“Well, then . . you an’ Cisco palavered it all out.”
“Yes.”
As the waiter delivered Jay’s coffee cup, Slash sipped his own mud and gave a stiff half-smile. Again, he felt that vein in his neck flutter. “I reckon you was up mighty late . . . with ole Cisco. Uh . . . sorry about that.” He dropped his gaze and took another sip of the coffee.
Jay lifted her cup and blew on her own steaming coffee. “Oh, it’s all right. Cisco and I go way back.”
“So you said.”
Jay sipped her coffee, then, setting the cup back down on its saucer, frowned across the table at him. “Slash, is something on your mind?”
“What’s that?” He cleared a constriction in his throat.
“You seem . . . well, odd.”
“Odd?”
“Oh, I know,” Jay said, lifting her cup again in her pale, elegant hands, the left one adorned with one simple ruby ring set in gold. “You met with Bleed-Em-So. That must be what’s wrong with you. Can you tell me what he wanted? Some new job for you and Pecos? Whatever it is, I hope it’s not too dangerous, Slash.”
“Oh, nah, nah,” Slash said. “Pretty simple, really. I won’t bore you with the details. We’ll be cuttin’ out purty soon. In fact . . .” He took a large, quick sip of his coffee. “I prob’ly best be pullin’ my picket pin. Pecos is prob—”
Jay reached across the table to place her hand on his. “Slash, what’s wrong?”
He frowned over his cup at her. “What do you mean?”
Jay returned his puzzled frown, though he vaguely opined that hers probably looked more authentic. “You’re wondering about Cisco Walsh and me, aren’t you?” She probed him more intensely with her stony, dark pupils. “That’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
“Ah, hell!” Slash said a little too loudly. “No, you got me wrong, Jay. Cisco—he looks like a right nice fella. Big and tall and broad-shouldered. Handsome as all get-out, I’m sure. Wears a polished badge. Tailor-cut suit made special. Has him a good upstandin’ badge pinned to his vest. I’m sure he’s right enticin’ to a purty woman like yourself. A good man all around.”
Jay’s expression changed from curiosity to incredulity. She set her coffee cup back down in its saucer, leaned back in her chair, and crossed her arms on the low-cut bodice of her dress. Her cheeks paled a little, and her lids hooded her eyes severely. “What if he did?”
“What’s that?”
“What if he did look right enticin’ to me?”
Jay paused, continuing to probe Slash with her gaze. He felt himself shrinking a little against it, his shoulders tightening, drawing closer together. That vein in his neck was writhing around like a rattler coming out of hibernation. He wished it would go back to sleep. He tried to say something, but the constriction had returned to his throat.
“Slash?”
He returned his gaze to her pointed one.
“How would you feel if I told you I fancied Cisco Walsh?” Keeping her eyes on his, Jay tucked her bottom lip under her top lip for a moment, then drew a shallow breath. “How would you feel if I told you that Cisco has told me that he fancies me, and that we’ve agreed to spend some time together? Some romantic time together. To see where it led us.” Again, she paused, making Slash’s heart flutter. He felt like a bug on a pin held up for close scrutiny. “How would you feel about that, Slash Braddock?”
CHAPTER 10
Slash stared back at Jay, sitting across the table from him. It was hard to hold her gaze. Her eyes were almost as hard and severe as that of an angry, challenging schoolmarm.
“How would I feel?” he croaked.
“Yes,” Jay said, crisply. “How would you feel?”
“I’d, uh . . . I’d, uh . . .”
“Yes? Out with it, amigo!”
Slash’s heartbeat increased. He sat up straight in his chair; then, crouching forward slightly, leaning toward Jay, he shoved his right hand into his right coat pocket. He wrapped his hand around the ring box. His heart was fairly racing now, and a hot wash of blood rose into his face. He started to pull the box out of his pocket.
Then he stopped.
He winced, grunted. He tried again to pull the ring out of his pocket.
Nothing doing. It was as though his right arm and hand had become paralyzed.
