Orphan Moon (The Orphan Moon Trilogy Book 1) (31 page)

“Left.”

He reached in and pulled out a tooled leather wallet, the initials HPL in fancy script. As he opened the wallet, his mouth moved as he counted the bills inside. With eyes bulging, he looked at Hughes.

“You lied, mister. There’s not five hundred in here.”

“Hey, what are you trying to pull?” the bigger of the two asked, stepping close to look inside the wallet.

“See here? There’s not five hundred,” said the smaller one, holding the wallet open for the big man’s inspection. “There’s closer to a thousand. Looks like our lucky night. Boss gets his three, we get . . .” He used his fingers to count. “Well, we get the rest.”

With their full attention drawn to the wallet and on their good fortune, Hughes brought his hands down in a plummeting rush, slamming the two men’s heads together with a sickening crunch. The smaller one fell sideways, unconscious. Staggered, the bigger man tottered on his feet, eyes blinking. Delivering a swift kick, Hughes knocked the gun out of the man’s hand, followed by a punch to the gut that dropped the big man to his knees, leaving him gasping for air.

“I believe this belongs to me,” said Hughes, reaching for his Colt revolver in the small man’s holster. As he leaned down to retrieve his gun, the big man lunged forward, knocking Hughes off balance, the gun slipping from his grasp. They struggled on the ground, trading punches, the big man groping for his own gun that Hughes had kicked from his hand.

Running to scoop up both dropped weapons, Barleigh stuffed one in her pocket, the other ready to hand off to Hughes. She was unaware that the smaller man had regained consciousness. He grabbed her ankle as she ran by, pulling Barleigh to the ground, the weapon in her hand falling from her grasp. She rolled to her back, trying to retrieve the pistol she’d stuffed into her pocket, but the man was quick to straddle her, pinning her arms to her sides with his knees. He picked up the dropped gun from the dirt, raised it butt-end first to deliver a blow to her head.

Struggling, bucking, and twisting her body, Barleigh thrashed her legs. Though he was the smaller of the two robbers, his weight was more than she could dislodge without the use of her arms.

She winced, bracing herself for the blow. Instead of feeling the gun coming down hard, she felt his entire body collapse onto hers in a dead-weight fall. Blood sprayed onto her face—Barleigh screamed. Another scream—but from where? Loud, next to her face, it came from the man lying across her as the comprehension of what had happened shocked him out of his momentary stupor.

Hughes, having seen what was happening, had taken his Rezin Bowie from his right bootleg and zipped it through the air, aiming it at the base of the small man’s skull.
 

“My ear,” he screamed. “You sliced off my goddamned ear.” Holding a hand over the right side of his head, blood poured between his fingers.
 

Hughes dashed over to where Barleigh lay, the small man still straddling her. He wrapped both hands around the man’s arm, and in an instantaneous move, yanked him off her with such brutal force that it dislocated the man’s joint. The small man dropped to the ground, holding his shoulder, writhing and crying out in pain.
 

Hughes scooped up his gun. Striding to where the man lay on his side, he forcefully booted the small man over onto his back. “Look at me, fucker.”

“Don’t kill me, mister,” he pleaded, holding his shoulder, his voice full of pain. “Please don’t kill me. I didn’t mean . . .”

“I’m not here to converse. I’m here to kill.” Hughes raised the gun.

“No, Hughes!” Barleigh rushed to his side. “He’s not worth it. I wouldn’t waste a bullet on him.”

“Oh, I would. I have plenty of bullets to waste on filthy animals like him.”
 

“I have plenty to waste on filthy animals, too,” said a familiar voice coming from the far side of the courtyard. “What kind of filth are we using for target practice tonight?” Stoney, his revolver drawn, moved to Hughes’s side.

“The thieving kind. The kind who do their lying boss’s dirty work.” Hughes lowered his gun, holstering it. He knelt and took the man’s gun, then patted him down for other weapons. Finding none, he jerked the man to his feet and said, “Wake up your big buddy over there, then go tell your boss to stay away from games he’s not good at playing.”

Barleigh turned and looked at where the big man was laying, moaning, his unsightly face swollen and bloody. He was struggling to his knees, babbling incoherent words. Hanging useless and limp, his right arm was bent at an odd angle midway between the wrist and elbow.

Stoney aimed his pistol at the small man. “You’ve been given your marching orders. Make haste before we change our minds and start wasting bullets.”

