ROMANCE: His Reluctant Heart (Historical Western Victorian Romance) (Historical Mail Order Bride Romance Fantasy Short Stories)

by Jane Prescott

  So people like them, he'd told Dillard, were more and more in demand. They'd pissed off all of the local bandit games through their past jobs as cowhands, busting and hanging cattle thieves, that most nobody round these parts would willfully tangle with the two. They were what some of the Spanish speaking people called, “Bad men,” in broken English. Whether or not they were “bad” in the sense of being morally corrupt or “bad” in the sense of being stone cold killers wasn't something either of them worried about. They couldn't really afford to worry about it, and Jerry was especially aware of this being the brains out of the two of them. Not that Dillard was slow, by any means, he just didn't like to think about things that weren't money, booze, or pussy. So that meant that as far as planning went, Jerry was pretty much on his own. But he kind of liked it that way, anyway. What use would it be to have two minds competing to create the master vision that would in the end, with some luck, create a great deal of wealth for both of them.

  Like openly being against racism and being more than willing to work with any race had landed with them this job. The telegram preceding the one that had told them of the obfuscated plans had asked them what they thought of race. Jerry had sent back, “Race is a social construct.” That, combined with their reputations as bad hombres was enough to get them hired. So here they sat, waiting for Bell to get back from the out house. And in she walked. And now that they both weren't shocked to see a black woman running the affairs of far off rich white men they both basked in the beauty that she radiated. She had high cheek bones and caramel colored skin, an ample behind and bust. She was the kind of woman that reminded a man that he had urges.

  “How are the both of you?” she asked sitting down across the table from them.

  “We're very good, mam,” Jerry said with a polite nod. “You said yesterday that you might be needing us to be available to move from here with you to the bank, is that correct?”

  “Yes, of course,” Bell said. “But for now I think I need a drink and some time to rest my weary feet. I'm glad that both of you are still sober enough to talk straight. The last people the bank tried to line up for me were drunkards and racists, so it didn't work out very well.”

  “I can imagine,” Dillard said in a deadpan voice.

  “What my partner means is,” Jerry said, then faltered for words. “Well, you just might have to get used to Dillard's dry wit. He truly is a man of few words.”

  “Well it's good you're here then speak for both of you,” she said. “Because I would like to discuss the finer particulars of what will be going on. I know you are both very well versed in the art of killing people, as I see from your days of cow handing and also what followed up until now. In fact just yesterday I was checking the paper, and you know what? There you both were on the inside cover with warrants up, big numbers, right underneath your pictures.”

  “That's why we done killed them,” Dillard said.

  Jerry nodded and smiled politely.

  “Dillard again tells the truth, mam,” Jerry said. “Those people did meet grisly demises at our hands. But let's not talk about it. It kind of makes me queasy thinking about it.”

  “Oh?” Bell said with a cocked eyebrow.

  “I mean,” Jerry said, then his voice trailed off. “It's not important. Anyway. You were going to discuss plans and I'm very eager to hear what we will be up to.”

  “Well,” Bell said. “We need to head on down to Denver through the night because I have to be at the new bank there for the formal get together and ribbon cutting ceremony.”

  “Why in the hell did you take a train to Boulder to meet us, then?” Dillard said.

  “Dillard,” Jerry said, a slight edge in his voice.

  Jerry turned his head slowly to glare at Dillard, then turned back to speak with Bell.

  “Why of course. You see, we have a stagecoach ready and you can ride in the back. It's very comfortable back there. And you have my word you'll be safe enough on the way down there.”

  “Safe enough?” Bell asked.

  “Well I reckon that the reason that you didn't take the train into Denver where we could have met you without the trek up here to Boulder is that if your name was on some kind of log or passenger manifesto that ended up in the wrong hands you would meet some kind of end that you would rather avoid, ultimately. Am I correct?”

  “Yes,” Bell said.

  “That's good. Otherwise I'd be wondering why in the hell you didn't just meet us in God damn Denver. But not to worry I understand completely. Now what I meant by safe enough is that since we had no idea what in the hell we would be up against, we figured if you needed anymore than the two of us you would have rounded that king of man power up. But I think that keeps biting you folks in the ass so you don't want anything to do with a large group of armed men. With more men come their mouths and no one knows who is going to get too drunk at the bar and start blabbing things that get people killed.”

  Bell shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

  “So you've got the two of us,” Jerry said. “The two most hated cowboys in these here parts. The Sheriffs don't like us because we do their jobs for them. The bandits don't like us because we smoke them, then snuff them, out. So hopefully whoever is after you isn't in either of those two categories, or we might really be fucked.”

  Bell blanched at his language, but quickly brought her face back to a stern neutral look.

  “Neither of those groups is involved. The problem is that the people who are involved haven't really revealed themselves,” she said.

  “So what you mean to say is that you really don't have any idea who in God's name is after you at given moment, and you figured the best thing to do upon arriving in the front range would be to hire two of the local gunslingers to help make sure that you stay alive.”

  “That's right,” Bell said quietly.

