First Love

by Sevenstars

SUMMARY: Following the events of "The Turn of the Wheel," Slim confides in Jess about Abby O'Neill and what she meant to him. Thanks to Lisa for beta-reading.

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It was well into the next day by the time the gashes on Slim's arms had been patched up and Mort had gotten all the statements he needed. Jess, worriedly surveying his friend's bandages, tried to suggest that it might be better if they stayed a while in town, but Slim wouldn't hear of it. "There's nobody to see to the stages but Mike, and he can't harness the teams by himself, even if he could get 'em all in from the pasture," he said. "We've missed the first morning run as it is."

"That's part my fault," said Jess, abashed. "If I hadn't'a' got in that ruckus last night—"

"If you hadn't'a' got in that ruckus last night," Slim interrupted, "you wouldn't'a' gone over to the jail, and you wouldn't'a' gotten thrown into a cell with Mort, and he'd have had no one to help him get out, and Gordon would'a' had things all his own way. And I'd probably be dead, too." Jess held his breath, waiting, his heart in his throat, but Slim only said, "I guess that's another thank-you I owe you, pard."

"Well, if you're sure, then," Jess agreed. "Only we'll take it easy."

They swung around by the older, lesser-travelled trail, out Cemetery Road and past the Baxter Ridge turnoff, the way Jess had gone the day he first came to the ranch, not the road the stages took; Jess sensed that his friend wasn't in a mood to be answering a lot of questions about what had happened to his second-best jacket, or why his arms were bandaged. It was a warm morning, and by the time they hit the Sherman boundary line Slim was flushed and sweating. Jess checked, cocking a hard eye at him, and reached out for Alamo's bridle. "Come on," he said. "We're gonna stop by the lake a spell and get you cooled off before you drop where you sit. And don't you argue with me none!" he added sharply.

Slim sighed; right then he didn't feel up to a disagreement with Mike's fawn Twink, let alone a tough, hardheaded Texan ex-gunslinger who was, at that moment, in a good deal better shape than he was. It wasn't three more miles to the house, but he was suddenly feeling drained, and not just because he hadn't had any sleep. "All right," he said quietly, and allowed himself to be led up the trail to what he privately considered one of the most beautiful parts of their land.

The horses eased their way down the slope toward the gemlike pocket of vivid blue folded within the low hills. Slim idly wondered, not for the first time, just how deep it was. He was pretty sure it was spring-fed, like Stone Creek: in all his years here, no matter the weather, he'd never known either one to fail. His breath caught a moment in his chest as he remembered bringing Abby out here. Jess looked back at him, a question in his eyes—gunfighters with poor hearing didn't live long, and old habit remained strong. "I'm okay," Slim said, though he knew he wasn't.

He could almost hear what Jess was thinking: That's a matter of opinion. They continued picking their way along until the slope levelled and Jess checked in the shade of some young pines, swinging down quickly and coming to Slim's side to help him dismount. "Doggone it, Jess—"

"You hush!" Jess commanded. "You don't look good, pard. One time, just get off that Sherman high horse and let me help you."

Slim couldn't stop a chuckle. "One time? Twenty at least, these three years, and that doesn't count ranch work." But his arms were aching, and he acquiesced. Jess half supported him over to a patch of deep, soft moss, got him settled and went down to the water to refill their canteens, then came back and handed him his own. Slim drank, aware of the worried blue eyes on him, the concerned slant of the expressive brows. He lowered the canteen and smiled wearily at his friend. "I'm all right, Jess."

"No, you ain't," Jess retorted. "Them cuts is hurtin' you, and..." Hesitation, then: "And so's somethin' else." He didn't have to say the word; they both knew what he meant.

Slim sighed and let his weight ease back against the treetrunk. "Yeah," he confessed softly, "it is."

Jess settled alongside him, drank briefly from his own canteen, then lowered it and slanted a look at him. "You wanta talk about it?"

Slim shrugged. "Nothin' much to say."

"Maybe. Maybe not," Jess argued. "I know you told me a little, th'other day, after you saw her, but—well, you know, I been ponderin' on it some, and fact is I got a hard time gettin' my mind around you runnin' wild any time, let alone back then. If it was five-six years ago, that'd put it—what?—'67? Didn't your pa die before that?"

