Rash sighed, though whether in exasperation or relief, she couldn’t quite tell. She was going to have to take the big man out herself. Truth be told, she preferred it that way.
Using a knee for support, she worked her way to her feet. Once there, she glanced from the Colt resting at the old man’s feet to her own unreliable hands and instead reached for the sheath strapped to the thigh of her blue denim XX’s.
With practiced ease, she withdrew her Confederate side knife, wrapping her fingers around its rheumatism-friendly D guard. The big man was oblivious to her presence right up to the moment she seized his shoulder with one hand and thrust the lengthy blade into his spine with the other.
He dropped to his dead and useless legs at once, but Rash stopped him from falling onto his face with a firm grip on the back of his long, greasy locks. Then, without hesitation, she yanked the knife from his back and drew it across his throat, leaving him to fade into a puddle of bloody mud.
“Thirty-one,” she whispered.
Scarcely had she sheathed her blade when the old man was at her side, struggling in vain to lift the girl.
“We’ve got to make ourselves scarce,” he said. “Nobody can know we were here.”
“But this is a respectable town,” Rash replied, helping him drag the girl to her unsteady feet. “The Sheriff will understand. And I’d wager a man this mean’s bound to have some paper on him. Claim the bounty for yourselves. Maybe it’ll extricate you from whatever straits brought him after you in the first place.”
“An estimable plan, no doubt,” the old man said. “I just see one flaw.”
“What?”
He glanced at the gluttonous corpse gurgling its last at their feet.
“That’s the Sheriff right there. Don’t think he’ll be understanding much of anything until Lucifer shows up to drag him toward hellfire and perdition.”
Rash chuckled. Maybe Reno wasn’t quite so respectable after all.
Leaving the kid and the old man to find their own way home, Rash mounted Jenny and urged her toward the new bridge. When she reached it, however, she hesitated, peering down between the swaying cottonwood trees into the rushing waters of the Truckee.
The last time she’d crossed them had been in the womb, sixty years earlier, on the way to Mr. Sutter’s New Helvetia. There hadn’t even been a bridge then. Or a ferry. Or a Reno. Her parents had forded the river hereabouts, at what was then called Big Meadows in the Mexican province of Alta California.
Times had changed since then.
She glanced across the modern concrete bridge, along the streetcar rails, to the new and sprawling Masonic Lodge. A left turn just beyond the Lodge would bring her to the ornate Victorian lines of Mrs. Tolliver’s boarding house—lines that she’d only ever seen on the handbill that had convinced her to fork out for ten years in advance and retire, owing to her declining health. But now, on the cusp of making that change a reality, she felt herself wavering.
A glance over her shoulder picked out the old man and the kid, struggling their crippled way in the opposite direction.
Tolliver could wait one more day.
Rash turned Jenny around and chased down the sorry duo stumbling through the dust behind her.
“I’ll take the girl home,” she said when she reached them, massaging her stiff and aching knuckles.
The old man frowned. “What about me?”
Rash glanced at his useless stumps. Without hands, he was nothing but an effete, dependent coward and she hated him for it.
“You can walk.”
He snuck a peek at the large knife strapped to her thigh, still stained in Sheriff’s blood.
“All right,” he said.
After they’d hefted the kid in front of Rash in the saddle, the old man held out his stump.
“The name’s Dandridge K Peasy, but everyone calls me Dandy,” he said. “And that’s my niece, Lila.”
Rash didn’t know what to do with the useless limb, so she let it hang.
“Which way’s home?” she asked.
He pointed Southwest and she took off, leaving him to bring up the rear.
Eventually, the buildings thinned and then vanished completely, leaving Rash and her ailing cargo in the dark and biting outskirts. Several rough roads twisted in various directions before them. There was nothing for it but to idle among the bitterbrush and hopsage of the arid steppe and await further instructions.
Lila stirred in front of her. “My belly hurts.”
Rash peeked over her shoulder. Dandy trailed them by a dusty furlong.
“We’ll get you home, kid,” she said, nudging Lila’s elbow. “You’ll be safe tonight.”
When the old man finally caught up to them, Rash let him navigate the labyrinth of diverging paths. After a spell, he slowed to Jenny’s side.
“Where you from?” he asked, glancing up at Rash.
“Mexico.” It was true enough.
He squinted, inspecting her face in the slight moonlight.
“You don’t look like no Mexican I ever seen.”
Rash spat out a mouthful of spent cloves, forcing Dandy into a patch of awn-riddled squirreltail in order to avoid it.
“I’m from Illinois, myself,” he said after he’d returned to her side, picking the prickly awns from the seat of his pants. “Did my bit for the Union and then moved out West with Mrs. Peasy. Never looked back.”
Lila groaned again. She needed tending.
“Is Mrs. Peasy waiting for you two at home?” Rash asked.
Dandy dropped his head. “Ingeborg’s with God now. And he’s lucky to have her.”
“What about Lila’s people?”
“You’re looking at him. Her mother, Inge’s niece, was a troubled girl. Came out West to stay with us in ’92, but couldn’t take the quiet and moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter. She loved the city, but it didn’t love her back. First she got pregnant, then she got consumption. They gave her a pneumothorax for treatment, but it didn’t take, so I brought her and Lila out of that damn fog and straight to Reno for some clean air.”
“Did it work?”
“No. She died shortly thereafter.”
Glimpses of Rash’s own mother sprang to mind. Hair the color of the Forty Mile Desert. Eyes as deep and blue as Tahoe.
