CHAPTER 25
Pecos dug a handkerchief out of his back pocket and offered it to Hattie. “Need one of these? It’s clean, more or less.”
She plucked the hanky out of his hand and mopped her eyes with it, then blew her nose. “I’m such a fool. I thought I was a real professional. But I’m only a fool. A silly little Pink.”
“Ah, no, you’re not.”
“That’s how you two see me.”
“No, it ain’t.”
“Well, it’s how Slash sees me.” She blew her nose again, dabbed at her eyes.
“It ain’t how he sees you, either.”
“I should have stayed in Denver. I volunteered for this job because my boss, Mister Carter, needed a woman. I haven’t worked in the country before. Only in towns. Chicago and Denver.”
“Oh?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve helped ferret out murderers and corrupt politicians.”
“I believe it.”
“Mister Pinkerton . . . and then Mister Carter in Denver . . . saw me as a master of disguises. I’ve worked my way into rich men’s homes as housekeepers and private nurses and secretaries. I once uncovered a counterfeiting scheme that way. I pretended to be a fortune-teller once, and even an actress, helping bring down an opera house manager who was hiring assassins to have his rival businessmen killed. I once worked in a gambling parlor as a dancer. While the men ogled my legs, my male counterparts uncovered rigged gambling tables and shifty blackjack dealers.”
Pecos chuckled at that. “I bet you sure could keep the men distracted.”
“I guess I’m better working in town. I’ve made a fool of myself out here in this rough-hewn country. I’ve made a series of mistakes, one after the other. I took myself too seriously, and you and Slash exposed me as the fool I am!”
She sobbed again, blew her nose. “I’ll leave in the morning.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. That last stupid thing I did was the final straw. Letting myself get grabbed by that scoundrel Pettypiece on the boardwalk of that dugout saloon! Slash had to shoot the man when, if he’d been able to take him alive, we could have learned where the gold was headed. The case could have been solved right then and there!”
“Oh, hell, Hattie, you didn’t do nothin’ any more stupid than Slash an’ me have done countless times before. Livin’ out here . . . runnin’ off your leash amongst others doin’ the same . . . is not an easy way to live. You’ve made mistakes. We’ve made mistakes. We’ll keep making them until we’ve made one too many, that’s all.”
“Throwing in with me might have been one too many. I don’t want to get you two killed.” Hattie pursed her lips and gave him a begrudging look of admiration. “I sort of admire you two old cutthroats, truth be told.”
“We admire you, too, Hattie.”
“Slash hates me.”
“That ain’t true.”
“It is so true!”
“Slash has taken a shine to you, truth be known, Hattie.”
“Ha!”
“If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have taken such care to blow ole Otis’s eye out!” Pecos chuckled. “You gotta understand one thing about Slash. He don’t act like most people act. You can’t really tell how he feels about anything or anyone until you’ve learned how to read him. Me? I may not be able to read three or four words strung together in a book, but I can read Slash better than an old sky pilot can read the Bible.”
Hattie laughed in spite of herself.
Pecos chuckled. It felt good to see her smile again. She was a pretty girl even when she was in a sour mood, but she was downright beautiful when a smile dimpled her cheeks. “The secret about Slash, you see,” he continued, “is that he has a great big ole heart. He says I got the big heart. But mine’s the size of a frog’s heart compared to his great big swollen ticker. Slash has a heart the size of a rain barrel. You see, he’s just desperate to make sure nobody finds out.”
Hattie stared at him, pensive. She smiled, nodded, glanced down at the hanky in her lap. “Thanks for tellin’ me, Pecos.”
“And with that,” he said, climbing to his feet, “I’m gonna mosey back over to the fire before that old cutthroat drinks all the whiskey.”
Hattie held up the soaked hanky. “I’ll wash this out and give it back to you tomorrow.”
“All right, honey.” Pecos placed a hand on her shoulder and turned to start back to the camp.
“Hold on.” Hattie grabbed his hand and pulled him down to her.
She placed a kiss on his cheek.
