CHAPTER 24
“You okay, darlin’?” Slash asked Hattie.
She was staring back over her shoulder at the dead man on the boardwalk.
Slowly, she turned toward where Slash was lowering his smoking Colt, the blood starting to return to her cheeks, but her eyes still wide and glassy with shock. “Yes,” she said, drawing a breath. “Yes . . . I think so.”
Slash walked over and extended his hand to her. “You’d best sit down for a spell.”
“Yes,” Hattie said, placing her hand in Slash’s. “Yes, I think I’d better.”
When Slash had helped the girl into a nearby chair, Jupiter Dodge said from his station behind the bar, “Say, that was one helluva shot.” He frowned again, curiously. “Who in the hell are you two, anyway? I’m beginnin’ to wonder if you two might be Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid!”
“Us?” said Slash, feigning bemused incredulity. He looked at Pecos, and they both laughed.
The two former cutthroats stepped out onto the boardwalk and stared down at the dead man, who stared up at them through his one remaining eye, which remained wide open in death as though he were perusing the cloudless sky for the angel that would take him to heaven.
“Nice shootin’, Slash,” Pecos said. “But you should’ve left him alive so’s we coulda found out where the rest of his new gang headed with the gold.”
“What’d you want me to do? Nick his ear so he could still drill a hole through Hattie’s head?”
“That girl’s trouble,” Pecos said, staring down at the dead Otis Pettypiece.
He’d said it quietly enough that he’d thought only Slash had heard. He was wrong. Hattie had stepped quietly up behind him and Slash, and now she said, crisply and with no little air of offense, “Excuse me. I’m going to go and pick out that horse now.”
“Ah, hell,” Pecos said. “Why don’t you stay inside and rest up? I’ll saddle a hoss for you.”
Hattie strode quickly and stiffly across the yard toward the corral straight out from the cabin, swinging her arms, her hair winging out behind her. She turned her head and said in the same crisply offended tone as before, “I wouldn’t want to be any more trouble!”
She turned her head forward, continued toward the corral, and plucked a rope off a gate post.
Pecos turned toward Slash. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”
“She almost got more than her feelings hurt in there.” Slash jerked his head toward the saloon behind him. “She came damn close to saddling a cloud instead one of those gold-robbers’ horses.”
“She’s just young,” Pecos said, staring toward where the girl was moving around the corral, inspecting the horses that sidled apprehensively away from her. As she moved, she swung the loop at the rope’s end, gradually enlarging it.
“She’s green. She shouldn’t be out here. I’m surprised Pinkerton sent her. Or one of his field lieutenants. She may not have gotten herself killed today . . . or someone else killed today . . . but the day ain’t over.”
“Don’t you start on her now, Slash. I feel bad about what I said. An’ her hearin’.”
“That’s the trouble with you, partner,” Slash said. “Your heart’s too damn big.”
“Oh, come on. She’s just a kid!”
“You look out for her from now on, then, if she’s just a kid. Me, I’m gonna go in an’ have some more bear stew before we hit the trail. And another tug or two off Dodge’s brandy.”
“What the hell’s climbin’ your hump all of a sudden?” Pecos said as Slash stepped over the dead Indian twin and headed for the bar, where Jupiter remained, drinking the Spanish brandy. “You can’t be feelin’ bad about layin’ out ole Otis. You know what a copper-riveted peckerwood he always was. No one shed a tear when he lit out for California.”
“Shut up,” Slash said as he ladled up a fresh bowl of bear stew from the pot on the range behind the bar. “You’re interruptin’ my dinner!”
Dodge grinned. He stretched out an arm and pointed a finger at Slash, looking between him and Pecos standing in the doorway. “I was right, wasn’t I? Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid! In my very presence! I’ll be ding-dong-damned!”
Dodge lifted his leg and slapped his thigh.
Slash scowled at him, then kicked out a chair and sat down at a table. “Shut up, old-timer, or Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid are gonna make you dance!”
