Young Thayer cackled wickedly and shoved his coyote face down closer to Walsh’s. “Oh, I guess you won’t be there, will you, Marshal? Since you’re here and I got you dead to rights! Hah!”
Jay turned to Myra, and the two women shared a delighted, much-relieved smile.
Then Myra turned to Thayer and said, “Del . . . honey . . . ?”
Thayer jerked his head to her, his face turning as bright as Christmas morning. “Yes, Miss Myra?” he asked eagerly.
“Since you got that poison-mean, low-down dirty dog—with apologies to dogs—dead to rights, could you maybe tie him up now and cut me and Jay loose? We haven’t had any blood to our hands or feet for a good half hour.”
Young Thayer stared at his beloved. Jay thought that if his heart had been a bird, it would have flown out of his chest and burst into song. “Why, sure, sure. Sure, I will, honey!”
EPILOGUE
“Gentlemen, I feel the need to apologize one more time for my unpardonable crime of cheating the hangman,” said Jenny Claymore.
“There ain’t no need,” Slash said.
“No need at all,” Pecos agreed. “We’ll send him a few bucks for a bottle and a cheap doxie.”
“I don’t know what came over me.”
“Hell, it was goin’ over Slash nearly every hour. If you hadn’t finished off them three curly wolves, Slash would’ve blown off so many of their body parts there wouldn’t have been anything left to hang in Denver!” Pecos chuckled as he glanced around at the first shacks and shanties moving up around the four riders as they passed the old army outpost and rode into the outskirts of Camp Collins.
Two days had passed since Slash and Pecos had culled the outlaw herd down to nothing but the outlaws’ horses, two of which now carried Glenn Larsen and Jenny Claymore. Jenny had finished off Chaney, Beecher, and Black Pot, so the last leg of their journey to Cheyenne had been a whole lot quieter and less laborious—what with their being no more extra mouths to feed and slop buckets to empty.
They’d spent the night in a nice hotel in Cheyenne, after indulging in long, hot baths at a Chinese bathhouse, then hopped the train earlier this very morning for the Camp Collins station, out on the flats east of town. The loot the outlaws had stolen from the Sundance stage had been turned over to Sheriff Hank Covington in Cheyenne, who had bristled at seeing the two ex-cutthroats still kicking and appearing very little worse from their recent wear.
Slash and Pecos had convinced Glenn and Jenny that they might find an easier time starting their lives over in Camp Collins, which was smaller and more sedate than the bustling cosmopolitan cow town that Denver had grown up to be. Besides, in Camp Collins, the pair—who were, indeed a pair now, though they were still shy about it and hadn’t formally announced themselves—could take advantage of Slash and Pecos’s connections, few as there were.
They’d even offered Glenn a job as hostler or teamster for their freighting company until he could find a more permanent vocation. They’d also offered to stake them to rooms in Camp Collins’s finest hotel, the Horsetooth Rock Inn, directly across the street from Jay’s House of a Thousand Delights saloon and gambling parlor, until they could find more permanent housing of their own.
“Yes, but I got you in trouble with your boss,” Jenny pointed out.
They were entering the Camp Collins business district, which was growing quiet this late in the afternoon, nearing five p.m. with the shadows growing long across the broad, dusty main street sandwiched on both sides by tall business façades and stitched along its north side by telegraph poles and their sagging wires.
“Oh, don’t worry about ole Bleed-Em-So,” Slash said, reining his Appy around a stalled lumber dray. “He’s just sore he don’t have no one to hang.”
“He’s also chafed that we’re still kickin’,” Pecos added.
“Ain’t that the truth?” Slash chuckled.
“He threatened to dock your pay, though,” Glenn Larsen said as he looked around at the shops and offices lining the street.
Whoops and hollers were already issuing from the local and relatively new opera house the quartet was just now passing and before which a good dozen horses stood tied to three hitchracks.