“You’re all right, Pecos. Despite all your depredations, I mean.” She gave him a mock scolding look.
Pecos grinned at her. “Why, thank you, Miss Hattie. You just made my day!”
Hattie sat there on the log, kicking her feet slowly as she stared out at the star-dappled water. She listened to Pecos tramping back toward the fire. His voice rose, deep and raspy, echoing hollowly in the quiet night. “Give me that bottle before you empty it, you cussed old fart!”
Hattie smiled.
* * *
Slash had settled back against his saddle for the night and drawn his blankets up to his chin, when he heard Hattie move through the brush toward the camp. Pecos was already asleep on the other side of the fire, snoring softly.
Slash looked out from beneath his down-canted hat brim to see the girl step into the firelight. She poured some water from a canteen into a tin cup and took a drink. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, sat on a log, and spent nearly fifteen minutes slowly brushing out her long, thick hair.
Slash drifted off to sleep, listening to the soft, regular raking of the girl’s brush.
He didn’t know how much time had passed when a deep, guttural growl sounded from somewhere off in the heavy mountain darkness.
Closer by, Slash heard a shrill gasp and a clipped cry. He poked his hat up onto his forehead and blinked groggily. To his left, the fire had burned down to a few low, snapping flames, but he could see Hattie sitting up about seven feet away from him, staring off into the darkness.
“Nothin’ to worry about,” Slash assured her quietly so as not to awaken Pecos, who continued snoring on the other side of the fire. “Just a bruin likely rousin’ another bruin from his hidey-hole.”
“Will it come over here?”
“Nah.”
“Won’t it attack the horses? Don’t they eat horses?”
“There’s plenty of deer in this valley. What would it want with a stringy ole hoss?”
Slash pulled his hat down over his eyes again.
Vaguely, as he started drifting back to sleep, he heard the rustling sounds of the girl moving around. Soft footsteps drew near. He looked up again to see Hattie drop down beside him, shrouded in her blankets. She slid up close to him, snuggled up against him, and threw an arm around his waist. She clung to him tightly, shivering.
“Whoa!” Slash raked out.
“I’m scared.”
“Like I said—”
“Hush.”
“Why don’t you go over and pester Pecos? He likes you more than I do.”
“No, he doesn’t.” She snuggled closer against him, tightening her arm around his waist.
Slash pulled his hat down over his eyes again. He placed his hand on hers, squeezed it gently, and smiled.
* * *
Just after noon of the following day, Slash stopped his Appy and sniffed the air. “You smell that?”
Pecos and Hattie, who’d stopped their own mounts behind Slash, also raised their noses to sniff the air.
“I don’t smell anything,” Hattie said, frowning. “Should I?”
“I don’t smell nothin’ neither,” Pecos said.
Slash took a deep breath, sitting up high in his saddle. He coughed a little, chokingly, then grimaced and shook his head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a town ahead. You can always smell a town before you see it. The privies and junk piles. No mistakin’ a town.”
“There’s Slash’s one gift,” Pecos told Hattie, twisting his mouth into a wry grin. “He can’t follow signs for beans, and a Mojave green rattlesnake has him beat all to hell for personality. But he’s got a sniffer on him, all right.” He looked at Slash, who was still sitting up high, staring up this side canyon they were now following nearly straight west, since the gold robbers’ trail appeared to lead this way. “How do you know you didn’t smell a town?”
“A town way out here?” Slash gave his head a single, doubtful shake. “What would a town be doing way out here? We haven’t even passed a mining camp today. I don’t recollect even spying a single prospector’s cabin.”
“Well, then we’re due,” Pecos said, booting his big buckskin, Buck, past Slash and continuing on up the canyon. “Come on. I’m thirsty, an’ you drank all the tangleleg. Besides, maybe we’ve finally come to the gold thieves’ hidey-hole.”
As the trail widened, Slash booted his Appy up beside Pecos. They climbed a low rise, and there ahead, maybe a hundred yards away, several buildings appeared on the trio’s side of the stream. As they continued toward the buildings, more buildings appeared beyond them and then up the slope behind them.
