Slocum and the Meddler

by Jake Logan

  “Yes, M-Mr. Bozeman!”

  The huge man flung his captive across the room, knocking over two others.

  “I said you don’t speak to me. And you did.” He growled like a grizzly and lumbered toward the hapless farmer.

  “What kin I git you?” Clara asked. She interposed her slip of a body between Bozeman and the prone farmer. “You look like the kind who can hold his liquor, so I bet you want whiskey. The rougher the better.”

  “Yeah, I don’t want none of that sissy smooth stuff. I want it to taste like sandpaper goin’ down.”

  “Come on over, try the house special. It’s got nitric acid in it. Don’t reckon anybody else here’s man enough for a drink with such a mule’s kick.”

  Slocum approved of the way Clara maneuvered the huge man and got him to forget about beating up on the farmer, whose only crime was trying to leave as Bozeman entered. She was worth whatever she was getting paid if she could keep the peace within the saloon walls like she had just done. Knocking back the last of his beer, Slocum made his way through the crowd and stepped out into cool night.

  He looked around, expecting to see Herk. But the small man had made himself scarce. Slocum doubted he had moved on, though Herk seemed to spend a lot of time going between Hedison and Abilene, plying his vicious rumors so he could watch the deadly results.

  “John! John!”

  He turned to see a flustered Angelina hurrying toward him, waving a paper in her hand.

  “Have you seen this?” She thrust out the newspaper until he took it from her.

  “Haven’t paid attention to the local news. What’s got you het up?”

  “This!”

  He held up the paper so he could read in the light coming over his shoulder from the saloon. The print was smeary and small, but his anger mounted as he worked his way down the front page of the Hedison Gazette.

  When he’d finished, he stepped closer to the light and read the article again.

  “That… that man can’t say things like that about me. About us!”

  “Doesn’t bother me what others call me. A pimp is about the least of what some have said about me over the years, but calling you a ‘traveling whore’ and a ‘two-bit soiled dove’ is libel.”

  “Libel. Yes, that’s the word! I wasn’t able to get a lawyer to handle the sale of the ranch because both of them in town said it would tarnish their reputation representing me!”

  “Why’d the editor print this?” Slocum folded the paper and tucked it under his arm. The pressure of his arm against his wounded side gave him a different kind of pain now, but his outrage that any newsman would print such lies about Angelina pained him more.

  “Let’s find out,” Slocum said.

  “He can’t print tripe like that. He can’t.” She was close to tears.

  Hedison wasn’t so large that Slocum couldn’t find the small newspaper office in a few minutes. A single coal oil lamp burned inside. He heard mechanical clanking, telling him a new edition of the Gazette was being printed.

  He tried the door, but it was locked. He rapped loudly but got no response.

  “Wait here. I’ll see if there’s a back door.”

  As he rounded the small building, his hand flashed to his six-gun. An indistinct form moved away at great speed, a shadow blending into a shadow. The man had left the rear door ajar so that a tiny sliver of light dribbled out onto the ground. Slocum started after the fleeing man, then stopped and pushed open the door to the newspaper’s storage room. The smell of printer’s ink and newsprint made his nostrils flare. He stepped inside, moving carefully through the haphazard stacks of supplies.

  Another door led into the print room. A portly man with an ink-stained apron worked to place every sheet of paper, then screw down the printing plate before peeling back the freshly printed newspaper.

  “You the editor?”

  The man spun about, then scowled.

  “You made me smear the page. Takes forever to dry. I need some of that fast-drying ink they use over in Abilene, but it costs an arm and a leg. Who the hell are you?”

  Slocum walked through the print room and opened the front door to let Angelina in. He turned to face the editor.

  “I’m the man you lied about, and this is the woman you’re trying to ruin. Care to explain?” Slocum held out the newspaper Angelina had given him.

  “I don’t know you. Either of you.”

  “That didn’t keep you from writing terrible things about me. About us!” Angelina stepped forward. “Those were all lies, every last column inch of it.”