“Ah, he was just blatherin’,” Pecos said, referring to the cable Bledsoe had sent to him and Slash in Cheyenne, in response to the cable they’d sent the marshal announcing that due to circumstances beyond their control, he would have no outlaws to hang. “He knows if he docks our pay, we’ll just put in for the reward money the dead outlaws have on their ugly heads, and we’d come out better in the long run. He’ll pay us. He wants to keep in good with his old ex-cutthroats because he’s got no one else to take on his dirtiest assignments, and he enjoys torturing us so much!”
“You’re right there, partner,” Slash said, chuckling.
Jenny reined her chestnut to a stop and turned to regard a secretarial school housed in a tall, narrow brick building sandwiched between the Western Union office and a grocery store.
“What is it, Jenny?” Glenn said, reining in his own mount.
Ahead of the pair, Slash and Pecos did likewise, turning back to regard the younger folks.
“Look there,” Jenny said, pointing at a pasteboard sign in one of the school’s two front windows. “ ‘Tutors needed.’”
Glenn smiled at her. “Surely you don’t want to apply for a job already, Jenny. We just pulled into town.”
Jenny returned his smile with a winning one of her own and flicked her hair back with mock haughtiness. “I feel fresh as a flower. I had a long bath last night, and I haven’t powdered this pretty new outfit Slash and Pecos bought me with too much dust.” They’d bought both her and Larsen full sets of new duds in Cheyenne yesterday afternoon. “I look presentable, don’t I?”
“I’ll say you do!” all three men said at nearly the same time, meaning every word.
“Well, then . . .” Jenny slipped smoothly down from her saddle and extended her reins to Glenn. “Wait for me?”
Beaming, Larsen stepped down from his own horse’s back and accepted her reins. He lowered his new Stetson from his head and held it over his heart, giving a courtly dip of his chin. “It would be my honor.”
“Good luck, Miss Jenny.” Pecos doffed his own hat to her.
Slash said, “Good luck, darlin’. I know you’ll get the job. Any gal who looks and talks good as you is a lead-pipe cinch!”
Jenny winced, flushed a little. “Um, yeah . . . that would be ‘Any gal who looks and talks as well as I do,’ Slash.” She flashed him a tolerant smile.
“See what I mean?” Slash said, chuckling.
When he and Pecos had said goodbye to the pair and made plans to meet later for supper, Pecos turned to Slash. “Well, partner, looks like we’re on our own.”
“It does, indeed. Shall we wet our whistles?”
“Capital idea. Any place in mind?”
Pecos grinned at his partner.
Slash scratched beneath his chin as he gazed off, pretending to laboriously consider the question. “Well, I reckon I was sorta thinkin’ maybe the Thousand Delights.”
“You were?” Pecos said, feigning shock. “The Thousand Delights?”
“Yeah, I was thinkin’ maybe we should go over and get a drink at the Thousand Delights.”
“There wouldn’t happen to be a raving red-headed beauty you’re sparking over that way—would there, Slash?”
“Oh . . .” Slash chuckled, feigning incredulity as he spat over his left stirrup and ran a hand across his mouth. “I don’t know, I reckon there might be.” He booted his Appy forward. “There just might be, at that.”
“Well, what the heck, then?” Pecos spurred his own mount up beside Slash. “I reckon we can get the low-down on what’s been happening around here while we been gone, too. That may or not be interesting.”
“In this lazy town?” Slash said with sarcastic chuckle. “I doubt if anything more interesting happened around here than a drunk miner or two br
oke out some windows in one o’ them cheap parlor houses down by the river.”
“Yeah, I gotta feelin’ you’re probably right, Slash. Nothin’ much interesting ever happens around here. Not that I’m complainin’, but it does get a little boring from time to time.”
“Purely, it does,” Slash agreed. “Purely, it does.”
Keep reading for special excerpt….
BLOOD IN THE DUST
A HUNTER BUCHANON BLACK HILLS WESTERN
by William W. Johnstone
and J. A. Johnstone
The greatest Western writers of the 21st century continue
the adventures of Hunter Buchanon,
a towering mountain of a man who made his name
as a Rebel tracker in the Civil War.
Now he and his coyote sidekick Bobby Lee are trying to
forge a new peaceful life in the Black Hills, Dakota.
But they’ll have to fight to the death to keep it . . .
THERE’S COYOTES IN THEM THERE HILLS.
