by Logan, Jake
Slocum walked forward slowly, not hurrying to spook the man but not slowing either. He stopped at the end of the bar, interposing himself between Beefsteak and the cantankerous gunman. The way he carried his shooting iron, the way he moved, how he watched Malone, all told Slocum this was a man who had no qualms about shooting down an opponent.
“Not seen you around town,” Slocum said. “You new to Grizzly Flats?”
“Git outta my way,” the man said. “This ain’t none of your business.”
“Slocum, he—” Malone started. He never got another word out.
The gunman went for his six-shooter. Slocum was faster. He stepped up and grasped the man’s brawny wrist, preventing him from drawing. The man grunted as Slocum applied more pressure. Bones began grinding in the trapped wrist as Slocum tightened down even more.
When the gunman realized he wasn’t going to outpower Slocum, he half turned and tried to knee his attacker in the groin. Slocum shifted his weight slightly, caught the knee on his outer thigh. He applied even more pressure on the man’s wrist. This brought a cry of pain to the man’s lips.
“Get out. I’d hate to bust your arm, but I will.” There was no threat in Slocum’s words, just promise.
“All right, all right.” The man pushed Slocum back with his left hand. Slocum held on just long enough to let him know this wasn’t the reason he was relaxing his grip.
Slocum stepped back, hands at his sides, elbows slightly bent. He could clear leather before the man got circulation back into his gun hand—and both of them knew it.
“This ain’t over,” the man said.
Slocum wasn’t sure who he was talking to, him or Beefsteak. It didn’t matter. The man backed away, still rubbing his right wrist, spun, and went back out into the freezing rain.
“Goddamn, Slocum, you didn’t have to do that. He didn’t mean no harm.”
Slocum looked at the saloon owner and started to ask who he had just tossed into the storm. Beefsteak turned and rushed to the far end of the bar to keep from answering. Whoever the gunman was, Malone knew him and they had a history. The barkeep wasn’t afraid of him, but he should have been. Slocum had seen enough gunfights to know when a man was ready to draw. The one he had thrown out of the Damned Shame had been a hair away from sending a slug or two into Malone’s guts.
Everyone in the saloon had fallen silent. Now they began whispering, eyes darting toward Slocum and then away if he tried to look directly at them. This would be talked about for days to come. Life was pretty dull in Grizzly Flats.
Beefsteak made a point of ignoring him, too, making Slocum even more curious. He touched his Colt Navy, then went to the swinging doors and looked out into the rain. White chunks of sleet mixed with the rain, preventing him from seeing as far as across the broad main street that meandered through the middle of town.
Slocum stepped out and knew instantly he was exposed to more than a late autumn storm. He heard boots scraping on the boardwalk to his right. Without hesitation, he half turned, hand flashing to the butt of his six-shooter. He drew, aimed, and fired just as the gunman cleared leather. Slocum’s slug ripped through the man’s belly, doubling him over. He staggered, went to one knee, and tried to raise his pistol. Slocum fired again.
The reports came as one. The man’s round went wide of Slocum’s head and was swallowed in the rain. Slocum’s cut through the brim of the man’s hat and plowed into his forehead. He toppled over. The .36-caliber bullet hadn’t gone all the way through the man’s head. Slocum knew it had rattled around, bouncing off skull bones and scrambling brains.
His thumb went to the hammer to draw it back again when Malone came running out, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. Slocum noticed the man’s composure. He wasn’t shaken up by the shooting, and his quick glance at the corpse on the boardwalk in front of his saloon showed less fear than irritation.
“You had to push him, didn’t you, Slocum?”
“He was waiting for me. I didn’t have a choice.”
“No, reckon not.” Malone took a deep breath. His barrel chest expanded and light from the gas lamps just inside the saloon reflected off his diamond stickpin. He lowered the shotgun, sucked on his gums, then said, “You get rid of the body.”
