“Nah.”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Pecos turned his head forward, staring off to the north, but he wasn’t doing much seeing, only thinking.
They rode along in silence for close to ten minutes before Pecos turned to his partner riding beside him again and said, “Well ... that just purely breaks my heart, Slash.”
He looked genuinely pained. In fact, Slash wouldn’t have put it past the big, tender-hearted galoot to let out a sob or two. Pecos had been known to bawl and even wail over women in the past, but mostly only over those who, having soured on his outlaw ways, kicked him to the curb.
“It purely breaks my heart, it does,” he insisted.
“The point here, Pecos, is what are you gonna do so’s you don’t break her heart?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Pecos said. He thought again for a time, then said, “I’m way too old for her. I mean... I sorta see her like a younger sister or ... even a daughter. She wouldn’t want nothin’ to do with an old man like me. Not really.”
“You better let her down easy, or you’re gonna have Jay on your behind. She feels right protective about Myra.”
“Yeah, I know... I know,” Pecos said, scowling miserably over his buckskin’s head at the northern horizon.
“Well, you got some time to think about it.” Slash gave a dry chuckle as he put his Appy into a trot. The ugly sprawl of Cheyenne bisected by two sets of railroad lines had begun to show itself on the fawn plain ahead, cradled by tall bluffs. “I gotta hand it to you, partner—you sure have a knack for getting yourself into women trouble!”
Booting his own mount into a faster pace, Pecos yelled ahead at Slash, instructing his dark-haired partner to do something physically impossible to himself.
Slash only laughed.
Nathan Stark, Army Scout Page 31