by Jake Logan
But before he could begin slapping Slocum’s cheeks with it, Slocum asked, “The bank and such? What else does he see to?”
Cool, good-smelling witch hazel thinly coated Slocum’s face, applied by skilled hands. “Oh, just about everything! Didn’t you pay no attention to the signs when you rode in? We got Chandler’s Mercantile and Dry Goods, Chandler’s Tobacconists, Chandler’s Gun and Rifle, Chandler’s Feed and Grain, the Poleaxe Saloon, of course, and the Poleaxe Hotel. Then there’s Chandler’s—”
“I get the picture,” Slocum interrupted gruffly as the barber turned his chair around to face the mirror.
David Chandler. He sounded like the perfect mark for Lil.
“You want a haircut, too?” the barber asked hopefully.
“No,” Slocum replied with a shake of his head. “Just had one last month. Would like a bath, though, if you got a tub free yet.”
“Oughta have by now,” came the reply as the barber walked toward the rear door and parted the curtain. “Yup,” he said, turning back toward Slocum. “They’s both empty. Pay first, and when you’re finished, you can go on out through the back door. Unless you change your mind about that haircut. Only cost you another quarter.”
Slocum stood, then dug into his pocket. “Doubt I’ll be doin’ that,” he said. He handed over money for the shave and the bath, then walked through the curtained doorway.
“Hot water’s on the stove,” the barber called after him. “Help yourself. And there’s hooks on the far wall for your clothes and guns and such.”
David Chandler called for Tiger Lil at just the moment that Slocum was up the street, lowering himself into a tub of hot water.
After straightening his tie for the fourth time, Chandler rapped a pattern on Lil’s door, practically giddy with the thought of her, which was totally out of character for the town’s leading citizen.
He didn’t understand why she had this effect on him, why she made him feel like a kid again. Oh, he understood why he sometimes was embarrassed to stand up in her presence and why just the simple mention of her name had him erect half the time.
But the things he didn’t understand, he wasn’t going to question. He was just going to enjoy them.
A vision in pink, she opened the door. There was a broad but impish grin on her beautiful face. It never ceased to amaze him that a woman of her beauty had bothered to come to a tiny town like Poleaxe.
True, they had a fine saloon. He ought to know. He owned it. But still—Tiger Lil!
After all, she was one in a million. Her features were beyond compare, her figure the stuff dreams were made of, and her manner . . . what man could ask for anything more?
“Hello, David,” she purred. “Right on time, as usual. Aren’t you a darling!”
“Miss Lily,” he said, bowing slightly to hide his flush. He couldn’t have scrubbed the grin off his face with a bristle brush and a bar of lye soap. And he didn’t want to.
“Shall we?” she said.
He offered his arm. “We shall, indeed.”
Acey was trotting at full speed, the muscles in her dark bay haunches and shoulders were working overtime, and a lather was beginning to build up under her harness. David let out a whoop, and Lil glanced over—without releasing her death grip on the side rail—just long enough to see him in profile. His face was lit up in absolute joy as he wielded the reins and buggy whip.
Boys and their toys, she thought, just as the longest hairs of Acey’s tail lashed lightly at her hat. But this little frolic is going to get us killed!
David whooped again, and she forced a gay laugh. At least, she hoped it was. And then, over the wind beating at her face, she shouted, “Isn’t this long enough, David? The poor horse is . . . perspiring so heavily!”
Immediately, he reined the horse down to a slower trot. “Sorry,” he said, still smiling. “I’m awful proud of her.”
Lil barely knew a mustang from an English Thoroughbred, but she nodded enthusiastically and said, “Oh my, yes! She’s beautiful. And so fast! Why, for a moment there I thought we’d grown wings!”
Apparently David liked this, because he laughed, then took her gloved hand and kissed it. “How did I get to be so lucky, Lil?”
She knew where this conversation was heading, but she arched a brow coyly, and said, “Lucky?” as if she hadn’t the slightest idea what he meant.