Before Slocum could ask what Beefsteak meant by that—dump the gunman in a gully and let the rain wash him away or find the town’s undertaker—Marshal Willingham came running up. Behind him trailed a deputy and a few bedraggled townspeople coming to see what the commotion was about.
“What happened?” the red-faced marshal demanded. He looked from Slocum to Beefsteak, as if whatever had happened was the saloon owner’s fault.
“Will,” Beefsteak said, “come on inside and we’ll talk it over. I told Slocum here to get rid of the body.”
“That highwayman O’Dell is on the way, I know it. Who’s gonna pay for the burial? Ain’t the town. We ain’t got money for a proper burial.”
“The potter’s field is good enough for the likes of him,” Malone said. He put his arm around the marshal’s shoulders and steered him inside.
Again Slocum wondered at the two. They weren’t friends, not exactly, but they were more than adversaries. He looked at the dead body, already accumulating an icy sheen on the legs thrust out into the sleet.
“Let me through, let me through,” a high-pitched voice demanded. A toothpick-slender man dressed in a black cloth cutaway coat and floppy-brimmed hat came up, pushing a wheelbarrow through the mud.
He lowered the handles and went to kneel beside the body. Quick fingers worked through the dead man’s pockets, turning out a few damp greenbacks, a gold watch, and nothing else.
“You O’Dell?” Slocum asked.
“Yes, I am. I’m the town undertaker, sir.” He made no move to hide the loot he had taken from the corpse. Slocum figured the undertaker was used to such robbery and probably considered it his due. If the marshal was right, this might be the undertaker’s only pay for the funeral.
“Need help getting him into your wheelbarrow?”
“That would be appreciated, especially since you seem to be the one who caused this man’s sad condition.”
Slocum grunted as he got his arms around the gunman’s body and heaved him upright. O’Dell moved the wheelbarrow forward as Slocum released his grip. The body fell neatly into the barrow. Without a word, O’Dell lifted the handles and pushed his way through the rain.
Slocum watched him vanish in the storm with his burden. As he started back into the saloon, movement caught his eye. He turned as the sheets of rain parted. He saw a woman standing in the downpour, arms around herself and shivering. The way she looked at him made a lump form in his throat. Before Slocum could say a word, she stepped away and disappeared into the storm as if she had never existed.
3
“Closing time, Slocum. Git on outta here,” Beefsteak Malone said, throwing his grimy rag onto the bar and beginning to pull his apron off from his bulging gut. “Been a hell of a night.” He laughed but without his usual boisterousness.
“Is the marshal giving you any trouble over the shooting?” Slocum watched his boss closely. A flicker of resentment crossed Malone’s face, but he hid it quickly. By the time he came around the bar, there wasn’t a trace of umbrage remaining.
“Don’t worry yourself none over Will,” he said. “He gets a bee in his bonnet now and then, but who cares about . . . a drifter?”
Slocum wondered why Malone checked what he was going to say. It didn’t matter that much. Every town had its secrets, and this isolated, has-been town was no exception. He was the drifter, coming in with his saddle slung over his shoulder and down to his last dollar. He owed the saloon owner for giving him a job, especially one out of the foul weather.
He turned up his collar as he stepped into the storm. If anything, it had grown worse. The wind drove t
he sleet at an angle, sneaking up under his hat brim. Slocum tugged it down and slogged through the muddy street, heading for the hotel a few doors down.
“See you tomorrow, Slocum. Don’t be late!”
“Won’t,” Slocum called back. “I wouldn’t miss that spread you put out at noon for anything.”
Malone laughed as he made his way into the storm. He knew Slocum’s sarcasm meant nothing. Free food was one small benefit of working in the saloon.
Slocum crossed the street and used the boot scraper outside the hotel’s front door to get as much mud off as he could. He opened and closed the door as fast as he could to keep the heat in the hotel lobby from escaping into the freezing night.
