Slocum and Hot Lead

by Jake Logan

  “Stolen?” Claudia sounded unsure. “I don’t think so. Papa was an artist, not a bank robber. He wouldn’t know how to steal. That was why we were always as poor as church mice.”

  Slocum doubted Claudia was being square with him, but he didn’t press the point. The anticipation of Neale and his gang riding up made Slocum edgy.

  “We’ll look for an hour or two and if we don’t find it, we move on,” he said.

  “No!”

  “Let me finish,” Slocum said. “We stop hunting for a spell, go back to Taos or just camp for a week or so, and let the outlaws move on.”

  “You said they might have a hideout here.”

  “I’ll scout the area to be sure. If they do, the marshal over in Las Vegas might find it useful knowing where it is. I get word to him, he brings a posse and arrests or chases off the outlaws, then we have all the time in the world to hunt for your pa’s treasure.”

  “You wouldn’t run off?”

  “Why’d I do a thing like that with the promise of so much treasure?” he asked. She looked angry. Slocum grabbed her by the arm and spun her around into his arms so he could kiss her. “There’s real treasure,” he said. “And I didn’t even have to dig for it.”

  “A shame,” Claudia said. “I enjoy the way you plow.”

  “You are quite a handful, aren’t you?” Slocum laughed as he released her. Claudia swung away and ended up facing the painting, frowning and intent on deciphering its hidden message. If there even was one there. Slocum had his doubts about this being a map, much less a map to a fortune in gold Claudia did not know even existed. From what she said, her pa wasn’t the most likely sort to even stumble across such wealth.

  “If these are trees,” she said, “might be the number or type of tree means something.”

  Slocum squinted at the painting. Then he stood and looked around.

  “White bark means either aspen or birch. This meadow’s too low for them to be aspen. There’s a stand of birch trees.” He pointed. A quick count matched the number with what the painting showed. His heart began to hammer a little faster. This was more than coincidence. Seven distinctively placed birch trees deliberately itemized on the painting.

  “Where would he hide the treasure?” Slocum asked. “In the grove of trees?”

  “I don’t know, John,” she said. “Let’s go look. Something might suggest itself if we poke around enough.”

  “How long has it been since you got the painting? If it hasn’t been more than a month, the dirt might still be loose over the spot where the gold’s hidden.”

  “So you think I’m telling the truth now?”

  “I never doubted what you believe,” Slocum said. “I’m still not sure about the gold.”

  “Any dirt would have settled back and packed itself down. It’s been more than three months since I got the painting. It took a while for me to leave Chicago.”

  Slocum heard more in what she was saying than she actually said. Had Claudia left behind a husband or boyfriend? Or had she sneaked away without telling the rest of her family?

  “What about your ma?”

  Slocum saw he had struck to the heart of the matter.

  “She died. I . . . I was nursing her while Papa was out West doing his painting. She succumbed about a month after I got the painting, and it took me two months to get her affairs in order.”

  “Sorry,” Slocum said. It was plausible, but Claudia had lied convincingly to him before, looking as if she was the worst liar in the world and then making it count when she had to put one over on him.

  They started walking for the birch grove. Slocum thought hard on why he kept doubting Claudia. It might be that she was simply too good to be true, but he knew it went deeper than that. When it came down to counting chips, Slocum was a good poker player and read the others at the table well. She held back too much from him, masking the deceptions with wide-eyed innocence, for him to feel completely comfortable with her. He doubted she would shoot him in the back, but anything up to that, including swindling him, was fair game.

  But just in case, he wasn’t going to turn his back on her if she was carrying a gun.

  “Seven,” she said. “Seven was Papa’s favorite number. And he always said it was perfectly formed with fours and threes.”

  Slocum saw four trees to one side of the small grove and three to the other. The spot directly between the two groups was grassy, but his sharp eyes caught something that gave him pause. A patch of grass looked greener than the surrounding area—and the dimensions of that patch were about what he would expect from a grave.

