The two deputies sat on the corral’s top slat, to the right of the gate, smoking. Slash could see only their silhouettes in the darkness, but he could clearly see the badges pinned to their coats and the coals of their cigarettes, when they took drags, the gray smoke wafting around their high-crowned, broad-brimmed Stetsons.
Slash and Pecos didn’t say anything to the two federals. The two federals said nothing to them. They just sat there atop the corral, smoking and staring dubiously toward the newcomers in the night, the darkness relieved by a low half-moon, stars, and the lamplight ebbing from the saloon’s front windows.
Two saddle horses were tied to the hitchrack fronting the low, mud-brick, brush-roofed saloon. The cutthroats and old Bledsoe likely wouldn’t have total privacy, but out here, men knew not to shoot their mouths off without getting something else shot off for their indiscretion. Also, very few who visited the saloon these days were from around here. Most were just passing through, keeping to the back roads and shaggy ravine trails. As travelers, they knew to keep their noses out of other men’s business.
Slash and Pecos put their own mounts up to the hitchrack. The strains of a fiddle pushed through the batwings atop the narrow, rickety-looking front stoop. In one of the dimly lit windows fronting the place, two shadows moved close together, as though a couple were dancing.
Slash glanced at Pecos. Pecos shrugged.
The two cutthroats tossed their reins over the rail, worn down to a mere stick in places by the reins of many a soldier’s horse, then negotiated the untrustworthy three steps to the porch and pushed through the batwings. Slash and Pecos stood side by side just inside the doors, hearing the batwings clatter back into place behind them.
The saloon was twice as wide as it was deep. The bar, comprised of pine boards stretched over three stout beer kegs and flanked by dusty shelves housing maybe a dozen or so dusty bottles, occupied the rear of the place directly beyond the batwings. An old man with snow-white hair hanging down his back in a tight braid and a crow’s dark-eyed face with a sun-seasoned, liver-spotted beak of a nose sat in a chair in front of the bar, sawing away on an old fiddle. Tex Willey wore old denims held up on his skinny frame by snakeskin galluses, a grimy calico shirt, and a badly sun-faded red bandanna knotted around his red turkey neck.
To the right of the old man, in a place clear of tables in which soldiers used to dance with the parlor girls who’d worked here at one time, two middle-aged men in dusty trail garb were now dancing just like a young man and a young woman would have danced back in the day. Only, these two were men. One tall, one short. Both outfitted like cowpunchers. Unshaven. Battered hats on their heads. Old pistols in cracked leather holsters sagged on their thighs, above their mule-eared boots.
Just then the taller gent raised his hand and gave the short man a twirl, and the short man’s batwing chaps buffeted out around his legs, whang strings flying. He closed his eyes, smiling dreamily as the old man continued to saw away on his scarred, ancient fiddle. Slash thought he recognized the song, even so poorly played, as “The Gal I Left Behind.”
Slash and Pecos shared another look and a shrug.
By now, Tex Willey had spied the newcomers.
The old man paused in his fiddling—though the dancers did not stop dancing—to look at Slash and Pecos and nod toward the door at the back of the room, to the right of the bar.
“Thanks, Tex,” Slash said as he began wending his way through the dozen or so dusty tables and around the two dancers, who appeared so absorbed in their two-step that they did not take note of the newcomers, even as they did a swing and an almost-graceful pirouette that nearly rammed the short one into Pecos as he stepped around them.
Slash rapped his knuckles on the door of the old storeroom that Bledsoe now used as a part-time office.
The knock was answered by a raspy man’s voice saying, “If you’re anyone but my two raggedy-heeled, over-the-hill cutthroats, stay out. I got work to do!”
Slash glanced at Pecos and gave a crooked smile.
Pecos shrugged.
Slash tripped the latch and stepped into the roomy office that owned the molasses aroma of liquor and malty ale. “Your cutthroats?”
“Oh, you’re mine, all right.” Luther T. Bledsoe was sitting at a big walnut desk he must have had hauled all the way out here from Denver. The chief marshal looked especially small and insignificant, sitting with his pushchair drawn up to the giant, cluttered desk on which a Tiffany lamp burned.
