wanted Slash and Pecos dead.
Who could blame the man?
Slash himself had crippled Bledsoe many years ago. He hadn’t intended to, but the lawman—a deputy U.S. marshal at the time—had caught one of Slash’s ricochets. It had shattered Bledsoe’s spine, confining him to a pushchair.
Slash knew that, given their history, Bledsoe wasn’t going to pull any punches when handing out job assignments to the two former cutthroats. Slash and Pecos were always going to be going after the worst of the worst.
Until their tickets were punched.
Luther T. “Bleed-Em-So” Bledsoe would not shed any tears at their funerals. If they received funerals. Which they almost certainly wouldn’t.
Bledsoe kept an office of sorts in the little near-ghost town of Cedar City, which sat amongst rocks and cedars in a broad horseshoe of the Cache la Poudre River. The town had never been a city, despite its obvious aspirations, and had ceased even to be a town when the army pulled out of Camp Collins, which was the original name for Fort Collins. Now it wasn’t even a fort anymore, and all that remained of Cedar City were a few abandoned mud-brick dwellings, an abandoned livery barn and stock corral, and a single saloon, the Cormorant, which mostly served the rare drifter and local cowpuncher and acted as a home to the old gentleman who owned the place—a stove-up former Texas Ranger, Tex Willey.
Tex and the chief marshal had been friends for a couple of generations, having worked together in chasing curly wolves in their heydays.
These days, Bledsoe came out here to get work done when he found himself drowning in red tape in his bona fide digs in the Federal Building in Denver. It was a handy location, given its close proximity to the railroad line. An old freighting trail, still in good repair, offered access from the rail line to Cedar City.
Now as Slash and Pecos rode into the ghost town from the west, they saw the old Concord mud wagon that Bledsoe had customized for himself, nattied up a bit with brass fittings and gas lamps, softer seats and velvet drapes offering privacy, and brackets on the side for housing his pushchair. The horses milling in the corral flanking the mud wagon were likely the two that had pulled Bledsoe out here from the train.
The other two would be those of the two deputies who always escorted and ran interference against possible assassins. The wily old reprobate had locked up his share of owlhoots over his long years of service to Uncle Sam, and he had a poisonous personality, to boot. There were likely plenty of gunslingers who would love to add the crippled old devil’s notch to their pistol grips.
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
