A Good Day for a Massacre

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

Dodge suddenly looked stricken.

  “Don’t mind him,” Pecos said from the doorway. “He’s as moody as a pregnant puma!”

  * * *

  The former cutthroats and the pretty Pinkerton found scattered bits of the gold-robbers’ sign north of the roadhouse. The killers appeared to have followed a relatively recently carved wagon trail, faint in places and likely cut by the supply and ore wagons of area prospectors.

  Pecos found the sign, rather, while Slash and Hattie sat their horses, purposefully not talking to each other.

  In fact, the girl didn’t say anything all the rest of the day from where she rode, last in their Indian-file line as they followed the gold thieves’ trail deeper and deeper into the Elk Range.

  Slash thought he was seeing about as pretty a country as he’d ever seen in his life, as they rode generally northwest. He couldn’t remember ever traversing this terrain before. He’d covered a lot of the frontier over his nearly forty years out here, but he knew if he’d ever been out here before, he’d remember.

  He, Pecos, and Hattie followed a broad valley filled with tall grass and wildflowers lining the banks of a crystalline stream meandering through beaver meadows and aspen groves on the trail’s left side. Beyond the stream, forest rose, cladding the apron slopes jutting as severely as a ship’s prow to craggy gray peaks that must have stood two thousand feet above the valley floor.

  More forest—both coniferous and deciduous—rose on the group’s right, the aspens touched with the first bright yellows of autumn. Several times the trio spied elk cropping grass along the stream’s far side, and once they heard the distant wail of what Slash identified as a grizzly bear likely marking his territory.

  Deer were everywhere, grazing like cattle. Mountain bluebirds flitted amongst the stirrup-high grass and pine branches. Beavers and muskrats played in the stream’s deepest side pools, and both golden and bald eagles rode the air currents over the steep, rocky slopes on both sides of the canyon, occasionally giving ratcheting cries that echoed eerily in the clean-scoured, high-mountain air.

  For most of the afternoon, the sun blazed down from a sky as clear as the pristine snowmelt stream that had carved the valley. Just after three, though, at the usual time, clouds rolled in, thunder rumbled, and lightning began dancing along the high ridges, flickering between peaks like inebriated witches on burning brooms.

  “Head for cover!” Slash shouted, nudging the Appy with his spurs.

  They made it to the cover of a jumble of massive boulders that had probably tumbled down from the high western ridge an eon or two in the past, just as the storm really unleashed its venom. Holding their horses by their bridle reins under the cover of the massive rocks, they watched the storm in all its varied manifestations, starting with rain that turned to hail, which, as the air cooled, turned to snow for about six minutes before the snow dwindled to sleet, then became slashing rain again.

  The rain stopped abruptly, as though a lever had been thrown. Even before the last drops had landed, the clouds parted dramatically, as though swept from the sky by a large invisible feather duster from on high, and the sun shone, nearly as clear and warm as before. The last raindrops fell like large grains of pure gold sprinkled from heaven. It glinted on the marble-sized hail now melting together and crusting with a soggy, icy layer of wet snow.

  Since there were still a couple of hours of good light left, the trio mounted their horses and set off once more.

  They’d traveled a few more miles, following the trail around a bend in the west-angling canyon before the sun dropped behind the western peaks. They stopped to camp in a clearing in an aspen forest. Night as dark as the inside of a glove fell quickly. Good thing they managed to find some wood that hadn’t been soaked by the storm, for the night was not only dark but cool.

  Slash and Hattie tended the horses, while Pecos tended the fire and made supper, which would be a meager meal of only biscuits and beans tonight, as they’d run out of bacon.

  Slash and Pecos cast each other conferring glances over the crackling fire as they spooned beans from their tin bowls. Hattie still hadn’t said a word to either man. By her sullen expression, she was in one hell of a sour mood. She just sat there, a good ten feet from Slash and Pecos, silently eating her beans, keeping her own counsel. The firelight played in her rich brown hair, glinted in her brooding eyes.

  Pecos looked at Slash again, scowling his dislike for the sour mood the girl was in. Being around an angry woman was hard on a fella’s nerves.