"In '63," Slim agreed. "Yeah, I see what you're sayin'. You're right, too. I was just back from the war and all of a sudden I was head of the family, had Ma and Andy to look after... what I'd'a' done without Jonesy and the stage-line contract I can't tell you."

He sighed. "I was twenty-two when the war ended," he began. "I'd joined up at eighteen. Well, you're younger; you know what the war could do to fellows that age." Jess nodded somberly. "Not that I was some green kid off the farm who'd never seen blood spilled. I'd gone up the trail from Texas with Pa when I was only thirteen... lost a couple of good friends on that trip, too, Mike Farrell, Joey Redhawk... I ought to tell you about Joey sometime, you'd have liked him. Then a couple of years after that we came here. They didn't call it Laramie back then; it was Dancytown, after the family that originally filed on the land, and between the end of the war and about '67, when Mort got the sheriffin' contract and settled in and took hold, it was a pretty rough, rowdy place; even Mort couldn't do it all at once. A few small lodes of gold had been found up in the hills, inside a hundred-mile radius, mostly south and west but not entirely, right around the end of the war—that was when Jubilee was built; they only lasted a few years, three or four at most, before they petered out, but while they did they made this a transshipment point, and we had all sorts comin' through, not all of 'em honest or peaceable.

"Lookin' back, I guess it wasn't just the fightin' and killin' I'd seen, or the plain useless waste of it all. Out here, before it all blew up, we heard about the way things were shapin' up, but it didn't have the... I don't know, immediacy, I guess, or relevance, that it did to folks back East, or even in Texas. Pa didn't want me to go; said it was North-and-South business, not Western business, and one reason he'd fetched us out here was to get free of it all. I'm not even rightly sure why I felt I had to; it seemed like there should've been some other way to settle it..." He wasn't going to talk about the greatest of the hurts, the things that had been said about Matt Sherman in the first years after his death—the things that had really been responsible for any "runnin' wild" that he'd done. It wasn't that he didn't trust Jess; he did, implicitly and without question—it was just that that wound, that loss of his neighbors' trust and respect, was still too raw to deal with on top of this newer one. He'd never fully understood how people who had known his pa could have believed such things, even for a little while, given his early-settler status and his origins north of the Ohio... He realized he was wandering and yanked his thoughts back on track by an effort of sheer will. "Anyway, what I was sayin', it wasn't just the war; I know I kinda led you to believe it was, but you're right, it was more. It was losin' Pa, losin' him when I did and the way I did—" losin' our good name, even if only for a while— "never havin' the chance to smooth out the rough feelings left over from my enlistin', and suddenly bein' in charge of everything, includin' the station contract... Lord knows I was glad enough to get it, I don't know how we'd have survived without it, but it was still a lot of work... maybe the work in itself was a good bit of what kept me sane, but—"

Jess's hand fell lightly on his shoulder. "Yeah, pard. I know. You was a dang hardnose when I first come here, but I reckon everybody's got to blow off steam, times."

He nodded tiredly. "And I blew off my share, that first year or two—more than any time after; when we lost Ma, I had to straighten out in a big hurry, on account of Andy. I sometimes wonder if maybe that was part of why I bore down on you as hard as I did, in the beginning—because I saw so much of what I'd been, not too long ago, in you." He paused, trying to order his thoughts. "I'd ride into Dancytown every two or three nights, not just Saturdays, and—well, in a lot of ways I was close to what you were when we met. I was on a hair trigger and I'd throw a punch at the least excuse, and even if nobody gave me one I'd drink, and—well, you've been in trail towns, you'd know." He managed a wry smile. "More than once I woke up in Mort's jail with a hangover. He tried to straighten me out; so did Ma, and Jonesy gave me a talkin' to a couple of times, before he got disgusted and gave up. Maybe on some level I even wanted to do what they were askin', to save Pa's dream for us, to make him proud, but I... I couldn't seem to get up the traction, somehow."

Jess nodded somberly, but said nothing; he could see that Slim was finding his depth, and he didn't want to interrupt the flow. Slim's voice softened, suddenly, and a look came into his eyes, a dreaminess, that the Texan couldn't recall ever seeing there.

