“I just can’t figure it,” Slash said the next afternoon as they crossed a barren pass under a blue, sunny sky, a cool wind battering him and his two trail pards. “Why wouldn’t they head south to Mexico like reasonable men? Where in the hell are they going? If they’re still headed where they were headed yesterday, and we’re on their trail, they’re headed only deeper into the Elk Range. All that’s up here is mining camps and old Indian ruins and ridge after ridge after ridge. I just don’t get it!”
“Maybe they’re just extra cautious,” Pecos opined as, astraddle his buckskin, he began dropping into the next valley. “Maybe they’re worried someone’s trailing ’em, and they’re trying to make it look like they’re headed north when they’re really headed to Mexico—by one heckuva roundabout way.”
“If they knew we were trailing them,” Slash said, “we’d know they knew it.”
“How so?” asked Hattie, riding behind him, her arms wrapped loosely around his waist. He could feel the hard bulge of her horse pistol snugged against the small of his back.
Dropping down through pines, following the meandering cart and horse trail, Pecos said, “They’d have stopped and set an ambush for us. They like ambushes too much for ’em not to have at least tried to ambush us by now.”
“Yep, what Pecos said,” Slash said to Hattie, grinning over his shoulder at the somber Pink. “He’s smarter than he looks.”
“Thanks, Slash.”
“Don’t mention it, partner. Say, I hope you’re keepin’ a good, careful watch up there. I know we been in the saddle for a while, but you remember our old saw?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Pecos said. “Lazy eyes’ll get you a cold, dead hide.”
“How poetic,” the Pinkerton said snidely behind Slash.
“Oh, he’s a poet,” Slash said. “He just don’t know it. Let’s hope he never does, or we’ll never hear the end of it!”
“Shut up, now, Slash,” Pecos said. “Remember our other old saw?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Slash said with some chagrin. “Bein’ a chatterbox will get you the bullet pox.”
“You two are a real joy to ride with.” Hattie sighed deeply. “And I believe it’s all for naught. They could have turned off this trail anywhere, and we wouldn’t know because last night’s storm would have wiped out their signs.”
“You got a point, señorita.” Slash shrugged. “But what else we gonna do? Me—I’d rather be ridin’ through these here mountains than ridin’ back to Denver with my tail between my legs and likely right into a hangman’s noose.”
Hattie sighed again. “Yeah, well—it would be little better for me. Mister Pinkerton would likely give me my time and send me on my way. I’ve done this so long, it’s about all I know how to do anymore. I hate the smell of tobacco smoke too much to wait on saloon tables for the rest of my life.”
“You don’t like men enough, either,” Slash said. “Er . . . unless it’s just me an’ Pecos you harbor such a grudge against.”
“No, it’s pretty much all men,” the girl said in her cold, flat tone once more. “But notorious owlhoots, especially.”
“What’s your last name, if you don’t mind me askin’?”
“Aren’t we supposed to be quiet?”
“Just tell me your last name, and I’ll go back to avoiding the bullet pox.”
“Friendly.”
Slash scowled over his shoulder at her. “Huh?”
“Friendly. It’s Hattie Friendly.”
“Pshaw!”
Hattie sighed. “You asked me and I told you. I don’t care two cents if you believe me or not.”
“Hey, Pecos—did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Pecos said, still dropping down the winding trail into yet another deep, forested canyon, at the bottom of which they’d likely find another stream or river. Maybe some prospecting or woodcutting cabins, which these mountains had so far been sporadically peppered with.
“Hattie’s last name is Friendly.”
Swaying easily in his saddle, Pecos shook his head and laughed softly.
“Yep,” Hattie said with another sigh, “you two are a real joy to share the trail with.”
* * *
Around the same time the next afternoon, they followed the trail along a canyon sheathed by two steep, rocky, pine-clad ridges, and right up into the yard of a dugout cabin built into the side of a small butte rising against the base of the northern ridge. A small corral and stable fronted the dugout, which had an age-silvered front log wall and a brush roof with a tin chimney poking up out of it, issuing thick, gray smoke.
