CHAPTER 35
“What’s the matter?” asked Kentucky Dade, laughing. “You two look like you just seen a ghost!”
Pecos rose slowly, slowly raising his hands palms out.
“I’ll be damned,” Slash said, also raising his hands and staring nervously at the Winchester Dade was aiming in both shaking hands.
“Did you like my performance?”
“I gotta admit—it was purty damn good,” allowed Pecos.
“Yeah, yeah,” Slash said. “You, uh . . . you must’ve growed up in some traveling theater outfit. You sure did look dead to me.”
“Nah,” Dade said, his voice raspy and pinched with the pain of the dozen or so widely scattered buckshot pellets in his chest and neck. Blood bibbed his shirt. He must have lost a whole quart on the climb from the saloon to the mine. “I feel like I got a good two, three minutes left. I’m gonna put ’em to good use!”
“Why don’t you set that rifle down so we can talk about this?”
“About what?” Dade said. “You stealin’ my gold? Our gold—Mister Greenleaf’s and all the rest of the boys and Gerta’s.”
“Mister Greenleaf ?” Slash looked at Pecos.
Pecos narrowed his eyes, studying the name for a few seconds, then looking in surprise at Dade. “John Greenleaf?”
“That’d be the one.”
“Damn,” Pecos said to Slash. “I thought he was dead.”
“I thought he died in the Texas state pen,” Slash added.
The notorious Texas outlaw John Greenleaf had been running off his leash way back before the War Between the States. He’d paused to fight on the side of the Confederacy, and when he returned to Texas to find that carpetbaggers had moved in, buying up ranches for back taxes, he took right up where he’d left off—robbing stagecoaches and banks and then trains, and also killing willy-nilly, like a rabid wolf, since the war had inspired in him a great desire for further bloodshed.
Slash and Pecos had run into the notorious Greenleaf—a queer and dangerous sort of fellow, as Slash remembered—and part of his old gang in Mexico a time or two. They’d played poker together, visited the señoritas together, though they’d otherwise stayed clear of the unpredictable old rapscallion, who was known to kill men for petty grievances and sundry imagined reasons.
Nigh on twenty years ago, the Texas Rangers had caught up with Greenleaf, who must have been in his forties even then. They’d killed most of his gang, wounded Greenleaf himself, and thrown him in the state pen, where Slash and Pecos had both assumed, apparently incorrectly, that he’d died.
What had distinguished the old thief and killer was that he’d raised a child—a girl, if Slash remembered correctly—on the outlaw trail. The girl had been storied for her ugliness and dangerousness, as well as a queer and mercurial nature that she’d come by honestly, given who her father was. She’d spent some time in prison, as well, but not nearly as much as old Greenleaf had.
“Downright surprising to hear that old thief’s name again,” Slash opined. “After all these years . . .”
“I can’t believe he ain’t dead,” Pecos said.
“He probably thinks you two old goats are dead, too.”
Slash and Pecos shared an offended scowl, then gazed curiously at the man holding the quivering long gun on them.
“I know who you two are,” Dade said, still giving a coyote grin. “Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid. Before my very eyes!” He chuckled with glee. “Took you killin’ me to recognize you, I reckon. The infamous Snake River Marauders!” He coughed up some blood, spat it to one side, and shook his head as if to clear it. “Reckon I should be honored.”
“Or,” Slash suggested, “you could just put the rifle down and we could swap big windies . . .”
“No time. I’m dyin’ . . . you kilt me . . . an’ I’m takin’ you two green-fanged devils along with me to powwow with Saint Pete.”
Slash said, “Don’t expect us to put in a good word for you.”
Dade grinned down the Winchester’s barrel, drawing a breath, trying to steady his shaking hands. “Which one of you wants it first?”
“He does,” Slash and Pecos said at the same time, canting their heads toward each other.
The rifle thundered.
Slash and Pecos jerked with starts.
