Читать книгу A Good Day for a Massacre - William W. Johnstone - Страница 9

CHAPTER 4

“What the hell was that?”

“One of the mules!”

“I know it was one of the mules!” Pecos said, scrambling heavily to his feet as Slash did the same thing. “What’s got its neck in a hump?”

“Reckon we’d best find out.” Slash stood with both pistols in his hands, looking around, half-expecting to find more highwaymen on the prowl. These isolated canyons were notorious for all stripes of long-coulee riders. That’s why Slash had taken to carrying the derringer in his coat pocket and Pecos had rigged the cage for his shotgun beneath the wagon seat.

Curly wolves could very well be on the lurk for a load of freight to steal and sell themselves, or for the takeaway from such a sale, which of course was the mistake that the four men in the wagon had made, or for the stock to which the wagons might be hitched.

Or two of the three . . .

Pecos strode quickly over to the wagon and pulled his Colt’s revolving rifle out from beneath the seat. Holding the rifle up high across his chest, his thumb on the revolver’s hammer, he looked around.

“I hear somethin’,” Slash said, ears pricked.

“What?”

“I don’t know.” Slash followed the sound he’d heard into the trees flanking the coffee fire.

He moved through the trees to where the creek chuckled over its shallow, rocky bed and peered across the cool, blue, mountain water toward where two riders were galloping their horses up the shoulder of a bald haystack butte. One man followed the other. The second man glanced back over his shoulder, staring toward where both Slash and Pecos now stood at the edge of the creek, scowling toward the two suspicious riders.

The second man turned his head forward and followed the lead rider up and around the curve of the mountain and out of sight.

“You recognize ’em?” Pecos asked.

“Too far away.”

“Who do you suppose they were? And what’d they want?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. They wanted somethin’, all right. And they hadn’t wanted to be spotted. They weren’t just a couple of innocent saddle tramps—you can bet your boots on that.”

“Damn,” Pecos said. “Maybe this new line of work we’re in ain’t gonna be so boring, after all.”

Slash looked around again, cautiously. “I was kind of starting to like the boredom, myself.”

“Yeah, I reckon I was, too, now that you mention it.”

Slash holstered his pistols. “Come on. Let’s kick dirt on that fire and get a move on. I got the chilly-willies, and I’d as soon get back to Fort Collins before the sun goes down.”

“I hear that.” Pecos followed Slash back through the trees toward the fire. “Besides, you got you a weddin’ ring burnin’ a hole in your pocket.”

Slash glowered at him over his shoulder.

Pecos grinned.

* * *

The two former cutthroats didn’t run into any more trouble on the trail back to Fort Collins. They did not, however, make it to town before the sun had dropped down behind the towering crags of Long’s Peak and Mount Rosalie and the purple blackness of good darkness had stretched out from the Front Range over the vast, fawn-colored, gently undulating prairie to the east.

It was over this prairie, having left the Front Range near Johnstown, that the freighters negotiated their wagon, heading north, the mountains on their left. They could hear the clashing piano chords issuing from several saloons in the town ahead as they passed the old army outpost of Fort Collins, which had been decommissioned several years earlier, on their right, along the bank of the Cache la Poudre River, and followed a sharp dogleg in the trail and on into the town proper.

Fort Collins was booming here, between the southwestern bank of the Cache la Poudre and the rocky cliffs and slanting sandstone ridges that were the first cuts and rises of the Front Range to the west. Miners, ranchers, and farmers in the surrounding area used the town as a supply hub as well as a center of entertainment.

That’s why the saloon and bordello Jaycee Breckenridge had bought with the stake Pistol Pete had left her was doing so well. Tonight, as most nights, every window in all three stories was lit, and jostling shadows moved behind them.

The House of a Thousand Delights occupied a prominent corner on Main Street and sprawled across several lots. Except for a nearby opera house, the Thousand Delights was the largest business establishment in town. In nearly the whole county, in fact.

Now as Slash and Pecos rattled along the dusty street, clattering past the rollicking, bustling bordello, they could hear the hum of conversations and laughter and the raucous strains of a fiddle, and smell the tobacco smoke and the mouthwatering aromas of beer and fine spirits wafting out through the main set of batwing doors mounted atop a broad front veranda that wrapped around three sides of the yellow-and-white-painted, wood-frame structure.

They delivered the dead men to the county sheriff and were glad that the sheriff himself, a portly, contrary man by the name of Wayne Decker, was not on duty. Decker always eyed Slash and Pecos with suspicion, as though he’d seen them somewhere before, which he probably had.

On wanted dodgers tacked up across the West.

