by Jake Logan
Both Slocum and Zoe knew this had to be Sid Calhoun. Slocum wondered how long the unholy alliance between Molly and Calhoun would last. Not long, if they located the gold.
Zoe continued to inquire about the business, and asked personal questions to get the man to feel less anxious. The story slowly unfolded about as Slocum had expected. The Turner Haulage Company was out of business and the unpaid, fired employees had made off with the wagon holding the $50,000.
“The box rolls like Turner Freight,” Zoe said, her eyes widening. “The strongbox is in a freight wagon! It could be anywhere!”
“Not likely the employees would drive it too far before trying to bust it open,” Slocum said.
He left Zoe with the accountant and saw the signs to the livery stable. The horses and loading dock couldn’t be far from the office, and they weren’t. He stuck his head into the stable and saw a half dozen horses standing contentedly. He went to the tack room and found gear there, and saddled a pair of horses that looked to be broke for riding. Only then did Slocum hunt for the stable hand. The man had curled up behind the livery in a pile of hay. From the empty whiskey bottles around him, he had gone on quite a bender.
Slocum led the horses back around to the front of the office, and lashed them to a nearby hitching ring. Inside, Zoe still interrogated the accountant, but Slocum broke the spell she had the man under. He hastily left without another word.
“Something I said?” Slocum looked after him.
“You remind him too much of Sid Calhoun,” she said solemnly. Slocum looked at her, and then she broke out laughing. “Just my little joke. The interview was over, and he was trying to determine what our status was.” Slocum said nothing. Zoe went on. “Between you and me, since we’re obviously not related or married.”
“He could tell that?”
“No wedding ring,” Zoe said, holding her left hand up for him to see.
“You’ll be able to get all the rings you want without getting married when we get the prize.”
“I don’t think we have much chance of that, John. Colonel Turner’s disgruntled employees took the wagon with what sounds like a formidable vault in it as their due. Whatever chance we had disappeared when the colonel went out of business.”
“Companies are going bankrupt all over the country. The colonel started his freight business at the wrong time.”
“He should have lived up to the letter of his rules, though,” she said. “I’m going to send a very nasty article to Mr. Zelnicoff about this. If the colonel hadn’t gone out of business first, this would certainly damage him financially when the world reads what a crook he is!”
“I saw a telegraph office not far from here. You want to send your article while I nose about?”
She saw the horses in the street.
“Very well, John. You will wait for me?” His nod satisfied her. Slocum watched as she bustled off, mumbling to herself as she composed her scathing attack on devious business practices.
Slocum walked around, speaking to people for close to twenty minutes before Zoe came out of the telegraph office. Her shoulders were slumped, and she might as well have worn lead shoes for all the spring in her step. Slocum had never seen her byline in any of the papers as they’d made their way across country. He thought he knew what she was going to tell him. But he was wrong.
“The newspaper is bankrupt, John. They aren’t going to pay me. They never printed a single one of my stories!”
He had anticipated the lack of ink on the page, but not the newspaper going under in the economic tidal wave swamping the country. It was high time for him to get back into the mountains where he could live off the land for a year or however long it took for the financial woes to abate.
“I know the direction Molly went with the wagon,” he said. “She and the chief clerk at Turner’s office left an hour or so before we got here. Nobody else has come by to claim the prize.”
“She drove off with the clerk? In the money wagon?” Slocum nodded, and found himself being hugged and kissed by an excited woman. “This is wonderful! We can track them down and get the gold for ourselves. One of our keys has to fit. It has to. There’s no way any of those cheats could possibly win!”
“Even if none of Molly’s keys fit, do you think that would stop her from getting the gold? She’s thrown in with the clerk.” He sucked on his teeth a moment, then asked, “Where’d Calhoun get off to?”
“She dropped him like a hot potato.”
“Calhoun had Swain with him. I don’t see either of those owlhoots ever giving up if they caught the scent of gold.”
“Let’s ride. You said you knew where they went. Where?”
“Figured out the direction, but not much else. We can ask along the way. Molly’s beauty is going to attract attention, even if a wagon with a bank vault in the bed doesn’t.”