  Slash merely shrugged and swabbed his bowl with a chunk of stale baking powder biscuit. His sparse associations with women—associations that had lasted more than an hour or two, that was—had taught him that the best antidote to their sour moods was to let them stew in their feelings until they tired of them. Not even a woman could stay in a permanent snit.

  Or so went his theory.

  Finally, when they’d all finished supper, Hattie spoke. But it was nothing more than, “Toss your bowls over here. I’ll take them to the creek.” She looked at neither man.

  When she returned from the creek ten minutes later, she dropped to her knees and set the wet bowls, cups, and wooden-handled, three-tined forks on a flat rock where they could dry by the fire and be handy for breakfast.

  She sat back on her rump near the saddle she’d appropriated at the dugout saloon, along with a sleek sorrel gelding, and spoke her third sentence in the past eight hours: “I have something to say.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Pecos grunted out. “I ain’t used to bein’ around a quiet woman. It’s downright spooky.”

  “Shut up and let her talk!”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, you—” He stopped abruptly and turned to Hattie. “See what happens when a woman don’t talk?”

  “I would like to apologize,” Hattie said, casting her gaze between the two ex-cutthroats. A thin sheen of emotion coated her eyes. “I have not been an equal partner. I have been a burden. Not only a burden, but I have jeopardized our mission. I have said and done some very foolish things. I have endangered both your lives as well as my own.”

  She paused, looked down. Two tears rolled quickly down her right cheek, in the trough running along beside her nose. Her hair hung down along both sides of her face, somewhat concealing her expression.

  She lifted her head and flung her hair back with one hand, and turned to Slash and Pecos again. “In the saloon, I was showing off. I was trying to prove to you both what a wonderful detective I was. I wanted very desperately to earn your respect. Instead, I proved myself nothing but a silly, silly girl.”

  She rose quickly, unsteadily, and turned her teary gaze to Slash. “I don’t blame you for hating me. I will take my leave tomorrow. I will ride to Denver and tender my resignation to the Pinkerton field office, and you will never see me again.”

  She swung around and ran off into the trees, heading in the direction of the stream. Both cutthroats could hear her strangled sobs amidst the crackling brush, beneath the stream’s quiet murmur.

  Slash and Pecos shared a vaguely sheepish glance across the fire. Slash sipped his cup of post-supper coffee.

  “What you got to say for yourself, you mean son of a buck?” Pecos asked him.

  “Be nice to be shed of her,” Slash said, taking another sip of the hot mud. He swallowed and added, “Never did cotton to riding with a female. They do their best work in parlor houses, where a man can get shed of ’em when they start gettin’ to be harpies.”

  Pecos choked out a caustic laugh as he set his own coffee aside and gained his feet. “Good thing Jaycee found her a new beau. If she let the likes of you, you old scurvy dog, put your mother’s ring on her finger, she’d see no end of misery!”

  Pecos headed off in the direction of the girl.

  “Oh, leave her alone,” Slash told him. “She needs to cry out the nonsense.”

  “I didn’t ask you for your sage advice,” Pecos returned, drifting off into the darkness, sounding like a bear moving throu
gh the brush.

  Slash gave a dry snort and took another sip of the mud.

  Meanwhile, Pecos approached the stream, stepping over a deadfall that looked like a long, black witch’s finger stretched before him in the darkness. The stream itself looked like a giant black snake, its skin glinting dully in the light of the myriad stars blazing in the black arch of the sky.

  Hattie sat on a log facing the stream, only a few feet away from the water. Pecos could see only her silhouette as she sat there, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, head in her hands.

  She sobbed wetly.

  As Pecos walked up to her, she said in a strangled voice, “I want to be alone.”

  “No, you don’t.” He stepped over the log and sat down beside her.

  CHAPTER 25

  Pecos dug a handkerchief out of his back pocket and offered it to Hattie. “Need one of these? It’s clean, more or less.”

  She plucked the hanky out of his hand and mopped her eyes with it, then blew her nose. “I’m such a fool. I thought I was a real professional. But I’m only a fool. A silly little Pink.”

  “Ah, no, you’re not.”