  “Column inch?” The editor looked hard at her. Slocum didn’t see the lust in the editor’s eyes that most men showed when they looked at Angelina. Instead, there was an appraisal that went to what she said. “You know about the newspaper business?”

  “I know you print terrible typographical errors… in addition to the lies!”

  “You found mistakes? I copyedit my own work!”

  “Forget that,” Slocum said. “Your paper will get Mrs. Holman run out of town on a rail—and she hasn’t done anything, much less the things you accuse her of.”

  “I have proof. I never print a word that isn’t backed up with solid facts!”

  “What proof do you have that I’m a pimp? That Mrs. Holman is ‘a Cyprian who goes from town to town pleasuring the lower class of males?’ I think I got that line right.” Slocum didn’t bother looking at the page. He balled up the newspaper and tossed it into the corner, where an already tall stack of discarded sheets threatened to topple over.

  “You’re Slocum?” The editor thrust out his chest and puffed himself up. “I’m not afraid of you!”

  “You ought to be!” Angelina blurted out. “He’s the one who caught the bank robbers. Shot one and tracked down the other one for the marshal.”

  “That’s not what Marshal Hooker said. And Boyd shot the bank robber.”

  “Boyd?”

  “The bartender. If you’d been there, you would have known.”

  “Never heard his name before, but if you press Boyd about it, his story might change. And the marshal’s up for reelection, so he’d claim he caught the other robber. Fact is, he was the only lawman in the posse since he didn’t deputize any of us.”

  “He didn’t? That’d mean what Boyd did might have been manslaughter, not being a lawful deputy trying to arrest a bank robber.”

  “I am not a whore!” Angelina suddenly shrieked at the top of her lungs, silencing the two men. Tears running down her cheeks, she balled her fists at her sides and stamped her foot like a bull getting ready to charge.

  “Got proof you are, though you don’t have the look.”

  “Not like Clara, over at the saloon?” Slocum said.

  “She does have the look of dipping into drugs a bit more than most,” the editor said.

  “Why not write that… that tripe about her?” Angelina still sputtered in her anger.

  “Because I got proof you’re a whore.” His words were defiant, but Slocum heard some doubt creeping in. Angelina wasn’t acting like a soiled dove. If anything, such a woman would revel in the publicity for the attention it would bring her.

  “What is it?” Slocum kept his tone level.

  “You’re Slocum? And you’re Mrs. Holman, of course. Yes, of course.”

  “And you’re Josiah Hightower,” Angelina said.

  She had paid more attention to the details of the article than Slocum had. Putting a name to your enemy helped keep the fight in perspective. He silently applauded her for such keen observation.

  “I am. It’s irregular for you to come to my office. I have a paper to get out.”

  “Your next edition will carry a full retraction and an apology,” Angelina said. “I will accept no less.”

  “Here, look at these,” Hightower said, pulling out a folder crammed with newspaper clippings. “I am merely reporting what has already been stated in other papers. Why, here’s a damning piece from the Abilene paper.” He he
ld out a long strip cut from a newspaper.

  Angelina snatched it from him and read down.

  “Why, this is all lies, too.”

  “Is it from another newspaper?” Slocum asked. “Or is it a fake article?”

  “It’s from another paper. How can it be fake?”

  “You have a telegraph here in town. Find out. Wire the editor over in Abilene.”

  Hightower looked at Slocum strangely and finally said, “Why do you think it’s a fake?”

  “None of that ever happened, that’s why,” Angelina broke in. She subsided when Slocum shot her a silencing look.

  “She’s right. More than that, the paper is brand spanking new. Is the ink even dry?”

  “What’s that—oh, it’s supposed to be six months old.” Hightower ran his fingers over the paper, then held it up and crinkled it. “Not newsprint either. A better paper than any frugal publisher would use. How do you know these things?”

  “I found a book filled with clippings. I thought they might be souvenirs, but then it came to me they were all fairly new. Dates were wrong for the paper and ink. I’ve seen what a newspaper looks like after being in the sun for a day. These were kept nice and purty.”

