As the newcomer approached, fifteen feet away and closing slowly, Slash saw the long blond hair hanging from the man’s tan Stetson to jostle down Lisa Ingram’s shoulders. Wearing a plaid wool coat, she stopped ten feet away from Slash and Pecos and the outlaw she’d just polished off.
Slash lowered his hands, chuckling and shaking his head. “Boy, that was some nice timin’, sweetheart.”
“I couldn’t agree more!” Pecos said, also chuckling his relief.
Lisa Ingram gritted her teeth and squeezed her carbine in both her gloved hands. “I ain’t neither one of you old cutthroats’ sweetheart. Now, get your hands back up before I gut-shoot you both and leave you howlin’!”
“What?” Pecos said.
“Get ’em up!”
“Ah, come on, sweetheart,” Slash said. “We came up here to—”
“I know what you came up here for. You came up here to steal the stolen gold.” Lisa loudly cocked the carbine again. The spent shell casing clattered to the stone floor, where it rolled, making a tinny warble. “Get ’em up, or, like I said, you’re wolf bait!”
“Easy,” Slash said, raising his hands again, shoulder high. “Just take it easy. We didn’t come here to steal no stolen gold. We came here to retrieve it for them it rightly belongs to.”
“Hey,” Pecos said, also raising his hands. “How’d you know it was stolen, anyways?”
“I know all about what goes on up here,” Lisa said, her jaws still hard, gray light from the entrance reflecting off her flinty eyes. “Leastways, I’ve had my suspicions. Pa forbade me from ridin’ up here. He said the mine an’ the ranch were out of our jurisdiction, and, besides, there’s dangerous secrets out this way.
“Well, I’ve always been right curious about dangerous secrets. And I’ve been right curious about the Spanish Bit for the past two years, when the ranch changed hands, and suddenly the mine was supposedly open again after it had been shut down for the previous three years.”
“You’ve been up here before, then?” Slash asked.
“Yes.”
“You knew it was a ghost.”
“I knew.”
“Did you tell your pa?” Pecos asked.
Lisa shook her head. “I tried. He didn’t want to hear nothin’ about the Spanish Bit. You see, folks around Honeysuckle who get curious about the Spanish Bit—the ranch or the mine—end up in shallow graves, pushin’ up daisies somewhere around these mountains. I reckon I learned over the years to keep my mouth shut and to mind my own business, though it chafed me raw to do so. But when you two old cutthroats showed up . . .”
“You got curious again,” Slash said.
“That’s right.” Lisa gave a stiff smile. “I got curious an’ ambitious.”
Pecos frowned. “How do you mean?”
“I got ambitious to make a name for myself.” Lisa’s smile broadened. “I may not be able to bring down the Spanish Bit, but I can take down the two famous Snake River Marauders still runnin’ off their leashes.”
“Get your name in all the papers, eh?” Slash said.
Lisa’s smile grew smug. She gave a slow, arrogant blink.
“You wouldn’t be makin’ Chief Marshal Henry T. Bledsoe very happy,” Pecos told her.
“Bleed-Em-So?” Lisa stitched her brows and canted her head to one side. “Don’t be silly. Everyone knows he’s carryin’ Slash’s bullet in his back.”
“What everyone don’t know—only a special few,” Slash said, “is that we ride for ole Bleed-Em-So now ourselves.”
“Pshaw!”
“That’s right,” Pecos said. “Like Slash done tried to explain, we ain’t here to steal this gold. We’re here to retrieve it. On Bledsoe’s orders.”
“Leastways, now we have to retrieve it”—Slash cast his partner an ironic glance—“since it got stole out from under us.”
“Yeah, well . . . ,” Pecos said through a sigh.
“Hah!” Lisa laughed without mirth. “You expect me to believe—”
She cut her question off with a squeal as Slash bounded forward, swinging his left arm up against the underside of the girl’s rifle. She triggered a round into the low ceiling. Inside the stone sarcophagus, the report sounded like a cannon blast.
Ears ringing, Slash wrapped his hand around the barrel and jerked the carbine out of her grip. At the same time, Pecos bolted forward and grabbed the girl’s Schofield revolver from the holster thonged on her shapely right thigh.
