CHAPTER 21
Slash marched up the three steps to the raised boardwalk. Hattie followed him, then Pecos.
Slash saw a man sacked out on the boardwalk to his right. The sleeper was a grizzled, gray-bearded oldster lying prostrate, ankles crossed, hands entwined on his fat belly, head resting back against a feed sack. He raked soft snores out through fluttering lips.
A coonskin cap, an empty bottle, and several mashed quirley stubs lay nearby.
Slash glanced at Pecos, shrugged, then reached across his belly to release the keeper thong over the Colt holstered on his left hip, just in case. He stepped through the door and to his left, so the door wouldn’t frame him against the outside light. As Hattie and Pecos walked in behind him, Pecos stepped to the right, for the same reason that Slash had stepped to the left.
Hattie stood in front of the open door, frowning curiously at each man in turn.
“Damn fool,” Slash bit out quietly through stiff jaws. “Gonna get your purty self perforated, entering a place out here like that.”
Deep lines of incredulity cut across her forehead. “Like what?”
Slash just shook his head and peered into the thick shadows before him. The darkness was relieved by two sunlit windows in the front wall to his right, beyond Pecos. The windows were small. They were also very dirty, so the light that mixed with the shadows was murky at best.
He could make out five figures in the place—two sitting at a table to his left, and three against the cabin’s far wall on his right. There were three other tables, all open.
Pine planks nailed to beer kegs at the rear of the room served as a bar of sorts. A wide-shouldered man with thin hair and wearing a ratty blue apron stood back there, leaning against the bar, a loosely rolled quirley smoldering between his lips.
Flanking him were shelves of bottles, canned goods, dry goods, and even some groceries. Bins were spread out to the right of the bar, also housing goods, including denim trousers, leather boots, caps, gloves, snowshoes, and axes and shovels. Stacks of flour were piled in a corner. Sausages and cheeses hung from the ceiling all across the room. The smell of the smoked and cured meat and cheese made Slash’s mouth water.
Yet more bear skulls were mounted on the walls and on ceiling support posts about the room. A bearskin served as a curtain for the doorway flanking the bar.
Behind the bar, a pot bubbled on an iron range.
All eyes in the room regarded the three newcomers stonily, including those of the broad-shouldered barman, who puffed the quirley and exhaled the smoke through his wedge-like nose without using his hands.
Since there appeared no immediate threat, Slash nodded cordially to the barman. Stepping forward, away from the front wall, he said, “You got beer? I could really go for a beer.”
The man nodded, his stony expression in place. A fly buzzed around his left ear, and he lifted that cheek in a wince of sorts. He appeared so big and tired that he didn’t have the energy to swat at the pesky fly. “Ale.”
“That’s what I’ll have,” Slash said.
“Me, too,” said Pecos.
“Tea for me,” said the girl.
“No tea. I got some coffee I can heat up from this mornin’.”
“Just water,” the girl said, turning her mouth corners down in disdain.
Slash headed for a table in the middle of the room, between the two men sitting against the left wall and the three to the right. He didn’t like sitting out in the middle of the room like this, but he didn’t see that he had a choice. As he slid out a chair, he glanced at the barman, who was drawing a mug of dark beer from a keg behind the bar.
“What kind of stew you got bubbling away on the range there?” He glanced at the skulls that made the place look like a catacomb. “Wait—let me guess. Bear!” He chuckled.
The barman merely glanced over his shoulder at him, his face as expressionless as before. The other customers regarded him with the same dullness.
Slash’s smile grew wooden. He glanced at Pecos, who regarded him with a skeptically arched brow as he dragged his own chair out from the table. “I reckon we’ll each have us a bowl of whatever you got cookin’, then,” Slash told the barman, then muttered under his breath, “Sure smells like bear to me.”
When the newcomers were seated at the small square table, under a too-short leg of which Pecos wedged a lucifer to steady it, Slash glanced around. His eyes had adjusted enough to see more clearly the three men now on his left as he faced Pecos sitting across from him. He also faced the front wall. The three to his left were a hard-looking, bearded bunch in dusty trail gear. All three wore at least two six-shooters apiece, and a sawed-off, double-bore shotgun, not unlike Pecos’s own gut-shredder, rested across a corner of their table.
Empty stew bowls were piled to one side.
The three were playing poker and drinking ale. Two were smoking cigars, while the third, sitting with his back to the far wall, directly facing Slash’s table, had a lump of chaw bulging out his lower lip. He didn’t appear to be concentrating on the cards fanned out in his hands. He appeared far more interested in the three newcomers.
Why?
Was it the girl?
Or was there some other reason?
Slash turned to his right, to inspect the two men sitting against the wall on that side of the room. They were identical twins, one the mirror image of the other. If they weren’t full-blood Indians, they were close—two big, dark-eyed, copper-skinned men with broad, flat, hairless features and beak-like noses. Long, coarse, coal-black hair hung straight down from their bullet-crowned black felt hats. The hats were identical twins, as well.
