“ ’Cause it ain’t one bit true!” professed Slash’s ape. He glanced quickly over his left shoulder. “Is it, Tiny?”
“It sure ain’t, Buck!” Tiny shot back, glaring down at Pecos.
“Gentlemen, please believe me,” Slash said, holding up his hands in supplication “Pecos and I never saw you before in our lives.”
“We wouldn’t know neither one o’ you fellas from Adam’s off-ox!” agreed Pecos.
“And even if we had—and even if we’d been privy to the rumors being so maliciously spread about you two fellas, who obviously never played grabby-pants a single night around the old campfire in your lives!—we’d certainly never spread such lies ourselves. Would we, Pecos?”
Pecos choked on a dry laugh, then quickly recovered to shout, “Hell, no!”
Buck glared down at Slash, wrinkling up his massive, broken nose. “Slash Braddock, huh?” He raked his gaze from Slash’s face to his boot toes, then back up to his face again. “You don’t look like so damn much!”
“Neither does the Pecos River Kid,” agreed Tiny, staring down at Pecos. “They don’t look nothin’ like the newspapers are always tootin’ about ’em!”
“And you know what, Tiny?” asked Buck.
“What’s that, Buck?”
“I think they’re funnin’ with us!”
Slash had stepped away from Buck, moving to the side of his cell, backing away from the large, unwieldy, and red-faced giant who kept pace before him, glaring down threateningly, ham-sized fists bunched at his sides.
“Now . . . take it easy, Buck!” Slash said, backing toward his cell door, holding his open hands farther out from his chest as Buck decreased the space between them. “What you two do in the privacy of your own campfires ain’t no one’s business but your own!”
“You know what I’m gonna do to this one here?” Tiny asked Buck, following Pecos around their own cell.
“What’s that, Tiny?”
“I’m gonna tear his head plum off his shoulders!”
“That’s a good idea,” Buck said. “I’m gonna tear this one’s off, too, and I’m gonna paint the walls with his brains!”
Buck lunged for Slash, raising his arms as though to wrap them around Slash’s head. Slash ducked out from under the man’s arms, then scrambled around behind Buck, who was lumbering and slow, wheezing like an ancient bellows, spreading the fumes of the whiskey oozing from his sweaty pores.
When Buck turned, Slash yelled, “Stand down, Buck, or this ain’t gonna go well for you!”
“I doubt that, you little dung pile!”
Again, Buck lunged for Slash.
As he did, Slash pulled his right foot back, then launched that boot straight forward and up, burying the toe high between the raging Buck’s stout legs. He felt the soft, pillowy flesh yield and give a soft cracking sound.
Buck loosed a high-pitched, wailing, effeminate-sounding scream and, closing his knees inward, jackknifed forward and closed his massive hands over his ailing crotch. His head swelled up to nearly twice its normal size, and his face turned first flour white, then fire red, his eyes flashing like diamonds in their doughy sockets.
“Buck!” Tiny yelled, swinging around and bounding away from Pecos and toward his cell door. “Buck! My God—Buck, honey, you okay over there?”
He canted his head to see through the bars, and when his eyes found Buck dropping to his knees, wailing, he switched his gaze to Slash and bellowed, “What did you do to Buck, you crazy polecat!”
Pecos strode up behind Tiny. He picked up the empty white enamel thunder mug from beneath his cell mate’s cot. He raised it high by its metal bail, then gritted his teeth as he swung it down hard against the back of Tiny’s pumpkin-sized, long-haired head.
Bang! went the bucket against Tiny’s stout skull.
Tiny appeared to hardly notice. He merely stopped, blinked, then slowly turned around to face Pecos, whose wide blue eyes betrayed his fear. Pecos raised the bucket high again and then swung it forward and down against Tiny’s skull once more.
Bang! went the bucket against Tiny’s stout skull again.
Tiny had his back to Slash now. Slash didn’t think the giant flinched against the assault this time, either. He just stood facing Pecos—nearly a whole head taller than the blond-headed cutthroat, who cowered back away from the bigger man, staring up at him in wide-eyed trepidation.