He took her hand again. “Lucky that you ever came to Poleaxe, for one thing. Why’d you do it, anyway? It’s hardly Denver or San Francisco.”
She smiled and squeezed his hand. “It’s the oddest thing. You know, usually I don’t play these little towns. But when your letter came, asking me if I might pass through for a week or so and honor you by performing for your customers, there was something about it . . .” She shrugged shyly and cast her gaze downward. “I don’t know. Perhaps it was fate.”
David slowed the horse to a walk. Thank God. Her backside, despite the padded seat, was practically beaten to a pulp, what with their previous speed and the rough roads.
He said, “You and I think alike, Lily darling.”
He reined Acey to a standstill, which left them under the shade of a tall cottonwood beside the road. He twisted toward her and lifted her chin.
Here it comes, she thought.
He took her other hand, and folded them both in his. “Lil,” he said, “my dearest Lily . . . would you do me the very great honor . . . would you possibly consent . . . I know I must seem like a backwoods yokel to you, but would you consider . . .”
Lil kept smiling sweetly, but she was thinking, Get on with it, for the love of God!
Finally, he did.
And she acted startled and a little shocked and flustered, even though she’d been through this more times than she could count, and she turned her head away.
“Oh, David!” she whispered. “This is so sudden! You take my breath away!”
“Please, Lil!” he demanded. No, pleaded. “Will you at least consider it?”
Slowly, she turned to face him again and said, “I shall consider it, dear David. You shall have my answer tomorrow at six in the evening.”
Leave them dangling a little while to set the hook deep, that was her motto.
“Darling!” he cried, kissed both her hands, and startled Acey in the process.
Slocum checked into the Poleaxe Hotel, which was connected to the Poleaxe Saloon by a double-decker veranda, and which sat above the Poleaxe Restaurant. He signed in, but the clerk turned the book back around too fast for him to see little more than a flash of Lil’s signature.
As the clerk handed him a key and pointed to the stairs, Slocum rubbed at the back of his neck. “Friend of mine’s stayin’ here, I think. Miss Lily Kirkland. What room’s she—”
“Hold it right there,” the clerk said, cutting him off with a wave of his pudgy hands. “Mister, if I gave out her room number to every yahoo who walked in claimin’ he was her friend, I’d have . . . Well, I don’t know what exactly, but it’d be a big heap of something like what comes out the back end of a horse.”
Slocum leaned on the desk toward the clerk, who shrank back just a tad. “Listen,” he said quietly, “I am a friend of Lil’s. If you won’t give me her room number, then I suggest you hike up those stairs and tell her I’m here. Got that?”
The clerk whipped out a large white handkerchief and mopped his balding head, which had been dry only moments before.
“I c-c-can’t,” he finally stuttered. “She’s not here.”
Slocum cocked a brow. The clerk was fat and short, and Slocum towered over him, even from the opposite side of the polished desk. Slocum leaned harder into the counter, and the clerk took a step back.
“She’s out buggy ridin’ with Mr. Chandler, sir!” he said, almost shouting.
At least, it was loud enough that an old man, sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper, looked up with some alarm. “Trouble, Walt?” the old man asked.
Slocum ignored him. “Any idea when she’
ll be back?” he asked the clerk.
“N-no, sir,” came the reply, and then the little fat man peered around Slocum long enough to say, “It’s all right, Ed.”
Without turning, Slocum echoed, “Yeah, Ed. It’s all right.”
He took a step away from the front desk. In obvious relief, the clerk let out a little whoosh of air through pursed lips, then mopped his brow again.
Slocum snorted under his breath while he bent over and picked up his pack roll, rifle, and saddlebags, which had been nestled at his feet.
Hefting the saddlebags over his shoulder, he said, “When she comes in, tell her Slocum’s here. Room . . .” He consulted the key in his hand. “Room seventeen.”
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said behind him as he mounted the stairs. “Certainly, sir.”
