“Oh, shut up.”
“Both of you, shut up, and get me down to the wagon!” the girl yelled.
“All right, all right,” Slash said. “Don’t get your bloomers in a twist.” As he and Pecos started walking down the slope toward their horses, the girl following, aiming her derringer at them, Slash said, “What about your friends here?”
“What about ’em?”
“Don’t you wanna bury ’em?”
“They’re dead. They don’t deserve burying. No more than I would if I were among them—dead. Not after the foolish stunt we pulled—letting ourselves ride into that ambush!”
As they approached the horses, Slash shook his head. “You’re a tough one, Hattie.”
“It’s Operative Number One to you, cutthroat!” the girl bit out behind him.
“I’m not gonna keep choking on my tongue every time I address you, Miss Hattie,” Slash said, wheeling and, catching her off guard, snatching the derringer out of her right hand.
“Ouch!” she cried, stumbling forward. “Oh, you—”
“And you ain’t gonna keep that little popper aimed at my back,” Slash continued. “I don’t doubt you know how to use it, but it’s a silly man who’d let a girl keep a gun aimed at him when he don’t have to.”
“How dare you! Why, you’re nothing more than a—!” She lunged at him, bringing her open right hand up and around to slap him. He grabbed her around her narrow waist, and before her hand could hit its target, he’d tossed her up onto his Appy’s back, behind his saddle. Her hand swatted only air.
“How dare you!” she cried again, deeply indignant.
Slash glanced at Pecos, who regarded him skeptically as the bigger man swung up onto his buckskin’s back. Slash sighed as he boarded his own horse. He glanced back at the young woman, who sat glaring at him, gritting her teeth and firing miniature bayonets with her eyes. “Hold on tight, now, darlin’,” he said, adding with an ironic snort, “I sure wouldn’t want to lose you!”
He pointed the Appaloosa downhill and touched spurs to its flanks.
Hattie cursed him all the way back down to the valley.
“Where is it?” she yelled behind him when they hit level ground. “Oh, my God—where is it?”
“Keep your pantaloons on—we ain’t there yet!”
“Oh, my God!” the girl cried. “They’ve taken it! I know they’ve taken it! Oh, the humiliation of this! The shame! Mister Pinkerton will send me packing, and rightly so!”
“Like I said, keep your pantaloons on, honey,” Slash said. “See—there it is! Right where we left it!” He laughed in relief as he and Pecos put their horses up to the rear of the wagon, behind the rocks that hid it from the trail. “Look there, the cover’s still on it. Why, I don’t think it’s been molested in the least bit!”
He laughed again, giddy in his liberation from the anxiety that had gnawed at his gut while Hattie had chewed his ears all the way down the mountain.
He stopped the Appy and swung his right leg over the horn, dropping straight down to the ground. Pecos dismounted the blowing, sweat-lathered buckskin and straightened his hat.
“Check it out, partner,” Slash said.
“Here we go.” Pecos released the tarpaulin from the steel rings in the tailgate and then from around the sides of the box. He whipped it forward against the box’s front panel.
Slash let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The strongbox was still there, unmolested.
He blinked. Blinked again, rubbed his eyes.
He’d only been half right. The box was still there, all right. In the middle of the wagon. The chains were still attached. Only—the locks had been sprung!
Pecos must have seen the same thing Slash had seen at the same time Slash had seen it. He’d been grinning in relief. Only, now his smile quickly vanished without a trace.
The two men shared a dark look.
Slash leaped into the bed of the wagon. He dropped to a knee for a closer look.
Sure enough, the jaws of the locks were open.
His gloved hands shaking, Slash lifted the box’s lid.
“Ah, hell!” rattled out his lips, pitched with anguish.
All the box contained were a dozen or so pine cones arranged into a stick figure’s face complete with mocking smile.
Behind Slash, someone gave a breathy groan.
He turned to see Hattie, who’d been standing off the end of the wagon, faint. She dropped like a sack of thrown grain.
* * *
Just after sunset, Pecos was making his way back through woods toward the campfire he could see flickering in the near darkness of this narrow mountain valley, when he heard something on his left. A strange sound. Not a natural sound.