In fact, the two men appeared to be entirely identically outfitted—worn wool suit coats over wool shirts and sweaters, and broadcloth trousers stuffed into high-topped, mule-eared moccasins. Each man wore a red neckerchief, tightly knotted, the ends dangling down their broad chests.
Colt pistols were holstered for the cross-draw on their left hips. Bowie knives were sheathed on the other side. Even the Colts and knives appeared similar if not identical.
The two Indians appeared even bigger than Pecos.
They were so fascinating, these two identical Indian twins, that Slash found himself openly staring.
The two big Indians, facing each other across a small table, stared straight back at Slash, one holding a smoking tin cup up in front of his broad, full-lipped mouth. As far as Slash could make out, the only way you could tell these two apart was by the eyelash-shaped knife scar, knotted and white, that resided on a cheek of the twin on the left, facing the back of the room.
This twin had a Henry repeating rifle leaning against the wall to his left.
Slash smiled and pinched his hat brim to the two. The scar-faced one on the left showed no emotion. The other one gave a stiff, fleeting smile and opened and closed his right hand above the table. If that had been a wave, it hadn’t been a warm one. In fact, there’d been something vaguely ominous about it.
Slash felt a boot toe ram his shin beneath the table. “Ouch!”
“Stop starin’, ya damn fool!” Pecos admonished him under his breath.
“Ah, hell,” Slash said, scowling against the pain in his shin, “they gotta be used to it by now.”
Hattie, sitting to Slash’s left, was also staring at the two big Indians, whose eyes had found her as well, Slash saw with an apprehensive tightening of his shoulders. The girl didn’t look too happy about it, either. She lowered her gaze to the table and wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose.
The barman came over and set big mugs of ale before Slash and Pecos. He set steaming stew bowls before all three. Looking into his bowl, seeing the dark-brown chunks of organ meat floating in a thin broth spotted with what appeared to be bits of fat and carrots, Slash grinned up at the man and said, “See—I knew it was bear!”
The man started to turn away, but Slash stopped him with: “Say, amigo, do you have any idea where we could buy a horse around here?”
“A horse?” the man said, scowling as though Slash had said dinosaur or dragon. “Nah.” He shook his head and walked away, limping slightly on one leg.
Slash glanced at Pecos, who shrugged and began spooning stew into his mouth. Slash did likewise. Hattie was going at the food a little more tentatively, as though she had something against bear, when out of the corner of Slash’s right eye he saw one of the Indian twins rise heavily from his chair. Slash winced, then spooned another bite of the stew into his mouth as he saw the twin, the one with the scar on his cheek, hitch his pants up higher on his broad hips and begin sauntering toward Slash, Pecos, and Hattie’s table.
The man’s boots thumped loudly on the worn, badly scarred wooden floor.
Slash and Pecos shared another glance, this time a dark one, then looked at the big twin standing over their table, to Slash’s right and Pecos’s left. The Indian grinned, his eyes on Hattie, who scowled up at him, indignant. The Indian leaned forward and rested his big fists on the edge of the table, glancing from Slash to Pecos, then back again.
“I will give you one horse for the girl.” The twin’s grin broadened, his dark eyes flashing in delight.
Hattie’s own eyes blazed up at him. “I beg your pardon, sir.”
The Indian stared back at her, showing his horsey, off-white teeth through that broad, eager smile. “One horse for the girl.”
Hattie’s eyes widened. Her lower jaw hung nearly to her chest. She sank back in her chair with a shocked gasp, and said, “Why, I have never been so insulted in all my days!”
“Easy now, girl,” Slash said, chuckling nervously as he smiled up at the eager-eyed Indian. “It’s just a little misunderstandin’ is all. You see, amigo, the horse is for her, don’t ya know. She herself is not for sale. Hah!”
Again, Slash chuckled, and Pecos joined in with his own wooden laugh.
A stone dropped in Slash’s belly when Hattie gave another one of her groans of outrage, scraped her chair back from the table, and rose to her feet like a wildcat preparing to pounce. In a flash, her big horse pistol was in her hand, and Slash watched in silent horror as she cocked it loudly and thrust it up and over the table and planted the barrel against the Indian’s nose, yelling, “How dare you—you smelly, rock-worshipping heathen—come over here and insult me with such a moronic proposal! Purchase me for a horse?”
Both Slash and Pecos stared, tongue-tied, at the big, cocked pistol that the girl held tightly in both hands against the Indian’s nose. Slash thought for sure the man would explode in fury.
But, no. He didn’t look frightened or angry at all. He looked genuinely even more delighted than when he’d first walked over here.
He crossed his eyes as he looked down at the big gun snugged against his nose and then slid his gaze in raw delight, in euphoric enchantment, at the girl beetling her brows and pursing her lips at him, holding the pistol rock steady in her small, strong hands.
Meanwhile, the big Indian’s just-as-big twin was sagging back in his chair, leaning back against the wall and laughing and stomping his boots on the floor in spasms of joyful humor. He held one hand to his forehead and the other across his mouth, childlike, as he continued to stomp his feet and roar.
