As Beth and Heyes rode the train west for their Christmas visit they grew a bit concerned – it was getting very snowy. But when they arrived in Louisville, it was a bright afternoon, not too terribly cold, and there was the Kid to greet them at the train station. He was driving a pair of bright bay horses hitched to a big sled that would easily carry his two passengers and their luggage. The local horses had trampled down several feet of snow along the street to make a good smooth, firmsurface for sleigh-riding.

"Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Welcome back!" called the Kid merrily as Heyes helped Beth down from the train to the white-clad ground. There were a couple of people in earshot, so he stayed with the safe aliases.

As they got into the sled and were close enough to speak more privately, Heyes said, "Yeah, Beth, somehow you've wound up with an alias, too! You might rethink really marrying me – the other name you'd get is pretty bad."

Beth kissed her fiancé fondly on the cheek, "Not to me! I won't accept any name but yours, darling."

"What did I ever do to deserve that kind of loyalty, Kid?" asked Heyes, putting his arm around Beth as they took a lap around town to enjoy the beautiful snowy mountains that towered against the blue sky.

"Search me, Heyes!" said the Kid with a laugh as he stylishly turned the horses back toward Christy's Place. He had become quite the expert sleigh driver in his five years in snowy Louisville.

That night after dinner Heyes and the Kid and their ladies gathered close around the cherry-red stove in the back room, which barely kept the Colorado chill at bay.

"So you guys really did know that British author Teagarten, or Birch, or whatever his name really is?" asked Cat.

"Yeah," answered the Kid, "Called himself Teagarten in those days. Don't know which name is real – if either one is. He wore buckskin and carried a rifle and collected Indian stuff. He seemed like a decent enough guy. Never turned us in, anyway, and he sure could have. He made friends with a bunch of trappers and cowboys, though I suppose we were the only outlaws. Guess we seemed a bit more, well, harmless, than somebody like the Teasdales who murdered people left and right."

Heyes took up the story, "Teagarden said he was traveling around the West gathering material for a book. He got us to trust him. I was so young in those days. I thought it sounded romantic to be featured in some book that English folks would read. He promised faithful he'd send us, and the other guys he wrote about, royalties on whatever he published. But then it never happened. Or at least, he never wrote the book until now. And he sure never did sent royalties!"

"He did have a point – you would have been hard to find. But something makes me doubt that he ever tried to find you, really," said Beth.

Heyes nodded and smiled, "I did see some . . . magazine articles he wrote years ago, but he never featured us – just the fur trappers and cowboys and Indians. Used the name of Teagarten on those article. And then he got involved in writing about the Indian wars. So after while, we just kind of forgot about him. Don't know what got him back to us, after all these years."

The Kid tilted his head thoughtfully, "Actually, Heyes, he did feature us once in a magazine piece – remember? It was in Harper's, back about 77' or 78'."

Heyes nodded, "Oh yeah! The one about how we saved the lady and her little boy from the Shore gang up Montana way. I'd forgotten all about it. It was just a short piece and we didn't see it for quite a while. Didn't do a lot of magazine reading at the Hole."

"Well, I haven't forgotten it!" said Beth, "I read that article! It sure made you out to be heroes – and a lot of fun even when you were robbing people. I wasn't at all sure I believed it."

"Gosh, I read that, too, when I was just a girl!" exclaimed Cat, "And so did all my friends! We thought you two about hung the moon!"

"He did kinda' make it sound a bit better than it was," said the Kid. "We didn't do anything that anybody decent wouldn't've done in our place."

Beth laughed, "Teagarten or Birch or whoever he is might have done you boys more of a favor than you know. Harper's is a mighty popular magazine – it gets all over the country. That story was the first time I ever heard of you two, but it sure wasn't the last. There were a lot of newspaper and magazine articles after that one – some had you as heroes, and some made you sound a bit more dangerous. But all of them made it seem like you had, well, style."

"With that first story in mind, I guess folks gave you the benefit of a doubt," said Cat.

Heyes and the Kid looked at each other. The Kid said, "I always kinda' wondered how people got started being so nice to us. Now maybe we know. Mr. Teagarten might have done us a pretty fair amount of good."

"Then what made him turn on you in New York, Heyes, and say he was going to turn you in?" asked Cat.

Heyes and Kid both laughed. They knew. "Money!" said the Kid. "Cash on the barrel head!"

"No question about that, Cat," said Heyes. "Kid and I have seen it over and over again. Fifteen or twenty thousand dollars staring him in the face will change a man fast. Book money has got to come in a lot slower than that and take a lot more work. It was when he got to dreaming about how his sales would go up that I was able to get the gun away from him. Easy come, easy go, I guess."