They blinked in hang-jawed shock. Slash looked down at himself. Not seeing any bullet holes, he started to turn toward Pecos, who’d started to turn toward him at the same time.
Kentucky Dade made a strangling sound.
They turned toward him. He wore a shocked look. The rifle was sagging in his arms. Fresh blood—fresher than the stuff Pecos had spilled—welled from the bloodred bib of his shirt front.
Dade opened his mouth as though to speak, but then the rifle dropped from his hands to the mine floor. His knees buckled, and then he crumpled atop the rifle.
Slash stared toward where a new figure was silhouetted against the gray light of the open mine door. The figure walked slowly toward him and Pecos. The figure had a rifle in its hands, aimed straight out from the person’s right hip. Batwing chaps flapped against the person’s legs, and spurs rang softly, echoing off the mine’s stone walls.
As the newcomer approached, fifteen feet away and closing slowly, Slash saw the long blond hair hanging from the man’s tan Stetson to jostle down Lisa Ingram’s shoulders. Wearing a plaid wool coat, she stopped ten feet away from Slash and Pecos and the outlaw she’d just polished off.
Slash lowered his hands, chuckling and shaking his head. “Boy, that was some nice timin’, sweetheart.”
“I couldn’t agree more!” Pecos said, also chuckling his relief.
Lisa Ingram gritted her teeth and squeezed her carbine in both her gloved hands. “I ain’t neither one of you old cutthroats’ sweetheart. Now, get your hands back up before I gut-shoot you both and leave you howlin’!”
“What?” Pecos said.
“Get ’em up!”
“Ah, come on, sweetheart,” Slash said. “We came up here to—”
“I know what you came up here for. You came up here to steal the stolen gold.” Lisa loudly cocked the carbine again. The spent shell casing clattered to the stone floor, where it rolled, making a tinny warble. “Get ’em up, or, like I said, you’re wolf bait!”
“Easy,” Slash said, raising his hands again, shoulder high. “Just take it easy. We didn’t come here to steal no stolen gold. We came here to retrieve it for them it rightly belongs to.”
“Hey,” Pecos said, also raising his hands. “How’d you know it was stolen, anyways?”
“I know all about what goes on up here,” Lisa said, her jaws still hard, gray light from the entrance reflecting off her flinty eyes. “Leastways, I’ve had my suspicions. Pa forbade me from ridin’ up here. He said the mine an’ the ranch were out of our jurisdiction, and, besides, there’s dangerous secrets out this way.
“Well, I’ve always been right curious about dangerous secrets. And I’ve been right curious about the Spanish Bit for the past two years, when the ranch changed hands, and suddenly the mine was supposedly open again after it had been shut down for the previous three years.”
“You’ve been up here before, then?” Slash asked.
“Yes.”
“You knew it was a ghost.”
“I knew.”
“Did you tell your pa?” Pecos asked.
Lisa shook her head. “I tried. He didn’t want to hear nothin’ about the Spanish Bit. You see, folks around Honeysuckle who get curious about the Spanish Bit—the ranch or the mine—end up in shallow graves, pushin’ up daisies somewhere around these mountains. I reckon I learned over the years to keep my mouth shut and to mind my own business, though it chafed me raw to do so. But when you two old cutthroats showed up . . .”
“You got curious again,” Slash said.
“That’s right.” Lisa gave a stiff smile. “I got curious an’ ambitious.”
Pecos frowned. “How do you mean?”
“I got ambitious to make a name for myself.” Lisa’s smile broadened. “I may not be able to bring down the Spanish Bit, but I can take down the two famous Snake River Marauders still runnin’ off their leashes.”
“Get your name in all the papers, eh?” Slash said.
Lisa’s smile grew smug. She gave a slow, arrogant blink.
“You wouldn’t be makin’ Chief Marshal Henry T. Bledsoe very happy,” Pecos told her.
“Bleed-Em-So?” Lisa stitched her brows and canted her head to one side. “Don’t be silly. Everyone knows he’s carryin’ Slash’s bullet in his back.”
