run. Only, he was too drunk and too slow. The left puller barreled into his back, throwing him to the ground and then trampling him. Slash saw him on the ground, hammered by the hooves. Then the wagon passed over him and he was behind it.
Slash stopped the team to skidding halts, half turning them, half turning the wagon, kicking up dirt and gravel. The horses whinnied and shook their heads, not appreciating the fire. Slash leaped out of the wagon and hit the ground on both feet, forgetting about his ankle. His knees buckled and hit the ground.
“Ow—dammit!”
“You damn fool!” Pecos scolded him, leaping out of his side of the wagon, running around behind it, leveling his rifle on the three drunk, sorry-looking killers.
Slash straightened, holding both pistols now, stumbling forward. The Indian, who must be Black Pot, lay groaning on the ground, caked with dust, bloody from cuts the wagon’s two horses had inflicted. His clothes—calico shirt trimmed with a beaded necklace, and black denims with high-topped moccasins—were torn. He was spitting and hissing like a leg-trapped bobcat. When he saw Slash limping toward him, his coal-black eyes glittered, and he reached for one of the two pearl-gripped pistols bristling from black leather holsters on his hips.
Slash crouched over him and rapped the barrel of his right Colt across the big Indian’s left temple. “Ow!” the man squealed, clutching his head with both hands. He lay on his back, rolling from side to side and howling.
Quickly, Slash ripped both guns from the man’s holsters and tossed them down the hill and into some brush. Pecos was already disarming the man who Slash assumed was Talon Chaney, a muscular beast with close-cropped brown hair and a head like a miniature boulder shaped by the chisel of some drunken, dark god. The man’s eyes didn’t appear to line up right. He was covered in tattoos.
The other man, who had to be Hell-Raisin’ Frank Beecher, lay parallel to the church’s front step. He was clutching his wounded leg with both hands, howling, shaking his head and his dirty tumbleweed of long, curly hair. He was too preoccupied with his health at the moment to be an imminent threat.
Meanwhile, the fire from the brush was chewing into the church’s walls. Men and women and children were screaming inside. A baby was howling.
Slash limped quickly past Pecos, heading for the front door. “Watch these vermin!”
“I got ’em!”
Slash hurried up the church’s front steps. The church doors had been locked by shoving a stout two-by-four through the door’s wooden handles.
“Christ!”
Slash holstered his Colts and yanked the two-by-four out of the handles. He pulled a door open and two men burst through the opening, nearly shoving Slash down off the steps. The men were coughing into the handkerchiefs they held over their mouths and noses. Smoke roiled through the opening around them.
“Come on out!” Slash yelled, waving his hand to clear the smoke, trying to see through the open doors. “You’re safe! Come on out!”
He stepped back as several more men and women and a few children ran through the doors, bent over, coughing, sobbing, crying, the baby wailing in a young woman’s arms.
Slash turned away from the doors and back to the prisoners. Pecos had them well in hand. Chaney and Black Pot, stripped of their weapons, lay side by side. Chaney was wrapping a bandanna around his wounded leg. Pecos was just then burying the toe of his right boot into Hell-Raisin’ Frank Beecher’s gut.
“I told you to keep your hands away from your hoglegs!” Pecos bellowed at him. The man flopped onto his back, wailing, and Pecos bent over at the waist, yelling, “You hard o’ hearin’, amigo?”
“I’m shot!” Beecher hollered. “I’m wounded! I’m bleeding! I need a doctor!”
“We oughta throw you into that church an’ let you burn!” Slash yelled at the man, thrusting his arm and finger out to point at the church from which the dozen or so citizens of Dry Fork had emerged to gather in a group in front of the burning building, composing themselves. “Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t do that? Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t drill bullets through your ugly heads right now!”
He turned to look at Chaney and Black Pot. Chaney lay on his side now, propped on an elbow. He regarded Slash, grinning, as though Slash had just told him a joke he’d found royally amusing. Black Pot was sitting Indian style, still caked with dust, his eyes pain-pinched. But even the big Indian was curling half of his thick, chapped upper lip in a jeering grin at Slash.
Beecher, however, just held his bullet-torn leg in both hands and screamed, “Doctor! I need a doctor, damn you! I’m gonna bleed dry here!”
“Shut up!” Pecos told him.
“Don’t mind ole Hell-Raisin’ Frank,” said Talon Chaney, slurring his words. “He never could stand the sight of his own blood!”
He and Black Pot laughed.
Slash cast his frustrated gaze at Pecos.
Pecos returned it, shook his head. “Well, we got ’em, anyway, partner.”
Slash nodded. He looked at the church. It was nearly fully consumed and the wind from the fire was blowing against him. He turned to the people who’d been locked in there. Now they were making their way down the hill, heading toward the burned town by ones and twos and threes, looking like survivors of a very large and savage battle.