A good dozen bear skulls, maybe more, were tacked to the logs. Two bear hides were tacked to the log wall as well, and a fresh cinnamon hide hung over the rail of the narrow boardwalk fronting the place.
Two goats were grazing the colorless brush growing up from the roof, near the chimney pipe. One goat was black, the other white.
Several horses stood still as statues inside the corral.
There were a few more cabins off the trail’s left side, opposite from the dugout side of the canyon. These appeared to be prospectors’ shacks, lined up side by side and also issuing smoke from their chimney pipes. Three or four men were out in the stream that ran along its rocky bed over there, at the base of the southern ridge.
The men were bearded, dressed in wool shirts, suspenders, canvas breeches, and high-topped, lace-up boots. They wielded gold pans and toiled over sluice boxes running into the stream from the near side of the valley. A collie dog milled in the water near the prospectors, apparently looking for fish.
One of the men sat on a rock in the middle of the stream. He’d taken his boots off; the boots sat beside him on the rock. He was puffing a pipe, tipping his head back to take the sun on his face.
Pecos glanced at Slash. The girl rode with Pecos now. “What do you think?” Pecos asked his partner.
“I think I’m hungry, and I’m tired of your beans.”
“You can take over the cookin’ chores whenever you want to, Slash. Be my guest.”
“Oh, stop your caterwauling. Let’s go see if we can get our bellies padded out. Besides, maybe we can find a horse for little miss. We’d make better time if all three of us had a horse.”
As they rode toward the dugout, fronted by two hitchrails at which five saddled horses stood, the girl said, “Maybe we can find out if the killers stopped here, and where they might be headed.”
“Maybe so,” Slash said. “But you let us do the talkin’, little Pink.”
“Stop calling me little Pink. And stop ordering me around. You are not my boss, Mister Braddock.”
Slash only sighed as he brought his Appy to a stop before one of the hitchracks.
Pecos dismounted the buckskin, then reached up to help Hattie Friendly down and received a none-too-friendly response.
“Hands off.”
Pecos threw up his arms and lowered his head in defeat.
The young Pinkerton lithely swung her right boot up and over the cantle of Pecos’s saddle. Turning to face him, she slid straight down to the ground, landing flat-footed and staring up at him smugly.
She straightened her dress and adjusted the big horse pistol behind her wide leather belt.
“Do you gotta wear that in there?” Slash asked.
“You’re going to wear yours, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, well, they look natural on us. That big hogleg doesn’t look natural on you. It draws attention to you, in fact.”
“As if she wouldn’t do that even without the cannon,” Pecos said.
“Yeah, but that don’t help. It could attract trouble.”
Hattie gestured toward the weathered wooden door propped open with a rock and beyond which was a cave-like darkness. “I will not waltz in there unarmed.”
“How ’bout if you just walk in there unarmed?”
The girl hardened her jaws and gave another croaking wail of frustration.
“All right, all right,” Slas
h said. “Have it your way. Just let us do the talkin’. We’re liable to contract food poisonin’ in a place like this, and addin’ lead poisonin’ would cloud up and rain all over my day!”
CHAPTER 21
Slash marched up the three steps to the raised boardwalk. Hattie followed him, then Pecos.
Slash saw a man sacked out on the boardwalk to his right. The sleeper was a grizzled, gray-bearded oldster lying prostrate, ankles crossed, hands entwined on his fat belly, head resting back against a feed sack. He raked soft snores out through fluttering lips.
A coonskin cap, an empty bottle, and several mashed quirley stubs lay nearby.
Slash glanced at Pecos, shrugged, then reached across his belly to release the keeper thong over the Colt holstered on his left hip, just in case. He stepped through the door and to his left, so the door wouldn’t frame him against the outside light. As Hattie and Pecos walked in behind him, Pecos stepped to the right, for the same reason that Slash had stepped to the left.
Hattie stood in front of the open door, frowning curiously at each man in turn.
