Wild to the Bone

by Peter Brandvold

  Haskell looked around, found a fist-sized rock, and hurled it high and far over the rock behind which the dry-gulcher had disappeared. He heard the muffled thunk of the rock’s landing.

  A rifle cracked.

  Bear took off running toward the large boulder. He ran past it and into the shade of several large boulders sprawled across one another like exhausted lovers.

  A minute later, he looked around the left side of one of the boulders in time to see the backside of the shooter disappear behind the boulder’s other end, to Haskell’s right. The boulder was about ten feet wide. Moving on the balls of his boots, Haskell went to the boulder’s other side, slipped around the rear corner and scuttled toward the front, hoping to meet the dry-gulcher at the far front corner.

  A grinding rattle rose. Haskell saw the diamondback just as the stone-colored beast, coiled on the near side of a patch of prickly pear, struck. Bear leaped straight up in the air. The snake’s head collided with his right boot heel with a dull thump.

  Haskell gave an involuntary grunt. The only thing he hated worse than snakes was dry-gulching sons of bitches.

  He landed on his other foot and pressed his back to the cool side of the boulder, glancing at the snake that was now slithering off, looking vaguely chagrined, around the prickly-pear patch toward a small, dark, V-shaped gap at the base of two abutting boulders. It shoved its head into the notch. Its scaly four-foot-long body traced a serpentine pattern as it slithered into the gap, and the button tail disappeared.

  Bear jerked a look toward the front of the boulder against which his back was pressed. Had the shooter heard the snake or his own startled grunt or both?

  Most likely.

  That’s why the man had not yet appeared. He was likely holed up just around the front corner, getting ready to snake his rifle down the side of the boulder and toss a couple of .44 rounds.

  Two feet to Bear’s left, toward the front of the boulder, a low notch had been weathered out of the rock. Having seen two snakes already on the slope of this bluff, he felt every nerve ending in his body leaping around like striking vipers at the thought of stepping into that notch without investigating it first. But, grinding his molars, that’s just what he did, crouching low so his big body would fit.

  Quietly, listening for snakes and half-expecting to feel one chomp into one of his calves, he drew back the hammers on both of his pistols and tried to slow his breathing while his heart tattooed a war rhythm against his breastbone. Breathing through his mouth, his chest rising and falling sharply, sweat dribbling down his beard and pasting his chambray shirt against his back, he waited.

  There was the nearby crunch of a boot coming down on gravel.

  A leg appeared suddenly as the shooter stepped around the corner. That knee bent as the shooter crouched. Haskell saw two gloved hands aiming a rifle from the shooter’s right hip. The rifle leaped and roared, flames lapping from the barrel.

  As the shooter pumped the cocking mechanism, Haskell slammed his right boot against the neck of the rifle. He wanted this bushwhacker alive to answer questions.

  The shooter grunted as the rifle flew out of his hands. And then Haskell sheathed his pistols, bounded out of the notch, and had the dry-gulching son of a bitch by the throat, thrusting him back and cocking his own right hand for a savage punch against the man’s left cheek.

  He’d just started thrusting the fist forward when he stopped suddenly. The shooter had screamed. His hat had tumbled back off his head, and now Haskell was staring down at the greenest pair of eyes he’d ever seen.

  They were framed by a curly mess of tawny-golden hair. Rich lips were stretched back from delicate white teeth, one of which was missing, leaving a small gap to the right of the front ones. The bottom teeth were slightly crooked. Those were the only flaws in the heart-shaped face, whose eyes bored sharply into Bear’s, cast with animal fear mixed with an innate defiance.

  Bear glanced down at the girl’s coarse gray wool work shirt. He’d pulled up the collar with his hand, tightening the shirt across her breasts, which rose and fell sharply.

  The girl spit out through gritted teeth, “Go ahead and hit me, you fuckin’ ape! That’d make you feel like a real big man, wouldn’t it?”

