The two deputies sat on the corral’s top slat, to the right of the gate, smoking. Slash could see only their silhouettes in the darkness, but he could clearly see the badges pinned to their coats and the coals of their cigarettes, when they took drags, the gray smoke wafting around their high-crowned, broad-brimmed Stetsons.
Slash and Pecos didn’t say anything to the two federals. The two federals said nothing to them. They just sat there atop the corral, smoking and staring dubiously toward the newcomers in the night, the darkness relieved by a low half-moon, stars, and the lamplight ebbing from the saloon’s front windows.
Two saddle horses were tied to the hitchrack fronting the low, mud-brick, brush-roofed saloon. The cutthroats and old Bledsoe likely wouldn’t have total privacy, but out here, men knew not to shoot their mouths off without getting something else shot off for their indiscretion. Also, very few who visited the saloon these days were from around here. Most were just passing through, keeping to the back roads and shaggy ravine trails. As travelers, they knew to keep their noses out of other men’s business.
Slash and Pecos put their own mounts up to the hitchrack. The strains of a fiddle pushed through the batwings atop the narrow, rickety-looking front stoop. In one of the dimly lit windows fronting the place, two shadows moved close together, as though a couple were dancing.
Slash glanced at Pecos. Pecos shrugged.
The two cutthroats tossed their reins over the rail, worn down to a mere stick in places by the reins of many a soldier’s horse, then negotiated the untrustworthy three steps to the porch and pushed through the batwings. Slash and Pecos stood side by side just inside the doors, hearing the batwings clatter back into place behind them.
The saloon was twice as wide as it was deep. The bar, comprised of pine boards stretched over three stout beer kegs and flanked by dusty shelves housing maybe a dozen or so dusty bottles, occupied the rear of the place directly beyond the batwings. An old man with snow-white hair hanging down his back in a tight braid and a crow’s dark-eyed face with a sun-seasoned, liver-spotted beak of a nose sat in a chair in front of the bar, sawing away on an old fiddle. Tex Willey wore old denims held up on his skinny frame by snakeskin galluses, a grimy calico shirt, and a badly sun-faded red bandanna knotted around his red turkey neck.
To the right of the old man, in a place clear of tables in which soldiers used to dance with the parlor girls who’d worked here at one time, two middle-aged men in dusty trail garb were now dancing just like a young man and a young woman would have danced back in the day. Only, these two were men. One tall, one short. Both outfitted like cowpunchers. Unshaven. Battered hats on their heads. Old pistols in cracked leather holsters sagged on their thighs, above their mule-eared boots.
Just then the taller gent raised his hand and gave the short man a twirl, and the short man’s batwing chaps buffeted out around his legs, whang strings flying. He closed his eyes, smiling dreamily as the old man continued to saw away on his scarred, ancient fiddle. Slash thought he recognized the song, even so poorly played, as “The Gal I Left Behind.”
Slash and Pecos shared another look and a shrug.
By now, Tex Willey had spied the newcomers.
The old man paused in his fiddling—though the dancers did not stop dancing—to look at Slash and Pecos and nod toward the door at the back of the room, to the right of the bar.
“Thanks, Tex,” Slash said as he began wending his way through the dozen or so dusty tables and around the two dancers, who appeared so absorbed in their two-step that they did not take note of the newcomers, even as they did a swing and an almost-graceful pirouette that nearly rammed the short one into Pecos as he stepped around them.
Slash rapped his knuckles on the door of the old storeroom that Bledsoe now used as a part-time office.
The knock was answered by a raspy man’s voice saying, “If you’re anyone but my two raggedy-heeled, over-the-hill cutthroats, stay out. I got work to do!”
Slash glanced at Pecos and gave a crooked smile.
Pecos shrugged.
Slash tripped the latch and stepped into the roomy office that owned the molasses aroma of liquor and malty ale. “Your cutthroats?”
“Oh, you’re mine, all right.” Luther T. Bledsoe was sitting at a big walnut desk he must have had hauled all the way out here from Denver. The chief marshal looked especially small and insignificant, sitting with his pushchair drawn up to the giant, cluttered desk on which a Tiffany lamp burned.
“Bought and paid for!” added the chief marshal with a delighted, mocking flourish, dropping the pen he’d been scribbling on a legal pad with to lean back in his chair. He ran his two bone-white, long-fingered hands through the cottony down of his unkempt, silver hair after thumbing his little, round, steel-framed spectacles up his long nose.
As Pecos closed the office door and stepped up beside Slash, Slash saw his tall partner’s head swing toward where Bledsoe’s comely female assistant, Miss Abigail Langdon, sat at another desk abutting the wall to the right of the chief marshal. Her desk was every bit as large as Bledsoe’s, and just as cluttered. A pink lamp burned on her desk, illuminating her cool, remote, severely Nordic beauty in the flickering light’s shifting planes and shadows.
Miss Langdon flipped a heavy curling lock of her red-gold hair back behind her shoulder, revealing wide cheekbones that tapered severely down to a fine chin and regal jaw. Her crystalline, lake-green eyes, long and slanted like a cat’s eyes, lingered on Pecos’s tall, broad-shouldered frame, raking him up and down. A dark cloak was pulled around her shoulders, over the purple velvet gown she wore so well. She reached for a shot glass on the desk before her, amidst the clutter of open files and dossiers and bound books on federal law, and took a sip.
Her eyes stayed on Pecos as she said, almost too quietly to be heard above the small fire crackling in the small sheet-iron stove flanking her boss, “Hello.”
Pecos seemed to be breathing hard. He cleared his throat thickly and said, “H-hello, there, Miss . . .” He remembered his hat, quickly doffed it, and held it before him. “Hello, there, Miss Langdon.”
Slash squelched a chuckle. Pecos had reacted to the remote beauty—whom Slash judged to be in her middle twenties, though with a decidedly more mature air about herself—the first time they’d met. Abigail Langdon had reacted similarly to Pecos. It was almost as though the two were giving off invisible sparks of attraction—a primitive reach for each other.
Bledsoe seemed to sense it now, too. Sitting back in his chair, hands behind his head, he studied the two with an amused half-smile, his eyes dubious.
He slid his gaze to Slash, his eyes vaguely curious. Bledsoe gave a dry chuckle, then leaned forward slightly and beckoned to the two cutthroats impatiently. “Come in, come in. We’re burnin’ moonlight. I have to get back to that consarned, infernal hellhole, Denver, for a meeting at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I came out here to try to get a little work done in the peace and quiet of the bucolic countryside, and because I got a fresh job for my two over-the-hill cutthroats.”
He smiled at that, again mockingly. He enjoyed ringing men’s bells and watching for a reaction that might amuse him. Slash and Pecos had learned that the first time they’d met the man.
“If you really thought we was over the hill,” Pecos pointed out, indignantly, his voice rising angrily, “we wouldn’t have turned Jack Penny into a human sieve tonight, just like we done to the rest of his gang last year. And you wouldn’t have called us here, Chief Marshal. So why don’t you stop tryin’ to rub our fur in the wrong direction just ’cause you’re hip deep in bureaucratic sheep dip, and bored, and get down to brass tacks.”
Slash turned to his partner, brows arched in surprise. Even Miss Langdon turned to look over her shoulder in shock at the tall, silver-blond cutthroat who had just shoveled it right back to old Bleed-Em-So. Pecos rarely got riled or spoke out even when he was. It took