by Jake Logan
Holes smoldering where the sparks had ignited, he stumbled into the bedroom and looked for a door.
“There isn’t one,” Angelina called from the other side of the bed.
“Out the window. Wait, stop!” He thought only of escaping the fire that spread rapidly through the kitchen and now licked at the ceiling. In minutes—less!—the house would be nothing but charred, smoking remains. But he had forgotten whoever had flung the torch through the window.
Angelina used her case to knock out the window and started through when loud shouts from outside told Slocum his worry had been confirmed. An instant after the outcry came a hail of bullets. Again he tackled the woman and carried her to the floor as a hail of lead ripped through the air above them.
“What are we going to do?”
“Get out of here somehow,” he said, choking on the smoke. Near the floor he found it easier to breathe, but only inches higher, toward the window, he had to hold his breath or pass out from the suffocating smoke.
Worse, the gunfire through the window started up again anytime he showed himself.
“Who is it? Who’s doing this?” Angelina broke out crying again and sat, back against the wall and hugging herself.
“Let’s find out,” Slocum said. He drew his six-shooter, took Angelina’s hand, and yanked her to her feet. She grabbed her case and clutched it to her chest. More lead came their way, but Slocum returned fire. He saw where the muzzle flashes blazed in the darkness and aimed just above them. He was sure he winged at least two of the gunmen.
He shoved her out the window; Angelina tumbled over the wall and flipped around to land flat on her back, still holding her case. This saved her life again as part of the roof came crashing down in a shower of sparks. She shrieked and thrust the case upward reflexively. The debris slid to one side, leaving her unharmed. Slocum hurriedly came through the window and knelt beside her, firing at any muzzle flash he saw until his Colt Navy came up empty.
By now Angelina had regained her feet and led the way. Slocum wasn’t sure where she ran but had no choice but to follow. She started to go down into a root cellar, but he stopped her.
“We’ll be trapped there.”
“No, we won’t. Please, John, I know what I’m doing.”
Heavy gunfire forced Slocum to follow her into the storm cellar. The bullets dug holes in the heavy wood and then the closed door muffled the gunshots. Slocum clung to the rope on the door to hold it shut in the complete darkness.
“What do we do now?” he asked. Slocum looked away when the sudden flare of a lantern blinded him. Squinting, he saw her holding up the lantern.
“This way.” She paused, then said, “Can you bring my valise?”
Slocum was torn between taking the time to reload and doing as she asked since she worked hard at the far wall.
He picked up the bullet-ridden case as Angelina pried open a wood panel to reveal a low-ceilinged tunnel leading away. Slocum wasted no time following, then pulled the planks behind him to close up the passage.
“The light!” His warning alerted her to shield the light with her body.
The storm cellar echoed with repeated shots, then shouts as men dropped into the hole. Slocum pressed his eye to a knothole and caught sight of one man.
“Finch,” he said when he recognized the cowboy. He lifted his pistol and would have tried firing through the peephole but remembered in time his pistol was empty. Such an abortive attack would only draw unwanted attention. He heard Angelina moving behind him but dared not move, not yet.
“Where’d they go?”
“You just thought you seen ’em come here. There’s so damn much smoke from the house, they musta run off into the night.”
“Naw, they died in the fire. You were both seeing ghosts.”
The argument raged for almost a minute, causing Slocum to get antsy. He was usually a patient fighter, but now he wanted to attack. Only the knowledge that Angelina would also die kept him frozen in place.
“Might be another way out,” Finch said. He moved around, using his pistol butt to rap on the wood walls. Slocum held his breath as Finch moved closer. When he got to this panel, he’d hear nothing but a hollow ring and know where his victims had fled.
He stopped just inches away when another man stuck his head down and called out, “We gotta go. The weeds are catchin’ fire. We’re gonna burn if we stay.”
“Just a minute more.”
“Now,” insisted the cowboy, who disappeared.
Finch grumbled but immediately left the root cellar.
