by Jake Logan
Marybeth said, “Oh, pshaw,” and parted the fingers of a hand just enough to reveal a skeleton key on a length of torn rawhide thong. “From Everett’s neck,” she said. Her smile and raised eyebrows told Slocum she was going to be okay.
Eli cleared his throat and said, “From Clew I got three bullets and a mess of matches down my shirt—unless they slipped out one of the holes, that is.” His grin matched Marybeth’s, and they both looked at Slocum.
He shrugged. “I don’t have much—unless you count my boot knife.”
“Well, well,” said Eli. “Things are looking up.”
“Looking up? We could have done this back at the ranch and cooked up some sort of plan a whole lot closer to horses and guns.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but there was the chance they’d come down hard on the folks here, just to squeeze us. These are my people now. My place is with them. And so is yours and yours.” As he said that, he looked at Marybeth and Slocum in turn.
Marybeth offered a solemn bow of her head. There wasn’t much else Slocum could do but nod in agreement.
By then, the basket had reached the bottom of the ravine. And what Slocum saw shocked him more than anything he’d seen in years.
14
The basket hit the bottom with a hard clunk. “Get out now!” a voice from above shouted.
Slocum looked up to see every rifle bristling the rim of the small canyon trained down on them. It was too far for a man to jump or punch or spit, but not too far to shout and not too far to shoot. To throw? He wondered. How about a slingshot? Take one down when the others weren’t looking, maybe they could get a rifle, then . . . do what with it? He’d share the idea with Eli later.
Right now, he had to take in all that he was about to be surrounded with. He followed Marybeth and Eli out of the basket. As soon as his feet touched the hard, stone ground, the basket jerked upward.
Slocum looked around. He was beginning to gain an understanding of how deep Colonel Mulletson’s bigotry ran. In the full sunlight filling the ravine, he saw all too well dozens of people, mostly old women and men, plus young boys and girls, all of them thin and all of them, save for Marybeth and himself, definitely not white-skinned. Slocum saw blacks, Mexicans, and Indians, and one old man who was probably Chinese.
Some of them shuffled from the weight of manacle chains connecting their feet, the clinking of links accompanying a slow, dragging sound. They all were dressed in filthy rags, and those that had footwear were the lucky ones, he guessed, though what they wore on their feet were grimy, rag-wrapped bundles.
The closer they drew, the more pungent the tang of unwashed bodies became. Their faces were masks of hopelessness, their bodies thin and unwashed, their hair matted tangles of rope, like twists of various colors of wet yarn.
As Slocum glanced around at the small, dull-eyed crowd, he saw that a number of them bore blackened, swollen limbs, hands with puffed fingers, cheeks and foreheads raised up as if they’d been bludgeoned. Slocum had seen enough snakebites in his time to know some of the telltale signs. But this many? And to have survived without any sort of medical help? The thought both frightened and amazed him. This was a hardy band of ill-used prisoners.
Eli extended an arm outward. “My people.” He smiled a hopeful smile, but his eyes looked suddenly sad and tired, as if returning here had sapped whatever little verve and strength he had gained from his brief sojourn topside.
“What do you all eat here, Eli?” Marybeth asked, a hand to her throat, another hugging her chest.
“Not much from up there, as you can imagine. But our curse is also our blessing, in a manner of speaking.”
Slocum had an idea of what he was referring to. He almost hated to say it. “Snakes?”
“You bet.” The big man smiled again.
“Oh, please don’t tell me that.” Marybeth Meecher closed her eyes and shuddered.
Slocum put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. “Food’s food.”
She pulled away and narrowed her eyes at him. “Do you at least get to cook them?” she said to Eli. “If I could cook down here, I feel I might be of some use, maybe make it through this . . . somehow.”
Eli’s smile dropped completely. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but there ain’t no making it through nothing down here. You work, then you die. That’s it, that’s all.” He turned to go, then said, “And not much cooking going on. We really ain’t allowed cook fires, though we make them back in the tunnels.”