For several seconds, Tiny stood facing Pecos without moving. The giant gave a ragged sigh and fell straight forward, like a tree shorn off near the ground by a two-man ripsaw. Pecos gave a startled grunt and scrambled to one side, away from the big man, who dropped like that cut-down tree in the woods, and smashed face first and belly down against the stone floor of the cell.
Tiny lay unmoving.
Pecos looked through the bars at Slash and shrugged.
Slash looked down at Buck, whose face was still bright red. Buck glared up at his cell mate, clamping his hands between his legs.
“You injured me, you crazy devil!” Buck croaked, a forked blue vein throbbing in his tattooed forehead. “You injured me real bad. I . . . I think you . . . broke me somethin’ awful down there!”
“Better than you breakin’ me something awful up here,” Slash said, pointing at his head.
Following Pecos’s lead, Slash picked up his own cell’s slop bucket, which he was glad to find empty. The deputies must have emptied the buckets.
“Here ya go, Buck,” Slash said, raising the bucket by its bail. “I’ll put you outta your misery.”
“D-don’t you dare!” Buck raged.
He’d started to raise his arms but didn’t get them even to his chin before Slash slammed the bucket down against his head with a wicked-sounding crash.
Buck’s big head wobbled on his thick shoulders.
His eyes rolled up in their sockets.
He sagged back against the cell wall, dipped his chin to his shoulder, wagged his head, gave a long ragged sigh, and fell fast asleep.
* * *
“You boys ready for that long, last walk?” asked Deputy U.S. Marshal Vern Gables late the next morning, another long, black Mexican cigar poking out from between his swollen and scabbed lips that looked more than a mite sore.
Despite his painful mouth, he appeared in a good mood, all smiles and glittering blue eyes. His black hat was set at a rakish angle upon his dark head. His cheeks were cleanly shaved, his thick dragoon-style mustache freshly clipped. He smelled like peppermint pomade and Ogallala Bay Rum & Sandalwood Skin Toner. He winked through the bars as Deputy Vince Tabor unlocked the door of the cell that housed both Slash and Pecos together now.
Late yesterday afternoon, the town marshal’s deputies had hauled Buck and Tiny off to the local sawbones for tending. The local lawmen had had to carry the ailing brutes out on stretchers. Tiny had been curled in the fetal position, thumb in his mouth. The sizes of both patients had evoked quite a bit of grunting and cursing, and more than a few incredulous gazes had been directed toward the two middle-aged cutthroats whose clocks the two giants were apparently supposed to have cleaned, and who’d stood smiling and waving as their cell mates were evacuated.
The cell block still stunk with the fetor the two had carried in here, however. It would likely linger well into next week.
“No, I ain’t ready for that walk,” Pecos said, scowling at Gables as Tabor opened the door, which grated loudly on its dry hinges. “But if you think I’m gonna dribble down my leg and sob for mercy, you got another think comin’, you lawdog son of a weasel!”
“There’s the spirit!” Gables said, holding his cigar out and gingerly tapping ashes from the coal. “The two old catamounts are gonna go out cussin’ blue streaks!”
“Not me,” Slash said, holding out his wrists as the third deputy, Tyson Waite, clicked handcuffs around them.
Tabor applied the spancels to the prisoners’ ankles. Two deputy town marshals stood at the end of the cell block, near the outside doors, both big men cradling
long-barreled, double-bore shotguns in their thick arms, all-business expressions on their mustached faces, beneath the brims of their pulled-down Stetsons.
“I’m not gonna cuss none,” Slash continued. “There’s likely young children and old ladies on the street. I wouldn’t want to be a bad influence. If I dribble down my leg while I’m doin’ the midair two-step, though, Vern, I’ll be sure to dance in your direction. You’d best stand upwind.”
He winked at the sore-mouthed federal.
“Thanks for the advice,” Gables said, taking a long pull off the cigar and blowing the plume directly at Slash.
When the cuffs and spancels were secured to both prisoners, preventing them from throwing any punches or running, Gables stepped back, drawing the cell door wide.
Waite and Tabor shoved the prisoners out into the corridor, and Slash and Pecos started that long, last walk, having to shuffle awkwardly along due to the two-foot length of chains securing their ankles. Ahead were the two stout, oak, iron-banded doors. Beyond those doors were the stone steps rising to the barred cellar doors.