“You were right, Slash,” Hattie said, putting her sorrel up between the two men. “It’s a town, all right. A small one, looks like, but a town just the same.”
As they continued toward the settlement, entering it where it abruptly began with a general merchandise store on the trail’s right side and a blacksmith shop on its left side, the stream flanking it, a sign tacked to a cedar post announced HONEYSUCKLE in sloppily painted letters. A big man in a leather apron stood hammering what appeared to be an andiron on an anvil just outside the long, low shack’s double open doors.
Hearing the horses, he turned abruptly, raking a thick arm across his forehead and scowling curiously at the newcomers, turning his head slowly to follow them as they continued on into the town.
Slash saw that Hattie had been right. The town was small, all right. Beyond the general store, on the trail’s right side, sat a small livery and feed barn. Beyond that was a barbershop and bathhouse. A little man in small, round spectacles and armbands was sweeping the raised boardwalk fronting the barbershop. He glanced up over his sagging spectacles as the newcomers passed.
Beyond the barbershop was a harness shop and feed store. Across the street lay a butcher shop/grocery store, with a stock pen and chicken coop flanking it, and a gunsmith’s shop. The only other buildings were two saloons, sitting catty-corner across the street from each other, Alma May’s Café, a small hotel that doubled as a post office, a town marshal’s office, which was little more than a small stone shack, and an assayer’s office.
That was it. Ten business buildings total, with a few log and canvas dwellings flanking them in no particular order, as though they’d been built where the boulders and large pines and cedars scattered along that southern ridge would allow. There also appeared to be a half-dozen shacks along both sides of the stream on the town’s north side, likely belonging to gold-panners.
The only folks visible anywhere in town were the blacksmith, the barber, and a tall, elderly gent wearing a five-pointed tin star and thick, red muttonchop whiskers. He was parked in a hide-bottom chair in front of the marshal’s office. He held a double-bore shotgun across his bony knees.
He wore a pair of rectangular, gold-framed spectacles on his long, thick nose, which bore what appeared to be a knife scar just beneath the bridge. He was fanning his angular face with his brown slouch hat and giving the three newcomers the same once-and twice-over that the blacksmith and barber had given them.
No, there were two others, Slash saw as he and his trail pards reined up in the middle of town, on the broad main street. On a second-floor balcony of one of the town’s two saloons, two scantily clad women stood smoking—and giving the three strangers the woolly eyeball.
Given their skimpy, garish attire, they were no doubt doxies, both well past their prime. One was short and fat, with jet-black hair likely from a bottle. The other was skinny, pale, and freckled, her own copper-red hair also from a bottle. The doxy’s red hair, which hung long about her shoulders, reminded Slash a little unpleasantly, given the circumstances under which they’d last parted, of Jay.
Keeping his voice low, Pecos turned to Slash and said, “They musta come through here, them killers. Where do you suppose they are?”
Slash poked a back tooth with his tongue, looking up and down the street. “Hard to say. Looks like the end of the line, though.” He couldn’t imagine there being any more towns beyond Honeysuckle. The trail to the west, opposite the direction from which they’d ridden in, appeared to narrow down to a single-track horse trail dwindling past an old, mossy-roofed log cabin into thick forest.
“Reckon it’s time to do some detective work?” Pecos asked.
“I reckon it is,” Hattie said.
Both men looked at her. She was studying the front of the saloon, below where the two doxies gazed down at the three strangers in the street. A sign stretched beneath the second-floor balcony announced the name of the place as the Honeysuckle Saloon and Dance Hall. Honeysuckle blossoms were painted on each end of the sign. Or a crude artist’s depiction of such blossoms, anyway. One of the blossoms had been chewed by a bullet.
“What you got in mind?” Slash asked her.
“A job.”
“A what?” Pecos said, stretching his lips back from his teeth in disdain for the three-letter word.