“Can we go now?” Angelina asked in a low voice.
Slocum made sure the panel would stay in place if he released it, then turned and pushed her along the tunnel. She hurried, half bent over because of the low ceiling. Slocum’s back ached by the time she stopped and pointed up to a trapdoor.
“It opens in the barn,” she said. “Michael dug the tunnel so he could get to the barn and tend the animals in case of a tornado.”
“That was right thoughty of him,” Slocum said dryly. He motioned for her to extinguish the lantern, then pushed up the trap and peered around. It took him a few seconds until his eyes adapted to the dark. Flickering light from the direction of the house caused the horses to kick at their stalls and whinny in growing fear.
Like a snake, he slithered through the small space between the ground and the lifted trapdoor. After duck-walking to the barn door and looking out, he relaxed. Finch and his men had mounted and ridden off. The glow from the burning house afforded him enough light to reload his six-shooter, then slip back into the barn, where Angelina was already saddling the horses.
“The cowboys have lit out,” he told her. She turned and stared at him, her face bleak. The light from the fire danced in her eyes.
“You recognized them, didn’t you?”
“One was Finch, the man who might have gunned down Macauley back in Abilene,” he said.
“I know him. He’s top hand at the T Bar T. He works for George Lawrence.”
Slocum made sure he repeated this over and over so it was etched into his memory. He owed Finch for the necktie party and now this despicable crime. Not only had Finch and his boys wanted to burn out Angelina, they wanted to kill her.
“What does Finch have against you? Or is it his boss?”
“Michael and Mr. Lawrence got along all right,” she said, keeping a tight grip on the skittish horse as she led it from the barn.
She and Slocum turned their horses’ faces from the dancing flames, mounted, and rode straight off into the night. He hoped they were heading in the same direction taken by Finch. A quick touch on the ebony butt of his six-shooter assured him how that encounter would turn out. He wasn’t about to give Finch a third try at killing him.
“Which way are we riding?” Angelina asked after they’d ridden more than a half hour away from her house. She looked up but clouds obscured the stars.
Slocum worked his way through the entire sky, hunting for pieces of constellations he recognized. He finally found the Scorpion in the southern sky and told her.
“Hedison is to the southwest of our—my—house,” she said. Angelina fell silent as she took in the idea that even this was denied her now. She had lost the property when her husband had been murdered, and now the house with all her belongings was gone, too.
Slocum saw that she had lashed her valise to the mare’s rump. That was her entire heritage, whatever she had packed before Finch set fire to her house.
“How far?”
“Close to twenty miles. There’s no way I can make it tonight, and my horse is starting to falter.”
“Might step in a prairie dog hole in the dark, too,” Slocum said. He wished he knew where Finch had gone. He asked Angelina where the T Bar T lay.
“It’s northeast of us. It’s not half the size of Ralston’s spread, but it’s easily twice the size of the Circle H.”
Slocum listened with half an ear. He strained to hear the night sounds. He
caught the distant howl of a coyote, but nearer came small animals running about. Insects buzzed and other noises assured him that Finch was already long gone and not waiting in ambush somewhere near.
There was no good reason for the cowboy to believe they would come this way when he wasn’t sure what had happened to them. As they rode, Slocum relaxed even more. He kept a sharp eye on the sky and saw more bits of constellations to guide them.
“There’s the Big Dipper,” he said, pointing to the north. “The sky’s clearing to the north.”
“But not to the south,” Angelina said. “That’s where storms come from this time of year. The wind blows the rain off the Gulf of Mexico.”
Slocum took a deep whiff of the night air and nodded. He smelled rain in the air. Being caught in the open during a frog strangler of a Texas storm wasn’t to his liking.
“Anywhere nearby we can take shelter?”
“There’s an old cabin somewhere around here,” she said. “It’s got a windmill tower by it. The windmill doesn’t work—Michael took the blades down to use for our own windmill, but he never got the pump working right.”