3
Charlie Townsend rode down the fence line, scowling. Damn that Chandler, anyway! Acting the fool over a woman!
Charlie was ostensibly out scouting for breaks in the fence or maybe a yearling or a calf or a damned mule deer caught up in it. It happened sometimes. He’d hated it when they had to fence the place, or at least part of it. Goddamn neighbors!
He would have liked to blame that on David Chandler, too, but that had happened several years back, before Chandler bought the place from Charlie.
Now, there was a cocked-up deal! Chandler had come along out of the blue and offered Charlie time and a half what the old Circle C was worth. And seeing as Charlie, after expenses, pulled barely more than what he paid his hands—and also seeing as how he liked to play cards and was in debt and about to lose the place anyhow—Charlie had said yes.
Practically shouted it, in fact.
And then, after he’d gotten paid—and in turn, paid off his debts—he’d gone soft in the head and gotten into another game again. He’d lost every last blamed cent of that money in one long, twenty-four-hour game of five card stud.
It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair.
But it had happened.
And so Charlie had gone back to the Circle C, tail between his legs. Swallowing his pride, he’d asked for a job. And oddly enough—to Charlie’s way of thinking, anyhow—Chandler had not only given him a job but hired him on as foreman.
“Guess nobody knows the place any better than you, Charlie,” he’d said and offered Charlie sixty and found per month.
Hell, Charlie had never paid even close to that to his foremen. He supposed that’s why they didn’t stick around too long, but he gladly accepted Chandler’s offer, and that was that.
What made him mad, though, was that Chandler was making a real go of the place. He’d changed a lot of things—mostly against Charlie’s advice—and the place was making money hand over fist. As much as any ranch the size of the Circle C could, that was.
“Who does he think he is, anyhow?” he muttered to his horse, Red, as he reined him around a little stand of prickly pear. “Already owns more’n half the town, and now he wants to own that Tiger Lil hussy, to boot!”
Well, Charlie wasn’t going to work for any woman, that was for sure. He’d heard stories about her from the boys who’d been to town in the last few days.
“She’s the most beauteous thing I ever seen,” young Curly had said, his eyes to the heavens and his hat held over his heart. “Ye gods!”
“Sure gotta pair’a titties on her,” Gus Crow added, then cupped his hands a good six inches away from his chest.
“Yeah, I’d like to be hangin’ on to one’a them with my teeth right this minute!” Tip Thompson had enthusiastically added.
Idiots, the lot of them!
Didn’t they knew that women were all just plain trouble, no matter how spangled or pretty a package they came in? Oh, Charlie had wed him a woman, a long time back. Married her right out of the whore-house, when he was a kid back in Texas.
And what did he get for his trouble? She’d taken off with a drummer first chance she got, and a button salesman to boot!
Well, he’d shown her.
He’d followed that drummer and his Betty Sue, found them humping their brains out in a hotel in a little smidgeon of a Texas town that didn’t even have a sheriff, and he’d shot both of them in the head, just like that.
And afterwards, Charlie had just walked down the stairs, as bold as you please. Walked past the startled desk clerk, walked past the tiny crowd that was already gathering on the walk, stepped up on his horse, and jogged out of town.
And nobody followed him. At least nobody that he was aware of. He just kept on riding and rode himself into New Mexico, then Arizona. He had a little money, but not enough to do much more than get him into a poker game.
So he just rambled around, playing a game whenever one was handy, doing odd jobs during losing streaks and smoking fat cigars after he won.
And then one day, he’d won him a big game, and he was temporarily smart enough to buy a ranch.
Not smart enough to run it decent, but he’d been keeping an eye on how David Chandler did things. He was learning.
But lately, he was learning that David Chandler was a fool. This did more than irritate Charlie. In fact, he was nearly provoked to murder a couple of times, one of which was when Chandler drove off this morning in the buggy behind that fancy trotting horse of his.
