Slocum and the Meddler

by Jake Logan

  But he would live. And he’d find out what he had blundered into the middle of.

  “How’d you come to get involved?” a man asked. He dropped a large satchel, opened it, and took out diabolical-looking medical instruments.

  “You the vet?”

  “None better,” the man said. He fumbled about inside and pulled out scissors. In seconds he had a large patch of Slocum’s vest and shirt cut away. With a gentle touch that no human doctor ever shared, he peeled back the blood-soaked fabric and began tending the cut itself. “You’re going to need a few stitches.”

  “Do it,” Slocum said.

  “Get him out of the sun.” The vet looked down at Slocum. “That’s not to make you more comfortable. No way you can be comfortable with that cut. It’s because the sun reflects off my suturing needle. You want some whiskey? I can send for it, but I’ll have to charge you extra.”

  “Stitch me up,” Slocum said. He winced as the carbolic acid burned away at the wound, but it was numb by the time the vet began sewing.

  “I’ll close it up with more sutures than I need so you won’t have a scar, though that doesn’t look like much of a concern.” The veterinarian ran his hand over Slocum’s side, fingers tracing out several existing scars.

  “You done?”

  “There,” the vet said, snipping off the thread. “You’ll be good as new in a week. Sooner, if you don’t ride or do anything to tear open the cut.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  The vet looked at him thoughtfully, then said, “I’ll put it on your bill. You’ve got the look of a man who might qualify for a discount because of quantity.” He closed his valise, talked to Marshal Hooker, then sauntered away as if nothing had happened.

  Slocum sat in the shade, his side aching now rather than hurting. He tossed aside his shirt and vest. No amount of cleaning or sewing would repair them.

  “John, I heard the commotion. I should have known you’d be in the middle of it. Were you trying to be the hero again?” Angelina stopped and stared at his bare chest. Blood still smeared his side and the wound was beginning to pucker around the stitches. “Are you all right?”

  “Been better,” he said.

  He got to his feet and went to the marshal. Hooker held the two farmers apart, stiff-arming them both. They snarled and hissed and spat like a pair of fighting tomcats.

  “You two cool off, or I’ll throw you both in the clink,” Hooker said. This hardly settled them.

  Slocum took care of the matter. He swung a roundhouse that doubled over one farmer. He recovered his balance and sent a flurry of jabs into the other’s midsection, dropping him to his knees and holding his gut.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Slocum. Now I got to run you in for disturbin’ the peace.” The marshal wilted under Slocum’s glare. “Might be this was self-defense, you gettin’ stabbed and all.”

  Slocum grabbed one of the men by the collar and pulled him up until their faces were only inches apart.

  “What started the fight?”

  “He’s been lyin’ ’bout me!”

  “How do you know?” Slocum asked. He shook the man like a terrier would a rat trapped in its jaws.

  “I was told, that’s how. How do you think I’d know?”

  “Who? Who told you he’s been spreading lies about you?”

  “That gimpy little wart. The one what came to town a month or two back and showed up again a couple days ago.”

  Slocum heaved, sending the man to the ground. The other was fighting to regain his breath.

  “You know Herk?” he asked this farmer.

  “That little fella? I seen him around. Not so much after I tossed him out on his ass when he came sniffin’ ’round my wife a month back.”

  Slocum let him go and turned to the marshal. He fought to keep his anger in check as he said, “The cause of all this is the man calling himself Herk. I don’t know what that’s short for. Maybe nothing. He gets men drunk and then watches them fight. He spreads rumors and outright lies. This is what he wants.”

  “Why? Just because Luke chased him off a month back?” Marshal Hooker looked confused at the sudden turn of events.

  “That might be all, but I suspect he enjoys watching men fight and die. It makes him feel big to be in control—and they don’t know it. He’s the finger on the trigger but never the bullet.”

  “Can’t arrest a man for talkin’,” Hooker said.