“Do you think she’s pretty, John?”
“I do,” he said. Before Zoe could pout, he added, “And she’s as treacherous as she is beautiful. I wouldn’t be in the clerk’s boots for anything right now.”
This smoothed Zoe’s ruffled feathers, and she smiled almost shyly, then looked down to the back of her horse’s neck. Her smile broadened until Slocum couldn’t see it anymore as she galloped ahead.
The road was deeply rutted from traffic, but Slocum thought he’d found one set of wheel marks leading from San Francisco that were considerably deeper. While the tracks might have been left by any wagon conducting commerce farther south, Slocum had nothing better to go on. When the tracks cut sharply to the west and the ocean, he hesitated. This was the all-or-nothing gamble.
“I can hear the surf,” Zoe said. For some reason, this convinced Slocum he was on the right track.
“Let’s head that direction.”
“We’re getting close, aren’t we? I feel it in my bones.”
“We’re riding faster than a weighed-down wagon can roll,” Slocum agreed, but he had no similar sense of being closer to Calhoun and Molly. Another twenty minutes brought them to a butte overlooking the ocean. Slocum saw the body before Zoe did.
He dismounted and handed the reins to her.
“Stay here.” He slid his six-shooter from its holster.
“John,” she said in a choked voice. “There’s a body.”
“I know.” Slocum moved closer and rolled the man over using the toe of his boot. The front of his face was a bloody mess. The hole in the back of his head was small. but the exit wound was in the middle of his forehead and almost as big as a fist.
“Another one? Oh, my.”
Slocum looked up sharply, and saw that Zoe just noticed the clerk’s body. He swung around as a gust of wind caused a billow of skirt not ten yards away. Approaching carefully, he saw that Molly Ibbotson had come to the end of her trail. For a few seconds, he worked through the way two bodies had ended up on a butte overlooking the gray waters of the Pacific.
“She shot the clerk, then somebody shot her. Since she was shot in the back of her head, I’ve got to peg Sid Calhoun for the murder.”
“I see tracks going southward,” Zoe said from her perch mounted on her horse. “The ground is softer here.”
“Sea spray,” Slocum said. He scouted the area and found gold keys strewn about. A grim smile came to his lips. “Calhoun didn’t get into the strongbox. He stole the wagon and is looking for a way to open it without a key.”
“There’s a town not too far off, John. I see smoke rising from dozens of chimneys.” Zoe pointed. Slocum walked to the edge of the butte and down to the sandy beach. Then he looked to where she had pointed.
He mounted and they rode for the small coastal town using the deep ruts left by Turner’s prize wagon as a guide. Slocum hoped Calhoun would get mired down, but his luck didn’t run that way.
“What are we going to do?”
“Molly tried all her keys and probably Calhoun’s, too. He double-crossed her and left her up there for the seagulls. The only way he’d try to open a strongb
ox or a bank vault is dynamite.”
“He’d blow it up? Wouldn’t that destroy everything inside?”
“Depends on the size of the vault. From the depth of the wheel ruts, that’s one damned heavy vault. Calhoun will do what he’s most comfortable doing.”
“Blowing it up,” Zoe said with distaste. “Has he robbed banks like that?”
Slocum didn’t reply. All he knew of Calhoun was what he had seen since they boarded the train in St. Louis. The outlaw was a coward and thought nothing of shooting a woman in the back. The rest of his gang had likely met a similar fate so Calhoun could accumulate more gold keys. Since Molly had traveled with Calhoun, she had probably seduced him and stolen his keys, but she would have ended up dead even if she hadn’t crossed him. Calhoun wasn’t the sort to share such wealth.
Slocum smiled ruefully. Molly Ibbotson hadn’t been either.
“Would a town this small have a store selling dynamite?”
“They have to build roads,” Slocum said. “Stumps need to be removed. There’s a call for it.” His attention fixed on a store selling mining equipment. There wasn’t much call for such tools, not since the Gold Rush of ’49, but somehow the store had stayed in business. Slocum went to it like a homing pigeon to its roost.