Just because he did a better job of running the ranch than Charlie ever had didn’t mean he knew his butt from a hole in the ground when it came to women. There, Charlie could teach him a thing or two.
Especially about saloon women.
Because in Charlie’s mind, a woman who sang in a bar was the same as a woman who worked on her back in one. And there was no way he was going to let another hussy come ruin his life, no matter what capacity she arrived in!
Charlie whoaed his horse. There, stuck in the fence, was a hapless mule deer doe. It had given up struggling against the wires that tangled its legs and just lay there, panting heavily.
Charlie pulled his rifle, aimed, and fired, then rode on past the now-still corpse.
It felt damn good to kill something.
Damn good.
David and Lily arrived back at the saloon/hotel around suppertime. Lily had been coy all afternoon about the marriage proposal, but being a gentleman, he didn’t press her.
She had said tomorrow at six, and tomorrow at six it would be.
If she didn’t answer him then, he’d go crazy.
He rounded the buggy, tying Acey at the rail on his way, then helped her down.
“Always so polite, David,” she said demurely.
“Always at your service, ma’am,” he said, smiling. He gave her a wink and hoped she knew that he really meant that always part.
He offered his arm and escorted her into the lobby, where she asked for her key before he had a chance to do it for her. Well, he supposed she was accustomed to being on her own.
That was one reason he loved her: her independence. It was incredibly refreshing after all these wilting wallflowers that seemed to populate the territory.
“Miss Lil, ma’am?” stuttered Walt, the desk clerk, as he handed over her key. Walt was still in awe of her, as he supposed was most of the town.
“Yes, Walter?” she said, smiling.
Which only served to make Walt’s discomfort worse. But he managed to blurt, “A man named Slocum says to tell you he’s in number seventeen.”
Slocum? Who was Slocum?
Lil seemed puzzled, too, much to David’s relief. She tipped her head and knitted her brow, and said, “What is this gentleman’s name again?”
Walt repeated it, and Lil shook her head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.” She turned toward David, a smile on her lips. “Things like this happen all the time. I’m sure you understand, darling.”
That darling almost had David’s knees knocking. “Of course I do, Lily. Just a fan, I’m certain. If he gives you any trouble, I can assure you that—”
She laughed, and it was like music. “Dear David, I’ve dealt with his kind before and never
come to any harm. But I shall keep you in mind.” She put a hand to the side of his face and added, “My knight in shining armor.”
David felt a hot flush creeping up his neck. “I suppose I’d best take my rig to the stable,” he said lamely.
“You’ll be there for my first show?” she asked, one dainty foot on the first riser of the stairs.
“Certainly!” he said. “And I expect to buy your dinner at the hotel between the first and the second performances.”
“As always,” she purred.
He doffed his hat. “Until later, my love,” he said. And left to take Acey down to Jess’s livery stable.
As the owner, David had his own private suite at the hotel, and he wondered, as he handed over the rig to Jess, if perhaps he should invite Lil up for a quiet supper for two this evening.
When she was through working, of course. He had more in mind than food.
But he decided against it.
Lil was a lady, after all. She might not take kindly to any premarital advances he might make. No, he’d best be patient and hold off till the wedding.
He was already convinced that she’d say yes and make him the happiest man in the territory.
Tiger Lil took dainty, ladylike steps until she was out of Walt’s earshot, then hurried to her room. It was a corner room and faced both the street and the saloon, and she wanted to make certain that David was indeed on his way to the stable.
When she saw his rig out in front of it, far down the street, she turned on her heel and stormed out and down the hall to number seventeen.
She pounded on the door.
When it opened, she threw herself at Slocum. Quite literally.
He caught her in his amazing arms and kissed her until she almost wilted.
“Just like the good old days,” she breathed, once she had a chance.
He scooped her up in his arms. “Not quite yet, baby.”
But as he began to stride toward the bed—his bed, which she suddenly ached to be in more than anyplace in the world—she said, “Stop, honey.”
