Bone's Country 4 (Patreon)

“That’s property gotten by ill means. I’m sure you could claim Frenly here bought his horse or boots with the proceeds from his life of infamy, but we all saw that this here rifle was gotten him by a fair contest. And as a weapon of some threat, it’s within my rights as his captor to confiscate it until such time as his sentence is resolved.”

“You’re taking my gun?” Frenly asked, mush-mouthed from the blood that’d pooled in his throat.

Bone let him up and the first thing he did was turn on his side and spit up the bloody saliva that’d clogged his pipes. “If you want it back, you’re welcome to claim it just as soon as the law’s finished with you. Til then, I’ll hold onto it for safekeeping.”

The Mayor pulled at his white hair like a bird plucking worms from the ground. “Damn it all, man, why couldn’t you arrest the sumbitch before the race?! That rifle was meant to go to the fastest man here and you let it go to a rascal!”

Bone pushed his hat up out of his eyes. “Mr. Mayor, if I weren’t as fast as any rascal west of the Mississippi, then the only place we’d be having this conversation is Boot Hill.” He slanted the Winchester across his shoulder. “Sorry to pull the long bow with your good name. This is a One of One Thousand Winchester. And I will think well of your little town next time I put it to use.”

***

Just like that, Frenly was stowed in the town jail. Sometimes it went as such, Bone thought to himself. Soft and smooth, a clean shave, with no nicks or cuts. You always hoped you got that lucky, but rarely did.

It used to make Bone suspicious; watching for the sucker punch after Fate’s seeming surrender. But these days he didn’t look too closely. He preferred to chalk it up to the girl. Good sex, good company, good to look at if the talk and the fucking fell through. She just might be his lucky charm.

The saloon was busy but not crowded. Which surprised Bone. He was used to saloons that amounted to planks spanning barrels of whiskey. Plenty of self-respecting dudes would miss that. He himself would if he weren’t an outsider and obliged to drink where it was sold.

But this place was fancy. The storefront seemed as much glass as wood, letting in light to show off the luxurious surroundings. The back of the building was taken up by the gleaming mahogany bar with ornate pilasters running its length. Behind it, bottles and glassware were set into the wall. Bone had seen that before, but the recesses usually looked like potholes turned upright. Here, arches flowed over them like something in a Catholic church.

The tables were skinned with green baize and each had a deck of cards set on it, though Bone couldn’t imagine any serious gambler using them. There was a game of blackjack going at the other end of the bar from where Bone had settled himself, but they were playing for nickels and dimes. And Bone had reason not to get up, even if they started throwing double eagles into the pot.

Sophia sat in his lap, the rolling hills in back of her weighting down his knee. He hadn’t even asked her to do it, but far from the window, with the sun set and the drinks flowing and saloon girls flitting about trying to measure up, in their sequins and feathers, to what Sophia was doing in her walking suit, with just a few tresses of jet-black hair escaping her bun. Falling across her sultry face to make it almost look pale.

She held the Winchester, telling Bone she would clean it for him, shine and polish it, so long as he promised to take good care of it. She didn’t want anything to happen to such a beautiful rifle.

“You know I take care of my things,” Bone told her, his voice pitched low, as rough and as smooth as the whiskey in his free hand. He wasn’t drinking it. He didn’t want to give any of the saloon girls an excuse to bother them.

“Then why do you have a taste for things that take care of themselves?” Sophia retorted. “Remember you tell me that if you ever settle somewhere, you might just take the saddle off your cayuse and send it on its way with a slap on the culo?”

“Where do I get my ideas?” Bone mused. His other hand was under Sophia’s skirt, feeling her leg, finding where it became her thigh. Slowly searching for what that became.

“And your pistola, you say it could work if it sunk to the bottom of the lake and was dragged through a mile of mud and fell off a cliff?”

Bone let go of his drink, though his fingers were chilled with the cool of it. He reached to Sophia’s throat and undid the button there. The skin of her throat worked in a nervous swallow. Bone’s fingertips barely touched it—just enough to feel.

“Jeremiah, people will see,” she whispered. That, too, he could only just feel.

“You’re the one with the gun,” Bone pointed out. “Defend yourself.”

Playfully, Sophia jerked the rifle at Bone’s head and, equally playfully, Bone caught it—his hand jumping from Sophia’s throat to the barrel as quickly as he would slap leather.

