by Logan, Jake
“He pissed off damned near everyone,” Marianne said, a small smile curling her lips now. “Including me, but I loved him for it. Damn him for leaving me.” She forced back tears and turned from Slocum.
He kept kicking through the debris, not sure what he hunted. After a half hour, he knew he wasn’t going to find it, whatever it was.
“You have anything you want to sling in a blanket so you can take it back to town?”
“Some things from the cedar chest. My dowry,” she said softly. “There wasn’t much, but it was enough for Jack. We were—”
Slocum dug his toes into the burned debris and dived forward, arms outstretched. He grabbed Marianne in a steely grip and carried her backward until her heel caught a burned, curled-up floorboard, sending them both crashing to the ground amid a flurry of soot and black cinders.
“What’s got into you, John?”
He stayed atop her long enough for the second bullet to sail past. From the corner of his eye he’d seen movement, then the bright spark of sunlight off the front sight of a rifle. His quick tackle had saved them from getting ventilated.
“Stay down,” he said, scrambling about in the ashes and coming to a kneeling position behind the cedar chest with his six-shooter drawn.
Bracing his hand against the wooden chest, he squeezed off a round. He was rewarded with a string of curses from the underbrush where he’d spotted the rifle barrel. Another quick shot didn’t bring any new cursing. From all his time in the army as a sniper, he had learned to trust his instincts. The first shot might have winged their attacker. The second missed.
“They tried to kill you!” Marianne’s outrage caused her to stand. Slocum tackled her again.
This time she didn’t flop onto her back but sat hard. Her blue eyes flashed angrily, then widened in horror.
“The gunman is still out there. He could have shot me!”
Slocum wanted to find the sniper to learn who had been the target. The slug had passed between them, so either could have been the intended target. Or the rifleman’s intent might have been to run them off. Something in the burned remnants might have been the shooter’s goal, rather than killing them. Somehow, Slocum had the itchy feeling between his shoulders that he had been the target, not Marianne. That didn’t make her any safer if he left her alone, but he had no choice.
“You have a hidey-hole?” He kept his keen eyes fixed on the woods for any sign of movement.
“I, uh, yeah, I guess so.”
“Crawl in there and wait for me.”
“John, no, you can’t!”
She reached for him, but he had already dashed halfway to his horse. Slocum threw his arms around the pony’s neck, kicked hard, and mounted as the horse ran a few tentative strides. Staying low, his head down near the horse’s neck, he galloped for the woods and then burst through the curtain of brush into a cool dimness. He gave the pony its head as he hunted for his attacker.
He saw nothing, but ahead along the game trail the horse instinctively found, he heard pounding hooves. Slocum kept low to prevent the rapidly passing tree limbs from knocking him off or cutting his face. Fear of another ambush evaporated. He was the hunter now, and his quarry ran for his life.
The Indian pony was stronger and slowly closed the distance. The man he chased kept shooting back over his shoulder with the rifle, wasting ammo. Not a single round came close to Slocum, and the noise only spurred on the racing pony. When they were within a half-dozen yards, Slocum lifted his six-gun and fired.
The man’s hat went flying. He grabbed for it. As he turned, Slocum got a good look at his face. Lester Carstairs. He fired again, but Carstairs was already off balance and fell from horseback to land with a loud thud.
Slocum lacked stirrups to give more control. All he could do was draw back on the reins and use his knees to convince the running horse to slow. By the time the pony swung about, Carstairs had vanished into the forest on foot.
Without hesitation, Slocum slid from the pony and hit the ground running. Carstairs’s rifle lay on the ground where he had dropped it. Slocum didn’t bother to check. The magazine was likely empty. That meant all the firepower Carstairs had rode in his six-gun. Slocum slowed when he reached a tangle of brush, then dropped to his knees to get a better look ahead.
Carstairs either underestimated Slocum or had panicked and thought of nothing but a clumsy ambush. Hiding behind a tree, his hand braced against the bole, he waited for Slocum to blunder forward. Slocum slipped his pistol back into its holster and cut off to his left, making a wide circle to come up on Carstairs from the man’s rear.