“Bought and paid for!” added the chief marshal with a delighted, mocking flourish, dropping the pen he’d been scribbling on a legal pad with to lean back in his chair. He ran his two bone-white, long-fingered hands through the cottony down of his unkempt, silver hair after thumbing his little, round, steel-framed spectacles up his long nose.
As Pecos closed the office door and stepped up beside Slash, Slash saw his tall partner’s head swing toward where Bledsoe’s comely female assistant, Miss Abigail Langdon, sat at another desk abutting the wall to the right of the chief marshal. Her desk was every bit as large as Bledsoe’s, and just as cluttered. A pink lamp burned on her desk, illuminating her cool, remote, severely Nordic beauty in the flickering light’s shifting planes and shadows.
Miss Langdon flipped a heavy curling lock of her red-gold hair back behind her shoulder, revealing wide cheekbones that tapered severely down to a fine chin and regal jaw. Her crystalline, lake-green eyes, long and slanted like a cat’s eyes, lingered on Pecos’s tall, broad-shouldered frame, raking him up and down. A dark cloak was pulled around her shoulders, over the purple velvet gown she wore so well. She reached for a shot glass on the desk before her, amidst the clutter of open files and dossiers and bound books on federal law, and took a sip.
Her eyes stayed on Pecos as she said, almost too quietly to be heard above the small fire crackling in the small sheet-iron stove flanking her boss, “Hello.”
Pecos seemed to be breathing hard. He cleared his throat thickly and said, “H-hello, there, Miss . . .” He remembered his hat, quickly doffed it, and held it before him. “Hello, there, Miss Langdon.”
Slash squelched a chuckle. Pecos had reacted to the remote beauty—whom Slash judged to be in her middle twenties, though with a decidedly more mature air about herself—the first time they’d met. Abigail Langdon had reacted similarly to Pecos. It was almost as though the two were giving off invisible sparks of attraction—a primitive reach for each other.
Bledsoe seemed to sense it now, too. Sitting back in his chair, hands behind his head, he studied the two with an amused half-smile, his eyes dubious.
He slid his gaze to Slash, his eyes vaguely curious. Bledsoe gave a dry chuckle, then leaned forward slightly and beckoned to the two cutthroats impatiently. “Come in, come in. We’re burnin’ moonlight. I have to get back to that consarned, infernal hellhole, Denver, for a meeting at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I came out here to try to get a little work done in the peace and quiet of the bucolic countryside, and because I got a fresh job for my two over-the-hill cutthroats.”
He smiled at that, again mockingly. He enjoyed ringing men’s bells and watching for a reaction that might amuse him. Slash and Pecos had learned that the first time they’d met the man.
“If you really thought we was over the hill,” Pecos pointed out, indignantly, his voice rising angrily, “we wouldn’t have turned Jack Penny into a human sieve tonight, just like we done to the rest of his gang last year. And you wouldn’t have called us here, Chief Marshal. So why don’t you stop tryin’ to rub our fur in the wrong direction just ’cause you’re hip deep in bureaucratic sheep dip, and bored, and get down to brass tacks.”
Slash turned to his partner, brows arched in surprise. Even Miss Langdon turned to look over her shoulder in shock at the tall, silver-blond cutthroat who had just shoveled it right back to old Bleed-Em-So. Pecos rarely got riled or spoke out even when he was. It took a lot to get his dander up. It appeared, however, that the chief marshal’s riding him an
d Slash about their ages—in front of Miss Langdon, especially—had done just that.
Slash covered a chuckle by brushing his fist across his nose and clearing his throat.
Bledsoe stared across his cluttered desk at Pecos, tapping his fingers on his blotter. “Well, well, it is possible to get his neck in a hump, after all.”
“Oh, you can do it, all right,” Slash said. “Always best not to, though. It takes some doin’, indeed, but once Pecos has got a mad on, it takes a good long time to cool him off. Sometimes several days, and only after he’s turned a whole row of saloons to little more than matchsticks and jackstraws.” Slash chuckled dryly, switched positions in his chair. “That’s a bonded fact. I’m an eyewitness!”
He chuckled again.
