Belle had been riding since dawn.
Content warnings for references to period-typical misogyny and rape culture, and primarily off-screen violence.
Belle had been riding since dawn.
It was now past dusk, and the Saddler was flagging underneath her. She finally pulled off the trail for an hour or so, careful of snakes and traps alike as they made their way over the underbrush, picking their way down into a valley, out of sight of the main roads.
She stayed close to one tall tree to make her camp, the better to obscure any smoke from her fire, and laid out her bedroll. Her every limb was aching as she hauled the rabbit she’d trampled underfoot earlier, out of luck as much as anything, out of the bottom of her pack. She felt that ache settle in her shoulders, her elbows, her bruised arse and thighs, as she skinned it, ate, and parceled out the rest to eat tomorrow.
The horse grazed placidly beside her. It had a name, she supposed, but she didn’t know what.
It had been the tamest in the stable she stole it from, and had let her put her saddle on its back, which was all that mattered.
Here she was, dressed in a dead man’s jeans, a little too big for her, and a flannel shirt — she’d thought to cut her hair too, but no. Like this, if she got seen, she could still let her hair down and clean up and put a dress back on and whoever it was wouldn’t recognise her any longer, or so she hoped. If she could just get some lemons she could bleach a little of the colour out of her hair — not all of it, but enough to make a bounty man look twice.
No one had recognised her in weeks, and she kept trading horses, changing clothes. Her thighs must have been black and blue from riding, and she was exhausted, so exhausted she felt it right down to her bones, but it felt like the end was finally in sight.
She was nearly free, she could taste it, the ghost of liberty that she could soon tear into with her teeth.
It was that taste that lulled her to sleep — and maybe it was that which made her sleep so deep.
When she woke up, the dogshit sonuvabitch who’d crept up on her already had her pinned underneath him. She couldn’t help the noise of terror that cut out of her throat, her whole body flinching under his weight.
“Ain’t gonna hurt ya,” said the bastard kneeling on her back, and she felt like she couldn’t breathe; he hogtied her like he’d been hogtying people all his goddamn life, and it was tight enough that she couldn’t work her hands free.
That he was tying her up at all was the clue.
“Miss Belle Dansen?” asked the bondsman, picking up her revolver, and she hocked and spat on the floor. “Uh huh,” he said, and pulled her up by the wrists, threw her over the back of his horse, tied her in place like she was a fucking deer.
She tried to roll free, tried to shift her wrists, her ankles, move anything, but she had no chance at all as he rifled quickly through her things, packed the rabbit still warm into his own pack, took the silver she’d stolen.
“You’re a son of a whore,” she said when he stood.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied. He had a low voice, quiet, but not gruff; the drawl to it was thick, but he spoke clean and neat and tidy, enunciated some of the consonants, like he was scared otherwise she wouldn’t understand him. “Used to be, anyways, but not no more.”
“Why, she retired?” she demanded.
“She died, Ma’am,” said the bondsman. “Guess that is a retirement, after a fashion.”
“You’ve got the wrong lady, you know,” Belle said. “I never heard of a Belle in all my life — my name’s Daphne, Daphne Short, and I haven’t done a thing wrong. ”
“Well, Miss Short, I’m afraid I gotta take you in,” said the bondsman without feeling.
“I’ve got papers,” she said. “I do, just check my pockets, I — ”
“You cold?” he asked.
She stared at him, and he looked into her pack, pulled out her jacket, and threw it over her back.
“You’ve got the wrong woman,” she repeated. “You’re making a big fucking mistake, the biggest mistake you ever — “
“Miss Short, or Miss Dansen, Mrs Kelley, Mrs Marks, I don’t know which name is yours or which you prefer neither, but no matter what, Ma’am, I got a warrant out on you.”
She spat on the floor again.
The bondsman tutted his tongue, putting one spurred boot against the stirrup and pulling himself back astride his horse. “Now,” he said, “that just ain’t ladylike.”