“Evening, Mr. Slocum,” the sleepy clerk said, throwing him a sloppy salute. For some reason the man thought of himself as a soldier, and Slocum was his superior. Slocum had been a captain in the CSA but wanted nothing more than to forget his service and the war.
He had been gut-shot by Bloody Bill Anderson for protesting Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, and cutting down every male over the age of eight. Quantrill had been on a mission of revenge for slaughtered prisoners, including his own brother, but that hadn’t been an excuse for killing children. Slocum had complained and been left for dead with a bullet where it caused the most pain and promised a slow death.
Slocum was tougher than even the hardened men in Quantrill’s Raiders and had survived. By the time he recuperated, Quantrill was dead and he had no way of tracking down Bill Anderson. He had returned to Slocum’s Stand in Georgia, his parents dead and his brother, Robert, killed during Pickett’s Charge on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. All he had wanted was to find peace. Instead he found a carpetbagger judge who had taken a fancy to the farm. The Reconstruction judge probably thought it would be easy to force a debilitated man like a wounded veteran off his property with a bogus unpaid tax lien.
In one respect, the judge had been right. Slocum didn’t stay on the farm. And the judge did. In a grave. Next to the gunman he had ridden out with to seize the farm. Slocum had ridden west and never again considered becoming a farmer, preferring to live by his wits and quick gun. Wanted posters for federal judge killing dogged his steps, but if he kept moving, he stayed ahead of the law.
He nodded in the night clerk’s direction. This was good enough for the young lad to smile broadly, showing a broken front tooth.
Slocum trudged up the steps to the second story, turned at the landing, and went up to the third floor. Every stair was increasingly rickety so he watched how he stepped. Halfway up to the third floor and his room, he paused and looked at the stairs. Then he looked up ahead and slipped his pistol from its holster. He wished he had reloaded, but only a round or two would be adequate.
He reached the top floor, which should have been empty. The damp spots on the stairs and the floor leading to his room warned him someone had preceded him. Stopping in front of the door, he carefully turned the ceramic doorknob, then shoved the door open. His six-shooter came up and centered on the dark figure sitting on the side of his bed.
“I’m not armed,” came a tiny voice. “I saw you kill him.”
Slocum stepped into the room and kicked the door shut with his boot heel. He was slower to holster his six-shooter. He fumbled in his vest pocket, found his tin of lucifers, and lit a coal oil lamp on the table holding a small washbasin and pitcher. The resulting soft yellow light after he trimmed the wick bathed his unexpected guest.
It was the woman he had momentarily seen standing in the storm earlier. She looked like a drowned rat. Her brown hair hung in wet strands. Her dress had seen better days, being torn as well as wet and plastered against her thin body. Slocum doubted she had been eating regularly from the way her cheeks were sunken, and her eyes had a dark, haunted look about them.
“Do you always break into strangers’ rooms?”
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t have much.” She reached down and ran her finger around something in her dress pocket. Slocum couldn’t tell what it was but it was small and round and not a hideout gun.
Somehow, he didn’t think he had anything to fear from her. If she had been the dead gunman’s lady out for revenge, she would have shot him down from ambush. Even if she had wanted to watch him crawl, have him apologize, somehow make amends for the two bullets in the gunman’s body, back shooting him was an easier road to travel. After all, she had to know how good he was with his six-shooter.
“Let’s start over,” Slocum said, perching against the washstand. His body ached and he wanted nothing more than to stretch out on the bed to get some sleep, but he felt that making her move might spook her. For some reason, he wanted to find out what her story might be.
“I saw you kill him. If you hadn’t, I would have. I would have tried,” she amended. From the set to her jaw and the way she shook all over—and not from the cold—Slocum believed her.
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
Slocum thought he was past being surprised about anything that happened around him. He was wrong.
“You don’t know who he was but you’d’ve killed him yourself? I don’t even know why he tried to gun me down.”
“Pure cussedness,” she said with a bitterness that put him on guard. “He killed my husband. Him and two other men. Or maybe there was more of ’em. Can’t rightly say.”