“Duly noted,” Bledsoe said, impressed. He sipped from the shot glass on his desk. A tequila bottle stood near his right elbow, uncorked. He did not, however, invite the two cutthroats to imbibe with him and his assistant. It was one thing to employ two men he’d been, for most of his career, trying to run down and jail or execute, one of whom had crippled him, however inadvertently. But old Bleed-Em-So was not going to sink so low as to invite them to drink with him.
That would be like telling them he didn’t hold a grudge, which of course he did. Anyone would.
Smacking his lips, he set the glass back down on his desk and brushed two fingers across his lips. “All right, all right. What’s this about Jack Penny?”
“Gone to his reward,” Pecos said. “Which means he’s likely wielding a coal shovel about now.”
“Hmmm.” Bledsoe tapped his fingers on the blotter again. “Self-defense, I’m sure . . .”
“He bushwhacked us in the Thousand Delights. Baited us in with Jay.”
“I do hope the lovely Miss Breckenridge is unharmed,” Bledsoe said, sounding as though he meant it, though he was well aware that she’d once run with Pistol Pete and that Slash and Pecos had often holed up in her San Juan Mountain cabin between outlaw jobs. Still, it was hard for anyone to dislike Jay. Even old Bleed-Em-So.
“Fit as a fiddle,” Slash said. “A little shaken up is all.”
Bledsoe looked pointedly across his desk at “his” two cutthroats. “I hope I’m not going to read about this in the newspapers, gentlemen.”
Slash and Pecos shared another look.
“Jay’ll keep it out of the papers,” Slash said, adding with a definite edge in his voice and a burn in his belly, “She an’ the new marshal at Fort Collins are old pals, don’t ya know.”
Pecos glanced at him. Slash did not meet his gaze.
“Good, good,” Bledsoe said, leaning forward and entwining his hands on his desk. “All right, then, let us get down to pay dirt.”
CHAPTER 8
The willowy old chief marshal sagged back in his chair, thumbing his spectacles up his nose and entwining his hands once more behind his woolly head. “I got a job for you. Don’t let its simplicity spoil you.”
“A simple job,” Pecos said, smiling. “I like that.”
Bledsoe glanced at his assistant, who sat hunched over her desk, her back to the men. She appeared to be writing in one of the several legal pads surrounding her and her shot glass. Slash could hear the quick, unceasing sounds of her nib and the frequent clink as she dipped the pen into an inkwell.
“Do you have the file over there, Miss Langdon?” the chief marshal asked.
“Right here, Chief.” The gorgeous young woman plucked a manila folder off her desk and rose from her chair. She was a tall, big-boned young lady, a creature of the rocky fjords, yet she moved with the grace of a forest sprite. The air she displaced smelled of cherries and sage—just the right combination of sweet and spicy.
Slash heard Pecos draw a sharp breath as Miss Langdon leaned over the chief marshal’s desk to hand him the folder. Pecos squirmed a little in his chair. Slash elbowed him. Pecos glanced at him, scowling and flushing. Turning back toward her desk, Miss Langdon’s eyes met Pecos’s once more, and held.
Slash wasn’t sure, but he thought the beautiful Scandinavian quirked her mouth corners ever so slightly, appreciatively, before completing her turn toward her desk and sinking back into her chair, once again moving the air touched with the aromas of a springtime desert.
Bledsoe flipped through the file before him, holding one hand on his glasses as he skimmed the typed words.
“Yes, yes, all right,” the chief marshal said, closing the folder and tossing it aside. “Just needed to refresh my memory. As I said, don’t let the simplicity of this job spoil you. I thought of you for it since you’re in the freighting business and, after a year, seemed to be fairly handy at it.”
“Did I just hear a compliment?” Slash asked Pecos.
“Nah, couldn’t have been.”
Ignoring the cutthroats’ banter, Bledsoe leaned forward, elbows on his desk, hands steepled before him. “I want you to drive one of your freight wagons up to the mountain mining town of Tin Cup in the Sawatch Range, and haul a lode of gold bars from a mine up there, the Cloud Tickler, as it’s called—due to the high altitude in those parts—to Union Station in Denver. There the gold will be placed on a train to the federal mint in San Francisco.”
“Doesn’t the mine company usually have Wells Fargo haul the ore out of the mountains, Chief?” Slash asked, frowning.