He tried again, but for the life of him, he could feel neither his hand nor the box he thought it was wrapped around. He grunted, winced. He looked at her staring back at him, one brow arched, waiting. She was opening and closing her hands around her arms, and he could hear her tapping the toe of one shoe on the floor beneath the table.
He tried again to pull the box from his pocket, but it was as though his entire body had returned to stone. His heart was pounding so fiercely that it ached. Sweat beaded his brows. That he could feel. It was not a good feeling at all.
Jay stared at him with those hard, cold eyes, waiting. “Well . . .”
Slash ran his tongue across the back of his upper teeth and swallowed. It was as though another man were speaking, though he could feel his own mouth shaping the words and letting them slither out from between his lips, while yet another voice inside him—his true, authentic voice, the voice that spoke from his heart of hearts—bellowed, “No, you damn fool! Tell her how you really feel, Slash Braddock! Ask the gal to marry you, because that’s what you really want, you lame-brained post-head! It’s all you’ve wanted for years, and it’s all you’re gonna continue to want for the rest of your silly days!”
“Slash,” Jay said, drawing another deep breath, “I’m going to ask you one more time . . .”
“How would I f-feel?” he said.
“Yes? How would you feel?”
The imposter inside him smiled winningly—oh, what a cunning, confident con artist he was, too!—and chuckled. “He’s a helluva fella, Jay. I can tell. A right upstanding citizen with a bold future. You deserve the best of men. If you wanted to go ahead and let Cisco Walsh spark you, then I’d give you my blessing. I know Pecos would, too.”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket, only vaguely amazed that he could feel it again, and glanced at the clock on the wall. “In the meantime, I reckon I’d best tramp on back to the salt mine before Pecos sends out a catch party for me. We have some ground to cover.”
Chuckling again as though he didn’t have a care in the world—while his heart of hearts was tearing in two—he rose smoothly from his chair, tossed his napkin onto the table, and donned his hat. “Take care, Jay. See you when we get back. Say hi to the marshal for me!”
Jay sat back in her chair, half-slumped, as though all the air had gone out of her. She stared up at him, her face pale, a thin sheen of tears accumulating in her beautiful eyes. Slash winked, nodded, turned away, and tramped on out of the dining room and into the hotel’s foyer.
He must have blacked out on his feet for a time, for he wasn’t aware of anything for several minutes, until he found himself halfway across Main Street, heading for the freight yard, with a man’s voice cussing him royally, “Get out of the road, you dunderhead! Watch where you’re goin’! I damn near let ole Betty run you down!”
Slashed stopped abruptly and turned to see a big Percheron standing not six feet away from him, on his right. The big draft animal had her ears pinned back and was shaking her head incredulously, pawing at the dirt with one front hoof the size of a dinner plate.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” shouted the big man on the driver’s seat of the wagon the Perch was pulling. “Are you drunk so early in the morning or soft in your thinker box?”
Slash realized with a shudder how close he’d come to being smashed as flat as an immigrant’s hat. He held up a placating hand, palm out. “Sorry, friend.”
“Damn dunderhead!” The big man, whom Slash recognized as a ramrod for one of the local ranches, shook the reins over the Percheron’s back. As the horse and ranch supply wagon lumbered forward, the big man scowled down at Slash once more and said, “B
y God, you’re lucky I wasn’t asleep at the reins or you’d be no more than a grease spot in the street!”
Sheepish, Slash continued across the street and then turned down a side street. He still felt numb, as though his body were not his own. He also felt a little sick to his stomach and imagined he looked a little green around the gills.
What had he just done?
He’d turned tail, that’s what he’d done.
He started to feel a little better about things, to forget about the horrific scene he’d left behind at the Thousand Delights, when, walking into the freight yard, he saw a familiar figure standing on the freight office’s wooden front porch with Pecos. A familiar horse—a calico mare—stood at one of the two hitchracks fronting the humble log building. Pecos and the young woman, dressed in a calico blouse, wool skirt, and worn boots, were facing each other on the porch, conversing, both smiling.
When Pecos saw Slash approaching on foot, he beckoned with one arm and said, “Slash, get your skinny ass over here and see who’s come callin’!”