“If you’re about done with your yammerin’, you all best get to work!” The voice from on high echoed down into the ravine. “If I don’t see no ore piled up for the basket, steady all day, I’m liable to forget your food!”
“Oh Lord. . . .” Marybeth looked first at Eli and then Slocum. “What is going on here?”
Slocum did his best to explain the details of the story that she hadn’t yet heard. By the time he’d exhausted his knowledge of it, her eyes had widened and her mouth had dropped open. It was apparent she believed him, but also wasn’t sure just what to think about it all.
“This isn’t what you had in mind when you set out from your roadhouse, is it?” Slocum commiserated.
“No, John. That would be an understatement. But now that we’re here, what do we do?”
They had been following Eli across the base of the little canyon to what looked like a large cave. It was, in fact, that—and much more.
“That’s the entrance to the tunnel where we dig,” said Slocum with a wink.
“In there?” She held a hand to her throat again.
“You’re going to have to stop doing that, Marybeth, if you intend to get any ore out today.” He tried to make his voice sound lighthearted and mocking, but the joke fell flat.
“You sound like you have some experience with a rock hammer,” Eli said to Slocum.
“A bit, mostly placer mining, but some hard rock, too. How far does this go in?”
“Some of them go back, oh, I’d say a couple hundred feet into the rock wall. And let me tell you, it’s pure rock.” Eli’s eyebrows rose, as if he felt a peculiar pride of ownership of it.
Slocum whistled. “She shored up?”
“With what?” Eli smiled.
As if by magic, all the other slaves began slowly walking back to work, pushing steel carts, wheels squawking, on ramshackle tracks that led from the big mine entrance. Eli had said that from there, the tunnel split fingerlike into five.
From what Slocum could see, the ore they were hauling out was low-grade stuff, and he suspected it would take whole lot of it to make much money. From the looks of it, he doubted it tested out very high in quality. How on earth did the colonel think he was going to get rich—or even pay his bills—with such low-quality ore?
“Can’t he just hire people to work the mine for him? Pay them a fair wage to dig his ore? I’m sure a scaffolding and some sort of rail system could be rigged to get the ore up and out of the shaft and on up out of the ravine.”
“That’s the way it began, sure enough, but he’s a scrimy man, is Colonel Mulletson. He’s also a man in deep debt. Barely keeping his head above water, as they say.”
“Couldn’t you wait him out? To maintain a ranch the size of the Triple T, and an appetite the size of his, he depends on the income from this ore. Maybe you could wait him out, not send any up until he caves in, has to come down here and—”
“And what, Slocum?” Eli stared at him as if he were a simp. “You don’t think we’ve already tried that? Six, seven months back. That very thing. You know what it got us?”
A crowd was gathering now. Slocum had dug into a nervy topic, but he had to know just what had been tried and how it had failed if they were to form any sort of workable plan of escape. He shrugged and Eli continued.
“Okay, okay,” said Eli. “I get that you need to figure out what all’s been
done, but look, we tried that. And them guards up there . . .” He flicked his good eye upward toward the rim above, where Slocum could see the armed bastards every fifty feet or so. “They come down here in force, shot into the crowd, didn’t care who they killed. I took a shot myself.” He lifted his shirt, and his lean but hard-muscled waist, to the side, bore a badly healed pucker of scar tissue that a bullet would surely have made. Slocum also noticed the long lion-claw lash scars that must have been laid on Eli by a whip back when he was a plantation slave. He caught Eli’s eyes and knew the man had read his mind.
“I’m sorry, Eli. I didn’t mean to ride point on this.”
“No, truth is, we need your help. It’s bad here. A thousand times worse than ol’ massah’s cotton farm. But somehow, I don’t know just how, I got me some hope. And as my mama used to say, where there’s hope, you can be sure help ain’t far behind. Even if you have to make it yourself.”
