“Now, just wait a minute!” Elwood stumbled forward, his face turning red with fury behind a thin coat of scraggly beard stubble. “That there is nothin’ but a girl. Why, she can’t do a man’s work!”
“I say she can,” Pecos said, drawing Myra against him again, smiling proudly. “I say she can do all your work—if we can call it work—and one hell of a lot more. And you know what?”
“What?” Slash and Myra said at the same time.
“We’re gonna pay her a dollar plus fifty cents a day.”
“We are?” Slash said, weakly.
“Now, just you wait here!” Elwood took one more shambling step forward, his eyes even brighter now with rage and moist with emotion. “I won’t stand for bein’ insulted like this. I waited till three o’clock. No, no, wait! I meant five o’clock! I waited till five o’clock, an’ then I headed off for a drink and got lassoed into a poker game!”
“Three o’clock,” Slash said, smiling knowingly. “I had me a feelin’.”
“No, no!” Elwood yelled. “You just got me all confused is all!”
Pecos’s own blue eyes bored invisible holes through the enraged scalawag. “Give him his time, Slash. Send him on his way.”
“Love to.” Reaching into his shirt pocket, Slash withdrew the envelope containing his and Pecos’s take from their last run. He counted out a few bills and held them out to Elwood, who merely glared back at Slash, fists bunched at his sides.
“I won’t stand for bein’ treated this way.” The drunk’s voice was brittle with barely controlled rage.
“I’m gonna drop these bills,” Slash warned. “And then I’ll be payin’ the wind and you’ll take nothin’. Try to buy whiskey and even the cheapest parlor girl with nothin’, Todd.”
Quickly, Elwood reached up and snatched the bills out of Slash’s hand. He cursed both men, and he cursed Myra for a lowly whore, and then he wheeled and stomped back in the direction from which he’d come. When he’d crawled through the Texas gate, he turned back and shouted, “You three haven’t heard the last of Todd Elwood—I’ll guarantee you that!”
“If I see you on the place again,” Slash warned, “I’ll shoot you on sight, Todd. Just like any other damn coyote!”
Elwood made a lewd gesture, then stumbled away, casting frequent enraged glances back over his shoulder.
Pecos turned to Myra. “You sure you’re up for this?”
“Hell yes, I am!” The girl smiled broadly, looking purely giddy at the prospect of finally having a home again. “I can do twice or three times that man’s work.”
“There’s a hell of a lot to do around here,” Slash warned. “Maybe you better have a look around first, and think about it.”
“I can handle anything you two old cutthroats can throw at me!” Myra smiled proudly, then turned to open the office’s front door. She peered inside.
She froze, tensed, sniffed, then turned back to Pecos and Slash.
“My God,” she croaked, covering her mouth and nose with her hand. “What on earth is that smell?”
Pecos sighed. “Slash shot a rat last week. It’s in there somewhere, but on account o’ the mess, we ain’t been able to find the wretched thing!”
CHAPTER 11
“That girl’s taken a shine to you,” Slash said, glancing at Pecos sitting beside him on the driver’s seat. “You know that, don’t you?”
Pecos frowned at him. “Who?”
“Myra, ya dope!”
“Myra? Taken a shine to me? Why, she’s young enough to be . . . well, she’s young enough to be the oldest daughter of my oldest brother. Oldest brother by a long shot!” Pecos snorted to himself and ran a sleeve of his suit coat across his mouth.
“She’s old enough to be your daughter, ya lout!”
“She’s old enough to be my daughter if I fathered her when I was still a boy. Now, that’s as far as I’m gonna go. You keep pushin’ it, I’m gonna drag you down off this noisy contraption and kick your bony behind!”
“All right, all right. Don’t get your bloomers in a twist. I’ll let that part go. Fer now.” Slash shook his head and gave a wry chuff. “Believe me, I’m even more confounded by the situation my ownself. Don’t see how anyone could take a shine to an old scudder such as yourself, let alone a pretty young thing like Myra Thompson. But she has, all right. You maybe can’t see it, but I can.”