  “That’s how you two see me.”

  “No, it ain’t.”

  “Well, it’s how Slash sees me.” She blew her nose again, dabbed at her eyes.

  “It ain’t how he sees you, either.”

  “I should have stayed in Denver. I volunteered for this job because my boss, Mister Carter, needed a woman. I haven’t worked in the country before. Only in towns. Chicago and Denver.”

  “Oh?”

  “Believe it or not, I’ve helped ferret out murderers and corrupt politicians.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Mister Pinkerton . . . and then Mister Carter in Denver . . . saw me as a master of disguises. I’ve worked my way into rich men’s homes as housekeepers and private nurses and secretaries. I once uncovered a counterfeiting scheme that way. I pretended to be a fortune-teller once, and even an actress, helping bring down an opera house manager who was hiring assassins to have his rival businessmen killed. I once worked in a gambling parlor as a dancer. While the men ogled my legs, my male counterparts uncovered rigged gambling tables and shifty blackjack dealers.”

  Pecos chuckled at that. “I bet you sure could keep the men distracted.”

  “I guess I’m better working in town. I’ve made a fool of myself out here in this rough-hewn country. I’ve made a series of mistakes, one after the other. I took myself too seriously, and you and Slash exposed me as the fool I am!”

  She sobbed again, blew her nose. “I’ll leave in the morning.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes, I will. That last stupid thing I did was the final straw. Letting myself get grabbed by that scoundrel Pettypiece on the boardwalk of that dugout saloon! Slash had to shoot the man when, if he’d been able to take him alive, we could have learned where the gold was headed. The case could have been solved right then and there!”

  “Oh, hell, Hattie, you didn’t do nothin’ any more stupid than Slash an’ me have done countless times before. Livin’ out here . . . runnin’ off your leash amongst others doin’ the same . . . is not an easy way to live. You’ve made mistakes. We’ve made mistakes. We’ll keep making them until we’ve made one too many, that’s all.”

  “Throwing in with me might have been one too many. I don’t want to get you two killed.” Hattie pursed her lips and gave him a begrudging look of admiration. “I sort of admire you two old cutthroats, truth be told.”

  “We admire you, too, Hattie.”

  “Slash hates me.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “It is so true!”

  “Slash has taken a shine to you, truth be known, Hattie.”

  “Ha!”

  “If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have taken such care to blow ole Otis’s eye out!” Pecos chuckled. “You gotta understand one thing about Slash. He don’t act like most people act. You can’t really tell how he feels about anything or anyone until you’ve learned how to read him. Me? I may not be able to read three or four words strung together in a book, but I can read Slash better than an old sky pilot can read the Bible.”

  Hattie laughed in spite of herself.

  Pecos chuckled. It felt good to see her smile again. She was a pretty girl even when she was in a sour mood, but she was downright beautiful when a smile dimpled her cheeks. “The secret about Slash, you see,” he continued, “is that he has a great big ole heart. He says I got the big heart. But mine’s the size of a frog’s heart compared to his great big swollen ticker. Slash has a heart the size of a rain barrel. You see, he’s just desperate to make sure nobody finds out.”

  Hattie stared at him, pensive. She smiled, nodded, glanced down at the hanky in her lap. “Thanks for tellin’ me, Pecos.”

  “And with that,” he said, climbing to his feet, “I’m gonna mosey back over to the fire before that old cutthroat drinks all the whiskey.”

  Hattie held up the soaked hanky. “I’ll wash this out and give it back to you tomorrow.”

  “All right, honey.” Pecos placed a hand on her shoulder and turned to start back to the camp.

  “Hold on.” Hattie grabbed his hand and pulled him down to her.

  She placed a kiss on his cheek.

  “You’re all right, Pecos. Despite all your depredations, I mean.” She gave him a mock scolding look.

  Pecos grinned at her. “Why, thank you, Miss Hattie. You just made my day!”

  Hattie sat there on the log, kicking her feet slowly as she stared out at the star-dappled water. She listened to Pecos tramping back toward the fire. His voice rose, deep and raspy, echoing hollowly in the quiet night. “Give me that bottle before you empty it, you cussed old fart!”