Carstairs nervously shifted his weight from foot to foot. Even if Slocum had popped into view where the miner thought, his aim would have been off. Slocum stepped forward on cat’s feet, not making a sound. His shadow betrayed him as it swept across the tree Carstairs used for refuge. The man whipped around, but Slocum leapt like a mountain lion. His left hand closed around Carstairs’s wrist and his right drove straight for the man’s neck. Grease and dirt made the throat slippery, but Slocum’s strong fingers bore in to choke his enemy.
Carstairs made gasping sounds. He squeezed off a round and then dropped his weapon as air was denied his lungs. Slocum bent forward and put his weight behind the choke. Carstairs dropped to his knees. Both hands tried to pry loose the fingers killing him, but his strength had already left him.
Slocum followed the man to the ground, then through force of will stopped choking before he took a life. For what Carstairs had done to Marianne, he deserved to die. She was sure he had burned down her house after barging in on her and a client. Slocum knew this was the man who had tried to rape her the night before. The identifying scar on his cheek stood out, livid and ragged.
He released his strangling fingers and rocked back, gasping from exertion. As Carstairs slowly recovered, rubbing his tortured neck, he found himself staring down the bore of Slocum’s Colt Navy.
“Any reason I shouldn’t kill you and leave your worthless carcass for the coyotes?”
“I don’t know you from Adam. Why’d you chase me? You tryin’ to rob me? Take it. Take ever’thing. I—” Carstairs blanched when Slocum cocked his pistol.
“You burned out a friend of mine, then you tried to rape her last night. Or did you? Was it rape or was it something else?”
Carstairs’s mouth opened and closed like a fish flopping on a riverbank. Then he recovered some of his sand when Slocum didn’t pull the trigger.
“She’s got something I want. The whore won’t give it to me.”
Slocum hit him. The Colt’s barrel left a dent on the side of Carstairs’s head but didn’t knock him out.
“Keep a civil tongue in your head. If you don’t, I might cut it out.”
“You ain’t gettin’ any part of it. You and the whore”—Carstairs cringed when Slocum reared back to pistol-whip him again—“you don’t deserve it.”
“What’re you talking about?” Slocum saw the suddenly sly expression and knew he wouldn’t learn any more from this man unless he had plenty of time and a sharp knife. There wasn’t much the Apaches knew about torturing a man that Slocum didn’t know, also. Some of it had come firsthand.
“You don’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, do you?” Carstairs spat blood from a cut lip. “Go to hell.”
“You’ll be there to greet me,” Slocum said, drawing a bead between the man’s eyes. Carstairs blanched again but didn’t say a word. Considering that questions still had to be answered, and Sheriff Whitehill had only let Slocum out for the killing of Texas Jack Bedrich because of his deputy’s vouchsafe, it wouldn’t do to have another killing over his head.
Somehow, someway it would get back to Silver City that he had plugged this worthless snake. More than this, Slocum found it irresistible that Carstairs was willing to die rather than spill his guts about what he wanted from Marianne. That was
the only explanation Slocum could come up with. Marianne had something, some item or tidbit of information, Carstairs was willing to rape and kill for.
“On your feet,” Slocum said, his gun hand never twitching. Carstairs understood he was a goner if he tried anything now.
They walked to where Slocum’s pony nibbled at grass. It took the better part of an hour to track down Carstairs’s horse and ride back to the burned-out house. As they approached, Slocum looked for Marianne. He had told her to go to ground, and she had. She was nowhere to be found.
He called for her, then started when debris not ten feet from where he sat astride his horse slipped away from a door. She poked her auburn head out, smiled when she saw Slocum, and then hissed like a cat when she saw his prisoner.
“Root cellar?” Slocum asked.
“Give me your gun, and I’ll kill him. I swear it!”
