It was late afternoon before the rifle-woman allowed the gaunt Iron Eyes to dismount from his Indian pony
The sun was setting below the far-away hills that marked the Texas side of the wide river.
It was still unbelievably hot, and the sweat had soaked through both their shirts. Now every detail of her fine-formed breasts could be seen by the sharp-eyed bounty-hunter.
He had continued bleeding from the hole in his ear for over an hour, and his shoulder was stained with his own blood.
She watched as he bent down to pick up the tin plate she had indicated. He helped himself to a slice of burned bacon and sat down upon the hard ground. It tasted good, he thought, as he chewed the meat and watched her with squinting eyes.
Whoever she was, she was good.
She had done something no other living person had ever managed to do. She had taken a chunk out of him.
Iron Eyes respected her for the attitude she displayed toward him. It was like his own.
Merciless.
She walked around him and never once allowed the long rifle barrel to wander off its chosen target, his head.
‘Who’re you chasing?’ she asked as she finally stopped pacing through the soft sand.
‘Nobody,’ he replied, with the black-and-pink meat sticking to his uneven teeth.
‘You look like a hunter of men,’ she said, sitting down on a large boulder opposite him.
‘I am.’
‘So who’re you after?’
‘Nobody at the moment.’ He pushed the remaining lump of bacon into his mouth and chewed. It was the first solid food he had eaten for several days, apart from hard tack.
‘So you’re a bounty-hunter?’ She reached down and picked up the black tin mug full of coffee. ‘That is an evil trade.’
‘Suits my character,’ he sneered, picking his teeth with his fingernails.
‘You good at it?’
‘The best there ever was,’ he bragged.
‘You are the best?’ She gave a belly laugh. ‘How come I got the drop on you then?’
He shrugged. It was a shrug that disguised his anger.
‘You got lucky.’
‘No, my friend.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘You got lucky.’
‘Me?’
‘I didn’t kill you. That’s damn lucky’
He nodded as he dropped the plate on to the sand. His mood was changing. He was no longer angry at having a chunk of his ear blown away.
Now he wanted to know more about this woman who sat before him.
‘What do they call you‘?’ he asked.
‘What does it matter?’
‘I like to know who the hell shoots me.’ Iron Eyes felt the stinging ease up on the side of his head. The blood was finally clotting on his wound.
‘They call me Jane.’ She tossed the sentence away like a child would toss away its favourite rag-doll. Her eyes looked at him with the look of a woman who was interested in something she had captured. His long coat and hair were not what she had become used to seeing in the past few years of her life. He looked as if he were the sort of man who held up trains in dime novels. Her curiosity about this painfully thin man was the only reason she had not killed him.
For some reason she wanted to know more about this creature, who looked as if he belonged in some graveyard rather than out here upon the plains.
‘Jane what?’
‘Jane is enough,’ she growled.
He accepted that he was not getting any further with that line of questioning, and decided to alter his approach.
‘Where you headed?’
‘West.’
‘What the hell do you wanna go there for?’ he asked, as he cautiously touched the scab upon his ear. ‘There ain’t nothing in that direction except Indians and Mexicans.’
‘Suits me.’ She finished her coffee and got to her feet.
Iron Eyes rose to his full height, which was only barely taller than her. He studied her body She was thinner than any woman he had ever seen.
She was also the first female he had ever seen wearing men’s clothes. He liked what he was looking at.
‘What you thinking?’ She glared at him, with the rifle still balanced in her hands.
‘Nothing.’ He blew out heavily, trying to clear his brain of the thoughts that had raced through him. Thoughts that sent the skin on his thin neck tingling. She had a body that he would gladly kill for. That was strange for Iron Eyes, as he had never once before been tempted by a female. She was somehow different.
Very different.
‘What do they call you, Mr Bounty-hunter?’
‘Iron Eyes,’ he drawled. ‘Just Iron Eyes.’
For the first time since they had run into each other, her face went pale, as if suddenly shocked.
The name meant something to her, but what? She looked him up and down carefully for what seemed an eternity, before lowering the rifle.
‘Iron Eyes?’ She repeated his words.
‘Yep.’ He felt very uneasy by this creature and her sudden mood-swing. The hostility had vanished.
Yet it had been replaced by something totally alien to this ruthless man’s knowledge.
‘I heard about you.’ Her eyes darted at him briefly, before turning away once more. Anything good?’
‘Depends on your point of view.’
Iron Eyes looked at the lowered rifle, and then stepped closer to the slim lady with the emotionless face.
‘You ain’t aiming that iron at me anymore,’ he said, resting his knuckles upon his bony hips.
She nodded and moved away from him. She seemed deep in thought as she paced through the soft sand.
Finally she stopped, and turned her attention to the raging waters of the swollen river as it roared past them with an unceasing fury.
‘Yesterday that river was about six inches deep.’
Iron Eyes closed in on her.
‘That when you crossed?’
‘Yeah, that’s when I crossed.’ she replied.
She could feel his breath upon her neck as he stopped at her side and hovered, like a bee watching a flower. Ready to take the pollen. Finally she turned and gazed into his cold eyes.
‘What you looking at?’
Iron Eyes did not answer. He just continued staring at her, with hunger in his face. The hunger of a man who had never before seen something that whetted his appetite.