“Robbery?”
“Something like that.”
“He was crazy as a bedbug. He killed your husband and stole what you owned?”
“Him and others murdered my friends and Ike.”
Slocum said nothing. She worked up the courage to keep talking, and he wasn’t sure why. Something had brought her to his room, but if the man responsible for murdering her husband was dead, what she thought to get from him was a poser.
“You have a name?”
“Mirabelle,” she said. “Mirabelle Comstock.” She almost choked on the name. Slocum introduced himself and then fell silent again.
More often than not, folks spoke to fill a void. For his part, Slocum preferred silence. That was one reason he enjoyed traveling from one place to another alone, out on the range or in the mountains with only his horse and the wind as companions. Needless chatter bored him.
“There was at least three of them. I want you to find the other two that I know of.”
“I’m not a killer for hire. That owlhoot forced my hand tonight. Otherwise, I would never have paid him a second glance.”
“Then find who the other two are and I’ll do the chore.”
“This isn’t my fight. Tell the marshal.”
“He’s not reliable. I asked ’fore I came to you. Nobody in Grizzly Flats thinks much of Marshal Willingham.”
“Can’t say I’d disagree either. Then find the sheriff and tell him.”
“I don’t have any way of getting out of Grizzly Flats. I . . . I’m stuck here. Besides, where would I go? Ike was all the family I had. Him and the others were my friends.” Mirabelle looked off into the distance, focused on something beyond the wall with its peeling wallpaper. “They were Ike’s friends, but I got along all right with Cara.”
“Were you moving here? Or were you on your way to somewhere else to homestead?” The way her attention snapped back to him made Slocum wonder what the men and women had been up to.
“I can pay you.”
“You said you were flat busted, that the road agents stole everything you had.”
“They destroyed most of our gear. They didn’t even bother taking it. They raped Cara and Irene. Tortured and murdered the men. Hell, I don’t know. They might have raped them, too. They was animals what they did.”
“So how can you pay me if I was fool enough to agree?”
She ran her fingers around the small hard circles pres
sed into her dress pocket. She reared back, fumbled a mite, then pulled out two gold coins. Even in the weak light from the oil lamp the twenty-dollar gold pieces shone with an inner radiance that caught Slocum’s full attention.
“That’s enough to get you to San Francisco or Virginia City or about anywhere you’d want to go. You could live for a couple weeks, catch a stagecoach, and still have one of those twenty-dollar pieces left to help you along.”
She held out her palm. The two coins beckoned to Slocum. He took them, ran his thumbnail around the edge, and didn’t find any milling. Holding one coin close to the lamp let him examine it. The disk was worn smooth, erasing any hint of the coin’s origin. He bit down on the edge. His tooth sank into the soft metal, telling him this was gold.
“Might be lead,” he said to her. He held the coin closer to the light. Where his tooth had scored the coin showed nothing but more gold.
“It’s real, isn’t it?” She smiled at the question. They both knew the answer.
“I can’t take all you own. If it’s as you said—”
“It is!”
“—then you ought to think of this as your husband’s legacy to you. Take it and forget revenge.”
“I can’t forget. You didn’t see what them animals did. No, they was worse than animals. A beast would only kill. They tortured and then mutilated and killed.”
He tucked the two coins into his vest pocket next to his brother’s watch. That seemed appropriate. The coins were Mirabelle’s inheritance from her husband. The watch was all Robert had left him after being killed at Gettysburg.
“I don’t know where to start. How will you find them?” Mirabelle asked.
Slocum tapped the watch pocket as a thought came to him.
“Pickett’s Charge,” he said softly.
“What?”
“Picket’s Charge . . . Gettysburg . . . the attack on Cemetery Ridge . . . the cemetery.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“The undertaker took the man I killed tonight. He’ll bury him tomorrow. Might be interesting to see who shows up for the funeral.”