Could some of the gang of thieving killers have turned back to scour Slash, Pecos, and the pretty Pink from their trail?
The sound had come from the stream, a tributary of the Taylor River, rushing through the rocks and boulders over there, about seventy or so yards from the small clearing in which, after a long, frustrating afternoon of tracking the half-dozen thieves, Slash, Pecos, and the young Pinkerton had finally made camp.
Taking his Colt revolving rifle in both hands, Pecos moved toward the stream. He didn’t have to move too carefully, for the low rushing of the stream itself would cover his approach. He stopped where he could see the last pink, pearl, and green wash of late light reflecting off the water beyond three tall spruces, then bulled slowly between two of the pyramidal evergreens, and stopped suddenly.
Oh, my . . .
A figure stood before him, not ten feet away. It was none of the thieving killers. It was the pretty young Pinkerton, whose first name, Hattie, was the only name Pecos knew her by. Aside from Operative Number One, that was.
She must have finally gotten tired enough of the blood that had crusted on nearly every inch of her and that she’d refused to waste time cleaning off, so desperately focused had she been on catching up to the murdering gold robbers. Now, however, after they’d finally stopped for the night, and Slash was tending the fire, she’d decided to come out to the creek for a bath.
And . . . here she was . . . in all her naked, ripe young glory, standing not ten feet away from Pecos, on the edge of the stream, half facing Pecos while she ran a towel across her chest and dabbed it under her right arm.
Pecos’s throat was tight and dry.
His pulse throbbed in his temples.
Oh, my . . .
He needed to be on his way, but he was afraid that if he moved, she’d see him. She’d think he was spying on her. Ogling her. And that, by God, had not been his intention!
No, sir. Not by a long shot.
But Pecos had to admit that if there were any pretty young Pinkerton detectives anywhere on the planet that he would have wanted to ogle, this one standing butt-naked not ten feet away from him, her wet hair glinting in the last light, would likely be the one.
Tightening his jaws and stretching his lips back from his teeth, Pecos began to backtrack ever so slowly. He wanted to move faster, but for some reason, his feet felt like lead, and he could not remove his eyes, howsoever much he intended to—wanted to!—from the spectacular, mind-numbing, heart-wrenching scene before him.
Come on, dammit, move! he silently ordered himself.
But he could not get his feet to work. That damn towel kept moving across the nicely rounded body before him, making certain parts move in such damned beguiling ways, that—
As the girl lifted her left arm to dab beneath it with the towel, she turned her head in the same direction. She must have glimpsed Pecos standing behind her, because she froze for just a second.
No, no, no, no! Pecos silently shrieked at the girl. Don’t look over here! No need to look over here!
She screamed.
Oh, hell!
She screamed again and whipped around to face Pecos, covering her well-formed bosoms with the towel and leaping backward, long wet hair dancing across her slende
r shoulders.
“No!” Pecos shouted, holding his rifle out to his side in one hand and thrusting his left hand forward, palm out. “No! I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . !”
“What are you doing?” the girl screamed, then lunged to her left. The hazy, weakening light glinted off something on a rock over there.
Oh, no. That damned derringer of hers!
CHAPTER 17
At the same time, but roughly a hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, Jaycee Breckenridge drew in a deep draught of fresh, northern Colorado air and said, “What a heavenly time of the day. Thank you so much, Cisco, for luring me out of the Thousand Delights for a badly needed stretch of my legs and a good lung clearing.”
“Not at all, Jay. Glad I could help.”
“I swear,” Jay said as they stopped, arm in arm, at the west edge of town to stare toward Horsetooth Rock, beyond which the sun had just dropped, pulling the crimson bayonets of its last rays down along with it, “I inhale so much cigarette and cigar smoke all day, I forget what clean air really smells like. I go to bed feeling as though I’ve smoked a couple dozen quirleys rolled with cheap tobacco!”
“Yes, it can’t be healthy,” the tall, handsome marshal said, squeezing her hand in his. “But I have to admit that my motives for asking you out for a walk were farther reaching than just my concern for your health, Miss Breckenridge.” He rose up on the toes of his polished black cavalry boots and gave his chin a cordial dip while lifting his dragoon-style mustache in a toothy smile.
