Now, here the pretty girl was—shy, beaming, and fresh as a May morning here on the porch of the freight office.
Slash held Myra away from him and smiled down at her. “Good to see you again, kid. But what brings you out here to this jerkwater town? I thought you were gonna throw in with your uncle in Denver? Didn’t you say he ran a saloon up that way . . . ?”
“Yep, I sure did, Slash.” The girl’s smile turned stiff, and she glanced sheepishly up at Pecos. “I was just about to get to that with Pecos, in fact.”
Slash assumed rightly that she’d just arrived.
“What’s up, kid?” Pecos said. “Somethin’ happen with your uncle?”
“It sure did.” A bitterness entered Myra’s voice, and a sour expression twisted her mouth. “He turned out to be little better than some of the saloon owners I’d known in Silverton.”
Slash frowned. “You mean, he . . . ?”
“Wanted to put me to work. Upstairs. I went there to work for him. I certainly didn’t expect him to put me up for free. But I didn’t expect him, my own uncle, to expect me to work upstairs!” Tears rolled down the girl’s cheeks, and she angrily swiped them away with the backs of her hands.
“Ah, hell,” Pecos said, wrapping an arm around Myra’s shoulders and drawing her taut against him. “What a rotten thing to do to a man’s own niece.”
“I didn’t realize, but I guess my aunt died of some sickness nigh on a year ago.”
“There, there, kid,” Slash said, brushing another tear from her cheek with his thumb. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”
“What can we do to help? You need some money? It’s not like we’re loaded, but . . .”
“No.” Myra shook her head and smiled up at the tall, blond cutthroat. “I didn’t come here for a handout. I came here because you’re the only two decent, honorable men I know in all the frontier. Not that I know that many.”
She gave a rueful chuckle. “I came because I thought . . . well, I thought maybe that now, since you’ve been set up here almost a year, you could use a hand about the place. You know . . .” She glanced at the crude log cabin behind her, then looked from Pecos to Slash and back again. “A woman’s touch. I can clean and cook for you, and over the long winters up in the San Juans, I got to know a schoolteacher who taught me to read an’ cipher and even to keep accounts. I could keep your books for you, if you wanted,” Myra added demurely.
Slash glanced at Pecos. Pecos looked at Slash, and then his gaze lifted to something or someone behind Slash, in the direction of the road that led to the freight yard. Slash heard the crunch and scuff of approaching footsteps. He turned to see their hired man, Todd Elwood, enter the yard through the gate. Elwood was a short-legged, round-bellied man with thin, straw-blond hair poking out from his battered felt hat. He wore a shabby red-and-white checked shirt under his usual suit coat, which was splitting at the seams and coppered from many hours in the sun.
Elwood managed to latch the gate, then, starting toward the office, he tripped over the torn front flap of his right, mule-eared boot. He stumbled forward and sideways and nearly went down before he got his boots beneath him once more.
“Whoa now,” he said as though to an unruly team of mules. “Whoa . . . whoa, now . . .”
He continued forward, holding his arms, which appeared too long for the rest of his body, out to both sides as though for balance. The sunlight glinted on something poking up from the right, torn pocket of his coat.
Slash scowled.
A bottle.
Slash glanced at Pecos again. The two men shared a dark look, then Slash walked down the porch steps.
“Todd, where in the hell were you last night?”
The bedraggled man, in his late thirties and with a sun-seasoned face with a slender coyote nose bright red from drink, stopped ten feet from Slash and squinted his watery blue eyes, as though he were having trouble focusing. “What . . . what do ya mean, Mister Braddock?”
From the porch, Pecos said, “We pulled in last night late, and you weren’t here to tend the mules. We had to tend ’em ourselves, as tired and in need of food an’ drink as we was. That’s what we hired you for, Todd—to wrangle and tend the mules and to swamp out the barn and to keep the corral clean.”
“We got back to find the barn and the corral both a mess,” Slash said, his voice sharp with anger.
Elwood looked around, vaguely sheepish, running his hands nervously up and down on his ratty coat. “Well . . . I waited till five o’clock, an’ . . . an’ when you fellas didn’t show, I, uh . . .”
“You headed off to a saloon and likely been there till a few minutes ago,” Pecos said.
“Or some lowly doxy’s canvas crib,” Slash opined.
“We told you to stay here till we got back, Todd. We set you up in your own room in the lean-to off the barn. That’s where you live. Right here. On the premises. So you can take care of the mules any time you’re needed.”
“You should’ve been here, Todd,” Slash added. “That’s what we pay you for.”
Elwood’s dark eyes flashed yellow bayonets of sudden, raw fury. He jerked an arm up and pointed a dirty finger at the two cutthroats. “I waited till five o’clock! I don’t get paid to wait no later than that!”
Slash gave a dry chuff. “You waited till three at the latest. Then you lit out. We told you when we hired you that you’re to tend the mules whenever we arrive from a haul—day or night. And no tipplin’!”
“I got me a feelin’,” Pecos said, raking a pensive thumb down his unshaven jaw, “that Todd hasn’t been here since we left. I got me a feelin’ he thought that the days we were gone were a vacation for him. He looks a mite like he’s been on a bender, Slash.”
“I’ll go you one better, partner,” Slash said. “He smells like it, too.”
“You’ve done this before, Todd,” Pecos said in a stern, level voice. “We warned you before about cuttin’ out an’ goin’ on a tear. I took a chance on you when, uh, Jimmy here warned me not to, and that makes him right, and I plumb hate it when he’s right!”
“I can do what he does.”
Slash and Pecos turned to Myra, still standing on the porch, her hat in her hands, the morning breeze nudging the thick locks of her curly auburn hair.
“What’s that, darlin’?” Pecos asked.
“I can tend the mules. I can muck out the barn and the corral. What’s more, I can keep order in the office here and in your livin’ quarters. I can cook and I can clean and I can keep your accounts in order.” Myra’s voice had been rising steadily with resolve as she’d looked from Pecos to Slash, then back again. “And I can do it all for what you’re payin’ him.”
“A dollar a day to do all that?” Slash asked, skeptically.
“A dollar a day,” Myra said with a slow nod. “And room an’ board.”
Slash and Pecos shared a conferring look. The two men, reading each other’s minds, shaped slow, broad smiles. “Well, hell, darlin’,” Slash said, “you got yourself a place to hang your hat!”
“Now, just wait a minute!” Elwood stumbled forward, his face turning red with fury behind a thin coat of scraggly beard stubble. “That there is nothin’ but a girl. Why, she can’t do a man’s work!”
“I say she can,”