Recoiling from the sudden, obviously unexpected attack, the deputy town marshal of Honeysuckle tripped over her own spurs and hit the mine floor on her butt.
Glaring up at the ex-cutthroats, she cursed them roundly, hurling miniature sabers from her angry eyes.
“I didn’t know that about your bloodline,” Pecos quipped to Slash. “If I had, I might not have been so quick to ride with you, partner.”
“Yeah, well,” Slash said, stepping back and working the carbine’s cocking lever, ejecting all the cartridges from the breech, “she don’t know the half of it . . . unfortunately.”
He leaned the empty carbine against the mine wall. “I’m just gonna set this here, honey. If you go reloadin’ it, I’m gonna tan your behind.”
“I ain’t your honey and get your mouth off my behind!”
“Yeah, Slash,” Pecos said with a chuckle, “get your mouth off the girl’s behind.” He held the pistol out to her. “Here. Don’t reload it, or you’ll feel my hand on your behind, too. It won’t feel half as good as Slash’s.”
Sitting on her rump on the mine floor, legs bent before her, Lisa looked uncertainly from Slash to Pecos, then back again. “You don’t expect me to believe you’re not gonna kill me . . .”
“Nah,” Slash said. “We ain’t in the business of killin’ purty deputy town marshals.”
“Yeah,” Pecos added. “Our reputations are bad enough without addin’ savage killers of purty deputy town marshals to the list.” He turned to Slash. “Well, partner, we came for one strongbox of gold. Now we got two. We gonna take both back to Denver?”
“Why not? You can bet the other one’s stolen, too.” Slash went to the strongboxes and dropped to a knee. He lifted the lid from the one that had been stolen out of his and Pecos’s wagon. He whistled, shook his head, feeling the old burn of gold-lust again. “We can’t very well just leave it here, can we?”
He lifted the unlocked lid from the other one and frowned down at the gold ingots stacked inside. Even in the dim light, the gold shone, as beautiful and radiant as the most beautiful woman in the world . . .
“Say . . . ,” Slash said, frowning down at the bars.
“What is it?”
He picked up one of the ingots, scrutinized it, and turned to Pecos. He brushed his right thumb across the figure of a Spanish bit stamped into its center. The words SPANISH BIT, HONEYSUCKLE COL. TERR. were also stamped into the face of the ingot. “Look there.”
Pecos dropped to a knee to study the gold, then turned his puzzled gaze to Slash. “I don’t get it. There ain’t no gold comin’ out of this mine.”
Slash chewed the inside of his cheek, pondering. “You know what they’re doin’?”
“Pray tell.”
“They’re stealin’ the gold and haulin’ it here to melt it down and stamp it with the Spanish Bit’s old brand. Then they probably take new bars to the railhead and on to the U.S. Mint in Frisco.”
“I’ll be damned!” Pecos raked the back of his knuckles across the nub of his chin. “That’s why they don’t want it to get out that the mine’s closed, only a ghost. They want everyone to believe they’re minin’ their own gold, takin’ their own gold to Frisco, when it’s really stolen gold they’re sellin’ to the Mint.” Pecos whistled. “We sure have uncovered one hell of a criminal enterprise here, pard!”
“What about Greenleaf and his killers?” Slash said. “We gonna bring them back to Denver, too? Along with the gold?”
Pecos pondered the question. Lisa was still sitting on he
r butt on the mine floor, staring dubiously up at the two ex-cutthroats, as though she was having trouble believing she wasn’t dead yet. That the notorious cutthroats hadn’t fed her a pill she couldn’t digest.
“Prob’ly too many for us to handle by ourselves,” Pecos said finally. “Maybe we’d best get our gold back to Denver and have ole Bleed-Em-So invite more marshals to the party up here.”
“Maybe you’re ri—”
Lisa cut Slash off with: “They have the saloon girl.” She’d said it almost casually, as though she were noting the time of day.
Slash and Pecos jerked shocked looks at her. “What?” they asked in unison.