He smiled at Sophia, taking it as an acknowledgment of his masterful speed, and Sophia smiled back at him.

To them, it was a light bit of foreplay. No different from a casual touch or a held gaze. But there was one watching to who it was aspiration. He saw it and wanted a woman who’d mind him as Sophia Larraga minded this man of violence.

Hank Hendriks was only twenty-two. Though as tall as he’d ever get, it’d be inaccurate to say he was grown up. He’d grown a little more adult in his lusts and his language, in his height and the ugliness of his expression. Even the smile he smiled now was a frightful thing to behold.

Funnily, though, Hank had an alluringly pretty face. Almost womanly. He was tall and slim, blond, with deep blue eyes, a little nose, and soft lips. This had garnered him unwanted attention in the cattle runs he’d worked since the age of twelve, contributing to such a sour disposition that he welcomed and rejoiced in the three missing teeth that spoiled his good looks like a worm in an apple.

He’d been excited enough by the race; the capture of a wanted criminal immediately afterward had settled on him like a fever. Hank began asking himself whether he could’ve subdued the despicable Carl Frenly as Bone had. He’d convinced himself he could’ve. Then, he told himself he would’ve—that he had long-simmering suspicions of Frenly that would’ve crystalized into action, violent action, if Bone had not interrupted the progression of events.

Hank was still deep in the throes of misunderstanding a developing boy may have about adulthood. But he’d picked a bad place to have this problem. Men and men of toughness were ten a penny in the West, for good or ill. They lived stancheous and they died stancheous, every hour of the day.

And now, seeing the beautiful woman Bone had on his knee, Hank felt cheated. With the shocking violence and tension of the capture buried by long hours, and many drinks, he’d persuaded himself that only the luck of the draw had made Bone the hero of the hour and not himself. By good rights he ought to have a lightskirt as good-looking as Bone’s; Hank would’ve gone it as strong as he if only he’d had the chance!

Hank was self-aware enough not to challenge Bone for his bonita, but he saw no reason not to have his own. Even with the West’s scarcity of women, the town had its beauties. One scooted from table to table, bringing drinks and a smile to any man with the money to pay. Hank was short on funds, but long on courage, as he saw it. He gestured to the angelica for service.

The girl, Gail, was a blonde. Full-lipped and round-chinned. Her ruffled skirt, brightly colored, was knee-length, showing off her petticoat and how it scarcely fell to her shop-mades. From the straps of her low-cut bodice to her long nails, all she wore were lacy glovelettes. Tipping customers got her putting her leg up on an unoccupied chair as she took or delivered an order; showing the net stockings her garters held up.

Hank had only seen those from afar. He did not have the money to do more than nurse a beer and resent how watered down it was and how warm it quickly grew. But to a man on the trail, with weeks or months separating him from the sight of a woman and then no regularity to that sight, her dress seemed to be nothing more than the sequins and tassels that decorated it. The bareness underneath called to Hank like a siren song—to think, all of that naked body, starting at her calves and going all the way up under nothing more than a little thing like fabric…

She didn’t put her foot up on any of the seats at Hank’s table, though he sat by his lonesome. “What’ll it be?” she asked him.

Hank inclined his hatted head to Bone—the bounty hunter had his hand inside Sophia’s blouse. He openly fondled her generous bust. “I’ll have what the gentleman is havin’!” he said, flashing his tarnished teeth at Gail.

She planted her hands on her hips. She’d seen worse than Hank’s gaping grin and heard worse than his innuendo. Her voice was sharp and full of pepper. “Them making a spectacle of themselves supposed to put the same ideas in my head that you’re gettin’ in yours?”

Hank’s tongue clicked; she saw it through the holes in his smile. “What gives with the mad? The Mex looks to be enjoying herself fair to middlin’.”

Like as to humor him, Gail cast her gaze at what Bone and Sophia were doing.

“¡Cómo te atreves!" came Sophia’s cry. “Aléjate de mi tetas, imbécil!"

Her breasts were nearly out of her bodice, jiggling until the pink of her areolas seemed to be one flicker of the candle away from revelation. Bone had one hand up her skirt and from the look on Sophia’s face, he’d reached his goal. She slapped at the half-grin on his cruel face, but her blows were weak, as unmeant as her foul curses.

The rapidness of her breaths and the little coos that came from her chest were far more sincere. “Mi amor, mi amor, su mano!”