  “This might not be the right place,” Slocum said.

  “No, no, this is it. I feel it. And here is the spot where I’d put my treasure if I were Papa.” She stood directly on the too-green patch, oblivious to its shape and dimensions.

  “What happened to your pa?”

  “I don’t know. I told you. I . . . I suspect he might be dead.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Why else would he send the painting and never follow it himself? He didn’t even come back for Mama’s funeral.”

  “You think he knew she’d died?”

  “I wrote letters.”

  “Where did you send them?”

  “To Santa Fe,” she said. “I don’t know how long it took him to pick them up. There wasn’t an address. I just sent them to him in care of general delivery.”

  Slocum stared at the ground, hoping he was wrong. He had seen too many graves to doubt it.

  “If the gold’s not here, where else might it be?”

  “John,” she said solemnly, “what’s wrong? You sound so . . . different.”

  “Look at the ground where you are standing. The grass is greener and in a rectangle about the size of a grave.”

  Claudia jumped as if someone had given her a hotfoot. She stared at the grass, then dropped to her knees and ran her fingers a few inches along the boundary between the different shades of green.

  “It’s been dug up,” she said. “You . . . you think it’s a grave? My father’s buried here?”

  “That’d mean he brought someone else to where he had hidden the gold and a swap was made. Him for the gold.” Slocum walked around, then added, “There might be something else there, though. Nobody who’d dry-gulch a man to steal his gold would bury him. Better to leave the body out where the animals could get to it.”

  “Why? Why would that be better?” Claudia was aggrieved now at what he was suggesting.

  “Because it’s easier,” Slocum said. “I’ll go get something to dig with. You had a shovel in the wagon.”

  “I expected to do a fair amount of digging. There’s a pickax too. Would that be better for digging in dirt like this?” She reached down and pressed her palm flat against the grass.

  Slocum left her and went to the wagon, got in, and drove it to the stand of trees. He took his time rummaging around in the back of the buckboard for the tools so she would have time to herself. Everything he’d said was all guesswork, and he might be completely wrong. But he didn’t think so.

  Pick over one shoulder and carrying the shovel over the other, he entered the shelter of the birches and tossed the shovel to the ground, favoring the pickax for the preliminary work. He put his gun belt aside and wiped off his hands before getting down to work. Claudia watched from a few feet away, face drawn and anxious.

  When he had pulled up the sod, he turned to the shovel and began digging. The dirt turned softer, and he knew it had been turned recently. More carefully, he removed the dirt so he wouldn’t damage the corpse he knew was in the grave. When his shovel skidded off something hard, he dropped to his knees and brushed away enough to reveal a shoe.

  “There is a body, isn’t there?” Claudia was crying openly now.

  “It’s not your father,” Slocum said. “Not unless he’s got a mighty small foot.”

  “What?”

  Slocum began digging faster now, moving the dirt away from the body to reveal a woman about Claudia�
��s height and build. It was hard to tell the color of her hair because it was so filthy, and the flesh was drawn back with maggot holes throughout where the worms had burrowed aggressively. Slocum wiped back the last of the dirt from the dead woman’s face and couldn’t recognize her. She had been buried too long.

  But Claudia let out a tiny gasp.

  “You know her?”

  “Th-that’s my sister,” she said. Then she fainted.

  10

  “How do you know it’s your sister?”

  “That’s Maggie,” Claudia said. “She’s wearing her favorite dress. And the locket. The tiny silver locket. It has a picture of our parents in it.” Claudia’s hand fluttered like a wounded bird flying in the direction of the open grave. Slocum supported her with his arm around her shoulder. She was pale, but color slowly returned to her cheeks.

  “You want the locket as a keepsake?”

  “If you don’t mind, John. I . . . I couldn’t touch her to get it. She was so pretty. Far lovelier than I am!”

