Page 47 of Follow the Lonesome Trail
The Trouble With Rubies
Hannah Kaye
Easiest hundred dollars I ever made.
Jimmy Butler couldn’t keep the grin off his face as he pulled the last loop of rope tight. The frayed hemp left prickles on his palms that stuck to his sweat, but that discomfort was well worth the satisfaction of a job well done. He stood and brushed his hands against the seat of his pants, then stepped back and surveyed his work.
At Jimmy’s feet lay the stagecoach driver, curled up on his side in the shade of the Colorado pines. A long, low snore slippedout from beneath the young man’s dust-caked bandana. Jimmy nudged him with the toe of his boot.
The driver didn’t even twitch. His boyish features were downright peaceful. If it hadn’t been for the ropes that bound his hands and feet and the red-tinted bandage that peeked out from beneath his curls, Jimmy could’ve believed the man was in the middle of the most relaxing midday nap of his life.
A good day’s work, Jimmy thought to himself with a satisfied nod.Not even the Pasadena brothers could’ve done it so clean.
The ambush had gone off better than Jimmy could’ve hoped. He’d had his doubts about the job from the outset, though he never admitted that to his partner, Frank. But now that the job was done—and done without a single hiccup in the plan, no less—Jimmy was glad he had kept his reservations to himself. Now he could hit Frank with a big old “I told you so” on the way to collect their prize.
As far as partners went, Frank wasn’t all bad, though Jimmy certainly considered himself the brains of the operation. But Frank was a crack shot, and his level of accuracy was hard to come by. Frank McCoy never missed. He was the only man Jimmy believed could hold up a stage without firing a single shot.
A single gunshot, that is.
Jimmy had told Frank as much not an hour earlier as they waited, sweaty and fidgeting, for the stage to enter the mountain pass. The road ran through a narrow ravine, bracketed on each side by steep, rocky slopes. It was the perfect site for an ambush.
“Yeah, so what?” Frank replied shortly, cutting his eyes away from the road just long enough to shoot Jimmy a disgusted glance. His white-knuckled grip tightened around his slingshot, as if willing the primitive weapon to magically transform into his trusty Colt revolver. “Lotta good it’ll do, whether I hit him or not.A pebble to the forehead ain’t gonna do a darn thing. Why we gotta do this without guns?”
“A pebble to the forehead took down Goliath,” Jimmy retorted. “But I don’t expect you ever listened enough in Sunday school to know that.”
Frank snorted. “If you’d’ve listened in Sunday school, you wouldn’t be out here robbin’ the stage.”
It was a fair point, but Jimmy ignored it. His Sunday school years were far behind him now. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the crumpled paper that had been stuffed under their door at the boarding house yesterday morning.
This whole operation had been arranged in that manner. No faces, no conversation. Just secret messages and anonymous notes. Whoever wanted this stage robbed was being very careful not to be tied to it. Fair enough, Jimmy supposed, but the lack of details made him uneasy. All he had to go on was this scrap of paper with their orders spelled out in impossibly neat, tiny script: the time the stage was expected at the pass, the location of the rendezvous, the stipulations about weaponry.
But most importantly, the reward.
One hundred dollars. Each. Cash.
“Payout’s too good to ask too many questions,” Jimmy muttered, probably for the fiftieth time since taking the job. He and Frank had been holding up coaches and stealing horses for going on three years now, but they’d never come across a job that promised so much for so little work. Only a fool would spoil a chance like that by prying too deep into the client’s personal business.
“Stage will be here any minute,” Jimmy said. He stuffed the note back into his pocket and stood. He patted Frank on the shoulder. “Don’t miss.”
“Never do,” Frank mumbled, pulling his bandana up over his face, leaving only his eyes uncovered.
“Remember, you can’t kill him,” Jimmy said as a final reminder. “We ain’t gettin’ paid for murder.”
“I know.”
“And don’t hurt him too bad neither. He’s gotta be able to walk it off. Those were the terms of the deal.”
“Do I look like I’m stupid?” Frank grunted. “You worry about your job and let me have mine.”
Jimmy’s worry turned out to be wasted. Frank, accurate as ever, knocked the driver from the coach with a single shot. While the man was still gasping for breath on the road, Frank swung up to the driver’s bench and whipped the horses into a mad gallop. He’d disappeared, stagecoach and all, into a cloud of dust before the driver even realized he’d been robbed.
Jimmy’s part of the plan was less flash and more finesse, but he pulled it off perfectly, and he didn’t mind saying so. Playing the part of a Good Samaritan, Jimmy arrived on the scene a few minutes later to care for the injured driver. Claiming to have been hunting nearby, he’d slung the driver’s arm over his shoulder and half-carried the man back to the shelter of the trees. He even bathed and bandaged the driver’s head. A nice touch, if he did say so himself. Jimmy felt downright hospitable as he handed the driver a canteen to refresh himself. Charitable, even.
Only, it wasn’t cool water Jimmy offered to the injured man.
Just a few swallows of the laudanum tincture had been strong enough to knock the driver flat on his back. He had one of those slender, wiry frames without much meat on it, so it could be hours before he came to. And when he eventually recovered his senses, he would have to get out of his bonds, get his bearings, and hike to town on foot. By the time the driver could tell a soul what they’d done, Jimmy and Frank would be long gone, their pockets lined with more money than either of them could make in months of driving cattle or skidding logs.
But Jimmy didn’t want to waste a single second of that precious lead time. This plan had two phases, after all, and it was high time to move on to the next one.