He clucked his tongue to the Saddler, and given as he’d given it an oatcake, it cantered along beside them the hour or two they rode, ’til they found some collection of fields and ranch houses too small and lackluster to be called a fucking town.
He lead her horse to the first house, knocked on the door, and when a man with a shotgun answered, words passed between them. He left the Saddler in the fella’s yard, and then they were riding off again.
She tried again to convince him he had the wrong woman, but he ignored her, barely even replied.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded finally.
“There are two warrants outstanding on you that I got told of,” said the bondsman, “but far as I know, bounty’s highest in — ”
“Lake County, Colorado,” she grumbled.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I’ll fucking kill you,” she said. “I’ll slit that dirty neck of yours open and pull your balls out through it, give you a new fucking necktie.”
He huffed out a low, not quite laugh. “Sounds like a neat trick, Ma’am,” he said. “You do that, and if I can still applaud, I guess I will.”
The bondsman didn’t beat her, didn’t leer at her, didn’t say unpleasant things, like other bounty men had, when capturing her before, back in Colorado, here in Utah too. Those men had been stupid and ignorant as much as they were horny, and they hadn’t been hard to kill.
This man wasn’t stupid or arrogant or horny, so it seemed, but he barely said a word, and it was hard to tell.
He looked away when he let her piss, but wouldn’t unbind her wrists, and although he loosened the binds around her ankles so that she wasn’t pissing over her boots, he wouldn’t untie her.
Each time she tried to wrestle free, but she just didn’t move fast enough to get away, and he kept her far away from the weapons not firmly holstered to his hip.
“Can I see my bounty poster?” she asked after the third day riding, her ribs aching from the back legs of the horse underneath her chest, and he took it out of his pocket and held it near the fire so that it lit up the etching. The sketch was done from her wedding photograph, and it looked like her, had her freckles, even.
“Two hundred and fifty is a real big bounty,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am, sure is,” said the bondsman politely. “Biggest bounty I ever collected.”
“You’ve not collected it yet,” she said. “Dead or alive, it says here.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“It’d be easier if I was dead.”
The bondsman looked uncomfortable at that, and he folded the bounty poster again, sliding it back into his pocket.
“You too much of a coward to kill me?”
“Last I checked, Ma’am, I ain’t no jury, and I ain’t no judge either.”
“Says dead or alive. It’s not like you’ll be a murderer if you kill me — you’re a lawman, aren’t you?”
“No, Ma’am, I’m a bail bondsman.”
“You ever killed a man?”
The bondsman was quiet a second, his face lit from underneath by the fire. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said quietly, very serious. “We got that in common, I’m informed.”
“You need the money, lawman?”
“Guess we all need money in a world like this, Ma’am. Don’t know that there’s a choice about it.”
“They’ll kill me, you know,” said Belle. “What they’re accusing me of, that’s hanging offences three times over. Just ’cause you aren’t putting a bullet in my head doesn’t mean you aren’t killing me.”
“Guess that’s true, Ma’am,” was the reply. “Can’t fault that argument.”
A day later, she asked, “What if I didn’t do it?”
“Which one?” was the bondsman’s reply.
She paused a second. “Any of it.”
“Seems unlikely,” said the bondsman. “Sure was a lotta witnesses for them bondsmen you killed, all three of ‘em.”
“Maybe I was being unfairly persecuted by the law,” said Belle. “Maybe I only killed them ’cause I was being chased for murders I didn’t do.”
“Could be,” said the bondsman. “Ain’t my decision.”
He always tied her in a bedroll to sleep, pinned her down in it, but it seemed to her that the bondsman slept as light as any man ever had, because even if she breathed too loud, he’d come suddenly awake.
“Killed two husbands, they say,” said Belle.
“Uh huh,” agreed the bondsman.
“First one beat me. Beat me so hard I feared for my life. Second one said he’d protect me from men like that when I was on the run, helped me change my name, then he turned out to be just the same stuff.”
