right for once in his life,” Slash said. “You can’t keep us from droolin’ over the thought of that much gold. Lord knows we tried for that much a time or two, but never even got close. But we’re not stupid enough to actually run off with the Cloud Tickler’s ingots. Of course, you’d run us down before we even got to Denver, and we’d be hangin’ from the gallows outside the Federal Building faster’n a judge could hammer his gavel. We know that. We’re not stupid despite how Pecos might look.”
Pecos gave him a frosty smile. “Thank you for so nobly rushing to my defense, partner.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Miss Langdon snorted, then turned around quickly and dug back into her paperwork, scribbling away with her ink pen.
“Rest assured you’d be run down, all right,” Bledsoe assured the cutthroats. “You wouldn’t get far. And, believe me, the deputy marshals who ran you down would have marching orders not to waste time taking you back to Denver, where you’d only waste more taxpayers’ dollars on a worthless court trial. They’d be under orders to hang you from the nearest tree and to leave you there, a feast for the buzzards and crows!”
Bledsoe pounded his desk once more. “Now get out of here. Miss Langdon and I still got a pile of work to plow through before we head back to the oversized stockyard perdition of Denver.”
“When are we due in Tin Cup?” Slash asked.
“As soon as you get there. The Pinkertons are en route even as we palaver. Here—take this.” Bledsoe tossed the manila folder over to Slash’s side of the desk. “That’s the file on the operation. The name of your contact in Tin Cup is in there. It’s a Pink—you know, one of Pinkerton’s female operatives. Make sure—let me repeat—make damn good and sure that file doesn’t leave your side. Once you know everything that’s in there, burn it.” He frowned suddenly, cutting his gaze between the two men. “Say . . . you two can read, can’t you?”
“Of course, we can read!” Slash said, chuckling his exasperation at the question as he flipped open the file. “Leastways, I can. I don’t know about—”
“I can read just fine!” Pecos growled, rising from his chair.
“Say, Chief?” Slash said, also gaining his feet. “You said we was supposed to haul a load of freight up to Tin Cup. To make us look genuine, I assume. What freight did you have in mind?”
Bledsoe shrugged and looked up impatiently. “I don’t know. Why don’t you just fill the back of your freight wagon with firewood or something like that? Tie a tarp over it so no one’s the wiser. Unload it once you get up there. And make sure no one sees what it really is, or your goose is cooked!”
Slash and Pecos shared a glance, shrugged.
“Nice palaverin’ with ya, Chief,” Slash said, donning his hat as he headed for the door.
Bledsoe only grumbled and muttered something incoherent as he picked up his own ink pen and began scribbling, holding his spectacles on his nose with one hand.
Pecos headed for the door behind Slash, turning toward Bledsoe’s pretty assistant and saying, “Just wanted to mention you look especially fine this evening, Miss Langdon.”
Miss Langdon looked up quickly, arching her brows over her lovely eyes in surprise. “Oh . . . well, uh . . . thank you, Mister Bak—”
Backing toward the door and holding his hat over his heart, Pecos said, “No, no—please, call me Melvin.”
“Oh . . . well, then, uh . . . thank you for that nice compliment, Melvin.”
“Be seein’ you now,” Pecos said.
“Good-bye,” Abigail Langdon said, giving a little wave.
Pecos backed out the door. Slash grabbed a chair and thrust it behind him, turning it sideways. Pecos backed into it, ramming it over on its side, then giving an indignant cry as he twisted around, tripping over it and falling to the floor with a booming thud.
Chuckling, Slash ran to the batwings.
Pecos rolled up on his side. He saw Miss Langdon standing in the open door to Bledsoe’s office, holding a hand over her mouth in deep dismay.
Pecos’s cheeks turned as hot as a branding iron. He swung his head toward where Slash was just then running through the batwings, and yelled, “Come back fer your whippin’, you black-hearted son of Satan!”
CHAPTER 9
“Slash, you know what I think?” Pecos said later that night as the two former cutthroats lay in their respective cots, on opposite ends of their small, crude cabin behind their just-as-small and crude freighting office.
“Forget it.”
“Huh?”
“If you’re thinkin’ I should help you use the privy after all that steak an’ beans you had for supper—not to mention beer and whiskey—forget it. You’re too damn big an’ drunk, and I drank too much whiskey my ownself to stay on my own two feet. You’d fall and kill us both.”
It was true. After they’d gotten back to Fort Collins, they’d headed for the Bon-Ton Café on Larimer Avenue, where they’d proceeded to pad out their empty bellies with liberal portions of red meat, beans, and sourdough bread. They followed that up with whiskey in a little cantina on the other side of the street. They’d decided that after the dustup earlier in Jay’s room, they’d probably best not show their faces in the Thousand Delights for a while. Someone might recognize them for who they really were and complicate their lives.
Pecos’s wrath over Slash’s high jinks out at the Cormorant had dissipated quickly. The big cutthroat could blaze as hot as a pistol in mid-fire, but the smoke and flames usually cleared just as quickly as they had erupted. Especially when his ire was directed at Slash. They could get into all-out brawls, the cutthroats could, but they were the brawls of brothers, not true-blue enemies.
Pecos’s wrath would burn down quickly, even when Slash did something as boyishly devilish as what he’d done to his partner out in Cedar City, in front of the gal for whom he had developed an animal-like attraction. Pecos knew Slash had merely been out to amuse himself as well as to distract himself from one Miss Jaycee Breckenridge. Pecos knew Jay was on Slash’s mind. Her and the fancy-Dan town marshal, that was. Pecos always knew what Slash was thinking, just as Slash could read his partner’s mind as well.
“That ain’t what I’m thinkin’ about,” Pecos said. “I’m too drunk to even think about usin’ the privy even with help. I was layin’ here thinkin’, waiting for this cabin to stop turnin’ circles around me, that one reason Bledsoe selected us for that job up in Tin Cup is because he’s wanting to get our goats.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Ain’t I right?”
“You’re right, all right. One of the rare times.”
“He’s probably just chucklin’ to himself right now, as he’s rollin’ back toward Denver, about how that gold is going to affect us. And there’s not gonna be a damn thing we can do about it, ’cause we both know we’d never make a clean break with it.”