Ex-Rebel tracker Hunter Buchanon is down on his luck.
He lost his family’s ranch in a fire. He lost his gold to a
thief. And he just might lose his fiancée—a beautiful
saloon girl named Annabelle—to a stinking-rich rival.
But Hunter’s not ready to give up just yet. He’s got a
temporary sheriff ’s badge, a long-range plan to rebuild
his ranch, and his loyal coyote Bobby Lee by his side
to make things right. Too bad it all goes wrong—
when Annabelle gets kidnapped . . .
The mayhem begins with a stagecoach robbery in the Black Hills town of Tigerville.
It won’t end until Sheriff Hunter Buchanon gets back his
girl and his gold—on a long, dusty trail
of blood-soaked vengeance . . .
Look for BLOOD IN THE DUST. On sale now.
CHAPTER 1
“That coyote makes me nervous,” said shotgun messenger Charley Anders.
“You mean Bobby Lee?” asked Hunter Buchanon as he handled the reins of the rocking and clattering Cheyenne & Black Hills Stage, sitting on the hard, wooden seat to Anders’s left.
He spoke through the neckerchief he’d drawn up over his nose and mouth to keep out at least some of the infernal dust kicked up by the six-horse hitch.
“Yeah, yeah—Bobby Lee. He’s the only coyote aboard this heap and that there is a thing I never thought I’d hear myself utter if I lived to be a hundred years old!”
Anders slapped his thigh and roared through his own pulled-up neckerchief.
“No need to be nervous, Charley,” Hunter said. “Bobby Lee ain’t dangerous. In fact, he’s right polite.” Buchanon leaned close to the old shotgun messenger beside him and said with feigned menace, “As long as you’re polite to Bobby Lee, that is.”
He grinned and nudged the shotgun man with his elbow.
“If you mean by ‘polite’ give him a chunk of jerky every time he demands one, he can go to hell!” Anders glanced uneasily over his left shoulder at Bobby Lee sitting on the coach roof just above and between him and Buchanon. “Hell, he demands jerky all the damn time! If you don’t give him some, he shows you his teeth!”
As if the fawn-gray coyote had understood the conversation, Bobby Lee lowered his head and pressed his cold snout to Anders’s left ear, nudging up the man’s cream sombrero.
“See there?” Anders cried. Leaning forward in his seat and regarding the coyote dubiously, the shotgun messenger said, “I ain’t givin’ you no more jerky, Bobby Lee, an’ that’s that! If I give you any more jerky, I won’t have none left for my ownself an’ we still got another half hour’s ride into Tigerville! I gotta keep somethin’ in my stomach or I get the fantods!”
Hunter chuckled as he glanced over his right shoulder at Bobby Lee pointing his long snout in the general direction of the shirt pocket in which he knew Anders kept his jerky. The coyote’s triangle ears were pricked straight up.
Hunter gave the coyote a quick pat on the head. “Bobby Lee understands—don’t you, Bobby Lee? He thinks you’re bein’ right selfish—not to mention womanish about your fantods—but he understands.”
Hunter chuckled and turned his head forward to gaze out over the horses’ bobbing heads.
As he did, Bobby Lee subtly raised his bristling lips to show the ends of his fine, white teeth to Anders.
“See there? He just did it again!” Charley cried, pointing at Bobby Lee.
When Hunter turned to the coyote he’d raised from a pup, after the little tyke’s mother had been killed by hunters, Bobby Lee quickly closed his lips over his teeth. He turned to his master and fashioned a cock-headed, doe-eyed look of innocence, as though he had no idea why this cork-headed fool was slandering him so unjustly.
“Ah, hell, you’re imagining things, Charley,” Hunter scolded the man. “You an’ your fantods an’ makin’ things up. You should be ashamed of yourself !”
“He did—I swear!”
A woman’s sonorous, somewhat sarcastic voice cut through Anders’s complaint. “Excuse me, gentlemen! Excuse me! Do you mind if I interrupt your eminently important and impressively articulate conversation?”