"And you told him that you had even better stories to tell him?" said Cat.

"Yeah. Teagarten said that he thought going straight would be dull!" chuckled Heyes. "Dull! I told him that he was way off on that. And that I sure wasn't going to tell any good stories to a man holding a gun on me. So maybe one day he'll get in touch, once we get amnesty."

"He might be able to help us make some money on our stories," speculated the Kid.

"Or he might steal it all. He can write, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him," said Heyes with a bit of a growl.

"Well, Teagarten did cheat a bit at cards," observed the Kid. "Thought after while, he seemed to stop that."

"I gave him a good talking to, late one night," said Heyes, grinning evilly.

"Had your gun with you when you was talking, did you?" asked Curry, having no doubt of the answer.

"It just so happens that I did," said Heyes. "And my skinning knife. And you know, that timid Brit left town not too long after that."

Cat and Beth shook their heads. "Maybe his attitude toward you is not so hard to understand after all, Heyes," said Cat.

Beth nodded. "You do have a little bad left in you, honey, but it seems to me that you used to have a lot more."

"Yeah," agreed Heyes, "Or maybe I've just grown up a mite and gotten more cautious. In the old days, I wouldn't have left him his gun. Nowadays, the amnesty gets to talking to me. After all, that would have been one more charge of theft. I've kinda' lost my nerve."

"Or gained some good sense," said Beth, giving Heyes a hug.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

The next day was Christmas Eve. It seemed to Heyes and Beth that as Cat was getting breakfast for them and the Kid came in from looking after the stock, the two exchanged quite a few happy glances. The western couple seemed to be keeping some kind of happy holiday secret from their eastern guests. As it grew late in the afternoon, the Kid excused himself and left the hotel. Heyes looked out the window and saw his partner going out to the stable. A few minutes later, the sound of sleigh bells came from the street as Curry drove by in the sled.

Less than twenty minutes later, the bells rang again outside of the back door of Christy's Place. Beth looked out the window. She said, "Heyes, the Kid just let a man and a woman out of the sleight with luggage. I don't know either one of them. I'll bet you do, though."

Then there was a knock at the door and Cat answered it. She let in a graying middle-aged man with a mustache and on his arm was a woman of about his own age. The man kissed Cat happily – evidently the two knew each other. Cat took their wraps and smiled at the pair. Heyes grinned in startled joy and called out, "Lom! You surely are welcome here! I guess you know Cat Christy and this is Beth Warren, who kindly said she'd be my bride. But who's this lovely lady with you?"

Lom smiled under his rapidly graying mustache. He reached out to shake the hand of his old friend. "This is Isabelle – Isabelle Trevors. Yes, I finally found a woman who could put up with me. In fact, we've known each other for years – but it's only recently that she's been free to . . ."

"Free to follow my heart," said Isabelle in a sweet, mellow voice, smiling at her new husband and squeezing his arm. The grey sprinkling the lady's hair and the few wrinkles around her eyes did nothing to dim her loveliness. She seemed to glow with happiness.

Lom went on, "Isabelle, honey, this is my dear, trusted old friend . . ." He stopped for a moment and went on, switching to speaking to Heyes, "Friend – if I give you my word that you can trust my new wife as much as you can me, would you introduce yourself to her properly so you don't ever have to lie to her?"

"Sure Lom," said Heyes softly, smiling at the shining blue eyes of the woman who must only recently have married his sheriff friend. "Ma'am," the former outlaw said, "My partner and I have been straight with the law for seven years. Your husband has been trying for all those years to get amnesty for us." Isabelle looked at Heyes in surprise, and yet without any fear, knowing that this meant that an outlaw was introducing himself to her. She hadn't been married to a sheriff very long, but she had already learned to be at home around a strange assortment of people on either side of the law. At that moment the Kid came through the door, taking off his old shearling coat.

Heyes said, "Partner, have you introduced yourself to Lom's lady . . . properly?"

The Kid knew what Heyes meant and said, "No, partner. Not out in public. But if Lom says we can trust her, and why would he have married her if we couldn't, then I got no objection."

Heyes nodded and went on, "Ma'am, as I was saying, this blonde fellow is my partner, Jedediah Curry."

"And this fellow over here," said the Kid, carrying on the boy's custom of introducing each other, "is my partner, Hannibal Heyes."

Isabelle Trevors' mouth formed a little o as she looked back and forth between the two most famous outlaws in the west. But her voice was perfectly calm as she said, "I'm very glad to meet you, gentlemen. Allow me to assure you that Lom never told me your right names." She smiled with a little sparkle in her eyes, "But I must admit that I had grounds to guess that they weren't likely to really be Jones and Smith."