  Slocum bit his tongue to keep from saying that was no longer true, if it ever had been. He made sure Claudia was able to sit up on her own, then went to the grave and looked down at the body. A closer examination showed what he had missed earlier. There was a small hole between the woman’s breasts. She had been shot. From the look of the burned fabric, whoever shot her had done it at close range and the gunpowder spat from the muzzle had set fire to her blouse.

  Slocum pushed it back and saw that the hole was good-sized. No belly gun had been used on Maggie Peterson. She had been shot with a .45 or even something larger, though he doubted it was as big as a .50. That would mean she had let someone close in on her with a buffalo rifle and shoot her point-blank. Slocum rolled her half over, bones clattering, and saw the spot where the bullet had exited through her spine. She had died instantly. That told Slocum a little more. Whoever had killed her wasn’t after information. She would have been tortured if they hadn’t known already what she knew. Her killer had wanted her dead.

  He dropped the body back into the grave flat on its back, then worked on the silver locket around her neck. He finally opened the catch and held it in his hand, wondering what Claudia and Maggie’s parents looked like. It might help if he knew what her father looked like. Before he could open it, a quick hand snatched it away and closed over it.

  “Thank you, John. I could never have beared to take it like you did. She’s so . . . dead.”

  “That’s what happens when you get shot close up with a big-caliber gun,” he said, trying to shock Claudia into giving him more information. Slocum was reaching the point of needing to know what was going on since his own life might depend on it.

  “You end up very dead,” Claudia said without emotion. “Like Maggie.”

  “You want anything else from the grave?”

  “What? Oh, no, sorry. I was thinking of growing up together. She was always the daring one, and now she’s gone. It isn’t right. I want to know who killed her.”

  “The outlaws up the canyon would be a good bet,” Slocum said. “Their leader’s named Neale, and he looks a lot like me. It wouldn’t surprise me if he wasn’t the one who shot your sister.”

  “Neale,” Claudia said, rolling the name over and over like she tasted something unpleasant on her tongue. “I’d actually wondered if you might be Neale when both the marshal and the bounty hunter came looking for you. For Neale. For—oh, never mind.” She turned away and buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking as she sobbed.

  Slocum tossed dirt back over Maggie Peterson until he had a mound built again. He considered finding stone and marking the grave, or at least putting rocks over the dirt to keep the wild animals from digging her up. Then he realized there was no need. She was long dead, and any scent that might attract wolves or coyotes was long gone. He marveled that they hadn’t attacked the grave earlier since they could smell a dead body under less than six feet of dirt. Maggie had been put in a two-foot-deep grave.

  When he finished, he looked at Claudia, who held the silver locket up, letting it flash slowly in the sun as it rotated back and forth on its delicate chain.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes,” Slocum said. “Then we had better get out of here.”

  “There’s no gold,” Claudia said sadly. “And my sister is dead. I didn’t know. I didn’t even suspect.”

  Slocum started to ask the questions that he wanted answered most, but turned away to leave Claudia with her grief for a few minutes. He worried about Neale and his gang showing up. He left the small grove and looked around, seeing other groupings of trees that could have been interpreted as being where the treasure was. As he walked around this part of the meadow slowly, he took in the terrain and the trees and knew they had been lucky—or unlucky—finding this particular spot where the woman had been buried.

  He walked slowly back to the birch tree grove and saw Claudia wiping away tears. She stood and faced Slocum when she realized he was watching.

  “Let’s go. I . . . I want to paint some. As a tribute.”

  “You and your sister were close?”

  “No,” Claudia said, surprising Slocum yet again. “She was a terrible person. On any given day I might have called her a whore. In fact, more than once, I did.” Claudia sniffed. “But she was blood kin, and that means something.”

  “You didn’t know she was out here? Was she with your pa?”

  “She might have seen him, but she wasn’t with him,” Claudia said positively. “He looked down on her loose ways. As any decent man would.” Claudia glared at Slocum as if challenging him to contradict her. He said nothing.