“They rode out of town with her early this mornin’. I was fetchin’ my horse from the livery barn, to track you two, when I seen ’em go by. They had a sack over her head, and they had her in the back of the wagon, but it was her, all right. She was whimpering like she was hurt. I recognized her by that cute little form of hers that had all the men in the saloon last night ready to gnaw on their own boots.”
Slash lurched to his feet and regaled the girl with a look. “They took Hattie, and you didn’t do anything to stop ’em?”
Lisa gave a coy shrug. “What could I do against all o’ them? Gerta was there. No one messes with Gerta.” Lisa feigned a yawn, patting her fingers against her lips. “Besides . . . Poppa wouldn’t like me interferin’ in Spanish Bit business.”
“Hatties’s a Pinkerton!” Pecos told Lisa, also rising.
“Is she, now? Hmm. Well, I reckon she got her purty little rump into a real fix, didn’t she? Maybe she’ll bat her eyes, and they’ll let her go.”
Slash and Pecos shared a worried look. “I thought I seen that feed sack move. Down at the ranch. That was Hattie!”
Slash glanced at the two strongboxes. “We’ll leave the gold for now, fetch it after we’ve got Hattie back from them curly wolves.”
Slash and Pecos hurried back toward the mine entrance. They both cursed when they saw snow coming down, swirled by the wind—big, heavy, wet flakes. Some of it was sticking to the ground. As they started down the trail away from the mine, Lisa yelled, “Hey, wait for me! I’m the one wearin’ the badge here!” Catching up to them, she said, “What’re you gonna do? Greenleaf has a good twenty, thirty men riding for him.”
“If that’s counting the five we turned toe down back along the trail, then it’s twenty or thirty minus five,” Slash said.
They dropped onto the level ground, Lisa having to run at times to keep pace, holding her Winchester on her shoulder. They tramped through a break between the old mercantile and another dilapidated building and started across the street toward where Slash and Pecos’s mounts, and a strawberry roan, which must be Lisa’s, stood tied to the hitchrack, their tails blowing in the swirling wind, the wet snow gathering on their saddles.
Walking to Slash’s right, Pecos stopped. “Oh-oh.”
“What is—?”
Before Slash could finish the question, he saw what Pecos had seen—six or seven horseback riders trotting toward them from the north, following a trail that must lead up from the valley directly to the west, where the ranch lay. They all wore yellow slickers, and the wind was nipping at their hats, the wet snow sticking to their hat brims and crowns.
One man rode out in front of the others. He was tall and dark, with a thick mustache drooping down both sides of his broad mouth.
Apparently just then seeing Slash, Pecos, and Lisa Ingram, he drew back on his cream’s reins. The others abruptly halted their horses around him. They stared at Slash, Pecos, and Lisa, who stared back at them a full five seconds before Pecos said tightly, “What do you say, Slash?”
Slash brought his Winchester down from his shoulder, pumping a round into the chamber, and dropped to a knee. “I say let’s do-si-do!”
CHAPTER 36
As Slash raised his rifle, the lead rider bellowed, “Get ’em!” and rammed his spurs into his cream’s loins. The horse whinnied and lunged into a turf-chewing gallop as the rider raised his own carbine straight out in his right hand.
“Take him, pard,” Slash yelled. “I got the one behind him!”
The first man’s carbine cracked beneath the howling wind.
Pecos, who’d shrugged his twelve-gauge off his shoulder, took the cannon in both hands and tripped one of its two triggers. The first man screamed as the buckshot tore into him, turning him into a big yellow bird in his yellow rain slicker as he flew straight back out of his saddle, flapping arms and legs that served poorly as wings.
He hit the ground on his butt and rolled, his hat flying off in the wind.
The horse shot straight up the street past Slash and Pecos and Lisa, laying its ears back and whinnying shrilly.
Slash drew a bead on the second rider galloping toward him. The Winchester barked, and the second rider cursed sharply as he dropped his own rifle. He fell back and sideways down his horse’s right hip. Only his head and shoulders hit the street.
His right boot had gotten caught in his stirrup, and he screamed again in agony as the horse dragged him straight off up the street on the heels of the fleeing cream. The scuffed snow slush behind him was blood-painted pink.