He turned to his partner, gesturing with his hands. “Every time she looks at you, she gets two little pink dots and one large pink dot right here on her cheeks.”
“Oh, she don’t, neither.”
“Does, too.”
They were riding along through the mountains, following a narrow, winding valley toward the Sawatch Range. This was their first day on the trail. They’d gotten a late start after the row with Todd Elwood and having to show Myra around the freight yard.
It was just after midday, and Slash was driving the team of four mules. They were leading their saddle horses—Slash’s Appaloosa and Pecos’s buckskin. Sometimes a man had to ride far wide of these well-traveled mountain trails to find game of a night, and it was best to have a good saddle horse along for that purpose.
The box behind the two former cutthroats was empty. Slash had thought it best just to cover it with a tarpaulin rather than fill it with wood. This way, the pull would be easier on the mules, and they’d make better time in climbing to Tin Cup.
Bleed-Em-So’s advice about the wood be damned. He’d likely never driven a freight wagon before.
No one had any reason to believe the two freighters were not hauling freight in their freight wagon.
“She don’t neither.”
“She does, too!”
Pecos glanced at Slash, one brow arched over a lake blue eye beneath a thin blond brow. “You really think so?”
“I know so. All mornin’, she was followin’ you around like a long-lost stray that had finally found its owner. Only”—Slash grinned at the big blond freighter—“I heard violins sawing soft and low in her heart.”
“I’ll be damned.” Pecos looked straight ahead over the mules’ twitching ears and shook his head. “So I wasn’t just imagining it.”
“You sensed it, too?”
Pecos grimaced, nodded. “Yeah, I could kinda feel her eyes on me too long at a stretch. Then when I’d look at her, she’d look away right quick an’ flush like you said, or she’d continue gazin’ up at me, her eyes fairly glowin’ like sunshine through rose petals.”
“Like sunshine through rose petals. Damn! No wonder she’s gone for you—you silver-tongued old devil!”
“I think I mighta stole that from somewhere,” Pecos lied.
Slash dug a half-smoked cheroot out of his shirt pocket, inside his coat, and stuck it in his mouth. “What’re you gonna do about it?”
He scratched a lucifer to life on his thumbnail.
“I don’t know. It makes a fella feel like struttin’ with his feathers out to know such a young, purty thing gets all fluttery-hearted over him, but you’re right. I’m too damn old for her. She needs her a younger man.” Pecos sighed. “Oh, well. She’ll be alone there in Fort Collins a few days before we get back. The way she looks, she’ll turn more than a few heads around town in that time. Hell, by the time we get back to the freight yard, there’ll probably be a whole line of young men linin’ up at her front door, waitin’ to ask for her hand in holy matrimony.”
“Maybe.”
Pecos glanced at Slash. “Say, I forgot to ask. Speakin’ of our love lives, how’d it go with Jay?”
Slash’s belly twisted. “How’d what go?”
“I assume you seen her this mornin’ in the Thousand Delights. I figured you went alone so you could talk to her—you know.” Pecos grinned insinuatingly. “Private-like.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You mean you didn’t see her?”
“No, I didn’t go in alone to see her private-like.” Slash paused, winced. “Or . . . maybe I did. I’m not sure.”
<
br /> “Slash, fer cryin’ in Grant’s whiskey, did you see her or not?”
“What’s it to you?”
Pecos studied him through one narrowed eye. “Did you make a mess of it?”
Slash stretched his lips back from his teeth in silent agony. Only half aware of what he was doing, he steered the mules around a tree that had fallen partly into the trail. When they were past the hazard, he blew out a long breath, and said, “I think I lost her for good.”
“What happened?”
“She asked me if I’d object to her steppin’ out with Cisco Walsh.”
“She did? She asked you that?”
“Sure as hell.”
“What’d you say?”
“I don’t wanna tell you. You’ll drag me off this noisy contraption and kick my scrawny ass.” Slash turned to his friend in misery. “And you know what, Pecos?”
“What?”
“It’d be too good for me!”
“She was testin’ you—you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know that.”
“So what’d you tell her? Go ahead—risk it. Your punishment can’t get any more severe.”
“I wished her the best.”
