Slocum and Hot Lead

by Jake Logan

  “You did all right getting a horse as fast as you did. How’d you pay for it?” Slocum looked ahead down the pass leading into the meadow, which would be their last stop before hunting for the mine where he thought the gold was hidden.

  “Knew people,” Wilmer said vaguely. “People willin’ to give me a horse in exchange.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Not turnin’ them over to the law. The rewards on their heads didn’t amount to a hill o’ beans, but they didn’t know that. They figgered a horse in exchange fer me fergettin’ where they are was just peachy.”

  Slocum wondered if there had been more to the transaction, but the Taos marshal wasn’t galloping down on them, waving a noose around in the air and screaming that they were horse thieves. He was willing to believe Wilmer. A little.

  “Real purty country,” Wilmer said, pausing to study the meadowlands as they came to the top of the pass leading down into the grassy area. “A man could do worse than have a spread here.”

  “I’m more interested in the gold,” Slocum said. “What do you know of Maggie Peterson’s pa?”

  “Cain’t say I know much of anything ’bout him. She was in with Neale, but I heard tell she had a partner. Could be it was her pa.”

  “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of anyone other than Neale and his gang—and you—since coming to this part of the world,” Slocum said, thinking on the matter a bit harder. How could a man let Neale kill his daughter and not be outraged? It was possible Neale had dispatched Peterson just after he sent the painting to Claudia. Had Neale known the painting was a map to where the gold was hidden—and who had hidden the stolen cavalry payroll?

  Slocum looked sideways at his new partner. Wilmer had recovered in less than a week and hardly showed the effects of being drilled twice in the belly.

  He was a potent force of nature.

  “You pick that hill where I found you for any particular reason?” Slocum asked.

  “Naw, I was only pawin’ my way up to get to the top of the hill. If I’d got that far, I could lose Neale fer good.” Wilmer turned in the saddle and stared at Slocum. “You figger that there hill’s where the gold is hid?”

  “I do. The painting Claudia Peterson had was a map made by her pa, but it had information hidden away in it. I think I found part of it, but I need to look at the painting again to be certain.”

  “Don’t matter. If the gold’s in one of them mines, there’s no way we can miss findin’ it. There’s only a handful—”

  “Three.”

  “Three of them there mines. We kin find the gold if we look long enough. We’re gonna be rich, Slocum. Richer than if I’d turned you over to Marshal Hanks fer the reward.”

  “Why’s the reward so low on Neale? A hundred dollars hardly seems enough for someone who’s stolen a thousand-dollar payroll.”

  “They were offerin’ more alive than dead. I bet the Army wanted to sweat it out of him where he hid the money. They was settin’ on the wanted poster fer a long time, their own patrols out huntin’ fer the varmint. When they couldn’t find ’im, they musta put out the reward.”

  “How’d you get on the trail so fast?”

  “I was hangin’ ’round the post, that’s how. You never kin tell what’ll turn up at Fort Union. Big post. Huge. Lots of supplies goin’ in and out all the time.”

  Slocum read more into the bounty hunter’s words than Wilmer actually said. Wilmer wasn’t above doing a little stealing of his own. If he had a chance, he would have stolen the payroll himself. Since the cavalry was so stirred up over Neale and the theft, he’d had no chance to do anything like it on his own. Slocum guessed Wilmer had been living off the post garbage when the commanding officer had finally let the station agent in Las Vegas know they wanted a former officer for desertion and robbery.

  They rode down into the meadow. Slocum stared at the birch grove where Claudia’s sister was buried and wondered if her father was also nearby, a feast for the maggots.

  “That the right canyon?” Wilmer pointed.

  “You don’t know?” A dozen wild thoughts raced through Slocum’s head. If Wilmer didn’t know where he had been shot, he didn’t know where the three mines on the steep hillside were either. Even as the thought of double-crossing Wilmer crossed his mind, Slocum pushed it away. They were partners, and partners didn’t cheat each other. The bounty hunter would be useful in reaching the hidden gold and in getting it out of the mountains. They could split the take and go their separate ways then, and Slocum wouldn’t have the burden of watching Wilmer’s back—or the relief of having the bounty hunter watching his.