Slocum saw a starlit trail cut by hundreds of hooves over the past few months and followed it. Angelina had gone from crying to talking incessantly about what she and Michael had planned and how it would never happen now.
“There,” he said, pointing to a dark shape rising from the prairie. “A windmill tower.”
“Just in time,” she said. “I just got hit in the face with a raindrop. A big one, too. We’re in for a hard shower.”
They’d barely reached the ramshackle cabin by the time the storm hit. Angelina protested when Slocum led their horses into the small cabin, but he wanted them out of the rain, too.
“I don’t want to get stepped on in my sleep,” she said querulously. “Can’t we leave them outside?”
“In this rain?” Sheets of water cascaded from the sky, making it impossible to see more than a few feet. With the starlight blotted out, Slocum thought they had been swallowed by some looming, dark, dank beast.
“They’re animals.”
“They’re what we need to get us to Hedison,” he reminded her.
Angelina grumbled, got her blanket, and curled up in the far corner of the single-room cabin, her back to him. Slocum looked out, didn’t see anything or anyone moving in the rain, and finally sank down, back against a wall in an effort to find as dry a spot as possible. He was soaked through and through by dawn, but at least he had gotten some much-needed sleep, even if nightmares of fleeting figures and ambushes and lynchings filled his dreams.
In the morning they were both quiet, lost in their own thoughts. As if they finally locked into the other’s mind, they looked up at the same time and spoke.
“You first, John,” she said. “What is it?”
“Ride on into Hedison alone,” he said. “I want to scout for the cowboys that burned you out.”
“To make sure they’re not following us?”
“They can’t know,” he said, “that we escaped the fire. This makes it easier for me to do something about them.”
“You’re not talking about turning them over to the marshal, are you?” She shivered. Just a little. Her blue eyes appeared dull now, their luster gone because of all she had endured.
“There’s no evidence against them,” Slocum said. “One would alibi for the other.”
“You might go to the T Bar T and tell Mr. Lawrence what his men have done.”
“That’s not going to work if Lawrence told them to do it. You said that the land was more valuable to him than it would have been to Ralston. Might be, Lawrence is behind everything.”
“Including Michael’s death?” She shook her head. “Barnett had the knife.”
“He was a dupe. Somebody planted the knife in his gear when they found out the doctor kept the knife tip buried in your husband.”
Slocum saw tears welling in Angelina’s eyes and knew he had been too straightforward, but he wasn’t the kind to put a spoonful of sugar on anything like death. It ought to be cruel and terrible to remind everyone how fragile life was and to hang on as hard as you could. Make dying too easy and people got careless.
“Let them go,” she said. “I need to get over Michael’s death, and seeing Finch and the others strung up or shot down isn’t going to bring him back. It won’t bring back my house and everything in it. That… that was the last thread I had holding me to him. All we’d done together, it’s all lost now.”
“You have your memories,” Slocum said. “Those are more powerful than any chair or table or picture.”
“I suppose you’re right. It just doesn’t seem like that now.” She looked at him hard and the tears began to flow. She let them dribble down her cheeks before looking away. “Let’s hurry, John. The sooner I’m in Hedison, the sooner I can see the ranch sold and you can be on your way.”
He said nothing to her as he packed up their gear, saddled, and the two of them rode in silence.
13
“You going to stay here or move on?” Slocum asked. It was the first time he had spoken in more than an hour. There didn’t seem to be much else to say to Angelina. She certainly had nothing to say to him—nothing that would have convinced him to stay with her.
Slocum thought she was a beautiful woman, but she wasn’t thinking straight this soon after her husband’s death and getting burned out by Finch and his men. Too much had been heaped on her. She needed time to sort through it all and decide what her life ought to be like. In a month or a year. Slocum knew there wasn’t any set number of days for the shock and sadness to fade away. He still felt some sorrow at his brother’s death and the way his parents had died before he could get back to Slocum’s Stand in Calhoun, Georgia, after the war.