“Damn fool,” Slash bit out quietly through stiff jaws. “Gonna get your purty self perforated, entering a place out here like that.”
Deep lines of incredulity cut across her forehead. “Like what?”
Slash just shook his head and peered into the thick shadows before him. The darkness was relieved by two sunlit windows in the front wall to his right, beyond Pecos. The windows were small. They were also very dirty, so the light that mixed with the shadows was murky at best.
He could make out five figures in the place—two sitting at a table to his left, and three against the cabin’s far wall on his right. There were three other tables, all open.
Pine planks nailed to beer kegs at the rear of the room served as a bar of sorts. A wide-shouldered man with thin hair and wearing a ratty blue apron stood back there, leaning against the bar, a loosely rolled quirley smoldering between his lips.
Flanking him were shelves of bottles, canned goods, dry goods, and even some groceries. Bins were spread out to the right of the bar, also housing goods, including denim trousers, leather boots, caps, gloves, snowshoes, and axes and shovels. Stacks of flour were piled in a corner. Sausages and cheeses hung from the ceiling all across the room. The smell of the smoked and cured meat and cheese made Slash’s mouth water.
Yet more bear skulls were mounted on the walls and on ceiling support posts about the room. A bearskin served as a curtain for the doorway flanking the bar.
Behind the bar, a pot bubbled on an iron range.
All eyes in the room regarded the three newcomers stonily, including those of the broad-shouldered barman, who puffed the quirley and exhaled the smoke through his wedge-like nose without using his hands.
Since there appeared no immediate threat, Slash nodded cordially to the barman. Stepping forward, away from the front wall, he said, “You got beer? I could really go for a beer.”
The man nodded, his stony expression in place. A fly buzzed around his left ear, and he lifted that cheek in a wince of sorts. He appeared so big and tired that he didn’t have the energy to swat at the pesky fly. “Ale.”
“That’s what I’ll have,” Slash said.
“Me, too,” said Pecos.
“Tea for me,” said the girl.
“No tea. I got some coffee I can heat up from this mornin’.”
“Just water,” the girl said, turning her mouth corners down in disdain.
Slash headed for a table in the middle of the room, between the two men sitting against the left wall and the three to the right. He didn’t like sitting out in the middle of the room like this, but he didn’t see that he had a choice. As he slid out a chair, he glanced at the barman, who was drawing a mug of dark beer from a keg behind the bar.
“What kind of stew you got bubbling away on the range there?” He glanced at the skulls that made the place look like a catacomb. “Wait—let me guess. Bear!” He chuckled.
The barman merely glanced over his shoulder at him, his face as expressionless as before. The other customers regarded him with the same dullness.
Slash’s smile grew wooden. He glanced at Pecos, who regarded him with a skeptically arched brow as he dragged his own chair out from the table. “I reckon we’ll each have us a bowl of whatever you got cookin’, then,” Slash told the barman, then muttered under his breath, “Sure smells like bear to me.”
When the newcomers were seated at the small square table, under a too-short leg of which Pecos wedged a lucifer to steady it, Slash glanced around. His eyes had adjusted enough to see more clearly the three men now on his left as he faced Pecos sitting across from him. He also faced the front wall. The three to his left were a hard-looking, bearded bunch in dusty trail gear. All three wore at least two six-shooters apiece, and a sawed-off, double-bore shotgun, not unlike Pecos’s own gut-shredder, rested across a corner of their table.
Empty stew bowls were piled to one side.
The three were playing poker and drinking ale. Two were smoking cigars, while the third, sitting with his back to the far wall, directly facing Slash’s table, had a lump of chaw bulging out his lower lip. He didn’t appear to be concentrating on the cards fanned out in his hands. He appeared far more interested in the three newcomers.
Why?
Was it the girl?
Or was there some other reason?
Slash turned to his right, to inspect the two men sitting against the wall on that side of the room. They were identical twins, one the mirror image of the other. If they weren’t full-blood Indians, they were close—two big, dark-eyed, copper-skinned men with broad, flat, hairless features and beak-like noses. Long, coarse, coal-black hair hung straight down from their bullet-crowned black felt hats. The hats were identical twins, as well.
