Hi again everyone!
This roughly follows parts of Ladies' Day, but the timeline is changed. Jess is not back from his snooping yet when the stage pulls in, and to avoid confusion, a little spoiler: Bud Deiver and Sally Malone are not involved in my version. They didn't add anything to my plot and ended up being in the way, so I wrote them out. (Sorry if they were anyone's favorite!)
Enjoy!
Chasing Strays Ch 11
Halfway through his rounds, Jess picked up a wayward set of tracks not too far from the ranch. One horse and one rider, moving along at an unhurried trot through the property. The front right shoe had a nick in it. The edges of each print were still crisp in the dirt, letting Jess know the rider had to have been through here recently.
Might be nothing, Jess thought, Could be just another drifter.
Could be Willet.
Could be the stranger.
He doubted that it was their mystery man, though. A man who put that much effort into appearances wouldn't have tolerated the damaged shoe. Willet or one of his gang was more likely. Jess listened carefully for anything out of place as he followed along.
-Laramie-
Slim watched from the yard as Mike climbed another branch higher in the tree out behind the barn. He closed his eyes and fought the urge to call out. Only a few minutes before, Mike had been throwing mudballs at the wanted poster pinned up on the barn door. Slim had scolded him for that and sent him off to find something less muddy to do. Climbing trees actually did qualify as a cleaner activity, so Slim kept his Not so high, Mike! comments to himself.
As Jonesy used to tell him with Andy: A man has to pick his battles.
Instead, Slim just took a deep breath and blew it out through his mouth as he led the fresh team of horses over to the coach. He made short work of hooking them up. The three passengers, who appeared to be a cowboy, a doctor, and an older woman, milled about the yard as he worked. The doctor seemed to be assessing the place, his eyes shifting around the house and the barn, but that in itself wasn't all that uncommon. Cowboys and gunslingers sized a man up by the way he held his whiskey, his gun, and his cards. Men who made their livings in suits paid much more attention to straight fenceposts and chipped coffee cups. While Slim had grown used to that kind of baseless judgement, he had to admit he'd be happier when they were all gone. As soon as Slim was done, he gave a wave to Mose.
"Alright, Hank, let's go," Mose said to the shotgun, making to climb back up onto the seat. The one female passenger stopped him.
"You're not leaving right away," she said, her voice wavering with uncertainty.
Slim, making some final adjustments to the lead horse's headstall, half-listened as Mose explained about their schedule.
Her next statement caught Slim's full attention.
"But, uh, you've unloaded all my things!"
Now isn't that just convenient, Slim thought. He fought back a sigh as he strode over to find out what was going on.
"Anything wrong, Mose?" he asked.
Mose shook his head. "Not for Hank and me," he answered with a shrug, "We're rollin', Slim."
Great.
"I am Mrs. Daisy Cooper, Mr. Sherman," the woman told Slim, capturing his attention once again. "May I ask you a few questions?"
"How do you do, ma'am," Slim answered out of pure habit as he looked around at the amount of luggage on the ground. "I've got a few questions myself," he said, at a total loss to explain the situation.
Mrs. Cooper took a moment to gather herself to her full height and squared her shoulders before asking, in her prim east cost accent, "Is this Sherman, Wyoming?"
A joke, Slim reasoned. Someone was putting him on, and they'd put a lot of effort into it. Who would have thought to get their mother or aunt or other such person involved, just to play a trick on him? He started smile. Sherman, Wyoming, for crying out loud!
The woman's eyes, though, were sincere with a hint of something unsure behind them. Slim had seen that look before; it was the look of someone who'd gone all-in on a Saturday night and was starting to worry their opponent wasn't bluffing.
He tried to school his features before answering.
"Not exactly, ma'am," he said, still hoping any moment for someone to jump out and say We got him!, but nothing came. "My name's Sherman, and this is my ranch and relay station, but we're a long way short of being a town."
He watched the uncertainty in Daisy Cooper's face shift to outright disbelief.
"But it must be Sherman," she insisted, with a hint of desperation. "I own a store here!"
"You do?" It was Slim's turn to stare in disbelief. "Now how's that?" he finally managed.
She gathered herself again, putting on a show of confidence. No matter how tall she stood, the top of her little hat barely reached Slim's shoulder, and he couldn't help but feel protective of this woman. He opened his mind to gauge her truthfulness and was almost disappointed to find that she was, in fact, telling the truth as she believed it. That only complicated things.
"Perhaps I better explain," she said, her tone proper and polite once again. "Before my husband died, it was his dream to open a store out west. He even purchased a building out here, from a nice man who was traveling through our town," she finished with a decisive nod.
Led settled in Slim's stomach as he listened to the story. He chewed the inside of his cheek. "And you paid cash for it?" he asked, afraid he already knew the answer.