"The Nugget was the big saloon in town then; the Stockmen's was just gettin' well started. And, as I guess you've figured from what Mort told Mannis, he ran it wide open and red hot. I'm lucky I'd never been the kind who gets a rush from gamblin', or I'd have probably lost the ranch there. But it was still the place I went to the most; the Stockmen's knew it couldn't compete, so it was already settlin' into bein' a respectable kind of saloon—at least as respectable as it could be with the town what it was then—a range club, where the Nugget was a place to whoop it up. 'Drink and dance and elegance, and keep your money in your pants'—if you could.

"Like I said, I was eighteen when I went into the Army. I'd been goin' to the socials for the last year, but at that age I was only interested in girls in a general way—one was about as good as another, you might say. There'd been a girl during the war, but she was in love with a friend of mine, and him with her, and I knew I had to step aside. Then afterward, I'd come to more of a sense of my own mortality, but I didn't really connect it to women, and I didn't feel I had any right to go courtin' anyway, even if I'd had the time to look around and decide who I might be interested in. Mostly what I was focused on was the responsibility, the work, the loss...

"I remember like it was yesterday the first time I saw Abby come down the stairs... I even remember the date and the time. May 14, it was, just past eight o'clock. I remember how she was dressed... an evenin' gown of jade-green silk, low-cut, with a bustle of pink roses on it. Peacock feathers in her hair... that was just comin' in as a style then. Long evenin' gloves of black lace, a diamond bracelet over one of 'em, necklace to match, ring and earrings of emeralds and diamonds. I'd never seen anything so... so elegant; not even on the Southern ladies I'd met during the war. And the way she carried herself... if anybody'd told me she was barely eighteen, I'd have called him a liar. It was like... like seein' a fairytale princess walk out of the pages of a book. I don't think I took a breath for three whole minutes; when I did, finally, my lungs ached like I'd been too long underwater.

"I'd had a drink in front of me, but I didn't touch it the whole rest of that evening. I didn't need it, or want it, any more; it was almost like she was enough to make me drunk. I just stood there, leanin' on the bar, watchin' her move around the place, listenin' when she sang her numbers, and I—I... well, I know how it sounds, but I guess I fell in love with her then and there. I didn't know her name, didn't know anything about her, and yet... and yet I knew what I wanted.

"I couldn't get enough of lookin' at her. I rode in every night to watch her show... didn't drink a drop; I'd order a beer, maybe, but it'd sit on the bar and go flat. Mort saw the change in me, and Ma, and Jonesy, but I guess they were all so relieved I wasn't gettin' in fights any more, they didn't want to ask questions and maybe spoil it.

"I wanted so much to go up to her, to introduce myself, but I was scared. Scared down to the marrow of me like I hadn't been since the war. Somebody like that... what would she want of me, with nothin' but a hardscrabble little ranch that needed a monthly payment from the line just to keep goin', and a mother and a little brother and an ex-trail-cook with a bad back dependin' on me?

"And then, one day, I rode in with the family, to do the weekly shopping—I never let 'em go in by themselves, Dancytown was too wild. Even Jonesy used to carry back then; he had a Sharps .32 four-barrel derringer that he'd tuck in his derby, and a Starr .22 seven-shot revolver, just eight ounces loaded, under his vest in a shoulder-rig.

"I had some gear to take to the blacksmith, heavy stuff that couldn't be repaired on our little portable forge, so I left them off at the store and headed that way in the buckboard. I knew Andy and Ma 'd be safe enough with Jonesy, he was armed like I said, and, well, you've seen he can be pretty tough when it comes to defendin' people he cares about... anyway, I was drivin' along Front Street and I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked, and it was a woman, back about twenty feet down an alley, fightin' with what looked like a couple of miners. I couldn't see who she was, too many shadows, and she had her back to me; all I could really see was her dress, a nice respectable one, the kind of cut Ma would have worn, only fancier. I didn't think. I just swung down off the seat and charged.

"I don't remember much about the fight. There weren't two miners; there were three, big Welshmen, and tough. I came to with Mort kneelin' alongside me, his gun pointed at the last one standin'; I'd broken one of the others' collarbone, and shot the second under the knee when he came at me with a knife. I had a couple of ribs caved in, a bruise on my shin where one of 'em had kicked me, my cheek laid open, a cut on my forehead drippin' blood into my eyes, my shirt was in rags, and I could just about breathe. And then I saw the woman again, standin' back against the wall of the building; saw the dress, recognized it, looked up to her face, and it was her—the girl from the Nugget. That's when I passed out.