  “Might be he was the one who convinced the two they ought to rob the bank. Talk to your prisoner real good and find out. He said somebody set it up for them, and they couldn’t refuse because they thought there was a thousand dollars in the bank.”

  “How come they’d ever believe someone like Herk?”

  “Because he liquored up the teller and convinced him it was a joke on those two. A teller spills his guts that there’s a fortune in a small-town bank, no guards, not much of a vault, and even a man used to robbing banks would listen. Two drifters who’d never robbed anything other than a candy jar in a store when they were kids would believe that story.”

  Hooker went on to protest, but Slocum paid him no attention. He tried to fit everything together that had happened to him. Angelina said her husband and Herk had argued. Herk had a penchant for lovely ladies, or so it seemed, and a bigger one for causing trouble for their menfolk. Slocum had to wonder about Macauley getting gunned down.

  That had all the earmarks of what he thought Herk did. Somebody passed along to the cowboy that his wife was cheating. Might have been, Herk picked a hotel room number at random. But did he get Finch to gun Macauley down, or did he do it himself just for the thrill of the confusion it caused? Slocum had seen the glint in Herk’s eyes when he saw men fighting. He was like a drunk with a new bottle of rye whiskey as he listened to how the bank robber had been gunned down.

  Confusion, yes, but more. Fights, deadly ones, and even murder all seemed to thrill Herk.

  And Slocum had no way of proving any of it. Who’d believe a man with a game leg could get around that much?

  “You need to get out of the sun,” Angelina said, taking his arm and pulling insistently.

  Slocum looked around before he let her lead him away. He had the eerie sensation of being watched—and he knew it was Herk. It had always been Herk, but how had he managed to move so fast, so agilely?

  “Did you ever talk to him? Herk?”

  “Not really. When he came by that one time, he only spoke to Michael. Argued with him.”

  “Did your husband know Macauley? Or Finch?”

  “I suppose he did. I know he and the marshal were friends. He always called him Willie. Well, maybe not friends, but they knew each other well enough to be on first names.”

  “Trying to figure out where all the strands go of the web Herk is spinning is too hard,” Slocum said. His side ached more by the minute, and he was getting a little woozy. He had felt this way before so it wasn’t anything that worried him unduly. When Bloody Bill Anderson had shot him in the belly and left him for dead on William Quantrill’s orders, he had felt much worse. It had taken months to recover. This was hardly a scratch compared to that wound.

  “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” she said. “So what if he is a Paul Pry and sticks his nose everywhere? That doesn’t make him a killer.”

  “He’s worse. He’s like a vulture. Never kills anything himself but is always there when something dies. He feasts off the misery of others. The difference is the buzzard doesn’t help matters along by lying to the rabbit about the location of a watering hole or telling a blacksnake that an owl is its best friend.”

  “This is shock from your wound making you talk this way. Come along. I will see if there isn’t a spare bed or cot where you can lie down. Señora Gomez might even let you stay in my bed.”

  “But not for long,” Slocum said.

  “Not overnight. She is a very religious lady, and she has children.”

  They went to the Gomez boardinghous
e but all the señora would allow, in spite of Slocum’s wound, was to bed down in the barn. That was plenty good enough for him.

  Señora Gomez fussed over him even as she chased Angelina out to go find her lawyer.

  “You rest. I have water for you here,” the woman said. “Would you like food? I can prepare another place at dinner.”

  “That’s all right. Just give me a place to stretch out,” Slocum said. He heard the charity in Señora Gomez’s offer but also the strain it would place on her family feeding another, even for one meal.

  “If there is anything, ask,” Señora Gomez said.

  “One thing,” Slocum said as she turned to go. “A man with a bad leg. Did he try to rent a room from you?”

  She looked at him curiously before answering.

  “How is it you know this? Sí, such a man did ask a week ago.”

  “But you didn’t rent him a room. You couldn’t have or there wouldn’t have been one for Angelina—Mrs. Holman.”

