Slocum and the Killers

by Jake Logan

  Grimes and his six men topped a rise, and they saw the outlaws riding toward them.

  “There they are,” he said.

  “About ten of them,” said one of the men. “We’re outnumbered.”

  “Get down behind this knoll,” said Grimes, “and open fire with your rifles as soon as you can get a good shot. We’ll change the odds soon.”

  The men rode back down the knoll and dismounted, clambering back to the top and falling flat on their bellies and readying their rifles. They waited as the outlaw gang drew closer. Luckily, they had not been spotted.

  Gillian and Sluice rode side by side, with another man riding to each side. The rest brought up the rear. Suddenly, unexpected gunshots rang out. Sluice felt a bullet tear his right ear. He yelped and flung himself off his horse in a flash and onto his belly in the dirt. Ignoring the bleeding ear, he jerked loose his six-gun and looked for a target. Gillian had hit the dirt just a split second before, but he had jerked out his rifle before falling. The others behind them also fell to the ground, but neither Sluice nor Gillian had any idea how many of them fell of their own accord or were dropped by bullets. The horses, with the bags of gold on their backs, ran wild.

  It did not take the Gillian gang long to locate their targets and start returning fire. The fight did not last long. In spite of their slight advantage of higher ground and surprise, Grimes’s men were easily overwhelmed. Grimes found himself left with one man. The others were dead. He could see that the horses of his enemies were scattered. His own were still bunched up behind them. He turned to his sole surviving underling and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” They crept backward a short distance, then got up and ran for their horses. Initially, they raced back east, but as soon as they got a safe distance away, they turned north. They left five horses behind, with the bodies of five of their men.

  “They’re getting away,” said Sluice, standing up.

  “Let them go,” said Gillian. “We won’t see them again.”

  “I’d sure like to know who the hell they were,” Sluice said.

  “What difference does it make? We cut them to pieces.”

  “We didn’t come out so good ourselves,” said a voice behind them. Sluice and Gillian both turned around to look. There were three men standing behind them. The rest were lying dead.

  “Catch up the horses,” said Gillian. “All of them. They’re all carrying gold.”

  Jigs had been riding on a more or less parallel path to that of Grimes and his men. He was somewhat north of them and a little farther west, but not so far that he did not hear the shots. He wondered what was going on. Then he figured that the gang Sluice was riding with would be coming back this way, and it was quite possible that Grimes and Slocum and all those might be after him. They might have run into each other. He thought about riding away as fast as he could, but his curiosity got the better of him. He wondered who was killed. It wouldn’t bother him at all if anyone on either side got killed, but he particularly hoped that at least Sluice and Grimes were dead. He would piss on their bodies. He turned his horse and rode toward where the shots seemed to have come from. As he rode along, he spied a small hill just off to his left. He made for it and rode to the top. There he dismounted and made sure that his horse was out of sight. Then he found a spot behind a rock and snugged down behind it.

  He did not have to wait long. Two riders were headed his way. He watched anxiously as they drew closer. He wished that he had a rifle, but all he had was his six-gun. He drew it out and held it ready. The riders came closer. He waited a little longer, and then he recognized them. Grimes and one of the men who had beat on him. His heart pounded with anxiety. His palms began to sweat. He was overwhelmed with a desire to kill. They came closer. Jigs eased himself down lower on the side of the hill. He moved carefully. He did not want to give himself away.

  The riders were moving in a direction that would take them close to the hill. Jigs could hardly stand the wait. Then he could not believe his good fortune. They stopped their horses right at the base of the hill and dismounted. Grimes sat down on a small boulder, the other man on the ground. Jigs continued easing himself down. He had a good shot. He started to raise his gun to shoot, but the men below started to talk. He waited to hear what they would say.

  “So what do we do from here, Boss?” said the one man.

  “We don’t quit,” said Grimes. “We ride back to Bascomb and get some more men. I mean to kill Jigs and Sluice. This little setback ain’t going to stop me.”