Pecos blinked, astounded. “You wished her the best?”
“Yep, that’s what I did, all right.” Slash jerked back on the ribbons and worked the brake. “Whoa, now, Socrates!” he called to the lead puller. “Whoa, Katie! Whoahhhh, you hayburners!”
“What’re you gonna do?” Pecos asked him when the wagon had stopped.
Slash set the brake, then clambered down off the wagon, his guts roiling. “I think . . . I think I’m gonna air out my paunch!”
He stumbled off into the brush.
CHAPTER 12
Two days later, they rolled into Tin Cup, a bustling little mining camp way up high in the Sawatch Range, within hailing distance of both the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River to the west and the Royal Gorge to the east. It was beautiful alpine country, teeming with craggy granite peaks dipped in the ermine of last winter’s snows and jade-green beaver meadows awash with lens-clear, high-altitude sunshine.
Even in August, the air was fresh and as heady-smelling as a sparkling French wine. Or at least what Slash imagined a sparkling French wine would smell like if he ever got the chance, which didn’t seem likely.
While the countryside around Tin Cup was like a reclusive mountain man’s dream, Tin Cup itself was a stinky little perdition, a clearing in the fur and spruce forest choked with log cabins and tar-paper shanties and privies and plank-board stock pens and canvas hovels soaked with mud.
A lot of rain fell at this altitude—rain and hail and even snow after July—so the mud was a good foot deep in and around the town proper. The streets were stitched with half-submerged boardwalks that made walkways of sorts, though you couldn’t count on the sodden wood to keep your boots or skirts dry.
About all they really did was kept you from drowning.
Slash and Pecos put their wagon and mules up in the High Country Federated Livery and Feed Barn, telling the pipe-smoking liveryman, whose boots were surrounded by half-wild barn cats of every size and color, that they’d already off-loaded their freight and were looking to hole up for a day before starting back down out of the mountains to Denver. Fortunately, the man wasn’t overly curious about the pair of strangers. Nor did he seem skeptical about their story. Smoking his corncob pipe, he began unhitching the team and humming “Sweet Betsy from Pike” to himself while the cats rubbed against his ankles and Slash and Pecos headed out into the mire that was Tin Cup.
Following the instructions provided by Bleed-Em-So’s file, which they’d burned in their previous evening’s campfire, they headed over to the Sportsman’s Saloon—a large but crude log building resembling a military barrack and fronted by a large halve-logged veranda propped up from the mud by two-foot-high stone pylons and outfitted with unpeeled pine rails. Smoke from the saloon’s stone chimney flattened out over the roof to swirl into the street like thick fog laced with the enticing aromas of a succulent stew.
Burly men in mud-splashed wool laughed with parlor girls on the front porch.
Inside was a good-sized crowd for so early in the afternoon.
Slash and Pecos strode casually up to the bar. When the barman had finished setting a bowl of steaming stew onto the bar beside a frothy beer schooner fronting a one-eyed, thickset jake clad in stinky damp wool and a leather-billed immigrant hat, he turned to Slash and Pecos, arching both brows inquiringly.
Slash smiled at the man and said, “Hello, friend. My partner and I would each like a beer. A big one. We’re teetotalers, don’t ya know, but we decided to celebrate.”
“Oh?” the barman said. He was tall and middle-aged, with short, black hair parted on one side, shiny with oil and showing the tracks from his comb. He rolled a lucifer match around between his thin lips. His eyes were as black as the mud in the street. “What’re you fellas celebratin’, if you don’t mind me askin’?”
“It’s my dear pappy’s birthday, don’t ya know,” Pecos said.
“Your pappy’s birthday, eh?” the barman said. “How old would your pappy be today, son?”
“If he were still alive, he’d be eighty-one. Thanks for askin’.”
The barman probed Pecos with his eyes, then slid his inquiring, vaguely suspicious gaze to Slash and said, “Well, hell, then. I reckon the first ones are on me. Why don’t you fellas go sit down, and I’ll bring you a bowl of stew and some fresh bread? Looks like you’ve come a far piece.”