Dodge suddenly looked stricken.
“Don’t mind him,” Pecos said from the doorway. “He’s as moody as a pregnant puma!”
* * *
The former cutthroats and the pretty Pinkerton found scattered bits of the gold-robbers’ sign north of the roadhouse. The killers appeared to have followed a relatively recently carved wagon trail, faint in places and likely cut by the supply and ore wagons of area prospectors.
Pecos found the sign, rather, while Slash and Hattie sat their horses, purposefully not talking to each other.
In fact, the girl didn’t say anything all the rest of the day from where she rode, last in their Indian-file line as they followed the gold thieves’ trail deeper and deeper into the Elk Range.
Slash thought he was seeing about as pretty a country as he’d ever seen in his life, as they rode generally northwest. He couldn’t remember ever traversing this terrain before. He’d covered a lot of the frontier over his nearly forty years out here, but he knew if he’d ever been out here before, he’d remember.
He, Pecos, and Hattie followed a broad valley filled with tall grass and wildflowers lining the banks of a crystalline stream meandering through beaver meadows and aspen groves on the trail’s left side. Beyond the stream, forest rose, cladding the apron slopes jutting as severely as a ship’s prow to craggy gray peaks that must have stood two thousand feet above the valley floor.
More forest—both coniferous and deciduous—rose on the group’s right, the aspens touched with the first bright yellows of autumn. Several times the trio spied elk cropping grass along the stream’s far side, and once they heard the distant wail of what Slash identified as a grizzly bear likely marking his territory.
Deer were everywhere, grazing like cattle. Mountain bluebirds flitted amongst the stirrup-high grass and pine branches. Beavers and muskrats played in the stream’s deepest side pools, and both golden and bald eagles rode the air currents over the steep, rocky slopes on both sides of the canyon, occasionally giving ratcheting cries that echoed eerily in the clean-scoured, high-mountain air.
For most of the afternoon, the sun blazed down from a sky as clear as the pristine snowmelt stream that had carved the valley. Just after three, though, at the usual time, clouds rolled in, thunder rumbled, and lightning began dancing along the high ridges, flickering between peaks like inebriated witches on burning brooms.
“Head for cover!” Slash shouted, nudging the Appy with his spurs.
They made it to the cover of a jumble of massive boulders that had probably tumbled down from the high western ridge an eon or two in the past, just as the storm really unleashed its venom. Holding their horses by their bridle reins under the cover of the massive rocks, they watched the storm in all its varied manifestations, starting with rain that turned to hail, which, as the air cooled, turned to snow for about six minutes before the snow dwindled to sleet, then became slashing rain again.
The rain stopped abruptly, as though a lever had been thrown. Even before the last drops had landed, the clouds parted dramatically, as though swept from the sky by a large invisible feather duster from on high, and the sun shone, nearly as clear and warm as before. The last raindrops fell like large grains of pure gold sprinkled from heaven. It glinted on the marble-sized hail now melting together and crusting with a soggy, icy layer of wet snow.
Since there were still a couple of hours of good light left, the trio mounted their horses and set off once more.
They’d traveled a few more miles, following the trail around a bend in the west-angling canyon before the sun dropped behind the western peaks. They stopped to camp in a clearing in an aspen forest. Night as dark as the inside of a glove fell quickly. Good thing they managed to find some wood that hadn’t been soaked by the storm, for the night was not only dark but cool.
Slash and Hattie tended the horses, while Pecos tended the fire and made supper, which would be a meager meal of only biscuits and beans tonight, as they’d run out of bacon.
Slash and Pecos cast each other conferring glances over the crackling fire as they spooned beans from their tin bowls. Hattie still hadn’t said a word to either man. By her sullen expression, she was in one hell of a sour mood. She just sat there, a good ten feet from Slash and Pecos, silently eating her beans, keeping her own counsel. The firelight played in her rich brown hair, glinted in her brooding eyes.
