I took a page out of SpacefullofObjects' book by typing this here chapter right in the text box on Blue Sun. It's un-edited and un-spell checked. Will fine-tune it once I get back to my own computer. Leave me feedback, will ya? Thanks for reading.

~~~

As Adelai Niska's craft burned hot leaving the atmo of Jayne Cobb's home planet, the young man planet-side tucked his ladylove into her high counterpaned bed. He collected her simple sighs of contentment like flowers for his mind's collection as he gently touched her kiss-swollen lips with his own, tucking a lock of flame colored hair back behind her ear.

He tiptoed out of the bedroom, side-stepping the calico cat that swiped playfully at his bare ankle as he bent to pick up his boots that'd been discarded there when he and Maeve stripped bare arse naked, hurrying to the bed.

He had a lot on his mind, did Jayne Cobb. His concerns included coin, murderin' gunhands on their way to endin' his current employer and/or his current job. Other matters of high interest were his family and what was owing to them, how best to see to their upkeep. And, most important to the young man, was a woman. Ahhh, and SUCH a woman.

His body was replete, satisfied for the first time since he hit puberty a few years gone, the cause for the fullness of feeling lay in the bed back there. Jayne was in love, full-on, stupidly, completely in love with Maeve Burlee, town herbwoman, reader, calm and patient instructress in the arts of love to a rawboned ignorant cattle rustler barely out of the schoolroom.

Though he was many years her junior and she coulda done worlds' better, Maeve had given him so much, had him wrapped up tight in her more ways than he'd ever really thought would work that way. And gorram grateful he was for it, too. He figured the lessons he'd learned in her lap, at her mouth, on her, in her, around her, would be tools in his belt for as long as he breathed, long as his hydraulics worked.

Said equipment twitched in happy memory of the woods lovin' they'd recently enjoyed, added to by the horizontal dance they'd taken to the sheets till her last quivers of satisfaction had taken her off to deepest sleep. Jayne weren't no kinda ready for sleeping, had his job, his employer, on his mind just now.

Hand on the doorknob, turning it slowly, he looked back over his shoulder in the direction of Maeve's soft breathing and then left her small house behind.

His horse nickered softly as he approached, his hand went to its mouth, carrying a small wedge of hard sugar to the grateful animal. "Gotta get us back to Inga's quick-like," he told the horse, as if it could and would understand him. The bay raised then lowered its head as if in agreement as the young man checked both his guns, assuring they were loaded.

He checked the cinching on the western saddle that weren't changed even a little bit from the saddles last made on Earth That Was, swung one long leg easily up over the pommel and took the bay in an easy canter that changed to a hard gallop, soon as the horse was limber and ready enough for it.

An hour later they were at Jayne's erstwhile employer's house, center of their smuggling operation. All was eerily quiet, only noises made by ghostly whishing dust and sand as it twirled up into spectre shapes that took the form of giant tops spinning and cavorting from barn to house and back.

Jayne left the bay's reins to trail in the dirt as he headed to the house at a run, sense a'riot with a dread that wasn't alleviated a bit by the strong smell on the air that was full of his boss, Wood Harbinger's, normal unwashed body stench, but was joined by the copper tang of blood and something worse. Jayne had a suspicion the something else was death.

One leap took him up over the three porch steps; he wrenched the rickety screen door off it's hinges and plunged into the morning-lit front parlour. No Wood there, but the couch was upholstered with blood and gore, not enough to drain a man dry, but more than enough to mean somebody meant to make it hurt. The long hanks of razer wire left cut and hanging at odd angles on the material and laying on the filthy rug were testament to the bloody binding that had taken place.

"WOOD!," he bellowed out, voice cracking, fear racing along every nerve ending. Maeve sat straight up in her bed at his call, her heart beating a frantic tattoo, her brow furrowing as she flung her psyche out towards her man while he battled his fears.

Jayne stepped back feeling his woman's touch on his soul like a soft hand along his face and he breathed her influence in, one hand on the wall behind him for support. "I'm breathing, Honey, now lemme get to seein' if I can help him out any, will ya?"

He smiled, the worry loosening off his face a mite, and nodded his thanks to Maeve as he pushed off the wall and took the steps upstairs two at a time after first looking into Wood's bedroom, finding it empty.

A cursory inspection upstairs turned up nothing but booted footprints on the dusty floor so he rushed back downstairs then out the kitchen, back door flapping staccato behind him in the wind.

The barn wasn't far away and he made the big front door easily. A piece of an old mud-smeared flowery dress was cast off on the grass outside, he didn't know how it came to be there, but he weren't looking for no woman nohow so he paid it little mind. Jayne ran pell-mell into the barn's dim-lit depths and skidded to a quick stop, heels digging into the dirt floor as he felt via Maeve's touch on his mind, rather than saw with his eyes in the darkness, the form stretched upside down on a ladder-like rack before him.

She stifled a shriek at what she felt, at the evil of the deed and of the doer, casting her Second Sight out to glean what she could of the reasons behind the horror she felt Jayne only just now begin to take in.

He went to the barn's shuttered eastern window and flung it open, the planetary sun's rays illuminating what he had no desire to see, yet had no choice but to take in.

Wood Harbinger, late boss of young Jayne Cobb, was hung head down, no trace of skin on him anywhere. Only way to tell it was Wood was the belt and longhorn buckle flung on the blood soaked ground beside the macabre spectacle. A device that Wood had explained to Jayne was a sigul of Inga's family was carved into the skinned thing's chest, only patch of skin left on him serving to draw attention to it.