“Let’s get to making some help for ourselves, then.” Slocum extended his right arm, and the men shook hands.
Beside them, Marybeth Meecher cleared her throat and slapped her hand atop theirs. Despite the situation, the three of them laughed.
Far above, a man shouted down to them, “Hey, you three down there! You lay off with that playin’ and get to work!”
The men, women, and children who had begun to creep out of their dark places in the walls of the ravine all melted back into them, shrinking and cowering as if struck. Only Slocum, Eli, and Marybeth remained, standing defiant and staring upward, each mulling over possible solutions to a big, but not impossible, problem.
But their moment of hopefulness was short-lived.
15
Something spanged the rock face near them, kicked up rock chips, and was chased within a hair’s breadth by the far-off report of a rifle. The delay caused by echo was barely faster than Slocum’s gun hands drawing on . . . nothing. His sidearms had been taken, and for the first time in a long time he felt exposed and powerless.
And just as he had in such rare times in the past, he immediately admonished himself, told himself no, this was not how it was going to be—he was going to stand up to these vermin, find a way to beat them at their own game, and get these people out of this hole in the ground, this living grave.
Beside him, he noticed one of the women, a bent thing of indeterminate age, looked pained and clutched at her arm. She clamped a gnarled hand on her forearm, and red blood trickled from between her knotted fingers. Slocum was about to tear off part of his shirttail when Marybeth beat him to the punch. She peeled some of her skirt and tenderly helped the old woman, but the already-weak slave looked ready to faint. Slocum steadied her while Marybeth did her best to stop the flow and bandage her wounded wing.
“Had to be the rock chips from that shot.”
“They do this to us all the time,” the old woman said in a voice as firm as a twenty-year-old’s. Her tone and perfect English surprised Slocum.
“What tribe are you?”
“Lakota.”
“Your people . . . don’t they miss you?”
“I am dead to them. I was sold by my brother to Colonel Mulletson.”
“Your own brother sold you?” said Marybeth.
“Yes, yes. He wanted things from me I should not have to give him. In the end, he took them, and then he sold me. Then I was with child. For several years I was a cook and housekeeper for the colonel. But when his money troubles began, he became angry all the time.”
Another shot spanged rock close by, sending rock chips winging outward. No one appeared to get cut from them. Slocum walked out into the open. Behind him, Eli said, “No, Slocum. Don’t do it—only makes ’em madder at us all!”
But Slocum was beyond caring. He raised a fist skyward, toward the rim, and said, “All right, you bastards, you want to play your games, you come on down here and do that! Fight like a man, not like the bone-sucking coyotes you are!”
He stood there, hands on his hips, and watched the effect his words had on them, these armed slave guards. One of them, from that distance Slocum could not tell just who it was, spun away as Slocum’s words lanced skyward. The guard’s rage was evident in the way he flailed his arms. Then he turned back to the edge and brought his rifle up to bear once, twice, three times on Slocum.
Another guard nearby shouted something to him and the man finally lowered his rifle and turned away. Within seconds he turned back again and shouted down, his hands cupped to his mouth so that Slocum would be sure to hear him. “You son of a bitch! Ain’t nobody talks to me like that and lives! I will see that you pay for this! You mark what I say, you will be begging me to kill you this time tomorrow!”
The man’s words echoed down on them, the last of them barely reaching the slaves down below. A breeze, such as the sort that precedes a storm cloud, rolled down into the little canyon and gusted at them in a last explosive burst before dissipating. It felt as if the man’s words had created the brief but forceful wind.
Slocum saw the slaves shrink back in fear and he knew that they believed the man’s speech held some magical power, even if half of them didn’t know what it was he had said. Slocum also knew that if he let this thing drop now, this little fit of rage he had instigated, that he would have no power with the slaves, and the captors would have more than ever. And that would not help them in the least.