“Settle down,” Slocum cautioned. “We’re going to turn him over to the sheriff. Whitehill might get some answers from him.”
“I don’t want answers, I want to get even.”
“I ought to let her claw your eyes out after what you did last night,” Slocum said.
“I didn’t do a damn thing to her. Nuthin’ she don’t collect money for from any poxy miner out in the silver fields anyway.”
“Off your horse,” Slocum said. “Get down, or I’ll plug you where you sit.”
Grumbling, Carstairs dismounted.
“Climb aboard, Marianne,” Slocum said. “It’s a ways back to town, and one of us is going to be on foot.”
“That’s my horse. You can’t steal it!”
“Might be we can lasso him around the neck and drag him some,” Marianne said.
When Slocum looked favorably on that, Carstairs started hoofing it toward distant Silver City. It took until sundown for them to return and get their prisoner to the jailhouse.
“Go on in. You’re going to spend a considerable amount of time here,” Slocum said, his six-shooter waving around to point out the entire jailhouse.
Carstairs cursed under his breath, lifted the latch, and went in, Slocum and Marianne close behind. Sheriff Whitehill looked up from a newspaper spread on the desk in front of him. His eyes darted from Carstairs to Slocum and then back before he let out a gusty sigh, made a big production of folding the paper and then tipping back in his chair. He eyed them, covered in dirt and soot, and shook his head sadly.
“Spit it out. What’s goin’ on?”
“They tried to gun me down, Whitehill. They—”
Slocum jammed his six-shooter into Carstairs’s spine to shut him up.
“He tried to bushwhack us out at Miss Lomax’s house,” Slocum said.
“Then he ran off, John chased him down, and we brought him back. And last night he—”
Slocum reached over and caught Marianne’s arm to quiet her. Even a whore could be raped, but adding this charge to trying to kill them both only muddied the waters. Slocum doubted Whitehill would take kindly to locking up Carstairs on a rape charge, and the jury would be even less inclined to convict. The trial would be a circus, not a way to achieve justice.
Whitehill had them go over the story several times, then let Carstairs speak his piece.
“I was out there, all right, Sheriff, but I never tried to shoot them. Slocum came chargin’ after me while I was out in the woods. I heard a shot, sure, but it wasn’t me who fired on them. And he charged like a wild Injun. I ran.”
“And he caught you,” finished Whitehill. He gusted another sigh. “You brung his rifle in, Slocum?”
“Wouldn’t prove a thing, Whitehill. I fired it at him tryin’ to escape his evil clutches,” Carstairs said. “After he started chasin’ me.”
“Slocum, did you actually see Les here shoot at you?”
“No, but he was the only one in the woods.”
“The only one you found, you mean!” cried Carstairs. “There was someone else who tried to gun them down.”
“Marianne, you see Carstairs doin’ any shootin’ at you?”
“No, Sheriff, but he—”
“So neither of you can swear on a Bible that Carstairs shot at you. But you ran him down in the woods when there might have been somebody else out there you didn’t see. That sum it all up?”
Slocum said nothing. He gripped Marianne’s arm harder when she tried to add to the charges by describing what had happened the night before in her hotel room. The time for such incrimination was past, Slocum saw, as the sheriff listened to her. Whitehill would think they had tried to kill Carstairs as retribution, or at least frame him for attempted murder. The lawman would never throw any Silver City citizen into the lockup simply for soliciting a soiled dove, and Marianne had the reputation.
On the other hand, the sheriff seemed to have hidden feelings for her, and Slocum sensed that Whitehill was itching to show off and even protect her in some way.
“You see anybody else out there in them woods, Les?” The sheriff’s eyes bored into Carstairs.
“Well, no, but I—”
“And what were you doing over by Miz Marianne’s place?”
Carstairs glared at him. “Mindin’ my own business.”
The sheriff chewed his bottom lip as if thinking things over. “Well, it’s been right quiet in town so far, and I don’t want anything complicatin’ my evening. Les, I’m gonna hold you ’til I can get to the bottom of this.”