The bondsman said, “Men’re foul beasts, Ma’am, but the law is the law. Can’t be putting them down. Besides, I heard the stories. Bullets in their feet and hands, knees and hips, all around, ‘fore you shot ’em in the head — that’s pure torture.”
“Maybe they deserved it.”
“That ain’t for me to decide, Ma’am,” he said. “Nothing is.”
“Nothing?”
“Nuh uh.”
“You’re deciding to give me in for a bounty.”
“Got asked.”
“You got — you got asked?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You always a reward hunter?”
“Nope. Ain’t chased after a bounty in five years, or near to it.”
“Why me?”
“Got asked.”
“You really want a lady to be hanged for killing a man what deserved it?”
“Don’t know what you’re God, Ma’am, and I sure ain’t. Ain’t for us to decide what a man deserves.”
“Never wanted to get married in the first place, you know. My daddy all but sold me.”
The bondsman nodded his head, but didn’t look surprised, and he didn’t argue either. “That’s a bad business,” he said. “It’s not right a man should treat his daughter as chattel, I’ll say that, and happens all the time. But a bond is a bond.”
They crossed the state line no problem, and she wondered if someone would see the big man with the woman on his horse, wondered if anyone would stop him, would ask, but no one did.
“You famous?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” said the bondsman.
“The fuck do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Guess I don’t know how to measure famous, Ma’am. I can assure you I ain’t on a cigarette card.”
“People know you? By sight?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“As a gunfighter?”
More reluctantly now, the bondsman said, “I guess.”
“If I was a man, I’d never’ve been saddled with useless husbands with shit for brains, best only to be put down and left for dead. I’d be a fucking gunslinger.”
The bondsman nodded. “Seems there’s a lot of women who’d be happiest with a man’s life, and maybe in secret, there’s men who’d want the other.”
She stared at him. “What, you want to be some man’s fucking wife?”
“Didn’t say that,” he said. “Guess I just think women and men aren’t as different as people make out. Same as men’s colours, all that fuss and bother. Seems to me it’s all made up by rich folk.” He sucked his teeth, then, and turned the spit on the fire. “That or people who ain’t rich but wanna be, and don’t care who they gotta kill and steal from to get it, so use any excuse.”
“Well, that’s the fucking West,” she said, hoping to cut him, and it seemed it did.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, all low. “I bet you’re right.”
She cried one night, wondering if it’d melt his cold demeanour, but it did no such thing.
“You’re killing me,” she said through tears, trying to look small and dainty. “You’re killing me sure as all them men wanted to. I only did what I did to survive!”
“I believe you,” he said, chewing on a piece of rabbit. When he swallowed, he added, “You keep crying like this, you won’t be able to taste your food.”
She stopped.
“Neat trick,” he said. “Always found that real impressive, doing tears on command.”
“Go fuck yourself,” muttered Belle.
“No, Ma’am,” said the bondsman. “I’m a working man, ain’t got time for leisure activities ’til the job is done.”
It made her laugh, as bitter as the sound was.
“I’m not scared of dying,” she said. “I just don’t want to.”
“Don’t reckon any of us want to, Ma’am,” said the bondsman. “And if they do, I expect they hope it’s quick.”
“Why do you do this?”
“’Cause a man I know asked me. Said no one else could take you, said he knew I could.”
“What, your brother?”
“No, Ma’am, I ain’t got brothers and no sisters neither. I only got him.”
“He a lawman?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“But not you.”
“No, Ma’am.”
“And what do you do with your days, if you don’t chase bounties?”
“Guess I could tell you a secret, being as you’re about to be dead and all. Would that make you feel better?”
“No.”
“That’s fair.”
He went quiet, and she said sharply, “That doesn’t mean don’t tell me.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. I stay home. Mind the livestock, a cow, a coat, a few chickens. Feed the dog. Mend clothes.”
“You mend clothes?” she repeated.
“Yes, Ma’am,” said the bondsman. “Lawmen’re always getting into scrapes. Tearing their shirts and all the rest.”