  Haskell blinked. Shock over finding that a girl had damn near blown his head off had rocked him back on his heels. But now he focused on the part about her nearly having blown his head off, and it didn’t seem to matter so much that she was a girl, even a good-looking one with a nice set of breasts nodding at him from behind that shirt.

  He clenched his fist again and cocked his arm, glaring at her. “Why the hell shouldn’t I go ahead and smack your pretty head down between your shoulder blades, you sassy little bitch? Give me one good reason, and maybe, maybe, I won’t do it!”

  The girl screamed and squeezed her eyes shut, cowering. She jerked free of his grip and stumbled backward, hitting the ground on her butt. She stared up at him, breathing hard, eyes wide as a doe’s spotting a mountain lion ready to pounce.

  The look took some of the sand out of Haskell’s anger. He lowered his fist. “All right, I won’t,” he said. “But I should. Why in the hell were you shootin’ at me?”

  She continued to stare up at him for several more seconds. Gradually, the fear and bitter defiance bled out of her gaze, and she frowned slightly, curiously. “You ain’t . . . you ain’t Burt Needham.” Her brows furrowed with a deeper befuddlement.

  “No, I ain’t Burt Needham. Who’s Burt Needham, and why do you feel the need to bore him a fresh ear hole?”

  “’Cause I figured he was comin’ to ravage me. Just like his brother tried to do only last week but got a paring knife in his balls for his efforts. Both of ’em been wantin’ me to marry up with ’em for nigh on the past two years. Dirty prospectors!”

  Haskell studied her. “You Dulcy Stoveville?” Since he was not far from the Stoveville ranch, who else could she be? He doubted there were many young women in the Pumpkin Buttes anymore, even fewer this close to the Stoveville place.

  “That’s right.”

  Haskell sighed. He extended his hand to the girl. She did not take it but continued to glare up at him. If she was mad at him now, he thought, wait till she found out about her brother.

  Haskell scowled and hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. He had never learned the proper way to impart bad news, so rather than hesitate all over the place, he just jerked it out from deep in his craw: “Miss, your brother’s dead. I killed him yesterday out at the Devil’s Creek stage relay station.”

  Her lips parted. Slowly, her lower jaw sagged. All the caustic anger bled out of her gaze. It was replaced with slow-growing shock and horror.

  Bear kept his eyes down, feeling deeply chagrined despite having had no other option but to shoot the young dry-gulcher. Vaguely, he wondered if bushwhacking ran in the Stoveville family. Or perhaps it was a trait of folks living like wild coyotes in the Pumpkin Buttes country.

  He cleared his throat, canted his head toward the trail, and said quietly, “I got him in the wagon.”

  He felt like a bug on a pin as the girl continued to gaze up at him. Finally, she seemed to stare right through him at the sky above and behind him, and then she purposefully gained her feet. She started down the side of the bluff but stopped after only a few steps and looked around as though in a trance.

  She spotted her rifle, went over and picked it up. She absently dusted it off and, holding it by its receiver in her right hand, started making her way down the slope.

  Haskell followed her, feeling grim, meandering around the boulders and twisted clumps of wiry brown brush. The girl did not run but held to a steady stride until she gained the trail. Then she quickened her pace and, approaching the wagon, leaned her rifle against the off rear wheel.

  She fumbled with the rusty tailgate latches, cursing under her breath, until Haskell released th
e latch on the right side of the gate and lowered the board with a jangle of its supporting chains. Dulcy Stoveville climbed into the wagon box and squatted beside the blanket-wrapped body of her brother.

  She dropped to both knees and stared down for a time, her hands on her thighs, as though she were working up the courage to continue. Then she opened the blanket and peeled both sides back to reveal her brother’s tan face with the half-open eyes staring up dreamily, the edges of the kid’s upper teeth revealed in a fine white line beneath his cracked, chapped upper lip.

  Dulcy’s hands, clad in elk skin, shook as she reached down and placed them on each side of her brother’s face. She didn’t say anything, but Haskell saw that her slender shoulders quivered as she stared down at the dead boy.