Slash quickened his pace. “Myra?”
Myra Thompson turned to Slash, and another broad smile split her young, pretty face, deeply tanned and owning a comely splash of freckles across her nose and her youthfully smooth cheeks. Myra was a pretty, brown-eyed girl of nineteen or twenty with thick curly auburn hair spilling across her shoulders.
“Hi, Slash.” Myra was turning a broad-brimmed felt hat in her hands, nervously pinching up the rawhide-stitched edges.
Slash laughed, happy to see the girl again, and leaped up to the veranda two steps at a time. He took her in his arms and squeezed her tight—this pretty, rustic young mountain woman, the daughter of a now-dead prospector; she’d once come very close to cleaning his and Pecos’s clocks not all that long ago in the San Juan Mountains, near the mining camp of Silverton.
Jay had saved the two old cutthroats from that little whipsaw their own foolishness had led them into. Jay had knocked Myra out cold as the girl had been about to drill both Slash and Pecos where they’d lain reeling from the raw opium with which she’d spiked their whiskey, having feigned a twisted ankle and luring them into her camp. Both men had always been suckers for a comely female form, no matter what age. It had turned out that Myra had been riding with the very gang—Slash and Pecos’s old gang, in fact—whom Bleed-Em-So had assigned Slash and Pecos to wipe out.
The Snake River Marauders had sent Myra to hornswoggle the old cutthroats with her youthful beauty and charm, and to snuff their wicks before Slash and Pecos could foil the gang’s train-robbing plans. Myra had accepted the nasty assignment only because she’d been desperate for the gang’s protection, her father being dead and her time as a pretty young woman alone in Silverton having turned out far darker than she’d expected. Slash, Pecos, and Jay had turned the girl back right, and Myra had helped them run the gang to final ground.
Now, here the pretty girl was—shy, beaming, and fresh as a May morning here on the porch of the freight office.
Slash held Myra away from him and smiled down at her. “Good to see you again, kid. But what brings you out here to this jerkwater town? I thought you were gonna throw in with your uncle in Denver? Didn’t you say he ran a saloon up that way . . . ?”
“Yep, I sure did, Slash.” The girl’s smile turned stiff, and she glanced sheepishly up at Pecos. “I was just about to get to that with Pecos, in fact.”
Slash assumed rightly that she’d just arrived.
“What’s up, kid?” Pecos said. “Somethin’ happen with your uncle?”
“It sure did.” A bitterness entered Myra’s voice, and a sour expression twisted her mouth. “He turned out to be little better than some of the saloon owners I’d known in Silverton.”
Slash frowned. “You mean, he . . . ?”
“Wanted to put me to work. Upstairs. I went there to work for him. I certainly didn’t expect him to put me up for free. But I didn’t expect him, my own uncle, to expect me to work upstairs!” Tears rolled down the girl’s cheeks, and she angrily swiped them away with the backs of her hands.
“Ah, hell,” Pecos said, wrapping an arm around Myra’s shoulders and drawing her taut against him. “What a rotten thing to do to a man’s own niece.”
“I didn’t realize, but I guess my aunt died of some sickness nigh on a year ago.”
“There, there, kid,” Slash said, brushing another tear from her cheek with his thumb. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”
“What can we do to help? You need some money? It’s not like we’re loaded, but . . .”
“No.” Myra shook her head and smiled up at the tall, blond cutthroat. “I didn’t come here for a handout. I came here because you’re the only two decent, honorable men I know in all the frontier. Not that I know that many.”
She gave a rueful chuckle. “I came because I thought . . . well, I thought maybe that now, since you’ve been set up here almost a year, you could use a hand about the place. You know . . .” She glanced at the crude log cabin behind her, then looked from Pecos to Slash and back again. “A woman’s touch. I can clean and cook for you, and over the long winters up in the San Juans, I got to know a schoolteacher who taught me to read an’ cipher and even to keep accounts. I could keep your books for you, if you wanted,” Myra added demurely.