“What everyone don’t know—only a special few,” Slash said, “is that we ride for ole Bleed-Em-So now ourselves.”
“Pshaw!”
“That’s right,” Pecos said. “Like Slash done tried to explain, we ain’t here to steal this gold. We’re here to retrieve it. On Bledsoe’s orders.”
“Leastways, now we have to retrieve it”—Slash cast his partner an ironic glance—“since it got stole out from under us.”
“Yeah, well . . . ,” Pecos said through a sigh.
“Hah!” Lisa laughed without mirth. “You expect me to believe—”
She cut her question off with a squeal as Slash bounded forward, swinging his left arm up against the underside of the girl’s rifle. She triggered a round into the low ceiling. Inside the stone sarcophagus, the report sounded like a cannon blast.
Ears ringing, Slash wrapped his hand around the barrel and jerked the carbine out of her grip. At the same time, Pecos bolted forward and grabbed the girl’s Schofield revolver from the holster thonged on her shapely right thigh.
Recoiling from the sudden, obviously unexpected attack, the deputy town marshal of Honeysuckle tripped over her own spurs and hit the mine floor on her butt.
Glaring up at the ex-cutthroats, she cursed them roundly, hurling miniature sabers from her angry eyes.
“I didn’t know that about your bloodline,” Pecos quipped to Slash. “If I had, I might not have been so quick to ride with you, partner.”
“Yeah, well,” Slash said, stepping back and working the carbine’s cocking lever, ejecting all the cartridges from the breech, “she don’t know the half of it . . . unfortunately.”
He leaned the empty carbine against the mine wall. “I’m just gonna set this here, honey. If you go reloadin’ it, I’m gonna tan your behind.”
“I ain’t your honey and get your mouth off my behind!”
“Yeah, Slash,” Pecos said with a chuckle, “get your mouth off the girl’s behind.” He held the pistol out to her. “Here. Don’t reload it, or you’ll feel my hand on your behind, too. It won’t feel half as good as Slash’s.”
Sitting on her rump on the mine floor, legs bent before her, Lisa looked uncertainly from Slash to Pecos, then back again. “You don’t expect me to believe you’re not gonna kill me . . .”
“Nah,” Slash said. “We ain’t in the business of killin’ purty deputy town marshals.”
“Yeah,” Pecos added. “Our reputations are bad enough without addin’ savage killers of purty deputy town marshals to the list.” He turned to Slash. “Well, partner, we came for one strongbox of gold. Now we got two. We gonna take both back to Denver?”
“Why not? You can bet the other one’s stolen, too.” Slash went to the strongboxes and dropped to a knee. He lifted the lid from the one that had been stolen out of his and Pecos’s wagon. He whistled, shook his head, feeling the old burn of gold-lust again. “We can’t very well just leave it here, can we?”
He lifted the unlocked lid from the other one and frowned down at the gold ingots stacked inside. Even in the dim light, the gold shone, as beautiful and radiant as the most beautiful woman in the world . . .
“Say . . . ,” Slash said, frowning down at the bars.
“What is it?”
He picked up one of the ingots, scrutinized it, and turned to Pecos. He brushed his right thumb across the figure of a Spanish bit stamped into its center. The words SPANISH BIT, HONEYSUCKLE COL. TERR. were also stamped into the face of the ingot. “Look there.”
Pecos dropped to a knee to study the gold, then turned his puzzled gaze to Slash. “I don’t get it. There ain’t no gold comin’ out of this mine.”
Slash chewed the inside of his cheek, pondering. “You know what they’re doin’?”
“Pray tell.”
“They’re stealin’ the gold and haulin’ it here to melt it down and stamp it with the Spanish Bit’s old brand. Then they probably take new bars to the railhead and on to the U.S. Mint in Frisco.”