  “Cain’t say I do,” replied Wilmer. “I spent most o’ my time with my nose to the ground trackin’ folks. Didn’t matter to me where I was as much as who I was huntin’.”

  Slocum had the uneasy feeling Wilmer was lying through his broken, blackened teeth. He was on old mountain man and never forgot a single landmark, a single stone or turn of river or canyon. In that shaggy head must reside a virtual map of every inch of these mountains.

  “It’s where Claudia Peterson ran off the road,” Slocum said. “We find the spot where the road collapsed under her buckboard, then we find the painting and get on up to the mines.”

  “But you don’t know which one’s hidin’ the gold?”

  Slocum shook his head. He rode slowly, alert for any sign of Neale or his gang. More than the road agents, Slocum was hunting for Claudia. It still bothered him that he hadn’t found her body at the bottom of the slope amid the wreckage.

  “There’s the break in the road,” Wilmer said. He didn’t try to contain his eagerness. “Downslope. Dang. I see it! There’s the busted-up buckboard.”

  Slocum wished the bounty hunter wouldn’t sound so cheerful. A woman had probably died down there. Then he frowned as the thought occurred to him that Neale had no reason to take her body, and there had not been evidence of a new grave anywhere. That meant Claudia was likely alive and Neale’s prisoner.

  Or had wolves dragged her body away? Slocum just couldn’t tell.

  “How do we git down there?” asked Wilmer. “The horses’ll bust their fool legs tryin’ to go straight down.”

  “Farther along the road is an easy way down; then we can double back along the ravine.”

  “Hell’s bells, Slocum. Time’s a-wastin’. I want to be rich!”

  Wilmer edged along the narrow place in the road, then galloped off in search of the trail Slocum had taken earlier. Slocum followed more slowly, scanning the entire ravine from the elevated road for any trace of Claudia. He saw nothing by the time he reached the bottom of the slope.

  “Where’s that damn fool thing?” he heard Wilmer howl. The bounty hunter thrashed about like a bear with its foot in a trap. By the time Slocum reached the wrecked buckboard, Wilmer was red in the face and hammering his fist into the wood. “Where is it?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That painting. The one you said showed where the gold was. I don’t see it nowhere!”

  “I left it a ways off,” Slocum said. He rode across the gravel-bottomed ravine to the spot where he had begun the climb before finding Wilmer all shot up. Slocum frowned when he didn’t find the painting where he had left it. He rode up and down the ravine for almost a hundred yards, in case he was wrong about the spot. He might not have the memory of a mountain man for terrain, but he couldn’t have made a mistake of such proportions. The painting was gone.

  He hopped to the ground and went to the rock where he had leaned the painting when he had studied it. Even the paintbrush was gone. He ran his fingers over the rock and came away with a blue smear.

  “Somebody took it. Some paint rubbed off. This was where I left it.” Slocum held up his fingers with the bright blue smear to show Wilmer.

  “Neale! That thievin’ son of a bitch done it to me again!”

  Slocum sat on the rock and wiped the paint from his fingers. He felt suddenly tired. The painting had vanished.

>   Claudia was dead. The gold might or might not be up in one of the mines. He had succumbed to gold fever and lost his common sense, at least for a while.

  “It’s no good, Wilmer. We ought to get the hell out of here before Neale and his henchmen find us.”

  “I want the damned gold!” Wilmer roared. “He ain’t gonna cheat me out of it. Not again.”

  “Again?” Slocum looked sharply at the bounty hunter.

  “I mean, I had him before and he slipped through my fingers. He’s a slippery bastard.”

  Slocum heard slyness rather than truth in the man’s words, but shrugged it off. He meant it. Let Wilmer keep hunting for the gold and Neale. Colorado sounded better and better to Slocum.

  “I’m moving on,” Slocum said. “There’s nothing for me here.”

  “The gold, man! The gold!”

  “It’s the Lost Dutchman Mine all over. I could have been entirely wrong about what I saw in the painting. And there may not be any gold. I paid for your doctor bills with a twenty-dollar gold piece I took off one of Neale’s men. You said the payroll was in gold coins. Might be he divvied it up among his men and that was all that’s left.”

