Give My All to Jessie (Third in Outlaw Series)

Chapter Nineteen

Jessie was laughing with amusement as she stepped closer and saw the rattler coiled up a few feet from Langley. "That's a nice one," she said, placing her hands on her hips.

Langley licked his lip. "That's one way of looking at it. You know another good way of looking at it. Dead. I want to look at it dead."

"Okay, okay, tough guy. Don't mess yourself."

Langley's blue eyes narrowed and Jessie knew she had hurt his feelings. She sighed, pulled her gun and shot the rattler quickly.

"About that..." Langley began, kicking at the grass.

Jessie laid her hand on his arm. "Don't worry about it. If it had been a spider, I would have been there pissing my pants."

"I didn't piss my pants."

Jessie laughed. "You never cease to amaze me. An outlaw that's afraid of snakes."

"I'm not an outlaw, I'm a gunsmith," Langley insisted. "And snakes aren't right. Scales and tongues and slithery bodies...." He shivered. "God was just messing around when he created them things."

"Well get a fire going, brave one, and I'll cut our friend here up for dinner."

Langley stuck out his tongue. "You're mean."

Jessie smiled, her violet eyes sparkling with mischief. She stood on her toes and wrapped her arm around his neck, twirling the ends of his red hair around her finger. "You know you love me," she replied, kissing the corner of his mouth.

"More than you know," he assured her.

Jessie quickly pulled away and looked around the ground. "You better gather up wood if we're going to have snake for supper."

Later that night as the two sat around the fire with full stomachs, Langley decided to bring up his idea for dealing with Benjamin. "We're getting close to Benjamin," he said as he went about cleaning his gun.

Jessie nodded, looking up from the knife she was sharpening. "Yeah, just another day or two of traveling and we should be there."

"You know, I've been thinking..."

"Uh-oh." Jessie winked. "That's always dangerous."

Langley nodded. "I think we should go to Windfall up in the Dakotas and get some help to ride with us. That way we can have some more guns when we go after Benjamin. There's no way of knowing how many men he'll have working for him."

"How long would it take to reach Windfall and exactly who would we get to ride with us?" Jessie asked.

Langley was taken aback first. He'd expected an argument at the mere mention of getting help. "Uh... three weeks, maybe two depending on how hard we ride. And my brother-in-law Pete would probably help. Then of course there's my pa and Duke."

"Your pa?" Jessie asked without any trace of surprise in her voice. "So Marston is alive."

"You already knew that," Langley assured her, finishing with his gun and sliding it back in the holster.

"I suspected," she agreed, holding up her knife and letting the firelight dance off the blade.

"I just think it would be better to have more people with us when we go after Benjamin," Langley voiced. "And since we already know where his second house is, we won't have to worry about hunting it down again."

Jessie stared into the firelight and thought over Langley's idea. Going to Windfall would mean another month or two before her father would be avenged. Could Jessie wait that long when she was so close right now? But then again, Langley was right. Benjamin might have quite a few men with him and Langley and Jessie alone didn't make up much of a fighting force.