The Wicked Die Twice

“Haystack butte to the right, maybe a quarter mile,” Slash said, jerking his chin in that direction.

They were riding south of the little ranching settlement of Wheaton, along Little Porcupine Creek. They’d skirted the town because they’d seen no reason to bring trouble to innocent bystanders. Wheaton had one old lawman, but neither Pecos nor Slash thought Wilton Dunlop would be much help in their perilous situation. The last thing they wanted to do was get another town burned, its citizens killed and worse.

The two ex-cutthroats were on their own until they reached Cheyenne. They’d swung off the main trail and followed a secondary ranch trail in turn following Little Porcupine Creek as it skirted the settlement’s ragged southern edge. A stout old woman in a red scarf had stopped beating a rug on a clothesline to watch them. A dog had run out to chase them for a time, nipping at the wagon’s wheels, but it had soon turned and low-tailed it back to the shade of a scraggly cottonwood near where the old woman had been beating the rug.

Pecos turned to follow Slash’s gaze to the west. Sure enough, a rider was just then dropping down the far side of the butte over there. Pecos caught a brief glimpse of the man’s upper torso and then his shoulders and his black-hatted head just before he disappeared. A little curl of dust spiraled above the crest of the butte, fading quickly on the hot breeze.

“Damn,” Pecos said, riding beside Slash sitting on the wagon’s driver’s seat, crouched forward, the ribbons in his gloved hands. He held a quirley between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, and he took occasional puffs off of it, blowing the smoke out his nose.

Beside him, Jenny Claymore said, “Another one over there.”

“Over where?” Slashed asked her.

She turned to gaze through the jail cage behind her and Slash, over the sullen, owly faces of the three desperadoes slouched in the wagon, toward the northeast.

“Yep, I see it,” Pecos said.

Another single rider was riding along a low bench another quarter mile or so off the trail. Looking around, Pecos saw yet another rider just then dropping down the far side of a rise to the southeast. The rider’s horse switched its tail, and then it and its rider were gone.

Slash lifted his chin and scratched his neck. “Just like a pack of wolves following a buffalo herd. Waiting for dark.”

Despite the early-afternoon heat radiating down from the sun and then back up off the pale, bristling ground, Jenny gave a shiver.

Pecos scowled at his partner. “You know, sometimes your colorful way of talkin’ gets old.”

“Well, ain’t that how it seems?”

“I ain’t sayin’ it ain’t how it seems, but do you have to say it like that?”

“I speak the truth, my friend.” Slash reached over and patted Jenny’s left leg through her skirt. “I’m sorry, Jenny. Pecos’s right. Sometimes I get a bad case of the hoof in mouth disease.”

“No, you’re right,” Jenny said, glancing at him and then at Pecos riding just off the wagon’s left front wheel. “That’s just how it is, isn’t it? My father was a buffalo hunter back when there were still buffalo to hunt. He told stories of how the wolves would follow the herds, all spread out, each one waiting for an opportunity to grab a sick one or a calf or maybe . . .”

“One of the old ones,” Pecos finished for her when she seemed to think it prudent not to finish the thought herself. “That’d be Slash. His lips might fly a mile a minute, but he’s weak and slow. That’s what old age and a coming marriage does to a man, I reckon.”

Pecos chuckled at that. Not because he’d found what he’d said funny, but because he was nervous and needed a distraction. Maybe he thought Jenny did, too.

She turned to Slash, frowning curiously. “Is it true?” she asked. “Are you getting married, Slash?”

Slash just hiked a shoulder slightly, grumbled, and cast Pecos the quick, furtive wooly eyeball.

Pecos chuckled and said to Jenny, “Slash don’t like to talk about it. He don’t really like to talk about nothin’, when you get right down to it.” He winked at Jenny. “Women an’ weddin’s most of all. Those two things right there scare him worse than a cold pine box in a dark grave.”

Chuckling, Pecos rode ahead of the wagon to maintain the point position roughly fifty yards ahead, glancing around to pick out the wolves dogging their trail.