Hattie dipped her chin toward the pasteboard sign tacked to the porch balustrade:
WANTED: PURTY SERVENE GIRL. 25 SENTS A DAY PLUSS TIPPS
“What?” Slash said. “You think you’re gonna work there?”
“Why not?” Hattie smiled coquettishly at him, flinging her hair out from her neck with the back of one hand. “You think I’m purty, don’t you?”
“No, no.” Slash shook his head, eyeing the run-down-looking place and the two well-worn doxies leaning forward against the second-floor balcony railing, smoking and regarding the newcomers with bland interest. “You can’t work there. That’s no place for you. You said yourself you hated tobacco smoke.”
“Oh, I can put up with it for a day or two. And don’t be so protective, Sla . . . er, I mean, Uncle Jim.” Still smiling, Hattie batted her long, lovely ashes at him, then cut her gaze to Pecos. Her voice acquired a sharp but melodramatic scolding tone. “You neither, Uncle Melvin. You two old scalawags drank up all our money in that tumbledown mining cabin of ours. We have nary a dime to our names. I think it’s time I take matters into my own hands and try to build us a stake so we can ride down out of the mountains before we get snowed in for the winter. If I left earning a living to you two, we’d starve!”
“You gonna apply for the serving girl job, princess?” asked the short, fat doxy with the jet-black hair, grinning down over the balcony rail at Hattie.
Looking up at her and the redhead, Hattie shaded her eyes with a gloved hand. “I was pondering on it. These two jackasses can’t make a living, sure enough, so I thought I’d give it a go.”
Pecos gave an injured chuff and said under his breath to Slash, “She don’t have to sound that convincing, does she?”
“I know what you mean, honey,” said the redhead, then scowling at Slash and Pecos. “Men aren’t worth the cheap busthead runnin’ through their veins these days.”
She hacked phlegm from her throat and spat the big plop into the dirt of the street near Slash. To Hattie, she said, “Come on in and talk to Clifford. He runs the place, what there is of it.”
“You just stick to servin’, though, honey,” instructed the black-haired whore, letting her dark-eyed gaze flick with no little envy across Hattie’s young, ripe frame. “Don’t you go crowdin’ me an Iris. The tough nuts around here would take one look at you an’ never throw another dollar in our jars again!”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Hattie assured them, swinging down from her sorrel’s back. “I have no intention of working the line.”
“No, she don’t,” Slash said pointedly to the two doxies. “If we caught her doin’ that—me an’, uh, Uncle Melvin here—we’d take a switch to her backside so she wouldn’t sit down again till Christmas.”
“Say, you’re handsome!” said the black-haired gal. “Why don’t you come on up here an’ let me curl your toes for you, handsome?”
“You too, big man,” said the redhead to Pecos, beckoning broadly with her arm. “Get up here, an’ let’s me an’ you play some slap ‘n’ tickle.” She dipped her chin and raised a flirtatious brow. “You can tickle me all you want. I don’t slap hard at all!”
She and the dark-haired gal had a good, long, cackling laugh that quickly turned into a raucous coughing fit for each. It ended with both hacking more phlegm over the balcony and into the street near Slash and Pecos’s horses.
“I do apologize,” Hattie told the doxies. “But Uncles Jim an’ Melvin have little but lint in their pockets. They can’t afford either one of you ladies, and even if they could, they too need to be looking for work. Don’t you, Uncles Jim and Melvin?”
Hattie smiled sweetly at them.
Slash and Pecos grumbled.
Hattie tossed her horse’s reins up to Slash. “Tend my horse for me, Uncle Jim. You two behave yourselves, now, you hear?” She started for the saloon’s front steps but glanced once more over her shoulder to say, “And make yourselves useful. I’ll be checking!”
With that, she lifted the hem of her skirt up above her ankles and mounted the Honeysuckle Saloon’s front veranda.
When she’d disappeared inside, Slash turned to Pecos and said, “You know, I think she was really enjoying that.”
“Yeah.” Pecos snorted. “Maybe you shoulda shot her and let ole Otis Pettypiece live.”
They chuckled as they rode off down the street.