  “You mean the articles are all lies?”

  “Wire the editors of the papers those clippings supposedly came from. I know what you’ll find. And it’s all lies about Mrs. Holman and me.”

  “You wouldn’t ask me to send those ’grams if a one of these came back true, would you? No, you wouldn’t run a bluff like that ’cuz you know I’ll do that very thing!”

  “I—we—want a full front page retraction,” Angelina said.

  “Don’t much care,” Slocum cut in, “what you say about me but the lady’s reputation is at stake.”

  “And I want to copyedit the page to be sure you don’t put in those terrible misspellings again.”

  “You ever work at a paper?” Hightower asked.

  “Why, no, but I’m asking to clear my name.”

  “I need somebody who can go over the stories and make sure my English is intact and the words are spelled right. You need a job—provided I get back telegrams saying none of what I’d been shown is right?”

  Angelina looked at Slocum, then said, eyes wide and sparkling, “I would love to work for you, Mr. Hightower.”

  “Call me Josiah, or if you want to be more formal, call me Editor Hightower. I’d like that. Never had an assistant before.”

  “Senior editor,” Angelina said. “Perhaps I can even write a story or two.” Seeing his reaction, she said, “It’s not unheard of having a woman reporter. Why, in Saint Louis they—”

  Slocum left the two of them discussing the news trade. He slipped into the street and looked around. Asking Hightower to describe the man who had given him the bogus newspaper clippings wasn’t necessary.

  It had to be Herk. And Slocum needed to do something about him. Soon.

  19

  The house was empty. Slocum poked around using the barrel of his Colt Navy to push aside debris, but nothing he had seen before that he identified as belonging to Herk was to be found.

  Herk had moved on.

  Slocum sat on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out where the gimpy little son of a bitch would run. The only place that made any sense was back to Abilene. Herk bounced around like a child’s ball, from one town to another, spewing his lies and making a passel of trouble for whoever suited him. Slocum wondered if he had been chosen for a reason or if it had all begun with Macauley’s death. Herk had poured the poisonous lies into the cowboy’s ear and picked a hotel room at random. Slocum happened to be in the room, innocent of everything boiling around him.

  The best Slocum could figure, Herk had actually shot Macauley down—whether to watch him die or to add more fuel to the flames hardly mattered. Macauley was dead, and Slocum was swept up in a flood of lies and death that got worse by the day.

  He knew that Hightower would get back the truth when his telegrams were answered, but how had Herk gotten the clippings so specifically damning Slocum and Angelina if he hadn’t written and printed them himself?

  “Abilene,” he said under his breath. There were a couple newspapers there. Herk could have set the type and printed the bogus sheet himself after breaking into either of them—or even both after the editorial staff had left for the night. He might have done up an entire page, then cut the articles apart and made them look as if they’d come from different newspapers. The man was nothing if not cunning.

  Slocum had to keep telling himself that Herk was also very dangerous. He didn’t have to pull the trigger; all he needed to do was make someone else believe the lies and they would do the killing for him.

  For his sick pleasure.

  Slocum stood and started to leave when something shiny caught his eye. A knife lay half-hidden under a chair. He picked it up and had a curious sense of having held it once before. Turning it over and over in his hand, he was slow to remember where he had seen it before.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He slid the knife into the top of his boot when he heard scraping sounds outside.

  Slocum knew better than to rush out, even with his six-shooter drawn. The sound was likely to be a lure for a trap. He stepped back, looked up, and saw a hole in the ceiling. With a jump, he caught the edge of the hole, winced at the pain this caused in his side, then pulled himself up and into an attic. The roof was only inches above him as he crawled along, but he soon came to a ventilation hole he could peer from.

  Crouched below him, a pistol in each hand, Big Bill Bozeman waited impatiently for his quarry to pop out the front door. If Slocum had gone out to investigate the noise, Bozeman would have opened up with both six-shooters.