“We have at that, we have at that,” Slash said, smiling and slapping a hand down atop the bar in gratitude. “And we thank you mighty kindly.”
He and Slash moseyed over to a table abutting the front window, left of the batwings. They hadn’t been sitting for long when the barman came over with a tray.
He set two big mugs of dark ale on the table and followed them up with two steaming bowls of what appeared to be venison stew rife with carrots, potatoes, onions, and even a few peas. He set a plate with several thick slices of crusty brown bread on the table between the two cutthroats-turned-freighters.
“There ya be, boys!” the man said, straightening and grinning down at the customers, showing one silver eyetooth. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Here, let me pay for the stew,” Slash said, reaching into a pocket.
Clamping the empty tray under one arm, the barman held up his other hand. “I won’t hear of it.” He glanced at Pecos. “It’s the least I can do to help you celebrate your pappy’s birthday. Besides”—he leaned forward and grinned like the cat that ate the canary—“I know that once you’ve partaken of my own personally brewed beer and stew, you’ll be back many times for more!”
He winked, chuckled, and strode away.
Slash and Pecos looked at each other, frowning incredulously.
Slash looked around at the surface of the table, and then, as inconspicuously as possible, he peered under it. Still not seeing what he was looking for, he glanced at Pecos and shrugged. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, took a long slug of the malty ale, grabbed a spoon, and started digging into his stew.
Lifting the steaming spoonful of meat and gravy to his mouth, he glanced across the table and froze.
He cleared his throat just loudly enough for Pecos to hear. Pecos looked at him. Slash dropped his chin as he stared down at the slip of paper poking out from beneath Pecos’s stew bowl.
Pecos followed Slash’s gaze. His eyes widened. He glanced around the room before casually pinching up a corner of the paper and sliding it out from beneath the bowl. It was a lined leaf from a small notebook, folded once.
Again casually, Pecos brushed his thumb across the note, opening it. Pecos lowered his head, frowning down at the missive, silently moving his lips.
So as not to look like he was interested in anything except his stew, Slash chowed down with his spoon in one hand, a thick slice of bread in his other hand. As he dipped th
e bread into the stew, he whispered across the table between bites: “What’s it say?”
Pecos’s brows ridged over his eyes as he looked down at the paper, still silently moving his lips.
Slash gave a dry snort. He quickly shuttled his eyes around the room. No one in the watering hole appeared in the least bit interested in the newcomers, so he set his bread down, reached quickly across the table, and pulled the note over to his side.
“Dammit, Slash, I woulda sounded it out if you’d given me half a minute!” Pecos complained under his breath, indignant.
“Half the day, more like. I thought you sparked a literate woman a while back. One who read books.”
“I did, but she read to me, an’ she wasn’t all high an’ mighty about it, neither!”
Again, Slash snorted as he stared down at the note, written in a swirling feminine hand in blue-black ink. Quickly, he folded the note closed, slid it beneath his bowl, then took up his bread again.
“Well?” Pecos said, cutting a furtive glance around the room and then spooning stew into his mouth. “What’s it, say, you smug bastard?”
“It says, ‘Room fourteen, the Palace Hotel, eleven-thirty p.m. Do not draw attention to yourselves.’ ”
“That’s it?”
“What more did you want it to say?”
“Well . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Eat your stew and drink your beer, ya big dummy.”
“Don’t press your luck, you scrawny-assed cuss!” Pecos said, eyes blazing angrily. “You still got my blood up for mocking my readin’ skills.”
“Or lack of same,” Slash said, chuckling and stuffing a chunk of stew-soaked bread into his mouth.
* * *
An eerie ping! sounded to Slash’s left. Just off his left ear, in fact.
It was followed closely by a dull wooden thud! in the wall on the other side of his and Pecos’s small room in the Palace Hotel.
Slash saw the nickel-sized hole in the opposite wall, just above a small oil painting of a scantily clad blond woman lounging dreamily on a fainting couch while a man in a dark suit and wearing a creepy smile crept up behind her through an open door. At the same time, the report from the gun that had fired the bullet reached Slash’s ears—a sharp bark of thunder characteristic of a .45.
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 9