The two bloodied men hobbled off, leaning on each other for support.

“Are you all right?” Hughes was in front of Barleigh, peering into her face, his hand on her chin, turning her head left and right. “You’ve got a cut on your forehead.”

“When he tripped me, I hit my head on the ground. It’s not bad. I’ll be fine.” She reached up to touch the cut and felt Hughes’s fingers still there. “Are
you
all right? You got the worst of it.”

“
They
got the worst of it.”

“You almost killed them.” The reality of what had transpired washed over her, and she shivered.

“I aimed to kill. He got lucky. I would have finished it if he’d hurt you.”
 

Stoney cleared his throat. “Don’t mean to interrupt, but what the
hell
just happened?”

“Bar won big at poker. The loser sent those two idiots to rob us and get his money back. It didn’t quite work out the way they planned.”

“I’d say not. I should have stuck around. I missed all the fun.” Stoney holstered his pistol.

“All the fun? Didn’t it work out for you and the doe-eyed blonde?” asked Hughes.
 

“No, sir, it did not. My heart’s as wounded as that big man’s face you pummeled.” Stoney pulled a bottle of Valley Tan from his coat and threw back a slug, offering the bottle to Hughes, then to Barleigh.
 

“God, no. After Baer Brothers, that’d be sacrilegious. Let’s walk,” said Hughes, steering Barleigh and Stoney toward the Salt Lake House Hotel.
 

“When I found Elizabeth to ask her to marry me,” continued Stoney, his breath clouded with whiskey, “she told me she’s
already
married. She’s wife number
seven
. Seven! All at the same goddamned time. Can you believe it? Men—Mormon men—can have all the wives they can stand. But the wives? They get just
one
husband. Now who in the
hell
came up with that shit?”

“I can bet it wasn’t a woman,” said Barleigh, shuddering at the thought.

As they neared the hotel, Stoney stopped walking. Hughes and Barleigh turned, waiting, watching Stoney to see what he was doing. Raising a hand as if seeking permission to speak, he cleared his throat and rubbed the hand down his face, pulling on a serious expression.
 

“If I can see what’s happening, then others can too.” Stoney crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, and then shoved his hands in his pockets, clearing his throat again.

“What are you saying, Stoney?” Barleigh asked, ignoring the nagging voice in her own head that mirrored those same words of caution.

He looked from Barleigh to Hughes, then back to Barleigh, starting and restarting his words until they flowed freely. “Tonight at the pie-eating contest, then at the poker game, I saw the way Hughes looked at you. Sorry, Hughes, but I did. And the looks weren’t one-sided, Bar. You tried to hide it, I could tell, but maybe ’cause I’m your friend I picked up on it quicker. And I seen the way y’all’s fingers lingered on the whiskey bottle, the glass, on the cards, or the money, on anything that might lend a chance to touch each other. Hughes’s concern over the cut on your forehead.” Stoney looked at each of them, then shrugged his shoulders, an innocent gesture, apologizing for what he had seen.
 

Hughes threw Barleigh a raised-eyebrow gesture, then looked at Stoney. “I know what you
think
you saw,” began Hughes, “but—”

Stoney held up both hands, palms out. “Please.” He continued. “I’m not here to pass judgment on your private business. But others will. They’ll pass judgment, all right, then pass the shotguns while they’re good and riled up. Seems here in this Great Salt Lake of a City, a man can have as many goddamned wives as he wants at one time, seven even, if he sees fit. But two men can’t have tender feelings toward one another without it getting them run out of town. Or killed. Even I know that, and I’m an . . . an uneducated grunt from Arkansas.”

“Stoney, you don’t know what—” Barleigh tried to reason.

“All I’m saying is,” interrupted Stoney, “if I’ve picked up on it, it won’t be long before others do, too. You best be more careful.” He threw back another slug of the Valley Tan whiskey, making a wincing face and shuddering his shoulders as it went down.

Barleigh bit her cheek to keep from laughing and looked at Hughes, who was stifling a laugh as well. In a low voice, she said, “You’re right, Stoney needs to be brought in on my secret. I’ll tell him first thing in the morning after he sleeps this off and a pot of black coffee sobers him up.”

“Splendid idea, Barle . . . Bar,” said Hughes.