Jay turned to him, giving both her copper brows a feigned coy arch. “Oh? And what other motives might you have, pray tell? Careful now, Marshal, I do believe I’m within hailing distance of First Avenue. You wouldn’t want a scandal on your hands—now, would you? To be arrested by your own deputies would be downright embarrassing, I would think!”
She chuckled throatily.
Marshal Walsh chuckled, as well, and patted her hand, which he held firmly in his own. “Never to worry, milady,” he said through another oily grin. “I give you my word as a gentleman as well as an upholder of the law that your honor is safe in my hands.”
He chuckled again, a tad nervously, self-consciously, Jay silently opined. Then he cleared his throat and, sobering somewhat, bounced up and down again on the toes of his boots and said, “All jokes aside, I must confess that I invited you out here because I’ve simply come to enjoy your company.”
“Oh?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Obvious?” Jay frowned. “In what way?”
“Well, you must have seen me frequenting the Thousand Delights. Several times a day,” he added with another charming smile.
“You’re not the only man, Cisco, who enjoys our free lunch counter. Some of that summer sausage I ship up here from Denver, and the cheese—”
“It is not the sausage nor the cheese, dear Jay, that beckons me through your doors so often.”
“It’s not? Oh, well, then’t. . .” Jay let her voice trail off as she returned her gaze toward the appropriately named Horsetooth Rock, now fully silhouetted against a lime green sky. “You have me at a disadvantage, then, Marshal Walsh. I do know you haven’t called on any of my girls in several weeks . . .”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Do you find them, um . . . less than satisfactory? Let me assure you, I have Dr. Raskin examine each one every two weeks, just to make sure none of my customers can complain of unexpected surprises.”
Walsh canted his head to one side and arranged a mock-admonishing expression on his broad, handsome face beneath the narrow brim of his crisp bowler. “Come now, Jay. Don’t be coy. You know how I feel about you. You must have known how I’ve felt about you since we first met in Abilene.”
“A hundred years ago,” Jay said.
“It sure is funny.”
“What’s funny, Cisco?”
Walsh turned square to Jay and placed his hands on her shoulders, bare beneath a teal-green shawl that matched the green of her sparkling gown. His eyes dropped furtively—or with what he probably thought was furtiveness—to her freckled cleavage, revealed by the gown’s low bodice cut to accentuate the handsome woman’s rounded curves, before rising again to her eyes. “It feels like only yesterday to me. And you don’t look a day older. In fact, I do believe you’ve become even more beautiful than when you were a bouncing young redhead singing and kicking your legs up high for those border roughs in the Armadillo!”
“Oh, well,” Jay said, chuckling her surprise. “That’s quite the compli—”
Before she could complete the sentence, Walsh leaned down to place his mouth on hers. Jay was startled by the man’s sudden show of passion. She tried to return the kiss. She wanted to, in fact, but for some reason her lips wouldn’t soften and yield to his the way he wanted her to.
Walsh pulled his head away, dropped his hands from her shoulders, and averted his gaze, vaguely sheepish. “I’m . . . I’m sorry if that was unwanted.”
Jay smiled, flushed a little, and turned away to stare off toward the shelving stone dikes to the north of Horsetooth Rock, which were turning a darker purple now as the light left the sky. “Oh, Cisco, it wasn’t so much unwanted as . . . as it just sort of startled me a little. Caught me off guard. I’m sorry.”
She truly was sorry. She welcomed this man’s attentions. She was flattered by them, for she was attracted to him. And yet she felt a barrier between them, a hesitancy, an aloofness in her own demeanor when he was near, which she’d known even before he’d mentioned it that he very much wanted to be near.
A part of her wanted that, as well.
And yet . . .
“It’s Braddock, isn’t it?”
The name as well as the question drew her shoulders together slightly.
She turned around to face the tall man again, frowning at him. “What?”
“It’s Jimmy Braddock. Slash. He stands between us—doesn’t he, Jay?” Walsh paused. He removed his hat, swept a hand through his wavy, thick brown hair with a sigh, then took the hat in both hands, tossing it absently, turning it between his long fingers.