  Haskell stepped back and turned away, feeling lousy and awkward and knowing he should give the girl some time alone with her brother. He picked up her rifle and rested it on his left shoulder, just to be on the safe side. He wandered off a ways, kicked a couple of stones. When he finally turned back to the wagon, she was sitting on the tailgate, legs and boots dangling toward the rutted, powdered trail.

  She looked at her rifle riding Haskell’s shoulder, opposite the one on which his own Winchester rested. “That wasn’t necessary,” she said.

  “Just a precaution.” Haskell spit to one side, opened and closed his hands around the neck of each rifle he continued to hold on his shoulders. “I do apologize, Miss Stoveville, but I didn’t kill young Danny in cold blood. He shot first. Several times.”

  “What in the hell was he doing way over at the Devil’s Creek station?” she said. “That line’s been closed for years.”

  “I was sorta hoping you could tell me that.”

  She stared at him. Her pretty face was stony, dour, as her eyes flicked up and down, appraising the big man before her. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Name’s Haskell. Bear Haskell.”

  “What the hell were you doing at Devil’s Creek?”

  “Just passin’ through,” he lied. He saw no reason to tell her that he was a Pinkerton. Not yet. The gang of stage-robbing cutthroats was headed up by two young women, and Dulcy Stoveville might just be one of them. “Figured that old windmill was still pumpin’ water, and it was. That water baited me into your brother’s rifle sights.” He hardened his voice. “Suppose you tell me why Danny would want to perforate my hide so bad?”

  Dulcy hardened her own voice, narrowed her suspicious eyes. “Suppose you tell me!”

  “I never met the kid before. Leastways, not that I can recollect.”

  “Maybe your recollectin’ ability has dimmed a little. I never did know a man big as you whose lamps was turned up all the way in the first place.” She wrinkled her nose at that. She wanted to hammer away at him for killing her brother. He didn’t mind. He deserved it. Besides, she wasn’t the first one who’d thought him stupid just because he was big.

  “That could be, that could be,” he said, lowering his rifle and leaning it butt-down against his leg. He took Dulcy’s own carbine—an old-model Winchester with a hide-wrapped rear stock and a rust-spotted barrel—and ejected her last three cartridges.

  They plopped into the dust at his boots.

  She smiled with half of her face at that. “Chicken shit.”

  He tossed the rifle at her. She caught it one-handed and continued to glare at him.

  “Where’s your horse?”

  “Why do you wanna know?”

  “I’ll follow you on back to your ranch. That’s where I figure you’ll be plantin’ Danny, ain’t it?”

  “What makes you think I want you ridin’ back to my ranch with me? I’m alone there now, and I’ve already had trouble with no-accounts wantin’ to stick their dicks in me.”

  Her bold eyes flicked down to his crotch.

  Haskell didn’t wonder that men wanted to lie with the girl. One, she had an enticing, bold way about her. Two, she was pretty and well set up. She wasn’t so skinny that you could break her like a twig over your knee but full-hipped and stout-legged.

  She had some extra tallow in her hips, ass, and calves. Her breasts weren’t large, but they were large enough. Her mouth was soft and pink, and her devilish green eyes, framed by all that honey-gold hair, were frankly erotic and alluring.

  Her dark blue denims tapered tightly down from her wide hips to her ankles, where they were folded into three-inch cuffs above her soft brown shit-stained boots.

  “You want me to sit here so you can draw you a picture?” she asked him snidely, though there was a slight upward curve of her mouth corners.

  “Nah, I got it,” he said, feeling himself flush a little. “A girl like you shouldn’t be out here all alone.”

  “What kinda girl is that?”

  “A purty, young one.”

  “Nothin’ much I can do about that, now, is there? No thanks to you.”

  “You could move into town.”

  “I’m too wild for town. Hell, I’d be lurin’ off all the married men and settin’ their wives to caterwaulin’!” She smiled evilly at that.

  Haskell gaped at her. Had she just said what he thought she’d said? “Christ, you don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “That’s how it is for us Pumpkin Buttes girls.” Dulcy glanced back at her blanket-wrapped brother in the box behind her. “Especially those of us who live alone with no-account horses, some wild cats, and a few dusty chickens.”