She stared at him, at the plain expression on his face, his unsmiling lips. “Your lawman’s the one who asked you to get me.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You live with him.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Mend his clothes, mind his house.”
“Uh huh.”
“You let him fuck you too?”
The bondsman sighed, picked up another piece of meat, chewed it, swallowed it. Stared into the fire a while. “Many’s the man just wants to live in peace and not hurt nobody, you know.”
“You’re hurting me, handing me in for my bounty.”
He sighed again. “I know.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?”
“Sure do. Always do, no matter who I come for. Do you?”
“No. They had it coming, every one of them. I’d kill them all thrice over — I’d kill you, if I had the chance.”
“Can’t fault that,” said the bondsman.
They were only two days ride away from the Lake County jail when they made camp. It was a rocky clearing, the ground hard, and he made his apologies for it.
There were sharp enough outcrops of rock, she realised, to start at the ropes on her wrists. She studied him to see if he knew this, but the bondsman was quiet and sad, and a part of her, she was surprised to find, felt for him.
She’d never felt pity for a man before.
“Your lawman,” said Belle. “He do for you as you do him?”
“He ain’t my lawman,” said the bondsman, and she scoffed.
“That’s an answer, then,” she said. “You act like his wife and he don’t even care?”
The bondsman took this in. “Don’t reckon you know much about what it means to be a wife, Ma’am. With respect.”
She laughed, because it was honest, and it was true, and she never much wanted to be a wife anyway.
He was flensing rabbit skin, focused on his work. He liked to have his hands occupied, she noticed, could almost never stay still.
“Bet it wounds you,” she said as cruelly as she could, thinking to distract him, make him angry. “Loving a man who won’t love you back, him thinking you’re some pansy, keeping you on the hook to do his laundry and run his errands for him.”
It didn’t spark any big reaction in him, and that he barely reacted sparked an uncomfortable, foreign sensation in her gut.
“Guess it does, at times,” said the bondsman softly. “But not more’n it’d harm me to be lonesome. Can’t abide to be lonesome.”
“A bail bondsman is lonesome by definition,” she pointed out.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You’re pathetic,” she said. “No better than the women who let their husbands treat them like they do, instead of killing them like they deserve.”
“I reckon it’s an important thing, to be able to choose the life you have.”
“No one gets to choose,” said Belle.
“Guess you’re right, Ma’am. ‘Scuse me just one moment.”
He always did that, politely excused himself when he needed to drain his lizard, like they were just sat down to dinner together, like Belle wasn’t tied up.
Of course, she wasn’t anymore.
Once her wrists were loose, she made quick work of the binds on her ankles: she barely had two minutes to grab her revolver out of his pack — and the bullets, too, because the bastard had unloaded it.
“How long’ve you been at that lawman of yours?” she asked when he came back, and he glanced at her.
“Eighteen years,” he said. “Nineteen come spring.”
“Since before you were a bounty hunter?”
“Used to work on a train. Security. Got deputised a while, met him there.”
“How old are you?”
“Five and forty.”
“You look younger.”
“Kind of you to say, Ma’am.”
She pointed the revolver at him, and he didn’t move, his knife going still on the rabbit skin.
“You want to see forty-six?” she asked.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said quietly, looking at her sideways without turning his head. “I reckon I do.”
“Knife down. That hand goes for your pistol and it’s coming off at the wrist.”
He moved slowly, laid the rabbit skin flat with the knife on top so’s she could see, and he didn’t try to get up, his hands rising up either side of his head.
Unlike any man she’d ever pointed a gun at before, the bondsman didn’t try to convince her out of it, tell her she was making a mistake, tell her to drop the gun. He didn’t say a word, and she came forward, kept the gun back from him with her finger on the trigger as she stripped his from his belt.
“On your knees,” she said, and the bondsman slid onto the hard earth, his hands cupping his head as she took up her pack, looked to the horse.
It was his horse, she knew, and they’d know it too well around her for her to ride it — it was a nice horse and recognisable at a glance, all Palomino dots. She slapped its flank so that it ran down the hill, releasing a loud neigh, and turned back to the man on the floor.
