“Tame as the widow lady’s parlor cats,” Slash added.
“Tame as the widow lady’s parlor cats—my foot!” Deputy Lisa removed one hand from her shotgun, reached behind, plucked a pair of handcuffs from her belt, and tossed them at Pecos, who caught them against his chest. She tossed a second set to Slash, then reestablished her two-handed grip on the barn-blaster. “Put on them bracelets. Make ’em tight. I’m takin’ you in. Gonna get you off the streets. Gonna send for a couple of deputy U.S. marshals from Denver so they can haul you down out of the mountains and string you up!”
A deep flush burned in her cheeks. She’d followed the cutthroats’ careers, and now, improbably, unexpectedly, she—way out here on the backside of nowhere—was going to be the lawman . . . er, law woman . . . to burn them down!
Slash and Pecos shared a glance, silently conferring on whether to tell her about their deal with Chief Marshal Bledsoe. With their eyes, they warned each other to keep quiet. Neither was entirely sure why—maybe an old, habitual suspicion about other folks’ true motives—but they decided the information could wait until they knew exactly what the young law woman was really up to.
“Well, Slash, I reckon she’s got us,” Pecos said, ratcheting the cuffs around his wrists.
Slash winced at the ominous sound of his own cuffs racketing closed. “I reckon she does at that.”
“Turn around, open the door, and move out. Don’t try anything or I’ll blast you, and old Syvertson. . .”
“We know, we know,” Slash said, dourly as he fumbled the door open with both cuffed hands, “old Syvertson will be scrubbing us off the walls till May Day.”
“You got it.”
Slash led the threesome down the hall and then down the stairs. Hearing the boot thumps and spur chimes on the stairs, old Syvertson looked up, the big black cat still sprawled on his lap. The old man’s eyes glinted devilishly, and he grinned in kind.
“You got ’em, Lisa. Good on ya! I’m just glad they paid in advance.” He chuckled.
“Thank you for cooperating with law and order,” Lisa said, prodding the two cutthroats across the hotel’s small, shadowy lobby and out the front door. “I’ll be back for their gear.”
“You keep ’em locked up tight, now,” the old man urged. “I don’t want ’em comin’ back and wreakin’ their savage revenge on me an’ Felix here!”
“Don’t worry, Pops—you and Felix can rest easy,” Lisa called behind her, as she thumped on down the porch steps behind her two prisoners. “These two cutthroats’ days of death an’ destruction are over!”
“Yippee-ky-yaaaa!” came the old man’s gleeful cry behind them, as he stomped his feet on the floor.
Slash and Pecos walked side by side straight down the near-dark street. The only lights were those emanating from the town’s two saloons, on opposite sides of the street from each other, and from Alma May’s Café. A penetrating chill had descended. Though not a breath of wind moved along the street, Slash could hear the constant roar of the breeze assaulting the high, stony, pine-stippled ridges above and beyond Honeysuckle.
As he moved along the street, approaching the squat jailhouse just ahead now and on his right, he decided to take what little advantage of the situation he could by trying to glean some information from the pretty, young, overzealous lawdog.
“Deputy?” he called to the girl, who remained a safe distance behind him and Pecos.
“Shut up.”
“Ah, come on,” Slash complained. “I was just wonderin’ what it is you could think me an’ my depraved partner was hunting here in Honeysuckle. I mean, it don’t look like you have a bank or anything like that.”
“Yeah,” Pecos chimed in. “Not even a Western Union office, as far as I can tell.”
“Shut up,” came the girl’s cold reply, beneath her crunching boots.
Slash glanced at his partner and gave a defeated sigh.
“Nice try, anyway, partner,” Pecos said.
“Thanks.”
“No talking!” the girl ordered.
“You’re a tough nut, ain’t ya?” Pecos asked her.
“No talking!”
Pecos leaned toward Slash and whispered, “You really think she’d shoot us for talking?”
Slash glanced back at her walking forthrightly behind them, keeping the scattergun aimed at their backs. Then he returned his gaze to Slash. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Slash walked up to the jailhouse’s front door and stopped. Pecos stopped behind him. Slash turned to the girl.