  She kept her gaze on her brother for a time. Her nostrils flared a couple of times, but she otherwise continued to keep her emotions on a short leash.

  A tough one, this girl.

  “Why don’t you get your horse, miss?” Haskell said gently. “We’ll strap your brother behind your saddle, and you can take him home and bury him.”

  Dulcy turned to him. “You shot him,” she said crisply, dropping down off the tailgate and striding up the side of the bluff. “The least you can do is help me bury him.”

  22

  A couple of hours earlier in the Overland Hotel, Raven gasped and lifted her head from her pillow. She’d expected to find herself staring up at Bear Haskell’s face as the big man hammered away between her legs.

  But Bear was nowhere in sight.

  What she did find, however, was that sometime during the night, she’d pulled her undershirt up above her breasts. She’d kicked out of her cotton panties and spread her legs and was massaging herself almost violently with the first two fingers of her right hand.

  Her hands were creamy. Her pussy was quivering.

  She was coming.

  She squealed and, feeling foolish, threw her head back on the pillow, lifted her shirt over her face, and chomped down on it so her love cries wouldn’t be heard all over Spotted Horse. At the same time, she continued to massage her clitoris, seeing and feeling again, as she had only a moment before, Haskell grinding his forehead against her chest while his cock hammered in and out of her, setting every nerve in her body on fire.

  She imagined she could feel his beard raking her bare breasts deliciously, feel one of his big, callused paws massaging one breast while he sucked the other one with the vigorousness of a newborn lamb.

  “Gnahhh!” she grunted, chewing on her shirt and laughing despite herself.

  When her body stopped spasming, she lay slack on the bed, her breasts rising and falling sharply as she breathed. “Christ,” she rasped out, poking the tip of her right finger inside her vagina once more, remembering how the head of his cock had felt, sliding in and out of her snatch.

  Raven felt the warmth of Victorian shame rise in her cheeks and behind her ears. But then she laughed again, despite feeling like a fool, scissoring her legs and rolling onto her side, chewing on a fingernail as she let herself go ahead and pine for the big, shaggy-headed, whore-mongering reprobate.

  “All right, that�
�s enough,” she said, finally, and dropped her feet to the floor. She sighed and threw her hair back behind her shoulders. “You, lady Pinkerton, have a job to do. What that man does is his business, and his alone. You do not depend on him or anyone else.”

  She heaved herself to her feet. “In fact, you do not care about what he does. In fact,” she added more firmly and loudly, “you don’t care about him in the least. Sure, his cock is nice, but the trouble with cocks is that they come with men attached!”

  She snorted at that as she glanced out the window.

  It was full dawn, purple shadows turning light gray. The sun would likely be up in half an hour or so. She had to get to work.

  Still tingling from her imagined love tussle with Haskell, she chuckled again as she sort of staggered over to the marble-topped washstand. She poured water from the pitcher into the porcelain basin and began taking a slow, leisurely sponge bath, starting with her face and breasts.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was bathed, her freshly brushed hair gathered into a ponytail hanging down her back. She dressed in the same clothes she’d worn yesterday. Normally, that would have rankled the girl who’d been brought up in New York City high society, complete with debutante balls and coming-out parties, but she’d been a field operative long enough to know that she couldn’t very well haul a steamer trunk around to wherever her assignments took her.

  Especially to the Pumpkin Buttes country of eastern Wyoming.

  She had one change of clothes stuffed into her saddlebags, in which she also carried rudimentary camping gear and ammunition. Between changes, she was proud to make do with a little soap and water and her ebony clothes brush from Japan.

  Raven donned her hat, used the mirror over the dresser to make sure it was straight on her head, the thong dangling against her chest, and then wrapped her cartridge belt and .41 pistol around her waist. She decided to leave her Winchester carbine in her room, as she doubted—at least, hoped—she wouldn’t need it here in Spotted Horse.