The other three customers looked on, grinning from beneath their hat brims, cigars smoldering in two of the men’s hands, chaw streaming down the chin of the third one.
The Indian twin whom Hattie was bearing down on slid his flashing dark eyes to Slash and said, “All right—we give you two ponies for this little wildcat!”
Hattie’s jaws grew even tauter, and she yelled, “Why, you—”
Slash reached out with both hands, grabbed the gun, and lifted it straight up as Hattie squeezed the trigger. The blast rocketed around inside the cabin, the bullet plunking into a ceiling beam directly over the table. Slash wrenched the big popper out of the girl’s hands. She screamed and cursed him, her hat tumbling down her back, her hair falling over her face.
Slash shoved her brusquely into her chair, lowered the smoking Remington to his side, and held his left-hand palm out to the Indian in supplication. “Friend, I want to apologize for my . . . my . . . my niece there. Her blood tends to run a little hot when she’s hungry.”
“Yeah, she just needs to get a little somethin’ down her gullet is all,” Pecos added, turning his reproving glare on the girl and adding, “Maybe a rusty nail or two would be more to her liking.”
“Three horses!” the big twin said through a beam at Slash, holding up that many fingers.
Sitting low in her chair, peering through the screen of her mussed hair, Hattie gave another enraged wail through gritted teeth. Pecos hurried around behind her and clamped a hand over her mouth, muffling the outcry.
Turning to the big Indian, Slash grinned and shook his head. “No, no.” He chuckled. “You see, this polecat’s . . . well, she’s my niece, you see. An’ she’s not for sale. Not that I wouldn’t sell her, personally, if I could, but, well, she just ain’t mine to sell, ya see? If I were to accept such an offer, we’d likely have quite the family dustup, don’t ya know. Besides, if you wanna hear it from the horse’s mouth”—Slash leaned toward the big Indian twin and held his hand to his mouth as though conveying a secret—“she ain’t worth one ewe-necked broomtail, let alone three mountain-bred mustangs!”
He laughed.
Hattie squirmed in her chair and cussed. At least, Slash assumed she was cussing again. He couldn’t tell for sure, because Pecos held his hand taut against her mouth.
“You not sell wildcat girl even for three horses?” The big twin looked incredulous and more than a tad heartbroken.
“Nah, can’t do it,” Slash said. “Sorry, amigo. I’ll buy you a beer, though. Apron, outfit the twins with a fresh round of your delightful ale, will you?”
That seemed to appease the big twin. He muttered under his breath, eyed Hattie as though she were a tasty meal he was having to walk away from, then tromped back over to his table, where his twin was still chuckling over the whole affair, apparently having the time of his life.
Pecos kept his hand over the girl’s mouth. She sat fuming, glaring up at him.
“I’ll take my hand away, but only after you promise to behave yourself,” said the big ex-cutthroat. “I didn’t come here to get shot over no caterwauling Pinkerton.”
She just stared up at him, her face pale with fury.
“Okay, here we go,” Pecos said. He glanced at Slash, then removed his hand from over the girl’s mouth.
They both thought for sure she’d explode like a keg of dynamite and were surprised when she remained in her chair, pale with rage, jaws hard, eyes like two chunks of brown flint, but as quiet as a church mouse.
Slash and Pecos sighed in relief.
“Now, then,” Slash said, “maybe we can finish up our meal in peace and ride the hell out of here.”
“What about the men we’re tracking?” Hattie asked him.
“What about ’em?” Slash said, spooning stew into his mouth.
“We haven’t inquired about—”
“More beer, gentlemen?” The barman had limped over to their table holding a stone jug. “Refills only a penny.”
“Sure, sure, I’ll take a refill,” Slash said, holding up his half-empty glass.
“Me, too,” said Pecos. “Damn good ale, sir.”
The man had topped off Slash’s mug and had just started to pour more ale into Pecos’s mug when Hattie set her spoon down, cleared her throat, and looked up at the big man. “Excuse me, sir, but I have a question,” she asked loudly enough for the entire room to hear. “Has a group of riders passed through here recently? Perhaps a beady-eyed group of border toughs leading a pack mule or two?”
The barman dropped Pecos’s heavy glass onto the table. The glass struck the table with a sharp thud and fell over. The ale spilled across the table and onto the floor.
The barman looked at the young Pinkerton, wide-eyed, lower jaw hanging.
The room fell deathly quiet.
All eyes were on Hattie.
Slash glanced around the room, heart tattooing the backside of his breastbone. Pecos looked around, his own ticker turning somersaults. Every muscle of every man in the place was drawn taut as razor wire.
Slash looked at Pecos. Pecos looked back at him in hushed awe. “Oh . . . boy . . . ,” he muttered.
The men to the cutthroats’ left and right leaped to their feet, clawing iron.
“Get down!” Slash cried, and hurled himself to the floor as the guns started thundering.