LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 3

      Slash and Pecos chinned for a time about what to do with the dead men.

      Slash wanted to drag them off the trail and bury them under a few rocks. They weren’t worth burying, but since they were men, albeit no-accounts to a man-jack of them, he supposed someone should make at least a little effort by way of laying them to rest.

      Pecos, more tenderhearted than his lean, dark, and moody partner, wanted to deliver the dead men to the town marshal in Fort Collins. “I mean, they might have family in the area, Slash. Or family somewhere. If one of your kin met his demise, you’d want to know about it. You wouldn’t just want to have to think about it all the rest of your life, would you? To be left to imagine all the various nasty ways they might have met their ends? I mean, even if said kin had gotten exactly what they deserved . . .”

      Pecos usually won such arguments. He won this one, as well. As hard and cynical as Slash was, he knew his partner was the better man. Besides, he always felt guiltily wicked when he found himself trying to argue with Pecos’s moral authority. He might have been a wicked man in other folks’ eyes, but he didn’t like feeling that way himself.

      Also, he had an ulterior motive in caving in to his partner’s wishes so easily. There was a chance there was a bounty on the heads of one or all of these men. Slash figured this wasn’t their first holdup. If so, and if someone had put a reward on their heads—well, in this humbler life the two former cutthroats were now living on the right side of the law—he and Pecos could use all the extra cash they could get.

      They loaded the dead men into the wagon, covered them with the canvas tarpaulin they’d used to cover their freight on the way into the mountains a couple of days ago, and vamoosed on up the trail. When they came to a broad, grassy area in some trees along Marmot Creek, they pulled off the trail and into the shade of the breeze-ruffled aspens and pines. They fed and watered the mules and built a fire over which they boiled coffee.

      It was midday, after all. They had only a few hours of travel before they’d be home, and besides, they weren’t as young as they used to be—a fact so wickedly emphasized by the men now lying belly-up in the wagon.

      Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid needed a break.

      “How 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

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