It’s now or never, Slocum old boy, he told himself, and once again raised his arms. “Why wait, you little fool! Come down here and I will show you what it is to be a man. You are less than half a man, standing up there with your silly gun and acting like you own this ranch!”
In truth, he had no idea what to say, he just knew that goading them into some sort of action was far better than giving in to them and becoming a weak, dissipated version of himself. If he gave in, he’d grow weaker and weaker by the day. Then if he did finally come up with a plan, he would be too weak to enact it.
“John, what are you doing?” Marybeth said, standing in front of a gathered throng of rag-wrapped slaves. She had, as was her character, already taken it on herself to become their protector. Good, he thought. At least it will give her something to keep her from becoming like them.
“I think,” Eli said, eyes cut toward the rim, “that Slocum’s doing something. Bad or good, I don’t know, but at least it’s something.”
They all looked to the rim, and sure enough, the man who had been hollering a blue streak now threw his rifle to the ground, and was arguing with the other men to lower him down into the ravine. Behind him, the same man who had admonished him before was now shouting again.
Slocum could only hear snippets, but the words did not sound particularly soothing. The last thing he heard was a final threat that had some teeth: “You like to be a slave down there, too?”
And that should have done it, but it didn’t. The man who Slocum had riled said, “Hell yes!” loud enough for them all to hear. There was a pause up there while the boss man stared at the hothead, as did all the other guards.
Finally the boss man relented. Slocum saw him nod, then throw up his arms as if to say, “Okay, have it your way.”
The hothead all but bolted for the basket.
Behind him the boss man shouted something that caused the man to stop just before he loaded up. Hothead turned back and the boss man shouted, “Nope. You take the other way down.”
“What other way?” And that was all he had time to say, because the boss man advanced on him, poked him in the gut with the barrel of his rifle, and walked him back away from the edge.
From below, they saw the man’s arms raised, heard his angry shouts turn confused, then become squeals of begging—all topped off with a single rifle shot.
Seconds later the boss man walked to the rim. “See what you made me do, Slocum? That ain’t going to stand well with the colonel. If I get in deep because of it, you can bet your ass
I will take you with me.” He pointed a long, bony arm at Slocum. “Mark what I am saying as truth, Slocum. That be all.” He turned away and shouted, “Now back to work, everybody!”
Slocum turned and headed back to the mine, but as he did, his fellow slaves eyed him with what he hoped was respect. He had caused the guards to squabble and one had died because of it. He felt as though he had won some sort of victory in the slaves’ eyes, made him into someone they might trust. And that would be crucial, for he might well have need of them soon. Everyone would have to do their part in whatever plan of revolt they would settle on.
Slocum also knew that, far above, the boss was not a happy man, having to kill one of his own men to prevent some of the colonel’s down-home insurgency. When would someone like the colonel learn that oppression never resulted in good things for anybody?
16
“Get him as dirty as can be.”
“He’s already filthy.”
Slocum sighed. “I know, Marybeth, but I want him to be the color of dust, the color of the bottom of this canyon, so that he will blend in when seen from above. Right?”
Slocum knelt before the boy. Were it not for the snake, he was tempted to put his hands on the lad’s shoulders. “Now, Little Dog, remember our plan? It’s dangerous, but you trust me, right?”
The boy nodded, his complete faith in Slocum glowing in his shining eyes. I hope to God I’m doing the right thing and not sending this kid to his death. But it’s the first part in the plan and it has to work, and I can’t do it myself—has to be the boy. “Okay, when the basket begins to be lowered, I need you to become part of that wall just behind where the basket lands. But hold on to that snake, don’t let it go until you get to the top, right?”
The boy nodded and held up his rattlesnake, his little hand gripped hard just behind the creature’s head, its mouth opening and shutting rhythmically, tiny droplets of venom pearling from its fang tips, its tongue flicking like a miniature forked whip. The serpent’s body writhed around the lad’s arm, its rattles working up a hair-raising sound. It seemed as if the boy had sprouted a serpent from his arm.