  A million thoughts raced through his head. Bozeman might be hunting for Herk. Somewhere, somehow, Herk had made a misstep and had a reward levied on him. But a bruiser the size and ferocity of the bounty hunter wouldn’t consider gunning down a man with a game leg who hardly came to his shoulder. If he brought back quarry like that, he would become a laughingstock. From what Slocum had seen in the saloon, Bozeman wouldn’t tolerate any disrespect, much less mockery.

  He wasn’t after Herk. He was after John Slocum.

  A coldness settled on him when he remembered Herk’s warning that a bounty hunter was on his trail. Slocum had brushed it off, but this had to be another of Herk’s deadly schemes. He might have sent for the bounty hunter immediately after alerting Slocum.

  Looking down, he saw no quick and easy way to escape. It would have been an easy shot from Slocum’s vantage. He could put a bullet smack on the top of Bozeman’s head, and the bounty hunter would be dead before he hit the ground. Even if he had a skull like a grizzly bear, he would be very, very dead at this range.

  Slocum considered a parley if Bozeman was on someone else’s trail, but he didn’t think the bounty hunter was the talking kind after the fight back at the saloon.

  Before he could consider another course of action, Bozeman shot to his feet, ran to the front door, and kicked it in with a sound like a gunshot. The bounty hunter roared and went stomping through the house. Slocum had heard quieter wild horse stampedes. A few shots tore through the ceiling behind Slocum, but he didn’t budge. Bozeman vented his wrath at not finding his quarry, nothing more.

  In a minute, the bounty hunter stomped from the house and looked around. Slocum held his breath when Bozeman spotted Slocum’s gelding out by the barn. The huge man laid a gentle hand on the horse’s neck, then looked around with a gimlet stare. Slocum lay still, watching intently. He had to shoot it out if Bozeman took his horse, but that would be horse thieving and Slocum would be within his rights to keep his own property.

  To his surprise, Bozeman laughed harshly, then strutted away. He thrust the two six-guns into his broad leather belt and vanished into a ravine. Slocum heard a horse galloping off shortly after.

  He caught the edge of the opening, turned himself about, and dropped feet first to the
ground. The impact sent a jolt of fresh pain into his side, but he ignored it. Bozeman had something in mind, and Slocum wanted to find what it was. He thought of the bounty hunter as a thread in a bigger tapestry. Tug a little on this thread, and he might trace back to the design Herk was weaving.

  Herk had to have done something wrong that a marshal would find illegal.

  Trailing the giant bounty hunter wasn’t too difficult. His horse tired after a few miles, letting Slocum close the gap between them. He still hadn’t figured out what he was going to do when he lost the trail.

  One instant it was as plain as the nose on his face. The next it disappeared like smoke in a high wind. Slocum circled the area, trying to understand how he had lost the trail so quickly. After twenty minutes he had no idea. Bozeman must have known he was being followed and done something to throw his tracker off. What that was, Slocum was at a loss to say.

  He sat and considered what the bounty hunter might do, then coldly considered everything he knew. Herk wasn’t the bounty hunter’s victim; he was. Slocum knew that Bozeman had recognized his horse outside the barn and must have decided to lure his prey to him rather than continue hunting and maybe catch a bullet in the gut.

  Slocum was sorry he hadn’t shot the man in the head when he’d had the chance, because the only bait that was sure to draw Slocum was back in Hedison.

  Angelina Holman was in danger from the bounty hunter.

  Slocum put his heels to his horse’s flanks and galloped across the countryside, taking a shortcut to get back to town as fast as he could ride. The entire way he cursed himself for trying to play Herk’s game—Bozeman’s game. He had outsmarted himself, and if he was right, Angelina would pay for it.

  Hooves flashing, he rode down the middle of the main street before skidding to a halt in front of the Hedison Gazette. He hit the ground running and threw open the door. Hightower had not bothered locking it, possibly because it was early enough in the morning that no one would disturb him unduly as the townspeople went about their business. He had claimed only gossip showed up in late afternoon, when it got too hot to work but not to talk.