A Good Day for a Massacre Read online

  Slash shrugged. “Nothin’.”

  “Nothin’, huh?”

  “What else can we do? We’re gettin’ old. Our holdup days are over. Even if we wanted to go back to ’em, we couldn’t. Old Bleed-Em-So would have us run down in a matter of days. His marshals would hang us right where they ran us down, and that would be the end of it.”

  Pecos took a bite of the jerky he was nibbling, along with his coffee. “Hell,” he said, chewing, “maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “Yeah . . . well, maybe.”

  They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. They both just sat there, staring into the fire’s small, orange flames that leaped around like ghostly yellow snakes in the brassy sunshine filtering through the forest canopy.

  Finally, Pecos frowned across the fire at Slash. “What you got there?”

  Slash glanced up at him, dark brows arched over his cinnamon eyes. “Huh?”

  “What you foolin’ with in your pocket there? You was foolin’ with it earlier, before the stickup.”

  Slash pulled his hand out of his pocket and sat back with a sheepish air. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” He sipped his coffee and looked off through the trees.

  “Ah, come on, Slash. What you got in your pocket? You was fingerin’ it on the way up, and you been fingerin’ it on the way down.”

  “It’s the derringer.”

  “No, it isn’t. You keep the Double-D in your right-hand pocket. Whatever you was fingerin’ you got in your left pocket.”

  “Oh, never mind!”

  “Ah, come on! Humor this old reprobate, Slash! I’m burnin’ up with boredom!”

  “It’s Jimmy, damnit, Melvin. We gotta remember to use our given names. Slash an’ Pecos are dead.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “Ah, hell!” Slash brushed his hat off his head and ran a hand through his still-thick and mostly dark brown hair, give or take a few strands of gray, which hung down over his ears and his collar. He raked it up like a shaggy tumbleweed, then threw it straight back off his forehead. “It’s . . . it’s a, uh . . .”

  “It’s a what? Come on, Slash . . . er, I mean Jimmy . . . you can say it. Spit it out.”

  Slash drew a deep breath and stared up at the forest canopy, where a crow was doing battle with an angrily chittering squirrel. “It’s a ring.”

  “Huh?”

  “My mother’s ring.”

  “Your mother’s ring?”

  “Weddin’ ring.”

  “What you got your mother’s weddin’ ring for, Sla . . . I mean, Jimmy?”

  “I wrote to my sister in Missouri, had her send it to me. Since I’m the only livin’ boy in the family, she’s been savin’ it for me.”

  “Okay, well, let me ask you again—what you got your mama’s weddin’ ring for, Jimmy?” Pecos’s eyes snapped wide, and he opened his mouth in sudden recognition. “Oh . . . hell!”

  He grinned across the fire at his sheepish partner. “You . . . Jay . . . you’re gonna pop the question—ain’t ya, you old rattlesnake?”

  Slash tried to snap a fly out of the air in front of him with his hand, and missed. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? If you went to the trouble of sending for your momma’s ring, you must know!”

  Slash cast him a fiery look, his cheeks reddening beneath his deep brown tan. “Ah, hell—I never shoulda told you a damn thing. Look at you—you’re actin’ like you got ants in your pants!”

  Pecos dipped his chin demurely and held up his hands in supplication. “I’m sorry, partner. I apologize. I shouldn’t make fun. It’s just that—well, hell, you really caught me by surprise. I mean, I know you an’ Jay got . . . well, got somethin’ goin’ on, though I can’t rightly put my finger on just what it is. You take her out to breakfast a whole lot, an’ she buys you more beers than what you pay for at her saloon, but . . . Well, you’re pretty tight-lipped on the subject of women, Slash. You always have been.”

  Pecos studied his stoic partner, who was looking off through the trees again as though he were watching for Apaches. In fact, Pecos could tell that Slash would probably rather tussle with Apaches than continue the current conversation. James Braddock was not a man who could speak frankly on subjects of the heart.

  “All right, all right,” Pecos said, using a glove to grab the coffeepot from the iron spider over the fire. “You’ll tell me when you’re good an’ ready. I won’t prod you about it no more.”

  He refilled his coffee cup, then held the steaming pot up to Slash. “More mud? Pretty good pot, if I do say so my—”

  “I think I’m gonna ask her.” Slash was still staring off as though watching for those imaginary Apaches. He turned to Pecos again and said, “You think she’ll have me?”

  Pecos just stared back at him for a few seconds, still overcome with shock. Slash had never confided in him about women before. Pecos had confided plenty in Slash, but never the other way around. Mainly because Slash had never seemed interested in women. At least, none beyond the sporting variety. Oh, he’d made time with plenty of parlor girls, but Jimmy Braddock had always been a love-’em-an’-leave-’em kind of fella.

  “Well,” Pecos said, when he found his tongue. “I think she’s too good for you, but, yes, I think she’ll have you.” He grinned, chuckled. “Yes, I do indeed think that Jaycee Breckenridge will accept your hand, James.”

  “Son of a buck! Do you really think so, or are you just sayin’ that to humor me?”

  It was Pecos’s turn to cloud up and rain. “You dad-blasted fool! What does it take to convince you? Can’t you see the way she looks at you? Why, as soon as we step into that saloon of hers, her eyes light up like a Christmas tree. Like a barn fire! And a flush always—always! —rises in her cheeks. And, believe me, it ain’t me she’s lookin’ at. Why, that pretty li’l redhead is pure-dee gone for you, Slash!”

  “Jimmy.”

  “I mean Jimmy!”

  “Okay, okay,” Slash said, running a sleeve across his nose. “If you say so.”

  “Can’t you see it for yourself?”

  Slash winced, shrugged. “I’m a little slow that way, I gotta admit. Besides . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, Pecos, but—”

  “Melvin.”

  “Melvin, I mean. But it always feels like there’s a hand inside me, holdin’ me back.” He punched the end of his fist against his chest.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Slash raised a knee and hooked his arm over it. He picked up a stick with his other hand and poked it into the flames. “I’ve never been good with women. I’ve never really known how to talk to ’em. I reckon that’s why I always preferred parlor girls to . . . well, you know, to real women. Real ladies like Jaycee.”

  “Well, that just don’t make sense.”

  Slash frowned. “What don’t?”

  “Women fall all over you, Slash. I mean, Jimmy. They always have. Leastways, they always seem primed to. It’s your looks. You’re a square-jawed, handsome devil. I’ve always been jealous of that. I suppose we’re so old now it don’t matter if I go ahead and confess it.”

  “Pshaw.” Slash flushed.

  “No, no. You’re a dark-eyed, handsome devil. Me? I’m too big an’ lumbering. I’m an ole bulldog. And I got this stringy hair, an’ the sun makes my face all splotchy instead of Injun-dark like yours. Oh, I’ve had me some women over the years. I don’t deny that. Some I’ve loved. Some have even loved me back.” He chuckled as he stared into his steaming coffee cup. “But I’ve always had to work for the ladies. You? Hell, all you gotta do is walk into a saloon or restaurant, and the eyes of every girl in the place just naturally shuttle to you like steel to a magnet.”

  “Well, I sure wish I knew how to talk to ’em.”

  “You gotta pretend like they’re just people.”

 
“Huh?”

  “Like 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 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 s
mell 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.