The plea had come from below and on Buchanon’s side of the stage. He glanced over his left shoulder to see one of his and Anders’s two passengers poking her head out of the coach’s left-side window. Blinking against the billowing dust, Miss Laura Meyers gazed beseechingly up toward the driver’s box. “I’d like to request a nature stop if you would, please?”
Hunter and Charley Anders shared a weary look. Miss Meyers, who’d boarded the stage in Cheyenne a few days ago, was from the East by way of Denver. Now, Hunter had known plenty of Eastern folks who were not royal pains in the backside. Miss Meyers was not one of them.
She was grossly ill-prepared for travel in the West. She’d not only not realized that the trip between Cheyenne and Tigerville in the Dakota Territory took a few days, she’d not realized that stagecoach travel was a far cry from the more comfortable-style coach and buggy and train travel to which she’d become accustomed back east of the Mississippi.
Here there was dust. And heat. The stench of male sweat and said male’s “infernal and ubiquitous tobacco use.” (Hunter didn’t know what “ubiquitous” meant but he’d been able to tell by the woman’s tone that it wasn’t complimentary. At least, not in the way she had used it.)
Also, the trail up from Cheyenne into the Black Hills was not as comfortable as, say, a ride in an open chaise across a grassy Eastern meadow on a balmy Sunday afternoon in May. Out here, there were steep hills, narrow canyons, perilous river crossings, the heavy alkali mire along Indian Creek, and, once you were in the Hills themselves, twisting, winding trails with enough chuck holes and washouts to keep the Concord rocking on its leather thoroughbraces until you thought you must have eaten flying fish for breakfast.
Several times over the past two days, Miss Meyers had heralded the need for Hunter to stop the coach so she could bound out of it in a swirl of skirts and petticoats and hurl herself into the bushes to air her paunch.
So far, they hadn’t been accosted by owlhoots. They’d even made it through the dangerous country around the Robbers’ Roost Relay Station without having a single bullet hurled at them from one of the many haystack bluffs in that area. Nor an arrow, for that matter.
Indians—primarily Red Cloud’s Sioux, understandably miffed by the treaty the government had broken to allow gold-seeking settlers into the Black Hills—had been a problem on nearly every run Hunter had been on in the past year. He’d started driving for the stage company after his family’s ranch had been burned by a rival rancher and the man’s business partner, his two brothers murdered, his father, old Angus, seriously wounded.
He wanted to say as much to the lady—a pretty one, at that—staring up at him now from the coach’s left-side window, but he knew she’d have none of it. She was a fish out of water here, a
nd in dire straits. He could see it in her eyes. She was not only road-weary but world-weary, as well.
Though they’d left the Ten Mile Ranch Station only twenty minutes ago, after a fifteen-minute break, and would arrive in Tigerville after only another ten miles, she needed to stop.
“Hold on, ma’am—I’ll pull these cayuses to a stop at the bottom of the next hill!”
She blinked in disgust and pulled her head back into the coach.
“Thank you, Mister Buchanon!” Charley Anders called with an ironic mix of mockery and chiding.
“Now, Charley,” Hunter admonished his partner as the six horses pulled the coach up and over a low pass and then started down the other side, sun-dappled lodgepole pines jutting close along both sides of the trail. “She’s new to these parts. I reckon you’d have a helluva time back East your ownself. Hell, even in the newly citified Denver!”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t go back East. Not after seein’ the kind of haughty folks they make back thataway!” Charley drew his neckerchief down, turned to Hunter, and grinned, showing a more-or-less complete set of tobacco-rimmed teeth ensconced in a grizzled, gray-brown beard damp with sweat. “She’s hard to listen to, but she is easy on the eyes, ain’t she?”
They’d gained the bottom of the hill now, and Hunter was hauling back on the ribbons. “I wouldn’t know, Charley. I only look at one woman. You know that.”
“Pshaw! You can’t tell me you ain’t admired how that purty eastern princess fills out her natty travelin’ frocks! You wouldn’t be a man if you didn’t!”
“I got eyes for only one woman, Charley,” Hunter insisted. Now that the mules had stopped, the dust swirling over them as it caught up to the coach from behind, Hunter set the brake. “You know that.”
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