Everyone in the room laughed as Cat came back in and started setting out hot coffee and tea for everyone. All six of them sat down around the table and it was a little hard to get started talking, when everyone had so many questions to ask.

Once they stopped inadvertently interrupting each other, Cat inquired, "May I ask how you two came to know each other?" inquired Cat, "Since Lom says that you've been acquainted for so long?"

Isabelle looked down and blushed prettily as Lom said, "She was married to the leading mine owner in Porterville – Harry O'Malley - for over twenty years. He was the mayor for a lot of that time, so Isabelle was far above me. But I never could take my eyes off of her. Isabelle was always nice to me, of course, but no more than would be proper."

"Until my husband died last year," said Isabelle. "He was shot by one of his foremen. The foreman ran away, but Lom heroically tracked him down and made sure he got what was coming to him." Isabelle's normally soft voice took on a hard edge for a moment. She ducked her head for a moment and blinked hard. While it was clear that she loved Lom, it was also clear that she had loved the mayor. Isabelle took a breath before she could go on. "Lom and I saw a lot of each other around the trial – and I needed all the comfort he could give me."

Lom had no eyes for anyone but Isabelle as he spoke, "I was glad to do what I could. I couldn't believe that such a great lady would ever look at an ordinary sheriff, but she did . . ."

"I can tell you that he's a good man, Ma'am," said the Kid. "We've always been able to count on him, through thick and thin. Mostly thick."

Mrs. Trevors looked up at the reformed outlaw, "I know that!" she said, "But, Mr. Curry and Mr. Heyes, please call me Isabelle. When you've known Lom so long, it seems silly for you to be too formal with me."

The Kid said, "Then please call me Jed."

And Heyes gave his friend's wife a little smile, "And m . . . Isabelle, you can just call me Heyes. I purely can't stand my first name, so nobody calls me by it. Of course, in . . . other company, Joshua will do just fine."

"I must admit, Heyes," said Lom, "I'm mighty impressed at how well you're doing in school – with everything."

"Thanks, Lom," said Heyes very quietly. "It's been a lot of work, getting this far. I never could have done it without Beth, and without Cat and the Kid. And, of course, I'd have been dead or in prison long ago without you. I'm in a lot of debt to a lot of folks."

"Lom tells me you've put in years of labor at your degrees. So, how far are you from graduating with your master's, Heyes?" asked Isabelle, sounding a little awkward in addressing a man by his last name.

"The little winter session, and then one semester . . . and forever," said Heyes with a little grimace. "If, after all Lom's done, those four governors won't come through with our amnesty, and if I can't get a jury in Montana to find me innocent of man slaughter – or worse – none of the work matters a . . . matters at all."

Isabelle, catching Heyes at deleting a curse from his conversation around ladies, gave him a tiny wicked smile. The three women laughed together – none of them was quite so innocent or proper as their men liked to make out.

"So you're even teaching?" asked Isabelle.

"Yes," said Heyes, "though it isn't always easy. I locked up – you know about my aphasia after I got shot in the head? My trouble talking? Yeah, I was teaching math lab and locked up over a word so bad a couple of times that I had to tell me students about what had happened to me. They were really nice about it – even seemed kind of impressed. And you know, after that, I never locked up again. The mind is a funny thing, isn't it?"

"After all that, it's awful to think that they might not let Heyes get his degrees," said Cat, "or give amnesty to both of the boys."

"Heyes and Jed work so hard, and Lom keeps trying so much to help, and then they can't get a word of support from the new governor in Cheyenne," sighed Beth. "There's no justice in it."

Cat smiled at the Kid, who nodded at her as she stood up and went to into the next room, which was her office. She came back with an official looking white envelope in her hand. "Well, here's something you should see," said Cat to Heyes and Beth, and also looking over to Lom and Isabelle. "We just got this the day before yesterday. We haven't dared to open it yet. Thought we'd save it for you folks as a present. Or we hope it's a present. It's from Washington. You want to read it, Heyes?"

For a second the Kid was startled to see something unprecedented in his partner's brown eyes – a combination of confusion and panic. Heyes couldn't know any more than the rest of them what was in the envelope – could he?

Beth said, "Honey, please let me read it. I'm so eager to see it!" she grabbed the letter from Heyes' fingers. As Beth took the envelope from Heyes, the Kid saw the fear leave his partner's eyes and heard him exhale softly with what sounded like relief. That was even odder – why would he be relieved when the envelope hadn't even been opened yet?

Then Beth took a little silver letter opener handed to her by Cat and slit the long, white envelope. "It's from Senator Francis Warren in Washington, D.C.!" Everyone looked eagerly at Beth. They had thought that Warren would take no more interest in their case, since he had left the governor's mansion to his successor, Amos Barber.

