Page 5 of Runaway Hucow

“Aren’t you going to unchain me first?”

“Now why would I want to do that?”

Tess pouted and batted her eyes. “This chain is so heavy and confining,” she said. “And there’s so many more positions I can get into if you take it off. This is going to be our only night together, and I want to show you everything I can do.”

The little auctioneer just stared at her for a moment, lust and suspicion warring behind his glassy eyes. At last, he stood up and staggered back to the door of the stable, where he’d hung the keys. Tess allowed herself a tiny sigh of relief. Her plan was working.

But she wasn’t free yet.

The auctioneer lifted the jangling ring of keys off the nail by the door, but instead of returning straight to where Tess was kneeling, he went to the side of the stable and retrieved something else from a rack on the wall. When he stepped back into the lamplight, Tess saw what he was holding.

It was an electric cattle prod, like the ones the workers had been carrying during the auction earlier that day.

Tess’s pulse quickened.

The auctioneer stopped in front of her and stood there, swaying drunkenly. He brandished the cattle prod in her face.

“You try anything funny, heifer, and I’ll use this on you… understand?”

“I’ll be a good girl,” Tess said sweetly. “I promise.”

That seemed to satisfy the auctioneer. He tucked the cattle prod under one arm, then crouched over Tess’s shackled ankle as he fumbled with the keys.

Tess didn’t wait for him to find the right one. She rolled back onto her butt and kicked her free leg up and out, driving her heel hard into the man’s groin. The man made a sound that was halfway between a whimper and a cough, and the cattle prod dropped from under his arm.

Tess caught it.

She had never wielded an electric cattle prod before—she’d never had any reason to—but she’d seen the awful things used enough times to know how they worked. There was a trigger on the handle that produced the electric shock, and a little slider that controlled the voltage. She pushed the slider all the way up, then she jammed the business end of the prod between the drunk man’s legs and pulled the trigger.

The auctioneer’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body spasmed as the electricity flowed through him. A dark stain spread across the front of his trousers as his bladder emptied itself of the whiskey he’d been drinking earlier in the night. When Tess finally released the trigger, the man toppled sideways like a little chopped-down tree.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Tess said.

The auctioneer didn’t answer. He was out cold.

And Tess wasn’t about to wait around for him to wake up. She yanked the keyring out of his hand and started testing the keys one by one, cursing herself under her breath for not waiting until the man had unlocked her before kicking him in the balls.

Still, she had to admit… kicking him had felt pretty damn good.

The fourth key did the trick. With her ankle free, Tess picked up the cattle prod again and sprang to her feet.

She looked down at the unconscious auctioneer, wondering what she should do with him. It would be an easy thing to kill the little bastard. She could zap him with the cattle prod until he choked on his own tongue. Or she could just bludgeon him over the head with the damn thing. In the end, however, she decided to let the man live. The reason was practical rather than moral. A runaway hucow would fetch a decent bounty, but not as much as a murderous one—and the fewer bounty hunters she had chasing her, the better.

Tess left the auctioneer lying in his own piss and rushed to the door. With her cattle prod still in hand, she peeked outside, craning left and right to make sure nobody was coming. Once she was certain the coast was clear, she slipped out into the night.

CHAPTER 4

Tess woke with a start.

She’d been sleeping among a little stand of quaking aspens nestled in a bend in a stream that snaked across the plains. The cool, clear water chuckled quietly as it raced over the smooth stones of the stream bed, and birds were singing in the trees overhead. The first drowsy light of dawn was filling the sky, and when Tess raised herself up and looked around, she could see the tallgrass prairie stretching away in all directions. Far to the west, the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains seemed to hover above the horizon, more a part of the sky than of the earth from which they were born. The highest summits were still dusted with snow even in summer, and they shone like gold in the light of the new sun.

Tess hadn’t meant to sleep for so long, but she forgave herself for doing so. After escaping Crooked Valley, she had run all night, and all the next day too. By the time night had fallen again, her legs had felt like two pieces of wood, and her lungs felt bloody and raw. She knew she needed to rest if she wanted to keep going, so she’d hunkered down within the little cluster of trees by the stream, intending to doze for a couple of hours. Three at most.

She’d slept the whole night through.

Little good it seemed to have done her. This morning, her legs felt even worse than they had when she’d stopped, and her lower back ached from a night spent lying on the unyielding ground. And now, to make matters even worse, she was hungry—hungrier than she’d ever been in her life.

She wished she’d thought to grab something to eat before leaving Crooked Valley behind, but there hadn’t been time for that. As soon as the auctioneer came to, he would have rallied his men to start looking for her. Tess had needed to get as far away from Crooked Valley as possible, so that’s exactly what she’d done.