  “He made me uneasy, but I found him a place. It is not as nice as my house, but it suited him.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “An old house on the far side of town, east toward Abilene. The Edson family lived there for many years but all died of food poisoning.” The disdain in her voice told Slocum she blamed the adults in the family for the sickness. “It is not a place filled with disease. Not like plague, but no one wanted to stay there.”

  “So he might be staying without paying anyone?”

  “That is so,” Señora Gomez said. “There is no one to pay rent to.” She pointed to the pallet on the straw she had laid out.

  Slocum dutifully stretched out, wincing only a little as his tense muscles began to relax. By the time the woman had left the barn, he was almost asleep.

  Almost.

  Herk kept haunting him, the left leg dragging behind—or was it the right? Slocum painfully sat up and concentrated. Which leg did Herk favor? He couldn’t remember, and that bothered him because he had seen the man hobbling about often enough.

  “East of town,” he said softly. “East in an old house.”

  Gripping a broken board in the stall, he levered himself to his feet. A moment of giddiness passed and he left the barn, taking care not to be seen. Señora Gomez was not one to anger by rejecting her hospitality, but Slocum had to find out what he could about Herk. The man had mysteriously appeared at the damnedest times.

  And the shadow he almost saw from the corner of his eye too many times. It had moved faster than a crippled man ever could, but which leg had Herk injured?

  Slocum retrieved his horse, mounted, and rode slowly through town. He kept a wary eye out for Herk, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Before he reached the outskirts of Hedison, Slocum checked his six-shooter to be sure it was loaded. There was no telling what trouble he’d ride into if Herk was at his home.

  He rode for another ten minutes before seeing a weathered, knocked-over sign proclaiming edson residence. The small road shooting straight back to the ramshackle house afforded no cover. The prairie was flat, and he would have to wait until sundown if he wanted to approach the house without being seen.

  He rode directly to the house.

  A quick circuit showed where a horse had been tethered, but the animal was gone. Feeling luckier than he had recently, Slocum dismounted gingerly, favoring his side. It had stopped aching and now filled his entire body with a throbbing like a tooth going bad. As long as he didn’t outright hurt, he could draw his six-shooter in a flash.

  He went up the three steps onto the porch. Two of the risers were missing and one step had broken through, rotted in spite of the dry air. He pressed his ear against the door and listened for any sound inside. Only the faint creaking of the house responding to his weight on the front porch and the soughing of wind through cracks in the walls could be heard. The doorknob felt cool to his touch. Slowly turning, he waited for some reaction from inside.

  He flung the door open, hand resting on his six-gun. Only the wind disturbed the quiet interior. The Edsons had died fast, or so Slocum guessed. It was as if they had simply left one day and never come back. The rocking chair in the far side of the room had knitting on the seat, everything thick with dust. Two plates had been set out on the table, but there wasn’t any silverware. Slocum poked around and found another plate that had been used recently, wiped clean, and then placed beside the woodstove.

  A cast iron pot sat atop the stove. Some wood had been stacked beside the potbellied Franklin along with a bucket of water. With the wind and heat, that water would have evaporated in a day. That meant Herk had been here recently, maybe sleeping until daybreak and then going into town in time to lie about one farmer to another and see the fireworks.

  Slocum touched the long, shallow knife cut on his side. He might have died from that. And then another memory returned, one he had forgotten because of the fight and his injury. A hand had rested between his shoulder blades an instant before he stumbled into the middle of the fight. He had been pushed.

  He continued to prowl around the room. A pile of newspaper pages carried recent dates. Slocum touched one page and was surprised when he found the ink smeared. Pushing the sheets around, he couldn’t figure out what newspapers the pages had been taken from. He remembered that the Hedison Gazette was a weekly paper. The pages might have been taken from it, but the articles dealt with goings-on in Abilene.

  Slocum held one page out and saw where a single article had been clipped out. From context he couldn’t tell what it was. He tossed aside the paper and continued to hunt—but for what? He wasn’t sure but would know when he found it.

