CHAPTER 16
“No, no, no!” Pecos said, shaking his head. “We didn’t have no part in that.”
“We were below,” Slash said. “We heard the Gatling gun. Rode up here to check it out. Put the gun down now, darlin’. You got no reason to be afraid of us.”
She continued to aim down the little peashooter for almost another minute, sliding her gaze between the two former cutthroats. Then, gradually, doubt shone like a shadow across her retinas. She frowned, removed one hand from the gun to wipe blood and sweat off her forehead, and said, “You . . . promise you weren’t one o’ them?”
Suddenly, her voice had lost its guile.
Slash walked over to her, extending his hand for the pistol. “Cross our hearts, Hattie.”
Fire returned to her mouth as well as her gaze. “It’s Operative Number One, damn you!”
“All right, give me the gun, Operative Number One.” Slash reached out and closed his hand around the derringer, gently pried it from her hand.
As he did, the young woman gazed up at him, a sheen of emotion washing across her eyes. Her upper lip trembled, and then she flung herself forward against Slash, roping her arms around his waist and sobbing.
“It was awful!” she said, trembling in Slash’s arms. “They bushwhacked us, opened up on us with that machine gun! They blocked the trail with that tree, and Donnally hadn’t even got the coach stopped before they started shooting. They didn’t shake us down! They didn’t threaten us! They didn’t demand the gold! None of those things!”
She tipped her head back to stare up at Slash, the tears mingling with blood and streaming down her cheeks and down her neck. “They just opened up on us with that Gatling gun!”
Pecos walked toward them. “Easy, girl—where you hit?”
The girl turned to him. “They shot us like ducks on a millpond. I don’t think any of us . . . any of the others . . . even had a chance to draw a pistol!”
Slash lowered one arm and, keeping the other arm wrapped around her waist, led her over to a tree in the shade along the trail. “Come on—you’d best sit down over here, Operative Number One. You look mighty beat up.”
Slash eased her down against the tree and raked her blood-soaked body with his eyes. “Where you hit? We’re gonna have to—”
She shook her head. “I’m not hit.”
“Huh?”
“I’m not hit. This is not my blood.” She gave another sob and then, lips trembling, said, “I was sitting on the opposite side of the coach from that savage gun, facing forward. When those cowardly ambushers opened up, I was shielded by the other four Pinkertons in the coach. Somehow . . .”
She looked down at herself, swept her bloody hands across her bloody thighs. “Somehow, I don’t believe I even caught a burn. When the horses headed down the slope, the coach broke away from the hitch and rolled. The door on my side opened, and I was thrown clear. I must’ve been knocked out. I remember hitting the ground . . . hearing that awful din! . . . and then I regained consciousness in those shrubs over there . . . and . . . and I saw you two . . . up here on the trail . . .”
Pecos was on one knee beside Slash. He looked at his partner and said, “How do you fathom them not stopping the coach to rob it but just shooting it off the road?”
Slash scooped up a handful of dirt, let it sift slowly to the ground, pondering. “Maybe they . . .”
“Knew it wasn’t on the coach,” the young woman finished for him. Her voice rising, she said, “They must have known the gold wasn’t on the coach! They must have known only Pinkertons were on that coach, and they were out to kill us! To keep us off their trail! They shot us so fast . . . so fast . . . we didn’t even have time to pray!”
Slash and Pecos exchanged dark glances.
“How in the hell could they have figured out our plan?” Pecos said.
Sitting up straight, a flush rising into her cheeks behind the crusted blood, Operative One said, “Where’s the gold?”
Slash and Pecos winced, sheepish. Neither one said anything for a few stretched seconds. Then Pecos cleared his throat. “It’s, uh . . . it’s, uh—”
“Back down in the valley,” Pecos finished for him, looking sharply, dubiously, at Slash.
They both suspected what they knew the young woman suspected.
Slash rose quickly. “I reckon we’d best get down there, partner. An’ check on the gold, an’ hope like hell what we think might’ve happened ain’t what happened!”