In fact, the two men appeared to be entirely identically outfitted—worn wool suit coats over wool shirts and sweaters, and broadcloth trousers stuffed into high-topped, mule-eared moccasins. Each man wore a red neckerchief, tightly knotted, the ends dangling down their broad chests.
Colt pistols were holstered for the cross-draw on their left hips. Bowie knives were sheathed on the other side. Even the Colts and knives appeared similar if not identical.
The two Indians appeared even bigger than Pecos.
They were so fascinating, these two identical Indian twins, that Slash found himself openly staring.
The two big Indians, facing each other across a small table, stared straight back at Slash, one holding a smoking tin cup up in front of his broad, full-lipped mouth. As far as Slash could make out, the only way you could tell these two apart was by the eyelash-shaped knife scar, knotted and white, that resided on a cheek of the twin on the left, facing the back of the room.
This twin had a Henry repeating rifle leaning against the wall to his left.
Slash smiled and pinched his hat brim to the two. The scar-faced one on the left showed no emotion. The other one gave a stiff, fleeting smile and opened and closed his right hand above the table. If that had been a wave, it hadn’t been a warm one. In fact, there’d been something vaguely ominous about it.
Slash felt a boot toe ram his shin beneath the table. “Ouch!”
“Stop starin’, ya damn fool!” Pecos admonished him under his breath.
“Ah, hell,” Slash said, scowling against the pain in his shin, “they gotta be used to it by now.”
Hattie, sitting to Slash’s left, was also staring at the two big Indians, whose eyes had found her as well, Slash saw with an apprehensive tightening of his shoulders. The girl didn’t look too happy about it, either. She lowered her gaze to the table and wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose.
The barman came over and set big mugs of ale before Slash and Pecos. He set steaming stew bowls before all three. Looking into his bowl, seeing the dark-brown chunks of organ meat floating in a thin broth spotted with what appeared to be bits of fat and carrots, Slash grinned up at the man and said
, “See—I knew it was bear!”
The man started to turn away, but Slash stopped him with: “Say, amigo, do you have any idea where we could buy a horse around here?”
“A horse?” the man said, scowling as though Slash had said dinosaur or dragon. “Nah.” He shook his head and walked away, limping slightly on one leg.
Slash glanced at Pecos, who shrugged and began spooning stew into his mouth. Slash did likewise. Hattie was going at the food a little more tentatively, as though she had something against bear, when out of the corner of Slash’s right eye he saw one of the Indian twins rise heavily from his chair. Slash winced, then spooned another bite of the stew into his mouth as he saw the twin, the one with the scar on his cheek, hitch his pants up higher on his broad hips and begin sauntering toward Slash, Pecos, and Hattie’s table.
The man’s boots thumped loudly on the worn, badly scarred wooden floor.
Slash and Pecos shared another glance, this time a dark one, then looked at the big twin standing over their table, to Slash’s right and Pecos’s left. The Indian grinned, his eyes on Hattie, who scowled up at him, indignant. The Indian leaned forward and rested his big fists on the edge of the table, glancing from Slash to Pecos, then back again.
“I will give you one horse for the girl.” The twin’s grin broadened, his dark eyes flashing in delight.
Hattie’s own eyes blazed up at him. “I beg your pardon, sir.”
The Indian stared back at her, showing his horsey, off-white teeth through that broad, eager smile. “One horse for the girl.”
Hattie’s eyes widened. Her lower jaw hung nearly to her chest. She sank back in her chair with a shocked gasp, and said, “Why, I have never been so insulted in all my days!”
“Easy now, girl,” Slash said, chuckling nervously as he smiled up at the eager-eyed Indian. “It’s just a little misunderstandin’ is all. You see, amigo, the horse is for her, don’t ya know. She herself is not for sale. Hah!”
Again, Slash chuckled, and Pecos joined in with his own wooden laugh.
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 16