  “They might be anywhere by the time we get there and back,” the man said.

  “We’ll find them,” Grimes said. “The only thing that worries me is that Slocum will get Sluice before I do. Sluice and those others are headed right back for the ranch, and he’s waiting there for them.”

  “Boss?” said the man.

  “What?”

  “Did you see them bags on their horses?”

  “Bags? What are you talking about, Rimes?”

  “It looked to me like every one of their horses was packing two heavy bags hanging from the saddle horn. The only thing I can think of they might have been full of is gold.”

  “How can you tell that from looking at a bag?”

  “They went out on a job to steal some gold according to that Limpy fellow,” said Rimes. “Each horse was packing two bags. Heavy-looking bags. It had to be the gold.”

  “I bet you’re right,” said Grimes. “We’ll have to hurry back to Bascomb. We need to get back to that bunch while they’ve still got it on them. Come on.”

  Both men stood up, and Jigs fired. His bullet hit Rimes in the chest, knocking him back into his horse. Grimes turned and went for his gun, but Jigs fired again. This time he hit Grimes in the right shoulder, causing him to drop his six-gun and stagger. Jigs got up from behind his boulder and started down the hillside, still holding his gun on Grimes.

  “Well, now,” he said, “Mr. Grimes, you slimy no-good piece of snake shit. It looks like now the shoe’s on the other foot, don’t it? I been waiting for this a long time now. I been longing for it.”

  “Go ahead and shoot, you little chickenshit,” said Grimes.

  “Oh, no,” said Jigs. “I ain’t in no hurry. I mean to enjoy this. I’m thinking about when you had all them men beat up on me. All at once. Hitting me and kicking me. And me with my nose shot off and hurting. They broke my ribs. Hurt me all over. I couldn’t even set on a horse, so they tied me to the saddle. Sent the horse running out of town, with me hurt and starving. I cried, Grimes. I was hurt so bad, I cried. I wouldn’t tell that to nobody, but I’m telling it to you on account of I’m fixing to kill you, so it don’t matter if you know about it. You’re dead.”

  “Fuck you,” said Grimes.

  “Fuck you, too,” said Jigs, and he shot Grimes in the left kneecap. Grimes yelled in pain and grabbed his knee, almost falling over.

  “Go on and kill me,” said Grimes.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” said Jigs. He shot Grimes’s other knee, and Grimes, screaming with pain, dropped to the ground. Jigs holstered his six-gun. “Come to think of it,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ll kill you at all.” He slid a long skinning knife out of a sheath on his belt and stepped forward. He took hold of Grimes’s left ear and pulled, then sliced with the knife. Grimes screamed again. Jigs did the same thing to the other ear. He tossed the ears off to the side. “I think I’ll just leave you here to bleed yourself to death.”

  17

  Sluice, Gillian, and the remaining three riders of the old Gillian gang were busy chasing horses for some time. They caught enough for themselves, but there were still others running loose. The horses were not important, but each horse was carrying two bags of gold. Neither Sluice nor Gillian was willing to let that go. They kept chasing the spooked animals. The three extra hands at last caught all but one. No one could get close to it. Sluice pulled out his rifle and cranked a shell into the chamber.

  “I’ll get the goddamned
thing,” he said.

  He raised the rifle to his shoulder and took aim. He pulled the trigger, sending a bullet smashing into the horse and dropping it instantly. They rode to get the gold. Soon, they had all the gold loaded on a couple of extra horses, and they started for the ranch. They had not gone far, though, when Holmes and his posse appeared on the horizon.

  “Look,” said Sluice. “Who the hell is that?”

  Gillian looked back over his shoulder.

  “It looks like a damned posse to me,” he said. He looked ahead again at a small outcropping slightly to their left. “Head in there,” he said, “and use your rifles.”

  They rode for cover, dismounted, and secured the horses. All five men readied their rifles and waited for the posse to come into range. Then five rifles sounded and five members of the posse dropped from their saddles. The sheriff and the two remaining posse members all dismounted and fell flat to the ground. Their frightened horses scattered.