“Wait!” Pecos grabbed Slash’s shirt. “How could they know we’re carryin’ the gold?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Come on!”
“Hold on.” Hattie rose heavily, grunting, breathing hard now, anxiously. She extended her hand. “You still have my derringer. Give it back.”
Slash looked down at the derringer poking out from behind his cartridge belt. He’d forgotten about it. He pulled it out and set it in her hand. “Here you go, darlin’.”
“I’ll be riding with you.”
“Oh, no,” Slash said. “We just got two horses. We’ll check out the wagon an’ come back for you later.”
Hattie raised her pistol in both hands and clicked the hammers back. “You either take me with you now or I blast you both right here and take your horses!”
Pecos scowled at his partner. “That was a real swift move, Slash.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Both of you, shut up, and get me down to the wagon!” the girl yelled.
“All right, all right,” Slash said. “Don’t get your bloomers in a twist.” As he and Pecos started walking down the slope toward their horses, the girl following, aiming her derringer at them, Slash said, “What about your friends here?”
“What about ’em?”
“Don’t you wanna bury ’em?”
“They’re dead. They don’t deserve burying. No more than I would if I were among them—dead. Not after the foolish stunt we pulled—letting ourselves ride into that ambush!”
As they approached the horses, Slash shook his head. “You’re a tough one, Hattie.”
“It’s Operative Number One to you, cutthroat!” the girl bit out behind him.
“I’m not gonna keep choking on my tongue every time I address you, Miss Hattie,” Slash said, wheeling and, catching her off guard, snatching the derringer out of her right hand.
“Ouch!” she cried, stumbling forward. “Oh, you—”
“And you ain’t gonna keep that little popper aimed at my back,” Slash continued. “I don’t doubt you know how to use it, but it’s a silly man who’d let a girl keep a gun aimed at him when he don’t have to.”
“How dare you! Why, you’re nothing more than a—!” She lunged at him, bringing her open right hand up and around to slap him. He grabbed her around her narrow waist, and before her hand could hit its target, he’d tossed her up onto his Appy’s back, behind his saddle. Her hand swatted only air.
“How dare you!” she cried again, deeply indignant.
Slash glanced at Pecos, who regarded him skeptically as the bigger man swung up onto his buckskin’s back. Slash sighed as he boarded his own horse. He glanced back at the young woman, who sat glaring at him, gritting her teeth and firing miniature bayonets with her eyes. “Hold on tight, now, darlin’,” he said, adding with an ironic snort, “I sure wouldn’t want to lose you!”
He pointed the Appaloosa downhill and touched spurs to its flanks.
Hattie cursed him all the way back down to the valley.
“Where is it?” she yelled behind him when they hit level ground. “Oh, my God—where is it?”
“Keep your pantaloons on—we ain’t there yet!”
“Oh, my God!” the girl cried. “They’ve taken it! I know they’ve taken it! Oh, the humiliation of this! The shame! Mister Pinkerton will send me packing, and rightly so!”
“Like I said, keep your pantaloons on, honey,” Slash said. “See—there it is! Right where we left it!” He laughed in relief as he and Pecos put their horses up to the rear of the wagon, behind the rocks that hid it from the trail. “Look there, the cover’s still on it. Why, I don’t think it’s been molested in the least bit!”
He laughed again, giddy in his liberation from the anxiety that had gnawed at his gut while Hattie had chewed his ears all the way down the mountain.
He stopped the Appy and swung his right leg over the horn, dropping straight down to the ground. Pecos dismounted the blowing, sweat-lathered buckskin and straightened his hat.
“Check it out, partner,” Slash said.
“Here we go.” Pecos released the tarpaulin from the steel rings in the tailgate and then from around the sides of the box. He whipped it forward against the box’s front panel.
Slash let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The strongbox was still there, unmolested.
He blinked. Blinked again, rubbed his eyes.
He’d only been half right. The box was still there, all right. In the middle of the wagon. The chains were still attached. Only—the locks had been sprung!