Or a massacre. Yeah, that’s what this had been. A damned massacre.
Slash looked at the three killers. They were sweating and dirty. They smelled like something dead, like smoke and sour whiskey. Slash spat to one side. He ran a grimy sleeve across his mouth. “Let’s get these animals into their cages, Pecos. And get the hell out of here.”
Pecos turned to Beecher. “You heard the man.”
“Go to hell!” Beecher said.
“Who the hell are you?” This from Talon Chaney, now sneering at the two ex-cutthroats. “The U.S. marshals sent a couple of old men to take us to Denve
r?”
Slash limped up before Chaney and Black Pot. “You two get your raggedy asses into that cage, or I’ll shoot you both right here.”
“You ain’t gonna make it.” Black Pot smiled knowingly and shook his head. “No, sir—you two old men ain’t gonna make it. You don’t know who you’re dealing with, amigo.”
“You got till the count of three to stand up,” Slash told them, aiming his pistols out and down, clicking both hammers back.
“You too, Frank,” Pecos told Beecher.
“One,” Slash said, smiling coldly down at Chaney and the Indian. “Two . . .”
“All right, all right.” Chaney grimaced, started to rise, then sat back down and extended his hand toward Slash. “I’m gonna need a hand, though. You done shot me good, old man. You crippled me!”
Slash narrowed an eye and aimed down the Colt’s barrel, planting a bead on Chaney’s forehead. In the dead center of the man’s forehead, two inches above his wedge-like nose. He started to squeeze the trigger. Chaney slid his brown eyes toward Slash’s trigger finger and snapped his eyes wide in terror. “All right! All right!” He pushed off the ground with a grunt, gaining his feet and glaring at Slash. “I’ll be damned if you wasn’t about to do it.”
“I’d be damned if you’re not right,” Slash said with a grin.
“We’re criminals,” Chaney said, thumbing himself in his lumpy chest. “We got rights!”
“Not on this ride,” Pecos said behind Slash.
Slash had just switched his gaze from Chaney to Black Pot, when the Indian gave a wild cry and sprang off his heels. He moved so fast and unexpectedly that by the time Slash got his Colts turned toward him, Black Pot’s head was already smashing into Slash’s chest and the Indian’s long arms were wrapped around Slash’s waist.
Black Pot slammed Slash over backward.
Slash triggered both Colts into the ground where Black Pot had just been sitting before he’d made that puma-like leap. With the big Indian full on top of him, Slash flew up off his feet and hit the ground with a loud whuff! as the air exploded from his lungs. Black Pot gave another wild cry and reached for one of Slash’s Colts.
A shadow passed over Slash. Slash saw the butt of a rifle swing over him, making a soft, whistling sound before it connected with Black Pot’s left temple, making a solid thumping sound. Black Pot flew off of Slash and crumpled up on the ground beside him. Out like a blown lamp.
Slash looked up at Pecos standing over him. Slash’s brains were still scrambled from Black Pot’s assault, but Pecos must have seen the expression on his face when Slash saw Frank Beecher run at Pecos from behind. Pecos wheeled, swinging his rifle again like a club.
“Oaf!” Beecher said, staggering backward and grabbing his own left temple. “Oh, oh, oh!” He turned full around, dropped to his knees, then fell facedown in the dirt.
Talon Chaney started toward Slash, but by now Slash had gotten his wits about him enough that he raised both his Colts again at the tattoo-laden monster before him. Chaney stopped, resting most of his weight on his good leg.
“Go ahead,” Slash said. “Please, do it. I really want you to do it, Chaney. Take one step. I’m begging you.”
Chaney glared down at him. He looked at the unconscious Black Pot, then at the unconscious Beecher. He returned his defiant gaze to Slash and held his hands up in surrender. “Not now,” he said, and spat to one side. “I’ll save it for later.”
CHAPTER 14
Jaycee Breckenridge clutched the pearl-gripped,. 32-caliber Colt Rainmaker to her breast and ran her thumb across the hammer. She pricked her ears to listen for sounds in the hallway outside the closed door of her third-floor suite.
So far this morning, the House of a Thousand Delights had been quiet, as it was most mornings. But a minute ago, she’d looked out the window to see Cisco Walsh making his way toward the saloon from the opposite side of the street, weaving through Camp Collins’s early-morning traffic and puffing a fat cigar. He’d disappeared from the view from her window, and when he had—when she knew that he was mounting the front porch steps on his way inside the saloon/brothel/gambling parlor—she’d found herself hurrying over to her armoire and pulling out the small wooden drawer in which she kept the Rainmaker.