Pecos looked at Slash again, scowling his dislike for the sour mood the girl was in. Being around an angry woman was hard on a fella’s nerves.
Slash merely shrugged and swabbed his bowl with a chunk of stale baking powder biscuit. His sparse associations with women—associations that had lasted more than an hour or two, that was—had taught him that the best antidote to their sour moods was to let them stew in their feelings until they tired of them. Not even a woman could stay in a permanent snit.
Or so went his theory.
Finally, when they’d all finished supper, Hattie spoke. But it was nothing more than, “Toss your bowls over here. I’ll take them to the creek.” She looked at neither man.
When she returned from the creek ten minutes later, she dropped to her knees and set the wet bowls, cups, and wooden-handled, three-tined forks on a flat rock where they could dry by the fire and be handy for breakfast.
She sat back on her rump near the saddle she’d appropriated at the dugout saloon, along with a sleek sorrel gelding, and spoke her third sentence in the past eight hours: “I have something to say.”
“Glad to hear it,” Pecos grunted out. “I ain’t used to bein’ around a quiet woman. It’s downright spooky.”
“Shut up and let her talk!”
“Don’t tell me to shut up, you—” He stopped abruptly and turned to Hattie. “See what happens when a woman don’t talk?”
“I would like to apologize,” Hattie said, casting her gaze between the two ex-cutthroats. A thin sheen of emotion coated her eyes. “I have not been an equal partner. I have been a burden. Not only a burden, but I have jeopardized our mission. I have said and done some very foolish things. I have endangered both your lives as well as my own.”
She paused, looked down. Two tears rolled quickly down her right cheek, in the trough running along beside her nose. Her hair hung down along both sides of her face, somewhat concealing her expression.
She lifted her head and flung her hair back with one hand, and turned to Slash and Pecos again. “In the saloon, I was showing off. I was trying to prove to you both what a wonderful detective I was. I wanted very desperately to earn your respect. Instead, I proved myself nothing but a silly, silly girl.”
She rose quickly, unsteadily, and turned her teary gaze to Slash. “I don’t blame you for hating me. I will take my leave tomorrow. I will ride to Denver and tender my resignation to the Pinkerton field office, and you will never see me again.”
She swung around and ran off into the trees, heading in the direction of the stream. Both cutthroats could hear her strangled sobs amidst the crackling brush, beneath the stream’s quiet murmur.
Slash and Pecos shared a vaguely sheepish glance across the fire. Slash sipped his cup of post-supper coffee.
“What you got to say for yourself, you mean son of a buck?” Pecos asked him.
“Be nice to be shed of her,” Slash said, taking another sip of the hot mud. He swallowed and added, “Never did cotton to riding with a female. They do their best work in parlor houses, where a man can get shed of ’em when they start gettin’ to be harpies.”
Pecos choked out a caustic laugh as he set his own coffee aside and gained his feet. “Good thing Jaycee found her a new beau. If she let the likes of you, you old scurvy dog, put your mother’s ring on her finger, she’d see no end of misery!”
Pecos headed off in the direction of the girl.
“Oh, leave her alone,” Slash told him. “She needs to cry out the nonsense.”
“I didn’t ask you for your sage advice,” Pecos returned, drifting off into the darkness, sounding like a bear moving through the brush.
Slash gave a dry snort and took another sip of the mud.
Meanwhile, Pecos approached the stream, stepping over a deadfall that looked like a long, black witch’s finger stretched before him in the darkness. The stream itself looked like a giant black snake, its skin glinting dully in the light of the myriad stars blazing in the black arch of the sky.
Hattie sat on a log facing the stream, only a few feet away from the water. Pecos could see only her silhouette as she sat there, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, head in her hands.
She sobbed wetly.
As Pecos walked up to her, she said in a strangled voice, “I want to be alone.”
“No, you don’t.” He stepped over the log and sat down beside her.