Even though Slash and Pecos had been pardoned by the president at the request of Chief Marshal Luther T. Bledsoe, they knew that their likenesses no doubt still adorned the walls of many post offices, telegraph offices, and Wells Fargo stations all across the frontier. Decker probably even had one on his own bulletin board, and a vague, nettling memory caused him to try to match the poor pencil sketches to the faces of the two Fort Collins newcomers who’d come from seemingly nowhere to buy the local freighting outfit.

Even though Slash and Pecos were no longer wanted men, they didn’t feel like trying to convince the sheriff of that and having to explain the circumstances surrounding their pardons, which were supposed to be secret—known to only them, a few politicians, including Rutherford B. Hayes, and Chief Marshal Luther T. Bledsoe. Bleed-Em-So was counting on them to keep their true identities secret and to forevermore go by only their given names of James “Jimmy” Braddock and Melvin Baker.

“I don’t know,” one of the three deputies on duty that night at the new courthouse said, shaking his head as he stared into the wagon box. The dead men’s four sets of eyes glittered eerily in the light from a nearby saloon window. “Sheriff ain’t gonna like this. No, he ain’t gonna like this a bit. He’s gonna want to talk to you fellas himself.”

“County coroner might wanna seat a jury,” opined one of the others, also staring moodily into the bed of the freight wagon. “You’re gonna have to write out an affidavit. There might even be a . . . a whatdoya-callit. . . ?”

“A coroner’s inquest,” said the third deputy from inside a halo of aromatic cigar smoke.

“A what?” both Slash and Pecos said at the same time, flabbergasted by the ever-growing complexity of these modern times.

“I told you we should have buried those boys under rocks,” Slash told Pecos, when the coroner, unhappy at having been roused from his smoking parlor, had come to collect the dead men and the three deputies had returned to their courthouse office, smoking, shaking their heads, and casting suspicious glances over their shoulders at the two freighters. “Now we’re gonna have to have a talk with Decker and the coroner, and you know how that fat badge-toter is always givin’ us the woolly eyeball.”

“What’s right is right, Slash. I mean Jimmy, damnit!”

“Dammit, how are we gonna get out of the habit of usin’ the old handles?” Slash said, rocking back on the seat as Pecos pulled the mules up to the small compound of their freighting office, which was flanked by a stable and a barn. “Maybe we oughta get ourselves hypnotized.”

“Ah, hell,” Pecos said, “we’ll remember when the chips are down. Besides, we don’t overly socialize in town all that much. Hell, this job has us toolin’ around the mountains most days of the week. Breaking our butts for pennies and pisswater,” he added with a surly grumble.

“Yeah, well, I reckon it’s better than what most range hands make in a whole month.”

“Yeah, but most range hands are young,” Pecos said. “We’re gettin’ old, Slash. We gotta start savin’ up for our retirement.”

“Jesus,” Slash growled, leaping down off the wagon when Pecos had drawn it up in front of the main corral. “You are one dark and depressing cuss tonight, Pec—I mean, Melvin. Galldangit, anyway!”

He kicked a front wheel.

“Yeah, well, I don’t got a woman to go see. Nor one to marry, neither. Hell, you won’t need to work once you marry Jaycee.” Pecos looked around. “Now, where do you suppose Todd’s at? He’s supposed to be out here takin’ care of this team.”

Todd Elwood was the young wrangler they’d hired about a month ago to help out around the barn. He had a history of drunkenness and general sloth, Elwood did, but he’d promised he’d lay off the Taos lightning if Slash and Pecos would give him the job. He’d been plumb tired of bouncing around from one ranch spread to another.

Slash looked around, fists on his hips. He called for Elwood but was met with only silence from the darkest corners of the freight yard. No lamps appeared to be burning anywhere.

“I’d say he’s on a tear,” Slash said with a sigh.

“Damn his drunken hide!” Pecos cursed again. “That’s what we get for giving a firebrand a second chance.”

“I had a bad feelin’ about him, and I told you so,” Slash said. “He had layabout written all over him. Your problem is you got too big a heart.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Don’t tell me to shut up!”

“Shut up!” Pecos walked around the front of the wagon to help Slash unhitch the team. He cast a glance back toward the giant, glittering jewel of the House of a Thousand Delights, from which they could still hear the fiddle music, albeit faintly. “As I was sayin’ about Jay . . . if she ain’t by now, she’s soon gonna be one of the most money-eyed women in the whole damn county if not all of eastern Colorado Territory!”

That gave Slash pause. As he worked on snaps and buckles and removed hames and harnesses, he too glanced toward the Thousand Delights. He hadn’t thought of Jay’s money.

Could he suck his pride down deep enough to marry a woman who would for all intents and purposes be supporting him?