* * *

Back in the wagon, Slash could feel Jenny’s eyes on him. He could also see that she was chewing her bottom lip, pensive.

Slash took a deep drag off his cigarette and blew the smoke out on a long sigh. “Go ahead.”

Jenny frowned. “Go ahead?”

“Go ahead and ask.”

She brightened with a smile. “All right, I just will, then.” Her smile grew brighter. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

“Lucky lady,” one of the desperadoes slumped behind Slash and Jenny said through a low chuff. He followed it up with a mocking chuckle.

Slash slid his right-hand Colt from its holster and, without looking behind him, turned the gun over and rested the top of the barrel on his right shoulder. He clicked the hammer back.

“All right, all right!” Chaney said. “Don’t get your drawers in such a twist! I was just passin’ the time.”

“Pass the time keepin’ your mouth shut.”

“All right, all right!”

Slash depressed the Colt’s hammer and slid the piece back into its holster on his right thigh. Keeping his gaze straight ahead, he said, “Her name’s Jaycee.”

“What a lovely name.”

“Jaycee Breckenridge.”

“Even lovelier!”

Slash felt himself blush. He hated when he did that. Why did talking about Jaycee make him blush? Talking about the wolves stalking the buffalo didn’t make him blush one bit.

“How did you two meet—you and Miss Breckenridge?” Jenny asked.

Slash knew she, too, was just passing the time. Probably wanting to distract herself from the horror of their situation. Normally, he’d probably discourage such personal chinning, but under the circumstances, he thought the gentlemanly thing to do would be to help keep the girl distracted.

“Me an’ Jaycee? Hell, we’ve known each other goin’ on ten, fifteen years now.”

“And you’re just now getting married?” Jenny asked with surprise.

“Yeah, well . . . long story. You see, she took up with a close friend of mine and Pecos. Pistol Pete Johnson out of Dakota.” Slash chuckled, fondly remembering Pistol Pete. “Big, fun-lovin’ fella, Pete. Ugly as moldy sin, but the women stuck to him like cockleburs on a cur’s tale. As did Jaycee,” he couldn’t help adding with a touch of jealousy. “Pete was killed back five, six years ago now. It was my own damn fault, leadin’ the fellas into that box canyon. But, anyway . . .” He shook his head, wanting to swing the conversation back in a friendlier direction. “Anyway . . . Jaycee and I been friends a long time. Only lately . . . in the past year or two . . . we . . . we . . . well, we . . .”

“Fell in love?”

Slash’s flush rose so high in his cheeks it blurred his eyes.

“Go ahead,” Jenny said. “It’s not a dirty word, you know, Slash.”

“Oh, I know. Yeah, we . . .”

“Fell in love.”

“F-fell in love.” Slash felt an embarrassed laugh burst out of him. “That’s what we did all right. Sure enough!”

What really amazed him was that he’d been able to say the word and not pass out from overexertion.

“There, that wasn’t so hard—now, was it?”

“No.” Slash looked at Jenny. His embarrassment was gone. He suddenly felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

He loved Jaycee. Why should that be such a hard thing to admit to? He’d done far worse things in his life than fall in love.

“No, it wasn’t at all!” He laughed again, louder this time.

He heard a couple of the desperadoes chuckling at him quietly, and he didn’t even care.

He turned to Jenny. She’d turned her head to gaze back over her right shoulder at Glenn Larsen riding behind the wagon, keeping pace from about thirty yards back.

She turned her head back forward. She didn’t say anything. She stared straight ahead beyond the horses, her eyes cast with thought.

Slash kept his eyes on her. She’d helped him. Why not return the favor?

“You know, Jenny . . . about last night . . .”

She jerked a surprised look at him. It was her turn to blush.

“Especially under the circumstances, you know,” Slash said in his slow, resonate Missouri drawl, “it’s the most natural thing in the world. Pullin’ close, I mean. You and the young marshal.”