Pecos must have seen the same thing Slash had seen at the same time Slash had seen it. He’d been grinning in relief. Only, now his smile quickly vanished without a trace.
The two men shared a dark look.
Slash leaped into the bed of the wagon. He dropped to a knee for a closer look.
Sure enough, the jaws of the locks were open.
His gloved hands shaking, Slash lifted the box’s lid.
“Ah, hell!” rattled out his lips, pitched with anguish.
All the box contained were a dozen or so pine cones arranged into a stick figure’s face complete with mocking smile.
Behind Slash, someone gave a breathy groan.
He turned to see Hattie, who’d been standing off the end of the wagon, faint. She dropped like a sack of thrown grain.
* * *
Just after sunset, Pecos was making his way back through woods toward the campfire he could see flickering in the near darkness of this narrow mountain valley, when he heard something on his left. A strange sound. Not a natural sound.
Could some of the gang of thieving killers have turned back to scour Slash, Pecos, and the pretty Pink from their trail?
The sound had come from the stream, a tributary of the Taylor River, rushing through the rocks and boulders over there, about seventy or so yards from the small clearing in which, after a long, frustrating afternoon of tracking the half-dozen thieves, Slash, Pecos, and the young Pinkerton had finally made camp.
Taking his Colt revolving rifle in both hands, Pecos moved toward the stream. He didn’t have to move too carefully, for the low rushing of the stream itself would cover his approach. He stopped where he could see the last pink, pearl, and green wash of late light reflecting off the water beyond three tall spruces, then bulled slowly between two of the pyramidal evergreens, and stopped suddenly.
Oh, my . . .
A figure stood before him, not ten feet away. It was none of the thieving killers. It was the pretty young Pinkerton, whose first name, Hattie, was the only name Pecos knew her by. Aside from Operative Number One, that was.
She must have finally gotten tired enough of the blood that had crusted on nearly every inch of her and that she’d refused to waste time cleaning off, so desperately focused had she been on catching up to the murdering gold robbers. Now, however, after they’d finally stopped for the night, and Slash was tending the fire, she’d decided to come out to the creek for a bath.
And . . . here she was . . . in all her naked, ripe young glory, standing not ten feet away from Pecos, on the edge of the stream, half facing Pecos while she ran a towel across her chest and dabbed it under her right arm.
Pecos’s throat was tight and dry.
His pulse throbbed in his temples.
Oh, my . . .
He needed to be on his way, but he was afraid that if he moved, she’d see him. She’d think he was spying on her. Ogling her. And that, by God, had not been his intention!
No, sir. Not by a long shot.
But Pecos had to admit that if there were any pretty young Pinkerton detectives anywhere on the planet that he would have wanted to ogle, this one standing butt-naked not ten feet away from him, her wet hair glinting in the last light, would likely be the one.
Tightening his jaws and stretching his lips back from his teeth, Pecos began to backtrack ever so slowly. He wanted to move faster, but for some reason, his feet felt like lead, and he could not remove his eyes, howsoever much he intended to—wanted to!—from the spectacular, mind-numbing, heart-wrenching scene before him.
Come on, dammit, move! he silently ordered himself.
But he could not get his feet to work. That damn towel kept moving across the nicely rounded body before him, making certain parts move in such damned beguiling ways, that—
As the girl lifted her left arm to dab beneath it with the towel, she turned her head in the same direction. She must have glimpsed Pecos standing behind her, because she froze for just a second.
No, no, no, no! Pecos silently shrieked at the girl. Don’t look over here! No need to look over here!
She screamed.
Oh, hell!
She screamed again and whipped around to face Pecos, covering her well-formed bosoms with the towel and leaping backward, long wet hair dancing across her slender shoulders.
“No!” Pecos shouted, holding his rifle out to his side in one hand and thrusting his left hand forward, palm out. “No! I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . !”
“What are you doing?” the girl screamed, then lunged to her left. The hazy, weakening light glinted off something on a rock over there.
Oh, no. That damned derringer of hers!