“Me?” Pecos said, taking a bridle strap in his teeth. “They’ll likely be digging a shallow grave for me out in potter’s field.”

“Oh, shut up, will ya?”

Pecos looked at him, his eyes sharply indignant even in the relative darkness of the unlit freight yard. “Now, what the hell’s got into you?”

“Oh, just stitch your mouth closed, will you?”

Slash cursed and began leading the team through the open corral gate.

Pecos yelled behind him that he should do something physically impossible to himself.

* * *

Slash’s mood improved later, after he and Pecos had taken whores’ baths in their respective rooms in their cabin flanking the freight yard office.

He and Pecos had silently agreed, as they always did after one of their frequent dustups, to bury the hatchet. They might argue bitterly from time to time but never for long. They brushed their clothes, rolled cigarettes, took a few pulls from a bottle, then tramped off side by side toward the Thousand Delights for drinks and supper—and, of course, so Slash could see Jaycee.

He wasn’t planning on asking the woman to marry him tonight. In fact, he still hadn’t decided whether he ever would pop the Big Question. While the whiskey had sanded the rough edges off the day, he was still wrestling with the idea of marriage. He shoved his hand in his coat pocket just to make sure the ring was still there, on the off chance his heart would overrule his mind and his pride and he’d blurt out a proposal.

It was still there, inside the small maple ring box, the box’s top adorned with an antique gold metal flower with a rose crystal in the center. The inside of the box was lined with white burlap. Slash had to chuckle, thinking of his crusty old man, dead now these thirty years, buying such a feminine bauble for his mother, oh so many years ago.

But, then, the boy his father had been must have been as gone for Slash’s mother as Slash now found himself gone for Jaycee Breckenridge . . .

“Stop thinkin’.”

Slash glanced at Pecos as they both walked up the broad wooden steps fronting the Thousand Delights. “What?”

“Stop thinkin’ about it.”

“Stop thinkin’ about what?”

“You know what. Just follow your heart, or you’ll work yourself up so bad you’ll turn tail and run all the way back to Missouri, yippin’ like a butt-shot coyote.” Pecos chuckled as he paused to toss his quirley into the dirt of the street behind them.

“Oh, shut up!” Slash snarled, and pushed through the batwings.

The main saloon hall was filled to near bursting. Slash and Pecos had to sidestep their way through the men as well as Jay’s painted, scantily clad girls. The potpourri of male and female aromas was nearly overwhelming after several days of sniffing only the pure, high-country air.

Tobacco smoke hovered in a thick fog, skeining like ghostly snakes in the lights of the crystal chandeliers and gas lamps that lit up the well-appointed saloon, which resembled the tony set of some stage play or a mine magnate’s ballroom.

Varnished oak, velvet draperies, expensive wall hangings, shining brass spittoons, and glistening leaded-glass mirrors shone every which way. Some of the floor was carpeted. Some was hard maple. The fiddle music, now accompanied by a horn or two as well as a guitar, was issuing from a side room given over to dancing. Slash could hear the cowboys letting their hair down, yipping and laughing and stomping their boots.

When Slash and Pecos finally made it to the bar, squeezing in between two drummers who didn’t look happy about being crowded, one of the barmen, Vance Taylor, saw them and said, “Hey, Slash!”

“Set us up—will you, Vance? And, uh . . . where’s Jay?” He’d been looking around but so far hadn’t spotted her.

Taylor, flushed and harried, glanced at the ceiling. “She asked me to have you two head on up to her suite.”

Slash and Pecos cut befuddled looks at each other. “Her suite?” Pecos said. “Both of us?”

Taylor just shrugged and then waltzed off to fill shouted drink orders with the two other aprons, all dolled up in pinstriped shirts, celluloid collars, foulard ties, and sleeve garters, working behind the broad, horseshoe bar.

Slash and Pecos again worked their way through the crowd and up the broad, carpeted stairs. As they headed down the third-floor hall toward Jay’s suite of rooms, Pecos said, “What do you suppose she wants to see both of us about?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“That kind of cramps your style a little, don’t it, partner?” Again, Pecos gave a mocking grin. “I mean, you probably don’t want me around when you drop to a knee.”

“If you don’t shut up, you’re gonna find out it’s true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

Pecos snorted a devious laugh.

They stopped at Jay’s door.

Slash tapped lightly three times. “Jay? It’s Slash an’—I mean, it’s Jimmy and Melvin!”

He cursed under his breath. Their given names sounded so foreign as to be comical.

He frowned at the door. Behind it was only silence.

He was about to tap again when a strangling, gagging sound rose from inside.

“Slash! Pecos!” Jay screamed. “Hit the deck—it’s a trap!”