Jay pondered that, made a sour expression. “I don’t know. Yes. I guess so.” She turned away again, abruptly. She sighed, lifted her chin, and laughed dryly deep in her chest. “Yes, yes, yes. Indeed, he does, Cisco. I’m sorry. Honestly, I don’t know what it is about that scruffy, owly, cold, and aloof, middle-aged cutthroat—but I do harbor a deep fondness for him, indeed.” She gave a guttural groan of frustration through gritted teeth.
She turned back to the marshal, frowning up at him in deep consternation. “I have no idea why.”
“Sometimes the heart doesn’t always tell the brain.”
Jay smiled and placed a hand on Walsh’s cheek, caressing it a little with her thumb. “That’s very wise.”
“Oh, I’ve got all kinds of wise things to say, Jay. But I guess I’ll be needing to find another woman to tell them to.” Walsh gave a pained smile. “Won’t I?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Cisco.”
“Yes, you do. The man is gone for you, Jay. I could tell it in your room the other night. There was something between you. It was in the air, like electricity after a lightning storm. I was jealous. I’ll be honest with you . . . as I so seldom am with other women, for some damn crazy reason . . . but I was jealous as hell!”
“Maybe you’re so seldom jealous,” Jay said, keeping her hand on his cheek, then playfully poking her finger against his broad, blunt-tipped, sun-seasoned nose. “Maybe, mostly, other men are jealous of you. You’re uncomfortable with having the tables turned.”
Walsh laughed at that, turned away. He was kneading his hat brim as though it were a flour crust he was packing along the lip of a pie pan. “You know me too well, Jay.”
“That’s not a hard thing to figure out.” Jay sighed and fingered the edge of her shawl, staring at the dirt of the trail they’d followed out from town. “What’s hard to figure is a person’s own heart.”
“I have a feeling you’re a lot alike—you an’ Slash,” said Walsh. “If that helps any.”
“Oh?” She frowned up at him. “How so?”
Walsh shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It was just a sense I got up in your room the other night.”
“Hmmm.” Jay nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Does he know how you feel?”
Jay continued to nod, and she smiled a little. “He knows.”
“Has he told you how he feels about you?”
“No. But not for lack of trying.”
Walsh frowned, curious. “Come again?”
She laughed again, but with more than a little irony. “Slash has told me more about how he feels with his eyes, when he didn’t know I was looking, than he’s ever said with his words. Long ago, I thought we were going to get together—Slash an’ me. Before Pete came along. But Slash could never find the words back then, just as he doesn’t seem able to find them now. So I took up with Pete.
“Oh, I was in love with Pistol Pete—don’t get me wrong. Such a big, handsome, commanding figure, with more than a little of the rascal in him” She hacked out a bawdy laugh and shook her head in wonder. “But I think I was always a little in love with Slash, too. There was just something about his lonesomeness and his grumpy demeanor. That anger he always tries to show is betrayed by the gentleness of his eyes. I know he has a romantic turn of mind. Maybe not as much as Pecos does. Lord, Pecos can fall in and out of head-over-heels love in a week and do the very same thing the next week, and end up howling like a gut-shot coyote when the next one leaves him. Hah!”
Jay toed a line in the dirt with the heel of her high-heeled leather boot. “Slash falls harder and deeper, I think. And he doesn’t do himself any good by being unable to express his feelings. I think I know why he has trouble with people, though.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“He was an orphan, Slash was. He was raised along the river piers and warehouses in St. Louis. Back when that town was wide open. His mother was a prostitute. She died when he was very young. Slash was raised by other prostitutes, each one of whom ended up the same unfortunate way as his mother. Dying slowly of one disease or another. Pleurisy, consumption, black fever . . . syphilis. That kind of life does something to a boy, and the man that boy becomes. He never trusts anybody. Not fully. Not ever. Never feels a part of something larger than himself. Can never fully belong. Can never tell a woman he loves her, because—who knows?—she might not return the favor and leave him even lonelier than he was before.”
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