“You two can stand there whispering till morning if you want,” said Stoney. “I’m going to bed and dream up my own religion where I get as many wives as I can stand, all at the same goddamned time. G’night.”
 

*****

The next morning, Barleigh left the hotel before Stoney awoke, wanting to take a long walk to clear her mind—something different, not on horseback for a change. The unseasonably warm weather invited the casting off of coats and gloves, but not the casting off of troubled thoughts. She headed out of town toward the foothills with a canteen full of black coffee and a mind jumbled and confused.

She thought telling Stoney would be easy, just come right out with it, but figuring out the best way to tell him, which exact words to use, proved tricky. As she walked, she tried out a few scenarios, practicing her speech out loud.
 

“Hi, Stoney, I have a secret to tell you. I’m really not a homosexual carrying on a flirtatious relationship with another man; I’m really a girl masquerading as a boy. So, I guess for all the world to see, it does appear that I am a homo . . .”
 

Discarding that one, she tried another.

“Hi, Stoney. I’m a girl. Pretending to be a boy. But you can’t tell anyone, even though you’ve sworn on the Bible to be honest and trustworthy and I have too, but I have to ask you to lie for me and to not tell anyone . . .”

Shit.

Draining the last drop of coffee from the canteen, she looked around, noticing how far she’d walked. As she turned back toward town, she saw a lone rider approaching at a steady canter, silhouetted against the rising sun. As he rode nearer, the shape of a sombrero glowed like a soft yellow halo in the morning light.
 

“Stoney, how’d you know I was here?” she said with a smile. She was nervous but ready to get this over with.

“Cookie said you filled a canteen and took off walking. This is the one place I knew to look, after I didn’t find you at the barn.”

“How’s your headache?”

“Aww, takes more than a little whiskey to give me a pounder. I’m fine, but I need to haul your ass back to town—you have a run to get ready for. Mario said this one has some urgent letters of some sort. Hop on.”

“Thanks.” She grabbed hold of Stoney’s arm and threw a leg over the back of the saddle, riding double behind him on the big chestnut gelding. The horse’s easy stride was smooth and fast, the town growing large on the horizon.
 

“Stoney, remember last night when—”

“I remember. I remember that’s it’s none of my business. I sure as hell don’t understand it, but that don’t change our friendship if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s—I’m relieved to hear that—but what I have to tell you
might
change our friendship. The secret that we spoke of last night—”

“Should stay a secret. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to know. I don’t. I meant what I said, Bar. Whatever’s going on between you and Hughes is—”

“Stoney, listen to me. What I’m trying to tell you is that. . . . Damn it to hell—I’m a girl.”

“Girls say things like ‘damn it to hell.’ Men say ‘fuck.’ So you’re the girl in the, uh, relationship. I was wondering how that all worked. I tried not thinking about it, but I confess, I wondered. I guessed you’d be the girl and Hughes the—”

“Stoney. Listen to me. I’m not a boy. At all. Period. I. Am. A girl.” Barleigh wound her arms tightly around Stoney’s waist and pulled herself close to him, hugging forcefully to his back, pressing her chest against him. “Do you feel these? These are breasts.
My
breasts.”

“What the—” Stoney twisted himself in two as he spun around in the saddle to get a good look at Barleigh, his eyes as wide-open as his mouth. The fast movement caused him to jerk on the reins, pulling too hard on the horse’s mouth, bringing the horse to a grinding stop. The combination of the horse’s abrupt stop and Stoney’s own centrifugal force spun him right out of the saddle, bringing Barleigh tumbling to the ground with him.

“Holy fuck,” said Stoney, stumbling and dusting himself off as he grabbed for the reins. “But, I thought you—everyone thinks you’re a boy. Are you going to tell me what the hell’s going on?”

“Yes, yes I am. Everything I’ve told you about myself—”

“You ain’t told me much except you’re an orphan from Texas. Shit, I’ve learned more about you in the last twenty-four hours than I have since we joined up in Arkansas, about your grandpa teaching you cards and you wishing you wasn’t his kin, and now this. It’s no wonder you kept to yourself. I thought you was just the quiet type, but good God a ’mighty.”

“Listen, Stoney, I need this job. I need the money. This is the only way, the only
decent
way, a single girl can earn a respectable wage.” Barleigh’s mind flashed over the remembrance of Mr. Goldthwaite and his indecent proposal, the memory giving her body a shudder.