Beth began reading in the clear, steady voice of someone well used to reading aloud to an attentive audience:

"Dear Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith:

My apologies for being so long in answering your communications. I fear that the new governor's staff has been remiss in transmitting my correspondence to my new office in Washington. I have been attempting to transfer your case to the capable hands of my success as Governor of Wyoming, Amos W. Barber, as well as his counterparts Lawrence Ross of Texas, Job Cooper of Colorado, and Joseph O'Toole of Montana. All four are at last in communication. However, I fear that there will be further delays as Ross was defeated in the recent election and in January he will be replaced by James S. Hogg. Therefore you may expect no progress on your case until some weeks or even months after that date. As you will appreciate, any new governor has a great many things to attend to. The kind of appeal that you are making takes some time to consider.

I will caution you that Hogg has an unhappy incident in his past that may prejudice him against you. Some years ago he was ambushed and shot in the back by a group of outlaws. He is a strong law and order man and he will not do anything to jeopardize that reputation. However, I will continue my efforts on your behalf after his inauguration.

I wish you and your respective fiancés a very happy Christmas and a fortunate New Year.

Sincerley,

Francis Warren, Senator, State of Wyoming."

As Beth finished, Isabelle was covering her mouth with her handkerchief. It was not difficult to detect that she was trying to suppress laughter. "Dear, it isn't funny!" said Lom, seriously offended, "If those governors can't agree, all of Heyes' work could go for nothing and he and Curry could end their days in prison!"

Isabelle turned red and said, "I'm so sorry. I know it isn't funny at all. Quite the reverse. But I was remembering something that I'm afraid is, unfortunately enough for the person involved. If you have trouble with Governor Hogg of Texas, you might try to play on his rather odd sense of humor. I am reliably informed that he named his little daughter Ima."

Within a minute, despite their best efforts, everyone else at the table was laughing, too. "You aren't serious!" snorted Heyes.

And the Kid asked, "He really named his daughter Ima Hogg?"

"I'm perfectly serious!" smiled Isabelle. "However, don't give credence to rumors of siblings named Ura or Hesa or Shesa. Only Ima is authentic, from what I understand. However," she poked Lom in the ribs, "I wouldn't put it past the old boy in the future!" That set them to laughing again.

Some time later, Cat was working to prepare dinner with Isabelle's aid, and Heyes and Lom were in a room upstairs catching up with their respective histories. The Kid found Beth alone in the big back room setting the table for their holiday dinner. She wasn't surprised to have Heyes' partner ask her very quietly, "Beth, I saw Heyes when Cat handed him that envelope. He looked scared! And then when you took it, he looked better. What's the matter? I don't want to embarrass him by asking."

Beth nodded, "But you're mighty curious. I can't blame you. I'm glad you came to me – it surely would have hurt his pride badly. He . . .well, you know he reads extremely well. But not out loud. It's about the last skill he hasn't mastered yet that was taken away by his aphasia. He can do it, but it's very slow and awkward for him."

"Oh," said the Kid. "So that's why . . ."

"That's why I took that envelope away from him. I hope it didn't look too rude, but he would have been in agonies of embarrassment to try to read aloud in front of you all without any time to prepare. He says that he sounds like a first grader. It's not true. He sounds like a slow third grader. I don't mean to be cruel, but it's true. It's getting better, but very, very slowly. Knowing him so well, I'll bet you can guess how he usually covers for it."

Curry nodded, "Yeah. I'll bet he reads whatever it is over first and memorizes it. Then he recites from memory and just pretends he's reading off the page."

Beth smiled. The Kid certainly did know his partner well. "That's right, Jed! Typical Heyes, to cover that he can't do something ordinary that's easy for other folks by doing something extraordinary that's easy for him but not for other folks. He can read and memorize several pages in almost nothing flat. He's quite an amazing guy, your partner."

Jed Curry sighed. He said, "Yeah, I just hope he doesn't finish up by being quite an amazing guy in prison for the rest of his life. It would be an awful waste!"

"Heyes and I think it would be just as big a waste for you to be in prison, Jed," said Beth. "And Lom and all of us are doing everything we can to keep that from ever, ever happening. But right now, while we're all together, let's just forget stupid old Governor Hogg as much as we can and have a Merry Christmas!"

So that's exactly what they did. Heyes got out his guitar that night and the next day. They all sang together and Cat fixed them a delicious Christmas dinner. The day after Christmas, the Kid took them all for a memorable sleigh ride by the light of a brilliant full moon.

But once Christmas was over, Heyes went back to worrying. Once he got past the brief winter session, there would be only one more semester to go. That last semester, he had a feeling, would be one to remember. But whether it would be memorable for good or ill, or some combination of the two, he just couldn't know.