Slash pumped another cartridge into his Winchester’s breech but held fire. Having seen what had happened to their two partners, the other five riders were holding back and quickly dismounting the sidestepping horses. Slash drew a bead on one, but the man was bouncing around too much, and the slug sailed over him and plunked into the street beyond him.
As the others scrambled for cover, they triggered their own rifles. Slugs sliced the air around Slash, Pecos, and Lisa, plunking into the two buildings behind them. Pecos discharged the second barrel of his sawed-off, but the double-ought buck merely tore into the wood of a building corner as his target leaped around and behind it.
“Ow!” Lisa cried.
As he worked his rifle’s cocking lever, Slash glanced toward the girl on his right, between him and Pecos. She’d fallen back on her butt, this time clutching her bloody upper left arm. Her Winchester dangled in her right hand. Slash saw what had happened. Forgetting that Slash had emptied her carbine, she’d been trying in vain to return fire, and one of the killers’ slugs had ripped into her.
“Thanks for emptying my guns, damn you!” she screeched at Slash, pain in her eyes.
Slash took his Winchester in his left hand and, crouching low, scrambled over to her. “Cover me, Pecos! I’m gonna take the deputy to cover!”
“All right, but hurry up—I’m low on ammo!” Pecos said, shoving his double-gauge back behind his shoulder and clawing his big Russian .44 from the holster on his right thigh.
As he returned fire on the five outlaws, who were now shooting from cover on both sides of the broad street, Slash grabbed Lisa’s right hand and drew her up over his shoulder.
“Ow!” the girl cried. “I ain’t a sack of potatoes!”
“No, you’re too loud for potatoes!” Slash shambled off toward the saloon as bullets buzzed around his head and thudded into the street with angry whines. All three horses—his, Pecos’s buckskin, and Lisa’s roan—had wisely jerked their reins free of the hitchrack fronting the saloon and run off in the direction of the two dead men’s fleeing mounts, away from the lead storm.
“My rifle!” Lisa shouted. She’d left her carbine in the street.
“I only got two hands, darlin’!” Slash was carrying his own Winchester in his right hand while holding the girl on his left shoulder.
“I ain’t your darlin’, cutthroat!”
“Well, okay, then . . . your loss . . .” Breathless, gritting his teeth against the five killers’ onslaught of flying lead, Slash pushed through the door that he and Pecos had left standing half open and deposited the girl on the saloon floor, leaning her back against the wall, under a badly faded oil painting of an Indian on a horse with hungry-looking wolves surrounding him.
Pecos triggered his last shot from the boardwalk, then ducked into th
e saloon as well. He closed the door against the killers’ lead, but he hadn’t even gotten it latched before two bullets plunked through the front window and ground themselves into a table.
Pecos dropped to a knee between the door and the now-broken window and broke his shotgun to commence reloading. “How bad she hit?” he called to Pecos.
Slash was inspecting the girl’s upper left arm, holding it in both of his hands. “I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”
“I didn’t say it was serious,” Lisa said defensively, studying the blood dribbling from the thin furrow that the bullet had cut across the outside of her arm. “I just said I was hit.”
Slash drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket, wrapped it around the girl’s arm, and tied it. He winced as another bullet smashed through the window and into the wall about three feet from the oil painting, over Slash and the girl’s head. He looked again at Lisa. “You’ll be okay till a sawbones can look at it.”
He frowned at her. She was as white as a sheet as she continued staring at her arm. “What’s the matter? It can’t hurt that bad.”
“Nothin’ .”
“What is it?” He was thumbing fresh cartridges through his Winchester’s loading gate.
“It’s just . . . I . . . I get all woozy when . . . I see my own blood . . .” Lisa sagged back against the wall, her chest rising and falling sharply. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”
“She okay?” Pecos asked as a bullet slammed into the door to his left, causing it to lurch in its frame.
Slash chuckled. “She’s fine as frog hair. She just ain’t quite as tough as she lets on.” He winked at the girl, who was hardening her jaws against her own anxiety, trying fiercely to compose herself.
“You both go to hell!” she raged.
“There ya go, darlin’,” Slash patted her chap-clad right leg. “You’ll be just fine! For now, anyways,” he added grimly, casting a glance out the window. “I can’t guarantee beyond that!”
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 28