“I’ll be damned!” Pecos raked the back of his knuckles across the nub of his chin. “That’s why they don’t want it to get out that the mine’s closed, only a ghost. They want everyone to believe they’re minin’ their own gold, takin’ their own gold to Frisco, when it’s really stolen gold they’re sellin’ to the Mint.” Pecos whistled. “We sure have uncovered one hell of a criminal enterprise here, pard!”
“What about Greenleaf and his killers?” Slash said. “We gonna bring them back to Denver, too? Along with the gold?”
Pecos pondered the question. Lisa was still sitting on her butt on the mine floor, staring dubiously up at the two ex-cutthroats, as though she was having trouble believing she wasn’t dead yet. That the notorious cutthroats hadn’t fed her a pill she couldn’t digest.
“Prob’ly too many for us to handle by ourselves,” Pecos said finally. “Maybe we’d best get our gold back to Denver and have ole Bleed-Em-So invite more marshals to the party up here.”
“Maybe you’re ri—”
Lisa cut Slash off with: “They have the saloon girl.” She’d said it almost casually, as though she were noting the time of day.
Slash and Pecos jerked shocked looks at her. “What?” they asked in unison.
“They rode out of town with her early this mornin’. I was fetchin’ my horse from the livery barn, to track you two, when I seen ’em go by. They had a sack over her head, and they had her in the back of the wagon, but it was her, all right. She was whimpering like she was hurt. I recognized her by that cute little form of hers that had all the men in the saloon last night ready to gnaw on their own boots.”
Slash lurched to his feet and regaled the girl with a look. “They took Hattie, and you didn’t do anything to stop ’em?”
Lisa gave a coy shrug. “What could I do against all o’ them? Gerta was there. No one messes with Gerta.” Lisa feigned a yawn, patting her fingers against her lips. “Besides . . . Poppa wouldn’t like me interferin’ in Spanish Bit business.”
“Hatties’s a Pinkerton!” Pecos told Lisa, also rising.
“Is she, now? Hmm. Well, I reckon she got her purty little rump into a real fix, didn’t she? Maybe she’ll bat her eyes, and they’ll let her go.”
Slash and Pecos shared a worried look. “I thought I seen that feed sack move. Down at the ranch. That was Hattie!”
Slash glanced at the two strongboxes. “We’ll leave the gold for now, fetch it after we’ve got Hattie back from them curly wolves.”
Slash and Pecos hurried back toward the mine entrance. They both cursed when they saw snow coming down, swirled by the wind—big, heavy, wet flakes. Some of it was sticking to the ground. As they started down the trail away from the mine, Lisa yelled, “Hey, wait for me! I’m the one wearin’ the badge here!” Catching up to them, she said, “What’re you gonna do? Greenleaf has a good twenty, thirty men riding for him.”
“If that’s counting the five we turned toe down back along the trail, then it’s twenty or thirty minus five,” Slash said.
They dropped onto the level ground, Lisa having to run at times to keep pace, holding her Winchester on her shoulder. They tramped through a break between the old mercantile and another dilapidated building and started across the street toward where Slash and Pecos’s mounts, and a strawberry roan, which must be Lisa’s, stood tied to the hitchrack, their tails blowing in the swirling wind, the wet snow gathering on their saddles.
Walking to Slash’s right, Pecos stopped. “Oh-oh.”
“What is—?”
Before Slash could finish the question, he saw what Pecos had seen—six or seven horseback riders trotting toward them from the north, following a trail that must lead up from the valley directly to the west, where the ranch lay. They all wore yellow slickers, and the wind was nipping at their hats, the wet snow sticking to their hat brims and crowns.
One man rode out in front of the others. He was tall and dark, with a thick mustache drooping down both sides of his broad mouth.
Apparently just then seeing Slash, Pecos, and Lisa Ingram, he drew back on his cream’s reins. The others abruptly halted their horses around him. They stared at Slash, Pecos, and Lisa, who stared back at them a full five seconds before Pecos said tightly, “What do you say, Slash?”
Slash brought his Winchester down from his shoulder, pumping a round into the chamber, and dropped to a knee. “I say let’s do-si-do!”