“Listen, son—” he began.
“Don’t worry, honey, I can handle this,” Cara said. She looked at Reynolds and went on, “I reckon you’re the real man you think I should spend a little time with?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Yeah, I can tell by lookin’ at you that it’d be a little time, all right. A real little time.”
“What do you—Hey! What do you mean by that, gal?”
Cara laughed. “You know what I mean,” she said.
Reynolds crowded closer to her, saying, “I don’t appreciate some stranger talkin’ to me that way!”
Cara didn’t flinch. Instead she leaned toward him and said, “Do you appreciate this?”
Before Reynolds knew what was going on, Cara had snaked the young cowboy’s gun out of its holster. She jammed the muzzle up under Reynolds’s chin and eared back the hammer with an ominous, audible click.
The talk around the poker table stopped abruptly, and the men in the Red Top who weren’t already watching the confrontation turned to see what was going on.
Cara had taken Scratch by surprise, too. He’d had no idea she was about to grab the cowboy’s gun. If he had known, he would have tried to stop her.
But Cara herself probably hadn’t known what she was about to do until she was already doing it. She was acting on pure wild impulse, Scratch sensed.
Reynolds’s eyes widened until they looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. He came up on his toes in an effort to lessen the pressure as the gun muzzle dug into his neck, but Cara just forced it up even harder.
“Wha ... what are you doin’?” he managed to gasp. “Are you loco?”
“Loco?” Cara repeated. “You come over here and look at me like I’m a whore instead of a lady and you insult this fine gentleman, and you ask me if I’m loco? You’re the one who’s loco, buckaroo! And it seems to me like you need a lesson in manners, too.”
Scratch said, “We don’t need to do this. Why don’t you just let that hammer down easy-like, and we’ll get out of here.”
“Not until we’ve had our steaks!” she insisted. “Which are gonna be on you, aren’t they, cowboy?”
The burly counterman had emerged from the kitchen, only to come to a shocked halt as he saw Cara holding the gun on Joe Reynolds. Reynolds swallowed as best he could and cut his eyes toward the counterman.
“Y-you heard what the lady said, Larry,” he stammered out. “Their steaks are ... are on me!”
“Look, ma’am, we don’t want any trouble here ...” the counterman began.
“There’s no trouble,” Cara said. With her thumb on the hammer, she eased it down as Scratch had suggested. Again, she moved so fast it was hard to follow what she was doing as she lowered the gun and slid it back into Reynolds’s holster. “Joe here is just leavin’, but he’ll pay you later for our meals.”
“Yeah, I ... I sure will,” Reynolds said. Now that the gun wasn’t pressing into his throat anymore, he moved back a step. He watched Cara like a small, terrified animal would watch a snake advancing toward it.
But his pride wouldn’t let him just turn tail and run. He looked at Scratch, and the belligerent expression appeared again on his face. He said, “Listen, mister, you need to get this woman of yours under control!”
Scratch stood up and moved a step away from the counter so he could face the cowboy squarely.
“I like her just fine the way she is,” he said. That wasn’t true, not by a long shot, but this young peckerwood annoyed the hell out of him.
Reynolds’s gaze dropped to the pair of ivory-handled Remingtons on Scratch’s hips. It was pretty obvious that the silver-haired Texan knew how to use the guns.
After a moment, Reynolds muttered, “All right, it’s none of my business if you want to let her act like a hellcat. I gotta get back to work.”
He turned and stalked out of the Red Top. Cara’s merry laugh followed him. That was the only sound in the place. The other customers still seemed a little stunned by how close Reynolds had come to getting his head blown off by the beautiful blonde.
The counterman finally cleared his throat and said, “Them steaks y’all wanted ought to be just about ready. I’ll go fetch ’em.”
“Much obliged,” Scratch said with a nod.
The other two men sitting at the counter laid down coins and left. Once they were alone on the stools, Scratch asked quietly, “What was the idea of that little fandango?”
“I just can’t stand cocky cowboys like that,” Cara said. “They rub me the wrong way.”
“Maybe so, but now folks around here are gonna remember us. That ain’t what we wanted.”
Cara shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow we’ll be where we’re goin’, and after that we won’t have to worry about anything. We’ll be rich.”
“Bein’ rich don’t always mean that trouble can’t find you,” Scratch observed.
“I plan on goin’ so far away that nobody will
The counterman returned with their food. The steaks were fried just right, and the potatoes and other fixin’s were good, too. The way things had turned out, Scratch would have rather they had just waited at the blacksmith shop, but he had to admit that this was the best meal he’d had since leaving Fort Smith.
When they were finished, Cara said to the counterman, “You won’t have any trouble collectin’ from Reynolds, will you?”
“No need for that,” the man said. “It’s all on the house.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Scratch said.
“It’s my pleasure.”
“Well, if you’re sure ...”
Scratch figured the only thing the man was really sure of was that he wanted the two of them out of his place before any real hell broke loose.
Scratch helped Cara down from the stool, and they walked arm in arm out of the Red Top. Together they angled across the street toward the blacksmith shop.
As they stepped through the open double doors into the shaded interior of the shop, Scratch looked around for the proprietor. He didn’t see the man, but he spotted their horses standing tied to a post. He picked up the hoof that had caused the trouble and checked it. The horse had a new shoe nailed onto that hoof.
“Hey,” Scratch called as he lowered the horse’s leg and straightened. “Anybody home? What do we owe you? We’re ready to settle up.”
“You’ll settle up, all right, you old bastard, you and the bitch both,” Joe Reynolds said as he stepped out of the shadows behind the forge with a rifle in his hands.
CHAPTER 26
Scratch reacted instinctively to the threat, shoving Cara aside with his left hand while his right dipped to the Remington on that side and drew the long-barreled revolver.
Reynolds brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired, but Scratch was already moving the other way. The bullet whipped harmlessly through the air between him and Cara, who let out a startled cry as she lost her balance and fell on the dirt floor of the blacksmith shop.
Scratch triggered the Remington just as Reynolds ducked for cover behind the forge. The Texan bit back a curse as he saw splinters leap from one of the thick beams holding up the roof. His shot had missed.
He scrambled farther to his right as the rifle cracked wickedly again. He hated using the horses for cover, but that was all he had. He hurried behind the animals as they started tossing their heads and stamping their hooves. The gunfire had spooked them. Normally they were coolheaded and accustomed to the sound of shots since Bo and Scratch had been riding them for several years, but the blacksmith shop’s low ceiling made the echoes boom deafeningly.
Scratch snapped a shot at the forge and heard the bullet whine off the brick. More splinters flew as a slug chewed into the wall above his head. He couldn’t see Cara anymore, and he hoped that she had taken advantage of the chance to scramble out of the shop to safety.