“You can’t do that!”
“You’ve been accused of some serious things. I can hold you till I look at all the evidence.”
“My rifle’s still out in the woods. I gotta go get it.”
“I’ll send Dan out to find it. For now, you stay put.”
When the sheriff turned to get his key ring, Carstairs sneered and whispered to Marianne, “This ain’t the end of it. I’m gonna find out where it is.”
“You take Marianne on back to the hotel, Slocum,” the sheriff said. “I’d run you out of town, but there’s still the question of how Texas Jack died.”
Slocum took Marianne by the elbow and steered her out of the jail. She sagged against him, exhausted after the day’s events.
11
“He didn’t believe me,” Marianne Lomax said, her lip quivering from emotion. She wrapped her arms around herself as if she could keep out the night cold that way, but Slocum knew it wasn’t the mountain air that caused her to shake.
It was barely suppressed anger.
“The sheriff’s afraid,” Slocum said. “He doesn’t want to have Carstairs’s entire crew hurrahing the town.”
“They’d lie to get their boss out of jail,” Marianne said. “I should have lied. Then it would have been my word against theirs!”
Slocum walked beside her as they made their way to the hotel. It was late, and the day had been a long one. At least the sheriff had agreed to consider the possibility that Carstairs had taken a shot at them. Slocum didn’t doubt that the mine foreman had done that very thing. But who had he been aiming at?
As much as he hated to admit it, he was the likelier target. Carstairs wanted something from Marianne, and anyone who got in the way was a problem to be solved, a man to be ambushed. The more he thought about what he had seen the night before, the less he thought Carstairs had tried to rape Marianne. He had been demanding that she tell him where something was. But what?
“That’s no good,” she said, breaking his train of thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Even if I lied, no one would believe me. They think I’m a harlot, a Cyprian who has a grudge against Carstairs.” Marianne laughed harshly. “The Silver City harlot. That’s me. I sell my body and that’s all a jury would remember. Evidence against Carstairs—my testimony!—wouldn’t be credible.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Slocum said. They stood on the front steps of t
he hotel. Slocum saw the curtains in the sitting room flutter. Someone was watching them.
It might be her son or his friend. More likely the hotel owner was spying on them.
“John, you can’t imagine how hard I am on myself for all I’ve done, for all I haven’t done. Raising a boy like Randolph is a full-time chore, and I just can’t spend the time with him I should.”
“It’s not easy earning a living, no matter how you do it.”
“Why don’t you come up, John?” Marianne looked up at him, her eyes bright with tears. Her lip still quivered. “I don’t think I can sleep. I’m too wound up, and I want to talk. I need to.”
Slocum glanced at the curtains, but they hung still now.
“What about Mrs. Gruhlkey? She wouldn’t take kindly to me going to your room, especially after shooting out the window last night.”
“You’re right. She warned me about that and how she’d throw Randolph and me into the street if I tried to sneak any man into my room,” Marianne said. She reached out and ran her fingers up and down the lapels of his coat. A light tap sent up a tiny cloud of soot and left her fingers greasy black. She kept running her fingers over his chest, then said, “I owe you a bath.”
“It’s late,” he said.
“Old man Higgins never locks up his barber shop. If you can heat the water, I’ll . . . wash your back.”
He hesitated, but then his resolve faded as memories of Georgia and the time he and Marianne had spent there rushed back. He tried to brush off his coat and only produced a new dust storm. He smiled ruefully before saying, “Reckon you have a point about me needing a bath.”
“Just like we did before,” she said, nudging still other memories.
The first time he and Marianne had gone off together in the piney woods had seemed innocent enough, but she had fallen off a log crossing a stream and drenched herself. She had sputtered and then shaken all over like a wet dog. He had laughed so hard he had fallen into the stream, too.
From there, assuring each other they were only going to dry their clothes, the inevitable attraction of youth had brought them together in the cottony warm summer sun on a patch of grass.