Beyond lay the crowd that Slash and Pecos had heard gathering for the past hour or so, milling in eager anticipation of the necktie party. For the past twenty minutes or so the crowd as well as the two condemned prisoners had listened to the spiel of a traveling snake oil salesman, using the opportunity to hock his Doctor Roman’s Liver Purifier as well as his sure-fire cure for the chilblains and occasional pleurisy—Mrs. Parker’s Lung Tonic.
Through the barred outside window, smoke from several cook fires had slithered into the cell, rife with the tantalizing aromas of roasting meat. The lingering smell was still making Slash’s mouth water, though his throat was dry and his neck ached in anticipation of the rope and the sudden drop through the trapdoor. His and Pecos’s last meal, which had been this morning’s breakfast, had consisted of what all their meals had consisted of so far—beans cooked with very little bacon, and a tin cup of water.
Just as there’d been no last bottle of good Kentucky bourbon, there’d been no lavish last meal for the condemned men, either. Chief Marshal Luther T. “Bleed-’Em-So” Bledsoe was going to laugh the two former heads of the Snake River Marauders all the way to the gallows and beyond....
The two deputy town marshals unlocked and opened the stout oak doors. They climbed the stone steps, unlocked the cellar doors, then pushed them wide, ordering the crowd that had gathered around the cell block entrance to stand back. Bright, high-country sunlight poured down over the steps and into the faces of the condemned men, who hadn’t seen direct sunlight in nearly a week.
The bright light was like a million tiny javelins stabbing Slash’s and Pecos’s eyes and causing both outlaws to jerk back on their heels.
“Get out there!” Gables barked, ramming his rifle butt against Slash’s back, shoving the old outlaw on up the steps and out into the street.
Tyson Waite gave Pecos similar treatment, and suddenly both outlaws were stumbling forward, a small crowd of gawkers converging on them. There were old and young, men and women, crying babies and barking dogs. A particularly tall elderly man in a black suit and with a Bible in his hand jutted his hawk face toward Slash and Pecos, wailing, “Repent sinners! Repent! Rejoice in the word of your Lord and Savior, or have thee sins drowned in the fires of eternal hell and damnation!”
“Speaking of hell, old man,” Pecos barked back at him. “Hop back into it and get the hell out of my face!”
A little towheaded boy pushed through the crowd to stare up in delighted horror at Slash and Pecos before glancing over his shoulder at several other little boys pushing up close behind him. He pointed a dirty finger at the two cutthroats and bellowed, “That’s them! That’s them! It’s Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid their own selves!”
A fat little boy with mean, little, close-set eyes, and holding a thick pork roast sandwich in his fat little fist, bulled in close to shout up at Slash and Pecos, “My ma says no two badder cutthroats have ever fogged the western trails! She says hangin’s too good for ya!”
“My pa says you’re both meaner’n rabid wolves!” chimed in another little boy, a small sack of rock candy in his hand. “That true?”
Slash chuckled, then leaned down and shoved his face up close to all three little boys, snarling, “Come here, you little devils—I’m gonna chew your ears off and eat ’em while ya watch!”
The three boys screamed, wheeled, and ran, one crying loudly for his mother.
“For shame, Slash,” Pecos reprimanded his partner. “You like to have taken several years off those poor children’s lives!”
“Ah, hell,” Slash said, chuckling as he and Pecos were shoved on ahead, the lawmen batting their rifle butts at the clambering crowd, “they’ll delight their grandchildren with that tale!”
He laughed.
He sobered up right quick, however, as he stared at the gallows looming ahead, a block away now and standing in the middle of the main street, out in front of the Colorado House Hotel with its broad front veranda. The gallows looked like an especially wicked thing, looming there with the two nooses drooping from the wooden frame mounted on a plank board platform only a little larger than a boat dock, five or six steps running up one side.
Slash had seen gallows before, but he’d never paid them much mind.
He paid this one plenty of mind, however. The instrument of his own annihilation.