"Mort and Jonesy got me in the back of the buckboard with the supplies, and Ma took me home. Two days later I was lyin' in bed, or rather tryin' to get out of it, and Jonesy was doin' his best to keep me in, when a horse came into the yard; just one, a saddle horse, no sound of wheels. I was still buttin' heads with Jonesy when Ma came to the door of the bunkroom and said, 'Slim, you have company.'

"She was wearin' a gray cloth riding habit, with a little blue silk necktie, and a saucy little hat with a plume curvin' down to her shoulder, and she had a picnic basket on her arm and a pair of saddlebags over her shoulder. I jumped back in bed real fast, I can tell you, and pulled up the quilt, and Jonesy got a smirk on his face, you know the one, and tipped his derby to her and said, 'Much obliged to you, ma'am; I been tryin' this half hour to make him stay put so those ribs can knit, but his head's harder than his pa's ever was.'

"She looked at me, and it was like there was nobody else in the world except us two. I could hardly hear Ma makin' introductions for the roar in my ears. Then she said, 'Why would you want to get out of bed with two bad ribs? Don't you know what you could do to yourself?'

"I got kind of red and said, 'I got a place to run, work to do. Family to keep.'

"And she said, 'Well, how do you think you'll keep them if you put one of those ribs through a lung?' Like we'd known each other all our lives and she was scoldin' me the way only a friend of the family can do.

"Jonesy said, 'That's what we been tellin' him, ma'am,' and I gave him a look and told her, 'If you say I should stay put, I will, though I don't know how the work's to get done.'

"She said, 'You let me worry about that. I'll see to it when I get back to town. Now, do you want to see what I brought you, or not?'

"That basket... it was like one of those enchanted packets you read about in stories; I don't know how she'd gotten so much stuff in it. She'd brought a bottle of Sonoma burgundy, some of the new Underwood devilled ham, Malaga raisins and Zanta currants, a cold roast chicken, a cold tongue, a big Mason jar full of lentil soup that Ma only had to heat up on the stove, a loaf of eggbread, six assorted quarts of canned goods, a marble loaf cake, not to speak of the Laramie and Denver papers and half a dozen books in the saddlebags. Even a few toys for Andy, and a yellow scarf, thin as a cobweb, for Ma to put over her hair, and a shavin' mug for Jonesy. I tried to say it was too much. She wouldn't hear of it." He chuckled softly. "The first time I'd ever dared speak to her and we almost got in a fight. Till we realized where we were headed and both started laughin'."

Jess winced in sympathy. "Bet that didn't do them ribs much good."

"It didn't," Slim admitted, "but I didn't care. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so... not just happy, but... I can't exactly say what it was, maybe because I'd never felt it before and never have since.

"She stayed for two hours and we talked the whole time. I'm not sure when Ma and Jonesy slipped out with the basket, but it couldn't have taken either one of 'em too long to see what was goin' on. Finally she said, 'I ought to go; I'll tire you out.' And I said, 'You couldn't tire me out if we talked till next week this time.'

"She kind of blushed, and said, 'I have to get back to town. I've got a show tonight, and besides I have to make arrangements for you to get some help out here.'

"I said, 'Will you come again tomorrow?' And held my breath till those ribs ached worse than ever.

" 'I'll come,' she said.

"She did, and the next day, and the day after, and meanwhile she sent out a couple of drifters who'd gone bust in the Nugget to do the range work, and Ben to help Jonesy—that was the first time I met him; he'd been swampin' in the place and I guess I'd seen him around there, but you know how you tend to look past swampers. She insisted on payin' their wages, too, till I could get back on my feet. Said she'd picked 'em, and it was her right. As I healed, we got closer, and when I could ride again, I took to showin' her the country. All over the ranch, we went—here, and Stone Creek, and up into the high meadows. Havin' her with me made me feel like there might be more to my life than just work and responsibility, like there'd be room in it for happiness and joy—like maybe I actually had a right to those things. It helped me to get some distance from the war, too, and Pa's death, to realize that, just like it says in the Bible, there's 'a time to every purpose.' She told me about growin' up on a farm in Kansas, about her little brother Billy—he must've been twelve or thirteen then—and her parents, how her pa had gotten shot up in the border troubles and by the end of the war wasn't much good for farm work. They could'a' moved into town, I guess, sold the farm and maybe started up a dairy—there's many a woman can turn out a hundred pounds of butter in a week, and more that can make fifty, and if she can sell it at thirty cents per, that's sixty dollars a month or more, enough to keep a family well; or Abby and her ma could'a' sewed or baked or somethin' to support them, but the place was paid for and they weren't sure they could manage town prices. So when Abby was fifteen she went off to Wichita to find work. She got it—in a dance hall. She was young and pretty and popular, and she got half the price of each dance ticket she sold and a kickback on the drinks she persuaded the men to buy, and even workin' only half the nights in the month she made better than $300. So she sent money home to her folks—fifty a month was plenty to keep 'em goin', with what they could get off the farm, and Billy takin' game—and got herself pretty clothes, and told herself she'd find a man who could support all of 'em, and quit the business as soon as she could.