  “Well the good news is that's fine by us. The bad news is that we can't really make any guarantee about your safety beyond 'safe enough' simply because we don't have the faintest idea who we're dealing with right now. It could be the Mexican Army for all we know.”

  Bell shook her head slowly.

  “It isn't anything like that. Don't think bigger, think smaller and meaner. Like assassins and stuff like that. There is a lot of double crossing going on right now so I figured the best thing to do would be to hire two people that I know aren't involved and go from there.”

  “Well,” Jerry said. “Let's head to the stagecoach and get out of here.”

  “I'm not so sure about all of this,” Dillard said as the two of them sat on the front of the stagecoach, guiding the horses down the road at a slow trot.

  They'd be to Denver long before morning, which meant that they'd be checking into a hotel just on the outskirts of town, then they'd head in at daybreak.

  “I understand your reservations completely,” Jerry said. “But what can a man do when he takes a job? We took this job, and for a good amount of money paid up front. And I don't know about you, but I don't have much of that money left. So if we were to say, I don't know, decide to go back on our word that might just well mark us lousy out east, and then they won't ever want to work with us again. But if everything goes smoothly who knows how much repeat business we can get out of this.”

  “Those are good points,” Dillard said. “I guess I'm just talking out loud, but I sure wish we knew what the fuck was going on. I mean, I get that boss lady can't exactly just prattle off every little secret in the world to us, but at the same time, you'd think she'd be a little more helpful in preparing us for what could happen.”

  Jerry nodded. He agreed. And sitting by Dillard in the dark while they trundled down the rocky road that it would be easy to get a really bad attitude about everything that was going on. And Jerry didn't want to do that. So far nothing bad had happened and there was pretty much no reason to think that anything bad would happen. Bell had met them in Boulder and that had been the right call. Even though Boulder was only fifty miles awa
y from Denver it wasn't like the people in Denver would be watching every town around them. And if they were then they wouldn't have allowed Bell to leave Boulder because it would have simply been too big of a risk, that is if the goal of the unknown parties set against them was to keep Bell from reaching the opening of the new bank. But maybe he'd figured it all wrong the whole time, or maybe Bell wasn't telling them the pieces of information that would really help them tie the loose ends together.

  As the stagecoach bumped and rattled down the road Jerry looked up at the beautiful summer night sky. The stars above him blazed so brightly it seemed as if he shot at them maybe he'd put it out. Up ahead the city of Denver glowed slightly in the dark from the light of street lamps. The night was still, aside from the occasional whirr of bats overhead as they headed back to their caves to sleep. That meant dawn was coming on quicker than Jerry had anticipated. It could also mean that there were bandits out in the desert keeping coals burning to stay warm, and the slight smoke was driving away the insects and making hunting for the bats near impossible.

  “Sure are a lot of bats headed home early,” Dillard said.

  Dillard usually picked up on these things just as quick as Jerry, so Jerry wasn't surprised that his partner was thinking the same thing.

  “I don't reckon the sun to be coming up for some hours,” Jerry said. “So it might stand to reason that we should take the bats early return as a kind of warning.”

  Jerry heard Dillard cock the hammer on his Winchester repeating rifle, the newest that had come out yet. It held a good handful of bullets in the magazine and was lever action. That made Jerry feel a whole lot better because Dillard was a crack shot with a rifle, one of the best that Jerry had ever seen. And Jerry himself wasn't a bad shot, but with a pistol. He was also one of the fastest draws on the front range. It had been up in the air who was faster, him or Slick Tony, but after they had a walk down not but a month ago that left Not so Slick Tony dead the mattered had been settled. So Jerry wasn't all that worried, even if it did seem like things were headed toward violence. It wouldn't be the first time, and it probably wouldn't be the last the way things seemed to be going. The government needed to do something about all of the crime that crossed state lines. So far it didn't seem to have an answer, so criminals that were wanted in Wyoming were free to ride down to Colorado with little chance of pursuit or capture once they arrived since states only talked to each other about the most wanted criminals.

  Dillard and Jerry had almost hightailed it out of Denver and headed west when things had really heated up the last summer. That's when they'd kept having run in with the locals bandits. Jerry couldn't believe they were going to have another. He just knew it. It was one of those times where he could feel something was going to happen as sure as if the sun was cresting the horizon and he could see the bandits mounting their steeds off on the distant prairie. Of course they wouldn't be out in the open and Jerry knew that, he knew that they would most likely be laying low in an arroyo, waiting to ride out and ambush them somewhere along this stretch of lonely road. While he thought about it Jerry slowly reached behind him grasped the stock of his double-barreled sawed off shotgun. In the dark it would be hard to see, and he'd specially loaded the two cartridges that were currently ready to go with nail heads and pieces of barbwire so the pattern would be wide and erratic. It was a trick Jerry had picked up while he was still a young man, from an old man who'd fought the Confederacy for the Union. That old man had been his grandad, and he'd said that at night there wasn't anything like a bunch of nail heads to scatter shot about the dark—if you weren't going to hit intentionally then why not increase the chances of an accidental strike? Jerry had found the special loads to be useful in situations where he only intended to let off both barrels at once, then drop the shotgun for his pistol.