It took less than five minutes to get the information he wanted.
“Well, John? He bought explosives, didn’t he?”
“He did. Why he needed a full crate is a poser, but that vault must be bigger than I thought. The owner didn’t see the wagon because Calhoun walked in. I doubt anyone in town saw the wagon either. It’s not something Calhoun wants to advertise.”
“Where is he?”
“Down by the ocean,” he decided. “If he finds a cove with high walls, the sound of the explosion will be muffled. The surf will hide the sound that isn’t swallowed up by the rock, and he can rifle through the contents without worrying somebody will come to investigate the blast.”
“He won’t be able to drive such a heavily laden wagon on the beach,” Zoe said dubiously.
“That’s why we look for a cove with a road leading down into it.”
Just when Slocum began to despair, he saw a turnoff from the road leading toward the ocean. The roar of the surf, even a half mile away, was almost deafening. Calhoun could blow the safe here and never be heard, but Slocum knew the outlaw wouldn’t do that. He’d play it close to the vest.
“I wish I had a gun,” Zoe said. “I’m getting goose bumps thinking of what’ll happen when we find him.”
“If you’ve never fired a six-gun before, you’re better off without one.”
“I wouldn’t shoot you by accident,” Zoe said indignantly.
“I’d be more worried about you shooting yourself.”
Before she could protest, Slocum held up his hand to quiet her. He pointed to a steep section of the road. From the look of the tracks, the wagon had run out of control. Slocum leaned out and looked down off the brink of the road and saw a dead horse.
“The wagon brake didn’t work, or Calhoun didn’t apply it hard enough, and he ran over one of his own horses.”
“He won’t be using that team to pull the wagon back up the road,” Zoe said.
“He’ll use the remaining horse to ride out and leave everything else behind.”
“A corn husk. He’ll take the corn and leave the husk.”
Slocum motioned for her to remain on the road where she’d be out of range when the shooting started—and he knew it would. Calhoun wasn’t going to peaceably turn over the wagon and its contents. After what the outlaw had done, Slocum was going to kill him even if he tried to dicker. Molly Ibbotson might have been as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, but she was a woman and Calhoun had shot her in the back of her head. She had deserved better.
Slocum snorted. She deserved a knotted rope for the way she had killed the freight clerk, but she shouldn’t have been gunned down the way Calhoun did it.
Slocum rode to the base of the cliff, and looked back to be sure Zoe wasn’t coming to see the fight. She remained hidden around a curve in the precipitous road. Dismounting, Slocum drew his six-shooter and went the final dozen yards to see an inlet lined with trees, a finger of ocean reaching inland. The wagon was parked nearby, canted to one side because of a broken wheel. Even if Calhoun hadn’t killed a horse on the way down, this wagon had reached the end of the line without considerable repairs.
Slocum usually depended on his sense of hearing for hints that trouble brewed, but the very reason Calhoun had driven down here robbed Slocum of that. The roar of the ocean reverberated along the steep cliff walls, and the trees sucked up any small sounds that might alert him to danger. Slocum pressed his back against one cold, wet stone wall, and advanced until he reached a spot where he had a better view of the wagon.
Calhoun was nowhere to be seen, but the dynamite crate had been broken open and a few sticks removed. Try as he might, Slocum couldn’t find a bag holding fuses or blasting caps. That more than anything else made him wary. He craned his neck around and looked up toward the front of the cliff.
He stepped out, aimed, and fired three quick shots. Sid Calhoun had crouched on a shelf ten feet above him with a bundle of dynamite and a cigar already lit. The outlaw had put the coal to the fuse, which now sizzled and popped as it made its way down to the blasting cap.
Slocum dug in his toes and ran as hard as he could. He barely escaped the worst of the blast as the rock face twenty feet above Calhoun shattered from the explosion and sent out shards of stone sharper than any knife blade. Slocum staggered, took another step, and then fell headlong onto the ground as debris showered down on him. Dazed, he shook off the confusion that addled his brain, and felt hands fumbling at his arms.