“What, you need me to open it for you an’ give you a warm welcome, maybe offer you a biscuit and some tea?” she said snidely. “Go on in—it ain’t locked, and we don’t affect city manners, Pa an’ me.”
Slash gazed at her. He glanced at the solid stone building behind him, a light showing in the one lone window left in the door. His guts recoiled at the idea of being locked up. For all his years running on the wrong side of the straight and narrow, he’d spent only a handful of days behind bars at any one time.
And he hadn’t liked them at all. Even the idea of being locked up in an iron cage turned his blood cold.
He looked at the shotgun in the girl’s hands, considered making a play for it. He still had his pearl-gripped Derringer in his right-hand coat pocket. The girl hadn’t thought to look for a hideout weapon, her only weakness as far as Slash could tell.
Lisa backed up a step and quirked her mouth corners up in a wry, challenging grin. “Go ahead,” she said, reading Slash’s mind. “I’d like you to. I’d love to have my name in the Rocky Mountain News . . . right beside your death notice.”
Pecos arched a warning brow at him. “I think she really would, partner.” He gave his head a quick, fateful wag. “She’s got the drop on us, all right.”
Slash spat angrily into the dust. He doubted he’d have time to get the derringer clear of his pocket before she shredded him. He’d save the surprise of the nasty little popper for later.
He flipped the metal door latch and stepped into the small but homey-looking jailhouse office. The man Slash and Pecos had seen before, sitting out in front of the place and then on the porch of the butcher shop/grocery store, was now kicked back in a chair behind a rolltop desk to Slash’s left, facing the front wall. The town marshal had his boots propped on the desk. He leaned back in a wooden swivel chair, long arms crossed on his broad chest, snoring raucously, his thick red mustache blowing up with every exhalation.
“Go on,” Lisa said, prodding both Slash and Pecos with her shotgun’s barrel. “Get in there!”
“Ouch!” Slash protested, stumbling forward.
The old lawman awoke with a startled jerk and an anxious gasp, sitting up in his chair with an angry squawk of the swivel. He reached first for the big, horn-gripped hogleg resting atop the desk, then, realizing a lead swap wasn’t imminent, reached for the rectangular spectacles beside the heavy Colt. He placed them on his nose and stretched the bows behind his ears.
“What . . . what in God’s name are you up to, Lisa?” he grumbled, peering through the rectangular lenses, his voice thick and phlegmy from what had apparently been a protracted nap.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Slash said, standing in the middle of the room, staring at the man in wide-eyed astonishment. “Hey, Pecos—lookee who we got here.” A smile spread Slash’s lips and glittered in his brown eyes.
“Ah, hell,” Pecos said, his own features betraying his shock and recognition. He thrust his arm up and a finger forward. “That there’s Red . . . Red . . . Red . . .”
“Ingram,” Slash finished for him.
“Damn, Red,” Pecos said. “I didn’t recognize you from a distance. I didn’t know that was you out there, givin’ us the woolly eyeball!”
“Likewise,” the tall, red-haired, red-mustached, and red-muttonchopped lawman said, placing both knobby fists on the desk before him and rising stiffly from his chair. “I didn’t recognize you two fellas, neither, at first. It was Lisa who done t
hat, though she’s never seen you in the flesh like I have. She recognized you from your likenesses sketched on wanted circulars over the years, which she peruses with the frequency and pious zeal of a Baptist preacher flipping through his Bible.”
Red Ingram’s flinty gaze was on his daughter. “I told you to stay clear of these two scalawags, Deputy. What’d you do—wait for me to drift asleep, then waltz into the Honeysuckle to arrest ’em?”
“Not at all,” Lisa bragged. “I was waiting in the hotel. Took ’em down easy as pie. Why, I’ve arrested passed-out drunks who had more teeth to ’em.”
Slash and Pecos scowled at the wild young woman indignantly. Then Slash said, “This is your daughter, Red?”
“That she is, that she is, I am sometimes sorry to say,” Ingram confessed. “For some dang reason, I saw fit to pin a deputy town marshal’s star to her shirt. But only because after the boom went bust, there was nobody else to pin it on.” Again, his reproving gaze shot to his daughter. “How many times do you think you can disobey my direct orders before I’ll fire you, Lisa?”