  “Sheriff,” said one, “we’re like sitting ducks here.”

  “Shut up and shoot back,” Holmes said.

  “My rifle’s still in the boot,” said the man.

  “Mine, too,” said the other man. “They’re out of six-gun range.”

  “Then just keep on eating dirt,” Holmes said.

  Back behind his cover, Gillian said to Sluice and the others, “They’ve lost their horses. Let’s get out of here.”

  They mounted up and gathered the reins of the extra horses. Then they resumed their ride to the ranch. Holmes and his men heard them ride away. They stood up and looked around for their horses. Most of them had not gone far. In an hour or so, they had them all.

  “Let’s get back on their trail,” Holmes said.

  “I’m heading home,” said one man.

  The other man agreed.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Holmes said. “They’ve killed our friends. They have all that gold. You want to let them get away?”

  “There ain’t as many of us as what started out,” said one man. “And we’ve rode farther away from home than what we expected.”

  “What the hell did you expect?” said Holmes. “Did you expect a guarantee that we’d catch up with them in a mile? Or two? Did you expect them to all lay down their weapons when they saw us coming?”

  “You can say anything you want to,” said one man. “We’re leaving.”

  “All right,” said Holmes. “All right then. At least load up these bodies and take them along with you.”

  “Take them along with us? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m keeping after those goddamned outlaws,” said the sheriff.

  Jigs was feeling like hot shit. He had finally encountered Grimes, one of the men he most wanted revenge on, and he had left him in miserable condition to die alone and painfully, his kneecaps shot and his ears cut off. Perhaps coyotes or buzzards would even go to work on him before he was quite dead. Jigs laughed out loud at that new thought. He was riding in a southeasterly direction, thinking that he might encounter Sluice and those others along the way. If he could kill Sluice, he would be satisfied.

  He was surprised when he came across a lone rider who seemed to be following someone. He laid back to stay out of sight, but he dogged the trail of the lone rider. At one point, the lone rider stopped and dismounted, apparently taking a break, resting his horse. The man rolled himself a smoke and lit it, and as he turned to sit down on the ground, the sun glinted on his chest. A badge, Jigs thought. It was a lawman. Could he be after Sluice and the rest of that gang for stealing the gold? He decided to stay on the trail of this lone lawman.

  When Gillian, Sluice, and the other three men drew close to the ranch house, Gillian saw smoke. It wasn’t much smoke, not like a fire raging. It was more like smoke from the smoldering remains of a fire. It was enough smoke, though, to worry Gillian.

  “It looks like it’s coming from my house,” he said, “or close to it. Let’s ease up on it.”

  They rode slower, and when they finally came in view, Gillian could see that his house was gone. It had burned.

  “Damn it,” he said. “What the hell did Limpy and them do?”

  He spurred his horse to hurry on to his house, or what remained of it, but a shout from Sluice stopped him.

  “Hold it, Reb,” Sluice called out.

  Gillian hauled back on the reins of his mount and turned in the saddle.

  “What?” he snapped. “What?”

  “You might be riding into something you don’t want to ride into,” said Sluice. “Anyone got some glasses?”

  One of the three outlaws reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a set of binoculars, holding them out to Sluice. Impatient, Gillian rode back and waited while Sluice zeroed in on the burned house and then the cookshack and the corral. He spotted the Appaloosa right away.

  “Goddamn,” he said.

  “What?” said Gillian. Sluice held the glasses toward Gillian.

  “Take a look,” he said. “I killed a man a while back who was riding a spotty-ass horse like that. He was on my trail. Out to get me.”

  Gillian located the horse. “It don’t belong in my corral,” he said. “You say you killed the man?”

  “I did.”

  “You shoot him from a distance or get him up close?”

  “He fell off the edge of the road. I went to look, but I couldn’t even find the body.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you didn’t actual see him dead, you might have just thought you killed him.”

