in the hell did you do that, Pecos?” Slash asked after he’d taken a sip of his piping-hot, oily black mud.
Pecos glanced at him from where he sprawled against a grain sack on the other side of the fire. “How did I do what?”
“You know—make your face go so pale and cause that sweat to pop out on your forehead. For a few seconds there, you had me goin’. I was afraid you really were having a heart stroke!”
“Truth be told,” Pecos said, taking a sip from his own, steaming cup, “for a few seconds there, I was worried I was, too!” He gave a sheepish chuckle, then took another sip of his coffee.
“What?”
“I wasn’t fakin’ it, Slash.” Pecos looked at him directly over the low, crackling flames. “At least, not at first. For some reason, when I tossed away my weapons and it was just you and me sittin’ up there, facin’ them four cutthroats who looked so damn eager to snuff our wicks, a strange feelin’ came over me. It was like I was suddenly runnin’ a powerful fever. My heart started poundin’ and bangin’ against my ribs. I felt like someone had shoved a dull, rusty knife in my guts. My back got so damn stiff, I felt I couldn’t move!”
He shook his head and stared off into space. “I can’t figure it, partner. You an’ me rode roughshod over thirty years. We faced lawmen an’ bounty hunters—some o’ the best on the whole damn frontier—an’ nothin’ like that ever happened to me before. Seems like . . . seems like lately . . . I been more aware of . . .”
He let his voice trail off, as though he were having trouble finding the right words. He turned to Slash and continued with, “I don’t know . . . I guess lately I just been more aware of the sand in the ole hourglass. You know? Been . . . well, I been thinkin’ about . . . you know . . . the end. Kinda scares me a little. You know?”
“Yeah.” Slash nodded as he stared into the dancing flames. “I know.”
“You, too?”
Slash looked at Pecos. “Yeah. Me, too.” He sipped his coffee, sighed, and thumbed his hat back off his forehead. “That young juniper’s crazy eyes sort o’ got to me, as well. It was like death starin’ right at me, an’ I realized then and there that I wasn’t ready for it.”
“Hell’s bells.” Pecos raked a thumb down his bearded cheek and shook his head fatefully.
“You know what I think’s causin’ us both to get gloomy?”
“What’s that?”
“Boredom.”
Pecos scowled. “Huh?”
“You heard me. Neither of us had jobs like this—haulin’ freight. Aside from what happened earlier, these long hauls have been nothin’ but back-busting on each end and boring in between. Hell, sometimes I imagine we got a posse on our tails just to keep from falling asleep . . . or just to entertain myself, to keep my heart pumpin’!”
Pecos shrugged and recrossed his ankles, stretched out before him. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Slash. I don’t think I’m bored.”
“You’re bored, Pecos. You just don’t wanna admit it.”
“Okay, so say we are bored. Say we do have too much time to think about things. What’re we gonna do about it?”
Slash shrugged. “Nothin’.”
“Nothin’, huh?”
“What else can we do? We’re gettin’ old. Our holdup days are over. Even if we wanted to go back to ’em, we couldn’t. Old Bleed-Em-So would have us run down in a matter of days. His marshals would hang us right where they ran us down, and that would be the end of it.”
Pecos took a bite of the jerky he was nibbling, along with his coffee. “Hell,” he said, chewing, “maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Yeah . . . well, maybe.”
They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. They both just sat there, staring into the fire’s small, orange flames that leaped around like ghostly yellow snakes in the brassy sunshine filtering through the forest canopy.
Finally, Pecos frowned across the fire at Slash. “What you got there?”
Slash glanced up at him, dark brows arched over his cinnamon eyes. “Huh?”
“What you foolin’ with in your pocket there? You was foolin’ with it earlier, before the stickup.”
Slash pulled his hand out of his pocket and sat back with a sheepish air. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” He sipped his coffee and looked off through the trees.
“Ah, come on, Slash. What you got in your pocket? You was fingerin’ it on the way up, and you been fingerin’ it on the way down.”
“It’s the derringer.”
“No, it isn’t. You keep the Double-D in your right-hand pocket. Whatever you was fingerin’ you got in your left pocket.”
“Oh, never mind!”
“Ah, come on! Humor this old reprobate, Slash! I’m burnin’ up with boredom!”
“It’s Jimmy, damnit, Melvin. We gotta remember to use our given names. Slash an’ Pecos are dead.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Ah, hell!” Slash brushed his hat off his head and ran a hand through his still-thick and mostly dark brown hair, give or take a few strands of gray, which hung down over his ears and his collar. He raked it up like a shaggy tumbleweed, then threw it straight back off his forehead. “It’s . . . it’s a, uh . . .”
“It’s a what? Come on, Slash . . . er, I mean Jimmy . . . you can say it. Spit it out.”
Slash drew a deep breath and stared up at the forest canopy, where a crow was doing battle with an angrily chittering squirrel. “It’s a ring.”
“Huh?”
“My mother’s ring.”
“Your mother’s ring?”
“Weddin’ ring.”
“What you got your mother’s weddin’ ring for, Sla . . . I mean, Jimmy?”
“I wrote to my sister in Missouri, had her send it to me. Since I’m the only livin’ boy in the family, she’s been savin’ it for me.”
“Okay, well, let me ask you again—what you got your mama’s weddin’ ring for, Jimmy?” Pecos’s eyes snapped wide, and he opened his mouth in sudden recognition. “Oh . . . hell!”
He grinned across the fire at his sheepish partner. “You . . . Jay . . . you’re gonna pop the question—ain’t