"Well, she found the man, sure enough: Mannis. He owned the place, along with a couple of other resorts in town. He found out she could sing and offered her a job in his flagship place—it was a lot like the Nugget. It was easier on her than havin' her feet stepped on fifty dances a night, and it paid just about the same—he started her out at fifty dollars a week, but he threw in lodging on top of that—and Mannis can be smooth when he wants to, and he had money and influence, and I guess too she felt flattered that an older man would pay attention to her. When he decided to move out here, she came too.

"We'd known each other just about three months when I asked her to marry me. She shied off at first, asked what people would think of me marryin' a—a 'girl like her.' I said it was none of their business who I married. She asked what about her family—they still needed money. I said fine, let 'em sell their farm and come out here; Billy could bunk with Andy and we'd build on another room at the back for her parents, at least till we could run up a small house they could have for their own, maybe up Stone Creek a little way. That was when she told me Mannis had already asked her. I'm not sure if it was true, or if she just didn't feel it would be right to burden me with three more mouths to feed besides herself, all at once; you know it still got kinda rough around here, money-wise, even after you came, even with just four of us.

"It was almost time for fall roundup. I begged her to think it over while I was gone, and she promised she would. Four days after I left on the drive, the U.S. Marshals raided the Nugget and arrested Mannis. By the time I got back, she'd left town.

"I tell you, I went wild. I badgered Mort till he admitted she'd gone to Denver for Mannis's trial and got me the name of the place where she was stayin'. I wrote her, half a dozen times; she didn't answer. I wanted to go to her, but there was all the work to do to get the place winter-ready and I couldn't; I'd let my temporary hands go once we made Cheyenne, so it was just me again. Then the snows started, and Ma got sick, and..." He trailed off, swallowing hard.

Jess waited; he knew Slim well enough, by now, to know there was more. "The day Mort rode out here to tell me Mannis had been convicted and sentenced," the rancher went on, his voice heavier now, "I asked him if, somehow, he could get the Denver law to send her up here—say he needed her as a material witness, or somethin'. I wasn't too proud of myself, makin' that kind of request of a lawman like Mort. He understood, though. He sent a telegram. By the time it got there, she'd checked out of where she'd been stayin' and disappeared. He rode out again and told me so. That night Ma died. I got Jonesy's medicinal bottle and got drunk—first time in my life I'd ever deliberately set out to do that. It didn't help."

Jess sighed. "Mostly it don't," he agreed.

Slim was silent for a time. "If I could've afforded it," he said then, "I'd have hired the Pinkertons or somebody to find her. But of course I couldn't, and I couldn't leave the place and go to Denver myself. And if I had, how could I have traced her among 6500 people? I'm not a patch on you when it comes to trackin', but at least out on the range I've got a fair shot at findin' what I'm lookin' for; Pa taught me enough for that, and Flint McCullough, and the Cheyennes, but their methods wouldn't work in a city. All she'd had to do is change her name, maybe dye her hair, and I wouldn't have had a chance. I thought of tryin' to find her family—maybe she'd gone home to them, I figured; but how could I locate one little farm in the whole of eastern Kansas? Like lookin' for a tick on a hairy dog. And even if she hadn't, that didn't mean she'd stayed in Denver. Just before you and I met, Mort picked up a rumor that she might've gone to San Francisco."

He sighed deeply. "You could say," he went on, "that knowin' her, and losin' her the way I did, pretty much made me the man I was when you came here. On top of everything else, I mean—Ma and Pa and the war. I made up my mind—I swore to myself, I was never gonna let a woman get under my skin that way again. Fool thing to do, but I was only just turned twenty-five and thought the pain would never stop, and right then it just didn't seem the game could ever be worth the candle, if you know what I mean. I threw myself into the ranch, and the stage line, and tryin' to be both parents to Andy. And... well, that's about all there is to it, Jess."