Now she sat in a brocade armchair by her unlit fireplace, clad in only her nightgown and velvet auburn robe, clutching the snub-nosed popper to her breasts. She could feel her heart beating against the pistol as she remembered the conversation, almost word for word, she’d overheard the night before through the billiard room door:
“That team will be hauling eighty thousand dollars in bullion, Walsh, and—”
“I know how much it will be carrying, Hall. I just don’t want your men to—”
“Like I said, we’ll all be there to make sure everything goes off without a—”
“At Horsetooth Station?”
“Yes, that’s where I said we’d meet. We’ll get back to you on the exact night. Now, look, Marshal, if you’re getting cold feet, let me remind you of a little problem in your past. One that likely would not—”
That was when Hall’s voice had stopped abruptly, as though someone on the other side of the door, realizing they were being overheard, had waved him to silence.
Jay wondered—had, in fact, wondered all through the long, sleepless night—if Walsh and Hall knew that she’d overheard their nefarious plans. They must have. She remembered how her hand had shaken when she’d set the brandy bottle on the table, and how when she’d looked at Walsh, he’d been looking at her shaking hand.
Why else would she have been shaking—unless she had just heard that Walsh had thrown in with a plan to rob eighty thousand dollars in bullion routed from one of the mountain mines through Camp Collins and probably to the railroad several miles east? Cisco Walsh—the handsome, dashing, brash, and upstanding western lawman himself!
Jay wondered how long he’d been riding on both sides of the law.
She wondered if he knew that Jay was now privy to his secret. She wondered what he would do about it if he was, which he most certainly was. Would he try to kill her? Try to have her killed?
And what was she going to do to foil his robbery scheme? It had to be foiled. Not that Jay held herself up as some great upstanding citizen. After all, she’d once run with outlaws herself. But she couldn’t allow that bullion to be robbed. She was a part of the legitimate business community here now, and she had to do her part to maintain law and order. Since she was likely the only one who knew about it, and of Walsh’s betrayal to the citizens of Camp Collins, she felt the weight of her responsibility....
Boots sounded on the stairs.
Clomp! Clomp! Clomp!
Slow, steady, echoing thuds. Each one followed by the trilling of a spur. It was almost as though he was trying to sound menacing. Trying to put the fear of God into her . . .
Almost?
Maybe that’s exactly what he was doing. For it most surely was Walsh on the stairs. He usually paid her a visit in the morning at the Thousand Delights. But never this early and never upstairs, in her room. Since she worked late, she usually slept in and didn’t go down for breakfast until ten or eleven. Sometimes Walsh would join her in the dining room off the saloon. Not every morning, but maybe once or twice a week.
He’d come early this morning, however and he was coming all the way up to her room because he was eager to find out if Jay really had overheard that telling conversation. He’d probably gotten as little sleep as Jay herself had, wondering what she knew. Wondering what she would do with the information if she did, indeed, know . . .
Boots thumped in the hallway, growing louder.
Spurs rang.
Her hands shaking slightly, Jay flicked open the Rainmaker’s loading gate and checked the cylinder, turning it slowly, quietly, not wanting the faint clicks to be heard in the hall. When she saw that brass resided in each chamber, Jay flicked the loading gate closed. She gasped when the thudding stopped in the hall outsid
e her door.
She gasped again, nearly dropping the pistol, when three light taps sounded on her door. Cisco Walsh’s voice: “Jay?”
She drew a breath to calm herself. “Y-Yes?”
“Are you up?”
She paused, her mind working. “Just up. I haven’t bathed yet, Cisco. What can I help you with?” Did her voice sound several octaves higher than usual, or did it just seem that way to her?
There was a discomfiting pause followed by his menacingly quiet, even voice: “Can I come in, Jay? I’d like a word.”
A scream rose inside Jay’s head. She looked down at her hand holding the Rainmaker. It was shaking. She closed her left hand over it, squeezing, trying to formulate a response. She could not let him into her room. That might be a big mistake. Maybe the biggest mistake of her life.
Maybe he was reading her mind, because before she could respond, he said, as though trying a different tactic, “I was wondering if you’d join me for breakfast.”
Um . . . “It’s a little early for me, Cisco. And I haven’t bathed yet.” She tried to think. She didn’t want to see him today. She wasn’t sure what she would say. She needed time to compose herself . . . to come up with a plan . . .
She was just too damn nervous!
“I have a rather busy day ahead, in fact,” she said, speaking a little too quickly, though she couldn’t get herself to slow down. “Perhaps later in the week . . . ?”
A pause. A long pause.
Then, Cisco’s voice sounding a bit miffed: “Perhaps.”
A floorboard in the hall squeaked. Footsteps thudded, dwindling, as the town marshal walked off toward the stairs.
Jay let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Resting the revolver on her right thigh, she sank back in the chair, relief washing over her. It was a short-lived relief. As she heard Cisco’s boots retreating down the stairs, echoing in the quiet building, Jay’s heart picked up its rushed beating again.
What was she going to do about the robbery? Somehow, she had to stop it.
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