  “They'll probably ride out of some gulch and surprise us,” Jerry said in a low voice. “When they get close enough to throw a rock at I'll let loose with the nail heads. That should put enough of the little metal buggers in their horses that most of them rear and bolt. Whoever is left we'll need to finish off quick with small arms fire.”

  Dillard didn't say anything, just put the butt of his rifle in the crook of his shoulder and settled into a waiting position familiar to shooters who have to sit for long periods of time at the ready. Dillard would be good to go, and Jerry knew that. It wasn't the first time they'd ridden out on some fools errand to find a group of people waiting to do them in. And every time that happened they managed to either get away or scare enough of them off that they could finish off the rest.

  “I've got one of them explosive things the miners gave us after that one job,” Dillard said, then spit tobacco off the side of the stagecoach.

  Jerry chuckled.

  “You mean the metal balls filled with gun powder? I didn't think those worked very well the last time we tried them,” Jerry said.

  Dillard spit again before continuing.

  “Well I had them etch a deep pattern onto the ball so that when it pops it should break into chunks, unlike the other ones that just shot off in one direction like a rocket.”

  Jerry chuckled again.

  “Yeah, those other ones sure didn't work that great that one time we threw them into the downtown Denver saloon to kill the McKinley brothers. All they did was shoot into the church across the street and start the damn thing on fire!”

  Both of the men were laughing as the remembered. They were being too loud, and they both knew it, but neither cared. The could hear the stamp of impatient horses waiting around the bend in the road. They'd learned to listen for little things that most of the bandit folk just didn't think about. Like the jingling of spurs if they were close, or the strike of a match. But a horses stamp could be heard at a distance if you knew what to listen for and if it was the dead of night and there wasn't anything else going on.

  “They'll be on us,” Jerry said.

  He pointed the gun down the road in front of them and sure enough a posse of bandits thundered out from around the bend, about ten abreast, as if at of nowhere. It was an old trick meant to scare and intimidate. Jerry muttered to Dillard to hold his fire until he let loose with the shotgun. The bandits slowed their horses to a slow trot and kept approaching them. Right when they were within a stone's throw Jerry let loose with the shotgun. The nail heads and wire must have dug into a few of the horses, and they whinnied and took off. The remaining men shot wildly toward the flash that had just blinded them and scared their steads, but were quickly put down by the combined fire of Jerry and Dillard. It took less than a minute and there was no one left but them and a few riderless horses milling about the road.

  “Didn't even have to let off the popper!” Dillard said. “These boys might be softer then we make them out to be.”

  “Might be,” Jerry said. “Or might not be. Maybe that was just the skirmishers, sent out to draw fire and see what the rest of the posse would be up against.”

  Dillard thought about it for a minute before spitting again.

  “They'd have to be the God damned stupidest sons of bitches if they actually knew that was what the posse was using them for.”

  Jerry grunted an acknowledgment and then leaned back and told Bell to be still back in the stagecoach, that she didn't have to worry. Bell didn't answer. When Dillard checked on her the tremor in his voice told Jerry something was really wrong.

  “She's asleep,” Dillard said. “But not in a natural way. Someone must have slipped something into her drink at the saloon. But that means that they knew she was in Boulder.”

  “And that means that they know we are here now,” Jerry said.

  Jerry checked Bell's pulse and found it to be going pretty strong. It didn't seem like she was in any kind of emergency medical state, so they let her be. Jerry and Dillard climbed back into the driver’s seat and got the horses going at a pace that would have them to Denver in no time.

  “Think they'll be at the hotel when we get there?” Dilla
rd asked.

  “Sure as shit you know they will,” Jerry said. “But I'd rather fight in a hotel, or from a hotel, then have a bunch of those assholes ride down on us like that again. Bunch of fucking bushwhacking scum is what they are. I bet they work for the Mexican Army or gangsters when they aren't out here trying to scare and intimidate people into giving up without a fight.”

  Jerry heard Dillard take a long pull from the flask he always had with him.

  “Yeah,” Dillard said. “But I don't know, man. One of these days we aren't going to be lucky. One of these days these motherless whores will ride down on us and lay us out dead like we done to so many others. And I know in the end every man has to be killed, or die, which is much the same. But I don't know if I've got the taste for all this like I used to. It just isn't as fun and it's always the same.”

  “I hear you,” Jerry said. “And I'm hoping that after this gig we can get on at the bank as full time security. Can you imagine that? Just working eight to five every day? Because I hear at night they take all the money and put it in a big vault and just lock it up. Locked up money don't need no one to watch over it. Or at least that's what I suspect the thinking is. So we would have the nights and weekends to ourselves. It could be a pretty good deal.”

  Dillard spat again, then took another long pull. Jerry always wondered how some people could keep a plug of chew in their mouth and drink whiskey at the same time. It wasn't something he could do himself.

  “Well, in any event, up ahead is the hotel,” Dillard said.