  “You never tole me ’bout that,” Wilmer said, glaring.

  “Fact is, I didn’t know about the payroll then, and it only just occurred to me. Like it’s occurred to me I could be entirely wrong about the painting being a map.”

  “Then we gotta find it so you can be sure,” Wilmer said. “I’m the best damn tracker anywhere in the Rocky Mountains.” Wilmer dropped to his hands and knees like a dog and began sniffing around. Slocum sat and watched. The man did everything but bark and wag his tail when he found a trail.

  “This way, Slocum. The owlhoot what took the map went this way.”

  “The painting,” Slocum corrected, but he jumped down from the rock to see what Wilmer had scouted out on the ground. It was a faint but definite partial footprint in a patch of soft dirt that Slocum should have found if he hadn’t been so down in the mouth over all that had happened.

  “Cain’t tell how big the varmint makin’ the print was. Not enough of it, but it’s fresh. And he went thata way.” Wilmer pointed back toward the buckboard.

  Slocum walked alongside Wilmer as they went back to the wreckage. Here Slocum used his own considerable skill to hunt for any sign that Claudia had died. He only confirmed his earlier observation that there wasn’t much blood if she had been seriously hurt. Still, she might have been thrown free as the buckboard tumbled down the hill and hit her head. He worked around the entire area and found no trace of blood.

  “This way, Slocum. This way,” Wilmer said, waving to him. He had gone a dozen paces up the ravine. “Found another footprint. Or piece of one. Somebody was tryin’ to be careful, but I’m too good fer ’em.”

  Slocum and Wilmer made their way along the ravine until Slocum saw a rock dislodged on a slope leading up the side of the canyon. A quick look around showed that there were shallow caves above.

  “Up there,” Slocum said.

  “No, no, Slocum, you got it all wrong. You must be blind as a bat. See this? He went on ahead.”

  Slocum didn’t see anything. He looked back up to the shallow depressions in the side of the hill.

  “Up there,” he insisted.

  “You go on, waste yer time. I’m goin’ after that there painting.” Wilmer strode off purposefully, now and then dropping to all fours to look for traces of the trail he followed. Or thought he followed.

  Slocum took two quick steps, jumped up onto the rim of the arroyo, and quickly found a more distinct footprint. He had wondered about the size of the foot making the other tracks. There was no question who had put this one into the dirt.

  Claudia Peterson had climbed up higher on the mountainside.

  Slocum began trooping up the slope, aware of how weary he was from the trip to Taos and back with Wilmer. Telling the bounty hunter he would partner up with him seemed less important as he caught scent of cooking meat coming from a cave. He slipped the leather thong off his Colt Navy and then went into the smoke-filled cave.

  “You’ll choke yourself to death,” he told Claudia. The woman jumped a foot. Her violet eyes went wide as she tried to speak, but nothing came out. “Mind if I help myself to a little bit of this?” Slocum sat down, waved his hand a few times to move the smoke away from his burning eyes, and then plucked at a piece of bacon Claudia had frying in the pan.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I’m glad to see you too,” he said. The bacon was half-raw, but tasted fine to him. He tried to remember the last time when he had eaten and couldn’t. That was a sure sign he ought to chow down while he had the chance.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, John. You know that. I was trying to hide so they wouldn’t find me.”

  “The outlaws?”

  “They ride back and forth all the time. I have to be very careful when I venture out. I’ve only been going out at dusk and dawn, coming back here during the day and fearing for my life at night. There are animals out there!”

  “Two- and four-legged,” Slocum agreed. He tried a second piece of bacon, but the first had turned his stomach. Claudia hadn’t scraped enough of the mold off it before frying it. “How’d you get away from the buckboard without a scratch?”

  “I . . . I jumped at the right time, I suppose,” Claudia said. She had a wild look about her that was slowly going away. Slocum had startled her more than he’d thought possible. “I landed in a patch of something stickery but wasn’t hurt any.”

  “Lucky.”