Oh, well. No point in thinking about it. He supposed he had it coming. What had he thought all those years running hog-wild down the long coulees—robbing banks and trains and even saloons and parlor houses at times—would add up to if not a stretched neck?
He’d never killed anyone who hadn’t tried to kill him first. He’d never crippled anyone who hadn’t been trying to do the same to him, or worse, as Bledsoe had been trying to do when Slash’s bullet had chewed into Bleed-’Em-So’s back. Tell that to the good marshal, he thought with a clipped, dry chuckle.
Tell it to Judge McClelland.
Tell it to the hangman, Grimes, resembling a withered old crow where he stood atop the gallows in his black suit and black hat, his gaunt, pale face as grim as a deacon’s. The swallowtail of his coat fluttered in the hot, dry mountain breeze that kicked up the dust being churned by the crowd, salting Slash’s eyes. Despite the dust, Slash saw the old executioner’s face clearly. He thought he detected the first quirk of an eager smile on the man’s lipless mouth.
This was Grimes’s payday. He’d eat well and sleep under a roof for the next few weeks.
As he and Pecos approached the gallows, the crowd cheering or cajoling, salesmen and newspaper boys hawking their wares, Slash found his eyes scanning the crowd and the buildings and boardwalks along both sides of the street for one familiar face out of all the eager faces of the strangers surrounding him.
Jay.
CHAPTER 17
Slash had tried to put her out of his mind, and he’d thought he’d been successful, but apparently he hadn’t. For some reason, he found himself yearning for one more look at her, however brief. It was only a half-conscious desire, and it was followed close on its heels by the sharp bite of her having double-crossed both himself and Pecos, two of her closest friends. Two of her very few friends in all the world.
Why, Jay?
If one merciful saint had suddenly swooped down from heaven just then on the pale wings of a dove and granted him one wish—anything at all in heaven or on earth—he’d have asked to have that one last question answered.
Why did you do it, Jay?
Slash’s gaze swept the broad veranda fronting the Colorado House.
A dozen or so men milled there. He spied McClelland and the prosecutor, George Hill, both holding soapy beer mugs in their fists while chatting and smiling, occasionally laughing. There was Lester Hyman, as well, also with a beer and talking to two men who were probably town council members or the like. The rest appeared wealthy ranchers judging by their natty Stetsons and tailored suits.
He threw his head back, laughing.
Abigail Langdon smiled coolly.
Ignoring them both, Slash swept his gaze across the veranda, to the right and left of the chief marshal as well as behind him, looking for Jay. He’d half expected to see her at Bleed-’Em-So’s side, since, if what Gables had told Slash was true, they were spending time together. Or had that one night in the Colorado House been all that the chief marshal had required of her? That and double-crossing Slash and Pecos, of course. Maybe Bledsoe had paid her off and she’d lit a shuck for New Orleans or San Francisco. A woman with Jay’s devious, manipulative mind would do well in either place.
Apparently she wasn’t anywhere out here. If she wasn’t altogether shameless, shame would no doubt keep her away from witnessing the fruits of the whipsaw she’d put Slash and Pecos in.
“Welcome, gentlemen!”
Adolph Grimes stood atop the steps leading up to the gallows, smiling almost mockingly down at the two condemned men staring up at him. He had bulbous eyes and a mouth that sort of stuck out, as well, bulging out over a mere nub of chin. Gray muttonchops ran clear down to his doughy jawline.
“Are you prepared for your reckoning?” Grimes inquired through a broad smile, showing very small, yellow-brown teeth.
Slash mounted the steps, tripping a little on his spancel chain. “Don’t just stand there chinning. Let’s get on with it, hangman!” The outlaw mounted the platform and shambled over to one of the two ropes awaiting him.
“Yeah, let’s get this show on the road!” Pecos agreed, dragging his own chain across the platform and standing behind his own noose, to Slash’s left. “I got me a purty Mexican angel awaiting me in heaven with a bucket of fresh sangria and a bag of Mexican tobacky. She’s a purty one with ruby lips and long, jet-black hair. She came to me in a dream last night. So come on—tie them nooses tight and drop these doors.” Chuckling, he danced a little jig on the trapdoor he was standing on, and elbowed Slash in the side.
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