  Hattie smiled.

  * * *

  Slash had settled back against his saddle for the night and drawn his blankets up to his chin, when he heard Hattie move through the brush toward the camp. Pecos was already asleep on the other side of the fire, snoring softly.

  Slash looked out from beneath his down-canted hat brim to see the girl step into the firelight. She poured some water from a canteen into a tin cup and took a drink. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, sat on a log, and spent nearly fifteen minutes slowly brushing out her long, thick hair.

  Slash drifted off to sleep, listening to the soft, regular raking of the girl’s brush.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed when a deep, guttural growl sounded from somewhere off in the heavy mountain darkness.

  Closer by, Slash heard a shrill gasp and a clipped cry. He poked his hat up onto his forehead and blinked groggily. To his left, the fire had burned down to a few low, snapping flames, but he could see Hattie sitting up about seven feet away from him, staring off into the darkness.

  “Nothin’ to worry about,” Slash assured her quietly so as not to awaken Pecos, who continued snoring on the other side of the fire. “Just a bruin likely rousin’ another bruin from his hidey-hole.”

  “Will it come over here?”

  “Nah.”

  “Won’t it attack the horses? Don’t they eat horses?”

  “There’s plenty of deer in this valley. What would it want with a stringy ole hoss?”

  Slash pulled his hat down over his eyes again.

  Vaguely, as he started drifting back to sleep, he heard the rustling sounds of the girl moving around. Soft footsteps drew near. He looked up again to see Hattie drop down beside him, shrouded in her blankets. She slid up close to him, snuggled up against him, and threw an arm around his waist. She clung to him tightly, shivering.

  “Whoa!” Slash raked out.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Like I said—”

  “Hush.”

  “Why don’t you go over and pester Pecos? He likes you more than I do.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” She snuggled closer against him, tightening her arm around his waist.

  Slash pulled his hat do
wn over his eyes again. He placed his hand on hers, squeezed it gently, and smiled.

  * * *

  Just after noon of the following day, Slash stopped his Appy and sniffed the air. “You smell that?”

  Pecos and Hattie, who’d stopped their own mounts behind Slash, also raised their noses to sniff the air.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Hattie said, frowning. “Should I?”

  “I don’t smell nothin’ neither,” Pecos said.

  Slash took a deep breath, sitting up high in his saddle. He coughed a little, chokingly, then grimaced and shook his head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a town ahead. You can always smell a town before you see it. The privies and junk piles. No mistakin’ a town.”

  “There’s Slash’s one gift,” Pecos told Hattie, twisting his mouth into a wry grin. “He can’t follow signs for beans, and a Mojave green rattlesnake has him beat all to hell for personality. But he’s got a sniffer on him, all right.” He looked at Slash, who was still sitting up high, staring up this side canyon they were now following nearly straight west, since the gold robbers’ trail appeared to lead this way. “How do you know you didn’t smell a town?”

  “A town way out here?” Slash gave his head a single, doubtful shake. “What would a town be doing way out here? We haven’t even passed a mining camp today. I don’t recollect even spying a single prospector’s cabin.”

  “Well, then we’re due,” Pecos said, booting his big buckskin, Buck, past Slash and continuing on up the canyon. “Come on. I’m thirsty, an’ you drank all the tangleleg. Besides, maybe we’ve finally come to the gold thieves’ hidey-hole.”

  As the trail widened, Slash booted his Appy up beside Pecos. They climbed a low rise, and there ahead, maybe a hundred yards away, several buildings appeared on the trio’s side of the stream. As they continued toward the buildings, more buildings appeared beyond them and then up the slope behind them.

  “You were right, Slash,” Hattie said, putting her sorrel up between the two men. “It’s a town, all right. A small one, looks like, but a town just the same.”

  As they continued toward the settlement, entering it where it abruptly began with a general merchandise store on the trail’s right side and a blacksmith shop on its left side, the stream flanking it, a sign tacked to a cedar post announced HONEYSUCKLE in sloppily painted letters. A big man in a leather apron stood hammering what appeared to be an andiron on an anvil just outside the long, low shack’s double open doors.