Out with it, amigo!”
Slash’s heartbeat increased. He sat up straight in his chair; then, crouching forward slightly, leaning toward Jay, he shoved his right hand into his right coat pocket. He wrapped his hand around the ring box. His heart was fairly racing now, and a hot wash of blood rose into his face. He started to pull the box out of his pocket.
Then he stopped.
He winced, grunted. He tried again to pull the ring out of his pocket.
Nothing doing. It was as though his right arm and hand had become paralyzed.
He tried again, but for the life of him, he could feel neither his hand nor the box he thought it was wrapped around. He grunted, winced. He looked at her staring back at him, one brow arched, waiting. She was opening and closing her hands around her arms, and he could hear her tapping the toe of one shoe on the floor beneath the table.
He tried again to pull the box from his pocket, but it was as though his entire body had returned to stone. His heart was pounding so fiercely that it ached. Sweat beaded his brows. That he could feel. It was not a good feeling at all.
Jay stared at him with those hard, cold eyes, waiting. “Well . . .”
Slash ran his tongue across the back of his upper teeth and swallowed. It was as though another man were speaking, though he could feel his own mouth shaping the words and letting them slither out from between his lips, while yet another voice inside him—his true, authentic voice, the voice that spoke from his heart of hearts—bellowed, “No, you damn fool! Tell her how you really feel, Slash Braddock! Ask the gal to marry you, because that’s what you really want, you lame-brained post-head! It’s all you’ve wanted for years, and it’s all you’re gonna continue to want for the rest of your silly days!”
“Slash,” Jay said, drawing another deep breath, “I’m going to ask you one more time . . .”
“How would I f-feel?” he said.
“Yes? How would you feel?”
The imposter inside him smiled winningly—oh, what a cunning, confident con artist he was, too!—and chuckled. “He’s a helluva fella, Jay. I can tell. A right upstanding citizen with a bold future. You deserve the best of men. If you wanted to go ahead and let Cisco Walsh spark you, then I’d give you my blessing. I know Pecos would, too.”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket, only vaguely amazed that he could feel it again, and glanced at the clock on the wall. “In the meantime, I reckon I’d best tramp on back to the salt mine before Pecos sends out a catch party for me. We have some ground to cover.”
Chuckling again as though he didn’t have a care in the world—while his heart of hearts was tearing in two—he rose smoothly from his chair, tossed his napkin onto the table, and donned his hat. “Take care, Jay. See you when we get back. Say hi to the marshal for me!”
Jay sat back in her chair, half-slumped, as though all the air had gone out of her. She stared up at him, her face pale, a thin sheen of tears accumulating in her beautiful eyes. Slash winked, nodded, turned away, and tramped on out of the dining room and into the hotel’s foyer.
He must have blacked out on his feet for a time, for he wasn’t aware of anything for several minutes, until he found himself halfway across Main Street, heading for the freight yard, with a man’s voice cussing him royally, “Get out of the road, you dunderhead! Watch where you’re goin’! I damn near let ole Betty run you down!”
Slashed stopped abruptly and turned to see a big Percheron standing not six feet away from him, on his right. The big draft animal had her ears pinned back and was shaking her head incredulously, pawing at the dirt with one front hoof the size of a dinner plate.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” shouted the big man on the driver’s seat of the wagon the Perch was pulling. “Are you drunk so early in the morning or soft in your thinker box?”
Slash realized with a shudder how close he’d come to being smashed as flat as an immigrant’s hat. He held up a placating hand, palm out. “Sorry, friend.”
“Damn dunderhead!” The big man, whom Slash recognized as a ramrod for one of the local ranches, shook the reins over the Percheron’s back. As the horse and ranch supply wagon lumbered forward, the big man scowled down at Slash once more and said, “By God, you’re lucky I wasn’t asleep at the reins or you’d be no more than a grease spot in the street!”
Sheepish, Slash continued across the street and then turned down a side street. He still felt numb, as though his body were not his own. He also felt a little sick to his stomach and imagined he looked a little green around the gills.
What had he just done?
He’d turned tail, that’s what he’d done.
He started to feel a little better about things, to forget about the horrific scene he’d left behind at the Thousand Delights, when, walking into the freight yard, he saw a familiar figure standing on the freight office’s wooden front porch with Pecos. A familiar horse—a calico mare—stood at one of the two hitchracks fronting the humble log building. Pecos and the young woman, dressed in a calico blouse, wool skirt, and worn boots, were facing each other on the porch, conversing, both smiling.
When Pecos saw Slash approaching on foot, he beckoned with one arm and said, “Slash, get your skinny ass over here and see who’s come callin’!”
Slash quickened his pace. “Myra?”
Myra Thompson turned to Slash, and another broad smile split her young, pretty face, deeply tanned and owning a comely splash of freckles across her nose and her youthfully smooth cheeks. Myra was a pretty, brown-eyed girl of nineteen or twenty with thick curly auburn hair spilling across her shoulders.
“Hi, Slash.” Myra was turning a broad-brimmed felt hat in her hands, nervously pinching up the rawhide-stitched edges.
Slash laughed, happy to see the girl again, and leaped up to the veranda two steps at a time. He took her in his arms and squeezed her tight—this pretty, rustic young mountain woman, the daughter of a now-dead prospector; she’d once come very close to cleaning his and Pecos’s clocks not all that long ago in the San Juan Mountains, near the mining camp of Silverton.
Jay had saved the two old cutthroats from that little whipsaw their own foolishness had led them into. Jay had knocked Myra out cold as the girl had been about to drill both Slash and Pecos where they’d lain reeling from the raw opium with which she’d spiked their whiskey, having feigned a twisted ankle and luring them into her camp. Both men had always been suckers for a comely female form, no matter what age. It had turned out that Myra had been riding with the very gang—Slash and Pecos’s old gang, in fact—whom Bleed-Em-So had assigned Slash and Pecos to wipe out.
The Snake River Marauders had sent Myra to hornswoggle the old cutthroats with her youthful beauty and charm, and to snuff their wicks before Slash and Pecos could foil the gang’s train-robbing plans. Myra had accepted the nasty assignment only because she’d been desperate for the gang’s protection, her father being dead and her time as a pretty young woman alone in Silverton having turned out far darker than she’d expected. Slash, Pecos, and Jay had turned the girl back right, and Myra had helped them run the gang to final ground.
Now, here the pretty girl was—shy, beaming, and fresh as