“Pa!” the girl said, stomping her foot in exasperation. “I just took down two of the gnarliest criminals in all the western frontier. I arrested Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid!”
“Yeah—you did, did you? Now, what you suppose you’re gonna do with ’em?”
“I’m gonna lock ’em up!” Again, Lisa prodded the two cutthroats with her shotgun barrel, jerking her chin toward one of the three cells lining the stone building’s rear wall. “Get in there, and be quick about it, or I’ll—”
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Pecos said as Slash opened the door of the middle cell. “They’ll be scrubbin’ us off the walls till the cows come home.” He glanced at Red Ingram standing at his desk. “She’s got colorful language, anyway, Red. I’ll give her that!”
“She comes by her nastiness honestly,” Slash added. “I’ll give her that, too!”
When Lisa Ingram had turned the big key in the cell door’s lock, she swung toward her father, frowning. “What’d he mean by that?”
Red winced and walked over to the potbelly stove standing in the middle of the room. A speckled black coffeepot was steaming atop the stove. Ingram grabbed a tin cup from a nail in a ceiling support post by the stove, and a leather pad, and filled the cup with hot black mud. “Ummm, daughter, I been meanin’ to tell you this for some time now, but . . .”
Red seemed to have trouble proceeding.
“Um what?” Lisa said, canting her head to one side.
“He was an outlaw before he ever became a lawman,” Slash told her.
“For a very short time,” Red said.
“But he was a bad one, old Red Ingram was. Until he saw fit to change his ways. Then he was a county sheriff over in Utah. Tangled with us a time or two.”
“Almost caught you, too—damn your rancid hides!” Ingram glowered at the two cutthroats peering back at him through the cell’s bars. “The only reason I wasn’t able to quite run you down was because I, being only a county sheriff in some of the remotest territory anywhere in the country, was badly outmanned. You always seemed to somehow slither over one territorial line after another—gone from sight.”
He sipped his coffee, swallowed, then eyed Slash and Pecos again, severely. “If you’d stayed in Utah a little longer, I likely would have turned the key on you at the very least, possibly turned you both toe down, which would have been no worse than what you deserved.”
“Not much to rob out thataway,” Pecos said. “We was just cooling our heels out in Utah, robbing a few stagecoaches now an’ then just to keep from gettin’ bored.”
“What in the hell are you doing here, Red?” Slash asked the lawman now standing by the cell door, beside his fiery daughter. “You an’ this bronco of a daughter of yours.”
Slash glanced at the girl again. Now, in the light, he saw that she was a true beauty. Whereas Hattie Friendly was china-doll beautiful, this young woman, roughly Hattie’s age, was a wild child of the mountains, with fiery blue eyes and wild hair and obviously the temper of a she-lion with cubs. Her face was oval-shaped, with a pug nose, and a firm jaw along the same lines as her father’s. Her hair was sort of a tawny red, and its unkempt condition, hanging down from beneath her Stetson in knots and tangles, flecked with dust and seeds, somehow added to her raw, natural beauty.
She was as wild as the mountains, this girl.
The years obviously hadn’t been kind to her father. Slash had noticed that Red walked with a limp. While a big man, he’d been whittled down to bones and sinew, and his face, sandwiched by the thick red muttonchops, looked a little like that of an embalmed Indian—one with eyes the same sky blue as his daughter’s, though touched with the cream splotches of cataracts that were likely the result of all his years hunting owlhoots in the burning Utah sun.
CHAPTER 30
“What brings me here to Honeysuckle?” Red Ingram said, peering through the cell bars at Slash and Pecos. “I came here with the others when gold was found in the quartz veins and slab rock lining the creeks up thisaway. I’d had to turn in my badge over in Utah.”
He reached down to pat his left knee. “Took a bullet to this leg during a bank robbery. Damn near shattered my knee. A sawbones put it back together again, but I can’t ride like I used to, an’ even if I could, Lisa here has to help me into the saddle. Damned embarrassin’.”
Red sipped his coffee.