  “I want to paint,” Claudia said.

  “We have to leave,” Slocum countered. “I told you why. The outlaws—”

  “Won’t bother us. Why should they? There’s no gold, is there? Just a solitary, unmarked grave.” Claudia chewed on her lower lip and came to a decision. “Perhaps later I’ll mark her grave, but it doesn’t seem right to do it now.”

  “They’ll kill us,” Slocum said. “They probably killed your sister. And your pa’s nowhere to be seen, is he? They might have killed him too.”

  “I’ll stay. You can go, John. You’ve been so kind to me.”

  Slocum didn’t say another word. He turned, mounted, and rode off, but he found his path leading away from the northward trail to one going back into the canyon where Claudia had matched her painting with the mines on the slopes. He damned himself for being a fool, but he couldn’t abandon Claudia to the outlaws, and he wasn’t going to hogtie her and force her to accompany him. Either of those solutions rankled.

  Slocum had to find the outlaws and figure out some way of decoying them away. A smile came to his lips. He wasn’t above joining them, if they were going to make a quick raid on the Fort Union payroll. The smile faded when he realized that Neale wasn’t likely to allow any newcomers to join his gang, especially one who looked like his mirror image. Slocum was better off trying to catch the leader of the road agents and turn him over to Marshal Hanks. And the chances of him accomplishing that were so small he couldn’t begin to calculate them. Better to draw to an inside straight.

  The meadow gave way to rockier terrain, and then he found the narrow trail going into the jaws of certain danger. Out of sight but not that far ahead, Slocum heard the clop-clop of several horses. The loud conversation among the men warned Slocum that he was going to locate the outlaws a lot easier than he had expected. They were riding the trail directly into the meadow—the one he was on.

  Slocum realized how foolish this sally of his had been. Neal and his cutthroats weren’t likely to accept him or let him ambush them one by one. Killing Neale might give him a little head start, but the way the outlaws had fought without their leader told him they were more likely to avenge Neale’s death than run from the man causing it.

  He wheeled his horse about and trotted back to warn Claudia. He hoped he was far enough ahead of the outlaws so the sounds of his passage w
ouldn’t alert them. When he came to the widening in the trail, he put his heels to his horse’s flanks and galloped back to the birch grove. His heart jumped into his throat when he saw the buckboard was gone—and so was the woman.

  He stood in the stirrups and looked around, frantic to find her before the outlaws spilled into the meadow. He doubted Neale or any of the men with him would miss the fresh tracks made both by Slocum’s horse and Claudia’s buckboard. Where was she?

  She’d said she wanted to find a spot to paint. Slocum couldn’t understand the goad that drove her to such crazy behavior when running was obviously the way to stay alive and not end up in a shallow grave like Maggie. He didn’t see her. He took a chance and called out to her.

  “Claudia!” he shouted. No answer. Slocum dared not shout a second time or he would warn Neale of his location. He dismounted and studied the tracks in the grass left by the buckboard. He let out a gusty sigh of relief. She had driven toward another canyon. Slocum saw no sign that anyone else had joined her or coerced the woman to drive off. From the depth of the tracks, she had driven off alone in the buckboard.

  Slocum swung into the saddle and trotted after her, hoping to be out of sight of the outlaws and into the canyon before they knew he even existed. Claudia might be safer if she had chosen some other canyon to explore, but Slocum doubted it. Neale and his gang roamed the entire region, either on patrol against lawmen or to find and rob careless travelers. Slocum wondered if the bounty hunter had provided enough distraction for Neale that the outlaw would be cautious when he rode into the meadow.

  Still, the rocky canyon afforded little in the way of grass for their horses or water, while the meadow was a paradise. This convinced Slocum that Neale would spend some time in the meadow to rest his horses and men. He just hoped that Wilmer had done more than die fast under the outlaws’ guns.