He tried to swing his six-gun around and shoot, but he had dropped it. His face was a bloody mess from a dozen scratches, and dirt blinded him.
He fought the best he could. Fists swinging awkwardly, he tried to connect. Then small hands pushed against his chest hard, and he sat down hard. Through the roar in his ears, he heard Zoe’s distant voice ordering him to calm down.
“Zoe?”
“I’m here, you big idiot. He could have killed you!”
“I shot him.” As his vision cleared and he saw the woman kneeling in front of him, Slocum pieced it all together. Gunning down Calhoun hadn’t been a great idea since the man had lighted dynamite on a ledge above him, but there hadn’t been any other choice.
“You might have only caused him to drop the dynamite and then he blew himself up,” she said.
“I killed him.” Slocum groped about and found his six-gun. It felt right in his hand, as right as the bullet he had sent into Calhoun’s belly. Being a sniper during the war had allowed him to get a feel for where his lead went. Sometimes, he knew he had missed clean. Other times, it was only a nick he’d inflicted. This time he had the unshakable faith in his marksmanship. He had hit Calhoun smack dab in the belly and probably killed him outright.
He had killed Calhoun, not a dropped stick of dynamite. All the gold in the wagon wouldn’t equal the satisfaction he got from killing Sid Calhoun.
“Come on, get to your feet,” Zoe urged. “We’ve got to open the wagon. Where are the keys?”
Slocum stumbled along, and regained his balance by the time he joined her at the rear of the wagon. He let out a long, low whistle. All the way to San Francisco he had thought Colonel Turner had put the gold in a strongbox. This was a rolling bank vault.
“Your keys, John, try your keys.”
He reached for the vest pocket where he had the keys, and felt a sinking sensation when he discovered the vest had ripped away, spilling the keys. They had to be around somewhere, but finding them would take a while.
“They’re gone,” he said. “I lost them. All except this one.” He pulled out his watch and tapped the key he had put onto the watch chain. “I won this in a poker game back in St. Louis.” The key gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the trees.
“One key out of fifty?” Zoe sighed. “I’ll start looking for the others you lost.”
Slocum stepped up and thrust the key into the lock. It fit. He heard Zoe catch her breath as he turned it in the lock. A click louder than the surf and the rustling leaves above sounded. Slocum grabbed the handle on the vault door and pulled.
“John, John, we’re rich!” Zoe cried. Her excitement died when she got a better look into the vault.
It was empty.
27
“I’m still so mad I could chew nails and spit tacks,” Zoe said. She had ridden the entire way back to San Francisco muttering curses and sitting so stiffly that Slocum thought she might topple from the saddle. Her anger kept her going.
He had been surprised to find the rolling vault empty, but unlike Zoe, he wasn’t expecting to get rich. The ride back let her curse, and let him think on the matter, until he was sure he knew how to find where the gold had gone.
“It was never in the vault,” Zoe said. “He was a crook trying to dupe everyone. Why, how dare Colonel Turner try to lie to a news reporter!”
Slocum had fought to keep from laughing that she’d said such a thing. As far as he could tell, not much of what was told to a reporter was the truth, and even less of what they printed counted as being in the same county as the truth.
“We need to do some searching through the stacks of newspapers,” he told her.
“The morgue. That’s what they call it. And if I find Colonel Turner, he’ll end up in a real morgue. How dare he!”
“Think this paper’s been around long enough to build a morgue?” Slocum drew rein in front of the San Francisco Times, a hole-in-the-wall publication. Peering through the tiny window on the street allowed him to see three men struggling with a press in the rear of a single long, narrow room.
“Why not? What is it you want to find out?”
As they entered, Slocum said in a low voice, “You look for any coverage of the race and get the names of any reporters assigned to cover it. I’ll check for other stories.”
“Very well.” Zoe bustled in, spoke at length with one of the men who had been struggling with the printing press, and finally shook hands with him. She didn’t seem to mind that his hands were drenched with printer’s ink. After all, this was the profession she had chosen to follow. Slocum hung back until she led him to a smaller room stacked floor to ceiling with newspapers.