“When the boom went bust, the town offered me the badge an’ a monthly salary. Figured there wouldn’t be much to do except collect taxes an’ arrest a drunk now an’ then, an’, until now . . . when you two old cutthroats rode into town . . . I was right. I hired Lisa because she wanted the job so bad, bein’ a student of the law as well as bad men, and I needed some way to keep her out of trouble, with all the lowly men in these parts doggin’ her heels with their tongues hangin’ out.”
Lisa flushed and looked away, but a pleased grin twitched at her mouth corners, as though she was embarrassed by a compliment.
Again, Red sipped his coffee and slid his milky gaze between the two incarcerated cutthroats. “That’s what I’m doin’ here. Now, suppose you tell me what you two are doin’ here.”
“An’ who’s that prissy little miss slingin’ drinks in the Honeysuckle?” Lisa asked sharply, flaring her nostrils at the two jailbirds. “She rode in with you. I seen her.”
“Daughter?” Red asked, arching a brow at each former cutthroat in turn.
Slash gave a dry chuff. “Does either of us look purty enough to have fathered that little chestnut-haired filly?”
“The mother would have to be one hell of a looker, I’ll give you that,” Red said.
“You can say that again,” Lisa added, with little of her father’s good-natured ribbing.
“You have your mother’s beauty but little of her charm,” Slash told her.
“You never knew my mother.”
“No, but your old man’s as ugly as a boar hog, and a snake has more charm than you do.”
“Admit it—I rattled you,” Lisa said with a smug smile.
“Let’s get back to the looker in the Honeysuckle,” Ingram said with loud impatience, beetling his red brows.
“We just picked her up along the trail,” Pecos said. “An orphan child. Her old man . . .” He glanced at Slash. “Didn’t she say he was a prospector, Slash?”
“Yeah, yeah, a pick ’n’ shoveler. Died from a cave-in. The poor child’s mother was a doxy from Leadville. Dead. Now, with the father dead, she had nowhere else to go, so she was heading to Denver but got turned around on the trail. She was wanderin’ this way all alone in the big cruel world, so we let her throw in with us . . .”
“For protection from vermin trail thieves.”
“Like yourselves,” Lisa said. “I’m surprised you didn’t rob her blind or worse . . .”
“Well,” Slash said, shortly, “she didn’t have nothin’ to rob, and while we might be vermin trail thiev
es, our honor is intact, as is hers.”
“How long that will last, with her workin’ amongst your unwashed populace over at the Honeysuckle in little enough cloth to swaddle a newborn baby, I wouldn’t want to wager on,” Pecos added.
Red Ingram walked up close to the cell, narrowing one suspicious eye and arching the other brow. His coffee cup steamed in his big, knotted right hand. “Now for the big question—what are you two doin’ here?”
“Just driftin’ through,” Pecos said.
“No one drifts through Honeysuckle,” the tough, pretty, tangle-haired deputy pointed out.
“We didn’t know that,” Slash said. “So I reckon we’ll be driftin’ back the way we came.”
“You’re here to rob the gold—admit it!” Lisa yelled. “Come out an’ admit it, or I’ll blast you!”
She stepped back and raised the shotgun in her hands once more, rearing back both heavy hammers with ratcheting clicks.
Slash cast the marshal an imploring look. “Leash your wildcat, Red!”
Red said, “Lisa, galldangit—put that scattergun down before you hurt someone!”
“They’re here for the gold, Pa! I’m gonna make ’em admit it!”
“They can’t admit it if they’re running down the back wall yonder. Now put the gun down, child!” Ingram glanced at Slash and Pecos. “I do apologize for her behavior, fellas. She lost her mother when she was shin-high to a tadpole, so she knows only her father’s raggedy ways. I’ve been softening in my later years, but Lisa here is still hardening up.”
“She does need some tempering,” Pecos admitted, eyeing the wild child cautiously through the cell bars.
“You might try a finishing school back East,” Slash advised.
“I’m gonna finish you right here less’n you admit you’re here for the Spanish Bit gold,” Lisa threatened, staring down the double-barrel greener at the prisoners.
Slash and Pecos shared a quick, conferring glance, then returned their gaze to the big twin barrels bearing down on them.
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