  His search finally brought him around to the bed, where an old Army-issue blanket had been tossed on top of the mattress. He peeled back the blanket and saw a large book. He picked it up and recognized a family album. But instead of pictures, the pages had newspaper clippings pasted on them. Holding the album up to the light, Slocum tried to read the first article, but the ink had faded and the paper had long since turned yellow.

  Flipping through, he discovered more recent clippings. As he read them, he grew angrier by the minute. On the last page, he found the article from the Hedison Gazette about how Marshal Hooker’s posse had gunned down one bank robber and brought back his partner.

  Each of the clippings was about a death, a murder, or some other crime. Slocum started to toss the album down when he saw faint markings in the margins. He thrust the page out into bright sunlight and saw the penciled notations. If Herk had been there when he finished deciphering the crabbed writing, he would have shot him down without a second thought.

  Beside each clipping Herk had written comments about how excited or disappointed he was in the death. One man had been sent to prison for three years. Herk had hoped to see him lynched.

  The notes led Slocum to believe that Herk had instigated the crimes described in each article. Slocum had all the proof he needed to be sure Herk deserved to die for the crimes he had provoked. But it wasn’t legal proof. He was convinced, but a judge would dismiss any charges because of a lack of solid evidence.

  Slocum stomped from the house, not sure how he’d stop Herk but positive that he would.

  18

  Slocum stepped out of the shack and looked around, squinting in the blazing sun. He had a prickly feeling that he was being watched. The only one likely to be out here and intent on him was Herk, but Slocum couldn’t find a place where the man might be hiding. He walked around a bit, hunting for a hidey-hole or somewhere that Herk could squeeze his small frame into, but he found nothing.

  Slocum rode back to town, feeling a bit woozy. He wanted to ask some questions and find out what the people in Hedison knew of Herk, but he was almost falling out of the saddle. He headed back to the Gomez house and dismounted, expecting to be caught and scolded like a wayward schoolboy. Wherever everyone was, they weren’t watching for him. He went into the barn and sank to the pallet. The outline of his body from when he had lain here bef
ore was still impressed into the blanket. He fitted himself into that outline again and expected to rest for a moment.

  When he came awake, it was dark. He panicked, thinking he had gone blind. Then he settled down and realized the sun had set. The cool breeze blowing through the open door assured him that he had slept most of the day. Carefully stretching, he found that he was stiff and a bit sore but otherwise in good shape. He stood, his legs stronger now than they had been earlier when he had gone hunting for Herk’s lair.

  The house was dark and nobody answered when he rapped on the door. Slocum rode back into town. The saloons were booming now. He tried to remember if it was Saturday night again. The days had slipped away from him, and the entire day spent sleeping had done nothing to let him figure out what day of the week it actually was.

  He grinned crookedly. Not having to be at work at a specified time or day robbed him of his sense of the day of the week. It felt good not having to be tied down even that much. Working a ranch, there was never a break in the week except Sunday church services. Otherwise, one day followed another and looked no different.

  Finding a spot to hitch his horse, he went into the saloon. It was packed to the walls, the barkeep working to keep the beer mugs full and the pallid woman, Clara, doing what she could to pour whiskey and make small talk with the customers. He settled down with his back to a wall. Eventually Clara made it to him.

  “Whiskey?”

  “Give me a beer,” Slocum said. He was running short of money. Better to pay a nickel for a beer than a dime for a shot of the whiskey.

  She turned and floated away like a ghost on the wind. Slocum leaned back and discovered he was still tired. His eyelids drooped, only to pop open when a commotion at the door awakened him.

  “You little snot,” bellowed a man the size of a mountain. As he moved into the saloon, Slocum decided he was closer to being the size of a mountain range. He held a farmer by the front of his shirt and lifted him up on his toes. “You don’t say nuthin’ to Big Bill Bozeman. You unnerstand?”