“Cynthia, stop that!” Bixby ordered. “You are disgracing yourself!”
After a few more moments of wriggling, she pulled a large piece of silk from under her skirt.
“How about this?” she asked Matt. “A silk petticoat.”
“Cynthia!” Bixby gasped. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Oh, don’t be silly, Jay,” Cynthia replied as she handed the slip up to Matt. “I have two more on.”
Up on the driver’s seat, Matt unbuttoned Moses’s shirt, then pulled it away from him. Some of the coagulating blood had caused the shirt to stick to the wound, and Moses winced in pain when the shirt was pulled away.
“I know that probably stung a bit,” Matt said. “But the truth is, sticking to your wound like that is probably what saved your life. It acted like a bandage and it stopped the bleeding. If it hadn’t, you might have bled to death.”
As Matt worked to apply a bandage to the stagecoach driver, the drummer and the young student pulled the masks off the dead robbers.
“Look at them,” the student said. “They are mean-looking, aren’t they?”
The whiskey drummer chuckled. “They’re mean-enough-lookin’ all right, but I’d say these boys picked the wrong coach to try and rob.”
“They did that, all right,” the student said.
“Wait a minute,” Matt said, looking down at the three bodies. “I know these men.”
“You know them?” Hendel asked, surprised by the announcement.
“Sort of. I don’t actually know them by name,” Matt said. “But I’ve seen them before.”
These were the same men Matt had encountered at Ian Crocker’s ranch almost two months earlier.
“I would imagine they were up to no good then as well,” the drummer said.
“You are right about that,” Matt replied.
“What are we going to do with them now?” the student asked.
“Well, if you two men will give me a hand, we’ll lift them up onto the roof of the coach. I hate to lay the shotgun guard out there with the others, but we don’t have much of a choice.”
“You can put the shotgun guard inside the coach with us,” Hendel suggested.
“What? How dare you make such a suggestion?” Bixby shouted, angrily. “Anyway, there is no room for him inside.”
“There will be,” Matt said. “I intend to finish the trip by riding up here with the driver.”
“You will not put that dead man in the coach with us! I will not allow it!” Bixby said.
“You won’t allow it?” the driver called down. “Mister, I’ll have you know that as the driver of this coach, I am in charge. Me. Not you. Now, either Pinkie rides in there with you, or you can ride up on top of the coach with the dead outlaws, or you can walk. It’s up to you.”
“Your employer will hear from me, my good man! You can count on that,” Bixby said.
“Oh, Jay, for heaven’s sake. Be quiet, will you?” Cynthia said. She was cleaning his wound and she pressed down hard on the bump.
“Ouch!” Bixby called out. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”
“Don’t give her any ideas, mister,” the whiskey drummer said, and the student laughed out loud at his joke.
“Well, I’ll be!” Bixby said, his face turning red in anger and embarrassment over being the butt of a joke.
Both Cynthia and Hendel managed to hide their smiles.
With the bandage applied to the driver’s side, Matt climbed up onto the top of the coach, then called down to the drummer.
“You two start passing them up to me, I’ll lay them out up here.”
“I’ll help,” Hendel offered and, over the next few minutes, the three dead outlaws were lifted up to the top of the coach, then laid out side by side. After that, the student climbed up and helped Matt pass the dead guard down to Hendel and the whiskey drummer.
“Now we have to get the log moved,” Matt said.
Once the log was moved, Moses picked up the reins, gave the team a whistle, and they resumed their run into Phoenix.
Chapter Seventeen
“Can you believe that?” Bixby asked after they got under way once more. “Mr. Jensen has just killed two men. Two men, mind you, yet to look at him and to hear him talk, you would think nothing had happened.”
Bixby had a large, discolored bump on his head, clearly visible because of his baldness.
“To think that we had befriended him,” Bixby continued.
“Surely, you aren’t condemning him, are you, Mr. Bixby?” Hendel asked.