"What about her folks?" Jess asked suddenly. "Dad-gum, Billy's dead, and now Abby... somebody'd ought to write 'em—"

Slim shook his head. "We found a couple of letters in her luggage. Her pa died soon after Mannis's trial, and her ma about two years ago. That was when Billy found out what she'd been doin' all that time to support them. That was when he made up his mind to kill Mannis."

The younger man pondered his response for a bit. "I wisht I could'a' saved her for you, pard," he said softly at length.

"Don't blame yourself. I said before, if it hadn't been for you, Gordon would'a' won. And I don't know as he'd have left me or her alive afterward." He looked quizzically at his friend. "Jess, were you ever in love?"

"I ain't rightly sure," Jess admitted. "Thought I might be, a time or two, but—no, I reckon not. Not like you and Abby, anyways. 'Course, 'long's I still had that score to settle with Bannister, I didn't reckon I had no right..." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Seemed to me like, when Winona was here, you was gettin' to think pretty highly of her."

"I was," Slim agreed. "Maybe I was finally startin' to heal... though I don't think I could have loosened up enough for that if I hadn't had you around for a couple of years."

"If it hadn't been for Jacero... would you'a' married her?" Jess asked. "I been wonderin' about that a while now."

"I think I would," said Slim slowly. "But... when I understood that she loved him... I knew I couldn't. Knew I had to find a way to release her. It was like that other time, in the war... I couldn't let anyone else lose someone the way I'd lost Abby—knowin' that that person was alive somewhere on the world and that they could never be together..."

"No," Jess breathed. "No, I reckon you couldn't."

They were both silent for a while, and then Jess said, "I reckon she must'a' loved you, though, sure enough. She'd been hopin' to get her revenge on Mannis all that time, but in the end she told Gordon where them plates was so's they'd quit cuttin' on you. And she run in front of a bullet for you. Man expects that of a pard. Don't expect it of a woman. Should maybe, if she really cares about him." He looked up into his friend's intense light eyes. "That's one thing you'll always know, I reckon. That she loved you enough to die for you. There ain't a lot of us can say that."

"I guess I'll never really stop wonderin' what it would'a' been like... what we could'a' had if she'd said yes, whether we could'a' made it work, with Billy and her folks..." Slim's voice trailed away into silence. "She wanted me to run away with her; you heard me tell Mort that, didn't you?"

"Yeah, I heard. Would you'a' done it?" Jess asked, thinking uneasily of the home he had found here, of Daisy and Mike, of whether they could have gone on without Slim, whom Daisy had once called "the linchpin of our household."

"I was sure ready to try," Slim allowed. "I had a surrey all ready... but I think in the end I'd have asked her why, tried to get her to come back. It was just so sudden—to have her say she'd go with me, to know she'd finally decided on me and not Mannis, after all those years... I probably wasn't thinkin' too straight, just then."

"It's a funny thing," Jess mused. "They always say as how women are the weaker sex... but they sure got it in 'em to twist us men into knots, don't they?"

"They do," Slim agreed. "I guess it's like the saying goes—can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em."

His friend searched his face. "You gonna be all right now?"

"All right?" Slim repeated. "Maybe not entirely, not for a while. And yet... when I think about it, I see that, on some level, I never really believed it would work out. I miss her, I wish we'd had the chance... but she made her choice, Jess, long ago."

"She made another choice too," the younger man reminded him gruffly. "Don't you be forgettin' that, pard. In the end, it was you she chose."

Slim sighed and rubbed his eyes wearily. "Turn of a wheel, I guess... You gonna let me get back in the saddle now? I want to go home."

"And go straight to bed, I hope," Jess told him. "If you don't, once she sees them cuts Daisy's just gonna fuss at you till you do. Lemme give you a hand up..."

With some difficulty Slim made it to his feet, swaying a little as the shock wore off and the pain and exhaustion began to tell. "Yeah... all right. And, Jess—"

"What?"

"Thanks, pard. For last night, and for now."

"Reckon that's what we're for, the two of us," Jess observed. "One's got trouble, the other's there. Come on, hard-rock, let's get you home."

-30-