Jenny drew a deep breath, turned her head back forward. Slowly, a new smile shaped itself on her lips. She turned to Slash, wrapped both of her arms around him, and pressed her head affectionately against his shoulder.

* * *

Riding ahead of the wagon, Pecos suddenly jerked back on Buck’s reins.

He slid his hand to the Russian .44 residing on his right thigh. He closed his hands over the pistol’s grips but left the piece in its holster.

Roughly thirty yards ahead, three men had just ridden out from behind a boulder to block the trail. They turned their horses to face Pecos. Each man held a rifle with a white cloth tied to the end of the barrel.

“Whoah!” Slash said behind Pecos, checking the two geldings down, rolling the jail wagon to a stop. “Whoah . . . whoah . . .”

One of the geldings whinnied. One of the horses ahead of Pecos answered the greeting whinny with one of its own. The killers’ horses looked friendly. The killers themselves, though—and that’s who they were, Slash knew, because who else would they be?—looked mean as two bobcats locked in the same privy.

“Tatum!” one of the desperadoes in the jail wagon called to the three newcomers facing Pecos. “How you doin’, you old rattlesnake? George! Hidy, Dawg !”

Hell-Raisin’ Frank Beecher laughed loudly and yelled, “If you three aren’t sights for our sore eyes . . . !”

“Shut up,” Pecos heard Slash admonish the jailed killers. He also heard a gun click, which meant that Slash was aiming his Colt at the killers again through the bars.

The middle rider facing Pecos lifted his chin to yell, “Don’t worry, fellas, we’ll have you out of there in no time!”

The jailed killers did not respond. Slash had cowed them with his Colt; they knew he was just waiting for an opportunity to blow off another body part.

“I don’t think so,” Pecos said, keeping one eye on the three men before him, keeping another eye skinned for a possible trap. These three might be raising truce flags, but Pecos didn’t trust any of them farther than he could throw them uphill against a Texas tornado.

“We came to talk some reason into you and your partners,” said the killer in the middle of the trio. He was short and stocky, and he had long, flowing white hair dropping down from a battered opera hat. His face was Indian dark, deeply tanned and weathered. Pecos thought he was around his and Slash’s age.

“Is that a fact?”

“You turn our boys loose before midnight tonight, and we’ll let you three fellas and the young lady live. We’ll let you just ride on . . . free as jackrabbits. You don’t, you’ll all be dead by noon tomorrow.” He narrowed a hard, cobalt-blue eye and pointed a warning finger straight out at Pecos. “All except the girl, that is.” He smiled. “We’ll let her live a little longer . . . if you get my drift.”

Pecos could sense Jenny’s horror on the wagon behind him as anger flared in him and he fired back with: “You come this close again . . . try a single threatening move on us, and we’re gonna kill those boys of yours. A bullet to each one’s head, starting with Chaney, then on to that butcher, Beecher, and that butt-ugly half-breed!”

“I heard that!” protested Black Pot in an ironic tone.

“Shut up,” Slash ordered him tightly.

“You do that,” said the white-haired man, narrowing one of his cobalt eyes in anger. “And it’ll be the same as killin’ yourselves, because as soon as you’ve done it, you’ll be dead, too.”

“You tell him, Dawg!” Chaney yelled.

“One more word and I’m gonna drill you in the knee!” Slash wailed at him.

Dawg smiled broadly as he looked past Pecos at the wagon. “You boys sit tight. We’ll get you out of there. Just wanted to give these civil servants somethin’ to think about.” He winked, muttered something to the two men sitting to either side of him, then reined his horse off the trail and booted it into a gallop to the east. The others followed suit. All three were soon speck sized as they rode up a distant rise, their dust sifting behind them.

Their hoof thuds dwindled to silence.

Pecos stared after them for a time.

Then he turned his head to look at Slash.

“Better think it over, fellas,” Chaney said. “I mean . . . for the girl’s sake, if not your own.”

Gritting his teeth, Slash drew his right-hand Colt, turned, and fired a round into the jail wagon.

Chaney screamed.