they’re just like you an’ me. ’Cause they are. Just start talkin’ like you’d start talkin’ to a man an’ see where it goes from there. You’d be surprised. But, then, hell—you already got that figured out with Jaycee. I seen you two huddled over some long, serious conversations lately. You appeared to be givin’ back as good as you was gettin’.”
Slash nodded. “It’s easier. Talkin’ to her. Always was—leastways, it was when Pistol Pete was still alive.”
Jaycee Breckenridge had been married to Slash and Pecos’s outlaw partner, Pistol Pete Johnson, until Pete had met his end by way of a posse rider’s bullet late one night in a deep-mountain box canyon. That had been five years ago now. Slash had loved Jaycee before she’d married up with Pete, but he hadn’t known how to tell her. Or even how to just carry on a casual conversation with her.
He’d gotten more comfortable with her, though, over the years that she was married to Pete, and they—Jaycee, Pete, Pecos, and Slash—had holed up together in Jay and Pete’s remote shack high in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, on the back side of jobs they’d sprung. He supposed Jay’s being married to Pete had taken some of the pressure off his expectations, since she was already married and there was room for a genuine friendship to grow.
Now, however, Pete was dead.
“Well, you go for it, then, you son of a devil!” Pecos spat into the fire, then ran a sleeve across his eyes. His voice pinched as he added, “Go ahead and leave me high an’ dry!”
“Don’t tell me you’re cryin’!”
Pecos blinked as he stared guiltily into the fire. A few tears dribbled down his cheeks and into his short blond beard. “Yeah, I reckon a little. Not out of sadness. Just chokes me, is all—hearin’ about you an’ Jay. Here, I figured you’d be the one to die alone pinin’ for some woman you never had. I figured I’d be the one with a woman keepin’ my feet warm on cold winter nights, feelin’ guilty about you out in some desert cabin—just you an’ the scorpions an’ centipedes.”
“Well, let’s not put the cart before the horse. I haven’t asked her yet, and just thinkin’ about it is givin’ me the fantods. I might still be shackin’ up with the scorpions an’ centipedes.”
“Oh, you’ll do it. You’ll ask her. She’ll accept. And you two will be standin’ up before some sky pilot grinnin’ at each other all dewy-eyed, and you’ll slip Mama Braddock’s ring on Jay’s purty finger, and you’ll tie the damn knot!”
Slash shuddered as he stared across the fire at his teary-eyed partner. “Jesus, will ya shut up? You’re startin’ to give me cold feet all over again!”
“An’ you’ll leave ole Pecos—I mean Melvin—all high an’ dry.” Pecos sleeved more tears from his cheeks.
“Ah, hell,” Slash said. “You might be uglier’n a five-legged goat, but you’re a silver-tongued devil. That’s what always made me jealous of you, Melvin! You may not have a woman right now, but you’ll wrangle one soon enough with that gold-plated charm of yours. The trick for you is—can you keep her long enough to marry her before you tumble for another?”
They both had a good laugh over that.
Belly laughs, both. Until they thought their ribs were gonna bust and poke out of their bellies.
They sobered up right quick when one of the mules brayed a sharp warning.
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