  Sluice sat for a moment, thoughtful. He scratched his beard. “Damn,” he said. “You could be right about that.”

  Gillian raised the glasses again just as Old Jan walked out of the cookshack. “There’s a stranger down there all right,” he said. He swung the glasses back to the corral and looked closer. “There’s more horses there that ain’t mine,” he said. “I’d say there’s someone down there laying for us.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Sluice asked. “Do we ride in shooting?”

  “We don’t know how many of them are in there,” Gillian said. “They’re holed up in the cookshack, and we’d be out in the open. No. I say let’s ride out.”

  “Leave your ranch?”

  “We got enough gold here to buy ten ranches like that, or more. Anything worth a damn was in the house anyhow.”

  “All right,” said Sluice. “Where will we go?”

  “That way,” said Gillian, pointing northwest. “A little mining town out there in the foothills called Devil’s Gap. We’ll go there.”

  He turned his horse and led the way with Sluice and the other three following. Without knowing it, of course, they rode in the path of Sheriff Holmes as he rode toward the ranch house with Jigs still riding on his trail.

  It was sometime later when Sheriff Holmes rode up to the cookshack. Slocum heard him coming and went outside. Pretty soon Billy and Old Jan joined him. “Just one rider,” said Old Jan. “It can’t be Gillian or Sluice.”

  “Not hardly,” said Slocum.

  They waited until Holmes pulled up just a few feet away.

  “Howdy,” said Holmes.

  “Howdy,” said Old Jan.

  “You’re a lawman,” said Slocum.

  “That’s right. I was trailing a gang of outlaws. They were headed this way, but I lost their trail a ways back. I don’t suppose you’ve seen any strangers coming through here.”

  “No,” said Slocum, “but we’ve been expecting a bunch. Might be the same ones. Why don’t you get down? Come inside and have some grub.”

  “Thanks,” said Holmes. “I will.”

  Inside the cookshack, Holmes stopped, a surprised look on his face.

  “Oh,” said Slocum. “Those three hog-tied over there are part of that outlaw bunch we’re waiting for. The man that owns this ranch is named Reb Gillian. He took his whole crew somewhere west to rob a gold shipment. Left four men here to guard his ranch. These three are left.”

  “Then it is the
same bunch,” Holmes said. “They stopped the stagecoach. Killed the driver and all of the guards and got away with the gold. What’s your interest in them?”

  Slocum poured Holmes a cup of coffee and asked Old Jan to fetch him some food. He then told the tale of Trent Brady’s murder and the ambush that laid him up and the killing of Charlie Gourd. He told Holmes about Jigs and about Grimes and his men. Old Jan put a plate of hot food in front of Holmes, and the sheriff started to dig in.

  “How come you went to strike out after a gang that size by yourself?” Slocum asked.

  “I had a posse when I left,” Holmes said. “The gang way-laid us. Killed several of my men. The rest quit on me and headed for home.”

  “So you kept on by yourself?”

  “Those guards were friends of mine,” Holmes said. “And the members of my posse that the gang killed.”

  “I see,” Slocum said.

  “Not everything you don’t,” said Holmes. “I’m out of my jurisdiction now. I’m just a private citizen.”

  “Well, then,” Slocum said, “you ought to put away that star.”

  The sheriff looked down at the badge on his breast. “I reckon you’re right,” he said, and he pulled off the star and tucked it into a pocket. He continued eating. “So you think that bunch is coming back here?” he said.

  “We been counting on it,” said Slocum. “It’s Gillian’s place. I can’t think why he’d go anyplace else.”

  “Smoke’s still rising up from where the house used to be,” said Holmes. “I noticed it back a ways. Gillian will see it, too. It might scare him off.”

  “You’re right,” said Slocum. “And you were behind him. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then he should’ve got here already.”

  “If he was coming here.”

  “We’d better ride your back trail,” said Slocum. “See if we can pick up anything.”