  “I was frightened, John. I was sure the outlaws would catch me. I saw them ride by a couple times and they never spotted the buckboard, but I couldn’t take a chance.”

  “Nope, of course not,” Slocum said. He leaned back against the cave wall and saw the map painting behind Claudia. She tried to shift to hide it, and then saw he recognized it for what it was.

  “I found it some distance from the wreck,” she said.

  “You saw me poking around and didn’t think anyone would take the painting. When I went up the hillside, you grabbed the painting.”

  “You never came back, John.”

  He considered this and saw some truth in it. He had found Wilmer, and this had slowed him down when he returned, but he found it unlikely Claudia hadn’t seen him.

  “I reckon you did too good a job of hiding your footprints,” Slocum said, “for me to track you. Have you found the gold?”

  “No,” she almost whined. “I’ve hunted everywhere, but there’s so much around here. I don’t even know what to do.” She reached down and picked up the paintbrush. She jabbed it at him like a sword. “You knew what this meant. You lit out like you knew exactly where to go, but I looked everywhere and didn’t find the gold.”

  “Your pa was clever the way he hid it,” Slocum allowed. “I think there’s writing on the painting.”

  “What? I never saw it!”

  Slocum gestured for her to hand him the painting. He wasn’t sure why he bothered, but being this close to Claudia again scrambled his common sense like a plate of eggs.

  He edged toward the cave mouth and held up the painting out of the smoke to catch the light. Turning the painting, he said, “See this here?” He ran his finger along the word and dotted line. “I don’t know where this goes, but it looks like it points to this mine.”

  “I looked there. I looked in all three of them,” Claudia said. “But I appreciate you being honest with me, John.” Claudia moved a little closer and Slocum felt the heat, not from the fire in the cave but from the woman’s eyes. She laid her hand on his leg and moved it little by little to his crotch. She found the growing lump there and began massaging slowly.

  “Don’t start something you aren’t willing to finish,” Slocum said.

  “I want to start,” she said, her eyes closing. “And I want you to finish it.” She moved even closer and let Slocum kiss her. All the while he was sampling the sweet, ten
der lips, her hand worked on him, making him uncomfortably hard in his jeans. Somehow, as they kissed, she managed to get a couple of fly buttons open. He popped out into her hand.

  “So warm, so big, all mine,” she whispered. Her feverish violet eyes looked into his green ones; then she dived down to the fleshy pillar she clutched so hard. Her lips kissed the very tip, and then opened enough to allow him to slide into the humid warmth of her mouth. A shudder passed through Slocum’s body as he leaned back and let the eager woman tongue and kiss him.

  He ran his hands through her hair, guiding her up and down at a pace that sent his pulse pounding like a smithy’s hammer hitting an anvil. Every time her tongue flicked out and touched the sensitive underside, a new tremor passed through Slocum and caused him to get even harder. He saw her cheeks go hollow as she applied suction. This was almost more than he could take. He pulled her mouth away.

  “My turn,” he said.

  “Your turn? What could you possibly do to excite me as much as I excite you?” she taunted. “Maybe you’ll open my blouse and play with my breasts.” She pulled open the now-dirty blouse and exposed the twin melons bobbing delightfully. Cupping them, she lifted first one and then the other, as if trying to take her own nipples into her mouth. “Or you could twist them a mite. Like this.” Claudia’s fingers caught the cherry-red nubs and turned from side to side until her breathing came in hard, sharp pants.

  “You’re getting all the pleasure, and there’s nothing I’m doing. You’ve been alone too long,” he said. He pulled her close, crushing her naked breasts against his chest as he kissed her lips. Moving from her lips, he covered her forehead and cheeks and closed eyes with kisses before moving lower. Her head tipped back. He kissed the hollow of her slender throat, and then slipped down between the fleshy mounds that captivated him so much.

  Licking and sucking, he tended first one crest and then the other. He felt the nipples pulsing with every throb of the woman’s heart. Pressing his tongue down hard, he buried the nip amid snowy white flesh and then released it suddenly. He repeated this on her other perfect breast, then suckled until moans of delight came from Claudia’s lips.