She didn’t want to kill the bondsman, she realised. The understanding made her feel sick.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bill, Ma’am,” said the bondsman. “Bill Shipp.”
Her lips fell open, and she stared at him. “You’re Bill Shipp?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You didn’t fucking tell me that before.”
“You didn’t ask.”
There was something crazy, something wrong in the whole wide universe, that a living legend had been tracking her, had been carrying her back all these days — and more than that, that she never fucking knew. Fuck a cigarette card — she’d never been in a goddamn bar and not heard someone tell a tale about Bill Shipp.
She’d thought he was dead — thought he had to be, except that she’d never heard a story about it — but no, he was worse than that, playing housewife for some two-bit fucking sheriff out of Lake County.
“I should kill you,” she said. “Bet no one’d dare come after me, knowing I killed a gunfighter with as many notches as you have on your pistol.”
“Ain’t nothing to be proud of, Ma’am, killing men,” said Bill. “Not even those who try to shoot you first.”
“Speak for yourself,” she retorted. “Maybe I let you live — maybe I should do you a favour, kill that lawman of yours, break your shackles to him.”
For the first time, instead of his being resigned and grim, she saw a glint of genuine emotion in his eyes — fear.
“I’d ask you kindly not to, Ma’am,” said Bill in a very low voice. “Wouldn’t fix things for anybody, least of all yourself.”
“And what would you do?” she asked. “Find some other man to wait on hand and foot?”
“No, Ma’am.” His voice was sober. “I reckon I’d die. They say a fella can die of a broken heart — and if he can’t, I’m sure I’d die anyways. You’d be killing me as sure that way as now with that gun.”
She spat on the floor.
“Wish you’d not do that.”
“Will you come after me again, if I let you live?”
“If I’m asked,” he said, “I reckon I will.”
“Probably he smarter to lie, you know,” she snapped, furious for a reason she couldn’t define, and he shrugged.
“I ain’t smart, Ma’am. Never claimed to be.”
“I can’t get it out of my head,” she said disgustedly. “The great Bill Shipp — I thought you were dead, thought you had to be dead. And instead you were sucking off some nobody sheriff.”
“Ain’t never been the great Bill Shipp, Ma’am. Reckon I stopped wanting to be Bill Shipp at all the first time I killed a fella.”
“Oh, boo hoo,” she said harshly. “You don’t want to be a hero, you want to be some lawman’s bitch — and here I am, I just want to live on my own, and because I don’t want to be anybody’s wife, I just have to be killed, if raping won’t do the job!”
The bondsman was silent.
“On your feet,” she said.
He stood, then howled when the powder was ignited, the gun fired, and a bullet pierced through his foot.
“Good luck,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it.
It was ten years later, maybe to the day, that enough time had passed that she felt comfortable riding through Colorado. She was going west for the first time since she was last hunted, and she rode alone, unencumbered by man or big pack.
The ex-bondsman was more grey on top than black when she saw him, sitting on the porch of a house in a little town slap-bang in the middle of Lake County. She’d already ridden past the sheriff’s office.
Bill Shipp sat alone in a chair with a cat in his lap, his bad foot rested on top of a crate. Chickens clucked and wandered back and forth in his front yard, and at least he had the good grace to read a book instead of doing his fucking needlework in view of the street.
He knew her as soon as her saw her, she could see that in his eyes, but he made no big show of it as she came by slow on her horse. He touched the brim of his hat. “Ma’am,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said.
She saw the door open as she rode away, saw a man come out of the house and step over the grey-muzzled dog dozing on the mat.
“Who was that?” asked the sheriff, another man with silver hair, but he was tubby, with a patchy beard.
Bill Shipp looked up at him like he’d forged the moon from silver and hung it up just for him: even now, she rolled her eyes.
“Just some lady,” said Bill. “Don’t know her name.”
Belle rode on.
Adapted from a TweetFic. Thanks for reading.
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