"Inga. Wood killed Inga, didn't he? And somebody named Adelai something-or-other loved her more than anybody woulda thought; came and explained her worthiness to Wood, here," Jayne said to nobody in particular, though Maeve heard him plain. He looked toward the door as if he could see the flowered patch of dress from where he stood, then he looked around the barn.

A hastily dug-up roughly rectangular hole looked like it had been a grave, and Maeve's reader's mind felt it to be so as his own gaze led hers to see more than upset dirt there; gave her the sense that a spirit had laid there before taking a path to a purer afterlife.

Jayne cut down the body, careful to not touch the slimed musculature any more than he had to, using the edge of an old horse blanket to steady the limbs as he let the thing slip to the ground. He rolled Wood up in the blanket, grunting at the smell and the dead weight feel of his old boss, oddly astonished at the lessened bulk of the old fat reprobate even as he choked on a sob of grief.

"Didn't like him, 'zactly," he muttered, as he wiped his nose on his sleeve, disregarding the wetness on his cheek, calling it not tears but dust irritation; "Just a gorram shame that I'm out of a job, is all."

He began to drag the bundle toward the hole where Inga had lain, then thought it more respectful to play pall-bearer to the man who had taught him what it was to be a man, leastwise gave him those talents that he'd be using his whole career life of crime, he figured.

He tucked Wood into the grave the man had dug for his elderly female victim, folding the moldly rodent-chewed blanket over the unrecognizable face when it flapped open. The shovel resting against the barn wall made the burying easy and Jayne was done in a trice. He patted the heap down, smoothed it over and tossed a bale or two of hay on it, and all around, then looked to the nasty torture device that had ended Harbinger for good.

Jayne dragged the wooden structure outside to the burn pile, went back for the blood soaked cloths and such that had lain near it, shoveling the worst of the bloody earth on top of the material to drag the whole shebang outside. He poured kerosene from a lantern onto all of it, lit the mess and loved the whoosh of the flames as they licked over the pile, then keened as the oil in the wood sizzled and scrimmed out into vapor.

His ears caught the faint sound of lowing cattle; his feet followed the path to the cleverly hidden entrance to the cave he and Wood had made into a stable. The steers, cows, calves and horses appeared to be in fair shape, though they were powerful hungry, though thirst was not a problem owing to the natural spring in the cavern.

Jayne dragged down some hay and oats from the high ridged shelf, swatted a few dry dusty cowhides, then left them there to munch contentedly as he ran back to the house to see about salvaging what he could.

He didn't know how long he had till the killers returned, but he didn't cotton to meeting back up with either the ones who'd accosted him and Maeve at their forest tryst, nor certainly did he ever want to meet up with the man who'd etched Inga's family crest on his dead employer's breast.

He scooped up such trifles in the house as he could in the minimum time he allowed for it, and rushed back to the bay, a pillowcase of booty swung and knotted on the pommel. His cache included every one of the guns, rifles and ammunition Wood had cherished and taught the boy how to clean and fire. Jayne counted these among the best haul, smiled fiercely as he took a little extra time to swaddle each in a separate swatch of terried material, telling himself the cloth would please his momma and his sister Timmie, though he knew the guns merited the gift-wrapping by their very nature, their value to him.

Sharp-shootin', horsemanship, cattle-managin'. Not for the first time nor the last, he was seven hell's of grateful to Wood Harbinger for the skills he'd taught him. He heeled and wheeled the bay horse toward the stone-hilled stable, leaped down to move the bristled thicket barrier, then "Hee-YAH'ed" the bovines out of the deepest recesses, the tethered and stalwart horse at the front of the natural hallway out guarding their headlong flight. He flint-lit a short fuse on a tiny bit of gunpowder at the back of the small herd, carefully placing it so as to not hurt them, merely to scare them forward out of the cave.

Jayne ran past the herd, his back scraping along the stone hallway and leaped onto the bay, his heels and the reins in his hands, readying the animal for flight any second.

Smiling grimly, excitement at his cleverness, at the risk in this here adventure, Jayne held a longish strip of leather in one hand to use as a goad on cow flanks, his other hand gripping tightly to the reins of the bay. Both stood their ground as the cattle eyed the horse and man and each other warily, the animals at the back of the group turning their large heads back toward the faint hissing on the dirt floor of the cave at their backs.

"Sssssss-POP" was enough to send them barreling out, bumping into one another as they fled the horrible danger behind them. Jayne whooped in glee and ran half the horse in half circles along one side of the running bovines then the other, his riding perfectly timed to keep them grouped more or less, not one animal straying farther than ten feet at the most before being struck on the back or butt with the leather goad, sending it racing back to bump lightly into its brethren as they all ran in the direction of the Cobb family's dirt farm a day's ride away.

Jayne didn't let the pace dwindle to less than a good jog even after the cattles' memories of their hiss and bang exit lessened, allowing the eye-rolling and snorting fear to vanish. He was in an all-fire hurry to gain ground away from the scene of his employer's demise in case the killers returned to look for more fodder for the torturing.

He saw a faint plume of smoke from his home and hollered, screamed out Timmie's name, gladder than a madman let loose from his I-love-me-peacoat when she came tearing out the door and down the steps gape-mouthed, then smartly ran for the half broken-down corral to throw open the rope gate.

Jayne rode the cattle down into the enclosure, Timmie closing it up behind him, awash in the whorls of dust and grime that used to grow their crops but now grew only mites and chiggers.

He piled off the horse straight into Timmie's outstretched arms, flung his hat off his head into the air and bellowed out in the general direction of the house, "Hi Ma! I'm HOME!"

End, The Way of Jayne, Part 10