Slash glanced at Pecos. Pecos looked at Slash, and then his gaze lifted to something or someone behind Slash, in the direction of the road that led to the freight yard. Slash heard the crunch and scuff of approaching footsteps. He turned to see their hired man, Todd Elwood, enter the yard through the gate. Elwood was a short-legged, round-bellied man with thin, straw-blond hair poking out from his battered felt hat. He wore a shabby red-and-white checked shirt under his usual suit coat, which was splitting at the seams and coppered from many hours in the sun.
Elwood managed to latch the gate, then, starting toward the office, he tripped over the torn front flap of his right, mule-eared boot. He stumbled forward and sideways and nearly went down before he got his boots beneath him once more.
“Whoa now,” he said as though to an unruly team of mules. “Whoa . . . whoa, now . . .”
He continued forward, holding his arms, which appeared too long for the rest of his body, out to both sides as though for balance. The sunlight glinted on something poking up from the right, torn pocket of his coat.
Slash scowled.
A bottle.
Slash glanced at Pecos again. The two men shared a dark look, then Slash walked down the porch steps.
“Todd, where in the hell were you last night?”
The bedraggled man, in his late thirties and with a sun-seasoned face with a slender coyote nose bright red from drink, stopped ten feet from Slash and squinted his watery blue eyes, as though he were having trouble focusing. “What . . . what do ya mean, Mister Braddock?”
From the porch, Pecos said, “We pulled in last night late, and you weren’t here to tend the mules. We had to tend ’em ourselves, as tired and in need of food an’ drink as we was. That’s what we hired you for, Todd—to wrangle and tend the mules and to swamp out the barn and to keep the corral clean.”
“We got back to find the barn and the corral both a mess,” Slash said, his voice sharp with anger.
Elwood looked around, vaguely sheepish, running his hands nervously up and down on his ratty coat. “Well . . . I waited till five o’clock, an’ . . . an’ when you fellas didn’t show, I, uh . . .”
“You headed off to a saloon and likely been there till a few minutes ago,” Pecos said.
“Or some lowly doxy’s canvas crib,” Slash opined.
“We told you to stay here till we got back, Todd. We set you up in your own room in the lean-to off the barn. That’s where you live. Right here. On the premises. So you can take care of the mules any time you’re needed.”
“You should’ve been here, Todd,” Slash added. “That’s what we pay you for.”
Elwood’s dark eyes flashed yellow bayonets
of sudden, raw fury. He jerked an arm up and pointed a dirty finger at the two cutthroats. “I waited till five o’clock! I don’t get paid to wait no later than that!”
Slash gave a dry chuff. “You waited till three at the latest. Then you lit out. We told you when we hired you that you’re to tend the mules whenever we arrive from a haul—day or night. And no tipplin’!”
“I got me a feelin’,” Pecos said, raking a pensive thumb down his unshaven jaw, “that Todd hasn’t been here since we left. I got me a feelin’ he thought that the days we were gone were a vacation for him. He looks a mite like he’s been on a bender, Slash.”
“I’ll go you one better, partner,” Slash said. “He smells like it, too.”
“You’ve done this before, Todd,” Pecos said in a stern, level voice. “We warned you before about cuttin’ out an’ goin’ on a tear. I took a chance on you when, uh, Jimmy here warned me not to, and that makes him right, and I plumb hate it when he’s right!”
“I can do what he does.”
Slash and Pecos turned to Myra, still standing on the porch, her hat in her hands, the morning breeze nudging the thick locks of her curly auburn hair.
“What’s that, darlin’?” Pecos asked.
“I can tend the mules. I can muck out the barn and the corral. What’s more, I can keep order in the office here and in your livin’ quarters. I can cook and I can clean and I can keep your accounts in order.” Myra’s voice had been rising steadily with resolve as she’d looked from Pecos to Slash, then back again. “And I can do it all for what you’re payin’ him.”
“A dollar a day to do all that?” Slash asked, skeptically.
“A dollar a day,” Myra said with a slow nod. “And room an’ board.”
Slash and Pecos shared a conferring look. The two men, reading each other’s minds, shaped slow, broad smiles. “Well, hell, darlin’,” Slash said, “you got yourself a place to hang your hat!”
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 8