“Of course, they do. Most mines up in that neck of the high-and-rocky ship their gold out by stagecoach. But there’s been a problem.”
“Robberies,” Pecos said.
“The Front Range Stage Company has been robbed so often that Wells Fargo refuses to haul gold for them anymore. Determined to catch the robbers but not wanting to risk losing another strongbox filled with gold, the mining company has instead hired undercover Pinkerton agents to ride the stage, guarding a dummy strongbox in hopes to catch the robbers red-handed once and for all, and get them out of their hair.”
Pecos was raking his thumb across the heel of his boot, which he had propped on his left knee. “Dummy strongbox, Chief?”
“You’ll be carryin’ the real one. You see, the Cloud Tickler isn’t taking any chances. They can’t afford to lose one more ounce of gold. So, while they’re gonna fill that stagecoach full of Pinkertons—there’ll even be a couple of Pinkertons in the driver’s boot, acting as driver and shotgun messenger—they’re not going to risk shipping the gold on that run. You’ll be shipping it in your freight wagon, in a hidden strongbox, taking a separate trail.”
“Just us?” Pecos asked, canting his head toward his partner. “Just me an’ Slash?”
“Just you two. If all goes as planned, no one will suspect that you two are anything but what you’ll be pretending to be—two freighters who drove a full load up to Tin Cup, picked up their pay, and are heading back out of the mountains to home sweet home.” Bledsoe paused, blinked, snapped his mouth slightly, adjusting his false teeth. His eyes shifted quickly between the pair. “Think you can handle that, boys?”
“I don’t know,” Slash said. “Somethin’ about this makes me a little uneasy. How much gold will we be hauling in our humble freighter?”
“Pretty damn close to a hundred thousand dollars’ worth.”
Slash and Pecos whistled at that.
Bledsoe said, “Gold prices are on the rise just now, and the Cloud Tickler is extracting some of the highest-grade ore in the Rockies at the moment. How long that will last is anyone’s guess, but right now it’s imperative they get their gold ingots out of those mountains and down to the train station in Denver.”
“Why don’t you throw a few guards in with us?” Pecos said. “If the company is mining that kind of color, surely they could afford it.”
Bledsoe took another sip of his tequila, extending one beringed pinky. He made sure the cutthroats knew it was right tasty stuff, smacking his lips and sighing as he returned the glass to his desk.
Again, he leaned forward and steepled his fingers before him. “Even the richest companies are tighter than the
bark on a tree. The way they see it, that’s how they stay rich. They’re paying enough money for the Pinkertons they’ve hired to corral the stage robbers. They don’t see the need to waste any more on your run, which should go without a hitch if you both play it right and don’t go getting drunk and shooting your mouths off in the various and sundry bordellos up thataway!”
Now it was Slash’s turn to cloud up and rain. “You know we didn’t stay two steps ahead of you and the other federals as well as bounty hunters all those years by getting drunk and shooting our mouths off about our holdup plans in hurdy-gurdy houses, Chief Bleed-Em-So!”
Bledsoe sat back in his chair, chuckling delightedly at the reaction he’d evoked. “No, no, you’re right there, Slash. That’s partly why I’ve chosen you boys for the job. And why there’s no need to throw Pinkertons at you. Besides, if anyone were to see more than you two within several hundred yards of your freighter, they might get wise to the ploy. No, it’s better this way—just you two and a seemingly empty freight wagon. Only . . .” Bledsoe raised his brows to convey the gravity of the operation. “Only, you’ll be hauling around one hundred thousand dollars of high-grade gold.”
“Damn,” Pecos said.
“Yeah,” Slash said. “Damn!”
Bledsoe furled his brows and carved deep lines of casti-gation across his high, weathered, liver-spotted forehead. “Don’t you two old cutthroats go gettin’ any ideas, now, you hear?”
“Ideas?” Slash said. “About what?”
“About what?” Bledsoe mocked, widening his eyes.
“Ah, hell, Chief,” Pecos said. “You know we done mended our ways. Why, neither me nor Slash would ever consider runnin’ off with that gold.”
“No?” Bledsoe asked.
“Of course not!” Pecos cried.
The chief marshal jerked a crooked finger toward Slash. “Then why is he sweating?”
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 6