"Oh yes," she said, all confidence once again in the way of someone who knows they're in the right. "I have the deed, right here." With that, she pulled a thick, folded paper with fancy letterhead out of her purse. She offered it to Slim and he took it, sure now exactly what had happened. He unfolded it anyway just to be sure.
A tug on his holster announced Mike's arrival. "Slim," he said, not waiting for Slim to look up from the supposed deed, "the doctor wants to talk to you 'bout buyin' a horse!"
"In a minute, Mike," Slim answered absently, as he scanned the paper. Mike drifted away again. "I hate to say this, ma'am," he started again, turning his full attention back to Mrs. Cooper, "but this deed isn't worth the paper it's written on."
Her eyes widened just before her face started to fall. Slim knew he'd just put the last nail in the coffin of her hopes and dreams. He couldn't change the truth of the matter, but he felt hollow inside at being the one to tell her. "The… Deed…" she muttered, trailing off, as she tried to process what he had just said.
"As you can see," Slim continued, trying to apologize as much as explain, "there aren't any store buildings here. No town," he said, gesturing around the place with palms open wide. He found himself wishing, irrationally, that he had a store building to give her. He'd sign one over to her in a heartbeat, just to wipe the crushed look off her face. He'd met a lot of untrustworthy men in his life, but for someone to swindle an old woman without remorse? That was just about as low as a man could get.
Mrs. Cooper swayed once, giving Slim just enough warning to catch her when she suddenly lurched sideways.
"Maybe you better sit down," he said gently, trying to project a little calm her way. It was more difficult to project on someone who wasn't a sentinel or guide, and he found himself a bit out of practice. The cowboy, who had previously been leaning up against the porch rail, rushed forward to help Slim lower the woman onto one of her suitcases. "Are you a doc?" Slim called over his shoulder to the man in the suit.
Adjusting his glasses, the man moved to join them. "Yes I am," he confirmed, "Dr. Watkins." He walked up to Mrs. Cooper and set his bag down.
Mose's gruff interruption caught Slim off guard. "We're ready to go," he said.
"You better wait, Mose," Slim called back. Afterall, none of the passengers were even on the stage.
"Only one leavin' is the Doc," he said, impatient to get back to his run. Hank, for his part, just looked bored.
Slim turned a questioning gaze to the cowboy. "You stayin'?" he asked.
"Oh, yessir, I'm Pete Johnson, I came to see about a job. Folks in town said you'd be lookin' for brandin' help," the man told him, glancing between the doctor and Slim. He seemed a bit nervous, but Slim dismissed it without a thought. The man had been put on the spot, he reasoned, and some folks just had that kind of a disposition.
"Could be heat stroke," the doctor piped up, despite Mrs. Cooper's weak protests that she was alright. "She's sicker than she thinks, Mr. Sherman, you better get her inside."
One crisis at a time.
"Alright, doc," Slim said, helping Mrs. Cooper to her feet. Having a doctor around was a rare luxury, and Slim wasn't about to argue with him. He and the cowboy, Pete Johnson, helped Mrs. Cooper inside and settled her into Mike's room while the doctor followed behind.
As he heard the coach pull away, now empty of passengers, Slim couldn't help but wonder just what the day would bring next.
-Laramie-
Jess didn't realize anything was wrong until the tracks led him up to Stone Creek. There, the tracks went into the water, across to the other side, and then right back into the stream before heading off up the hills, nearly back the way they'd come. There was only one reason a man would follow that pattern.
He doubled back.
Jess followed the direction of the new path with his eyes and made another unsettling realization.
He doubled back and took the high ground.
From the top of that ridgeline, a man could stay well hidden and watch most of the valley without being seen. Odds were good that he'd been watching Jess all the time he'd been tracking. Jess cursed himself. His senses were on high alert, but still, he couldn't notice everything all the time. He scanned the trees and bushes but didn't see anything. The rushing of the stream behind him drowned out most other small sounds, and down here in the valley, the wind wasn't much help in carrying scents to him. For all he could tell, he was perfectly alone.
He shifted uneasily in his saddle. The whole thing reeked of intentionality. He'd been purposely led here; he was sure of that. Whoever had made the tracks wasn't close enough now for Jess to notice him, which meant he also wasn't close enough to take a shot at him. There was no reason Jess could come up with that a man would lay a trap, an effective trap at that, and then abandon the plan once it had worked. Unless…
Unless that man had been warned about Jess, warned about his ability to see and hear and smell and feel better than the average man. A man who knew about Jess would be extra careful to stay out of sight and out of range once he saw that Jess had taken the bait. A man who knew about Jess wouldn't try to take him alone.
A man like that would use a partner.
The realization shot through Jess just as the telltale CRACK of a rifle shot tore through the air, coming from somewhere over his shoulder, beyond the stream. Jess did the only thing he could do:
As the slug slammed into him, he threw his weight to the side, launched himself off of Traveler's back, and kept rolling when he hit the ground.
Not even a sentinel could outrun a bullet.