He felt the sadness, but it didn’t make him wake in the night, sobbing, the way Angelina’s sorrow did her. If they had met earlier or maybe if their trails crossed again in a year, things would be different. Slocum didn’t want to play savior to anyone, even a woman as lovely as Angelina Holman.
She looked down from the low hill at Hedison. Her expression was neutral, but her shoulders were tense, giving him the answer. She was still too near her ranch and all that had happened there to be comfortable here.
“Might,” she said at length. “Is there a lawyer in town to handle the sale? Michael never cottoned much to bankers. Didn’t have anything to say one way or the other about lawyers.”
“Lawyers are like cockroaches. They’re everywhere. You shine some light under a basket and hint that there’s money to be had selling a ranch and they’ll line up from here to Abilene.”
“One lawyer will do me.”
“There’s got to be one,” he assured her.
They rode down the hillside and to the road splitting Hedison in half. There were a few streets parallel to the main one but damned few. Abilene was a cattle town and catered to the hordes of cowboys off the surrounding ranches. Hedison survived from a few ranches but probably more from farmers. This would be a quieter town, one without the gunfire and sudden death offered by Abilene.
As they rode, Slocum felt the eyes of the townspeople on them. He doubted they were staring at him as much as they were at Angelina and wondering what brought her there. Slocum was obviously a drifter, but she looked the part of a ranch wife.
“Howdy, folks,” said a small, wiry man who stepped out into the street in front of them. The badge on his vest told the story. “Welcome to Hedison.”
“Marshal,” Slocum greeted. “Just the man we wanted to find.”
“Now how’s that?” The lawman turned slightly, as if preparing to throw down on Slocum. “You got reason to seek me out?”
“Not you personally. Just the town marshal. This is Mrs. Holman, and her husband died recently. She wants to sell the Circle H ranch and needs somebody to represent her legally.”
“We got a couple lawyers. Neither’s worth the gunpowder to blow ’em to hell. Don’t take
offense at such blue language, ma’am,” the marshal said. His attitude toward her changed subtly when Slocum had declared her to be a grieving widow. In every small town it was the same. If you were a loose cannon, you were suspect. If you could be placed in a box, neatly labeled, and placed on the shelf in an appropriate spot, everything was just fine.
“Which is the best of the sorry lot, Marshal?” Angelina asked.
“That’d be Lee Dawson, and I’m not sayin’ that just ’cuz he’s my sister’s oldest. He hasn’t screwed up as many cases as Tom Underwood. He’s not as much of a drunk either. Not so far, though Lee has been known to tipple a bit too much on Saturday night over at the saloon.”
“You make them both sound so appealing,” Angelina said, smiling.
“Just tellin’ it like it is. Circle H?” The marshal scratched the back of his neck. “That’s closer to Abilene than here, ain’t it?”
“Mrs. Holman found too many memories in Abilene and wanted to make a clean break.”
“How’s that?”
“Her husband is buried there. Everything in town reminds her of better days,” Slocum said. He saw Angelina turned glum as he furnished the reasons the marshal might believe and knew he was hitting the bull’s-eye one after the other. He made no mention of Finch and how the T Bar T boys had burned her out.
“You’ll want to find a place to stay?” The marshal looked hard at Slocum.
“I can sleep in the livery stable, but Mrs. Holman would be better served at a hotel or boardinghouse.”
“Elena Gomez runs a nice place on the far side of town. Heard tell she has a room for let.”
“Much obliged, Marshal.”
“Marshal Hooker. No relation to the damned Federal general.”
“Glad to hear it,” Slocum said, getting a smile from the lawman. The smoother things went now, the quicker he could be on his way out of town. San Antonio beckoned. Or perhaps El Paso. He had been on his way there when he stopped over in Abilene. Adobe Walls lay to the north, but it would take a powerful lot of riding before he found another town, and for some reason he found himself wanting people around. Not many, but some.